Video Transcripts

Welcome. Um, we're here today to talk about MIT's, uh, very special one team culture, um, joined by two project managers, KD and Luke. Um, KD to you first, I suppose, what's important to you about your culture within your work environment and how's your experience at Mint? Um, experience at Mint has been absolutely amazing so far. Been with the business for around 10 months now. Um, everything you had advised me of what the culture would be like 'cause very much been the case. Um, and I think that's got a lot to do with the amazing people that we have within the organization. That's great. Luke, what about you? Yeah, I think I'd, I'd echo everything kind of Katie said, I think, you know, it was one of the big drivers behind me kind of joining the business as well. You know, obviously I had some experience with some of the guys from the business already, uh, having worked with you guys previously. But you know, like Katie says, all the kind of expectations you guys set around, you know, the culture and, and the things that we do and how important it's to mint, you know, I think you really kind of walk the walk with that, to be honest. Great. I, from my point of view, I think we do some things that are very professional, like we do some knowledge sharing, which is great. We, we, we've got few of those going on, especially around RCA and RM. Uh, and I think we do some other, you know, not unprofessional, but you know, we have great banter on Slack and we share pets pictures and children's pictures and those sorts of things. Do you enjoy that side of it? Yeah, I think it's, especially working in a, in a remote environment, um, I think it's really important to kind of have that, that engagement across the business, especially where we're all working across different projects and different teams. So it is great that we're able to kind of share updates and using a tool like Slack, uh, really allows for that as well. Yeah. And how about you? You big fan? I am, yeah. I'm, I think, I think it's, you know, with, like Katie said, with it being a remote environment, I think it's really important. Um, but I think, you know, on top of that, obviously we also, you know, like to regularly get together as well in person. I think that's also important. Um, you know, I think being in a remote environment, it's easy to kind of just get kind of set in your ways and, and maybe not do that sort of thing, but I think, you know, it meant there is a, a continuous and kind of constant effort to, to make that happen and, and really drive the culture. Yeah. We, um, a co a couple of weeks back, I remember we went, um, ax throwing, which was pretty cool. Um, didn't do, didn't do too well myself, unfortunately. Yeah. That was terrible. No, Might've been the beers. Yeah. Yeah. But, um, yeah, it was great. It was great. Just a chance to everyone to get together. Um, the team's getting bigger and bigger. Yeah. So it's a good opportunity for people to kind of meet in person, get to know each other. Yeah. Uh, especially outside of work as well at the same Time. Yeah, that's a really good point. The team is growing and um, you know, that's, that's something that we need to think about, isn't it, as we get bigger and how do we retain what we have, um, for it to not get out Van. So yeah. Uh, we'll probably need to just be aware of that. I guess I was gonna ask you, um, do you think that, uh, the clients that you deal with, because you are very much engaged with them, can feel any of that in the team that they are working With? Yeah, definitely. Definitely. And I think, I think it's, it's something we get a lot of feedback from our clients that we work with so far in terms of that. I think, you know, as project managers, myself, kd, Sonya, we all like to kind of try and transmit that culture. You know, it's very much, you know, it's not about just delivering the projects, it's about how we deliver the projects. We really want to kind of transmit that with the clients. And I think, you know, like I say, that's, that's something we've had quite a lot of feedback on. To be fair. Um, we, we've had quite a lot of, of kind of positive feedback from clients around, you know, pretty much everyone across the team really, to be honest. Yeah, that's great. And with your client interaction, similar? A hundred percent, I think, um, it's, it's transmitting that one team culture to the client as well. At the same time, we're one big team, effectively when we're delivering a project, spend a lot of time together, there's gonna be elements of the project which, uh, are that might be particularly stressful. Um, there might be elements which, uh, require a lot of, uh, a lot of hard work as well. So spending time with one another, getting to know, um, each other as well is gonna be super important to ensure that we can deliver it successfully. Not just the Mint team directly, but any outsourcers and contractors that we work with as well. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's super important to ensure that they're on board and they can feel that, um, that they're supporting the project as well. Yeah. I mean, I can say from firsthand, having very recently spent some time with our offshore team, you know, we're very like-minded, very similar vibe, and uh, that just really helps because we, we all spend a lot of time together, don't we? Yeah, definitely. Definitely. And I think, I think we're also quite kind of selective in terms of who we bring in and who we work with. Both, you know, like KD says in terms of kind of outsource partners, but also who we bring into the business as well. I think that's something we do really well. We're very selective, you know, we, we always aim to kind of look for people that are like-minded with us, so we can kind of ensure that runs through kind of every strand of, of delivery. Yeah, we do. And I think that's often very natural, which is generally a really positive thing, right? If it's natural, then it's meant to be. Um, but it's something that we absolutely have to be really selective and really think about because, um, we can't, getting it wrong is just, you know, got massive ramifications. But I think that's why we subliminally are so attentive to it all of the time. Yeah. And I think we, and we ask a lot of people's opinions, um, at that point as well, you know, because it's valuable, isn't it? Like we're adding to the team. It's important that you Yeah, I think it's, I think it's very kind of open door with it as well. I think, you know, it's, it's a kind of feedback centric environment where it's encouraged, you know what I mean? I think, you know, you can join some organizations where, you know, it's almost feels like you probably shouldn't kind of put your head up above the parapet and, and kind of say something, but I think it's kind of welcomed in the, in, in the mint culture. And I think that helps because I think it means we can always kind of try and improve and, and everyone feels valued as as well. No, agreed. I think the other thing is, it's one thing being able to say it, but I think actually seeing your, uh, opinions or suggestions actually being implemented is just validates it, I suppose. And it gives you confidence that you are actually, you are making a difference as well. At the same time. I think that's one of the amazing things working for a startup, is that you are able to kind of help grow the business organically as well. Yeah. At the same time. Um, so yeah, it's been amazing so far. Yeah, and I think, I think on that point as well, I mean, I think, I think like you say, a lot of companies do say things and then a lot of the time, you know, it goes into a backlog and you never really kind of action it. I think, you know, we, we had a, a pm meeting probably around a month ago, and we're already seeing, you know, kind of positive change coming outta that. So, so like Katie says, it's kind of refreshing to, you know, be in an environment where we're fortunate enough to be able to make changes quickly rather than just, you know, kind of sit on them. But even that, even like, even beyond that actually, 'cause we, we, going back to that PM meeting, um, Luke mentioned there were elements of what we had raised that were good improvements, that things that we could definitely do better on that had impacts on other teams. So going back to that one team culture, being able to interact with the architects and the functional leads and kind of get their feedback as well, um, has been an amazing experience also, I think, um, even just learning from the offshore team, like other things that we could be doing better and improving upon to make their jobs easier Yep. Um, enable them to be doing their job more effectively and more efficiently as well, has been really, really Positive. Yeah. Everything you're saying makes me think, so if I think of a word to describe the culture that I experienced, and I, I always think of the word unintimidating. It is, it is absolutely unintimidating and everybody to my knowledge, feels free to express themselves. Yeah, definitely. Definitely. I mean, you know, like anybody can approach, you know, the likes of Sam or Ed at any point. Yeah. And, and, you know, not feel nervous about it. It's, you know, they're just another person here. Yeah. Yeah. No, I agree. I agree. Is there any, one of the things that I've been thinking about is like having worked at other organizations and kind of comparing the culture that we have here, um, versus other places. Anything that kind of stands out for you guys? Um, I think that it definitely comes from, uh, leadership, like where I've seen it done. Right. Um, and we have a lot of similarities here. Um, and I think you can't, uh, you can't, uh, manufacture that. Um, back to my point, probably about if it feels right and it's natural, then it's meant to be. Yeah. Um, and if it, if it feels off, then it probably is and I Yeah. Yeah. And I think, I think for me, I think one of the things I've seen, 'cause I've also worked in, in startups like kd, I think, you know, one of the things that, that companies can often lose sight of is culture through growth. And I think, you know, there's always a, you know, we need to really focus on pushing the business, expanding the business, et cetera. And that kind of cultural aspect kind of falls by the wayside. Mm-hmm. But I think, you know, it, for me, in terms of other businesses, it's very, very obvious how much of a focus we have on kind of maintaining that fo that culture as we grow. Yeah. Um, you know, I, I don't think I've seen that much kind of emphasis in, in some of our previous companies on, on that. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you both very much. Really enjoyed that. Sounds like we're all on the same page. Yeah. Good to chat. Thanks Lou. Cheers. Cheers.

