Episode 7: Ian Moyse Salesforce Career Conversation with ROD. Is Ian the busiest man in cloud? Not only is he the EMEA Sales Director for Natterbox, he is also a Non-Exec Director for numerous cloud companies and bodies. Listen to his story on our latest RODcast.
Lee: Hiya, it's RODcast again with me, Lee Durant. Today's very special guest is Ian Moyse. This is going to be a long introduction because Ian, as you'll find out by listening to this episode, is many things and does many things. A very busy man. He's currently Non-Exec Director for Digital Leadership Associates, who are experts in social media; a company called ZAR, who are a managed cloud and IT services provider; FAST, which is the Federation Against Software Theft, and Assure Data, who are a GDPR training firm.
He's also an advisory board member to SAAS Max Data, an SAS applications platform. He's a governance board member of CIF, which is the Cloud Industry Forum. And he still has time for his main role, which is the EMEA Sales Director at Natterbox - Natterbox being the most integrated Salesforce telephony experience.
This is an interesting episode because Ian talks about his career but also talks about the wider world of Cloud Salesforce and how it's gone since 2001. So, quite a long, in-depth one, but hopefully you'll learn a lot about Ian's experiences of the wider world of Cloud as well as Salesforce, and of course Natterbox.
Hope you guys enjoy it.
Lee: So, Ian, thanks very much for joining us today. How are you doing?
Ian: Good, Lee, thank you for the invite as well.
Lee: No, I appreciate it. You've got to be probably the busiest person we've had on so far because I was thinking initially, "Oh EMEA Sales Director for Natterbox, you’ll be busy enough doing that."
Ian: Yeah.
Lee: But then I noticed you're an advisor and Non-Exec Director, a speaker and presenter. There's so much else you do as well. Could you just do a little introduction on yourself for everyone listening and explain what it is that you currently do. That would be great.
Ian: Sure, the day job, as you quite rightly say, is EMEA Sales Director at Salesforce Cloud Telephony provider Natterbox. So that's the core piece. But around that, over the past number of years, more by accident than setting out to do so, I've ended up involved as a Non-Executive and things like that in industry bodies: Cloud Industry Forum, Federation Against Software Theft, as a Non-Exec at different times and some other firms in and around the Cloud sector. And I speak, I'm a CLAT School Speaker; I speak at a lot of events, and I get asked to blog and social influence for a lot of major corporations in the technology, and specifically the Cloud, sector.
Ian: So, what I've found is, the more you do it, the more you get invited to do it. If you do a good job of providing value and insight to the audience, whether it be at a speaking event or through a blog you've written, other people tend to spot it.
So, I tend to get inbounds every week through social media direct messages, "Oh, do you do this?" or, "Could you help with this." or, "We noticed this, could you do something for us?" Which is all nice, but as you say, time's limited, so it's a bit of a game of shuffling stuff in, and often, I find a podcast like this or a blog comes out and it's four months later because people schedule stuff ahead in their content library. And I've forgotten I've even done it!
Ian: But it's a bit of a game of doing stuff in front of the TV in the evenings or weekends, if you're in between meetings.
Ian: And the great thing about the social side, the input of some of it is, you can do it on the move in a taxi, right? So there's an element of that.
Ian: The hardest thing for me is writing blogs because you have to really give it some thought. I get the ideas quicker than I get the writing it. So I've probably 20 or 30 blog draughts of the headline and a couple of bullets all written out, ready to go. But it's finding the time as you've already said, of sitting down and writing them.
Lee: I understand that! For the people listening, it will be really interesting to hear your journey because you've risen through the ranks to become EMEA Sales Director of Natterbox, and all these other Non-Exec Director roles you've got. It would be interesting to see, going back to the beginning, how you go into this, what your career was prior to Natterbox, and what you were doing before you got into the Cloud.
Ian: Yeah. I'll do it very quickly because it's more interesting to me than everyone else! I got into computing because right at the beginning someone moved in as a neighbour who had one of the old, I won't say which one it was because it would date me, but one of the very basic old computers that hardly did anything and didn't have whizzy graphics. And I was just hooked from the start. So at that point, I did everything around mathematics and got to be a programmer at IBM.
