Salesforce User Group Meeting - Bay Area

UPDATE - SLIDES POSTED - CLICK ON PRESENTATION HYPERLINK!

Today marked the first ever Salesforce.com Bay Area User Group meeting to take place in the morning, and it was a big success. Hosted by VerticalResponse, in their SF office, it drew a crowd of 40+ users from a broad range of industries (both commercial and non-profit) and edition users (group, professional, and enterprise).

Following an introduction by Jason Stewart, the Bay Area User Group leader, I kicked off the morning with a presentation on creating web-to-lead forms and auto-responder emails.





On behalf of our host, Alex Scalisi took the floor and touted the benefits of working with an email service provider like VerticalResponse to drive increased deliverability and ease of use. Jason was followed by Andrea Wildt, Sr. Product Mgr Salesforce Marketing, from salesforce.com, who demonstrated how to create advanced workflows for marketing. For instance, triggering an HTML email offering a total cost of ownership whitepaper one week after a lead is archived due to a lack of budget. Pretty powerful stuff.



There were lively debates over the virtues of HTML vs. plain text emails, with a focus on deliverability and trackability implications. The issue of designing emails for Blackberry users arose as well with the key takeaway being less image and text at the top of the email are key.

There was a lot of interaction and with only one sponsor presentation, it allowed for a lot more audience participation. Overall, it was a great event!