How To Automate Salesforce To Save Time & Money

Welcome to The Did You Know Podcast by Varisource, where we interview founders, executives and experts at amazing technology companies that can help your business save a lot of time, money and grow faster. Especially bring awareness to smarter, better, faster solutions that can transform your business and give you a competitive advantage----https://www.varisource.com

Welcome to the Did you know podcast by Varisource, where we interview founders and executives at amazing technology companies that can help your business save time and money and grow. Especially bring awareness to smarter, better, faster solutions that can transform your business. 1.2s Hello, everyone. This is Victor with Varisource source. Welcome to another episode of the Did you know podcast. And as you know, at Varisource, we're all about bringing the audience, all of you, the most innovative technology that's going to help you save money, save time and help make your company better. And today, I'm really excited, actually, to have Danny Hodge, who is the VP of Sales with Sweep. Sweep weep is a solution that allows you to customize and scale any salesforce configurations without the dev time. I mean, that right there, it really got me. I can't be more excited to partner with these guys to help solve all these salesforce challenges that company has. Welcome to the show,

Danny. Thank you for having us. We're excited to chat with you guys. 1.1s

Yeah, a lot of exciting questions, man, because a lot of companies have sales force, right? And obviously it's a very big platform can do a million things, but when a platform can do a million things, it's also very difficult to manage. So a lot of exciting questions coming up, but can you give us a little bit of maybe your background and experience and kind of how did you get to kind of where you are now?

Yeah, absolutely. So I've been in SAS pretty much my entire career since finishing college and 1s the most relevant experience that I've had was for the four years leading up to me joining Sweep, I was at Wix and that's actually where I met the founders of Sweep. We launched pretty much a miniature startup for a new market inside of Wix and had a really great experience working with them, had a really great experience kind of bringing a new concept to a market that was ready for disruption. And 1.1s 18 months ago, 1s the two guys that founded Sweep left Wix and said, hey, we're going to work on something that's a similar concept, a little bit more sophisticated for configuring and managing salesforce. So if you're familiar with Wix, it makes website building creation and management very simple, removes the need for devs. And 1.2s I would say about a year later, we got back in touch, just catching up casually and they said, hey, the product is pretty much ready to go to market and let's talk about you joining the team in Sweep. 1.8s I wish I could say that the interview process was much more complex than that, 1.5s but yeah, it was really great to join up with a team of founders that I trusted who had started and successfully built and sold startups before. And it's been a whirlwind of six, seven months since I joined the team and I've been incredibly impressed with 1s I watched a demo yesterday that I had done in September because I was having a follow up with somebody. And I was blown away by how far the product has come, even in just the last four or five months, compared to what I was showing people in September. So the pace is exciting, the group is awesome and very happy to 1s really try and bring this new concept of a better, more efficient way to scale and manage salesforce to the market, because the more people we talk to, the more clear the pains are and they really align with what our product is looking to solve. 1.2s

Yeah. So I'm personally well aware of Wix, and there's a lot of these website building tools, or even the no code, right, has been around a long time, but it's still a lot of people aren't aware of it. And I could probably honestly talk to you, just my personal interest, but I could talk to you probably for hours around no code or just applying the thought or technology or concept of no code. Because is anytime you think about software, it's all development. And people that are not developers feel like they don't have a lot of control, right. They have to rely on developers. And so I got a couple of questions for you coming up on that. But usually the funny thing is I ask founders or executives, like, why did you guys start this thing? Well, what was that epiphany moment that made you start this thing? And the funny thing is, I'm not going to ask you that because I think anybody who's ever worked in a company who uses Salesforce or managed salesforce or anything associated with salesforce, they totally understand the pain. It is just a monster of a platform to work in, to manage, to do anything. 2.3s So I'm not even going to ask you what the pain is because I think anybody who's seeing Salesforce understand. So instead, what I'm going to ask you is why is salesforce so difficult to manage? 1.4s So you touched on it at the beginning, and I think it relates very well to websites as well. But anything that is, any platform that can do quite literally anything is extremely powerful. But in order to customize it, to fit the needs of a specific business or a specific use case, you need to build in a lot of intentional infrastructure to make it behave the way you want. And if we take that Snippet, you can apply it to a website or salesforce. But that's really, in my opinion, the root of why salesforce can become so burdensome. It requires a high level of customization. And if you think about that, that's one standalone challenge. But if you think of the nature of growing businesses, their needs today are not the same needs that they had two years ago or even sometimes three or four months ago, right? As companies grow, their go to market becomes more complex. They add on new teams, they try and go after new segments of the market, different verticals. I could list out a dozen different reasons, but all of those represent significant projects in salesforce, especially because most companies are looking at salesforce data as their source of truth. It's connected to all different systems, to their website, to their outreach tools, to any number of third party databases. And 1.3s it just really adds so much complexity. 2.9s

