SPEAKER_00 0:01

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

SPEAKER_03 0:29

Welcome to CRM's success show. Today we're talking with Daniel Erdebees, a senior engineering manager at Builders First Source. Welcome, Daniel.

SPEAKER_01 0:39

Thank you. Excited to be on the show today.

SPEAKER_02 0:42

Daniel, good to see you again. So we obviously have met a few times over the years being local in Dallas. So thanks for uh participating, volunteering, twisting your arm a little bit to uh to join us on the show.

SPEAKER_01 0:54

Uh there was no arm twisting. I did I think we've had several occasions to try and get together. And uh, you know, my schedule is pretty crazy. So I'm glad that today we get this opportunity.

SPEAKER_02 1:04

Likewise. So we're gonna cover a lot of ground uh in today's episode. We're gonna talk a little bit about building a modern enterprise, combining Salesforce ERPs as part of a broader transformation, a little bit about digital adoption in the manufacturing space as well. Uh, but just to start with, tell us a little bit about yourself, Daniel, um, and then uh likewise a little bit about BFS.

SPEAKER_01 1:26

Yeah, so as you mentioned, I'm uh the engineering manager for Salesforce at Builders Force Source. We're the nation, the nation's largest supplier of building materials, manufactured components, and construction services for professional builders and contractors in the country. Currently, we mostly do business in the US only. Um, but that's, you know, in the future, we're looking to expand that to North America in general. But I lead a team that builds and supports Salesforce that really helps drive sales operations and customer engagement across the organization. Throughout my career, I've held technology leadership roles at Builders First Source Now, Interstate Batteries, Liquidity Services, and another company called Terramark, which was acquired by Verizon. So those experiences over the time have given me the opportunity to work across enterprise software, cloud platforms, integrations, digital transformations uh in a variety of industries.

SPEAKER_02 2:22

Now, always curious. Uh, you have a preference for startups versus Fortune 100, different types of challenges between the two, but which one do you enjoy the most?

SPEAKER_01 2:32

Uh I Builders, I think Builders First Source and Terra, Terramark was an interesting place. It was a little bit smaller company. I call it a mid-sized company. Builders being the size it is, it's really interesting to work in an ecosystem that involves a lot of Salesforce professionals as well as a lot of integrations as well as enterprise architecture that that goes with the Salesforce platform. So we'll probably talk about this a little bit later, but it presents a lot of interesting challenges that I like to work on. I've also worked for smaller companies, the likes of TerraMark. And when you work in smaller companies, I feel like you get more involved in maybe the the business functions. Uh, whereas when you get into the large enterprise companies, you're, I think you become more of a tower lead at that point. And then you have to, you're pretty much relegated to focusing on the engineering part of the platform because of all of the integrations and the size of the ecosystem.

SPEAKER_02 3:34

Now, I I didn't know this prior to doing our preparation for the podcast, but BFS is one of the largest suppliers of structural building products, correct?

SPEAKER_01 3:44

That's right. They um we do business not only like if you think, you know, think of it in in layman's terms, when you look at the communities that are getting built around you of all of the houses. I was just recently looking at a new project that's being built just outside my my city here in Fort Worth of you know, 2,500 homes that are gonna be built in a community. That's really where sales, where uh builders first source comes in and works with the builders of that community to provide all of the materials that are gonna be needed to build the homes in that community. And sometimes it can be multifamily homes also. And so there's a leg of the company that does multifamily, single family. Uh, we do we do restorations also, and we do install services. And so the reason I mentioned that is because Salesforce really has a place for all of those lines of business.

SPEAKER_02 4:39

Um BFS, 292nd on the list of uh Fortune 500 companies, 15 billion revenue organizations, 28,000 plus employees, one of the largest enterprise employers in the DFW area, being headquartered in Irving. So a stone thrower away for you and I. Tell us a little bit about um, I guess joining your two and a half years. Maybe let's start with why you joined BFS in the first place. What were you brought into to kind of achieve? What was your mandate for being hired?

SPEAKER_01 5:10

Yeah, when I when I first joined, well, when I was first interviewed for the position, uh the questions were really around understanding business process, bridging technology with with business functionality, understanding or having an um, I think, empathy towards the user that uh uses the system. And you know, this is an area that uh with all of the experience I've had, I've learned that adopting technology is really not about the technology itself, of course. It's about the people that are that you're presenting it to, right? So when you get into what would you do in a situation where you're bringing a technology into a company that's largely a manufacturing company that has traditionally worked with emails and spreadsheets and long sales cycles, or people that have been that have developed a way of working based on people relationships, you know, what would you do to bring Salesforce into an environment like that? And so I really like the questions around that theme because I believe that's where the success really starts to show itself. You're building technology or you're bringing technology to an organization or to people with a frame of mind of giving people better tools to be able to be more productive. Um, and so we a big leg of what we do in Salesforce is with CRMA or with analytics dashboards, where we bring data into the system and display sales information to the sales organization so they can do better account planning with their customers, so they can make better decisions on their in within their sales cycle. Um, and since I've joined, we've actually implemented new solutions in completely different areas for those exact reasons.

SPEAKER_02 7:13

So you mentioned CRMA. I guess next question was just tell us a little bit about the Salesforce footprint over at BFS. What type of products do you use uh as part of a Salesforce tech stack? And how many users are you are you supporting? Uh, how big's your team?

