Thoughts are my own and not my employers.

Salesforce Customer Company Tour (called CCT by those in the know) was recently held at the London ExCel center. I’ve attended before as both Salesforce employee (lots of fun to prep) to manning booths working for two different partners in the ecosystem (Zuora and now Box). So I knew what to expect but this year CCT took a slightly different tack. Rather than the bigger is always better that had proceeded before this conference took a smaller more focused look. There were less attendees and the booth section was much smaller than before but it provided a more concentrated version of the SFDC experience. The most interesting and valuable aspect of Salesforce conference is both the attendee type and intent. CCT is full of business people as well as technical folk. You’ll find more marketers and Sales type people there looking for quote automation or marketing campaign management as developers looking for the next Heroku API. The intent is clear as well. Once a customer gets Salesforce they want to look at other applications in the ecosystem. The value of the tool is the square of the number of add-on applications of the tool ( a metcalfes law for app ecosystem). Box provides a unified content layer for business applications and our embedded version for Salesforce was very well received. Attendees liked the unification of a content discovery and collaboration tool inside the Salesforce User experience. Some wanted to deliver sales collateral , others to provide a secure collaboration environment to share contract and product information with either suppliers or customers. I really like the full HTML 5 capabilities of the Box embed feature. You can just drag and drop of your desktop into the embedded folder and your content is instantly available to share.

Box Embed

The fact we provide a mapping to account/opportunities for folders/subfolders was important as well for a coherent user experience. Overall the event was a great learning experience to understand how the sales and marketing community could use Box’s secure content and collaboration to drive engagement and to become the ‘customer company’ that was the headline of the event.