Unlocking Salesforce for PE: Interview with Salesforce Ben

Ben McCarthy [00:05:02]:

It was, it was fairly quick actually. I think I was, I think I was kind of right place, right time, a little bit lucky. I think when I started out, Salesforce were doing about 3 billion in revenue and then now they’re doing about 33. So you know, the ecosystem really exploded over that time. So it did get traction quite quickly actually, I think because I was consistent. I was, I was no, no, by no means an SEO expert, but I was paying attention to SEO, you know, trying to rank for keywords, that kind of thing. Just trying to be a bit smart about it. So yeah, I was just trying to be smart about it. Write stuff people actually interested in. I was trying to be a bit Buzzfeed about it as well. Like I don’t know if you ever read Buzzfeed, but it was like Listicles, you know, eight Cool. You know, I remember writing this one that was like sounds so cheesy now but like kind of six things that make you a kick ass admin or something like that. You know, it’s just, you know, I thought the posts were pretty, they had a cheesy clickbaity title but some of the content was, that was, was pretty good. So trying to do unique things like that. You know, when the site started it had a kind of funny super hit. It was Superman logo with his kind of fist out flying with my face like cartoons on. You know, it’s cheesy, funny, a bit unique. So it did get traction quite, quite quickly. And I remember, so I started it in April 2014. I remember in May 2015 was London World Tour and I was on the booth with Conga. So I was doing booth work and people were coming up to me then and kind of recognizing me, which was a little bit nerve wracking but very cool at the same time saying oh, your sites helped me so much. So it did gather steam quite quickly. And it was definitely down to being a little bit lucky. Right place, right time, but also being smart with creating the right type of content but also being unique about it as well. You know, I’d always recommend any content creator nowadays to really, you know, what is your USP in a sea of Content creators. How are you going to stand out from another one? And that’s why I see so many people now creating AI generated content. I’m just like, no, you know, to.

Jeff Williams [00:07:21]:

Think 23 people, you know, are employed now, literally because of this sort of, you know, gap or this opportunity, you know, in creating content. I’m curious, you started to get recognized that at events and stuff. Salesforce acknowledge you there any sort of, you know, relationship there?

Ben McCarthy [00:07:44]:

Yeah, yeah, no, we’ve. So I’m a Salesforce MVP, so I’ve kind of. I got that in 20. It must have been 2015. I got that so near. Just about a year after I started, which I was ecstatic about. So I’ve been linked up with Salesforce kind of, you know, officially for a while. We’ve been. Because we’re classed as media now. We get. We work with the Salesforce press team, so we get forwarded press releases which are going to be released, you know, as we get the news ahead of time, just so we can prepare content, write content, which is nice. And yeah, we have good relationships with Salesforce product managers. We’ll often speak to them and say, what features are they working on? What’s new and exciting, what content can we work on together? We have something very exciting coming up on this Friday in two days, because we’re going to go do some filming in the Salesforce tower in London, which is just down the road. So we’re going to go film what it’s like to be in the Salesforce tower, film some, interview some Salesforce employees and things like that. So, yeah, really good relationship with Salesforce. They’re a big part of ours, I gotta tell you.

Jeff Williams [00:08:58]:

I think, you know, I was sort of one of those folks that probably found you pretty organically, you know, how to do this, how to do that. It’s really cool to see that you’ve built a real business out of it and you’ve got the sort of formal relationships with Salesforce, you know, talking to the product managers and things like that, because it would have been easy just to sort of, you know, be a place where there were some tutorials. But those are two very different things. So hats off to you. When was the first time you heard the name Salesforce? I was thinking about this this morning and I think I’ve pinpointed mine. I want to know if. If you kind of recall that.

Ben McCarthy [00:09:41]:

I do, actually. So it’s quite funny. I. I got a. So I. I graduated from college in information systems, which is perfect for Salesforce. It’s basically half computer science, half business, mostly business. Less, less coding, you know, so it’s perfect to go into Salesforce and I, I did get a job becoming a IT consultant and it was starting in September of 2012 and I was just telling people I was going to be an IT consultant, but I didn’t know what I was actually going to be doing. But I had a few months before I started this job. So I actually got a job with Yelp, who you probably know very well, but people in the UK would probably know TripAdvisor more. But Yelp’s big in the US so it’s like a cold calling, cold calling job. And I was actually using Salesforce for that, which was quite funny. And then, and then I quit and then I got a job at this IT consultancy where I found out on the first day I can be working with this tool called Salesforce. And then it kind of all clicked together and I already kind of knew what it could be used for. So it slotted in quite well when I joined that role. And like, honestly, it just kind of fit like a glove, the software, with my skills, you know, I didn’t really know what a real job out in the real world meant or what being an IT consultant meant, but when I found out I could kind of build systems without coding and everything, you know, I knew databases, fields made sense to me, relationships made sense to me, objects made sense to me. So I did learn it quite quickly.

