Podcast 24 with Chris Pearson, Director of Salesforce Enterprise at Jostens is now out!
I had an amazing conversation I had with Chris about his career path that spanned so many #Salesforce clouds and made him a true platform owner.
He talked about the lessons he’s learned along the way, in particular how to manage diverse stakeholders in a large organisation.
What do you do when you have group of stakeholders, all wanting different things?
Sales, as usual would get the most attention because they bring in the customer, and the revenue.
This leaves Marketing and Service trailing behind, and it can be quite challenging to manage priorities.
Chris works on building deep relationships with those around him, which makes it easier when difficult conversations becomes necessary.
What I’ve learned through so many conversations is that nothing is more important than being human, building trust and creating a safe environment for mistakes to happen and innovation to flourish.
Hope you enjoy the podcast!
#OnThePeiroll
Transcript
Pei Mun Lim
Good morning, Chris. Hello, and welcome to my podcast OnThePeiroll. How are you today?
Chris P
I’m doing great. I’m excited to be here. Friday. Couldn’t be better.
Pei Mun Lim
Fantastic. I hear you’ve just come back from your honeymoon. So congratulations again. Thank
Chris P
you. Thank you. well rested and ready ready to tackle the world’s problems afterwards.
Pei Mun Lim
Fantastic. Fantastic. I always begin my podcast by asking my guests to tell us the story of how you got to this point, and feel free to branch off in any direction that you wish to. flesh out the story of crispy isn’t sure.
Chris P
Well, I can start off with just who I am right now and talk a little bit about I guess how I got here. My name is Chris Pearson. I’m the director of Salesforce development for a company called Johnston’s and Johnston’s is an American based manufacturer that works with schools, academic, universities and institutions to provide all of the the memorabilia and memories and physical products that go along with with students as they progress in their journeys, anything from class rings, yearbooks, cap and gown announcements, all of that. And at Justin’s, we run sales, Cloud Service, cloud, revenue, cloud marketing, cloud, mule, soft and tableau. So there’s a lot of Salesforce that I’ve been responsible for. We’ve got 2000 users of Sales and Service Cloud and a bunch of different Marketing Cloud organizations. And within the company, we have three different divisions. We’ve got what we call the yearbook division, the Scholastic which takes care of kindergarten through 12th grade, and then college. So a little bit about me, I started my career as a business analyst my my college degree was in finance wasn’t a big fan of finance when going through university and I was lucky enough to to somehow land an entry level business analyst job and fell in love with it because I knew I love technology. And then I had that business background. And from there I was able to grow from from there from into multiple different industries, I started out in financial services, and then jumped from there to larger financial services organizations, a big bank called called JP Morgan, where I was ba slash PM, starting to kind of build my skills as a, as an analyst and both as kind of a project manager. From there, I made a jump into high tech company called BMC Software. And that’s where I got to get my first exposure to Salesforce was probably like, like many professionals thrown on to a Salesforce project, the company had acquired another company and our company was running Salesforce, and they were running Salesforce and had their own marketing automation systems and, and they said, Chris, you’re going to be the lead analyst to smash these two things together. And really, for a stumbled and fumbled my way through that project, learning a lot of hard lessons along the way. But I came out with a with an understanding of the platform capabilities. And I kind of knew that this was something that, that I that I found more interesting, because it wasn’t so opaque as a person without like a technical background, you know, understanding code and reading code was really frankly, putting me to sleep it was boring. But Salesforce, being able to really understand how things connected and in a easier user interface was really exciting to me. From there, I was able to jump into a little bit larger of an organization that was implementing Salesforce in the media industry. And I like to think of my career as taking a jump from being an IT individual to working in from in that point marketing operations. So marketing operations gave me a completely different view from what it is usually responsible for, which is, you