SPEAKER_00 0:01

Welcome! You are listening to the CRM Success Show, where you will hear from CRM executives who have overseen some of the most interesting and complex CRM implementations. Your hosts, David Mossri and Kiro Whitey, will be bringing you real stories, real insight. Follow along on social media for updates on new episode releases, exclusive content, and much more. Enjoy the show and thanks for listening.

SPEAKER_03 0:29

Welcome to the CRM Success Show, where we deep dive into CRM success and failure, delivering real stories with real impact. I'm Dave Mastery. And I'm Kira Whitzi. And today we're talking with uh Todd Salter, who will be telling us about his time with the Intercontinental Hotel Groups. So welcome, Todd.

SPEAKER_01 0:49

Thanks, guys. Thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_02 0:52

So so Todd, um, why don't we start off by uh giving our listeners um and and those that are uh are watching um a bit of background and context about you and your time in the Salesforce ecosystem, please.

SPEAKER_01 1:04

Yeah, for sure. So I originally got into the Salesforce ecosystem in the mid-2000s, started as a senior systems analyst. We had an opportunity um to replace some a legacy business process that was using email and Excel. And at the time we didn't have a good um option for how to offer them a better solution. And uh ITVP I worked with at the time had heard of Salesforce, had recently been contacted by Salesforce, and thought it would be a good thing for us to try out. And so started around 2007, I believe, at Intercontinental Hotels Group. We replaced um a very small solution with Salesforce and it took off from there. And uh I grew with it within the company. I had several different roles solutions architect, enterprise architect, single team delivery lead, and then eventually um helped build and lead the COE there. My last few roles since then have also been directing, building and leading COE, Salesforce COEs at um different companies.

SPEAKER_02 2:18

Fantastic.

SPEAKER_01 2:18

Here we are.

SPEAKER_02 2:19

Here we are. Um and today you're gonna be uh telling us a little bit about your time uh well you almost 10 years with uh Intercontinental Hotel Group. So um what why don't you just give us an overview of you know what the and for those that haven't heard and can't piece it together, um, just give us an idea of the size of the hotel group and some of the names that it it kind of gives us.

SPEAKER_01 2:41

Yeah, so it hotel franchise company. Um by now, I mean, since I left several years ago, they've added more brands, but they're probably 15 different hotel brands across uh the entire globe. Um, somewhere maybe 6,500 uh properties with tens of thousands of rooms. So one of the largest, I know in the hospitality industry, there's always an ongoing debate on how you should measure the largest hotel company, but um, they're always in the top three, four, five um hotel companies that would be mentioned by anybody in the industry. Um Salesforce usage there started very grassroots. In fact, what I was just explaining about how I got involved with it, we later found out that there were already two other uses within business teams at the company. And uh it it grew immensely to where we had um several hundred internal users, and then we're also rolling different functions out to our hotel portfolio um users as well.

SPEAKER_02 3:46

Fantastic.

SPEAKER_01 3:47

Um and I can mention a little bit about the brand. Sorry, I mean, for people that don't know what IHG is, um, Holiday Inn, Holiday In Express, Intercontinental Hotels, Crown Plaza, um, many others now, but those are some of the big big mainstays you would have heard of.

SPEAKER_02 4:03

Perfect. And and in terms of um, just to touch on super high-level COE, um, you know, for those that that might maybe are not familiar with the acronym, um, Center of Excellence. Um simplified, and we'll cover this a little bit further in the podcast, but a simple one-sentence answer, what does that mean uh to you?

SPEAKER_01 4:24

For us, and I know there are people, I I think Mass has a a different um perception of it, but for us and everywhere I've worked, it has been the team that was responsible for all the technology delivery related to Salesforce.

SPEAKER_03 4:44

Awesome. So you said um it started in 2007 with a small implementation and then you kind of just grew out with Salesforce, right? Um why don't you tell us a bit a little about that, the early days, right? Um how how you chose Salesforce, what with application that was being replaced, yeah, and then maybe you know how it kind of grew over the years and you know and the why behind some of that stuff.

SPEAKER_01 5:06

Sure. So uh first application that we were technically testing it out with was a to support a team that had field-based resources, so that would these individuals would be going out to visit the hotels for different reasons. And they were using, as I mentioned, uh Excel, maybe MS Access at the time, and it just wasn't giving them the uh capability that they needed to fully be aware. It was more of a risk management um type of need that they had that they realized that they needed to have better awareness of where specifically in the United States this team was just America's based, where specifically in the United States their their field resources were. And so um, you know, kind of true get it done fashion, we brought in two developers that had no experience with Salesforce, and I was just starting to understand it. And we hacked away at this solution for several months, um, something now that would probably take two weeks, and uh gave them a solution that that they were very happy with. And as we were growing that, adjacent teams to them were also going, oh, that's interesting. We could probably use that to do this. And as I mentioned, I also was at the same time finding out that a different business team had already implemented purchase licenses and implemented Salesforce for themselves, and a different team had so there were the time we got done with that first project, there were probably two existing teams and then three more teams that were interested in getting solutions, and it just kind of continued to develop that way. Um, very grassroots. And I I mentioned in a previous conversation with you guys that IHG at the time, by before I left, was up to 13 different orgs. Um, and part of that was because of the way it grew internally, kind of at a grassroots level, and also because the business supported that type of implementation. There weren't a lot of teams that were needed to share data or business process across the enterprise. So it made sense to support them kind of with their their own implementation. Um and my role grew, as I mentioned, eventually there was so much, there was so much sales force happening within the company that IT leadership decided we should pull this all together. And that's when the Center of Excellence started at IHG. Um, the growth didn't stop, thankfully. So the two years I was the director of the team there, um, we grew from when we started, we had I think six to eight resources, and within two years, we were over 80. And all of that was done on a grassroots level. I mean, most of it was done on a grassroots level because um individual business function teams within the company were realizing that they could leverage Salesforce for different reasons. They worked with a group that we had already helped build something, uh, some solution on Salesforce. And it just kind of grew. IHG was a bring your own funding um technology for the most part, at least for Salesforce. Everybody brought their own funding. And so it was at that time really easy to identify demand and and meet that demand with services and capabilities with Salesforce.

