Salesforce Simplified: What Does Salesforce Do?

​​Maybe you’ve heard CEO Marc Benioff speak on CNBC or CNN. You may also recognize our cloud logo, friendly characters, or our very tall headquarters in San Francisco. But, because our work in the world is so varied, we often field the question: What does Salesforce actually do? In short: Salesforce offers technology and services to help you build strong, lasting customer relationships. Salesforce is the customer company. We’ll break down what that means below.

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-host: Derek Cassese
Co-host: Fred Reynolds

Transcript

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Hmm!

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Andy Whiteside: Hello! And welcome to episode 2 of Salesforce simplified. I'm your host for today, at least, Andy White side I've got our main host. Dereka sees this today. He's gonna be kind of a kind of a contributing guest host. I'm gonna walk you through a bunch of dumb questions because I'm I'm really good at dumb questions, because I have a lot of them. And also in addition, that we have Fred Reynolds, who is part of the modern apps practice with Derek, our modern apps practice built around salesforce and service now, and if you are a

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Andy Whiteside: if you're a customer of into either one of those products specifically today, salesforce. And you do not feel like you're getting the value out of the product. Then you're doing it wrong. And whoever you're working with is doing it wrong. And we need to help you with a true advice. And we're gonna do some of that today. Derek, how's it going? It's good, going real good.

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Andy Whiteside: I am excited to ask you dumb questions about salesforce, because I know what I do with it, but I don't know what else it can do. And I think I'm gonna find out a lot today on that. Fred, you got your dumb questions queued up. You know what I'm so excited as well, cause I can join in on the dumb questions. And I actually really want to learn a lot more about it. So I'm excited about today. No, there's no such thing as a dumb question.

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Derek Cassese: only the one not asked right? That's right.

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Andy Whiteside: So

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Andy Whiteside: so, Derek, we you brought this blog forward. You said they do it every year after dreamforce, because they got a lot of new buzz and a lot of attention and the title of it. What does Salesforce do? You shouldn't have to have a blog like this if it was simple, but it's not simple cause they do so much. I was overwhelmed at Dreamforce. Why? Why bring this blog forward today?

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Derek Cassese: Yeah, I just think it's a good level set. You know it's salesforce has the word sales in it in the name. And you know, sometimes people get

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Derek Cassese: tunnel vision in what the the platform can do and or don't realize what it does, just from a high, level perspective. So I thought this was a good

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Derek Cassese: blog to kind of walk through from, you know, from a high, level kind of what the platform has to offer in various aspects of a business. And step one is. It's not a product or an app. It's a platform.

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Andy Whiteside: Correct? Yeah, alright. So there's about 5 paragraphs here trying to explain what salesforce does help us digest these 5 paragraphs in I would say layman's terms, but maybe a little layman a little techy all at same time.

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Derek Cassese: Yeah, I mean, the first part of this is really talking about.

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Derek Cassese: you know, if you've got. If you've got customer, then you've got customer data, and

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Derek Cassese: the word, like the days of siloed data.

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Derek Cassese: is no more right. And what I mean by that is, when people used to walk around their laptops and have customer data and excel spreadsheets, and you know, if if Tom had it then Fred had no idea what he had on his laptop. So with a platform, you can create what Salesforce likes to call the customer, which is a complete end to end vision of your customer for anybody.

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Derek Cassese: So all the touch points all the aspects of your customer in one pane of glass if you will. And traditionally, that's their their customer relationship management software Crm.

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Derek Cassese: otherwise known as Sales Cloud.

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Andy Whiteside: Okay, that's

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Andy Whiteside: that's the customer oriented data in crm, Aka sales cloud.

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Andy Whiteside: That's the that's the the granddaddy, the foundational piece of the platform.

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Derek Cassese: Yeah, that's kind of where the platform started. I mean, they're.

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Derek Cassese: you know, their their stock ticker is. Crm, so it's at the root.

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Derek Cassese: but yeah, that this is where the platform kind of started from. And you know, from a Crm perspective, and then grew from there, just.

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Derek Cassese: you know. And as we go through this document you'll see. Kinda you know the other aspects of of what this thing of what the platform has to offer, but at the root of it the key takeaway here is

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Derek Cassese: is visibility, and connecting with your customer right? So Salesforce will call. They call themselves the the Customer Company. and the whole idea is to enable the the their customers that use the platform

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Derek Cassese: to do the same thing with their customers to connect it. The levels and personalization that the customers are expecting in 2023, which is, we were. You know where we're at right now, where I wanna I don't wanna tell them that I bought, you know, 40 40 pairs of shoes. I want them to know that you know that type of thing.

