5 Key Concepts to Maximize CRMs with Trevor Wellen

Jordan  00:00

Hey everyone, this is Jordan, the owner and CEO of Greaser Consulting. On this call, we got Trevor Wellen with us. He has been working in Salesforce, I think since the beginning of his career, and he’s one of the most systematic minds that I think I’ve ever worked alongside. So we, we used to joke around, we work together, that man, he would, he would get in the background of things and just meant he could knock out systematically a project step by step. And on my end, just put me in the room with the salespeople, and we’ll go have a good time. So, you know, always an interesting conversation with him, because it kind of really rounds out the way that you really should be doing things, a little bit of flexibility, and a lot of process goes a long way. And so listen, if you’re on Salesforce today, you’re thinking about Salesforce, he’s got five things that he’s going to talk about, that make the adoption of Salesforce, so much easier for everyone involved, the administrators, the users, customer success, what have you. So I’d really encourage you to lean into today’s episode and think about how you maximize these five points around the concept of Salesforce.

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Jordan  01:30

Everyone, we got Trevor with us. Trevor, go ahead and introduce yourself.

Trevor  01:34

Jordan. Trevor. Well, I’m from MavenForce. We started the company about almost six years ago, and we are a Salesforce consulting firm. And what we do best is we take smart business process, and we implement, implement it using Salesforce and other third party Salesforce apps on the ecosystem to help scale your business.

Jordan  01:59

Well, you know, I think I first met you right at BlueJeans. And back at the BlueJeans time, you were like a one man shop. So I think that was six years ago. To your point, one man shop. So I mean, what has happened in between? We’ve caught up a couple of times. But where’s, where’s MavenForce today? What are you getting into?

Trevor  02:21

Yeah, great question. BlueJeans. That’s really back back in the day, a Verizon company now. Bluejeans was our first customer. And that was early on. Now. We’ve had about, we have about 50 customers now. And we’ve grown the team, we are actively hiring. But we’ve done a lot in the last six years.

Jordan  02:44

So I know you, you’ve always been, you know, you always laugh at the different consultants you meet along the way, right? Everybody’s kind of wired a little differently. Everybody works a little differently. And so even thinking about the BlueJeans days, I used to come in and do a training, beat on some people, yell around, and then bam, I’m out. Okay. The thing I remembered about you is very systematic, very methodical, which by the way, lends itself very well to like a Salesforce consulting shop, right? Everything’s a waterfall. We have the logic and reason behind it. And I know there’s really like five core things that you think about in every engagement that you do. So again, being a little bit more systematic than I am, what are those five things that you think about?

Trevor  03:27

Yeah, I’d say number one, I think this is probably the most overlooked, overlooked aspect of all Salesforce or any system, and it’s simply the user interface. What I mean by that is the page layouts, where fields are organized on the page, which fields should or should not, should not be on the page, how the entire lightning page is structured. That’s such an easy and fast way to enhance the view of the page. And it helps the user adopt the system and to systematically know, Okay, what’s next? Or, oh, I need to populate these fields upon creation of the app. Great. They’re all right in the same section. That’s number one, I can definitely expand on that more.

Jordan  04:17

Well, that number one right there. The thing that I laugh about that you’re even talking about this before we hopped on today, is I can’t tell you, you know, I do these trainings, whatever else amount of times I’ve seen it at open an opportunity. And then like literally just cuss every other word trying to hit save, because there’s a red line here, scroll down five, there’s a red line there up to there’s another red line there. And the thing that’s fascinated me about that is SAS companies spend all kinds of money on research and development on like, how often does the mouse click here? How often does the mouse go over here? What’s the click, you know, trying to figure out how their tools are better. But nobody thinks about their own team’s internal use case of like, the systems that they’re using, right? And engineers are all the time, or I should say Salesforce administrators, whatever. Like they’re essentially architecting this thing they live in all the time, and nobody cares about where anything’s located.

Trevor  05:14

Yeah, if you look at all the dollars spent on maybe a channel partner portal, or ZoomInfo, or outreach, and if you just simply look back to what did this, what is their sales team or your Salesforce end user touch most there on the page layouts? So for example, like every field should have help text, there’s just a field and it’s called something like “Source.” Great. It’s the source of what? What does this field mean? Help text is just so simple. Every field should always have help text. Two: everything should be cleanly organized into sections. And I’ll give an analogy. So I like to clean closet myself, you know, every day. No surprise. Nobody likes a messy closet. Okay, I get a messy closet. Oh, where are those pants? I don’t know, I gotta go digging through all these drawers or these different sections in the closet. But if you keep everything organized, you keep all of your pants together, maybe your formal pants versus your jean pants, all in the same section, your button down shirts, or your dresses or your or your golf shirts, or polo shirts, keep them all in the same section, all the socks in the same drawer, maybe it’s the short socks, the long socks. And that way you can always find something very quickly, keep your Salesforce pages like your closet.

