Since the late 1990’s, technology companies have been leveraging user conferences to demonstrate their systems, solutions, and innovations to their clients.
As the conferences have progressed, the content of the events has expanded beyond demos and simple discussions about future enhancements. Many of these companies drive attendance through unique entertainment, exciting destinations, and networking opportunities with industry thought leaders. Tech and software providers are an integral part of today’s auto financing space. By studying companies like Salesforce, Fiserv, and DataScan, auto lenders can gain insight into how they create a valuable user conference experience.
SALESFORCE
Coined Dreamforce in 2003, the annual Salesforce conference takes over downtown San Francisco – literally. In 2015, over 165,000 registered attendees swarmed the Bay Area. Salesforce has made learning about CRM a cultural event. It has all the elements – a great city, forward-looking content, and entertainment. Frankly, entertainment that is pretty out of this world. In the past, Stevie Wonder, Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Metallica have all performed during the conference.
What Salesforce does incredibly well is promoting that its platform has a number of opportunities for partnerships and third-party plug-ins. To support that effort, they allow companies with Salesforce interfaces to exhibit and discuss interface benefits with potential clients. The conference has proven hugely valuable to companies looking to automate functionality related to their CRM, lead generation or cloud computing. www.salesforce.com/form/dreamforce/prereg/
FISERV
Fiserv is a systems and software based company that provides comprehensive solutions in banking, lending, and payments. Their user conference, which is hosted in Las Vegas this year, is focused on bringing all of their business line solutions under one roof. For example, it’s not uncommon for auto lenders to have multiple systems to manage processes related to lending money and collecting payments. Fiserv brings those functions together and gives users a glimpse of what it would be like to have fully integrated technologies. In addition to cross pollinating products and solutions, Fiserv also performs deep dives into their solutions so that the power user can better understand the functionality within the core systems. www.forum.fiserv.com/spring/Default.aspx
DATASCAN
On a smaller scale, niche-based companies like DataScan can accomplish similar results for clients through user conferences. DataScan is North America’s leader in providing systems and solutions to banks and finance companies that offer wholesale floorplan lending. Given that floorplan lending is a niche market, it is difficult for industry participants to find opportunities to discuss best practices, operational execution, and managing risk with their peers. DataScan’s user conference solves this issue by providing an intimate forum for floorplan lending specialists to share ideas. It also provides demonstrations of the system functionality, presentation of the roadmap for future enhancements, as well as guest speakers. DataScan will host their annual user conference in Las Vegas in March, and will continue its tradition of entertaining its clients at one of Las Vegas’ Cirque du Soleil shows. www.onedatascan.com
Although they serve different segments of the auto finance industry, and their target markets are of varying sizes, one of the value propositions that companies like Salesforce, Fiserv, and DataScan share is their commitment to serving their clients through content-rich and entertaining user conferences.