And that's what we're trying to really remove, is why complexity slows people down. And if you have a tool that is going to sidestep the complexity and write code for you, build architecture for you, if you can define what you want it to do, that's really where we're trying to attack the problem.

Yeah, I think a lot of people, people who maybe built software, I mean, they call it somewhat like a technical debt, right? Which is if you build a software ten years ago, 15 years ago, and then you become a billion dollar, 100 billion dollar company, it's kind of hard for you to go back and change some of these things because it's like, well, you already paved the road and people are driving on it. It's kind of hard to now change a lot of these things. Maybe the flow wasn't as good. And I think you guys really democratizing 1.9s managing of salesforce. And one thing that I really found interesting, I want to get your thought is I've seen a lot of these obviously enterprise type of solutions. And because they charge you hundreds of thousands of dollars, millions of dollars, right. I feel like to some degree, they have to make it complicated. So you feel like you're really getting a lot because you're paying so much, right? If it was so simple, 1.5s maybe then you're like, wow, I'm paying for this. It's so simple. It's quite fascinating. I mean, again, your technology is very transformational. Every company that has or uses salesforce absolutely 1.3s should use your platform 2.4s

just to hop in here. There's a statistic that Gartner published a year or two ago that says for every dollar paid to salesforce for their product and their licensing, $5 are spent on implementation and maintenance. So I think that just kind of puts into a very clear perspective, like what some of the costs are that organizations, especially as they grow, are facing in order to just manage this product, which is incredibly powerful. But investing in the world right now, investing to have it behave the way you want and actually deliver what you're hoping to get out of it is 2.2s really not a small budget item. 1.9s

Obviously, I love numbers, love data. That was a great add in there. Great nugget. So the next question for you is what are the top three challenges that you've seen companies face with salesforce? You obviously talked about a lot, a wide range of things. When you talk about how, you know, why, it's difficult to manage. But if you have to give two or three kind of main challenges that you see when you talk to companies, what are some of those when they deal with salesforce? 1.4s

Absolutely. So especially when we're talking about companies that are growing, 1.9s I'm trying to think of which one to position first, but I'll do all three of them, which is speed. A reduction in speed and agility of salesforce needs to reflect our business. But our business is changing and evolving, and we're understanding best practices better today than we did six months ago. 1.1s As a salesforce configuration gets more mature and more complex. Like you had mentioned before, this road is already paved. So in order to figure out how to branch off of the main road without breaking anything is really what slows people down. And when I talk to people that are not salesforce admins, maybe they're head of sales at other companies or even leadership, they'll tell me, I've got a laundry list of requests for salesforce that I don't even bother asking because it takes me a week if I request to get a field built 1.3s for my team. So I think that's a good encapsulation of the speed challenges. 1.1s Normally, the method to combat the speed is the other challenge, which is cost balloons. 1.9s I spoke with someone yesterday that was implementing salesforce, and their CTO is apparently trying at all costs to kill this project because he's been at companies before that have implemented salesforce and he's seen how expensive it gets to be very quickly in order to try and combat this issue of salesforce. Our CRM is moving slowly and we can't adjust. 1.5s And the final piece, I would say is really understanding what you want salesforce to do for you and being able to have control and visibility to people that are not fluent in salesforce. So what I mean by that is. 1.6s Leadership go to market teams they can talk to you all day about here's the process our team takes to close business, here's our customer success strategy. 1.1s But they're always on some level relying on a third party, even whether it's internal or external, to translate whatever they've said, build it in salesforce. And there's really no way for them to validate, hey, my strategy is represented directly in salesforce. And because our tool is so visual and we represent everything as flow charts and automations, as plain English, we're really trying to break down that challenge. So to recap but I would say speed, cost and just visibility into what's actually going on.