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Nathan, Jack, great to see you both. Great to see you, ed. Great to be here. Super. So we've talked and we do continue to talk quite a bit about our methodology, the way we run projects, how we, uh, tackle solution design industry points of view. Uh, one topic we haven't really talked about too much until now is the commercial side and how we contract for work and how our clients contract with us. Right. And we talked about how that would be quite an interesting topic 'cause it's so important that all of our, uh, the clients and ourselves, we sort of go into these projects, uh, knowing that we're, we've got the right kind of legal mechanisms and frameworks for engaging with each other. Right. I know it's a kind of a dry topic for some, uh, but, uh, certainly important and it has some implications as well as that have a bearing on, uh, how the projects are run and how the relationship works with the client as well. Right. So, uh, from your perspective, knitting is delivery director. What does that kind of commercial arrangement mean for you? Of course, the commercial arrangement is the center of any projects that we do at Mint. And if you look at time and material as a concept within that, um, engagement, it typically works based on the customer paying for the time we take to complete a particular task or a deliverable, uh, based as simple as that. Contractually, we discuss with a client ahead of the project start to help them understand the time it's gonna take to complete a project. And on a regular basis. We give them visibility on how that's been progressing and, and how much they would have to pay on a month by month basis based on the time they have utilized within using the project team. Certainly. So you are keen obviously to ensure that the client has a great experience with us and that delivery is, is efficient from, from our perspective with our utilization, but that the client gets exactly what they're contracting for as well, right? Correct. So My role in this ensure to ensure that the, the client is happy and we deliver what we set as a success for the projects at the beginning of the project, uh, to make sure that's been delivered to the customer. So, uh, Jack with your role is lead solution architect in the high high-tech space. What does the commercial arrangement kind of mean to you with the work that you do, particularly on presales? Yeah. I think it's like, you know, when you hear sort of the, the different commercial models that can be agreed, obviously the fixed price and times and material, um, obviously my focus is around scope, so it's obviously ensuring that our estimates are accurate and obviously in a the difference between obviously t and m and a fixed price, there's a lot more emphasis on, you know, the lower level detail in a fixed price, um, model. So I need to put, you know, I need to cater for some of that risk, for example. 'cause obviously in a fixed price, you're kind of, a lot of that risk is kind of taken on by, by mint and we have to kind of effectively know the unknowns at that point in time and that's where the buffers come into the estimates and can potentially lead to, you know, um, you know, a, a larger kind of timeline and potentially bigger costs as well. But it's because we are factoring the unknowns around the client, for example, we dunno their readiness, um, we dunno enough about the suppliers, about the third party integrations that kind of overlay into that program of work as well. So we have to understand all of those, those kind of, uh, external factors as well when we're estimating. Right. Understood. So for the majority of work that we do, majority of the projects, we tend to work on a a time materials basis. Right. And that is our generally, uh, recommended uh, approach. A typical example is as you, as you go through kind of a time and materials project engagement, there may be some, you know, what's called show and tell. So you're actually playing back some of the functionality of the client and they may say like, look, um, we love it, but actually we can do some enhancements here. We are able to kind of take on that feedback, look at it in terms of prioritization, uh, against maybe some of the kind of should have, could haves and be able to kind of adapt the kind of the, the boundaries of the scope, um, within, within a sprint, which ultimately leads to kind of better success of the overall platform for the, for the end customer. Right. In a, in a fixed price model, it's very much focused on, you know, we're gonna deliver this x um, you know, in these timelines and it's, it kind of assumes that all of the definition work is, or or the customer knows everything about their business process, everything about their co complexity or their functionality upfront. That's a good point. I mean, I guess in our experience it's pretty rare that requirements would be known in any detail. A hundred percent Right, exactly right at the start, which is often sort of cited as, uh, one reason why the older, older traditional waterfall methods have not necessarily been, uh, beneficial for projects. So I, I guess just summarizing in a sense what, what you're saying, it's a bit more in tune with the agile type approaches that we use in our project. Exactly. Exactly. And so like being able to kind of adapt the, um, you know, for example, we do a lot of show and tells, obviously during sprints, playbacks, the, the product owner may say, for example, we know we love this particular piece of functionality, but actually can we do some enhancements here? Mm-hmm. We're able to take on that feedback, look at it and prioritize it against the next sprints Right. Sort of, um, backlog and start to prioritize it over maybe some of the should have and could have. So having that flexibility, 'cause all we're all driving towards Salesforce outcomes in that model, comparing it to a fixed price, it's as if the customer knows all of the, you know, the functionality upfront. Mm-hmm. They've got detailed analysis of the, the business processes and there's, there's no, no ability to challenge some of those business complexities because it's all been defined upfront and, and that's it, we're going with that model. Mm-hmm. But actually in an agile methodology, we're actually able to challenge those requirements as they come in and start to simplify them. Yeah. And the client can challenge themselves as well to exactly degree. It's very hard, the best will in the world, I think for a client to actually conceptualize the entire system in enough detail Right. At the start. To some extent, they need a bit of flexibility for their thinking, their own thinking to Yeah. Evolve as they see our build taking shape and then it might prompt another idea, I guess. Exactly. And like, um, you know, I feel like t and m is very much focused on the results rather than the boundaries. Yes. And it's kind of like we we're all, we're we're working towards the same goal in terms of like return on investment on your, on your Salesforce platform. Yeah. I think that's an important thing to remember, isn't it? Is that, um, from the client's perspective, they, they may not realize always that the, a partner such as ourselves is always gonna have their budget at at heart and know that and we're on Absolutely. On the same side. Yeah. You know, we want to grow our reputation, we want happy clients and we want to make sure that we're actually hitting those budget time quality goals just as if it were a, a fixed price. Right. Exactly. That was one thing, um, Jack said I really like, which is the customer readiness side of things. We do accept that every project is different, every customer is different, how they prepare themselves for a project. And Jack touched on a couple of Salesforce products such as Revenue cloud, agent force projects, how much detail would they understand what they want from those investment they make to Salesforce and how that can convert into a business benefit. So those kind of things comes with a lot of readiness preparation they have to do for a project to be successful. Now if you overlay that with a model we deliver such is either TNM where time and material, a lot of fixed costs, the TNM could provide a significant value because they enable the customer to think, have the light bulb moment during the workshop to say, I didn't think about this, what Mint is talking about totally makes sense. That may result in changing direction for what's been originally agreed for, but in return give a better benefit for the business. Right. That kind of thing is totally possible on a time and material, but in a fixed cost engagement, such light bulb moment will be seen as a big risk. Yes. And a potential significant cost and a timeline implications. Sure. So we, we've talked quite a bit about the benefits of TNM. I mean, what would the drawbacks be? Why would people hesitate before going into a t and m type contract? It's a, there's a false belief that t and m requires significant additional admin time and a governance. Basically what that, what that relates to is amount of time needed to stay close to a project that runs on a time and material basis to ensure that you can digest, understand what's been burned, meaning how much time been utilized, and what value is being provided, which is a show and tell Jack was talking about earlier on. That may seem as a lot of admin, but in practicality actually that enables you to actually see things as they progress through. So although it's may come across as a highend admin, but those are value add, which you could see as the project evolves through. And it, I guess, I mean it is back to kind of Ed's point earlier on around sort of fixed price following that more waterfall sort of approach. But actually I think the real value is actually getting the feedback as the, as the, the solution's being developed, right? Mm-hmm. Um, and some of that's lost in that sort of fixed price model whereby it's kind of like, you know, here's a, a bunch of requirements be delivered on time, but actually the value is actually a product owner saying, well actually I've, you know, we've demonstrated some functionality and they've gone, okay, it needs to be enhanced or improved or actually there's a simpler way of doing this particular thing. Right. And therefore you are reaping the, the rewards of that that input from, from yourselves as the, as the client. Sure. Which is a much more engaging way of working, right? Yeah. The stakeholders are, are more involved. They get the chance to see the, uh, the build in the early stages and give their feedback knowing that we can work together to kind of reprioritize things if necessary. Incorporate the feedback and shape it collaboratively. Exactly. Uh, as we go for a better end result and ultimately better adoption. Right. Yeah. Adoption's key there as well. Like the, the biggest benefit is obviously because you're part of that development, um, you're