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Andy Whiteside: Okay. So we're gonna go from there into there. Is it fair to say that was the first real Crm, born in the cloud that was scalable, extensible, had all the cloud benefits is. But how much of the salesforce story

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Andy Whiteside: benefited from being born natively in the cloud.

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Derek Cassese: Yeah. Well, it it was.

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Derek Cassese: It was one of the first. So salesforce really was transformational from the perspective of

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Derek Cassese: when they created salesforce. It started in the cloud. But also it started as a subscription based product. Right? It was.

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Derek Cassese: It was Mark Benio saying, You know. Why? Why can't business data be as easy as buying something from Amazon wasn't at the time. And so that's

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Derek Cassese: that was, you know how the the founders started this whole thing right was making it easy, making it easily accessible, but also secure, but easily accessible for everybody using it.

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Andy Whiteside: And what was the book you had me start reading that the the binny off book the early one, the first one

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Andy Whiteside: behind the clouds behind the cloud. Yeah, I've learned a lot in the first opening section in the first chapter around his background. And why this just made sense to to start the way he started when he started.

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Andy Whiteside: Alright. So, Fred, here's your first chance. First dumb question you want to ask. We move on to the next section.

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Fred Reynolds: Thank you for that opportunity. So so there, I guess what I'll ask is, everybody typically, well, thinks they know what salesforce is. One thing interesting. Here it talks about a customer relationship management.

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Fred Reynolds: Right? That's what Crm is for. But is it internal? Is an external, because for me, most people use salesforce as an internal view of managing what they have going on. How much of it is customer facing for them?

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Derek Cassese: Yeah. So I mean, it's a good question.

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Derek Cassese: but you can. So it depends on how you want to deploy it. Traditionally, you know, if you're working with a customer, it's gonna be the

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Derek Cassese: customers that they serve but doesn't have to be right. So this is the the age. All that matters answer that I'm going to give you.

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Derek Cassese: so you know you could. Let's just give an example. Right? If you, if you're a business and you've got partners and internal business partners that you work with, you could put them in the Crm Sales cloud, you can also put all your B to. You know your your B to C

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Derek Cassese: customers in there. Right? So it's it can be business to business. It could be business to customer. It can also be inward facing from a service perspective like, if you're thinking about employee management, things like that. But that gets into more of the service side of the platform as opposed to the Crm. Sales side of it.

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Fred Reynolds: Door

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Andy Whiteside: perfect. Derek, the next session, says, how does salesforce work?

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Derek Cassese: Yup!

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Derek Cassese: Do, do you know.

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Andy Whiteside: do I know how that works? Just to add. I don't. I? Really? I

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Andy Whiteside: I'll say no, and I'm probably right. Cause when you answer the question, I'm sure whatever I thought was, gonna be wrong.

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Derek Cassese: Yeah. So I mean, it's it's, you know, it's a multi-tenant meaning that.

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Derek Cassese: you know, you've got multiple companies in the same cloud instance, but not sharing data. Think of like an apartment complex. Right? They all share the front door, but they've got their own apartment.

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Derek Cassese: Multi-tenant cloud based platform that lives in what they're calling now. It's built on hyperforce right, which is a cloud. Native architecture, leveraging public clouds. Think aws!

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Derek Cassese: That gives a whole lot of flexibility and agility like. So if you have, you know you need your data residency to be in one spot or another. The platform is configurable from that perspective

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Derek Cassese: subscription based right? And you get free upgrades a year. What that means is that the days of you know, sitting at a data center, upgrading servers and whatnot are non-existent. You literally get email saying that you're gonna get the new release

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Derek Cassese: and then you come back to work the next day, and once the new releases are there, you can take advantage of. If you. If there's something you don't want, you, can you? You can choose not to use the update.

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Derek Cassese: But there's nothing you need to do from an update perspective. That was really the the big, the big win from a perspective of enterprise.

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Derek Cassese:  you know, business. It management is that there's really nothing that you have to do. From the perspective of of upgrading the software, you get it, you get free upgrades a year, you continue to use it, and you pay your subscription fees.

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Andy Whiteside: Fred. Question on that one.

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Fred Reynolds: No, I'm actually good right now. That was actually good.

