SPEAKER_00 0:02

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 0:28

Welcome. So today we're talking with uh Christy Growe, Senior Program Manager at Beacon Point, a fairly large RIA. So welcome, Christy.

SPEAKER_01 0:36

Thanks. Thanks for having me. Excited to be here.

SPEAKER_02 0:40

Uh Christy, before we start, I know you have uh a few uh legal touch points to talk about. So over to you.

SPEAKER_01 0:48

We're we're working in uh financial services. Uh, for any of you can appreciate that we always have to have our disclaimer at the beginning of the call. So here's my legal spiel. These are views expressed by me. They don't necessarily reflect beacon point advisors. This conversation is intended for general informational purposes only and should not be construed as legal tax, investment, financial, or other advice. It does not take into account the specific investment objectives, financial situation, or particular needs of any individual. Information shared is subject to change without notice.

SPEAKER_02 1:18

Fantastic. All right, with that. So tell us a little bit about you, uh, your background, and then lastly, just high level on beacon point.

SPEAKER_01 1:29

Yeah, so I, like many people in the Salesforce ecosystem, have kind of a non-traditional background. So my degree is actually at clinical lab science. So I went to college for laboratory testing and did that for about a decade, kind of got bored, was looking for what I was gonna do next, and didn't really want to go back to school if I could help it. I'd already paid off student loans. And so uh one day I was listening to a financial podcast, and this guy was on there talking about Salesforce and how he worked part-time doing Salesforce. And I had never heard of Salesforce, didn't know what it uh was, but he mentioned, you know, if if business processes interest you in solving problems, Salesforce might be a good career for you. And so I thought, hmm, sounds like there's free training, let me go check it out. So got on Trailhead. Uh took me about two days on Trailhead before I figured out what Salesforce was or what companies used it for. And then after I figured it out, I thought, you know what? I'm gonna prove that you can get a Salesforce cert without any paid uh resources. So I rather stubbornly uh didn't pay for any courses or anything. Um not that those are beneficial. I think probably for a lot of people uh they are a necessary part of the process, but I paid for a $20 practice exam from Salesforce, paid for uh the exam fee, which I got discounted because I went to one of the web webinars. So all in, I think I you know spent less than 200 bucks uh to get into this career path. And then uh was super, super lucky to land my first job as a Salesforce admin at Goldman Sachs. And as you can imagine, really, really great experience there. I uh was working with a phenomenal team, learned a ton, um, and just you know worked hard, kind of did whatever uh was needed of me, and uh ended up leading a team there. Um so I worked at Goldman for uh almost five years uh in a little uh part of Goldman that was an acquisition. So um this was a RAA that was acquired by Goldman, and then I actually ended up uh being divested with that part of the company uh four years later. Um and during that divestiture is when I uh decided to kind of keep, you know, warming my network, see what was out there in case I was um made redundant in that uh process. So that's how I ended up at Ozaic, uh, worked at Ozaic for two years, um, didn't love the broker dealer space as much as the RAA space. And so um a couple months ago I heard about this opportunity at Beacon Point Advisors. And uh once I met with the CTO, David Lay, who is my now boss, uh just really saw that this was going to be a good opportunity for me and uh made the the jump. So now I work at Beacon Point. Um I manage the Salesforce team. Uh Beacon Point has about 350 advisors across the US, uh, 90 offices, 60 billion in assets under advisement, and uh really a family culture. One of the things that attracted me to Beacon Point is that we have uh an unusually large number of female leaders, so our CEO, RCO, or chief marketing officer, director of compliance, director of marketing, uh chief wealth planning officer, all females. Uh so that was very um attractive to me as a fellow woman. Um and this the financial services industry is quite male-dominated, and so this is this is pretty unusual in the space. Um, but yeah, I've been super happy. It's a great firm, and they are really a Salesforce shop. So uh that's been really cool. I the last two companies I've worked for, senior executives didn't love Salesforce, and so it was always this battle of, well, we could use Salesforce for this, but oh, we don't want to pay Salesforce money. And so now to be in a company that really is leveraging Salesforce, I would say if not to its fullistic extent today, that's the roadmap, right? Is to use Salesforce um as much as we can uh to help grow the business, uh it's been a nice, nice place to be.

SPEAKER_02 5:46

For sure. I think what's really so many questions I want to ask, but for the sake of time, um, so getting your first role in a Salesforce ecosystem, I think unless individuals look at your LinkedIn profile, we should probably disclose that you did have tech, knowledge, experience prior to that role. It was just in the form of like the medical industry and it wasn't Salesforce, right? So what did you do prior when you were at Baylor Scott for five years?

SPEAKER_01 6:15

Yeah, so one of the things that helped me kind of transition into this role is my my last role at the hospital was it was called the point of care coordinator. So I was kind of bridging the gap between the lab and the testing that's done by the nurses. And they have a lot of instrumentation. So they take, you know, blood glucoses and they do um chemistry panels at the bedside, and all of those results get uploaded into computer software. And so uh I got to work on a implementation of a new glucometer, which came with a new software. And so I really got to see kind of that technology development process before I really moved into the tech space. You know, we loaded everything into a test environment first and then pushed things to production. And so I kind of got a taste of that development lifecycle, even though I wasn't the developer, um, and and then you know, an implementation plan, um, both of the software and then the actual um devices. And so uh yeah, definitely leveraged that experience as I was interviewing and talking to people to land that first role.

SPEAKER_02 7:22

Amazing. Four years at Goldman, as you said, you managed two orgs, around 800 users um on the B2C side, 100 users on the on the B2B side. What was the one takeaway you took with you from that role into your next role at Ozaic? Because in seven years, you've gone from some would say entry-level admin to you know senior program management. You were a VP, you know, prior to that, right? So you've accelerated your career very quick by leveraging your background um and nailing it in the role since being in the Salesforce ecosystem. What was the one thing you took with you from Goldman to land that role at Osette? Would you say what helped you the most?