obviously involved in the functionality, you're getting exposure to Salesforce as a platform and therefore the handover should be, should be a lot, you know, smoother. Sure, sure. I get that completely. I guess one of the drawbacks or the challenges we might hear from time to time is that people can be worried about the, the variability of cost with a TNM model. So what can we do to kind of mitigate the risk on that? I think ni you've already talked to this to some degree on, uh, you know, working collaboratively, having the client more involved in the, in the planning. Can you expand a little bit on on that? Of Course. So typically when we kick off the project, one of the key things we do at the earlier on in the project is agreeing with the client the key milestone dates for various activities I expect to happen and some of the roles and responsibility needed to make sure those milestone can be successfully completed. That could be various, uh, things such as agile ceremonies, could be standups, could be weekly meetings, it could be staco meetings and it could be show and tells that we do, which is the demo of the development work we have done on a sprint by sprint basis. But also being transparent about the reporting side of things. So showing everything nice and good on the progress we make. It is very good for stakeholders. SMEs, we do a comprehensive reporting on a weekly basis, helps the customer to see where exactly the resource utilization has been on a week by week basis. And they get to see the itemized reporting both on the invoicing side as well on a monthly basis from us. Right. Right. So if it, they can see there and then if we're consuming, for example, more architect time than we'd plan to, we can have a discussion about that, try and understand together why that's the case and what we can do about it and where we can potentially save elsewhere. And the plan to, to mitigate exactly The, the, the other added benefit of having that earlier, earlier agreement and transparency is that in the event where the burned out, which is the utilization tend to deviate from the original plan, both the customer and us have an opportunity to discuss and agree a way forward, which will fix the problem at the same time provide better value for the customer. Right, Right. And I guess another key part of mitigating any potential downside of the TNA would be to actually make sure that the estimates are robust in the first place. Right. And Jack, you spend quite a lot, lot of Yeah. Time. Exactly. Making sure that we do just that. Yeah. So part of our offering, we obviously offer like sort of discoveries, so that could be within a pre-sales remit or through like a pay discovery. And within that, uh, model, we're obviously understanding the pain points today, understanding the business processes, um, understanding the business needs and future needs. Uh, within that we're obviously gathering all the requirements. We are looking at kind of the lower level detail around some of the complexities and we're super transparent with the clients. You know, for example, if I put together estimations, I also produce like a, what's called a capability map. Mm-hmm. And within that capability map on rag status, the complexity, so I can actually say to the customer, this is the cost, this is the timelines. And we see these as sort of like the heat map sort of complex areas at the moment. Do we want us to start to challenge some of those business requirements now so that I can simplify, um, the, the capabilities that are required within Salesforce and ultimately reduce the cost and timelines so we're having that transparent discussion upfront to, you know, support the kind of end-to-end delivery. Sure. And I've, I've seen a lot of your estimation work over the years, uh, and I know that you, you always prepare a meticulous list of assumptions and, and dependencies Yeah. Which, uh, underpin the estimates. Right. So, uh, I think from my perspective, I'd be advising a client to actually, you know, look quite carefully talk through those Yes. With you. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. And if there are any assumptions that we think there's a risk that they might not hold true, then that's definitely worth a discussion. Right. And is there anything we can do to make sure they do hold true or does it need to be a discussion about more buffer on those certain points or Exactly That like, um, it's, it's about, you know, the, the doc the documentation. Hopefully the statement at work, at, at the end of the sort of engagement before delivery is, is, is very organic. Right. We've produced it as a, as a team, as one team. I'm going through that documentation with, with the client and, and kind of, you know, looking at the different assumptions in there, challenging some of the business requirements, ensuring that some of the dependencies on, on them as a client, uh, are being fulfilled through, through their initiatives. Uh, but also identifying risks for the client as well, um, and making sure that I'm gauging some of the client readiness pieces as well. Right. Which touches on, on some of our other content around, you know, preparing for CPQ implementations, for example. For sure. There can be quite a few dependencies. Can't there things that the client will need to prepare and deliver to us in order for us to be able to progress build at certain Exactly. Points Yeah. Dependencies on, on third parties sometimes as well that the client might be engaging that plays a part in the overall or in the wider program. So important that those are called out and that the client has that third party lined up in sync with the the plan. With the plan as well. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Sure. So where in our experience, what would be some of the common scenarios if we do something, if we do see something go off track, if it cost, uh, increasing or, or a delay, what, what tend to be the typical reasons for that? Maybe Nitin you'd like to, The more often we see change in scope, I often relate this to, uh, a simple example of extending a house. When you get a project to extend a house, you have a plan to have window in a certain place in a kitchen, your fridge's gonna sit in a certain place. And then halfway through the project, you just, your, you and your other half discuss and agree that the, the light into the kitchen is not gonna be good enough on the originally agreed window location. So you decide to move the window to a certain place. Now that's the change in scope, which is in the fixed cost world that's already been agreed, the window's gonna be in that place. Changing that will come with a significant cost because you're changing the scope of the project. Right. But the time and material provided the window location has not been already been built. That is a conversation with the customer transparently to see the implication of moving the window to the left if that's where they need to go to, and then having that level of conversation. Um, so those moves can be done without having a huge impact to the cost of the project. Right. Right. And I, I suppose if it were a fixed price arrangement, then the supplier will be still saying, well, that's actually a change in scope, therefore it's a change request. Therefore the customer might be thinking that the price is fixed. But actually in reality, you're paying, it's not that, that would still trigger a change. Uh, and the supplier would've probably built in some buffer for the fixed price in the first place. So the client actually ends up paying more Yeah. Than they otherwise would've done in that. That's circumstance. I, I would imagine. Yeah. Uh, interesting. Uh, and I mean, perhaps back to the discussion we were having about assumptions and dependencies, I think from my experience, that can be a common cause of a, of a delay, which can add some more cost, right? If some of those things don't hold true perhaps. Yeah, absolutely. So obviously like, um, if we've got some delays in some of the inputs from the business, it may be a specific team within, within the business around certain requirements that can obviously cause some, some delays in, in sort of the, the delivery, I guess in, in terms of, you know, we're, we're, we are ready to kind of initiate that build sprint. There may be some user stories in the backlog which require input from the business, and they're unable to provide us that input. That can obviously delay, um, sort of timelines and, and obviously ultimately lead to some, some costs. But obviously in a, in a times of material sort of, um, environment, we can start to adapt that. So for example, there may be a, a, you know, some, a particular epic is blocked, for example, and it requires input from a bus business. We can maybe adapt and kind of look at a focus on a different epic within that sprint. Right. And again, from the client's perspective, if they made a fixed price contract, if they hadn't delivered a piece of work where they needed to or their third party didn't or whatever it would, the fixed price would still not Yeah. Cater, uh, to that situation. Right. It would still trigger a change request and an additional cost and potentially make it a little bit more difficult to handle. Yeah. So really interesting discussion and I think what I'm taking from this discussion is that we sometimes talk about the phrase fixed price, but it does for me seem to generate almost a false sense of security because the things that we've seen that tend to cause a delay or a cost, uh, increase to a project are things that actually fixed price don't really protect against, right? There are things that outside the supplier's control, like, uh, an assumption not holding true, uh, some information the client needed to provide or some dependency on their third party. A scope change. Yeah. Another classic example, right? Things that would still trigger a change in scope. So it's almost better, uh, and actually the suppliers we talked about would've built in some contingency in buffer and some extra cost anyway. So it's, it's likely, if anything to cost more people have different perspectives on this. You know, we are open obviously to talk to our clients and work out the best commercial model that's going to, to suit us all, but it's, it's good to, to talk about these things and uh, and make sure that people are going in with their kind of eyes open and knowing the pitfalls of the different approaches, right? Yeah. So yes, I think we found that the, the model that we work with, which as we said is normally on a time and materials basis with the right collaboration between ourselves and the client and the right governance and control mechanisms, then we, we do end up kind of on the same side working collectively to the, to the goals of budget, time, cost, business benefit, essentially at the end of the day. So, and Jack, thank you very much for the discussion. Thank you very Much. Thanks for the time.

