SPEAKER_01 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 Mostri and Kira 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_04 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.

SPEAKER_03 0:37

And I'm Kira Whitzi.

SPEAKER_04 0:39

And today we're talking with Kristen Sisler, who will be telling us about our time at Sequoia.

SPEAKER_03 0:46

Welcome to the show, Kristen. Thanks for joining us.

SPEAKER_02 0:49

Yeah, thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_03 0:52

So just to start off with, could you give our listeners an overview of your role, company, and high-level high how Salesforce is used and the landscape of the org in terms of products and users and so on?

SPEAKER_02 1:09

Yeah, so I'm the senior director of Salesforce at Sequoia. We're a strategic compensation and benefit partner. We help you get the most out of your total people investment. We specialize in VC backed companies. Sequoia is very big on relationships and we're a relationship-driven company. And so I think one of the really unique things about it is you can start out with us as a small 20-person startup. And we will grow with you all the way up to an enterprise level, over 500 employees and help you do all of that. So I think that's really interesting, which is we're we're not trying to just focus on how do we get this new business, but how do we maintain that relationship, you know, over 20 years as you grow your company.

SPEAKER_00 2:02

Fantastic.

SPEAKER_02 2:04

The landscape of the org, we've got about a thousand users. Um we use sales cloud, service cloud, CRMA analytics. Um, and then we do have um uh experience cloud as well for a couple features in our Sequoia People platform.

SPEAKER_03 2:24

Perfect. Um and and in terms of the org, any anything uh in the in the pipeline that you're looking to invest in or moving to grow out the org further?

SPEAKER_02 2:36

Um, we'll continue to expand, you know, Einstein, start to push more of the AI functionality. Um we just want to make sure that it's really thoughtful and make sure that it's something that's gonna get adopted and used as you roll out more and more things. You know, there's always a tax to it. So you can't just roll it out and then what's you know, it's not a project base where, hey, it's done now. What's the next thing? It's now there's a tax on maintaining that, adding new functionality to it, supporting it if something goes wrong. Um, and so just making sure that whatever we are rolling out in those spaces um are things that are gonna actually add value to our users.

SPEAKER_03 3:15

Which teams for Sequoia are heavily interacting with Salesforce?

SPEAKER_02 3:20

Um, our sales and service. So um we use both sales cloud and service cloud, um, and it's what our sales and service teams use to deliver.

SPEAKER_03 3:29

Anything on the marketing side?

SPEAKER_02 3:32

Um, we use Marketo, so there is some on the marketing side. We have Marketo integrated, we use some prospecting. Um, so we don't use marketing cloud right now or cardot. Um, but yes, there's a little bit of marketing as well.

SPEAKER_04 3:50

Awesome. So just give us a bit more about what Sequoia does. It's not Sequoia capital, right? Because I know it's a common confusion. Um right, so so we know that you help you help companies grow in terms of their um their people resources. Just like tell our listeners a little bit more about what that means.

SPEAKER_02 4:11

Yeah, so we've got um a great team um of our client services. So we can help you. Um, you know, we have a PEO side of the business for um smaller startups, and then we really move into more of that advisory. So we've got um not only benefits, but we've got you know compensation, um, help you with um your merit planning. Um, we can do you know, 401k risk management, we offer um compliance um guidelines. So we really try to um really do that total people investment, um, and we want to be tech enabled. So we don't want to just do that, but we want to do it in a really smart way, and that's where our Sequoia people platform comes into play. Um, and so it uh we not only have a portion for you know the the CFO to be able to look at compensation, but we also offer um the Sequoia People platform and different modules to um the clients' employees and their um dependents. And so um it's kind of funny, but my husband loves the app. So we've got a Sequoia app um and he does most of um taking our kids to the doctor for their appointment stuff. And so he just loves like he's got a digital insurance card. So anytime he goes there and they say, Do you have an insurance card? It's like, oh yeah, it's right on my phone. I don't have to be looking for it. Um, it shows you like how close you are to the deductible, what you have for insurance. And so um he loves it. Uh every time we go somewhere, he's always showing people, oh, I love this app from her company. Um, so it's great to see that um, you know, we we use it obviously internally. We always try to be the first, you know, customer of anything that we're rolling out. Um, and um we are just really focused on making sure we have good uh client experience.

SPEAKER_04 6:02

Awesome. So you provide tools and training, I guess, and advisory, but not people, but not people. You wouldn't like place an HR individual.

SPEAKER_02 6:13

Um we do have HR business partners, yes, for part of our PEO.

SPEAKER_04 6:18

Oh, cool. Okay, awesome. So tell us uh uh a bit about your your journey with Sequoia. Um you know how long you've been there, when you started, what you walked into, um, you know, what was your you know, your kind of mandate when you started, you know, what problems you were facing, you know, all of that kind of stuff. Tell us the you know the start of the trend.