Jeff Williams [00:11:17]:

Which was quite nice to hear a name like that. I mean, I was thinking for me it was probably, I can’t remember now either, 2005, 2006, I went to work, as some of the listeners will know, out of school at a venture capital fund of funds. And I was sort of a junior guy on the investment team coming in in the fall and there had been a summer intern who had worked to take what was a newly implemented Salesforce instance by a third party consultant and start kind of entering all of this, this data we have had at the time. And the data was primarily like details on some of the venture capital funds that we were invested in and then the information about the underlying holdings of those funds. So, you know, what was the company’s name, where was it headquartered, what sort of sector is it in, you know, how much is the fund invested, things like that. And it’s sort of ironic, I suppose, because we’re going to go down this little thread here about, you know, kind of the power of Salesforce. But, you know, some of the things about, you know, UX UI is one we’ll talk about. Anyway, my rec. My first recollection is a visual one of watching this intern sit at a computer, what was to me clearly a website, and click through all these screens. And that was, you know, I guess Salesforce called it the aloha. So it was like very square, lots of, you know, drop shadows, just hideous gradients, things like that. And at the time, it was perfectly fine. But, you know, I. I recall being like, wow, that’s a website. You know, and so that was ironically, like, you know, the first visual, the first recollection I have of. Of being introduced to Salesforce. And of course, you know, spent five years going on to, you know, invest in software as a service companies and that, you know, that whole theme was mainstream. And of course, actually, you know, in many cases used Salesforce as a proxy for how we would value certain companies and things like that. But in any case, I suppose it was right then where I was like, wow, this is, you know, pretty interesting. Again, I emphasize that it was a website, right, because it wasn’t 2005, 2006. It was not super mainstream to use a browser as software. And of course, that changed quickly. But. And then the other one was like, I had to watch him and try to figure out what he was doing because he was leaving. You know, he was a summer intern. He was done, and somebody had to figure out what he was doing there. He was entering a lot of data and of course, then all of the clicks and stuff like that. I had no idea I would go on to have such big feelings about the Salesforce UXUI and clicks. But in that moment, it was one where it actually made it difficult to keep track of exactly what he was doing. So it was a little bit overwhelming. Of course, you know, we fast forward. The story is written for us. You know, to your point, just since 2012, you know, 11 times over that Salesforce has grown revenue and so that, you know, we could fill hours and hours of podcast tape just about that when we won’t. But I. I am curious to get your take. Just kind of, you know, perhaps, you know, your parents, your parents, friends, your grandparents have asked you this sort of thing before. You know, what do you do? And you tell them, you know, Salesforce, Ben, and then they ask the question, well, what is Salesforce? Like, if they asked you that today, I’m curious, kind of like what Your view of salesforce.com is today. How would you describe it? What would you say about it?

Ben McCarthy [00:15:17]:

I mean, I think it really is kind of, you know, the hub for most businesses now. You know, I mean, it’s many things to many different people, right? Like if you’re a tableau professional or something, Salesforce is just this random company that’s come and acquired your precious tableau and you might not like, I know tableau people don’t have that much involvement with Salesforce. Sometimes it’s quite segmented still. But I think the way that Salesforce, their kind of acquisition strategy and how they’ve grown over the years is just really, really smart. I think they’re almost kind of ahead of their time in a way because some things like they started multi cloud in, I don’t know when service cloud was born, but marketing cloud, they purchased in 2013, I think. So that was when multi cloud properly started. Get your sales with us, get your service, get your marketing. And that was 10 years ago. And people are still kind of trying to adopt multi cloud, move other systems on Salesforce. So everything’s on one platform. And I know some people are seeing kind of consolidation now. People have after the kind of SaaS boom over the last few, few years, people are using like, there’s some crazy stat. Salesforce like came out with like some enterprise businesses using like 3000 systems or I can’t 300 or 3000. But anyway, crazy, crazy number of systems. And now Salesforce have all these products, some of which they bought, some of which they’ve created organically. You know, one for example is like high velocity sales. I don’t know if you know that one, but you know, they compete with people like outreach and sales Loft. But sales have it. Salesforce have it on their own platform. So a lot of people consolidating software at the moment, they want to get rid of stuff. And I think Salesforce should hopefully do quite well from that. Just because people want to simplify things, they want to integrate less with other systems, have everything on the same platform, even though Salesforce isn’t necessarily all on one platform, but it does integrate quite easily together. So, yeah, no, I think they’ve done very well. And, and I mean, I, you know, we’ll. We’ll see what happened with that. As much as people like to kind of try and bring doom and gloom to people, like, if you don’t learn AI now, you’re going to be out of the job next month. You know, I think we are very, very early days, but I think what Salesforce have positioned with their kind of, it’s kind of like flow or lightning app builder for AI, you know, it’s a declarative system where you can set up prompts, you can connect to different models and you know, we’re yet to see too many real life examples of that, but I know there are a bunch out there. So yeah, I think they’ve positioned themselves very well. And I said in one of my blog posts recently, you know, we might salesforce have slowed down revenue growth quite significantly across most products. You know, sales and service cloud in particular. Data still growing quite fast. Data cloud’s growing very fast. But you know, it might give them a big second wind because they do seem to have a market leading AI.

Jeff Williams [00:18:24]:

You know the, there was so much said about AI and people, you know, felt the need to react and declare stuff. And you know, I was thought a lot about this and it was sort of like there’s going to be a lot of nonsense in that, right. And there’s going to be people who strategically are sort of, you know, motivated to and rewarded by just blabbing something out there about AI but not have it make any sense. And then there are going to be people that are sort of not as quick on the trigger with a reaction but are a little bit more thoughtful and when they have something to say, they’ll, they’ll have something that’s meaningful. I mean, I think if you’re salesforce, you, you straddled that line. You had to react and sort of leave the perception with the world that you’re sort of on the leading edge of that. But I also think that they’ve, you know, been thoughtful on the stuff that they’ve done and they’ve taken their time with and to your point, really impressive. They’re in a, they were in a great position to lead there and I think they’ve executed pretty well even if, you know, they weren’t the first, first ones to have something in front of other people. I think it’s, you know, at the end of the day a little bit more meaningful at least to me to see what’s the substance of what people are saying about AI and what are they doing with it versus just having a reaction of like oh well, you can, you know, use a ChatGPT bot like on our public facing website, you know, like cool, nobody cares, you know.

Ben McCarthy [00:19:52]:

Yeah, no, yeah, I agreed. I think it is going to be really exciting. But just a way I’ve been a little bit of a kind of AI pessimist kind of over the past year or so just because like the hype was just crazy and of course ChatGPT was super cool. You know, I was using it the other day to kind of, I don’t know if you’ve tried out the new kind of voice and speak thing so you can speak to it and then it replies in a very scarily, eerily human voice replies back to you. And I was like brainstorming business ideas and saying, you know, hey, what was the, what’s the, what’s the disadvantages of this current platform out there? And you know, would this business idea work to compete with it? You know, it’s, you know, it’s still very generic, but it was a good conversation I had with ChatGPT, so very impressive. But it’s just the way people are over hyping it and, you know, these things are going to take time. You know, enterprises aren’t going to implement these things overnight. It’s going to be a, you know, there’s going to be a lot of testing, trial and error, experimenting to see what actually works. But then at the same time, a lot of surveys that I’ve seen are saying people, customers are basically going to throw money at this stuff because they don’t want to. They don’t want to, you know, lag behind their competitors. So it might, the hype might create this kind of cycle of spending on stuff that might actually bring value, but it might.

Jeff Williams [00:21:20]:

So let’s go back a little bit. So you kind of get into no, Salesforce and clearly powerful, like you said, the declarative stuff. And I mean, I mentioned this very briefly, but I implied a lot more. I think what is so powerful about Salesforce is the fact that you don’t, you know, have to be a computer science person. You don’t even really have to know to code, and yet you can build meaningful, you know, business applications and get them, you know, to market quickly. And so, you know, I guess I’m a little torn about this, right, Because I think that my viewpoint about this is that that is in large part what has led to Salesforce’s success. I mean, at the end of the day, had they been constrained by an ecosystem of implementers and integrators, that where that wasn’t the case, then of course they would not have gotten into the accounts that they did and certainly as quickly as they did. At the same time, you know, I think that there are people who have controversial and conflicted views about salesforce.com in terms of their own personal experience of being a user. And that is to say that if you’ve used salesforce.com, you have an opinion on this matter, even if you don’t know it. So, you know, we’ll help you unpack it here on Preferred Return. In some cases, people absolutely adore Salesforce for virtually everything, right? Its ability to be deployed quickly, its flexibility, its scale, security, reliability, all those sorts of things. And then they’re sort of indifferent perhaps about the user experience and whether or not they enjoy the way the application is laid out and the ways that they interact with it. What’s interesting, I think, about, you know, the universe of Salesforce users is that there are many of the many people who have really big feelings about that specific part on the UX front still feel the way those that other group does in terms of, like, adore it for its, you know, scale and, you know, ability to integrate and its flexibility and all those sorts of things. And now over, you know, whatever, however long it’s been, 20 years or something, you know, I think that the sort of timeline is now long enough that. That people are, you know, making decisions to. To stick with Salesforce, not to, you know, to go with something else because their. Their feelings are so strong about this matter. And so that there’s a lot there and we’ll kind of, you know, take it out one by one. There are a lot of folks there have been since the origin of Salesforce and the ecosystem has only grown in, you know, compounded fashion. I think Salesforce, Ben, is evidence of that, of people out there with varying degrees of experience of implementing Salesforce. Not necessarily like technically formally trained backgrounds and experience, but, you know, definitely cooking with gas and able to make clicks and relying upon Salesforce, Ben, to be able to do some pretty sophisticated stuff that kind of straddles that line of don’t know a thing about code versus, you know, take it to the next level and do some coding. And so, you know, you’ve been doing this for a long time. I mean, what would you say about that? There’s a bunch of people out there that have made this company in large part what it is because of their ability to deploy it at the same time. It’s, you know, like I joke sometimes if software engineers were civil engineers, like, man, be really dicey, right? Bridges, you’d think maybe twice about going over them each time. And so when we’re talking about, you know, folks that aren’t even as classically trained as, you know, a lot of software engineers. So, you know, I think that’s a part of Salesforce. I think you have to embrace that it’s served it really well. And in some cases it maybe done a little damage, but certainly you, you’ve seen that in many ways. It’s sort of like there are these little Salesforce implementer zombies and Salesforce, Ben is doing the world a favor service to help get these zombies pointed in the right direction. The zombies are gonna be there one way or the other, right? And it’s actually probably a good thing.

Ben McCarthy [00:26:14]:

But yeah, it’s a really interesting topic and you know, there is a stereotype out there that people don’t like using Salesforce. You know, salespeople around the world unite about not not wanting to use Salesforce. I guess there’s probably a few things at play. I think firstly, Salesforce is so powerful and you can do anything with it. It does mean you could over customize it, overcomplicate it. You can create processes that aren’t needed. I used to run a Salesforce consultancy and we grew it to 25 people. We were fairly big, had a lot of customers, a lot of SMB customers and projects didn’t go well all the time. A lot of them did. But it was so dependent on a perfect process, perfect requirements, gathering per process, perfectly understanding their, their goals and what their real pain points were, what their needs were, passing that all over to the, to the implementers to do it properly and building in best practice. And you know, obviously there’s a million and one ways to do one thing. So depending on which way that consultant wants to do it, you know, it can, it can get a bit complicated and then you’ve got training, training is a huge part of it. You know, if, if people aren’t on board, you haven’t got executive buy in, you know, you can get some sales managers who are, you know, resistant to using it and if they’re resistant to using it, and the salespeople are going to be resistant to using it. And then what? And then you’ve got ongoing maintenance as well. Right. Like we used to work with a lot of customers who had it implemented five years ago, didn’t get an admin, didn’t have any kind of managed services from a consultancy. It’s just left there, stagnated. You know, some of the crazy reports and dashboards people build with no experience just look terrible. And you know, people think it is Salesforce, the platform. So, you know, it’s not an easy tool to work with. Everything needs to kind of run perfectly and you need to have constant maintenance and someone, you know, you need like a sales ops person, rev ops person kind of analyzing processes, making sure users are happy, making sure Those, you know, things are being implemented and ultimately, you know, Salesforce is there to make you more money, make you more money, make customers happier, make your users more productive. And if it’s not doing that, then it really needs to be analyzed. Projects need to be spun up to work out what’s actually going on. And I think just to kind of bring it back to the here and now, AI and data quality are coming into play. AI isn’t going to be any good if your data’s rubbish. And data quality has always been a big issue on Salesforce.