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Hi, my name is Nathan. I'm a delivery director at Min. Every, every time I meet Nathan, I always feel pretty underdressed, very suave guy. Doesn't Actually own any casual clothes. He's a, a resident racer, A petrolhead, but motorbikes. He is amazing With clients. You do need to listen out for his pup, though. Um, that tends to snore in the corner on, uh, on meetings. Uh, very experienced guy and holds a lot of information in his Head. He manages to work on 20 different projects at once, but still has a great idea of what's going on in each of them. Uh, Interesting fact about NI has the second best hair in the company. You know, clearly he is wrong. It's obviously Ed. He said what? I think we all know who has the best hair at Mint.

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Hi, my name's Edit and I'm a functional lead here at Mental Towing. So I've known UDDI since he joined on a grad scheme. He's now Mr. Ai, our lead engineer for all things artificial intelligence. But he is not artificially intelligent. UDDI is blazing a trail for us, getting deep into the world of, of ai. He's already delivered successfully in a couple of projects. He's now an absolute expert in Agent Force. He's awesome to work with. He's teaching everyone else's tricks as well. He's my chat, GBT. Anything I need, I can always ask him. Really chill guy. Um, you know, nothing seems to phase him to be honest, and he is always kind of happy to turn his hand to anything really. Unfortunately, he's an Arsal supporter, um, and he actually likes to travel more than me. So watch out, Sam, Come You gun is.

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Hi, I amm. I'm a functional lead at Mint. So Mitch joins with loads of experience, comes in a key role as a functional lead, came straight into the organization, came and join us at Mint, and he is working on one of our key projects doing a full lead to cash rollout. So what a great guy on the team. M has been an absolute rockstar. He actually joined one of my projects halfway through, covering one of my colleagues, and, um, yeah, took to like, took to like a duck to water, really. He was, um, he was excellent. Merge. Uh, our CPQ expert here in-house, uh, as a functional lead, uh, merge has worked in the industry for a number of years as a great financial background as well. Working with Mitch is great. Um, you know, very hands on, always willing to kind of, um, you know, put the work in. Very strong work ethic, a fellow kind of, uh, football fan as well. So a lot for us to talk about when we're on projects together. Uh, but unfortunately supports United Carmen Gans.

1049371006

Hello. Um, I'm Sid, I'm lead technical architect at Mint. SID is our technical architect. He's technical, he's an architect, Which means he architects things technically He's calm, under pressure, very technically capable. What's amazing about Sid is how he's able to articulate to non-techy people what needs to be done. I, I love his explanations. He's really good at dumbing things down for me. Um, of course, not that I need it Very kind of technically proficient, very curious in his spare time, you know, always sending things in the chat around, you know, the latest kind of technical things that he's delving into on his weekend, et cetera. A recent experience of Sid, um, we went to Salesforce and we presented to the MuleSoft team and he completely blew them away. Incredibly Composed in front of clients. Always got a smile on his face, and He is a top guy.

1049371223

Hi, I'm Luke. I'm a project manager at Mint. Luke is one of our PMs, not been with us for too long, but he came in, took on one of our biggest and most complex clients, and he is just hands down, super at his job and he's a genuinely top look as well. Professional, calm, um, excellent communicator, Very efficient. And on top of, uh, all his work Seems to have, um, the situation always under control. Keeps everyone to task relentless. Meticulous. The fact That he often misses the gym session in the morning surprises me. He's said what? Luke is a great project manager. Uh, also a little bit of a diva. Uh, a bit of a diva. A bit of a diva. He's not wrong.

1049371415

Uh, my name's James Melville and I head up architecture at ric. Ric offers a suite of products which extend and enhance the Salesforce 360, including products which, uh, offer CTI payments, onboarding and recruitment capabilities. My role spans the technology of those products, including when we acquire companies, evaluating their, the products and how they'll fit into our product suite after acquisition, um, managing the product teams in order to deliver great products on the Salesforce platform, and also managing our internal systems in order that we can sell and track our business. Unic is is a company that has grown through acquisition over the last two years. We've bought eight companies and 16 products. Those acquisitions have brought with them a broad range of sales and subscription management products. Our project is looking to align and standardize all of those companies onto a single process and technology stack. Unic offers a suite of solutions which extend Salesforce. In order to run our business on a single stack, we wanted to use Salesforce, so Revenue Cloud was an obvious choice from that angle. In addition to that, we were attracted by the roadmap that Salesforce is proposing for Revenue Cloud and how it aligns with some of our business vision. Our focus has been on time to value and getting the solution into our users' hands quickly. In order to, in order to gather feedback and iterate on that, we've identified a set of users to start off with and a subset of our processes and getting that live before expanding out to more users and building more functionality. Our focus is on our ability to send, sell our full suite of products from a single contract from a single system, so it's transparent to both our sales users and our customers that we are a single company. We're also looking in the future to provide capabilities where our customers can self-serve. For example, our initial rollout will focus on having a single solution where all of our products can be sold under one process and make it easy for our sales users to price and sell a deal, and for our customers to sign up for multiple of our products in a single process. There's a number of the revenue cloud capabilities that we want to take a advantage of. Um, some of the things we're looking at doing next will be order orchestration, contract, lifestyle we call management, some ability, um, for our customers to self-serve, and also looking at agent force and the AI angle on how this will support our processes.