SPEAKER_02 6:39

Yeah, so I've been at Sequoia a little over two years, so two and about two and a half years. Um, and um we have our Salesforce environment is pretty old. It's been around for 15 years or more at Sequoia. Um, and so obviously that comes with its unique set of um challenges, pros and cons. Um, and so one of the um you know challenges when I was when I first came in, my mandate was just like help make sure things are getting delivered. Um and so then you know it was really about identifying areas that we could um grow in, mature in um to not only help that, but then go, you know, go further than can we just get these things delivered? Um and so one of the areas was really looking at how we were structuring our processes, how we were structuring our team, um, and just being more engineering um led versus product led. And so that's something that I'm really passionate about is you know, to me, Salesforce um and the work that you do on it is very similar to a product. And so I really like to structure teams in the way we do things to be more product led. So um, you know, structuring the team that way instead of hey, we've got a Salesforce admin, it is we're gonna have you know product managers, and a lot of times, you know, admins are really playing a product manager role if you think about it. Um, and so having proper, hey, we're gonna have product managers, we're gonna have a true roadmap, we are not just gonna take tickets out of a queue and do whatever's on that ticket. It really has to be how does this fit into our roadmap? How does it fit into our strategy? How is this going to scale for us? So having, you know, kind of architecture as one arm of our team, having engineering as another, QA, um, product management, and then not just having support, but we actually call it platform operations. So they're not responsible just for you know helping manage a new user, getting them permissions, but they're responsible for the overall health of our production environment.

SPEAKER_04 8:51

Okay, so it sounds like before you'd get a business request, I guess what they posted you're a ticket or something, and someone would just work off a queue. Um and you want it to be, let's say, more goal focused.

SPEAKER_02 9:03

Yeah, so there was there was kind of two pieces to it. There was, hey, these are the large projects we want to do this year, and then here's a bunch of requests coming in from the business. But the problem was, you know, you could have two business people submitting a request that actually cancel each other out, right? I want this added or I want this removed, and they could cancel each other out. Um, and so really making sure that it wasn't, well, this is just a really simple thing to do, let's go ahead and do it, but putting some thought behind it while at the same time not saying we can't get to you for a year or you're not gonna be able to have things pushed out um quickly. So that was really a balancing act, and we accomplished it a couple ways. One is through separating our um support tickets as far as this is a problem and enhancement requests. Um, and then we set up a Salesforce Council. So it has all of our lines of service, um, they can come, it has the executives from those departments, and we talk about the priorities. Um we look at, hey, we've got a lot of you know, unplanned work that's being requested and that we need to balance against a roadmap. Does it make sense to take on some of this and remove some of the things from the roadmap in order to compensate for this? Um, we do obviously save some capacity for this unplanned work or this business as usual work, right? We can't say we're not adding any fields because it's not on the roadmap, and you didn't know this when we planned the roadmap, so therefore we can't add this new field. So we do try to do that as a balancing act, but I think all of that kind of combined has helped.

SPEAKER_04 10:42

Awesome. So those the initial goals, right? Were those more like fixed broken things that the user might not care about, let's say tech debt, um, or is that more like corporate initiative you want to blow out a marketing campaign? Yeah, so tell us a bit about more of those initial corporate goals that you wanted to um and how much of that was really forward-looking as opposed to um you know cleaning up this 15 years of debt that you were talking about. Like how bad was that, the 15 years? What it just, you know, so there can be a lot of different things.

SPEAKER_02 11:18

Yeah, there it there was a lot of different things. There's there's things that weren't being used anymore. Um, we have a lot of custom code. Um, you know, making sure that we have proper code coverage um is really important. So when I first um started, I inherited um kind of the the list of projects for the year. I was coming in after the start of the plan year, and so that first year was really focused on how do we make the team really efficient, how do we build in some best practices, and then how do we deliver this? Because we it's already been promised that we would deliver this. So I inherited that. Um, and then the second year was really about okay, now that we're planning this out, um, how do we um get to a place where now we're developing a roadmap that really aligns with what the business goals are? Um, so for this year, we're looking at, you know, how do we drive more value out of what we already have? How do we make sure that we have the user adoption that we need on functionality? And if it's not there, do we need to sunset it? Is it not being used anymore? Um, because of what I talked about with that tax and like we don't want to support it if nobody's really using it.

SPEAKER_03 12:32

Almost a use or lose it type uh mentality, right?

SPEAKER_02 12:37

Yes, definitely. Um, but that you know also comes with a lot of challenges because it's a you know, 15 years ago or even 10 years ago, you may have had to code something or bring in a third party because it just didn't exist out of the box. Um, and now it does exist out of the box, and so it'd be great to just leverage that, but there's work involved um to move it over, and you don't always the end user's not going to see the benefit of that because at the end of the day, it could look exactly the same to them, um, but you've moved it to out of the box versus being code. Um, and so um, you know, we were talking earlier about analogy of with technical debt, um, you know, renovating a house. Nobody wants to spend the money on fixing a foundation. It's really important, but like I want pretty cabinets in my kitchen and I want nice appliances and I want the countertops, like things I can see and I'm gonna be using. I don't want to spend all of my money on a renovation just like fixing a foundation that seems boring, or you know, having to redo all the electrical or something I'm not gonna see. And so it's really a balancing act of we know we have to fix technical debt and to keep the system running smoothly, to set us up for success in the future, um, to get the most value out of what Salesforce is pushing out, right? Salesforce does a lot of releases, they do three releases a year, which is a good, a good amount. Um, and they um if you're not keeping up with that, you can't always take advantage of what they're releasing because they're building on top of what you know they their product. And so if you've custom built something, you may not be able to take advantage of that unless you move it over to more out-of-the-box um functionality. And so really balancing that with continuing to deliver the things that the user wants um is you know the chat gonna be the challenge with technical debt.

SPEAKER_04 14:27

Yeah, so um selling the need to clean up technical debt is always a challenge. Any uh ticks or trips, tips for doing that?

SPEAKER_02 14:36

Um, I mean, if you can tie it to security, that's always a pretty, pretty good one, right?

