Podcasts about financialforce

Evelyn Grizzle, Senior Salesforce Developer, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss the often-misunderstood and always exciting world of Salesforce development. Evelyn explains why Salesforce Development is still seen as separate from traditional cloud development, and describes the work of breaking down barriers and silos between Salesforce developers and engineering departments. Corey and Evelyn discuss how a non-traditional background can benefit people who want to break into tech careers, and Evelyn reveals the best parts of joining the Salesforce community. About EvelynEvelyn is a Salesforce Certified Developer and Application Architect and 2023 Salesforce MVP Nominee. They enjoy full stack Salesforce development, most recently having built a series of Lightning Web Components that utilize a REST callout to a governmental database to verify the licensure status of a cannabis dispensary. An aspiring Certified Technical Architect candidate, Evelyn prides themself on deploying secure and scalable architecture. With over ten years of customer service experience prior to becoming a Salesforce Developer, Evelyn is adept at communicating with both technical and non-technical internal and external stakeholders. When they are not writing code, Evelyn enjoys coaching for RADWomenCode, mentoring through the Trailblazer Mentorship Program, and rollerskating.Links Referenced: Another Salesforce Blog: https://anothersalesforceblog.com RAD Women Code: https://radwomen.org/ Personal Website: https://evelyn.fyi LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/evelyngrizzle/ TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. But what do we mean by cloud? Well, people have the snarky answer of, it's always someone else's computer. I tend to view it through a lens of being someone else's call center, which is neither here nor there.But it all seems to come back to Infrastructure as a Service, which is maddeningly incomplete. Today, we're going in a slightly different direction in the world of cloud. My guest today is Evelyn Grizzle, who, among many other things, is also the author of anothersalesforceblog.com. I want to be clear, that is not me being dismissive. That is the actual name of the blog. Evelyn, thank you for joining me.Evelyn: Hi, Corey. Thank you for having me.Corey: So, I want to talk a little bit about one of the great unacknowledged secrets of the industry, which is that every company out there, sooner or later, uses Salesforce. They talk about their cloud infrastructure, but Salesforce is nowhere to be seen in it. But, for God's sake, at The Duckbill Group, we are a Salesforce customer. Everyone uses Salesforce. How do you think that wound up not being included in the narrative of cloud in quite the same way as AWS or, heaven forbid, Azure?Evelyn: So, Salesforce is kind of at the proverbial kid's table in terms of the cloud infrastructure at most companies. And this is relatively because the end-users are, you know, sales reps. We've got people in call centers who are working on Salesforce, taking in information, taking in leads, opportunities, creating accounts for folks. And it's kind of seen as a lesser service because the primary users of Salesforce are not necessarily the techiest people on the planet. So, I am really passionate about, like, making sure that end-users are respected.Salesforce actually just added a new certification, the Sales Representative Certification that you can get. That kind of gives you insight to what it's like to use Salesforce as an end-user. And given that Salesforce is for sales, a lot of times Salesforce is kind of grouped under the Financial Services portion of a company as opposed to, like, engineering. So again, kind of at the proverbial kid's table; we're over in finance, and the engineering team who's working on the website, they have their engineering stuff.And a lot of people don't really know what Salesforce is. So, to give a rundown, basically, Salesforce development is, I lovingly referred to it as bastard Java full-stack development. Apex, the proprietary language, is based in Java, so you have your server-side Java interface with the Salesforce relational database. There's the Salesforce Object Query Language and Salesforce Object Search Language that you can use to interact with the database. And then you build out front-end components using HTML and JavaScript, which a lot of people don't know.So, it's not only an issue of the end-users are call center reps, their analysts, they're working on stuff that isn't necessarily considered techie, but there's also kind of an institutional breakdown of, like, what is Salesforce? This person is just dragging and dropping when that isn't true. It's actually, you know, we're writing code, we're doing stuff, we're basically writing full-stack Java. So, I like to call that out.Corey: I mean, your undergraduate degree is in network engineering, let's be very clear. This is—I'm not speaking to you as someone who's non-technical trying to justify what they do as being technical. You have come from a very deep place that no one would argue is, “Well, that's not real computering.” Oh, I assure you, networking is very much real computering, and so is Salesforce. I have zero patience for this gatekeeping nonsense we see in so many areas of tech, but I found this out firsthand when we started trying to get set up with Salesforce here. It took wailing and gnashing of teeth and contractor upon contractor. Some agencies did not do super well, some people had to come in and rescue the project. And now it mostly—I think—works.Evelyn: Yeah, and that's what we go for. And actually, so my degree is in network engineering, but an interesting story about me. I actually went to school for chemical engineering. I hated it. It was the worst. And I dropped out of school did, like, data analytics for a while. Worked my way up as a call center rep at a telephone company and made a play into database administration. And because I was working at the phone company, my degree is in network engineering because I was like, “I want to work at the phone company forever.” Of course that did not pan out. I got a job doing Salesforce development and really enjoy it. There's always something to learn. I taught myself Salesforce while I was working at IBM, and with the Blue Wolf department that… they're a big Salesforce consulting shop at IBM, and through their guidance and tutelage, I guess, I did a lot of training and worked up on Salesforce. And it's been a lot of fun.Corey: I do feel that I need to raise my hand here and say that I am in the group you described earlier of not really understanding what Salesforce is. My first real exposure to Salesforce in anything approaching a modern era was when I was at a small consulting company that has since been bought by IBM, which rather than opine on that, what I found interesting was the Salesforce use case where we wound up using that internally to track where all the consultants were deployed, how they wound up doing on their most recent refresher skills assessment, et cetera, so that when we had something strange, like a customer coming in with, “I need someone who knows the AS/400 really well,” we could query that database internally and say, “Ah. We happen to have someone coming off of a project who does in fact, know how that system works. Let's throw them into the mix.” And that was incredibly powerful, but I never thought of it as being a problem that a tool that was aimed primarily at sales would be effective at solving. I was very clearly wrong.Evelyn: Yeah. So, the thing about Salesforce is there's a bunch of different clouds that you can access. So there's, like, Health Cloud, Service Cloud, Sales Cloud is the most common, you know, Salesforce, Sales Cloud, obviously. But Service Cloud is going to be a service-based Salesforce organization that allows you to track folks, your HR components, you're going to track your people. There's also Field Service Lightning.And an interesting use case I had for Field Service Lightning, which is a application that's built on top of Salesforce that allows field technicians to access Salesforce, one of the coolest projects I've built in my career so far is, the use case is, there's an HVAC company that wants to be able to charge customers when they go out into the field. And they want to have their technician pull out an iPad, swipe the credit card, and it charges the customer for however much duct tape they used, however much piping, whatever, duct work they do. Like I said, I'm a software engineer, I'm not a HVAC person, but—Corey: It's the AWS building equivalent for HVAC, as best I can tell. It's like all right, “By the metric foot-pound—” “Isn't that a torque measurement?” “Not anymore.” Yeah, that's how we're going to bill you for time and materials. It'll be great.Evelyn: Exactly. So, this project I built out, it connects with Square, which is awesome. And Field Service Lightning allows this technician to see where they're supposed to go on the map, it pulls up all the information, a trigger in Salesforce, an automation, pulls all the information into Field Service Lightning, and then you run the card, it webhooks into Square, you send the information back. And it was a really fun project to work on. So, that was actually a use case I had not thought of for Salesforce is, you know, being able to do something like this in the field and making a technician's job that much easier.Corey: That's really when I started to feel, as this Salesforce deployment we were doing here started rolling out, it wasn't just—my opinion on it was like, “Wait, isn't this basically just that Excel sheet somewhere that we can have?” And it starts off that way, sure, but then you have people—for example, we've made extensive use of aspects of this over on the media side of our business, where we have different people that we've reached out to who then matriculate on to other companies and become sponsors in that side of the world. And how do we track this? How do we wind up figuring out what's currently in flight that doesn't live in someone's head, or God forbid, email inbox? How do we start reasoning about these things in a more holistic way?We went in a slightly different direction before rolling it out to handle all of the production pieces and the various things we have in flight, but I could have easily seen a path whereas we instead went down that rabbit hole and used it as more or less the ERP, for lack of a better term, for running a services business.Evelyn: Yeah. And that is one thing you can use Salesforce as an ERP. FinancialForce, now Certinia, exists, so it is possible to use Salesforce as an ERP, but there's so much more to it than that. And Salesforce, at its heart, is a relational database with a fancy user interface. And when I say, “I'm a Salesforce developer,” they're like, “Oh, you work at Salesforce?” And I'm like, “No, not quite. I customize Salesforce for companies that purchase Salesforce as a Salesforce customer.”And the extensibility of the platform is really awesome. And you know, speaking of the external clients that want to use Salesforce, there's, like, Community Cloud where you can come in and have guest users. You can have your—if you are, say at a phone company, you can have a troubleshooting help center. You can have chatbots in Salesforce. I have a lot of friends who are working on AI chatbots with the Einstein AI within Salesforce, which is actually really cool. So, there is a lot of functionality that is extensible within Salesforce beyond just a basic Excel spreadsheet. And it's a lot of fun.Corey: If I pull up your website, anothersalesforceblog.com, one of the first things that you mentioned on the About the Author page just below the fold, is that you are an eight-time Salesforce Certified Developer and application architect. Like, wow, “Eight different certifications? What is this, AWS, on some level?”I think that there's not a broad level of awareness in the ecosystem, just how vast the Salesforce-specific ecosystem really is. It seems like there's an entire, I want to reprise the term that someone—I can't recall who—used to describe Dark Matter developers, the people that you don't generally see in most of the common developer watering holes like Stack Overflow, or historically shitposting on Twitter, but they're out there. They rock in, they do their jobs. Why is it that we don't see more Salesforce representation in, I guess, the usual tech watering holes?Evelyn: So, we do have a Stack Overflow, a Stack Exchange as well. They are separate entities that are within the greater Stack websites. And I assure you, there's lots of Salesforce shitposting on Twitter. I used to be very good at it, but no longer on Twitter due to personal reasons. We'll leave it at that.But yeah, Dreamforce is like a massive conference that happens in San Francisco every year. We are gearing up for that right now. And there's not a lot of visibility into Salesforce outside of that it feels like. It's kind of an insulated community. And that goes back to the Salesforce being at the kids' table in the engineering departments.And one of the things that I've been working on in my current role is really breaking down the barriers and the silos between the engineering department who's working on JavaScript, they're working on Node, they're working on HTML, they're, you know, building websites with React or whatever, and I'm coming in and saying, like, hey, we do the same thing. I can build a Heroku app in React, if I want to, I can do PHP, I can do this. And that's one of the cool things about Salesforce is some days I get to write in, like, five or six different languages if I want to. So, that is something that, there's not a lot of understanding. Because again, relational database with a fancy user interface.To the outside, it may seem like we're dragging and dropping stuff. Which yes, there is some stuff. I love Flows, which are… they're drag-and-drop automations that you can do within Salesforce that are actually really powerful. In the most recent update, you can actually do an HTTP call-out in a Flow, which is something that's, like, unheard of for a Salesforce admin with no coding background can come in, they can call an Apex class, they can do an HTTP call-out to an external resource and say, like, “Hey, I want to grab this information, pull it back into Salesforce, and get running off the ground with, like, zero development resources, if there are none available.”Corey: I want to call out just for people who think this is more niche than it really is. I live in San Francisco. And I remember back in pre-Covid times, back when Dreamforce was in town. I started seeing a bunch of, you know, nerdy-looking people with badges. Oh, it's a tech conference, what conference is it? It's something called Dreamforce for Salesforce.Oh, is that like the sad small equivalent of re:Invent in Las Vegas? And it's no, no, it's actually about three times the size. 170,000 people descend on San Francisco to attend this conference. It is massive. And it was a real eye-opener for me just to understand that. I mean, I have a background in sales before I got into tech and I did not realize that this entire ecosystem existed. It really does feel like it is more or less invisible and made me wonder what the hell else I'm missing, as I am too myopically focused on one particular giant cloud company to the point where it has now become a major facet of my personality.Evelyn: And that's the thing is there's all kinds of community events as well. So, I'm actually speaking at Forcelandia which, it's a Salesforce developer-focused event that is in Portland—Forcelandia, obviously—and I'm going to be speaking on a project that I built for my current company that is, like, REST APIs, we've got some encryption, we've got a front-end widget that you drop into a Salesforce object. Which, a Salesforce object is a table within the relational database, and being able to use polymorphic object relationships within Salesforce and really extending the functionality of Salesforce. So, if you're in Portland, I will be at Forcelandia on July 13th and I'm really excited about it.But it's this really cool ecosystem that, you know, there's events all over the world, every month, happening. And we've got Mile High Dreamin' coming up in August, which I'll be at as well, speaking there on how to break into the ecosystem from a non-tech role, which will be exciting. But yeah, it's a really vibrant community like, and it's a really close-knit community as well. Everyone is so super helpful. If I have a question on Stack Exchange, or, you know, back in my Twittering days, if I'd have something on Twitter, I could just post out and blast out, and the whole Salesforce community would come in with answers, which is awesome. I feel like the Stack Exchange is not the friendliest place on the planet, so to be able to have people who, like, I recognize that username and this person is going to come and help me out. And that's really cool. I like that about the Salesforce community.Corey: Yeah, a ding for a second on the whole Stack Exchange thing. That the Stack Overflow survey was fascinating, and last year, they showed that 92% of their respondents were male. So, this year, they fixed that problem and did not ask the question. So, I just refer to it nowadays as Stack Broverflow because that's exactly how it seems.Evelyn: [laugh].Corey: And that is a giant problem. I just didn't want that to pass uncommented-on in public. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to basically—Evelyn: Fair enough.Corey: —mouth off about that crappy misbehavior.Evelyn: Oh, yeah. No. And that's one of the things that I really like about the Salesforce community is there's actually, like, a huge movement towards gender equity and parity. So, one of the organizations that I'm involved with is RAD Women Code, which is a nonprofit that Angela Mahoney and a couple of other women started that it seeks to upskill women and other marginalized genders from Salesforce admins, which are your declarative users within Salesforce that set up the security settings, they set up the database relationships, they make metadata changes within Salesforce, and take that relational database knowledge and then upskill them into Salesforce developers.And right now, there is a two-part course that you can sign up for. If you have I believe it's a year or two of Salesforce admin experience and you are a woman or other marginalized gender, you can sign up and take part one, which is a very intro to computer programming, you go over the basics of object-oriented programming, a little bit of Java, a little bit of SOQL, which is the Salesforce Object Query Language. And then you build projects, which is really awesome, which is, like, the most effective way to learn is actually building stuff. And then the second part of the course is, like, a more advanced, like, let's get into our bash classes, which is like an automation that you can run every night. Let's do advanced object-oriented programming topics like abstraction and polymorphism. And being able to teach that is really fun.We're also planning on adding a third course, which is going to be the front-end development in Salesforce, which is your HTML, your JavaScript. Salesforce uses vanilla JavaScript, which I love, personally. I know I'm alone in that. I know that's the big meme on Facebook in the programming groups is ‘JavaScript bad,' but I have fun with it. There's a lot you can do with just native JavaScript in Salesforce. Like, you can grab the geolocation of a device and print it onto a Salesforce object record using just vanilla JavaScript. And it's been really helpful. I've done that a few times on various projects.But yeah, we're planning on adding a third course. We are currently getting ready to launch the pilot program on that for RAD Women Code. So, if you are listening to this, and you are a Salesforce admin who is a marginalized gender, definitely hit me up on LinkedIn and I will send you some information because it's a really good program and I love being able to help out with it.Corey: We'll definitely include links to that in the [show notes 00:18:59]. I mean, this does tie into the next question I have, which is, how do you go about giving a cohesive talk or even talking at all about Salesforce, given the tremendous variety in terms of technical skills people bring to bear with it, the backgrounds that they have going into it? It feels, on some level, like, it's only a half-step removed from, “So, you're into computers? Here's a conference for that.” Which I understand, let's be clear here, that I am speaking from the position of the AWS ecosystem, which is throwing stones in a very fragile glass house.Evelyn: Yeah, so again, I said this already. When I say I'm a Salesforce developer, people say, “Oh, you work at Salesforce. That is so cool.” And I have to say, “No, no. No working at Salesforce. I work on Salesforce in the proprietary system.” But there's always stuff to be learned. There's obviously, like, two releases a year where they send updates to the Salesforce software that companies are running on and working on computers is kind of how I sum it up, but yeah, I don't know [laugh].Corey: No, I think that's a fair place to come at from. It's, I think that we all have a bit of a bias in that we tend to assume that other people, in the absence of data to the contrary, have similar backgrounds and experiences to our own. And that means in many cases, we paper over things that are not necessarily true. We find ourselves biasing for people whose paths resemble our own, which is not inherently a bad thing until it becomes exclusionary. But it does tend to occlude the fact that there are many paths to this broader industry.Evelyn: Yeah. So, there is a term in the Salesforce ecosystem, we like to call people accidental admins, where they learn Salesforce on a job and like it so much that they become a Salesforce admin. And a lot of times these folks will then become developers and then architects, even, which is kind of how I got into it as well. I started at a phone company as a Salesforce end-user, worked my way up as a database admin, database coordinator doing e911 databases, and then transitioned into software engineering from there. So, there's a lot of folks who find themselves within the Salesforce ecosystem, and yeah, there are people with, like, bonafide top-ten computer science school degrees, and you know, we've got a fair bit of that, but one thing that I really like about the Salesforce ecosystem is because everyone's so friendly and helpful and because there's so many resources to upskill folks, it's really easy to get involved in the ecosystem.Like Trailhead, the training platform for Salesforce is entirely free. You can sign up for an account, you can learn anything on Salesforce from end-user stuff to Salesforce architecture and anything in between. So, that's how most people study for their certifications. And I love Trailhead. It's a very fun little modules.It gamifies learning and you get little, I call them Girl Scout badges because they resemble, you know, you have your Girl Scout vest and your Girl Scout sash, and you get the little badges. So, when you complete a project, you get a badge—or if you work on a big project, a super badge—that you can then put on your resume and say, “Hey, I built this 12-hour project in Salesforce Trailhead.” And some of them are required for certifications. So, you can say, “I did this. I got this certification, and I can actually showcase my skills and what I've been working on.”So, it really makes a good entrance to the ecosystem. Because there's a lot of people who want to break into tech that don't necessarily have that background that are able to do so and really, really shine. And I tell people, like, let's see, it's 2023. Eight years ago, I was a barista. I was doing undergraduate research and working in a coffee shop. And that's really helped me in my career.And a lot of people don't think about this, but the soft skills that you learn in, like, a food service job or a retail job are really helpful for communicating with those internal and external stakeholders, technical and non-technical stakeholders. And if you've ever been yelled at by a Karen on a Sunday morning, in a university town on graduation weekend, you can handle any project manager. So, that's one thing that, like, because there's so many resources in the ecosystem, there's so many people with so many varied backgrounds in the ecosystem, it's a really welcoming place. And there's not, like… I don't know, there's not a lot of, like, degree shaming or school shaming or background shaming that I feel happens in some other tech spaces. You know, I see your face you're making there. I know you know what I'm talking about. But—[laugh].Corey: I have an eighth-grade education on paper. My 20s were very interesting. Now, it's a fun story, but it was very tricky to get past a lot of that bias early on in my career. You're not wrong.Evelyn: Absolutely. And like I said, eight years ago, I was a barista. I went to school for chemical engineering. I have an engineering background, I have most of a chemical engineering degree. I just hated it so much.But getting into Salesforce honestly changed my life because I worked my way up from a call center as an end-user on Salesforce. Being able to say I have worked as a consultant. I have worked as a staff software engineer, I have worked at an ISV partner, which if you don't know what that is, Salesforce has an app store, kind of like the Google Play Store or the Apple App Store, but purely apps on Salesforce, and it's called the Salesforce App Exchange. So, if you have Salesforce, you can extend your functionality by adding an app from the App Exchange to if you want to use Salesforce as an ERP, for example, you can add the Certinia app from the App Exchange. And I've worked on AppExchange apps before, and now I'm like, making a big kid salary and, like, it's really, really kind of cool because ten years ago, I didn't think my life was going to be like this, and I owe it to—I'm going to give my old boss Scott Bell a shout out on this because he hired me, and I'm happy about it, so thank you, Scott for taking a chance and letting me learn Salesforce. Because now I'm on Screaming in the Cloud, which is really cool, so—talking about Salesforce, which is dorky, but it's really fun.Corey: If it works, what's wrong with it?Evelyn: Exactly.Corey: There's a lot to be said for helping people find a path forward. One of the things that I've always been taken aback by has been just how much small gestures can mean to people. I mean, I've had people thanked me for things I've done for them in their career that I don't even remember because it was, “You introduced me to someone once,” or, “You sat down with me at a conference and talked for 20 minutes about something that then changed the course of my career.” And honestly, I feel like a jerk when I don't remember some of these things, but it's a yeah, you asked me my opinion, I'm thrilled to give it to you, but the choices beyond that are yours. It still sticks out, though, that the things I do can have that level of impact for people.Evelyn: Yeah, absolutely. And that's one of the things about the Salesforce community is there are so many opportunities to make those potentially life-changing moments for people. You can give back by being a Trailblazer Mentor, you can sign up for Trailblazer Mentorship from any level of your career, from being a basic fresh, green admin to signing up for architecture lessons. And the highest level of certification in Salesforce is the Certified Technical Architect. There's, like, 300 of them in the world and there are nonprofits that are entirely dedicated to helping marginalized genders and women and black and indigenous people of color to make these milestones and go for the Certified Technical Architect certification.And there's lots of opportunities to give back and create those moments for people. And I spoke at Forcelandia last year, and one of the things that I did—it was the Women in Tech breakfast, and we went over my LinkedIn—which is apparently very good, so if you don't know what to do on LinkedIn, you can look at mine, it's fine—we went through LinkedIn and your search engine optimization in LinkedIn and how you can do this, and you know, how to get recruiters to look at your LinkedIn profile. And I went through my salary history of, like, this is how much I was making ten years ago, this is how much I'm making now, and this is how much I made at every job on the way. And we went through and did that. And I had, like, ten women come up to me afterwards and say, “I have never heard someone say outright their salary numbers before. And I don't know what to ask for when I'm in negotiations.”Corey: It's such a massive imbalance because all the companies know what other people are making because they get a holistic view. They know what they're paying across the board. I think a lot of the pay transparency movement has been phenomenal. I've been in situations before myself, where my boss walks up to me out of nowhere, and gives me a unsolicited $10,000 raise. It's, “Wow, thanks.” Followed immediately by, “Wait a minute.”Evelyn: Mm-hm.Corey: People generally don't do that out of the goodness of their hearts. How underpaid, am I? And every time it was, yeah, here's the $10,000 raise so you don't go get 30 somewhere else.Evelyn: Yeah. And that's one of the things that, like, going into job negotiations, women and people of marginalized genders will apply for jobs that they're a hundred percent qualified for, which means that they're not growing in their positions. So, if you're not kind of reaching when you're applying for positions, you're not going to get the salary you need, you're not going to get that career growth you need, whereas, not to play this card, but like, white men will go in and be, like, “I've got 60% of the qualifications. I'm going to ask for this much money.” And then they get it.And it's like, why don't I do that? It's, you know, societal whatever is pressuring me not to. And being able to talk transparently about that stuff is, like, so important. And these women just, like, went into salary negotiations a couple weeks later, and I had one of them message me and say, like, “Yeah, I asked for the number you said at this conference and I got it.” And I was like, “Yes! congratulations.” Because that is life-changing, especially, like, because so many of us come from non-technical backgrounds in Salesforce, you don't know how much money you can make in tech until you get it, and it's absolutely life-changing.Corey: Yeah, it's wild to me, but that's the way it works. I really want to thank you for taking the time to speak with me. If people want to learn more, where's the best place for them to find you?Evelyn: So, I am reachable at anothersalesforceblog.com, and evelyn.fyi, E-V-E-L-Y-N dot F-Y-I, which actually just links back to another Salesforce blog, which is fine. But I'm really [laugh] reachable on LinkedIn and really active there, so if you need any Salesforce mentorship, I do that. And I love doing it because so many people have helped me in my career that it's really, like, anything I can do to give back. And that's really kind of the attitude of the Salesforce ecosystem, so definitely feel free to reach out.Corey: And we will, of course, put links to that in the [show notes 00:30:27]. Thank you so much for taking the time to, I guess, explain how an entire swath of the ecosystem views the world.Evelyn: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for having me, Corey.Corey: Evelyn Grizzle, Senior Salesforce Developer. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with an angry, insulting comment that I will one day aggregate somewhere, undoubtedly within Salesforce.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.