SPEAKER_03 8:36

So you said you were at 13 orgs, um, didn't really see a solid use case for merging. Um just to give us like a little better understanding, like what were some of the the use cases for the larger orgs? What were they used for? Yeah, I think you said field service was one of them, or that's the one that you started.

SPEAKER_01 8:57

Well, we weren't using field service. We were we weren't using field service properly, we were supporting um field-based resources. Um, a lot of back office functions. So you can imagine being a large franchise company that um has every hospitality-related business function that you could guess, helping support the hotels in different ways, whether it be marketing or operations or revenue and more financial-based um service and capability, and all the back office things that IHG needed just to operate its business as a franchise company. So, business development, the negotiation process, all of that. We had Salesforce solutioning for all of that. We didn't at that point get into anything customer-facing or more directly customer-focused support. It was all on the hotel support and operations side that we were focused on then. Um, there was a huge announcement probably about a month ago now. Sales um IHG and Salesforce have increased their partnership, and now IHG is starting to get out into that more customer, customer-focused type of capabilities that Salesforce can provide to marketing and you know, um, personalization and all of that kind of thing. But for the time being, we were all back office and supporting capabilities that we were building out.

SPEAKER_03 10:22

Yeah, it's it's funny because right, the C obviously stands for customer and you guys weren't doing that. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 10:31

Yeah, in this case, our customer was the hotel. And so we tracked everything about um everything we could about our hotels, about the individuals that we worked with at the hotels, about the interactions that our internal teams had with those individuals at the hotels, um, issues that they would uh submit internally to our business support teams. Um, we tracked all of that kind of thing. And uh you can imagine before something like Salesforce would which brought this all together, the information was extremely siloed. And I know that kind of is counterintuitive to something where you have 13 orgs, but we were able to share easily between Salesforce instances the data that a particular business process or business group may need to further enhance that process or automate things for the next process down the line. Um, and it was a big win in that in that regard. Teams that worked together but independently suddenly had insight into wow, okay, you went. I mean, one of the greatest examples before something common like this that could be easily shared from a data perspective, every team made their own appointments with the general manager at a hotel. And you got 15 teams trying to get a hotel general manager's time, which he already he or she already doesn't have enough time available. And they're like, okay, IHG corporate, calm down. You're you're killing me with time request here. And so uh a system like this that helped teams be have more awareness really helped open up and save those demands on the uh general managers and other individuals at the hotels that we frequently worked with.

SPEAKER_03 12:19

So um big one and just yeah, I mean that's not something that's easy to example exactly.

SPEAKER_01 12:26

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 12:27

So tell us more about that, right? Because it's not easy to share data, like you're making sound like it's easy, but it's not easy to share data between 13 orgs. Um, I doubt you use Salesforce Connect for that. How you know how did you accomplish that?

SPEAKER_01 12:39

Um, well, we were fortunate to be able to have MuleSoft. Um, we you know, this is over a period of time, so we started with some Salesforce to Salesforce for very simple needs, um, more end-to-end uh needs like that. We eventually had more of a pub subhub type architecture where if we had a single instance that was creating new information, new data that then should trigger things in other orgs, we were able to publicize those and the other orgs would consume and kick off whatever process that um was necessary otherwise. So sort of different approaches based upon the need, but we got to a little bit more modern, and we were fortunate to be able to use uh MuleSoft for a lot of that.

SPEAKER_03 13:32

Um that you decided to go with a pub sub and mule soft as opposed to really just merging the orgs. It never crossed your mind let's unify.

SPEAKER_01 13:44

Um, you know, honestly, instead, I've always had the perception that merging the org orgs raises complexity and risk for those individual teams, you have to have a um more full, proper, complete regression testing process involved. Um, we weren't really too worried about data security at that from that perspective. That's another thing that always comes into mind for me. I recently worked in the healthcare industry for a bit. Um, if you don't have users in an org that has um protected data of some sort, that's obviously the best form of security. Um, but at IHG, you know, we weren't that worried about data security, but just the complexity of the technical solution and making sure you didn't introduce accidentally any defects or have any implications to other teams. Again, the the overlap of business process and data sharing wasn't that large. Even the example that I gave was just kind of an uh data sharing to connect business processes, and so um easier for us to connect and share data on the few cases where that was necessary rather than absorb all of the potential risk of having merged technical environments.