SPEAKER_04 14:40

Um, security says we have to do it.

SPEAKER_02 14:43

Yeah, exactly. No, if you can tie it to that, that that helps. Um I would say, you know, education is a big one. Um, you know, just educating leaders, you have to build up the trust first, right? You can't come in day one and be like, oh, we've got to fix all this technical debt. Um, and so you have to build up the trust to a point where when you are saying like this is something that has to be done, um, you know, leadership understands, oh, there must be a good reason for that, and you're able to explain that um and really show where the value is gonna come from. Um, I would say that the other piece is um saving some capacity from your team. So making sure that you can work on it and you can kind of do both at the same time, um, and then tying it to different releases. So, you know, hey, you're let's take a good example of we're moving there, you know, deprecating process builder, everything needs to move to flows. Okay, we've got a request and that's going to be a lot of rework on a current process um builder. You're gonna as part of this, we're actually gonna change it to a flow. So, really baking in when you are touching um pieces that are legacy or um you know that you need to fix them a little bit, just baking that into the level of effort so you can do it the right way.

SPEAKER_03 16:06

In terms of the the three, I guess three key areas that that I take away from the plan uh that you talked about when when you when you started a role almost you know two, two and a half years ago. Technical debt, heavy custom code, and also a big realignment of teams, their roles, the structure of those roles. Um taking those three things and we could break them down individually. How did your new ideas, ways of working? How did the team react and the business react to those kind of changes that you were recommending and putting into the old?

SPEAKER_02 16:53

Um, yes, I say it varies. Um, the team for the most part, um, they were excited because I've got such a great team. They want to do um, you know, best practices, um, they want to you know clean up the technical debt, make sure everything's running really smoothly. Um, and so that was actually more of a balancing act of um, hey, we can't just work on technical debt. Um, we've got to work on these other things, but we will save capacity, we will save room for that. So I've got a team that you know they really want to do the right things. They're very excited about um, you know, putting in place best practices. We're also at the size where we can try things processes out and try different things out, and we don't have to do a ton of change management within our own team. We're um only about 25 people, which for some people they might think that's a lot. Um, but previous to this, I ran a team of almost 300. And so there you have to think through things more carefully and have a really well thought out process before you push it out because now you're trying to roll it back from 300 people. Where here, about 25 people, so I always tell them, let's try it. If it doesn't work, we just won't do it anymore. So very open to trying new processes, um, trying to um get things continually better. Um, I think Sequoia overall is very much like that, um, where it is let's continue to improve, let's continue to um make things better and try, you know, new things. Um so that culture is already there. Um, and then for the business side, you know, it it wasn't here's my plan um and I'm gonna do this. It was more slowly again educating so that it was it didn't seem like such a drastic change. It was like, hey, I'm gonna make this change. Um I think the interesting thing is that when I first joined, I started putting all of my plans into a deck. Um and I shared that with the CEO. It has taken, I didn't share that with the whole team right away because I think it would have been a bit of a shock. Um, wait, you want to do what? You want to get to where? And so it has taken a couple years to take that initial vision of what I saw and get us to where we're at, but it hasn't altered very much. It was, this is really what I see for the team, this is where I want to get to. Um, but then just again making that incremental progress and then getting that confidence that, hey, we can execute, we can, this is gonna make things better. Um, that gets you to a place where again, you're trusted to make more of those decisions, people have more faith in you as you're trying to do these things. Um, and um, you know, then they start to come up with their own ideas. Um, and so um I think that, you know, having a plan, but being able to um actually show that you can execute on it is really important. I think a lot of times people have great ideas, but they oversell it and then they can't deliver it. Um, you know, in consulting, I come also from a consulting background, it's always what underpromise and over-deliver. Um, and so I think that you do have to be careful that you're not overselling what you want to accomplish and what you can do. Um, because if you if you can't deliver on that, then you lose a lot of trust with your team, with your leaders, and with the business.

SPEAKER_03 20:29

So you mentioned a team surprisingly, very receptive to change. Uh I think uh that's always a leader's dream, right? If you've got a uh a team that are open to improving and without too much commenting, right? That they want to do it on their own accord, uh imaging best practices and being you know, do the sales just the right way. But uh what what was unexpected? Um, and except from that, you know, maybe the team leads don't go on board, but I'm not surprised at that by by listening to you already uh and and your ways of working and ideas, but what was unexpected? What was an unexpected kind of ah, I didn't anticipate that kind of moment.

SPEAKER_04 21:10

Yeah, just to tack on that question, what about your users change management? That's a much larger user base, a thousand as opposed to your team of 25. How did that compare and contrast?