SPEAKER_01 8:05

Yeah, it's a great question. It's hard to nail down one thing, right? But it but I if I have to say one thing, being willing to do what is needed for the organization. And that means looking beyond just your one little piece of the pie. I see so often, you know, in team members that I'm coaching, in colleagues, that they spend a lot of, you know, they're very willing to do what someone asks, right? So, you know, their boss asks them to do something, they go do it. But one of the reasons I was able to accelerate my career so quickly is because I was always thinking about the company and what can I do to help move the company forward? What can I do to help the company increase revenue? You know, ultimately that's what a company is, their primary focus is making money, right? And so, you know, in your little role, you know, whether you're a low-level admin, so it's funny you say that. My original ask by my boss when I joined Goldman was to write knowledge articles and uh workcases. And I want to say within three months, because just because I asked, I said, hey, well, you know, I I can do this and I was doing it, but then on the side, I said, hey, you know, if you have like a field that needs to be created, I'm happy to, you know, why not let me do that? My, you know, this low-level admin, and then the developers can focus on more exciting stuff. And so just being willing to do kind of those menial tasks that you know nobody else really wants to do, um and and volunteering to pick up work. I I did the same thing when I was at the hospital, you know, I was always, if there was an opportunity uh to take on an additional responsibility, I was always the one volunteering and and pretty quickly people will come to you, right? So you volunteer for a couple times and then and then your boss, your you know, boss's colleagues, like people start asking. Um, and and that's really I think how I grew my career. And so by the time I was, you know, and and I guess it really at that point, I guess the other thing that I would say for people kind of um in the career realm is after that first job, I really never I I have applied for jobs, but that's not how I actually got jobs, right? So the jobs that I've gotten have been by talking to people, letting them know, hey, you know, I'm kind of thinking about making a change. Um, you know, do you know of anything? And so the the role I got at Ozaic, that was a referral. The role I got at Beacon Point, someone reached out to me proactively and said, Hey, I think you really vibe with the CTO. Um, do you want me to make an intro? And so I I wasn't even seeking this role. It came to me. And I think when when you're making the genuine connections, I I know you guys talked about this um with another guest on a podcast, but that that organic networking when you don't need anything, that's really the key to having a very easy time moving around, making your career changes, getting the job that you want.

SPEAKER_02 11:02

I was trying to think what as you were talking, you reminded me of a podcast we did, and I wish I could remember which one it was, but um that the takeaway was act for the job you want versus the job you have. And I think what you shared is a testament to that. Um, going above and beyond, be naturally curious, trying to create the role that you want, or do the things that are going to help you get to where you want to be. Um so uh kudos for that. Beacon point, you talked a little bit about in your uh intro, just very quickly, and I'll hand over to Maz. Umber of users, what you used, um, how big's your team, to give our listeners an idea, kind of what you what you're overseeing there.

SPEAKER_01 11:46

Sure. So we have about 800 users. Uh we are using Financial Services Cloud. Um, we are a Salesforce shop, so we're using Salesforce for most of our core functionality. We don't really have custom applications, which is new for me because, like I said, my other firms, the CEOs, were trying to move off of Salesforce. And so there was a lot of custom uh builds, but really Salesforce is our platform. So we do our tech support through Salesforce, um, we manage our client lifecycle. So, you know, prospecting, um, lead management, the client onboarding is all done in Salesforce, um, and then any of the client servicing, all of those, you know, we are heavy users of cases, and so anything related to a client is logged as a case, and then somebody is working that case. Um we also use it for MA activities. So beacon point is growing through acquisition of advisors and offices of advisors, and so our prospecting more of like the B2B um business is also tracked in Salesforce. So any of the advisors or potential um new offices that we want to bring on, all of that uh is tracked in Salesforce. Oh, and then my team size. So I have three internal employees right now. Um, I had four contractors, and then a week ago we just onboarded four uh more, a couple to help with data migrations for these offices that were onboarding, um, and then a new uh developer. So uh yeah, excited to, I mean, almost double double my team uh since I joined a couple months ago. Um, and and I think we will continue to grow as the company is growing as we continue to leverage Salesforce. Uh my team will uh grow. And and that was one of the things that attracted me about uh the position my boss told me when I interviewed, you know, this this is an opportunity to grow your dream team. And so a lot of the ideas I've had at previous firms um to kind of create this cycle of, you know, bring on junior people and train them up and and promote them. Um I'm I'm passionate about employing people um in really like fair, ethical ways. And so I I will never be the boss that tries to get someone for as little money as possible or um you know force them to leave because I won't pay them. I I have this vision of of uh cycling through you know junior to senior team members. And so it's a really exciting opportunity for me to be able to actually bring that vision to life.

SPEAKER_03 14:12

Yeah, that's that's awesome. Um obviously it's always great, you know, when you can see a junior employee flourish and grow. It's one of the most satisfying things of hiring. Um now I'm my own boss, I can control salaries. Um, so it's it's uh it's a lot easier to be generous. And I guess when you're internal and you got to deal with budget and more senior people above you, and then not only that, fairness to other people on the team, or at least perceived fairnesses. Um so I definitely want to talk about FSE and financial services cloud, specifically in wealth management. I think, I think, or at least I wouldn't be surprised, probably Salesforce's biggest industry. It's definitely their biggest industry cloud. Um I think it was their first one too. Um, and then so they originally had the managed package version, um, and then they had the um the now the industry cloud, the industries cloud version. So tell me tell me it's definitely also I think the most mature of all the industry clouds, I think. I don't know if that's true anymore. Healthy uh or non-profit, I think is also pretty mature um as well. Those are definitely the three that are the most um but getting back to usage, I know you mentioned the cases um I know that that's often used like has that gotta go back to the custodian to interface with outside authorities. Um but generally it's generally well I'll let you talk a bit. How how how do your advisors generally use uh Salesforce or maybe better in the wealth management industry, how like how do they generally use it?

