Podcasts about cloudcraze

In this podcast episode, Dr. Jonathan H. Westover talks with Ray Grady about best practices in scaling your freelance and contract workforces. Ray Grady, the CEO of Worksuite, brings over 20 years of experience in scaling high-growth B2B organizations, leading the company in designing and executing Worksuite's vision, strategic growth plans, and company operations. Prior to joining Worksuite, Ray held several executive positions including CEO of Conexiom and SVP, COO, and GM of B2B Commerce at Salesforce. Previously, Ray was President and COO of CloudCraze, where he led the company through its 2018 acquisition by Salesforce. Ray lives in the Chicago area with his family and in his free time, he likes to play golf (poorly) and wakesurf.   Check out all of the podcasts in the HCI Podcast Network!

No digital transformation is the same, but when a massive B2B organization embarks on that journey, you better believe that there will be a lot of lessons learned that can be applied to any other company. That’s why we wanted to talk to former Chief Digital Officer at Univar Solutions, Ian Gresham, who led the digital transformation and ecommerce implementation at this $9 billion multinational industrial distribution business. Look around at the things around you, make up, dish soap, skincare, solvents for your car. Univar probably has a part to play in that. On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, Ian tells us about the experience of bringing a massive organization into the world of digital commerce, and he reveals some of the biggest learnings from the experience that he is using now as an executive advisor to multiple businesses. For example, how should ecommerce leaders frame the building of a platform to get buy-in from the top down, and what kind of strategies should you implement to drive adoption of your platform? Interestingly, it’s a combination of moving fast but also taking it slow — tune in to learn what that means in practice. Plus, Ian shares more tips and discusses some of the insider details on the projects he’s currently working on. Enjoy! Main Takeaways:If You Build It, They.. May Not Come: When going through a digital transformation, many companies fall into the trap of believing that if they simply build and launch an ecommerce website, their customers will flock to it. In reality — and especially in the B2B space – there is an education and adoption phase that needs to happen to actually make an ecommerce site successful.M-V-P!: It’s wise to take an MVP approach to building an ecommerce platform because it forces you to focus on one specific feature that you can provide that solves a problem for a customer reliably well over and over. By offering that one solution, you can drive faster adoption of the platform because you are not overwhelming customers with a multitude of features, some of which they don’t want or need. New features can come down the road, but adoption needs to come first. And the entire organization needs to be on the same page that building a platform is an ongoing process with no set start and end date because there will always be new things to add or improve.It’s About The Journey: In businesses that rely on face-to-face interactions, the omnichannel experience is becoming more important than ever. To digitize some of the interactions and drive the adoption of more online tools, you have to start from the bottom up and understand every kind of customer and customer journey that exists within your business. From there, you can start reallocating headcount to digitize certain processes and send other resources to handle high-value customer interactions so that you know you are investing in the parts of the customer journey that are most in need.For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.---Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we’re ready for what’s next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce---Transcript:Stephanie:Hey everyone. Welcome back to Up Next in Commerce. This is Stephanie Postles, your host and CEO at Mission.org. Today on the show we have Ian Gresham, Chief Marketing Officer and Digital Officer, and currently an Executive Advisor to multiple businesses. Ian, welcome to the show.Ian:Thank you very much, Stephanie. It's great to be here.Stephanie:I'm excited to have you here. I just was looking through your background and we did not cover on our call that I thought you went to University of Maryland, which I am from Maryland, so-Ian:That's right. Go Turts. Fear the turtle.Stephanie:This is already off to a wonderful start now that we have that connection. I love that. I wanted to kind of start with your background. I see you've been in a lot of marketing roles, and I wanted to hear how you got interested in marketing, what that journey looked like.Ian:Yeah, sure. I don't remember exactly how marketing became an interest. In business school, I was looking at a number of things. I think perhaps that it was the fact that it was pretty people-oriented, and it's sort of an extrovert function in business if you will. That was pretty exciting to me. There were some pretty school businesses in the Maryland area that were recruiting at the business school there, and ultimately I ended up starting my career with Black and Decker. I worked on the DeWalt brand, and it's just a great place to learn a ton of great marketing and sales skills, and get out there and interact with the world.Ian:They put you out there on the street selling and talking to real people very quickly, and it was a lot of fun.Stephanie:Are there any lessons from Black and Decker where you still use them today, or you think back to advice you got or campaigns you were running? Or is it totally different now?Ian:I guess I think that for one, they set the standard very high for brands to create excitement and create products and experiences that their customers love and are loyal to. We used to get on the DeWalt brand pictures of people who had DeWalt themed weddings. I have had the good fortune in my career to work on a few other brands like that with Craftsman and later... And Sherman Williams, we had a brand called Purdy, which is a brand of paint brushes and applicators. They make these paint brushes here in the US by hand, and painters can tell a Purdy in their hand when they're blindfolded. They know the feel of the wood. They know just how these things feel and work, and they believe in them.Ian:Anyway, to be able to work on a brand like that at Purdy, we got a video of a guy who had a funeral for a paintbrush that he had used for years and years. When it finally just wouldn't go any further, he filmed a little memorial service and buried it in his yard.Stephanie:Oh my gosh.Ian:Anyway, DeWalt's the same way. Black and Decker, they just set the bar very high in terms of brands that create amazing loyalty and amazing customer experiences, which I have tried to carry through my career as well.Stephanie:I want to dive into your time at Univar, because that company is obviously huge. I think it's what, a $9 billion company, Fortune 500.Ian:Yep.Stephanie:9,000 employees or so.Ian:Yep. Yep.Stephanie:I want to hear about your work there. First of all, what is Univar and what did your role look like there?Ian:Sure. Univar, now Univar Solutions, is a pretty global multinational industrial distribution business. So, very B2B. We sold chemicals and ingredients into many different industries, everything from food ingredients to food manufacturers, to ingredients to personal care product companies like cosmetics companies, shampoos, sunscreen, lotions, paint and coatings, adhesives, industrial use. It was just a super diverse customer base. Thousands and thousands of customers, hundreds of thousands of products, and just millions of transactions. Lots of repeat business.Ian:Some of the products we sold were very commoditized. Some were highly specialized and patent protected, and exclusive ingredients that took a much different sales approach. The customer experience around that was very different too.Stephanie:What was your role when you first started at Univar? Then where did you transition to over time?Ian:Yeah, so I spent a couple of years as the first CMO at Univar, and put in place the first global corporate strategy, built out a lot of the core marketing frameworks with market research, with brand standards, articulating our value proposition, enhancing the value proposition, and aligning how we were communicating that and the brand identity globally. Then after a couple of years somewhere along the way I picked up a responsibility for ecommerce. A couple of years into it, the CEO talked to me about this opportunity to become the first Chief Digital Officer.Ian:When we had that conversation, he made the point that he really didn't want a technical person in this role. He wanted a commercial person in this role who could think about value creation and how we leverage digital to create value for our customers and suppliers, and to differentiate ourselves in a pretty fragmented marketplace with a lot of competitors of all different sizes. To me, this was really exciting. If I think about my whole career, I'd spent time in these companies like Black and Decker, Sherwin Williams, companies that made mostly consumer-facing products that really thought a lot about innovation.Ian:Then to make the transition into B2B distribution, one of my observations was innovation was not as common as daily there as it was in these manufactured product companies. I think a huge opportunity that I saw was with digital this is a way for a distributor to innovate around customer experience. A distributor doesn't typically make products. What they make is a unique customer experience, and they deliver on that better or worse than their competition. Digital is a way for that type of business to really create a better customer experience and solve problems that have remained somewhat unsolved.Stephanie:Very cool. Were you nervous taking on not only one, taking on a role where you're really the first CMO, and now it's like and now you're going to be the first Chief Digital Officer, were you hesitant to take on a new role that the company had not had before?Ian:Yeah. When I had the conversation initially, one of my thoughts was I don't know if I'm the right person for this. But that conversation around wanting somebody who had the commercial mindset rather than a technical mindset was reassuring. I think if you look at chief digital officers as a position and the people that sort of reside in those roles today, there are few different walks of life that find people there. Sometimes it's a technical leader. Sometimes it is a commercial leader, and maybe sometimes it's a transformational sort of complex project leader type person.Ian:It's not uncommon to have a marketer in that type of a role. As I think about marketing as a field and CMO as a role, what's clear in today's world is that digital is becoming really important to marketers. It has already, but the CMO role in general has evolved a lot and it continues to evolve. Much of the change is around digital and the power of data. As I thought about this role, to me it felt very relevant to my career, and it felt like the right skill set to be adding to my toolbox.Stephanie:Yeah. Yeah, very cool. What did it look like behind the scenes when you were entering into this new role? After you started observing for a bit, what did the process look like and where did you want to evolve it to?Ian:We had already started someone. We had an ecommerce platform we had just launched, and we had some analytics work that was already underway. We had some thoughts on how digital would help in supply chain and some other ways. The idea with creating this chief digital officer role was to put it all together to create a bigger wholistic vision, to prioritize and think about which of these things do we really want to do, and what sequence do we want to do them in, and how much are they all worth to us, and what is the investment going to require?Ian:The first thing to do was start to put the elements together and continue progress for accelerated progress in the things that we already had started. Fortunately, I really enjoyed a lot of the work we were doing there. It was very customer-facing. It was on the commercial side of the business, so we had an advanced analytics team that we rapidly were growing. We were doing AI and machine learning. We had a ton of transactional data, very good CRM data, and we were able to create a lot of value out of that by identifying insights that were commercially actionable.Ian:We had a couple of marketing automation systems in place, and we were choosing and moving to one. We were using that pretty effectively to reach out and activate with our customers as well as the ecommerce platform itself. We were still really trying to drive adoption of the ecommerce platform. I guess one of the lessons we learned was we were moving.... There assumed to be a lot of pressure to have a website, an ecommerce system, a customer portal where our customers could transact. There was a bit of a race to build it and launch it. We did.Stephanie:[crosstalk] you launch it, and what did your tech stack look like? What was the perfect fit for a company of Univar's size?Ian:We were using very heavily the Salesforce B2B commerce stack. That's what we built our commerce platform on, which was originally CloudCraze then became B2B commerce for Salesforce. I'd say we had a pretty good experience there. We were able to launch a platform in weeks, not months.Stephanie:Wow. [crosstalk]. That's super fast for a company that size, because we've talked to other people who were like, "Oh, 28 weeks." It's a whole thing.Ian:It was incredibly fast. We had both a strong internal team using very good development processes, and moving fast. Also, we used outside support for the build as well. We spent some money on it. Speed and money sometimes are inversely correlated. This was kind of an example, but we built it. I guess the story that I think is relevant here though is that... Let me just say, my story is one of helping lead a company that's pretty early in a digital transformation stage, not the bleeding edge. I think that looks like a lot of the companies out there who see digital transformation as an opportunity, but an overwhelming one. Where do we start? How do we get our house in order to get going?Ian:We just knew we needed a platform and there was a race to launch it. We launched it. What we learned was the Kevin Costner movie, "If you build it they will come," Field of Dreams, is not necessarily the case in ecommerce. You have to drive adoption. You have to have a great product that makes something better for customers to use it, prefer it, and stick with it. But also, you got to do some hand holding with some of these customers that have been doing things the same way for a long time. Digital transformation is about leaving an old state of affairs and moving to something new and better, but change requires support and communication.Ian:Honestly, we had to do some handholding with customers to show them what's possible, show them how easy it is, and then once they've used it a lot of them feel like "Yeah, this is great. I like this. I didn't know this was that easy." They're just not even open to thinking about something new because they have a habit in place.Stephanie:Yeah. How did you scale that adoption? Because when I'm looking, I think you have over 100,000 customers. How do you scale adoption? Are you giving them training videos? Other than the [crosstalk] handholding, what did you guys do to really pull them onboard?Ian:Yeah, we did do some one-on-one calls. We had some webinars. We had programs where we were getting our Salesforce and customer service reps to have the same conversation on scale across all of their customers. We were trying to activate it across all our touchpoints to introduce it to customers and have that conversation with them. If they needed more support, we could put them on the phone with somebody who could help them answer questions and demo it. We had automated or sort of recorded demos they could watch online.Ian:All of that still felt like it wasn't as fast as we had hoped it would be, adoption. That was one of the lessons that we learned. I guess another thing I would suggest is it's really helpful to know what are your most valuable features, and focus them on that first. If customers need to... One of our most popular features was having a library of customer documents where they could access at any time. In the past, they had to call somebody, they had to email somebody, they had to wait. Well, this is 24/7 that they could go access documentation, is a regular thing that customers needed.Ian:Once we introduced that, it became a no brainer for a customer to say "Oh, okay. That's where I go? Thank you. That's a solution to a problem that I've been less than satisfied with in the past." I've talked to other companies that maybe handling payments was their way in, where once they started taking payments online and managing payments online, adoption went through the roof. It was one feature that customers really felt was superior to the old way of doing things, and that helped to drive adoption.Ian:There were a few things like that where we zeroed in on key features. Another key feature that we had a lot of popular success with, and was highly used on the site was Two Clip Reorder. 