The Salesforce Career Show
The podcast dedicated to helping you HIRE, GET HIRED and SOAR HIGHER in the SALESFORCE ecosystem.
Enjoy these live recordings of The Salesforce Career Show from X Spaces and YouTube's JoshForce. A guest + AMA format hosted by Josh Matthews, founder of Salesforce Staffing, LLC, Joshforce and The Expand Exchange and Vanessa Grant, Dreamforce speaker, 9X certified BA, consultant and social media darling. Recordings are 3x per month.
The Salesforce Career Show
Advancing Rev Ops, Sales Strategies, and AI - A Focus On Fin Serv
Prepare to unlock the secrets of the Salesforce ecosystem with our esteemed guests, industry veterans Fred Cadena and Anna Papas, as well as our cherished regulars, Josh Matthews and Vanessa Grant. This episode promises a trove of insights as we dissect Salesforce products like Financial Services Cloud and Marketing Cloud, and delve into the game-changing Velocity acquisition—revolutionizing industry cloud specialization. Anna doesn't hold back as she shines a light on the crucial role of personalized marketing in banking, while we collectively ponder the hurdles and future of financial services within Salesforce amid privacy concerns and a fluctuating economy.
Imagine a world where the strategic goals of financial institutions blend seamlessly with the prowess of AI, a world we bring to life in our vibrant discussion. Banking and AI advancements take center stage as we share personal anecdotes that underscore the significance of tailored customer engagement strategies. Our guests peel back the layers of Salesforce's Einstein features, exploring their potential while maintaining the sanctity of data privacy. We also breach the topic of generative AI's role in marketing, emphasizing the importance of pristine, consolidated data for the most effective AI deployment.
As our conversation unfolds, we connect the dots between marketing and sales, drawing inspiration from how juggernauts like IBM and Cognizant have reimagined their strategies. Discover how Marketing Cloud has transformed client interaction, and weigh in on the perennial debate: should sales precede marketing or vice versa? We spare no details as we confront the challenges Salesforce Account Executives face in a market brimming with competition, and we uncover the interviewing nuances that can make or break a candidate's chances. Closing the loop, we highlight the ascent of Revenue Operations, a vital element in harmonizing sales, marketing, and customer success for sustainable organizational growth.
All right, and now the number one audio program. Whatever Salesforce career show, here we go, let's rock it.
Announcer:And now the number one audio program that helps you to hire, get hired and soar higher in the Salesforce ecosystem. It's the Salesforce career show with Josh Matthews and Vanessa Grant Welcome everybody, my name is Josh.
Josh Matthews:I'm here with co-host Vanessa Grant and a couple of guests today, including Fred Cadena. You know, fred, he's a regular on the show and we also have Anna Pappas. Fred, go ahead, give us your quick 10-second introduction Then we're going to jump right in there with you, anna. We're going to talk all sorts of things today marketing, ai, finserv. It's going to be a great convo. Go ahead, fred.
Fred Cadena:Hey, josh, thanks so much for having me on the show. Love the podcast. My name is Fred Pavetta Been in and around the Salesforce ecosystem for about 16 years.
Josh Matthews:All of that time in financial services and excited to talk about the intersection of the two today. Fantastic. And what he didn't say is he's also the host of Banking on Disruption, where FinServ and banking and AI and tech meet. It's a great program. If you haven't listened to it, make sure that you like and subscribe. All right, Anna, you're up next. Who are you? What are you all about?
Anna Papas:Yeah, hi everyone, anna Pappas. I am a global sales and marketing leader. I have been in Salesforce ecosystem just shy of 15 years, so Fred's beat me by about a year. I have been in financial services probably the last 10 years from an industry standpoint, but I've also been, you know, an actual. I've worked at HSBC, capital One as well as the payment technology, so I sort of bring a little bit of both client side as well as consulting side and yeah, that's my story and I'm sticking to it.
Josh Matthews:I like it. Okay, and Vanessa, go ahead and give us the quick intro on you. I mean, most people know who you are, but go ahead and do it anyway.
Vanessa Grant:I am Vanessa Grant. I've been in the ecosystem for 14 years now and I am the product owner and manager for the Salesforce platform for a fintech company, mosaic. But my heart has always been in business analysis and I'm currently working on getting my next meeting together for the Salesforce virtual trailblazer community group.
Josh Matthews:Fantastic, good for you. And on the panel today we have Peter Ganza. I said it correctly. This time We've got Janine Marquardt. The two of you with your last names, my gosh. So you guys are free to pipe up anytime you like. My name is Josh Matthews. I run the salesforcerecruitercom and get to host this along with my friend Vanessa twice a month. It's awesome. Okay, let's get down to business. So I invited Fred and Anna to have their own guest slots here on this program today, because not only do they know each other and not only do I know them both fairly well and really like and appreciate them for not only their friendship but their contributions to the ecosystem. But I thought wouldn't it be neat if we had two senior people who are both significant hiring managers? They have big experience. Both have worked at IBM. Anna worked at Cognizant for a long time. Fred's been, you know, ran FinServ over at Silverline. These are smart folks. Tell us what are the products within Salesforce for FinServ?
Fred Cadena:Sure, I mean I'll go ahead and jump in. I mean, obviously, financial Services Cloud front and center. If you're a financial services company, that's really all. Salesforce has been interested in selling you from a platform perspective marketing cloud in any and all of its iterations. And then the Velocity acquisition brought in the basis of a lot of industry cloud specialization products, including all the OmniStudio stuff, and so for years that was limited to the insurance segment. That was contractually the agreement between Velocity and Salesforce. But when Salesforce bought Velocity that came across asset management, banking and using that pricing engine, using the OmniStudio tool set. I think it's been a real game changer for externally facing applications especially. I'm sure Anna's going to love it. Yeah, let's hear from you, anna.
Anna Papas:Yeah, yeah, I would just add MuleSoft as well, just especially since we're trying to integrate, you know, different systems throughout there. So I would just add MuleSoft. I do want to kind of talk a little bit about Marketing Cloud and just saying you know, it really has sprung up in the last couple of years as a must-have tool, especially when it comes to personalization and banking. So I would say that to me right now is sort of a you know rising star in the ecosystem as well. But, yeah, agree with Financial Services Cloud being sort of the number one.
Josh Matthews:Of course Now Financial Services Cloud, I know at least two years ago, was the fastest growing segment of Salesforce. Do either of you have a pulse on where it stands as far as its growth in the ecosystem right now?
Fred Cadena:I know it's still fairly sizable growth. I don't know that it's still the fastest growing industry cloud, but I do know that Financial Services continues to be the largest.
Josh Matthews:Okay, and Ana, what do you envision is going to be the future of FinServ within Salesforce? What do you see coming down the pike? I mean, yes, ai get it right, but like it's a unique, it's a unique. It's a unique segment. There's a lot of privacy concerns, things like that. So what do you think is going to happen in the next 12, 18 months?