SPEAKER_01 7:29

Yeah, so uh, and that was another attraction when when I interviewed was the size of the team and being able to put a team together that really becomes, I don't know, I guess I'll use the word productive, but it's more in tune with with what the business needs are. So I've got a team of people, uh roughly 20, that is composed of business analysts, and and we can talk about that later. I know that we talked about, you know, where do we see Salesforce positions going later? And I think the business analyst or the product owner are sort of blending together now. So although the product owner is not directly on my team, I do have a dotted line into several product owners, and then they work with my business analysts, and I think the business analyst is like a key role for uh for feature intake, right? And how we bring in new features and making sure that we've got all of the information we need to really build effective solutions in the system. So going beyond your BA, then we have several solution architects and technical architects as part of that team. And we have a very strong team of QA testers, but also QA automation developers. And so we're making a big effort. I'll give you an example. When I first came in, we had, and I don't know if I should admit this, but there were 26 test cases that were automated as part of our regression testing. Today, you know, two and a half years later, we have over 2,000 test cases in our regression testing. And that really has elevated the game in terms of the quality of product that we provide or we release to the business almost on a monthly basis. And so with our DevOps as part of that, right? So we had our BAs, our SAs, our TAs, and our QAs, and then we have a team of QA of DevOps people that basically make sure that using a tool like Capado, that we have a very streamlined development process together with that QA and that release management, which has made the system so much easier to build over time. And that I in the first three months that I joined the company, that's what we focused on was quality assurance and development cycle efficiencies.

SPEAKER_02 9:54

You've got CRMA, CRMA. Um, you're for your testing, is that a product native to Salesforce or using another tool?

SPEAKER_01 10:04

We um we use largely Capado uh to do our testing. So our QA team works in Capado a lot. Now, when it comes to the integrated systems, we do use other systems on the Microsoft stack to do some integration testing. So our team uses both uh environments. We are largely use Jira for our also for story building and feature building and QA logging within the development cycle. And and then our Jira and Capado environments are integrated. And uh most lately, we actually upgraded to source formatting within Capado and kept our Jira integration and introduced AI, which is going to be game changer. I'm really excited about where we're starting with AI on the Salesforce engineering team specifically. The company is investing and looking at AI solutions enterprise-wide, but we're really finding that we're, and I'm almost going into the AI conversation here, but we're finding that um AI has a role in different aspects. And what we're gonna see, I think, is more of a uh you know, a broader AI strategy that will eventually become sort of a mesh of AI agents working together.

SPEAKER_02 11:25

So given the nature of the business, uh I'm I'm curious, are you using CPQ, field service? Is it just straight up core cloud? What does that footprint look like?

SPEAKER_01 11:35

Yeah, so in with Salesforce, we we do use the sales cloud uh heavily. Um, we also have service cloud, but I'll, you know, I'll I'll basically say that we don't heavily use service cloud because we don't have like a truly a support organization within Salesforce. Um, we have, I would say, tower level support that mostly uses cases, but we don't get into consoles and stuff like that. We do have an implementation of field service management, which we have been working on for the last year and a half, roughly. Uh, so that's the FSM product, right? That uh Salesforce sells. Um, we also use NetZero for our sustainability reporting uh with integrations to third parties for data that that is needed to generate that sustainability uh information to our public for public consumption. And uh we use MCAE for our marketing. So all of our marketing goes in through formerly known as Part Out, as probably most people will know. But that that has you know been really working well for us to bring in all of our prospects as leads and then conversion to opportunities and so on, right? And then there's again, like I said, there's a lot of integrations with ERPs and data EDPs, I guess, enterprise data platforms, right? So we've been really, I think, doubling down on our data integrations lately in the past 12 to 18 months, I would say. Another area that when I came in needed a lot of work was our data quality within Salesforce. Uh, data spread out across a lot of systems. And so the company's been really focused on elevating the quality of the data enterprise-wide. And for good reason, right? You can kind of see the writing on the wall with the AI. If you don't have good data, your AI is pretty much going to be useless.

SPEAKER_03 13:28

Everything is useless without good data, like your typical sales cycle. Like, if you don't, you're not tracking your opportunities, you don't know the history of accounts, AI is just the latest excuse of why you need clean data.

SPEAKER_01 13:41

But yeah, I think it elevated it's it sort of surfaces the pain points, right? And it's it's not that the data is necessarily bad, it's that is it structured correctly to be able to get processed uh in a meaningful way or interpreted in a meaningful way. So we have great data actually. If you really look at it, you have great data. It's like how do you share it among all the systems, and how do you make it purpose-fit for the various organizations? And so we take a lot of our data and we pass it through what we call a middleware. So we have some, we we use MuleSoft for part of our solutions where we need to ETL that data to be able to make it more territory representable or presentable so that our sales teams can have the right information for the territories that they manage.

SPEAKER_03 14:39

Yeah, one of the problems with relational database structures is that they're difficult to performance tune, particularly when you're doing kind of like really complex reporting across a lot, a lot of objects. They're really designed for ACID, meaning you don't duplicate your data and your the database model enforces your referential integrity. So it's to cut it to cut it, it's it's basically designed for write speed, heavy transactions. You get very throughput on the write speed, but then when you want to read out particularly a complicated report thing, they tend to fall down, and that's why you have all these new data architectures starting going back to the big data days, and now more snowflake and cloud databases and and all of that kind of stuff. So perfect segue into enterprise application strategy or enterprise architecture strategy, which I tend to view as architecting a whole ecosystem across the enterprise, so a series of applications, not just single application architectures when you think of system architecture. Um, would you agree with that definition?