SPEAKER_02 21:20

Okay, so so first the unexpected. Um, let's see, the unexpected, I would say, is our team of engineering is um they understand the business processes very well. Um, and I think that comes from a lot of times they were also the ones that um before we had you know proper product managers in place, they were having to get the requirements and just try and build. So that is um that was unexpected. I hadn't worked with an engineering team that seemed to understand the business more than I did when I first came here. They still understand probably the business more than I do. Um and And so that it was unexpected in a good way. And it's great to actually be able to talk through. And to this day, you know, I will maybe say, like, oh, we should do this. And they're like, okay, but what about? And then I know as soon as they say, but what about, they're going to very politely point out exactly where I didn't understand a business complexity that I really needed to in order to make the feature be the way it needs to be. So I think that that was unexpected in a really great way. And you know, one of the things I always tell my teams when we structure it, where we have product managers and architecture, architects and engineering, is I want um there to be um like healthy tension. So I want the product managers pushing back on engineering to say, why didn't you just use this out-of-the-box feature? And I want engineering to push back and say, hey, product manager, you're not thinking about um, you know, how c like how we actually need to build this. You promised this in a week, like to do this properly, we need three, four weeks. And then architecture should always be pushing back on like how is this gonna scale? And product managers are how do we deliver you know quickly? How do we make sure that it's what the end user wants? And so I want that healthy tension and that healthy balance because I really think that's how you get the best product. Um, as far as the user management goes, um, we're still working on that, right? Um, and I think there's a couple things. One is I view the users as my clients. I think that comes again from having a consulting background, but to me, they're my clients. And so ultimately, I am trying to make them happy. Um, I am trying to give them what they need to be successful in their role. Again, you know, when you think about is it a profit driver, a cost center? I'm thinking about as a cost center from that perspective of um, you know, they're out there selling, they're out there working with the clients that brings in that revenue. And so, how do I make sure that they're successful at their job, that we're getting what we need to be doing? Um, and then managing that, you know, I could easily from what the business wants have a team three, four times the size that I have today and keep them all busy. And so it's really managing all of those priorities and um working with uh the user. So I think there's a couple ways that we do that. One is building relationships at the um that leadership level over each team, making sure that I really understand what they're um looking for. Um, I'm educating them on, I know it's just this field, but it actually requires a whole deployment process to do this. Um and then working on those conflicting priorities. So identifying the people who can help you understand in the business. I just got six people that told me this was like the most urgent thing ever. It's probably urgent to them, but I don't understand across Sequoia right now how urgent it is. And so being able to go to that person and say, all right, out of these six things, like what is actually the real impact here? Can you help me understand that? Um, and so build I building those relationships, and again, that's what Sequoia is all about, um, is going to be your number one, you know, success factor. Same thing with uh running a team, like you're not gonna be successful if you don't have a good team. So it's really important that you have a strong team that works well together, that gets along, um, and that really wants the same things or this has the same values of we really want um, you know, that quality um of over scope, essentially, which is actually one of our sequoia values, which I love. Um, it's quality over scope. I think that's how they got me um signed up with them because when they did that in an interview, I was like, wait, one of your values is quality over scope. Sign me up. Um, and so making sure they have the same values as you, um, we want to do a really good job. We want to um, you know, enjoy what we're doing, be constantly learning. I have a team that just wants to learn constantly. Um, and so I think that that is, you know, at the end of the day, it's about people. You aren't going to be successful if you don't have those relationships and you aren't working together. Um, some of the other things that we rolled out is for our enhancement process, we push it up to director level. So only directors and above can submit enhancement requests, and that just makes sure that we ensure their understanding how this change is going to work in their overall business process. Um, and then, like I said, we set up that Salesforce Council to even raise it another level to say, do we all understand like what we're asking for? Do we agree on the priorities? Um, and people can raise their hand to say, wait, you're asking for this um enhancement request, you understand that this actually impacts me too. Um, and so that's a really good way to move quickly and understand impact is if you bring kind of everyone together and talk about it.

SPEAKER_03 27:12

In terms of the council, so the audience of the council, there were two things there that I heard you mention. One of my questions were when you're deciding what a priority is, how do you come to the conclusion of it's a high priority, this is a low priority, it's admit. If you have a voting system, but then you you referred back to the council, and then you also mentioned that you know only directors can kind of bring those investment ideas for to the table. Now I know those directors is a team, um, but there's a pretty bit of bias there, right? You know, if you want to one team, the director of that team might not think so, right? But the user could really be struggling with the bag to contribute. So I'm sure it's the council. What members make up of the council? Is it is it more users or is it still directors, or um, it's a combination.

SPEAKER_02 28:05

So it's usually so we've got every um line of service. Um, the leader of that line of service is on it. We've got our director of sales operations on it, so kind of representing all of sales there. Our service team is much larger than our sales, and so that's why we've got um, you know, kind of one representation from the sales and then multiple from the lines of service. And then, you know, another great thing about Sequoia, just everybody pitches in where they need to. Um, we actually have our chief client officer joins that, so she sits over all of service, which which helps when we don't have to have a voting, right? We kind of understand the impact. Um, and then our um Sequoia One CEO is also, she just joined recently and she's gonna be on it too. So that really helps because um, you know, they don't want to look through a thousand requests, right, that come in. Um, but being in that and hearing from their leaders what's important from the technology, they're able to provide um guidance too on the impact. So they could say this is really valuable, but it's you know, in the middle of what we call our growth season. So we're not gonna do it right now because we don't want to disrupt the business flow. Let's do it kind of in our off season for this business unit. Or I understand, but I'm aware of like the you know, business priorities overall, and this just doesn't align with exactly what I need right now. Um, and so having that um as well helps because now everybody's aligned, everybody's on the same page. It's not, well, there was a vote of four to three, and that's how I lost, and I've got to go, you know, behind the scenes and champion for votes or anything like that. It really is a collaborative environment with everybody understanding, all right, I get why we didn't prioritize my item that I was asking for. And it's still a work in progress. Um, so it's not perfect by any means. I'm still, I'm sure there's still users who are frustrated. Um, but it is really has gotten us to a place where it is manageable for our team because um before we put some of these processes into place, um, users didn't know when stuff was gonna get delivered. We had a backlog of hundreds of um enhancement requests. We, you know, my team was overwhelmed on what do we need to work on? How do we need to do this? Is this still relevant? I'm looking at this ticket. Well, this was from six months ago. Is this still relevant? Now I gotta go figure this out. Is this even the right person who owns a business process that I can talk to? Um, so it has brought um a lot of um kind of clarity, um, efficiency for my team. Um, and now, you know, really getting it to a place where it is beneficial for the users, isn't that the next step? So I would say we still have work to do because I don't want to, you know, one of the users is listening to this, they may say, Oh, it's still not where I need it to be. Um so for my team, it's working really well. Um, and we're just now gonna focus on how do we make it um work really well for the business, too.

