SPEAKER_00 0:02

Welcome. You are listening at CRFX.gov, where you will hear from CRM executives who have oversee some of the most interesting and complex CRM implementations. Your hosts, David Mosfree and Carol White, 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_02 0:28

Welcome to the CRM Success Show. Today we're talking with Paul Cobb, CRM executive at Greco. Welcome, Paul.

SPEAKER_03 0:35

Thank you for having me. Glad to be here.

SPEAKER_01 0:37

Great to have you join us today, Paul. So for those that don't know who Paul Cobes is, how did you originally find your way into the CRM Salesforce ecosystem?

SPEAKER_03 0:47

Yeah, I kind of fell into this into the system accidentally. I grew up doing some medical device sales. That's where I started my career and selling medical devices out of the back of the car essentially. But I was an organized guy. I was organized and I didn't know that that was really a marketable skill at the time. Talking with some colleagues and friends at the time, they said, hey, Paul, we need someone organized that can help us with some software projects over here. So I started getting into project management, software delivery with some software companies, and it came very naturally to me. And so I really leaned into this idea of being organized and marketable skill. And one of the projects I ended up leading was a CRM project, and I fell in love with it. It's just kind of the perfect matrix of people, process, technology, data all in one. And so I've been in the area ever since.

SPEAKER_01 1:35

Love it. And we're talking what, 10, 15 years later, present day? Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:40

Yeah. Yeah. I did the medical device sales for a couple of years. Then I did IT project management for about five years. And then so yeah, been in the Salesforce CRM space for about 15. Perfect.

SPEAKER_01 1:50

Love it. So if you look across your career, is there a single turning point that shaped how you approach Salesforce today?

SPEAKER_03 1:58

Yeah. So that project that I mentioned where I had the fortunate ability to run an enterprise-wide CRM project. I was with a company called Probation Medical. And we had gone through a growth spurt, right? And they just hired a lot of project managers to deploy all the software that was getting sold. It was hard to get onboarded, right? Because you go here for that, and you go this over here for another system. And there was just a lot of different tools that were needed in order to get the job done. And I remember having conversations earlier on with my manager and my director, and say, this is it's kind of hard to scale. And so after a couple of conversations, it was like, Congratulations, Paul. We're deploying a CRM and we want you to lead the project for us. And I was like, Great, what's a CRM? I barely even knew what one was. We actually got started in Sales Logics at the time. I think it was acquired by Sage for a little bit, and now it's part of Infor. And so I learned in kind of the, you know, a little bit more old school format what the CRM was, and then it slowly got into Salesforce and some of the other systems. But that project was the awakening for me into CRM, starting all the way at the beginning from marketing automation and integration with those types of systems through sales, service, finance. We had integrations on the back end to our back office systems as well. I just learned the whole system. So it was a ton of fun. And the transitional moment in that project was that we went from a project to being live then as well, right? So going through the mechanics and shift from what was a project CRM to looking like to how to how to operate one.

SPEAKER_01 3:34

So across that 12, 13 year journey, typically CRM speaking, you've gone from medical to enterprise 3M. You were there during a billion dollar acquisition, Cargo, we're going to speak about later on, even OG, we're going to talk about a little bit to Graco present day. So for those don't know Graco, not to be confused as you shared with Geico or Baby Graco, what do Graco do? What do they sell? How do they use Salesforce? Where does that fit into their broader tech tech stack operating model?

SPEAKER_03 4:07

Yeah, so Graco designs and builds, pumps, sprays, measuring, anything that moves, fluids that matters is kind of the slogan of the company. So the main one that you can think of is like paint and paint sprayers. So I don't know the exact number, but a lot of the cars, right, that come off the manufacturing line are spray painted with a Geco piece of equipment. You can also go to your local Home Depot or Lowe's or Sherwin Williams or something like that, and you could buy a Graco paint sprayer. Graco's been in the Minneapolis area for over 100 years now. The way the story goes is that they started the two brothers that started the company, they ran a parking garage in downtown Minneapolis. And in the winter time, when people would pull into the garage, you would get your wheels greased. And the guys could never get the grease guns to work on the cold winter days where it was, you know, a beautiful negative 20, 30 degrees. And they ended up breaking his finger one time. And it was that point where he just said, Hey, there's got to be a better way to do some of this stuff. So they put their two heads together. One of them was an inventor, one of them was more kind of operations-based, and they started designing and selling equipment. I've been there for a little over three months now, and we have three instances of Salesforce. We have one main one and then two by way of acquisition. So we're working through our org strategy right now and what that should be, not only just for those two instances, but for how our mergers and acquisitions might what our strategy should be for that in the future. We've got about a thousand users. We're kind of, you know, we're using the core functionalities, marketing, sales, service, and there's a lot of room for us to develop some maturity, right? So there are pockets that are doing some pipeline management, some opportunity forecasting, things like that. On the service side, there's a lot of great usage, but we're just finalizing our email the case and getting those types of things into the system. And then on the marketing side, too, lots of activity there, lots of active campaigns, and we're working to develop the maturity there so that we can have actionable metrics and know exactly how many leads we're converting and bringing into the funnel.

SPEAKER_01 6:13

In terms of marketing, and again, just for a little bit more context for listeners, a bit of research prior to billion dollar revenue organization, 4,000 plus employees, global company on the New York Stock Exchange, a beast of a company, it's better to say your enterprise, right? So on the marketing side, who's like a typical customer, would it be those guys on a pool who want to spray paint our fence, or is this more like B2B businesses that Greyco tried to sell to?

SPEAKER_03 6:42

Yeah, good question. I mean, mostly B2B, a lot of distributor networks, right, that we run through. So partnering with Home Depots and the Sherwin Millions and the big store vendors like that, but then also the local paint companies and things like that, and that might be out there. So there is some B2C component, but it's on the smaller side. Okay, got it.

SPEAKER_01 7:01

So when Graco brought you in, I guess was there a significant problem or specific opportunity that you uh hired to address?

