The Value of Coming Home
Meet Jim Steele, President of Global Strategic Customers at Salesforce and our first Salesforce Boomerang!
(upbeat music)
- Welcome to Inside the Ohana.
I'm Dan Darcy, Chief Customer Officer at Qualified.
And today I'm joined by my friend, Jim Steele.
Jim, how are you doing?
- I'm doing great, Dan.
Anytime I'm talking to you, it's all good.
- So I wanna dive right into our first segment,
Ohana Origins.
Tell me how you discovered Salesforce.
- I happen to be vacationing with my family
down at the Jersey Shore.
It was August of 2002.
And John Thompson from Hydrix said,
Jim, you gotta get on a plane, fly out
and meet Mark Benioff.
And I said, no, I'm not doing that.
I'm on vacation.
By the way, who is Mark Benioff?
And I kind of knew of Mark, but I didn't really focus.
It seemed to me, it was a S&B kind of company,
small company, and I had mostly spent on my career
calling on big enterprises.
So I didn't ever pay much attention to Salesforce.
But he said, no, Jim, this is an opportunity
you don't wanna miss.
So I said, I still can't fly out, you know,
with my family.
So he said, all right, you're gonna go
to the Atlantic City Community College.
It's 20 minutes from where you are in Stone Harbor.
You're gonna get on a video call with Mark.
It's gonna last between 45 minutes and an hour max.
And you can go on your way.
And I said, okay, fine.
So I talked to my wife into getting in the car.
I said, look, we'll go to Atlantic City.
Not my favorite place to go, but we're gonna go.
We can make this fun.
We'll go gamble afterwards and have dinner, drinks.
So I went into this Atlantic City Community College
in the back of some room, and my wife sat in the back
of the room, and Mark, we were on the call
for maybe an hour and a half to two hours.
And I was mesmerized.
Just listening to Mark talk about his vision
for Salesforce, that we were gonna be one
of the largest enterprise software companies in the world.
We were gonna be competing with Microsofts and Oracle's
and SAP's.
I, it was such an audacious goal for a tiny little company,
but Mark said it with such confidence
and so much passion that it got me excited.
So I couldn't wait to get back to California
the following week to meet Mark in person.
And that's how it all started.
And I really didn't know much about Salesforce
until I walked in the door, you know,
that fall of 2002.
- That's awesome.
I mean, well, I mean, give us the details.
What, I mean, obviously you got the job,
but what was your first job?
Who was your team?
- At the time, we were about 150 people in the fall of 2002.
We were doing about 22 million of revenue
the previous year and we had about 22 people in sales.
I remember that 'cause I was like, okay,
22 people in sales and 22 million in revenue.
That was just an interesting thought
that I had in my mind at that point.
- The quota coverage.
- Yes.
So I had sales, I also had the partner organization,
I had marketing, although he said to me, he said,
look, don't waste any time in marketing.
He said, I run marketing here.
This is Mark telling me this and he said,
I just need to park it under use.
So when something goes wrong, I have somebody to blame.
And that's exactly the way he thought of it.
And so I didn't, I'm not a marketer.
Like I've never really run a marketing organization,
Dan, like you and others that have immersed your careers
in that, but it was fun to be part of that.
And you know, it was part of that first dream force,
but I also had the services organization,
so all the consulting and services.
So it was, I'd say of the 150 people,
it was about 80 to 100, somewhere in that range
when I came in.
- So after starting at Salesforce,
what was your initial impression of the people?
- The people were amazing.
Like everyone was so passionate
and everyone was so committed to be part
of this game-changing company and technology
that Mark was the pioneer of.
Like what Mark described to me, he said,
look, we are going to change the game of software.
He said, just like Google and Amazon deliver their technology
to millions and millions of consumers
that know nothing about running,
you know, a data center running computers for that matter,
we're gonna do the same thing with enterprise software.
So we're gonna mask all the complexities
that customers have been frustrated with over many years.