1094735501

Right. I'm Ed Foster from Mint Consulting. Very happy to be joined today by Dev Jama, principal, a, a AI solution engineer from Salesforce and Mia, functional lead from Mint Consulting. And we're here to talk about the exciting world of AI and Agent Force at Salesforce. So if I can start with, uh, you dev, there's obviously, there's been a lot of excitement around Agent Force ever since it was launched. That excitement continues growing. Uh, if anything, I mean, how, how are you finding it's been received in the market? It's the concern. I've been at Salesforce around seven-ish years. It's probably the technology I've seen that's been the most hands-on from the moment it was conceived. Uh, we launched or announced Agent Force actually in August. We had customers play around with it in September, and then we ga the product in October. So you could actually see that our belief in the product is absolutely there. I think since that October release, we've seen some brilliant, brilliant, um, customer stories really come out of it, but also use cases that go beyond just those customer stories and actually entire industries, whether it's case management, if you're an insurance business, whether it's FAQs, if your variety of different, uh, businesses, in particular retailers, uh, WiMo. Whereas my order seems to be the most common use cases that people are trying to resolve, but even things like password resets in the high tech space has been really, really key. The other thing we've really seen when it comes to use cases are those opportunities not to just deflect or resolve, it's really to cross sell and upsell. So being able to recommend product, being able to recommend different things a customer should do. We've seen lots of excitement about that in particular, but really the time to value, I think that's the big, big difference we've seen with Agent Force compared to our sort of foray into predictive ai. You need a lot of data to make predictive AI work. Yet with Agent Force, actually we could, like you could build an agent within the space of, uh, 20 minutes is what we saw, uh, during Dreamforce, uh, last year. So actually time to value and how quickly you can build these agents is really where we're seeing a lot of enjoyment at the moment for customers in particular, whether they're just starting their journey or now beginning to mature into their a uh, their agentic uh, uh, agentic workforce. That's fantastic to hear that there are all those use cases and, and real genuine business value already being created out there in, in the world. So to so to speak must be great to, to get that, uh, feedback. And, uh, t if I can, can turn to you. You've been working with, uh, ai, Salesforce AI and Agent Force for a while now. You've become our, our expert, uh, in this. You've been working with, uh, a couple of our customers, uh, and also doing some internal work. I mean, how have you, how's your journey with Agent Force been? Sure. Um, yeah, so I think similar to the timeline, Deb mentioned, uh, we started working on agent force projects, uh, late last year. So I think especially with, as with most new products, there were definitely some challenges with it, particularly around maybe grounding some of the responses and with the hallucinations and edge cases that you tend to get with ai. But I think especially over the last couple of months that we've seen with, uh, Salesforce and how quickly the platform's developing, we can see how much that's improved. So with the idea of how well it understands company and customer context, as well as the whole, uh, retrieval side of system within Salesforce, so not just Salesforce data, but also external data as well as how well it interacts with other systems has been really key in that. And we can see how much it's improved with, you know, those responses that customers now get. Mm, okay. It sounds like we've learned a lot, uh, along the way from, from doing all this work. I mean, are there any, so obviously the product itself is evolving, but in terms of how we've gone about implementing it, what are the sort of challenges that we've hit and, and had to overcome with this? Sure thing. I think what's new, uh, what was the new way of thinking for us with these kind of agent force projects is it's not like your typical standard project where you kind of, you know, you deliver the project, you go live and that's your sort of end of, um, interaction with your customer. It's definitely a lot more of a iterative process. So what we can see is, you know, we want to get initial version out of the agent and we can want to see how it interacts with your customers, you know, what kind of responses it's getting, you know, what's working well, what isn't, where we're finding gaps. And then with that, we're working with our clients to help build out those, uh, gaps and bridges with the agent, and then helps to iterate, um, how well it improves over time and to give it better value to the customers as well. Sure, sure. Is that how you see it dev as well, in terms of kind of best practices approach for companies such as ourselves helping other companies implement this? A hundred percent. I think what we've really seen from customers is to ideate and create, has become a lot quicker with lots of AI assisted capability now within the platform, either to help you build an agent just by writing a few sentences either to help refine what those instructions and those, uh, topics are. But really where the time is now spent is all around testing. If you're gonna launch anything that's generative ai and really anything that's autonomous and customer facing, you absolutely want to ensure that it does the right thing and it doesn't, uh, necessarily, uh, hallucinate or provide responses where it shouldn't or falls down and always wants to escalate to a human being. Mm-hmm. So one of the key things within the product was all centered around testing. Yeah. How could we ensure that you could test that scale, not only using AI to help you build, but using AI to help you test. So being able to automatically generate those test cases and show you where you potentially need to refine those topics, that's what we're seeing is the life cycle has become a lot quicker from ideating and creating, but now actually the focus is on testing because before you put that out in front of your customers, you wanna ensure that it does the right thing. Yeah, of course. For sure. So it sounds like companies looking to implement this kind of need to approach it with the right expectations and, and an idea of the business value they're looking to get in the use cases they want. And so kind of define it to a degree, but also need to be prepared to, uh, to try it. And then if you saying, well, actually you're both saying this, take the iterative approach, test it, see what results you get, tweak it, fine tune, uh, improve the data, uh, and, and get the, the ultimate, uh, result at the end of the day that you're looking for. Sure. Very, uh, interesting. So, um, what's, um, tips, what other kind of tips do you think we would give to companies that are looking to implement this in a, approaching this in the right way? Sure. Um, I think the best thing that we've noticed with Agent Force and with AI as a whole is to really start on some foundational use cases, especially within Salesforce and Agent Force. Uh, Salesforce provide quite a good range of different templates that are ready for this. You know, you have your service agents, you have your sales agents, and I think that's a really good place to start. You want to help your customers gain that confidence with AI and get the responses grounded correctly with their own data. And then from that you have a really nice base and foundation to then help build on that and add in more of those complex functionality and, uh, layers to that as well. So I think that's one of our key, um, ideas for customers, uh, that want to dive into the world of AI and Agent Force. Great. Makes perfect sense. Thank you. So in terms of the future for, for agent force Yep. What, what scoops can we get on the, uh, what's coming up on the, the public roadmap? So, plenty happening when it comes to product roadmap. Unlike our sort of traditional releases at the moment, anything with AI is releasing almost, uh, every, every 14 days, there's a brand new release. Um, some of my favorite things that I've just released, uh, include agent Force on email. We know email is a huge, huge channel for most customers. And actually having agents to autonomously respond to those emails, it's absolutely key. The other big feedback that we took from customers was actually, it's great having text. Can we make this a bit more multimodal? Let's show pictures, let's generate links, uh, let's create buttons, uh, as well, which was one of the key things that, uh, when we think about generative ai, you know, you're not really dealing with structured content, uh, necessarily. However, buttons are still really important if you want someone to click something within an experience. So even having adaptive surfaces that customers can leverage has been absolutely key. The ones really to look forward to, uh, really begins to focusing on other channels like voice. We know voice is still a huge channel, whether you are on web starting, uh, with a text-based interaction, but having that ability to switch to voice, uh, if you want to explain something, uh, in a much easier human way, in a more conversational way, rather than just texting everything. Right. The other key focus I would, um, really look at when it comes to agencies, really the wider ecosystem, I think the entire agent ecosystem is growing. Uh, whether it's, um, from our side, the things like the agent exchange, where can we better use what our partners build and our wider, wider ecosystem partners create and bring those into the agent force ecosystem for our customers to best use, but also how do agents interact with other agents, whether those agents are within Salesforce, uh, to ud it's point a servicing, uh, a service agent interacting with a sales agent or marketing agent. How do we ensure that agents are interoperable, whether they're on the sales source platform or not? And that's really where the future of agents begins to really play its role. Yeah, huge, hugely powerful. Very exciting times ahead. It sounds like, uh, obviously in today's world, everyone has experience of, of ai, you know mm-hmm. As consumers with the events, uh, of chat GPT, how's that impacting customer expectations of what AI's about? Yeah, so consumers, again, we all have AI in our phones, right? Siri, Siri's got an upgrade. Uh, so we've all got really used to using ai. And really what's come out of it is we do expect zero hold cues when we go contact a customer. We do want personalized conversations because we've already started interacting with our AI so frequently, but also, you still want the ability to have empathetic conversations when you do talk to a human being. So what we are really seeing is that shift really of us as individual consumers and having things like chat GBT and AI tools, whether it's, uh, your Geminis, et cetera, is great as an individual consumer because we're willing to take that risk. If it does get something wrong, we don't really mind, we'll Google it, we'll do something else, uh, to go and find the right answer. But if you're a business, that becomes a really, really important to minimize, right? So you don't just want to give it a wide set of data where it's gonna go search for information and potentially get things wrong. Yeah. The data strategy becomes completely more paramount to delivering that a, uh, that agentic experience that you're trying to deliver. Sure. And that's really what we're seeing. Consumer's expectations of really high businesses kind of need to catch, catch up in terms of that, uh, expectation, but then data becomes the absolute key foundation of delivering that Experience. Yeah, absolutely. And, and I guess, yeah, businesses are obviously, you know, more constrained. There's certain services they have to deliver. They've got, um, legal parameters to, to work with within contracts with their, their customers. I mean, think, yeah, things have to be right in a, in a sense. So, uh, I guess having two broader remit in, in terms of access to, to data, you know, would, would obviously be a concern, right? Yeah. So, uh, definitely considerations from an info second legal perspective, important that companies go into this, presumably with the right guardrails kind of in place. Yeah. Fascinating world. And t from your perspective, uh, is there anything on the wishlist for the, uh, upcoming roadmap that we should talk to Dev about? Yeah, I think one thing, I guess as we were speaking on data, uh, we know how well Agent Force works with Data Cloud within Salesforce and how you can pull in not just data from Salesforce, but also external systems. You know, they don't have to be structured. You can put in structured data, unstructured data as well for it to look at. Um, I know on the Roadmap Rag 2.0 has been talked about a lot recently. Uh, could you expand a bit more on that? I know there's, uh, talks about how, you know, you have an ensemble of retrievers now so that it doesn't have to just look at one data source, but it can look at multiple and bring the data in all together. Yeah, It's, it's such a key piece really for delivering that trusted experience that we spoke about, uh, previously. If, if we think about every business, no one's gonna have their data source in one place. Um, we also know that data source is probably not gonna be structured. It's probably a data source that's not necessarily been cleaned up in a few years. Um, again, like we saw it a lot, especially in travel. Like you think about when COVID happened, lots of people created tons of content. All of that content's now our date, because those rules just don't apply. And really, when we start thinking about, uh, rag 2.0, if we can look at different retrievers in order to get the right information and actually search, not just structured data that we bring in, um, whether that's in a data lake or different system, but unstructured data where usually that's where the rich content is, whether that's in a PDF, whether that's in a Word doc, whether that's in a spreadsheet, but more importantly, whether that's in a call transcript. Mm-hmm. So that's really the benefit of when we start thinking about, uh, ensemble retrievers and how these different retrievers work together, but also being able to look at a much wider data set in order to get the right answer, but still having the right data sources where it's not too wide Yeah. Where it potentially has, um, places where it potentially clashes. Mm-hmm. Yeah. So I guess working with the right kind of implementation partners important for, for customers to consider, uh, companies with experience of doing this and, uh, and know what the, uh, uh, the gotchas might be and what needs to be prepared and, uh, and scoped for, for success ultimately. But yeah. Great. I mean, fascinating and exciting to see that, uh, there are, there's real business value being created out there already and only more to come, so, yeah. Well, definitely did. Thank you very much for, for, uh, coming to this, uh, session and talking about all things agent force. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, thanks for having us.