SPEAKER_03 7:09

I think the specific opportunity is probably like help us figure this thing out. It's pretty open-ended. Greco had recently gone through a major re-org or 12 divisions previously. And they consolidated those down to three. So industrial, contractor, and expansion markets. And expansion markets is essentially the mergers and acquisitions type realm of the company. So contractor and industrial. And industrial is the one that I mentioned, like when a car rolls off of the line, you know, there would be a paint sprayer there, contractor would be those painting companies, right, that are out there painting all the buildings or painting the lines on the highways. So the question was really like help us to do this, right? Where we previously were in an organization where all of these divisions, all these groups, had a group sales marketing leader that was running each one of their businesses and had systems and responsible and flexible enough to do the job just for that one particular area. Now we want to do them across these much larger teams. So we're gonna need some architectural design elements right here to be able to maybe undo some of the design and some of the permission sets and page layouts and all those basic fundamental stuffs that's there, but then also to accelerate some of these things, right? Being able to show that we are actively working a pipeline and forecasting revenue, that we are measuring, you know, case time, resolution times, case to close, and all of those types of things. We were doing that, you know, from my understanding previously, a little bit, but only in certain pockets. And so the goal is to do that on a one Graco or on an enterprise scale.

SPEAKER_01 8:41

So obviously you've done this a few times now. So when you inherit a Salesforce environment like the one you inherited at Graco, what are the first couple of things that you do, investigate, audit before deciding what you should change or who you should change, or you know, basically that assessment walk us through kind of what your approach is in that first 14, 30 day, 45-day period of time?

SPEAKER_03 9:07

Yeah, I think the easy part is to do a technical analysis, right? And to log into the system and run org check or whatever tool of the day that you would like to kind of get an assessment of what's going on out there. I think the more important thing is to learn how the organization is making decisions and how are we coming together to understand what those decisions are and at what different levels are those decisions being made. There's a backlog and there's a process to get work into the queue, and we need to learn who's gonna be deciding, who are the champions, who's our detractors on every decision that's there. So at Draco, I walked in thinking that actually a lot of this was gonna have to be constructed. There was some hard workers on the team and some good support to get some structure that was there already, which is essentially kind of what we call our Salesforce Council. So that's a group of our leadership, you know, kind of director and VP level decision makers, so that we can collectively see the backlog together and understand who's making decisions against what. More recently, within the last month, we also established our executive level committee so that we have two layers of buy-in and responsibility to check each other and make sure that we're on the right path, but that we also have buy-in and support for what it is that we're trying to do. I think that that's it's a much longer and it's a much more nuanced type of evaluation that you need to do once you're once you're in a new company. But I think that that's really the key then to be able to execute on the changes that might be needed is learning how the organization makes decisions.

SPEAKER_02 10:40

Yeah, it's it's so nice to have such a standard, classic, perfect CRM use case, right? Like sales marketing, forecasting service. Yeah, it's it's really, really a core, a core solid use case. Sometimes you forget it exists in the CRM world when you get pulled into all of these different oddball and weird scenarios. Yeah, believe it not, I actually started, I started I started in in the CRM space in 2008 in Sales Logics. Yeah. So yeah, which the time frame lines up, I think pretty close to Juka. That's when shortly after they started having dissenter getting killed by by by Salesforce in the market. I didn't know what CRM was when I started at that company. So uh I think at your previous company, Craigill, Cargill, how's it pronounced?

SPEAKER_03 11:27

Yep, correct.

SPEAKER_02 11:28

Right, you really also started there from scratch building a team. Uh so tell us briefly what Cargill does, and then and then yeah, how you go about that? Do you start being hands-on yourself, then choose your lead, let's say, or did that just grow organically, or did you like say, no, we need a team and you put together your ideal team or your A-team?

SPEAKER_03 11:51

Yeah. Yeah, so Cargill is a Minnesota-based company that not many people outside of the Minneapolis metro area have heard of, but it's always one of the largest privately held companies in the country and essentially is responsible for the world's food supply. I think in orientation, the numbers of 85% of the world's food supply is either touched or manufactured or has some type of cargo ingredient or additive to it. So major player, 160,000 employees, I think about 160 billion dollars right now as well. Huge, huge company. So my role there, yeah, when I was hired there, there was a lot of Salesforce and CRM activity, and it was completely led by vendor partners. So Cargill had a lot of relationships with you know, the Accentures, the Cogus, and so on. And there was about 100 people in the space across all of the different business units and groups that were doing this work. So my role there was to kind of help make sense of it, right? Figure out, you know, everything that's going on here. And recently the IT part of Cardiel had been brought together, right? Similar story to Graco, where all of the individual business unit groups had their own IT and their own leadership. At Cardillo, it was the same thing, except earlier, all of those teams had been brought together. And then the question I was tasked with was, or the feedback that I kept hearing was we want to be able to go faster and we want to have visibility into the dollars that we're spending here. The contractors that were there, the vendor partners, they were doing great work, right? They were delivering, and there was just a level of strategy at cargo that was missing. So we put together, I worked with management and leadership at the time, and we put together a talent strategy to say, well, if we want to have visibility into the spend here and know what it is that we're investing in, we want to build a Graco team and we want to selectively build thought leadership of it and bring that in-house first. We're gonna continue to have vendor partners to be in the space for expertise on certain products and features within the Salesforce environment, but then also to add to our volume and our output when we needed to. So we set out to solve those those two problems. And Cardill, being a huge global company, had a we had a global footprint already. So we opened up markets, we opened up some roles in the in India and the Bangalore area. We also opened up some roles in Costa Rica and San Jose and across the United States as well, mostly within the within Minneapolis area, but but also other other places. And we started hiring. So we started with our with you know, like I mentioned, the the thought leadership. So product managers, technical architects, and our tech leads. That's kind of that's where where we started. And we built a team from there. So um, you know, over the years, we had, I think our count in Bangalore was up to about 17 or 18. We had about six or so people in Costa Rica, and then we had about eight to 10 through North America, and then the balance of that was still vendor partner. So we still had 40, 50, 60 vendor partners in the spaces as well. So that was the journey that we were on to build the global team.