Deb Ashton joins me on the Tech Talks Daily Podcast. .With over 25 years of experience in ERP and digital transformation, Deb has cultivated an impressive reputation in the industry and has now directed her focus towards connecting business systems, enhancing data analysis, and promoting intelligent business decision-making with Certinia. In this insightful discussion, Deb sheds light on the evolution of FinancialForce into Certinia, revealing the vision and strategy behind the rebranding. We delve into the heart of Certinia's mission to provide certainty in data, highlighting its unique attributes of a connected business, intelligent delivery, and scalable agility. Deb will share her thoughts on the emergence and potential of generative AI, and how Certinia is planning to stay ahead of the curve in an ever-evolving tech industry. We also uncover the secrets behind Certinia's culture and how it plays a pivotal role in staff retention. Finally, we touch on the importance of diversity, equity, and inclusion in the tech industry, a cause that Deb is particularly passionate about, and discuss how she sees the future of ERP and PSA technology solutions shaping up. For tech enthusiasts, digital transformation advocates, and aspiring leaders, this episode offers an insightful view into the journey of a technology company from its early roots to its current success. Tune in to learn from Deb Ashton's wealth of experience and understand why Certinia is making waves in the world of Services-as-a-Business platforms.

SAP and IBM announced that IBM Watson technology will be embedded into SAP solutions to provide new AI-driven insights and automation to create more efficient and effective user experiences across the SAP application portfolio. Google Cloud and UKG announced an expanded partnership to bring Google Cloud's generative AI (GenAI) capabilities into the UKG HCM suites. FinancialForce announced that it had changed its name to Certinia to align with the company's evolution and delivery of a comprehensive Services-as-a-Business (SaaB) platform. Epicor will host the 2023 Epicor Insights Conference next week. ERP Advisors Group will be attending the event to provide firsthand coverage of Epicor's advancements in 2023 and beyond. Don't miss out, subscribe to our channels, or follow us on social media for coverage of the event.Register for EAG's AI Webinar at: https://www.erpadvisorsgroup.com/events/transforming-your-business-with-financial-automationConnect with us!https://www.erpadvisorsgroup.com866-499-8550LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/company/erp-advisors-groupTwitter:https://twitter.com/erpadvisorsgrpFacebook:https://www.facebook.com/erpadvisorsInstagram:https://www.instagram.com/erpadvisorsgroupPinterest:https://www.pinterest.com/erpadvisorsgroupMedium:https://medium.com/@erpadvisorsgroup

Getting through the door to have a deal with executives can be intimidating and difficult. How can you approach these high-positioned individuals and successfully sell to them? In this episode, John Turner, the Chief Revenue Officer of Certinia (formerly FinancialForce) shares his insights on how you should talk to executives to avoid slipping out of deals. Coming from a sales perspective, he breaks down the dos and don'ts when approaching CEOs and senior executive-level people. What should you prioritize? How do you go about it? John answers these questions and more! Plus, he shares the four legs of a table that are vital for any sales representative to possess. Tune in and learn how to speak with executives today. In this episode, you will learn:• How to talk to executives from a sales perspective?• What is Peer-to-Peer Positioning?• The four legs of a table when looking for representatives.

The Big Themes:Purpose-built solutions centered on people: Managing resources to deliver for customers can be a challenge for companies with large services organizations. Certinia's solutions are purpose-built, focusing on the people and the service economy business, rather than product ID, which was formerly considered to be the "center of the universe."Synchronous process flows: When looking at process flows, most companies find that they have silos of automation, and the "as quoted" verse "as delivered" aspects generally are not in alignment. "By having a system that runs all the way from opportunity to renewal, we [Certinia] bring those things into alignment with each other and have the "as quoted" and "as delivered" very much in sync with each other," notes Brown.Automation to enhance opportunity: When speaking with service economy workers, it is clear that "low-value work makes them crazy." Automating this work enables service economy workers to do more of what they love, like being in front of customers and providing "intellectual horsepower." Certinia applies automation as a means of optimizing the employee experience, too, and having a "great, enriched career journey." The Big Quote: "We are, kind of, starting a new chapter in our company's history with the rebranding to Certinia... and everything that we've developed up to now is widely increased the aperture of who we are. If you look at it across the spectrum of all those different products, we now are a full end-to-end provider. And hence, Certinia, as our new name. And we think it probably reflects not only the company we are today, it's the company we aspire to be. And so working with the large customers and the mid-tier customers that we have, we listen very carefully to what they need to get certainty in their environment, how to manage the very large and complex services organizations, and ultimately to have success. So we think the rebranding is the next chapter of our history, we think it's a really important thing to do, because it reflects the nature of who we are. But more importantly, we see big things in our future."

Looking back, CFO Ravi Narula tells us that he wishes that he had become a “servant leader” sooner, as he references the familiar leadership tag signaling a mind-set focused on serving others. “If you asked me 15 years ago, ‘Do you have a servant leader mind-set?,' unfortunately, I would have said ‘No,'” comments Narula, who credits a graduate executive program at Stanford University for helping to raise his acumen when it comes to the role that servant leaders can play in successful businesses. “I began thinking more broadly as a CFO and seeing servant leadership and company culture as being foundational to the success of firms, as well as to my own future success as a CFO,” remarks Narula, who—in addition to servant leadership—identifies the customer-probing Net Promoter Score (NPS) as a primary contributor to the culture of his current company, FinancialForce. Asked if FinancialForce's NPS rating is the most widely known measure across the company's workforce, Narula tells us that he believes that 80 to 90 percent of the company's roughly 1,000 employees likely know the company's current scores, whether by geography, industry, or customer segment.   To support his claim, Narula reports: “At our townhall meeting this morning, 20 of the 60 minutes were devoted to the Net Promoter Score.” Still, like many tech companies, FinancialForce has a work environment that has evolved in recent years to accommodate more remote workers through a hybrid model that has at times put management practices as well as servant leadership goals to the test. According to Narula, it's now up to leaders to extend their reach in order to connect more often to capture the insight required to help an employee succeed.

Oracle announced its fiscal 2023 Q2 results. Total revenues were up 18% year-over-year to $12.3 billion, with cloud services and license support revenues up 14% to $8.6 billion. Fusion Cloud ERP revenue was $0.6 billion, up 23% and NetSuite Cloud ERP revenue was also $0.6 billion, up 25%. FinancialForce announced the general availability of its Winter 2023 Release. The new release strengthens FinancialForce's Services-as-a-Business (SaaB) approach, bringing together key capabilities for running any services business efficiently and effectively. QAD closed the acquisition of Livejourney, a provider of a real-time and predictive flow (process mining and process monitoring) solution designed to discover, monitor, and improve business processes. Salesforce announced the general availability of DevOps Center to help teams release technology solutions faster.ERP Customization Conundrum: Best Practices for Implementing Your ERP System:  https://www.erpadvisorsgroup.com/blog/best-practices-for-implementing-your-erp-system Connect with us!https://www.erpadvisorsgroup.com866-499-8550LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/company/erp-advisors-groupTwitter:https://twitter.com/erpadvisorsgrpFacebook:https://www.facebook.com/erpadvisorsInstagram:https://www.instagram.com/erpadvisorsgroupPinterest:https://www.pinterest.com/erpadvisorsgroupMedium:https://medium.com/@erpadvisorsgroup

Do you know an ERP platform that started with the investment from Unit4 as the subsidiary but ended up being on its own and calling itself an ERP? Do you know an ERP system that got its PSA capabilities from the Salesforce consulting firm Appirio, which is now part of Wipro? Do you know an ERP platform that is primarily targeted at service-centric industries? If you have guessed FinancialForce, then you are right.In today's episode, we invited a panel of industry experts for a live discussion on LinkedIn to conduct an independent review of FinancialForce's capabilities. We covered many grounds including its origin and alignment with Unit4 and how it shaped up the target market for FinancialForce. Finally, we covered its strengths, weaknesses, and target industries.For more information on growth strategies for SMBs using ERP and digital transformation, visit our community at wbs.rocks or elevatiq.com. To ensure that you never miss an episode of the WBS podcast, subscribe on your favorite podcasting platform.

This episode features an interview with Ravi Narula, Chief Financial Officer of FinancialForce, a cloud-based applications platform that accelerates business growth with customer-centric ERP, Professional Services Automation (PSA), and Customer Success solutions.Ravi has over 20 years of CFO experience, and he's helped turn several technology startups into large, mature, public companies.On this episode, Ravi describes the growing role of the CFO, company risk management, and the future of AI technology.Quotes*”These are tough, challenging economic environments right now. How do we plan for it? Having a clear line of sight to what our long-term goals are and then connecting our short term actions to long-term goals becomes very critical.”*”There's lots of things that CFOs have to focus on from a risk management perspective. And then governance plays a role. How do you empower the teams and the people while governing it from the corporate side? So there's a lot of balls up in the air, but more communication, more training, more standardization of policies helps a lot.”*”How do we justify technology adoption and get some real hard ROI and benefits out of it? It's important that we connect some of these actions and data we get. And not only at the time of decision making, but after implementation. [We should] do an annual assessment [to look at] what can we do differently to adopt this thing even more? And not only looking at technology that is live. How many users are using it? How well accepted within the organization?”Time Stamps[1:45] Ravi's path to CFO[9:21] Cash Crossroads: Ravi's technology vision at FinancialForce[15:51] The Playbook: Finance Strategy at FinancialForce[16:35] Risk management at FinancialForce[25:08] Report from the Future: Ravi on the next generation of finance leaders[28:39] Quick Hits: Rapid fire questions with Ravi NarulaSponsorThe Invisible Vault is powered by the team at Kyriba, the global leader in cloud treasury and finance solutions, empowering CFOs and their teams to transform how they activate liquidity as a dynamic, real-time vehicle for growth and value creation. To learn more visit www.kyriba.comLinksConnect with Ravi on LinkedInConnect with Daniel on LinkedInFollow Daniel on Twitter

How to get started collecting feedback and ideas from your community when you can't commit to full-blown ideation and complex processes. Community Industry News: Jessica Mendez joined Contentsquare as CX Specialist, Community Manager Steven Demoya joined TelevisaUnivision as Help Center Community Manager Mariana Rodriguez joined Coinshift as Community Manager V.J. Watkins joined FinancialForce as Community Manager Faruq Hammed joined RECUR as Community Manager Rima Sengupta joined Automation Anywhere as Community Manager

"Cloud Accounting Software Market Analysis and Forecast 2021-2028 | Intuit, Sage, SAP, Microsoft, Oracle (NetSuite), Infor The global Cloud Accounting Software Market analysis provides a high-level review of the company, its market expansions, current trends, market volume, and market development opportunities that affect market growth. The global Cloud Accounting Software market study forecasts sales growth throughout the forecast period. This research will assist you in synthesizing facts on the global Cloud Accounting Software sectors growth and characteristics. Firms are ranked according to their operational skills and product portfolios, giving the industry a strategic perspective. A brief study of the market history, classification, motivations, competition, and strategic initiatives taken in recent years is included in the Cloud Accounting Software research. It also includes a demand prediction, a detailed description of methods, assumptions, historical insights, and complete market projections. Graphs, maps, and data are used to segment the market thoroughly. The global market study offers accurate market analysis of volume and value. The study looks at the sectors economic climate in order to assess local and global competitiveness. Free Sample Report + All Related Graphs & Charts @ https://www.adroitmarketresearch.com/contacts/request-sample/295?utm_source=SujaK8 Leading players of Cloud Accounting Software Market including: Intuit, Sage, SAP, Microsoft, Oracle (NetSuite), Infor, Epicor, Workday, Unit4, Xero, Yonyou, Kingdee, Acclivity, FreshBooks, Zoho, Assit Cornerstone, MEGI, Reckon, KashFlow, Dropbox, Carbonite, Apptivo, FinancialForce, Wave Accounting Inc. The Cloud Accounting Software global business analysis provides specific information on demand drivers, restraints, and other variables like as organizational disputes, changing production rates, and R&D expenditure. Future technologies, R&D initiatives, and new goods are all explored in-depth in the Cloud Accounting Software research study. The study examines all industries in various geographical places and provides a cross-sectional picture of global economic market estimations. To assist customers in assessing the price environment of key global manufacturers in important marketplaces, this study employs the Porter Five Forces model and a detailed investigation of industry competitiveness. This extensive study also includes a thorough assessment and description of each part of the research. In addition, the market research study covers historical and future industry trends, firm innovations, multinational corporate problems, and end-users. The analysis also tracks the Cloud Accounting Software of previous sales as well as the predicted market volume based on area circumstances. The Cloud Accounting Software industry report provides detailed information on important established locations as well as big rising areas, based on the sectors global expansion. In a short manner, the market report Cloud Accounting Software presents market segmentation, market share, and growth characteristics. It informs readers on the alliances and strategies used by competitors in the global Cloud Accounting Software arena to battle competition. Based on the features of the sectors top providers, the market research analysis determined the size of the vital industry. The Cloud Accounting Software research study also looks at the size and volume of state and local marketplaces. In addition, the Cloud Accounting Software industry overview examines the market development opportunities and restraints predicted during the forecast period. The Cloud Accounting Software research examines regional and global marketplaces in great detail. The global Cloud Accounting Software report also provides information on the registration and assessment of all global and local industries. The Cloud Accounting Software study report delves deeply into the local and global markets. Cloud Ac