80% of our business was repeat purchases. For a customer to log in and then see their last several orders and be able to immediately access those and reorder turned out to be a very popular feature. I guess for a company starting the work, that it was important to do is, to really think about the customer journey today and what are those moments along the customer journey that you can make better quickly, and focus in on those and try to create the right solution that'll drive adoption around those features, is my takeaway from that.Stephanie:Yeah, and that's such a good reminder for a platform. I would see a lot of people, if you try and throw all the features, most people are probably not ready to get power user of a brand new platform and they're like, "I want to know every single feature on here," so just presenting them with the things that are pretty uniform, like you said, payments are a big thing, reordering is a really smart way to get people in the door. Then start maybe dripping out the extra features that would overwhelm them from the start.Ian:I would take it further upstream than that too, Stephanie, which is to say maybe you don't need to build a platform with all of those features on it out of the gate. If you take a true MVP view, focus on what are the moments in the customer journey that you can digitize successfully and give them a superior experience, and start there. Maybe you don't need as many features on your platform to start with, but build something that does perform very well and earns their adoption, and then add other features as you go. Beyond adoption, it's even how do you start faster and get out of the gates with some traction on it earlier?Stephanie:Yeah. Did you have any surprises from either customers or maybe your internal employees who you were also trying to train up on this new platform? Anything that you look back and you're like, "Oh, we should have probably done it this way. We could have avoided this if we would have approached it a little bit differently"?Ian:Boy, there's probably a good list of things that we would have... We learned along the way by doing. I guess I would say one of my biggest takeaways was probably we could have started smaller and been a little more rigorous or embrace that MVP concept even more.Stephanie:Rolling it out for a pilot group type of thing? Like smaller in that sense? Like don't do it [crosstalk] on there?Ian:Or is less complexity to begin with. An even simpler platform and prove that you can drive adoption around that, it's easier to explain, it's easier to build. Then there's less to change and iterate as you learn more about how to make it even better platform. But one of my takeaways I think is really embrace that idea of MVP. You can think about narrowing the scope of the customer base you launch it to. You can think about limiting the products. You can think about a lot of things to make it smaller and more manageable, and get it out the gate and just have data coming in on what's working and how is it generating value. Then build complexity around that. Know what works, and build on success rather than... This is what makes it intimidating for people who are starting the journey is, seeing the complexity of all the problems that need to be addressed, or all the features that you need.Ian:If you compare yourself with Amazon, yes it's going to be a very expensive, very big project. But you don't necessarily need to have all of the features and benefits to start with. Start small. Move fast. And work in the world of results to understand what's working and where to double down on success and invest in scale.Stephanie:How would you get your leadership team to agree on "Here's the five features that we know that maybe 80% of our customers want," how do you get everyone in the same room to all agree when everyone probably has very different customers and they all heard different things, even if it's one off their like, "I know this is important to a customer. It's very big revenue-wise for us." How do you [crosstalk] agree on something?Ian:First, I think it helps to start with a long range vision. I guess one of my other learnings would be that I've seen companies that become system-focused like "We need a platform. Let's build it. Let's turn it on. It's going to cost us $X million and take a year and a half to build." They think about it as a project with a start and an end. The reality is, you need to just think about how fast can we get to the starting point and how do you make that as fast and reasonably good as possible for their MVP. Then assure people that this is not a project that has a start and an end.Ian:It is a journey that has a starting line, and MVP is sort of how you're racing to get to a starting point. Then a multiyear potentially perpetual journey building that out. I think when you get the team in the room, you've got to have some data. You need to have data around your customer segments, around their preferences and needs. You need to sort of have an understanding of the customer journeys that exist. I think it's important to realize that it's easier to digitize simple processes than complex ones. There's a logic to we got to start small. Let's take recurring purchases with existing customers who know exactly what they want, and they buy it regularly.Ian:How do we just automate a repurchase? That's super simple. The customer would prefer to do it that way anyway versus... Later, you to get to things like troubleshooting or selling differentiated products that are a first time purchase to our customer that has a high performance need. Leave the high value add complex work to people and start with simple processes. Add complexity as you go. I think you can, between using real customer insights and the logic of what is possible in the digital world in terms of solution creation, and using a longterm like a three to five year journey map or a journey roadmap. We can assure people, "We can't get to you first, but these are the building blocks that we have to put in place in order to get to that level of complexity," and something that serves that unique customer need.Stephanie:Yeah.Ian:But there may be some things that'll never be digital or in the foreseeable... They're just too complex and they don't have the scale. You may have some one-off customer problems that only occur several times a year, and it just doesn't make sense to invest the kind of cost and a digital solution for some things. People might need to hear that too along the way.Stephanie:Yeah. What did the change management when it came to employees look like? Was there any pushback? Because I could see as an employee being like I always talk to my customer like this, we're on the phone, I do the order for them. We have this relationship. Don't mess with that. What was that like behind the scenes trying to train the employees up, get them onboard, and what kind of things [crosstalk]-Ian:Yeah.Stephanie:[crosstalk] for that.Ian:I think there are two great things to discuss on that. Great question. First, I would like to talk about Agile and how Agile played a role in adoption in our own employee environment. Second, really we had a very robust change management approach going into place at Univar Solutions that is worth talking about. First of all, Agile, this is where I became a real believer in Agile and certainly there was a lot of resistance. There were sales people who said "I don't want anybody touching my customer without me knowing about it. You shouldn't go take them a price or an offer, or anything like that without me approving it first."Ian:A lot of businesses out there are like that still today. There's a lot of trepidation about change. Really, we just had to find a support somewhere in the business who believed that they had an opportunity. The reality is that the speed you can move in digital is an opportunity. We could touch the entire national customer base for a given product in seconds, where it might take weeks for our traditional Salesforce to get out in front of those customers. We found somebody who wanted to work with, and try, and experiment. We put together a plan to target the right customers with the right offering given out there via marketing automation.Ian:We started at a very small scale, and it was to be honest, so small. We knew going into it, this is not going to move the needle at all. It's just too small. Everyone was being too cautious. But we ran the experiment and it came back, and sure enough we just didn't have enough scale to get any movement. But that was what we learned from it. We took it as a learning. We started too small. We need to open the target zone here of customers. The second trial we did, very quickly with a larger customer base, we started to see some progressing results. We picked up a few other learnings. So, we quickly ran a third iteration of it, and by that time we sent this experiment out, this message to customers, and we got real traction on it.Ian:The conversation which started from "Wait a minute. I don't know, why are we messing with customers without salesperson involvement?" to within about three to four weeks having results that were very promising. The conversation flipped, and the business team was saying to the digital and marketing team, "How can we do more of this? What do you need from me to do more of that? Because that felt good. That was a great solution that aligned with my business themes." In that sense, Agile, this idea of start small, run real experiments to get real data, and then once you prove a hypothesis about something that works, the discussion about investing and scale is much easier and you actually have a pull for the solution rather than pushing it into the business teams.Ian:I think first, Agile is a great adoption tool and a process for working cross-functionally with the rest of the business to help drive adoption of digital solutions. Second, I wanted to talk about change management. I would say I commend Univar Solutions for the approach here where part of this came in as well as it relates to an acquisition, and a lot of change that we were rolling out, because we were integrating two companies. I guess I would say as companies think about investing in digital, they're really thinking about how they spend every penny and they make those pennies go as far as they can.Ian:Usually, it is not natural to say "We need to hire people to help communicate." Meaning, communicate through and train our employees, communicate and train our customers. It feels like can't we just have existing people have that conversation? But the reality is, we did hire a change management leader. We started staffing out change management roles to integrate with customer service, to integrate with sales and to interact with customers. I guess a learning, looking in the rear view mirror was, that is the way to do it.Ian:You might even want to have customer adoption teams or cross-functional teams that involve adoption leaders throughout the company.Stephanie:What did this role look like? I mean, you're bringing someone in. Their role is to do change management. What does their day to day look like? How are they supposed to be partnering with teams?Ian:We had a leader at Service Central level who was thinking about putting together training programs, putting together communication, and coordinating timelines and rollout structures, and plans. So, full-time they were... Now, they weren't just working on digital. They might have been rolling out other major changes in the corporation, but digital transformation is something that fits that bill. My point is to have a dedicated structure in place, probably with a leader whose overseeing it, and potentially ambassadors in a variety of cross-functional teams or functions, like sales, customer service, sales ops, and even customer-facing adoption sort of agents is very fruitful.Ian:If you've invested and you believe in an ROI that will come with this, then adoption is an important factor that limits your ROI. I would just suggest that the company starting and going down this journey are thinking about all the investment and systems, and infrastructure of digital. Don't spare too much on adoption in favor of technology because you will be spending money on technology that's poorly used. It's worth the investment to drive timely, effective adoption and satisfaction with everybody in the ecosystem.Stephanie:One point I'm thinking about is all these things are changing, and a lot of the managers... I mean, I've seen this in the past companies I've worked for, well we need more head count. We always need more head count. For what's happening behind the scenes here, you just need to throw more people at it. How did you approach your teams who probably were all saying something similar I would assume? Did you supply more heads to try and solve problems? Or were you like "Hey, let's rework the talent pool. Let's put people on different roles." What did that look like?Ian:Yes. The answer is yes. No, certainly, you are thinking about head count, but this is where as a B2B business we started talking about omnichannel and sort of reconfiguring how we handle customer needs. In a business that has traditionally been very sales driven and relied on field sales reps to deal with face to face with customers for a lot of things, which many businesses out there still do, we started to think more about these customer journeys. There's simple, there's more complex, and there's very complex types of customer journeys, or events on a customer journey that need support.Ian:How do you start digitizing from the bottom up, the most simple, and how do you drive adoption of those? You can build a plan that drives the customer to self-serve options in order to reallocate head count into new... Sort of reinvest it into higher value activities from handling regular orders and replenishment orders to digitizing that and then thinking about how are we reallocating head count to digitize more complex processes, or to handle more high value added customer engagement opportunities. You can go from customer service handling manual work to more sales reps that are technically proficient and able to go sell a high value customer on a high value solution.Ian:As you up the continuum of complexity with digital, you're continually reinvesting head count by creating a self-serve option, driving adoption, and then moving head count into a higher value space.Stephanie:That's great. Yeah, I can see a lot of companies struggling with that now, and thinking how do I put these people in new roles, and then train them. Is it worth all that? Or should I hire someone who's already done this before? Tricky place to be, but I like that.Ian:Yeah. You can think too in today's world post-COVID, I think there's a continuum from digital to sort of inside... Or let's say digital, customer service, inside sales and then your outside sales or national count. Sort of that hierarchy of the types of resources you're applying against customer needs. The inside sales team becomes an even more potentially bigger team. They make more calls a day than outside sales rep can, and in an omnichannel environment they have the tools that you're investing in with ecommerce and digital to be even more efficient and have more intelligence at their fingertips to handle those customers as well.Stephanie:Thinking about intelligence at your fingertips, I want to shift back to the topic of AI. I know we mentioned it earlier that you guys are starting to experiment with that. You have a really big catalog at Univar. You have high frequency of transactions, a lot of stuff going on. What did that look like, introducing that into some of your processes? What did that world look like?Ian:Yeah, sure. Let me say, I am such a huge believer in AI and machine learning, and the opportunity here. This is sort of a revolution that's just starting. We