know, support tickets, incidents, project management and all of that. And from my marketing operations roll, I got a different perspective all around generating leads quality of the leads, how that integration and marketing automation can really help. An end sales professionals. From there, I actually then made a jump to go be kind of what you’d call in the industry, a little bit of a solo admin, I was working in a high tech organization that had Salesforce that had about three or 400 users. And they knew that they weren’t getting the best value out of Salesforce. And so as, as I see companies, now those Salesforce admins and those technology professionals are really getting embedded in the business. And so this was the midpoint of my career. And it was really exciting because I got a different perspective on the sales operations side. So before I cared about the lead quality in the handoff to sales, but as in sales operations, I was like, Okay, give me the leads. But I also care about forecast enablement, how can I can, how can I work with my customer success team and enable them better from a renewal standpoint, and a whole bunch of different problems from a sales perspective, even even working with an inside sales organization to spin up what we call the power dialer, or computer telephony integration so that our inside sales reps could be making those outbound calls and all of that. From there, I now had my my it, my sales ops, my marketing ops background, and then I got the opportunity to join a commercial real estate company that was implementing a really large instance of Salesforce. So they were moving off custom apps, and they wanted to move to Salesforce. And so that was really, really exciting. Got to lead that organization, grow a team from one single business analyst to a team of admins, architects, QA professionals, and then inherited that custom apps, that custom application as well. And so it was really fun. The company was doing so well, we got acquired by a much larger organization. And so that very early first project where I was kind of thrown together, smashing two companies together, many years ago, now I was at the forefront. This was a $2 billion acquisition, we’re talking 1000s of users, tons of custom functionality. And I was a leader, frontline leader on the integration of those two companies, and so learned a lot about working with, with large organizations, really the negotiation prioritization, you know, how long you do have to actually implement these two companies, there’s a lot of tough decisions you have to make along the way, because that those businesses are running in two separate systems, and they’re experiencing pain, because they don’t know what the other hand, it’s like having two hands and not knowing what the what the right hand is doing, what the left hand is doing something else. So we were under a lot of pressure to deliver. And we were able to achieve that. I had a great time, and then was looking for my next challenge. And then I arrived adjustments. And so that’s the long story short, maybe about me.
Pei Mun Lim
Fantastic that I made some notes, and there’s lots of lots of places we can go. So first thing, actually, you mentioned that you were at BMC. And so for a short time, so was I and BMC, as I understand it is a service oriented company with ticketing in it and that sort of thing. So, so I just wanted to get that out there. But it sounds like you have a very wide, how Salesforce calls it a 360 degree view of the customer. And you’ve sat in every single division that touches the customer from leads right up to post sales. And that gives you a very, I don’t know very many people like you. Because you know, even in our industry, we kind of I don’t know why a lot of the projects that I’ve been on have mostly been service based Service Cloud, so to speak, on Salesforce side of things, but before that I was at Microsoft. So the support, functionality and call centers and contact centers that we have here. So most of my experience has been that even though I’ve done some sales and some marketing, so but you have a more comprehensive view of this from from what I hear, not only from a implementation point of view, but also from business operations and functionality. And so that makes you a very rare breed I think. So, lots of places I could go. I would like to start with so you were talking about marketing. So tell To me a bit more about how what were the challenges that you encountered when you first moved from it with the ticketing with the managing of infrastructure, possibly in the support functionality moving into marketing? That sort of well, what were the challenges that you saw for yourself? And for how you were implementing the systems for your users?