They've spent millions and millions of dollars
trying to build the infrastructure
to run their computer system before they see any value
and have any chance of the return on their investment.
We're gonna turn it on like you would a utility.
And he described, he said, thank yourself, you know,
he said, Jim, did you build a nuclear power plant
in your backyard to run the power of your house?
No, of course not.
Did you dig a wealth, you know, for the water?
No, of course not.
He said, well, that's the way we think
about delivering technology.
We're gonna deliver this as a service
and we are going to be completely in tune
and aligned with our customer success.
We can't be successful unless they're successful
and we can never just throw the deal over the trance
and then kind of wash our hands up
and say, good luck to the customer.
It doesn't work, it's not our problem.
Bringing it to myself, I'm the chief customer officer here
at Qualified and I learned a lot of around customer success
really from what Salesforce built early on
and continued to never shy away from
and just always taking care of the customer,
bringing in the best practices.
I think that's one of the biggest lessons I've learned,
especially from Salesforce.
But if you could go back to your early days of Salesforce,
at Salesforce, what advice would you give to yourself?
- You know, there's this saying that's gone around
in the industry forever in any business.
You know, if it ain't broke, don't break it.
You know, just don't fix it, right?
And sorry, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
And Mark, his saying was, if it ain't broke, break it
because we need to learn to fix things
that we create ourselves rather than having
the competition do it or the market conditions do it,
which is much harder to recover from.
So Mark was always like, hey, just when you think
something's working to your satisfaction
and you don't want to tinker with it,
Mark's like, oh, nope, we're gonna keep tinkering.
So he would come in, like he'd be making these suggestions
to me all the time, like, Jim, why I've been talking
to you about this for two days now,
like why haven't we made a decision?
And that was not really the way things worked at IBM.
They'd go through a process over many weeks
or months, sometimes years.
And so I'd be like, Mark, are you serious?
You're really like, you want me to move on this now?
He said, Jim, what's the worst thing that can happen?
He said, if it doesn't work, we go back to the old way.
But all I know is if we stay doing what we're doing today
that will never get the benefit of making those changes
and seeing what the potential is.
He said, I need you to embrace change at all times.
So that changed me forever.
Like I went from being this passive, resistant executive
to being this enthusiastically embracing all of these,
but I thought sometimes we were a little crazy
some of these ideas.
Like just the way Mark thought about organizing my team
or about pricing a solution or about bundling a solution
or hiring certain people that didn't necessarily,
their skills had didn't necessarily fit.
What I thought was the conventional profile
that I came from.
So these are the things that just got me thinking differently.
And I have to say now after 20 years,
'cause it was about over 20 years ago
that I started working at Salesforce,
in 20 years the company obviously has gone from 22 million
to now this year, 32 billion is what we're projecting
almost 32 billion.
And from 150 people to now 80 plus thousand people,
like reinventing yourself is such an important part
of first of all building the right skill sets
and really all that embracing change.
That has changed me forever.
Like I've gone from my wife, she teases me,
she said, "You've become like the Benjamin button
of the technology business."
I started my career in 1978 in New York City with IBM
and here I am, you know, 44 years later.
And I just, I feel like Mark has created this beginner's mindset.
Always thinking from a beginner's perspective,
which maybe for me was an easier thing.
It's much easier now.
Like just forget whatever biases you've built up,
from the past, like put them to the side
and just think openly and embrace that there's new ideas
and that change.
And I feel like I could do this for another 20 years,
honestly.
- I mean, Jim, I love, there's a few powerful things
I wanna call here because I think that's a powerful lesson
for our listeners and viewers is really that, you know,
if it ain't broke, break it, embrace the innovation,
embrace the change and in a way it's genius
because you really do bring that beginner's mind
to everything that you're doing.
And you just have to be in this constant state
of embracing the innovation and change.
And so I think that is an incredible lesson
and great piece of advice for folks on the line.
