To wrap season 2, past Inside the Ohana guests share their favorite Dreamforce memories, from both behind the scenes and center stage.
To wrap season 2, past Inside the Ohana guests share their favorite Dreamforce memories, from both behind the scenes and center stage.
Featured Quotes:
“There's no more energizing place to fill your Salesforce tank than Dreamforce.”
- Andrea Tarrell, CEO, Sercante
“You've never seen anything like it. You're like, ‘This is where I work?’”
- Sara Varni, CMO, Attentive
“Dreamforce is where you're so tired and delirious but when you're done, it’s like, ‘Oh my God, I did this.”
- Shannon Duffy, CMO, Asana
Episode Timestamps:
*(01:46) - Andrea Tarrell, CEO, Sercante
*(03:44) - Sara Varni, CMO, Attentive
*(03:44) - Bala Balabaskaran, Co-Founder & CTO, Fullcast.io
*(06:48) - Shannon Duffy, CMO, Asana
*(08:21) - Joe Houston, Sr. Renewal Manager, Salesforce
*(10:07) - Jane Hynes, VP, Global Communications, Google Cloud
*(11:04) - Avanish Sahai, Board Member & Advisor to Tech Companies
Sponsor
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Intro (00:34):
Welcome to Inside the Ohana for our last episode of season two. We're gearing up for Dreamforce 23 by looking back at past Dreamforce, you'll hear memories from industry titans about what makes Dreamforce so special. And don't miss out on Qualifieds Pipeline Summit. Live at the San Francisco MoMA rooftop. Mark your calendars for Wednesdays, September 13th from four to 7:30 PM just before the big concert at Dreamforce. But before we dive in, here's a brief word from our sponsor. Inside the Ohana is brought to you by qualified, qualified as the pipeline generation platform for revenue. Teams that use Salesforce intelligently grow your pipeline by understanding signals, a buying intent, and having real time conversations learn more over unqualified.com. So please enjoy this episode featuring conversations between Past inside the Ohana guests and your host, Dan Darcy. Our first featured guest is Andrea Terrell, c e o, and founder of Sante, as well as a 12 time certified Salesforce m v p and marketing champion. She tells Dan about her first Dreamforce, which ignited a passion and shaped the course of her career.
Andrea (01:46):
Well, Dreamforce definitely has sort of my fondest numbers of the ecosystem because there's no other more energizing place to fill your Salesforce tank than Dreamforce. It's just great energy, great people, great vibes. Yeah, lots of epic pardo parties. I feel like somehow I always ended up missing the concerts even though the concerts are a really great time. The one thing that stayed about my memory from last year, so how they did a buyout of the pink elephant alibi and our marketing team made these stencils elephant footprints and spray painted pink chalk leading up to the site. They stopped traffic to do it at a crosswalk. They did it in front of a police officer in front of security for the safe regions and X still amazed that we were able to publish that without somebody coming and slapping us on the wrist.
Dan (02:31):
You mean San Francisco? So I want you to tell us about that first Dreamforce that you spoke about earlier that you attended, that your boss sent you to and why it meant so much to you. So
Andrea (02:41):
Being my about Dreamforce was the social enterprise. It was right when Chatter came out. Social media was a new thing with businesses we're investing in. The number one thing I remember being surprised by was going to keynotes and thinking it was like, alright, we're going to be talking about tech and I'm here to learn about the platform and what I need to build on the platform. And I felt like every five minutes work, Benny off was like, and now here are the Black Eyed Peas and now here. And I'd never been in a room with so many celebrities at the same time in my life and I kept wondering, what do all these crazy people have to do with Salesforce? But yeah, I've learned that's just part of the process. I mean,
Dan (03:18):
Everyone needs c R M, even the black guy. Even Will I am even Will I am needs CRM.
Intro (03:24):
Up next you'll hear from Sarah Varney before her role as the C M O of Attentive Sarah spent more than a decade at Salesforce as the senior vice president at product marketing where she played a key role in positioning and launching Sales Cloud. She tells Dan about a career defining moment that unfolded during her first Dreamforce experience.