SPEAKER_02 15:10

So the ultimate goal you're saying was to go faster. When you're saying go faster, you're talking in terms of tech rollout faster, I mean faster on execution of the business strategy into the tech, or are you talking about no, we need to close deals faster, we need to hit the market faster? Because originally I was thinking the latter, right? When you say you want to go close faster, you're thinking your time to close was too long, your deal cycle is too long, you want to speed that up. But then it sounds like the talent strategy, you were really talking about we have too many ideas, too many things we want to do, and you don't have the right team.

SPEAKER_03 15:50

Yeah, so it was the former, which ended up translating onto the business side of being able to close deals faster and whatnot. But yes, the context that I was saying that is what was kind of more IT focused, right? Yeah, we wanted to be able to go faster. We wanted to be able to, you know, look at inbound ideas or initiatives or projects and be able to understand and vet them through architecture, through integration, through security more quickly.

SPEAKER_02 16:16

Yeah, so how did you go about doing that? So let's start with okay, you have a couple of vendor partners. How did you guys pivot from okay, we're not going fast enough? Let's how we're going to accelerate the speed of that, if you don't mind sharing what the strategy there was, that would be awesome. How much of that was partner led? Because sometimes partners do kind of management consulting too, or you know, maybe not formally, but definitely in a more collaborative way, more from the tech side, and then carrying that over to you know 20 to 30 people to execute on as well.

SPEAKER_03 16:50

So what we started with starting with the product manager and technical architect, right, having those roles in-house to be able to deeply understand the business and the objectives that we're trying to achieve, and then being able to talk about and to position those needs within the machine of Cargo IT. So, for example, right, like one of the one, one of the scenarios that's coming to mind for me at Cargo was we had this one specific business group that had an instance of Salesforce that they were on that had been relatively stable but had been built on year after year with a vendor partner, which executed and did what it was needed to do, but in a way that didn't have much more than a two to three month type of strategy. So there was a lot of those bolts in the Frankenstein type of machine that we see in those instances. So by going faster, part of that story is having a product manager and a technical architect right there in business to be able to help translate the understanding of like, okay, well, we actually one of the options that we want to consider here is standing up a new org. Rather than trying to decommission and eliminate all the tech debt that we need to do here, this particular business group has a lot of new responsibility and hey, they've brought business groups together. So we want to stand up a new org. So, in the old sense, right, in the old environment, like getting a new org and getting alignment and strategies and approvals for all of that thing probably would have taken quite some time. In this scenario, I don't remember exactly, but it was shorter. It was, you know, on the order of weeks rather than months. So being able to execute and understand what the strategies are, business outcomes that we're going to, and then be able to bring in a team behind that of you know 20 people or whatever the number might be to then design a new org and bring things over and migrate as a as the case may be. That's an example of how we we made things faster.

SPEAKER_02 18:42

I mean like we can do a whole show on Jeff's decision of fix an org versus a new org? I think we did have one, right? Kiro, we had one episode like that. Yeah. So you guys decided to start from scratch. We're gonna dump this, we're gonna rebuild. But from the business strategy side, was that driven based on tech debt in the old org that this org is too hard and inflexible because of the tech debt? So we want to start new, or was it our go-to-market strategy is so different, it pays to start over. You had to give us a bit about that decision, right? To start over.

SPEAKER_03 19:19

Yeah, I mean, it was a little bit of both, right? I mean, it was largely a subjective conversation, right? We had some metrics to look at and some data to provide us into the season. But if I remember right, you know, the thing that came to the front of the mind was speed and speed to delivering, getting the tool into the hands of the sellers and the service. And so there was a window of opportunity, right? Where the executives and leadership within that particular business group were bought in and they wanted to go, and they knew that CRM and Salesforce in particular was the solution of choice, and they had metrics and business object goals that they needed to deliver on. So looking at that and being able to say, okay, well, we need a pipeline, you know, forecast, you know, tool for these people, or we need customer service. And in some of these areas where they maybe they didn't already have the old tool, so to speak. So we could say, okay, well, let's we can get a new tool up more quickly and build it in the right framework so that it can be you know reverse scalable back to all these other areas that are using the older tool. So that was one, if and if I'm remembering right, kind of the longer piece of information was like, hey, we have a narrow time window here to be able to get this tool into the hands of the sellers and service people.

SPEAKER_02 20:32

So I have to ask, often when you have a new team taking over a legacies team code, and in this case was code developed by the partner, you're bringing it in-house with literally a brand new team, but then people don't even know each other, they'll say it's easier to build from scratch than to learn and understand the legacy code base. And that's almost a driver more so than the quality or the tech debt, let's say, in the legacy, in the legacy org, it also gives them a feeling of ownership, I guess. They now own it, right? As opposed to it being owned really by the by the the vendors. You think there was any of that going on?

SPEAKER_03 21:12

A hundred percent, a hundred percent. There was there was some of that there. I mean, it's it's it's muddy, right? And and totally agree. Like, you know, if I I can't say that if I if the roles were reversed and I was in that position, like I wouldn't want to, you know, just start from fresh, right? And be able to kind of control it and and whatnot a little bit more. But absolutely, there's some of that. And I think that it's a little bit of an art and science together in making some of those decisions. And I think coming back to that window of opportunity and the funding that was available to us at that moment that seemed like seemed like the right way to go. For what it's worth, it was right when I left that that new instance that was created had a lot of great success, a lot of great adoption. Though their orbs was still there and hadn't been migrated or retired yet, but it was kind of localized to some niche areas where they had some really highly customized. Areas within a couple of specific groups, and there was no further development there. So it was successful in the end.