were building out AI and machine learning use cases and deploying those, and integrating them with our entire sales and customer service ecosystem sort of. I think first, if there are companies out there that are wondering about this, I would say a lot of people quickly go to debates about is it AI or not? Or is just a formula?Ian:I saw a couple authors of a book Competing in the Age of AI. I saw them speak recently and one of the authors said "Look, you can get into a debate if you want to. I suggest that you just forget about that. It's not even worth debating. The reality is, if it is, if you're using algorithms and automation to do something a human used to do, let's call that AI." AI isn't all about sort of recreating human-centric consciousness or something, or super complex. More and more, the vast majority of AI application is going to be in super focused problem solving sort of settings.Ian:That's what we are looking at, at Ford. I would say any company out there that has lots of transactions, lots of customers, lots of products, any of those combinations probably has a great opportunity here because if you've got the data from transactions, from your CRM system, and especially if you have a large catalog and you're only selling a portion of that to most of your customers, there are insights hiding in all that data. In a B2B environment, it can be very valuable to understanding and optimizing your pricing.Ian:Pricing is hard to manage, and there are a lot of variables. AI can allow you to put many variables together and create some really sophisticated ways to monitor competitive things, or going on regents to look at how you're pricing customers across your own business, but bring some timely intelligence and automation to recommending optimum prices. AI allows you to predict and prevent customer turn. You can put together dynamics across a variety of variables that might indicate when a customer's regular purchasing cycle is changing, and there may be other factors involved that would indicate that this customer is likely to leave us.Ian:We've had a few things that are not correlated with success here and retention. Certainly, everybody has experienced as a consumer going online and seeing customers like you also bought. AI allows you to see and make those connections with more certainty and a higher understanding of what's the probability of success on these things in order to invest in automation and turning that into a feature, or marketing automation.Ian:This was super exciting, and we had success building teams out internally, bringing in data scientists and setting them loose on different business opportunities where they could build an algorithm and then we connected it through marketing automation or ecommerce to drive real financial benefit and results for the company.Stephanie:Yeah, that's awesome. What kind of insights did you get, or "aha" moments where you're like, "We never would have stumbled on that without building out these algorithms"?Ian:An example would be that we had a customer segmentation model in place but AI created an outcome that had 34 micro-segments of customers that was driving certain activity that was really generating value. No human could manage coming up with 34 micro-segments of customers based on many different variables. That's an example of how AI is able to piece together insights that just humans wouldn't get around to and couldn't connect on the right kind of actions probably with that in place.Ian:Like I said before, if you're a business that has a lot of transactional data, AI might be for you. If you have a lot of customers, a variety of customers, AI might help you. If you have a big catalog that you're trying to sell to a lot of customers, AI might help you. I think that there are plenty of businesses that think it's too farfetched or too sophisticated. I'm a believer that it's more within reach than people think, and that that's not just for any one business but it's already starting to change everything about online merchandising for some businesses, and marketing automation.Ian:It's worth diving into.Stephanie:Awesome. I spent a lot of time diving into Univar because obviously the company is amazing. Your story there, all your stories, are awesome. I also want to hear about what you're doing today. I know you're advising, an investor. Tell me what are you up to these days?Ian:Yeah, so I've started working with another sort of distribution business that is starting their own digital transformation, a very similar story. I believe that there are plenty of them out there. Also, I've been helping a business where I'm an investor that is called Parcel Home. This is an IOT connected device. It's launching in Europe. It's been in Europe for a couple of years and we're getting ready to launch it in the UK. Essentially, it's a delivery box that install outside your home on your front porch or out by the street. It's IOT connected, so with your phone you can access and monitor it. You can delivery people codes, so like if you were to purchase on Amazon, you'd just go in your delivery instructions and instruct them to use a code on the box.Ian:When they get there, they punch in the code. It unlocks. They leave your packages in the box. They close it. Then as you get home it notifies that you have received packages today. Make sure you go get them. You can enable other people in your home to use it, and you can set one-time codes for somebody who's just coming by to pick something up or drop something off. Or set it up as a recurring solution for all your deliveries.Stephanie:I can't believe that [crosstalk] haven't had that yet. I'm just thinking about how archaic dropping off a box of Amazon, there's a $500.00 item in there potentially, and it's just sitting on my front porch for [crosstalk].Ian:I know. I had the same thought. People buy multi expensive things, and then the package gets left on your front doorstep and it feels like really I think in that situation it's like security is essentially the fact that it's concealed in paper or cardboard. The only thing protecting it is the fact that somebody's not sure what it is, but it's sitting out there outside your home for a while.Stephanie:Could be a baby bottle. Could be a high end TV. I don't know.Ian:Yeah, $500.00 handbag or something like those, yeah. We see and there are some sort of online communities for neighborhoods where we see people talking about package theft. We know that's an issue.Stephanie:Oh, I know that from being in the Bay area.Ian:Weather is an issue. If it's left outside and you have precipitation or things like this, it can damage packages. I think now there are places where it's just not okay to read the package because of threats of theft or something, so they have to ring the bell or knock on the door and interrupt now what are Zoom or Microsoft Teams, or whatever online meetings. It's a nuisance as well.Ian:Anyway, this is a startup business that has been active in the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, and launching in Denmark here this spring as well as UK later this year. And really, direct-to-customer. So, building out regeneration assets and processes, a sales and marketing funnel and the processes to support that, and thinking about, as many companies are now, living in an almost purely digital environment and interacting with customers in that way.Stephanie:Yeah, that's awesome. Do you feel like you have certain lessons from the past that you're able to bring to this company to kind of help accelerate their progress? Or is it just such like a different field and startup where you're really having to kind of relearn the industry and what startups are doing versus really large Fortune 500 type of companies?Ian:I think it's some of both. It is. As you're launching, there are some fundamentals that even startups may or may not have the talent or resources in place. They just need to do some of the blocking and tackle about marketing and PR as you're entering a new market. How do you approach PR? There are some basics about press engagement for instance, that I can help with, but we're also learning about influencers, micro-influencers, and how to... That's an ever-changing game. There are new sort of marketplaces of influencers where brands can go and evaluate who are the influencers with audiences that matter to me, and how do I transact with them, or come to a mutually beneficial agreement to work with certain influencers? How do I scale that kind of work and what kind of investment do I need to do that?Ian:It's an important way that brands are reaching people now. Every moving target, with new platforms: TikTok, et cetera. It's a combination of executing on known best practices and staying in touch with what's working today. In a startup, you have a business that in the course of a year their commercial processes may change many times over. You add one additional person into the working team, and suddenly new processes emerge, or people reallocate different tasks. So, it's a very dynamic environment in that way.Stephanie:That's awesome. Yeah, I will be watching them closely. I'll be excited to see them expand, and hopefully they come here.Ian:Yeah.Stephanie:Well, let's shift over to the lightening round. The lightening round is brought to you buy Salesforce Commerce Cloud. This is where I ask a question, and you have a minute or less to answer. Are you ready, Ian?Ian:All right, I guess I am ready. I didn't even know about the lightening round.Stephanie:It's easy [inaudible]. What one thing will have the biggest impact on ecommerce in the next year?Ian:I honestly think we'll see... If we rewind, people have entrenched behaviors. Take my family for instance, we were buying groceries online from a source. Everything got disrupted. We were a loyal online customer, but certain products and processes changed and we had to change to adapt to what our needs were. Many customers change brands and change their choice of where they purchase these things in the last year. I think the question will be, where did things land? Do people stick with the new brands that they've adopted? Or do brands settle back into a way that they win their customers back who've experimented and gone somewhere else? I think we're still in the turbulence of COVID.Stephanie:Mm-hmm (affirmative), yep. I agree. What do you predict then? Do you think people go back to kind of what they knew before? Or do you think now it's so ingrained with the new stuff they've been doing that that's the new way of living?Ian:I think more and more people will stick with their new solutions. To me, some of that is surprising because honestly we have bought through Amazon and Whole Foods, which I would think Amazon has got this under control, but for certain reasons a Target has over-delivered on new solutions and the product is [inaudible]. We had stopped buying from them. That's an example where competition moved fast and have different relationships with some of those customers now. I think that businesses better get used to where things are now, and it's going to be hard to re-win customers that they've lost.Stephanie:Yep. Yeah, same thing with Walmart. I feel like they've stepped it up in a huge way-Ian:Yes.Stephanie:On very quick delivery. I ordered a planter the other day and it showed up the same day. I didn't really understand the delivery process because it seemed like just some random person, but I'm like, "Hm, my planter's here," in that same day.Ian:Yeah.Stephanie:Which made me kind of rethink where before I'd be like, "Yeah, I'm not going to Walmart because it could take a couple of days, and shipping and all this." But yeah, they stepped it up.Ian:Yeah. I totally agree. They've done a great job.Stephanie:What's the nicest thing anyone's ever done for you?Ian:The nicest thing anybody's ever done for me? Whoa, that's tough. Other than my wife bearing children? I would say that [crosstalk]. That's a big one. It's hard to beat that.Stephanie:That is a good one.Ian:I don't know if I could top that. That's a big deal. And as a father, there's this moment where you're like you're going into that experience and you realize "I really don't control anything about the things that matter most to me. I just have to sit here and hope it all goes well."Stephanie:Yeah. Yeah. If you were to have a podcast what would it be about, and who would your first guest be?Ian:I think I'd have to have a podcast about what people are passionate about, and the lengths that they will go to to pursue their passions. I don't know who my first guest would be, but I think that the most interesting conversations are when you talk to people about stuff that they really love, that they love doing, and that they... That's what lights people up. I think I might start with unexpected guests, people that are sort of somebody in your own neighborhood that nobody knows, but there are amazing things happening that people are...Ian:I love these sort of stories of real humans of, kind of stories where somebody just went to great lengths. I read a great story that's a good example. A little restaurant in Baltimore that made Fusion Asian food, there's a woman who came to visit her kids in Baltimore regularly. Loved a certain dish they had there. Then she came down with terminal cancer. She lived in Connecticut there in Baltimore, and the kids this woman had called the restaurant and said, "Hey, can we get the recipe? We'd just like to prepare it for her in her final weeks."Ian:The owner of the restaurant was like, "You know what, where does she live? We'll be there." They drove six or seven or eight hours and prepared it on the back of the tailgate of their truck, and knocked on their door and brought this food to her. Anyway, that sort of thing is... That makes for great stories.Stephanie:Oh, goosebumps over here. That's amazing.Ian:Yeah, totally.Stephanie:We need that podcast. Someone sponsor this. Ian needs a sponsor. Oh yeah, that's really great. I'd definitely listen to that. What one thing do you not understand today that you wish you did?Ian:Let's focus it back on ecommerce.Stephanie:Okay.Ian:A big question that I don't see an answer to that I really think is a big opportunity is, if I think about real world brick and mortar shopping it's a very rich experience. If you think about walking in a store and walking back to the department you're going to, you past thousands of products and many, many, many opportunities for a retailer to sell something to you: visually, stimulations, [inaudible] signs, POP, that kind of thing. Digital ain't there yet.Ian:It's a long way away from it. At best, we're saying customers like you also bought, or... You know what I mean? It's a cross merchandising that gets relegated to a side banner or below the fold kind of merchandising. It's hard to imagine replicating the richness of an in-store experience, but I'm really curious to see how that evolves because brick and mortar is becoming less and less... It's not going away, it's just that's a rich experience of hard to replicate, and how many online browsing occasions do you need to replicate or replace all of those stimulus that retailers or brands can present you with in-store effectively?Ian:I guess I'm wondering, without that in place what's the output of the whole system here? Do people become just way more replenishment purchase-oriented and less new purchase? Or can we find other ways to effectively introduce people to products they didn't know they were looking for?Stephanie:Mm-hmm (affirmative), that's a good one. Definitely something that I'll be watching closely over this next year, because I love retail. I love going into stores, especially if they have a good experience, good curation, the collection. I feel like you can't beat that, even in a digital world and things like... Yeah, it's hard to get there.Ian:The real world shopping can also be a social experience that online is not anywhere close to replicating either. How you share it with somebody, it's a little different experience online too.Stephanie:Yeah, and you go with someone and... Yeah. Well, that is a great answer. Ian, thank you so much for joining us on the show today. It's been a pleasure having you. Where can people find out more about you and your work?Ian:Reach out to me on LinkedIn. It's LinkedIn slash in/slash... Whatever. IanLGresham.Stephanie:I'll link it up. [crosstalk].Ian:Yeah, there you go. I'd love to connect with you. If there's anybody that has questions about digital transformation or how to connect with customers in that way, I'm happy to have a good conversation about it. Thank you, Stephanie, for having me today. It's been a great conversation.Stephanie:Thanks so much.

