What Makes a Great TND Session
With the TND27 Call for Speakers now well underway, we thought this was a good time to answer a question we hear every year:
What makes a great TND session?
There really isn’t one formula.
We receive submissions from experienced speakers and people considering their first conference session. Some cover the newest technology in the Salesforce ecosystem. Others focus on problems people have been solving for years both at work, professionally, and personally.
All can make great sessions.
Start With Something Useful
You don’t have to come up with a topic no one has ever talked about before.
Maybe you solved a problem in an interesting way. Maybe you learned something the hard way. Maybe a project didn’t go as planned, but what you learned from it could save someone else a lot of frustration.
Or maybe you simply know something now that you wish someone had explained to you a year or two ago, or had explained differently.
Those are often the experiences that make the most useful community sessions.
Keep Your Audience in Mind
Think about who would benefit from your session and what you want them to leave knowing.
A great session doesn’t necessarily need to cover everything there is to know about a subject. In fact, trying to cover too much can make it harder for attendees to take away the important parts.
Pick the part of the story that matters and give yourself enough time to tell it well.
For TND27, you can submit:
20-minute sessions for a focused topic, idea or demonstration
50-minute sessions when you need more room to explore
1h20 hands-on training sessions when attendees need the opportunity to actually try something themselves
Choose the format that fits the idea rather than trying to make the idea fit the time.
It Doesn't Have to Be About the Latest Thing
Yes, we expect to see plenty of submissions about AI this year.
But TND isn't an AI conference.
We’re looking for sessions from across the Salesforce ecosystem: Salesforce Platform, Tableau, Slack, MuleSoft, Professional Development and Career topics, and all sorts of subjects in between.
Sometimes the session someone needs most is about a problem they have today, not the technology everyone is talking about tomorrow.
You Don't Have to Be a Professional Speaker
We love welcoming experienced speakers to TND, but we also want to hear from people who haven’t been on a conference stage before.
You don’t need to know everything about a subject.
You need to know something that could help someone else.
If you have that, you may already have the beginning of a TND session.
Have a Topic in Mind?
If you’re wondering whether your idea is “right” for TND, the best thing to do is submit it.
We’re not able to pre-approve session topics by email or guarantee that a particular idea will be selected before it goes through the review process. Part of building the agenda is looking at all of the submissions together — the topics, formats, audiences and overall mix.
So if you have an idea you think could be useful to the community, don’t wait for permission from us. Put it into a proposal and let us take a look.
Still Thinking About It?
The TND27 Call for Speakers closes November 15, 2026, so there’s still time just not as much as there was a few weeks ago.
If there’s an idea sitting in your notes, your drafts folder, or somewhere in the back of your mind, now would be a good time to turn it into a submission.
True North Dreamin’ 2027 takes place April 6–7, 2027 in Toronto.