Episode 19 of my #podcast with Caimin McGovern is now out!
As the Director of Customer Success at Salesforce, Caimin had deep insights into what are the key principles that an organisation should adhere to, in order to ensure project success.
Just like a gym, there needs to be the feeding and caring of a system that will bring you long term value. Don’t stuff yourself with curries every night and binge watch netflix and expect your health and fitness to be in tip top condition!
Come and listen in, there is so much to unpack in there.
If you are a #Salesforce customer, and you care deeply about getting the best out of your platform, you might want to listen in on our conversation. Link 👇🏻
It was so fascinating, that we had to record Part 2, which will be next week!
Enjoy!
#OnThePeiroll
Transcript
Pei Mun Lim
Hello Caimin. Hi there. Welcome to my podcast. It’s called OnThePeiroll. How are you today?
Caimin
I’m extremely well, thank you delighted to be here. I know we’ve been talking about it for a while. So we’re delighted we got the chance to get it done.
Pei Mun Lim
Thank you also for jumping through the hoops to get the necessary approval. So I’m quite looking forward to our conversation. Shall I begin by saying that I’m really quite interested in your career path? So why don’t we start there. And if you can just carry myself and listeners on your journey, because I know you started off in on in QA, as I can see from your profile, to where you’ve got to today.
Caimin
Yeah, it’s funny, you know, I was thinking recently, I’m the greatest stroke of luck that I have in my life is that there is a role that enables me to use my talents, which are a little bit vague, and a little bit, not well defined. But But I think they fit this role really well. So I started off, I kind of drifted into it. I left school in 1992, not really sure about what I wanted to do, but I always had a real interest in computing terms of you know, and started off with a Commodore 64. I had an Acer computer back in the day, which costs a huge amount of money 386 with, I think, four megabytes of RAM. But I always enjoyed, you know, tinkering with things and seeing how things worked. So I started in it doing computer science. And when I left college, I had a role for about eight months as a developer, in a very, very small company, but it was very rigid in terms of the work that I was doing. So I applied for a role for a company that produced x 400, mastering software. So this was, I guess, the precursor to email, it was secure message transmission. But it gave me the opportunity to work on a ton of different operating systems and transport protocols as they were then it wasn’t just TCP IP, and port, which I really enjoyed the role that I had there was in QA, which I loved, you know, I love kind of getting software and just bashing it to see couldn’t make it break, or could I find holes in it. But one of the things that I really enjoy doing wires, we would have customers that would come into the lab, to see you know, how we tested the software. And I really liked giving tours and explaining the process and, you know, explaining how we how we did our role. So after about a year, I actually started working in the development arm after the company that I was working for, but I didn’t enjoy it as much as the QA because it was primarily bug fixes very kind of focused, and you’d be working on one issue for a long period of time. So I had an opportunity to move into technical support. And that was where I really started to enjoy working with customers different problems every day, you know, quite complex problems, sometimes, you know, really getting the bit between your teeth and trying to reproduce issues and working on them. So I started then, to move from technical support into a more technical consulting role. The software that the company produced was white label mastering software, if you have that, an ISP account in the UK with talktalk, or bt, more than likely the email address you get with that is was was that company software. So I would go and help their technical support teams get set up for supporting, you know, their, their customers. And through that then got into technical training. And that was maybe five or 10 years starting in 2013, I started to really travel all around the world. You know, doing training courses and training classes, and working with technical teams to you know, teach them how the software worked and how to how to support the I really liked the aspect of explaining technical concepts to people. And while I was working with primarily technical teams or results or working with some non technical people, let’s say people who support managers who may not necessarily be be technical. And if you look at my LinkedIn profile, I have in an in a nutshell my my passion is making tech technical concepts accessible to non technical people. So interact in I’m sorry. So I started to doing technical training in about 2005. And in 2013, I had the opportunity to interview for a role as a customer success manager, which I hadn’t really heard about. But it was explained to me that it was like a combination of technical support, and business support and enablement, which sounded perfect. So I joined Salesforce in 2013, I actually have my eight year anniversary on Monday. And I’ve been kind of working there ever since. So I started off working with smaller customers all around Europe, and moved into a role that we had called a portfolio success manager where I worked with specific sales teams. So worked with some really interesting brands in the UK in terms of retail, so Chanel and Liverpool Football Club, Manchester City, which was, you know, really interesting. And then in October of last year, I asked third role as a customer success manager, so a dedicated success resources for customers based primarily in South Africa, Turkey and the Middle East. So that’s, that’s kind of how I got to where I am today.
