Attendance was up 10% and there was clearly a buzz about the place. The majority of attendees were marketing focused with a significant minority interested in B2B developments. Not surprisingly the hot topics were all around various flavours of social networking although the relevant speeches we caught were frankly a little predictable, a little ho-hum.

What is obvious is that with companies like Dell achieving real and measurable success through social networking it’s clearly time to take it seriously and make it part of the marketing mix.

The CRM area makes up a significant proportion of the show but the enterprise class suppliers were conspicuously absent and the rest didn’t have much that’s really new.

Huge strides have been taken to make sales and marketing applications available through facilities like the app-exchange on Sales Force. For Enterprise companies this means that effective sales and marketing processes can be bought off the shelf and, provided you’ve got deep pockets, achieve what everyone wants right now which is to enable fewer people to get more sales.

Of course, smaller organisations don’t have the deep pockets or the spare people sitting around to make these things work; they need it affordable and right first time. We decided to use the show to test market the Pipeliner application; our effort to deliver an enterprise CRM and associated applications to SME’s, off the shelf, as a hosted service. The response was amazing! It may have appealed only to the B2B minority at TFMA but absolutely everyone we talked to was really impressed and most want to talk to us about it in more detail.

If you’d like to get involved, and win an early view of the next big thing in CRM development let us know.

“There is nothing new except what has been forgotten.”
 Marie Antoinette