The Value of Going for Growth
In this episode, Bala Balabaskaran shares his firsthand experiences of crafting automation solutions that played a pivotal role in Salesforce's expansion during the 2010s.
(upbeat music)
- Welcome to Inside the O'Hanna.
I'm Dan Darcy, Chief Customer Officer at Qualified.
And today I'm joined by Bala.
Bala, how are you?
- Doing great, Dan, how are you?
- So I wanna dive right into our first segment,
O'Hanna Origins.
How did you discover Salesforce
and what started your journey?
- Yeah, no, Salesforce for me was all Maria Martinez.
I mean, she was the one that talked to me about Salesforce.
I had worked for her at Microsoft
and I left Microsoft to go do a startup.
And Maria actually was in town as it was wrapping up
that startup opening up the Seattle office for Salesforce.
And she said, "I want you to talk to a few people
"because I have this problem.
"I'd like you to help."
And so that's kinda how I got introduced to Salesforce.
You know, I was in the Microsoft bubble
and yeah, Maria was the person that kind of pulled me in.
- That's great.
And now Maria Martinez, just for the listeners and viewers
or is the, she's the COO.
- COO, COO at Cisco.
- COO at Cisco now, which is,
she's had an incredible journey.
She was the, you know, basically head of customer success
at Salesforce for a very long time.
But give me the details.
You know, what was your job?
You know, what was your title?
What was your first initial impression?
- Yeah, no, I think when Maria called me, she said,
"Hey, look, I've got a team of people
"that are trying to figure out processes around org 62."
I said, "What is org 62?
"That got me interested."
And, you know, and then as I got talking to people,
just understood this behemoth of an internal instance
that we had that was, you know, a showcase of Salesforce.
Yeah.
And it was a great showcase for everything
that the platform can do.
But it's also a great showcase for how people
can get things wrong on it.
And, you know, and from a scale standpoint,
struggle with how to sort of move the organization forward.
So, she had known me at Microsoft coming in
from the product side, so I've never worked
in an operational role.
And her point to me was,
I want you to take a look at this
from a product perspective,
like how would you use automation to solve this problem.
And that was kind of how what got me interested in it.
And the scale of the issue seemed like it was
the right time for Salesforce as it was, you know,
we were scaling like crazy at around the 2012 timeframe
when I joined.
And so it was a really interesting problem
for me to dig my hands into.
It was a quite meaty one.
So that's how I got started.
And then we actually had a team called GoToMarketScale.
That was the name of the team that Maria had created.
So I took over that team working with IT
to sort of look at all the pre-sales, sales
and co-sales processes on top of our internal instance
and just kind of scaling it.
And after about six months of that,
we figured it was too big for one person to handle.
So we kind of split the sales and the post sales.
So I took on more of the sales side of the house
and inherited the annual planning cycle,
which we used to call Fast Start or Quilfer Growth.
And that was working with over 400 people
across the company to build out territory models,
the compensation models and so on for the sales team.
And then also all of the product owners
that worked on processes on August 62,
the internal instance of Salesforce.
And the operational side of it,
so the field operation side.
So regular day to day management of territories
and accounts and data quality and all of that fun stuff.
- Yeah, I mean, so GoFor Growth is definitely
a bohemith project.
And I mean, if you think about our calendar,
Salesforce's fiscal year start date is Feb 1.
That's when everyone needs to hit the ground running
for the new fiscal year.
- GoFor Growth's planning starts when?
- July, August.
- July, August, yeah, yeah.
Because part of the process was actually updating data,
cleaning up data and doing all of that stuff.
So we used to go through these massive data projects
for a month and a half or so.
And then you start building out what the growth plans are,
building out territories, capacity models,
how many people are we gonna hire,
what roles are we gonna build.
So all of that process took us a good six to eight months
to kind of get in place.
And then we would February 1st, you know, for school,
we would deploy it after the start of the fiscal year
and things would sort of settle down around March, April.
So we got a couple.
- And then you took a vacation.
- For a couple of months, we were back at it again.
- Yeah, well, Paul, I want you to brag a little
because I know you've had incredible success
during your time at Salesforce.
But what would you say is one of the biggest successes
you've had while working at Salesforce
or something that you're just really proud of?