Jordan  06:37

Do you think? I’m sure you’ve seen Spec It? (I have.) Okay, now, we’re about to get in trouble here. I don’t know if you have partnerships or anything else in between. But my question is, I’ve seen like the walk me’s where you get in and it’ll like literally show you, click here, do this whatever, 99% of time, and again, I’m gonna get in trouble, I’m going to alienate half the folks listening. I see like AES, for example, just hit skip, skip, skip, skip. But I think like Spec It, it’s like right there, you click it, it gives more details. Like is that necessary? Or like simple? Just one line direction is enough?

Trevor  07:18

I think it’s definitely necessary. But it’s companies if you can’t define a help text for the purpose of the field? And how are you going to take a more complex tool expected and implement it. So I think that’s something if you already have very clean help text and clean flow and Salesforce, great, you can expand and double down on that. And then implement spec. But if your, if your pages are really quick, really dirty, and you have no help text and the adoption, or even to implement, Spec is going to be that much harder.

Jordan  07:56

Like who’s actually in charge of that? Do you think it’s the Salesforce admins job to come and write all the source details? Or does that, like, is an enablement team actually the right people to be thinking about how the user interfaces with this? I know I’m like belaboring your first point. But to your, to your sort of commentary here, if you don’t get this right, people don’t know how to use anything.

Trevor  08:18

Right. That kind of question of who owns that piece, I would say it’s definitely the admin has to govern it. And anytime you need a new field, even, even a backfill lever to go back and fill in help text for legacy fields or older fields, but at least a new field should never be created without sufficient help text. So we have the finance teams asking for it or further the RevOps team or customer success team. Those requirements should be getting that help text and understanding exactly what is the purpose of this field, in very simple terms.

Jordan  08:55

So, keep your underwear in one spot, your polo in another, and give some context on how you put each on, when, where and why. Right? That’s kind of the pulse of point one. That’s it. What’s the point? What’s point two?

Trevor  09:09

Let data drive decisions. And I’m going to keep using this page ladder logic. So let’s say for example, you’ve got these 30 fields on the page lab, and they’re all required or not required, but they’re all there and they’re all needed. And we can’t remove any of them. Well, is that data set supported by data? Or is that just an impression, or one dots that that’s not a required field? So what’s wild is we either use a free third party app tool called field trip, or we just simply run our own analysis with Salesforce report and determine the utilization of each of those fields. And oftentimes, and I say oftentimes, almost every time there’s at least a handful of those fields that have been used less than 5% or never. So always use data to drive decisions. 

Jordan  10:03

You know, I can’t name the company, unfortunately. But a very, very well known SAS company I worked with, that had an entire process in place. And this is like a fairly large organization where everybody on the go to market team spent between four-eight hours a week, four to eight hours a week on that process. Some folks spent 20 hours a week on that process, in an all rolled up to a report. And I asked them, when I got it to the report, I’m gonna get this could get sales can be guilty, too. But in this case, it was marketing actually on the report. And I asked him, I said, Okay, what do you do with this report? They said, Well, we look at it and we make decisions based off, I said, in the last nine months, when is the last time you’ve changed your strategy based off of what you’ve read in this report? Never. So why are we like, literally, we’re spending 20% of our time across the whole organization on a process that you’ve never made a change of decision on? And so my point is, I’m with you on that, like, let data make the decisions. But just because you could have data doesn’t mean you should, because how are you even going to use the stinking stuff?

Trevor  11:23

Right? Some say, Why build a report or build a metric? Like how many leads do we create this week? Unless you intend to improve it? I don’t always agree on that entirely. But for the most part, if you’re looking for some KPI metrics, why report on it unless you intend to improve it?

Jordan  11:46

Well, I’m okay with like, quality insurance. Sure, we’re trying to check on someone, we just want to make sure we have a record of it, like I get the point. But it’s amazing how often processes designed that everybody follows, but there’s no real outcome as a result.

Trevor  12:05

Right. I’ll give another example. I came across this last week, I can’t even I won’t even the client, but we want more meetings booked. So that means we have to hire more SDRs. Well hold on a second. That’s an assumption. Let’s use data to drive the decision here. All right, so we have what’s our process, or it looks like our process. Let’s look, let’s look at the metrics that we’re tracking for current meetings booked by SDRS. And only at that point, if you can define the process, and look at the metrics and use the data, the reports themselves, you can determine if we have, is the issue really we need more bodies, or our current team isn’t being fully maximized.