SPEAKER_01 15:50

Yes, um I I'm not sure that I completely understood what you were getting at, but in your description about relational databases, maybe I can repeat what you kind of said. But I the relational database, yes, becomes a challenge. And it's it's more about a corporate strategy about where the what the systems of record are for the data that's feeding into a central data warehouse, if we can simplify it to that. And then how do you take that information in the data warehouse and create views around that data that's needed in various systems? And if we focus on Salesforce, uh, one of the things that we have done lately is we've uh been architecting our data to go through an EDP in a view format directly into Salesforce from there, and then we have a lot more control over what goes into that view uh based on information that becomes available over time from a lot of the systems that we inherit from our acquisitions. And so Builders First Source has been a company that's been heavily built on acquisitions over the years, and so we're presented with a challenge of having a lot of information coming in from various ERPs. You know, if you think about BizTrack or Sage or uh SAP and all of the different ERPs that different companies might be using. So the challenge is like, okay, well, how do we get all of that transactional information into a place where the sales team can then have the information they need to better service their customers?

SPEAKER_03 17:32

Um yeah, I didn't mean to derail the conversation. Um, as much as I love talking about data as as regular listen listeners of our show uh know. My only point was that relational databases are are tuned for data integrity within the individual system and for write speed much more than read speed, although they do a good job of read speed too, but not.

SPEAKER_01 17:57

Yeah, we do if you architect them correctly, right? Because I think and I and I can get into databases a lot because I I configure databases on supercomputers. So, you know, where we've we've highly separated the database architecture across multiple disks and and IO channels, and you know, you can really make the database, you know, we've we've had databases spread over two systems when I was working with the likes of Silicon Graphics and Cray Research in the day, where relational databases were pretty much what was available back then. I'm maybe dating myself a little bit, but then object-oriented databases were just coming up, and we were starting to marry together relational databases with object-oriented databases. And that's where, you know, the the systems have evolved a lot over time, right? Or the databases have evolved a lot over time. So today, certainly, honestly, I don't even talk about relational or not. And when you look at Salesforce in itself, the reason why I love Salesforce so much when I started my career with within the Salesforce ecosystem back in the mid-2000 time frame was the database aspect of it. And I was like, oh, I can design anything in Salesforce, it's object-related, right? But you if you look deeper into Salesforce database architecture, if you can call it that, it's really not a relational database, although it feels like that a lot when you're designing objects. But there's a lot of object-oriented aspects of the Salesforce database. I don't know if you agree with that, but and then it really presents a different way of architecting your solutions in Salesforce. I think, admittedly, that's where a lot of times we get into trouble. You really do need to have solid database architects, I believe, looking at how you're building your solutions within the Salesforce system itself to make sure that you're going to be able to have an extendable platform for the long term.

SPEAKER_03 19:52

Yeah, yeah. Salesforce is absolutely not a relational database. It has a relational database engine because it runs on Oracle. I think it still runs on Oracle. I I can't be sure of that anymore. Um but yeah, I actually have a uh uh a sizable chapter or a sizable section of my book explaining to why it's not a relational database. And the primary reason is that you have to you like relational databases don't do roll-ups, right? You would never do that because that's an integrity issue. Okay, anyways, let's get back to enterprise architecture. So, what I was saying was enterprise architecture is essentially architecting um right a system of systems, right, that are going to work together, so variable software systems generally. What's your particular strategy? So, obviously, if you talk to Salesforce, Salesforce the company, they're gonna tell you, oh, just do everything in Salesforce. You can there are actually ERPs built on top of Salesforce, so you can go down that route somehow. You strike me more of a best of breed and integrate type of person. But what's your strategy on enterprise architecture? How do you go about deciding what systems you want to use, how many you want to use, how they're gonna connect?

SPEAKER_01 21:05

Yeah, that's an interesting question because I'm gonna put the people aspect in that, right? So, as technology people, we want to design the best technology architectures for us. And I think at the end of the day, and this is what we are actually very attuned to with my team, is are we really designing a system for the people or are we designing a system for us? And at the end of the day, you've got to be thinking about an architecture that makes the end user's job again more productive, easier, um, reproducible, right? If you've got a top selling salesperson and they have a way of working with their system and potentially with the new technology that you're bringing to them, are you making them more productive? Are you able to cookie cutter them into To another sales rep that can be as high performing as they are. And so is your architecture really mapping to the way that people need to interface with the systems? And so not everything belongs in one system. I think that's always a big mistake if you're trying to come up with solutions that are too maybe call it top heavy with certain systems, then eventually that silo falls down, right? So you really have to become disciplined about what is the back office and what is the front office in terms of the solutions that you're building. And then trying to, I guess, bring people together, especially the architects in the company, to determine what is the best system where the data needs to be sourced from or created from. I'll take an example, right? So you get a new customer and you're a sales rep and you go, hey, I've got, I've identified this new customer or what they think is a new customer. Where do you go enter that customer information? Do you start in your ERP? Does it start in the CRM? Does it start in a customer portal, right? But at the end of the day, it could just be on the cell phone where they're, you know, these people live most of their day, especially in my world. People are on sites, they're on construction sites, they're walking neighborhoods, they're working with communities, and they might be working with custom home builders. And they're like, oh, wait a minute, you're buying uh your lumber from this other uh supplier. We can sell you this lumber also. Let me set you up, right? And so we have to really understand where our end users are connecting with our systems and then build from there. So in the example I just gave, there's probably a customer portal involved, and you're going into the customer portal and you're saying, Where do I have this customer already in my list? Is somebody else already managing them, working with them? Is it a lead? Is it a prospect? Is it a, you know, is there existing opportunities? There's so many things. And so just in what the sentence I just gave, I might have talked about four systems, right?

