If there’s a common theme coming out of the Salesforce Dreamforce show in San Francisco this week, it’s about using the Internet to help reps reach their optimal performance. When you get down to it, it’s pretty similar to striving for the best conversion rates you can get out of an e-commerce site. If a web site with a million monthly visitors and an average order size of $100 boosts its conversion by even just a single percentage point to, say, 3.5% from 2.5%, the increase in revenue is millions of dollars a year.

It’s the same deal for sales reps. If a company’s team of, say, 1000 reps each has an average targeted annual sales goal of $1 million, and an average success rate of 70%, an increase of one percentage point brings in millions of dollars of revenue.

That’s partly why hundreds of vendors at Dreamforce—and the some 150,0000-plus attendees—are buzzing about the many cloud-based software tools designed to provide reps with the instant updates of reams of data from endless sources to help close deals. For example: which particular bundles of products and price points close the most deals in their market; which web content distributed in marketing and merchandising campaigns push the most effective product sales; which training courses are used by the top sales reps–or data on all of the above and more. Having that kind of data on a smartphone, tablet or laptop for constant review, Dreamforce attendees say, can make all the difference between an “A” rep and a “B” or “C” rep.

But Dreamforce isn’t only about sales reps. It’s about the increasing use of cloud-based customer relationship management and related marketing and service tools that also provide self-service e-commerce as a selling option. And—even more important, with e-commerce and other software built on the core CRM the core technology platform of Salesforce1—it’s about keeping selling efforts centered on the needs and interests of customers.

And companies that can maximize the performance of both their e-commerce sites and their teams of sales reps will ring up sales performance far higher than those that don’t.