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Fred Reynolds: I mean only thing that comes to mind around you say about that is security, right? But I understand how these platform works. I know they're secure, so most people would not know would probably be concerned. You tell me as you know, everybody apart with a front door. But some of the data is very assisted to each customer. So maybe something on that Derek around the security of the platform itself.

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Derek Cassese: Yeah, I mean, so it is, you know, multi-tenancy. So like what I said, think about an apartment complex, but also

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Derek Cassese: the the data is extracted away from the configuration. So what I mean by that is that

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Derek Cassese: you've got configuration. What they call metadata. And then you've got your data.

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Derek Cassese: and

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Derek Cassese: there it's extremely restricted on who has access to the data from the perspective, like you have to actually turn on allow support

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Derek Cassese: to you know. So let's just say you're having an issue with something in your in your salesforce environment. You click a button, saying, Give support access for an hour and they'll get on a a video session with you to troubleshoot. But they don't even have access to your actual data. What I mean by data, I mean the actual content in there. So

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Derek Cassese: I can configure a customer page with name, location, phone fax. All the information is in those fields is still protected and unaccessible from anybody other than who's in my organization. It's encrypted

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at rest. And then there's an additional feature you can get, which they call shield, which gives you a little bit more from an audit perspective

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Derek Cassese: and encrypting data and transit things like that.

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Andy Whiteside: Yeah, I love the example of the analogy of an apartment complex where we we share things. We share the pool. We share the front desk.

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Andy Whiteside: But yeah, I've got access to my stuff. Nobody else can get to mine but the the hallways and elevators. We share those, because and then, like, you just said, maybe encrypt the maybe we encrypt ourselves as we walk down the hall that way. We have another sense of security. But is. It is the most scalable cost, effective way. Because, look, if you had to, if you truly built everybody's environment separate from each other in the cloud, the cost, you might as well just keep it on. Prem.

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Derek Cassese: Exactly. And you know one thing that they also did from the onset was full transparency.

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Derek Cassese: So if you go to trust salesforce.com

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Derek Cassese: at any point in time. You can see the status health of

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Derek Cassese: all the instances all the way down to the one that your org is sitting on. You can see all the maintenance it's been done to it. You can see scheduled maintenance. It's been done to it. You can see if there were issues with it. Full transparency at all times.

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Andy Whiteside: Alright! So we were at Dreamforce a week ago or so, and we heard a lot about marketing cloud. If you've got customer data

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Andy Whiteside: that you're using to better understand how to interact with those customers, it makes total sense that you would use that data and the constructs around it, engines around it to do the marketing, help us understand what how salesforce can be used for marketing

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Derek Cassese: yet.

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Derek Cassese: So marketing. So we were kind of moving off of the sales right? So if you think we got sales, we talked a little bit about service. Now we're talking about marketing

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Derek Cassese:  and it's it's about connecting with your customers on preferred channels. So whether that be email websites, social media placing ads.

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Derek Cassese: You know all the above. What marketing cloud allows you to do is interact with them on those channels, but also get until intelligence. From that

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Derek Cassese: you know. How long did it take to open the email? What pages were they on? For example, if you're you know, if you've got a a web page and you can, you can base. You can see all the articles, all the pages that they've hit, basically basically creating an intelligent profile of your customers. From a marketing perspective.

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Yup.

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Andy Whiteside: Fred, how much do you know about Marketing Club? Not. But I mean, I find that very interesting, right? I think that's

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Fred Reynolds: very smart, right? A very good use of it. Because one, you know that customer, you have a lot of customer information, even back in information around the customer right? How do you map that to their needs as well? So I think that's pretty powerful tool to use as a marketing angle as well.

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Andy Whiteside: So I'll I'll use my view of the world. II look at the view of the world through marketing, and then sales, and then service. Now, that doesn't mean to demean service, nor does it mean to demean sales. But you gotta let people know what it is you have for them to know about, and that's where it all starts with marketing.

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Fred Reynolds: Yep.

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Andy Whiteside: yeah. Alright. How do you use salesforce for sales? Derek.

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Derek Cassese: yeah. So this is kind of circling back

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Derek Cassese: to where we started with sales. Cloud. And you know this is this is talking about.

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Derek Cassese: you know, making the sales executives job easier.

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Derek Cassese: Allowing them.