- So I think my time at Salesforce
I really focused on kind of turning this,
what was a very heavy manpower spreadsheet,
kind of a problem into a lot of auditions.
So we had great support from our IT organization,
Russ Mykord and his team to really look at the problem
and build out automation that would sort of help us
deliver territories and quota plans and things like that
before school.
Believe it or not, up until that point,
they hadn't delivered territories or quota letters by school.
So when the year kicked off,
it was there was still some time before the reps understood
what they were selling and so on.
So the automation took us about a couple of years to build
and put in place.
And I'm happy to say that when I exited that role,
that was the first time in like 17, 18 year history
of the company that we had actually delivered territories
by school.
So that was quite a big uplift in terms of automation.
But we learned a lot,
we learned a lot about how we can do this at scale.
Salesforce was growing at, I think like 600 or 700 new reps
every year in all parts of the business.
And we were acquiring companies,
I think the exact target was an acquisition around that time.
So we were just adding to the team
and continuing to do that with people is just not possible.
And so automation was the way out.
And that's really kind of,
I drove a lot of that project with Ross
and the rest of the team to sort of build that out
for Salesforce internally.
- I mean, that's incredible.
So on the opposite side of the spectrum,
what would you say was your biggest lesson learned?
- I think the inherent complexity in the tribal knowledge
was something that I didn't expect.
So you go in and when you approach the problem
as an automation problem,
you kind of miss out on so much of the tribal knowledge
that's built into org 62.
And it almost felt like every little thing you touch
impacted some team somewhere.
And so that I think was one of the biggest learnings for me,
approaching a problem like that.
You know, I was a product guy before that.
So for us, we didn't have to look at how the system
was implemented, we just built new features.
And that was, you know, perfectly the way we approached it.
But with this sort of an environment
where you have all of the businesses and processes
running on top of it, it was always interesting
and learning experience for me to sort of understand
all of those relationships and all of the unset,
undocumented kind of things that happened.
- Yeah, I mean, I'm actually curious on that, you know,
with the tribal knowledge, how do you take tribal knowledge
and code it into software?
How did you think about that?
- I'll tell you an example of something that we needed to do
before we started the automation, right?
So we would think about sales policies.
We were about a 4,500 sales person organization at that time.
But we didn't have sales policies written down, right?
And there was no policy organization
that looked to standardize how things were written down
and so on.
So a lot of it was assumptions that the ops teams
were the creators, the arbitrators and the executors
of policy and there was none of it was written down.
So one of the first things that we had to do
was actually say, okay, let's get people in a room
and actually start writing down some of the critical policies
that we're looking at automation.
Because without that it's impossible to scale it, right?
And because everybody came in with their own assumptions
and as you know, sales and especially in field ops,
every interaction is emotionally charged
because this is how the sales team makes money.
So, you know, there's a winner and there's a loser
and we have to arbitrate that
and doing that without written down policies
and thought processing to it was a problem.
And so that's one of the first things we solved
is let's write it down, let's publish it
so that everybody knows here are the rules
of the road in a sense.
- Wow, that's pretty crazy, that's awesome.
Now if you could go back to Balla
just starting out at Salesforce,
what advice would you give yourself?
- I think, you know, one of the things that I learned
to do through my tenure is actually take things
a little bit slower than I actually intended to do.
I was like, you know, I want things to move fast
and Salesforce was a startup culture
so why aren't people making decisions
and getting things moving, you know?
That was kind of the way I approached it
and not realizing that the organization
is actually pretty large and huge
behind this sort of facade of a startup
that was so many things that was going on
which is, you know, big huge credit to Salesforce
to be able to behave in that way
but it also meant that you couldn't, you know,
just make changes on the fly and move things quicker.
So that was a big learning for me
is just slow down and really understand
the organization first before getting into the job itself.
- Nice, nice.
So I asked this question of all my guests
because everyone answers it a little bit differently
but I want to ask you,
what is the meaning of Oohana to you?
What does that mean for you?
- So for me, you know,
I, for the longest time I didn't know what it meant,
you know, the word Oohana
but the feeling I can describe, right?
And the feeling for me is the incredible relationships
that you build working in a company like Salesforce
that I haven't worked in a place that was as conscientious
about how people treated each other.