SPEAKER_03 24:15

I mean, you you you even talked about a customer, and we still don't know who the customer is, right? Is a customer the contractor? Is a customer the architect? Is the customer the end person owns his home?

SPEAKER_01 24:24

Uh exactly. And is, you know, and then is the not only that, is do we have the ideal customer profile defined to do we should we even do business with this customer because they're not in our in our ideal customer profile because they won't order enough material from us for really to make a difference. Like we don't really do retail. Maybe they're you know, they're a customer that's better suited for the likes of a retail, a retail supplier rather than a mass supplier like BFS is, but we still we still cater to some of that, right? So if you're a custom home builder that builds 10 homes, then yeah, we do want to do business with you. And maybe you're you are building one massive custom home that might be a multifamily kind of home. And yes, we do need to do business with you because you don't know where that business is going to go over time. And so you need, again, you need an architecture that's very that's designed to be easy to use and transparent, I would say, to the end user. They shouldn't really care or know. And I can tell you that end users don't really care what system they're using. At the end of the day, they want to know that they can interact with their customer. So when they're entering that customer somewhere on a page, on a mobile device or on their desktop, I think it should present itself as being agnostic to a system, particularly, and that they're entering a customer. And then from there, that's where the architecture starts to take on the back office capabilities of saying, okay, we need an ERP account for this customer. We need to open a credit application for this customer, we need to identify if they're an ideal customer profile for account planning, et cetera, et cetera. Or do they already have a relationship with some of our suppliers or built mass production builders out there that we need to actually partner with them and say, hey, you need to go buy from Lenar or DR Horton or you know these other big builders that are in the country that we already do business with at volume discounts that maybe the custom builder should be talking to. So I didn't I didn't get into specific technologies, but you know, again, to answer your question, I think there's no easy way to look at it other than we're not building systems for IT, we're building systems for the business.

SPEAKER_03 26:49

Yeah, no, I I I completely get it. And I think what you're saying makes makes the most sense, right? It's going to be the system the system that needs to perform the job or is best suited to perform the job, but you want to make the fact that there's multiple systems out there somewhat seamless to the user who's working with it, which is a great integration, not necessarily a data integration, but at least some kind of integration between the two systems, be it screen pops or right, even a loosely knit integration. Can you talk to us about how you go about building a complicated flow, let's say even a process flow between these various systems? So I'll give I'll give you an example, and I'll use the example you made, right? Somebody's out on the road, so you have like I guess like a traveling salesperson type, which sounds like you have. Maybe they're visiting construction sites, maybe they're going to Home Depot. I I don't know. So they want to create a prospect, not necessarily a customer. Maybe they're the credit check process there. Maybe you got to check if they're already a customer in the system, and then at some point they're gonna place an order. That order's got to go to the ERP system for billing, probably has to go to some kind of warehousing system if that's in the ERP or somewhere else for fulfillment, and then somebody has to be made aware of status. I'm not sure if that's a salesperson or that's going back to a service team, or if that's just, I don't know, getting emailed out to the client or customer portal, right? So that there's so many moving pieces, right? So, how do you sit down and try to design this up front, or do you just let it grow organically?

SPEAKER_01 28:33

No, it it definitely has to have some design up front, and that's where, in fact, we're dealing with a lot of that right now with you know new ERP systems that we're bringing in and defining processes. So when you think of a process, I like to break it up into two segments to make it simple. So you have your lead to order and then your order to cash. And if you can look at those processes that you're currently using and deciding what needs to be enhanced or changed in those processes, that's where you get into change management, right? The change management starts with the business. And so you, if you can define the as-is business process and identify where the uh weak links are uh and why you're trying to change something. The the why question comes up a lot. In fact, oddly enough, I was in a meeting this morning about the business wants to have a new feature that involves a lot of security implications. And we, you know, we're really trying to steer away from having to make heavy changes that are that, especially in Salesforce, have a lot of impact or dependencies on permission sets, permission set groups, you know, your role hierarchy, maybe your territory management. There's so many things that come into play. So somebody comes to you and says, Hey, I want a new persona to come into our business process. You go, well, okay, tell me why and what exactly are you trying to achieve? So getting the why is extremely important because as IT people, we want to jump, we often want to jump into solutioning way too quickly, I find. Um, we get excited about uh a heavy, a big challenge, and oh, uh, this is super fun, we're gonna solve this big problem that the business came to us and we jump really quick, but we don't stop and pause and take the time. And I found that, and it's happened to me here and it's happened to me in other companies. We if we succumb to the pressures of we have this challenge and we need it fixed by X date, then you're already shortchanging yourself potentially in really understanding the essence of what we're trying to achieve in the transformation. And so that definition has to be there. I would use a BA or maybe a couple of BAs in that case, depending on how big the business process is that we're trying to change, to really define the as is, identify the efficiencies of the currents of the current process, and maybe the uh the opportunities for improvement that the business is looking for, and then coming up with a future state uh business process that takes into account the deficiencies in the process that the business is explaining, but yet keeping the good things that are currently in the existing process and then bringing them into the future state process. And then how do you actually the the key there is really mapping out in very demonstrable ways? Is that a word? Like, how do I demonstrate the future state in a very easy way to understand? So, you a lot of people use S-curves to do some of that to really bring it at a high level to say, is this what really what you're after? And is this are we addressing the pain points? And then we would also get into potentially once we understand that, then internally from a solution architecture point of view, we're looking then at sequence diagrams and maybe swim lane kind of diagrams to really make sure that is the solution that we're going to use to address the specific business process completely aligned. And then can we build a somewhat of an easy prototype of what that user experience will be in the new process?

