Episode Overview
In this episode, Kevin Ascher from Acoustic Selling discusses the critical concept of “known unknowns” in consulting, likening the necessary thorough assessments to doctors taking images before surgery. We’ll explore the importance of documentation, adherence to process, and clear communication in both high and low trust environments to mitigate risk effectively.
Kevin also shares how meticulous preparation and due diligence can vastly impact project costs and outcomes. He highlights real-life scenarios where assumptions based on past high-trust relationships led to challenges, underscoring the necessity of treating each new engagement rigorously. We’ll delve into a range of topics, from his experiences with custom Salesforce solutions, like the “course decision unit” object, to optimizing sales processes, and integrating tools like Pardot and Outreach.
Additionally, Kevin will provide insights on handling customer support challenges, the intricacies of data modeling for complex account hierarchies, and the future of AI in CRM. He’ll also share valuable lessons on project management, advising on the importance of thorough preparation and understanding industry limitations.
Our conversation wraps up with Kevin reflecting on his journey from sales to a more technical role, adapting to changing needs, creating user-friendly systems, and his vision for AI’s transformative potential in CRM. Tune in to hear Kevin Asher’s compelling stories and expert advice, aiming to help you navigate and thrive in the dynamic world of Salesforce!
Interview Highlights
1. Introduction to Kevin Asher
- Location and Background
- Based in Lake Tahoe, California
- Grew up in New York, lived in Bay Area and Seattle
- Salesforce Journey
- Started in college as an engineering student, transitioned into sales
- First encountered Salesforce at a startup in 2000
- Moved from sales role to technical role within Salesforce ecosystem
- Current Role at Acoustic Selling
- Administrator and architect
- Team structure: two full-time employees and flexible resources
- Engages in coding and AI tools for solutions
2. Concepts and Practices in CRM and Salesforce Implementation
- Known Unknowns and Consultants’ Role
- Comparison to medical imaging before surgery
- Importance of Documentation and Process Adherence
- Essential in low trust/high unknown scenarios to limit risk
- Written and approved requirements, change order processes
3. Trust Levels in Client Environments
- High Trust vs Low Trust
- High trust allows flexibility
- Low trust necessitates strict documentation and process adherence
4. Preparation, Due Diligence, and Impact on Project Costs
- Organized vs Chaotic Client Environments
- Case Study: New Department Issues Due to Assumptions
5. Value of Transparent Cultural Environments
- Learning from Mistakes
- Evaluating Potential Partners
6. Custom Solutions in Salesforce
- Creation of “Course Decision Unit”
- Used to connect accounts, contacts, courses, and departments
- Data Modeling and Synchronization Challenges
- Marketing and sales platforms integration
7. Role of Heads of Sales and Customer Success
- Translating insights into technical Salesforce requirements
8. Salesforce Customization
- Complexities of Account Hierarchies
- Importance of Understanding Business Needs
9. Case Studies and Examples
- Smartbiz Case Study
- Initial CRM and shift to Salesforce during COVID-19
- Active Learning Case Study
- Complex data structure and unique sales process
10. Customer Support Issues
- Criticisms of Script Reliance
11. Inherited Salesforce System Challenges
- Cluttered Leads or Opportunity Pages
- Tools for Analysis and Optimization
12. UI and Workflow Preferences
- Dynamic Forms and Screen Flows
- Reducing dependency on complex validation rules
13. Workload and Operations at Acoustic Selling
- Work hours and use of pre-packaged solutions
- Focus on delivering high-quality solutions
14. Product and Service Integration
- Combining products and services into custom packages
15. Kevin’s Ideal Work Environment
- Enjoyment in solving technical challenges
16. Future of CRM and AI
- Potential transformations with AI
17. Webinar on Salesforce Data Quality
- Collaboration with Cloudingo
18. Gap Analysis and Readiness for Process
- Assessing data-driven decision-making tools
19. Challenges in Projects
- Key example: AI analysis of call recordings
20. Technical Difficulties and Solutions
- Thorough preparation for avoiding surprise complications
21. Project Management Advice
- Importance of adequate planning
22. Use of AI Tools and Technology Stack
- Tech stack at Acoustic Selling
23. Criticism of Salesforce Sales and Support Teams
- Lack of technical knowledge among reps
24. Legacy CRM Systems and Transition to Salesforce
- Comparison of Microsoft admin systems to Salesforce
25. Implementation and Integration Challenges
- System design for managing loan applications
- Flexibility and user-friendliness for new systems
- Smartbiz solution managing significant loan volumes during COVID-19
26. Role of Strong Sales Operations Leadership
- Importance in quick and effective implementation
27. Declarative Tools and Minimal Use of Custom Code
- Use of connected apps, flows, and minimal custom code solutions
Full Episode Transcript
Jerome Clatworthy [00:00:00]:
Welcome to CRM Stories with me, Jerome Clitworthy. CRM Stories is a podcast where we talk with Salesforce professionals from all over the world about their careers and favorite Salesforce case studies. Today, I’m joined by Kevin Asher from Acoustic Selling. Kevin, thanks so much for joining me.
Kevin Asher [00:00:16]:
Thanks for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:00:18]:
So where in the world are you sitting, Kevin, as we have this conversation?
Kevin Asher [00:00:23]:
As I glance away from the screen, I am looking at Lake Tahoe in California.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:00:28]:
Oh, beautiful. Fantastic part of the world. And have you always lived there or somewhere you’ve moved to later in life?
Kevin Asher [00:00:35]:
2nd time around being here, we were in I grew up in New York, made my way to the Bay Area, Seattle, and then returned here to Tahoe about 6 years ago.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:00:45]:
Oh, fantastic. Sounds beautiful. Alright. And, Kevin, how did you get started in Salesforce? What was your introduction to the ecosystem?
Kevin Asher [00:00:54]:
Well, it sort of started in college. I was an engineering student, and when I found my way into sales, I ended up being a very process oriented salesperson Okay. As opposed to more of a relationship oriented salesperson. So it was pretty natural to me when I was at a startup in the year 2000 and this new product called Salesforce came around. Yeah. I was a sole rep and Salesforce automation was the new rage and I really took to the product because even though I was a team of 1, it really helped me keep myself organized. And it’s pretty funny thinking back then it replaced products known as ACT or gold mine or things that the vast majority of your users or your listeners are probably too young to know. Yeah.
Kevin Asher [00:01:42]:
But I I became familiar with Salesforce, very early in its history. Okay. 20 years of ad sales, guts, for a variety of reasons, was ready to move on
Jerome Clatworthy [00:01:54]:
Yeah.
Kevin Asher [00:01:56]:
And always was intrigued by the technology. So over time, I became more and more technical. It dove in more into the Salesforce platform and realized that was the best way that I could help sellers more so than being a coach or a trainer.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:02:11]:
Okay.
Kevin Asher [00:02:12]:
Working behind the scenes on implementing the technology that helps them sell.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:02:16]:
Okay. So enduring student career in sales, which then morphed into being a a technician of the of the Salesforce platform.
Kevin Asher [00:02:24]:
Yes. And as I’ve gotten more technical, I found that people coming originally as Salesforce users and sales people is relatively rare. As you go up the technical ladder, there’s a lot of, developers and people from a tech background. Yeah. They just people coming changes. Yeah. From a sales and business background starts to thin out a bit.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:02:45]:
Yeah. Right. Interesting. Okay. Cool. Cool. And so what would just how would you best describe your sort of current role?
