A few weeks ago I got an email over the transom about a Salesforce.com “Success Tour” conference coming to New York. Easy to read through that title – it means “sales pitch.” But it made me curious. How would SF.com present itself in public sales venue?

So here I am, sitting in a soaring ballroom in the Grand Hyatt, surrounded by … 200? 250? … prospective clients. And this is one of three similarly filled rooms. And this is one of 50ish events around the world this year. Yowzah!

In my line of work, it’s easy to forget the difference of scale between nonprofit / campaign software and enterprise software. Sure, I know intellectually that Salesforce has 32,300 customers (that’s maybe 100 times the average nptech vendor). But seeing a huge room full of these customers, and knowing it is just a tiny fraction of the total number, I’m viscerally reminded of an old axiom — when nonprofits can leverage enterprise technology, they should. Because nptech vendors just can’t compete.

Now, I’m not knocking the nonprofit / political software vendors. Not for a second. But the vast amount of resources getting plowed into the Salesforces of the world blow away the resources devoted to the DemocracyInActions of the world. Even the Convios and Kinteras, who are much more heavily capitalized than most, can’t keep up. There’s just no corporate money supporting those tools.

Obviously, cost is the #1 impediment to nonprofits adopting enterprise software. That’s why Salesforce has been such a disruptive technology in the nptech space – 10 free licenses for any 501c3.

The pitch itself is … whatever. If I was a potential customer already interested enough to come to this event, I’m not sure this presentation would seal the deal. Then again, I’m not going to muscle my way to the front of the line for 1-on-1 tutorial. In fact I’m about 5 minutes from leaving.

But one random detail I like – the name badges here are double-sided. So when your badge flips around people can still tell who you are. Why didn’t the NTC think of that?