Jordan  12:53

So we’ve got good interface, data driven decisions, what’s three,

Trevor  12:59

Communicate changes, I think, and this is going to kind of be my next two topics are going to tie together here. But if you’re a RevOps team, and assuming that Salesforce is owned by the RevOps team, I know that sometimes it can be owned by engineering. But I think it’s really important if you’re going to improve user adoption, whether customer success or sales, or a finance user or whatnot. I think it goes a long way, when they receive some sort of communication, whether it’s weekly, bi weekly, and monthly, just simply outlining, hey, what changes were made by the sales by the Salesforce team. Because oftentimes, they’re like, no, they’re not doing anything, I reported this, I’ve got this bug and it hasn’t been fixed yet. They must not be doing anything. I think it’s the chance where the sales ops team can basically, that’s their time to shine, and say, hey, yeah, we introduced a new closed loss reason and opportunities, we now have very clear lost reason tracking. We now have this new requirement for a primary contact by stage four. Here’s why it’s valuable. Hey, we also added LinkedIn pages inside of the lead contact and account. And what’s coming up next, we just bought ZoomInfo. Keep a lookout over the next four weeks, we’re going to be reaching out to you, you’re gonna see some changes in Salesforce. And we’re going to train you how to use ZoomInfo to further enrich ourselves. 

Jordan  14:24

Here’s one of the problems though. It’s usually always, we added, it’s rarely ever we stopped doing.

Trevor  14:32

Great question. That’s a good one. That can definitely be added. If you’re gonna, you tried this competitor intelligence project to track track competitors for every lost deal. Maybe it didn’t, didn’t work out the way that it was planned. And instead of leaving that on the page layout, more noise for something that no one’s using. Remove it from the page lab.

Jordan  15:00

But that’s this is my point, though is everybody has ideas on how it can get better. But rarely those ideas involve, you know, getting rid of something that was already that, right. So there’s, I don’t even know who said this, but there was a concept of hey, anytime you you add a regulation you have to remove two, okay? Like, like that never happens in the Salesforce environment, it’s almost always, Hey, we’re gonna add, we’re gonna add three.

Trevor  15:30

That’s a line, it’s the coding, coding, I guess full saying it’s you get one point for adding a line of code, you get two points for removing line of code.

Jordan  15:42

So rarely happens.

Trevor  15:44

But it happens a lot more in the back end of Salesforce. If you’re administering Salesforce in a way where you have an absorbent amount of workflow rules or process builders are within today’s workflows, it can become very challenging to implement new stuff in Salesforce with all the technical debt. So same concept, every project, I kind of always like to use the concept of take two wind projects and sneak in a technical debt cleanup project in between the winds. Because at the end of the day, you know, management is looking for, okay, is this project contributing to hitting our number. And so you can’t just jump in and do a technical debt all the time, there has to you have to, you have to sneak those in inside of wins that are going to help the company move to its next milestone.

Jordan  16:35

So a little bit of politics there to use the momentum to slip in what needs to happen. Yeah, so we’ve got good UI data driven decisions, communicate the changes, walk me through four.

Trevor  16:48

Help desk, I think if you have the bandwidth, or if not create the bandwidth, build a helpdesk function. And that might be as simple as using Salesforce cases that come with any Sales Cloud, or service cloud license, you don’t need to go out and buy a separate platform to do this. And right out of the gates, if a rep is on the lead, or an opportunity or an account, any page, something as simple as adding a button there, need help, click on this button. And they can submit the case right there. And why is that important? Because if you’re a Salesforce admin accompany or you’re in the sales ops RevOps function, you ended up getting emails, slacks phone calls, people walking over to you, there’s no way to track that, there’s no way to actually measure how many fires or how many fires I put out, or how many fires I prevented. So enabling the users to quickly submit a ticket, and in responding to those tickets, or walking, maybe walking over to their desk, that’s a great way to improve their adoption. And for them to trust the system. And it’s also a great training method.

Jordan  18:01

You, you talked about, communicate changes, well, you want to talk about the concept of changes and change management, getting an account executive, instead of just to pick up the phone and call you. But like submit a case, it can be done, but it takes some change of culture to get a team to go from that sort of free wheeling environment, to now everything goes to a case. The reason I say that is, what size organization does this move away from like, you probably should do it, to now that we’re at this size, we got this much going on like this is mandatory, like you literally can’t run your shop, without moving to this case system.