Anna Papas:From financial services as an industry or from Salesforce financial services.
Josh Matthews:With Salesforce.
Anna Papas:Yeah, you know, I think right now people are trying to get creative, especially given where financial services as an industry is at the moment right, it's struggling a little bit. So people are trying to get very creative of how do we use this timeframe to leverage the tools to grow the business? Right, so, coming in and you know, like, for example, mortgages, right, how are we using, you know, the mortgage industry to kind of offset what's happening right there? So that's kind of what I see right now a little bit.
Josh Matthews:Okay, Anything to add there, Fred? Yeah, no, I mean.
Fred Cadena:I think that's a huge thing. Right, it seems like it's a cliche, but it's the doing less with more. And so people have made huge investments in their Salesforce technology and really just finding ways to continue to extend that in ways that aren't necessarily adding a lot of license costs. And I know, as mentioned, mulesoft is key. You know bringing in the right amount of data. Bringing in the right amount of data, making sure that you're doing analysis in. You know finding. You know who are the right targets for cross-sell and up-sell or if you're going after net new people. You know doing some lookalike, modeling, leveraging, you know, both the Salesforce and the marketing cloud tools around that.
Fred Cadena:I hear a lot of that.
Anna Papas:Yeah, everybody wants to talk about data and analytics, but I think the big thing right now is people don't really Clients really don't know who their customers are right. So how do I really better understand the personas and the segmentation of each of my customers so that I can either increase wallet share right from existing customers, or how do I get new customers right, because it's really you know you have one or the other. It's going to take you longer to get a new customer, but so how do I find those existing customers right Because, for example, maybe you're going to get $1,000 from Anna, but maybe you're going to get $500. And there's only one, anna, in my whole client. You know my customer portfolio, but maybe I'm sorry to hear that.
Josh Matthews:I hope you get more Annas in your portfolio down the road.
Anna Papas:But maybe there are, you know, a thousand Freds that may not be contributing the $1,000, but you're going to get more revenue. You know what I'm saying. So, fred, yeah, there we go. So I don't think a lot of companies are looking at it that way. Right, they, they have a higher level. But when you start getting into the demographics and the segments and the personas, you really get a better understanding of where can my revenues come from, right, and how do I increase the products and services to the people who are going to buy that?
Josh Matthews:And then you know, to stay on topic with that, and then I'm assuming you're then engaging marketing cloud to help target those specific groups with personalized information and product offerings.
Anna Papas:Yeah, so that's sort of that second piece of it. Right. That comes after you've done your data correctly, right, that you know where your data is sitting and you know what data you have, right. But I think people want to, you know, do all of this personalization and AI and all these things, yet they do not have the right data and they don't have it in the right place. So that, to me, is sort of the biggest area of opportunity in my opinion at the moment.
Josh Matthews:Okay, interesting. What about some of the critical? What are the critical few challenges that most organizations that are utilizing or thinking about adding in, you know, financial services cloud from Salesforce for their organization? What are some of the unique challenges or risks that they face with the product?
Anna Papas:I don't know if it's a product as much as they don't really know what they need it for.
Josh Matthews:Well, that's every Salesforce customer, isn't it Right, yeah?
Anna Papas:right yeah, so that's universal.
Anna Papas:Yeah, right. So I guess you know my it's all right. Great, we have this opportunity at the very senior level. Everybody's like, yeah, we got to get Salesforce in, and then that message of the why we need Salesforce doesn't trickle down to the people who are going to start using it, Right? So then you turn this into an adoption issue, right? How do we, how are we not using our Salesforce when, in reality, the tool is so tremendous, it can really deliver on the business values that it claims to do, but you're just not using it. So I think that's typically in a lot of cases what some of the issues are.
Josh Matthews:Go ahead Fred.
Fred Cadena:I'll also. One thing I definitely want to add on is Salesforce has been. Financial services has been strong in Salesforce since they started and there's a lot of institutions that have, you know, longstanding Salesforce awards, with a lot of data, a lot of business process built out that are not financial services cloud. Through doing the analysis, figuring out what is it going to take to move off of sales and service cloud or whatever we've been on, to financial services cloud, can we do it in the same way? How do we do it without causing too much disruption and how do we do it in a way that we're also retiring a lot of technical debt and I think a lot of the conversations I've had lately have been about how to figure out and navigate that rather than necessarily net new, you know, people onto the Salesforce platform.
Vanessa Grant:Yeah, yeah, I mean yep, you know. And Fred, in case you knew anybody who might be in that position, how would you recommend they do that?
Fred Cadena:I mean, yeah, I mean I would always recommend, you know, starting with what I would call a discovery, a deep discovery process, where you're kind of going through, you're sitting with different business groups, almost like you would with a net new implementation, and just start talking about what's working, what's not working, like you would if you were switching from a non-Salesforce platform onto Salesforce platform onto Salesforce and then go from that to looking at your org, understanding what's your level of technical debt, and really make a decision of. Is this something that we can build, just like a house? Can we take the house that we have today and do some remodeling, knock out some walls, add on a room and we're great? Or are we going to have to tear the same to the ground and start from scratch? And it really is a case-by-case basis. But I think I would definitely start with understanding what are the business needs, what's working in today's system and what's not working in today's system, and go from there.
Anna Papas:Yeah, and Fred, to add a house analogy, I love that you use that example. I think what I would add to that is you also have to ask the right questions about who's going to live in that house, right? Like, is it somebody who's just getting married and hasn't started their family yet, or is it somebody who's become an empty nester, right? So a lot of those questions also have to be taken into consideration. What you're going to do with that house, right? So what are these banks and financial services companies trying to get to right? What is their business objective for the next 12 to 18 months? Right? Because and I say they can't really go out beyond that, because there's just so much changing economy factors- and you know, trying to plan beyond 18 to 24 months is sort of a waste of time in my opinion.
Josh Matthews:but You're kind of talking about the relevance of certain client segments and like, really like getting that down so that you're not messaging or delivering products to the wrong segment in general, is that kind of what I'm hearing a little bit?
Anna Papas:Yeah, exactly Well, and it's funny because I actually just had this conversation about an hour ago, right? So if you took the example of myself, my son and my mother, right, we're all bank customers at the same bank, yet we're three different people and this bank doesn't even know how to communicate. To my mother, who doesn't use technology, right, who's that good old fashioned brick and mortar, but they could use technology to know when she's come into the bank, they can use technology to know what does she have and what can I recommend them, right? So we've talked about next best action in those situations.
Anna Papas:Or someone like myself, who's doing online banking, right, who has almost no physical interaction, yet by certain clicks, you can perhaps use your virtual assistant to make recommendations to me, right? Or my son, who's just graduated, who has no money? Right, what are your goals and your objectives? With you know he's got a college account. What are your goals and objectives to reach that segmentation? Right? So you've got three different customers at the same bank, yet you don't even know how to use the tools to be able to reach each one of us right? That, to me, is your opportunity.
