I successfully navigated my first year at DreamForce (the annual Salesforce.com event of the year).

I had heard that you can get any one of 100,001 things from DreamForce, so my objective was to go and learn as much as I could about VisualForce and Apex. I’m certain I succeeded in reaching that goal.

Monday was a 14 hour day that included registration, the big keynote from the Salesforce.com CEO, session after session of learning, a two-hour hack-athon on the new Force.com Sites technology and ended with a Foo Fighters concert.

Tuesday was a 12 hour day that included several hands-on sessions with the Force.com platform, two keynotes and the nations presidential election.

Wednesday was a day of dragging yourself from session to session learning new things.

I can’t put scale to this event in words. I do know there were close to 10,000 people there, so you can only imagine the size of the keynote room that could accommodate 10,000 people (sitting nonetheless).

Regretfully, I didn’t get to sit the Admin certification exam, but I did pick up a voucher for a free certification exam soon.

In sum, it was great experience, I learned a lot, and I’m looking forward to the next one.

I’ve completed an instructor-led course on the introductory topics in C#. The application of choice was, of course, Visual Studio 2005.

This fits nicely with my SQL Server 2005 course and adds ASP.NET programming to my skill set.

I’ve completed an instructor-led class on MS SQL Server 2005.

So far this class has turned out to be quite timely. We are discussing a web application that shows power consumption data stored, of course, in a SQL database. We have only discussed this app being available on our company intranet. But I expect that it will public as the app expands in scope. At that time, I’ll be sure to post an example.

Things I have learned so far:

- there is a delicate balance how sophisticated your app is and the performance of your database query results. I like to review highscalability.com to here the developers that work on applications like Amazon, Facebook, Flickr, etc. talk about the millions of transactions they have per second and how their chosen architecture performs.

- virtualization is a fantastic invention. Being able to work with my IT group via a virtual machine has beneficial. Speaking from a developers standpoint, I can see how it aids in getting apps built and deployed quickly.

Owning a Business

Do you remember when you were in grade school english class and the teacher made you start every class with writing a journal entry based on a prompt? There is one entry in particular that I found when going through one of my old journals where I detail a business plan for sports memorabilia (e.g. baseball cards, autographed helmets, authentic jerseys, etc.). To own and operate my own business has been a part of me for a very long time. I like business, but am limited by my own intelligence and I constantly get frustrated by my own ambition and desires. e.g. my ambition far exceeds my intelligence.

Work Experience

January 2007 – Present

I now work for Digital Realty Trust – http://www.digitalrealtytrust.com – as the Marketing Information Systems Manager. We lease out datacenter space to companies like Facebook, Yahoo, UBS Financial, BP, MySpace, etc.

There are four of us in the Marketing department and my role includes:

• Project Manager – every month this year we have a marketing campaign consisting of print ads, banner ads, direct mail, a microsite and email and I am responsible for making sure everything gets done (working with the creative agencies and getting the necessary approvals internally as well as ensuring that all Leads are getting to sales people ASAP)
• Market Research – we have an online survey that we invite our contacts in our marketing database to answer. I work with the market research agency for the online survey, I conduct the email invitation broadcasts, then I assemble all of the results, analyze and then the results end up in a white paper that we send back out to our marketing database and conduct a webinar
• Webmaster – managing and maintaining the coporate website including a 12-month search engine optimization project that started in January
• Salesforce.com admin – we have more than 80 employees using Salesforce in many different departments, which involves a lot of reporting to Senior Management
• Vtrenz admin – this is the tool we use to manage our opt-in marketing database and broadcast our email invitations regarding our events and webinars
• Webinar host/moderator – I run all of our online webinars; both promotion and production

May 2004 – December 2007

I started my career working at Starr Tincup. What an experience it was! I was there 3 1/2 years and, at the end of my time there, realized that I was way out of my league. The people there at Starr Tincup set an entirely different bar for hard work and intelligence. I am glad that I was part of it and got to help build parts of the company. However, it was definitely disengaging and deflating to come this self-realization, but I knew because of my own personal limitations that I would never become Partner in the firm and, therefore, agreed that it was my time to move on. For my first job, I couldn’t have had a better opportunity and I still thank the Principals for affording me the chance to work there.