Chris P
Yeah, that’s a great question. There were several different challenges, I probably categorize them both as, as, as either business and operational, and then technology. So I was in what was called a global role, which meant that we’re really sort of in charge of helping each of our regions are working around the globe to adopt marketing automation, get to some level of standardization, even though there’s differences in the way that those companies and groups go to market. And so I think back to the disparity between the US and the UK, the US had no no marketing automation system at all. So that was a very heavy education on what can marketing automation do? How, like, what what is a lead? And what are lead statuses, what is what does the funnel look like, and what are what is an automated campaign look like that is not something that we called a spray and pray, which has is a funny name for a campaign, it’s basically sending a message to an entire list. And so we would kind of joke that the US is this for this particular company, their go to market strategy was download the phone book and send him an email. So really a lot of education on the power of segmentation targeting what you can do with interactive campaigns, as far as based upon the response, you can trigger a different message, if they don’t respond to the first message, you don’t need to recreate an entire email, simply change the subject, you know, try, try again. But then I think about the other side of the challenges that I mentioned, technology challenges, and that was on the UK side of the fence. So they were using a marketing automation tool, different one from what the the sort of the enterprise platform was. So they had their expectations, they had a different way of going to market where they didn’t even have a technology, they weren’t equipped to actually build their own campaigns, what they came up with was campaign briefs. And then they worked with the vendor to build very bespoke campaigns within the system to execute. And we were changing that model, we were not only changing the model and moving them to a different technology platform. But we were also going to kind of what I like to call is to be able to care and feed for yourself, meaning you need to learn how the constructs of this marketing automation tool work, so that you can move migrate your campaign activities to it and run them yourself. We’re moving away from that bespoke step bespoke model and a separate tool and more about standardization, where each team is equipped with the data that they need to execute on those campaigns.
Pei Mun Lim
Fantastic, thank you for that. So when you move from marketing into sales, what kind of mental shifts did you have to make in order to transition successfully?
Chris P
Oh, good question. The you, you spent so much of my time around, leads, you know, and not not the object at Salesforce. But the concept of a lead, how do you warm qualify handoff a lead, move into sales operations. So they’re like, Look, we’re we are working with opportunities. You know, I’m speaking in object constructs. But at the end of the day, we’re working with transactions Park, they cared a little bit about that new business development, those potential prospects, but the different focus was much more on the pipeline itself. I’ve got someone interested on the phone I want I’ve got them. I’ve had a webinar with them. How can I manage this entire transaction all the way through to close? How can I give my sales leaders that have visibility into exactly what products we’re pitching? So that was a big change? Like not not just the fact that you had a customer but what offers what programs bundles were we pitching or potentially selling to that customer and the other main thing that they really cared about was that closed date, you know, that shift that if that closed date moved out of the quarter, we had to set up a bunch of red alerts, alarms, emails all the way up to the CEO, we’re very laser focused on hitting our numbers from a quarterly basis, because Salesforce was really responsible for the forecast to Wall Street. So that was a big change to move from all about that demand Gen. And, and and prospecting to focused on transacting.
Pei Mun Lim
What were the unique challenges that you’ve found working with the different groups of people, because you’ve got the marketing type who are creative? And then you’ve got the sales people who are quite different, as you say, quite laser focused on their quarterly targets? What are the challenges that you’ve found working with different divisions so to speak,
Chris P
I think it comes down to finding out what motivates people not only you know, there’s, there’s the what motivates individuals, you know, as far as what excites them, what are their strengths, but then also what speaks to them. My one of the my favorite phrases that I adopted from my stint in sales, sales ops, was that sales people are coin operated. And it took me a minute to sort of understand what that means. But that means that they’re, they’re in sales for a reason. They want to make money, they want to close and earn that commission. So I found myself early on in my job, implementing new functionality and being really excited about it, hosting webinars, and in the reaction was anywhere from a yawn to a not even listening. And I realized I had to change my message and figure out a way to speak to them, how can I, how can I position these features and functionality in a way that speaks their language that makes their lives easier, that finds a way for them to earn more money with those kinds of things. And once once that finally clicked, I was able to achieve a lot more.
Pei Mun Lim
Wow, that’s really an operator’s eye. That’s an that’s a new term that I found, and I will find an opportunity to use that in the future. Thank you for that. You also mentioned that you had to learn more about the negotiation and a privatization, when you took onboard more clouds and more kind of responsibilities. That must have been quite challenging, because suddenly, you’ve got a lot more stakeholders to deal with. How did you manage that?