Lee: Oh, my word!
Ian: So that was my goal. It was techie, getting my hands on this stuff. A couple of years into that I came across the world of sales, saw an opportunity and realised that salespeople at the time, and probably still now, got a lot of the perks. So, mobile phones as they were then - a brick that you need a suitcase to carry - but also a company car and all this stuff. And I was, "How am I going to get that?" I was aspirational and took the leap from technical to sales - as many say, no-one does that successfully, but hopefully, I am a case in point of proving it wrong.
Ian: I absolutely made the spin, went into inside sales, got promoted to field sales in under a year and that was all in-channel. I did channel-based and distribution in the resale market before I ended up in vendor land where I've sat now for quite a while.
Ian: I sold software products for many, many years; different types, system management or security. Moving into the Cloud space was more by accident than selection. I came across a job opportunity in the security space. The locality, the package, everything about the role looked good, but it wasn't because it was Cloud. It wasn't, "Oh, I must get into Cloud." That was just a by-product; it happened to be a Cloud solution. But since I got into it, I've never looked back.
I've been in Cloud for the last 13 years and watched the evolution of vendors such as Salesforce. We were in a very different world very quickly. Technology has moved at an accelerated pace continually and continues to do so, which makes it more interesting, but you've got to reinvent yourself and stay relevant for that reason.
Lee: Absolutely. And when it comes to being a sales leader as you are now, when did that start in the Salesforce space? When did the Cloud thing become more specific to Salesforce?
Ian: I first used Salesforce around 2001 when I set a UK office up for a US firm - one of the many smaller, start-ups that I've instigated. I had six people in an office in Reading and needed some tools, and at that time, Salesforce had a five-user free edition. So, I can say it now, we used the five-user edition and some of us shared one of the IDs... because the minute you bought the sixth licence, it became expensive for everyone.
Lee: Yeah.
Ian: And we were a start-up, so we used the five-user edition. So right back there, I guess that was three years into Salesforce.
Lee: Because they started in 1999, didn’t they?
Ian: '98, '99 I think. The product wasn't out on day one when they founded the business, but it was the earliest edition from when Salesforce came into existence and people didn't really know the name - just that it was the new kid on the block. Siebel was the market leader in CRM, but I needed something flexible, and to be blunt, cheap at the time. And there was this great five-user, ‘get you started’ edition. It was a no-brainer. And that's why they did it. And look what they've built from it over that journey.
Lee: Yeah. And going to where you are now then, from that point, where does Natterbox sit within Salesforce - just for listeners that perhaps haven't heard of it or don't know much about it.
Ian: So firstly, a good standpoint is we run a whole business on Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Financial Force and Salesforce app exchange tools such as Conga. We are fully on board as a customer of Salesforce.
Ian: Our business; what we have and our own technology that we sell, is a fully end-to-end Cloud-based telephony platform. We have embedded within Salesforce. We are the most integrated phone system you can get in Salesforce. And that's from end-to-end, so we only have PBX technology, the engine, the core server routing piece of the telephone system, through to the Computer Telephony Integration. That’s what pops up on your PC as a webphone. We've built that technology and we've built it around Salesforce. So, for a Salesforce customer, we're fully the app exchange; we install the whole phone system and we support Salesforce users in all of the platforms: Force.com, Service Cloud, Sales Cloud, Communities, Omni-channel, et cetera.
So, we live that world, ’Eat our own dog food.’ We run a whole business on what we sell to customers and Salesforce. And we live solely in that eco-system: supporting customers who have Salesforce in their business. But we also support all the other phone users in the business, but through Salesforce. Salesforce becomes your core engine at the centre of your phone system.
Ian: And the beauty of that, the bit that's different, is we allow you to leverage Salesforce and the phone system together. So, we leverage Salesforce data to personalise the phone journey. For example, when you call us, it says, "Morning, Lee, good to see you, we'll put you through to Ian, your account manager." Simple example. Because we do a data dip in Salesforce, to see who your phone number's related to, so we can address you by name,