Known throughout the industry as an expert in B2B ecommerce, Salesforce’s Andy Peebler now guides Product GTM for Commerce Cloud at Salesforce. Host Jason Nyhus explores Andy’s ecommerce journey, including his involvement with CloudCraze, which shaped Andy’s thinking today. Andy also shares his thoughts on how COVID-19 will change how we do business and where […]

Known throughout the industry as an expert in B2B ecommerce, Salesforce's Andy Peebler now guides Product GTM for Commerce Cloud at Salesforce. Host Jason Nyhus explores Andy's ecommerce journey, including his involvement with CloudCraze, which shaped Andy's thinking today. Andy also shares his thoughts on how COVID-19 will change how we do business and where you can find more information on the Salesforce Shopping Index blog.

When Matt Schmeltz and his partners acquired CloudCraze, it was a simple software application helping businesses that use Salesforce.com manage their customer relationships. CloudCraze generated $2 million in annual recurring revenue, but Schmeltz & Co. figured it could do much more.

Pascal has been with Salesforce since 2009 and is leading the Salesforce CPQ + Billing Team since 2017. In this interview he shares how much his team has grown and changed since the Steelbrick acquisition, his thoughts about the Cloudcraze and Mulesoft acquisition, ISV Partnerships and much more Contact Pascal at PYammine@salesforce.com or LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/pascalyammine/   The Salesforce CPQ + Billing website is @ https://www.salesforce.com/products/quote-to-cash/overview/  Pascal will do the Salesforce CPQ + Billing Keynote on Wednesday September 26 @ 1pm PST

Yeva Roberts of PFL.com joins the AppChat Podcast to share what her role as Senior Director of Strategic Alliances & Innovation entails and how relationship building plays an integral role. Also addressed is the critical gatekeeper role of Salesforce solution engineers, successful tactics PFL uses to interact with them to drive sales, and what to look for in a great Alliances Manager of your own. Here are the key topics, with timestamps, as well as the full interview transcript: Key Topics 00:00-00:50  Introducing the AppChat and our guest, Printing For Less’ Yeva Roberts 00:51-2:23       Defining the role of Strategic Alliances and what it means 2:24-4:37          The history of Printing For Less 4:38-10:42       How Yeva got involved with PFL and the changes she has seen 10:43-11:55      Bridging the digital and print worlds to ensure people understand the value, importance, and opportunity 11:56-15:31       The breakdown of relationship building vs. business development in Strategic Alliances 15:32-20:04     The role of solution engineers and how to interact with them 20:05-22:39     How to identify the SEs that are going to help you the most to get established 22:40-26:21      Tips on managing relationships with your partner account managers (PAMs) 25:32-28:52      PFL's versatility across multiple clouds at Salesforce 28:53-30:15      What to look for in a great Alliances Manager 30:16-30:52      Closing out and how to get in touch Full Transcript Intro: 00:01 You're listening to the AppChat, a podcast focused on SaaS growth strategies, plus successes in the Salesforce ecosystem and beyond. Here's your host, CodeScience CEO, Brian Walsh. Brian Walsh: 00:13 Welcome back everybody. We are back on the AppChat podcast and today I'm joined by someone I think is absolutely fascinating. I had the honor of working with her for the past, I think a year and a half, two years. We've been on and off again, been working on things, having conversations, meeting up at conferences -- and so with us is Yeva Roberts who's the Alliances Manager for PrintingForLess.com. Welcome. Yeva Roberts: 00:39 Thanks, Brian. I'm so excited to be here. Brian Walsh: 00:41 It is great to be here. I'm sorry everybody else doesn't get to see the video of this because your smile just makes me want to speak in a really happy tone. So thank you for that. How would you define your role as an Alliance Manager? What does that mean? Yeva Roberts: 00:56 Wow. So, that's a tough one. So I guess it depends on what stage of growth you're in. As an ISV, I think for us being a startup within a larger company, it means that you get to wear multiple hats. So initially if you're the very first Strategic Alliances, evangelists is what we call each other, you get to be the channel operations person, the channel sales, channel marketing, what have you, because you're really trying to prove your worth in an AppExchange exchange of 4,000 apps. So for you and me, I think it's a matter of just being open to wearing multiple hats and navigating the ecosystem, and being that internal subject matter expert on Salesforce. As well as being that external subject matter expert on PFL, in my case to all the Salesforce solution engineers, account executives, marketing teams, PR, as well as all the SIs and ISV partners. Brian Walsh: 01:55 That is such an interesting role. I once heard it described to me as you're in charge of making sure two large companies, corporations, actually can speak the same language and understand each other. Yeva Roberts: 02:06 Yeah, it's funny. I love that because you're essentially a translator. You're getting to look at the world through a keyhole, really two keyholes, right? So you get to see your worldview as an ISV and then you get to advocate for and evangelize the second worldview of your partnership. Brian Walsh: 02:24 So why don't we back up a second and actually talk about Printing For Less. What is PFL? What do you do? Yeva Roberts: 02:33 So PFL is actually about 20-year-old company and it got its start as America's first eCommerce only print shop. So imagine in 1996 and 1998, that time period where eCommerce was still in its infancy, PFL had this idea really. The founder, Andrew, and his partner had an idea of, "Hey, we're in Montana, you know what would be really cool is to open up a print store." But because as you can imagine, the population in Montana doesn't really require you to have a storefront, they decided why don't we copy what Amazon user experience is like. At the time Amazon was just launching it and so they went live with the storefront on website only, so there was no physical store. And then fast forward, they accumulated about 125,000 small business customers. Those small business customers grew up and they thought that while Printing For Less -- or PFL now -- was doing a great job with print, what they were starting to do is really adopt tools like Salesforce for their CRM or marketing automation platforms and digital marketing platforms. And then they said, "Hey, you do a great job for us in print and since you are a marketing technology company first, meaning you have the API and the tech stack, why don't you integrate and make our lives so much easier. Integrate with these CRMs and these marketing automation platforms. And so that's when PFL, Andrew, and the team decided to pivot. It's been really about five years ago now that they decided to pivot and really take the company into a new direction. And we still have our 125,000 small business customers to serve on the direct side of the business. But now we're working within Salesforce and other ecosystems as well. Brian Walsh: 04:24 All right. So their printing shop, they've built up 125,000 customers, start pivoting into actually a channel model working with different marketing automation, different CRM and sales process on there. How did you get involved? Yeva Roberts: 04:41 I love that story. It's one of my favorites, so I'm actually a digital marketer by training. So I spent about 10 years in the B2C space, and I was managing digital strategy for some global brands as well as direct mail. So I was really in the thick of things, trying to figure out how to integrate email and direct mail and social together to go to market in the integrated way, and at the time -- I guess this was probably eight years ago -- marketing automation was still in its infancy. Salesforce was still trying to figure out how do we really support B2C brands. So I was struggling being in the middle doing everything manually, in terms of handing over files and walking them over for direct mail, to the digital team, or the taking the files for digital and handing them off to the direct marketing agency. And so I thought, "Hey, you know, after so many years of being in the middle, it would be kind of fun to pivot as well and go into a more product development, product marketing role, and figure out a way how to integrate a printing type environment with an email service. And so ExactTarget -- I was a user at the time -- was in our backyard, and so I went work for a printing company here locally in Ohio and just convinced the executive to give me some play money. And, so we decided to do the very first light integration into ExactTargets' Hub Exchange. So at the time they didn't have Journey Builder, they still had Automation Studio at the time. And so we did this light integration, it was really just a test. And so I'm really excited, the engineering team is really excited. Again, working for this other printing company and ExactTarget is super excited and this is 2012 and we go to this user conference. We have our first showcase, we go to the user conference again the following year and I meet PFL. So PFL is that the exhibit hall, the Expo Hall. And I walk up to them like, "You know what, you did a great job swag bombing our entire executive team with your tactile marketing automation concept." And I absolutely love you for doing that because you know, here I am advocating for this integration because as a marketer I feel like it's a problem that we need to solve in the marketplace, and I would love to see your app. And so it all happened in their booth. Their CMO and founder, Andrew, showed me what they had built and I absolutely fell in love with it because obviously, it was like, here's my light version, MVP if you will, and here is their full-on product stack of what I wish I would have built. Brian Walsh: 07:30 What it could be. Yeva Roberts: 07:31 Exactly. And I was like, "Is this working?" You know, the usual kind of customer question you get, "Is this for real? Did you actually build this or is this still POC concept," right? Proof of concept. They're like, "No, this is working. This is how it looks." So anyway, fast forward, we stayed in touch and I eventually moved over to the team. I think I was in a product marketing role managing ExactTarget reseller professional service, and I thought, "You know what? I would love to do this 100% and just evangelize what PFL team has built." And since I understood the marketplace, had been in the Salesforce ecosystem for so long, both as a customer and as a partner, that it just made sense and they needed somebody that knew how to navigate it, that had a passion for it and could talk peer to peer. I think that's so important in the Strategic Alliances role that you truly understand the problem that you're trying to solve with your apps. And so we didn't know, I think the two of us didn't really know what it was going to end up looking like and we've been figuring it out ever since. Brian Walsh: 08:41 That's wonderful. So it's like six years ago, they're already using the term of tactile marketing automation. Now they're saying, "Hey, here's the physical representation of what we've been doing on digital, around ads and email and all of the other piece. When that happened, when everyone started talking about ABM, there must've been fireworks going off at PFL. Yeva Roberts: 09:04 Oh yeah, absolutely. What you just said is perfect. Brian Walsh: 09:07 It was like, it was converging because everywhere I go, it's about the sort of Omnichannel of hitting from all the different angles around your target account list and is there a more impactful way of doing it with them with some printed item that shows up and you provide a way to automate that? Yeva Roberts: 09:22 Yeah, absolutely. We always talk about like, everything is cyclical, so you had direct mail has been around, print, direct mail, it's been around for 50 some years if not longer, and then you have this new shiny thing come out, email, and everybody just swarms to using email and direct mail is no longer sexy, and you used to worry about junk mail in your mailbox, now you worry about your junk mail in your inbox, right? And so, as they de-invested and marketers de-invested into direct mail, they're not coming back around and saying, "Oh my gosh, we have so much digital clutter. How do we break through that? Oh, I know. Why don't we talk to our friends in the direct marketing space and figure out a way how to integrate that as part of an overall customer journey." And I think that's what's happening. And it's nothing new, I think we've just gotten a lot smarter and now we have tools, like marketing automation tools, to make that happen for us that us marketers 10 years ago didn't have. Brian Walsh: 10:18 So I agree with you, it's not new. But, having worked with Salesforce for so long in digital space, the idea of combining what we're doing in the digital world and all of the language that we use, our lexicon around that, and then this idea of there's a print shop and people behind it pushing items, and they're getting printed and then shipped and mailed. We'll go back to this translation idea, how do you bridge those two worlds together to make sure everybody understands the value, importance, and opportunity?" Yeva Roberts: 10:47 So that's hard, right? On one hand, it's much easier to introduce a new concept to somebody in maybe the B2B space and high tech who has not traditionally used direct mail, they're digital natives. And it's much harder to pivot somebody who is a traditional brand, been using direct mail for a long time, going through this digital transformation and trying to get them to break their old habits of how to think about it in a completely different way. Meaning that their digital email subscriber data is stored in one place, their tools for email execution are also in a different place, and their direct mail, physical mailing address, also live in a completely different place. And for traditional brands, it's much harder sell because you're having to re-educate them on breaking this habit. Whereas ABM and the high tech B2B space, it's so much easier. They get it because they believe in the concept and it's a new channel for them to add and the integration is so much easier for that. Brian Walsh: 