Jeff Williams [00:28:57]:

These are all things that, you know. Well, the bulk of them are not, you know, specific to Salesforce. I mean, this is the reality of like business applications generally, right? Especially when you’re talking about applications that are as core and as mission critical to, to businesses, especially large ones, as CRM is. And so, you know, in many ways that’s just the reality of committing and investing in business applications. Salesforce still has that very unique and differentiated position of a whole ecosystem, time to market, flexibility, all those sorts of things. And so I think in many ways it gets this bad rap as if to imply that there’s this world out there where you can commit and investment in a meaningful mission critical business application. And it’ll just be, you know, apple pie and roses, you know, there’ll never be any sort of issue. And so, you know, that that’s the sort of flip side of this dynamic is that because so many people have used Salesforce because it’s so prolific, a lot of people have, you know, controversial opinions about the sort of user experience. Whereas, like, you know, many of us have never actually interacted as a user with like NetSuite. But it’s been around, you know, I think even longer. Right. So it’s a, I think a position that Salesforce is probably proud to sort of be in because it’s actually a position of that demonstrates their strength and yet they’re also very committed to, you know, kind of working through that. And like, say, you know, my first interaction with it was a couple of major UX changes back. And so they’ve definitely, you know, done wonders to do that stuff. But also, you know, part of the challenge here and where I want to go next is just the inherent flexibility that Salesforce offers of not being able to design, you know, very purposeful and thoughtful user experiences and user interfaces for every single Persona in every, single, you know, segment of every single market, you know, out there. And so that’s where there’s a lot of, you know, emphasis on the ecosystem to. To go with that. And so, you know, on that point, we chatted prior to this call here and talked a little bit. You know, I think that one of the things that Alvia would act as a witness to is that for whatever reason, not because we chose, but for whatever reason, the traditional Salesforce, especially the sales cloud model and the workflows, you know, just don’t line up all that well with how, like, private asset managers raise capital for their funds and then ultimately deploy it. And again, that’s just kind of one of those things. And I’ve been fascinated over the years to be working in, like, the nuance that distinguishes the two in terms of what we’ve built at Alvia, which is a repeatable model that has all of this, you know, stuff. You don’t have to rely upon communicating requirements perfectly to somebody who doesn’t have a lot of context for the industry and how the industry works. But I think that that is this thing that has emerged very clearly over the years, especially as the result of people who have committed and invested in Salesforce, maybe haven’t found a ton of success. Maybe users, you know, get frustrated with what it’s like to use the application and in many cases kind of commit back to the Salesforce ecosystem and say, maybe there’s a specific partner that understands this a little better and therefore the sort of implementation and configuration of the application will be different. In our case, we’re a, you know, OEM ISV provider that has pre built, you know, the sort of model to the tune of, you know, nearly 100 objects and all sorts of field and code and things like that. Because we come from the industry. But what would you say about that? I mean, it’s like when you’re kind of new to a Salesforce consultancy, it’s like, you know, you learn Salesforce cloud and you learn, you know, object models and things like that. What you don’t know that you don’t know at that point is what experience will bring you. But it’s sort of like, you know, not everything truly is as simple kind of as an opportunity. And I think sometimes the sort of temptation is for, hey, let’s go buy Sales Cloud and then hire somebody. And it’s like, oh, let’s start with opportunities. What’s your experience with that? I mean, it’s pretty nuanced in certain industries, maybe not all of them, but certainly in this one.

Ben McCarthy [00:33:54]:

I mean, I would probably go as far as to say it probably is nuanced in every single industry. I remember When I was first starting my consultancy in 2016, and one of the first bit of advice is I got, when I went out for some drinks with a sales ae, was like, you need to niche down now because we are, you know, and they had just started those conversations, I think back in 2016, they were starting to verticalize the AE teams and stuff like that. And after going out to the market and trying to sell into some businesses, it’s very clear that if you have industry experience, you just bring so much more value to the project and to the client. We used to work in private equity and VCs and it’s very different to selling widgets or something like that. I remember when I was in a meeting with a private equity company and I was showing them like a sales path, you know, you can add in like tips in opportunity stages and stuff like that. And I was like, oh yeah, you know, you can add in tips for your salespeople. And the woman just looked at me and just went, ben, our salespeople don’t need any tips. They’re extremely senior. Okay, my bad. But you know, it’s just like, you know, that’s just a silly thing, but it was just like, you know, things like that and just ways of working and, you know, what’s important to different businesses. I think if you put a great consultant with financial service experience and a great consultant from some other industry and put them both on a financial services project, the one from the consultant who’s never worked on it is going to be a lot worse. It really is, because they haven’t made mistakes in other projects, seen what works in other projects. So I think that’s just a fact. And I think it’s even more emphasized, by the way, that Salesforce have acquired Velocity and they’ve got all their, their different clouds.