Pei Mun Lim
Wow, I have made quite a lot of notes. And I want to I want to touch on different things. So I was just thinking that your, your how you started is very similar to mine, because my first computer was an Acer as well. But it was a 286 I didn’t have a condor. So you know, things have come a long way since then. And fact that you started off as QE. Right, so I’ve got a question about it. Do you feel that anyone can be a good tester? Are they born or bred? Sorry?
Caimin
That’s a great question. I don’t think that anyone can be a QA engineer, I definitely don’t. Because I think you need to have a particular mindset, you need to be curious. And you need to be to not have a, you know, if you’re a QA engineer, and you just work through a series of tests, all you’re ever going to find are issues that were reported before, you really need to be able to look at a product, and think about how it could be used. And I think QA and technical support go hand in hand, because I remember, back in my first job, and I think this is a bit of an apocryphal tale, everybody says it but I was dealing with somebody on the phone, and they said they couldn’t see a particular forum. So it’s okay, if you close down all the windows, just see if they’re on your desktop, and there was a long pause. And he came back and said, okay, I’ve shut all the windows have closed all the blinds, I still can’t see it. Okay, this is something that’s, you know, completely obvious to me. But this is not a technical person, this is a is a freight company is a driver. He doesn’t understand what I’m what I’m saying. I think that if you, you need to understand that mindset when you’re testing a piece of software to look at all of the different ways that it could be used. So I don’t think there’s sometimes there’s a perception, particularly in manual QA, that kind of anybody can do it. I definitely don’t think that that’s the case, I think that you do need to have an understanding of how the software hangs together an understanding of how people use software. And, as I say, like a curious mindset that you can go in and just bash it all different ways and see what happens.
Pei Mun Lim
So in your current role, what do you tell customers about QA testing?
Caimin
Again, you know, it’s that message of making assumptions is a dangerous thing. The one thing that I would say, as well as, when I work with customers who are rolling out implementations within their own are typically the customers that I’m working with, they have worked with that implementation for a long period of time before their end users ever get their hands out. So it’s very easy to make assumptions about how things will work. And so user acceptance testing, for example, is a great way of finding out where the holes are in the implementation and where the gaps are, in terms of if somebody looks at a screen. And it’s not completely obvious to them, what they should do, it’s the designers fault rather than the users fault. So I would always say, you know, don’t make assumptions, understand that you have lived in this product for a lot longer than the user will have. And so there are things that you know, about the product that they won’t know, but if they don’t know what they need to know, it’s never gonna work. So you know, it’s it’s listen to feedback. The one thing that frustrates me as well as when I, when somebody gives feedback about a product and this, this would always happen in QA where you’d say To a developer, if I do this, the results aren’t what I expected. And the developer would say, Oh, yeah, but nobody’s going to do that, or no, that’s fine, you know that, that’s not a big deal. The problem is, is that this is the way that it’s been designed. And if it isn’t easy and intuitive for the user to use, you basically have a really expensive screensaver, you know, you’re not fulfilling the purpose that the software is written to do. And that’s the, that’s the big problem.
