We know costs can add up when it comes to attending a conference out of town and you need to justify the expense to your boss. Since we want to make sure you don’t miss out, here are our tips for getting to YES on BbWorld!!

1.)    Plan Ahead – Select which keynotes, panels, and meet-ups speak most directly to your work and professional goals, and then show that specific agenda to your boss. This year BbWorld has five themes that hot topics in Education right now: Digital Content, Mobility, Analytics in Action, Technology Adoption and Social Learning. To go even further, identify some people you’d like to connect with and offer to set up meetings with them while you’re there.  Your boss will see you mean business, and you’ll be ready to go when you arrive.

2.)    Offer to Present What You Learn – Once you attend BbWorld, you will be well informed on the latest and greatest in education technology, but what about your colleagues?  Offer to present session recaps and key takeaways at a future staff meeting so everyone can benefit from your attendance. And of course, don’t forget to share a write up of what you learned at BbWorld for your school or organization’s blog or newsletter!

3.)    Social Media Visibility & Engagement – Not only will you and your boss know you’re getting the most out of BbWorld, but so will the rest of the world.  Tell your boss how you’ll embrace Twitter, Foursquare, YouTube, and other social networks to be a part of the conversation, grow your organization’s social media presence, and make new connections so you can continue the dialogue after the conference.

4.)    Build New Best Practices – Technology moves fast and what’s the latest fad in learning one year can be the must-avoid learning trend the next.  In order to be your best at your job, you need to be among the best.  We’ll make sure you have immediately applicable takeaways, make valuable connections, and make your trip to BbWorld an investment, not an expense! For example, this year BbWorld will have a Digital Content Upgrade Center so that you can talk to experts on the spot on how to incorporate our newest technologies at your institution.

5.)    Be enthusiastic! – Your energy and interest needs to come through in whatever form of communication you use to make the request.  Be yourself, but be the ‘yourself’ that conveys that doing your best at work means getting out of your usual environment sometimes and making that most of that time.

Through my career in marketing and sales management, I have learned how integral training and knowledge is to success in selling.  Whether your company is launching a new product or service, updated features, a robust B2B or B2C promotional campaign or training your distribution channel partners . . . your sales team should be constantly kept up to date with the knowledge and skills needed to drive sales.

If you are already spending the time and money to leverage online tools such as Salesforce to enhance your sales efforts, whywouldn’t you include an integrated training component to dramatically impact your business results?  Salesforce without this focus on training can be a real train wreck!

That’s why we developed Blackboard Learn for Sales: the first fully-featured sales training platform that is fully integrated with Salesforce.  It has already received a tremendous amount of press and acceptance in the market, and we are looking forward to watching it have a significant impact on sales in 2012.

I applaud the Wall Street Journal’s recent article, “Why Companies Aren’t Getting the Employees They Need” by Peter Cappelli (October 24). As Cappelli aptly points out, “To get America’s job engine revving again, companies need to stop pinning so much of the blame on our nation’s education system. They need to drop the idea of finding perfect candidates and look for people who could do the job with a bit of training and practice.”

I couldn’t agree more. Employee development and training improves the performance of both the individual and the company. Faced with limited resources, tighter budgets and a shrinking workforce, organizations need to make professional development a priority. Through corporate learning, there is a real opportunity to re-skill our workers, help them do their jobs better and improve business performance.

Blackboard and salesforce.com have joined forces to create the ultimate integration of sales and sales training! That’s right – today we announced the launch of a cloud-based learning management solution developed specifically for corporations focused on sales training and professional development called Blackboard Learn ™ for Sales.   After all, now that you’re managing your sales in the cloud, it’s only fitting that you provide your sales training and professional development there too.

Built on the Force.com cloud platform and available via salesforce.com’s AppExchange, this application gives sales reps, business partners, and service teams a single login to enroll and complete training courses on the award winning Blackboard Learn ™ platform but within the familiar Salesforce environment.

The average sales person spends several hours per day in Salesforce – but minimal hours each month on training.  So what if you could watch your sales team reach their full potential?  With dynamic and social learning directly within Salesforce, your team will WANT to engage and learn.

You want to see a positive impact on sales growth?  We’ve got it.

•    Certify reps on new products

•    Deliver training to geographically dispersed or traveling teams

•    Create targeted courses for underperforming reps

Blackboard has long maintained strong relationships with our Canadian clients; however, the recent rise in demand for in-region hosting services has led us to a more localized solution. That is why this summer we are slated to open a new data center in Canada.

Based in Calgary, Alberta, this new data hubcenter will be responsible for hosting and managing the online learning environments for Canadian governments, corporations, associations and other institutions. Blackboard Managed Hosting currently supports 8.5 million active users worldwide, growing 20 percent in the past two years. On a high-traffic day, our data centers can average more than 150 million Internet hits.