SPEAKER_01 15:50

Yeah, so uh what I have found in my experience in uh wealth management is that the advisors are usually not the ones using Salesforce. So they usually have you know some admins or a chief of operations that are really entering a lot of the data into Salesforce. Um that may not be as true at Beacon Point because we are such a Salesforce shop, but I've only been here two months, so I haven't spent a lot of time talking to advisors, but we have an advisor conference next week. So I'm curious to see how many of the advisors actually are in there versus their staff. Um, but if we're talking about advisors and their staff, which is usually how we talk about advisors internally, um they are uh using them. I would say that the primary use case is for um tracking their client services. And so if there are tasks that need to be done for a client, um, and again, this is typically they have staff that are tracking those tasks. So maybe they need to uh send out an annual mailing or they need to uh collect some documents from a client, there's probably a task. Now at Beacon Point, this is something interesting I've never seen done before. Um at Beacon Point, we essentially created cases that you would typically see in a task. And the reason that they did that, and and I I've been kind of mulling over whether I agree or disagree with this approach, um, but I'm kind of getting sold on it. So uh we built cases for essentially everything that we do for a client. And the reason is is because, you know, in another industry, I think it's more common that you have an action item that's did you do it or did you not? But in the financial services industry, a lot of those action items either stretch over days or touch a lot of people. You know, there might be multiple people that need to be involved in that action item. So for example, you meet with a client and the client says, Oh, well, I want to open a new account. And so, you know, someone needs to track that they asked for that new account, and then someone actually has to go and you know, draft our paperwork for the account opening, and then someone has to submit that um to the custodian. And so it's really this multi-step process. And so we really don't use tasks for anything that you would typically see tasks being used for, it's all done in cases. Um, and so I would say that that's really like tracking client meetings, the action items that come out of the client meetings, um, and then any anything in between the client meetings is is really the bulk of what we see advisors and their staff doing in Salesforce.

SPEAKER_03 18:23

Yeah, yeah, there's the the the activity workflow in uh in with wealth managers is really complex, right? Because also often it also requires multiple rounds of approvals. Um and that's another reason why you use the cases. And sometimes you need someone who has access to the custodian to actually do it, and the advisor is not allowed to do it because the segmentation of activities is a complicated thing, um, particularly when it comes to money movements, right? It's not just I'm opening an account, I need to move funds uh between my trusts or whatever it is, or to you know to beneficiary and that kind of stuff. Um real cool. So you guys are an FSE, um obviously that decision predates you, but maybe within a goldman, but at some point, right, you you were looking at okay, do we go with FSE or do you go just with with Salesforce core right service and sales cloud or now what they're called, agent agent or service, agent or sales agent. Um so tell me a little bit about that. Like what are the benefits and cons, let's say, of go of choosing FSE versus um versus the core product in your mind, and what's that decision process look like?

SPEAKER_01 19:38

Yeah, so it's been really interesting working at a few different firms now that all had financial services cloud, but I would say this is the first firm where they're actually using it. And this is something that for anyone who isn't already on Financial Services Cloud, I would just encourage you to think about. So Financial Services Cloud is very tailored to the industry. Um, I will say that it's very tailored to the industry, that the part of the industry that I am now, so that wealth management, you know, advisor servicing the clients. When I was at Ozaic as a broker dealer, and really the advisor was our primary client, um it didn't work quite as you would expect. Um, and I'm not sure that that was a great use case for financial services cloud. I probably, if I, you know, was advising um the broker dealer to start over, probably would have said, just use sales cloud. You don't really need that um, you know, customer 360 view for your advisor. I mean, yes, you need a lot of similar data points, but it was probably overkill um for that space. Um but one of the things that I think people should consider if they're looking, and I'm not trying to sway anyone, you know, one way or another, I know uh Salesforce is very passionate about financial services cloud, and it is a good cloud. In fact, um the little part of Goldman I worked for uh was United Capital prior to the Goldman acquisition, and they um actually helped Salesforce um, you know, gave them a lot of feedback to develop uh the uh Financial Services Cloud. And so we were actually using, uh even though we we technically had um FSC installed in the org, we were not using person accounts and we had created our own householding structure um even prior to um FSC. And so I would say one of, and and I'm curious, Maz, you've done a lot in the Financial Services Cloud if you agree with this. But my take after a couple of orgs is that if you're going to implement Financial Services Cloud, you should be ready to implement person accounts. Would you agree with that? Or do you think, or have you seen implementations where they were able to leverage FSC without using person accounts? I think they force you to now in a one. Oh, okay. I didn't know that. So I I worked in orgs that were kind of legacy before uh some of these recent. And so this is actually. First org I worked in with person accounts.

SPEAKER_03 22:03

A lot of people don't like them, but I I I never found the big issue with them. The my biggest complaint is that it doubles up your storage because it accounts as two records, but that doesn't really bother me. Um in in terms of FSC, I tend to look at it as two things. If you need householding and financial account-centric stuff, FSC is probably the way to go. If you're in a more peripheral financial services industry that's not necessarily dealing with end-consumer clients, like you said, like the broker dealer.

SPEAKER_01 22:29

Yeah, the rubber dealer, yeah. That was my experience as well.

SPEAKER_03 22:33

Yeah, or even if you're like um, let's say venture capitalist, a venture capitalist or or or um you know, an R uh uh like a like a REIT type firm, right? Where you where you may not need that kind of householding financial account-centric thing. Um for sure, like asset managers that deal with mutual funds, right? And their clients are the broker dealers, right? You may not need that kind of thing. Um, so that's how I tend to look at it. It's really if you're looking at financial service, financial account-centric um and relationship householding-centric, that's really where it shines, I think.