You know, I came from unnamed previous large companies
that were, was just cutthroat, you know,
everybody was waiting to stab you behind your back
on a culture, that competitive culture and so on.
And that was not the case at Salesforce.
It was very, very comfortable to be in, you know,
people cared about each other,
people cared about your personal situations
that you were going through
and there to support each other.
So I had an incredible team that,
where, you know, I had some personal issues going on
with my family when I was at Salesforce
and health issues as well.
And the first people that I would turn to are my teammates
and they would say, no problem, we've got you.
Well, I wouldn't even think about doing that somewhere else,
you know, but that was the comfort that I think
that Salesforce had built as a culture and mark, you know,
is generally a quite warm guy and it sort of flows down
from him, I think, as you work in the organization,
you understand that a lot more.
I mean, well, I mean, to your point around the competitiveness,
I would say we were competitive
and beating the other competitors in our market.
That's hard. Not internally.
But not internally is your 100% right.
It was all collaborative around achieving a goal.
Everyone was focused and, I mean, your point around, you know,
just really caring about each other was so spot on.
I mean, to that point, you know, even when we were talking
in the earlier things and how we've been, you know,
our time at Salesforce together,
you were there from 2012 to 2016 plus.
I, you know, obviously was there at the same time,
but I feel like I know you even though we didn't really
interact that much, right?
And it feels like that we're still on the same team
in that regard, so.
And even, you know, folks like Brian,
it was so, I was so comfortable to just ask Brian
for a meeting and I say, "Hey, Brian, I've got this problem.
Can you give me your advice on this?"
And he was very open, you know,
and just having that level of accessibility
to folks like Brian Millum, that was.
- Yeah, that's what I was gonna say.
Brian Millum, the now COO at Salesforce
who has taken on a lot more responsibility.
But yeah, you're right.
And he would open up and, you know,
had an open door policy.
And I felt like that was, that permeated everywhere,
which was pretty incredible.
So now speaking of that, are there any special, you know,
Ohana moments that are a little behind the scenes
that you'd like to share?
- I think for me, you know, I brought on a bunch of folks
at Salesforce when I was there
and the people that were there, I learned a lot from them.
And, you know, I was coming into this
from a product guy coming into an operational world
and everything I sort of understood and learned
are from the people there.
And to me, the biggest success of that is where
all of those folks have gone on to have, you know,
really rich careers at Salesforce
and also in the startup ecosystem.
And, you know, I talk to them all the time
and those relationships still remain.
And so for me, I think at that point,
you didn't really, you know,
there's not a moment like that,
but it's sort of a continuous, you know,
realization of the relationships
that we built at Salesforce, right?
For me, even today, somebody called me and said,
"Hey, I'm finishing up 10 years at Salesforce.
Thank you for hiring me."
And, you know, and that to me is not just one moment.
It's like, it's sort of continuous.
It's still happening.
That's the incredible part about it.
- I love that.
Have you, how many dream forces have you been to?
- I did four dream forces.
- Yeah.
Now, are there any special, you know,
dream force stories?
Like, what was your first dream force
and like, you're in a pressure there?
- So honestly, I was an events guy
as a product person in my previous roles
and previous company.
So I was averse to go into events.
(laughing)
So I approached it that way the first time I went,
but it's not an event.
It's sort of a cultural event, right?
It's not like a broadcast event from a product company.
- An experience, if you will.
- That's right.
Yeah.
And so that was the big light bulb moment for me.
It's like, wait a minute.
This is not like other tech company events
that you go to where they're just broadcasting you
what they're building.
This is Borba Connecting and so on.
So I enjoyed the four that I attended.
A lot of it was actually customers asking us
in my role about how we solve the problems
that I was responsible for.
And they were very interested to see how we scaled it.
Like how did you apply sales force technology
to that problem?
- Yeah.
- So that was very exciting for me kind of learning
about customers that are going through the same kind
of challenges that we are and be able to share what we do.
I think those were really exciting moments for me.
- That's great.
Let's get into our next segment, What's Cooking.
So, Bolin, you're now obviously the co-founder
and CTO at full cast.
Talk about how you got to where you are now
and what your journey's been like.
- Yeah.