Chris P
Well, I can tell you, I still haven’t figured it out. It’s, it’s a lot more art than it is science, you know, as, as, as IT professionals, as analysts, and all of that we love to be able to use data, and to be able to use metrics and numbers to make our decisions. But sometimes reality it’s, it’s, it blurs a lot. In my experience, sales, anything that’s going to have a financial impact, typically starts to get more eyes, more attention, and more resources. So, you know, in some regards, we’re always doing things for sales, but we have to balance that with the needs of marketing and service. And, and the way I go about it is really understanding what is the problem we’re trying to solve? What’s the impact of not doing it right now? or doing it later? And if it’s going to take a certain amount of time, that’s not accepted, acceptable to that business? Are there things that we can do in the interim? Are there workarounds? Or are there other activities that we can do that can that can make me feel better? And sometimes the answer is no. And that’s where it’s just a matter of delivering a hard message. But as long as you’re being transparent, as far as this is what it is, these are the amount of resources I have, this is what I can achieve. I found in my experience, people are understanding.
Pei Mun Lim
So right now you’re responsible for multiple clouds. And that’s if you’re able to I’d be interested to hear how you’re using the revenue cloud, which is CP Q. In your current business, I have the back of my mind a question I want to post but if you can just give me a bit grounding around that. Sure.
Chris P
One of our one of our divisions I mentioned at Justin’s it’s called yearbook. And so a yearbook for for those who may not know, it’s very much like a US based product. But it’s something that typic is typically received in high school. And it’s it’s really just a book of pictures and memories that commemorate the year. And if you think about the nuances of that book, every year book at every school is completely different. I still actually have my four year books from my time in high school, they’re gathering dust somewhere in my parents house, some locked away in the closet, but each year, they look completely different. And so it’s a very bespoke product. It’s a product that is also sold to students throughout the year at different price points. So just like it think about when you were buying an airline ticket, if you were to buy a ticket, a month, a month or two in advance, you’re going to have a certain price. But if you need to buy that ticket, a week, or a couple of days in advance, that price is going to be higher. So our business reps are helping are using Salesforce CPQ Q, along with some custom functionality, to not only model those transactions, but also set up all of the manufacturing rules that go into making that book, the number of pages that Inc, the cover type, whether they’re in sheets, there’s special rules that go along with all of our go to market strategies that need to be embedded within Salesforce CPQ. So that they can tell our manufacturing plant exactly what needs to what needs to be built according to specifications, and also tell the customer what it’s going to cost as well as the offset with those revenues. So if you think about it, you’re selling the book to students, and you’re earning money. But then there’s the price of the book itself. And so you’re what you’re doing within Salesforce is you’re trying to balance that throughout the year, because your goal is really for the school to almost zero sum, in some instances, the yearbook can actually be a profit center for a school. And so imagine all the complexity of trying to model that within Salesforce where you’ve got sales reps that are inputting this information in the manufacturing system that’s also integrating directly into Salesforce and making changes to their plan, making changes to their actual invoice. And Salesforce is the way of giving them visibility into that.
Pei Mun Lim
That is absolutely fascinating. where I wanted to go with my question was around ownership.
If you were
Pei Mun Lim
a Sales Cloud, for example, say a company just use a Sales Cloud, in theory that would be owned by the sales division, for example, you’ve got your sales admin or sales ops, as you call it, who would manage data, manage the rules manage the workflow, any automation as an example? So what I seen with a lot of the projects that I have had in the past, that there is no rule with regards to how a company might define data in system ownership. So broadly, as I mentioned, Sales Cloud might be owned by sales, marketing cloud, if that’s all they have, potentially just owned by marketing. And then the tricky one is Service Cloud, because it’s a cost center, generally. But you have so many that you’re in charge of, how is your division, the owner of all the clouds? How, how do you manage the requests that come in for features and functionality and releases and so on, so forth? Yeah.