Sara (03:44):
I mean, my first Dreamforce, it's just like you've never seen anything it you're like, this is like, where do I work? This is a rock show. I mean, not just the concert itself, but the keynotes and the campground and the expo and everything is just this massive, massive production you've never seen and super fun. And I just remember this one pivotal moment at my first Dreamforce where I was like, wow, I'm really lucky to be here at this time. And we were launching force.com. That was right around when I started. And Ariel Kelman was running marketing for the platform at the time, and there was a MO in the keynote when they brought on three CIOs. They kind of came out of the fog in a really dramatic way and walked on the stage and the CIOs weren't from any crazy enterprise company, but they had the c I O of Kelly services, the c i o of two other companies, and they came on.
(04:41):
I'm like, wow, we have arrived. This is a real moment where the company is really starting to make a name for itself and get into the enterprise. And literal did I know that that was just the start of many things to come and there's milestones that I could see the progression over keynotes as the years went on. I remember when the C E O of PeopleSoft came the next year and I was like, that was more validation. And George Lucas was there and then Bill Clinton and Richard Branson, not even, sometimes it was celebrity guests, but sometimes it was our customers. And just watching that progression just made you really proud to be part of Salesforce.
Intro (05:20):
A seasoned technology entrepreneur and architect Bala Bala Baskin found himself a little adverse to live events before his Salesforce tenure. In this next clip, you'll hear Bala tell Dan how Dreamforce changed his mind.
Bala (05:35):
So honestly, I was a events diet as a product person in my previous roles and previous companies. So I was averse to go to events ads. So I approached it that way the first time I win. But it's not an event. It's sort of a cultural event. It's not like a broadcast event from a product company. An experience, if you will. That's right. That's right. And so that was the big light bulb moment for me. It's like, wait a minute, this is not other tech company events you should go to where they're just broadcasting you what they're building. This is more about connecting and so on. So I enjoyed the four that I attended. A lot of it was actually customers asking us in my role about how we solve the problems that I was responsible for, and they were very interested to see how we scaled it. How did you apply Salesforce technology to that problem? Yeah, so that was very exciting for me, learning about customers that are going through the same kind of challenges that we are and be able to share what we do. I think those were really excited moments for me.
Intro (06:34):
Up next is Shannon Duffy, now the C M O at Asana, and previously the executive vice president of Cloud and Industry Marketing at Salesforce. She shares with Dan why going to Dreamforce feels like going home.
Shannon (06:48):
Money and some probably are not appropriate for podcasting right now, but I love Dreamforce. Dreamforce is that you're so tired and you're delirious, but when you're done you're like, oh my God, I did this and everything from being in the office on a Sunday or at nine o'clock at night, having conversations about which version of Cody the Bear to be put on a slide all the way to dancing on stage at concerts too. My favorite Dreamforce story is one year when I was working on par out, we had the cast of Silicon Valley at an event, and that was when Silicon Valley was the show, but I think it was a show for, but for tech people, it was the show other, sure other people watched it. And we had this event and we did not realize we were going to get the amount of interest.
(07:31):
And so we literally had people lining up. The police were called to see the Silicon Valley people, and we had the cast, these guys that play these characters and they were like, what's going on? We needed to get police to escort us from one building to the other. There were so many people, they're like, are these people here for us? I was like, you don't realize it's in our industry how much this show means to us. They're like, dude, we live in la. No one even knows who we are. I'm like, welcome to the Bay Area in tech. You are rock stars here. Welcome home.
Dan (07:59):
That's Awesome.
Shannon (07:59):
Yeah, exactly. That's amazing. So that's one of my favorite Dreamforce stories.
Intro (08:03):
Next we're hearing from someone who is no stranger to the Dreamforce stage. Joe Houston, a senior renewal manager at Salesforce and a social media superstar tells Dan about the time he took Center stage and how his speech ended up taking the internet by storm.
Joe (08:21):
It was the opportunity to speak on the main stage at Dreamforce and open up the C S G keynote, but not just once. Can you explain what C S G stands for? Everyone? Sorry. Yeah, the Customer Success group. So the renewal segment that I'm in is under the customer success group, and I was able to basically open up the keynote for the customer success group at Dreamforce on two different occasions. In addition to that, I was able to wear a custom suit each time that I actually make. Well,
Dan (08:55):
Tell me a little bit more. What did you do on stage?