SPEAKER_01 23:09

Yeah. Um well, yeah, it's cool, it's cool to hear your perspective too. So yeah, I think for people looking at it, like being prepared to use person accounts, and I mean, even though person accounts are enabled, you you can use non-person accounts even in um FSC org. Um, but I have found that the the out-of-the-box features kind of assume that you're using person accounts, and even as we've added integrations at Beacon Point, a lot of the vendors assume that you're using person accounts if you're on FSE. And so you to really leverage it fully, and this is where I say, you know, my last two firms were not really leveraged, they were paying for FSE, but they weren't really getting the value out of it because they didn't have person accounts enabled. Um, there's a lot of functionality that comes out of the box with FSE. And so this is one of the things that I would say um our pros. So um there's really robust relationship um uh like management. So being able to visualize those relationships. So it's not uncommon in um the financial services world for a client to you know have a spouse, have some children, maybe they also have an LLC or a trust. And so you want to visualize all of those relationships, which is pretty easy to do out of the box in FSC versus, you know, if you're in a sales cloud org, it's gonna take a little bit uh more work and customization to show those relationships in the same way. Um, and then things like action plans, there's a lot of uh tasks in uh or action items in the financial services world that are very repeatable. So, you know, every client is going to have an annual meeting. Um, when you're opening an account, you're gonna do X, Y, and Z thing. And so uh Financial Services Cloud makes it really easy to set up those kind of prefab task sequences. And like I said, at beacon point, we're not really using tasks, but it's something I'm kind of considering. You know, could we add action plans to a case that goes to operations where maybe the ops folks are working in those uh sequence tasks and they're not having to generate the action items every time? So that's one of the things that I'm looking for. As far as the cons, it is quite a bit more expensive. Um now, Salesforce will usually cut you deals on licenses because they want people to use Financial Services Cloud, but it's still ultimately going to be more expensive. Um and kind of a pro and a con. So FSE, I believe, now is built on unlimited cloud, and so you're gonna see typically higher API limits and things like that. Um, but that comes also at a cost. So um, if you anticipate having a lot of integrations with your Salesforce org, that's another consideration. You might be better off getting FSE and kind of getting that bundle.

SPEAKER_02 25:50

I think just on the cost uh piece, um, because I I did do a little bit of research on that, just as I know that's something that comes up maybe for those that maybe uh having this debate. Uh FSE typically costs around 300 a user uh versus sales cloud at 165. Um if you're looking at a 50 user org, that's 80k, 100 user org, that's 160k difference. In reality, that could fund, you know, um a Salesforce admin or product owner internally or a couple of resources near shore. Um, so it is a debate you've got to make, right? Um and um that is my two cents on the on the topic.

SPEAKER_03 26:31

I'm gonna put myself back immediately on that just a disclaimer on that Salesforce negotiates um the like the list price is not what anybody pays, right? Right, but but they're definitely there's definitely a price differential between standard and and FSE, and there's definitely uh uh an uplift. I would probably agree with that, but again, negotiate. Negotiate with your ref, negotiate with your ref. Um, so let's talk about person accounts. So um what what are your reservations with it? I know a lot of people don't like it. Um I'm a little bit more in the data side, so I'm not doing so much Salesforce config. Um so yeah, what what are your what are your issues with it?

SPEAKER_01 27:12

It's so I do have some issues. Um my comments earlier were more around uh I have seen orgs that are using financial services cloud and not using person accounts. And I actually think if you're gonna use financial services cloud, you should be using person accounts. The place where I think Salesforce kind of got it wrong here, and nothing we can do about it now except uh express my frustration is that it really what you needed, I I don't think you really needed to combine the contact and the account so much as you needed that extra layer of householding. And so I think what Salesforce could have done and probably should have done is kept the contact separate and then turned the account into that household structure. Now you you kind of have this contact and account that is related to an account, and it just it it causes some unnecessarily um complicated architecture issues with the contact and the um is so now you know for your person account, you have both a contact ID and an account ID, and sometimes you have to use the contact ID and sometimes you have to use the account ID, depending on what you're loading. So the data loads get a little messier, and then one of the things we're working on right now with Salesforce, I just had a call with them today, is the relationships. You know, do you have an account to account relationship or account to contact? And I found, and and I'm working through, I'm hoping that Salesforce has a solution for this, but some of the icons. So, you know, when you're looking at that relationship component right now in the org, which I'm hoping we can change, is uh you you see contact icons for the person accounts, even though you know our users are used to seeing that person account out icon when you're on the record layout. So I find it quite confusing for an end user. I'm pretty technical, so you know, I understand what's happening on the back end, but for a non-technical advisor or their staff, I think it's it's a little confusing to have the the contact and the person account and both icons show up depending on where you're at in the org.

SPEAKER_03 29:08

Yeah, that makes sense. Um, just to point out that person accounts isn't designed for FSC, right? It's designed for anything. So a lot of industries, and I would say most B2C industries don't really care about the household, right? I'm running an person account. I don't care whose cousin he is, right?

SPEAKER_01 29:28

So yeah, maybe what they should have done. Because I've always worked in financial services industry since I've been with sales in the Salesforce uh ecosystem. I I I guess wrongly assumed until now you've just educated me that person accounts were made for financial services. But yeah, that actually makes a lot of sense that that that was not the the primary.