Pei Mun Lim
So as you’re talking, actually, my mind was going on to slightly different places, mainly, because there are quite a few nuances in that. So let me just tease them out. For our listeners, where I come from, is from a consulting partner point of view. So we take a product. So my background was Microsoft, as well. So like you was in infrastructure databases in Microsoft CRM, before moved over to Salesforce. So as as a partner, we’re taking a product that this company has built, and we’re implementing it for you. So the QA that I have always worked with has been in this environment. So there are things that you test and things that you don’t, you don’t test list things, which are default from Salesforce, because they’ve already done their testing and QA and stuff. And what we test is what we build. So from what you’re talking about is more from Salesforce point of view, right? So you got your testers and then you got your developers who build features that are in the backlog, etc, that Salesforce wants to roll out every release, and so on, so forth. So when you’re talking to your customers, in your role as Customer Success director, I would imagine that you will have some customers who self enable, so they’ve got their own team. And then you’ve got those who work with partners. So if you kind of put that hat on. So I believe when you were answering the question earlier, you were looking inward internally into Salesforce and talking about your QA in that way. But if you’re talking to your customers, and and wanting to impress upon them the importance of good testing so that they get the best out of Salesforce, what are the kinds of things that you would say, let’s say to someone who’s self enabling, and someone who’s working with a partner, just on the topic of QA and testing,
Caimin
by Well, in terms of, let’s say, when somebody is, if they’re if they’re self implementing, or they’re working with a partner, particularly when they’re working with a partner, I always say the more knowledge about the platform you have, the better your experience will be. And that’s not to denigrate any work that any partner would do. The challenge is that it’s like me with cars, I know zero about cars, I know how to turn them on, and how to how to make them operate. But once I left the bonnet, I’m done. If I go into a garbage, and the man in the garbage says, you need this worked on, or the permanent, the guard says you need this worked on, all I can do is take them at face value. And you know if I’ve never worked, or I’ve never put my current lifeguards before, I literally have no idea whether what they’re telling me is absolutely vital, whether it’s something that I could consider, but doesn’t really matter if I don’t do it, or whether it’s something that will directly impact my safety, right. So with particularly with Salesforce, there’s an awful lot of information that you can get. Sometimes it’s overwhelming. But there are now you know, guided trails through product enablement. And the more you know about how the product works, the more specific your requirements can be. One thing that I always say to customers is if you if you go to say, for example, the admin trail on trailhead, and you even if you’re never going to be an admin, when you learn what features like workflows do or what validation rules do, you don’t necessarily know how to do you don’t necessarily have to know how to implement those things. But you do know that that feature exists in Salesforce. So you can then take your business problems and describe them in a way where you say, for example, I want to enter something in a field, but I want to make sure that it has a specific dial code. If you don’t know that that feature exists in Salesforce, you’re relying on the partner to ask that question. And if they don’t ask that question, that feature will never be implemented and it becomes technical debt because then you have, you know, we’ve poor data, or you have a feature gap. So it really is, you know, in terms of QA and testing in Salesforce, if you’re the one thing I would say is to be patient, you know, to make sure that at the testing phase, you take your time and you’re not as focused as we have Release Date, you know, I think if you’re using the agile approach, then a smaller release, where it’s fully tested and fully up to spec is better than a larger one where you think there are things to do in that. And there’s two things that I would say around that. So the first is, if you release a product where there is still work to be done, realistically, that work will never get done. The second thing is, you know, you will come under pressure to hit release dates and to hit release targets. But if the challenge that I see is, it’s a lot easier to get somebody to use a product for first time than it is for the second time, if the user experience isn’t good, the first time that they go and use a particular product, it’s really difficult to get them to go back, even if you’ve made a rafter changes, you know, that the the perception is, this isn’t fit for purpose, or it’s 90%, of what we need. But the other 10% is still in spreadsheets or external systems. So I need to keep using those external systems. So really, you know, in terms of, of QA and testing and user acceptance testing, it’s it’s to be patient to to understand what it is that you’re trying to do have a really clear vision of what it is that you want to achieve and focus on that and getting it right, before you try and correct the cliche in sales forces. Don’t boil the ocean. And that is, you know, really sound advice.
Pei Mun Lim
So you were talking about agile? So that’s kind of my one of my favorite topics, in terms of methodology. If, if you get a client who’s trying to do a big transformation, have you seen one where agile really works? Yeah. caking.