Joe (08:59):
So it's interesting, I think I talk about this synergy and the ability to kind of bring a passion of mine and my work life together. So in the initial year we had kind of a Wizard of Oz theme and I was essentially aunts and I came in and really hyped up the crowd. It was later in the day and got the crowd hyped up and ready to go, and really spoke about what we were planning to deliver and got them excited to be prepared to hear that. And the second year it was more of the same and it was well received. In fact, the suit that I wore last year to Dreamforce went extremely viral. Mark Benioff retweeted it and it got over 2 million views across all platforms, including LinkedIn.
Intro (09:45):
Next is Jane Hynes, the vice president of communications for Google Cloud. Jane is no stranger to the world of tech. Having played a pivotal role in shaping Salesforce communication strategy all the way from its startup roots to its status as a Fortune 500 giant. Listen, as Jane shares with Dan why her admiration for Dreamforce runs deep.
Jane (10:07):
I loved that Dreamforce became bigger than a technology user conference. It became an important place to have conversations around what was happening in the technology industry overall and what was happening more broadly. I loved, I thought it was just so special the year that we leaned in on women's equality and equal rights and we had Women's Day for the first time. Of course, Layla and Molly led that initiative and that was just amazing to be a part of. And I think that Salesforce was really at the forefront of doing so much of those sorts of things. And to wrap it up a behind the scenes story from Avinash Sahai, a notable Salesforce alumni and now advisor and board member to several technology companies, he tells Dan about a time where his team was tasked with the near impossible getting two competitors to appear on stage together at Dreamforce and how the Ohana made it possible.
Avanish (11:04):
Well, there is one that kind of became legend on the team. Like I said, we worked with these two major companies in 2009. We launched them after that. Things really started to scale pretty rapidly. Just before Dreamforce 2010, we had set up a call between Mark, our c e O and Bob Beam, the c e O of B M C, just a check-in call because we were going to have Bob again a year later come on stage and talk about how things were going. This is Friday before 24 starts on Monday and Friday afternoon right after the call, it's only one-on-one, the two of them, one-on-one. All of our blackberries at the time start exploding on both sides, both sides of the relationship. Turns out the two CEOs, as was their right, decided that were going to expand the relationship and by the way, rebrand it and announce it.
(11:59):
Tuesday morning we're reading this and we're like, oh, it was never easy. These are hard negotiations, a lot of variations. So we worked through the weekend and the two memorable moments I'll share, which I have never shared before in public, but now it's 10, 11 years, 12 years old. So one of them was a moment on Sunday night where there's a thread with Mark and some of the senior most people at Salesforce around brand. One of the decisions they hadn't made was that we were going to rebrand this, I think, which used to be called B M C A, remedy onforce.com. We've got a rebranded Remedy force, and our legal team just lost it. They're like, we've protected our brand. We sue anybody who uses anything force and there's no way we can allow this, there's et cetera, et cetera. And Mark's response to that thread was just do it.
(12:54):
So that was Sunday night, and the rest of us were like, oh, okay. I guess we're doing this. So that was one. Then the second story, or second part of the story was this is Monday now, and we spent all day locked up in a room. Turns out Monday was my birthday, and literally I pulled my second all-nighter at Salesforce, and that's where the Johanna came in. It was legal, it was Ron Huddleston, who I worked for, who we all miss dearly. Brad Armstrong from the legal team, John Moss, head of legal partnership, legal George, who getting ready for GForce the next day on the phone with us at two o'clock in the morning because we had some terms. We were still negotiating. We signed this thing at 6:10 AM We put it on the wire at 6:15 AM This was all in the city, in the office. I came home and I was supposed to be hosting Bob when he came to Dreamforce. So at six 15, I left. I drove home. This is pre-Uber, pre any of that. I drove home with no sleep, showered, put on a suit, and went back to host Bob. And that became a bit of one of those stories of we just do what you have to do. Everybody pulled together and we got it done.
Intro (14:10):
That's it for now. Thank you for listening to this season of Inside The Ohana and a huge thank you to the incredible guests who have shared their stories with us. We can't wait to see everyone at Dreamforce 23 and make sure to check out Qualified's Pipeline Summit live at the San Francisco MoMA on the rooftop that's taking place Wednesday, September 13th from four to 7:30 PM So mark your calendars. We'll see you there. Inside the Ohana is brought to you by our friends@qualified.com, the conversational sales and marketing company that's on a mission to transform the way B2B companies sell. Go to qualified.com to learn more. If you enjoyed the show, please take a moment to rate and review it and tell a friend. Thank you for listening.