SPEAKER_02 22:07

So you built a new team. Tell us about some of those challenges, right? Two parts. One is I'm getting 30 people. How long did it take you to hire this team?

SPEAKER_03 22:16

About two years.

SPEAKER_02 22:18

Oh, so it was spread over. So it wasn't, it wasn't horrible. How long to launch? To basically view off the legacy system.

SPEAKER_03 22:24

Well, that specific example, we never got off of it. It was still there, that legacy system.

SPEAKER_02 22:29

It was still there when you left the firm, or it's still there today.

SPEAKER_03 22:33

When I left Cargill, it was still there. I'd be willing to bet a dollar that it's probably still still there today.

SPEAKER_02 22:38

Would you call this the successful project?

SPEAKER_03 22:40

Well, yes, because it was still very isolated, right? I mean, there was one group in if I'm remembering right in India, right? There was there was there was that group, and then there was one other group that was still using it. And no net new projects or anything were going on there. It was a lot of maintenance. And then as those other groups wanted to do things, it was like, okay, yes, but you have to come over to the new work. So on the cardgill timeline, it was a success.

SPEAKER_02 23:04

Yeah, so I guess it was kind of like a rolling off user base. Okay, cool. So I know we want I know we want to get on to some other topics, but one more question on this topic.

SPEAKER_03 23:18

I think that what I would have done different in this specific example would be to have tighter alignment across our decision-making groups and how how we decide. Like taking a little bit of time to group together and say that this is how we're gonna make the decision. And these are the different factors that we want to weigh in, and these are the different people that we that we want to weigh in. Because it became very subjective, like I mentioned, right? And opinion was kind of Cardigan's a very relationship heavy, you know, organization. And whoever had been there the longest and was trusted the most in terms of guidance and whatnot, they had a very, very loud voice. So at times it can be very relationship influenced, some of those decisions. So that's where I would have maybe taken a little bit of time and saying, hey, because we didn't have an org strategy right at that point. It was really just kind of let's look at some of this information and some of the whys and to do this and make a decision rather than kind of having a guiding framework, which we later developed.

SPEAKER_01 24:18

How did you find the shift? I'm always curious through the pandemic years, the crazy years, the shift between, again, this type of industry, Minnesota as well. You just mentioned the people, very people relationship heavy business. I would assume I might be wrong. I could be wrong, but were you based on site at the time and you had to build this team locally? At what point did you make the decision to expand regional as well?

SPEAKER_03 24:42

Yeah, the presence that we had in Minneapolis was pretty light, actually. There was a core group of people that were in Minneapolis, and we decided to expand globally in India and Costa Rica to some cost saving options. And that's where a lot of our development was taking place in those regions. So during the COVID and pandemic years, our team was very global in nature to begin with. So starting the day at 7 a.m., we had that overlap out of other regions and being on Zoom calls very early in the morning central time was a natural part of the day. There was some ability to kind of co-locate some teams together. But we started building the team and we built an identity around the team so that they understood who they were. In a heavily matrixed environment like Cargill, we tried to build a Salesforce team that could serve each of our business groups that we were matrixed into and partnered intensively with day in and day out. But then also as Cargill. And how could we start to solve some of these problems as a larger Cargill? And how could we share some of these efforts rather than repeating them all individually? How could we share some of those efforts? So it was, you know, the pandemic years were tough and it was a lot of business as usual for us, right? Because we already had a lot of those mechanics and that infrastructure in place because we were a global team already.

SPEAKER_01 26:04

It definitely helped, I think, when you got the foundations uh, but was there a particular skill set in particular that you struggled more so to hire? You know, did you keep it core admins, BA's developers, or did you expand beyond that into architect, product donors, DevOps, QA, integration developer specialists? What was the hardest skill set to find?

SPEAKER_03 26:24

It was probably more by region. Like Bangalore and India just had this huge, huge market, right? And so we had lots of activity and lots of interest there. Maybe, you know, the technical architect kind of level was maybe a little bit more challenging to find just because at that point it had been kind of an evolving, you know, role. Bangalore was great and so much great talent that was over there. Costa Rica was a little bit more challenging, smaller talent, you know, population, obviously, but then growing skill set and being able to work with North America and US-based companies in that way. We wanted to do more in some of the Latin America areas, sort of for cost savings, but also time zone overlap. But we started with the core Salesforce engineer configuration type roles, and we went from there. To your point, we got to you know DevOps and we had you know QA and some automation engineers and things like that that by the end of building the team, we had most of those roles covered.

SPEAKER_01 27:21

Yeah, it'd be interesting if you were to go through the exercise again, you know, four or five years on. We've definitely seen the evolution of the infrastructure and the number of options available in that is having its way. All right, well, we're gonna move the topic to still at Cargill, but the idea of community of practice is not something we've necessarily heard too often. We're more used to the center of excellence direct phrase. So tell us a little bit about what community of practice looked like for you and you know, not only practical terms, but like how do you distinguish from a traditional center of excellence as well?