SPEAKER_03 15:11

Okay, uh just yeah, I mean it's really interesting. Anecdotally, uh many people know I'm in the data space. Um, a lot of what I do is is moving people off other systems onto Salesforce. Um the past few years, a lot of Salesforce org merges, usually because of acquisitions, right? But not so much in your case. But I've definitely definitely seen, at least anecdotally, um, let's say in the past year, year and a half, I've done two org splits where took an org and split it out into two, um, which is something you've never seen before. Like that's like that's just a new phenomenon that you're starting to see a little bit now. So it's interesting.

SPEAKER_01 15:49

Yeah, the acquisition makes sense because um, you know, in a lot of cases you might be acquiring a company that extends the business you already do. So the overlap of business process and data is kind of inherent. Um, it's interesting though, because when I first got into Salesforce, Salesforce proper, their architects and engineers, I think had more of the mindset of, you know, have one and put everything in it. Over time, their their deeper, more senior, um, deeper experienced knowledge people internally also started to have the same perspective that I do of, yeah, there's less and less reason. I mean, one other concern, consideration I've always had in this as well, and it's funny that we're kind of getting into this because I wasn't expecting it, but one other consideration that I've always had there is some of the um limits and capacity that you get from Salesforce aren't necessarily tied to the users. Um, and so you know, I use the analogy, you don't you don't put all of your custom dev applications on one server. Um, why do you necessarily have to have the perspective that all of your Salesforce solutions should go on one instance? And so I think Salesforce has also behind the scenes a little bit started to follow that. This was a few years ago, uh, some other conversations I had at Dreamforce actually, um, where they're like, Yeah, we're trying to get our salespeople and others to stop having that perception and pushing that perception that have one Salesforce instance and throw everybody in there. And uh so your mileage may vary. I mean, there's it's a it's a nuanced discussion, definitely.

SPEAKER_02 17:36

Um, I just want to touch on um before we move into kind of you know a bit more about the journey and and how the implementation went and and the building of a of a COE team. Um so you know, I think it's important to for those that are maybe new in the ecosystem the last five years or so, going back to 2007 and and and not to make uh not to show your age color or anything like that is not my uh goal. So uh cover the cover the grades in the beard. But uh joking aside, um 2007 childhead was it was it even a thing in 2007? Right?

SPEAKER_01 18:12

So I mean it wasn't it wasn't called that. I to be honest, I don't even remember what they offered at the time. No, it was a lot of um trial and error. And then we'd run into it, we'd run into an issue and then submit a help case to get some direction. There wasn't a lot to go on.

SPEAKER_02 18:31

Which which I think for most people go through that implementation journey now is just wild to think like that is how you had to figure it out, right, and get and get stuff done. Um there will there wasn't uh a quick quick trail mix to go and blast through and and yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_01 18:46

Can it just type anything into a browser window and get get the search results back, right?

SPEAKER_02 18:52

And then obviously you went through a huge hiring initiative. Um you you know, obviously added about 70, 80 people. I'm assuming um to get to that net number of employees, you probably hired another 20 on top that didn't work out, right? Um and you took that kind of homegrown. And so, what skill sets did these people have if if you know Getting Task Force was only three, four years in, maybe at that point?

SPEAKER_01 19:19

So well, I mean, by that point we were working with a partner already. Um, one of the big obvious ones that people would have heard of. They were providing the tech services for like literally everyone, everyone on my team at first, except for maybe one BA, was from a partner. Um, so they had the onshore tech lead, delivery lead, they had all the offshore delivery resources that were doing the work, and that was before the COE. That was like the largest delivery team that we had. And when we decided to go COE and bring all of the work that was being done from you know a multitude of smaller partners, probably, and even the large partner that I was working mainly with probably had some a few other resources with other teams. So I decided to pull it all together. So we we thought through a structure. Um, obviously, at first, we were gonna have to continue to be reliant upon that partner, but we did add a few other, like a project manager, probably another BA. We didn't have any in-house Salesforce expertise to speak of, and so that expertise grew over time. Um I'm trying to think, I don't recall that we even ever, when I was there, sought to hire any employees with Salesforce expertise. I think we continued to leverage the partner and we surrounded the partners with business SMEs, so our my who became the product people, but originally the BAs, they understood the business inside and out for whatever we were um working on, and then we leveraged that relationship with our partners to bring the deep Salesforce expertise. We all, me and the BAs and others, gained a lot of Salesforce expertise over time. But at first, we we definitely leveraged the partner. Now, when we started to roll out the actual COE, so that involved team structure, obviously, and we had to structure in a way that could be scalable. It involved tools. Um, so you know, DevOps tools that you've heard of, backup tools that you've heard of that are now owned by Salesforce, um, other other supplementary tools.

SPEAKER_03 21:46

You can name these fine.

SPEAKER_01 21:49

I mean, own and and capado were the ones we went with uh ultimately uh from that reg uh from those respects, but um and then processes. So we implemented Agile Scrum. We implemented uh Rally initially, and then the company in total switched, I think, to Jira. Certainly now I'm I'm using Jira more frequently. But um, you know, so we people process the team structure processes and tools in place to make the team scalable. And then we realized that our incumbent tech partner was not gonna make the transition very well. These folks had been ingrained with a single delivery team, and they weren't really making that transition to a larger, more broad um Salesforce COE implementation. And so we decided as an IT organization, we wanted a different partner that was gonna bring a few more outs uh uh skill sets outside of Salesforce to bear for the IT, the larger IT organization. So we switched to another um known partner and brought those resources in specifically to be able to support a Salesforce organizational structure. So we added a few onshore tech leads, we added an onshore QA, overall QA lead, um, a resource eventually just to support our just to lead our support staff. Um, so again, we're filling in these top resources and continuing to sprinkle in our employees, but for the most part, have always leveraged um our partners to be that that deep technical leadership in the world.

