Salesforce Career Converstions #8: Adam Weekes
Episode 8: Adam Weekes talks about his Salesforce journey from CRM Manager, to owning his own Consultancy and now being the Chief Visionary Officer at Aotrom.
Lee Durrant: Hello, it's RODcast time with me, Lee Durrant. Today's special guest is Adam Weekes, who's been in the Salesforce ecosystem for 12 years I think. So, we’ll have a good old chat with Adam about his career and how we got into it, and the difference for him in working as a contractor, then permanent. Loads of tips for you guys - looking into the Salesforce ecosystem for those of you that are in it and want to listen to someone who's risen to the ranks of Director as a Salesforce customer.
Lee Durrant: You'll be pleased to know I have a little bit of a cold, so I won't be talking quite so much in this one. And apologies if I'm slightly more nasal than usual, but hopefully it won't spoil your enjoyment of having listening to this podcast. Thanks. So, Hi, Adam. Adam Weekes, welcome to the podcast mate, how are you doing?
Adam Weekes: Thank you. I'm well, thank you.
Lee Durrant: Good, good, good. Thanks for joining us today, I know you're really busy as you have been for many, many years. So, I think you've heard of these before, I asked you to have a little listen, but just to let you know, this is really about us talking about your career in Salesforce. How you got into it and what's happened to you since, and perhaps any little tips or thoughts along the way that people listening could use, really. So, usually, the first question is actually, ‘what are you doing right now?’ And then we'll go back to the beginning.
Adam Weekes: Yeah, I suppose, right now I'm still in my home office where I spend an awful lot of time, chatting with you about Salesforce. That's probably the highlight of my day, because I'm quite an evangelist about the Salesforce ecosystem. And if anybody's ever met me at some of the events, they'll know I can talk the hind legs off a donkey when talking about Salesforce and the associated exciting pieces about that. But that wasn't really answering your question, I'm sure.
Adam Weekes: So, what am I doing right now? I'm helping organisations to implement Salesforce, which is quite a broad topic, of course. So more specifically, when you see particularly smaller, you look at the SMB side of the market there; you see this propensity to think, you've got a choice between Salesforce, which sounds expensive and it looks maybe complex, and then you've got... I won't mention any, but there are plenty of other CRM solutions that you can look at that all have a variety of strengths and weaknesses. Some of them are really good in certain areas, and you know, some in particular around the implementation are really simple - you pull out your credit card and 10 minutes later you're working. But there are limitations to that.
Adam Weekes: So, when you look at the difference between Salesforce as a CRM solution or as a platform really, and some of those others are more entry-level solutions, as I would view them. The big difference is that platform piece, you're buying into a whole ecosystem there. But what that does mean is, you can't just switch it on and say, ’Great, now we've got a CRM’. When you look at the Salesforce website, they'll tell you some fantastic metrics about... you'll see a 41% uplift in sales and your efficiency will go up, your costs will go down and everything, all of those things are potentially true, but they aren't necessarily true to be fair of any CRM mouth box.
Adam Weekes: So, you can instal any CRM and then think, "Fantastic, we're now going to be super-efficient: we've got CRM," the reality is you're not. What you're probably going to see is actually a drop in efficiency because you've got new processes to learn, new systems, new ways of working, et cetera. So what I try and do is work with my customers to think about their processes, what are they trying to achieve, which is obviously usually selling services or goods in an efficient way. And getting visibility, and then operating their business with as much insight as they can, and that's where Salesforce really comes into its own.
Adam Weekes: But it's all about reworking your business to be efficient and then using Salesforce as a tool to support that piece, as opposed to just thinking it's not a shrink-wrap product. It's not like Microsoft Word, you can't just install it and start typing in something, and then there you go; there's your novel. You have to really think about, what is it we're trying to achieve, how do we go about doing it? And that's really where Salesforce is, what I would view as a couple of steps above some of the simpler, lower-priced options, which absolutely have a place in many businesses.