Here is a bullet-point highlight of my tenure at Starr Tincup:

• I was hired as a ‘Rover’ to go around and be a helpful hand to all of our ‘Delivery’ teams
• Three (3) months after graduating college I was promoted by the owners to be the VP of Marketing
• I ended up writing the best marketing plan I had ever seen (subsequently, the plan was never funded)
• I did, however, have a team of people under me for that year to manage
• Quickly after that I was given the highly-coveted ‘Rover’ position for a while. Meaning, I had skills enough in most areas of marketing that I could help any of the project managers get things done for our clients
• Then I fell into data management where I became our firms expert in a few sales and marketing software applications (namely, Eloqua, Salesforce.com and Salesnet)
• Then I was pulled into an actual account manager position where I was in charge of client projects and delivering our service
• I had a team of people under me to deliver on client projects that I had to motivate, manage and herd towards success
• I was an account manager from that point on (~2 years total)
• I worked as part of a team on our business development strategy. As a result of that project, you now see some of the companies listed on the Starr Tincup Partners page
• I was a mentor to several people in the company during my tenure (e.g. staff, interns, peers) formally and informally and had some success making them productive, value-adding employees
• I had input into how project management plays a part into the way we deliver our service. See my resume entry on Project Management
• I was a part of several Salesforce.com implementations and roll outs. See my resume entry on Salesforce.com

There were two significant layoffs in my tenure at Starr Tincup and for some reason I seem to have found a way to survive both. There are millions of people smarter than I, but I seem to have been doing the right kind of work in our worst kind of times as a business and, thus, made it through the layoffs.

Ideas

I put a lot of effort into my ideas. Most people call me one of the more reflective people they have ever known and that comes out in my ideas and recommendations that I put forth.

People

I like people that are diligent; that are smart enough to challenge an idea on the fly; that have the critical thinking skills to understand the ‘why’ in a business strategy.

I can not count the number of MS Project plans I have created. Some seem to go on for hundreds and hundreds of tasks and some seem to get the job done in less than 50.

I’ve realized, though, that many times people just want the comfort of knowing that a file exists. Furthermore, the people that want that comfort are inevitably the people that end up deviating from the plan or making changes.

Project Management, without being too exhaustive here, isn’t the ability to just build a list of all the tasks that need to get done; it is the ability to know the ripple effects of any changes to your plan, it is the ability to know when to be a little more forgiving and when to be more strict, it is the ability to know when your project is in jeopardy, it is the ability to know how to change your project around completely and still hit deadline and budget, it is the ability to know where you can give and where you must take.

I have worked with several marketing automation vendors: Eloqua, My Emma, Vtrenz, Constant Contact, Email Brain, etc.

They all seem to have similar designs / features. Some get more “advanced” – and price themselves appropriately so – by adding more features that they feel marketers demand. My take is that most of these applications suffer from the fact that their end user never wants any application they manage to be more complicated than MS Power Point, but, in order to differentiate, the marketing automation vendors add features that they feel they can charge more for. This would be blatantly clear if you were experienced with a robust application like Eloqua and compare it an app like Constant Contact.

Being mindful of the balance between additional functionality (i.e. the Cadillac) and just a plain email broadcast tool (i.e. the Pinto), I recommended Vtrenz as our marketing database. I have it integrated with Salesforce.com so that contact data is sent back-and-forth and is managed for me.

I have implemented Google Analytics on a couple of sites.