1096304018

Hello, I'm Ed Foster from In Consulting, and I'm joined by John and Ben from Audio Network. Hi. Yep. Very happy to see you today. Thank you very much for giving us your time to us. Nice to meet here. Yeah, thanks for having us. Great. So first things first, uh, audio Network. So sounds like a really interesting business. Jo. John, can you tell me more about it? Yeah, so basically we're a a music service company, so we offer different kinds of services to our customers, um, particularly from a historical point of view. We work with composers, uh, to create music for film, TV branded content. Um, so we work very closely with composers and we have a, you know, vast library of music that's available, uh, for people to license for their productions. Great. I mean, that must be a, a a lot of, uh, information, uh, and data sources to actually kind of keep track of you need the right sort of systems to support that. Yeah, it's, I mean, obviously from a sort of backend point of view, it's a very complex organization, um, and making sure that we've got everything tied so we can tie the whole project management of music, you know, from the inception of the music, from the birth of the ideas through to when the royalties are getting paid. Yeah. There's a lot of work to be done there. Yeah. It sounds like a, a lot in involved to deliver all that to, to your customers. Yes, definitely. So, so, uh, Ben, if I can turn to you, I understand you've been working with Salesforce for, for quite some time now. How did that journey start? What drew you to Salesforce? Yeah, it's been a while, I think, uh, well, I've been at Audio Network for 15 years now, so I've been there through a lot of the changes that the company's seen over the years, and the move to using Salesforce as our CRM was one of them, uh, before Salesforce. I think we've had it for 10 or 12 years now. Before that, we were working off an old Microsoft Access database, which we very quickly outgrew and yeah, really overused. Um, and, uh, I think, uh, we used a company called Quida, you know, funnily enough to put, uh, Salesforce in place in to start with. And since then, over the years, we've kind of grown the use of our CRM to kind of support business operations across sales, marketing, finance, really trying to use it as much as we can to deliver that 360 customer experience. It Sounds like it's been pretty transformative for The business. It definitely was. Not without its pain, but it definitely has been transformative for the business, and I think there's still, and we'll probably get into this a bit further on, but there's definitely more opportunity for us to, to broaden that as well in the future. Great. And, uh, I believe you've been working with us at In Consulting for something like six months now, so thank you. Yeah, Yeah. No, it's been, it's been a great six months. We, uh, looked at managed services, uh, previously we've been working with internal admins for I think the entirety of the time we'd been working with Salesforce. Mm-hmm. Um, but when, uh, towards the tail end of last year when our admin decided to leave to go traveling, we started to look at the opportunity of, um, working with a managed services partner, knowing that, you know, our Salesforce org had not really been kind of renovated too much over the years. It kind of got to a point where there's quite a few aches and pains that we wanted to sort out and a fresh set of eyes with the expertise of the breadth that a, a company like Mint could provide us with, uh, was gonna help us get to where we still want to get to in terms of achieving our future goals. Right. So, so what drew you to Mint in the first place? I think there was a, a, a number of things. I remember the process very well actually. So, um, I met Sam many years ago through, uh, an old, uh, colleague audio network at Dreamforce. We had, uh, a few drinks and a few, uh, conversations over that time. And I think very randomly, I just remembered Sam decided to look at what he was doing now and found him, uh, that he founded or co-founded Mint. And so got in touch and I think just through the lead process, I think that's how we actually ended up talking and getting to this point. But we had a good due diligence process with a number of managed services partners. But I think what drew us to Mint was, uh, the, the friendly nature of the people, the professionalism, but yet down to earth, the determination of the, of the team and just how knowledgeable they are and, and supported we felt through the process. I think, you know, as we were going through that due diligence process, I don't think Mint ever dropped out of the top two, the, the running for the top two, uh, which is a real testament to how the team put together that proposal guided us through it, and were patient with us. You know, having not worked with a managed services partner before being used to an internal admin, it really took us some time to piece together ourselves what we were trying to do and how we were gonna achieve it, and the team helped us on that. Yeah, that's, uh, that's great. And certainly from, from our perspective, it, uh, looks like the collaboration's really strong actually, between the, the team. So I mean, we're certainly very happy to, to have you as a a customer. Um, so a bit of a leading question now, but, you know, how has the experience been? Have we, uh, met your expectations or Yeah, I, I definitely think that is the case. Um, the team have been fantastic. I mean, uh, individuals like Flavia have, have been really helpful on a day to day basis on just guiding us through. And there's probably been times where, you know, we moving away from an admin, we've probably asked more of the team than perhaps we usually would in a managed services agreement. Sure. But, you know, where we don't have an internal admin anymore, we've needed that extra level of support and, you know, there's never really a no, it's always just very much supportive or talking us through why something can and can't happen. Um, I think being completely honest though, when we first went with the managed services partner, we were nervous about offshore support as well. Mm-hmm. Um, being completely honest, but that's been not a problem for us at all. The team, uh, based in India have been absolutely fantastic, really friendly, really professional, and really, uh, responsive to everything that we've needed them to do, especially when we've had deadlines, you know, recent projects. We've had some really strong deadlines and they've gone above and beyond to try and get us towards that, which is, it's just been a really seamless experience. Uh, yeah, that's a great, I mean, we, yeah, obviously that it can be concerns with different time zones, uh, and so forth, but we are, we're very much used to working in that kind of model, so, uh, uh, yeah, we, yeah. Yeah, we've been doing it, it's second nature to us now, so we deliver one sort of seamless service Yeah. Uh, is what we strive to do. So yeah. Great to hear that feedback. Thank you for that. Then. So, uh, John coming back to you, uh, and what's next for Audio Network? I've, I've heard, um, that you are looking pretty seriously now at, at ai Yep. Obviously very exciting. Yep. World, a lot happening in that area. Uh, Yeah, and I think, you know, for us, AI is something that helps us deliver a service. You know, we are, we're very categoric in that we would never use AI to make music. Um, we are very much about human generated music, and we never will move from that stance. Um, but I think from the point of view of how we deliver service efficiently, AI is a massive opportunity. Right. You know, I think at the moment it's about sifting through all of the tools and all of the noise to find the ones that really add value. You know, when you look at Audio Network, you know, we are a, we're a small company. Um, we are very, very high on service. We're very focused on the service we give our customers. And so really where we can use AI is to supplement that and to really take away, you know, some of the lower levels of that so we can really focus our, our great people on giving that face-to-face service that we so pri some pri so pride ourselves on. Right. Excellent. So, yeah, I, I was quizzing some of the, the guys in, in Mints who've obviously been talking to you about this. It, it did sound like there was quite a bit of analysis that had happened in, in this space and you working out where the business value was going to be delivered and Yeah. And I think because, you know, you, you alluded to it earlier, because we have this sort of relatively large and complex backend estate, there are a number of places where we can, we can use AI to bring benefit. And really for the moment it's about starting to look at the, the early wins. What's the low hanging fruit there? How do we start to get those quick wins and really start to demonstrate that value? And so I think we are really looking at what are those use cases that we can, we can deploy now that really start to show the benefit. And I think we'll see over time, more and more of the sort of base cases, we'll, we'll move to ai And this is Agent force, age agents, potentially, uh, fielding queries that are coming in from, from customers. Yeah. And, And again, artists Yes. Taking Yeah. Mostly, mostly probably initially from customers. Um, so it'll be, you know, customers coming in, wanting to ask questions around licensing, wanting to ask questions around their usage of licenses, and really those kind of early questions before we, we get a human involved. Mm-hmm. And actually then we can, the, the questions that really require, um, some more personal service, we can really dedicate time to addressing those properly. Sure. By taking away some of the other, um, cases with Agent Force. Yeah, of course. 'cause as, as you're growing and the, the portfolio expands and the customer basics expands, that's a, that's a potentially pretty big volume for a human, a purely human team to, to feel. Yeah. And there, there's some really important questions our customers come to us with that require a human conversation. Mm-hmm. Require conversations around how will they be licensing music, how will they be using that music in their productions? And those are questions where we can really help them with a human who really can sit alongside them almost in their roles. And if we can free up our service people to do that, then that's incredible. Great. Sounds like there's a lot of potential there. There's a huge potential and a huge appetite to do it as well. Sure. Uh, but important to get it right, obviously with the, this implementation and, but then, you know, just talking earlier about, um, the, the preparations with, with Mint, how are those preparations going and has Mint been supporting you in that? Yeah, it's, um, well, because it's a new world in terms of AI agents and how they're gonna be supported, um, the team has been fantastic in kind of guiding us through just the nuances of how best to set up for success in this area. Of course, it's a new market and, um, the AEs at Salesforce have been helping us with this as well. Just identify, you know, just what are the opportunities that could land the most impact. And, you know, we are looking at service cases. There's other, um, possibilities for us as well with future agents as well. But, um, it's just been a guided process and we're at the proposal stage right now where we're kind of digesting through the proposal from Salesforce and Mint to see how we might implement this in the first instance. But, um, the expertise that we've been given has just helped us to really break down the problem space into the key deliverables and linking that back to measurable impact as well. Sure. Uh, yeah, we're, we're always keen in these implementations to make sure that, uh, that our customers are ready for the implementations. Have, have we given you the homework or you, you, you knew which homework you had to, to undertake in order to get ready for the implementation? Yeah, very much so. Very much so. And it's, uh, it's a piece by piece process. I think, you know, as a company, we're, again, we're looking at cases as our first kind of agent use case. We don't have a ton of documentation behind the scenes. We grew very quickly over a period of time when we first started using Salesforce. We don't necessarily always have the most rigorous process or documentation around things that we've done. So again, the team have guided us as to what documentation is gonna be required to train an agent, to give the outputs that we're gonna want. Right. To ensure we deliver that great customer service. Because, you know, we are doing service completely through our people right now and a little bit through our website, and it's just not scalable. So what we need to do is find a way to stop our sales teams and our support teams from burning out and getting to the point where we're putting effort into things that aren't gonna return the value that we want, but at the same time not negating the customer experience because every one of our customers is important to us and we want 'em to have a great experience. And we think that we can achieve that through really strong automation through an AI agent of, of some of the cases that come in. 'cause music rights can be a really difficult thing as well. Mm-hmm. A lot if we think, we try and think as much as we can from our customer's perspective. And sometimes, you know, an editor or producer of a film, you know, they need music yesterday, they really don't have the time to think about what music am I looking for and am I cleared for it? Where can I use it? They just need something there that they can trust. Mm-hmm. And that's what we wanna be as a trusted music partner. And I think that an AI agent can help us just generally train our customer base to say, okay, this is what we can do for you. This is what other companies will do for you, but this is what we can do for you. So it's an education piece, and that's gonna build trust and build confidence, which is important for our customers. Yeah. Fantastic. Again, just sounds like there's just so much value to be, to be had here. So much improvement for the business and, and great to know that, that that collaboration's working well between the audio network and Mint. We're, we're planning for this. Uh, and that you can get all the things in place, place data wise that are needed to get this off to the right start so that when, you know, when it comes to the, the start of our engagement, our formal engagement, yeah. Then we're, we're ready to hit the, the, the ground running Absolutely. To deliver successfully for you. Fantastic. So John, Ben, thank you very much for Thank you talking to us today. It's been a real pleasure.

