Dreamforce for Newbies ... During a Pandemic

Providing context to some of the 35,000 employees hired during the pandemic who had never experienced Dreamforce before.

What is Dreamforce?

You like to ask complicated questions, don't you? Fortunately, Inside Salesforce is here to roll up our sleeves and explain.

In regular times - and in another version of this story that we'll hopefully reuse next year - Dreamforce is our annual, 4-day family reunion, as we like to say. It’s our most inspiring gathering of the year and a showcase for what makes Salesforce, Salesforce. In 2019, there were 2,700+ sessions, over 170,000 registered attendees, and 10 million viewers on our streams. To put that in perspective, that's a hair more than the size of the city of Mansfield in Great Britain.

But this isn't just another Dreamforce

You've heard it before. At Salesforce, "iterate" and "innovate" are practically our middle names and in the wake of 2020's COVID-19 pandemic, that's exactly what we did last year because #safetyfirst.

Dreamforce became Dreamforce to You, a virtual version of our signature event that was customized for individual customers. Think of it as something like Salesforce Innovation Center-like (SIC) events in which a variety of Salesforce leaders held sessions with customers.

It's notable that flexibility became such a big part of the Salesforce vocab in 2021 because that's exactly what the Dreamforce Events Team leaned into this year. They initially developed an exciting plan for a scaled-down event that, for the first time, added in-person locations in New York City, London, and Paris. Unfortunately, the rise of the Delta variant of COVID-19 required the team to pivot because, as always, #safetyfirst. As disappointing as that might be (Hello Paris?!), we still have a lot of goodness in store for our customers who will now access content on our new Salesforce.. video platform. The sessions will be great, and the guests are incredible, we'll just be experiencing it all online.

Some things change, and some things stay the same

One thing that will never change is the importance of Dreamforce to our customers, partners, Trailblazers, and you - our employees. Whether or not we're in person at Dreamforce National Park, in the shadow of the Moscone Center in San Francisco, Dreamforce still helps demonstrate our company values: trust, customer success, innovation, equality, and sustainability. At Salesforce, we find solutions for a wide variety of customers, which encompasses those who buy our products, vendors who implement them, and companies that write third-party applications for our products and prospects.

And this part of Dreamforce is still as important as ever: the keynote! If you watched Laulima, you saw an early version of the keynote during which important new products were announced. In the weeks since then, Marc and Bret have presented the keynote to customers to get their feedback and make improvements. Last week, we saw the latest version of the keynote during the All Hands Call after which employees could offer more feedback. On Tuesday, September 21, we'll all join the rest of the world and see the real thing!

What happens at Dreamforce probably won't affect me

There were probably people who said that about Laulima or Kickoff, too. Nope, no matter where you work or what you do at Salesforce, what happens at Dreamforce will not stay at Dreamforce. For a high-growth company like us, the impact of Dreamforce will be felt in every corner of the company Whether you work in customer-facing roles in Sales or CSG (some would say we're all in customer-facing roles!), what is announced at Dreamforce impacts all of us

I'm new, can I really take lime out to watch this?

YES! Relax. This is an important company event, think of it as part of your job. In fact, while there won't be viewing parties in our offices as in past years, our Employee Engagement team has lots of ways for you to participate. Look for the chance to win a gift card to the Salesforce Store by playing their daily trivia game - or Dreamforce Jeopardy! "Mayim, I'll take Reasons to Love My Job at Salesforce for $100."