SPEAKER_02 23:40

So we're gonna focus a little bit more on the Center of Excellence Pete. Um, because I I know um for you and subsequent roles post uh IHG, that's been a key focus. Um it's something that you know to remain consistent in the roles that you you you carry out. So um so so so going um you know, going on to building the center of excellence, so so there's a combination of leveraging externalized guys, uh big big implementation partners, building the team in house, uh using resources you can get your hands on and moving them across the sales boards and just kind of you know being in the trenches together, learning, learning, and learning and growing as we go kind of mentality, right? Um what challenges did that present at the time? Um, and and thinking also about kind of general challenges uh that have come with building out center of excellence teams. Um could you elaborate on that for us?

SPEAKER_01 24:42

Sure. Um a couple of things that come to mind right off the top. Uh always have had a challenge, and back then I think it was a challenge with using partner resources instead of internal resources. And there was a belief back then, and probably still pervasive a little bit today, but I think changing, that if you hire people, you're gonna have them longer. Um, and certainly I'm I'm an example of that not being the case now, because the the employment environment that exists today, from my experience, is tumultuous, whether you're a contractor, um, a consultant through a partner or an employee, things could change at any point. So while it was a challenge back then of making sure that our offshore resources especially felt like they were part of the team and weren't willing to just necessarily change companies for a dollar, two dollars or something more an hour, um, but really doing everything we could so that they felt like they were part of the IHG team, even though they're from a partner. That was always a challenge. We had one terrible month where I think we lost at that point that the COE is probably like 30 or 40 people. We lost eight to 10 offshore resources in a month, which was crippling because you you know, all the knowledge of how we do things, um, obviously the work that they've been working on goes right out the door. You have to onboard. And the the bad part of it was that's that's a partner, you know, that is responsible for that. The good part of it is it's a partner that's responsible for that. So being the leader of all of these resources, I love the fact that I could offload all of that HR effort to the partner. In reality, you know, you can talk about onshore versus offshore, but you're all competing for the same resources anyway. Um, it's not like a partner or you, because you're hiring an employee, has some special um formula that's going to make sure that person stays in that role forever, especially in the Salesforce space. Now, I think, especially even in all of IT. So that that situation was a challenge just because of the partnership at one point. I think now it would be a challenge no matter what. Um, and so it, you know, it's something that everybody has to has to deal with, no matter if you're using a partner or hiring resources internally. And I would say I didn't take a job to do HR research uh processes and hiring and screening and all of that stuff. Um, so it's a nice benefit in my mind, especially trying to at different points trying to grow teams to be able to leverage a partner to do all of those things. Um, so that's definitely a challenge, has been a challenge. I think the other one that comes to mind is um funding, right? That some other there's a a big company in town who I've known um folks from for a while, and one of the things that we've talked about for years is how do you get all of your stakeholder groups to buy in and and want to participate and leverage something like a COE. And for me, it is um the biggest challenge there is funding. You know, every company has different funding model, especially for IT. Um, some of it is IT central. Um, I have really enjoyed the opportunity to work in those environments where your stakeholder, your business functions are bringing their own money to the table because I think you become an internal consulting arm then. And it I just enjoy that type of relationship. You have money, we provide services, we can provide value. So let's make this let's make this work. How can I drive the most value to you for the least amount of your budget possible so that you're overwhelmed with happiness on what we could provide? Um, I love that that whole thing. But that's a challenge is how do you align the COE with the funding sources that are available? Would be great if you just had a you know IT leadership or business leadership that knew they wanted a COE and had the funding for it. Maybe that would would satisfy a lot of um bypass a lot of challenges that you would have. But um, I love the bring your own money to the table. Let's let's serve as an internal consultant. If I can't provide you the services that you can get from outside on your own, then there's no point in me existing um as an internal COE. So that's how I always looked at it.

SPEAKER_02 29:23

That's interesting. When when when you um to just just context for prior to this question, um, how much of you know percentage-wise was offshore versus onshore for the for the center of excellence, would you say?

SPEAKER_01 29:36

At the largest at IHG, I was at 75% offshore.

SPEAKER_02 29:40

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 29:41

I had at that point 20 people onshore, and three-quarters of those were from the partner as well, but they were onshore resources.

SPEAKER_02 29:50

Got it.

SPEAKER_01 29:51

So when when you lost the 75% budget or 75% people, 75% of the resources people were offshore. Yeah. Geez, if you did the math on 75% budget, you'd probably be in the hundreds in terms of number of resources.

SPEAKER_02 30:11

In in in terms of um, so when you when you you know it sounded sounding like there's a a a particular piece, pain point there when you lost you know 20-25% of the resources overnight, right? Um how how did you pivot in that moment? Um, there must have been a period of time where it took time to assemble, you know, a like-for-like replacement.