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All right. Austin, sir, thank you very much for, uh, taking some time. You and I have known each other for, what, two or three years now? We've worked together for a while Yes, indeed. In different capacities. Yeah. Been fun. Now you're in a, now you're in a new role. Yep. Do you wanna tell us a little bit about what you're doing? Yes. Uh, new role for myself as well as Salesforce, which is why I think it's really exciting. Um, so AgTech AI Go To Market was a team that sort of formed over the last few, few months at the beginning of this fiscal year. Um, it, it's spearheaded sort of in a different way that we're separating our business into this new consumption model. Uh, we primarily focus on how Salesforce thinks about AgTech AI Agent Force is the, the product obviously, of which we represent. Yeah. Uh, and Data Cloud falls in that umbrella as well. But really just helping customers navigate what this Ag Agentic thing means, uh, and how we can actualize some of the value for them on, on the platform. Yeah, I mean, I've been in this space for 12 years, 13 years, and I've never known a shift at Salesforce. And, and it's kind of go to market, if you like. The, the conversations with customers now are all about how do we reach and unlock the power of, of AI and agent Force. So what are those conversations like for you? What, what are you talking to customers about now? I think The buzz is real and, and the excitement as well, for the first quarter was, it was immense. Yeah. Right. Like between the CNBC conversations with Jim Cramer, like everybody knows now what this category is, which is pretty amazing. Salesforce created a category essentially overnight. Uh, and now all of our competitors and, and all of the other SaaS vendors are starting to come on board and to a place now where customers have moved beyond, like, what is this? And they're now really moving into how do I make this a reality for me? Yeah. Um, so that time to value piece comes up over and over again as far as we, we know AI is a part of our world. We know we need to be doing something with it, but where do we start? Yeah. I think that's sort of where the question is now. Yeah. And that, and, and we're learning that, right? In the SI world, we, we we're moving from a model of like professional service, project delivery, and then managed service support to this kind of hybrid mm-hmm. Where it's, um, you know, standing agent open and work closely with the customer to just increase those resolutions and what have you. So it's, it's, it's, it's impacting us quite a lot. Right. So are you seeing that as well? I mean, is it a different conversation? Are you getting different, different stakeholders in businesses straight to the C-Suite, for example, this is where we wanna go with our business. Is that, is that the same for you? I do think, uh, it's fundamentally changed the way that Salesforce has to have conversations with customers, uh, in interesting ways. I mean, a, a problem statement right now is that if you think about AI as a whole, you're no longer selling a product Mm. Realistically, to the stakeholders internally, you're selling a project. Yeah. And, and that project is not something that Salesforce is used to having discussion around. 'cause we've been such brilliant product makers in all of our different clouds and our, our platform proposition. And with ai, it evolves literally weekly. Yeah. I mean, our, our product releases now have expedited down to a monthly, weekly basis versus we used to be a couple times a year. And, and that shift, uh, has changed the way that we have to have discussions. It's elevated our conversation for sure. Yeah. You know, we're, we're speaking into different parts of the business that I think we've wanted to really unlock for a long time. Uh, whether it's A-C-I-O-C-D-O, um, the these new C-suite roles that are being created around data are little looking to Salesforce, uh, and, and obviously our partner ecosystem to help them build the narrative. Yeah. Which is really interesting. It's a real journey as well, right? We're talking to customers about how, how can we start a, a kind of crawl, walk, run approach to adopting ai. Yeah. Um, and where do we see the value in that? And I think there's a trust and a kind of maturity on that journey. So we're talking maybe get some value, let's introduce it slowly. How quickly are you seeing some of your customers wanna move and be able to move? Like, how quickly can they adopt this new technology And that that's the fun of what AI is doing? You know, we, we now have themes of AI helping to build ai. Uh, and it's kind of a scary world. Scary, but it's also an exciting world, right? Um, I mean, we've, we've had customers now who have been able to realize value within weeks, uh, versus I think historically a lot of our programs would end up taking months, uh, a longer duration of time. And the level of complexity we're solving for too, uh, to either unlock those operational efficiencies or find new channels of growth, our things were literally co-creating. Yeah. You know, the, the use cases are bubbling up. There are things we didn't even imagine could be possible even a few months back. Yeah. Uh, and I think without having our partners at the forefront of that, that effort and that, and being the catalyst with the customer to find those solutions, uh, we, we wouldn't be moving as quickly as we are. Yeah. I, but it's been a positive story. It is, it is. Super quick. Yeah. Where you guys are going, you know, we've got dedicated, uh, one of our lead architects and one of our lead implementation consultants are just focusing on how can we move as quickly as Salesforce in how we implement AI agent force for our customers. So when you are talking to those customers and thinking about who's the right fit for, um, you know, this customer in terms of an implementation partner, what do you look for? What do you try and think about then? So I, I think we look for, so where we're learning, I'll say even too from our partners, is the business now on this consumption engine is really a derivative of the outcomes we produce. Mm. It's no longer about our product success, it's about how well we can achieve on, on the business opportunity that the customer has, has told us they need to solve for. And that's sort of what Partner ecosystems have done forever. Yeah. Right? Is they, they take these programs and then they bring them to life in, in outcomes driven selling motion. So now that we are doing that, I think we look to our partners to make sure that our outcomes are aligned to the product, to the product roadmap, uh, as well as building what the AI sort of next steps in, in phase two, phase three, phase four are gonna be, 'cause realistically, the evolution of now we work together is it's not let's tackle this and then that's the end of our engagement. It's, this is a, a perpetuity conversation. Yeah. We need AI partners to live and breathe our customer, uh, so that we can understand together where we're going. Yeah. And as our product evolves, it, it's, it's partners like Mint that are staying ahead of the curve and understanding how that roadmap is gonna influence what they're doing with our customers. And If that makes sense. And I, and I see that as the success factor for working with our customers as well. So it's not a, like you described a, you know, standup sales cloud and we can support you going forward when you need it. Sure. It's actually that, that long tail relationship, and we're looking at consumption based pricing as well. Mm-hmm. So, you know, users when you need us, but let's constantly try and find those new use cases that are gonna add a lot of value. You know, drive efficiency, create what should be really a relatively straightforward return on that investment. And it's not a, just a project and go, it's a, a longer term partnership. The Salesforce platform is so interesting now in the way that we play across the ecosystem of, of other technologies that exist within our customers tech stack. Right. And, and now the, the task on our partners and as well as what we do in these programs is how, how do we build agents that are leveraging data ecosystems are leveraging any LLM mm-hmm. At any point in time, uh, and making sure that essentially we're delivering amazing outcomes and amazing experiences, both for internal use cases within our, our customers, as well as obviously the external ones. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's a exciting year. I think this is probably the biggest change that I've seen, like I said before, and I think this year is gonna be exciting on a lot of fronts. You know, I've always enjoyed working with you. Uh, I think we'll work together going forward. Um, yeah. So thank you. Thank you, sir. Thank you so much. Cheers.