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Derek Cassese: you know, allowing them to do more faster and more efficiently. And what I mean by that is, I can go into my account. I can see everything I need to do. I can send emails directly from the platform if I want to. With AI built in. We now have the ability to one click button, create emails that are personalized.

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Derek Cassese: Based on the intelligence of that of that account.

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Derek Cassese: So, for example, if you had a meeting 2 weeks ago, right? The intelligence of that could be interwoven into the email. With a click of a button now leveraging some of the

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Derek Cassese: some of the AI capabilities. But really the I think the sweet spot is that.

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Derek Cassese: you know. Let's just say you're out, and you're going to meet with a customer. You pull up, pull out your phone, open up the salesforce mobile app.

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Derek Cassese: go to the account and you look, and you can see everything that you need to see from that account perspective, I can see

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Derek Cassese: emails. I can see contacts. I could also see service whether that's Service Cloud or an integration service. Now.

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Derek Cassese: it would be great to know if they just opened a case, and they have an issue, so that I'm going in there with that knowledge, instead of being blindsided by the fact that they just opened up a case. So it's putting those tools in the hands of the sales team so that they're

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Derek Cassese: as equipped as possible to close more deals.

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Andy Whiteside: Yeah, Fred, I was talking about. You know, projects and projects going sideways or something, and we need every we need every element possible to aggregate things back to Salesforce to keep the sales team in the loop as well as their own. You know a bill, their own desire to know what's going on. So that we can get in front of potential customer concerns which are gonna lead to sales issues later.

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Fred Reynolds: So I like with Derek with that, because obviously with something, I worked on my past, and being part of managed services and and having customers that we supported that, how do you salesforce for sales? I mean, this is what we did right to to your point, Derek. From your service side. You know. What are you doing to provide services for that customer, making sure that information is aware in the system. So they know just like problems, issues or things that are going on. Another thing is, is the customers landscape? What is the customer have that you're providing?

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Fred Reynolds: And how is that relevant to things that may be in minus one or things that could be updated, or campaigns you have going on so that whole marketing, the sales at all ties together. The more information you have, the more you can build on that. Put it for the customer. Did you know, or would you like to trial period of this, or would you like to upgrade, that you can promote more sales by putting in front of them and making them aware that they may not know nobody's told.

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Fred Reynolds: So can even automate that from a having it automated from that that mobile app you talked about making that the salesperson aware. You get ready to walk in this customer meeting, and this is the combination of what they have. We have a new marketing around this. Make sure you talk to them about that.

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Derek Cassese: Yep, and there's A, there's a whole suite of tools. And obviously, we, we can't get it all that on this one podcast, but there's a whole suite of enablement tools, for example, next, best action

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Derek Cassese: which can trigger, based on characteristics of the account, and tell the rep what the next best action might be. It might be, hey? You need to set up, you know. Set up a meeting with this person, or you need to recommend support to this individual to help with upsell. There's sales cadences where you can. If you know, you can streamline the onboarding

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Derek Cassese: and basically help the sales reps kind of move through a process, a defined process to help move opportunities from one stage to another. So all those tools are are built into the platform.

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Fred Reynolds: That's perfect.

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Andy Whiteside: All right during next section says, can sales force also work with B to C business to customer, and B to B shopping and commerce?

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Derek Cassese: Yep.

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Derek Cassese: so we're and you know there's a diagram in this article. It called the wheel internally, and you know, at the top it's sales, and at about, you know, 10'clock service marketing's at, you know, 20'clock. Commerce is 30'clock.

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Derek Cassese: And that's where we're at right now. And yeah, so there is, and you'll you'll get to know that it's it's commerce cloud, right marketing, cloud service, cloud sales cloud, and it is so we. There is a a cloud dedicated to B to C and B, 2 B shopping carts.

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Derek Cassese: and you know that starts to you start to kinda get this Lego approach. So think of like the traditional use case of somebody with a shopping with a shopping cart online. What do you do with a abandoned shopping cart? Right? We get them all the time. I'm sure you've done this. You go somewhere. You put something in. You leave and they get an email. Hey? You left something in your shopping cart. Well, that's all coming from a platform like sales salesforce.

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Derek Cassese: working in conjunction with commerce, cloud and marketing cloud, sending those emails, bringing that attention to the customers to try to get them to come back

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Derek Cassese: and rep and purchase whatever was in the cart and commerce cloud. Is that solution for the customers that are looking to. Do. You know, online retail on time? Online commerce?