Salesforce has quickly risen in the ranks to dominate the enterprise software market, specifically customer relationship management, surpassing even the most recognizable of industry behemoths. Despite this notoriety, few truly know about the ERP offerings within Salesforce.com's AppExchange that are written on the Salesforce Lighting platform, specifically FinancialForce and other sound products, Rootstock and Accounting Seed. In this episode of the ERP Advisor, Shawn Windle provides a full inspection of the ERP offerings of Force.com. Connect with us!https://www.erpadvisorsgroup.com866-499-8550LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/company/erp-advisors-groupTwitter:https://twitter.com/erpadvisorsgrpFacebook:https://www.facebook.com/erpadvisorsInstagram:https://www.instagram.com/erpadvisorsgroupPinterest:https://www.pinterest.com/erpadvisorsgroupMedium:https://medium.com/@erpadvisorsgroup

In this episode you hear from Mark Sloan Managing Director Asaph Advisors. Mark has ~ 30 years of business experience with companies like Accenture & Convergys and is based in Washington D.C.. Here he talks about how (tech) companies that sell Hardware and Software products or pure consulting companies should sell professional services (incl. educational, managed), the RARE methodology and much more. email mark@asaphadvisors.com  Phone 703-507-9788 LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-sloan-70500b3/ 

NetSuite wasted no time making significant product announcements at its annual SuiteWorld conference. First, Oracle NetSuite unveiled NetSuite AP Automation which embeds banking services into a cloud ERP system to help organizations improve profitability by making it easier and faster to process bills and pay vendors all from within NetSuite. NetSuite went on to announce NetSuite CPQ to enable sales teams to quickly configure, price, and quote complex products with complete accuracy and reliability, directly in NetSuite. Next, NetSuite demonstrated its commitment to improving warehouse operations with the release of NetSuite Ship Central, a mobile application that helps organizations optimize operations, eliminate manual processes, and accelerate customer deliveries, while equipping warehouse workers with packing and shipping capabilities on a mobile or kiosk device. Finally, NetSuite announced updates to NetSuite Analytics Warehouse, simplifying data management, accelerating time to insights, and providing access to more pre-built third-party data integrations and industry-specific content. Gartner released its Magic Quadrant for Cloud ERP for Product-Centric Enterprises. Within the leader quadrant, Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP, Workday, SAP S/4HANA, and Oracle NetSuite have secured their positions. Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Infor settled into the visionaries quadrant, and finally, the niche players quadrant is concentrated with SAP Business ByDesign, Sage Intacct, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, and FinancialForce. UKG announced the company has been named the overall Winner in its category for the AnitaB.org 2022 Top Companies for Women Technologists, landing the highest overall score of any company with 1,000-10,000 technical employees. In a separate honor, UKG also earned a “Social Impact” award from Ragan for its UKG Close the Gap Initiative, aimed at reaching pay equity in the workplace, with UKG pledging to continue to invest in education, training, and the technology and tools needed to ensure equity of pay, both internally for UKG and its customers.https://www.erpadvisorsgroup.com866-499-8550LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/company/erp-advisors-groupTwitter:https://twitter.com/erpadvisorsgrpFacebook:https://www.facebook.com/erpadvisorsInstagram:https://www.instagram.com/erpadvisorsgroupPinterest:https://www.pinterest.com/erpadvisorsgroupMedium:https://medium.com/@erpadvisorsgroup

On this episode of The Marketer's Journey, I interview Nicole Milstead, CMO at FinancialForce—a company that's a true force in the world of B2B marketing. During our conversation, Nicole explains why she prefers to make her decisions both with a purposeful yet open intent, tending to stick to a carefully designed plan while remaining flexible and adaptable to change. She also explains her unique approach to understanding data across the entire buyer journey, and how to create content that resonates with consumers.Check out this and other episodes of The Marketer's Journey on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Google Podcasts!Key takeaways from this episode:A varied background will take you far. Throughout her career, Nicole has carved her own unique path, veering away from the traditional stepping stones along the way to the coveted CMO role. By using all of her varied experiences—from social work to sales—as learning opportunities on the way to her next role, Nicole has been able to offer a nuanced perspective while creating alignment among teams.Prioritize relationships and culture. When making the decision to make the leap to FinancialForce from Oracle, Nicole used her positive working relationships and the company culture as her guiding light. By using these elements as guideposts, she was better able to determine whether the company would be a good fit for her particular skills, working style and personality.Be disciplined when it comes to data. For Nicole, analyzing data to determine the best course of action is an everyday pursuit. By using quantifiable metrics to track their progress, Nicole and the team at FinancialForce have a better sense of where they need to focus their efforts, while also having a chance to find better alignment with the sales team.Learn more about FinancialForce here: https://www.financialforce.com/ Learn more about Nicole here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nmilstead/

In this episode you hear from Steve Clune, CEO of CLD Partners. They offer a quoting product for Professional Services called PSQuote. Steve lives with his family in Virginia and has 25+ years of business experience with ERP Solutions and is a long-term partner of FinancialForce. Here he talks about their Salesforce native PSQuote solution, what other PSA tools they support, how long it takes to install the solution and much more. web: https://psquote.com  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/steveclune/

SAP and Francisco Partners (FP) announced that FP has signed a definitive agreement with SAP America Inc. under which Francisco Partners will acquire SAP Litmos from SAP. OneStream ranked among the fastest-growing companies in the 2022 Inc. 5000 list from Inc. Magazine. This is the 7th consecutive year the company has been recognized on the list, which represents the most successful private companies with a proven track record of growth. UKG delivered strong financial results for the third quarter of Fiscal 2022, ending June 30, 2022. Total revenue was $925 million, with subscription revenues excluding float growing 15% year-over-year. In addition, more than 70% of new customers selected the UKG full suite of HR, payroll, and workforce management solutions. Highlights of the quarter include recognition by Google Cloud for driving diversity and inclusion in the field of DevOps, collaboration with Uber to help organizations deliver rewards and incentives to people, and a multi-year partnership with the National Women's Soccer League, while also maintaining a high number of customer acquisitions. Salesforce released Salesforce Easy, a new simplified experience for businesses of all sizes, built for flexibility and business growth. Salesforce Easy provides self-service purchasing options and a three-click setup, making it easier and less costly for users to grow with Salesforce as business needs evolve. FinancialForce announced the general availability of its Summer 2022 Release. The new release introduces FinancialForce's Services-as-a-Business (SaaB) approach with improved resource management, significant enhancements to out-of-the-box analytics capabilities utilizing CRM Analytics by Salesforce, integrated Financial Planning & Analysis solutions, end-to-end intelligent bank reconciliation capabilities, and improved user experience.https://www.erpadvisorsgroup.com866-499-8550LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/company/erp-advisors-groupTwitter:https://twitter.com/erpadvisorsgrpFacebook:https://www.facebook.com/erpadvisorsInstagram:https://www.instagram.com/erpadvisorsgroupPinterest:https://www.pinterest.com/erpadvisorsgroupMedium:https://medium.com/@erpadvisorsgroup

This episode's guest 'Paul Battisson' If you are interested in transitioning from a Salesforce Developer to an Architect or COO role. If you want to awaken your inner curiosity and think more like an architect then I think you are going to get a lot of value out of this conversation with Paul. At Salesforce Posse, we interview influencers in the Salesforce ecosystem so that we can gain a better understanding of how to excel in a career path from a Salesforce Admin or Developer to an Architect. In this conversation, I talk to Paul Battisson he is a veteran of the UK Salesforce scene and he started out as a developer at FinancialForce. He has a wealth of experience from transitioning from a Developer to an Architect and now he's COO at Cloud Galacticos he's also an author of several Salesforce Books. Watch online here: Subscribe to the podcast at: https://www.salesforceposse.com/ Website: https://www.cloudgalacticos.co.uk/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/pbattisson LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulbattisson/ Amazon 'Mastering Apex Programming: A developer's guide to learning advanced techniques and best practices for building robust Salesforce applications' https://amzn.to/3HTt6f9 Amazon 'Learning Salesforce Development with Apex: Write, Run and Deploy Apex Code with Ease (English Edition)' https://amzn.to/3HZeqLl Sponsored by AdminToArchitect.com Salesforce Training 00:00 Welcome 01:22 The British Weather 03:17 Paul Battisson's journey in the Salesforce eco-system 08:35 The Fake Cloud continues in AWS, Azure & GCP 09:50 From Salesforce Developer to Architect 12:07 The importance of Curiosity as an Architect 15:15 You can't learn everything in Salesforce 17:06 Transitioning from Salesforce Architect to COO 19:27 Be Curious; Research, Try it and Break it 10 times. 24:30 When you have a lot of experience, people can lean on you too much 25:30 How Salesforce Roles transition as companies/Orgs increase in size 27:31 All Salesforce Admins make Architectural Decisions, they just don't know it 29:00 The barrier to entry into Salesforce is low, just remember what it used to be 33:00 You are a God and you can go in two directions... 36:56 Moving your Salesforce org from the evolved to design & planned 37:57 Your Salesforce org is like a human body 39:25 Salesforce User Experience 40:08 Tips for moving your Salesforce org from the evolved to design & planned 42:30 Observe, Orient, Describe, Act 42:51 Use Asynchronous Processes 47:55 If you could go back in time and give yourself some when and what would it be? 50:00 Failure is an amazing learning experience 52:15 Be Curious and be willing to break things - stop and think

ERP industry is divided mainly into two flavors. One is primarily focused on product-centric industries such as manufacturing, distribution, and retail. The other focuses on service-centric industries such as not-for-profit, architecture and engineering firms, construction, public sector, education, etc. But if you are in the construction or govt contracting space, your needs are likely to be unique. First, you have the compliance needs for unions with their requirements for submissions, which will require substantial reporting functionality for it to work. Then you have in-process compliance requirements, including DCAA, etc. The vanilla ERP, such as SAP, Sage, Acumatica, etc., may require several add-ons to support this critical piece of functionality. Even the ERP designed for professional services such as Workday, Unit4, or FinancialForce may struggle to support the critical functionality needed for these verticals. So what are your options if you are in this space?In today's episode, we invited a panel of industry experts for a live discussion on LinkedIn to discuss major stories in the ERP and digital transformation space and an objective and independent review of Deltek's capabilities. We covered several grounds, including their positioning in specific micro-verticals, product psychology, and corporate strategy. Finally, we covered several micro-vertical stories and why they chose to implement Deltek over other ERP software.For more information on growth strategies for SMBs using ERP and digital transformation, visit our community at wbs.rocks or elevatiq.com. To ensure that you never miss an episode of the WBS podcast, subscribe on your favorite podcasting platform.

John Bonney oversees the Harness company's finance, IT, legal, and accounting functions. Prior to Harness, he oversaw rapid growth as the CFO at Mapbox as well as FinancialForce, the latter quadrupling revenues to over $100M during his tenure. Prior to that, he was the Division CFO of the Cloud Business Unit at SAP, where he oversaw over $1B of Cloud revenues across multiple business units, products, and geographies. Bonney joined SAP from Ariba as a senior finance executive, and helped drive rapid expansion and, ultimately, the sale of Ariba to SAP for $4.3 billion.

Jess Weimer leads Global Revenue Marketing and is the Global PipeGen Officer at Confluent. She is a modern demand-to-revenue marketing executive with proven achievement in building and scaling global, data-driven, operationally savvy, integrated demand strategies directly resulting in pipeline attainment. Jess is passionate about inspiring and mentoring teams across the globe and heavily invests in team growth and scale. She leads with empathy while innovating with grit. Prior to Confluent, Jess held leadership positions at FinancialForce, Adobe, ServiceNow, and 8x8. Here are a few of the topics we'll discuss on this episode of Long Story Short: The need for intentional process and structure in a hypergrowth environment Building the plane while it's flying and why even rocket ships need marketing Why the status quo of leadership isn't good enough anymore The value of Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) to companies and how you can advance initiatives within your own organization Why it is vital to truly connect and check in with your extended teams at work The importance of mentorship in helping advance the next generation of leaders Balancing an attribution model while understanding that all of the value of marketing can not be captured into a single number Why Jess refers to ABM as ABX - Account Based Orchestration Footnotes Resources:Be a Better AllyDo Your Diversity Efforts Reflect the Experiences of Women of Color?5 Top Tips On Creating Successful Employee Resource GroupsConnect with Jess:LinkedInConnecting with the Hosts:Jeff Sirkin on LinkedInSophia Gordon on LinkedInWe want to make our podcast an engaging story for YOU - this means we want your feedback! Click HERE to answer some questions about your listening experience.