Josh Matthews:So your mom's gonna get the handwritten it looks like a handprinted letter right In the mail and that's the best way for the bank to communicate with her, potentially and you know, which is going to be very different from you know getting some pop, like yesterday my banker texted me like, hey man, what's up? So that's great for me and my banker the way they communicate with me. But yeah, it takes all of these different kind of ways to reach the right people. Okay, if we switch it a little bit, I want to, because we always talk about AI or not always, but often we talk about AI.
Josh Matthews:People are talking about it at every World Tour, at every Dreamforce, at every Dreamin' event. It's dominating the conference circuit right now and it doesn't matter if it's a Salesforce conference or anything else. Ai is dominating this year and it probably will for the next 18 months, I would imagine anyway. So what's going on with AI that's going to help improve increases in automation, manage more complexity in supporting advisors, identify relevant certain client segments and household groupings that work, cybersecurity, all that stuff. What are you guys seeing? That is and this doesn't have to be a big general thing, but is there a single thing out there that you're seeing, that you are in fact excited about it's coming down the pike, or at least it's beginning to gain some steam with more adoption.
Fred Cadena:I mean I'll go ahead and start. So I, you know, and I people that listen to the show fairly regularly know I'm a pretty big AI advocate. I will say, from a financial services perspective, I think that there is a little bit more kind of a measured, you know, approach to it. There are some things that I think Salesforce has done very well. You know they've built in with some of the latest Einstein features inside Salesforce and ability to go in, write predefined prompts and then, you know, hook in your own large language model, whether you want to, you know, bring in open AIs or somebody else's or build your own. And it makes it possible for institutions to start leveraging AI inside Salesforce in a way that they're sure they're not going to leak their PII, they're not going to leak any of their protected information and giving people some golden prompts to start with. And so I've talked to institutions recently about leveraging that for doing things like, you know, account and activity summaries. You know, especially for, you know, like private client or commercial banking. You know, if you're kind of a small, you know small consumer banking customer and probably not a lot of need for this. But if you have a more complex relationship or your commercial relationship. There can be a lot for somebody that's just stepping in to kind of ingest and understand about the business. And using AI, sending out all that information, leveraging a prompt that somebody's really kind of worked hard and worked all the kinks out of through a way that all of the PI is masked. Sending it out, getting that back in that's super powerful. Is masked. Sending it out, getting that back in that's super powerful.
Fred Cadena:That being said, there's some other cool things that I've seen around leveraging dynamic content creation, whether it be the words or the images for marketing messages that are either sent out in email or sent out during an advertising studio.
Fred Cadena:I've seen some of that stuff's really cool. So you're putting creative in front of people that really resonates with them. That's kind of, I think, the most I've kind of seen people in FI be willing to really kind of lean into from a generative perspective, and I think a lot of it is comes down to data preparation, getting the data clean, getting the data in one place, getting the data clean, getting the data in one place. A lot of financial institutions are still struggling, quite frankly, with doing even some of the predictive side of AI, the stuff that we don't really talk about anymore since ChatGPT came out, but doing things like lookalike modeling, doing things like predicting next best offers and next best action there's still a lot of institutions that are trying to get there with their data. That I think, before we get a lot further on the generative side, there's a lot of catch-up that needs to happen.
Josh Matthews:Okay, Thanks, Fred. What about you, Anna? Yeah.
Anna Papas:I would add yeah. So what I'm really excited about is kind of something that Fred touched on a little bit and that is sort of finding that needle in the haystack with processes at a bank right, where that AI is going to be able to find things faster right, like find the accounts that you haven't touched right, because I mean, think about, for example, those wealth advisors that have multiple you know, maybe 500 clients, right, that they're trying to manage on a yearly basis, right. I feel like AI is going to be phenomenal for someone like that to say, hey, you haven't touched these last 10, you know these 10 clients in the last six months. Reach out to them, do this with them, do that with them. You know, those are the manual processes that I think AI is going to be able to sort of bring to the forefront to increase efficiencies.
Josh Matthews:Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Look, I've been in sales a long time, for over 30 years. The reality is, we all have these bias mechanisms in our brain, right? We talk to a certain person, we think that this person is going to be a great client for us, meaning we can sell the products that our business is selling, and our chance of success in selling to that particular persona is whatever X, y, z, it's good, okay, but there's a lot of bias that goes on, and you're right. You know 80% of clients often get ignored or they don't get the same treatment as where we're spending our real energy, and that's cherry picking. Right, and you know I've been preaching for years and years. Never, ever, cherry pick. You don't know.
Josh Matthews:You know I was thinking that, old, like I never liked the song, but that like what, if God was one of us Remember that song? I never liked it, I just thought it was a dumb song. But like just a stranger on a bus, it's like trying to make his way up First of all. But like just a stranger on a bus, it's like trying to make his way up First of all. He can find his way home, just fine, if he's got. I don't, I'm not worried about that, right? But this idea that you don't know who you're talking to, right? It's just like when I did. I went to my very first Kung Fu class I don't know when, it was 12 years ago or something like that and I came back and it was like the number one thing I learned that day wasn't how to throw or punch or block or anything like that. It was that you don't know who knows this shit. You know to be able to find those things for you and put them in front of your face.
Anna Papas:Whereas you probably would have gotten lost in the you know paperwork, as they say.
Josh Matthews:Yeah, that's right.
Fred Cadena:Yeah, Well, I think to your point. Where AI can really help is like I think everybody has their preconceived notions and I'm going to use small B bias, not big B bias on who their good customers are going to be. But using predictive modeling, you can actually use the data to figure out who you should be spending time on, Because the reason why there's cherry picking is because cherries are good and pits are bad. Right, and you only have a certain amount of time in the day to reach out to customers. You only have so much contact right and you only have a certain amount of time in the day to reach out to customers. You only have so much contact center capacity. You only have so much ability to really focus your time and you need to invest your time where you're going to get the biggest payoff. Yeah, that's true.
Josh Matthews:I'll tell you for the last. Oh God, I'm trying to remember how many years it's been. I want to say at least five years, six years. I've had a Tuesday morning call with my friend Francisco Valdeviezo from Portland Oregon, religiously, at least three times a month, and it's an accountability meeting, right, and he's a financial advisor, I think. He's with Ameriprise. He does an incredible job. He's got every cert you possibly could imagine and he deals with some very wonderful clients. He has has wonderful clients and we have talked over the years, you know, both of us like, okay, what are we doing this week?
Josh Matthews:It's like, okay, I'm going to call all the people. I would think I would never call these people, you know, and like I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna call all the people that I normally wouldn't. And we're always shocked when we do a little thing like this. We're always shocked about about the response, you know, and it's generally followed by amazement and then shame for cherry picking to begin with, right, like because it was just stupid to do that. But you're right, fred, the good news is we have these tools now where we can communicate, we can reach out, we can make more calls, we can send more messaging and be of more value, and that's really the critical thing here. I messaging and be of more value, and that's really the critical thing here. I mean, if you're calling somebody just because you want to make a sale, well good luck to you. But if you're calling because you have something of value that's going to improve someone's life and you know what their needs might be, then you've got a good conversation to have there.