Caimin
To get across it always? Well, it, I wouldn’t say that it always works. But in every digital transformation project that works out john is used. And the reason is when I started in, in it, we used waterfall, and it was really a case of you’d sit down, you’d have your planning meeting, developers would go away for three to six months, and then present you with a feature at the end. The challenges, what are what a big transformation project is that you need to keep everybody moving forward with you. And we get to a stage where everybody gets it in everything where a lot of changes is required. Right in the middle of that project, you get to the stage where you don’t remember why you started it. And you can see where the end line is. And the great thing about agile is, at any point in that process, you can say, we’ll pause it here. And we’ll take what we have. And we’ll you know, we’ll we’ll really bet that in. And then we’ll move forward, you know, we’ll expand the the MVP. The other thing about agile Is that you, I think it’s really important. And this is one of the things that I’ll say, around executive sponsorship, and anti Change program, you really need to have an executive sponsor or a change champion, who can articulate the victim The reason, you know, if we use the pro se model, the adkar, why are we making this change? What are the benefits that it’s going to give us? What What do you need to do to be able to successfully implement this change, it’s much easier to do that with with an agile framework, because the rate of change is slower. But also, a lot of the change that I would see in Agile is we get a product, we get feedback from the user base who say I love 90% of this, but there’s 10% of it, that doesn’t work. And in a lot of cases, then we can make those changes. And in the next release, we see those changes implemented. And now I love 92% of that. And there’s only 8% that doesn’t work for me. The the the big benefit of that, as well as that. If you know speaking from a Salesforce force point of view, Salesforce generally isn’t the first system that’s been implemented in any of the customers that I’m working with. Generally, they’re changing from an in house product are different, you know, Microsoft or SAP or whatever. And there’ll be there become, you get this concept of change fatigue. Here we go again, we’ve been three years since the last system. Now we’re changing again, I’m going to use this for two years, and then there’ll be another change. When you use agile, you get your MVP, you start to use it, but you can also see how it’s maybe expanding or it’s adapting to the user changes and it implement or it enforces that or sort of reinforces that concept that this is the system of choice. This As the system of record for my organization, investment is going in, I understand why these changes are made. And even on a subconscious, subconscious basis, it reinforces that message that this is what we’re going to be using going forward. So it’s really important to understand how it works and to get on board with that. So it really helps with adoption as well, when you use I think, an agile framework. Okay,
Pei Mun Lim
thank you for that. That is, there’s quite a lot there. And I would really like to unpack it with your help, please. Also, I’m, I’m feeling slightly in a pedantic mood. So I just need your assistant slightly. So coming from a, you know, Microsoft implementation when I’m sad was very waterfall, but our projects were two years, three years in length, they were a little bit shorter and easier to manage expectations. And so the delivery of the features were not so far away that as you say, you know, yet for teqsa, When am I going to see the final product. So I saw it when I was looking at it, and when I was shifting from Microsoft to Salesforce, and I was you know, I took my certification, you know, for agile dsdm know that, I was very open minded, and I was trying to I wanted to be, I wanted to buy into it, I wanted to, because Salesforce was going on about agile so much, and I was immersed in it, in the partner working, I realized the definition of Agile that I had learned wasn’t being executed in a way the purists have envisaged it. And so from my point of view, agile so if we, you know, looked at manifesto that the all the principles, and I get, I totally get the benefits of it. But one of the principles is you spoke about MVP, which is constantly providing value to the client, I also see that, but the other thing was that you supposed to ship, every sprint, average sprint is supposed to deploy to production. Now in the company I was with in all the other Salesforce large Salesforce implementation that I heard, you know, some of my team was extended into the larger transformation. They weren’t doing that they weren’t shipping. At the end of every sprint, what I’m understanding began just drilling down to details is that you were working in sprints or iterations, but not deployed to production, until there was a coherent piece that you thought this will provide best value, and then you deploy. So in my head that was more like a mini waterfall development. And then you delivered it in very structured way. That was complete, because in my head, and I’ve worked on a few larger transformation projects, you have to work with external vendors. And therefore you cannot keep changing and you still need a plan. So how I’ve been training people and how I saw things was that the only true agile methodology in the way that I’ve understood it, which is shipping every, whatever your sprint is, yeah, belongs more for a software company where you had all these features you wanted to do, you prioritize them, and push them out, you test them and, etc worse, when you’re doing transformation programs, when you’re implementing as a partner. To agile is something that the customer, most customers don’t get. Most partners aren’t able to execute in the way that it was envisaged in the beginning. This is what I’m trying to, you know, just get clarity on and um, if you say that you’ve been on large transformation projects where agile has really worked, I would love to hear a little bit more whether it is like a pure agile way of delivering or a bit more like mini waterfalls, mini waves feature that’s been bundled together in a sensible manner.