SPEAKER_03 32:37

So when you say the business, quote unquote, like who really is that? I mean, most companies, the people on the ground, particularly on really big companies, and you and you kind of alluded this to earlier when you said you get to see a lot more process improvement at smaller firms, right? Um, and you get to see the bigger picture. But what when they're somewhat let's say siloed and focused on their job, are they really the best people to be thinking about process improvement? Right? So you have the warehouse manager, he's dealing with the bills of waiting. I'm sure he's perfectly happy handing out right a stack of uh pick tickets, right? You give it you give the guy four of them, he goes, he pulls them, puts them on the truck, gives them back on you, stamps him, yeah. Um, and then you pass that off to your data entry clerk. And that may have nothing to do with the salesperson doesn't care at all about that. So, how do you deal with this holistically when there's so many different business parts?

SPEAKER_01 33:40

Yeah, no, that's a that's an awesome question because we've actually gotten caught with that sometimes, where the business does bring a new request for enhancement to us, and we're like, okay, well, who can we talk to about how this works actually today, right? And and so you get a sometimes you do end up with a very narrow view, unknowingly sometimes, and and uh, you know, I think it it happens, right? I mean, let's not be innocent that sometimes you are talking to somebody that thinks they know enough about the process, and you think you're getting all the information, and at the end of the day, you end up designing something that didn't hit the mark because now you're you're launching your new feature and other people are interfacing with it and going, What is this? How why is this working this way? And then you get back on the phone, and that's where you you know you're figuring out. Well, we talked to that particular person in this particular role, and that's where we got our information, and they're like, Well, that's not the way we do it. And we get a lot of that in in our current company being nationwide and having a lot of different uh locations that use our applications, they often do business a little bit differently depending where they are in the nation. Uh, and that just can be because of you know the the seasonalities that they go through. So they have to deal with things a little bit differently. So we do have to be a little bit careful, even at BFS, about how we design solutions, to not be to build solutions that we know are potentially going to adjust as we get more adoption. Sometimes you don't have time to interview a lot of people, uh, but I think if you do a proper process diagram and you ask a lot of questions, then you can identify potential gaps that do need attention. And if you don't have time to give them attention, you have to design around the fact that you'll have to go back to those business functions and build them into your solution as it grows. So there's no way you can accommodate for everything. You're gonna have to build solutions that are going to be flexible and adaptable and maintainable over time. And that's where the job of the the SA and the TA come in to make sure that you're building solutions that will be that can grow with uh expansion and adoption.

SPEAKER_03 36:15

All right, um, so one more question on this before we uh before we move on. Um is there is there like I would think that this like gets really, really more complex as the company grows? So how do you keep these system like these systems evolving in step? Right? You have these master processes in, particularly, I guess you have various product lines, you have different sales processes, different fulfillment processes, different delivery processes, right? How do you keep it in line along like across all systems to the point of even know necessarily what's going on? Like you just need a committee for everything, seems expensive.

SPEAKER_01 37:00

I mean, you could probably write a book on this on this topic alone. I really find it interesting actually, because you deal with so many parameters when you get into that kind of enterprise level planning and on and day-to-day operations. And if you think about the other big the other big aspect of this is people retention. So, you know, you often talk about tribal knowledge. A lot of times, these complex siloed business functions live in in somebody's or a group of people's minds and experience. And now you're you need to try and and um bring them together to make them more what's the word I'm looking for, broadly adopted. But then you have to design them into the system. And and I think there's no easy answer to the question you just asked. I mean, it just takes it takes time, money, and people at the end of the day. And I don't know, honestly, with all the companies I've worked with, I don't know that there was one that had it perfect, right? And I've heard a lot of companies go through transformations. Transformations take a lot of time, they're very disruptive, they take a lot of people. Uh, there's a lot of change in people because because of the time it takes to do a major transformation, it takes years, right? I mean, I have not been in a in a I'll I won't even say like a major transformation. Just feels like normal transformations take minimum 18 months. And a lot of things happen in 18 months. Look at our economy lately. Builders first, or since I joined almost three years ago, uh, the economy's changed drastically in the construction world. Uh, interest rates alone have greatly impacted, you know, the the things that we can do in the industry. And that directly translates to the projects that are going on internally at different companies, right? And I think a lot of companies are feeling that pain. And unfortunately, I think it's just like I said, it's it's time, money, discipline, and maybe taking projects in small steps and really getting disciplined about identifying the real pain points and working on them. I'll give you an example uh where this really worked well. I I participated in the Ignite program um with Salesforce back in my days at Interstate Batteries. I think over a six-week period, we did a deep analysis using the Ignite program. That was one of my memorable experiences with Salesforce at any company because Ignite really brought all of the top executives together. It brought a lot of departmental department leaders together, and they all got to communicate individual pain points. And so you really work at uh an ideation process that most people probably have seen in either small form or large form like Ignite, and you really share together what all of the individual pain points are, and you start to realize that some of them align and they group together among different groups of lines of business or departments, and then you can collaborate together and say, wow, if we can do this one thing for us at Interstate Batteries, it was really understanding the competitive landscape. That was the number one thing that surfaced. And we say, well, how do we collect that competitive landscape? Well, we've got a bunch of trucks on the road every day going from dealer to dealer, distributing batteries. Who else knows better about competitive analysis than our truck drivers, our delivery people? And so we built a mobile app on an on a tablet that they can install. And basically, as they were doing their deliveries, they were able to collect information that was then brought into our marketing intelligence application that we built on Salesforce. And then we were able to turn that into really insightful uh initiatives for the business to make a change. And so I think the answer to your question is there, right? It's really driving the early stage ideation and having true collaboration among the leaders to decide what can really impact the business.

