SPEAKER_00 0:02

Welcome. You are listening to the CRM Success Show, where you will hear from CRM executives who have overseen some of the most interesting and complex CRM implementations. Your hosts, David Mostri 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_01 0:29

Welcome to the CRM Success Show. Today we're talking with Zach Reebanks, Director of Architecture at Link Logistics. Welcome, Zach.

SPEAKER_02 0:36

Excited to be here. Thank you for having me.

SPEAKER_03 0:38

Zach, it's a pleasure to have you. I know we first mentioned the idea of being involved a little while ago. I'm glad it's come full circle and we have you here today. So thank you. Just start by telling our listeners a little bit about your journey in the ecosystem. More particularly, we're interested in your journey, how it started from the contact center world and where you got your first break into the Salesforce ecosystem.

SPEAKER_02 1:00

Yeah, uh I'm very excited to be here. I'm glad we were able to make this work as well. So I got started as a call center rep early in my career over a decade ago. And that call center was using Salesforce. I moved to Austin, Texas to further my career. And I worked at another company who happened to use Salesforce. And I saw that company had an older version of Salesforce. I think they were still using Agent Console or whatever that version of Service Cloud was from 2009. And I basically, the talky 20, 21-year-old in me went up to the director of support and said, I can make this better. And she said, okay, prove it. And the rest was history. I learned a lot in Austin, Texas. I've held a few different jobs. I worked at a video game company where I was the solo Salesforce administrator reporting to the Salesforce architect. And then I also worked at a consulting company called Aperio. They've since been bought out by WIPRO. I was a developer and dev lead there, so I was managing some offshore developer teams. And then eventually I worked at PayPal where I held three different jobs. I was a product manager for Top of Funnel, or Tofu is what I like to call it. I was a portfolio manager, so I was responsible for managing different spends for the different sales departments. And then I was a manager of business architecture until Link came around and poached me from PayPal. And I am a director of architecture at Link Logistics, and I've been here for over three and a half years, approaching four years now.

SPEAKER_03 2:50

Time flies when you're having fun. And you're back in Boston on the East Coast now after spending some great years, I hope, in Texas, in Austin.

SPEAKER_02 2:59

Yes, made a lot of great friends, a lot of great memories, learned a lot. It was just time to be closer to family. Very excited to be back on the East Coast.

SPEAKER_03 3:08

And then in terms of linked logistics, so just high-level overview. What do they do? Industry, size of the company, how do they use Salesforce at a high level?

SPEAKER_02 3:19

Yeah, so the company employee-wise is a little over a thousand employees. We're in the commercial real estate space. So the easiest way to think of us is we help companies find space. So we're in the business of selling space for as big companies as big as Amazon, so those mom and to mom and pop shops in business parks. So we have two key types of real estate: our business parks division and then our industrial real estate division. We use Salesforce quite widely across the board. What I like to say is you could throw a dart, and we're using it with some department in some shape or form. My daily responsibilities, I'm responsible for the solution build of the Salesforce platform, but we use everything from supporting marketing to supporting leasing to supporting our energy arm or our accounting arm with various different workflows. So again, throw a dart and we're using it.

SPEAKER_03 4:23

Awesome. Now logistics, I was reading just to give the audience an idea. 3,000 plus facilities, 460 million square feet of space that they are responsible for. By no means a small business, just to kind of set the scene. Very much an enterprise user of Salesforce, it sounds like.

SPEAKER_02 4:42

Yes, we're a very large user, not the largest in terms of our size. Al was hundreds of times bigger than little old link logistics. But we are, we're not enterprise. I will say that with Salesforce. If they're how they do segmentation, we are not enterprise.

SPEAKER_03 5:01

Enterprising, maybe in terms of business sense, but perhaps not Salesforce sense, let's say.

SPEAKER_02 5:05

Maybe in terms of buildings, sure. But in terms of employees, I consider a little over a thousand employees more like mid-size, but we definitely have a good amount of uh real estate assets.

SPEAKER_03 5:18

Perfect. So we're gonna cover a little bit, some some topics we're gonna cover in the podcast, your journey from admin to product to architect, you bit about your background as MVP, the idea of a positive Salesforce marketplace, and some advice and observations that of those that you have interviewed when building your team. Over to you, Matt, for the next section.

SPEAKER_01 5:39

Yeah, so you said when you started out, you were in a call center and you just kind of went to your boss and you said, I think I can improve the software without we're running. I have no experience doing this, but don't worry, I can do it anyhow. Tell us about that. How do you do that? Because that's obviously, I would say, for a lot of our listeners, particularly particular more junior ones, potentially like the dream to just pivot that easily, or it sounds easy, let's say.