Kevin Asher [00:02:51]:
As a combination, admin and architect and a term that I see more often, an admin helper. The ability to write some light light code Okay. And use some of the AI tools to generate relatively simple, classes and triggers before needing to hand it off to somebody even more technical.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:03:16]:
Yeah. Sure. And are you sort of managing a team or doing most of your work yourself? What does your sort of structure look like?
Kevin Asher [00:03:22]:
At my firm, Acoustic Selling, we have, 2 who are full time and we flex up as needed with a reliable bench. So it’s it’s a small it’s a small but mighty team. So we do a lot of most of it is is our own direct handiwork.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:03:39]:
Okay. Of how we
Kevin Asher [00:03:40]:
serve customers.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:03:41]:
Fantastic. Well, Kevin, on this show, we love to talk about, I guess, real Salesforce examples and some case studies. So specifically, a potential example where you’ve seen Salesforce that’s really just transform transformed a business in terms of profitability or could be some sort of other efficiency sort of measure. And then maybe a scenario where you’ve seen Salesforce, it’s just been a really interesting and sort of weird and wonderful use case, which may people may not expect. And then also an example of a project that perhaps didn’t go so well, why you think that was, and lessons learned, and then maybe what you do differently from there. Does that sound alright if we work through those?
Kevin Asher [00:04:15]:
Let’s do it. Let’s do it.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:04:17]:
So, yeah, firstly, what is an example of something where you’ve seen Salesforce just absolutely, you know, blow business out of the water in terms of the impact that it’s had?
Kevin Asher [00:04:26]:
So a few years ago, we started working with a company called Smartbiz, which focuses on here in the US, the Small Business Association is a government agency that provides low interest rate loans to small businesses. So they provide those types of loans and similar types of financing options dedicated towards small businesses. And at the time, they had their own legacy CRM. It was a pretty flexible system. It was doing the job for a period of time, but it was managed by the engineering team, same team that built the core product. They know he said, hey. At some point, we’ll move to a product like Salesforce at some point.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:05:08]:
And so just to pause there, so just to manage their sort of the whole loans process and people that are inquiring about potentially getting a loan from them or is that a different So
Kevin Asher [00:05:16]:
their own product so when you go to the website and apply for a loan, all of the processing of that loan was their own product that they built themselves.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:05:24]:
Okay.
Kevin Asher [00:05:25]:
But they were using a legacy CRM for any of the actual customer information in any of the customer facing communications. And the systems spoke, sort of.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:05:36]:
Yeah. Sort of.
Kevin Asher [00:05:38]:
And so they recognized they needed to move to a more per a a more purpose built system, but it was always off in the future. But that future came as a result of the coronavirus. Oh, really? And, again, here in the US, there is a, a big sweep sweeping law that, brought the paycheck protection program. Small businesses were able to get low interest or fully forgiven government loans and grants to keep them afloat. So all of a sudden, Smart Biz saw a huge wave was about to hit their shores of increased loan applications. So the sometime in the future turned out to be Today. 6 weeks from now.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:06:25]:
Yeah. Wow.
Kevin Asher [00:06:28]:
So lot of work done, lot of just accelerating. This is one of those examples where we brought in a flex team. Sure. Lots of discovery, diligence, technical, business, and otherwise. And just to get you know, skip to the good part of the chapter, we got this system up and running where the main things it needed to be easy to use because this was the first CRM for many of the employees.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:06:55]:
Right.
Kevin Asher [00:06:55]:
Needed to connect to their existing system.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:06:58]:
Mhmm.
Kevin Asher [00:06:58]:
And in particular, really needed to handle, loans as in opportunity ownership, opportunity assignment. Salesforce has lots of purpose built out of the box for lead assignments and lead cues, but that same level of functionality doesn’t exist for opportunities.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:07:16]:
Okay.
Kevin Asher [00:07:18]:
So we needed to build that in a way that would be easy to use, easy to maintain, particularly easy to change.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:07:25]:
Okay.
Kevin Asher [00:07:25]:
Because business rules and capacity were changing sometimes multiple times a day.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:07:31]:
So the people still coming lead then opportunity, but it was more how those opportunities were being sort of diverted and processed where it was a bit more bespoke. Is that right, Hassan?
Kevin Asher [00:07:39]:
Yes. Because for them, the the lee or the the loan application was modeled as an opportunity in Salesforce.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:07:47]:
Yep.
Kevin Asher [00:07:47]:
And as it as you think of it like a conveyor an assembly line, as it moves stage by stage through the application process, there are other people at the company that need to start to touch that loan application. That’s the whole process. Checking financial documents and a bunch of sort of things. So it’s not the typical b to b sale where you have a rep who owns the op from start to finish. Based on different rules, it starts to switch ownership, switch hands.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:08:17]:
Yeah. Sure. Did you did you sync that up with the opportunity stages or you took a different approach in terms of a lot of those decisions?
Kevin Asher [00:08:24]:
It was it was the opera the opportunity stages was the big bucket, but then there were a bunch of criteria, particularly that got called in from their loan application system Okay. That would then either update the stage or update sort of the sub requirement with within the stage and at times then change ownership as it, let’s say, went from origination to more underwriting and final decision.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:08:53]:
Okay. So opportunity was end to end loan application, loan approved essentially, or it was like Exactly. Kind of a pre So the whole process was managed with the opportunity. Yeah. Right?
Kevin Asher [00:09:02]:
Yes. And and the opportunity teams weren’t at weren’t really meeting the requirements. So Okay. In the end, just a bunch of user lookup fields on the opportunity.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:09:14]:
Okay.
Kevin Asher [00:09:16]:
Change criteria based visibility and approval workflows.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:09:22]:
Mhmm.
Kevin Asher [00:09:23]:
So that was all just the configuration, the products itself layered on training and enablement, getting all the players and actors using this system Yeah. And needing to have complete confidence because this was a high stress environment of all of a sudden 100 of loans per employee per day
Jerome Clatworthy [00:09:48]:
Really? To
Kevin Asher [00:09:48]:
start processing. It needed to work.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:09:51]:
Yeah. Absolutely.
Kevin Asher [00:09:52]:
Luckily, it did.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:09:55]:
And is that same sort of system still in place to to your knowledge and working well? Or did they sort of scale back after that sort of process came to an antisemitism?
Kevin Asher [00:10:02]:
Well, yes. It the ultimately, it it is still in place. Once the surge of activity, there was a chance to finally reassess because we built things very quickly. Yeah. Right. And a lot of it was done in flow. Yep. And so I know since then, they hired an in house architect Okay.
Kevin Asher [00:10:25]:
Who did a bunch to refactor, consolidate flows, replace a few with triggers and classes.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:10:31]:
Yep.
