Executive Cloud Lunch Series

Being three weeks new to salesforce.com I was extremely excited to attend the Sydney event in our recent Executive Cloud Lunch Series. It was located at the beautiful Sydney Opera House, the marquee setup had an amazing view of the Sydney harbour.  As I waited for the lunch to start I chatted with some customers who had Salesforce implementations and I was taken back at the level of advocacy they were showing.  They really loved what they were using!  Most of the customers had Sales Cloud in their company and they were very interested in our Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud and Platform offerings.  I also had some good time to speak to a Practice Director from a key system integrator, he was telling me how their Salesforce practice is growing significantly and his customers were loving the seamless deployment and integration within their organisations.  That's the real power of the cloud!


The Sydney Opera House is a great place for lunch!

The keynote speaker was Naomi Simson, she is the founding director of experience gift retailer RedBalloon. Her company is now a multimillion-dollar business and has been listed in the BRW Fast 100 list six times.  It was great to see the passion she had for her work come through in her presentation, she genuinely cares about the customer experience at RedBalloon and loves the partnership she has with salesforce.com. She continued to emphasise that listening to customers was and is still core to growing her business and how this type of listening has changed dramatically throughout the years.  She talked about how customers are more socially active online than ever before through Facebook and Twitter and consume information faster through different devices such as smartphones and tablets.  This is where RedBalloon evolved their efforts around engaging with the customer through a multi-channel approach, this has enabled them to recently cross the mark of 2 million experiences for customers - during our Executive Cloud Lunch Series!

Naomi giving her insights how she has grown RedBalloon to a multi-million dollar company 

As the keynote address came to an end the team presented a great customer success story of Vodafone Australia. They use Marketing Cloud to connect and listen to customers through Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and the Vodafone community site.  They have also seamlessly integrated Service Cloud into their Tasmanian call centre to develop individual customer relationships.  Their internal usage of Chatter has brought their teams together to serve one purpose – the customer.  It was great to hear about how they have really turned around their business by partnering with salesforce.com. You can learn more about it here. 


Mark Innes, SVP Enterprise Sales speaking to the crowd about the importance of a multi-channel
approach to customer engagement

I’m really getting excited about how we are helping customers grow their business and drive amazing customer relationships for them with our products.  I’ll be contributing more to the blog throughout my journey at salesforce.com so make sure you stay up to date with the latest posts.  I look forward to discussing cloud, mobile, social, Big Data and the Internet of Things with you.