Pivotal moments are critical turning points that bring new perspectives and opportunities that alter the trajectory of our lives. As Tony Robbins famously said, “It is in your moments of decision that your destiny is shaped.” The decisions we make define our path of success, failure, and even happiness. Meet Jennifer Lagaly, Senior Vice President at Salesforce, who shares her story of navigating the pivotal moments in her life and career, which ultimately led her to success as a corporate executive and a mother of five. Jennifer shares advice on finding clarity on your career path, how motherhood prepares women for management, and why it is important for women to stay in the game and have their voices heard. Jennifer serves on the board of FinancialForce and has held a variety of sales roles in her 18 years at Salesforce guiding the success of her team and clients. She recently gave a TEDx talk inspiring both women and men with strategies to balance successful careers and a fulfilling parenting experience. Visit https://www.iambeyondbarriers.com where you will find show notes and links to all the resources in this episode, including the best way to get in touch with Jennifer.   Highlights: [02:29] Jennifer's childhood career aspirations [04:15] Advice on finding clarity in early career stage [07:07] Path to Senior Executive in sales [11:17] Pivotal career moments & decisions [15:13] The catalyst behind Jennifer's ambition [18:53] How motherhood prepares you for management [25:28] Demystifying sales [31:08] The best predictor of successful salespeople [34:32] What's in the future for Jennifer [39:23] Advice to women in the workplace [40:49] Paying it forward   Quotes: “Employees perform best when they feel their leaders care and support them.” – Jennifer Lagaly “The best predictor of one's future success is what they've done in the past.” – Jennifer Lagaly “Life is the journey, it is not the station. Striving and solving problems is life.” – Jennifer Lagaly   About Jennifer Lagaly: Jennifer Lagaly is a Senior Vice President, GM of Industrial Products at Salesforce. In her 18 years at the company, she's served in a variety of sales roles across the organization. Prior to Salesforce, she has experience in technology sales across several companies including Forte/Sun and Motiva/Siebel, and providing Siebel and Remedy call-center solutions to Siemens ICN. She is on the board of FinancialForce and has recently given a TEDx UCDavis talk inspiring both women and men to stay in the game while they balance successful careers and a fulfilling parenting experience. Lagaly lives in the Bay Area with her husband and five children and holds a degree in Chemical Engineering at University of California, Davis. Links: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenniferlagaly/

Today on Built By Humans, CEO of FinancialForce Scott Brown talks about managing the complex relationship between an organization’s chief revenue officer and its chief financial officer. As a former CRO, he shares his insights on how to make that relationship magical for company success. Plus, Scott gives us an inside look into how FinancialForce is pushing for post-COVID growth, including tuning up the organization’s efficiency with automation and a tailored sales funnel, aligning every team with three central goals, and using a new goal-setting and review approach.

Paul Rees is now the Director of Professional Services at Financial Force, the leading provider of ERP and Services Automation solutions on the Salesforce platform, based in San Francisco. Before this role, he was the co-founder of VFP Consulting, a fast-growing Salesforce and FinancialForce professional services firm based in Sacramento, California. Putting his business's growth in front of his family and personal health, Paul was forced to look at his excessive drinking and absentee life when he had a debilitating breakdown due to burnout. In the end, he made the difficult choice to leave his company and focus on his health and rebuilding his family. Paul has a fascinating story. Being deeply introverted and shy, he learned how to cope with chronic childhood illnesses and always being the new kid by creating personas through acting and music. When Paul started his career, he was miserable, always feeling exhausted at the end of the day because his job played to his weaknesses rather than his strengths. After learning more about himself through the Myer-Briggs and the StrengthsFinder assessments, his career took off, and he eventually started his own company, VFP Consulting. Quickly growing in the first few years, the desire to make the firm more successful consumed Paul. And he completely crashed and burned. Excessive drinking and complete burnout caused him to reevaluate his life, and he chose his marriage and his life over his business. I believe Paul's story will resonate with most of us. Why? Because so many of us focus on growing our careers and businesses at the expense of personal health and wellbeing. We don't fully appreciate our families and the health of our relationships. We sacrifice what matters most but don't always see it that way. When Paul broke down, he had to choose between his family and health, and his business. He walked away from the company he built to find balance and happiness again. Now, he isn't looking to advance his career. In fact, it's his mission not to. He doesn't want to be a CEO; instead, his mission is to stay healthy, balanced, and positively impact every person he interacts with. He finds daily satisfaction asking himself, "how can I make this person's experience better in some way?" and then acting in service of others. Paul is a profoundly brilliant and articulate person, and during this interview, you will gain so many insights and be inspired. I adore him, and I'm pleased to have gotten to reconnect with him during this interview. You can find Paul on LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulrees/ Question of the Episode: "I am a CEO and am looking at building my brand, and I'm not sure how to get started. Is it worth doing myself, or should I hire someone?" My Answer: YES! I think every CEO, leader, and professional should be using social media, particularly LinkedIn, to build a personal brand. People want to connect with you and get to know you. Social media is an excellent way to share your unique ideas and thoughts. I have not hired someone to do my social media, as I am the best person to convey my thoughts, ideas, and messages in my voice. Maybe someday I will hire it out, but creating my own content is rewarding and allows me to show up as my authentic self. If you have started putting out content that you craft (don't just share other people's content), today is the day to get started.

Joining us today we have the Director of Customer Support at FinancialForce, Adam Maino, and we discuss how to develop a world class customer support team. We talk about the importance of creating and cultivating an environment where your employees can fail fast and learn from those challenges. Adam tells us about how the structure of a world class customer support team should be organized and the types of layers and tiers they have. We discuss knowledge center services and how this process helps Adam’s people at FinancialForce. Don’t miss it!About Adam and his company 0:47Lessons he has learned 2:00What the structure should look like 4:15What is KCS? 7:04How many employees equal happy customers? 11:22“With my employees I never tell them what to do. I ask them what to do, right? It’s a request. There are no demands there. I think what we should really be focusing on is coaching our employees and not managing them so much. Kick open the doors and let them do their job.” 10:58https://www.linkedin.com/in/adammaino/

In this episode, I answer a question from Julie Ann regarding FinancialForce and Salesforce's Financial Services Cloud. I used her question as a jumping off point to demonstrate how you can take any industry and find a lot of resources for learning that specific industry's cloud solution on the Salesforce platform. I also demonstrate how to find companies that are using Salesforce in that industry as well as finding job leads and implementation guides. I even covered how to install and gain experience on the Financial Services Cloud, or whichever other industry cloud you are interested in. Along the way, I shared several resources during this segment from my live Office Hours show. Resources: Video version of this episode - https://youtu.be/GXVPeQY0RlQ Register for Free Office Hours Show - https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_zI1VigBIR0qnxOB54ETU_A Industry Cloud - https://www.salesforce.com/solutions/industries/financial-services/overview/ AppExchange by Industry - https://appexchange.salesforce.com/consulting Financial Services Cloud Admin Guide - https://developer.salesforce.com/docs/atlas.en-us.financial_services_cloud_admin_guide.meta/financial_services_cloud_admin_guide/fsc_admin.htm Trailhead Financial Services Cloud Basics - https://trailhead.salesforce.com/content/learn/modules/fsc_basics Financial Services Cloud Specialist Superbadge - https://trailhead.salesforce.com/en/content/learn/superbadges/superbadge-fsc-specialist Download the Financial Services Cloud package - https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=000323341&type=1&mode=1 --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/urelevant/message

Tod Nielsen is a multi-time CEO who heads the ERP company FinancialForce. His journey is one of ever-increasing responsibility all the way to the corner office. In this episode we explore his growth and leading through adversity, like the dot com bust and the pandemic. More information, a transcript, and a place to provide comments can be found at: https://clwill.com/pod/tod-nielsen/ Written and Produced: Chris Williams Original Theme written by: John Stephens Connect: Facebook: https://facebook.com/theCLWill Twitter: https://twitter.com/theCLWill LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/theCLWill Email: pod@clwill.com

On the PreSales Podcast, James Kaikis and Steve Klein connect on the topic "Stump the Chump”. Steve, Global VP of Solutions Engineering at FinancialForce, talks about how to handle a situation where someone is attempting to discredit our product demo or our presentation. The concept of Stump the Chump is as old as time and our episode highlights ways to handle this type of situation.

Kevin Jones, who joins to talk about his open-source project ApexLink, is a Senior Architect in FinancialForce. Main Points How does ApexLink work? What is ApexAssist VSCode extension? Future roadmap for ApexLink and ApexAssist – the local execution Kevin’s daily work in FinancialForce Links Kevin’s Twitter Kevin’s personal blog ApexLink Github Repo ApexAssist VSCode extension Video Teaser The YouTube Video URL The post 68. ApexLink – Salesforce offline package linker (2) | Kevin Jones appeared first on SalesforceWay.

Kevin Jones, who joins to talk about his open-source project ApexLink, is a Senior Architect in FinancialForce. Main Points Kevin’s self-introduction What is ApexLink, Kevin’s open source project? Is ApexLink similar to the PMD? Is ApexLink similar to the Illuminated Cloud? Why does Kevin use Scala language to create ApexLink? How does ApexLink work? Links Kevin’s Twitter Kevin’s personal blog ApexLink Github Repo ApexAssist VSCode extension Video Teaser The YouTube Video URL The post 67. ApexLink – Salesforce offline package linker (1) | Kevin Jones appeared first on SalesforceWay.

Host Zeb Couch, Sr. Enterprise Account Executive at LeadGenius, interviews Erik Taylor, Business Development Manager at FinancialForce, to discuss how Erik has improved efficiency within his BDR team throughout the entire sales process.  At one point Erik had calculated that his team was spending only 25% of their day on actual sales outreach activities, the rest of their time was being spent on researching, adding, cleansing contacts and then creating lists and reports so they could track these folks when they finally had the time reach.  This process was not scalable either financially or administratively, so FinancialForce partnered with LeadGenius to solve various issues and ultimately increase outbound selling activity by 50% within a very short time.  Listen to hear about real problems and solutions to all B2B sales organizations and how to fix them.   About our guest, Erik Taylor: He started his sales career unknowingly when he was 11 years old, trading Pokemon cards and collecting holographics. The stakes are higher now, but to Erik, the game is still the same. With a natural curiosity, desire to help others, and drive to succeed - he's hustled and grinded as a sales professional, and consistently over-performed both as an individual contributor and a team leader. Currently, he works for one of the fastest-growing Cloud ERP and PSA providers in North America. 

Daniel is the RVP Sales for ANZ at FinancialForce. Having been in sales for 20 + years Daniel speaks about his journey from completing an MBA at Maquarie University to going straight into Sales. Speaking with Daniel it's clear he is at the top of his game. We speak about his role as a sales leader, sales processes, his advice on mindset and his thoughts on being the best person you can be. You can reach Daniel via LinkedIn

This week on LeadGenius Radio, host Zeb Couch, Sr. Enterprise Account Executive at LeadGenius, sits down with Erik Taylor, Business Development Manager at FinancialForce, to discuss how Erik has improved efficiency within his BDR team throughout the entire sales process.  At one point Erik had calculated that his team was spending only 25% of their day on actual sales outreach activities, the rest of their time was being spent on researching, adding, cleansing contacts and then creating lists and reports so they could track these folks when they finally had the time reach.  This process was not scalable either financially or administratively, so FinancialForce partnered with LeadGenius to solve various issues and ultimately increase outbound selling activity by 50% within a very short time.  Listen to hear about real problems and solutions all B2B sales organizations and how to fix them.    About our guest, Erik Taylor:   He started his sales career unknowingly when he was 11 years old, trading Pokemon cards and collecting holographics. The stakes are higher now, but to Erik, the game is still the same. With a natural curiosity, desire to help others, and drive to succeed - he's hustled and grinded as a sales professional, and consistently over-performed both as an individual contributor and a team leader. Currently, he works for one of the fastest growing Cloud ERP and PSA providers in North America. 

Phil Wainewright, who coined the term XaaS for 'everything-as-a-service' sits down with Tod Nielsen, CEO FinancialForce to discuss the topic. Nielsen provides three examples of customers who are building out their service economies. It is early days and the vendors are ahead of customers in understanding how XaaS works and what needs to be put in place but this conversation provides a good start to the topic.

One of FinancialForce CFO Gordy Brooks’ most valuable early career-building experiences began by butting heads with his CEO. The chief executive insisted on issuing sales commissions on a weekly basis – an ask that would have most finance chiefs pulling their hair out.  After the CEO stuck to his guns in the face of counterarguments, Brooks spent two weeks carefully unpacking the problem behind his CEO’s requested outcome. He discovered that the root cause of the request involved ineffective operational processes (sales territory assignments and compensation plan design) and inefficient comp and payroll processes. When Brooks presented those findings with a significant process improvement proposal, the CEO embraced his systemic solution. “The CFO role is not only about metrics and business models,” Brooks notes. “It’s also about the human touch.”  Brooks – who possesses two decades of finance executive experience with VMWare, BEA Systems, Citrix, Microsoft and other notables – shares his takes on current comp challenges, the importance of early  public-company experience, and the high career returns on international assignments.