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Andy Whiteside: There, historically, I always view that as some type of you know database that somebody constructed these days. Is it mostly on a platform like salesforce? Or is a lot of people that still have it in these, their own little proprietary databases that need to move into a platform.

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Derek Cassese: I would say that there's I'd say that there's probably still a bunch of people that need to move, only cause they're a little

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Derek Cassese: concerned about moving to something new. But I mean it

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Derek Cassese: to be competitive in today's space. You really do need to be on a platform like this with its agility. And

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Derek Cassese: you know, and that's that's another thing I wanna touch on that I find really fascinating with salesforce. And what drew me to go work there for 5 years was the fact that

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Derek Cassese: you don't have to have, you know, 5,000 employees to use this software. If you, I mean, you can literally buy this software. Obviously, you have to pay for it. But I mean, you get the same. So if I'm a 4 person shop.

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Derek Cassese: I'm getting the same capabilities that a enterprise, you know, 20,000 employee customers getting. I'm getting the same bits. I'm getting the same software.

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Derek Cassese: so I find that fascinating.

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Andy Whiteside: Well, that kind of goes back to. Yeah. You get all the magic of this plus. It's the way it's done. As a you know, single environment with multiple instances, you know, instance, per customer or more allows it to be scalable for both the biggest of the big, but also for the small.

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Derek Cassese: Yep, and that was kind of the the driver. When you know, when we talk about AI is putting AI in the hands of everybody, not just the people that have. You know, the multi-million dollar budgets, and you know.

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Derek Cassese: thousands of employees. But let's let's let everybody have some of this stuff. Let's let everybody have a fair shot.

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Andy Whiteside: because I mean the reality of it is just like small business, United States it. It is the bigger business.

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Andy Whiteside: It's just carved up Chunk in a bunch of different instances. A bunch of different people.

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Andy Whiteside: Correct, Fred, any comments about the commerce point here.

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Fred Reynolds: No, I'm good. I enjoyed listening in all that. So nothing to add, I should say.

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Andy Whiteside: What about customer service? Are there salesforce tools for that?

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Derek Cassese: Yes, indeed. So I mean, that's really the true main, the true, probably most popular pieces from my perspective are sales, cloud and service cloud.

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Derek Cassese: and you know, this is where we've, you know, very similar to a service. Now, where you've got cases, you've got knowledge, base chat bots. You've got the ability to self service with web web web based front ends.

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Derek Cassese: You know, the the service service cloud is a full featured

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Derek Cassese: service solution. And it's built obviously right into right in the platform right next to Sales Cloud. And like, I said, if you think about this.

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Derek Cassese: you know with that right there in the platform, I now can see everything that the customer

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Derek Cassese: is doing from a service perspective. You know, I may have opportunities open but I'm also aware of issues. Is that no more do I get blindsided by stuff. You know, not knowing that they have cases of support cause it's a separate system.

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Andy Whiteside: If I go back to this whole thing. It all centers around the Crm. And if you go back to kind of this kind of comment, we all make all the time and in business. In the business world the customers always write. It's that customer centric approach

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Andy Whiteside: that everything comes from that makes sense for the platform to be constructed the way it is.

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Fred Reynolds: Freddie comments on this one. Well, I would say, just like what we talk about, and the building blocks. And you see the wheel that Derek talks about. I mean, if you really want to achieve really good customer experience and customer satisfaction, I mean, part of it is having that full view. So, having a customer service arm of this that feeds into it, that lets it know again, like Derek said, what is part of it integrated to this are really extremely important

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Fred Reynolds: part of it, and I will tell you I deployed all of this in a previous role for a specific customer set in Germany and did it all into in, and it worked very well together. Right? Be able to have that service side tied into the sales side, and everybody share that information across all channels made it very easy to use. Yeah.

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Andy Whiteside: So, based on my background and the background of Zintigro, the last conversation around services was was interesting. Now, of a sudden, I've got this comment. What about it there? Where does salesforce fit into an it world?

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Derek Cassese: Hello!

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Derek Cassese: Couple of different areas. The one that really, I think, is pertinent that we can talk about here is, it's, you know, essentially an an application platform as a service.

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Derek Cassese: So we've talked about sales, cloud service, cloud marketing, cloud

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Derek Cassese: commerce cloud. And you can also just buy a platform license.

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Derek Cassese: And what that means is you get the the platform

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Derek Cassese: without the pre-packaged pieces that those other clouds give you, and what I mean by that is, that in Sales Cloud you have an account.