SPEAKER_02 6:04

Yeah, thank you for that. When I worked at that first call center up in Maine, I had some very I had daily exposure to Salesforce as an end user, creating tickets, managing my inbound work coming from OmniChannel. We had some responsibilities around helping out and giving feedback to the Salesforce team of that company for how they built out chat or knowledge articles or just various different items. So I had a very light exposure and I was doing a lot of technical support. I was doing database recoveries, is the technical support that I was providing. So I do have I at that time I did have an associate's degree in computer science. So I was familiar with the concepts. When I went up to that director of support, I wanted to rework the routing as well as the case intake and the reporting for that. And they had some custom email apex classes and a custom email handler instead of using the out-of-the-box Salesforce. If you know me, I advocate very heavily to use that out-of-the-box sales force where possible. Doesn't always work out. There's a lot of constraints and give and take when you're negotiating with the business for that. But I was able to go up to the director and it was very much a conversation on, I feel like I can make it better. And her words were literally prove it. She gave me system admin access that day. That's how I became my accidental admin in that moment. And then I kind of sunk in at that time. I was like, oh, I actually now need to go and figure out this apex class and migrate us off and get us onto this standard email to case function. So what I did was at the time, there was this little thing called Salesforce Saturday. I'm kidding, it's still going on to this day. I went to the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf off 183 in Austin, Texas, and met up with Nadina Lisbon and Scott Lucard. They helped me out during my very first Salesforce Saturday with the Service Cloud. Big shout out to Nadina. She was incredibly helpful. This was back 2016, 2017. It was a while ago now. So I always say I really got my big start at Salesforce Saturday. So I always have a lot of thanks for Stephanie Herrera.

SPEAKER_01 8:20

Yeah, yeah. We had Nadina, you said, right? Nadina, we had her on a guest on our show. So yeah, for listeners, check out our episode. What did we talk about? I don't remember what we talked about with her. Drawing a blank hero, you remember?

SPEAKER_03 8:31

I think we put it primarily her background was really unique from a working from startups to mid-size to enterprise. She had a pretty strong philosophy, if I recall, on getting as much exposure to different types of businesses and industries and sizes of companies to make you more well-rounded as an architect. So yeah, typical, interest, interesting podcast. And maybe maybe she'd give you a little nudge as well, Zach. I think to uh to get involved. So we'll double thank her.

SPEAKER_02 8:56

Yeah, I'm notorious with answering my LinkedIn messages. She did give me a reminder to do this. I know we spoke a year ago. I'm just glad we're getting it done.

SPEAKER_01 9:06

Yeah, awesome. So it sounds like you had a reasonably decent technical background before doing this. You went to school for information systems instead of computer science. So I'm sure that came in handy. Was how important was it? How much did that background help?

SPEAKER_02 9:21

So I think foundationally it was important, but just I'll tell you the classes that I worked with. There was some Java programming, there was Microsoft Access Database, there was Microsoft Server 2008 R2. There was some networking, there was some HTML programming. So foundationally, it was pretty helpful, but I'm not one-to-one on Salesforce for sure. Don't get me wrong, the Java class helped with creating JavaScript buttons when that was a really big thing inside of Salesforce. And the concepts of a Microsoft access database and setting a primary key and a foreign key, that helps out really well when you're talking about creating different tables or objects inside of Salesforce. So I had the foundation there, but still very minimal a year or so of work experience at that point.

SPEAKER_01 10:11

Yeah, you're saying this with like the the early 2010s, right? You know what's terrifying? Is I graduated college in 98 and I had almost the exact same curriculum. That's terrifying. Yeah, anyhow. So all right, cool. So great, she let you do this. Did you hold you to a high standard? How did you continue to move on from there, right?

SPEAKER_02 10:33

Yeah, she did have hold me to a high standard. So it was for a startup company. It was called Kimzer Software. They're now known as Well Sky. So we had many customers in the post-acute care space. So think about your home health providers, your hospice providers, your home therapy providers. Kimzer sold the software that enabled them to do their electronic medical record database keeping. So whenever we were updating anything with the support mechanism, it was going to impact our live customers. We had an integration to the EMR software with Salesforce. So it was held to a very high standard. We had a sandbox, we did a lot of testing in it, we kept track of all the steps that we did. At that time, it was change sets. It wasn't really using Ant or using any of the DevOps tools that are really available today. But we still had a lot of high expectations, and I was able to deliver towards that. Eventually I got promoted there to be the Salesforce admin for the company. And then we quickly got bought out by Metaware, and then private equity came in and they rebranded the company into Wealth Sky. So I got a lot of great experience there. I ultimately ended up leaving there for more money, and that's when I went on over to Cabam.