Fred Cadena:Yeah, no, absolutely A hundred percent. I want to just say I apologize, I do need to leave, but this has been a phenomenal conversation. I look forward to listening to the rest of it when the podcast comes, absolutely.
Josh Matthews:And, by the way, you can get more of Fred and Ana. Ana was a guest on Fred's podcast Banking on Disruption about seven, eight months ago, something like that. So just scroll back a little bit, get a double dose of the two of them, so that'll be very interesting for you to check out. As always, fred, always great to have you on the show. Thanks so much. And he's gone, so he's got. He's a busy guy. Now it's just the you know whatever 12 of us or whatever it is here. So, and Vanessa, let's switch gears here a little bit. I know that Marketing Cloud is a passion of yours. You're not just a global sales leader on it, but you're also very interested and involved in marketing. So what are some of the insights that you've gleaned in the last 15 years, but really more in the last 12 months? What are some of the changes that you're seeing with marketing for organizations like the big ones that you have served, like the IBMs and the Cognizants of the world?
Anna Papas:Yeah, yeah. Well, let me just share why I'm so passionate about it. You know, I started my career, the first half of my career, in marketing right, so really doing the client segmentations and the demographics and understanding the channels and where they were going, and all of that. And then, you know, Salesforce came out and suddenly this amazing tool could take all of that and turn it into something I could actually, you know, have automation and work with. And I'll never forget the first client in 2009 was, you know, Modelo, the breast company, and here we breast pump company we were trying now to market to, you know, new moms, and it just was such a phenomenal experience to see what the tool could do. And so that's really where my passion from a marketing comes from. But it really is also the first step in reaching out, you know, in client acquisition and creating that brand and the awareness right. And when you know who the right customers are to buy your products and services right, and you have all of the data on them and can specifically find them, send them the right messages right and understand where they are in their buying cycle right, Then your sales cycle becomes much faster and it becomes much more successful.
Anna Papas:And you know I always talk about the Netflix experience, right. Netflix was phenomenal in knowing you know what movies am I watching. You know when am I watching them. Can it recommend things for me? Right, and I typically, probably eight times out of 10, go yeah, I'll watch that one, and they're pretty spot on because they're really learning who I am. And so, to me, you can't be successful in sales unless the marketing piece has done its job and it's transferred all those qualified marketing opportunities into sales. Right, it's done all the work for you, so Ana, do you think marketing first, sales second?
Josh Matthews:I mean, that's what I believe, just so you know that's my belief. But I've seen a lot of smaller SI companies that don't have anything going on as far as collateral marketing efforts. Messaging they might know who they are, no one else does, right, yeah, yeah. Then they think that the path to success is to hire someone who can I don't know make some relationships with AEs and pound the phone on their vertical and hopefully that they get some deals. But they don't have any collateral, they don't have any stories right, they don't have any messaging systems and things like that. What do you think Marketing then? Sales or sales marketing?
Anna Papas:all at once. What do you think? Yeah, so you know, if you're trying to get brand new customers, absolutely marketing first. Right, because you need to create the awareness and the brand and you know who you are. Right, like, how are you going to get customers if they don't know who you are? I mean, that's you know 101. So, yeah, marketing first. But I would say sales is sometimes first or sometimes second, depending on you know, have you gotten them as a customer already? Right? So now what you're going to do is you're going to continue that sale, right? So if I've, if I have sold you a brand new car, right, the next thing I may sell you is, you know, a warranty on the repair services when your warranty's gone out, right, and not those robo calls that we always get.
Josh Matthews:Yeah, I wish I'd taken advantage of that. My Beamer engine froze on me two weeks ago. I need a new engine. It's just such a bummer. But yeah, fair enough.
Anna Papas:Yeah or hey, you've had your car for three years. Now you know we're having a special on tires. You know, come on in and we'll, you know, do an oil change for you as well. Right, so it's that. So now you're, it's no longer marketing, but it's now you know the relationship. Part of it. Right it's I've earned your trust. I've earned your business. How do I keep selling you more stuff now and making it a very great experience? How do I make it simple for it? But hey, you know what? How many times have you gotten a call like, hey, you've owned your car for three years and you checked your tires?
Josh Matthews:Yeah, I don't know that I've gotten those calls, but I don't know Janine's raising her hand. Go ahead, Janine.
Janeen Marquardt:Yeah, I really wish there was like a chat function here, like the expand model, right, I mean land expand, so they're your customer, but you can't stop engaging.
Josh Matthews:You've got to keep re-engaging to keep an ongoing customer. Well, let me ask the both of you something, and Vanessa too, and Peter as well, and Steven for that matter. I'm kind of curious. So, look, there are I don't know how many thousands of admins, right, and they love the ecosystem, but so many of them that I've spoken to tend to have an aversion to sales. Does this sound familiar? I hope I'm not speaking out of turn here, but many people in general. You say the word sales and unless the word force comes after it, they cringe, right? Do you guys have any experience with this? And I'll shut up and hear what you have to say.
Anna Papas:I don't.
Josh Matthews:You don't Well, okay.
Anna Papas:Yeah.
Janeen Marquardt:I definitely do.
Josh Matthews:You do.
Janeen Marquardt:Yeah.
Josh Matthews:Okay. I mean, I think this is Janine speaking, by the way?
Janeen Marquardt:Yeah, I think there are let's call it broadly and I'll see if Vanessa or Peter, anyone else has seen this broadly two types of people in this quote unquote world People who are on the left side of the sale and people who are on the right side of the sale, the delivery side. Some people get the customers and some people deliver to the customers when we're talking, like you know, when you're not the customer right. So I think, like I identify as on the delivery side primarily, that doesn't mean I'm not in the sales support world. I very often am a supporting player but I'm not a primary seller. I'm very tied into the sales world and I have a lot of knowledge and experience about that, but I don't think of myself as a salesperson primarily. I'll provide a lot of technical support and damn if I'm not happy I have to close that sale, but I'm not a salesperson sure that's not, but you have an aversion to salespeople.
Josh Matthews:That's my.
Janeen Marquardt:That's what I'm most curious about to sales people or to the sales process. Yeah, this the function of sales kind of okay, only because the it's more of a, it's more of an experience with, sometimes when you've gone to, when you've been sold to the, and it's more of the like the stereotypical sales person.
Josh Matthews:Yeah, you got sold something that you wish you hadn't bought and you feel like someone did a number on you, that sort of thing.
Janeen Marquardt:But I can also tell you that, having been, are there any Salesforce salespeople here?
Josh Matthews:They will be listening, but they're not live right now.