SPEAKER_03 27:55

So, in practical terms, like what this looked like is we had our, as I mentioned, kind of global IT team, right? So there was 25, 30 Cargill resources on my team. We were matrixed into those business units that I mentioned. So four or five of my team members would be matrixed into our food group, and you know, another four and five would be matrixed into the protein group. And each of those groups had probably one primary instance of Salesforce, but there was probably a couple of other legacy ones in there as well. And so what we found ourselves in in just this you know easy example is that there's multiple things that each one of those instances is going to need. Salesforce, the you know, the quarterly updates or seasonal updates being one. Rather than doing this, you know, for each instance, each group of stakeholders, what we would do is we had a community of practice that we would form that would come together, and we would, you know, we'd have a couple people that would volunteer to go through all of the release notes and then to summarize the implications to these different instances and then to cargo as a whole. So rather than doing it and you know, piecemeal and doing it by org, we were able to do it a little bit more holistic. So when I say community of practice, it just means kind of just that, I guess, right? It's like it's just the community coming together to be able to solve a problem. There's no kind of center of X, there's no like excellence, you know, that we're going after in terms of best practices on Salesforce updates and whatnot. I feel like those are a part of that community, right? That community is going to develop those updates and how to bring them through a regression test, and all of those other things are going to be a part of that community. So that was kind of our approach to it, is that as these commonalities started to develop when we were building and bringing the team together, we said, okay, let's build a community of practice around that. Another example would be change management. So rather than, you know, kind of going off and doing sprint releases without any form of audit control or change management, we would come together and say, okay, how do we want to minimally track what it is that we're doing for audit sake so that we know what we're doing across the systems and can form other teams and have that official book of records, but not slow down our DevOps and our teams that are trying to deploy and deliver the code. So there was a couple other examples, I think, of some communities that we brought together. Some of them lived on, you know, for forever, but then others had, you know, kind of shorter purpose. So once we had the change management, once we had that process up and running, that community kind of dissolved.

SPEAKER_01 30:24

I mean, I think it's very successful to honor a few to call it a community versus a center of excellence, right? I like the idea of everybody rowing in the same direction. I'm curious, did you really have volunteers or you had to like, you know, when you say someone volunteered, all right, Dave, I'm picking you for to take that exercise. Was it what people grow into this idea, or did you have to do a little bit of persuading as well?

SPEAKER_03 30:46

A little bit of both. I think at, you know, there were people, you know, maybe kind of some of the more seasoned, more veteran, you know, team members that were like, oh yeah, I I did I've done this before in my old role. And then so I'll go ahead and do it. And then as we grow, you know, go down the line, then we would get to some of our less seasoned people and we'd say, Hey, it's it's now's your time, right? So they would get on a Zoom call or a Teams call and they would present to 100-150 people or something. So it was it was a skill development tool that we used along the way.

SPEAKER_01 31:13

Yeah. So I guess you obviously established in this community of practice for a purpose. Did you feel it helped with maybe governance, knowledge sharing, architecture, avoiding duplication of work? Like you said, you get delegated one person to do the release notes. That saves 10 people, you know, having to look at the release notes, and then that one person would communicate all right, these are the main release updates that we need to be aware of, right? So I could see that of almost answering my own question. Duplication of work is definitely a benefit. But any other reason you either set it up or the benefits that you found? Somewhat.

SPEAKER_03 31:46

I mean, I think in hindsight, they worked in developing a framework, right? So another one, for example, was like integrations. Some of our orgs and instances were heavily integrated. They had, you know, 15, 20, 30 integrations to SAP and data lakes and all that stuff, where others did not have any. So we had an integrations group which would kind of say, come together and say, hey, this is our best practices, this is how we're gonna do this is our lessons learned, and this is how we would recommend doing it. So that was a value that was an output, but the gap maybe was still back to the business outcomes, right? And mapping it all the way back to the deliverables that were going to have the metrics that matter. That was just kind of a missing part, and something that Cardill struggled with as a whole was right, like how do we have this one Cardill? How do we look at Salesforce as a whole for you know 15,000 users? But then also how do we be accountable and deliver to the specific, you know, instance over here with 1,000 users. So it was a hard thing for us to balance, but I think it helped to develop the framework and at least the ability to make some of those decisions, whether or not that was applicable to that particular business group or not.

SPEAKER_01 32:56

Now, the bigger the business, more teams, more people, you know, the bigger the disconnection can sometimes be, right? You've got these own, well, this is our instance, this is our or creating that unification is really important. So if there's a Celsius leader listening to this topic in particular right now, maybe they've got disconnected teams, like you said, maybe they inherit a team with people who have felt like they know it all, they've done it all, they've seen it all. What would be your advice? The first step to go and establish a community of practice?

SPEAKER_03 33:26

To first step would be relationship building and building trust and an understanding of the objective of why we're here is to understand, to share the tribal knowledge, to figure out what it is that how we can move faster, what it is that that's a part of that. So, yeah, I mean, previously there in at Draco, for example, I there was before I started, there was one person in the system that retired just before I left, and she was very integral in terms of delivering and helping the business to get what they needed on the service side. And it was a closed circuit communication, right? So someone went to that person and then something back was delivered. So what we need is we need transparency and trust in building that relationship to say, just because there's gonna be other people in this communication thread, or just because IT is gonna be here doesn't mean that it's gonna slow down. In fact, we want the opposite, right? We want to be able to help move things faster. But building that trust and relationships is key because that's how they've existed for so long. With whatever tools and relationships that are in place, that's worked for them. And when there's a threat to that, it's important to address that.

SPEAKER_02 34:34

I really like this idea of a community of practice being different than the center of excellence. And a lot of the particularly the mid-sized ones, where you have the large enough group of developers or admins or BAs that once a month at least, or bi-weekly, just to do this kind of hey, what are you working on? What are you developing that's cool? Demos, it really becomes a great team-building thing, getting people to collaborate, ask for help, know each other when they're not necessarily working together on the day-to-day because they're you know working on different projects, right? Describing it as a community, I think makes it very friendly, almost like a club. Really, really a great idea. And I like putting a name to it because we just called it, you know, bi-weekly team meeting or something like that.

SPEAKER_01 35:22

I think you see when you see that in your account, you think, oh, God's sake, like how's your council? Yeah, I like the accountability piece, right? Of it, if we are a part of this journey, we are a community and we all have a role in this community, right? Sorry, Paul, you get you go ahead.

SPEAKER_03 35:37

Yeah, no, I mean I was just gonna add it, it's it kind of you empower the the community to to have an identity and then to be able to self-enable around that, right? We got the team together and we said, hey, what are the top five priorities that we aren't addressing in these individual teams? And they kind of self-organize around those things, and then you start to build the network, right? You have the different rings of the network and you start to learn how people interact and when do they come in for expertise and how do you interact with adjacent teams and be able to help enable side projects and work that other portfolios are doing as well. So it was one of the main purposes was building identity and a company and as large as Cargill, and to your point here around some of the COVID days, like that was an important thing for me as a leader was to help people uh to understand what their identity was, how can they show up and make a value to their contributions?