Caimin
Yeah, that’s an excellent point. And one of the words the key words that you use there is pure, you know, pure agile and I’ve worked with, with, you know, Scrum masters and agile trainers who will always say the best agile is or the best way of implementing agile is the way that works for your organization. And I think you know that that’s exactly right in terms of, you have your overall vision which is more of a waterfall, you have your product deliveries, which may be and you know, the sprint may be three months right or it could be six months. But I think the concept of agile that works really well is that continuous improvement and continuous development, along with, I do think that it’s important to not necessarily to ship at the end of every sprint, but to ship in increments or to deploy in increments, where, like I say, you don’t want to boil the ocean, and you don’t want to give a complete brand new product where everything is changed. Although I have seen that work as well. A lot of the customers that I wouldn’t necessarily have been involved with myself, but that I’ve seen would be multicountry. I’ll give you an extra maybe a contrasting example. So two customers that are I’m aware of had multicultural multi country rollouts, one decided that what they were going to do, we’ll ship the same version to every country, and then iterate our increment in every country all at the same time, the other took the approach that they were going to prioritize the country less than or we’re going to start with the smaller countries. And then we’re going to roll out to a single country, and then make any iterations make any improvements that needed and then take that that completed version, and roll it out to the second country. And by I think, by far, what was the easiest to do was the second approach where it was a single country at a time, because it was much more manageable, it was much more there were few, far fewer variables in terms of personnel. And, you know, as you mentioned, external influences or if you like external dependencies, and really, by the end of it, so that was eight countries involved in that role. And by the end of us, it was such a smooth process of rollout to one country, this was including Marketing Cloud, basically just copy what was deployed in that country, roll it into the next country. And then once that implementation been finished, any improvements that were made, or any changes that have been made, were rolled back into the previous countries, and then bundled up and taken as the base platform for the next country. So you know, I think you definitely have to be adaptable. And as you say, this adherence to pure agile is probably going to be too inflexible for most. And also, you know, these can be complex projects that aren’t just software based, they’re also people based, and we can never really predict how people are going to react. So if you say, look, the software has done, we’ve rolled it out, it’s now time to move on to the next without looking at how that’s, you know, gone down with the, with the product that’s already out there. It’s, it’s a bit of a challenge. One of the things that we do as Customer Success is we look and we focus on adoption numbers. So not just, you know, in terms of how many licenses are deployed, how many licenses are being used, but also what features are being used? Is there a reason that, for example, a new feature hasn’t landed? Well. So yeah, I think, as I say, pure agile is, is not great, but I don’t know of too many companies or projects that would adhere to pure agile, now it’s more of a hybrid model. I
Pei Mun Lim
mean, that makes that that makes a lot of sense to roll it out in a way that works for that customer. So it’s just really interested in the way that you’ve said, rolling back as a, you know, call base template for the original company. Did you country did you get to a position whereby time you go to the eighth one, that the changes that had to be rolled back was so different that you needed retraining? Was there any element of that or?
Caimin
No, actually, as, as the delta between a country in one, country one and two was quite large, and there wasn’t really I think any kind of fundamental changes, it was more just process tweaks and things like that. But in that particular project, by the time they got to say country, seven of eight, the changes between seven and eight were were very, very small, you know, primarily language changes, and you know, very few feature changes or process changes, because they had now a large body of evidence from the previous countries of what worked and what landed well, and what the market needed. And it was, you know, it was essentially the same business but just it was over eastern Europe. So you know, multiple kind of the say former satellite states so very similar in terms of culture, and and process so yeah, it was quite minimal by the time they got to the end I would say,
Pei Mun Lim
did you? I know going teeny bit, you know, maybe won’t technically here, but is there a situation where you’ve got clients? So I’ve, obviously the sizes with projects that I’ve worked on never got to a point where we had to look at more than one or for the same company? Do you have clients who have got multiple orgs? And how does handle? Okay?
Caimin
Yeah. So there’s obviously, you know, different reasons why customers might have different orgs. In particular, mergers and acquisitions are a paycheck, the big challenge, I would say, or separation of data for, you know, some customers might want to use an instance of Sales Cloud, and a separate instance of Service Cloud, and maybe have an integration between the two tends to be for historical reasons, I think, you know, the Salesforce has evolved, so that, you know, we have this concept of the customer 360. And I think the value in Salesforce now is primarily this 360 degree view of the customer. And so for, yeah, for mergers and acquisitions, that would be the primary use case where you have multiple works. And I think the key is, well, really, it depends, right? So there is no requirement for you to have a single architect, there’s obviously advantages to that. But only if all of the processes are broadly similar. If the data is is able to be shared across, you know, that the entire arc, which isn’t always the case, and thinking of a retail group that I worked with in the UK, who have, they had a really strong business objective of basically just buying up smaller competitors and rolling them into their org, they decided to go for a single org strategy. And but they had a real problem in terms of separating data between the various different brands that they own, because they didn’t want somebody from brand one seeing data from brand two. So as they added more and more orgs, obviously, sharing rules became more complex performance started to be impacted. And that was, I think, probably not the right strategy for them at the time. I also have organizations who are going the other way. So one organization that have multiple orgs, where they’ve just migrated everything into a single org, it’s allowing them to be a little bit more agile, in terms of their selling process and do things like cross selling some, some multiple different similar services in terms of professional services and software sales. But there was a lot of effort involved in that. And it was a slow process. And it’s not completed yet. So I think they’ve got maybe one more external load that they are looking to bring in. It’s really just about communication. The challenge as well becomes and particularly in a merger and acquisition scenario is who is the owner of the data? Because, you know, you have two people are kind of similar levels from the two different companies where there may be conflicting opinion opinions. And the overall strategy is we can we all just get along, realistically, somebody needs to be the owner. So it’s there’s a lot of communication involved. And a lot of, let’s see what the broad strategy is. And if I can plug our expert coaching sessions, we do have an orc strategy coaching session, which is specifically for customers that have multiple orgs, and are looking to integrate them, like which processes get implemented, which processes get dropped? Who has the master set of data? It’s it’s quite a complex arrangement. And it really depends on what your overall objective is, and careful analysis of the pros and cons of each approach. I would say,
Pei Mun Lim
That’s really cool. I have not heard of the coach, coaching services that you speak of.