Trevor  18:47

I’d say 100 plus, 100 plus employees. And these all tie together, because I see some companies and they’ll go in and they’ll say, Oh, our ticketing systems over here and the separate completely separate system, go log into this other platform, submit a case. No one’s going to do that. But if you’re on the lead or the account, right where the issue is coming from and Salesforce and you have that clean page layout, you’re going to see that button, you’re going to click need help. It’s going to have the link right to the account that you were on when you hit that error. And then, now all these cases were submitted, and you can see the different student errors, or maybe reporting needs, and you can start using data to determine what’s up next, what’s next in our pipeline of what we’re going to build in Salesforce. We’ve gotten all these new requests for maybe enrichment so that’s driving towards the purchase of an enrichment tool like a zooming for DNB.

Jordan  19:50

Is there a company size that’s too small, that these types of cases and help desks, like you’ve just over-proselytize? Well, I don’t even know if that’s a word but you know what I’m saying?

Trevor  20:01

I think at some point, if you’re, if there’s not a person that can, at least at a part time basis, absorb and respond to these cases, then you’re too small. But this should be a function, even if it is the Salesforce admin, to be monitoring these cases, as they come in, to see, maybe it’s something I deployed last week as a bug. And everyone’s getting errors, they’d have no way to know that happened unless the case or some method of communication was transferred to them. And at least (I always, go ahead.) So the person that’s responsible, or the team responsible for answering that support request, they now have influence, and they can determine how people are coming to them. Versus getting five different channels of inbound requests.

Jordan  20:49

Well, it’s a good, it’s a good, I don’t know if safety is the right word, but it’s a good validation, even for the admin team, because I used to, whenever like a new person comes into a company, they’re not familiar with SAS, and all this. I usually explain to the sales ops person, like, well, they’re like an engineer, but they have to interface with the go to market team. So they’re always grouchy. And they’re like, Well, what do you like? What do you mean, they’re always scratching like, well, listen, everybody’s need is always immediate, it always has to be done. Now, it’s always the top priority. If it’s in the queue for longer than five days, and it hasn’t been moved to the top, somebody’s mad and upset. And everybody thinks these projects take three days or two clicks, or whatever. And they’ll be done. When reality it might take four weeks to do that, well might take six weeks to do that well. And so the sales ops person is typically overworked. Okay, and folks have no idea how long it actually takes to do the projects they’re requesting. And so even though it’s like I’ve seen those ticketing, and case systems, as much change management as it takes to get somebody on it, I’ve seen that actually really validate the sales ops team to say, look like we started this at this date. And it literally took that long. And it’s not because we’re lazy, or we’re slow, or we’re just not thinking straight, it’s because that’s what it takes. And so I’ve seen that as an excellent way for sales operations, teams, marketing operations, whatever, to actually get more headcount allocation, because of the recognition that, Oh, like this does take more work, and it’s documented.

Trevor  22:19

You’re starting to build the data to drive that decision for the next hire. And it has to be done via the cases. Otherwise, you’re making an assumption, Oh, yeah, there’s a lot more demand for sales ops functions. But you’re, you can only really feel that out. But building those cases helps you control how they’re coming in. And you can now use the data to maybe increase that headcount.

Jordan 22:46

Five.

Trevor  22:48

Maximize your tech stack, build up before you build and wide, before you build wide. I see, there’s countless examples of where companies go in and they buy these five new apps, and then they have to implement them all at once. And some of the apps have all this cross function, crossover and duplication and functionality. You know, ZoomInfo is purchased, Salesforce, Salesforce is purchased. And then they they want to add, they add Spec It on top. And then they have Salesforce inbox. And then they have outreach. So now you’ve got these five different apps. Now there’s some already some obstacles between Salesforce inbox and Outreach, unclarity. ZoomInfo, is running on its own. And no one’s really governing it because it’s not no one’s clear marketing or sales owns it. And then there’s so much functionality in Salesforce, that instead of going and buying or using a completely separate, maybe like a Zendesk system, why not keep the tech stack and the user interface all in one place. So I’m always a big proponent, I guess I do a favor, I’d have some allegiance, or probably some skewed perspective, or I’ll always pick Salesforce first. But make sure you maximize all of the apps that you’re using today, before you start buying new apps.

