This post is written by Bob Marsh, SVP Sales Strategy & Head of Sales Contest Builder here at ePrize. Last week a few members of our team headed out to San Francisco to attend the very popular Dreamforce Conference and to showcase our new Sales Contest Builder Salesforce App.

Salesforce is "the enterprise cloud computing company that is leading the shift to the social enterprise." Dreamforce is the 9-year-old annual conference for every one in the cloud computing industry.(Need a longer explanation of what exactly Dreamforce is? Click here for an in depth explanation.)

Here are Bob's insights & takeaways from the conference.

Last year was my first time attending Dreamforce and I left amazed and inspired to be working with such a great company. The event was very well planned and organized, had tremendous speakers, and great sessions that gave me ideas to take back to the office.

Dreamforce 2011 was no different. I loved our own little story. Our company went live on Salesforce 12 months ago and two ePrizers attended Dreamforce in Nov 2010. We left motivated to immediately move our sales team onto Chatter, and also inspired to use our 12 years of experience in brand promotions to create a new line of business to create sales contests in Salesforce.com.

So 12 months after going live on Salesforce for our 80+ strong sales team, we had 6 ePrizers in attendance at Dreamforce 2011 (including our VP of Marketing and SVP of Technology), a booth on the expo floor, and a new business line built specifically for Salesforce. Salesforce truly motivates and empowers innovation.

My main takeaways from Dreamforce:

• Salesforce now has over 100,000 customers and had over 40,000 people at Dreamforce. They have become the dominant force in their industry, yet it still feels like these guys are just getting started. I'd watch them if I were you...they are innovating on a grand scale.

• The world of sales is undergoing a significant shift. Sales leaders of the future will be deeply savvy in sales technology and social media. There are some incredible new tools out there like InsideView, Jigsaw, Marketo, and insidesales.com. The key is to know how to pull them all together for your business.

• Salespeople must learn how to use social media correctly to create and build relationships. Authenticity has never been more important.

• As an exhibitor for our new business line, Sales Contest Builder, I was struck by how passionate the attendees were about wanting to learn about new tools. The show floor was something attendees seemed to look forward to as much as the sessions themselves.

• Our account team from Salesforce was incredibly helpful. They were our stewards to make sure we were getting a lot out of the event, and made many introductions to people they thought would be good for us to know. A true partner.

In addition to following up with a lot of new contacts, here are the three things I'm going to do as soon as I get back to the office and prepare for 2012:

1. Continue to enhance how our company uses Chatter. Our team has been using Chatter for about 8 months, but I know we can use it even more to streamline our business.
2. Make our sales team more social by educating them on how to better leverage Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and blogs. Our team helps the world's top brands use social media, mobile, and digital marketing, but I think we can be using it better for ourselves. We're already using InsideView and Radian 6, so we have the right tools available to us.
3. I noticed many companies have specific teams that work on lead generation and qualification. Our company has tried this before, but I think we're ready to take it up a notch particularly by using the social media tools mentioned above. I've got a couple parts of our business where I think we can give this a go.

If you weren't at Dreamforce this year, I highly recommend you put it into your schedule and budget for 2012.

Click here to learn more about Sales Contest Builder, the easy, 6 step way to create sales incentive contests. You can also find Bob on Twitter @bobmarsh5.