11:56 So how much of your time is spent relationship building across Salesforce and the partners and that side of the ecosystem, and how much is like business development where you're actually working the deal. Actually creating a new business opportunity, trying to maybe create a new business line at PFL. How would you break down your job between those sort of responsibilities? Yeva Roberts: 12:18 I would say education is number one. And so, I think of it like three different degrees of separation from revenue. So the first degree is, like you said, helping the sales team, both sales teams, you know PFL sales team and the Salesforce sales team work together on opportunities, and that's really the deal conversations. Second degree would be activities that I probably spend the most of my time, which is relationship building, whether it's lunch and learns or customer shadows, where I go on site with the Salesforce team and conduct a training for their customer. And that's really where a lot of the magic happens and the relationships are built because for an AE at Salesforce or a solution engineer, they're looking to us as Strategic Alliance evangelists to be that trusted advisor or the subject matter expert in our space and they want to learn from you so that they could look like a rockstar in front of their customer. So long-term relationships I think is the key in this role. I don't care about the one and done referral as much as I care about educating my peers within Salesforce to speak our language, understand what tactile marketing automation is all about, understand our value and be able to be comfortable and know that they can always reach out to us, no pressure, and provide thought leadership. So I think relationships is number one and that's more like a second degree of separation from revenue. And then finally the third stage in degrees of separation is really around executive bridging, which is another relationship layer. I do spend quite a bit of time making sure our executive team is aligned with Salesforces' executive team whenever those opportunities present themselves. Brian Walsh: 14:11 Got it. And do those tend to be at events or throughout the year? Yeva Roberts: 14:16 Oh, every single day, every single day. I think the number one differentiator I hear about all the time for perhaps our competition is that the feedback I get is we are so incredibly responsive. So if there's a call going on tomorrow and the solution engineer and account executive at Salesforce are prepping for the call, they know that they can reach out to me today and I pick up the phone and answer their questions. Being at their beckon call and being 100% responsive is probably the biggest feedback I get all the time that we do. And I think that's what builds a really strong relationship as well, as well as coming up with new ideas to enable those teams. New demo environments, keeping those demo environments up and running. We have over a 100 marketing cloud solution engineers actually using our demo. I never even know what kind of meetings PFL has being demoed at every single day. But in good faith, I know that those teams are trained and they're representing us really well and we're happy with that. And I think, going back to your original question, I think relationships to us is just part of our long-term strategy. Brian Walsh: 15:33 Alright, solution engineers, this is like one of my favorite topics because they're the hidden secret to this whole ball of wax, right? Yeva Roberts: 15:38 I totally agree. Brian Walsh: 15:40 They make it happen. Alright, so explain what a solution engineer is. Yeva Roberts: 15:43 So solution engineers, sometimes referred to sales engineers too I think, they quarterback the AEs. So they're tasked with understanding what the business requirements are. So existing customers or future customers will come to Salesforce and, especially in the enterprise space, they'll get assigned to a solution engineer who goes under the hood, understands what their business objectives are, and understands what some of those business requirements they're looking for to transform their business. They have to be an expert in, imagine 4,000 Apps, which is like obviously impossible. So, I think from an unsung hero perspective, I think they quarterback the customer and the sales team pretty well from that perspective. Brian Walsh: 16:32 So it's identifying who these SEs are that are working your target market, it's building a relationship with them, and then it's providing them with solutions and education. Yeva Roberts: 16:43 Yep. And I think that the biggest misconception I hear about a lot is, the executive teams will set a goal, "Hey, you need to kind of get the word out about your app to every single social engineer within the Salesforce ecosystem." Well we know and you made a great point that being niche and being super specific on which verticals you're playing in, especially when you're first starting out, is so critical. These solution engineers, imagine they're being reached out to by what, 2000 ISVs every single day, either through LinkedIn or emails and they're bombarded. So, obviously, they're only going to pay attention to those ISVs that are being strategic in the way they approach them. They have a sharp elevator pitch, they understand the value they provide, and then you can provide them the support and solution engineers while we sleep, prioritize those relationships and really understanding those products more than somebody that boils the ocean and spams them, for lack of better word. Brian Walsh: 17:43 And their goal is to close this deal for licenses. Not just your product, but really to expand the Salesforce side of the relationship. So, if your product is on target to actually help them do that, then awesome; but if it doesn't actually help in that process, then they're not going to talk to you again, right? Yeva Roberts: 17:59 Absolutely. I think it's knowing who to reach out to. Like which solution engineers are aligned to your market, the market that you support, and then knowing what value you provide at the moment that they need it so that you're not constantly in their face but enable them in such a way that they know how to reach out to you. And then when they do, be super gracious and treat them like family. Brian Walsh: 18:23 Now, you know you're providing solutions for them to demo and in your case, you've got physical printed items. How do you bridge that gap so that it's actually impactful? I can imagine in your sales process they can mail you something, but now you've got like this third party that's demoing, like how do you pull that together to make sure that their demos are impactful? Yeva Roberts: 18:43 So, I think that it's part of our secret weapon in which is we drink our own champagne. What I mean by that, when we onboard a new solution engineer to PFL, part of the onboarding process is me actually using Salesforce to send them a welcome kit. So they actually have a welcome kit that they receive, so they go through the experience. Not only do they have access to the demo, but they receive a kit that spells out exactly what our value is and when we can help them and because they have now gone through the process, they're a better advocate for us on the call with the customer. Brian Walsh: 19:22 That's so cool. Like if you're doing just digital stuff, it's like what could I send you? I'll send you an email. In your case, it's like a printed box with their name on it and all of the materials inside. What's inside the box. Yeva Roberts: 19:32 Oh, okay. Hold on. Brian Walsh: 19:34 For those of you who can't see -- in fact that's all of you -- she's got the box. She's pulling it open, it's just full, It's chockablock full of customized content. Yeva Roberts: 19:43 Yep. It will have an invitation, an idea book, a note card with my headshot, basically just spelling out for them everything they need to know and because it's tangible, obviously it has a higher chance of being remembered than maybe some of our counterparts on the AppExchange. So, that's definitely part of our little hat trick. Brian Walsh: 20:05 That's great. All right, so let's move back to this first step. How do you identify the SEs that you think are going to help you the most to get established? Yeva Roberts: 20:16 I think it definitely goes back to being really critical on your target market. So what I mean is just from an internal alignment with your marketing team, your sales team, you as the Strategic Alliances manager really needs to be super clear with all the other teams internally on who's part of your go-to-market. Is it financial services, is it health and life sciences, is it retail? And so on and so on. If you have one or two key markets that you're going after, then it's really an opportunity for you to reach out to your partner account team at Salesforce and work with them and their leadership team to say, "Hey, who are the RVPs, the AVPs that I need to be aligned with?" And then hop on the sales team call for those teams, do a training, and understand what their focus is that year. And then from that conversation, ask them for the introduction to the solution engineers that support that team. And then it's a rinse and repeat and by the time you're done, like we're three years into it, I now know probably 200 to 300 account executive and the solution engineers that know them. It helps to have an elephant memory, which sometimes it's to my detriment, but I love people so much that I will remember things about them that maybe they said two years ago and they're like, "How did you know that, that's creepy." But, I think it goes back to Strategic Alliance, it's all about relationships. Brian Walsh: 21:46 Right. It's a people job that you're doing on there. And I think you've raised a great point, as part of the ISV program at Salesforce, you start with your partner account team. And so that partner account manager will help actually put together a go to market strategy for you to say how are we actually selling with Salesforce and make the initial introductions and get that ball rolling for you. Yeva Roberts: 22:06 Yep. Absolutely. Brian Walsh: 22:08 And I find that unique within as we look at, if you compared infrastructure, if I'm going to go to an Amazon or decided to do this on my own, walking into these ecosystems, that's one of the things that a great ecosystem is provided for you. Yeva Roberts: 22:20 Yeah. And there's a nuance to also working with your PAMs, partner account managers, because imagine they also have like 40 some ISVs that they're managing. So you have to be super helpful with them as well in terms of getting to your point very quickly. Brian Walsh: 22:40 All right. So what are some tips of managing that partner account relationship now? Yeva Roberts: 22:43 Wow, we're jumping around. So with the partner account managers, I think being organized for those 30-minute cadence calls that you have with them is always helpful. I think that's my number one tip is, you can rely on your partner account manager to do that for you. But it's actually easier if you do that because you know you're fighting for mindshare against all the 20 to 40 ISVs that they're working with. And on that call, be super clear on what your number one, just pick one thing that's important to you for the next two weeks before your next opportunity to speak to them and get support from them. I think being super organized and just having a bit of humility and patience, understanding what their situation is also helps. And then just follow up. I think following up with them is always super helpful and then celebrate those wins. So every single time we close a deal and the partner account manager helps us manage our Chatter community, and they'll send up "cha-ching" emails on our behalf, that helps them also get more visibility into the community of AEs and solution engineers we support. So you want to celebrate those wins together because it makes it super real for them and they appreciate like, "Why are you asking me for all these introductions and I never get to see the results?" But when you celebrate those wins, they get to see it from, "Oh wow. That account team introduction that I just made for Yeva four months ago actually resulted in a deal." And that's how they get incentivized, obviously, as we help them retire their quota. Brian Walsh: 24:25 So leveraging that Chatter group is actually what's pushing them to help encourage them to keep doing those introductions and bringing them out back top of mind for them. Yeva Roberts: 24:41 Yeah, our Chatter group has over, gosh, 350 AEs and solution engineers now, and I think growing a community is really important to us because it's really that resource for them for content. Trying to get teams to adopt other portals if you will. We've tried that, doesn't work. So keeping everything in the Chatter group is definitely worth it to us and something I don't see a lot of ISVs using. Brian Walsh: 25:02 Now, when you first built and you're using it, I mean it wasn't part of Salesforce yet, it was a standalone ExactTarget company. Or had it been acquired already by Salesforce? Yeva Roberts: 25:14 So the Chatter? Brian Walsh: 25:14 No, PFL, was first ExactTarget and then it was acquired by Salesforce later, right? Yeva Roberts: 25:21 Exactly. So yeah, by the time I joined the team, I think it was already part of the Salesforce family or was going through the acquisition actually. Brian Walsh: 25:32 Got it. Okay. How important has Chatter then grown because, at that point, the ExactTarget side wasn't using Chatter at all, like how did that grow? How does Chatter drive sort of your day to day use? Yeva Roberts: 25:45 Yeah, so that's funny you're making me think back. So when we first started we actually had to host two separate Chatter groups, one for org 62, which is where all the core team members were on Salesforce, and then one on NA7, I think it was called. So it was a different platform, but still Chatter. So two different communities and about probably two years into the acquisition they merged the two Chatter groups and so we ended up with one. But yeah, I think they still asked the ExactTarget marketing cloud team to start using Chatter. Brian Walsh: 26:21 Got it. And now, does your product work across the multiple clouds at Salesforce or is it still just marketing cloud? Yeva Roberts: 26:27 No, it's force.com. So we have four different apps. So because of that, it is extensible. I joke around, we just got back from connections and because it was the first time