Kevin Asher [00:10:31]:
But, ultimately, the the original framework, still exists to the to this day. And, ultimately, we we built a system that was able to handle a 500 time increase in loan volume and a 7 x increase in revenue. So this was just a, you know, a a found a seismic shift in the history of that of that company. We had to do it pretty quickly.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:10:58]:
That’s amazing. Wow. And so were they sort of on your right were you guys in talks before this? Or it was like, hey. We need someone. Hi, Kevin. Let’s use you. Boom. 6 weeks later, there was a soft or was there already sort of a relationship there of sorts prior to sort of day 1 or it was a were they able to look
Kevin Asher [00:11:12]:
for someone, you got the job
Jerome Clatworthy [00:11:14]:
and then you raced out of the gates?
Kevin Asher [00:11:15]:
Yes. Because although we focus and most of our work is with Salesforce, there are adjacent platforms that we use and manage and coach on.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:11:27]:
Mhmm.
Kevin Asher [00:11:28]:
For this company in particular, they were using Outreach, the sales prospecting product along with Gong. So a lot of our work with them was, started off with the coaching and cons or not the individual coaching, but executive coaching and consulting on building the right types of sales processes and systems on their legacy CRM. So we already do have an existing relationship. So when it was time to go, I remember it very well, getting the call on a Saturday. Kevin, we we What
Jerome Clatworthy [00:12:04]:
are you doing tonight? Pretty much. And, I guess, having that prior involvement and understanding that their their system, I guess, given your, I guess, involved in the the co design must have made that discovery process a lot easier. You weren’t learning them and their business from the ground up. You always had some sort of concept of of what they do instead of okay. So tell me about loans and starting from scratch, you know.
Kevin Asher [00:12:24]:
That’s right. And one of the things that I wanted to point out here, which I’ll point out in one of the other case studies, the biggest individual person factor of success was having a solid sales operations lead on their end. Yep. Because there’s so much work and stakeholder interviews, input, understanding the intricacies of their business business process. For us as outside consultants to get up to that level of knowledge would have slowed us down and and probably we still would have never gotten there. Yeah.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:13:00]:
Right.
Kevin Asher [00:13:00]:
So having a complete partner on the inside who was able to accelerate their end of the handshake
Jerome Clatworthy [00:13:10]:
Yeah.
Kevin Asher [00:13:10]:
Was instrumental in in in getting the speed and the accuracy that we did.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:13:15]:
Yeah. Okay. And in terms of, I guess, from a product point of view, was it pretty vanilla in terms of, you know, core platform plus sales cloud or was there a few other sort of nuts and bolts that were sort of added to the mix?
Kevin Asher [00:13:24]:
It was plain vanilla. It was it was sales cloud.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:13:27]:
Yeah. Cool.
Kevin Asher [00:13:28]:
Again, after this after this rush, we did end up, including what was Van High Velocity Sales, now sales engagement.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:13:37]:
Okay.
Kevin Asher [00:13:37]:
So we did, in that case, bring that functionality onto the platform from Outreach. But overall, the solution was, you know, it was connected apps, flows, and just a few classes and triggers, but almost all of it was was done declaratively.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:13:56]:
And in those cases where it’s such a a fast paced situation, I mean, my perspective is if you can get a flow to do the job and to do it well, that that’s a great way to get it up and running in there. You can bring in a developer after the fact, and they can optimize things and, you know, decrease the database calls and stuff like that. But it can be such a powerful tool to to get things off the ground and and, you know, get the show on the road, so to speak. And then you can always do that at a later date and, yeah, convert it to Apex if that’s better off. But, you know, they’re so powerful now that it’s such a great a great tool to to sort of use for that purpose.
Kevin Asher [00:14:25]:
Definitely. Definitely. Now I would have built those flows a little differently given the experience since then. I would have built them more modularly.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:14:35]:
Okay.
Kevin Asher [00:14:36]:
I would have
Jerome Clatworthy [00:14:37]:
So separate flows that sort of call on each other and and come back together sort of thing?
Kevin Asher [00:14:40]:
Yep. Exactly. Just like how in an Apex trigger you wanna separate the logic from the trigger, I would have done that more within within the flows.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:14:49]:
Is that just as your sort of flow expertise grew in time or just as you understood understood the business better towards the end of it?
Kevin Asher [00:14:55]:
Exactly. I I I like to you know, part of the part of why I like this field and I’m sure why you and your listeners like it, there’s always something new. There is always a way to grow. So kind of by definition, I I I like to joke to my customers in in really smart biz. They had the 2020 version of me.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:15:15]:
Yeah.
Kevin Asher [00:15:15]:
Right. The 2024 version of me is even better.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:15:19]:
Yeah. Absolutely.
Kevin Asher [00:15:20]:
The 25 version, I can’t wait to see what that’s gonna look like.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:15:23]:
Yeah. That’s right. Yeah. And as the tool grows, like, you know, next week, they could release a feature, which would change the way you would build every flow you ever built up to this up to today, isn’t it like? But
Kevin Asher [00:15:31]:
Drew, stay tuned to the 3rd case study, Drew.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:15:34]:
Alright. Can’t wait. Well, that was cool. Anything else you wanna drop on that one? I think that’s pretty good coverage before we move on to case study. Good.
Kevin Asher [00:15:41]:
So thank you, Smartbiz, for trusting us with a bet the company move, and it paid off.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:15:49]:
And And so what was, got that phone call on the Saturday through to users started using in production. What sort of time frame was that about 6 weeks that you mentioned that it was That
Kevin Asher [00:15:57]:
was 6 weeks. Wow. Yeah. Now again, a a brilliant move from my counterpart from Bobby, the sales operations head. He put together trail heads and requirements, and you aren’t allowed into the system until you completed and got badges.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:16:13]:
Okay. Yeah. Right. That’s a good idea. And I guess the trail heads and stuff is a lot more applicable when it is a vanilla sort of sales cloud implementation. Yes. When it’s something a bit more custom and the objects aren’t the same sort of terminology that’s all throughout Trailhead, it can be a bit more tricky. But, yeah, in those cases, that Trailhead’s perfect for that, isn’t it? Alright.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:16:31]:
So, can we move on to case study number 2, which would be an example of a really interesting, potentially, a weird and wonderful use of Salesforce that people may not have, expected or just something that was really interesting to you on a more personal level for some reason?
Kevin Asher [00:16:45]:
Well, the the the company that comes to mind with this, they’re they’re now known as Active Learning. At the time, they had a different name. But what Active does is it’s a student it’s a it’s a learning platform, a student engagement platform for STEM, science technology
Jerome Clatworthy [00:17:05]:
Okay.
Kevin Asher [00:17:05]:
Science technology, engineering, math, mostly at the university level. So it’s a software platform that helps students and the professors engage and get the most out of the course. It supplements the in person learning.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:17:20]:
Okay. So not content delivery, more student engagement sort of around. Is the in person thing or an online thing? Or
Kevin Asher [00:17:26]:
It’s an online thing. So Okay.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:17:29]:
A a a simple way to think
Kevin Asher [00:17:30]:
of it would be an LMS, a learning management system, but geared towards university students in the sciences in that in STEM subjects. Mhmm. And why I chose this is because it’s the first time in my career has all been b to b, business to business.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:17:46]:
Mhmm.
Kevin Asher [00:17:48]:
This is the first time in my whole career when the the business model was they don’t sell to people. Meaning, usually so used to there’s an account and we identify people at the account, their contacts. Maybe they start as leads, we convert. But ultimately, we end up with an opportunity. The opportunity is with an account and there are contacts and we work the deal to closure. And it’s and the details will differ, but that’s the overall structure. Well, it took me a while to understand that with their model. They don’t I mean, yes.