Now, you know, I want you to brag a little bit here
because you've just had an incredible career
at Salesforce and we're still going, right?
But I want you to reflect upon what's the biggest success
that you think you've had so far?
And I know there's many of them that you've had
at Salesforce or something that you're really
just proud of so far.
- The short answer to your question is creating an attitude,
not cocky, not arrogant because those don't play
in this world of enterprise software.
We learned that with Seabull or Colerne that the hard way
for a number of years.
Everyone's kind of reinvented themselves
but creating an attitude of we are all about the customer
and all about their success.
We, passion and confidence are great to have
but arrogance and cockiness don't work.
So creating that culture of we have this can-do attitude,
we're gonna stick with you and we go back
to these customers over and over again and say,
"Please take that leap of faith with us.
You know, we will do everything to make you successful.
We will live and breathe in your shop
and help you be successful.
We're not going away.
We can't be successful without you being successful.
And unless you're on stage a dream for sharing
that success story, it almost doesn't matter.
We can win the deal but if you're not happy
and you would trip a year or two later,
then that's really bad for us.
I'd rather not have won that deal in the first place.
So one of the really important sales calls,
I don't even know if I'd call it a sales call,
it was basically a, you know, we were called in
by the CIO of Cisco, Brad Boston.
This is Mark got a call from and said,
"I want you in my office and I'm gonna read you
the riot act."
And Mark and I go in there and said,
"You guys have infiltrated Cisco
without my permission.
You're not an approved solution.
We're gonna throw you out.
As soon as I can figure out how to transition
off of sales force back to Seebull,
we're gonna turn you guys off."
And I'm really upset that you did this.
You kind of sold around me.
And you know, Mark and I are like,
"But Brad, you gotta give us a chance
and what can we do to earn your business?"
And he said, you know, he said, "You can't."
He said, "I don't see you as an enterprise solution."
And so I remember the most important question I ever asked him
was, "How do you define an enterprise class solution
that you would approve?"
And he stopped and he said, "Okay, well,
let me tell you what's important to me."
He said, "Security is number one.
I don't care how easy and fast and cheap you guys are."
'Cause that was our sales pitch back then.
You guys have to be secure.
You have to be reliable.
You have to be scalable.
You have to have high performance.
I don't want to hit the enter key
and sitting there waiting for a long response time.
You have to be customizable.
He said, "I don't want the Salesforce generic version.
I want the Cisco version of Salesforce.
This has to be Cisco.
So how do you customize it?"
And then how do you integrate?
He said, "I have all these other enterprise solutions.
I can't run Salesforce in a vacuum.
I need to integrate Salesforce
with all these other backend solutions, Oracle,
Seabull, all these other enterprise solutions."
And so I remember writing all these down like,
"Wow, this is going to be my playbook for the enterprise.
This is back in like 2004, 2005."
And he said, "Oh, and one more thing."
He said, "You better be a lot cheaper."
He didn't use the word a lot.
He used something, a blank load of cheaper
than your competition.
And that was the only one I actually debated on.
I said, "Wait a second, I come from IBM.
I never sold anything cheaper."
He said, "What does it mean to you
if I can get you in and up and running
in three to six months instead of one to two years
like you described your Seabull deployment?
What does it mean to you with 80 to 90% adoption
of your Salesforce versus 20 to 30%,
which we know you get with Seabull?"
And he looked at me with a smirk.
He said, "I see where you're going."
He said, "All right, I'm not going to give you ROI
because that gives you too much room to,
for creative licensing to sell me on value."
He said, "Let's just compromise and we'll give you a TCO.
Give me total cost of ownership.
Show me all the other components that I have to spend money
on if I were to build it myself and run the Seabull shop."
So it took us a couple of years after that
to win them over, but we would win these pockets
and we'd always go down and say,
"Hey, we just won Europe.
We won Asia.
We've run these other divisions."
And finally, we got them to the table
and closed our big enterprise license agreement.
