I attended my first Dreamforce, Salesforce’s annual user conference, in 2004 where the attendance was right around 2,500 people. Last year’s Dreamforce over 150,000 registered to attend. It’s gone past a traditional user conference to one of the biggest business events of the

year. And this year the company is launching their first annual Customer Trailblazer Awards, where winners not only get to attend Dreamforce for free, but they also will have the power of Salesforce’s marketing might to share their winning story of why they are business trailblazers.

Cynthia Hester, Director of Customer Advocacy for Salesforce, shares why Salesforce is starting this award, what the criteria is, who can participate, and how you can enter a submission. She also discusses how the contest will be judged and the other prizes the winners will receive.

John Oechsle, CEO of Swiftpage, shares how they transformed Act! from an off the shelf software app bought in stores, to a subscription-based cloud offering customers pay to use by the month; increasing it’s subscription customers by 140% and annual recurring revenue by 131% over the past year. And how that transformation has changed the way the company interacts with customers today, and how they’ll interact with them tomorrow.

Kickstagram cofounders Ronan Galvin and Casey Mathews developed a platform to help businesses automate engagement on Instagram. But according to the duo, it wasn’t until they started using InfusionSoft’s marketing automation platform that they were able simplify a complicated and time-consuming onboarding process that improved the customer experience. And within eight months Kickstagram achieved 5,000 more leads generated, a 282% increase in revenue and a 336% increase in customers.

Pam Dierks, VP of Dierks Farms, discussed not only how using InfusionSoft’s marketing automation platform enhanced their 137 year old farming businesses, but it created a path that allowed their sons to follow in their family’s tradition of cattle farming.

It’s 2017 and there are multiple surveys out there saying more than half of small businesses out there still don’t have a website. And, according to an upcoming survey from Leadpages, even many of those with websites don’t feel they need landing pages – pages optimized for converting site visitors into contacts and leads.

While on the exhibition floor at InfusionSoft’s ICON 17 event this week I had a chance to speak with Bob “The Teacher” Jenkins, Manager of Education Content for Leadpages. Bob shares why it’s more important than ever to have landing pages optimized for conversation. He also discusses why Google’s emphasis on speedy page load times will impact your landing page conversion rates.

Before most of us knew what a bot was, Dan Miller, lead analyst and founder of Opus Research, was already looking at the potential impact the nascent technology would have on customer service and engagement. Now that bots, intelligent digital assistants and other conversational interfaces are becoming daily parts of all our lives, businesses of all sizes are expected to invest close to $5 billion by 2021, according to a new report from Opus Research - Decision Makers’ Guide to Enterprise Intelligent Assistants; The Brave New World of Bots and Virtual Agents .

Dan shares some of the key findings from the report, including what is driving the current bot/intelligent assistant craze, how businesses are approaching things, the role of “metabots”, and the role artificial intelligence/machine learning is playing (and will play) in bot adoption.

Recently I had the pleasure of moderating a panel of startup founders discussing the current state of entrepreneurship during Salesforce’s Small Business Basecamp event in Atlanta. And while the focus of the conversation was on entrepreneurship in Atlanta, the shared themes, experiences and advice offered up is great for anyone with an entrepreneurial dream regardless of where they live.

The panel included:

• Rob Forman, cofounder and Head of Technology of Salesloft

• Miguel Lloyd, founder of Lloyd Media Group

• Brooks Robinson, cofounder and CEO of Springbot

At the recent small business basecamp hosted by Salesforce in Atlanta, the idea of arming small businesses with a community of resources was central in helping them deal with the ecosystem of challenges they are faced with. Salesforce Sr. Vice President of SMB Sales Mike Wolff, and Jamie Domenici, Vice President of SMB Marketing, shared with me why being involved in local small business communities is important to Salesforce. They also share why bringing the tech community (and understanding of the latest developments like artificial intelligence) to local businesses is good for SMBs, the local communities they operate in, and for business in general.

Salesforce held their Small Business Basecamp event here in Atlanta attended by hundreds of entrepreneurs, startups and small business owners. It was a day filled with lots of great panels, sessions and networking opportunities – all focused on helping SMBs efficiently move their businesses forward.

One of the partners of the event is Zenefits, a cloud-based human resource software provider for small and midsize companies. With human capital management becoming more prominent in companies of all sizes, I had the opportunity to speak with Ben Lazarov, Senior Enterprise Account Executive for Zenefits, to better understand what HCM has to offer growing small businesses.

Michelle Hurd, CMO of marketing automation platform Act-On , shares with us the idea of adaptive journeys, and how technology like machine learning and artificial intelligence can help you provide a more personalized pathway to engage individual customers and prospects at scale.