SPEAKER_01 30:32

So two weeks or first phone call is the first phone call is to the account executive from the partner to ask what the hell is going on. Um, you know, you always have that thought in your mind. Did they pull them off for a higher margin project? Um, but fortunately I had the relationship. I felt confident um that that wasn't the case. They were kind of all leaving for different reasons. It had to happen to be unfortunate timing. And then you just asked them to put the pedal to the metal to start getting new candidates in front of you. Um, we did some bit of screening ourselves. We'd obviously look at their CV, we would have conversations with them just to get a broader sense of who they are as individuals from uh, you know, can can they fit into the team well? Are they gonna be active participants or kind of in the backseat riding along um quietly? Um, but yeah, you just it was just okay, we've got to correct this, and then you you look for ways that, or we did again, we had still a large enough team that we could cross-fill. Um, so while they may be dealing in a new business process or new functional stakeholder area that they were hadn't been working on, they at least because we had a COE understood the process that we have, the tools that we use, and how to get things done. It was just a focus and help then from our employees who were the business SMEs on how to accomplish and what what the business context was for whatever it was they were going to be asked to work on. But we would usually take our more experienced people then and cross-fill so that we didn't lose everything from a particular team and then backfill with new resources that were coming on. And so the size and scope of what we were doing helped a lot in that regard because we were able to shift with somebody that wasn't unfamiliar with how we were doing things already, and and known quantity, you know, known individuals. So we knew we were putting somebody that was good at X, Y, or Z or you know, a good leader or whatever onto this other team. You you're you're mitigating as much risk as you can when dealing with people essentially, right? Um, which is which is a lot of the job, and you know, from my perspective, whether that be resources or technology or budget, it's um you know, pushing the envelope and delivering value, but trying to do that in such a way that you're mitigating as much risk as you can.

SPEAKER_02 33:04

Was there a uh kind of KPI attached uh by the business around the center of excellence that would you know determine what the value would be? I know it's something we talked about you know already quite a lot, like the value, demonstrating value, showcasing value, but were there any landmarks or KPIs that helped you say, hey, here's the value we're driven?

SPEAKER_01 33:24

There weren't really. I mean, it was on an individual stakeholder basis primarily. Um you know, were we accomplishing what they needed on time and under budget? Um for my leadership in IT, how happy were our stakeholders? You know, that was a the CSAT for our internal stakeholders was a big one. It wasn't measured formally, but you know, are they beaming about what you guys are doing for them? If they're shaking their heads yes and they're not complaining, that was a great one. Um, you know, again, not overall, but my team's growing. People want our services, we're delivering, people want more of our services. That was a great one. Again, informal. So not a ton of organization-wide KPIs from a COE perspective. The KPIs that we did try to meet were more on a case-by-case basis on either a solution, a project, or for that stakeholder overall. Um, so they weren't widespread, unfortunately. Um, I what the one that I have tried to talk about more after IHG is um reduction in shelfware licensing and making sure that the spend is aligning with need. Um, I had a couple of instances recently that were dramatically overbought. And so being able to help that, I mean, that's a big again. I don't think it was formally stated as a KPI, but it's one I tried to bring to the table to newer organizations that had already made the purchasing decisions. Um, are you really leveraging what you have and can we maximize that? Or when the when the opportunity arises, decrease what you're buying because of you know you have so much shelfware out there.

SPEAKER_03 35:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 35:20

No, it's always a great conversation, but it does open up opportunities um to maybe shift spend to things that can be more useful. Um, one of the examples recently was uh uh um IT leadership had you know apparently had uh the Salesforce marketing documentation for every cloud imprinted on their brains. And so they had a huge vision to implement every single cloud. And when I started with this organization, they had implemented one of the clouds, and commerce was sitting, marketing cloud was sitting, sales cloud was sitting, um, MuleSoft had been used, but not widely. Uh so you know, you get in those situations where leadership is gung-ho, they don't really know how to get from purchase decision to implement it and providing value in any near-term future.

SPEAKER_03 36:17

So yeah, um, I'd like to pivot back a little bit to something we're talking about earlier with regard to partner management. Um it's not something you hear a lot about. Um so tell me a little bit about that. How many partners did you actually go through? Um this is over 10 years we're talking, right?

SPEAKER_01 36:43

Yeah, so over that amount of time we probably went through four or five. But when the COE was being formed, we started with one that was an incumbent and then switched to another and kept them um kept them for the whole time I was there. And so um, in terms of switching that that aspect of partner management, there wasn't a ton. Um, some smaller ones again, one of the IT objectives of having a COE was to cut out some of the mama pop shops that might have been helping one solution over there and another one that might be helping a different business group, but consolidate all that again to get the synergy and economies of scale out of having one larger functioning team with a single partner.

SPEAKER_03 37:33

So it sounds like your preference would be larger partners as opposed to smaller boutique shops. Is that fair?

SPEAKER_01 37:40

Um actually no. Uh depending, I guess. So I'm glad that wasn't a speed round question because I was thrown out a depending. But um uh and you know, some of the the prep you guys gave me, one of the questions towards the end was was uh some tips and guidance you would give, whatever. And part of it comes into this discussion. Um I right now, if I were gonna have a new implementation, and if it wasn't just sales and service, which you know a lot of the partner ecosystem can provide, um, if it was one of the more niche clouds, I would definitely go with a boutique recommend at least looking at using a boutique um agency to do that. Um if it is supporting already out uh functioning operations, I may lean the other way. Um, I think you can get better uh value for price from larger partners. Um I think you offload more of that HR concern if you're using a larger partner to support your ongoing existing technology operation. Um, but for implementation, especially as it gets out of core, further outside of core, I think the best approach is to leverage those boutique shops and then maybe at some point transition over to a support model that leverages one of the bigger uh options. That's interesting.