- That is an amazing story because
that obviously brings the number one value
that Salesforce have, which is trust, right?
The trust of the uptime, the performance and the security.
And I mean, that's incredible.
So I'm going to switch gears here really quick
because I want to ask you something
that everyone defines it a little bit differently.
But when I ask you about what you think
the meaning of Ohana is,
how would, what does Ohana mean to you
and how would you describe it?
- It's something that you don't always appreciate
when you're in it, you know, but when you're outside
and you see other companies that on the surface
look like they should have everything Salesforce has.
They have a compelling value proposition.
They have great people.
They've got great customers,
but there's a component
that you could describe as the Ohana
that happens at Salesforce that I've never seen.
You know, I've felt it at times at IBM back in the 80s,
for example, and some of that changed over time,
but it's hard to describe until you're out of it.
There's so many situations that we all have
in our personal lives that we don't always bring
into business because, you know, it's like business
and personal lives you don't always mix the two.
I'm telling you, the thing that made the Ohana special to me
was, you know, just going through like my father
when he was gone through prostate cancer back in the day.
Mark, bending up, it's like, Jim, we're gonna get your dad
with the best prostate cancer doctors in the world.
Like that, I'm like, Mark, look, that's,
I appreciate that, but that's, you know,
and he like insisted on it.
And there's so many stories that Mark has done that,
you know, this is not just like window dressing.
Like there's a lot of things that he does that,
and he's taught all of us to do for our people
that go way beyond, you know, the business side,
that because we're immersed in our job, like, you know,
with Salesforce, I was traveling around the world
200 days a year, I was at a hotel somewhere
in those early days when I was, when Mark gave me the,
the Twitter label, you know, Roadward 24/7.
And, you know, he recognized that business and personal,
you have to, at times you have to blend the two,
you can't keep them separate.
And just the way he did that, he also officiated my wedding,
which not too many people have their bosses to this,
but Mark offered to do it, and I gladly accepted his,
and of course we had to go through a beat of mom exercise,
which is a whole different story to get to that point.
But these are things that, you know, you can't replace,
like you can't just see that, you know,
in any other company that I've been a part of,
I've been a part of probably five major corporations,
four of which were public companies,
and I never, never experienced that kind of,
that kind of ohana that we have at Salesforce.
That's an incredible story because of the,
you know, the integration between work life and,
and you know, your personal life and everything coming together,
it truly is a special place.
So I wanna get into our next segment, What's Cooking?
Jim, you're one of the, our first boomerang folks
on the show, and for folks who know what a boomerang is,
is they leave the company and then they come back,
and you're now the president of Global Strategic Customers.
I want you to talk a little bit about your journey,
on how you got there and, you know,
what it's been like in your current role.
- So I, I basically spent my last three and a half years
before I went off to these other companies,
you know, before I then became a boomerang.
Just as an individual contributor, you know,
I worked for Mark, I was traveling the world,
I was 100% focused on customers,
and I'd have to still report to the ELT on a,
on a regular basis and share all the customer feedback
and the feedback I was getting from the field.
And, and I, it was kind of like the voice of the customer.
And I loved it because I was,
I didn't have to do any forecasting,
I didn't have to do operational reviews and QBRs,
all the things that I would be, you know,
fretting about working 24 hours a day.
And that, that suited me perfectly,
because I, he said, you're, you're kind of, you know,
one of the faces of Salesforce to the, to the customer.
So go do, do what you do best.
And, and because I knew everybody in the company
and I had built that trust and that, you know,
the credibility, I was able to leverage my relationship
rather than, you know, my, my job title owning, you know,
all the operations.
So I love that.
And, but I did get the itch to go do it all over again.
And with a smaller company,
I rolled the dice a couple more times.
One, not, not so successfully one was successful.
We took the company public and it was fun.
But, you know, when COVID hit, I got,
I started thinking, you know,
and I stayed in touch with Mark as a, you know,
as a friend of mine.
