Why we're sponsoring Dreamforce (for the first time)

It was the 6th of November, 2017.

Saleswhale had just 11 employees (mostly engineers), and just a couple of thousands of dollars of monthly recurring revenue.

We were neck deep in rebuilding our product after executing a hard pivot in April that year.

As a software engineer-turned-newly-minted CEO, I had just heard of the term "SaaS" (and realised that was what we were building) less than a year ago.

I decided to take a chance to purchase an attendee ticket for Dreamforce 2017. The event was held in San Francisco, about 16 time zones away. But I was keen to see what the hype was all about, and learn from one of the largest and most successful SaaS companies in the world.

It was incredible. I attended a keynote by Michelle Obama, and partied under the stars... to beats by Lenny Kravitz and Alicia Keys at Dreamfest. Marc Benioff was sharing his vision about the 4th industrial revolution. I was walking the Campgrounds, visiting the Exhibitor booths and being blown away by all the innovative partners and vendors. The Salesforce Ohana was out in full force. One day, Saleswhale would be back as a sponsor - I remembered thinking out aloud.

I ran into potential customers at Dreamforce who asked, “Do you guys integrate with Salesforce?”

“No, we do not—yet”, I admitted.

Back then, the only way we could get data in and out of Saleswhale was through spreadsheets. How archaic.

We had zero customers who used Salesforce (we mostly served small and medium businesses in our early days).

That conference changed everything for me. I had never seen an ecosystem of developers, partners, vendors, and customers so excited before. An engaged community of Trailblazers.

I knew that for Saleswhale to grow, we would need to be part of the Salesforce ecosystem.

Fast forward to today, November 2019.

We grew revenues 34X since Dreamforce 2017, raised our Series A funding and expanded our team to almost 50 employees now.

We now work with hundreds of enterprise and mid-market teams globally. Our clients include Fortune 500 and publicly-listed companies such as Cisco, Zendesk, and Randstad Group.

In Q3 2019, we opened our U.S. office to serve our U.S. customers better.

We went on a road show across the U.S. We met our customers and prospects in Portland, Phoenix, Chicago, New York, and San Francisco.

We were blown away by just how much appetite Salesforce customers had for a product like Saleswhale.

As we flew from state to state, we noticed that customers were waking up to the staid and old school ways of converting leads into revenue.

Salesforce customers were searching for complementary solutions to their marketing automation platforms.

We compiled dozens and dozens of pages of customer feedback. We used the feedback to make many improvements to our product, including a major release and upgrade to our Salesforce integration.

We now have a robust integration with Salesforce, which allows us to ingest leads and push back data into SFDC seamlessly. Salesforce customers are now consistently our best performing customers -- and we take pride in helping them operationalise and generate ROI on their SFDC instances.

With that, I am proud to announce that we are flying over to San Francisco to sponsor Dreamforce 2019. 

We are unveiling a brand new capability that we’ve built into our product: Reveal.

In a nutshell, Reveal gives marketers full visibility into the outcomes of the qualified leads that they pass to sales. More importantly, Reveal allows marketers to take action to ensure that every lead gets sufficient sales follow ups. This will be a huge game-changer to marketers who want to help their organizations increase revenue and growth.

Ultimately, Saleswhale’s vision is to place an AI sales assistant in every company.

We want our AI sales assistants to work alongside marketing and sales teams and help accelerate your lead-to-revenue processes.

Participating in Dreamforce 2019, and being part of the Salesforce ecosystem, is one small step towards that future.

Are you attending Dreamforce 2019? Come find us at booth #1539!

Meanwhile, you can request a demo here.