Fueling Hyper Growth – A Salesforce Event

Tonight I was invited to attend a set of talks on the subject of hyper growth. Innovation Enterprise (the company I used to work for) continues to grow incredibly quickly and I was interested to see how other companies manage to keep on growing and how their tech adapts with growth.

The event was put on by Salesforce and everyone invited was using Salesforce in their company, this meant it was a great opportunity to chat to other folk using various parts of Salesforce day to day.

Before I share my key takeaways from the talks I should point out I am incredibly new to the Salesforce platform and eco-system, I am learning a lot around what it can do and the types of companies it can help.

Game Changing Growth – Stephen Millard

The first talk of the evening was by Stephen Millard on the subject of Game Changing Growth. Stephen works for Notion Capital, a VC company who invest in B2B SaaS companies at the seed or series A level.

My key takeaways were;

• Product-Market fit is constantly changing
• You need great people in your business
• Growth at all stages should be about reducing risk
• Depending on your stage of growth you need think about expanding to hit more markets, or narrowing down to the ones that are working for you
• People need to be able to change and adapt along with the company

This was my favourite talk of the evening.

Fueling Hyper Growth (Salesforce’s Accelerator Program)

Next up we had Sean O’Connor and Christian Mielke talking about how Salesforce can help a company to grow.

Like many people I wrongly assumed Salesforce was a CRM with some bells and whistles. What I am learning the more I develop in it and with it is that it is much more like a platform.

What was very interesting to see was how invested Salesforce are in helping companies grow with them. They were very clear that they want their partners to grow and take them along for the ride.

I can see how this would be a natural fit for Salesforce, they are large enough to be useful to Enterprise level companies but dynamic enough to suit smaller startups who will need to iterate through solutions quickly. Helping companies to grow is at the very least going to get them more license sales!

Customer Story – Stuart Mills

The final talk of the evening by was Stuart Mills from Wood MacKenzie. Stuart was talking about how his company has been growing consistently and how they have managed that.

My key takeaways were;

• You need to be incredibly customer focused
• Percentage of customer contact for each person in the company is a decent metric to be looking at
• The importance of having your company story in place
• Once you hit a certain size plans can take years to finalise

The importance of story was incredibly interesting, I have heard lots of smaller companies talking about their story and I always assumed it was something you did when you had nothing else. It seems even companies who are massive and growing still care very much about their story.

Wrapping up

I have to confess I didn’t think I would enjoy the evening as much as I did, I guess my cynical developer brain was kicking in! On this occasion it was wrong, I learned a lot and enjoyed all aspects of it.

It was great to put some faces to names I had heard mentioned in the office and it was cool to chat to folk who are using similar products to what we use to get great work done. I would happily attend more events like it.