In this session, learn how Autodesk and FinancialForce have developed integrations between Salesforce and AWS applications, analytics, data lakes, and machine learning. Also learn what's new from Salesforce and AWS to help you build new customer experiences.

Quyen Chang (aka "Q" similar to the James Bond reference) is a leader with 12+ years of experience focused on scaling, mentoring, and enabling successful teams. She started her career at Salesforce, where she spent 8 years in a variety of roles, including consulting, IT program management, and enablement for the Sales and Solution Engineering communities. After Salesforce, Quyen was responsible for leading Sales/SDR onboarding and assisting with marketing programs at Zenefits. Now at FinancialForce, she is responsible for leading field enablement for the go-to-market teams and assisting with customer programs and events. Her drive is to serve her customers (internal employees, external customers, and leaders) keeps her motivated constantly. Quyen brings a unique combination of project management, sales and customer success expertise, and experience in scaling global programs. A Bay Area native, Quyen has spent her entire life on the Best Coast. She was born in San Jose and received her Bachelor’s in Business Management as well as her MBA from Santa Clara University. Quyen also loves to tell stories on her weekly blog CheersfromQ where she shares insights on community, vulnerability, and self-awareness. Lessons Learned: 1) Management of teams and the importance of your work tribe 2) 3 pillars of success within an organization and self-awareness 3) Journey to finding it… who are you? ACTIVATE YOUR POWER AND BE UNSTOPPABLE TOGETHER Former executive turned Lifestyle entrepreneur, Connie Pheiff is ridiculously dedicated to inspiring individuals to activate their power & live their dream as a lifestyle entrepreneur. Each week we bring you confident conversations with today's leading entrepreneurs who made the bold choice to go from moving up the corporate ladder to moving out and building a successful lifestyle business. We are Unstoppable Together.The Up or Out Network is reaching over 150m potential listeners each week. And we’re not done yet… We can be heard on… Be sure to subscribe, you don’t want to miss any of the good stuff. Conscious Business Radio  Apple Radio iHeartRadio Google Radio Stitcher 190 Networks 1,900 analog stations in 145 Countries. Let us know what you need to hear on a future episode of Up or Out with Connie. We are here to help Lifestyle Entrepreneurs activate your powers and develop high-performance habits and be Unstoppable Together. Apply to be a guest at www.uporout.com, and be sure to subscribe to Up or Out with Connie on Need a Business Coach or a Motivational Speaker for your next event? Connie is now booking for 2019. Contact Connie to learn more at 570.906.4395 or connie@pheiffgroup.com.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As community professionals, we have more tools than ever to help us do our jobs. That said, the qualities that make an online community and an online community professional successful are likely largely the same today as they were 10, 20, or even 30 years ago. This episode of Community Signal focuses on those exact qualities and opportunities to delight. If you’re applying for a job in community, Patrick and our guest, Angela Connor, have some tips on standing out [00:30:13]: Point to specific communities that you’ve worked in If you don’t have direct experience in community, start one! Skills from other fields translate, but you should still be eager to learn and grow And if you’ve been working in community for a while, but are looking to refresh (or rewind) your approach, Patrick and Angela suggest [00:37:48 and throughout]: Revisiting how you talk to your community Leaving room in macros and canned responses for customization Approaching each conversation as an opportunity to invite in new community members Visiting outside communities where your members might be talking about you In addition to these qualities and skills, Angela also surfaces the topic of knowing her worth and the value of the communications skills that she brings to the table. This worth translates to a certain salary, but as with all roles, it also requires internal buy-in and the right resources to make sure you can get the job done. There are many companies that think they can’t afford someone at this skill level, but that doesn’t mean they don’t need someone at this skill level. Our Podcast is Made Possible By… If you enjoy our show, please know that it’s only possible with the generous support of our sponsor: Higher Logic. Big Quotes On the value of community management skills: “[When it comes to hiring community professionals,] there’s a fine line between what [companies] can afford and want to afford. … It’s not very difficult for me to step into a social media crisis and help a client, figure out what to say and what to do because I understand social communications. I understand how you talk to people online and then the digital space. I don’t think that people really understand that that’s a unique value proposition.” –@communitygirl On the importance of effort and personalization: “[With community management,] you get what you give. If you are mediocre, then you get mediocre results. If you do the same thing over and over again, [deliver] the same canned responses [without] nuance. It’s what you get if you see community management as something that can be automated. If you think that an algorithm can do all that for you without a human touch, then what you get is poor comments and a poor community and you don’t get anything out of it. Meaning, you don’t get to lift anything out of that section and bring it into other things that you were doing.” –@patrickokeefe About Angela Connor Since 2010, Angela Connor has been the driving force behind the success of marketing and community managers, directors of social media and digital directors at companies of all sizes and across many industries including Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina, Deloitte, South State Bank, Duke Energy, UNC Health Care, Fidelity Charitable, Carolina Biological Supply Company and many more. Angela mastered the ugliness of internet and community trolls as the managing editor of user-generated content at the top news outlet in North Carolina – WRAL.com. She grew their first online community from zero to 14,000 members and chronicled that experience in her 2009 book, 18 Rules of Community Engagement. Angela recently founded Change Agent Communications, which serves companies looking to reach audiences in new ways, capitalize on an emerging trend, head down a different path strategically, reimagine their business model or reinvent themselves. Related Links Sponsor: Higher Logic, the community platform for community managers Angela Connor on Twitter Angela on LinkedIn Angela’s website WRAL.com Change Agent Communications The Social Rewind 18 Rules of Community Engagement Maria Ogneva, director of online customer experience and community at FinancialForce, on Community Signal Patrick’s post on Donald Trump’s threat to section 230 of the Communications Decency Act Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act Jay Rosen, journalism professor at NYU, on Community Signal Goodbye, GOLO; Hello, SHARE Angela mentions Goodreads, CafeMom, Nextdoor, and myFICO Forums as thriving communities Hug Your Haters by Jay Baer Niche communities are still popular Venessa Paech, co-founder of Australian Community Managers, on Community Signal Howard Rheingold, writer and early member of the WELL, on Community Signal Transcript View transcript on our website Your Thoughts If you have any thoughts on this episode that you’d like to share, please leave me a comment, send me an email or a tweet. If you enjoy the show, we would be so grateful if you spread the word and supported Community Signal on Patreon.