SPEAKER_03 29:50

Yeah, I even think for a while they had something called like an individual account. Um yeah, I I'm not fully up to date on it, but I think FSE now you have to use it um on the new industries. FSE. I'm not 100% sure. Um I do want to touch on on the MA's. Um it's one of my it's one of my favorite things because obviously I'm a data guy, we do tons of data migrations. Um financial services, particularly wealth managers, buying other wealth managers is a big part of what we do. Um it seems like they have more acquisitions and Salesforce SIs, a lot more. Um, that just to speak to how many there are. So uh you actually have a person dedicated to it. Uh pretty cool. Um yeah, how how do how do those goes like the there are two approaches when I see that I see is let me just get my financial accounts, my peoples, my household, my relationships. Generally, there's no overlap in data because nobody the two wealth managers, they tend to have one. Um, and then yeah, you migrate that. And then there's the approach of I need everything, I need all my notes, I need all my history, I need my, you know, all of this. So, yeah, what are your guys' uh philosophy on this?

SPEAKER_01 31:01

Yeah, and and I'll kind of tell you what prior firms have done and then what Bacon Point does. And I and I was actually really relieved when I came in and and this was the expectation. So prior firms, they kind of let people bring everything, they were you know quick to add pick list values and customizations for these specific offices. And you've probably seen this, Maz. It it gets messy really fast. And uh and so Beacon Point, we've really set the expectation that we have a standard way of doing things, and if you're going to join Beacon Point, then you you will integrate into the beacon way of doing things. And so, you know, a rare exception here or there. And we do one of the interesting things that um I haven't seen done before, but maybe you've seen this, is we have a legacy object. So we we map everything that's kind of standard and expected into our standard model. And then if there is legacy data that they want to uh maintain and or not really maintain, but they want to see from within Salesforce, then we'll migrate that into this legacy object, which is a little bit of a catch-all, but it keeps all of that um randomness contained to this one table in Salesforce that's all accessed from uh in a consistent way, even though you know the the data itself uh varies. Um and it and so it makes the data a lot cleaner on the go forward basis, which um I I really appreciate it. I I think it's um a good approach. Now I'm not the one telling the advisors the the bad news, so I'm not sure how uh well this is received uh with new advisors, but you know, we did about 20 acquisitions last year, so it must not be scared away too many people.

SPEAKER_03 32:41

No, no, very common. Um sorry, Kira, one sec. Uh so what I do is I actually migrate into a rich text field and format it as opposed to a separate object. Um it works nice, looks great on the screen. Don't pay extra storage. Uh it's it's fine.

SPEAKER_02 32:58

I mean, I'm I'm learning so much from you both. So um I'm happy to be a fly on the wall for this conversation. Um so your experience in wealth management, you've seen three different organizations from enterprises that can be um all the way to small, still large, but but in in the traditional kind of corporate sense, let's say smaller than a uh Goldman Sachs type type of equivalent. I know one of the topics we talked about that you were really passionate and interested about was what does good agile methodology look like in the wealth management industry specifically? Do you want to start with maybe setting the scene in terms of the and you could pick any example of the three and and compare and contrast all three three businesses? But what was agile in place? Was it true agile? Was it was it a a Wagile hybrid approach? Was it nothing, right? Um, just kind of I uh uh the floor is yours uh on this topic for 15-20 minutes to kind of share what you would like to share from your your lessons and and and lessons learned.

SPEAKER_01 34:10

Sure. And I'll just put the disclaimer out that I'm not an agile expert, and I probably my you know understanding implementation is of agile is probably a little uh um has my own spin to it. But it's been interesting because yeah, I definitely, you know, agile um at Goldman we were doing agile and scrum, and then Ozaic was using the scaled scaled agile framework. Um, and then I came to Beacon Point, and they said they were working in sprints, but there were no start and end dates to their sprints. It was it was very uh loosey-goosey. And uh and so it's been interesting to see the different ways of working. And and I think one of the messages I want to get across is that you know, for those who say they're doing agile, I highly recommend going and reading the Agile manifesto because the very first line in the manifesto is individuals and interactions over process and tools. And it's just so fascinating to me that these organizations say they're doing agile and then they're so, so rigid about the process and the documentation, and it seems to just completely uh go against the the very uh manifesto that they claim to be uh using. So um that would be just kind of kind of my first takeaway. Um, and then one of the things that I think is uh could could be potentially beneficial to your listeners is that even if you're a really small organization, using some sort of framework or really, I think about it as like an organizational structure is really helpful. So you get to an enterprise level and it's really a necessity. Like you cannot run a team of 20, 30 developers without some sort of project management management, right? And uh but but then you you know you might be a solo admin or a team, a very small team, or you know, when I first got to Bacon Point, I had you know two internal employees and and two developers, and so fairly small team. Um, and like I said, they were they were operating very loosey-goosey and they were getting development done. But what I found is that a lot of work was making it into our staging environment, but never to production. And so they're they're just it it there wasn't a good tracking mechanism. And so when I think about agile and um and and scrum and and working on you know in its sprint cadence um and having some sort of tool. So I'm fairly tool agnostic, but you know, having some software to track the changes. I mean, you could build something out in Salesforce if you wanted. Um, I've used Jira, I've used um Azure DevOps, um, having some project management tool to be able to track the work that the team is doing. Again, even if you're a solo team, you know, being able to track what you're doing, and then you know, from an agile perspective, um making sure that you're actually talking to your end users and you are iterating quickly. So, one of the other things that I've seen time and time again with you know, people claiming to do agile, they're they're tracking changes in a way that look, you know, they're they're they're working sprints, they're um they're you know, maybe they're deploying frequently, but more often than not, I see kind of a waterfall approach that's just broken out into sprints. Um, and I don't know, Maz, if you've seen uh similar things in your career, but uh it's it's working quickly, failing quickly, iterating, getting things in front of end users. For me, that's one of the core um takeaways from the agile methodology is is just making sure you're not spending three, six, twelve months before you ever get something in front of the end user to look at.