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Derek Cassese: You have a contact. You have an opportunity.  in

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Derek Cassese: marketing, you know, in commerce, cloud, you may not have a account contact. You may have a customer, right? And so the data model shift based on the language that you use for what you're trying to solve. And it's all done for you. You can get the platform and build any application that you want.

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Derek Cassese: So, for example, I'll go outside the box here if you wanted to manage like a football team with salesforce. Then you would have player.

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Derek Cassese: You wouldn't have a you wouldn't have in a a a contact or a customer. It would be a player. Name of a player. Position for the player. Custom fields, are they? First string? Second string? Are they, you know? Have you signed a contract? All that stuff could be completely customized and managed online with the salesforce platform.

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Andy Whiteside: No. Do do you see salesforce growing in this this piece? Yeah, I mean, this is a, this is a pretty big. This is a pretty big area from a perspective of

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Derek Cassese: you know, applications. You know, online web applications. And, interestingly enough, you know. Sometimes you may not even notice that it's salesforce. Right? It's it's the back end of this is a salesforce app. But it's you know, you're accessing it through a website or something that you're you're not even really aware that it's back ended by salesforce, which is which is common.

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Derek Cassese: Because again, most people associate it with just Crm.

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Fred Reynolds: right there I have a question for you because you spent 5 years of salesforce. So I'm done. You know this from some of the customer conversations I have when people think about salesforce it, organizations even where I was, even though it the organization I was getting to pay for salesforce. We didn't really own it. We weren't the driver. It was a sales organization. So I'm seeing some of that training and other places, too. Do you think the days of salesforce kind of being perceived as being a sales and sales only tool

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Fred Reynolds: coming into it? Organizations to own the tool and use the tool and promote the tool? Or did you see different than that when you were working at salesforce?

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Derek Cassese: No, yeah. I mean, so a lot of the conversations of adopting salesforce, or from the business perspective.

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Derek Cassese: like a a lot of business, a business owner.

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Derek Cassese: the the it folks will get involved when it comes to like multi-factor authentication or integration with third party platforms and services.

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Derek Cassese: Encryption things like that. But I will say that with

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Derek Cassese: the movement of AI and large language models and and whatnot. II feel like it is going to be a little bit more involved from the perspective of securing corporate data.

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Derek Cassese: even more so than they have been. Just because, you know, now, we're actually

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Derek Cassese: putting AI out there to take a look and leverage corporate data for modeling and whatnot. So from that perspective, I do see them getting more involved. But I do. Still, II don't really. I still think that the ownership and the drive is mostly coming from the business still to from my perspective.

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Andy Whiteside: Well, in theory it always should. But IT kind of, you know, dictated and took over a lot of the technology platforms and things that happened and

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Andy Whiteside: the business driving it while it advises and tries to help secure it and make it more efficient, makes perfect sense to me.

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Fred Reynolds: But I think this articles kind of say that it organization should utilize it and gain them 18% decrease. Right? That's why it's going to be difficult for an It organization to to use it unless they really understand they have some ownership of it, and what it can do for them versus. Just look at it as a pure sales tool. That that was kind of the point. I would drive right? You have to get a CIO that understands how it can be used to other areas. And just maybe just a sales. Only.

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Derek Cassese: yeah. And it's and I'm sure you did this. I'm sure you did right. It's the platform consolidation effort you buy into one of these. It's okay. Well, wait a minute. We've got 2 or 3 things. Now do the same thing all right, and then you have to start saying that can salesforce do it. That should be top of mind, and if it can.

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Derek Cassese: then you look and see all right. Is it? Does that satisfy what we need? And you know you could have a couple of different application development platform products. What have you that you could fold in to put to the platform of salesforce? And now you're consolidating even more on the platform.

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Fred Reynolds: agreed. No, I love it

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Andy Whiteside: alright. Next section says, see an example of salesforce at work, Derek, I think this could be its own blog.

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Derek Cassese: Yeah, that one, that one we could, you know we could probably do.

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Derek Cassese: It's it's really like. So what sales, you know, storytelling right? This is a big part of.