True to what they do, Google it seems will always add to this application. This is my recommendation on Google Analytics:

Make sure that your marketer and webmaster are on the same page when it comes to adding the tracking script. In other words, because the tracking script is something that you must ADD TO EVERY PAGE on your site manually, your marketer must ensure that the creative agency is adding your organizations tracking script OR when the creative agency turns over the pages to your webmaster to add to your marketing directories that the webmaster has it as part of the go-live process to add the script.

I’ve seen it happen to often that a marketing department is working with the creative agency to get the brand new marketing live and out the door, that they forget to add the tracking script. Then, a week after the campaign has the launched, the marketing director asks for metrics and there are none because neither the creative agency or the webmaster added the tracking script manually to the new pages.

And yes, of course, an include file helps with this drastically. But when you are building custom marketing pages that are not built on a template, you must remember to add the tracking script.

It seems trivial but the cliche is: the devil is in the details.

How much money has Google made from AdWords? wow!

I think it is a great application and appropriate for marketing departments that have larger than usual marketing budgets.

My recommendation is this: get a full-time employee to manage your AdWords account effectively and give that marketer a $5000 / per month budget. Instruct that person to constantly tell your webmaster or SEO agency what keywords are working. (Then instruct your webmaster or SEO agency to optimize your site accordingly).

A constant back-and-forth should be established between your guy managing your AdWords account and the person responsible for your site.

Furthermore, take advantage of any integrations that might be offered with your SFA / CRM. Salesforce.com and Google have a tight integration that can show you the number of search generated leads turned into deals and into closed-revenue.

My take is that the keywords people use to find your product/service, complete a form to become a lead for your sales department, then ultimately sign on the dotted line will tell your marketing director A LOT about what your company should be messaging and promoting.

Just some facts to start with:

• I’ve implemented, customized and trained on four (4) different clients.
• As of writing this post, I am now the single administrator at my company managing 93 users, Enterprise edition, across six (6) different departments.
• As of writing this post, I am now the marketing administrator and webmaster. That means I have customized our website and marketing campaigns to submit leads to SFDC, implemented the online customer service portal and am using ‘Campaigns’ to report on marketing ROI.
• I’ve built some complicated lead routing rules; currently my active routing rule as 28 statements.
• In my production environment, for the six (6) departments mentioned above, I have over 300 custom reports and 30 dashboards.
• I use SFDC sandbox regularly
• I have integrated SFDC with our marketing automation provider – Vtrenz – so that marketing information and contact data flow bi-directionally.
• I’ve built a flex app that used the SFDC API to call and publish data to a website.
• As of writing this post, I have over two years experience as an administrator for both one (1) client, as well as, multiple clients at the same time.

SFDC, and CRM in general, are still battling the adoption war but SFDC has made great strides. I am a huge proponent of the application and I say that having learned the application through “hard knocks”. SFDC marketing is pretty slick and the event coordination is something short of spectacular. But I don’t know that side of SFDC that well; I just know the application. The application speaks for itself and it is really good, not perfect but really good.

Some interesting projects that I have worked on:

1. Implementing SFDC : Kicking off a SFDC project is pretty exciting. Most people want to create the logins and send them out to everyone. They want to rush into it WAY too early. Being able to get perspective on how SFDC is going to be used requires a lot of patience and the ability to ask a lot of probative questions. I became quite the flowchart designer after having talked to so many people about their day-to-day process and how we could use SFDC to augment. You have to start with a flowchart and get approval from the executives (read: flowchart the lead/marketing process, the opportunity/sales process, the data update process, the database integration process, the outlook integration process, the reporting/dashboard process, etc. There is a lot of upfront thinking you have to do before you let everyone run free in the application. If you do not, the SFDC adoption will fail.

2. The API : We needed to display some information from SFDC to a website. One of our analysts internally was using Excel and a had a pre-defined process of checking the accuracy of the data with the executives. So I connected his file to SFDC using the Excel connector, which updated the data in SFDC when he told it to. That data went into SFDC as an ‘Asset’ record. That data was then subsequently called to the website via the API.