Kevin Asher [00:18:25]:
I mean, literally, there are people who have to approve. But the the the entity that they’re selling to, it’s not the university because there are departments within the universities. Yep. There there are, so they sell to a course. CHEM 101 may or may not be offered this next semester
Jerome Clatworthy [00:18:45]:
Okay.
Kevin Asher [00:18:46]:
At university a, b, c, or d. So there’s a a course needs to be offered and that course then may have 1 or multiple professors involved in making the learning. So in the end, a complex business structure of how they identify opportunities and how they chase after these opportunities and ultimately, it’s that opportunities get attached to a course being offered which just ended up being a harder data model to originally hit my head around. Let alone have salespeople understand and build in the necessary automations of how do I how do I identify my best opportunities this next academic year.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:19:35]:
Yeah. Right. Okay. So the company had their LMS platform that was separate. So this is still just for the sales. So it was just a really unique sort of sales, I guess, concept in terms of yeah. That was selling to a course instead of a yeah. Okay.
Kevin Asher [00:19:47]:
Yeah. So so ultimately, they’re selling a SaaS product like Yep. You know, most other SaaS products. It comes with subscriptions and
Jerome Clatworthy [00:19:55]:
Yeah.
Kevin Asher [00:19:55]:
Per user pricing and that thing. But instead of just, oh, I have an account and I go after the account, it’s just there’s something in between because there’s universities and there’s university systems and there’s university departments. Yeah. So both who are who who’s on our how we model our addressable universe and the relationships between them and how we actually identify, here is an in market opportunity for this next semester because if I’m at University of California and they’re not offering chem 101 next semester, I don’t have an opportunity there.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:20:36]:
Yeah. Right. So it was still was, you know, an account contact sort of setup or you had to go to personal accounts or what how we was it still
Kevin Asher [00:20:42]:
We still used the the business accounts, but we ended up creating a new custom object that we referred to as a course decision unit. And the the detail of that doesn’t matter as much as we well, it was a junction object to basically connect accounts and contacts and courses Mhmm. And departments to ultimately just help the active sellers Yeah. Make sense and understand, hey. In this next semester, I have 250 potential opportunities. That’s my universe.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:21:21]:
So every every university that’s running course a b c where we have some stuff to support them, that’s who we wanna be able to find and try and contact? Yep. Yeah. Right.
Kevin Asher [00:21:30]:
So there was a data modeling, you know, was the core challenge intellectual challenge to this. Mhmm. As well, they were using Pardot and Outreach. There were synchronization issues between their marketing automation platform, their selling engagement platforms, high high in the field use, travel from their reps. So there’s a mobile so there’s just there’s just a lot of stuff to dive into and untangle. And, again, common theme, highly engaged, highly motivated, highly skilled customer counterpart. Yep. So, you know, roll up sleeves and and and just get dirty with this.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:22:15]:
Yeah. So they had they had a pretty clear idea who the customer was that that that you were just sort of providing them with technology solution to make that easier to manage and track or that was part of your solution was how do we identify the right person to to try and call and get them in the system for you.
Kevin Asher [00:22:27]:
It was a new head of sales in in customer success, and she had she basically could draw things out and and had a pretty clear understanding of just how the sales motion should work. Mhmm. And then I was able to take that and basically transform that into the actual technical requirements of, okay. Great. Now how do we arm wrestle and reconfigure Salesforce to meet those unique business requirements that I had never come across.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:23:00]:
Yeah. Okay. Fascinating. And, again, from a, like, product point of view, which is the basic products of, you know, standard plus sales cloud or you had to bring in something to be creative
Kevin Asher [00:23:09]:
Pardot, now known as Yep. Account engagement.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:23:13]:
Yep.
Kevin Asher [00:23:14]:
And then also, you know, third party products Yep. Such as, Outreach
Jerome Clatworthy [00:23:20]:
Yeah. Sure.
Kevin Asher [00:23:21]:
Being being part of it. As the as the program went on, we did use a third party connector It could called Synatic because at some point, it became clear that part of the sales and service, we needed to have data from their first party platform. We need to start having, you know, our our students the obvious side
Jerome Clatworthy [00:23:47]:
of things. Yeah. Okay. So it’s about to have some
Kevin Asher [00:23:49]:
metrics around first party usage. Yep. So we did end up using a third party connector Okay. To simplify the API connections and basically have that middleware to start bringing their first party data into Salesforce and into account engagement and and Outreach.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:24:11]:
Yeah. Fantastic. Okay. Interesting. Alright. Well, that’s, anything the details there? I think that covers pretty well. Any other details you think are pertinent to to to mention while we’re on that one?
Kevin Asher [00:24:21]:
I think the one other is that account hierarchies can get pretty tricky and, this will come up in another this might come up in another example. Yeah. But often the Salesforce account hierarchy out of the box, it’s pretty basic. Meaning, there’s just one field, there’s one way to visualize it. Yeah. The only way to easily handle something through the UI is you have to go to the child account and then put in the parent. Now, of course, there are when you start building flows and lightning components and, you know, customization, you could get around. But out of the box, it’s relatively light.
Kevin Asher [00:25:01]:
Yep. And and account hierarchies can really come down to the business modeling. Because again, in universities, well, here again, here in the US, you have the University of California. Well, I think there are 11 or 12 campuses. I forget how many. There’s University of California Berkeley, University of California Los Angeles, University of California Davis. Well, within them, you have departments, the chemistry department, the math department. And, you know, and depending on how you wanna link and ultimately, through custom components, you can you can build anything.
Kevin Asher [00:25:38]:
Yeah. But ultimately, it’s trying to figure out what what do I really need? What are the reports? What business what KPIs and business decisions or or modeling am I trying to do? Because often what we find is that the customer doesn’t often know how to ask for it. They just well, in in the real world, here’s the hierarchy, so we should have that in Salesforce. And it may or may not need to be replicated in Salesforce. So my summarized point to to the audience is just because we can build something in Salesforce doesn’t always mean that we should.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:26:16]:
We should.
Kevin Asher [00:26:16]:
And being really clear on what does it take to manage the business, measure our success, you know, it’s always balance. It’s always balance.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:26:26]:
Yeah. Because there’s the technical skill, you know, you can do anything you want and then there’s that more the wisdom that comes in from, you know, taking those requirements and transforming that to the the best structure on the other end, which
Kevin Asher [00:26:37]:
And and there are app exchange solutions that focus specifically on account hierarchy.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:26:43]:
Yeah. Sure.
Kevin Asher [00:26:44]:
And and that’s something that I wouldn’t have predicted is as big of an issue as frequently as it is. So Okay. The, universities, okay, if you’re dealing with multinationals
Jerome Clatworthy [00:26:56]:
Yeah. Of course.
Kevin Asher [00:26:57]:
We’ve done work in the automotive dealers. So, again, you have automotive groups. The same ownership group may own a Honda dealer and a Toyota dealer. Brands, countries. Yeah.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:27:09]:
It can pro proliferate on so many different levels. That’s right. Geographically, brand wise, location wise, model no. Yeah. Gosh.