SPEAKER_03 38:33

Yeah, so um so it's changing a lot recently. Um I'll let you know why in a second. Uh so a lot of people don't notice. I'm actually PMP certified. I've been since like 2008 when it was like the big thing. Um so one of the one of the the things in the Agile Man Manifesto, which I don't I never thought I would meet someone else who read it, by the way. So congratulations. I think you're the first person. You're the first person. Um is is uh and to keep in mind that this was written way back when, right? Uh late 90s, early 2000s, I'm not quite sure exactly when, is um code before documentation. Right. Um but now with AI, what's happening is no, it's documentation before code because you feed your documentation into the the scripting agent and then it generates the code. So you have to really have good documentation. Um and then going back to having your tools, like now if you're using Jira, right, you got to track work, otherwise, like I don't know how you don't know what got released when. The AI agents can now sometimes do the pull right at Jira, try to code it, check it in, um, and then someone can review it. But but it also it needs the documentation because that's really how you communicate uh with any kind of form of AI. It's it's via data, even unstructured. So it's becoming really, really, really important. Um, and that's changing and it's gonna continue uh to continue to change. With regard to waterfall versus agile, um so my background is much, much, much more on the SI uh implementation partner side, um, and where we have contracts, like actual contracts that say we got to deliver X. So it's never true Agile because of that, because we have like real contractual binding deliverables, right? Um, and if we're not gonna deliver on that or we're gonna change, it's not like you get into a meeting and you say, Yeah, let's do this instead, right? It's it's a significant you know legal contractual change. Um, so you can never do true agile, but they all claim to do it, and what they do mean is mini waterfall sprints working towards a goal, but they do have a full plan um of where you're gonna go. Um and and I would I would probably recommend that approach. It is my preferred approach. Um, there used to be there used to be a joke of agile projects don't fail, right? They just run out of money or time and then they stop, right? Yeah, so yeah.

SPEAKER_01 41:11

Yeah, and one of the things that I have found to help with that is to really I I I my last role was pure product management, and I thought I wanted to live in that space that I uh missed owning the resources that were actually doing the work. And so it's uh nice to be back in more of a hybrid role. And so one of the things that is really important to me in my work is really defining the business goals first versus the project goals and outcomes. And what I mean by that is what problem are we actually trying to solve? And and then we can figure out the you know technical implementation to solve that problem, but that that makes it a little bit more clear, I think, when you're going to do the work is you know, you can iterate on the implementation, but the as long as you still get to that that end goal, and and I have found that that that helps.

SPEAKER_02 42:06

I'm gonna ask you a couple of questions on those um identifying problems and turning that into metrics to track in a moment, but I did just want to add for our listeners, um, Maz, you got good, pretty memory, pretty good memory. The agile manifesto uh was created in 2001 by 17 software developers in Utah.

SPEAKER_03 42:29

So you read it too, Kiro?

SPEAKER_02 42:31

I didn't know I I used AI to find out the answer. Um it was introduced with four core values and 12 principles. So there you go. It is it is what's that quarter of a century old, 25 years, right? So um, no, it's 25 years old, whatever, whatever that is, right? A quarter of a century. It's a quarter century, Kira. It's it's it's getting on in the day. So um, so more importantly, coming back to um problems and metrics. So within wealth management specifically, obviously you've got to define success. People want to be in an agile, they want to work in an agile way. It still seemed as like the sexy way, fast for you know, fast, innovative, we're a cool company, blah, blah, blah. Uh, waterfalls almost kind of like, oh, they're so old school. Um, what metrics have you found like in these environments that you're tracking to determine successful in terms of cycle times and things like that? Like, for example, is it as simple as a reduction in time for account opening, for example, or were there any kind of constants between the three roles you've had that you've you've seen in each role when it comes to like actual end user impact that agile has helped to track or measure or record against?

SPEAKER_01 43:45

So as far as like business outcomes, I think that's very like project specific, but kind of as a framework, what is most important to me, and I think I've developed this passion over the last few companies I worked for, uh Is really are our end users happy? So you can track that with things like NPS score, but ultimately are you talking to your users? And I think this is where a lot of people get it wrong. And I'll be honest, in my first Salesforce role, I was not talking to as many end users as I should have been. But as I have learned and grown in my career, I've realized just how important that is. And it depends on the company. You know, sometimes you have a very large company and you'll have product people sitting between, you know, the people actually doing the Salesforce development and the business, and sometimes multiple layers. My last company was uh quite uh advanced at convoluting the process of getting you know feedback from the end users to the people actually who could do something about it. Um so but one of the things that I love is forming focus groups. So if if you are one of those people working in the ecosystem and you've never actually talked to an end user or um or you're not doing it often enough, I love forming focus groups and you can usually find people pretty easily who are willing to give feedback. Um, and you can go about that a few different ways. You can actually go into Salesforce and see who is using the system the most because those are probably the people that are most likely to give you feedback. Um, if you work in a firm that has relationship managers or people who are kind of talking to your end users on a regular basis, you can go ask them for recommendations. Hey, who who's a really, you know, who knows the system really well, and also who doesn't know the system well, because you kind of need both people, right? You don't want to build just to the super um savvy people, but you also want to build for the people who are not tech savvy, don't really know how to use the platform, because ultimately that that's the best outcome, right? If you can create a platform that is intuitive and easy to use, even for people who are not tech savvy, then I think you've you've really won. Um so end user satisfaction. And then it is I am very passionate about getting code to production quickly, and so um I don't measure this formally today, but after this conversation, maybe I will start doing that. Um from idea to getting it live, you know, how quickly are you doing that? Um now you don't want to push things too early. You want to make sure you have enough conversation about is this really the right thing that we're doing? But again, one of the things I found when I joined Beacon Point is that there's all of this configuration that that had just been sitting, I mean, sometimes a year, I got at um, I think it was two or three weeks in, I was chatting with um someone from the data team who manages our Tamarack integration. She's like, I just need this button in production. And I'm like, well, you got to get on the list. She's like, no, no, it's it's ready. I've tested it. It just needs to be pushed to production. She's been waiting for a year. I mean, that that again, like, if you're not tracking, if you don't have a solid project management system, and you can do this in you know, a Microsoft Word document if you need to, um, just some way to track what is in the pipe, what is complete, you know, some sort of statusing around uh the work that's being done, um, so that you don't get this messiness and really ultimately and user dissatisfaction because they asked for something and it took you a year to do something that should have taken a week or two.