Ron Huddleston, Chief Partner Officer at Twilio, joins the AppChat Podcast to discuss the importance of building out ecosystems and the differences he has seen building multiple ecosystems for various companies. Other subjects include breaking down various ecosystem models, how Huddleston's previous experience prepared him for working at Twilio, and the importance of trust and credibility in the industry. Here are the key topics, with timestamps, as well as the full interview transcript: Key Topics 00:00-01:58 Introducing the AppChat and our guest, Twilio's Chief Partner Officer Ron Huddleston 1:59-3:28 The challenges of indirect software sales 3:29-8:43 The importance of software companies building out an ISV and/or SI ecosystem 8:44-12:34 The differences in building out an ecosystem for Salesforce and Microsoft 12:35-17:10 The differences between a pure, cloud-based ecosystem, and a hybrid model including cloud and on-premise 17:11-20:02 How much Huddleston uses his previous experiences building ecosystems for Twilio, and how much he has to continue to discover and invent 20:03-25:54 The importance of trust and credibility when building out ecosystems 25:55-29:06 Building an app and sticking to the commitment you made to your ecosystem 29:07-30:22 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: 00:14 All right. We're back on the AppChat Podcast. And today, I'm joined by Ron Huddleston, who, Ron, you have an incredible background when it comes to building out ISV ecosystems. Let me get this right. So you're currently the Chief Partner Officer at Twilio. Ron Huddleston: 00:31 Yeah. Brian Walsh: 00:32 Before that, CVP, One Commercial Partner organization at Microsoft. Ron Huddleston: 00:35 Yeah. Brian Walsh: 00:36 SVP of the AppExchange at Salesforce. Ron Huddleston: 00:38 Yep. Brian Walsh: 00:39 And started the OEM, ISV program at Oracle, where you were vice president. Ron Huddleston: 00:44 Yes. Brian Walsh: 00:45 Are there any bigger partner programs in the world to run than that? Ron Huddleston: 00:51 Amazon, maybe, now? Brian Walsh: 00:53 Maybe now, yeah. Ron Huddleston: 00:54 Yeah. Yeah, they're breaking new ground. But the Microsoft thing was definitely a big one. They've all been really fun. I do think that the folks at companies that get to build ecosystems, ISV, or SI, or any type of partner ecosystem, I think that it's probably the most fun job you can have at a bigger technology company, because you get exposed. It's not the same thing over and over. You get to really understand how to work with other folks and understand what's important to them. And so I stuck with it -- it was probably my 20th job at Oracle -- and when I found it and started building it, I just realized it was the most fun, like exciting, interesting, technically satisfying, from a business perspective, satisfying thing you could really do. So just from a personal perspective, I think it's probably the most fun you can have in cloud technology for a job. Unless you're like the CEO of a startup, or doing what you're doing, like building things. But if you're going to work for somebody else, I think it's a great job. Brian Walsh: 01:59 But I mean, I find that sometimes indirect sales, especially indirect software sales, can be extremely challenging. Like you're not actually doing that final license sale. You're lining up the partners and enabling them. I mean, is there something wrong in your head? Ron Huddleston: 02:14 No, there's not. It does carry its own set of complexities. But the strange thing is, whether it was on-premise or the cloud, those complexities repeat each other over, and over, and over again. So there really, after 20-odd years of doing this, there's not much you haven't seen, because where things get complicated is around human behavior, not necessarily around bringing really great solutions, and great partners, and technology together to solve problems. That's kind of the easy part, just to like address customer problems. Where things get a little crunchy is how human start, where things can get complicated, is when you're aligning different people, different organizations, different teams. That's where things get a little more complicated. I think everything up to that is not as complicated. But again, it's a pattern. And the patterns tend to repeat themselves. So you can sort of see around corners, the longer you do these kind of things, which makes it easier every time. This is, what, my third, fourth- Brian Walsh: 03:18 Fourth one. Ron Huddleston: 03:19 It kind of makes it a little easier every time you do it because you know, I probably made 10,000 mistakes. And you only make the same mistake three or four times. Brian Walsh: 03:29 Eventually, you get it right. So why an ecosystem? I mean, there's a huge amount of effort and investment. Why is it important for a software company to actually build out an ISV and/or SI ecosystem? Ron Huddleston: 03:44 Yeah. There's a lot of reasons. It depends on, are we talking about the technology company themselves that want to build an ecosystem? Brian Walsh: 03:51 Yeah. Ron Huddleston: 03:52 So you have to be a bigger company in order to do that, obviously. It's really hard to do it, otherwise. You can certainly build a small, little portfolio of folks that you work with if you're a smaller company. But there's nothing better than a broad ecosystem because it does a couple things. First things first is, if there's any way, shape, and form you're trying to prove out the sort of platform nature of the technology that you're trying to provide, the long road to get to that level of credibility is trying to do it yourself; trying to hire all the people in the world with the right expertise to sit down with a customer and explain to them, "No, bet on us. We're future-proofed. And you can do all of these things with us. We're a platform," it is really hard. The easier way to do it is to work with an ecosystem of technology, or IP, ISVs, and SIs; and the ones that are trusted in the space, that are maybe already trusted by the customers that you want to serve, and work with them to have them understand how your platform can help. And then build what's essentially, if those are the ingredients, then you know, the recipe book is how all those ingredients come together to help essentially cook a meal, like serve a beautiful meal for the customer, right? And so that's why it's a cool job. You get to be the chef, kind of. That's a good analogy, I'm going to use that analogy -- 20 years, I just discovered a new analogy. But you know, if you think about it that way, as ecosystems, as, you know, sure, you can call it one broad ecosystem, but really, it's a bunch of small solution maps, or what I was just calling recipes. It's a group of technologies, partners, companies, expertise, that solve particular problems. And no one company can really solve anything complicated on their own, really. Like it is just hard to do that over, and over, and over, and over again. You know, if you want to be broad-based, it makes it ... If you want to be a broad solution, like a platform, it makes it really hard to also solve problems, complicated problems, by yourself, right? If you want to stay really narrow and be like a really verticalized application or SI- Brian Walsh: 06:12 You can go super deep. Ron Huddleston: 06:13 You can go super deep. You can solve things on your own. But if you want to be big and broad, it's just the permutations of options are almost impossible. That's why ecosystems are so important. They drive credibility, but they also are the only way to solve really hard, complicated problems if you're trying to solve a lot of them. Those are the two reasons that it's great for the partner, or the platform, but it's great for all these companies that are sort of looking. It's great for cutting-edge companies. Like in the cloud, it was a wonderful thing. People actually all start relational databases. Like there were a lot of companies that were building up relational database practices back in the day. And there were these little, small startups that were building relational databases, or were driving Java for, like J2EE or something. Brian Walsh: 07:05 Yep. Ron Huddleston: 07:05 And I know this is going to sound really old. Brian Walsh: 07:07 We, you and I sound ancient right now. But keep going. It's great. We're reminiscing. Ron Huddleston: 07:10 Yeah. But the point was these companies, these smaller companies that would never have -- it was going to be a long time until they were big enough to where people really get exposed to them. Having an ecosystem, being part of a partner's ecosystem, of a vendor, a big platform's ecosystem, helped the companies that were the best, the most innovative, had the best technologies, sort of punch above their weight class, and could help change the market really quickly. So it's this symbiotic relationship between these platform players that need partners for the two, you know, for lots of reasons, but the two reasons I highlighted; but it's also great for partners, for ISVs and SIs, because it helps the best rise to the top. It helps the best innovate. And you know, it also, if you are the type of SIs or ISVs that are specialized in a particular place or industry, it helps you get access to customers where you might not get access before. So it's a real symbiotic thing when it's working really well, and nothing stands in the way, and there's no friction. And it's really just about sort of, you know, matchmaking. Like, you know, you're a cook. All your ingredients are great. You cook the best stuff. Everything, your oven works. Your waiters are awesome. I guess waiters would be sales in this analogy, right? Brian Walsh: 08:31 Yeah. Ron Huddleston: 08:32 Yeah. The waiters understand stuff. Brian Walsh: 08:35 Sales ops are your line chefs, right? Ron Huddleston: 08:37 Right, there you go. I'll work this analogy out at some point. I think it has legs. I'm thinking about it. Brian Walsh: 08:44 There's always an interesting thing, like if I compare where Microsoft has embraced their ecosystem, and I look at where Salesforce has, around capital efficiency, right? Because in the Salesforce world, there was almost no investment, outside of VC investment, almost no investment of, "Hey, let's invest in you to bring this product to market." Whereas we've seen, even on the Oracle and Microsoft side, lots of investment into ISVs to help them get started with an ecosystem. Ron Huddleston: 09:09 Yeah. I think Salesforce would argue, particularly back in the day when they were building it up, when we were building it up, where we didn't really have as much market presence. There are two things that companies can do to invest in you. They can certainly invest time or technology, but they can also -- I'm sorry, they can certainly invest money or technology, but they can also invest time and access. And at Salesforce, the way I pulled the AppExchange together was, you know, there were limitations around technology, and dollars, and investment dollars, which eventually got solved in one way, or shape, or form. But there was really very little limitation to time and access that could be provided. And so the big strength that Salesforce had at the time was, they were leading in the cloud. So they had, they were innovators, had access and had a sales organization. So a lot of the beginnings of that ecosystem were built around people receiving essentially go-to-market support, help, and guidance from Salesforce, in return for their technical investment in building something with Salesforce. And that was the trade-off that they made. Microsoft is a different beast, and they grew up through partners, and they always had partners. But they'd gotten to such a point where they were so dominant in the marketplace that they'd essentially become demand fulfillment. The partner channel was super optimized for really educated customers to come in and want to buy something. And they would go to very specific partners that would then fulfill that. And it was very educated demand fulfillment to a very educated market, which is entirely different than what we were setting up the One Commercial Partner team to do, which was to create demand. So, instead of having 1,000 points of connection with super-specialized partners, have partners that could show up in front of customers and say, "What problem do you have? What question do you have for my answers?" And then they could represent the full cadre of everything that Microsoft could do. You know, it's a huge technology portfolio. So they were just really limited historically because partners had to sort of pick their lane and stick with it. And so one of the things that's a great thing we did there, was break that down and only create very few lanes. So partners were expected to really lead the way and create demand. But in order to do that, we also had to change the finances. We had to change economics. We had to create a lot of incentives for the direct sales organization to work with them, which is a big part of it, too, because selling stuff, versus taking orders, is expensive. And so we had to make sure the partners could make money doing it. And so in that particular case, you know, the trade-off was, being able to represent Microsoft across the board is a tough thing to do, but if they'd invest their time, and energy, and attention, in learning how to sell and create demand, we made the economics work so that they could get a payback, which is a little different. It's almost the opposite of what Salesforce was doing. And so they're just very different situations. Brian Walsh: 12:29 Got it. Ron Huddleston: 12:30 But like I said, you know, you do this long enough, you've seen almost everything. Brian Walsh: 12:35 Well, let's actually study one more difference within that, which is you had a pure, cloud-based model. And then within Microsoft, you actually had this hybrid. You had cloud, right, like this emerging cloud ecosystem with Office 365 and Dynamics. You also had this gigantic on-prem, you know, basis of licenses. Is there a huge difference between those two types of ecosystems? Or are they basically the same? Ron Huddleston: 12:59 No. There really isn't. I mean, the economic models are different. But enough folks, I would say 8 years ago, 10 years ago -- God, 10 years ago, 15? I don't know ... Like 2008, 10 years ago, 2007, 2006, '07, '08, that's when the financial model differences, forget the technical differences, the relationship differences, the functional selling -- Brian Walsh: 13:24 Customer success, all that stuff. Ron Huddleston: 13:25 All that stuff, the actual financial models of how people expected to generate revenue and make a living, being a technology company or a consulting company, they were so different between cloud and on-prem that moving financial models was the primary thing holding people back from taking the step to the cloud. People liked the technology, but they couldn't take the jump. Like a lot of companies failed because they tried to put a foot in both camps, and you just couldn't. There's one financial model, on-prem, it's very short-term focused; one financial model, cloud, is very longterm focused. And if you're trying to serve both masters, you'll make bad, suboptimal decisions. And so I had a bunch of rules about the cloud. One of them was, you have to pick one or the other. You have to like, divest to one or the other. I think those days have changed, where even if people are doing a lot of on-prem stuff, like there's even the Microsoft SIs, or resellers, they've worked it out in such a way, through financing, through managed services, through something that they're emulating software as a service, financially. And so the technological flip is just a matter of time and opportunity. It wasn't a matter of this big burden, I'm sorry, barrier, an obstacle which is changing their whole financial model, which is really hard. I mean, I literally had sought out, the same way you guys were product development outsourcers, I'd sought out financial development outsourcers, as well, that helped to finance companies through the gap, like the two or three-year revenue gap when they make the transition, because the financial model transition was a lot harder than the technical transition, back in the day. Now, I don't think it's as hard. At Microsoft, it's, you know, some of the companies are so big, I think that the inertia is probably harder than the finances, you know? Just the daily grind, inertia of things makes things tough. Brian Walsh: 15:17 And I think some of your work in there really paid off; the Lighter Capital helping with MapAnything. Ron Huddleston: 15:22 Oh, yeah, I bet they made a crushing at that. Yeah. Brian Walsh: 15:26 Yeah. And now, I think Series D, and they're gigantic. Ron Huddleston: 