Caimin
Yeah. So for anybody who has a premier account, our premier success plan. Last year, we had these engagements that were called accelerators. And the idea is to accelerate your path to business value. So these are small focused consulting sessions with product specialists in our success successful and they basically work with you to achieve a specific outcome. So if you go to help.salesforce.com, you’ll see a list of the accelerators that are available. And I, when I’m describing them to customers, I say there are things like, you know, how to build reports and dashboards, how to use opportunities and the you know, the best possible way. But there were also things for experienced admins like how to build a governance framework. You know, how to how to define your arc strategy. And these really are useful for those more tenured admins that have a lot of product experience, but really are looking for advice on Where should we go next. And what should our strategy be because we use, the great advantage of being in customer success is you work with so many different customers, and you hear so many different stories. So when I engage with a new customer, the value that I bring is, I can teach you the mistakes that everybody else has made. And make sure that you’re aware of them so that you can avoid them. And that’s really what we do in the, in those expert coaching sessions, as well as this is the best practice stuff we’ve gathered from years of working with customers, very similar to yourself, you know.
Pei Mun Lim
So that segues quite nicely to my next question, what are the top five mistakes that most customers do that you have to you know, keep coaching and keep re explaining to new customers?
Caimin
I can boil it down to one, one top mistake. Okay. So if we if we were when we talk about adoption, in Salesforce, and we talk about why a Salesforce implementation hasn’t worked? Well, if I engage with a customer who says, look, you know, where we’ve got a lot of technical debt, we have a lot of duplicated data that processes don’t really work, we’ve got a ton of fields that were implemented. And we don’t really know why. Those are all symptoms of the same problem. And the same problem is always in nearly always anyway, it’s a lack of executive sponsorship. And it’s a lack of clear executive sponsorship from somebody in the org who is is driving the adoption of Salesforce, I would often talk to customers, and in my previous role, when I worked with much smaller customers, this was a particularly prevalent issue, I would talk to a customer and I would say, so who is your executive sponsor, and they tell me what was in it, it might be the person that I’m speaking to, or it might be their boss, you know, like a CIO, CTO, or whatever it might be. And when I would talk to that person, I’d say, so people regard you as the executive sponsor for this project. Most of the time, they would say, I guess that would be me. Yeah. So what do you do as an executive sponsor? Well, it’s my role to really promote the use of Salesforce and it Okay, so what is it that you specifically do to drive the adoption of Salesforce? And that that’s when the conversation gets a little bit stilted? Because it’s one of the things that I add is, are these these insights that are simple, but not obvious, you know, when you tell somebody to do, you could do this, or you could do that they go, it’s incredibly simple. I don’t know why I didn’t think of that before. It’s because it’s not your job to think about that kind of thing. You know, it’s my job to tell you. So the simple but not obvious tips. The way that I describe it, is it. So in Ireland, we have these huge weddings. And after the dinner, the band starts or the disco starts. And we have this phenomenon of the DMT dance floor. So everybody’s standing around the dance floor, everybody wants to dance, but nobody wants to be the first person. And you always have that first person, usually with a couple of drinks on them who go in, and once they go, everybody will follow them. And that’s the role of the executive sponsor, or one of the primary roles of the executive sponsor. In order for an inflamation implementation to be successful, you need to have a clear vision, okay, you need to have, this is what we’re doing. And this is why we’re doing it. And you need to have somebody who can articulate that at every level. So as an example, when Salesforce launched chatter, which you know, a couple of years ago, or both few years ago now, actually, but so everybody had access to this new tool. And if anybody who’s used chatter will now it’s kind of like Twitter, in that you go in, you add a photograph of yourself, you add a little note in your bio, but nobody knew how to use it. And nobody wanted to be the person who used it in the wrong way in front of the entire company. So Marc Benioff, chatter to all of his execs all of his directs and said, I want you by the end of business today, or by this week, to update your profile picture. And I want you to get all of your directs to do it as well. And so within 24 hours, almost the entire company had their profile picture on and now when somebody starts