SPEAKER_04 31:08

So in terms of negotiating with council, right, what we're gonna accomplish this year, this quarter, um, I assume it's not at the week level.

SPEAKER_02 31:18

Um well, it it is and it's not. So yeah, so uh we don't do the council every week, we do it monthly. Um, and we did just take like a little hiatus for a few months where we didn't run it. Um, we set a yearly roadmap, and that is at the executive level. So that is what are the big things that we want to do? We've got a sales roadmap, um, we've got a service roadmap, we have um a roadmap around um data and security. So basically, our cross-functional partners, what do you need to do to be successful on whatever um is on your roadmap? Like, how do we have to support you? So we make sure that that's baked into there, and then we've got um kind of our client experience roadmap, and we work with each of the executives on that to really align with um the Sequoia's goals for the year, and then we take that unplanned capacity that we're saving, and that's really what the council is focused on is what do they need for this upcoming month or quarter. Um, we do do weekly releases, so it um we have gotten to a place where every Thursday, this week it was Wednesday because of Diwali, but every Thursday we do a release. Now, sometimes it's a major release and sometimes it's just a minor release, but we try to do that because what that helps with too um is you know, if a user wants something really quickly, I don't have to tell them they have to wait a month or two months. I can say, great, it's you know, it this is something simple. Oh, it's a high priority. I don't have to do a crazy hot fix for this. Um, I can put into the next release. Can you just wait three days? Like it's simple enough that we can get it into it. Doesn't require, you know, a robust UAT. I'm gonna need you to do you know a quick QA for me, but we can fit into the next release, which is in three days. And so that has also helped with some of the noise is that we do that weekly release.

SPEAKER_03 33:16

I've got two questions and then we'll move on to the next section. There seems to be a lot of information, right? Um, and I'd be naive, but to me, there's a lot like you've got to keep on track with these requests, the council, the director meeting, the ongoing enhancements, that you've got the tickets, the date day to day. How do you track all this in terms of those requests that come in? Can you give us a little bit of context like what are you using behind the scenes to make sure that a user's request isn't up to I I promise I promise Matt will put in XYZ this week and we didn't. How do you stop missing those bits of bits of requests?

SPEAKER_02 33:56

Yeah, so I think there's a couple areas there. So one is you have to have really strong managers on your team, right? Because I can't do it all. Um so I've got, you know, strong manager over engineering, strong manager over our platform operations that does all that support, um, and then a strong director of product management. Um, and so they have to be really strong so that you don't have to get involved into everything. Um, but we again we use um systems to help with that. So when I first started, um, there was a lot of because because again, we're a relationship company and we just want to help each other, there was a lot of, hey, can you do this in in Teams or hey, can you do this in an email? And so we really had to come down kind of hard, not in a mean way, but to say, like, you know, this is great, but this is our process, and I need you to follow it. I can't do this. Um, and so a couple ways that we did that was, you know, if you don't feel comfortable telling someone, I can't do it this way, you've got to go submit a ticket, just tell them I've submitted this ticket on your behalf. This is our process. And so we started out that way, a little bit of white glove service as much as possible. But for um issues, we use um Salesforce cases. So if you've got an issue, you go submit a Salesforce case. We've got proper routing setup, um, it goes to our platform operations team. They'll take a look at it, they will look at it and determine is this a true issue? Is it something we already know how to resolve? Does it is it a bug? Does it need to go back to the engineering team and the product managers? Or is it actually an enhancement request that you try to submit as a bug or a defect, but it's an enhancement request, and we're gonna kick it over to our enhancement request process, which is also Salesforce cases.

unknown 35:45

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 35:45

For the large roadmap, we take that and we break that up into epics and then user stories, and that's all managed through Jira. So anything that we do that touches production and a change in production has to have um a JIRA user story. And then anything that is um, you know, hey, this user needs this um permission set assigned, or we need to onboard a new user, all that has to be a CTX case. Or sorry, uh we call it Salesforce, we call it CTX client team experience. Um, it has to be a Salesforce case. And so that has really helped us.

SPEAKER_03 36:22

And then on the topic of education, the question I've got for you is what is the Kristen Sizzler's way of measuring continuous improvement?

SPEAKER_02 36:34

Um well, I love data. Um, so I do like um to be able to see, you know, the actual data, not just somebody saying something is better. Um so I would say the um, you know, being able to look at that data to me is how you would measure the success. Are we driving user adoption? Um, are we able to um you know deliver more story points? So is our velocity going up? So that is to me how you would actually measure it. But um I would say I get um kind of more um happiness out of just seeing end users and my team like not having the frustrations or the team feeling like, okay, I don't feel burned out. I feel like I am doing a good job. I am finding happiness in the work that we're doing. I'm excited about what I'm doing, I'm learning stuff. So I definitely think that you have to have um the data-driven success, but I do like to see to me, you'll see the results also around you.