So a lot of the learnings that we've incorporated into full cast
both me and my co-founder, their mesh thing.
We've worked together at Microsoft at Salesforce
and now at full cast.
So we've been working together
and we've been eating around this sort of operational
problem set me from the product side,
him from an operational standpoint at the beginning
and then our roles kind of flipped.
But really kind of the idea of a revenue operations
problem space, right?
And what we mean by that is how do you put together
a go-to-market plan and how do you execute it?
And how do you keep these two worlds kind of tied
to each other and communicating with each other?
Because one of the big shifts that we've seen
in the industry of course is the SaaS business model
has essentially changed what used to be sales
where you made a deal and you're done,
collected your commission and you moved on.
Now the idea of a sale is the right to make money, right?
And so now you have to make sure that your marketing team,
your customer success team and the entire sort of revenue
pipeline is able to work in a common strategy
and actually deliver on the revenue goals that you have.
And that's really created a need for a revenue platform
and that's really the problem space that we're addressing.
And so a lot of it really comes from learning
in the trenches at Salesforce, you know,
from all the way from G4G and our Go for Growth
and our fast start planning processes.
What does it take to get 400 people involved
in a planning process?
What does it take to deal with bad data?
What does it take to deal with sort of effective
data commissioning and who gets the right credit
at the end of the day?
Your coverage models, roles overlays,
like all of that kind of problem
is really what fullcast is about.
And that's what we support our customers with today.
- Yeah, you know, it's interesting.
I mean, I love hearing that story around the rise
of a revenue platform and operations.
I mean, you know, clearly that's a qualified,
that's what we think about all day.
And I work with a lot of marketers.
And with the silos, you get into like,
oh, well, this is a marketing qualified lead.
And this is a sales qualified lead.
And really at the end of the day,
what we're trying to, what any company's trying to do
is just trying to help solve a problem
and bring revenue in the door.
So yeah, this revenue layer is really an interesting,
you know, concept that has evolved.
And I love seeing that.
And it's great to hear, you know, companies such as fullcast
really coming through and helping solve those problems.
'Cause it does, you know, go across everything
from to your point, the top of the funnel,
to the bottom of the funnel,
and then to the success funnel, if you will,
you know, that continues on because obviously, you know,
in my role as the head of customer success,
it's, you know, revenue is still extremely important
and keeping that base in place is really important.
So, but you know, what challenges are you seeing now
and how are you applying what you've learned
at Salesforce to those challenges?
- The biggest learning for me was when we were looking
at the problem at Salesforce, right?
It was heavily handled with what I call spreadsheets
in Elbow, Greece, right?
You got a bunch of analysts together,
you gave them a bunch of spreadsheets and say,
good at times.
And they would, you know, crank out numbers.
The spreadsheets would fail, but, you know,
they'll break it apart into small chunks and email it
to like 400 people, get it all back, put it all together.
This was kind of the model that was used to handle it.
And clearly, you know, there's a better way to do it.
And, but people weren't really sure
whether you could automate it, right?
There was so much variability in the ways
that you carve territories.
There's so much variability in the ways
that you sort of built comp plans and so on.
The question was, you know, could you build a platform
to do that?
And do that in a way that the platform
can actually support that variability.
And the learning for me at Salesforce was yes.
It can be done.
And we did it at Salesforce and we scaled
all of those processes.
And that was kind of the premise of taking that
and then enhancing that with what we're doing at,
at Vocast.
The problems are the same, right?
Whether you're a five person sales organization
or we have 5,000 person sales organization,
it's just at some point it becomes painful enough
that you need automation to kind of, you know,
you can't just keep throwing bodies at it.
So that was for me, I think the biggest learning
and the proving point that you can apply automation,
you can apply AI, you can apply technology
to kind of address that space
and give teams the agility, right?
I mean, that's really what we're after is,
market changes are continuous.
We will go to markets of volatile, right?
No longer is it that you build a plan
and you hold it out for the whole year
and you don't make any changes that that world is gone.
Now you're continually tweaking and changing
and adapting to the market.
And as you do that, you have to be able to deploy that
and get that working in your transactional environments.
And that problem was where things were getting stuck
and that was what my team used to do at Salesforce.