And, and I, I always confided in Mark to get his advice.
And so Mark, I said, look, I'm commuting from Park City,
Utah to New York City.
And with COVID, this is kind of changing the game.
I think our, we're going to deal with some headwinds
in our industry.
And I, you know, I've never felt like I felt
when I worked for Salesforce.
I still consider sales force my, you know, my ho-hanna,
my, my, my home.
And Mark said, yeah, I, I feel the same.
I want you to come back and we, we have this opportunity
for you to do similar to what you're doing before,
but you're going to focus on all of our strategic
customers globally.
You're going to work with the, the operating units
that kind of own those customers and all the different
industry teams and geography teams around the world.
But you're going to basically do what you did
as the chief customer officer.
So in your current role, what challenges are you seeing now?
And how are you applying what you learned previously
at Salesforce to these challenges?
- The number one thing, and I, I've probably been preaching
this forever is we have to listen to the customer.
You know, we, you know, it's changed so much.
If you like 20 years ago, I could go in.
I didn't necessarily have to listen
'cause there was only one reason they wanted us there.
And that was to sell them the one product that we had.
If we tried to do that today, where would we start?
We have dozens of products.
So you'd miss the mark, you know, 95% of the time.
So the most important thing is to listen to what are the,
you know, top strategic imperatives that the C level,
ideally right from the CEO or the CIO, the COO, the CFO,
what are their top imperatives that they're trying to drive
inside their company?
Are they expanding into new markets
and they want to grow revenue?
Well, these are tougher times we're going through, you know,
where a lot of companies are focused on the bottom line.
So are we helping them save money or to get more efficient?
Are they doing, are they focused on, you know,
retaining their customers and proving that whole customer
life cycle kind of, you know, the whole end to end
life cycle of that customer.
Are we helping them make that all those handoffs,
you know, as seamless as possible?
So we talked to them and what are their, you know,
everyone digital transformation is everyone's, you know,
buzz phrase like, what does that mean to them
and why do they need digital transformation in their industry
and why are they working with Salesforce?
What's important to them?
And, you know, that's probably most of my coaching
with the teams is always, hey, let's make sure that we know
exactly what the customer wants.
And, you know, rather than telling them what we think they want,
let's listen to them and then talk in their terminology.
Let's not talk in Salesforce speak and acronyms.
Let's talk in their business.
I love it.
Jim, I want to get into our final segment, The Future Forecast.
What do you envision as the future of Salesforce?
Yeah, the market, as we all know, the tech market has been
just incredibly, you know, up into the right.
It's almost like you can put a blindfold on and throw a dart
and hit whatever company you hit.
Probably had a pretty good likelihood of growth and success.
And, you know, these astronomical kind of valuations, you know,
that were, you know, on these incredible multiples that,
and what's, what we're seeing now is there is a flight to safety.
And by that, I mean, none of us are considered, you know, tree huggers
where we're, you know, always looking for safety.
That's not a selling point, you know, for people that like to take risk.
But our customers are telling us, and I, you know, I listen to our customers
all the time, they want to work with companies that are, that have a long
history
of success and a vision for the future that they know will be sustainable,
that will continue to be successful.
And, you know, they're not necessarily, this is not necessarily the time
that they're going to be looking for the, the startups that are maybe higher
risk
that are still not well funded enough for their valuations are so high
that it's almost impossible to see how they could, you know, go public, for
example.
What aspiring advice do you have for someone thinking about coming back to
Salesforce?
We just celebrate, you know, any boomerang coming back?
I, you know, I wondered about like I was, do I go back?
Like, do I just kind of leave that legacy behind?
It's okay. That was, you know, I left in January 2015.
I just remember that for the great memories and, and the, the legacy
that I feel I was part of building.
But Salesforce, that, that same energy and excitement that we all joined Sales
force for
and they kept us there for so many years is still there and the magic is still
there
and hasn't gone away.