SPEAKER_04 37:48

Okay, awesome. Um I think you can give us like a specific story that kind of embodies embodies this outside of the one you gave with uh with the metrics. Um that embodies just let's say negotiating negotiating with users um or with the with the with the uh the council picking up you know picking up a feature and then taking it through and some of the challenges you kind of might may have faced.

SPEAKER_02 38:22

Um trying to think of a good one. Um I don't think that there's any, you know, like to me, I I don't see it even looking at throughout my career, there's not like these big moments, right? I think it's just the small moments that add up. Um I will also say, and I tell my team this all the time, that I have a really hard time. It doesn't come natural to me to take a moment and celebrate success. I'm always thinking, we have so much farther to go. Look at all the stuff we have to do instead of taking a look back and seeing how far we've come. So to me, I'm always it's like incremental, it's never this really big thing unless I do take a look back and see where did we come from and where are we today? Um, we did launch a very successful um uh feature with one of our business users. Um, so it's our compliance checklist. Um, we had um the VP of compliance, and she was able to give just a really clear vision of what she wanted the user experience to look like, what she was trying to do. Um, and we had challenges along the way, right? Just like you do in every project. Um, and I would say that because of the relationship that we had, she was really good about talking through like, this isn't gonna work, what are other options? And we would talk through pros and cons where I can do this thing or I can do this thing. But these are the areas you're gonna have to give on either um how we're gonna be able to quickly change it in the future. It's gonna be very difficult. You can't change your mind a bunch in the future on these things, but maybe it's gonna be a better client experience, or you have to give on the client experience a little bit, and I can change, you know, more rapidly if you need that in the future. Um, and so I would say, you know, again, it comes back to building those relationships, um, and then you get that trust. Um, and so um that was one area where I saw, you know, if I look back over the last couple of years, that was a product that I felt was very successful because of her vision, her willingness to really work with us on, you know, just wasn't black and white, like, no, it has to be this. It's always okay, well, what are my options then? What can you do? Let's talk through this. Um, and so being very collaborative. Um, and you know, to this day, um, I think even this, not only that, but even working with her. Um, you know, a couple like last month, she was having a problem. And instead of just, you know, blowing it up or escalating, she like came to me and said, Hey, I need to talk to you about this. Like, this is my perception, this is what's going on. And so we just really talk through like how are the teams going to work together, where is the breakdown happening? And so, really always coming from a place of um of not thinking the worst, or like, you know, they're they're being difficult or they're not trying to help us, but really coming from a place of everybody's just trying to really do a good job. Um, priorities don't always match up. And so really understanding where the other person or the other team is coming from, and then how can you work together?

SPEAKER_04 41:41

Yeah, that's uh it's actually really, really important point. It seems obvious, you know, understanding the the other side. Um, but it happens a lot where people just completely misunderstand you know what's what's going on on the other side or how decisions are made. Even just something simple as understanding the decision-making process um often helps a lot. I was had a had a uh incident where we were a global company and the the client was in Europe, but the decisions were being made here in the US and he took that as the US's priority over the European business. Um and in a lot of ways it was the complete opposite because he was always he was very demanding and the US team was more laid back. Um but he had no clue and he kept thinking that he was being short-changed when it was probably the complete opposite. Um, yeah, so so great point there. Um I I wanted to ask you this before but kind of switched subjects, but I'll I'll pivot back to it. This is um about managing the council. Um, I know I know you have and I know this is a complicated subject, so I know you have the there the members of the council are running different departments, different divisions. Um so it sounds like they have their own budgets or allocations prior, or are you negotiating that within the council about what you know what features um or what's on the annual goals for this year? Like this is gonna be a service year, or this is gonna be, let's say, a big sales year in terms of of tech that you're gonna build. Um, you know, and how do you how do you how do you get them, you know, to kind of agree, or do you not have to make them agree? Right. One of the nice things about working with on the links, and I say this somewhat tongue in cheek by nice, is you can pull rank, right? Here you can't, you kind of have to, you know, either get them to agree or or get what that another CIO or someone else, um, to just kind of make a final decision. And often there's a tendency that, well, sales is just gonna be service because well that's sales and that's a revenue driver. Um so yeah, what are your thoughts on that? Or yeah, how did that go?