SPEAKER_03 41:41

Yeah. So I I I think that's great for like deciding the changes needed and what change needs to be done, but it doesn't really hit the nail when it comes to okay, how do we fully understand what's going on today? I think that there's something to be said for the power of like crowdsourcing and people dealing with just their domain and then small incremental changes. And I think that's how most of these companies get such complicated processes because it's essentially crowdsourcing, right? Um, so you have the back office team, they're working in their back office systems, they're making minor improvements to their own systems, and if it impacts another department, they just like they work with those people all day long, they just walk over to them, have a small conversation, implement a quick little change, and then that just happens for years, decades potentially. Um, where you get all of these small improvements over time by people who are actually doing the work who care. And then what happens is okay, now the system becomes antiquated or they disagree with the other system that's four or five hops away, right? And the management wants to come and unify things like okay, how the hell do we fill it figure out all this institutional knowledge? Um, and that's probably why these big software projects have such big failure rates. It's I think getting at that institutional institutional knowledge.

SPEAKER_01 43:16

I agree with you. It's um it's a massive undertaking.

SPEAKER_03 43:21

It's a massive undertaking, yeah. Yeah, I mean, that's why we consulting firms exist.

SPEAKER_01 43:25

Yeah, it's you know, it's uh this becomes very philosophical, more type of question about how do you actually gather the information from the ground up, right? It's and sometimes we think we know what people are going through. A lot of people leave their jobs because they're hard to do, right? Because of the systems we put in front of them or the the processes they have to follow. And they're like, I hate doing this job because I I can't do it my way, right? Or why I have suggestions, but nobody listens. I think there's something to that, right? And and we do a lot of surveys actually. In our company, to query uh everybody and the whole company to see, you know, tell us about how things are for you, right? And and then we literally uh gather that information and listen to it, and then it has to go through the right channels, and somehow it has to be assimilated and translated the right way to make sure that you're hitting the targets. But yeah, I I don't know what to tell you on that one. It's difficult. I think I've I've lived it in every company. It's um, and the bigger you get, the harder it gets. I think, and I think hero, you asked me a question at the beginning. You know, what's the difference between working at a big enterprise class company versus a startup? And I had a startup for almost 18 years of my career. Man, that was so much fun because you could execute anything you wanted in a moment's notice, and you could get together with people in a room. They usually fit within a conference room because you had 20 people and you asked everybody, hey, we're gonna do this. What do you think? And everybody was able to like react immediately. And so you built things very quickly, and you know, you you can also query what are you hearing from the market? What are you hearing from our customers? And you get the information quickly and you can fix things quickly. But man, when you get you know huge in size, like the Verizons of the world and the BFSs of the world, it becomes difficult. I don't know how else to put it.

SPEAKER_02 45:33

So one of the things you touched on was culture change, right? So culture change is it's often accepted, culture change is more challenging, harder, more difficult than the actual technology piece. You know, manufacturing businesses often have decade-old processes in place. We've always done it this way. They're often generational businesses passed down in the family, private companies. You know, the people are often the difficult factor in those types of organizations. Prior, you had kind of shared uh with us that you see or the business sees BFS as a manufacturing business trying to become more of a technology company. What does that culture shift actually look like in reality from what you've observed uh during your time there?

SPEAKER_01 46:23

Yeah, and you know, I I kind of rethought that approach or that statement, right? And I want to be careful in saying that you can't a manufacturing company doesn't need to become a technology company. It's more that the technology comes into the company and continues to enable the company to be a highly performing manufacturing company. So I don't think it's right to say that we're trying to change a certain, it's like saying I'm trying to change a financial company into a technology company. It's not their business purpose, right? So we've got to be mindful within IT that we're not trying to change the company into a technology company. IT doesn't run the company, right? IT enables the company. So I think what we again, I like to take a different approach of thinking of this, is you're thinking about user experiences all the time. And you want to make sure that the solutions you're building for your users are improving their experience and that they're going to adopt the solutions you're bringing to them. Often you I hear people say, make it their idea so that they'll adopt it. And so you have to present it in a certain way that it becomes their idea. And I think it's a valid statement, right? If you can partner with the business and continue to build a culture of what the company is meant to be, let them focus on that business function that they're they were built to be, right? If they're a manufacturing company, we do we're the best company at producing components and building materials and installing material or building houses. We're not a technology company, right? We're not gonna go and build robots that are gonna build houses. Maybe that'll come in the future, that'll be cool, right? Which is completely possible, but we have to be very careful about that. And I'm gonna retract if I said that in our preliminary conversations, because I've I I have been really thinking, I I like I liked our conversation because it really made me think about wow, you know, this is when we when we have this this conversation and other people are listening to how they should be thinking about it, I'd be curious to see, and maybe this is part of like a survey, right? How do you think uh a company adopts technology? Do they really become a technology company? No, they don't. Uh, and I and I think if we can build a culture where the business then feels not doesn't feel threatened by technology because we're not becoming a technology company, we're introducing technology to make their jobs easier.