SPEAKER_02 36:30

Yeah, and get lunch on the company.

SPEAKER_03 36:31

Yeah, there you go.

SPEAKER_02 36:32

Which always seemed to be part of them. Yes, yeah, yeah. So you've been very transparent about this. I know I've been let go at least three times in my career from various positions. Layoffs have been pretty rampant in the tech space. Salesforce seems to have a never-ending rounds of layoffs these past couple years. Hero claims he's never been laid off, but we don't know if we believe him.

SPEAKER_01 36:58

Yeah, no, in sales, if you get laid off in sales, it means you ain't selling, so you don't deserve to be there in the first place.

SPEAKER_02 37:05

Right? The first time I got let go, I was maybe three or four years out of school. It was right after September 11th, shortly after. So it was about February 2, right? Dot com blew up, and then September 11th, and I was in New York, downtown, and then I was let go, and I was getting married shortly, and the tech mark was just brutal at the time. I got let go a month before my wedding, which is always fun. Lots of new expenses because moving out of my parents' house, also. So yeah, never, never a fun experience. I will say that a lot of people come out of it stronger. I would say most people do, particularly if you're talented, but it's definitely a nerve-wracking time. And I will say that there is a small percentage, it's not even that small, of people that like they get too comfortable in a job, and it's the best thing that happened to them because they finally start thinking about how to advance their career. I will say that that was it for me. Back in that time frame, which is the early two corporate culture was shifting. I found the company that everyone in my division, everyone in there that I was joining was there for 20 years, right? So I thought, yeah, this is the good, long-term, stable job, and it was anything but, and it just changed on a dime. So it was a bit of a rude awakening, and then my whole mindset going forward was there's no such thing as job security. So, yeah, tell us a little bit about your experience going through this, how it impacted you, how you handled it, circumstance maybe.

SPEAKER_03 38:34

Yeah, yeah, it is hard. Yeah, I I sorry to hear about that. The month before your wedding, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 38:38

You're I've been married 25 years at this point. This is old news.

SPEAKER_03 38:42

Yeah, but you still remember it, right? I mean, it had that level.

SPEAKER_02 38:45

Yeah, I you don't you don't forget getting laid off. I mean, it's not it's true, and I think it can be a gift.

SPEAKER_03 38:52

I I had lived I hadn't been laid off, and I've lived through many rounds of that, and I'd watched friends, you know, go out the door many, many times. And at Cargill in particular, thousands of people have been let go. And yeah, I went to a new job and a new role, and I thought it was all excited. There were some early warning signs for me, some early red flags that I saw along the way. So I had a little bit of a spidey sense to kind of be ready for it. So when it did come, it was it still stings, right? And I think it can be a gift. It is personal any way you look at it, and you're left with kind of making a decision about what am I gonna do with this now? And for me, I know that I have value. I know based on, you know, for example, at Cardill, the team that I had built and the relationship that I built, people told me, like, hey, I like working for you. This is meaningful to me. Thanks for explaining this to me in this way. Nobody's ever done this that way. So I think that's part of the journey is to understand your value and to be able to keep it close. And to your point, Nas, your company is never going to look out for you in that respect. It's always a personal journey to know who you are and what's important to you longer term. And for me, I have two young kids in daycare, and you know, that's that's a lot of cash out the door each month. So, of course, I had a rainy day fund ready to go, but I knew it was gonna go quickly. So I try to get my head in the right spot and just kind of reaffirm myself with those things. Like, I know that I have value, I know that this was a little bit of bad luck. That's the other thing that I think I've shared with other people, you know, along the way. It's like I think we underestimate the amount of impact that luck has on us. Good luck and bad luck, right? There's always a little bit of that sprinkled in for us to make things interesting.

SPEAKER_02 40:48

Yeah, so if you don't mind talking about the finances a bit, you said you had a bit of a cushion. A lot of people, when you're let go, there becomes this weird, it's not weird, but it feels weird, equivalence between time and and money. It's like I have X number of dollars in the bank, that's gonna last me X number of months, and then I'm like, I'm screwed. Yeah. Um, and it's like it becomes a time frame. And then there's people also that like they're like, they're just gonna take two months off and then pick it up later, and maybe that's just uh a personality thing. I think it largely is a personality thing. Like me, I become very paranoid. I'm like, I'm looking and looking and looking because I don't know how long it's gonna take. The other part of it is that there's this, and this is what I want your opinion on. They say that it takes one month per year of experience to find a new job at the equivalent level. So if you have 10 years experience, it takes at 10 months to find the equivalent level. I don't know how accurate that is. What do you think of that rule of thumb? And what advice would you give to someone specifically in a more senior role that are just fewer and further between by the nature of the level of seniority?

SPEAKER_03 42:04

Yeah. I mean, I think generalizations always, you know, work at some level, right? I can see that. I thought for sure it was gonna take me a year to find a new role that was anything close to what I was doing, you know, and I found something, you know, within four weeks I had an offer in hand.

SPEAKER_02 42:21

You were looking before you left. Could you your Spidey senses were off? Well, am I wrong?