SPEAKER_02 44:00

Yeah, so we um we determine that prior. So when we're doing our roadmap planning, when I say we're saving capacity, it's capacity per roadmap. So we take all of our capacity at the beginning of the year and kind of assign it out based off of the roadmap. So sales is gonna get, you know, this number of developers, this road service is gonna get this number of developers, all the way through. And then, you know, our product managers, depending on the size of the team and the size of the roadmap, they may manage one or multiple roadmaps. Um, so their their job if they're managing multiple roadmaps is probably a little bit more difficult than the capacity planning at the engineering level. Um, and all of the obviously none of this is that black and white. I do want to call that out because if my when if my team listens to this, they're probably be like, wait, I'm in the service squad and I know I had to work on this sales ticket the other day. Um so it's it's not black and white, but you know, you go in with a plan and then you have to adapt to just get things done. But we try to decide that at the beginning. So I think a really great thing is we were, you know, reviewing the roadmap with the executives and the CEO this year, and we decided we wanted to add like a secondary roadmap. And I said, all right, where's the capacity coming from? I'm already showing you where that capacity is. Um so which of these roadmaps do you want to take one or two developers off of and move it to that other one? So that helps at the beginning, right? To say, well, this is your capacity for your roadmap. So what are your decisions that you want to make? Which is why, because we've got the largest um amount of users in that service, most of the people on our council are service uh members because they're the they're gonna have the most director, senior director, VP level. Um and that's again why we want the um S1 CEO and the chief client officer in there because that's really their teams. Um, and so we go into that um already understanding this is your capacity for your roadmap for your teams or for your business unit. Um, and so then within that, that's where it becomes really collaborative. And I would say that Sequoia is one of the most collaborative companies I've ever worked at. So there is not um there is not that kind of tension or we we don't even really talk about the budgets. It's just here's what it is. Let's all explain what value this is gonna add, where we're not gonna have be able to meet a commitment, and then we can push that up, right? And so having that, that's fine, I guess I can do it this way for now. It's not ideal, but I can give because I see that this other team has a greater need. So I would say that that's something that's very unique at Sequoia, which is it feels like one team. It doesn't feel like, well, this is my business unit and I have to be successful. Really, the mandate is always how are we coming through for each other and for our clients? And that's the goal. The goal is not, is your team gonna meet their you know, goals? It's is Sequoia gonna meet their goals and how do we come together to make sure that happens? So with that mindset in place, um, it makes it a lot easier. I was at a company where you know they had so many billable hours they had to hit, they wouldn't even join one of my meetings unless I gave them a code to bill to join that meeting. And so that cross-functional, trying to get that cross-functional um collaboration going was very difficult. Where here it is um, you know, everybody coming together, they're willing to make concessions if it's gonna make you know the company successful overall.

SPEAKER_03 47:42

In terms of insight and lessons learned, the the two areas that I'd like to add to if we can. Um, one would be advice to other CRM leaders that are looking to take all the ideas around attaching a council, building a council. And the second question question would be advice to other CRM leaders that uh two and a half years ago you know doing exactly what you were doing and inheriting a serious you know, legacy accessible tool with a lot of custom code because that issue isn't unique and it's not an issue that you know isn't gonna continue to happen for the next several years, right? So two bits of advice on those two areas, please, Kristen.

SPEAKER_02 48:28

Yeah, so I would say first for creating a council, like it's gonna look different depending where you're at. You have to look at your unique company, you have to look at the culture of that company. Um, so um, you know, I talked to a really good um friend of mine who and mentor who has done a council before this, um, Masnur uh Jen, and kind of talked to her like, how did you run your council? Like, talk me through some of that and taking the things that I felt like would work at Sequoia and then the things that I felt like wouldn't work here. Um, so really, you know, the idea of just how do we come together and agree on priorities is the ultimate goal. But how you're going to do that, there's not gonna be a playbook that tells you exactly how to do that because every company is different, um, every team is different, the culture is different. So at hers, they really did have a point system. You know, we're gonna go around, we're gonna vote, whatever feature gets the most points, that's what we're gonna do. That's not gonna work where I'm at. We're just a lot more collaborative, we're trying to do, we're trying to come together. Um, we're we're a smaller company, so we can do that too. We're not, you know, 100,000 people. Um, and so I think you have to look at what are you trying to accomplish? Um, and that's the most important part, and then building a plan on how you're gonna accomplish that, which is really around how do we prioritize? And then not only how do we prioritize, but how do we get um the leaders that aren't maybe at the executive level but are closer to our user base? How do we get them to understand why we're making these decisions? Because um, you know, um, Naz, when you were talking about that one example of, you know, somebody felt like they were getting left out. You don't want that because you want them to understand um, we do care about what you're saying, we do care about your needs, you're not, your needs aren't less than anybody else's. This is the reason why we're making this decision. Um, you can't do that for all thousand users, right? You can't go to every thousand user and tell them exactly why. But what you can do is um help educate um at that next level so that everybody is on the same page, because then you're gonna have a lot better collaboration. And there's a lot more trust when things don't go right, because that's when you really need those relationships, is when you're you know, something has gone wrong. Um, and you know, the thing that always will start is the finger point. And so I'm really big on I don't care what happened. That's that in the middle of a crisis, I do not care what happened. I want to know how are we gonna fix this. Once everything is completely resolved, then we're gonna take a step back and we're gonna say, how did we get there? But in that moment, I don't want to know who is to blame, what happened here. I mean, obviously we need the root cause if we're gonna fix something, but that's not the moment. Emotions are usually high, people are frustrated. Let's just resolve the issue. Then when things have calmed down and we understand the true impact of what just happened, if the true impact is still really high, you know, emotions are still gonna be high. But sometimes you walk away and you're like, oh, that in the moment it felt like that was a really big issue. The impact was actually really small. Um, and so it's not that big a deal, but let's talk through how we make it better. And so that's when you need those relationships to be able to say, um, you know, for you to work together without being like finger pointing in the middle of a crisis, but to all come together and just say, like, we're just gonna try and fix this. What can I do? What can you do? Um, not this is my responsibility, this is your responsibility. Because that's another thing, you know, when you're trying to work across teams and you're trying to work with IT plus the business, plus maybe a data team, um, and you don't own all pieces of it, um, you're gonna need to again figure out how you're gonna come together and say, you know, I I'm more than happy to do this. It's probably not my responsibility, but you know, we can we can do this that we can work together. Um, and so that is, you know, that's gonna end up being your goal.

SPEAKER_03 52:43

And and what about the um what about the legacy sales resources? Sorry.