SPEAKER_01 11:56

Yeah, I was just about to ask you that. So when you went to Cabam, you went there as a developer or also within Salesforce season, Salesforce developer, or you were like doing gaming development?

SPEAKER_02 12:06

So leave Salesforce Admin. I actually reported to Nadina Lisbon at that time. So she was my boss at one point in time. So I was doing typical service cloud administration. So they were their video games, they had Marvel Contest of Champions and Transformers Forged the Fight. They have a couple other games today, they're owned by Netmarvel. The support website and the email intake was hooked up to Salesforce. So whenever anyone emailed in or they filled out a case on the form, it would go into a queue and then it would be routed to people. We had skill-based routing, a queue-based routing set up. And so it was a lot of work on making sure the player support representatives got the right ticket at the right time for the right type of inquiry that matches their skill set. So making sure the person that can handle payments or refund questions got the payments and refund questions versus someone that was a gaming support that can tell you how to advance a level or really progress your story.

unknown 13:15

Cool.

SPEAKER_01 13:15

So you knew Nadina before you took this job. So she basically got you in the door, I assume. It was a good networking.

SPEAKER_02 13:22

Oh so I had to go through a full interview process. So I definitely knew her. Yeah, she let me know that she had an opportunity and I should consider applying. And I did. I went through three or four rounds and they brought me on board. But yeah, I didn't, I'd heard of it through the Austin, Texas Salesforce ecosystem. And that's how I got my foot in the door.

SPEAKER_01 13:47

Okay, awesome. So now you're approaching almost COVID, and then you pivoted to working at an SI after that?

SPEAKER_02 13:55

Yeah, so I didn't stay at Kabam long. Once Nadina left, I reevaluated and decided I wanted to go more heavy on the development. I had some good exposure at that point. Even though when you're a solo admin, not as much as Kabam, Nadina handles a lot of the development. But when I was that developer or admin uh wealth guy, I had to do a lot of development myself or go manipulate Apex. Pretty standard for solo admin. So I wanted to really engrave myself. So I left there in 2019, like November 2019, if I'm remembering correctly. And I went to this SI that I heard through my network. It's called Aperio. It's now bought out by WIPRO. And that I was a dev and then eventually a dev lead. So I was working on projects for companies like T-Mobile, Change Healthcare, and MD VIP. They were my favorite client. I'll happily say that. Loved working with them every single day. In the odd event, they're listening to this. Hope they're doing well. But yeah, I spent a lot of time doing a lot of different development, really brushing up my skills. And then eventually I was mainly when I was on Team Mobile, I was managing some offshore devs. I ended up leaving there when PayPal approached me with a very hard offer to refuse at that time.

SPEAKER_01 15:16

Yeah, like what's the primary difference? So if you're working internally versus consulting, that that you would advise like some of our listeners to really look out for that or yeah, your lessons learned or advice you would give for people working in those different environments?

SPEAKER_02 15:33

So I would recommend they consider what is important to them from a benefits and a pay perspective, first of all. So the consulting model is much different than when you're in-house. So first off, when you're in-house, you're typically salary. They don't typically pay you an hourly wage unless you contract with the customer and then you can get an hourly rate. But also, what I like to say is if you go to sleep on something, that problem's still gonna be with you tomorrow. Whereas when you're in consulting, I've seen some behavior where some developers or admins or architects will be like, we didn't get the renewal, it's not gonna be my problem anymore. So there's really that sense or lack of ownership for when you're in-house versus at a consultancy. And then there's some other details to consider. So when you're at a consultancy, you still have to log all your hours because you're doing a billable service to different clients of that consultancy. So you need to be making sure you can manage your time very effectively. I like to call managing your non-value add time, being able to update your documentation, update your tickets, update your billables, still attend your meetings, get your work done. There isn't really the same structure in consulting where you're gonna meet with a manager one-on-one in the sense that they are doing the very traditional items inside of a cusp, like the customer side of Salesforce when you're in-house. It's more so they'll review your billables, your attainment for the quarter. They will give you some great support if you put that effort out there, which is probably standard towards anything, on your career advancement. Some other details that are pretty important is you're always selling when you are kind of in that consulting world. So if you go out and speak in the ecosystem, they're gonna want to ask you to give them the leads. What I'll tell everyone is you don't have to do that for free. You can form an agreement, especially if you're just you're a developer or an architect and you don't have a commission goal or some other type of incentive on your agreement, whether you're hourly and then you have some type of fifth if you get them a client or a percentage of deal or some type of quota, or if you're salary and you have none of that, make sure you don't just give all the consultancies that free business unless they make sure they take care of you as well. It's always good to take care of the consultancy, but they should also be taking care of their employees, is my point of view.