15:29 Is Lighter Capital doing pretty well? I haven't talked to those guys in a while. Brian Walsh: 15:32 I think they're doing great. Ron Huddleston: 15:34 It's a great business model, I mean. Brian Walsh: 15:35 It is. Ron Huddleston: 15:35 Yeah. Brian Walsh: 15:36 It's interesting. They were so far ahead on that non-equity based funding for it. And now, I see Indie.vc. I see a lot of players coming in. Ron Huddleston: 15:44 Yeah. No, it's a good way to do it. Here at Twilio, there's so much. The funny thing is, it really feels a lot like the initial cloud, call it, revolution in 2007-08. Brian Walsh: 15:57 Yep. Ron Huddleston: 15:58 It's just in communications. And there's a lot of folks that are in the exact same spot; not that they're in financial, a big financial difference, model-wise. But telecommunications is like a different financial model, in a weird way. It's very like, usage oriented. It's got spikes. It's got a lot of weird things they're not used to, particularly if people are selling cloud seat kind of stuff. It's just a different sort of world for them. And a lot of folks don't have specialization in a lot of these things. And so, you know, building things like PDOs and financial development outsourcers are things that we're going to have to do here at Twilio as well, because there's thousands and thousands of ISVs and SIs that, whether they know it or not, are going to be using Twilio in the next couple years, because it just fits. Everybody who's moved to the cloud, there's probably an opportunity -- and touched a customer in some way, shape, or form -- there's an opportunity for them to work with Twilio. And you know, we've just got to make it easier. That was one of the things that, you were around at Salesforce when we did that, too. We just made it easier for people. Brian Walsh: 17:04 Totally. Well, let's jump into Twilio while we're here. You're assembling an amazing team. Ron Huddleston: 17:10 Yeah. They're good people. Brian Walsh: 17:11 It seems like you're applying all of your lessons from the past, you know, experiences building an ecosystem. How much do you have to continue to discover and invent? How much of this is just pulling out your playbook and running with it? Ron Huddleston: 17:24 You know, a lot of it is playbook stuff. I will say, the difference between communications technology, like it carries a lot of legacy with it. Like there is, you know, a whole lot of underlying technology that, if you're unfamiliar with it, which I am, you know, like the seven layers. That's just, there's a bunch of crazy stuff. Brian Walsh: 17:45 Yep. Ron Huddleston: 17:45 If you're unfamiliar with it, there's a lot going on there that has significant material impacts on business models that could work or couldn't work. So you bring the same playbook, and then you have this set of realities, constraints, and the technology as it exists, that then make things viable or not viable. And it is, you know, it's fundamentally a bit of a different thing, because it's a very API-forward company, which leads people down a lot of weird roads. Like what is an SI? What is an ISV? Which, by the way, we can get philosophical on this. Brian Walsh: 18:23 How do you differentiate? Ron Huddleston: 18:26 Like at Salesforce, people would just like get their heads wrapped around an axle, because you know, back in the day, when we were creating the partner program, I always tried to explain reselling, and OEMing, and trying to get like, I think, Veeva kept it on their first contract to sell Salesforce underneath their technology set. People were like, you know, "The technology is staying here. These are ours, it's in our -- this isn't the Salesforce," what do they call those things? I'm sorry. Do you remember those, at Salesforce, they have a name for the PODs that- Brian Walsh: 18:59 The ORGs? Ron Huddleston: 19:01 Not the ORGs, but whatever. It's Salesforce property. We're running it in our own data centers. Brian Walsh: 19:07 Right, in a POD. Ron Huddleston: 19:07 So how are you reselling anything? I'm like, "Well, it's, you know," even, and then licensing, which is just a human, you know, construct. It's not real. Like all these things, applying them to the cloud, it's semi-nonsensical, but it is a way to put these constructs together, and rules together, that help enable ecosystems to exist and thrive. There's something that they can sell, that they can put margin on, that they can build a business on. There's something that they can learn about, and then configure, and then leave with the customer. If you don't have the concepts of ownership, and passing ownership, and control, which don't make a lot of sense when you think about like a multi-tenant cloud, but if you don't have those things, you can't build businesses. And so, you know, a lot of it is building the faith that these human constructs exist, and that you can sell them, which for API companies, is a new thing. Like, I don't think AWS even does that yet. Brian Walsh: 19:59 No. But- Ron Huddleston: 20:00 It's weird, I know that I'm like waxing philosophical, but it is a- Brian Walsh: 20:03 But I mean, it all comes down to trust, right? Ron Huddleston: 20:06 Yeah. Brian Walsh: 20:07 You have to build trust with this partner that you will create these things, that you gave them your word, that they can actually invest millions of dollars to go forward with it. Ron Huddleston: 20:16 Yeah. Trust and credibility, in this space, is kind of what it's all about. And it's a thing about companies, too, is you know, they can, over time, their perspective on the importance of ecosystems and what the value is can change. But if you're leading up those ecosystem efforts, like you've got to try hard as hell to live up to the commitments, and consistencies, and visions that you put out there -- to the point where you're willing to sort of, you know, throw yourself in front of a train to make sure that like, you know, people don't change the philosophies you put in place, because people are betting their lives, their businesses, on what you're laying out as the vision and value of the partner program you're putting out there. And you're making these commitments, and anything that drives inconsistency, anything that's not committed, anything that violates trust in those things is a huge, huge problem. Like you know, you can spend years building up the trust that's required to build an ecosystem. And in one day, you can blow it. So that's, by far, the most important thing that you need people to understand who are setting up partner programs, or building teams, or you know, maybe looking to hire someone to build up their organization. Make sure that she or he, you know, the first thing out of their mouth needs to be like trust and consistency because without that, none of the rest of this really matters. Brian Walsh: 21:48 Yeah. And it's also, I think, the confidence that these larger organizations are actually going to stay in it, right? Ron Huddleston: 21:54 Yeah. Brian Walsh: 21:55 You know? This is not going to be a one-year test, then we're going away, because we're asking the likes of major companies to actually invest their future in this opportunity. Ron Huddleston: 22:04 Yeah. And you know, a lot of them don't take the jump and wait a year, wait two years, to see. I mean, the cloud took forever. It took four or five years for the bigger companies to jump. Brian Walsh: 22:15 Yep. Ron Huddleston: 22:15 But now, things are happening a lot faster. But there'll still be some companies that'll wait a year or two to jump. But you'll recall this, the ones that made it first in the cloud, the ones that were really successful were all the first ones, the people who moved fast. The consulting companies that moved fast, the ISVs that moved fast, the companies that jumped in there and took the risks were the ones that succeeded in the end. The ones that played on the sidelines, unless they were super dominant, they were playing catch-up, and still are. Brian Walsh: 22:44 And you watch the outcomes and success of those. ServiceMax, I mean, that was coming about when Service Cloud wasn't even fully baked, and almost a billion dollar exit. Veeva went public. DocuSign just went public. Ron Huddleston: 22:56 Yeah. Those were all the early ones, yeah. Brian Walsh: 22:58 Yep. They all came in. All right. So there is a PayPal Mafia: Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman. Ron Huddleston: 23:06 I don't know any of them very well. Brian Walsh: 23:08 Yeah, I know, but that's your social circle, I'm sure. You go surfing with them. I propose that there's actually an AppExchange Mafia as well now. We have you out there, Avanish at ServiceNow, Leyla took back over of the AppExchange, Todd Surdey is now at FinancialForce, Sean Hogan at Nintex, Brian Snyder at GE. That original crew, those people who were there on those early, Wild West days, are out there in the SaaS ecosystems. Ron Huddleston: 23:36 Yeah. Ross Eberhart's over here. Mike Rosenbaum's running product over there. Like, yeah, and a lot of trust amongst all those people. And we will, I'd love to work with any of those people. Avanish and I are always trying to figure out how we can do stuff. That's just a great group of people that, I think a lot of them learned a ton through that phase. There's even some folks that were from Oracle that are still in the Mafia, if you're going to call it that. Like, because Molly Bellero Fischer is still doing it. Ross is still doing it. Anders is still doing it. Ryan Begin's still doing it. Annie Heppberger, I think, runs partners now for Oracle. Brian Walsh: 24:23 Brent Floyd. Ron Huddleston: 24:24 Yeah. There's a lot going on; Kevin Walsh is still doing it. He's an Oracle person. Yeah. There are- Brian Walsh: 24:30 Joanne Pantuso is still doing it. Ron Huddleston: 24:32 That's right. Once you get a taste of working in ecosystems and partners, you don't really want to do other stuff, just because it's so fulfilling to help companies do something new, and grow, and to be part of their story. It's really fun. Like I said in the very beginning, in the opening when we were talking, if you could, you know, I had a lot of, I probably had 15 different jobs at Oracle. And this was by far the most fun. And I was a young man back then. And I had decided like, this is the thing I wanted to do. If I was going to work for somebody else, this is it, because there's no beating it. Like there's nothing, there's really not beating it once you get it going. That's why Twilio is so exciting, by the way. It's like the new Wild West. Brian Walsh: 25:13 Yep. Ron Huddleston: 25:13 It just reminds me of like the cloud. And a lot of those people are the same people, the Mafia you just mentioned, there's a lot of those same people that all recognize the same thing I do. Which means like, you're not running around saying, "Oh, trust me. This happened before." There's a bunch of people here that have lived it and are like, "Oh, my God. This is so interesting. It's exactly the same. And let's-" Brian Walsh: 25:34 We get to do it right the first time, this time. Ron Huddleston: 25:35 Yeah, yeah. Here's the thing -- we did it right before. I think I'd argue the Microsoft One Commercial Partner is set up the right way. We'll do it right here, it's just things are happening much faster. Instead of taking three or four years, it's happening in like 12 months. Brian Walsh: 25:52 Wow. Ron Huddleston: 25:53 It may be faster. It's crazy. Brian Walsh: 25:55 Well, and strategically, like technology-wise, adding in the whole serverless infrastructure, so you can host code now. You've got Flex, so you can start building out sort of UIs and the whole thing. Ron Huddleston: 26:05 Yeah, it has a face. Yep, that's a real thing. You'd be surprised how much having a face matters to LOB leaders, versus developers. Brian Walsh: 26:12 And I bet it also adds to some of the defensibility of it, right? Like, there's less attrition as you start adding even more and more layers, people can get deeper into your system, rather than just an API. Ron Huddleston: 26:23 Yeah. The thing about Flex, the most interesting part about Flex is the underlying technology. I don't want to give percentages, but I'd say a vast majority of the underlying technology has been around, you know, started 10 years ago, and it's been enhanced ever since. The moment that Flex came out, where it was a way to put a face, a UI, on what was possible in Twilio, the interest was a thousandfold, because it opened up people's minds to what Twilio was. Versus an API, which is a very difficult thing for non-developers to understand. You put a UI on it and explain what it is, you've just cracked open a huge market that should have been already there. It's just, people didn't understand what this, what Twilio could possibly do. And Flex wrapped that up nicely. Now the challenge is, when a platform, an API platform, which is a beautiful offering for SIs and ISVs, because it's like the cookbook that you need to do anything, which is just perfect for a partnering system. Brian Walsh: 27:21 And it's so damn easy to use at Twilio. Ron Huddleston: 27:23 Yeah. When you build an app, though, you, no matter what, unless you're picking exactly the right space, are probably going to bounce up into some elbows of people that have already built on your platform. And so, same problem at Salesforce, same problem at Microsoft, when you start expanding what you do and putting, you know, faces on things, and making new applications, like you mentioned Service Cloud and ServiceMax, that is a, you've got to tread very slowly, and know what you're doing, and make very considered decisions, because the chance that you are violating a commitment that you made to your ecosystem is probably very high. Now Twilio had never had a partner program, and really made a ton of commitments in that direction. But understanding the effects of things like this, and what's important, and what's not, is critical to our business going forward. And George and Jeff totally get it and understand. And so the idea of having governance, like a buy-build partner governance, and the impact that doing any of those actions, besides partner, if you buy or build, taking all that into consideration is one of the reasons why I feel really good about being here. Because they're super dead serious about it. And what they're focused on is, if they do buy or build, they're doing it underneath, like on the platform layer. Like even Flex, sure, it's a face. It's a UI. But if you really look at it, it's like an SDK for a UI. You know what I mean? It's not really a -- you could technically use it out of the box, but no one will. Brian Walsh: 29:02 Right. It's just the starting point. "Here, let me help you imagine this." Ron Huddleston: 29:06 Right, yeah. Brian Walsh: 29:08 That's fantastic. Well Ron, thank you very much for joining us. What's the best way, if somebody either wants to find a great job in an ecosystem, or they're looking to partner with Twilio, for them to get ahold of you and your team? Ron Huddleston: 29:20 If people want to do either of those things, the best way to get partnering going is to go online, and go to "become a partner," and go to the community. And then you'll get routed to like the person that you'll, you know, one of the 50-odd people that you'd be dealing with in to learn and become a partner. And there's people that are there just to quickly follow up and make sure you know how to do it and what's important. But if you're interested in getting a job, you can email me at rhuddleston@twilio.com, because we're hiring. We're going to hire another, you know -- lots. We're in super hiring phase right now. Brian Walsh: 29:59 Fantastic. Well, Ron, thank you very much for taking the time today, and glad we got this scheduled, and finally do it. Ron Huddleston: 30:04 Yeah, no. I'm very, very impressed by your fancy equipment and the level of professionalism in putting this podcast together. Brian Walsh: 30:11 Hey, look, I've grown up just as much as you have, okay? Ron Huddleston: 30:15 Yes, clearly you have. Brian Walsh: 30:18 All right, Ron. Thank you so much, everybody. Ron Huddleston: 30:20 All right. I'll see you around the water cooler. Bye. Outro: 30:22 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 their last sit-down of the spring event season, Brian and Jon huddle in the Alexa-free environment of FinancialForce Community Live 2018 to break down FinancialForce's goals and obstacles. Topics include the push for modern ERP and servitization, the pros and cons of their Salesforce platform play, and the keys to their current growth rate. The guys break out their talks with FinancialForce executives and customers and talk about what needs to happen next. Yes, you can get Busting the Omnichannel on iTunes. 