Chris P
It’s, I would say it’s a little bit of a blend with an organization of our size. So speaking at the enterprise level, you know, a company with an organization of 1000 employees, 500 employees, it may look different. So I’m just going to speak about sort of what, what what the way that it’s set up and the pros and cons of how it works in in my world. And so the way that I look at it is the data. The data itself, is for the most part owned by an enterprise data team. And we have a back office system a customer master that is That track that owns whether or not this company is an account or not, you know, there’s legal requirements and all of that we own the functionality around that data is the way that I think of it. So, and then those individual business groups own the business processes that that manipulate and support that data. So from and then we’re just think about from a service and Marketing Cloud standpoint, the way that I think of it is, we own the ability to get data out of our out of sales data into Marketing Cloud, that’s where we, that’s where we really fit. That’s the niche. We all know, in the creative assets, we don’t own the strategy for the journeys that are built or anything like that. We own getting you your data so that you can build your right segment and execute on the campaigns. From a Service Cloud standpoint, we own the functionality, functionality of how Service Cloud is set up. But as far as their process for managing cases, and SLA s that’s owned within the service, call center organization and their own respective business analysts.
Pei Mun Lim
Now that you’ve laid it out, it sounds really clear. Hmm, that’s the way to do it the right way. Thank you for that. Because I think because the projects that I’ve been on have not been as all encompassing as what you currently sit in right now. And as always, obviously, how I approach it is always from a consulting point of view, I’ve always worked with partners. And so I’m observing the client or the end user and how they’re managing things and the things or the road bumps that they come across, because they aren’t able to define the ownership of system or processes of data. And that’s where, you know, I keep hitting some roadblocks on and thank you for clarifying that. So now I have a much better framework, however, saying that, what you do have is you do have size behind you. And therefore having enterprise team having a data team having the kind of framework and the policies that you have makes sense. scaling down? How would you do it,
if
Pei Mun Lim
tomorrow you got a job in a company that’s maybe a quarter the size? What would the best practices be? You can’t, you don’t have the budget for the enterprise team.
Chris P
The data totally, totally how I felt like that, that was my stint when I was talking about when I was in sales, my time during sales operations, know what they actually wanted to call the team with business operations. It just for some reason, it didn’t roll off the tongue every all of the all the sales reps called the sales up. So it’s much easier to kind of equate that to. And as a business operations team, what we really said was, we own the data within CRM. And in that role, we were primarily supporting sales. But we also needed to support the legal team finance consumers of sales data, because each of those different groups has a say, in the sales process. If you’re about to close a transaction, chances are, you’re going to involve our legal department to actually get that contract signed, then you need to have visibility, they need to have workflows, they need to have a standardized quote an order form, which was actually one of the projects we implemented using the company’s own CP q platform at the time. And so from a from a, a, a legal standpoint, that that was that was the way that we supported them. And then the the other groups that I mentioned, we really just tried to work with them to enable their their needs. But ultimately, they all came to kind of a central part. And we simply prioritize those requests and tried to kind of set up a monthly cadence of releases and set up reviews to actually review what is on the backlog, what’s coming next. And then what has has yet to be done that seemed to work well with smaller organizations.
Pei Mun Lim
It sounds like from how you’re describing it, that they’re sensible people in the UK, for example. So another question before I go on to that. Who did your business operations team report to? Would it be the finance director of sales? Okay, good
Chris P
question. Yeah. So we had a we had a Senior Director of Business Operations who reported to the CEO which seems very logical because that CEO is working with, with legal with finance with sales, finance cares about that forecast, you know, what is what are we expecting? What are we projecting and all of that. So that model seems seem to work well, because that CEO kind of usually has a broad purview.
Pei Mun Lim
Again, that makes perfect sense listening, listening to you, because that hasn’t been the case in a lot of the companies that I’ve worked with over here. And there are conflicts of interests, obviously, because the what you call the business operations team would have to sit under, say, sales, in which case, the service side may get their requirements stamped down, because there’s no one to fight for the corner, etc. But having it in the structure that you’ve just described, just make a whole lot of sense.