SPEAKER_02 49:15

Yeah, okay, that's fair. Um, a couple of quick fire questions on on the topic. So in designing, I think you nailed it when you said earlier we sometimes have to remember that we are designing for the user what's best for them as opposed to what's best and maybe easiest for us, especially when it comes to Salesforce. How do you create empathy for the end user? Or how do you have your team create empathy for the end user when designing Salesforce? For instance, do you do a day in their role kind of thing, right? You know, is how close to the team uh mirroring kind of their everyday interactions with the platform, for example? Um, thoughts there?

SPEAKER_01 49:53

Yeah, we we actually have a, and I forgot to mention this in our when I was talking about the team, we have a dedicated UI UX designer that basically interviews users, uh reviews the tools they're currently using, understands all of the clicks that happen when they're using uh, you know, an application, understand the swivel chair aspects of their daily job, you know, doing that and mapping that out, uh, storyboarding what they do day to day. I think this is one of the key things that Ignite did really well is story mapping the user experience. And so that empathy is built by if I was in their position, would I like to use the system? You know, can I sit next to them and really understand what they do day to day? Uh, doing ride-alongs when when I did that solution for the truck drivers, I did a ride-along with them for several weeks to make sure that, you know, hey, I got to pick up this lot, this, this tablet every time I go into a place and I got to do something with it. It's gonna stay on his on his truck seat, it's not gonna go out. So I wanted to make sure that it was something that they valued doing, that they felt a responsibility towards feeding this information to the company because at the end of the day, it's gonna make their job more secure, grow, right? We always want the company to grow. Um, and so they got to see the value to why we're doing something. So, as much as we want to know the why they want to do it, we've got to tell them why they need to use it.

SPEAKER_02 51:30

Makes sense. So, if you're in a position, go out there, add a UI UX uh resource into your org chart, might be a uh good way of handling that. So, okay, a couple of quick quick fire questions, conscious of time. What mistakes the what mistake or one mistake, let's say, what's one of the top mistakes you see that organizations are making when it comes to digital adoption outside of what we've discussed already?

SPEAKER_01 51:56

The first thing that comes to my mind is is trying to go too fast. Um trying to build too much too quickly, trying to get the users to adopt too much technology at once. That's uh that's a deal breaker.

SPEAKER_02 52:11

How do you balance we could automate this versus should we automate this?

SPEAKER_01 52:18

Again, it's about user experience. And so are we really reducing something within what a person does, or are we adding burden to what they're doing with the automation? And if you do too much automation, does it take away from uh control of a process? So sometimes we over-automate and things get processed too quickly without human intervention or interaction, and it leads to mistakes. So I would say is again, are you really improving the process or not?

SPEAKER_02 52:59

What about encouraging users to embrace new technologies? That's a big topic at the moment. Even um encouraging Salesforce developers to learn new technologies, right? You know, go more into Python and TypeScript so they can go into more AI engineering, for example. So I guess it's twofold. How do you encourage your Salesforce teams to embrace new technologies? And then how would a business like BFS or similar, you know, there think those people in the field with those tablets, how does a business like that encourage uh its employees to embrace these new technologies?

SPEAKER_01 53:36

Oh, excuse me. I got choked up over that question. It's um, I think a big part of it is data entry. So a lot of times we want people to enter data all the time. And so if we can bring in new technology that minimizes the time that's needed to enter data, for example, we can add AI to enhance data collection or data, well, I guess data entry within the systems. We did recently we did a an implementation of TaskRate. So we brought in this task management tool to really enhance our estimators' ability to schedule work and plan work ahead of time. And it's been a monumental um success because they have visibility into uh the future and resource planning and things like that. And then also one other big thing we did is we brought in uh something Kanga and again Kanga X author. So I think uh Xauthor wasn't originally part of Kanga, but they acquired it uh a couple of years ago. But Kanga or sorry, Xauthor integrates spreadsheets with Salesforce, and so we didn't need to change the user's work by bringing in a technology that brings that maps the spreadsheet to Salesforce, and now we're able to get the Salesforce and uh the data in Salesforce without changing how the user works, which is monumental, and then we can take all that information and we can continue the process within Salesforce with all of the information that's in this spreadsheet. And people will might might say, well, why don't you just convert the spreadsheet to Salesforce? And I get that a lot. Sometimes it's not that easy, right? So a lot of spreadsheets might be used to do to do a lot of like estimating or design or things like that that have a lot of formulas. These spreadsheets have been built over the years. People are used to using them, they do things quickly, and so we want to continue to allow them to use those tools. They're not antiquated by any way. Excel is still a very good tool to use to do work, but you can integrate it with Salesforce easily using simple tools. And so it was twofold, right? The Salesforce team was able to implement a solution quickly using an out-of-the-box solution with out-of-the-box functionality that's very powerful, yet give the end users a very powerful tool that they they love using.

SPEAKER_02 56:14

So we touched a little bit there on um embracing new technologies. Uh, one of the questions we're asking every guest on the show uh to wrap up is uh going into next year, shifting slightly from new technologies and examples to skill sets and roles. Going into next year, what are your general thoughts on the SARS-CoV-s ecosystem and the direction it's going in terms of roles, where those roles are based, the skill sets, agent force, hiring sales of future people that you hire? Are you going to expect them to have you know AI experience, whether that's beyond Google type searching, maybe building their own AI agents? Is agent force going to be a criteria? Tell us a little bit about your just general thoughts on what you're seeing, what you're thinking as you plan your org structures for next year.