So really kind of automating that is the premise
that I've taken from what we did at Salesforce
to what we're doing here at
I mean, you saw all the announcements that Salesforce did
with General DVI.
But for us from a planning and on operations perspective,
what does that mean, right?
Could we provide the sales managers and the ops teams
with a similar experience from a planning perspective,
from a management perspective, right?
Could we drive that kind of a interface?
So I think that's why everybody in this space
is really looking at what's happening there
and the changes that Salesforce is making as well
to really understand.
I think it's a transformative model.
It's sort of the iPhone kind of moment for us
with General DVI.
And so everything is likely to change.
And all the models that we're used to,
our dashboards even real anymore.
Those are the kind of fundamental questions
we're gonna be asking ourselves.
And I think from a transactional perspective,
Salesforce has taken the lead and driving that.
And for us, could we do the same,
from a planning perspective,
could we do the same from an administration
or an ops perspective?
Like how does this change our landscape?
Is really the problem space that we're working on.
So that part is exciting.
That's a whole new world, essentially.
- I mean, extremely exciting.
And it's funny, I was thinking,
oh, I should have an AI question for you
because I know that's hot,
but I'm glad that you actually left us there already.
'Cause everyone's always asking,
especially around the generative AI.
And I do look at this as,
you're right, transformational
in the entire SaaS market, just like mobile was, right?
Like how do we think,
everyone was like, how do you think mobile first?
Now it's like, well, how do we think AI first?
And how do we adapt our world to that?
And what does that mean for our platform?
And it's not just a feature that people release.
It's actually something that is just part
of the actual makeup.
- It's much more fundamental, right?
And it's gonna change the user interaction
with software as we know it, enterprise software
as we know it.
And I think, as Salesforce is smartly catching onto that
and saying, okay, we've gotta have a model
for the transactional pipeline and how we handle that.
So I think that's very exciting.
I think it's gonna change the ecosystem
pretty considerably.
All of the apps in the broader ecosystem
is going to have to think about that,
going out to think about how to interact with Salesforce
in that way, Einstein in that way,
and feed into that.
So I think it's a whole sort of uplift
for everybody in the ecosystem.
- Let's get into our final segment, the future forecast.
So, Bala, what do you envision
as the future of the Salesforce ecosystem?
- So I've always kind of looked at the acquisition of Slack,
with the idea that when Salesforce made that announcement,
and they also bought MuleSoft as well,
which was for the two different models.
But for me, the old enterprise integration model is dead, right?
And really this conversational model
is really what's gonna drive
the business processes and workflows and things like that.
So I think there is a really powerful way
in which you were talking about data in silos
and how they integrate with each other.
And I really think that that layer
is how it's gonna change, right?
And essentially it's gonna be that conversational layer
that's gonna drive business processes.
It's not just for collaboration, but it's actually,
can I tell my systems in the background
like go do this, run this, work the phone,
get this results done, move this person
from this role to this role.
And as a sales manager, can I just do that on Slack?
Why can't I do that, right?
And I think that is an interesting sort of arc
to look at, especially with generative AI,
because that just changes the model
into what Slack already does really well,
which is bring people together
and allow for these kind of business processes
to be built on top of it, right?
10, 15 years ago, we would build that on top of an
AI enterprise integration layer.
Well, I think that's gone.
I think what we're gonna do is really build it
on top of this conversational layer,
which I am excited about.
- I mean, that is the vision
of what Salesforce wants to do.
So that's pretty, I mean, yeah, I agree with where
that's going.
Obviously there's a long road ahead
of driving that type of collaboration,
and business processes at the collaboration layer,
but we're gonna get there.
- And that's the fun thing as a startup,
is that that's where the ideas are spurred,
and you have a platform now to sort of start building
great new ideas on top, similar to what
the app exchange did for us, right?
And so I'm excited to see where startups
are gonna take that on top of the Salesforce ecosystem.
Is that what you see full cast also integrating
a lot more in that regard?
- Absolutely, absolutely.
You know, Slack as well as even supporting
those kinds of conversations.
So today, for instance, Salesmanagers would do
a bunch of operational tasks,
and they would go look at a dashboard,
they'll go click through some wizards
to get something done.