Yeah, and you hit it on all points and those are amazing. These are the things that we see as well from customers of all sizes who's deployed salesforce or really just a lot of these enterprise solutions right, that are 1.6s kind of really difficult to implement and manage and everything. And now this is awesome. 3.4s Can you give us a couple of examples of how sweet kind of solves that? Because when you talk about no code and obviously through a podcast, people can't get the visual, but can you kind of give a couple of use cases on how people or companies can utilize sweep to solve some of these challenges that you're talking about? Because I promise you, every company who uses salesforce has those challenges you talk about, right? Yet at the same time they do want salesforce, whereas all its benefits, right? And so how does we kind of solve that if you can kind of explain and give people kind of that visual of how that works, how simple it can be? 1.1s

Sure. So the first thing I'll say is I know that the whole notion of no code also comes with the other side of the coin in terms of perception. If the positive side of the coin is usability and efficiency, the negative side of the coin is lack of sophistication or complexity. And I think like really the proof is in the pudding. When we're working with companies that say of course we'd love to be more efficient and we'd love to introduce something that is no code but the real test is going to be is the end result of 1.6s identical quality to something that was built, quote unquote, let's say the old fashioned way. Something that was built natively in salesforce. 1.3s So to give you an idea of how we're breaking down some of those challenges, the first one that I mentioned is speed. And what I hear at organizations, I think you'd be surprised at how 1.2s much smaller organizations are already running into issues with. This 1.2s is dependencies where that road that you talked about, that's been paved is established. And they have a process that is working to some extent. And anytime they want to make a change to that process, just the way that salesforce or any software is built as you're customizing it, there are all these dependencies that can exist beneath the surface. And if you're not aware of them and if you're not familiar with how to sidestep them by fixing problem A, you create problem, you break something else. 1.3s So the way sweep sidesteps that is. 3s We don't use the conventional salesforce methods of deploying automations. For example, our product is writing custom code and it's writing it natively into Salesforce. So it's still in there and easy to understand what's going on. But it allows us to bring a level of precision to changes or additions that somebody might be wanting to make in their configuration. That without sweep. If you're working natively in salesforce, takes a great amount of care and attention to detail, and that's setting aside how much easier it is to configure settings like you would in Gmail, for instance, than it is to actually work natively in salesforce. So for anyone technical that might be listening, like the notion of, I just added a field and I built a validation rule that requires sales to fill in that field at step three. And now that simple change is going to require me to QA all of my other processes to make sure they're behaving correctly and I didn't break something elsewhere before I roll it out. That notion is gone when you're working with Sweep because we allow you the precision of if you're working on a particular process and you're making changes, that our product is creating architecture on the back end, that the impacts will only be felt on that process. So we say that we are speeding up very significantly how quickly teams can work in Salesforce because all of the deployments that come from Sweep are dependency free. 1.8s When we're addressing the challenge of ballooning costs to manage salesforce and trying to challenge that ratio right now of one dollars to salesforce, $5 1.3s to support it. 3s We hear from companies all the time that anytime they have a project, maybe they need to hire outside consultants or they need to add headcount, right? Traditionally, the only way to combat a lack of speed and agility is just throwing more hands on keyboards. Very expensive. The last thing we want to do is get rid of developers at a company or get rid of salesforce admins. What we want to do is empower the team that companies in place to be as productive as a team that's two or three times their size. So just when it comes to sheer output and volume and speed, working on our platform is faster. And removing the need to QA 1.5s is really what's allowing these teams to be so much more effective and supercharged working on sweep rather than working natively in salesforce. And the final challenge of for the unindoctrinated salesforce people, which usually represents all of leadership and gotomarket leaders. Our platform is incredibly visual. 1.1s We run into companies all the time that are documenting the processes that are built in salesforce using Mirror or using like a lucidchart just to create a representation that other folks in the company can look at and understand and give feedback on and make sure that what's built in salesforce aligns with the actual gotomarket strategy. 1.5s Our whole platform, our whole interface is a flowchart. So inherently, as you're building and making changes, you're producing real time documentation that you can bring to the teams that are actually relying on salesforce and have them understand what the process looks like, have them give feedback, and if they have changes to make, it's something that can be done in a fraction of the time. And actually in the next couple of months, we're taking that a step further and adding like a collaboration layer to where a CRO can look at different processes and leave notes for whoever's managing salesforce, say, hey, I think that there's these scenarios that happen quite often that are not really accounted for in this process. 1.3s Or head of sales can say, I'm looking at this process, I understand it, and now I know why our forecasting is off, because we're not accounting for these scenarios. So let's sit down and talk about how we're going to address this. So that's really where we're looking to attack those three very interconnected issues. 3s Through a visual no code interface.