SPEAKER_02 52:51

Yeah, so um I think there that my advice would be again, don't come in and immediately say, these are all the problems, this is how I'm gonna fix it. Um, there's always a reason stuff happened, right? And you don't have the history of that. Um, you don't have the history of why something was built a certain way. You don't have the history of the last 10 years. Um, and so when you do that, people can get really defensive, they can shut down to your ideas. So the first thing is really, you know, getting in. I would say as a leader, especially when you've got to be, depending on the size of your team, you might have to be at a not at a detail level, right? At a very macro level. But if the when you first come in as a leader, the more you can sit with the individual um contributors, really understand like what are you doing, what are your processes, explain to me. And you take that first, you know, however long you can. Maybe it's a couple weeks, maybe it's a month, maybe it's a couple months to really learn and understand what are their challenges. Well, why did this happen? What was kind of what is your perception of you know how we got to where we're at? What do you think the big challenges are? And then you can take all of that and really start to piece together those trends of, well, I only heard this maybe like once. Um, I don't think it's it was from a newer person, so I'm not really sure how much um you know, and it's it's their kind of point of view, or hey, I'm hearing this from every single team member, I'm hearing this from the business side, this is a true trend, this is a true challenge. Um, and then start to put together your plan based off of that because you aren't gonna be able to understand um everything right away, and and things that you think you know, um, you know, even two and a half years in, things that I thought I knew. I'm like, oh wait, okay, now I'm understanding this a little bit better and this challenge, this unique challenge better. So um being open to just hearing what everyone has to say, um, you know, uh seeking to learn and understand when you first come in, and then starting to build um your plan and then really understanding again the culture of do I need to put this big plan out there? Is this the type of company that wants to see a two-year plan and then we're gonna execute on it? Or is this the type of company that, you know, you've got to show results really quickly because of the pace that they're moving? And so, how do you just show that incremental progress? And hey, here's what we want to do. Um, I can get this done in a couple months, and here's the impact that I think it's gonna have. And then you're successful at that, and you say, all right, here's the next thing I want to do. Um, and so I think it's always about understanding um really the people and the culture because that's gonna constantly change um and understanding the best way to be successful, that that's not gonna look the same from company to company or from team to team. And so something you did at the last company, you can't just come in and do the exact same thing. You're gonna have to take some of the things that work there, um, and you're gonna have to leave some of those other things behind and figure out a new way. So I think that's what I like about it is I love to constantly learn, I love to constantly be challenged and try new things. Um and so, you know, that's just part of it.

SPEAKER_04 56:19

Awesome. Um, we're running a bit late on time. Um, so we do need to wrap up. Um, but we usually like to end with um just your opinion on where the industry is going, uh, maybe your industry, maybe Salesforce as a whole, any particular innovations um you're within the Salesforce ecosystem that you're looking forward to or think is gonna have a big impact.

SPEAKER_02 56:46

Yeah, so um I was actually kind of thinking about this this morning. I think that um, you know, from an engineering perspective, I think that has changed a lot, right? When you first started out with Salesforce, there was a lot you had to do with um development and code. Salesforce is making it easier and easier to do some of that without having to be a developer. So I think there's a couple things. I think on the more admin side, you need to become more technical. On the product manager side, you need to become more technical because you really need to understand if a user asks for this, how difficult is it gonna be? So I can set the expectation up front versus, oh, that sounds really nice. Going back to my dev team, they suddenly are like, you know, it's gonna take us a month, right? So if you're a product manager or you're a business analyst that's working with um the business, the more technical you can be, or at least understanding some of that, you can set those expectations up front. You can ask clarifying questions that's going to help your development team be more successful. Um, you know, is this a hard requirement? What if we did, you know, would you be open to kind of slightly changing these three things? Then you have an understanding of, okay, I bet we can do that more out of the box. And then on the developer side, um, understanding out of the box, I think, is really important in some of the configuration, um, looking more towards the AI and really getting um knowledge there because I think just building straight code is um, you know, not where we're gonna eventually go. There's gonna be AI that's gonna help you write things. So more people that are not maybe as strong developers are gonna be able to do some of that, understanding integration. So I think it's really starting to get into the pieces right now that are going to be less likely to be out of the box and that are going to be very difficult to get away from the more technical in the code, obviously moving into architecture. So I think it's really looking at your career path and where you want to go, um, and then making sure that you're in a good place there. Um and so that's what I that's what I always kind of care about is like, you know, how how can I help people with their careers? How can I get them the right skill sets, get them the experience that they need? Um, and so when I'm looking at where the the industry is headed for Salesforce, that's kind of my mindset that I'm thinking. It's not this big, you know, where where can a company go with it? You know, I do think that the AI is gonna catch up really quickly and we're gonna go that way like much more quickly than I think. I don't think it's quite there yet for some of the use cases that I need, but um, I think as a you know, an individual just looking towards where you want to keep your skill sets um for your career.

SPEAKER_03 59:50

Fantastic. Um, so with that, Kristen, we want to extend a thank you to you uh for sharing your story with us today. I personally found I'm sure you know our listeners found uh will find that your philosophy and ideas around Salesforce Council, establishing one, how to go about that in particular, uh was very interesting and inspiring. So thank you again for your time. Thank you, Chris. Thank you. For our listeners, uh please do not forget to subscribe to the CR section for more episodes be trading related to the Kristen. Uh, who really well appreciates uh existing the present process feature of Cascad. Um also follow us on LinkedIn for the update.