they brought service, commerce, and marketing cloud together, we had a lot of questions about, "Well I see your app working with sales cloud and marketing cloud, but what if we wanted service cloud?" And I'm like, "Well, it's extensible through the entire-" Brian Walsh: 26:53 It's just force.com. Yeva Roberts: 26:55 Yeah, exactly. So it was just like, "Of course," but I realize that not many people know that. And not that we even push that, we're trying to be super focused and not, like I said, boil the ocean, but if somebody asks us to, we could. That's the beauty of it. Yeah, that's the beauty of it. Brian Walsh: 27:15 We do an annual report, the State of the AppExchange Report and it was one of the most surprising to me findings in it is, how many of the ISVs are actually working across three, four, five different clouds and supporting it and actually leveraging that for all their growth. Yeva Roberts: 27:32 Yeah, I think coming up connections, it was super clear to me that, that's part of the growth strategy is cross-cloud. So the ISVs that can go cross-cloud, they're going to be the ones that are going to stand out from the pack. I think I heard that Salesforce wants to go from what, some close to 4,000 apps to 10,000 by 2020 or something. Did I read that in your report? I read it somewhere, and I was like, well, obviously going to your existing AppExchange partner base and encouraging them to create additional apps that can extend cross-cloud, as part of that strategy in terms of how they are going to grow from three and a half to 10,000 in a year and a half. I think that's part of it. Brian Walsh: 28:17 It is. There's actually a team on the ISV team whose only job is to help bring on partners onto all the new products that they're acquiring and launching. So as CloudCraze comes into the mix and as marketing cloud, and like each of these pieces gets built in, they want to bring that entire ISV ecosystem with them. So big focus on Quip, big focus on CloudCraze, all of these pieces. Data.com is starting to go away, and so they have lightning data service. So there's all of these opportunities and you have a team just focused on trying to get you onto a multi-cloud strategy. Yeva Roberts: 28:51 I didn't know that. I love that. Brian Walsh: 28:53 All right. So if you were to give people an idea, they're out, they're an ISV, and they're wanting to start building out an alliances team. They need an alliance manager. What do they look for? What's the type of role? What's the type of person that they're looking for to be a great alliance manager? Is it someone who's worked at Salesforce? Is it someone who's done that before? Or is there just an innate attribute about them that would make them great at this job? Yeva Roberts: 29:20 I think it goes just to DNA, because case in point is I had no background in Strategic Alliances. My background is all product marketing or in digital marketing, and so I'm proof that as long as you value relationships and you have a good strong business acumen and, you know, you can be passionate about whatever the problem the ISV is solving, you can succeed in this role for sure. Brian Walsh: 29:46 And it looks like you've been successful because PFL just announced some big news recently, right? Yeva Roberts: 29:54 Yes! We just got our funding round from Goldman Sachs for $25 million, I think it was announced in April, and now we're ramping up and hiring, building out an evangelist team. So if you're interested, definitely look me up. I'd give you some referrals. I'd love to build out a great team. Brian Walsh: 30:11 That's awesome. I might quit my job and join you then. Yeva Roberts: 30:14 I would love it. Brian Walsh: 30:16 If somebody wanted to get in touch with you, had questions, or maybe even wanted an opportunity to work with you, what would be the way to reach out to you? Yeva Roberts: 30:23 I think LinkedIn is probably my favorite platform. Definitely just message me, I'm pretty responsive there. Brian Walsh: 30:28 Fantastic. Well Yeva, thank you so much. I really appreciate this, and best of luck as you look forward. Yeva Roberts: 30:35 Thanks for having me on. Outro: 30:37 Thanks for listening to this episode of the AppChat. Don't miss an episode. Visit appchatpodcast.com or subscribe on iTunes. Until next time, don't make success an accident.

Jay Abraham, founder of the Abraham Group (and departing COO of CloudCraze, acquired by Salesforce in March), joins the AppChat to discuss his fascinating journey from nuclear physicist and submariner to highly-sought-after startup consultant, as well as what goes into a great (read: productive) relationship between a COO and CEO. Also addressed is: defining scale and how an organization prepares for it; how to know your organization needs a COO; and mistakes Abraham learned from in the trenches at CloudCraze and in his career. Here are the key topics, with timestamps, as well as the full interview transcript: Key Topics 00:00-1:56 Introducing the AppChat and our guest, Jay Abraham (formerly of CloudCraze) 1:57-4:35 Abraham's early career as a nuclear physicist and submariner before he held multiple COO positions 4:36-7:40 Experienced gained from handling the outsourcing of American Express' IT infrastructure 7:41-9:53 Transition to becoming COO of CloudCraze 9:54-16:42 The relationship between COO and CEO, and creating processes to delegate responsibilities 16:43-18:42 Defining scale and how an organization prepares for it 18:43-22:46 The cultural shift that happens when processes are defined and put into place 22:47-25:44 At what point does your organization need a COO? 25:45-31:02 How a CEO begins a great partnership with a newly hired COO 31:03-33:56 Giving power to employees to help identify and solve problems cross-functionally 33:57-36:37 Mistakes that Abraham has learned from 36:38-37:31 Closing out and how to get in touch Full Transcript Intro: 00:01 You're listening to the AppChat. A podcast focused on SasS growth strategies, plus successes in the Salesforce ecosystem and beyond. Here's your host, CodeScience CEO, Brian Walsh. Brian Walsh: 00:13 Alright everybody, welcome back to the AppChat podcast. And thrilled to have with us today, Jay Abraham, who is coming to us most recently from CloudCraze, and they're fresh off of their acquisition by Salesforce, which actually just closed last week. Welcome, Jay. Jay Abraham: 00:28 Welcome Brian, thank you very much. Brian Walsh: 00:32 Yeah, absolutely. Jay, before we get into you, give us a little bit of background, who was CloudCraze, talk about the acquisition, just what happened there? Jay Abraham: 00:41 CloudCraze is, I'd say, one of the foremost B2B e-commerce platforms. It's built natively on Salesforce, so it's tremendously helped our growth and scale, and obviously that was recognized by Salesforce by their recent acquisition of us; and I congratulate them on our acquisition and I think they're gonna have a wonderful future in the years ahead. Brian Walsh: 01:02 Fantastic. I think another statement of how amazing the Force.com platform is to be able to support an application this complex, as CloudCraze across so many large enterprise companies. Jay Abraham: 01:14 That's true, I think one of my team members on the product management side, was very appreciative. She came from one of the competitors, and she said that the biggest thing she recognized is that she didn't have to worry about the backend. But she had to worry about customer facing issues, giving them the capabilities they wanted, and that relying upon the Force.com platform allowed them to leverage everything they could -- and there's a whole team at Salesforce, obviously, building upon the Force.com platform. Brian Walsh: 01:47 Yeah it's such an efficient capital spend to not have to worry about that part of your infrastructure, the pager, all of those headcount just to manage what servers are up. Jay Abraham: 01:56 It is. Brian Walsh: 01:57 Awesome, so let's actually back into you, in your role getting there. So I mean you've done the COO role dozens of times in your life? Jay Abraham: 02:07 Officially as a COO, this is probably the first time. But I think I actively fulfilled the role as a Chief Operating Officer in many projects, both working at company's directly as well as being brought in as an executive troubleshooter. When people think about a COO, it's somebody you can give the mess to. The stuff that nobody wants to deal with, that's the COO. Brian Walsh: 02:34 I love that tagline on your LinkedIn profile, executive troubleshooter, because that's always been my experience of "Yeah, yeah, I got that. I'll take over." Jay Abraham: 02:43 Right. Brian Walsh: 02:44 But let's go way back in time. You actually were a nuclear physicist. Jay Abraham: 02:49 I was. That's what started off my career. I went to MIT. To think I built fusion power plants at the time. It was a really long time ago, 1983. When my professors convinced me to build one. Assuming all the technical details were completed and I figured out it would cost two billion dollars in 1983 dollars to do it and we'd have all the problems that we had with fission. The length of time that I would have to teach and do research before I could actually build the power plant would be 40 years and I'd be retired by that time. So I decided I'd do something else. Brian Walsh: 03:26 But it didn't end there. You actually became a submariner to practice at first, like hands on. Jay Abraham: 03:32 I did. It was kind of interesting to me. It started off at undergraduate school as a theoretical physicist and now to become a submariner you have to become a practical engineer. It was probably the genesis of my experiences being a Chief Operating Officer, because being on a submarine, you're responsible for everything that happens. And you need to, as Officer of the Deck or Engineering Officer of the Watch, you basically need to know how everything works. Even though you may not be the expert, you've got a lot of enlisted people who are -- the reactor operator, the electrical officer -- you need to be able to synthesize all that information and say, "This is what's important." And I think that's helped me a lot in my career going forward. Brian Walsh: 04:14 I can imagine. Does it also give you a whole background of jokes to say of "Hey guys, this is not nuclear physics." Jay Abraham: 04:22 I try not to say, because it was silence service in the submarine service. Everybody talks to me about telling all the stories and I can't really talk to them about it. Brian Walsh: 04:36 And I think when I was first starting to get to know you, the story that really broadened me of just the scale of things that you've done, was handling the outsourcing for American Express of their IT infrastructure. Jay Abraham: 04:48 That's true. It was an interesting project. We came in and the CFO for the technology group needed somebody to kind of lead point on financial evaluation. You go in and the technology team really wanted to outsource, which is very different in most companies. Most companies, the technology team would actually like to keep everything in-house. In this case, American Express had aggressive goals on reducing technology costs. I think the technology team felt like they wanted to step out of the way and give it to someone else to do and we said "Before we do that, let's figure out actually how the economics work." We can't just ask somebody to come in and give us a cost and say, "It's lower than what we're paying today, that's great." We build a model to kind of predict what we could actually, as American Express, reduce costs to. Then, each of these vendors bid against those costs, so we could compare, you know. These were, in the old days, we're talking about main frames, mid-ranges, desktops. We came up with unit pricing on each of those in MPS or server units or PCs and said based on various categories and scenarios of how things might play, here's how the cost would look for every vendor, as well as the internal vendor, and that's how we compare them. Brian Walsh: 06:10 Now did you have a big IT background at that point? To understand all of those individual units and how that built up? Jay Abraham: 06:18 No, I didn't have that IT background at the time. I had some technology background with my prior career with Mitchell Madison, I was a partner there. We did a lot of strategic sourcing and this is somewhat similar to strategic sourcing -- you need to understand base economics of both the vendor and yourself to see what lever needs to be pulled. My team had that background. I gave that direction on how to build it. We talked to technology people within American Express to say, "What are your parameters and what can't you do? What can you do?" And we helped them think through it. I think, a lot of this, people talk about technology being too complex to understand. My general impression has been that people think too much about what they don't have information from as opposed to what they do. Brian Walsh: 07:11 Yeah. Jay Abraham: 07:11 I mean, you can take whatever you have information on, make assumptions, simplifying the other type of things that you do have -- or you don't have -- and use that to be able to create a model or create a hypothesis that you can test against. Brian Walsh: 07:25 That's amazing. So my take away is you're a savant. Jay Abraham: 07:31 I think most consultants have got an ability to be able to synthesize and take useful data from a mess of information. Brian Walsh: 07:41 Yeah, that's exactly right. I know that it worked well for you as you transitioned to CloudCraze, because you had known Chris beforehand, right? And he was bringing you on just to sort of manage a couple of the pieces outstanding? Jay Abraham: 07:56 Right. Chris and I had known each other from marchFirst days, which is about the tail end of the time I was a partner in Mitchell Madison, which was a consulting firm. They got acquired by a company that Chris was part of and he and I knew each other. He was on the technology side. He'd always come by and borrow my people to help sell some of his engagements because we had this strategic mindset. Chris had always wanted to get me involved in some of the companies he'd done. His prior company, Acquity, which didn't work out because I had some projects going on at the time and was just too busy to get involved with it. At this point, with CloudCraze, he asked me to get involved and I started off helping him with certain areas in pricing. Went to contracts and poked into different areas until they said, "Well, you've been