Kevin Asher [00:27:17]:
So sometimes it could get we we we had an a pretty gnarly implementation around account hierarchies for a company that sold technology to fast food restaurants known as quick service restaurants, QSRs.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:27:30]:
Yeah.
Kevin Asher [00:27:30]:
Well, you have a conglomerate known as Yum Brands that might own Taco Bell and Kentucky Fried Chicken, and then you have Regions and franchise. So it can get really gnarly. So it it it’s really important to understand how does the business look and categorize these different types of units.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:27:50]:
Is there a question or, I guess, a a type of questioning that you do that helps you go from we could do anything to this is probably the best way to do it. That was in Salesforce or is it just
Kevin Asher [00:28:00]:
Well, usually with jump start where we jump start the conversation, we work a lot with private venture funded startups. Mhmm. They they have investors, so they have board meetings. So we start with what’s what are what’s the reporting and what are the expectations for your investors Okay. That you’re reporting each month or quarter. If it’s a public company, we we have at times dealt with smaller public companies.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:28:26]:
Sure.
Kevin Asher [00:28:27]:
So, again, they’re they’re very clear on what types of reporting. But usually, we start with you know, it should sound as obvious as it is. What what’s the current status quo? How do you currently make your business decisions and hold yourselves accountable?
Jerome Clatworthy [00:28:42]:
Yeah.
Kevin Asher [00:28:42]:
And from there, it’s then it’s a pretty quick jump to the gap analysis. Okay. So here so here are the reports or the analytics or the ways that you make decision. What’s your what’s your confidence that these numbers are accurate and representative? That usually, you know, gets you some level of certainty. And then what’s missing? If you could have something else, you know, what would that be? And and that’s ultimately the level of questioning that gets to our current state and our gap analysis and gives us direction. And do
Jerome Clatworthy [00:29:12]:
you find in most cases that they’re sort of ready for that process? Or sometimes you say, hey. I think you guys need to go away and figure that out first and then come back to us. Or that can be part of your services to alright.
Kevin Asher [00:29:22]:
Well Yeah.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:29:22]:
If you’re not quite there yet, let’s start. Let’s put it all on the table and Well let’s think about KPIs. Let’s think about metrics. So
Kevin Asher [00:29:28]:
That’s a great lead in to the projects that don’t go well.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:29:32]:
Alright. Perfect. The 2. Transition. Yeah. Let’s talk about something which maybe hasn’t gone well and and why.
Kevin Asher [00:29:37]:
The ones that do go well, they are ready for those conversations. Either they already have had them Yeah. And they could pretty much just read me in and bring, you know, bring us up to speed. Yeah. Or if they haven’t, they’re open to it. And they recognize that having an outsider facilitate and look at things with different experiences and frameworks is of value to them. That’s the growth open minded mindset.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:30:04]:
Mhmm.
Kevin Asher [00:30:05]:
When projects don’t go well, what we found that a common theme is either a a a lack of interest, accessibility, just a variety of obstacles to being able to have those foundational discussions.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:30:19]:
And do you think exactly that they they already think they know or they just don’t understand the important they’re just not aware of it as something that’s important or they think they’ve solved that and they just want you to build the system? We know what we want to build it.
Kevin Asher [00:30:30]:
It it often comes up as the last. We already know what we want.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:30:34]:
Yeah. We’ve done that. We’ve done that already internally in house. We’re we’re good.
Kevin Asher [00:30:37]:
Or or or or no. We have it. It it it could be that. It could also be we well, we haven’t built it, but we know it’s simple. You know, the, you know, the the age old it’s just a checkbox. All we need is a checkbox. You know? So and and why do you need why do you need to talk to our SVP? This is a technical implementation. Why do you you’re not gonna get their time.
Kevin Asher [00:31:02]:
They’re too busy with other stuff. That those are often the ways that it gets you know, why are you asking those questions? Just and I’m being a little facetious and a little cheeky here. Just just just shut up and code. Just build build what we told you to build and let us know when it’s done. So the first two examples I was giving, total hand in hand, high trust partnership.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:31:26]:
Yeah.
Kevin Asher [00:31:26]:
You know, nobody was above the other. We all got dirty. You know, we all we all zoomed in, zoomed out as needed.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:31:34]:
Respected each other’s expertise, understood the value of those conversations.
Kevin Asher [00:31:38]:
Yep. The ones where we we, you know, in retrospect, you know, saw red flags that we didn’t or, you know, either we didn’t see them at the time or we chose to ignore them were, you know, we’re we were we we felt and succumb to the timing pressure to where we skipped steps in discovery and analysis because we got caught up in the excitement of of rushing to build.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:32:07]:
Yeah.
Kevin Asher [00:32:08]:
And I can’t emphasize enough the importance of slow it down. Slow down to go faster. And the measure twice, cut once, choose your cliche.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:32:22]:
Yeah.
Kevin Asher [00:32:23]:
It just it always works. So for instance, we were this was a project for a company that has their own version of AI analysis of call recordings. Basically, you think of it as a competitive offering to Gong or Einstein Conversation Insights, and they record their sales calls using Zoom. Yep. And they wanted us to build a connection where we would fetch the recording from Zoom Mhmm. Submit it through their API to their platform, wait for it to be processed, and then push those changes back into Salesforce. Like, basically, you know, some some numerical scores and some categorizations and some things like that.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:33:09]:
Analysis, all that. Yeah.
Kevin Asher [00:33:11]:
So we in rushing through technical due diligence and business requirement analysis, we missed that at the time, their API required, client credential authentication, which really just means that it’s a one time connection with a very long username and password.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:33:36]:
Okay.
Kevin Asher [00:33:37]:
And the out of the box capabilities until the winter release, which wasn’t available then
Jerome Clatworthy [00:33:43]:
Oh, really?
Kevin Asher [00:33:44]:
That wasn’t in that sounds straightforward, but it was not an out of the box Salesforce capability.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:33:51]:
Ah.
Kevin Asher [00:33:51]:
So it required a bunch of additional coding and workarounds. And when you’re doing your own authentication in Salesforce, it’s timely. Salesforce does a lot of amazing out of the box things like Yeah. Keeping store securely and encryptically, storing, credentials, access tokens, refresh tokens, like all this complex stuff Okay. That even for developers, they don’t have to worry about. Developers will set this stuff up declaratively so they could just write their classes and code and not have to write all the complex logic for making callouts and all this stuff. Okay. But this one type and it was a very common way.
Kevin Asher [00:34:31]:
What the company built was very industry standard.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:34:35]:
Okay.
Kevin Asher [00:34:36]:
But at the time, it wasn’t Salesforce supported.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:34:38]:
Okay.
Kevin Asher [00:34:38]:
And we hadn’t gone through enough. We we were already in the build Yeah. When we had that OGs moment, and that was uncomfortable.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:34:48]:
The overall concept of Salesforce, send it out, do its thing, come back. So that was fine. There was no surprises there. It was just a technical aspect which came and, jumped up in front of you when you weren’t weren’t
Kevin Asher [00:34:57]:
ready for it. It was yeah. It was the technical aspect for their system to recognize, okay, you’re a Salesforce who’s asking, you’re safe. Come
Jerome Clatworthy [00:35:07]:
on in. Yeah.
