I've covered lots of ground at Dreamforce including informational workshops and collecting the coolest SWAG. I was hunting for the disruptive talent and believe I found a few buried treasures far away, and it was well worth the walk.

The Twitter Effect: Using Social Sales and PR to Amp Your Growth

Clara Shih is a powerhouse and is one of the featured speakers from the Founders Forum. Her company, Hearsay Social, is growing rapidly and getting mega recognition and endorsements by the giants -- in a disruptive way. She is a true Silicon Valley entrepreneur with a colorful success story and brilliant career trajectory that makes her a perfect thought leader in the social media explosion.

A few stats:

• 1.6 billion people around the world use social media (primarily LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook)
• The amount of sharing is doubling each year as the volume is growing exponentially Trust has shifted from institutions to individuals - according to the Trust Index, we are moving from a society where people would believe but today there is heavy skeptics, we don't trust much and this is giving people a voice- their own.

She suggests to:

1. Empower everyone to be a marketer

2. Be the expert in your space- customers want to be educated, not sold to

3. Get your customers to do the talking

4. Make your event social

5. Record, re-use, remix, retell, re-share- create sound bites to repurpose

Disruptive Startups: How Innovative leaders Are Shaking Up Industries

These smart entrepreneurs had refreshing ideas on how to really be disruptive in today's noisy space:

Adam Blitzer, Pardot: This company was voted Top 100 Workplaces in 2012 and their secret was to happy employees+ happy customers= everything will work out. Pardot maintains a cooperative and amenable work environment that translates into a better customer service experience for clients.

Angus Davis, Swipely: Forbes calls Swipely One of America's Most Promising Companies and also one of the Best Places to Work in Rhode Island. Angus is a big inside sales advocate and believes when you are selling in the SMB space, a direct sale loaded with lots of technology is necessary. He built his company from the inside.

Jack Welde, Smartling: This company is among the 13 Companies That Could Be New York's Next Billion- Dollar Exit and everyone is paying attention. Jack said that being misunderstood and not trusted is part of starting a new, disruptive business. Just have to stick with it and keep trying new ways of explaining yourself.

The New and Evolving Sales Conversation

Linda has been in the sales training world for years and has published tons of books -- especially putting sales coaching on the map. Her latest book, Changing the Sales Conversation, comes out next year. Linda gave a great overview of how we must redefine the type of conversation today's elusive customer wants to have. 

Yes, customers still want advice and expertise, they are laser focused on business outcomes, they make decisions by consensus and they are risk averse. Even though they educate themselves, as much as half way through the sales cycle, by the time they get to you, their information is truncated and not all the information they have received is equal or correct.

This is more reason why they are ready for a healthy conversation and Linda suggests 5 conversation changers. She explained that buyers want to learn and also be part of the selling process.

Linda also confirmed there's still a problem when it comes to sales coaching- managers are still not comfortable with it.

 Get more tips on sales success in the Salesforce ebook at the button below.