Janeen Marquardt:Okay, I mean honestly, having been on the partner side of this for a long time. My experience sometimes is that my customers come to us and they've been sold something that may or may not be the right thing, and I think that the version that I've experienced is that it's making sure that we've really understood what the needs of the customer are, even though I know that we engage in value. Selling is are we selling the right things for the right reasons, or are we just trying to close the sale?
Josh Matthews:You're talking about the difference between manipulation and actual selling right Like it's like really understanding.
Anna Papas:Well, but can I ask a question on that?
Vanessa Grant:Yeah, jump in anytime.
Anna Papas:What does that really mean? Like selling something they didn't really need? Right, because, like, if I look at Salesforce as a product, just like I have a hard time understanding what part of that, the entire platform I wouldn't need. Right, but it just depends on who you are in the process, right, and who's going to use it. Right, because I think sometimes people make that statement just because it hasn't been adopted and it's not being used, like I bought this, nobody's using it and that, to me, is a completely different issue. That, to me, is an adoption issue.
Anna Papas:No that's different.
Janeen Marquardt:That's different. Yeah, I disagree, yeah. So, for example, I don't know, vanessa, if you want to say something before I yeah, jump in, vanessa, go ahead. Yeah.
Vanessa Grant:I mean, I have so many things to say.
Josh Matthews:You get to say them here.
Vanessa Grant:First, on the whole, like if you're a Salesforce person and I've seen far too many Salesforce professionals that just want to solve every problem with a Salesforce hammer and me being more on the business analysis side for me it's all about the business problem. We don't necessarily, like Salesforce is a tool in the tool belt and it's always going to be my favorite, but it is not the only tool in my tool belt and it's not always the best solution for the business problem. And what happens is you get these Salesforce AEs that oftentimes will sell you a tool and then have you find a business problem that can be solved with that tool, as opposed to like actually looking holistically at what you're trying to solve with your business and then saying, oh, I actually have a really good solution for that particular thing, but here are some, you know, but there might other be other options and encouraging them to actually find the best solution for that particular problem, like for me specifically. Like something I had in mind was I had a client once that you know on on the SOW. It was we have to, you know, implement Quip. And I said, cool, what's the business problem that you're solving with Quip? And they're like don't have. We just got this from the AE and we're going to be paying for it in like a year, but they gave it to us for free for a year.
Vanessa Grant:Like well, you're trying to find business problems for this tool. You can like stand up a tool and I've seen that time and time again where the AEs don't necessarily focus on the business, they focus on getting the sale done and they don't necessarily tell you, they don't give you the variety of ways that you might be able to solve it, they don't do enough research on the problem and they don't tell you how you're going to maintain it afterwards. A lot of times they'll drop off after that contract gets signed and won't let you understand the maintenance costs involved, the upkeep as far as the documentation, and the DevOps and the business analysis and all the administration involved, and that's you know. Keep feeding the machine, though.
Josh Matthews:So it might be free, but you might spend 50 grand on you know someone to support it part-time. And just for those who don't know what Quip is, it was founded by Brett Taylor and Vanessa. You'll probably do a better job than me, but in summary, it has a bunch of core features, including collaborative document editing, spreadsheets, chat, the ability to embed live Salesforce data into documents and things like that.
Vanessa Grant:Yeah, I mean they got it for free, but they're paying me $300 an hour to tell them to use it, Right.
Anna Papas:Here's my only comment to all that. So those are great examples and I love it. Right, and you're absolutely right, you know, about sometimes trying to shove the tool into a business problem. But I also think and some of the items that you mentioned, I think are maybe individual, based on some sales account executives but I challenge us all to think sometimes we are also introduced to new products and services that we don't know we need yet, right? And I mean, I think there are products that I've purchased. I'm like, oh, I didn't even know this existed, oh, I didn't know I needed this. And then you're just like, oh my God, how did I not? How did I live without this my whole life, right? So I think there's both sides to that.
Janeen Marquardt:It's not that there's, it's not, that's not the the potential case, and I think if this was an occasional occurrence, it would be one thing that the recent example that for me that came to mind is maybe worse than what vanessa just shared, which is at a recent very small non-profit that has that is brand new to salesforce and really doesn't know anything about it, but came to Salesforce and, for whatever reason, was sold in addition to NPSP, somehow got sold Marketing Cloud. Now they don't have a use case for Marketing Cloud. They didn't necessarily ask for Marketing Cloud.
Janeen Marquardt:I don't know what it was the conversation that they came to, but when they came to us to implement and we tried to kind of take them through based on what they bought, like understanding the use case, what it was that they were doing and why they're doing it and we heard all that and said, okay, now we also see, you've got a marketing cloud license. What did you envision as your marketing needs? We don't really have any. We're totally funded, we're not going to be doing any fundraising, we're not doing any marketing, we're very self-contained. We didn't even understand why they had it. They didn't know why they had it, but it was a massive expense and it was just somehow sold to them. I don't even think they realized it was sold to them.
Josh Matthews:Look guys, I'm going to jump in guys, I'm going to jump in because we can go on this. I'm just going to jump in here. Okay, guys, I'm going to jump in here, guys.
Janeen Marquardt:It's just a recurrence that we've seen, and that's all we're saying is, if it only happened once before, it'd be one thing. We're just saying over time we've seen it.
Josh Matthews:Guys. Look, this happens. I want to ask Ana something here, though. Okay, as more and more businesses are signing up with Salesforce, there are fewer and fewer opportunities to acquire brand new, fresh clients. I mean, look, there's new businesses. Every year Businesses are born. They sign up with Salesforce, they go out of business. There's another business being born. Okay, fair enough, but how much of this kind of challenge that Janine and Vanessa highlighted for us, ana, do you think is relative to the reality that and I hear this from AEs, salesforce AEs frequently it's probably the most common thing I hear right Is I have this now, like these are my clients, I've sold them everything I can. Now they're asking me to sell them even more shit, and like I'm running out of stuff to sell them. But if I don't sell them, I don't have a job. Do you think that's a real thing, anna?
Anna Papas:I'm sure it is. But what I always challenge people is you know, have you really sold them everything? And this is why I say this right? Because if you step back for a minute and think about Salesforce as a true enterprise platform, and then you map it to a business, right? And then you look at what do they already have? So, for example, maybe they have marketing cloud but don't have anything in their customer service. They have nothing in their wealth group, they have nothing in their institutional group, they have nothing in asset management, right? So what I'm trying to say is have you really sold a true enterprise Salesforce deal? And I am going to tell you, I think if you look at the amount of customers that are out there and you look at the statistics of how many customers have more than one cloud, I feel like you're missing out on a ton of opportunities. I agree, Getting more customers is probably a challenge, but getting more from existing customers is where the opportunity is.
Josh Matthews:The expand part that Janine was talking about. Absolutely Okay, that's great.
Anna Papas:Yeah, because, like, for example, I don't see a lot of Salesforce in contact centers. There's a you know when you look at how Salesforce works, truly like if you look at Salesforce themselves right, and they're using a majority of their own products and they have that continuous enterprise running their business and they live and die by Salesforce and they have somehow in 20 years become the second largest software company. They must be doing something right with that platform and yet companies aren't learning from that.
