Salesforce Career Conversations #10: Helle Justesen
Episode 10: Helle Justensen talks to Lee and Theresa about Salesforce Change Management and Digital Transformation. Plus provides her tips for remaining positive during a pandemic.
[This interview with Helle has been transcribed for your benefit. Please ignore any rogue typos. Thank You.]
Lee Durrant: Hi, and welcome to RODcast with me Lee Durrant, joined today with Theresa as well. We're both going to be interviewing Helle Justesen today, who is in the Salesforce ecosystem, but this one's more about her experience as a transformational change specialist and a business and life coach and how she sees the future after COVID-19 and all of the lockdown issues we've been all going through. Well, this has been recorded in the middle of lockdown, but I think hopefully you'll all see some positive messages there from Helle about how life might change, but also how the Salesforce ecosystem will potentially thrive in the future, so I hope you enjoy it.
Lee: Hi, Helle. Welcome to the podcast. How are you?
Helle Justesen: I'm fine. Thank you. How are you?
Lee: I'm okay. Theresa is with us as well as you know.
Theresa: Hello.
Helle: Hi. Theresa, how are you?
Theresa: I'm good. Thank you very much. I'm looking forward to this day when - I don't want to use the word normal - but looking forward to the day when we can actually be a lot more social with people and not feel like you got to keep your closest people at arm's distance. Looking forward to those times. [chuckles]
Lee: Before we dive into it, are you okay just to give us a little introduction of yourself in terms of… Just introduce yourself if that's okay.
Helle: Yes, [laughs] of course. My name is Helle, Helle Justesen, and I am 43 years old. I want to put that in there because I'm proud of my age. I'm still alive, so that's good.
[laughter]
Helle: I have a feeling that we don't celebrate the fact that we get to get older enough. That's one of the things that…
Theresa: Yes, I love that, and it's the wisdom that comes with it. Why not shout about it? Absolutely.
Helle: Yes, exactly, and the fact that you get another year to do the crazy things that you want to do. I'm a transformation change specialist with a background in a bit of management consultancy, and I've worked in a multitude of different industries and things like that. The thing is there's always these similarities between each industry and everybody thinks that they're unique, but to be fair, we're really not. [laughs] We're all creatures of habits. That's one of the things that you can always take with you when you're on your life journey and things like that.
I'm very much a holistic person as well. I see us as living a life not necessarily having a career. I think sometimes that when people face a crisis and a crisis can be losing a job, which a lot of people are in that situation right now, or going through a divorce, which also a lot of people are facing right now.
[laughter]
Helle: Because of being at home with the family and things are coming out right now as well.
Lee: Theresa's laughing quite heartily at that one. It's a bit worrying.
Theresa: [laughs] You're so worried.
Helle: The thing is, with that, it's instead of seeing it as a tearful goodbye to something, then seeing it as an opportunity to actually go out and do the things that you've always dreamed about doing. Sometimes a crisis needs to happen for us to actually wake up and change what we're doing. It's the same thing with illness as well. It's like if you've gone down a road where you've been living an unhealthy lifestyle, then something needs to wake you up for you to actually alter that lifestyle or else we go through life mindless.
It's not really a conscious road that we're taking. We're not conscious of the present moment. We either dwell on the past and it's never a good thing about the past. It's never the good things about the past that we dwell on, it's always the hard things, and/or we focus on a better future. We never just appreciate where we are. I think one of those things is what we need to start working on a little bit more.
Theresa: You're right. I know we come from similar coaching backgrounds and I think that there are people that you know when you need to make a massive change because there will be some form of an intervention. You can either choose to do that intervention yourself, so you either make a decision to change the things about your life that you're not happy with, or it's forced upon you that you. I prefer to be in the control.
As I said, I know it's being in control of those changes, but they're often very good things. It's only when you look back through hindsight, that you suddenly go actually that if that thing hadn't have happened, I would have still been going down that same path and that wouldn't have been healthy. It wouldn't have been good. Yes, totally agree where you're coming from on that one.
Lee: Actually for people listening, I should point out that both Helle and Theresa are coaches to various different degrees. Is that right Helle? I know Theresa's a coach. You are as well, aren't you? As well as everything else you do.
Helle: Well, for me, it's both life coaching and things like that, but my background in coaching is an Agile coach as well, where it's in the corporate space of things but I'm also a neuro coach which is based on neuroscience and things like that. I look at fear elements and motivation elements and things. That's just a protocol that you can use in any type of coaching. You don't need to be something particular to actually be able to use that.
Lee: Just a tiny scene, a little bit with obviously the history of this podcast, you are in the Salesforce space so that people can find you on LinkedIn and everything like that.
Helle: [laughs] Yes.
Lee: What I like about you as well amongst other things is that you're not all about is the Salesforce. Part of your digital transformation and change management, Salesforce is a part of that. It's not the only--
Helle: Yes, it is.
Lee: Do you mind telling us a bit about that? I know there'll be some people listening as well that perhaps wonder, what is change management? What is transformational change management?
Helle: Well, the scary part is that a lot of people go out and buy new CRM systems as Salesforce is and implement that in an organisation and they think, "We're just changing a tool," but, in fact, you're changing the way that you're working. If you have an old legacy system, then Salesforce is this golden new goose that you're getting in, but you can't approach Salesforce with an old mindset. You have to change your mindset as well in terms of how to utilize that CRM to the best abilities of it. You're not just changing an IT system, you're changing the way you work.
For a Salesforce project to reap the best rewards and utilize the benefits that you're trying to achieve with the business plan you've set up originally, you really need to change more than just a system. That's where the mindset of the likes of me come in. I will come into a project, not as a change manager, but as a program manager. I take on the more strategic elements of it, but because of my background in coaching and change and everything like that, that means I can reach further than just delivering a program. In short, that's what I do.
Lee: Yes, brilliant. I think we had a message back and forth about how that can be different, or how in the Salesforce world there are some companies that perhaps just want to deliver a piece of Salesforce kit and then off they go. How does that differ for you then in terms of what you do around that, that makes sure that the users are happy with it and the business?
Helle: Usually, the thing is that you need to be prepared for getting a new system. That means that you have to look with some critical eyes on how you're doing your business now, and also what it is that you're wanting to achieve in the future. All businesses have a strategy that they're trying to achieve in a yearly business plan, and a Salesforce implementation fit right into that. Part of the reason why people are getting Salesforce is to achieve that business plan.
It may be that they want to have more customers or they want to reduce their cost of sales or whatever it may be. That's the reason why they're thinking, "I need a new CRM system", or it may just be a risk factor that the old system is not compliant with GDPR or something like that. There is a reason that you're making this investment. It needs to fit into that plan.
A lot of people just see it as an IT project and it isn't an IT project, it's a business project. You can look at a CRM system and say, so the technical part of it is an IT domain but the data that goes into the system is a business domain. Also, the business processes that you are mimicking in the system is owned by the business, not by IT. That's why these two needs to, you need to work hand-in-hand on this. You're not operating in a vacuum.
Sometimes, businesses are set up in the old way where it's silo-based and wherein the old days you can just have the database was run by IT and that's it and nobody actually knew what was going on there. You would have this a little bit of animosity between business and IT because IT would go, well, business will ask for something and IT would go like, "Oh my God but I can't-- That's a major configuration we need to do to the system to comply with what you're asking." When they say that to the business, they don't understand that. You have two people, two sides of the business that are speaking different languages.
This is again,