SPEAKER_01 18:09

You were full-time with the period, or you're a freelancer hourly?

SPEAKER_02 18:14

I was full-time. I was a W-2 full-time employee.

SPEAKER_01 18:18

Okay, yeah, just some of the things that you said, I think maybe you're referring to hitting billable hour quotas, which I assume you had.

SPEAKER_02 18:24

Yes, still have to hit billable hours. So that's where that can be a little bit of a difference. Where if you've been in-house before and your salary, you don't typically have to manage your hours in a timesheet. But when you go back to consulting, that's how they generate their revenue. And so you're gonna have to get back into that. For some people, I have heard it feels like, oh, you're going back to your first job where you're punching in and out, but you have to understand it's just how they that's how they make revenue, the billables.

SPEAKER_01 18:54

Yeah, I've obviously worked with a lot of SAs. SIs. I will say that what you're describing here is not super typical. I think it's a little it's it is very typical, but it's almost like a little like the smaller ones, they're a little bit more, they're a little bit more hybrid where you feel like an employee, you feel like you're part of a company where what you're describing seems a little bit more transactional. Is that the case? Um because you you left, right? And then you you left. It was the only time you worked at an SI, and then you went back in-house.

SPEAKER_02 19:26

That is the only time for the ones I've listed on my LinkedIn profile. I have freelanced before. I've been exposed to about five, and they have very similar billable systems. Yeah, even though it's in my experience, we each they all each have different no, everybody's billing hours, right?

SPEAKER_01 19:41

That's how it works, and everybody has billing targets. That's not going to change. I was saying, just saying that the uh the career path side of things often seems is not that structured of where they just don't care about you. Again, particularly the smaller SIs, they seem a little bit to be a little bit more a family. Yeah, I and I hate the term family when talking about a company, but they're more friendly towards each other and it just it has a more yeah.

SPEAKER_02 20:06

So Aperirio, Aperio was a smaller to mid-size SI. They were very successful and they led a lot of the early day models. So they got started in the 2000s. They were so successful that they got bought out by WIPRO, which is one of the biggest SIs in the world. Part of the reason I left is that loss of identity, that loss of, as you said, that culture. That was a big motivator on my departure. Just as the time went on, more and more policies came to fruit that didn't align with me. So when I had joined, it was absolutely amazing. It was that sense of culture, that like small SI was a lot of fun. For those that know, Aperio has thrown a lot of events at Screenforce and TDX, and they were quite legendary for that. But just once WhipRo came in, just various different items were changing. Not as much the events, but just different internal things. It was time for me to go. So I do agree with you, at least from my experience, smaller SIs have more of that bonding and everything than the larger ones.

SPEAKER_01 21:06

Yeah, and then you so then you went to back in-house, right? So what kind of advice would you give to someone who's making that move out of consulting and into in-house?

SPEAKER_02 21:16

Yeah, so it's a lot so consulting is very fast paced in the sense that you have a timeline, but you have to hit certain goals each week to keep the timeline on track. Otherwise, the project manager is hanging over your head on, oh, we might need a change order if we need more time to do this. It's a lot slower pace going from consulting to that in-house. Doesn't mean there isn't those timelines or project dependencies or programs to manage, but you have a little bit of a transition period there, which is kind of nice when you're in that go go method. You can take a breather and then ramp back up.

SPEAKER_01 21:52

Okay, so in terms of your career, was this planned? How did you plan your career in terms of do some I mean you get out of I don't know what's so just called this call center work into back into tech, which you went to school for. So I assume that was at least planned. You wanted a stepping stone into tech and then to a consulting firm and then back. How much of this was like you planning your career or as opposed to just cap a stance taking advantage of the opportunity as it came along?

SPEAKER_02 22:19

Yeah, I'd probably uh do what I like to call the UNO reverse. How much of your career did you plan out?

SPEAKER_01 22:27

I planned a lot of it, none of it worked.

SPEAKER_02 22:30

I so all I knew was I wanted to work with computers and I let the rest take me. Simple conversations or opportunities. I had an idea very early on on this is where I want to go. It didn't end up working out with what I wanted to go into with computers at the time. Then Salesforce ended up working out incredibly well. So that's where I just was like, you know what? I'm not gonna hurt my head or plan this out too much. I keep it very loose. And as an opportunity presents itself, I will consider it.

SPEAKER_03 23:02

Last question on the topic, Zach. How did working for an SI advance your career?