in Salesforce, and they don’t do it, one of the first things that somebody will say to them is, oh, by the way, you should update your your profile picture on chatter. If I was brand new to Salesforce, and I had started in whether it’s in Salesforce or in another org, and I logged into chatter, and I saw a sea of profiles that have no profile picture, updated. The first thought that would be in my head is I’m probably not really supposed to do this. And I’ll just follow the crowd. Okay? It’s the same with wood, wood, everything, do I, if I see an opportunity that I have some insights on, because I’ve worked with this customer in a previous role, should I mention that if nobody else is saying anything, and an opportunity is the dawn thing, you have an executive sponsor who will come in, and they will facilitate that they will lead by example. So, your executive sponsor will be encouraging sales managers to use sales reports to run their sales meeting, they will be connecting people between it doesn’t necessarily need to be the CTO, but it may be people within the organization who are highly visible, and they will push for duplication rules to be implemented, they will be reviewing the data to see are there there challenges in the data? Are we starting to see incomplete data? And what should we do about that? So, you know, when you say, what are the top, the top five mistakes, the top one mistake is, you don’t have an executive sponsor, or you do have an executive sponsor who doesn’t know what the role is, or what they should be doing. And once you identify that 95% of the the other forum stakes go away, because you then have a culture within your organization of best practice in Salesforce.
Pei Mun Lim
Wow, that’s amazing. That’s amazing. So I’m on that, on that particular note, I would think that you, when you see a customer who does not have an executive sponsorship, what do you tell them? You’ve got to appoint one or sorry?
Caimin
Yeah, yeah. So the executive sponsor doesn’t need to be the person who’s doing the day to day. Example, building in Salesforce, but they do need to be somebody who has the visibility and the authority within the organization to make change happen. Okay. And what I would say to them is that the first thing that I would say to a customer is why, why did you implement Salesforce? Now, when you deal with a customer who’s brand new to Salesforce, it’s amazing, because they’re super enthusiastic, they have a very clear understanding of why Salesforce was brought in. But 90% of the time, the customers that I speak with, are not the people who signed the order form for Salesforce. And there may be two or three generations removed from the person who did so. And particularly when I was working with smaller customers, and you would say, why the gentlemen Salesforce? The answer would be something like, I don’t really know, it was before my time. And it was, yeah, I think it was to help with sales, or, you know, because we’ve the service organization, we recorded on our our cases in Salesforce. So what I would then ask them to do is to take a step back, and let’s not think about Salesforce, let’s think about what new was an organization are trying to achieve, whether it’s, you know, increase your your profit margin, if it’s reduced the time it takes you to answer a call increase customer satisfaction, what are your your KPIs. And in Salesforce, we have the process called a business value map, where we take these KPIs that a company is trying to, to work towards, and then we start to break them down into Okay, let’s say it’s increased profits. How are you looking to do that? Is it to upsell to your existing customers, to widen your your customer base is to to improve cross selling, implement new, new products. And we start to get into the detail of that. And from there, we start to look at, what are the metrics that we can track. So if you want to increase your customer base, how many leads are you generating? How many of those leads are being converted? What’s the opportunity win rate for those converted leads, then we start to look at what are the processes in Salesforce that will actually help you to attain those. So you know, we have opportunity management, lead management, reporting, all of that kind of stuff. And based on that, we can actually build a dashboard. So we’ve moved away from Salesforce is a product that I have to use, along with Outlook and excel and whatever else you might be using to my goal is to get my customers open Salesforce at the starter today and say, the information that I can see on the screen determines how I spend my day, right that that for me is optimal usage of Salesforce where they look at the data, and they make decisions on how to spend their day based on that information. So the business value map helps those executive sponsors to understand how Salesforce connects back in and I should say as well, any CRM or any software. So you can use this process for, how does this actually help in helping an organization achieve their goals? Because if you, let’s say we define I need to increase my, the amount of leads, then we start to have a conversation around. Where