SPEAKER_03 42:26

Right. Spidey, I wasn't officially in engaged. Like my Spidey senses were up, so I you know, I had the I had the resume updated and kind of the network engaged, so to speak, but I hadn't officially applied to anything yet until that day. And the next day, I think I had applied, and yeah, four weeks later had an offer in hand, which again, good a little bit of good luck, a little bit of timing. And of course, I you know was working hard to make that to happen. I guess what I would say two things that I learned in that experience. Number one was like the network is amazing, and I don't think it's just by region and location. Like in the Minneapolis area, like I got invited to a couple of like networking events, and I am an introvert of introverts. Like my battery recharges by being alone, and so those networking things for me are draining. I've always looked at them as draining, like Dreamforce in particular. Like I need to recover for two weeks after those marathon days, right? Of you know, 8 a.m. to midnight. The thing that happened at these networking events, though, was that I was coming away energized, which was opposite of what I how I would normally approach it. And I think that part of that was just the circumstance that I was in. Like I knew I had to network, I had a purpose, you know, like I needed a job, I needed to find some connections. So that was one thing. And and well, I didn't sorry, I didn't finish that, but like the the network it was overwhelmingly like loving and welcoming, you know, to me as a newcomer, right? And just saying, hey, you know, who are you? What you looking for? And the second thing that goes kind of hand in hand with that is that from my perspective, it was a misperception that you have to actively network in order to keep your network alive. And my perspective was prove that otherwise, right? I network a little bit, somewhat, you know, I but it's not, I'm not one of those super networkers that like some of them that are out there. But just because I wasn't, you know, I didn't know how many kids people had or their last vacation that they took, that didn't hamper my ability to connect. And I was able to just engage with them in a way of like sharing this common ground of like, hey, looking for a job. And they everyone kind of resonated with that. So that would be the other thing that I would say is that don't don't think that you know, just because you haven't been actively networking doesn't mean that that the network, you know, won't all you know won't welcome you. And that it's it's not something that I think showing up and just having a past work relationship with somebody that was successful is more key than keeping in touch with someone. That was my experience through it.

SPEAKER_02 45:08

So this particular opportunity was through networking.

SPEAKER_03 45:12

Indirectly. I found the opportunity, applied for it, and then networked into it as well to try and get my name to the top of the list.

SPEAKER_02 45:19

Okay. But it was a new connection that you made from new networking, yes, your pre-existing old coworker. Oh, cool. Very nice.

SPEAKER_01 45:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 45:26

It's a combination.

SPEAKER_01 45:28

Yep. I think um having never been in the situation, um and not being uh uh a very how do I say this without uh coming across as a massive dick. Um having never been in the situation and not being known for being the most sympathetic person, I'm very much sure everyone's got a job, do it, don't complain, kind of person, right? Outside of uh and same in my life, right? If you're gonna do something, do it. You mentioned a few red flags, right? And you had the choice of moving there. Nobody took you there kicking and screaming, right? I'm not saying you deserved it, nobody deserves it. However, you are a smart individual, you know those red flags. I guess let me get to the point. What were the red flags that you were tracking? And what are there are a lot of choice of jobs for most out there when they choose to leave, right? I've seen some stories where Stars got a team of 15 for a 300 user org. I mean, you don't have to be an idiot to say that's top heavy, right? Like, come on, use your common sense. Like you've got a bit a team of 15 for a small little 10 million dollar organization. I could tell you you're probably gonna get laid off, right? So what are the red flags and what are some of the due diligences that you observed and you'd advise others having gone through that experience to observe, ask better questions to vet job security? Any advice there?

SPEAKER_03 46:56

Listen to your gut.

SPEAKER_01 46:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 46:59

I mean, I mentioned the red flags, like I'm kind of giving myself the benefit of the doubt because there were probably even more along the way where I just shoved them down, you know, within me saying, you know, these people are smarter, you know, than you, so trust them, type of thing. So, you know, some of the red flags, like I there was my hiring manager that kind of helped to recruit me, you know, you know, away from away from Cardiel. She had been in her role not that long, and she was positioned as a you know transformative, you know, type of type of role. And she got let go. It was a shortish period of time, you know, from my perspective, to have someone that's been tasked with transforming a role to be let go within 18 months. So that was an example of okay, red flags going up, spidey senses are getting engaged because she had put together the story around why we needed to invest in CRM, why we need to build a team. And something else that Kiro you were relating to is like we had a team of about one, two and a half, and this was at Apogee, so we're billion, billion and a half companies. So we needed a team, but we needed more than what we had. But where I was going with that is that along the lines there were other things that happened that I probably chose to ignore, probably a little too much. So my advice would just be listen to that gut. And sometimes it's a quiet voice. Unfortunately, it doesn't scream in your face like you would want it to in hindsight. It's it's a little softer whisper, so you have to be paying attention to hear what it's gonna say.

SPEAKER_01 48:26

I think sometimes I have to remind myself, I am in a bit of a luxury position where I know a lot of companies and I get to I get access and I speak to a lot of people, which maybe people don't have. But in that scenario, your team's two for a billion dollar organization. Why are you gonna invest now? Why haven't you done it in the last two years, right? If you can't be asked to hire five, ten people for this platform you're paying millions of dollars for, why should I join? That's just how direct I would be in that scenario. But I get it. Client diet, you don't necessarily have access to hundreds of companies and orgs and investment. If an admin you were hired said to you, Paul, look, I've been laid off before, the company switched from Salesforce to a different platform. Can I see a copy of how long we're signed up for Salesforce platform for? How long's our current contract with Salesforce? Would you be taken aback by that question or and be like, no thanks, see later? Or would you be like, fair play? This person wants to know, okay, we're committed to being on the platform for the next two years at least. Because I think that's a totally valid question. If I'm going to leave a company willingly, I want to make sure we're invested in Salesforce, if that's how I make my career, right?

SPEAKER_03 49:29

Yeah, I mean, that would be a very interesting question. I I have not got that question. I think, you know, to meet that would signal two things. One, it's a fear-based question, right? So one wanting, but then also it's a signal of a passionate question, right? Hey, like I'm gonna I'm gonna commit to you with a level of loyalty that is probably different than others. And so I want to have some assurances. So I would lean into that. I would be like, yeah, this is when our contract is signed. And then we would also talk about how you know changing platforms is very, very expensive and oftentimes cost prohibitive. So kind of have a little bit of a hand on ourselves.