Chris P
Well, it makes sense, I would say, in an academic definition, is what I think you’re saying. But there’s still politics, you know, organizations are dysfunctional by nature, you know, that not every group gets their needs met, you know, like the legal legal teams, HR teams, usually they’re the low rungs on the ladder, you know, it’s it’s always chasing after things that impact the bottom line, which usually fall in the sales realm sales and sometimes marketing. So I totally, I totally agree it, it sounds great. But you know, the reality of it was, it’s a very much push and pull.
Pei Mun Lim
It still sounds like multiple steps ahead of where we could be here in the UK, I think that’s a model that’s not as common as it should be. So I still the the, the line of politics are much, much more blurred over here. So you mentioned a couple of things earlier on that I want to touch on. Right, the beginning, you’re talking about mashing two organizations together, you’ve been in situations where the company you’ve been in has been acquired, so their integration requirements and things like that, how do you have you been in a situation where you’ve had to? I guess it’s great to OLX? Or put down from two to one? And how do you deal with the technical debt?
Chris P
Oh, gosh, that’s a good one. Um, a lot of my most recent acquisition, really was was complex, you had a much larger organization that had a fairly mature Salesforce org, and then a smaller organization that was acquired because because my organization because we were, we were exceeding their, their business, they wanted our business to be a part of their business, because we were doing it better than them. But we had some complexities in our, in our own organization, we had Salesforce, but we also had custom apps that had been built for decades, and, you know, grown with functionality that, you know, that may or may not be used functionality that was very complex, but serves a purpose. And so it was very, it’s it is it is very challenging, it was and still continues to be to be able to port that into another org, which may be running different processes may not be set up that exact same way. Some of the like, the initial challenges, were really just changing the security model, becoming more open, you know, think about from a private model to a public read. I mean, that’s kind of how we equate to it in Salesforce. So not but if you think about that, that’s, you know, that’s maybe flipping a couple of switches in in Salesforce. But the ramifications from a business standpoint and the culture, all of a sudden, my opportunity that was only visible to me, you’re saying everybody else can see that. There was a lot of reverberations in in that cultural change that we had to work through as a technologies as a technology team. We had to account for the nuances and still find ways to keep things confidential. It was it was a little bit of a push and pull, figuring out a middle ground to work through things. You mentioned, technical debt. That’s a tough one. I wanted to understand a little bit more about you know, how do you You see that actually impacting? It’s obviously something we all live with. But can you tell me a little bit more about what you’re looking for in regards to a migration or an org merge?
Pei Mun Lim
And more around? How do you unify things? How do you?
Do you?
Pei Mun Lim
Is there a shortcut for it is there maybe I’m thinking about it, along the lines of things that from a project point of view, when when we’ve had to deal with it, we a lot of decisions a customer has to make. And some of the, one of the bigger projects, they’ve decided not to make the decision because it was just too complex to merge. And they just carried on running two systems in parallel, and we had to do all sorts of things to make it both work. It just didn’t make sense to me to do it in the way that they’ve done it. And I was just wondering, if you have a better way, because you’ve gone through an acquisition and merger?