SPEAKER_03 39:18

So you said more for managed services type stuff, larger firms, more targeted implementation, uh more of a boutique shop.

SPEAKER_01 39:25

Um I just don't think you can beat the the depth of experience and knowledge that the boutiques can bring. Again, in some ways, it's all down to who's gonna be on your project. You know, I we've had multiple, I've had multiple experiences of um talking about new project implementations with the larger shops, and they bring in their A-team, they have this great presentation, and then they start sourcing the team of resources actually gonna be there. And it's um I have this funny joke with my contacts in India, it's it's freshers or what we'd call noobs. Um, you know, people with very little experience that have been sold at this price, and uh, you know, your boutique shop is probably gonna have people with this level of experience that are available at this price potentially. Um, so it really comes down to that resource, and I think the depth of experience you're gonna get from a boutique is probably greater.

SPEAKER_03 40:25

Yeah, the the boutiques tend to be a little bit more industry vertical or focused. Um, and a lot of times the founder of that company uh or the founders, um, or they just got a big project and then they just continue to hit that niche because it works for them and they end up very, very, very, very highly specialized, often with accelerators. That's a lot of things.

SPEAKER_04 40:46

Exactly, exactly.

SPEAKER_03 40:49

Um, one last question on partner management. Um contracts. How do you how do you deal with that? Because one of the things you were talking about, the DHR side of things, um, one of the strong benefits of working with a partner as opposed to in-house is that you actually have a contract in place, right? Um in-house, it's basically you have to own, right? Where a contract contractually obligated to the contract, I wasn't sure of, yeah. Yeah, yeah, sorry. The contract, yeah. So so your contract they're contractually obligated to deliver something. Um it's not just the body that they have to deliver, right? The body is the mechanism. Um yeah, so so yeah, tell us a little bit about that, right? You know, how you do the the contracts and how you use them, or do you just sign and then put it on the shelf?

SPEAKER_01 41:35

And I may be a contrarian here as well, but I prefer the body. Um being the Salesforce leader that I am, I prefer to dictate how things are being done, the approach that we're using to build things, leverage expertise as much as I can, but I'm not one that prefers the um tightly detailed SOW with a price tag on it and a zillion change orders that can occur. Um, I want to work in a more agile fashion. I want the technical resources to follow our process. And um we decide the scope, we decide the methodology, we decide the tools, we get input on approach to make sure it's best of breed. And you know, you would hope that a partner you're working with, especially boutique, has other experience in the industry or with that cloud that they can bring to bear. But um again, I'm I'm not a more waterfall tight SOW kind of old school. I prefer more flexibility, give me a body, let me manage them, let me plug them into the team, and go that approach. Is that the answer you're looking for there, Mass?

SPEAKER_03 42:53

We're looking for the cruise, man. That's what we want.

SPEAKER_02 42:56

Real stories, real impact is our is our tagline.

SPEAKER_01 42:59

So yeah, um much like the org discussion, I don't I don't have the same perspective on on that resource and contract management that maybe a lot of people would.

SPEAKER_02 43:10

No worries. So so in terms of you know reflection, um looking into kind of you know the lessons that you learned throughout um the building of the center of excellence over that kind of period of time, um, and and subsequent building of center of excellence in. Um if there's a CRM leader uh currently listening and and you know embarking on this journey today, what would your advice be to them around how to after you've done this a couple of times now, so you know, just best get success from building a center of excellence?

SPEAKER_01 43:48

Yeah, I mean, the always the first thing that comes to mind is get started. Um, don't over plan, don't let perfect plan be the enemy of getting started. Um Plan on a phased approach. We talked you know um earlier, plan on a phased approach, have your end goal in mind, um but plan on a phased approach. And we also talked about you know team structure. I'm a firm proponent of use a vendor. Um if you're talking about a new implementation of Salesforce Tech, um boutiques I think are the way to go. But in terms of laying down an operating model for excuse me, center of excellence in general, uh you know, maybe a boutique is the right answer if your scope of solution is gonna be focused in their particular area of expertise. But um, maybe a larger partner is a good option there. But get started, don't overthink it. Um, you're gonna pivot and adjust and change along the way. Um, definitely perform your due diligence. But um, you know, I I don't I try to bring agile methodology into everything that I do, and so let's not, you know, let's let's be nimble, let's adjust, let's learn, let's change, let's go. But you can't get there if you don't start. So don't overthink it. Um that that would be my few points of of guidance is um have a goal in mind, plan a phased approach, but get going.

SPEAKER_02 45:27

Avoid analysis paralysis. I I think that's the key takeaway, right? Um in in in terms of um, you know, you you you've got your phased approach, you figured that out, and it's about getting started. And now, you know, again, not to kind of make this a whole top of the ground partner selection, but but obviously that is a component to building a temple of excellence. Um, you know, how would you vet a partner? You you're gonna get you know recommendations from your AE that you're working with, um, they're gonna put three or four names in front, you've got your own contact, right? Is is is there something in particular you look for when selecting a partner? And and the second question is that obviously went through a few partners. So, what were the lessons learned in general off the back of the partner's lecture?