In a conversation with Fred Studer, the company’s chief marketing officer, he explains why the company feels why a services-based business model is what needed to be successful today, and why they call themselves a customer-centric ERP company.

FinancialForce, a leading provider of cloud-based apps like ERP, financial management, and professional services automation (PSA) built entirely on the Salesforce platform, recently held their annual user conference – Community Live. And a theme resonated throughout the three days I attended the event – speed is the currency in the new Services Economy. One of the ways discussed at the conference for speeding up your company’s ability to deliver consistenly good experiences throughout sales/service processes is combine the power of CRM with professional services automation. Austin Rohr, Product Strategy Manager for FinancialForce’s PSA offering, shared with me where PSA fits into the sales and service mix, and why the combination of PSA and CRM can provide faster, more profitable outcomes that improves overall customer engagement.

During this live on-site podcast with Jon Reed of diginomica and the usual suspect Brian Sommer (also a diginomica contributor), the guys hash out what they learned from a newsworthy FinancialForce user conference. This was the first time media/analysts were invited to a FinancialForce user conference, which generated plenty of discussions on customer value and sparks on the ADP partner announcement. Jon gets into highlights from the slew of customers FinancialForce lined up for him. Sommer shares why he was looking for more on big data and AI, and the guys discuss partner strategy, verticals, and yes - revenue recognition - aka "The CIO's Y2K." Brian also explains his mysterious lack of suit and tie and why he was spotted in a Las Vegas golf shirt. Yes, you can get Busting the Omnichannel on iTunes.

In this episode, we discuss fat-washing cocktails, FinancialForce's new CEO, Atlassian acquiring Trello, dueling with Salesforce support, and questions from the Good Day, Sir! Slack community. The Science of Fat-Washing Cocktails PDT’s Bacon-Infused Old Fashioned FinancialForce selects former Salesforce and Heroku exec to be new CEO Atlassian Acquires Popular Team Productivity App Trello For $425 Million Salesforce Einstein promises AI applications that 'just work'

A SaaS innovation and leadership conversation with FinancialForce.com CEO and President, Jeremy Roche (@Jeremy_Roche). With more than 20 years of experience building and leading both public and private technology companies, Jeremy brings a wealth of executive leadership experience. He has led businesses through IPO, de-merger and acquisition (both as acquirer and acquiree). And his work with growing FinancialForce offers insight into how to play the game of business at a rapid pace and growing scale. With $110 million in capital raised in 2015, the company’s growth has exploded, and Roche has led the team to disrupt the space of financial software. Roche also offers a global perspective on building companies. He holds or has held Board positions in technology companies in US, UK, Netherlands, France, Germany, Hungary, Estonia, Singapore, Malaysia and Australia. And FinancialForce now has offices in the UK, Canada, Australia, Spain, and multiple offices in the US. In this episode with Jeremy Roche, you’ll learn: 1.) How Jeremy Roche got into ‘the emerging world of software’ and SaaS 2.) How to balance enthusiasm from a SaaS leadership perspective 3.) The importance and practice of ‘peoplecastiing’ in achieving your goals 4.) How to surround yourself with a strong team of people that are prepared to disagree with you 5.) How Salesforce and FinancialForce came together, and how they have worked together to the benefit of both businesses This episode of Powder Keg is brought to you by DeveloperTown. If you’re a business leader trying to turn a great idea into a product with traction, this is for you. DeveloperTown works with clients ranging from entrepreneurs to Fortune 100 companies who want to build and launch an app or digital product. They’re able to take the process they use with early stage companies to help big companies move like a startup. So if you have an idea for a web or mobile app, or need help identifying the great ideas within your company, go to developertown.com/powderkeg.

Brent Leary Interviews Jeremy Roche Of FinancialForce by Brent Leary and Small Business Trends

In this episode we discuss going to Dreamforce 2014, Salesforce and Microsoft Office, wearables in an enterprise setting, the shaming school of philanthropy, optimistic locking in Salesforce.com, useless debug logs, an update on COIN, Salesforce.com as enterprise software, and Marc Benioff’s comments on Microsoft missing out on cloud computing.Dreamforce 2014Microsoft partners “pissed” about pact with SalesforceLondon’s Heron to Be Renamed Salesforce Tower After Leasing DealMarc Benioff's Public Shaming School of PhilanthropyFinancialForce.com Receives $50 Million in Funding From Advent International Download MP3 (40 MB, 00:55:02)