Once again, the Ceridian Insights Annual Conference provided tremendous opportunities to learn and interact with Ceridian executives and customers. The conference continues to grow and impress all that attend and Sability was proud to be a Diamond sponsor this year.
There were many great moments at Insights 2014, but three stand out in my mind as creating a lot of buzz, which I want to share.
The first was Ceridian CEO David Ossip’s personal demonstration of new Dayforce product modules and features in the general session. It was a strong opening act for the conference. Although I’ve seen David demonstrate Dayforce in the past and know how skilled he is at it, the real buzz came from listening to the chatter in the conference hall during his presentation.
Sability Team at Insights: Eric Hoffmann, Adam Noble, Maggie McHugh-Parrish, Rob Leonard and Scott Brown
The customers around me were all extremely impressed that the company’s CEO knows their products so intimately, can articulate their value proposition, and clearly understands the customers’ desire for highly functional and easy to use solutions. David’s performance reinforced that Ceridian is a different company these days, with a much stronger product focus and a clear understanding of their customers’ HCM needs. In fact, he pointed out that many of the new features in Dayforce have come directly from client requests over the past year.
The second buzz came from the Executive Track that Ceridian provided for the more strategic-minded attendees at the conference. Often, these conferences offer sessions on detailed product training or tax and payroll legislation that are targeted only at the HR and Payroll professionals that attend.
But, as the strategic HCM movement continues to grow, Ceridian was smart to offer an Executive Track for attendees to discuss their company’s broader HCM vision with other customers and Ceridian executives. We heard many great comments about the sessions in this track, and I think it made the conference more valuable to a broader audience.
Again, Ceridian has shown that Dayforce HCM is about more than the nuts and bolts of the software, but also how it fits into their customers’ employee relationships and enables strategic HR practices to be leveraged.
Shannon Curry, with Emmis Communications, was the winner of the Sability sponsored Vespa prize giveaway. Congratulations Shannon!
Finally, I was particularly impressed by the number of sales prospects that Ceridian invited to the conference and allowed to interact with their existing customers. Not all software vendors would be OK with allowing unsigned prospects to hear unfiltered and uncontrolled messages from existing customers.
Most prefer to cautiously offer a few select references during the sales cycle, where they know the feedback will be positive. This show of confidence was a brave move that shows that Ceridian is comfortable with prospects hearing the real message of the ups and downs that can come when implementing a new HCM solution. Only through transparency like this can their customers be prepared for the work ahead and thus ultimately have a successful deployment.
In my overall assessment, I have to say that the conference was wildly successful. Congratulations to Ceridian for another great conference and Sability looks forward to being a part of the next one in 2015.