SPEAKER_02 50:07

No, I was gonna say you're you're you're negotiating from a position of strength, right? Because you already have a job, and then you can ask a lot more aggressive questions. So when looking for a job, and I've done so many interviews, right? I like it be very picky in in the job that I would take. And I make sure to ask those same kind of questions, you know, the health of the company, why the petition is needed, why they're not promoting from within. You say you have all this great talent, like what why not promote from within? And and the question of them answering is like, will I get promoted when I'm there, right? It's a very similar type question, right? But that's very different than you know when you really need a job. But getting back to red flags, so uh if you don't mind, I'll throw a couple of them at you and you let me know if you saw them at the red flag at the time or if it was non-existent, right? So just let's real quick, let's not turn this into a long discussion because we're getting short on time. So very common things are changing in a way that your role has to change or shift, right? Because let's say whatever it is, business re-org, structural changes, tech changes, whatever it is, and then questions you ask about okay, what's next for you come back with we'll figure it out, don't worry, type answers. No concrete answers.

SPEAKER_03 51:24

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 51:25

That definitely happens.

SPEAKER_03 51:27

Absolutely right flow. I mean, yeah, and we probably didn't even get to that level of it. It was more just like it was more more more crickets, right?

SPEAKER_02 51:34

Around right, but you see things that are changing, yes, that there's going to be a change for you, and you can't get an answer on what that change is gonna be.

SPEAKER_03 51:42

100% right.

SPEAKER_02 51:44

Your manager starts canceling your one-on-ones.

SPEAKER_03 51:48

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 51:49

Okay.

SPEAKER_03 51:50

Yep.

SPEAKER_02 51:50

I see what's uh what's another another big one? Oh, yeah, just a general decline in business. Business is just not doing that great. Those are for sure the big ones, but that's putting aside a general announcement that they're gonna have layoffs.

SPEAKER_03 52:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 52:06

Which in which case, like like you know, anything can happen. I did want to ask you, Kiro, how often are are you talking to potential candidates that are coming back with oh, it's completely blindsided?

SPEAKER_01 52:16

All the time. And and maybe that's why I'm so thick-skinned around the topic. I'm just like, what are you doing? Walking with your eyes closed into a job. Like, I just don't get how you are completely blindsided. You there has to be signs. And I think that goes back to your point, Paul. Maybe life's busy, you're too comfortable, you're not looking for the signs, right? And in my line of work, we're always risk assessing. Is this gonna drop out? Is this deal gonna close? Is this candidate gonna say no? Evaluating every conversation to look for the risk, right? So maybe my line of work, I'm a bit more open to that kind of approach because I'm spotting risk, eliminating risk for a living. So I think all the time mad, people say it, but then I'll do a quick Google. And they did around a layoffs 12 months ago. So why do you think you're anything, without being again a dick, why do you think you're anything special? I don't want to say you're just a Salesforce admin developer, but if the CIO is getting laid off, you're not going to be safe. I think there's naivety. Like you said, perhaps that it's different when you're in a place of strength in that conversation versus, well, I need a job, I've got bills to pay, which I totally get. The piece I have a hard understanding around is there are companies out there like Salesforce get battered for laying people off, but they pay their people three, four, five, six months worth of pay, depending on their tenure, et cetera. Whereas there are companies that people have never heard of, they get the one week and that's it. But when you see on LinkedIn, oh, let's all help, you know, Salesforce employees, I'm not saying we shouldn't, but they it's like a hundred-meter sprint. They're already 20 meters ahead of these no-name companies that aren't even, we're aware they did a layoff, right? And all these companies are trying to help their employees, and they're the ones with the best severance packages. I'm not saying it's their fault, but there's a victim blaming card. I mean, you know, if my CEO is listening to sticky, wants to lay me off and pay me six months, man. I'm ready. I take the six month break. So it's not all doom and gloom when it comes to layoffs, depending on your package. Some I feel more sympathetic than others, is all I'm gonna say on the topic because we're at time and I don't want to upset too many people.

SPEAKER_03 54:17

I mean, it's it's a scenario that can be a gift for the right people. Others, it can be very, very challenging and it's tough.

SPEAKER_01 54:23

On that note, let's end it on a positive note. Final closing thought, Paul. Any bits of advice or just kind of like anything you're excited about this year, be it current employer, Salesforce Market, Dream Force. Are you going Dream Force this year? Yeah, tell us, tell us something.

SPEAKER_03 54:39

I am. I'll be back at Dreamforce this year. It took last year off because we had a newborn at home. But yeah, I think this will be 12, number 12 or number 13 or something. And as I shared with you, like they're a little bit draining on me and they're energizing at the same time. I love getting out of the office and I love hearing stories and talking to people at Dreamforce to hear how life is really going. I'm excited with where we're going as a team at Great Go. I had the gift of walking into two open roles. I have a principal solution architect that's starting in a couple of weeks that's gonna help drive a lot of work, and then we'll fill another role. And so we're growing the team. There's a lot of investment, there's a lot going on in the Salesforce space these days and the whole headless and agent force and the way that AI is coming in. I think it's very easy to be intimidated by that. And I keep remembering reminding myself too that things change at the pace that things can change. And you know, we're not gonna wake up overnight and AI is gonna take over the world, but we need to plan for it, right? We need to figure out how we're gonna get there. So I think that there's a lot to be excited about. And I guess my one parting thought on that is we kind of hit on it a little bit, but it's about relationships and it's about showing up with people and establishing some of those connection points, not so that you have a network connection or anything like that, but just so that you understand your value and you can be a part of the community and be able to grow and nurture yourself through whatever it is that you want to do.

SPEAKER_01 56:06

Amazing, love it. Well, I, for one, will be owing you a beer at Dream Force. So, and this will air. So, people, if you want to go meet Paul whilst he's in San Fran and you're in Dreamforce, hit him up. And we'd just like to say thanks, Paul, for your time. Appreciate it. Great guest, appreciate you.

SPEAKER_03 56:20

Yeah, thank you, gentlemen.