SPEAKER_02 23:08

I think working for an SI was incredibly valuable. One, I've made incredible connections that I still talk to this day. I know Maz mentioned that kind of like family aspect, which it's always a little bit of a thing to consider work your family. There's a lot of jokes about that where people say work is not your family. But there are some people I am incredibly close to this day that I still talk to at least once a week, if not multiple times throughout the week that I worked out with the Piero or even different alumni. I'm actually flying out in a month to a uh Piero 20th reunion. So even though the branding is depunked, the original founders and a lot of the people that work there, we're still getting together and we're having a great time together. So I think it helped my career a lot in some in terms of the connections that I've made throughout the years, but also the different skills that I picked up, managing offshore devs and a follow-the-sun model. That is a skill set that is much different than just coding some Apex for a client, as well as different skills around being client-facing and knowing how to present yourself or communicate or when not to communicate. The amount of time we've all been on those calls where you hear someone technical start talking and you kind of wish they would shut up. Yeah, yeah. So it was very helpful. Now, don't get me wrong, I still put my foot in my mouth sometimes, but it was definitely a lot of rapid exposure very quickly.

SPEAKER_03 24:42

Good. Good. I think that's sound advice, and I think that's the biggest advantage. You always mean working in different environments, different projects, multiple amount of people from the networking standpoint, those are connections that, if you nurture them correctly, can take you to other channels, other opportunities as they come up. Fantastic. So I want to talk a little bit about the MVP. So for those listeners who maybe don't know Zach, Zach is a Salesforce MVP. This is something that started the MVP model in the ecosystem early 2010, I think it was. I think most people who are listening are probably aware of what the Salesforce MVP kind of scheme is, but it's basically for the most influential leaders in the Trailblazer community. Zach, tell us a bit about kind of how the MVP selection process works. What are kind of some of the core behaviors that those who vote and approve the MVPs look for in an individual?

SPEAKER_02 25:34

Yeah, so the MVP process is not a secret, uh, very public. So happy to go over it. So first off, MVPs are awarded MVP from Salesforce through displays of generosity, expertise, and leadership. And how they get awarded that is through a pretty robust selection process that starts with the Salesforce community. So the first step is you have to be nominated by anyone in the community. So you, Cairo or Maz, you could go once the process opens up, you could go nominate someone. You could also go nominate yourself. There are people that have self-nominated and have received MVPs or the MVP recognition. But when somebody fills out that application, it's not about the quantity of nominations you receive. It is about really the quality. So where have you really displayed those characteristics of generosity or giving back, or how have you shown you're an expert, like really keeping up with all of the products, or how are you a leader in the space on creating different opportunities for others to really either learn or grow their career with the Salesforce ecosystem? So somebody has to fill out all of that information in an application. Then once that is filled out, it goes to MVPs, to current MVPs to review that feedback. They basically have to review if they know that person, whether or not they have anything supplementary that they would like to add about that. And then it'll go to a round at Salesforce where they review the community nominations and the MVP feedback and they provide their own round of feedback. And after that, based on the decisions of those three rounds, they make a decision on who is going to be in the next class, and then they let them know accordingly. Typically, once we know whether we're receiving MVP or renewed, typically have less than a day's notice before the social media starts. So there isn't a whole lot of time before the MVPs have just figured out they're an MVP and then all of a sudden they're getting blasted on social media.

SPEAKER_03 27:52

What is I guess the commitments of an MVP once you've been selected as an MVP? What are the continued behaviors that Salesforce expect to see from those individuals? Because it's not a set and forget it, put it on your LinkedIn and then your job done for the year, right? There is this expectation of continuation once you're an MVP.

SPEAKER_02 28:12

Yeah, you don't have to go changing your life or let it get to your head is what I like to say. Just continue doing what you're doing. What you were doing got you that recognition. You have gained a lot of support from those you have given back to in the community. I the key reason I got it is I did a lot for the Austin, Texas community. I had monthly user groups for years. I think our biggest user group, we had 199 people show up. I was still a little bit salty. I couldn't find one more. I made sure to count that number multiple times. But it's really just continuing that behavior. So continuing to be generous, continuing to grow your knowledge of the platform and continue continuously giving back to the ecosystem and creating opportunities for others to do so. As long as you keep doing that, you really don't overthink it. Don't go crazy. Some people do, and then they may or may not get renewed. They go too crazy, is what I'll say.

SPEAKER_03 29:09

Yeah, I've definitely seen a few examples of that over the years. So the Salesforce MVP class of 2026 was made up of 93 MVPs, which are split into new additions and renewed. So I think that's something that just on that, what do you have to do to renew your MVP? So you've you got awarded in four years ago, right? But are you still an MVP technically? Did you go through that renewal process of maintaining the MVP? How does that work?

SPEAKER_02 29:34

Yeah, so I'm on my fifth year as an MVP, and we have to go through two of the rounds each year. So we don't have to go through the initial community nomination, but we still have to go through a feedback round amongst our peers of other MVPs, and then of course, Salesforce reviews all of our feedback. We can log our contributions and is encouraged to do that once a year. But again, as long as you're not doing anything majorly different, you shouldn't have any sort of issue.