Jeff Williams [00:35:47]:

I mean, these ecosystems take time to evolve. I was talking with my niece over Easter the other day and she’s telling me she’s learning about ecosystems and fascinated by the complexity of how they evolve. And so this one too, in the sense that you got to get all those folks out there with skills that don’t line up with the traditional computer science, software engineering, get them, you know, just going and trained. And Salesforce, Ben, comes along and is enabling these people to do amazing things for customers. And then there’s this evolution of like specialization, right? And it takes firms, companies sort of maybe having worked with a consultant and realizing what didn’t work and where the, where there wasn’t experience and expertise in kind of deploying that in order to create opportunities for people with the specialization. Certainly that’s the, you know, a big part of the story of all VO2, but it’s actually pretty fascinating. You know, certainly cannot say that there would have been a better, you know, path for Salesforce. I think it was working out really quite well for them. Just get it out there, get it into people’s hands. People will learn the evolutions will of the ecosystem will create specialization and experience and stuff like that. That then the same folks will, you know, double down on that, will, you know, evolve on its own. It’s a pretty fascinating thing. I think Salesforce, Ben, is a testament to that of how many people out there, you know, could not. Did not have the experience, could not find the resources elsewhere to be able to do these sorts of things that help perpetuate and grow the ecosystem. Is that a fair take to have about your story and your business? I mean, it, like you said, right, right. Right place, right time and really well executed. But you know, that, that, that’s kind of the reality of the ecosystem. It’s a fascinating story. Is it fair?

Ben McCarthy [00:37:54]:

Yeah, no, I def. I definitely think so. I. I think, I mean, to your point about niches, it’s something we’re writing a lot about now at the moment. The job market is something we’ve written about a lot and it’s very clear that those with niches are really standing out and not really struggling at the moment because the Salesforce job market is a bit saturated. And yeah, we have grown alongside the Salesforce ecosystem every time Salesforce has acquired a different company. It’s given us more to write about.

Jeff Williams [00:38:26]:

Just from. From your viewpoint and your experience with Salesforce, Ben, with, you know, being sort of attached to Salesforce over the years, like what. What gets you most excited these days? A handful of them. I mean, is it this stuff that they’re doing with AI? Is it. You know, I think one thing we hear about quite a bit versus non Salesforce competitors in our market is like. And which we take for granted is like the, you know, Salesforce or. Yeah, well, Salesforce is integration with Outlook and the whole ecosystem of opportunities there. I know, you know, you did some. Saw an interview recently with our friends at Affinity who build an outstanding Salesforce integrated plugin for Outlook. And in fact, we actually partner on that. We think it’s great. Sort of a testament to that. But you know, what. What are these sort of things, you know, given your history and evolution, like what. What do you stop and be like, wow, this is really Cool. Or really, really powerful. Really differentiated. Still a, you know, sort of hallmark of what Salesforce is. Features, you know, whatever it may be.

Ben McCarthy [00:39:43]:

I need to preface this by saying that I’m not involved in the technical, kind of technical side of Salesforce much anymore. But I, but obviously I pay attention to everything that’s going on, but I, you know, I think top five have to be flow for obvious reasons. You know, Salesforce have made it so ridiculously powerful now you can do so much with it and it’s enabling admins like ever, like never before. The problem is it’s got a high, it’s got a quite a high barrier to entry in terms of learning. It’s definitely not easy, but I think when you get, when you get to a point where you can learn it, you’re almost as powerful as a developer. You know, developers are still going to be needed for Apex and you know, Lightning web components. But yeah, it’s got to be AI stuff. You know, it’s, I think it’s going to be, I think it’s going to be a slow burner. If you compare it something like. And my third was going to be Data Cloud. You know, Data Cloud is very exciting. CDPs is something that I’ve only just looked into, but I think it’s clear they are the future. You know, we are, we are already looking to implement CDPs. CDPs inside the Salesforce, Ben, to better understand our audience. You know, what they’re interested in, what web pages are they going on. It’s not just about what your name is, what your email address is anymore. It’s how are you interacting with brands so we can better target you with information that you’re actually interested in. But Data Cloud is running at 400 million in recurring revenue at the moment. And it was only, I mean, I think it was Crux originally, which was acquired about eight years ago and it’s had a few different names like cdp, some other stuff. No, what was it? Genie. Genie. And now it’s been renamed to Data Cloud. It’s growing at like 100% year on year or something. So massive. And you know, will we see that from AI the, you know, Einstein, you know, I, I doubt we’ll see growth that fast, but you know, I mean, hopefully it will be that, that would be amazing. And AI and dataglow go hand in hand because the more data you’ve got about your customers, the better you can personalize the generative outputs or the summarization. Something to add specifically in AI, I would say, is You’ve got like Copilot, which is the chatbot. You’ve got Prompt Builder which is building the templated prompts to do the same things for the same users, craft a sales email, something like that. And then you’ve got Model Builder which allows you to connect different models, so different LLMs to different prompts. So it means that if you’ve got a specific prompt which needs a very specific set of data, instead of connecting it to OpenAI GPT 3.0 or 4.0 which is very generic, a dump of the entire Internet, you can go to a financial services LLM which is specifically built for the private equity industry to do XYZ and you can connect that to that prompt which is going to carry out something very specific. So yeah, those are a few things actually. One more just to add on. Salesforce have recently released Marketing Cloud Growth, which is a product built on the core Salesforce platform. So Pardot, now called Marketing Cloud Account Engagement is off platform. Marketing Cloud itself, you know, exact target that was acquired 10 years ago is off platform. So Marketing Cloud Growth is built on platform and it utilizes flows and features like that. So you know, we write a post going, is this a HubSpot killer? Because people love HubSpot because it is really user friendly, it is easy to connect to other systems. But if there’s a kind of HubSpot on the Salesforce platform, Marketing Cloud Growth is completely new.

Jeff Williams [00:43:30]:

Um, super cool. You know, it is really fascinating to, to hear your story, having the viewpoint that you’ve had in building a business again. I mean I’m, I’m just sort of fascinated by the fact that 23 people, you know, have, have jobs and you’re having your 10 year celebration in London next week. That’s going to be a good time. They not only have jobs, they probably have a lot of fulfillment working for you and doing this. And to think of sort of all of the things that went into making that so, and Salesforce’s role in that, it’s pretty incredible. And you know, and yet we’re starting to talk still about all of the things that are ahead of, ahead of it as a company and the opportunities like you mentioned, super cool stuff. And you know, the other thing I was going to say just real quick to kind of wrap us up here is, you know, we, we hear this sort of UI UX thing obviously, you know, and I have the, the views on it and the feelings that I do. It’s clear that people feel this way, you know, not just me and you know, the ecosystem has evolved to the point where the ability to sort of go specifically into solving that problem are also there. And they’re in part provided by Salesforce at the platform level and in part provided by, you know, third parties. And the ecosystem, the partners that are in and around Salesforce to, again, ultimately with all of these things, allow folks to be able to get in there, solve specific problems like, well, let’s clean up this UX UI thing. And that’s a bit of a plug. Look out for some announcements from Altvia here shortly on some really exciting stuff we’ve done there on UxUI, but just a fascinating story, man. I’m really grateful that you took a minute to kind of walk us through this. I really enjoyed it. And when you were talking about flows, I’ll tell you, Salesforce Ben was. I too, haven’t done a ton of super technical stuff there, but flows, like you said, pretty intimidating for a while. And the thing that made it less so and got me into it was Salesforce Ben. So a sort of bunch of things in parallel and some interconnectedness here. Really cool to hear your story, man. Congratulations on everything related to Salesforce Ben.

Ben McCarthy [00:46:00]:

Yeah, thank you so much, Jeff. Pleasure to be here. Really good chat.

Jeff Williams [00:46:04]:

Thanks for everything you’re doing. Tell your team thanks. And there are real people out here, you know, that, getting into jobs and learning a lot from you, so it’s. We’re all grateful. And thanks again for joining me, man.

Ben McCarthy [00:46:16]:

All right, cheers, Jeff. Thanks a lot.