Kevin Asher [00:35:08]:
Sure. And we would’ve if we had just spent a bit more time with diligence and assessment before Ernie, like because nobody wants surprises or and we didn’t recognize that that was a potential hurdle. If you’re doing a kitchen remodel, a good contractor will tell will give you an estimate, and they’ll also tell you, look. There is a chance you have lead pipes. Your house is this many years old. When you put
Jerome Clatworthy [00:35:38]:
it covered away, we don’t know what’s gonna be behind it before we put the new one in. Yeah. Like, there are there are like, there are
Kevin Asher [00:35:45]:
known unknowns. There’s a relatively finite amount of things that could come up. If you go in to get your engine serviced at a car dealer, you’re gonna have a I mean, it’s it’s a finite list of things that could be wrong with your engine. Yep. I mean, it’s not gonna be that an astro you know, a meteor shower, you know, got jammed in the tranny. Like, it’s just gonna be, you know, so so we missed our role as consultants of giving a thorough assessment of, hey, here are the things that we need to look for during assessment. Just like a doctor, we’re gonna take some images. And so when they if you go into surgery, they know what they’re getting into and and there are also, hey, there are some things that may we may not know until we’re in there.
Kevin Asher [00:36:29]:
Yeah. But again, we’re telling you ahead of time these are those kinds of things and that that was on us. And and, ultimately, what I would, say as the learning experience for for everybody is that when trust and or clarity go down in an engagement, the need for documentation and adherence to a process has to go up.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:36:59]:
Yeah. Okay.
Kevin Asher [00:37:00]:
You know, getting business and technical requirements written Yeah. And approved. And if if if we go forward and find that they’re different from what was, you know Yeah. Defined and approved, it’s a change order, you know. And and calling that, it is different. And, again, when you’re in a high trust environment, you can go faster and ease off on some of those things. But if you’re in low trust, high unknown
Jerome Clatworthy [00:37:27]:
Yeah.
Kevin Asher [00:37:28]:
You gotta you gotta stick to the documentation and and and the the process. Or else, you as the consultant or the implementer will shoulder an unfair amount of the risk.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:37:41]:
So on your end, is that like a 2 pronged, you know, another reinforcement that gotta make sure you do your your due diligence? And then secondly, if there’s another API, we’re gonna really drill down those details before we write that up and start work. Is that the kind of a a technical learning as well as a general learning of make sure we don’t forget it. It always comes back to bite us as well as, alright. There’s another API. We’re gonna really map that out before we put pen to paper, you know, and start time.
Kevin Asher [00:38:05]:
Get paid for that. Yeah. You need to get paid for that because what I’ve also learned is we’ll answer questions in a general nature. Sure. But the moment it starts coming to looking at your specific situation and Yep. You know, assessing and diagnosing, like, you have to pay a lot to get an MRI to get an x-ray.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:38:22]:
Yep. Yep. It still doesn’t fix It’s the same thing. We come and analyze your system.
Kevin Asher [00:38:26]:
Broken arm, but it’s still necessary.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:38:28]:
That is a really good analogy as an MRI.
Kevin Asher [00:38:31]:
Yeah. Expertise. That’s a paid deliverable.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:38:34]:
Yeah. Because they can use the same knowledge if they go with someone else, you know, the work you do. That’s right.
Kevin Asher [00:38:38]:
If you
Jerome Clatworthy [00:38:38]:
get the job where they wanna go with someone else in the end, that’s still they could take that document and the work you do and that someone else can benefit from that same learning.
Kevin Asher [00:38:45]:
That’s right. So then often, they’ll be, okay. Well, how much does it cost? Yeah. And so we’re getting better. So, well, the cost goes down again the more it it all depends. How much are you gonna make yourself available?
Jerome Clatworthy [00:38:58]:
Yeah. Right.
Kevin Asher [00:38:59]:
If you have a rock star sales ops person or customer point of contact who can consolidate, facilitate, stakeholder interviews, questionnaires, surveys, you know, already have existing documentations, cost and time will go down. If you’re if you’re if we’re coming into a new dynamic chaotic environment, cost will go up. Mhmm. But those are necessary ingredients to give you a, you know, a a realistic accurate assessment of what needs to be done to meet these business requirements.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:39:35]:
Yeah. So in that case study you referred to, do you think was it you guys probably raced ahead because you just got so into the work or you sort of tried to, but then you got a bit of pushback so you sort of went with it? Do you sort of say your intentions were there and you sort of went through that motion and there was too much resistance, so you just went, alright. Let’s just get into it. Or it was you kind of probably got carried away yourselves and it wasn’t so much resistance on the other side.
Kevin Asher [00:39:58]:
It was probably a combo of all those specific specifically in this case, we had been working with the company with the revenue ops team for months. And these were peep these were previous clients from previous organizations. So the individuals that we were working with, extremely high trust relationship. We could finish each other’s sentences. Yeah. Sure. And things just went really well. They introduced us into a new department within the organization, and we made assumptions.
Kevin Asher [00:40:26]:
We just made assumptions based on past experience. And and in retrospect, we should have recognized those were those were full the there’s just we shouldn’t have made those assumptions. Yeah. A new business unit, even though it was same company company. We should have treated it like a brand new client And and gone in not that I wanna say not, but gone in with the approach where we start at a high level of documentation and process.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:40:54]:
Yeah.
Kevin Asher [00:40:55]:
It’s better to start there and ease up because the other way was the trap that we fell into.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:41:02]:
Yeah. Now that’s a real learning. And, yeah, it comes up again and again when you don’t do the work at that front.
Kevin Asher [00:41:07]:
And and yes, we did get I personally did get swept up in the excitement of oh, integration, and this is a great use case. And Yeah. Let’s just, you know, let’s start banging this out.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:41:18]:
Yeah. Let’s do it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I think it’s something you have to learn periodically because you, you know, you get reminded, then you go back and you get really disciplined. And then, things go well for a while and you can relax again. And every now and then, you just need that little, little reminder.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:41:31]:
Oh, that’s right.
Kevin Asher [00:41:32]:
Yeah. So I’d say if there are any, customer you know, Salesforce end user organizations listening right now, not, you know, Salesforce consultants and implementers, I’d say as you’re evaluating and interviewing potential partners, you should ask about lessons learned in projects that went south. Because if they don’t have any, either they’re not being truthful, the rep you’re talking to is unaware, or Yeah. They haven’t done anything interesting yet.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:42:01]:
Yeah. They’re so bad. The client didn’t even tell them. The client just said, let’s just walk away. They didn’t even tell them that it was a disaster. It was so terrible.
Kevin Asher [00:42:07]:
That’s right.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:42:08]:
Yeah. Either way. Well, that was so fascinating.
Kevin Asher [00:42:11]:
The the the Kevin of 2024, if we’re all not learning, you know, unfortunately, part of learning will come from learning from mistakes.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:42:18]:
Yeah. And we need to make sure that there’s a culture of mistakes are okay. Obviously, we wanna don’t want them to have a negative impact. But, yeah, I’m gonna make some judgment errors, and that’s alright. We’re living and we’re learning. Fantastic. We did get the other
Kevin Asher [00:42:30]:
work done, by the way. It was bumpy. But we did get everything connected, and we delivered a technically, viable and valid product.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:42:39]:
Yeah. Okay. And then you’re saying as of the next release, that would have been a whole lot easier. Is that correct based on new functionality that’s coming up?