SPEAKER_01 57:06

Yeah, I think in Salesforce, and I think this probably applies in a lot of different environments, is that the professionals that will stand out moving forward into 27 in the future are the ones that are able to connect the technology to business outcomes. I think that the days of having a tech a highly a large technical team are sort of dwindling away because it's becoming easier to create, you know, the fields and the objects and the reports. And and with AI now, I mean, I I'll I'll admit I use AI every day to remind myself, hey, how do we do this in Salesforce? Right instead of, man, do you remember like two years, three years ago? I mean, we were looking at Salesforce support and going in there and looking at things or going at the trailhead and hey, I'm gonna go try this out in trailhead. But now you can ask AI, hey, remind me how something works in Salesforce, whatever the case might be, right? Or how would I build this thing, or maybe it's how would I structure this flow? I mean, you can get answers quickly. And so there's I I and you know, and I I think I'd seeing this more even within your world, right? Is like how many companies are really hiring technology people compared to people that are able to really do more about what we're talking about today, connecting the technology to the business outcomes. So BAs are becoming a lot more, I think, prominent and important to the team up front. I think uh if you're running in a agile environment, a product, a good product owner is invaluable. Organizing the work that goes into building solutions is critical. I think the other part too is maybe more on the side of DevOps is becoming also an area where we can use AI to develop solutions, but also bring them to market with a much higher level of quality and speed, uh, using AI today. So, yeah, AI is you know becoming more prevalent, I would say, in that DevOps process, as well as the how do I build this? How should I build this? And so you need thought leaders with a lot of business experience to make sure that the technology that you're using and the solutions that you're building really drive business outcomes.

SPEAKER_02 59:42

A couple of quick questions. So um, I think there, you know, your your take, if I interpret it correctly, is perhaps moving away from them needing to be a product or cloud specific specialization and more the ability to do things quickly, be proactive. As your poster says in the background, for those that are only listening and not watching, Daniel has a great poster in the background, get shit done. Um, so um, would that be a fair assessment? Like that is kind of what you're looking at exploring when you hire is like ability to deliver ultimately at the end of the day, and whatever tools are around you, leveraging them to the maximum capability and getting it done.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:23

Yes, but with very well-defined business outcomes that you're trying to achieve. You know, I think the markets today, the economy is complicated, difficult, very fragile. Things can shift in a moment. Uh, it's very global. So you have to be able, you can build things quickly in Salesforce. We always have built things quickly in Salesforce. It's one of the main uh attractions to using a platform like this. A lot of different types of people can build solutions, but you can't do it in a silo. I mean, I think I see too many siloed solutions. And so you again, you've got to have a level of maturity and patience in how you uh want to expand your capabilities.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:13

How are you assessing individuals for AI, saviness, awareness, use cases? Is it like is it going back to the tell me about scenario, screen share? How would you prompt for this type of scenario? Is that is that what you're gonna incorporate more into your interviews as a leader of a growing team?

SPEAKER_01 1:01:30

You know what? I'll tell you one thing eye contact. Yeah, I look for genuine conversations and eye contact when it comes to interviewing people because I find and I've had this experience a lot lately, is people are actually using AI to answer the questions I'm asking them. And I'm like, are you real? Like, you if you can't answer this question from your own passion or your own, I guess, experience in in what you do in life, um, I'm not getting the genuine you, right? So AI is a great tool, I think it's a great assistant, but it's it's just that. If you you've gotta remain your own person, you've got to remain creative, and you've got to have good common sense and logic in the way that you uh work, period. And especially work with people. And I think I hope that's that that's not where we're gonna end up is that people can't work together because they rely too much on AI for the decisions they need to make.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:42

So much we could talk about, but we are tight on time. But I think one of the things that we are seeing uh or is a return of interviews in person, in-person interviews is on on the increase. You know, companies looking to de-risk uh who they hire, uh, even if that means paying a thousand bucks to fly them in, you know, if it's a remote role, but better to pay that expense than potentially bring someone on for three months and realize they're not the person or they can't think for themselves, right? I think that's the first thing. The other thing you mentioned about being over-reliant on AI tools. I think if you look at like a basic example of spell checker, right? Math, calculators, right? You know, how many people now know quick math? How many people now could spell, you know, without mistakes? Because we're so reliant on spell checker to pick it up for us anyway. So I think it's inevitable that people are going to lose the ability to think for themselves. You know, I think that's just the reality of AI being mainstream. I think that's what's gonna take place. Any any final thoughts, uh, words of wisdom, advice uh that you'd like to throw out there in the closing minutes?

SPEAKER_01 1:03:45

Uh you know, I I would say that Salesforce is an amazing platform. I've been using it for over 20 years now in a lot of different capabilities. I'd say keep on using the platform, but really be careful about the solutions that you're building on the platform. Take in account, taking into account data today is a very important aspect of it. So, how do you keep the system as a productivity tool to your end users as you as you're building out your solutions? I think that's key. Don't build solutions just to build them. Really think about how are we keeping it as a productivity tool?

SPEAKER_02 1:04:32

Well, we'll uh have to sit down and 12, 18 months later see see exactly we'll find the answer to that question, I'm sure.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:40

Um so um I'm already feeling it, so we're good.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:44

Good stuff. All right. Well, Daniel, thank you so much for joining us today. It was great to learn a bit more about you, your background, a bit about BFS, and uh we covered a lot of good content there. So thanks, Daniel.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:55

All right, thank you for your time and um always enjoy speaking with you guys. Cheers.