Jordan  24:15

There’s a huge philosophical comment, the commentary on that, of whether or not it’s better to buy, like you’re talking about build up before you go wide, but there’s a commentary within that of the product that you have, by a wide product, even if it doesn’t do certain things as well, okay, versus buy the most elite XYZ, but then you got to stitch everything together. And so, I mean, that can be kind of tricky business because on the one hand, you know, maybe one team really needs this functionality to be tight. Okay, but we’re gonna buy something that just goes really wide, which I think I’m actually kind of pushing against you just a second here. We’re gonna, we’re gonna buy something that goes really wide and it’s good for Team X, but bad for Team Y. And so I just, we’re about ready to round out here. But I want to get your commentary on in the concept of, you know, build up before you go out. How do you choose on that sort of type of tool system, buying tools that are individually very good versus one that just goes very wide – in the concept of building that one up.

Trevor  25:26

I’ll give two examples. So if you have Salesforce, Salesforce tremendous functionality, finish the Salesforce project before you go out and buy and ZoomInfo and Outreach. Go one at a time. And don’t get Outreach and ZoomInfo running this project the same time. Maximize Outreach, get it fully cranked up and running, and then tackle ZoomInfo. One other examples are those all those systems are complementary. I’ll give you another example where client, I’m not gonna name any names, they purchased Zendesk. Zendesk is a basically a support ticketing platform. Zendesk is very quick and easy to stand up. So that being said, That’s awesome. So one team is completely running on Zendesk. And then Salesforce, the other teams running on Salesforce. So now we have Salesforce and Zendesk are competitors. So I’ll take this back full circle, they’re using Zendesk in a completely separate system, so when you’re an account manager, looking at your account, that your client just opened 10 support cases this month, you have no visibility of those support cases in Salesforce, where is your primary serum database, because they’re all living in Zendesk. Separate login completely separate system. Now they’re completely disconnected. Instead of that Zendesk project. There’s so much efficiency by taking Zendesk away. And using those cases on Salesforce, it ties everything together, all of your accounts are the exact same, all of your contacts should be the exact same. And you bring transparency into all of those support cases for whether you’re a sales or customer success.

Jordan  27:16

So the five things were good interface, data driven decision, communicate the changes, for the life of me, I can’t remember number four (help desk). Oh, build the help desk. And then five, build up before you build wide. (You got it.) So I gotta, I gotta ask you. This would be the last question, do you do those five things? What’s the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow?

Trevor  27:42

I think all of these tie into adoption. interface, that’s probably the easiest ROI return on investment for how long it takes to clean up page layouts. Communicate the changes, that people feel informed, they’re going to feel more invested, and feel enabled, and they’re going to continue to adopt some of these new features. The helpdesk we had, we had one customer, we have one client that they wanted us almost for this one very unique engagement, I’ve never been involved with at this before. But they wanted us to be there to support and respond to any case that came in within an hour response time. And because of that, their users use it everyday. And they became so more invested in the tool. And they use it for everything. Because if they ever had a snag, they knew they were going to be supportive.

Jordan  28:38

Yeah, I actually I buy into that last topic or that last point, I think more than just about anything else. In my own experience. When we when we’re in projects where we’re allowed to give real time feedback, results, even just updates, not even it’s done just updates, the engagement levels are through the roof, versus when something just gets sent off into the ether and like, wow, you know, last week I sent it, and I finally get a response. And I like I don’t even care anymore, right? I googled it and I found you know, whatever. So, at the end of the day, you put these five things together, and you’re gonna get a much better adoption of the process of a whole and I’m imagining, you know, a much happier ecosystem of people as a result.

Trevor  29:27

 Yeah, fewer logins, fewer systems to log into. Everything’s integrated in the one core CRM platform, ideally, that’s Salesforce. These all help the end user in their enablement, standardizes reports for management, helps the sales ops team grow, as more support cases come in to justify that new, that next hire. Maybe it needs to be a junior admin. Maybe that new role makes, needs to be an analyst that’s going to be building a ton of reports and dashboards. Keep everyone involved.

Jordan  30:05

Here’s the scoop, we’re right at time. And I just have to say, I’ve always appreciated talking with you because I’ve always, you’re the Salesforce guy, you’ve got a an absolute program that you run and way that you think around it. And so anyway, I just appreciate you coming on talking through those five items that you know, everybody should consider. And I appreciate that they’re not really centered around just building some beautiful system. They’re, they’re built around the idea of let’s get some adoption and make this easy for folks. So listen, thanks for coming on. And, you know, I hope to, hope to catch you another time for some more details. 

Trevor  30:44

Awesome. Jordan, thank you very much.

Jordan  30:46

All right, sir. Stay out of trouble.

30:48Hot dog. That was a great episode. Thanks for listening. If you want to learn more about Greaser Consulting or any information you heard on today’s episode, visit us online at www.greaserconsulting.com. Be sure to click the Follow button and the bell icon to be notified on the latest here at RevOps Therapy. Thanks and see you real soon.