Kevin Asher [00:42:45]:
Yes. Because now what we had to build is now an out of the box capability using external credentials.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:42:52]:
Yeah. Right. Fantastic. Oh, how cool is that? Brilliant. Well, that was so fascinating, especially that last one they were. That’s really good. Any other technical details you thought would be interesting to drop there, or you think that’s a pretty good coverage before we move on? I I I think that’s oh, the other thing for the tech folks in the
Kevin Asher [00:43:09]:
audience, another thing that’s not out of the box with Salesforce is setting up a webhooks listener. Okay. So these are things where we’re using, Salesforce sites. Go to the admin go to setup UI and type in sites and see what comes up about Salesforce sites. I I’m gonna guess that the vast majority of your because this was, I think, like, an older technology. You could set up visual sports page and things like that. But web hosting is a common web standard now where it’s basically you’re subscribing to an external system, and you just wanna know when a change happens. Yeah.
Kevin Asher [00:43:47]:
So in our case, we just wanted to know that, that Zoom finished processing a call and the recording and the transcript was available. Yeah. And instead of constantly calling and pulling, we could just say, hey. We’re we’re instead of us calling you
Jerome Clatworthy [00:44:03]:
You let us say what you’re ready. Yeah. Tell us, and then we’ll do our thing. Yeah. Right. Okay. Fascinating. I’m gonna look up sites after this.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:44:10]:
Appreciate it. Alright. As we sort of get towards the end, I just wanna geek out a little bit, just ask some random sort of, technical questions. Right. IPhone or Android? Where do you sit?
Kevin Asher [00:44:19]:
So I’m an Android user and I think we need a new, we need a see that face says it all. People can be you know, we have protected class on gender, sexual orientation, age, national origin, and we need its new protected class for for technology selections.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:44:39]:
Discrimination laws.
Kevin Asher [00:44:40]:
Yeah. Discrimination based on my phone.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:44:43]:
Yeah. Oh, that’s funny. That’s hilarious.
Kevin Asher [00:44:45]:
We’re so tribal.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:44:47]:
And Mac or PC? Guessing PC then if you’re on Android already.
Kevin Asher [00:44:51]:
Let’s just do it. PC, we use off we use, Outlook Outlook, not G Suite.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:44:58]:
Yeah. Okay. Is that do you find that’s more common like the Microsoft in the corporate world, is Microsoft dominating or is G Suite still, flying the flag pretty strong?
Kevin Asher [00:45:07]:
In the vast majority of the startup world that, you know, the coastal leap companies that we tend to deal with, it’s it’s, it’s it’s, g Suite on a Mac. But when you get into corporate America and bigger companies, it’s PCs and Microsoft Suite.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:45:26]:
Why the g Suite? Is that better sales from Google side or just culture? Just just everyone’s just used to Google?
Kevin Asher [00:45:31]:
I think it’s a bit culture and probably simpler and lower cost is my guess. Yeah.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:45:36]:
Okay. Yeah. Sure.
Kevin Asher [00:45:38]:
As as hard as sale the Salesforce language can be sometimes, when I have to get into the, admin side of our Microsoft 365 account or we’re gonna do files connect within Salesforce to our SharePoint server. Anybody who thinks Salesforce jargon and nomenclature is is is complicated
Jerome Clatworthy [00:46:00]:
Hasn’t been there.
Kevin Asher [00:46:01]:
You ain’t seen nothing compared to Microsoft.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:46:05]:
Oh, good. And what do you guys what’s your tech stack internally for, I guess, communication and sort of project management? What do you guys spend your time in?
Kevin Asher [00:46:12]:
I’m, you know, I’m glad you asked that. For project management, we were using Jira. Okay. It wasn’t suiting our needs because it wasn’t good for project management, so we built our own. So we use we use cases. We bought a time tracking app off the AppExchange. Okay.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:46:27]:
So you got your own Salesforce to sort of
Kevin Asher [00:46:30]:
We’re in Salesforce all the time, our customers.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:46:31]:
Yeah.
Kevin Asher [00:46:32]:
Because we feel like if we don’t eat our own dog food, then what are we doing? That’s interesting.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:46:36]:
So yeah.
Kevin Asher [00:46:37]:
Makes sense. Here’s our tech stack. Part Pardot, account engagement.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:46:41]:
Yep.
Kevin Asher [00:46:41]:
We use Experience Cloud for our customer portal where they can log in, track and submit cases, get reports that they need, that sort of thing. Yep. We use, for our prospecting automation, we use sales engagement, we use Einstein Conversation Intelligence, and we use So you have pregnancy language? Yeah. Einstein Analytics. And we are we’re on unlimited edition. I mean, we’re just all in.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:47:08]:
Yeah. Nice. And with Pardot specifically, do you find you’re using the full sort of products there, not not just a glorified sort of order responder like a lot of people end up with?
Kevin Asher [00:47:16]:
We we are in the early stages of using it because Mhmm. We’ve spent a lot of time upping our content generation game. Okay. So for instance, Jeremy, when this podcast airs, we will use we will use Pardot to promote it.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:47:37]:
Yeah. Fantastic.
Kevin Asher [00:47:38]:
And now we chose to build landing pages within our website because the landing page capabilities within Pardot just not quite what we want for matching the look and feel of our website. But as far as engagement studio, all in. Yeah. Yep.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:47:55]:
I hope fantastic. If you were CEO of Salesforce for the day, what’s, is there something that comes to mind that you would change or you you got to make a decision? Is there, like, a a feature or a bug request? What comes to mind?
Kevin Asher [00:48:08]:
As much as I love Salesforce, Force, what has always driven me crazy is that I think their sales and support leave a lot to be desired. Okay. Iron so here’s my specific recommendations, Mark. Having your all employees reach ranger status is a great start. Every customer facing person at Salesforce should be sales and service cloud and admin certified. Just done.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:48:37]:
You have
Kevin Asher [00:48:37]:
to know the product. There have been so many instances where mine and my customers’ time was wasted and frustration grew from asking basic questions of your sales team with the response being, I don’t know. It’s too technical of a question. Shouldn’t be. Shouldn’t be like your sales team needs to know the product. Okay. And and then on the support side, maybe it’s a cultural thing, maybe it’s a coaching thing. I know you outsource your support to, Cognizant.
Kevin Asher [00:49:09]:
Okay. Your support people need to act more like people and listen and not read scripts. Yeah. I can hear them thinking and reading through a script as I’m trying to explain an issue instead of following and jamming me down a a a a list of questions as opposed to actually just listening to what the issue is. The The amount of times where I’ve had to repeat myself after it’s been documented extensively in the case Yeah. You guys can do better.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:49:42]:
Yeah. Sure. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Very pertinent. And, in terms of, I guess, when you guys have inherited an existing Salesforce organ you’ve logged in, is there sort of, I guess, patterns or themes you’ve noticed when you’ve sort of taken on, as an organ that’s already stood up in terms of could be a poor practice or something that you that you noticed that you think people should be more wary of in their work?