Chris P
Yes, that’s it’s a tough one. Um, you know, what, oftentimes, I think one of the most the modes that I we seem to I always seem to revert back into is, is, what’s the estimate, implement change? You know, you’ve got your requirements? And how long is it going to take to build that functionality? What we don’t do, or at least me personally, maybe maybe other IT pros do it is build in some building some some technical debt, retirement time into that estimate? Building refactoring time, it is really hard to stick to that. Because what we all want to do is we all want to get that data out to our business leaders, our executives, how long is it going to take to do and kind of like, what I loved about one of your recent posts? Where do you start to trim things, you may trim it in development, and they trim it in QA, you know, you may cut corners and in change management and readiness, to me, there are way more forms of technical debt besides just systematic, it could be cutting it out from QA could be, in my experience, maybe not writing down your test cases. Alright, we’re going to, we’re going to test this out because we don’t have time to document things. And once once we validated some things, we’re going to give you the thumbs up. That is technical debt, because guess what, next time you implement a change, you’re gonna have to rethink how all those scenarios are, you know, in from a change management standpoint, technical debt can mean cutting corners, let’s just go ahead and get it live, then we’ll tell our reps or our users how to use it. Well, guess what, they may not be ready for it. They may be discovering things, they may be reacting negatively, you may have a PR campaign, a negative PR campaign that you’ve now got to deal with, which may take up time for your analysts and your support team, when they should be focused on either requirements management or supporting incidents. But now they’re answering questions like how tos and in other low level questions that could be solved with better planning. So I think to me, your question about technical debt means that let’s look at it in more than one lens besides just the the technology side of it.
Pei Mun Lim
Thank you. That’s exactly why I love talking to people on my podcast, because you’ve just shared spective with me that I hadn’t looked at it that way before. Obviously, I am aware of what happens when you cut corners, but calling technical that is it is absolutely true. Because there’s rework this rethinking this redesigning, that has to go on, because we’ve somehow taken a shortcut,
either
Pei Mun Lim
purposefully, or he made a decision to do so or accidentally because we ran out of time, we just went ahead without doing the documentation, for example, or not doing all the test cases, but reworks going, you have to pay for it down the line somewhere. So thank you, thank you for that. That was really there was a being something like that. You have also worked with, you mentioned global global operations. You mentioned working with people in the UK. What other locations have you worked with in terms of people in culture?
Chris P
Well, you’re Europe at large in my you know, my last role or a global organization. So we kind of had America the Europe, Middle Middle East Africa, as well as APAC, Asia Pacific. So really, I, in my experience, I’ve worked all around the globe, and with those with those different groups across the world, and you know, they each have their own culture, differences of ways to go to market. And, you know, but there’s commonality, in in those different organizations, whether it was high tech, or media or financial services, it’s still, you know, you could still see that that culture of that region coming through in in the way that they approach technology.
Pei Mun Lim
So were they were they the stakeholders? Were they the end users? Or were they part of your team?
Chris P
All three, so I would typically be working with the technology groups, in each of those regions, who would then own the relationship with their business.
Pei Mun Lim
I see what we’re what the question that I wanted to, excuse me, the question that I wanted to pose was, how do you work with a team that might be dispersed around the globe, and get them to perform at a level that you’re expecting? But it sounds like the relationship is slightly more different than them being within your team?
Chris P
How do you get them to work? Well, with a team I, a lot of it comes down to build to me, building, that baseline of trust is new, when you’re when you start to start working with a new team, or when your company’s acquired, you’re starting to work with strangers, for lack of a better word, you know, you don’t you don’t know what they know, they don’t know what you know. And, and that can really cause a lot of friction, sometimes, whether it’s trying to prove who knows more, you know, who’s, who’s smarter, there’s there, there may be other commitments that those groups have, that you aren’t aware of. So it’s finding a way to build a baseline of trust. And for me, I’ve done that in one of two ways. I mean, in person meetings, so in person travel, you really can’t, we can’t escape, that’s the best way to do things. But you know, with the state of the world today, with the cost of doing that time away from family, maybe or other commitments, it’s just not always possible. Other ways I’ve done that is kind of setting up, watercooler time, you know, get get out getting outside of a meeting that has a specific purpose and setting up a recurring half hour block 20 minute block with a couple individuals just to chat, you know, you can, you can cancel that you can move that according to schedules. And I’ve used that to build relationships and and sometimes give people a little bit of a heads up, by the way, I’m going to be introducing a new requirement about this or this new functionality is coming from this specific region, you, you may be interested. So you may want to go look good in front of your business by sharing this. So those are just some tactics that I’ve been I’ve used, but I haven’t figured it out yet.