And, and I'd encourage anyone that's considering it to give me a call.
Tell me, you know, let me, let me hear your story.
Jim, before letting you go, I want to have some fun with a quick lightning
round.
Are you ready for this?
Here we go.
What's your favorite Salesforce product?
Well, you know, if you asked me 15 years ago, I, whenever the, I guess it was
50,
I would have said chatter because I loved showing chatter.
Like that was my lifeline.
I'd be out in front of a customer with my blackberry back then.
And I'd show them, I, they'd ask me some question that I had no clue what the
answer is.
Some technical question.
I'd type it into chatter and within a minute or two, some expert would give me
the product.
The perfect answer.
Now I'd have to say slack.
I'm, you know, I'm not quite the expert on slack because it's so much, so much
more
that it comes with slack, but, and we've been using it for like, I guess, eight
or nine months.
So slack would be right up there and just the way we communicate internally.
And I have to say, you know, Tableau as well because I love the dashboards
analytics.
The, you know, I, I used to, I, I felt like as the top sales person at Sales
force, you
know, 20 years ago, it was on me to show people how I used it as the head of
sales.
So I, I'd show people all the time sales cloud and the mobile app that we
created back then
allowed me to show my dashboards on my blackberry, which was amazing.
So now it's, there's so much more, but I'd have to say slack Tableau and sales
cloud
are my go to favorite Salesforce character.
I'd have to say blaze the wolf, you know, because number one, I live on a ranch
now out
here in Utah and I have, I don't know, 80 or 90 animals now, no, no predators,
no wolves.
But I do like the wolf because it's all about customer success.
It's about loyalty.
It's about trust and you know, that's what wolves represent.
They do things in a pack.
You know, sometimes little, little grizzly at times, but we won't go down there
That bet.
But yeah, blaze.
I know it's like these quick.
Well, I was thought you were going to say sassy.
If you look over my shoulder there, do you see the nose?
No.
Oh, yeah.
I see and I've been accused of being sassy from time to time with Mark.
Secret skill not on the resume.
Remembering people's names that that I'd have to say what and I have tricks to
it that
I could talk to, but it's such a simple thing and people don't ever do it.
Like it is the most basic thing in knowing somebody's name and you know, just
remembering
it and I, I obsess with it because it's really uncomfortable to be around
people that I should,
I feel like I should know I met them once before and now I don't know their
name.
So I, I obsess on it and I'm really good at it.
My, my best trick was 150 people at a dinner at my previous company.
I went around to all 150, about 75 company members with their plus ones and I
had everybody's
name.
Yeah, that probably was the highlight of my name recall.
Okay, last one.
Favorite brand of anything besides Salesforce?
This has changed a lot.
I'd say I've gone from Gucci and Louis Vuitton, Louis Vuitton is more of my
wife's favorite,
but to now, Polaris because I live on a ranch, I drive with Polaris.
I also like the, the John Deere and the case trackers that I've got.
Probably not what you expected there, Dan.
No, no, that's, I love it.
Well, Jim, this has been so much fun, but before I let you go, we let the
listeners know where
they can find you and is there anything else you'd like to share?
Dan, anytime you're ready to come back, man, we, we take you in a heartbeat.
We want you as a, some boomerang.
But no, I'd say, first of all, I, I love to gauge.
So my Twitter handle is, is, uh, road warrior 24/7.
Not that I'm a big Twitter person, but that's one.
Also my email at Salesforce is Jim.Steal with an E on the end at salesforce.com
And that, that'll be a good start to connect.
And I, I do check LinkedIn on a pretty regular basis and certainly my, my email
, but, uh,
or if you can slack me, that's even better because I'm, I'm looking at slack
before anything
else.
Jim, thank you so much for your time today.
I really appreciate it.
Thanks, Dan.
Great seeing you.
Take care, everybody.
Okay.
Bye bye. (upbeat music)
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