doing a lot of stuff. Why don't you come on as the Chief Operating Officer." Brian Walsh: 08:47 Yeah. And at that point it truly was just 20 hours a week. Jay Abraham: 08:55 Right, yes. It was just an ethic. They didn't have a clear role for me. I kind of defined my role as helping them set up the parameters so they can scale. You talked about what a Chief Operating Officer would do -- I think the most important ability for Chief Operating Officer is to help set you up to scale. A lot of people don't think about that until they start running into problems, and if you get a Chief Operating Officer early, then they'll start thinking about those things. The other thing I think is kind of risk management, which when you're growing a startup and are an entrepreneur, you're not really thinking about downside risk. But think about why you hire lawyers. Brian Walsh: 09:36 It's never for the great moments. Jay Abraham: 09:40 Right. It's to protect you from those moments you didn't really think about. That's the other thing the Chief Operating Officer should be helping you with, is to think about -- what are the things to scale and what are the things that can come bite you and to stop that from happening. Brian Walsh: 09:54 Yep. So Jason Lemkin, who founded EchoSign which Adobe bought and that's their Adobe sound product now. Sasstr fund, he runs the Sasstr conference. He tweeted recently, "A COO's job is to make the CEO's life easier." Jay Abraham: 10:16 I'll agree, that's probably true. If you think about a COO or Chief of Staff for President, et cetera, that's pretty much effectively the same role. You are to make everything easier for the president or the CEO, and get rid of all of those details. COO's should think about strategy division. COO should be thinking about, "Well, how do I make that vision a reality?" Brian Walsh: 10:35 Yeah. So how much of that is the chemistry between the CEO and the COO? How much of that is strengths and weaknesses? Because I can imagine that COOs play a different role depending on the strengths of the CEO then. Jay Abraham: 10:50 I think that's probably indicative more about what a CEO specifically focuses on, as opposed to what they do. I've talked with many CEOs, in my role as COO at CloudCraze, I had responsibility for all the back office functions, all the technology areas, etc. What it didn't have was kind of a front customer facing, but I've talked with a lot of COOs in other companies where they spent most of the time on the front in the sales end. I think that's just a matter of what role is needed in that company at that time. It could be, in our case, Chris focusing on strategy. We had Ray, who was our Pricing and Chief Customer Officer. They all worked closely together with each other from Acquity days, so they all knew how to work. Chris trusted me, so basically brought me in, said "Run with it. Decide what you want to do. Let me know if you have any issues or what you need." Brian Walsh: 11:59 Got it. I know that in my case I hired my COO back last summer. It was the very first time in my professional career where a new hire made my life better in two days. Like I turned around and said, "Oh my gosh, it's gotten that much better." And what I realized is that it freed me to actually think about two things. One, where I applied best. What was my skill set? And two, allowed me to truly focus, because up until that point, I was doing 300 different things and it can peel down. And you're right, stepped in and said, "Hey, I'm going to help you troubleshoot these areas and start to fix them, prepare for scale." Jay Abraham: 12:38 Right. You have to have that chemistry between the CEO and the CFO, and Chief Operating Officer and the rest of the executives. They have to be able to trust you to be able to go in and say, "These are the areas that are critical to fix right now and here are things we can defer." But also don't be defensive about a Chief Operating Officer coming in and saying to people in your areas, "Oh you need to change your human metrics. You need to start tracking and collecting this type of data." Brian Walsh: 13:10 Right. Jay Abraham: 13:12 Because you're not going in there to try to rip apart their organization, you're trying to come in there and say -- even in the sales area, which wasn't my responsibility -- I'd come in and say, "I want you to start collecting this type of data because that will help us tell what our conversion rates are. What's the cost per lead in various forms." And those are things that are important and will help the entire organization. Brian Walsh: 13:34 Yeah, and I found it is essential to have that second set of eyes, to really look in and say "Hey, you're already successful, but I think we can do a little bit more and let me collect data to help prove that." Jay Abraham: 13:48 Right. That's one of the things, but I think the other thing, it's real good, it goes back to scaling. In a small organization, everybody's working intuitively, in a lot of respects. For example, when we're making decisions on a contract and how much we're willing to give off of our list price, or what risk we're willing to take, those are done by the Chief Executives and they're making that as sort of, "Can I take that level of risk?" You're not quantifying it because it's a small organization and you can figure that out as you go through. Brian Walsh: 14:27 And you also think in your mind, you're thinking, "Hey, I'll be there to fix it if it goes wrong." Jay Abraham: 14:31 Right. Exactly. What goes on later is, as you bring more people into the organization and start to delegate some of those responsibilities, they don't have that same intuitive feel in business that you may have had. They may be doing things the same way you would have done them, but not doing the same exact thing. That starts to become a problem when you start scaling because you really want people to follow consistent processes at that point in time. Right? Because especially if you go to a funding event or a liquidity event, the lawyers and other teams are going to say that, "Well, what's your standard processes? How do you do this? What are all the exceptions?" And if you don't have a systematic way of doing that, it's going to be very hard. Jay Abraham: 15:19 Simple one for me was setting up processes say, well if you want to give a discount off of the price, up to certain level, it can be done by VP of sales. At a certain level it's got to go to the president. If you're taking on levels of risk that haven't really been defined yet, it needs to go to the board or certain other people to figure out how that should be done. It could be things like, what's important to you? Is it margin? Is it revenue? Is it risk? Brian Walsh: 15:54 Do you find yourself putting in that process, or do you find yourself asking the questions to assist other people in putting together that process? Jay Abraham: 16:02 Well, in most of my stuff, I think I've had to put in the process. I actually drive that to have other people think through it, and then we actually have to put in the process, say, "Ok, well this is how it's going to work when the contract comes in." I will come up with a table that says, "Here's various permutations of this." I'll give this to my legal counsel and say, "Hey, now when you talk contract to a salesperson, if their negotiation points on these five areas, then you know how to handle those five negotiation points." And there are exceptions and you can go to various people to get approval for those exceptions. Brian Walsh: 16:43 Got it. You've said the word "scale" five or six times now and I agree completely and that's one of the things we're embracing right now is we're growing so rapidly. How do you define scale? Why is it different than other parts of the business? You were truly on escape velocity for scale. Like, how do you define scale and how does an organization prepare for that? Jay Abraham: 17:05 I think I define scale as both velocity -- which is how rapidly you're growing -- and the size -- how big you are. My experience has generally been, the more you can think about standard processes and procedures -- and this goes back to my Navy nuclear submarine background, which is we would practice every single drill, possible, everything that could go wrong, so we would be prepared for it if it actually did -- that's what really helps a company out. When you're young and you're five people, it's hard to think about those things; then, you're 20 people and you're still going rapidly. Again, it's very hard to think about it. If you think about it then, and start making some standard processes, even if it's white boarded out -- take a little picture, say "This is our process." It will start progressively getting more difficult and then you'll get to a point where you're racing along and you're a race car, and now you're having to rebuild the chassis and the wheels while you're going 200 miles per hour. The earlier you start the processes of setting up standard processes, the easier it is. Obviously, if you wait until you get a Chief Operating Officer to do that, then it's usually too late to help out immediately. So it becomes harder. Brian Walsh: 18:43 I would imagine there's a huge cultural shift that happens. When we're a small startup, it's truly just art. There is no size to it. Right? It's just art, we're making it up as we go. We're making up these rules, we're just disrupting the market -- in your case it was B2B commerce, and all of a sudden we're going to put process in, we're going to define things. Did you find that there was this real pull with the organization for people who had been there a long time of, "Oh my gosh, we've never done it this way. Why do we have to define it all?" Jay Abraham: 19:10 I think that there are always people who object to that, but I think in general, my experience has been, putting the processes in actually made people feel like they knew where to go. Especially the new people. Some of the people that had been there and had all that intellectual knowledge in their head about how the organization works and could do it; they were very few and far between. There were a lot of people who were just, "I don't know where I can get that information. What can I discount the price to? How do I solve this issue with Salesforce?" Part of the steps of the process is, you have in that document of knowledge, so that anybody can go access it, as opposed to you always having to go to the one individual and they talk to you and that individual is doing a thousand things and they don't have time to talk to you. Brian Walsh: 19:10 Right. Jay Abraham: 20:11 And so I think, you do have people who say, "I don't want to be that rigid Fortune 100 company that takes forever to get things done." And I don't think putting processes from scale necessarily will lead to that. You still need to be flexible, you still need to be entrepreneurial, you still need to be able to make decisions in a collaborative environment without having to have 20 committees. You can still provide the processes and the tools that allow people to say, "Oh I know exactly where to get that information." Or "I know exactly who I need to go to get something approved by." Brian Walsh: 20:51 Eric Ries who wrote The Link Startup who has such great writings was recently on the First Round blog with an article around gatekeepers. And I think he's addressing some of those things of, those areas where they become gatekeepers, whether it be legal counsel or finance or admin, to actually bring them to the table to collaborate, rather than leaving them to the last minute. Because that just creates roadblocks and delays, so actually bringing them into the process so they become part of that decision-making process and everybody gets informed through it. Jay Abraham: 21:25 No, I think that's very important. A perfect example I can give with our teams is the sales team would not necessarily bring my engineering team into a sales pitch until well after they promised certain capabilities and certain things we were going to deliver. And then the engineering team would come in and say, "Well, how did you promise that? That's a very risky environment, right?" And I don't think they understood that they could do that. But on the converse, I kept telling my engineering team, "What have you provided the sales team to come say, 'Here's the sweet spot.'" This is kind of the like the boundary areas of what we should be playing in and to go outside, I call them green sweet spot, but yellow, you should be cautionary about doing anything like this. At the time, if you go into the yellow framework, that's a good time to call product management engineer and say, "Let me hear your thoughts on whether this works or not works." And then there's the red area, where things we shouldn't be playing in because that's not our core competencies. Brian Walsh: 22:34 I can't believe that sales would ever sell something that doesn't exist yet. Jay Abraham: 22:43 Right, when you're doing enterprise sales, you can always promise to do that. Selling a product? People expect it to work. Brian Walsh: 22:47 That's right. So if you're a CEO or you're on a board, when do you know your organization needs a COO? At what point? I mean, is it ARR? Is it number of employees? At what point is it like, "Holy crap, we need to have a COO in here to start helping." Jay Abraham: 23:02 Well, it depends on how you define your COO. So if the COO is just a responsibility that one of the other members of the executive team has, then I think you should start it pretty early in that mix. That responsibility is to set you up for growth, right? Brian Walsh: 23:19 Yep. Jay Abraham: 23:19 Okay, the President, Chief Customer Officer, the Head of Sales, it could be engineering. But somebody's got that role to go over and above their normal role and to set up processes and standards, right? Brian Walsh: 23:33 Yep. Jay Abraham: 23:35 You can do that. The other area is, you know you'll have a COO if you do. You haven't set up those standards and processes, and things start breaking or your growth stumbles or your people start leaving or your technology is always behind schedule, right? Some issue is going to come up and say to you, "Hey, I need somebody to get a handle on this." And that's when you know you've got a COO. But I'd say that's probably the wrong time to bring in the COO because it's going to be expensive and it's going to be hard and it's going to be culturally difficult. But the easier time is to bring them in well before you need it. Brian