Josh Matthews:Interesting. I'd like to ask you something, ana, specifically to you, about hiring. Okay, you've been in leadership, for you're still young, but many years, okay, and I'm curious, what have you seen has been the biggest challenge to and this can be different year to year, but in general, when you're interviewing people, when you're bringing people on board, what's the biggest challenge that you think people are facing when trying to evaluate good talent for their team these days?
Anna Papas:Well, I think everybody thinks they have to be very technical, right? So, because they think that they're going to sell this product to the IT, when in the reality is, you're selling it to the business. So I think a lot of people don't have a good, strong business acumen, right, they don't know how to speak to the chief marketing officer. They don't know how to speak to a line of business, right, like when I walk in and I'm talking to the vice president of wealth management, right, I'm speaking his language. That, to me, is the biggest challenge. What they're trying to do is sell a technology tool to the VP of wealth or customer service, rather than trying to sell a tool to solve a business.
Josh Matthews:Right Sell the problem that's going to solve versus all the technical attributes.
Anna Papas:Yeah, and they don't know how to come in and ask those questions, right? So what is a? You know what are the business challenges that a VP of wealth is dealing with right now in their industry, right? Do they even know how to ask those questions?
Josh Matthews:Yeah, you know we've talked about this, vanessa, pipe up here because we've talked a fair amount about getting the language down right, getting the specific language down so that you can communicate your ideas effectively to hiring managers or, in this case, to customers or what have you. How can someone go about? Well, what can companies do to help this? Do they silo more junior folks to just get really strong, say talking to wealth management, vps of wealth management, that sort of thing, and sort of silo them to the language that they know? Or is it that these organizations aren't creating enough training? Or is it really on the shoulders of the individual who hasn't invested enough time outside of getting paid to ramp up on their communication skills and colloquialisms and vernacular and whatever you want to call it?
Vanessa Grant:Well, I think if you're already in the organization, then your greatest teachers are going to be your end users. So if you're a Salesforce person and maybe you're learning the financial industry, spending time with those users, shadowing them, speaking to them about their business problems and how they use Salesforce, you will pick up that language. But you have to also be able to ask the questions. Like when somebody drops an acronym that you've never heard of before, you know, taking those notes and picking up that language. Now, if you're interviewing, that you know for sure is up to you to make sure that you're doing the research. So if you're interviewing for marketing cloud roles like have you gone through the certification paths? Have you learned those languages? Have you spoken to other people in the industry? Do you follow them? Do you understand the words that might come up in those interviews? But I think that goes for industry stuff as well as for Salesforce stuff you have to be able to speak confidently to the vocabulary words that are specific to those areas.
Josh Matthews:Absolutely, Ana. What's your favorite interview question to ask incoming candidates? Do you have a default one that's sort of the lead barometer of how you can gauge the quality of the candidate that you're evaluating?
Anna Papas:Yeah, you know, my favorite question is tell me an opportunity where you, or tell me a situation where you have failed, and the reason I always ask that is because we all fail. But I want to hear about what they've learned from that failure and how they've recovered from it.
Josh Matthews:And so there's the question, and then there's the evaluation of their response, and then there's the evaluation of their response. Right, and so what are some of the red flags, or pink flags that you might get in an answer where you're like this person is either not being honest, or they're not articulating this accurately, or they're trying to sweep dirt under the carpet. How are you evaluating the responses? What might some of those red flags be?
Anna Papas:Yeah, you can see the fear in their eyes, right, like, oh my gosh, now I got to talk about a fear and the body language, whereas I think, when they are happy to tell you about it, right, they're excited to share their learning, and that really is what I'm trying to get to, more than what the failure was right.
Josh Matthews:I love that answer. You know this. Just, I just need to say this for the whole audience. This is why in-person interviews if you can meet someone in person at a coffee shop, at your corner office, like wherever do that right Always, because you're going to see the whole body. And here's another thing that people can learn from that because the majority of us are interviewing people and evaluating candidates to work for organizations via Zoom right or a similar video conversation with cameras on, and so something that we can do to instill more confidence, more trust as a candidate to the hiring manager and vice versa. Hiring managers pay attention this is really important. Make sure your camera includes enough width so that they can see your chest and your hands. Okay, because we don't.
Josh Matthews:We're not always conscious of this, but when we're talking to someone, we are pulling in a mountain of data, a mountain of data from body language, and we're processing it without having to think about it. We're processing it in the same way that our heart beats and our lungs breathe. It's automatic. And then we're left with, basically, feelings. I liked them, I didn't like them, I thought they were dishonest. I'm not sure what's going on there. I thought that was weird, like whatever it is. So we're getting this. Our own personal computer is spitting it out.
Josh Matthews:But when you get to see someone say more newscaster, right, chest up with hands, there's a real ability to evaluate the honesty and integrity of their responses. Do they start breathing higher in their chest and faster? Right, if we're really going to break it down. Are they fidgeting with their hands? Are they hiding them? You know their eyes. Are they smiling, not just with their lips and cheeks. Are they smiling with their eyes? Because your outside corners of your eyes will come down when it's a genuine smile. And these are things that we know, right, but when we can't articulate it, we're not paying attention to it or, god forbid, we can't even see it, because someone's sitting with a sunlit window to their back and their face is in shadow or they're talking. You know, all we see is their head, you know, like just a talking head on the video camera.
Josh Matthews:We missed the opportunity to accurately identify their physical and emotional responses throughout the process. So I just wanted to make sure that people understood how you can take this a little bit further in your own skill set for either being a candidate and communicating to try and get a job or as a hiring manager, so that you can make sure you're actually capturing enough information. Most people should trust themselves for the most part, for the majority of people, you kind of trust themselves. I like her, I don't like her, I like him, I don't like him, whatever. Okay, that's like as simple as it gets, but it's coming from all of these physical cues, so make sure that your camera's on when you can. We've talked about that in other podcasts. Go ahead, janine.
Janeen Marquardt:Yeah, I mean I don't want anyone to take my comments about salespeople as like I have a thing against salespeople in general. I mean these are obviously. They're not totally isolated, but they are. There's enough of them that there's a pattern, but it's obviously specific to certain people. I mean I don't dislike salespeople.
Josh Matthews:It's okay. I want to stay on the body language and the interviewing if we can, but we know that You're a good person.
Janeen Marquardt:Don't worry about it. But I also want to say but I do agree with the body language thing, because I do feel like there's I am like I'm a hand talker and I don't know if that's a bad thing or a good thing, and I wasn't sure if that was kind of a like. I'm curious is does that like, is that endearing or is that annoying? I feel like sometimes I'm so fidgety with my hands, like should I be sitting on my hands? Should I be? Like? I'm really cheery.
