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More than 40,000 marketing and sales professionals gathered in San Francisco, CA Aug. 30- Sept. 2 for Salesforce.com's Annual Dreamforce Conference. DemandGen Report editors caught up with the major players in the automation space to learn what's new and where the market is headed.

Part 1 of 2:

• Joe Payne, CEO, Eloqua
• Umberto Milletti, CEO, InsideView
• Adam Needles, Chief Strategy Officer, Left Brain DGA
• Sam Weber, CEO, Genius.com
• Ryan Allis, CEO, iContact
• Mike Volpe, CMO, Hubspot
• Raghu Raghavan, CEO, Act-On Software

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Nurtured BtoB sales leads are nearly nine times more likely to result in sales appointments than cold calls, according to a recent internal study conducted by Sales Engine International, a BtoB integrated marketing and sales acceleration firm.

For the study, Sales Engine International tapped into the same BtoB marketing sales “road map” that it implements for clients. The company used itself as an example to analyze how marketing can be leveraged to drive sales appointments. Paul Rafferty, Founder and CEO of Sales Engine, noted that that the company’s predictions of the number of nurtured leads to sales was more pronounced than expected.

By Cari Baldwin, Co-Founder and Partner, Bluebird Strategies

The mojo of marketing was in full swing at Salesforce.com’s Dreamforce 2011. As a marketer, if you were not sure what you would learn and find, Dreamforce did not disappoint and was a great opportunity to visit with 40,000 of your closest friends.

ExactTarget, provider of email and interactive marketing solutions, recently announced the expansion of its product suite, designed to provide marketers with new cloud-based solutions to plan, create, automate and measure interactive marketing campaigns in real time.

Built on the ExactTarget Interactive Marketing Hub, the new solutions extend the capabilities of the company's cross-channel marketing platform with drag and drop automation across email, mobile, Facebook and Twitter and a framework for third-party application development.

"We are in a new era of marketing — one of an incredibly empowered cross-channel consumer who is interacting with brands via email, Twitter, Facebook, mobile and the Web, all from the phone they carry in their purse or pocket," said Scott Dorsey, Co-Founder and CEO, ExactTarget. "Marketers must move quickly and embrace the real-time reality of this new era or risk finding themselves and their brands irrelevant."

Email marketing and social media marketing company iContact recently announced the continued momentum of iContact for Salesforce during the 2011 Dreamforce conference.

Since its inception, iContact has prioritized its integration with Salesforce.com’s CRM products and has seen significant growth within BtoB organizations integrating the solution. “In just one year, we’ve seen strong global adoption of iContact for Salesforce,” said Ryan Allis, CEO of iContact in a press release. Currently there are more than 500 salesforce.com customers in the AppExchange since the launch of iContact for Salesforce in September 2010.