Essentials: Brought To You By Partner Power!

The Salesforce Essentials tour is all about customer success, but it is always important to recognise the role Salesforce Partners play in making the tour happen. In many ways it is a microcosm of the wider role they play in the ecosystem.

In all there were 31 partners taking part in the tour as sponsors, and many more attending as delegates. These partners vary greatly from service partners such as Cloud Sherpas and SquarePeg, to ISVs such as Mulesoft and Financial Force, to Application partners such as Dropbox and Docusign. In fact to wander around the Essentials Campground is to physically appreciate the richness and diversity of the Salesforce partner ecosystem and community.

For all the partners, it is the opportunity to network among customers and prospects that Essentials brings together as well as offering the chance to keep up with the latest developments announced at Dreamforce.

It is a great opportunity to network and press the flesh, but more than that, partnerships can be built right there in the Campground, said Andy Pattinson, Sales Director of Cloud Sherpas.

Beyond implementation services, Pattinson said that Cloud Sherpas provides great value in helping clients understand their broader roadmap beyond what is immediately in development.

We can provide that advisory role to help clients better understand some of these new announcements in the strategic context of their own investments, said Andy Pattinson, Cloud Sherpas

All the partners agreed that the hottest topic of interest to those at both the Sydney and Melbourne events was the Lightning announcement from Dreamforce and how to make the most of it in their organisations.

Along with experiencing the Dreamforce content first hand, a key aspect of the tour is the opportunity to see hands-on demonstrations in the Campground. A good example of this is Docusign, which lets you sign and send electronic documents easily and securely.

Essentials provides us with the perfect venue to show people how easy our product is to use - great user experience is better demonstrated rather than explained, said Danielle Walley, Marketing Manager at Docusign.

Equally, as well as new applications, customers also want to know how other applications they might  already be using better complement Salesforce - such as Dropbox for Business.

Essentials is a great environment where we can show customers how to share and collaborate easily around their customer centric information and documents on any device. We have been speaking to so many customers about how they can combine the power of Salesforce with Dropbox in a business context said Charlie Wood, Country Manager at Dropbox.

With so many partners at Essentials, attendees can quickly find out what help exists out there in the marketplace and understand how to solve problems and take their instance to the next level. Mulesoft is a company that can help customers of Salesforce better integrate across other cloud platforms as well as legacy systems - an issue which Brad Drysdale of the Office of the CTO at Mulesoft, described as a “$500 billion problem.”

We can help Salesforce customers enrich and add value to their Salesforce data by connecting to other systems to see a 360 degree view, said Brad Drysdale, Mulesoft

Essentials is as much about fun and community as it is about business; and is about replicating some element of the sense of fun and community you experience at Dreamforce. We would like to take this opportunity to thank all of our partners and our community for being a part of the tour.