Anna Papas:I think it just depends. I'm a Greek woman so I am always talking with my hands. I mean my hands do all the talking, so maybe people find that annoying. I don't know, Don't worry about it.
Vanessa Grant:I've actually had somebody tell me to use my hands less when I'm on camera. Oh my God.
Josh Matthews:Really Interesting. Who was that? Were they an expert in hand motion?
Vanessa Grant:It was. No, it was Ian Gatz at Elements and so, and he's so composed all the time. So I was like, oh, maybe I'm coming across like super nervous or something like that which I usually am, but you know my wrist again.
Josh Matthews:Yeah, Look, guys, just so you know, you get to be you right. We want people to take us for who we are. If you're a hand talker, talk with your hands, right? If that doesn't work for someone, they can. You know it doesn't matter, Move on.
Anna Papas:Yeah and Josh, my apologies, I've got to hop off now as well, so this was wonderful, thank you.
Josh Matthews:Thank you so much for being on the program. Where can people find you if they want to connect with you on LinkedIn?
Anna Papas:Yeah, so I'm on LinkedIn. So it's Anna V Pappas slash LinkedIn, or LinkedIn slash Anna V Pappas, so add the V to my name. Okay, it's A-N-A-V Pappas.
Josh Matthews:Yep, so it's A-N-A-V-P-A-P-A-S. Anna, you are welcome on the show anytime. Thank you so much for carving out some time out of your day, and good luck with all of your work.
Anna Papas:Yeah, thank you so much.
Josh Matthews:Okay, all right, guys. That leaves just us kids to wrap up with some possible questions or a continuation of this. I'm kind of curious Do we have any open questions over the last week or so that may have possibly come in Vanessa, or anything that you'd like to query the panel here? That may have possibly come in Vanessa, or anything that you'd like to query the panel here?
Vanessa Grant:I don't have any open questions from the audience, but I actually was. I know we don't have Ana anymore, but maybe the panel would have a perspective on this. I know Ana was. She has a focus on marketing cloud and we were talking about sales. I actually love working with salespeople, not getting sold stuff, but as far as helping them improve their processes. I'll just throw that out there.
Vanessa Grant:But there's also the idea and there's been kind of a. I think the industry's shifting a bit and I don't know if it's still the direction that everybody's going. But I know for a time there was quite a focus on the idea of and we'll throw another vocabulary word out there but revenue operations where you wouldn't necessarily have RevOps people be the people that were the administrators of marketing cloud and Salesforce service cloud or whatnot, but they would be the people that strategically would figure out how marketing, sales and service would all function together to feed each other, because they're so often when you go into an organization, those three can oftentimes, especially with the different types of clouds and different tools that they use, can oftentimes be siloed, and so having kind of a layer above that for RevOps, where they just are focused on the strategy and bringing those together is another kind of area in the Salesforce ecosystem that I've seen people move towards.
Josh Matthews:That's right. Yeah, is there a question?
Vanessa Grant:That's right. Yeah, is there a question More? I guess Ana's not here anymore, but I'm wondering if that's still the direction that we think that things are going, because it made sense to me from a strategic, like how we would organize a company so that we don't have those silos.
Josh Matthews:Right.
Vanessa Grant:Because you do ultimately want marketing to feed sales. You want service then to feed marketing with the feedback that we're getting from those customers, but I don't know that RevOps is necessarily the answer for that.
Josh Matthews:Look, it is growing for what it's worth.
Vanessa Grant:Okay, maybe that's my question Is that still a thing?
Josh Matthews:Yes, it's not only still a thing, it's a growing thing. And so, like to your point, yeah, marketing and sales don't always talk to each other. And what about customer success? Because that falls under RevOps as well, right, and so the purpose of revenue operations is to have a strategic approach that aligns the sales, marketing and the customer success teams with a goal overall of boosting revenue growth, enhancing the customer experience, this sort of stuff, and we're seeing it more and more.
Josh Matthews:I'm talking more and more like Ana didn't say it, but she's RevOps right, because she does marketing and sales and she's been a strategic leader in these large organizations big four plus some, plus software giants right, where she has overseen all of these, and I think it's a beautiful thing. I mean, in a way, I do RevOps in my company because I run sales and marketing right and Steven runs recruiting right. So you know, we get to, we, I get to see how one's affecting the other, and you get to, you know, see the analytics and make call the play right, whereas the sales leaders and especially when we are talking about large organizations, like very large organizations with teams of, you know, in the thousands I think Salesforce has about 15,000 biz dev people right so, and a massive marketing department. So marketing should be supporting the business first and foremost. But that means they need to support sales. Okay, and sales is, you know, supposed to, whatever pound the phone, do their own version of messaging, have actual one-on-one communications. Jump in there pseudo, you know, business analyst to figure out what the actual challenges are and help to figure out what products do we have or what services do we have that are actually in alignment with the customer's needs, right, and then be able to communicate that and hopefully get them to sign on the line that is dotted.
Josh Matthews:But what I've seen historically is a disconnect not in all companies but in many companies between marketing and sales, and the infighting that happens at the leadership level of these publicly traded companies is absolutely disgusting. I mean it's disgusting and it kills careers, it makes people not want to go to work. It makes people want to. You know they question the CEO like how come they don't have control over these two groups that are at odds with one another? But a RevOps leader solves that problem. They're listening to everybody, but they're also looking at the data so that they can make informed decisions and understand where people should be applying things. Now, in my own experience working for Fortune 500 companies in the past, there has often been a disconnect between what marketing is doing and what sales is doing. Sometimes it's really aligned. But many organizations, particularly Salesforce, si practices that are the small little redheaded stepchild of the consulting group the small little redheaded stepchild of the consulting group.
Janeen Marquardt:Right, Maybe there's a thousand.
Josh Matthews:What do you have against redheads? I got nothing against redheads, it's just a phrase that I think most people will understand. But it's okay, all right. So I've offended the one redhead in the house. I apologize. We love your fiery red hair, janine.
Josh Matthews:Okay, but the reality is oftentimes what happens with marketing. We see this where Salesforce, the Salesforce group, might have 20 people right, and then the AWS and the Oracle teams have, you know, 400 people each right, and then the marketing doesn't understand. They just don't get that what they're doing for Oracle or what they're doing for AWS is not going to work in CRM or in Salesforce CRM. Really better understand, because otherwise you're it's just like we were talking earlier with Fred and Ana you're pushing, you're pushing the wrong messaging down the wrong throat and that's, you know. That will kill sales. That will absolutely kill sales. Bad marketing can ruin a business and it can absolutely more than anything, it saps the energy of the Salesforce team or of the sales team, rather Okay. So I think it's a, I think it's a growing thing, vanessa. I think it's absolutely here to stay and I love it because it requires it's synergy, isn't it? At the end of the day?
Vanessa Grant:Well, you know well, josh. I would love to ask you then, as a recruiter who I think you've actually recruited for these types of roles before where do you see the differences between, like your typical, like Salesforce professionals and like a RevOps professional?
