Just like the gold miners of old, we’re headed off to San Francisco in September for Salesforce.com’s Dreamforce conference to mine for customers. We have been enticed by Salesforce.com because of our Google affiliation, Google integration into our product and also our search marketing knowledge. They have sufficiently convinced us that we would very topical to the conference because of the recent Google-Salesforce.com strategic alliance. We’re convinced too, as although we had never envisoned a Google-Salesforce.com alliance 2 years ago, we alway believed that search marketing would be very useful for online B2B marketing and sales. ActiveConversion is the result of that belief and represents one of the best ways to generated qualified leads and get sales intelligence to salespeople to close more business.

The alliance has been dubbed ‘Googleforce’, it’s Google’s large scale foray into marketing more aggressively toward B2B, and Salesforce.com way of accessing the 600,000 advertisers on Google’s network that have requirements for CRM and marketing automation. It also aligns Google and Salesforce.com against a common competitor that they have in Microsoft, and keeps them a few steps ahead in search and CRM.

It’s a tidy sum to exhibit or even to attend Dreamforce, so it qualifies the players and attendees in addition to providing a targeted audience of B2B marketers and sales executives. With our relatively recent Salesforce.com AppExchange certification, we can instantly (on-demand) integrate into SFDC accounts, to show online marketing activity, qualified leads being generated, companies visiting etc.

Dreamforce is a highly anticipated event for many people, not just Salesforce.com users. SFDC is a bona-fide ecosystem (platform) and is synonymous with Software as a Service (SaaS), so prospects, developers, partners, analysts, and investment firms flock to the conference at San Francisco’s Moscone Center to see what’s new in customer facing applications that can be implemented on-demand. On-demand is the new wave of business applications as it can be bought and deployed much faster and cheaper than traditional software.

We’re looking forward to S.F. September 16-19, 2007. Our team is as excited about the location as the potential marketing value. Personally, having lived there for almost 20 years, it’s like going home for me. Great food, great sights, and exciting technology. If you’re going, make sure you look us up!

My latest startup, ActiveConversion has just been nominated by Deloitte Touche for the Companies-to-Watch category for the Deloitte Tech Fast 50 awards. This honors younger, promising Canadian tech companies that have been in business for less than 5 years. This is rather surprising for us because we just applied for it for the first time. Many of our fellow nominees are funded and have excellent management teams. We are one of only 44 companies in Canada to be selected for this category, and will get interviewed to be considered for winning.

Just to be considered for this prestigious award, from the hundreds of tech companies that have submitted in Canada is flattering, and the entire team here is thrilled and deserves credit.

Deloitte’s Fast 50 Awards in general are based on revenue moreso than the concept, although you have to have intellectual property (like software), generating a significant part of your revenues. Previous top 50 companies have included great companies like Research in Motion (Blackberry), Replicon, Elluminate, Workbrain, Eloqua, March Networks and Solium Capital. The list goes on with too many to mention.

In some ways, I’m not surprised we were selected. Since starting our marketing campaigns, we have been getting a steady stream of interested new prospects that we’re having trouble keeping up with. There are B2B companies from around the world that want to generate more qualified leads from their existing marketing, and there are even a lot of companies that want to qualify leads, because they get so many.

We solve these problems and more, and this resonates with sales and marketing executives. Our tag line is ‘Marketing Intelligence for Sales’ sums it up, once they see how automated sales intelligence can give sales teams actionable information.

Look for more good things from us in the future!