Road To Salesforce Basecamp Singapore 2018
It was quite a battle between my self and Nasrul that day as we were on a heated ping pong match on that one Friday afternoon. It has become a so called “the company’s favourite sports activity” since Haikal our certified marketing cloud consultant brought his ping pong table to the office, and since then, ping pong was the way for telcowiners to settle any debates or arguments.
Back to the story, as Nasrul and I were on the last game set, our Mac books rang in an email notification at the same time. Bats and ball down, we headed to our working station and there it was, the email we have all been waiting for, “SALESFORCE INVITES YOU TO OUR BASECAMP SINGAPORE 2018”. Within a minute, we were done with the registration and confirmation to the event.
The following Monday came and the sales team were all up and ready for our weekly sales meeting with Hafiz, our CEO. As we were about done with the sales meeting, Hafiz then said that he will be attending the basecamp trip as well with Razak, the CFO.
We in the company know them as Batman & Robin as these two work hand in hand in terms of managing and building TELCOWIN to where it is now.
Final list was out, sales team and the management has been decided by the upper hand to attend the basecamp event.
From the sales team, it was myself, Nasrul a.k.a the old timer and Fadli the crazy rookie. Of course our CEO and CFO a.k.a Batman & Robin were also on the list.
28th November came and there we were, all up and ready at the airport waiting for our plane to bring us to Singapore. Batman & Robin flew in a day earlier as they had a meeting to attend with Salesforce.
The Air Asia flight flew us in to Singapore like nobody’s business. We were there even I before could managed to get the number from the lady seated next to me. Mind you, Air Asia is also a client of Salesforce **wink**.
Got an airport limo and there we were heading up straight to Marina Bay Sands where the basecamp venue is. Immediately we were greeted with all the familiar faces from the salesforce people. One thing about salesforce that I really like is about how they manage an event registration process. I have attended hundreds of events through out my life, but attending salesforce’s events is something that no other organisation can ever beat.
The flow, warmth and efficiency during the registration process is something that i personally look forward to whenever I attend a salesforce event, and this time was no exception. Got my self a personalize tag, freebies, goodie bags and the itinerary all within 30 seconds.
As usual, as Malaysians in Singapore, we will always try to make our country proud in any ways possible. We started by being among the first 20 people in the hall, which is like an hour before the basecamp event started. Which we don’t normally do when we are back in our own country.
The moment the clock struck 9am, lights were on and crowds were pouring in like a champagne fountain. Through out that day, we were all with our own plan and schedule as our clients from Malaysia also flew in to Singapore to attend the event. In my hand was Firefly Airlines, which is among our clients that was there on that day.
I took them under my wings and we were then from one booth to another.
The first booth was QUIP which is an application that will enable the communication within an organisation on a “galactic” level, I kid you not.
Next was the Einstein booth, where all the AI (Artificial intelligence) developed by Salesforce is up for demo. If u think “Siri” on your apple phone is the bomb, then “Einstein Voice” is the atomic bomb. Capable of doing things ahead of its time.
I would need a thousand more pages if I were to want to list down my experience from one booth to another. But be rest assured that the Mulesoft booth, Datorama booth, Heroku booth, Pardot booth and etc, were also experiences that you just have to go through yourself.
In between booth sessions, we challenged ourselves to a trailhead module at the trailblazer section in the hall, and for sure we went home with tons of badges, pins and stickers.
The good part of this Basecamp was that food was at a free flow basis and no one will ever go hungry throughout the day. I would need another blog entry if I were to tell you about the food part here in basecamp.
We also went into a few keynotes session where it was located in different halls within the arena. Information about technology was surprisingly overwhelming through out the day and I was pretty sure that I had to take an aspirin at one point just to level up my conscious mind.
As we were heading towards the last hour of the basecamp session, we just sat down and enjoyed the varieties of finger foods and free flows of sodas.
There is no way that anyone can ever feel the same way we felt just by reading this entry, one must be physically there to experience and digest the knowledge of SALESFORCE.