Adam Weekes: But when you're thinking more forward maybe, and you're thinking about how can we progress our business, how can we take our business to the next stage? We want to get super-efficient, we want to get better visibility of our pipeline and our operations. We want to increase the volumes of inbound leads, we want to increase coverage and conversion, et cetera, that's where Salesforce can help, but only if you have an understanding of why you want to do these things and then how to go about doing them at a business level first, and then at that technical level, and that's what I'm doing now.
Lee Durrant: And obviously that's not how you started out, so if we go back to, and I can't remember, I'm trying to thumb through your LinkedIn as we talk. When did it all start for you, then initially, what were you doing prior to getting into Salesforce? Because a lot of people saying this and this podcast that people that have been doing it for a long time didn't necessarily get into Salesforce deliberately; was it something you fell into by accident?
Adam Weekes: It was more of something that helped me out at the time. So my first intro to Salesforce was around 2007, I think…
Lee Durrant: [crosstalk 00:05:56].
Adam Weekes: ... that sort of time. Prior to that, straight out of college and everything else, I'd started off as a developer and then gone into business analysis from there. I ended up working for a company; I worked for the UK division of a multinational who produced fuel pumps and engaging equipment. And I was looking at some of the operations, so they had a whole bunch of field staff that we would be on about, and we used a whole bunch of different systems to try and make the field service engineers, et cetera, as efficient as possible.
Adam Weekes: As things do, situations change, and I was asked to move into a sales and marketing operations role. Which was something that at the time was relatively new to me. I mean, I was very fortunate that I had people around me that were incredibly helpful in helping me to understand the essence of what sales and marketing are, and how they work together and all this sort of good stuff. So whilst that aspect was new to me, they wanted somebody that had a transactional view of the world and could help them get some of their systems working a bit better and some of their processes, so that's what I started to do.
Adam Weekes: It became quite clear quite quickly; we needed some sort of mechanism, which meant we needed a CRM. So you don't go straight into it from email and excel sheets, certainly in 2007 to 2008, you didn't suddenly jump into using Salesforce. So what we did is we invested in an air system called Act. I'm not actually 100% sure if this is still a thing or not, it became Sage in part. But it was a very much a client-based application. I think at the time there was a bit of a competition going on between Act and GoldMine, and I think for whatever reason we chose Act.
Adam Weekes: We installed it on the sales guy’s individual laptops, there was no mobile other than laptops, so they all had mobile data cards in their laptops. At the end of every evening, they would sit there at the hotel or whatever, and update the CRM and then hit the sync. That would come back to the little server we had underneath the desk somewhere and then provide us with the information.
Adam Weekes: It was my role really to make that process work efficiently, and that's where it became more and more evident. The technical side of things was important, but that was more like a hygiene factor, it just needed to be there and to work, and needed to be easy for the sales guys to use. I've got a lot of input, not mostly constructive, from the sales teams about ease of use and about other considerations I had with the systems. It's a fairly small team, so we all knew each other well. So there was no holding back on the feedback.
Adam Weekes: I had to learn quite quickly about how the sales teams and sales like to work. And we got that working quite well actually. So as the business progressed, and I got more proficient at doing these things, they asked me to move into the European division and basically do the same there. The challenge there is that Act simply wouldn't scale that big, because it was quite a large operation now. So we're talking about, I think it was seven or eight European countries, something along those lines and just as many languages and currencies and everything else that you have to deal with.
Adam Weekes: So thinking about how we can do this, I decided to fall back on my old techie hat as it were, and designed a system that used Excel files that were mapped back into a SharePoint site. So they were all interlinked with each other, and anybody who's ever done that will know that's great in theory: in practice, it breaks constantly because people modify the files and since they're not in the exact right place for things to work properly anymore. I mean, I ended up spending two or three days every single week just trying to get the forecast pulled together.