SPEAKER_02 47:28

I feel like that is, you know, we were talking to it talking a little bit about uh weekend plans at the beginning. It's like all those like tickless things you've had around the house that you've been meaning to do for so long, change that light bulb in the garage or you know, repaint that kitchen cabinet that got scuffed by your electric Hoover. Um things like that, just like you know it's a quick job, but it's just like the mental capacity of getting it done. Um I think we we actually spoke to somebody who uh as a best practice every quarter, he has his dev team just work on pure small tickets like that, you know, just to get it into production and keep keep sales, those heavy sales environment and get keep the sales reps happy. Um just kind of set it as like a a fun, you know, kind of lunch in the office, you know, get a speak out, let's build, let's just have our devs build, no meetings, just let's get as many of these admin type stuff out of the way and and done. So anyway, um digress slightly. Uh focus group frequency, that's what I wanted to ask you about. How how often is like obviously it's a fine balance between overkill and letting letting letting the team stick to what they're doing and get stuff done. What have you found to be a good balance of cadence for how many focus groups with these different users? And uh, you know, what would you recommend?

SPEAKER_01 48:49

Sure. So I would say it it kind of depends on what project you're working on. Um, like once a month for 45 minutes to an hour, I find in normal circumstances to be pretty good. Um, if I've got something really big coming up and I need a lot of testing, then I might add some additional meetings. But during normal times, I would say one meeting, 45 minutes to an hour. 30 minutes just never seems to be long enough. So definitely recommend doing a longer stretch less frequently than um uh the latter, unless you're in a season of heavy testing. But that that that has worked well for me.

SPEAKER_02 49:29

And and have you found a secret to keeping business stakeholders like relationship managers, you know, the more technical um business-facing stakeholders engaged through these sprints?

SPEAKER_01 49:42

Two things that I have found to be very crucial in stakeholder management. So the first is transparency, and this is where something like Jira or ADO becomes really important. A lot of people are scared to give stakeholders access to those systems. In my very first role, people did not want stakeholders to have access. But as soon as I had the authority to give people access, I gave them access because one, I don't want people pinging me every day asking, hey, what's the status of this? I want to empower them to go look themselves. I want them to have dashboards where they can see, okay, here are my five requests. This one is in progress, this one is still pending, and this one is live without having to come to me. But then that transparency also helps people to be more patient, I have found. So when somebody has no idea where their request is in the life cycle, then they get really antsy. They typically are unhappy. But it I have found that even if you tell someone, I'm sorry, it's gonna be six months, if they know and they trust, so that's the other piece of it, is you can't tell them six months and then you get to the six months and you forgot to do it. Um but if you tell them six months and then you actually deliver it six months later, uh, then then that I have found is much better than not telling them at all. Um, and then the other one is is relationship building. So I know Kiro, you're really good at this as part of your uh your job, but but building the relationships. And you know, first thing I did when I got to Beacon Point was okay, who do I need to talk to? Who do I need to build relationships with? And I started doing that. And so again, it builds that trust. And so if I tell someone that, yeah, sorry, this is gonna take four weeks, or you know, this is really, really big, we can't even talk about this yet. Um, but then if there's something really little, I just go ahead and do it. You know, if if someone needs a pick list value and it's not gonna affect any automation, then we're just gonna do that and we're gonna get it out quickly. Um, and it's it's not gonna go to the bottom of the list, you know, below these strategic projects. Um and so balancing the transparency and the relationship building, uh, I really I mean, this it's something that I love doing, the the stakeholder management. And so maybe it comes easier to me than than other people, but but those two things uh will go a long way if you're uh managing stakeholders.

SPEAKER_02 52:08

Amazing. Um, so general thoughts on Agent Force and AI and Salesforce. Makes sense to talk about it from a wealth management perspective, um, give given background, but also in your current environment. What what are what are your takeaways?

SPEAKER_01 52:25

Yeah, so we are planning to implement Agent Force this year, probably around that like case management entry point. I did do a POC at Ozaic about a year ago now that I will say did not go particularly well. Um at least for us, it was not as plug and play as Salesforce made it sound at Dreamforce, which you know, probably no surprise to uh anyone here, but um, especially if you're working in an enterprise org where there's a lot of security and you need to um build things in a certain way. Um, I I think you know, for some people that maybe are not in as uh um highly regulated industries, maybe there's a little more um or a little less concern around security, but you know, our orgs have pretty uh large levels of privacy data. And so we're it's always gonna be a little slower to do anything. Um, and making sure that any data that is going into a um AI engine is secure and protected, we're not you know sending data off to Salesforce or any other vendor is always a concern. So I would say it it took longer to implement even a very small use case. Um, but I think once you kind of have that foundational layer done, then any additional work is probably I I didn't say long enough to uh find out what that next uh phase would have looked like. Um but it to be fair, it was it was not a great AI use case. We we had gotten some funding from Salesforce uh to do a POC and we're working on a very tight timeline. So we we didn't necessarily pick the best use case, but I'm excited to try it again. Um I the the two places that I see a lot of value in AI is around knowledge retrieval. So, you know, people probably use Chat GPT, Gemini a lot for this. You know, you ask a question, it searches very, very large volumes of data and it returns an answer. That type of functionality in Salesforce, especially in financial services, you know, give me a summary of my client or tell me all the open cases for this client, things like that. Uh, I think will be really valuable once we implement. We are going to do a hybrid of Salesforce AI and some other AI engines. Uh and then the other one is around actually submitting the case. So this is the one I'm probably most excited about. I just had a conversation with some folks at my firm today about this, um, where you know, rather than click, click, click through several menus in a case creation workflow, you tell the bot, hey, I need to open a case for this client. And then the bot, you know, you kind of have this conversation around what you need to be able to submit that case. You upload what you need to upload, and then that case is generated for you rather than having to kind of follow the prompts in the UI. So those are those are the two places where I think AI is pretty solid already. I think over time it will get more powerful, but some of the more advanced use cases, I think, still have uh some problems. And I but uh yeah, curious your guys' thoughts, uh, how you're using AI and where you think it's going.