Josh Matthews:Well, a RevOps professional has experience both in sales and sales operations and marketing operations. Right, someone who works in RevOps? Now someone could be listening to this and if I've got this wrong, it's okay, just DM me or let me know, or you could you know, whatever bag on me on LinkedIn, whatever you want to do. But my understanding, when I think about RevOps and positions specifically, you know, related to RevOps, it's not the same thing as sales ops. Right, like sales operations focuses on optimizing the sales process. Marketing operations supports marketing campaigns. Right, like sales operations focuses on optimizing the sales process. Marketing operations supports marketing campaigns. Right? Revops looks at the whole revenue generation process, from product to cash, and you know they've got the oversight. So they've got to have their hands in a few different cookie jars and have done it long enough in each that they understand. And they have to be exceptional communicators. And they actually have to be exceptional salespeople. Right, because they have to be able to sell their vision of how these groups within the organization should work together and say like, okay, sales, this is what marketing has created. I've approved it. We believe it's going to help you Now I'm going to be tracking your use. Help you, now I'm going to be tracking your use of these products or I'm going to be tracking your use of these systems, right, and they get to say that because they're the boss. So I think it's a. I think it's a good thing and so, in short, yeah, a RevOps person is very strong with leadership, with sales, with marketing and in general they are highly discerning people. They actually know how to say no to bad ideas right. The good ones do right and they know how to build up and promote a great idea so that it's successful and works for the company.
Josh Matthews:Once you're calling yourself like a director of RevOps or a VP of RevOps and you've got a couple years under your belt and you've got the numbers to back it up, it's like you're made Like cause. It's rare, only so many people have that. Have that. It's like. Think about the back in the day we used to call them programmer analysts. They're part BA and then they'd sit down and they'd code the prop code, whatever needed to get coded right. It's the same. Revops is sort of the same. It's what we call a slash, slashy Salesforce admin, slash sandwich artist, marketing, slash sales right. And then they get to integrate it Very cool.
Josh Matthews:Thanks, josh, you got it. You got it. Well, it's been quiet on the Peter Ganza front. We can kind of wrap this up a little bit. Let's talk about next events that we're going to. Vanessa, you're going to be in New York City in a couple weeks two, three weeks, is that correct?
Vanessa Grant:Yeah, so I actually am going to a wedding in Philadelphia for somebody I've met through the Salesforce ecosystem who invited me. So I was like, well, let me make a trip out of it, because I found out that World Tour was the day before. So we're going to hit New York World Tour and spend some time with my old friends, some family. I'm really looking forward to that.
Josh Matthews:That's fantastic. What part of New York city did you grow up in?
Vanessa Grant:Queens, Woodside, Queens.
Josh Matthews:All right right on my brother lived there. My brother lived there for some time when he was with the Coast Guard, actually, oh, in the Habba.
Vanessa Grant:Yeah, I am here again.
Josh Matthews:He liked Queens, but he did not like telling people to put their beer away on their 25 foot fishing boats. That's the part he hated. He's like they were just trying to have fun. Well, I'm looking forward to seeing you out there. I'm excited about my first world tour event. We will continue to have the podcast. If you can make it that night, that would be great. That's the Wednesday. That's the evening before the actual world tour. I believe I'm going to be in and at my hotel in time to run the show.
Janeen Marquardt:Is that the one we're supposed to do?
Josh Matthews:Yeah, janine Dresh, the whole gang, I'll be doing that one from New York.
Vanessa Grant:And yes, I will be doing it. I'm flying into New York early that morning and I took the day off so that I will be ready to record.
Josh Matthews:Well, maybe we can do it together. That would be neat. That would be neat and we'll get her. That would be neat and we'll get us on camera too.
Vanessa Grant:Yeah, there's also a pre-world tour on Wednesday, if you want to head to that.
Josh Matthews:Yeah, let's have a short show. How about that? I'm kidding, we'll have a good, awesome. We'll have a really good podcast. So stay tuned for that. And if you're listening to us, live, vanessa's conversation with Gordon and the rest of the crew is going to be released no later than tomorrow morning, so check it out. If you're listening to the recorded podcast well, it's the one that was just behind us. And also, if you are listening to this podcast and you're like, what does Josh Matthews look like when he's talking? Well, we've got a nice video where I had Christina Nava on a video interview with me and that is a podcast, so you can listen to the audio. But you can also just go to Josh Force on YouTube J-O-S-H-F-O-R-C-E and see the actual video recording of that conversation. We're going to have more of those probably at least one a month, I'm expecting of video conversations on the Josh Force channel, which is we probably should change it to the Salesforce Career Show channel. So, salesforce Career Show channel. So that's all I got to say about that.
Josh Matthews:Now, if you are interested in, or you are in fact, looking for, an opportunity right now, make sure that you get in touch with Steven Greger. It's Steven with a V. You can find him on LinkedIn very easily. We have a number of different open positions right now and a number that are coming down the pike. We are feeling that there's more movement in the hiring marketplace right now. These are all good signs that economy is turning around a little bit, at least with the jobs.
Josh Matthews:Reports have been very good, very solid, and there's been more confidence in the market in general, and when I say the market, I mean the stock market. Right, and all of those things are really good signs. Plus, some decisions that Israel has made recently have pointed to also positive signs. So it's a great time to build your Salesforce team, but don't make the mistake of hiring the wrong people. When you want to hire the right people, you call me directly I'm Josh Matthews, and you can reach me on LinkedIn, and you can also go to thesalesforcerecruitercom. Fill out a little form, book a meeting and we'll have a nice little conversation and see if there's a way that we can help protect and de-risk your team from hiring the wrong person. Okay, that's all I got to say. Any last words, vanessa?
Vanessa Grant:Josh, you're the best. And Peter, did you want to say something? You said you were here.
Josh Matthews:No, yeah, sorry, that's all I wanted to say. I was running around Just unmuted, but we can't hear you, buddy.
Vanessa Grant:Oh, I can hear him oh you can. Yeah, well, that's all that matters. Selective hearing.
Josh Matthews:It is selective hearing. Well, I'm sure he's saying wicked smart stuff. I just don't know if the podcast is picking up. If not, we'll maybe have to drop it in the transcript. All good, all right. Guys, have a wonderful week. We've got some incredible podcasts coming up, amazing guests we are already booked all the way through July and well into August, with some MVPs and some really interesting folks. In fact, I believe next week I'll be interviewing a digital nomad. He's a Salesforce guy. I've known him for about three or four years. He spends a good part of his life in Spain and he's going to be talking a lot about how you can achieve that digital nomad life as a Salesforce professional, and that'll be on the video, but we'll also have it on the podcast. And, of course, vanessa, you are invited to that. I'll make sure that you get the invitation. Until then, everybody, have a wonderful week and keep your chin up and keep plugging forward. Okay, have a great week.
Josh Matthews:All right, see you guys. Bye for now.
