You Had Me At Hello. Smiling That Is.

Dreamforce season is upon us! Attendees and Salesforce.com employees are talking about what they are wearing and not wearing (I really hope not!) to the event, the Dreamforce party app is hopping, SaaSy videos are going viral, animated gifs are turning up everywhere,  sessions are filling up fast and rumors are flying around. So what are we doing in preparation? Well, some hard work of course as we coordinate our booth (#1626), our customer session [360° of Excellence: How GE Capital Drives ROI Through Customer Intelligence], our team schedules and our client appointments---but also some fun, because that is how we roll here @FirstRain ... If you've been following @FirstRain or Penny, Ryan or myself on Twitter, you may have noticed we've been tweeting out about our new customer intelligence Tumblr:  "You Had Me At Hello, Letters to Marc Benioff", with a couple new posts a day. So what exactly is it? You Had Me At Hello are letters directly from Penny to Marc Benioff, Salesforce.com's CEO. They are 'penned' in Penny's own voice—no marketing content editor behind the scenes—and are what our COO, YY Lee, recently called "like passing hallway notes between two CEOs". We have had a lot of positive feedback from our customers (including many who are mutual customers with Salesforce.com), along with many "thanks for making me smile." This ticks off our #1 objective as we all continue to be manically busy trying to prep for Dreamforce, deliver our updated AppExchange offering, work on a couple of new client SFDC implementations and continue to drive value to our customers rolling out tools like Sales Cloud. Here are some highlighted posts from the Tumblr in the last week that might also make you smile:

• Why Crash Diets Don't Work: Diets don't work for losing weight, and they don't work for making sales quota.
• Collaboration is the mot du jour and without it, you won't be successful. We like “speed and agility” without the artificial steroids.
• FedEx, flexibility and yoga: this one got a lot of play, I think the sexy photo of the tattoo guy stirred up some interest. I wonder if people thought it was a buff Marc?
• Coach Needs you and we all need new hand bags (yes they have man purses for the savy dressed Salesforce.com male staff)
• Shout Outs to Salesforce.com: we work, we play but we all must give back and Salesforce.com leads the way with its non-profit work, Penny's talking about young girls and STEM
• Awkward, Choke, China and Will.I.Am and how SFDC can help them react, stay on top of the brand and coke drinkers everywhere.

To read the rest of the posts go to  #UHadMeAtHello! Read it, Tweet it, and Submit Your own Letter to Marc if you are so inclined. View the full archive here.