Pei Mun Lim
I just realized that we talked a lot about just just the word. And I want to focus a bit more about you and your values. However, just listening to you, I can probably name a few things I can tell that you are very excited about technology. You are a very much a people person, and you care about the outcome and making sure that a business gets what they need. And you have a very high emotional intelligence in order to get what you need from the people around you, regardless of where they sit within your organization. And therefore that that’s the picture that I’ve painted based on the conversation we’ve just had, I’d like you to share what are the other values that are important to you?
Chris P
Or your you the ones that you that you just espoused? It’s pretty tough to top that. I really think the I don’t have too much to add other than understanding where where people are at. To me that’s that is really understanding. where they’re at, in in their journey in if they’re, if they’re a team member or if they’re Business what is a business leader or business partner, an external consultant? Like, you know, what, what do they need? At what what do what can I do to make them successful? What are what are their needs, how do they like to be communicated to, those are things that are really near and dear to my heart, because I feel like I’ve had many managers over my career, and I’ve had many different stints and I’ve internalized experiences that that I didn’t like, and I’ve kind of just like, as a kid, I always go back. And I remember, you know, experiences with teachers or parents and, and telling, reminding myself, if I’m going to be a teacher, one day, I’m not going to do this, or when I have kids on my own, I’m not going to do this. And I feel like somehow, that has seeped into my professional brain, all of those different experiences where I’ve gotten my feelings hurt, or I’ve been upset with the results or lack of results, or a certain micro moment, and I really try and, and put a lot more care into identifying those and over communicating with people so that they understand, you know, I know I I’m doing my best to understand your position, and my background as, as a PM, as a BA, performing QA working in the business, I feel like that gives me a little bit of an edge over the next person to understand their perspective.
Pei Mun Lim
I get that totally get that. So let me flip the question, then. What are your non negotiables or your deal breakers, when it comes to people that you work with?
Chris P
I would say, trust, I mean, it starts at that if, if I start to lose trust in in someone, or if I can’t earn or achieve a certain level of trust with someone, it’s going to be very difficult for me to work with them. And trust can come down to doing what you’re going to say, you know, following through, it can mean hitting deadlines, it can be making accurate estimates, it can be on the business side, like I will support you in this and didn’t mind the requests that the business is asking of me relying on what they’re saying as truth. Those things are, it’s really hard for me to negotiate on, on a level of trust. Outside of that, I would say having some form of humor and flexibility, we know that, that we can’t always predict things and in the world of of IoT, the world of Salesforce, whatever your domain is, things are going to change and being very rigid about a plan and about wanting everything to be wrapped up in in a box with a bow is something that I find really challenging to be able to work with something with someone like that, who holds those values because in in the professional world, it’s just not everything is black and white. So I guess those would be two? Well, if I answered your question as accurately as you want to end, but I’d say those would be two values for me that are critical.
Pei Mun Lim
I, I want to be very mindful of your time, but there are places that I would still like to go into more along the perhaps more personal journey. Because you’ve mentioned about things that you’ve internalized that you don’t want to emulate from teachers and things like that. And I’d like to go into that a little bit more, because that’s okay. In a maybe a part two of that. I love that. Because I think a lot of what we talked about today is what would probably occur in an interview in a job interview. Tell me all the things that you’ve done and all the clouds that you’ve worked with, which are super interesting to me. But the other thing that is also interesting to me is the person behind it. And what I like to learn is about personal journey of the things that you’ve learned along the way what are the who are the mentors that you’ve had who’ve made an impact your life and, and so on and so forth. So don’t lie. Like I said, I am very mindful of your time want to be respectful, but no Love a second opportunity to just talk a little bit more about that if that’s okay. I look forward to that. Thank you very much, Chris. I really appreciated this. And I’m looking forward to the second part of this conversation. Thanks. It was great. Great to be here. And thank you so much for having me.
Thank you.