Kevin Asher [00:50:05]:
I think the so the idea of just adding a checkbox, usually, it’s a mishmash and a Frankenstein. You could just very quickly I mean, first place to look, look at a lead or an opportunity page Mhmm. And see how many things are jammed onto that page. It’s usually that’s the fir the within the first two minutes, you
Jerome Clatworthy [00:50:28]:
could
Kevin Asher [00:50:28]:
get an idea if if if you’re inheriting a hodgepodge or if there’s been, you know, intentional design.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:50:36]:
Yeah. Sure.
Kevin Asher [00:50:37]:
Using a product such as Elements Cloud or Yeah. Or Cloudingo or I’m sure there are plenty of others, you could quickly run an analysis out of all the, standard and custom fields on an object, have what percentage of them are populated. So you could very quickly just get a sense of
Jerome Clatworthy [00:50:54]:
Interesting.
Kevin Asher [00:50:55]:
Hey, out of all these fields, are people using them? And if they’re not using them, are they on the layout? So my quick tip would be so just look at the layout. Just Yep. As a user, does it look cluttered and intimidating? And are people actually using the field? So, you know, tip, dynamic forms, validation rules. You’re
Jerome Clatworthy [00:51:17]:
all in on dynamic. You love it?
Kevin Asher [00:51:19]:
Absolutely. Screen flows. Yeah. You know, just
Jerome Clatworthy [00:51:23]:
From a UI sort of bias, I’m getting more and more screen flows. It’s almost a preferred way of sort of data entry instead of just this never ending scrolling page of, you know, a 1000 fields, I think. And it saves these big clunky validation rules. Can you just guide them through the a dynamic process of, okay, you’re entering this, then I want this and this, and the flow does it so much more gracefully, I find, than just this big
Kevin Asher [00:51:42]:
So much more A thousand foot.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:51:43]:
You know? And it’s so much easier to train, so much easier to teach, so much easier for people to come in without learning.
Kevin Asher [00:51:49]:
And, absolutely, and and we said earlier that there are certain things that flows, Flows start to reach their limits when we’re talking about huge volumes of transactions or data. Yeah. But, again, you can have the structure of the framework live within a flow and start to replace some of the heavy lifting with an invocable Apex. And because, ultimately, one of the best parts about flow is that you could have admins make changes and maintain and update, you know, the vast majority of the logic or the functionality that needs to be updated and can be a lot more sparing of when you need to call on, you know, a full, you know, a full fledged pro code developer to bang out new lines.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:52:37]:
Yeah. Perfect. Totally agree. How many hours a week do you think you’re working on average of your are you happy with that, or are you trying to pull things back? What’s your what’s a week look like in terms of hours?
Kevin Asher [00:52:50]:
I would like to pull back. It’s probably on the range of 60 or so, and I’d say the reason for that is because and this is I am going to plug my company for a second.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:53:02]:
Definitely. We’ll get there at the end
Kevin Asher [00:53:04]:
of the webinar. Acoustic selling.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:53:06]:
Yep. You
Kevin Asher [00:53:07]:
can find us at acousticsselling.com. We are focused on startup and young growth companies. And while there are literally thousands of well qualified, excellent Salesforce consultants out there, what we pride ourselves on is is delivering quickly, fastly, or quickly, inexpensively with high quality, and the way that we could hit all 3 is by combining products and services. So what I mean by that, and the reason why I’m working so much, is a lot of the configurations and customizations that we that we find ourselves making time and time again, we’ve now bundled into unlocked packages. So we just can
Jerome Clatworthy [00:53:52]:
put that straight in and you We
Kevin Asher [00:53:54]:
could just put it straight in. Customize accordingly. Yeah. Tailor it as we need to. And then, again, spend the time diving into biz requirements, you know, analytics needs. So you get the benefit of a prepackaged software plus someone to talk to in your room.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:54:10]:
So it’s like you got a full time client job, and then you’re also building these assets, I guess, outside of ours, which should make the client work quicker and easier going forward.
Kevin Asher [00:54:16]:
Exactly. So once all these are packaged and ready to go and installable and self serve, then things will start to scale back.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:54:24]:
Oh, that’s great. And what’s a perfect day for you? You want the door locked, tapping away the keyboard, or on the client, on the phone, out and about? What’s, where do you strive for? A bit of everything.
Kevin Asher [00:54:35]:
As a salesperson, I I sometime there are time so it’s 2 part. The first part of the day would be that breakthrough moment of solving something technically complex. Yep. But then seeing the look on customers’ faces when they now see what their world is like now as a result of it. One of the one of the more recent one and this was wasn’t super I I put this somewhere in the mid scale. Company has leads. The leads are in a variety of different categories. Depending on the lead, we’ll go to a different round robin queue and giving them a very simple interface to add or remove, salespeople from the queue because, again, they’re always updating and just a nice clean interface to do it very intuitive.
Kevin Asher [00:55:24]:
They didn’t need any training because the way that they’re doing before was just a whole rigmarole. And that was just incredibly exciting. Like, oh my gosh. You just gave me hours back in my day or in my Yeah. That sort of stuff.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:55:37]:
Absolutely. Absolutely. And super quick, in terms of, I guess, AI, what how long do you think until our day to day life is like in terms of CRM and, you know, Salesforce? Do you think we’re already there in terms of seeing some really big changes to to the way we work, or do you think we might be a few years off from, like, a real notable difference of what work looks like in in the CRM world?
Kevin Asher [00:55:58]:
I think it’s gonna happen quickly, and I will plug one other thing on Yeah. Yeah. A week from tomorrow on February, February 22nd Mhmm. I will be having, hosting or I will be joining Cloudingo, a third, an app exchange partner that is an expert in data deduplication and other Okay. Sorts of data cleanup. We are hosting a a webinar on Salesforce data quality. And one of the big points that I’ll be making is that to take advantage of both flavors of AI, by the way, meaning predictive Mhmm. Using existing data to spot trends to give meaningful insights and predictions, either predictive AI or generative AI, outright creating sales emails or account summaries or marketing information, product recommendations.
Kevin Asher [00:56:54]:
To use either of those to their potential all requires on quality data in your CRM and connected sources. It doesn’t all have to live in Salesforce. But one way or another, Salesforce, for Salesforce to be able to generate these sales and customer oriented products and artifacts, it you need connected, clean, accurate, complete data. Data quality is everything. To me, I believe that is going to be the single biggest, gating factor for how quickly a company gets value from generative AI.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:57:35]:
Right. Interesting. Yeah. That’s all that’s all the rage of now. Appreciate that. Well, Kevin, that has been an amazing conversation. I’ve enjoyed this. I’ve got so much out of it.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:57:44]:
Anything else that you’d like to, to say or leave before we wind up? We’re coming up to an hour now. It’s gone so quick. So you’ve mentioned the website, acousticsselling.com. Is that the best way for you to get in touch? Or
Kevin Asher [00:57:54]:
that is. Come visit. Check out our Einstein bot. Come say hi. And thank you for anybody who’s made it this far. Thank you for listening to us. And hopefully, we’ll meet sometime at a trailblazerdx or
Jerome Clatworthy [00:58:09]:
That would be cool.
Kevin Asher [00:58:09]:
Dreamforce or somewhere or online in a trailblazer group.
Jerome Clatworthy [00:58:14]:
Appreciate that, Kevin. Thank you so much for your time.