SPEAKER_01 46:12

I mean, I think uh the answers to some of those smaller questions are similar, but it's um take it to don't just be satisfied by the presentation. The core team comes in to give you on the capabilities of Company X. Take it to the level of detail of I want sample resumes of individuals that you would actually put in my project. If we started tomorrow, how would you source these four roles? Give me, give me people. Um, because it is, in my opinion, going to come down the success or failure, at least initially, boots on the ground, is going to come down to the actual people that are doing your work. We had a huge project at IHG for one of our largest stakeholders there. Great sales presentation. This is from the vendor that we were actually using uh ongoing at the time, so known known an entity, known entity, but we needed a specific project implemented and um great sales presentation, the business stakeholder all on board. Let's do it. And then that was what I was talking about before. We got a team full of not very experienced individuals. And at one point, the stakeholders were coming to me going, these people don't know anything about what we're we do as a business, they have no experience. They went through a couple of um partner Salesforce courses to be able to put on the resume that they had done this for a year or whatever. And I think ultimately, if you can get to the level of conversation where, you know, maybe not with everybody you might consider, but with some of the front runners where you're actually talking, okay, I'm staffing tomorrow. Who are you giving me? And really look at those individuals and talk more about um what do you do to retain your people? How do you prevent them from leaving, especially for offshore resources? You know, if the guy who's you're you're nominating to be the leader of your team leaves tomorrow, what's your process for for replacing them? What's what happens to me? Get into that level of discussion because all those things are going to be real, they're all going to happen, and they're never covered on a sales presentation when the partner is pitching you their capabilities. And secondarily, I'd say talk to the partner about again. I prefer the the body model, you know, I don't want to throw it over the SOW over the wall and get back a product. I want to be, I want their individuals to be involved. But one of the benefits that you should get from a partner is more than just the people on your team, but what help and support and guidance and expertise do those resources have access to within the company outside of the people that are just with us? So if I don't know something myself as their leader and one of our other architect resources or something doesn't know an answer or is unsure, what does what do our resources have the ability to ask to the greater partner company resources to get help? So are they knowledge sharing internally as well? Because that could be a huge value with a larger or even with a boutique, if the people on your project or your staff can go outside of themselves to get expertise and input into what you're doing. That's a big value. But you got to have those discussions because those deeper concepts aren't always things that partners are talking about. They're talking about where their locations are and how many thousands of certifications their resources may have around the globe and all how many implementations they've done. But all those implementations aren't going to help your individual thing unless you know the resources are going to be on your project or the access to other individuals within the company that those resources may have.

SPEAKER_03 50:08

So you're sitting there, they've given you a sales pitch for a presentation, and you ask them what's your contingency plan for when half your team walks out the door. And like how how how do you like consultants, consultants are very good at answering these kind of questions, let's say, but you often know when they're how do I say very good at answering that kind of question. Yeah, yeah. Um, yeah, so so um I don't think I've ever heard that question in any of a sales page that I that I participated in. Um so it'd be interesting, yeah. What kind of answers do you get? Um, and you ever get like a truly satisfying answer? Like someone's like, oh yeah, we have an absolute absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 50:43

So we we used a secondary um, well, actually, it's a contact that I had, um, a growing India-based consultancy, they're actually in the US now as well. Um, and I was always trying to work with them at IHG, but because of our contract with the large consulting partner, we were never allowed to kind of pull in any competition for them. I asked them that question because after we had that huge exodus, obviously I'm reeling. Like, what are we how are we doing this now? Um, I thought that might be an opportunity to have a backup partner. And so I started talking to them. Their answer was amazing. They explained their entire, they had slides available to explain their retainer program so that they didn't lose individuals um for a dollar or two dollars an hour or whatever the case may be. Um, amazing. Like I've never heard anybody that had more prepared thought. Obviously, that was something that concerned them. I don't think it concerns, I think the larger ones just expect it as part of the, you know, they're gonna bring in so many people all the time because they know so many people are walking out the door on the other side. For the smaller growing agencies you might um come in contact with, they can't bring in that many people. They have to balance it with available project work a little bit more closely and have more tighter management. So I think retaining the expertise was a big deal for them, and they were prepared for that answer. And honestly, um they might be the only one I've ever talked to. I haven't talked to all of them, so you know, others may be prepared for that now. But this was a while ago, and they they had answers and they explained their whole retainer program to me, and I thought it was outstanding. Um, to the credit of the large partner that we worked with, when that exodus happened, we brainstormed for a couple of weeks on things we could do for the people on their offshore locations to make them feel like more of a team. And we implemented some of those things. And I don't know if it was a direct cause or not, but we didn't have situations like that. We would lose one or two here and there, but definitely um taking measures to make those individuals feel like they weren't just going to some huge office in Chennai or wherever the case may be, and sitting down at their desk and they were working next to people that had nothing in common with what they were working on. Like there were there were things that this partner helped us implement that I hope contributed to the people staying around on our team longer. Um, but yeah, it's a tough one. But I I because of those situations, I now take those into those types of discussions because I've been burned.

SPEAKER_02 53:30

I think it's a hindsight moment, right? Uh, for sure. You know, being more proactive around retention, engagement of resources. Um, how are we proactively managing uh the happiness of those resources? Do they feel like they're growing as part of the org? They're not just a contractor, right? They're all areas that um now you've kind of gone through that journey, I'm sure one of the first things on your list, right, when you when you bring in a partner.