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Derek Cassese: and if you've ever ha go to a a meeting with salesforce you know, it's the art of telling a story to kind of get the point across and how the products work. And this is about Loriel, who's been showcased in a lot of the dream forces and whatnot. And it's just showing

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Derek Cassese: all of these things coming together. For you know this, you know this company to

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Derek Cassese: satisfy all the customer needs, and you know, they touch on service sales, cloud marketing, etc. Through through this discussion. Yeah, maybe maybe we do that. Maybe tee that up and go through these one at a time and talk through

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Andy Whiteside: the different use cases and what they did with it.

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Derek Cassese: Yep

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Andy Whiteside: next. And next and almost last section says, what is salesforce best known for

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Derek Cassese: Yup. So we've touched on that a couple of times. But I would say that if you asked if you went out on the road.

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Derek Cassese: people would probably say, Oh, crn.

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Andy Whiteside: yeah.

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Derek Cassese:  and that's why, you know, II wanted to kind of talk about this, because, you know, there's a lot of people that probably don't realize

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Derek Cassese: how much, and we haven't even touched on all of it. But Crm is probably what it's best known, for it's also probably best known, for you know.

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Derek Cassese: being the kind of the leader in this space by a significant margin, as we saw at Dream Forest last week.

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Derek Cassese:  The other thing is that.

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Derek Cassese: you know Salesforce likes to talk about their 1 1 one model. and that's their philanthropic model where they

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Derek Cassese: they donate. You know, time product. to the community.

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Derek Cassese: And you know, for example, they've given, you know, they give nonprofits 10 free licenses.

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Derek Cassese:  of the software. They, you know, allow employees 58 h

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Derek Cassese: of community service. So that's another. You know. Th, this is, it's all about the community. It's all about the kind of culture that salesforce is cultivating with the product and the folks that use it. And it's really, you know, coming from somebody that's worked inside salesforce, you know it's

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Derek Cassese: infectious, as far as I can say is that you get customers that start a Br embracing this platform

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Derek Cassese: and the marketing that they've put around it with the characters and the you know, the the cartoon look and feel of trying to make something complicated. Not be complicated is, is really impressive from that perspective. Right?

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Andy Whiteside: Read any comments on this part.

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Fred Reynolds: No, I mean, you know you speak salesforce, everybody knows is Number one Crm and and has been. I think that's when it started. That's what it did. So no, for I think but started to understand more of what it's known for, too. And like they said, no generosity, they're given to nonprofits. The licenses use of that donation of time did not know that until recently. So that's really good. But yeah, definitely what it's done for Crm for sure.

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Andy Whiteside: Well, I'm gonna just repeat the Zintager Commercial from a little bit ago, and that is we. I'm I'm conflicted because I see all these other things we could do with it. And I wanna go do that. At the same time. I know that companies just like Zintigra is still is. It's under using the Crm functionality. And there's so much to be done there to help people get the true value they're getting. They're paying for out the tool just on the Crm side alone. So sales Cloud.

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Andy Whiteside: And then there's all the other things that are gonna happen with marketing cloud service cloud and AI, and so on and so forth. Just just super excited to have such a little frustrated that there's so many people struggling with something that's so powerful, but also see the opportunity to make a really good business right? Because we see, what is it known for? Okay, that's what's known for. But there's so many more things that can do. There's some more ways it can help you, and you own it, so utilize it right? And Derek just needs to help some of these people understand how to do that, because they just may not know.

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Fred Reynolds: Don't know what you don't know.

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Andy Whiteside: Yeah, I look at it like it's a it can box of Legos.

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Derek Cassese: and you're either the type of person that gets a new Lego set, lays everything out, gets the instructions, and does everything step by step, or you're the person that takes it out and just starts building some

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Derek Cassese: right? So you know, we can help with. I mean, the the both of those types of people need help with the salesforce platform, just from a perspective of. you know, understanding the ramifications of adding a custom object versus using a standard object, adding too many custom fields versus leveraging a related object. Things like that can really have an impact on the performance. And the you know the Usability.

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Andy Whiteside: Yep, yep. alright. Last one. And this is why is salesforce subsist with customers. And why are customers obsessed with salesforce? I added that second piece.

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Derek Cassese: yeah, like. So

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Derek Cassese: it it's really like that whole vision right? Of what they call the customer. 360 is the whole

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Derek Cassese: point of all of this. It's to. It's to build that

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Derek Cassese: end to end.

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Derek Cassese:  vision of your customer so that you can turn around and provide

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Derek Cassese: that personalized experience that they want.

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Derek Cassese: and with the tools.

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Derek Cassese: And you know all that we've talked about today. And there's, you know, even more from like analytics and AI and all that good stuff.