SPEAKER_02 55:45

This podcast is all about you, Christy. So um I mean, I mean, look, I think with Agent 4 specifically, uh the most common use cases have been you know case management, bot support, you know, kind of kind of functionality. We um we have a podcast coming out in the next couple of days, gonna talk a bit more about that. So we won't talk too much uh for for now, but um and um you know I think I think yes uh 12-18 months ago probably was a bit premature, uh, but we are hearing and having more guests on the podcast that I talked about, you know, Agent Force successfully deployed in in the workspace and in in live environments, um, and some some wins there. Um I guess in terms of Agent Force use cases, you talk a little bit more about AI in general, right? And and some of the case management stuff and and your experience at Ozark and how that leans into this. Um you're right, the most common scenario we're seeing is from a service perspective, the idea of reducing physical agents with um, you know, agent force agents. I'm curious, and we're curious, is there any other potential like ideas around Agent Force that you might have or think would be good use cases for Agent Force specifically in wealth management?

SPEAKER_01 57:03

So, one other interesting idea that we were kind of talking about at Ozaic um but never uh got to implement, I'm sure they will eventually will, but uh we we called it the magic the magic button. So advisors typically spend a lot of time prepping for a client meeting. And so if they could just click a button and get all of their meeting notes, all of the relevant information for a client, um, just think of how much time, you know, typically an hour of time prepping for a meeting. It could be more, it could be a little less. Um, but if but with a click of a button, all of that work was done for them, I think that's a pretty powerful use case. And you know, if an advisor has a hundred clients, then that that time savings adds up pretty quickly.

SPEAKER_03 57:46

Yeah, it's like a tier sheet type thing.

SPEAKER_02 57:51

Well, when you have that, let us know because I think uh I would add that I'd be an interested customer. Um so um what's next? Uh we talked a little about Agent Force, AI, uh a little bit more there. Um, anything else in terms of your team and becomes point and any other projects non-related to AI and Agent Force that you've got on the list for this year?

SPEAKER_01 58:15

So I would say some of our top roadmap items, we're doing a Slack integration, which I'm pretty excited about. Um, I use Slack back at United Capital pre-Goldman days and loved it, miss it, miss being able to thread conversations. You can't do that in Teams. Um so excited about that. Um, we're doing a lot of integrations right now, Schwab, Fidelity, um, wove. So I think it's gonna be exciting to see all of the data that we can surface within Salesforce so that advisors don't have to go to all these platforms. It's it's a pretty common complaint in the uh wealth management space that advisors have too many tools. You know, they want they want one place to go to do all of their work and to service their clients. And so the more that we can surface within Salesforce and then just send out via API uh to our vendor partners, the happier I think our advisors ultimately will be.

SPEAKER_02 59:09

Yeah, for sure. And um yes, Maz, we're gonna ask about Dreamforce. Um, even though we are several months away. Uh, is it on the cards for you this year? If some of our listeners who aren't in Dallas, you know, maybe they might be able to see you in in person and say hello. Will you be there this year or or no?

SPEAKER_01 59:26

I hope so. I I need to talk to my boss to see if uh Vegan Point will pay for it. But I believe he and one of my other colleagues won last year. So uh we'll we'll say I'm hopeful.

SPEAKER_02 59:36

Yeah, uh we know tickets aren't out yet, but we're just excited. And and obviously that's where we I I think the first time we put proper faces to names, obviously we were talking prior to that, but uh a couple of years ago at the airport on the way home, I I think if my memory serves correct. So um we'll just with that like to say thank you for being involved in in today's uh episode of the CRM Success Show. We really appreciate your time and I really enjoyed learning a bit more about your your journey into Salesforce and you know the the the focus um on the wealth management space. Last last question was that was that always was that an intentional decision to to go into wealth management? Was that an area that just interested you or was it just pure coincidence? You got one role and that was a snowball effect to stay in?

SPEAKER_01 1:00:17

Yeah, it was it was a happy accident, I'll say. I was interested in personal finance from a young age. I read the book Rich Dad Poor Dad when I was 12 years old, and uh many, many more books uh since then. So I I've always had a passion for personal finance. And so when I landed the role at Goldman, I thought, oh, this could not have been more perfect for me, you know, marrying the tech that I wanted to do and the personal finance. Um, so yeah, happy accident, but uh now that I'm here, I have found that people in the financial services industry with Salesforce specifically typically look for people who have that experience. And so now I feel like it's a a niche that I I won't ever be able to leave, which is okay.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:59

You play it, play it to your advantage. Uh again, thank you. And for our listeners, please do not forget to subscribe to the CRM Success Show for more episodes featuring phenomenal leaders like Christy Grove. Thanks all.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:10

Thanks so much for having me.