are you getting your leads from? What is the data quality of deletes that you’re bringing in? How can we improve that? And that translates directly into action. So if I’m a marketing manager, how can I evaluate the quality of leads I’m getting, and what can I do if I see that it’s dropping below a particular threshold. So it’s like, you know, it’s simple, but not obvious, I can say to somebody, we do a simple lead scoring system, we look at the fields that we’ve definitely require in a lead. And we we score the lead based on that. So if a lead falls below that score, this is the action that you need to take, or that you could take, if a lead is above a certain score, you recognize that person for consistently implement are entering quality data. And then other people see that and that leads by example. So the main conversation, it’s not really to, to force people to use the product that they have. Let’s take a step back, see what you’re trying to achieve as an organization. And potentially, you know, Salesforce that the implementation that you have, will help, or maybe we need to make some changes. But if I talk to a customer, and I say you need to do this body of work, to bring your implementation up to best practice standard, without explaining why they’re doing it, they’re just not going to do it. Right. The main reaction the customers will give is apathy. Particularly if there’s no downside. So I have, I know, I need to do some work. I don’t really know how to start it, I don’t really know how to approach it. What happens if I don’t do it? If the company goes out of business? Yes, I’m motivated. But the reality is, most companies will say, well, we’ll get to the end of our contract. And we’ll, we’ll go in another direction, we’ll get a smaller CRM, or we’ll get a different CRM. And I noticed there’s a really long answer. But I see a lot of the challenges, where customers think that it’s a product issue, rather than a cultural issue. And in customer success, when we describe the role we do, we often use a medical analogy, right customers come to us, they explain what our problems are, we diagnose their their issue, we write a prescription, which may be, you know, talk to a partner, or do this expert coaching session or install this app, or we redirect them to a specialist, you know, like an architect. In reality, we’re more like a gym. Because if the customer doesn’t come to us, in their world, nothing really changes, they carry on with a suboptimal platform. But that’s been okay for the last three or four years. So as a customer success manager, it’s my role to say, you know, you, you have this opportunity, if you take it really slowly, we’re not going to talk about you know, losing 20 kilos, or, you know, gaining muscle overnight. It’s a long, slow process, the problem becomes them. And the customer says, as I have done so many times in my life, I’ve joined a gym and gone, the opening hours and really suitable for me, so I let my subscription expire. And then I’ll find a gym that’s open when I can go early in the morning or late at night, or the equipment isn’t great or don’t like the music that they play. The problem isn’t the gym. The problem is the gym goer, ie me. And when you look at a CRM, or I think any software system and say the product isn’t a good fit for us, I mean, maybe that’s, that’s fair, but nine times out of 10 It’s a cultural thing, it’s you’re not suitably motivated to make the changes that you need to make, because you don’t understand the benefits that you can get from making those changes.
Pei Mun Lim
Oh, my goodness, I feel that a part two is in order because out of all that answer, the long answer they provided, there’s so many things I would like to unpack, but I want to be very respectful of your time. And I did say that was going to be 45 minutes.
Caimin
Sorry, I tend to ramble, particularly when I get onto that type of topic. Because it’s, it’s to me anyway, it’s it’s really fascinating. It’s all about, you know, human psychology, and things like that. So yeah, I might, or two if you’d like to. Yeah,
Pei Mun Lim
absolutely. That’s why that’s why I didn’t stop you because I was just, you know, I was with you all the way. So why don’t we Why don’t we plan a second one because I really want to unpack that particular answer, basically, and delve into a bit more detail. And I just want to thank you again for your time. Today was really cool. I had a bunch of questions which I would like an opportunity to touch on that Next time, so really appreciate that. I think you’ve given our policy, at least for this particular episode, an insight into what you do and the answer that you provided, which was the one thing which was the executive sponsorship. It just a little bit blew my mind because I had a whole list. That was one of it. I didn’t occur to me that it was actually the main one out of which everything else flowed until you, you know, you You said it, so that was that was really, really insightful. Thank you very much. I appreciate that very much. My pleasure. Okay, let’s let’s organize second one sometime soon. Okay. Thank you, Kaman. Thanks very much. That was a pleasure. Hi, guys.