Well, we want that model to change,
and if that changes, then you know,
learning curve and all of this,
second, our enablement problems,
a lot of those things get solved right away,
because people are very comfortable
with the conversational model.
And if we can do that,
and I think that changes the game.
- Can you give us a prediction
of what Salesforce looks like in the future?
- So the couple of interesting ideas that,
you know, the startup world have been throwing around
is what does a post CRM world look like?
Like, do we still need a database
in the old sense, right, of customer information
and things like that?
In that sort of collaborative world,
what does CRM even mean anymore?
And I think that's an interesting arc
that Salesforce is sort of looking at.
I don't know how far along they are in that sort of product arc.
But I think I sort of see a world
where this old idea of building a database,
a contact database, an account database,
and all of that, I think that's gonna slowly go away,
because most of that information is repeated
in every single CRM.
There's no reason for it to be.
And so I think there is an interesting angle there
from a Salesforce perspective in terms of what does that mean?
What does the post CRM look like?
Does it just become this collaborative layer
on top of like data sources that may exist
or may not exist in the future?
- I mean, that's a really, I mean, you know,
a hundred thousand foot view,
an awesome way to look at it too.
So what advice do you have
for any aspiring entrepreneurs out there?
- You know, entrepreneurship is not for everybody.
As we tell that to everybody that we hire in the company,
we say it's not a job, it's a lifestyle.
And that is, you know,
because you live and breathe this thing 24 hours a day.
And as entrepreneurs, it's very exciting.
The Salesforce ecosystem is a very exciting place to be.
But it's definitely a lifestyle as opposed to a job.
You can approach this like a job.
- Well, I mean, that's definitely,
I mean, going from Salesforce to, you know,
where I'm at now, that's a 150% true.
So that's, and I enjoy every single moment of it
'cause it is one of those things you live and breathe,
but it's, and it keeps you alive.
You know, you feel really alive.
And you feel a sense of ownership of the problem.
And you also see the impact of the things that you do,
the decisions that you make right away, right?
You're not waiting and you're gonna have two years
to see how things turn out, like things are,
it's sort of an interesting high, but you live it.
- Yeah, you definitely live it.
Now, before letting you go,
let's have fun with a little quick lightning round.
You ready?
- Awesome, go for it.
- Okay.
- Secret skill that's not on the resume.
- I am a wildlife photographer.
So I travel to places to take pictures of endangered species
and that's something that I enjoy a lot.
- That's incredible.
Do you, how long do you sit in blinds for?
You know, I'm like-- - Oh, days, days.
Like, I did a trip to the Canadian Arctic
to go take pictures of now walls, you know, the,
the corn whales. - Yeah.
- And we were there for four days
or kept out on sea ice and we saw them once.
- Wow, that is, that's an awesome story.
I love it. - Yeah, yeah.
- Best way to spend an evening after work.
- Take my camera out and go take pictures.
And that's sort of my sort of piece,
is be able to capture wildlife.
And you know, nothing about that is under your control.
The birds are not posing for you or whatever.
It's just, you just surrender and just deal with it.
(laughs)
- I love it.
Favorite brand of anything?
- Of anything, I'm a sports nut.
I grew up in Toronto, so the Toronto Maple Leafs
is my team and my jam.
So, you know, I dressed up my daughter
the second day she was born in Leafs uniform, so.
- That's great, I love it.
- I love it, love it, love it.
I mean, well, the Maple Leafs is definitely
very Canadian, you know.
- It is. - So, it's good.
You just won front row seat tickets
to your dream event, what is it?
- It's the Toronto Maple Leafs
in the Stanley Cup Finals game.
- There you go, love it.
- Front seat.
- Yeah, let's see, let's see what happens.
Balla, this has been so much fun.
Before I let you go, let the listeners know
where they can find you.
And if there's anything else you'd like to share
or plug with us today, please do that.
- Sure, yeah, I mean, I think Focast.io
is where I am right now.
And Balla at Focast.io is if you want to reach me.
And, you know, check us out.
And if you have a revenue operations problem,
then we probably can help you.
So, check us out and do reach out if you have any questions.
- Well, Balla, thank you so much for today
and great conversation, love having it.
Great to see you. - I appreciate it, Dad.
Thank you so much.
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