SPEAKER_03 30:04

Now, there is also the MVP Hall of Fame. That was something additional. I saw 21 people were inducted to that this year. I guess the MVP status is a one-year term, as we mentioned. It's reviewed annually. I think Salesforce Ben, I think it was put the global figure at maybe 250 plus MVPs since 2010. But what do you have to do to be in the MVP Hall of Fame? Is it like, I don't know, American football where you have the MVP Hall of Famers, you're the best of the best? Is what is the process there?

SPEAKER_02 30:33

Yeah, since I'm not an MVP Hall of Famer, I can't give you really any insight on that. If I do become an MVP Hall of Fame, which would obviously be an honor, first step I know is you have to have completed five years, but I really can't offer you any insight on a program I'm not a part of.

SPEAKER_03 30:49

When you get there, we'll invite you back on. You tell us more about it.

SPEAKER_01 30:52

But then it's automatic after five years. I thought if you get the fifth year, you become or the sixth year.

SPEAKER_02 30:57

No, it is not automatic. It is not guaranteed.

unknown 31:00

Okay.

SPEAKER_03 31:01

And so the MVP is different to the golden hoodie, right?

SPEAKER_02 31:05

Yes. Golden Hoodie is more of a thank you from Salesforce. They give it out for various different reasons. So they gave mine out at the height of COVID and one of the world tours in Austin, Texas, where they thanked a lot of what I was doing with helping people learn on Salesforce. Again, I was doing a lot in Austin, Texas at the time.

SPEAKER_03 31:27

I'm gonna ask you, what do you think? Your MVP or your Golden Honey Award?

SPEAKER_02 31:35

They're both great programs. I couldn't possibly say which one I'd be more proud of.

SPEAKER_03 31:40

Which one do you think might have benefited your career the most?

SPEAKER_02 31:44

I think they both have been very helpful in different ways.

SPEAKER_03 31:47

Any examples?

SPEAKER_02 31:49

No, I don't think I'm gonna go into any.

SPEAKER_03 31:53

All right. The topic of personal branding is something that comes up quite quite a lot. Do you think personal branding is overrated when it comes to setting oneself apart in today's market, right? Where maybe the opportunities are fewer and further between? Or do you think is it something that people maybe overworry about and it's not as it's not as much of a big deal as it should be? What are your thoughts on the kind of personal branding topic that you see people posting about?

SPEAKER_02 32:19

Yeah, I think personal branding is very important. So I originally branded myself as admin sack very early on. Fun fact, you can no longer put the word admin in your X or Twitter handle. Salesforce on Twitter used to be very big in the day. But I guess there was a bug with the word admin and handles where you could literally elevate yourself to admin access on Twitter. And so I had to change my handle because they were like, oh yeah, there's this bug. We really need you to change it. So that was kind of interesting. But one non-technical Twitter admin issues aside, something that kind of cornered me into is people just equating kept equating me to, oh, he only knows admin skills. He doesn't know dev, he doesn't know architect. So I went very neutral after that and just called myself Techy Zach. And I think that has been very helpful. I have my own blog. I have a newsletter list that I am not good with keeping up to date on. There's a couple of thousand people that have subscribed, but I do a horrible job at sending any emails on that. I keep saying I'll do something. I have some stuff in mind for the architect ambassador program. But having access to your own identity in this any professional space, not just Salesforce, it really helps companies and people know you. And it's marketing 101. How are you gonna get opportunities if people don't know you exist?

SPEAKER_03 33:43

Fair enough. I can only do, I think anything's better than nothing when it comes to personal brand, as long as it's fairly good content, keep putting it out there. So two last questions. One is why should people volunteer? And the other is how do community leaders stay authentic? There's obviously a yeah, how do you stay authentic? How do you stay relevant?

SPEAKER_02 34:01

Yeah, so I think there's many different ways. That's a lot of questions at once. Being authentic and staying up to date. So being authentic, just be yourself. But also, I like to if you do something with the expectation you're gonna get something back, and then you don't get that something back, you're just gonna be disappointed, and then you're gonna be demotivated and you're gonna be upset, maybe at yourself, maybe at the world, maybe at some random person that you don't really know. So when you do anything, make sure you don't do it with any expectation of getting something back. It's very evident there are some people throughout the ecosystem over the years where we've noticed them go really hard, really fast, and then they can implode or go very public on social media when they don't get like MVP or they don't get like XYZ that they expected for all this hard work that they're doing. So it's very important when you're going out and you're doing the stuff, make sure you actually enjoy doing the stuff. Like I love hosting user group events. I love helping people network, learn different items, advance their career, connect different people. So make sure you actually enjoy doing it and don't expect anything in return. And just naturally, you will get some stuff in return, you will get some benefits, but if you go out there with that wrong mindset of expecting anything in return, you're just gonna end up disappointed and you're gonna disappoint yourself largely. How I say up to date is just I like the mindset of continuously learning, so making time to learn different concepts. And it doesn't always have to be technical. I know AI is really big right now, but also people's skills are always ever important.