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Derek Cassese: those are the enablers to allow the customers to achieve that with their customers. Right? And but

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Derek Cassese: salesforce is

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Derek Cassese: hyper focused on that from a perspective of it's literally the first value in the value. You know it's it's trust customer success. right? It's the second value in their values. So yeah, they are. It is number one. Top of mind is about the customer.

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Andy Whiteside: Yeah, I love the. It's about the customer motion. I love the help that fact. It was born in the cloud, and they just got so far out in front of everybody else that everybody else is an afterthought. It seems like they had a slide last week. At some point it showed their market share and everybody else's. And it was. It was almost a joke. Where, you know, people are compared to where salesforce is, and yeah. Seems to have plenty of runway left

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Derek Cassese: Yup, I mean, and there's a whole ecosystem on top of the platform which we haven't even discussed. Maybe we to get into that next time they call the App Exchange. And I fo funny aside, real quick is that in in you'll hear this in the book. But you know Benny off was a good friends with Steve Jobs, and

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Derek Cassese: he actually owned the app store URL and gifted it to Steve Jobs when he created the iphone. So that was, it's pretty crazy when you think about like the impact. That that you know.

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Andy Whiteside: salesforce. And some of these big corporations like apple, etc., have had on what we do day to day. I thought that was a an interesting little tidbit from the book, so I'll I'll throw this to since into it seems like customers love salesforce. But almost every customer we talked to you wasn't happy with how they're using or how they rolled out salesforce.

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Derek Cassese: Yeah, it's it's that box of Legos. Right? It's easy. And you know, we didn't really get into the whole. No code. Low code concept by as well.

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Derek Cassese: of what this platform is strives to be declarative, and what I mean by that is point and click, not

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Derek Cassese: writing code. But like, I said before, right there's, you know, if you're not.

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Derek Cassese: if you're not trained up or educated on like the fundamentals of how the platform works, then you may not realize that just by adding, You know, 15 custom objects

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Derek Cassese: is is.

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Derek Cassese: and not a good practice. It will work, it will work no worries nothing wrong as far as it working, but because it works doesn't mean it's the right way to do it right. And we're getting into the whole best practice conversation there. And I think that's where a lot of the frustration occurs.

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Derek Cassese: And then I also think a lot of the frustration occurs is because a lot of partners out there will come in and say, What do you want us to do? And somebody says, I wanna take 3 rights to take a left. It'll say, okay.

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Derek Cassese: not the most efficient way to go left, though.

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Derek Cassese: Well, no, they don't. They don't tell them that they're okay. Pay me to make those 3 rights happen for you. Yeah.

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Andy Whiteside: push back. They just

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Andy Whiteside: they say, Okay, and then another partner comes in and says, Well, you know, why do you make right hand terms? Make a bunch of those like, where are you going? What's the point?

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Derek Cassese: Yep.

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Andy Whiteside: yeah. Alright, Fred, any any more comments on this section here.

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Fred Reynolds: Well, I think it's great. It lies with Zintigo story customer first.

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Andy Whiteside: and then and then I look down, Derek, and there's this last section, which is a whole. Another topic, section, or another element, or another degree of topics we could cover, learn more about the power of AI Crm and trust does sound like future podcasts? Oh, yeah.

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Derek Cassese: yeah, I mean, we've we've only scratched the surface. I mean, there is. you know, there's a ton of areas that we're gonna explore.

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Derek Cassese:  you know, data cloud is another one that was announced at Dreamforce this year. So we'll we'll talk about that. And why, that's important

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Derek Cassese: analytics. Why, that's important. Tying it all together, though again, it's it's tying it all together on the platform is the key

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Andy Whiteside: Yup, and we're here to help do that. So guys, I appreciate the time today. And Derek, hope we accomplished our goal of trying to simplify salesforce for people, including our own internal people as well as customers, that we'll be working with anything else to leave us with before we let you go.

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Derek Cassese: No, I think that's I think that's a wrap for that one.

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Andy Whiteside: Yeah, alright, Fred, anything we should cover. No, I'm just excited to participate and listen to the rest that that come out looks like there's a lot to cover. II do like the fact that salesforce seems to have a ton of blogs we can talk about. That's gonna be limitless. There's no lacking of that. Absolutely.

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Andy Whiteside: Alright. Well, we'll do it again in 2 weeks. Thank you for your time.