Strategic Events Manager

The Experience

The Salesforce Strategic Events team is seeking a highly organized, collaborative, and detail-oriented Strategic Events Manager to lead the planning and execution of Campground across our global event portfolio. Campground is the heart of Salesforce events where we showcase products, demos, customer success, and innovation across the entire Salesforce ecosystem.

In this role, you will own Campground planning and operations for your assigned events, partnering with Campground leads, agencies, product teams, and internal stakeholders to deliver operational excellence and product relevancy before, during, and after each event.

Reporting to the Director, Strategic Events, you will drive decisions, guide partners, and ensure operational and budget efficiency across Salesforce’s proprietary event portfolio.

What You'll Actually Be Doing

• Lead end-to-end planning for Campground experiences across Dreamforce, Connections, TDX, World Tours, and Tableau Conference. Own the planning timeline and critical path, set the structure for trackers, deliverables, and status reporting, and drive decisions on experience inputs, creative requests, product demos, technical needs, content, staffing, and equipment. Lead floorplan reviews, space planning, and operational readiness checks, balancing priorities across product teams.
• Serve as the primary partner to product marketing, creative and production agencies, research, and partner teams. Manage agency relationships and deliverables, set expectations, resolve conflicts or tradeoffs, and anticipate risks, making recommendations and escalating to the Director with proposed solutions. Lead internal communications and meeting cadences so planning stays efficient and transparent.
• Lead onsite operations to ensure Campground opens effectively and runs smoothly, directing daily walkthroughs and making real-time decisions on staffing, signage and demos, and issue resolution. Capture live insights and drive mid-event improvements. Travel can consist of 30-50% of time during peak spring and fall/winter event seasons.
• Manage the Campground budget for assigned events, including forecasting, tracking spend against plan, and approving agency and vendor costs within delegated authority. Define and manage KPIs and scan data tracking for each event, ensuring accuracy across data sources, and own recap reports that turn metrics into insights and recommendations for executive audiences. Identify and champion opportunities to apply AI and automation across planning, operations, and reporting, building scalable workflows, and apply process improvements and learnings across events and years.

You're Our Person If...

• 5-7+ years of experience in event planning, experiential marketing, expo or trade show operations, or program management, including leading complex, multi-stakeholder programs, and familiarity with Salesforce, our audience, and our products.
• Demonstrated ability to manage agencies, vendors, or creative teams and event budgets and contracts, and to identify process inefficiencies and implement AI-enabled or automated solutions.
• Strong judgment and decision-making, with the ability to influence senior stakeholders, lead through ambiguity, and stay calm under pressure, especially onsite.
• Excellent communication and relationship-building skills, with proficiency in Google Workspace or Office and strength in data analysis and reporting.

Even Better If...

• Experience leading large-scale events, trade shows, or experiential environments.
• Experience mentoring or managing junior team members.
• Proficiency in analytics and event performance metrics.
• Knowledge of the Salesforce ecosystem.