Detroit Salesforce.com User Group Meeting Recap

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Yesterday (Jan 24^th), the Detroit Salesforce User Group got together and we had a great session. Erica Stowe is the local user group leader, and it's amazing how she finds the time to pull this together. Big kudos to Erika for making it happen. The meeting was hosted at AAA of Michigan which is a really nice facility over in Dearborn. I hadn't been there before, so glad to finally get inside!

Below is a quick recap of the meeting…

• This group is expanding big time. 90 people RSVP'd, and I would guess there were at least 60 in attendance. Last summer's event had 30 to 40, so that's exciting growth to see.
   
• The group was primarily made up of customers, a few prospective customers (I hope we didn't scare anyone away), and maybe a dozen developers/consulting firms. This group loves to share ideas and learn from each other. What struck me most was that many companies had 2 or 3 people there in representation.
   
• Mike Fiascone from DocuSign came in from Chicago to share their story. It seems like most people are generally familiar with DocuSign, but their pitch is really great. Their service definitely makes things easier with less paper to manage, but I hadn’t thought about the dramatic impact of speed. Mike shared that 75% of DocuSign sent documents are signed in 24 hours or less. That's amazing, but what's flat out crazy is that 10% are signed in 10 minutes or less!
   
• AAA shared how they use DocuSign to improve the customer experience and reduce the cost of document fulfillment and delivery. They calculated having saved exactly 1 large tree because of using DocuSign… way to go AAA! The group also learned how AAA reduced their total "round trip" on document approvals from 10 to 15 days down to 1 minute to 2-days. That's some fast clicking to get 1-minute turnaround!
   
• I spent about 15 minutes sharing an overview of ePrize's move to Salesforce 18 months ago, how it's improved our business, and gave a brief overview of our new app – Sales Contest Builder. Our sales contest case study about motivating salespeople to fill out empty fields in Salesforce got some nice response – people love that one. Overall, the group seems to enjoy hearing about the ePrize growth story here in metro-Detroit.
   
• David DeSana from Salesforce spoke a little about the concept of the Social Enterprise which people are still learning. Most people in the group didn't attend Dreamforce and were looking for a primer. This is a big topic that David could probably spend hours on, and he did a great job sharing the overview. He encouraged folks to go to Salesforce.com to learn more, specifically here.

Thanks again to Erica Stowe for leading the charge for the Detroit Salesforce community here. Erica is already starting to think about our next event. She shared some great ideas about how to help everyone connect better with a new Facebook group, larger venues for the meetings, and considering Birds of a Feather type breakouts the next time around. Should be fun!