Yeah. First of all, obviously you're great at 1.2s explaining the problems companies have and then pinpointing specific solutions for those problems. And I have to applaud you for your good memory also, because a lot of people talk about the problem problems, and then when I talk about solution, they forget kind of like matching, like for like right. So mentally you got good memory or you are really good at knowing your product, but actually you also covered one of the questions I was going to ask was specifically for different kinds of people that are using salesforce. You have the admin, you have the developer, you have then, like you said, the people that are just using on a daily basis or even executives, there's different roles that gets involved in this salesforce because it's kind of like the heartbeat or kind of one of the core systems for the business. Right. So everybody gets involved. And I think you already kind of covered how it's by no means this is not a technology to replace developers because first of all, you got to keep all the developers you got because it's hard to find them, it's hard to hire them in the first place. And also the admin, you're just providing this tool to help them better manage salesforce faster, cheaper, easier. So I think you cover that pretty well already. Now as we kind of get to the bottom of the conversation here, usually when people think about salesforce, think about anything related to these type of solutions, they think about long implementation time. Even buying yourself, they think buying anything like, okay, if you're involved in salesforce, this must be really another thing I have to worry about, another thing I have to put a lot of work into, another thing that's going to take me a long time to implement to get value. How can you speak to that, Danny, on what kind of if somebody is interested in your platform, what does the implementation look like, how long does it take, and how quick do they typically see ROI? You think.

So if we fell into that trap of this is another tool in your tech stack that has a long onboarding implementation configuration process, we really wouldn't be 1.8s true to our mission of helping speed things up. So the implementation at the beginning. 2.6s It's really no more than a handful of clicks. The way our product works is when you first log into Sweep, it prompts you to connect Sweep to your existing salesforce environment. And the first thing our product does is scan everything that's ever been built in there. So when we're talking to enterprise companies, 2.2s we've had 1.2s two dozen people, people touching salesforce over the last ten years and we have no idea what the heck is built in there. So immediately our product is going in and demystifying everything that is built and active. Today. We're organizing it in such a way that you can see each of your processes represented as a flow chart, complete with all of the business logic, all of the automation, everything that is in there. And it's all attributed properly to the process that it impacts. So right away, within 15 minutes of connecting to Sweep, you have this complete audit of your existing salesforce configuration. 1.6s And then when we're talking about learning curve to for whoever is going to be working in Sweep, let's say it's the salesforce admin and their team of developers. 3.1s It's extremely intuitive which as I say it, I realize means very little coming from ahead of sales. But the proof is really like what we've seen the onboarding process look like with our existing clients. 1.1s We're usually having no more than three or four meetings that last anywhere between 45 minutes to an hour in order to a first piece first just kind of give people a walking tour of here's what we picked up on, here's what's built. Here's a few of our observations of things that you might want to address of like low hanging fruit that you can make improvements right away and learning the interface. It's really just a matter of us showing you like here's where you configure your automations. And again, the beauty of working in any no code tool is a we've got fantastic product designers that really make things intuitive. But the other piece is you're usually configuring settings in plain English. The way I would tell a salesforce admin I want an automation built and I want this field value to be pulled from another field value and I want this automation to trigger when X event happens. That's what it looks like when you're configuring and building and Sweep. So it's really a matter of 1s usually it's the longest part of our onboarding process is getting like a map and a list of here are the immediate challenges that a company wants to tackle in the first couple of weeks of working with Sweep showing them where everything is. And then the other challenge is keeping them up to speed as we release new functionality and making sure that they know there's actually more they can do with Sweep than when they signed up and showing them where those tools exist. But. 1.8s But yeah, to answer your question, concisely 1.5s with a couple of clicks, you're getting a full documentation of everything that's built in salesforce, like literally within 30 minutes. And then learning to actually use the interface to make changes and build out new processes, create assignment rules, whatever the use cases are. Is a couple of meetings.