SPEAKER_01 35:51

Yeah, so for me, I was always very not on social media at all until I published my book. And then once I published my book, I was like, Oh, I guess I gotta promote it. So it wasn't so much that it didn't want anything in return. Obviously, I was trying to promote a book. So I think the branding is what you get back in return, right? So it's the quality exposure, but that's what you're driving, not somebody handing you something, if that makes sense, right? You need to have purpose in in what you're doing, and the same thing with Did Podcast, right? Obviously, we really enjoy doing it and we're putting out some good content, but we definitely want some of the level of exposure to it, and that has to, I think, has to go with the reach, right? You want the reach, you don't want to be screaming into a void.

SPEAKER_02 36:36

Yeah, and that just takes time to build up. Y'all started in the same place with the CRM success show. I bet your first episode compared to your latest episode is it's probably different in impressions or engagement or different vanity metrics, so to speak. But it's a lot of work. It's essentially a part-time or full-time job, depending on how much you want to put into it. And based on how much you put into it, effort, there is some return on investment based on the effort you put in. Some effort will get more return on investment, some other effort might not get as much. I will say there will always be some type of return on investment. It's just dependent on how hard you want to work, but also don't go crazy about it. Otherwise, you're just gonna set yourself up for disappointment.

SPEAKER_01 37:22

Yeah, we can say that about everything in life. Okay, moving on, talking a little bit about disappointment in the tech ecosystem. Not even Salesforce ecosystem, obviously, has been somewhat impacted. There's been a lot of grumbling about changes going on in the tech world, heavily focused around AI. Salesforce is obviously pushing that in a strong way. People haven't been focused or they've been heavily focused on they don't necessarily like at least that's what you the grumbling that you're hearing online. They don't necessarily like the direction Salesforce is going. I think that somewhat changed in the past two weeks with the announcement of Cloud Force and coming back to Dreamforce and their stock finally making a bit of a turnaround after getting clobbered all of the early part of this year. I know you have a different point of view on this. So, what's your perspective? What would you say to all of these people that are kind of complaining they don't like the direction Salesforce is going?

SPEAKER_02 38:19

Yeah, so I don't really keep up with the stock, so I can't really talk about anything on that front. Whether or not they like the strategic direction in different product announcements, looking at the stock, it worked out well. If you look at other metrics other than a public stock number, if you go look at their company revenue, it has been growing every single year for many years. So I don't know about you, but something is working out, and uh us three are gainfully employed or able to support our bills, and the ecosystem is still growing. Now, compared to 10 years ago, there has been a large influx of talent. So if you kind of think about that basic supply and demand model, Trailhead serves a purpose where it created a large influx of talent for customers in a size of Salesforce to help eventually bring down the labor costs of implementing their software. I think you were getting at kind of some of the negativity I've seen in recent years on social media. I wouldn't really equate that to the stock or their outlook. I would equate that to a lot of longing for what it was like 10 years ago, that nostalgia factor. I don't think dogpiling is healthiest, so to speak. And what I like to say with emotions is you can choose to be angry, you could choose to be happy, you can choose and choose to ignore stuff. Negativity does get more engagement, and if you want that engagement, if I go put a negative post on LinkedIn, that post is gonna do amazing. If I go put a somewhat neutral or positive post, or this is cool, maybe I'll get like 10 likes, which is fine. I'm not doing it for likes, but there has been a lot of negativity in recent years, and my point of view on the matter is negativity gets engagement. Those clickbait sound bites will get you that engagement. If that's what you want, your engagement, then you can do that. But I think it's really important to lead with positivity and be that person that you want to see change, and it starts with you. If you take ownership of you think there's a problem, there's items you can control within your own span of control that you can change. And it can be as simple as just talking about something that's really exciting or something that you learned, or someone that you met at you know, Salesforce Saturday, or a user group. It doesn't always have to be the clickbait Salesforce fan articles that are coming out, even though I love Sasha.