SPEAKER_01 53:56

It is you can't afford, yeah, you can't afford those gaps. Um, I wanted to get as a a client partner of these companies, I wanted to be in the place where other resources were hearing about how good it was to work with us and were asking to get on our projects instead of asking to leave our projects.

SPEAKER_02 54:18

On a scale one to ten, Todd, um, I'm I'm curious. Um, two answers I would like from you. The first is um both scale one to ten. Uh the first is how would you view the success of the center of excellence? And then the second is how would the business view the success of the center of excellence one to ten?

SPEAKER_01 54:37

Um, I would give it at least an eight in both regards, and I think that is because um we had again before the pandemic, and that's a different discussion, we had um incredibly growing demand, and that's because how we were doing things and what we were providing to the business stakeholders was valuable, and um I think hand in hand with that is they were happy because of how we're doing what we did and the value we were providing. So, hand in hand, um, I think the success and the happiness fall right along.

SPEAKER_03 55:17

Uh so uh what about those last two? What do you think you could have got it to get it to a 10?

SPEAKER_01 55:22

Um I mean, I honestly would have liked a couple more resources to do more internal outreach. I think we could have grown more. Um you know, just uh maybe a little if we had been able to carry it out longer, if the pandemic hadn't happened and our growth would have allowed additional maturity in our processes, additional um automation or whatever that may be. We weren't quite all the way to where I thought we could be for some of those things. And then when the pandemic happened, all the funding goes to zero overnight. And I was just tasked with finding new definitions of what the lowest level of keep the lights on meant. Um, but yeah, I think if we had just been able to keep going, we could have continued to expand the value we could deliver and also make ourselves more scalable by continuing to improve our processes. Our um, there were a lot of things that we were trying to get done with with Scrum and management of same. I was trying to gamify our delivery pods between each other in terms of productivity and things like that. So there were just some other productivity, scalability kind of things that I think we could have continued to improve on.

SPEAKER_03 56:39

So um yeah, so looking forward, you know, Salesforce as a whole, the CRM industry, the hospitality industry, um, you know, where do you where do you see things going? I sometimes like to wonder because everybody starts talking about AI now, right? Like if Chat GT is gonna drop this on everybody a year and a half ago or two years ago, whatever it is now, um, you know, where would the past two dream forces look like, right? It would have been really it'd been very different, I can assure you. Um, but even even including AI, you know, where do you think the industry is going? What are you most uh excited about?

SPEAKER_01 57:14

It's gonna be interesting. Salesfor uh hospitality and Salesforce is one of those things where um, you know, uh widely used by the largest hospitality companies in the world. Um it's hard to determine this, but also believed to be extremely widely used to smaller, like the long tail of hospitality companies as well, down to individual resort management, you know, all that kind of stuff. Um, but it doesn't have its own cloud. There's no hospitality cloud. And so I think it's in this space now specific to the hospitality industry, where there's going to continue to be the large SIs, the large partners working with the largest hospitality companies, and on down the long tail to where you get more boutique shops working on SMB hospitality-related companies. Um, but all kind of implementing solutions in their own way, not a lot of consolidation because Salesforce hasn't really jumped in. In fact, in a lot of ways, they're helping that independent delivery of approaches for company A versus company B uh B versus company C because they are involved in a lot of cases, like the um announcement I mentioned earlier that Salesforce and IHG just uh increased their relationship to different areas. So I think that's going to continue to happen. And at some point, it seems to make sense and follow kind of Salesforce history that they're going to take the best of breed approaches and types of solutions that because hospitality can expand a broad range of capabilities that you could need, customer facing, back, back of house, um, everything in between. But I think Salesforce at some point will bring some of that together, I think, into a hospitality cloud. Um, but we'll see. I haven't heard rumors. Well, I can't say I haven't heard rumors, but I haven't seen any indication that that's soon to be forthcoming. Um, maybe it is behind the scenes already well on its way and being beta tested or implemented in some cases, but I think uh that'll be interesting to keep an eye on. I think that will happen eventually. There seems to be too much usage of it for it not to eventually be another industry cloud. Um, and then, you know, it's kind of redundant, but AI, I'm interested to see. And and again, contrarian in some cases. I'm very interested to see how AI helps the technology side of Salesforce delivery and solutioning, and not so much the capabilities that it can provide to the users. You know, how to it sounds like this dream upcoming Dreamforce is going to be all about agent force and how to help agents be better or more productive or efficient or whatever. Um, I'm interested to see the capabilities that continue to grow behind the scenes for the admins, the developers, the DevOps space, all of that kind of thing to see where AI comes to bear there more and more.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:24

Interesting stuff. Um, uh I on that note, uh just want to say quick uh you know, thank you uh to you, Todd. Um hopefully had a good time uh for joining us. And uh, you know, if you're into tight, we covered a lot of ground, you know, from building center of excellence teams, partner selection, and then management of those partners, uh risk uh and risk assessment along the way. Uh so thank you uh again. Um for our for our listeners, uh please do not forget to subscribe to the CRM subtext show for more episodes featuring uh awesome leaders like Todd, uh, who are really shaping up uh the future and present of the CRM space. Uh you can also follow us on LinkedIn uh and YouTube uh for the latest updates, uh, exclusive content and announcements. Until next time.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:19

Thanks, guys.