Yes, it's first of all, you would think that somebody spends tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars that they would have some visibility into this investment that they put in. But oftentimes it's the opposite. Right. Like you said, they've been using it for five years and spent all this money, yet they have no visibility. How things are even connected, built 2.3s even just a few minutes, they can get that visibility is already a great reason to work with you guys. 1.6s The last question that we always ask our guests is through all your experience and knowledge, if you have to give one personal and or business advice, it could be anything. Anything you're passionate about. Like, what would it be if you have to give kind of one advice to the world

outside of the context of sweep or anything, right.

Anything. Could be anything. 2s This is something I got to think on for a couple of seconds. Sure. 3s My advice would be to challenge the status quo because more often than not, there if there's something that's blocking you or frustrating you or 1.7s comes up as a challenge or pain point. The innovation, especially with technology, is so fast and it's so wide ranging that dealing with the status quo is really a mindset of the past and 1.3s if there's a will, there's a way to address whatever challenges you're facing. And 2.3s I would say the motivation from that comes from you. I've been a salesforce user both as like an account executive and in a number of leadership roles for over a decade at this point. And this whole idea of 1.2s

salesforce, the people that manage it, help me out with so much. I have this long list of things I would love for them to do, but I know that it's going to just stress them out. It's not an absolute must have, although it would add value. I'm not even going to bother them because I've got ten other open requests with them if that's like the status quo mindset that that I've had prior to joining Sweep. I love talking to other folks that are leading like a go to market unit and just trying to open up their mind to it doesn't have to be that way anymore. And your long laundry list of requests that you haven't even voiced wouldn't even represent 1.1s a stressful task or a stressful meeting for the person that you'd be asking to complete them for you. 1.1s And that's really, I guess, like the anecdote that matches the advice.

Yeah, no, that's a great advice. And actually, interesting enough, a lot of people ask me why, why we named our podcast Did You Know? And it really comes from actually that same 1.2s belief that I have that you just mentioned, which is there are so many things that in this world that it's possible because of technology. And actually today the technology is already there. Like, even today, you're solving this amazing challenge efficiently, cost effectively, yet it's just that people didn't know about it. If people knew right then, they would think that, wow, the status quo doesn't have to be that way. So sometimes it's just as simple as people not even knowing that this capability or solution is out there. And easier said than done, of course. 1.3s And that's why we built Verisource to be that kind of technology buying platform, so that people can know about solutions like Sweep and others. Again, it's super excited to partner with you guys to help any customer partners that have sales force to save a lot of time and money. So I really appreciate your time, Danny.

Thank you for having us. We're excited to kick off this partnership as well. 2.3s Thank you for having me on. This is a very enjoyable conversation.

That was an amazing episode of the Did You Know podcast with Varisource. Hope you enjoyed it and got some great insights from it. Make sure you follow us on social media for the next episode. And if you want to get the best deals from the guests today, make sure to send us a message at sales@varisource.com

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