SPEAKER_01 40:52

Yeah, so what one of the complaints that seem to be coming up a little bit more nowadays is that the Salesforce community both within ESIs, more so I think on the SI side, it feels like they're just like Salesforce is just not partnering with them the same way that they used to and almost going down their own their own path. I I think that's one of the largest complaints. The second one is just that they're somewhat lessening their investment in the community. Now, obviously, no company owes anybody, uh nobody owes anybody anything for nothing, but that is the kind of complaint I think that there's just that not same level of community support, both on the SI side and the and the community side.

SPEAKER_02 41:35

Yeah, so I can't speak about the partner team. I can speak for the community team. So when you look at it from 10 years ago to today, the community team has grown. There is significantly more programs around today, like Sales Blazer, Service Blazer, Data Blazer, Agent Blazer, Yes Who's MVP program, the community group program. There's hundreds of community groups across the world. There's many different events across the world stemming from the community team. There's the Dream impact. There is significantly more funding today than there was in previous years. I think what a lot of people feel is there might not be because of the negative dogpiling, oh, Salesforce isn't doing enough in my area, or oh, my Dreamin' didn't get the sponsorship level that I wanted. It's a little bit of a balancing act. Like, how would how would you prioritize over 500 different user groups and X amount of different dreamings and all these different local economies from London to Boston to Dallas, Texas, to India or places elsewhere in Europe? It's a pretty big problem that Salesforce has on their plate. I do think they are continuing to invest and they're growing their investment considerably. So I don't agree with the perception shrinking, but maybe I'm just looking at things differently.

SPEAKER_03 43:04

In terms of hiring, so your observations being a leader, manager with a team, your current team, I think we're right about 40 plus at the moment, around 40?

SPEAKER_02 43:15

Between 30 and 40, mix of contractors and FTEs. And I do actually have a hard stop. I know it's a little bit late for this in a couple of minutes. But yes, in terms of hiring, over the years, I have seen a lot of the skill sets start to meld together, is the best way I can describe it. With the advance of AI, the ability to like get code into a company has become a lot cheaper. But the skill sets that's really important is people management translates really well to agent management. How well you can articulate a problem, review the quality of the output. Ultimately, the decision still relies on you, the human, on what you put into prod. And if you don't stand Top of your agent, just as you would on staying on top of one of your direct reports. How can you actually feel like you can trust the decision that's gonna have your name on it at the end of the day? It's not gonna have an agent's name on it, it's gonna have who built that agent and why did they let that happen? But also a big skill set that's like very important is being able to think in systems. So again, very easy to code nowadays, especially with AI, but being able to solve the right thing upstream that translates to those like downstream solutions is a very important skill set.

SPEAKER_03 44:37

That's a really good call out. A couple of quick yes there questions then and in the sake of time. How much of a headache has AI caused you during an interview process so far?

SPEAKER_02 44:49

I have been on those candidate interviews in which I have seen people very clearly reading from a prompt. So it's caused a little bit, not too much. You can kind of tell when people are reading off their screen. I have more issues where it's more common, I think, or I mainly seen this in offshore developer interviews, is when either somebody shows up for the interview and then someone else joins, or some other type of issue is more common than just reading the AI prompt.

SPEAKER_03 45:24

In your opinion, last question, what do the top 5% of Salesforce candidates have or do that helps him stand out from the rest?

SPEAKER_02 45:34

Yeah, so I think being able to really articulate their business skills, their communication skills, as well as really thinking in systems. I like to call it being able to kind of solve that gray area, being able to look up and look down and not just wait for someone to tell you what a problem is. If you kind of have that problem blindness where you can't look past that Jira ticket that you have been assigned, you're very quickly gonna phase out. It's gonna be the people that can identify problems, be able to take ownership of what they can. It doesn't mean they need to be the owner of that very specific large problem, but being able to break it down and be like, oh, I can't go change our coding standards for the entire company, but I can go make my code better. That is the type of behavior that's very helpful to see that really moves the needle. Taking ownership on what they can control and moving that needle forward is very important.

SPEAKER_03 46:34

I said that was the last question, but this is gonna be the last question, Zach. What is the one thing you're looking forward to in the Salesforce ecosystem? Be it personal, be it skill set, be it new product features going into next year.

SPEAKER_02 46:46

Yeah, can't wait to see what it looks like a year from now, especially with the advent of AI. Uh every few months it changes very drastically. Loop engineering was really big. Systems thinking is now even bigger, in my opinion. Before loop engineering, there was the whole topics of agents and just improving the quality of the agents. I'm very excited. Not as much Salesforce, but across the board, what that's gonna mean in a year from now, as well as all the people that are really gonna lean into it.

SPEAKER_03 47:16

Awesome. All right, Zach. Thank you for your time. We appreciate it. Great content, and it's good to finally get it on the books.

SPEAKER_02 47:22

Yeah, so it's great chatting with y'all. I am gonna run, but I will text y'all via our normal methods.