Walsh: 24:11 Yeah, I mean it's always easier to see it after the fact. Jay Abraham: 24:17 Yes. Brian Walsh: 24:17 It's hard to have that foresight to say, "Hey, we're about to run into these problems in there." Did you participate in fundraising? I mean, were you just running the business while Chris was out fundraising? How did you help the organization during that process? Because you raised some incredibly large rounds there as CloudCraze grew. Jay Abraham: 24:38 I wasn't very involved in the fundraising aspect. Chris, Paul our CFO, and Matt our CMO, were the primary investors, they were the ones who were primarily focused on the fundraising. What I was able to help with was, the very fact that we set up quarterly business reviews and gave key metrics to every department we were supposed to track -- that allowed them to provide that information to investors in a much easier format without actually having to scramble about. Then this latest round, when Salesforce acquired us and went through the due diligence process, we had prepared most of the material they were looking for. So it's easy for me to just pull it around and go and say, "Okay, we already have this." As opposed to going and creating this. Brian Walsh: 25:26 Got it. That must have made that process go much, much faster than for everybody involved. Jay Abraham: 25:32 I don't know if it made it go faster. At least easier to pull the information from our side, and we didn't have to have much disruption to our normal business. Brian Walsh: 25:45 That's good because in the end, they're acquiring a fast growing business and they want that to continue. If you're a new CEO, and you have a COO that you've just hired, what would be some guidelines that you would offer both parties? Like how do you begin working together? How do you begin that great partnership? Jay Abraham: 26:08 I think the CEO has to be honest about what's worrying him. What are the things, that if he had time, he would be doing? Brian Walsh: 26:21 Yeah. Jay Abraham: 26:23 And then what are the areas he says, "I just trust the people to do this and never checked on this." But it's probably worth somebody checking on it. I think we even consider trust. Trust but verify. And I think that goes for a lot of things. I see executives getting into trouble when they trust but don't verify. Or they may say something at a high level and their direct reports may tell them things are working at a very high level, but nobody asks the detailed questions I think. Something that a Chief Operational Officer has to be able to do very well is to helicopter -- go from seeing the big picture strategy to going down to the levels of detail to say, "Does it actually work the way that I think it's going to work?" Brian Walsh: 27:11 Got it. I know you definitely got down to the details. At one point, you were actually answering all the customer success e-mails, right? Jay Abraham: 27:19 I wised up when my product support team manager quit and we lost several people. I was helping out by going through and helping my team to be able to look through things and help them fix some of the issues. It was actually a good thing for me because I got to see a lot more of the problems that customers were raising about the product. Things from documentation, from implementation, installing the application, uninstalling the application. And I was able to say, "Okay, well, let's start a project to fix the documentation. Let's create an installer. Let's start collecting data that allows the customer success team give the engineer product management team to say, 'Here are the problems that the customers are raising. Here are various areas of the product it's impacting. Let's put more resources on those areas to fix those issues so we reduce the number of product calls or reduce the issues that our system integrators were having.'" Brian Walsh: 28:25 It's always amazing that you never actually get those insights until you experience it first hand. Jay Abraham: 28:30 That is very true. Previously in my career, I used to run a consent order for one of the independent foreclosure reviews. I came into this project very late in the game. By the time I went down to the real core issue, which was how they ran and did the actual reviews of these projects, I started saying, "Let me try to answer the questions that we're asking all of these mortgage underwriters to do -- myself." And seeing what questions that come up in my mind. Then you can start saying that people write processes, but they never try to run it through themselves. Until you run it through yourselves, you don't really know what gaps there are. One of the things I would tell my teams is, "After you've run it through yourself many times and you've figured out all the answers and you've actually put in the answers and filled it out, just like someone else you're asking to do would do it, then find somebody else who's brand new, who doesn't know anything, and make them go through it and every time they come and ask you a question, you know that's an area where you actually didn't put enough thought. Brian Walsh: 29:48 Right. Recently our Senior Director of Delivery, Kim, was out for spring break. One of her direct reports, Jake was out as well. And so our COO, both report up that way, basically had to fill both of those shoes. He came back every single day with "Oh my gosh, I had no idea everything they did." And it was this uncovering process of "I now know what we can fix over the next two months." Like, if we knock these things off, we become so much more efficient. Jay Abraham: 30:18 It is. It's very helpful for senior leadership to experience that. Because what you typically find is middle managers, they know what the problems are, but they're so used to it happening that way. Brian Walsh: 30:32 They don't need to solve them. Jay Abraham: 30:34 They don't need to solve them. And they also figure out that's the way it goes. They don't have the authority to fix it. And it's only when somebody in executive management goes and says, "Why are we doing it that way?" And they're like "I thought that's what you wanted." And you realize that "Well I don't need that information or I don't need it done that way." You're the only one that's going to be able to get that perspective and saying, "Operating across multiple departments or multiple silos, here's how we can think about it." Brian Walsh: 31:03 Do you think it's possible to create a culture where middle managers do feel empowered to make changes like that? To look inside? Or is that a skill set you develop over time? Jay Abraham: 31:13 I think you can empower middle managers to raise questions and to challenge, but it's also a skill set. But it's also time and perspective. When you are a middle manager, you're working in a functional area, so it could be sales, right? Brian Walsh: 31:34 Yep. Jay Abraham: 31:35 And you're the account executive doing things. You go and say, "I'll need this information. I need this." You may be able to say, "I got problems getting that information." You don't know why you don't have that information or why you might have limits on things. You may be saying "This is what I've gotta do," but you don't have the perspective of what the sales team is doing. And so part of it is, you need to be higher up in the organization and have a perspective over multiple areas. Brian Walsh: 32:04 Right. Jay Abraham: 32:04 That breadth of experience is what helps you say, "I can solve things that middle managers can't because they don't see the whole picture." Brian Walsh: 32:11 It's that tee in leadership or tee in management where the more senior you become the wider breadth that tee has to become. So you see more and more groups and how they interact. Jay Abraham: 32:24 Right. And that's very important. That's why I think when people get afraid about going into big companies, because that tee is so high level, they start worrying about how long it takes to fix things. And because they go up in silos, until very senior level, you don't get that perspective to be able to say, "You really, actually, don't need to have those silos." And that's a cultural thing, because as you go from a small company to a medium size company to a really large enterprise, you have to be able to give people that authority. Not just even just the authority, but I think you want them to have the willingness to be able to challenge those things and go across silo boundaries and say, "Think about it." And talk to people in other organizations that, even if you might not have the authority to fix it, as long as you guys talk you'll be able to identify the issue. Brian Walsh: 33:24 I find especially in large organizations, working with some of our gigantic clients, that cross functional ability can be so rare. To actually think, "Hey, I'm only in the product group. I don't know what's going on in sales, or enablement, or finance." But those that do, are the rising stars. They work so quickly and assemble teams that actually get stuff done. Jay Abraham: 33:44 Yep. The very fact that many people don't do it well is really why I've had a very successful consulting career, because of that ability. People hire me just for that. Brian Walsh: 33:57 That's awesome. So any mistakes that you made over your time at CloudCraze that you're going to learn from and not make again. Something that you can share with everybody. Jay Abraham: 34:08 I think the biggest mistake I made with CloudCraze initially was, I didn't dive deep enough into the engineering team and the way they work. It took me three to five months until I figured out that the amount of resources we were putting against engineering was insufficient to do what we really needed to do. Because there were a lot of things core to the product that actually needed to be fixed, and I only heard that after my Product Support Manager quit and I had to start hearing those calls. I started saying, "Why are we focusing on creating all these new features when we have all these fundamental features that were broken that it wasn't sexy to sell?" Understanding that was a paradigm shift to say, "We need to stop creating all these new features. Fix the foundations, then we can set it up to scale and say, 'Here's the new feature we want to focus on.'" Brian Walsh: 35:16 I was always blown away by just how small your product and development teams were. Jay Abraham: 35:23 They're a great team and they were stretched immensely to do a huge job. I mean B2B e-commerce is a very complex system to be able to do, and building different capabilities into the platform -- which is what sales was doing -- those teams, my teams, were actually aggressive about saying, "Okay, sales says we need this and we're going to go do it." One of the things I had to coach them on was, "But you knew all these things were broken, why didn't you say something?" They say, "Well I did." And I said, "You gotta say it in a much louder voice or jump on the table and say, 'No, you gotta fix this.'" The security's important, scales important. We can't do this without doing that. And so getting down to culturally field it, it was also their job to decide what was important. It was a big part of what I worked with them over the last year. Brian Walsh: 36:21 Awesome. Well, I am absolutely positive that wherever you end up next will be the luckiest company on the planet to get your skill set. Now, if somebody wanted to get ahold of you, what's the way to get ahold of you? Because you're not another Jay Abraham online, are you? Jay Abraham: 36:38 No I'm not. I'm not the multi-level marketer, a lot of people recognize me as that. LinkedIn is obviously the best way to do it, but I have my own consulting firm. It's j.a@abrahamgroup.biz. So that's the easiest way to get ahold of me. Brian Walsh: 36:59 That's awesome. So abrahamgroup.biz to find you and obviously LinkedIn, you're not the one with the beard. Jay Abraham: 37:05 I'm not the one with the beard. Brian Walsh: 37:08 Fantastic. Well Jay, congratulations on the exit at CloudCraze. I know you played such a significant role to prepare them for scale and accomplish the hurdles, and I look forward to keeping up with you and see what you do next. Jay Abraham: 37:21 Thank you, Brian. Brian Walsh: 37:25 Alright, thanks everybody. Again, Appchatpodcast.com or you can find us on iTunes. Have a great day. Outro: 37:31 Thanks for listening to this episode of the AppChat. Don't miss an episode. Visit Appchatpodcast.com or subscribe on iTunes. Until next time, don't make success an accident.

In this episode, we discuss The Extracurricular and TrailheaDX, the Stack Overflow 2018 Developer Survey, Salesforce Ventures investment in Dropbox, Saleforce's acquisition of CloudCraze, Salesforce Essentials, and the top languages, skills, or platforms used for open source. The Extracurricular TrailheaDX Salesforce’s $100M Dropbox investment, on the eve of the IPO, could signal an acquisition - Business Insider Box Notes: Online Note Taking App | Box US Salesforce will acquire enterprise e-commerce software startup CloudCraze | TechCrunch Polyphasic Sleep Beginners Start Here - Polyphasic Society

Many business buyers have been there. They’re trying to make a quick, routine order to restock inventory, but the website keeps throwing them ads and offers for miscellaneous products they’ve never needed. With the product at the center of the commerce strategy, the customer never wins. However, when a company bases every interaction off of a holistic view of the customer, customers feel more valued, increase their brand loyalty, and in turn, the business increases revenue. So, how can companies determine if they actually have this customer-first platform or not? 1. Do you have a real-time understanding of how customers are interacting with your system? 1. Can you see how customers are acting across engagement channels, such as service, sales and commerce? 1. Are you able to respond to new customer cases by scaling and iterating based on customer feedback? 1. Are the new features you offer available quickly for the customer? Asking these 4 questions can help B2B organizations assess how customer-centric their platform actually is. B2B commerce expert, Ray Grady, can explain what to do if the answer to these questions is “no.” CloudCraze (http://www.cloudcraze.com/) is the only native B2B commerce platform on Salesforce. The company powers eCommerce for Coca-Cola, Avid, AB InBev, Barry-Callebaut, Ecolab, GE, L’Oreal, Kellogg’s, WABCO and more. CloudCraze is a Platinum Salesforce ISV Partner. Special Guest: Ray Grady.