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So Christian, thanks very much for taking some time. No problem. I know you're very busy. Um, you've been around the CPQ space for 10 years, nearly 10 years. Yep. Yep. Can you just gimme a bit of a background, what you've been doing? Yep. So, um, I was Oracle for probably about four and a half years, very much in the CPQ space. Yeah. So sitting between CX and the ERP side, um, came to Salesforce. Um, Salesforce for five and a half years, um, in the same sort of area for revenue management. Um, spent a little bit of time in our integration business. Yeah. Um, which is really handy now. Yeah. Um, and then back in the revenue cloud space again with a much broader proposition. Um, yeah. So you are at the sharp end of the customer conversations right? Talking about the new RCA suite? Very much, yeah. Yeah. So the way I see it, there's two buckets of customers there. There's those customers that are kind of net new into Salesforce for the quoting and billing functionality. Yep. And then there's existing ones that we've implemented, you know, a lead to cash, um, suite of tools for on the Salesforce platform, uhhuh. So what are those conversations like? Are they similar? Are they different? Yeah, there's, there's, there's both, right? There's, there's similarities are, um, effectively, you know, these customers are, are still looking at ways to sort of deprecate technology and remove friction out of that whole cycle. Yeah. Um, so that, you know, that's familiar with whether they're existing Salesforce, CPQ or, or, or not. Right? Yeah. Um, uh, from a revenue cloud perspective, um, I think there are adjacent things that they're doing in other areas. Contract management Of platform or using app, All of those things. Yeah. That they're, you know, the whole drive at the moment really is we want more growth, we wanna reduce friction out of the process. Um, how do we do that and how do we do that better moving forward? Yeah. So is there a lot more advantages with the new RCA revenue cloud advance Now? Yeah. Yes. I, I would definitely say from a point of view of cost reduction over that sort of cost of sale and the whole revenue management cycle, um, because we've got so much more on a platform now. Yeah. Um, that sort of native capability on the Salesforce platform is, is, is still massive. I know we talk about the Salesforce 360. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, we've always talked about that, but genuinely now, when you've got all of your revenue management from sort of cradle to grave in one place, it's an enormous benefit for customers Yeah. And their management, uh, uh, of their customers, basically. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we, we've done some big kind lead to cash transformation projects, um, and there were limitations, right? Mm-hmm. Using those managed package tools that there are now Yeah. With those customers that are existing customers, though, you know, with the, with the previous suite of, of, of tools Yeah. For that migration. Are they excited about what RCA is bringing? Have they got hesitation about that? 'cause it, it's a challenging part of Right. For delivery. That's a challenging part of, of, of implementation. So Yeah, for sure. Is an excitement there now about what they're gonna get with the new RCA? There Is. Um, you know, a lot of people have been on that journey to some extent. Yeah. Um, so there is always question marks around that, but I think the excitement is really when they look at the breadth of the capability now, and, you know, ultimately they're managing all these processes in separate tools. You know, their, their environments are often an evolution, um, over a period of years that are still siloed, still a bit disparate, not really integrated. Um, just managing all of that's pretty tough. So the excitement of bringing it on platform, um, and particularly the drive to push towards ai, you know, how can we deploy AI effectively Yeah. In an agent framework effectively to actually deliver something is really important. So, so yeah. They're certainly excited about that. Yeah. So bringing it all onto the platform, you know, we all talk about Agent force all the time, right? This is all about enabling AI in the future world, right? We get everything onto the Salesforce platform. Yeah. That new suite of products. What does that mean then going forward for those customers that are gonna start adopting RCA now, whether they're new to CPQ on Salesforce or not really? Yeah. What's, what's that gonna unlock, you know, a year down the road, say a A a hell of a lot? I, I think, you know, I often have the conversation with customers, can you deploy AI and agents in your current architecture? Yes. Um, but it's a lot more complicated and more costly when it's on a disparate architecture. So what Revenue Cloud really is doing is by centralizing a lot of the process on one platform, it's so much more easy to layer on an agent architecture. So we have the quo in agent going GA as we speak. Um, you know, the ability to be able to say, well, build me a quote for this customer with these discounts, right? For this period in natural language and building it out is massive, right? Yeah. Yeah. Um, and, and if you extrapolate that across the other disciplines of order management or show me all the contracts, et cetera, that's a really big thing. Yeah. So, yeah. Super powerful. Yeah. Yeah. And just sort of thinking back to some of the projects and programs of work we've done, and I'm thinking again about existing customers now, really. Mm-hmm. Um, there is that kind of business transformation that goes with, with a lead to cash implementation. There's a lot of work of preparation work really, for it to be successful there is, yeah. But I think a lot of that's being done for those existing customers on what was, you know, the managed package suite of products. So the migration to RCH should be less Difficult. Absolutely. I think many people sort of think, oh, I'm not gonna have to do all of this again. Yeah. Yeah. Um, but in many respects, the hardest bit of any sort of program around revenue management is working out how you want it to work. Yeah. And, and, and the business process aspect, as you mentioned, um, in many respects, revenue Cloud still maintains the same process. It's just newer technology. Yeah. So absolutely. Customers are often unknowingly, sometimes already, you know, a, a certain level down the road in terms of being ready for Us maturity of road again. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's, that, that is a really interesting point. I think, um, for us in our world as a, as an si, I mean, I've never implemented anything, thankfully for our customers, right? Mm-hmm. But I think when it's a lead to cash program, the preparation and the thinking that the business business has to do ready for that transformation is if, if not more difficult, it's as difficult as actually implementing what we're gonna get from the best, best breed. Really, really the suite of products. Yeah. Yeah. So I think a lot, if a lot of that work is done, then moving to RCA should not be as, as as challenging or transformational really. But there's a lot of additional value, right. There's a lot of more, more things you can do on the platform now. Correct. And, and, and why I wouldn't want, uh, customers to think is that, you know, look, yeah. RCA is this much bigger platform Revenue cloud now is this, you know, real much, much, much bigger. It's not about doing it all at once. Right. A lot of customers will move perhaps the CPQ component and perhaps adopt CLM from somewhere and put that onto the platform. If they go into order orchestration or they're go into invoicing subsequently, the good thing is it's already there on the platform. So, um, you know, they can grow into it. Yeah. Is the, is the Message. And that is typically the approach that we try and take. So, you know, let's, let's deliver value and iterate and, and, and grow the platform and, and the, and the use of it. So thinking from an SI point of view, then. Mm-hmm. Uh, when you are talking to your customers and, and you start getting to the conversation around implementation. So here we are today, you know, this is where we wanna be. Yes. Like we start talking about the how do we do it? And that's where someone like Min Consulting comes in. Mm-hmm. What do you think about when you are thinking about the right partner match for that customer? And you, you're about to introduce 'em 'cause it's key, right? Yeah. Yeah. Getting that right is key. So what, what do you think about Absolutely it is. Um, and, and it's, it's fundamental to success for a customer, essentially to make that sort of transition Yeah. Is to have the right sort of partners involved, you know, credentials for a partner is really important in the space. The partners that have done this before, um, they know, so they know where to go. Credit technology and certify all of those things are, are, are really important. I think the ability to, um, think creatively around, um, how to break down a bigger project Yeah. And how to land that with the customer show value sooner rather than later, and then iterate on the back of that. That's really important. Um, certainly for me in terms of, you know, my involvement with customers. Um, and really I, I think bring some innovations to it, right? Allow them the customer to think more broadly around how they could use the platform and understanding the platform itself, um, is, is a of big importance. Yeah. Because like I say, it's a much broader platform now. It's encore, composable API first. There's so much more that a customer can do in a sort of structured way that was difficult Previously. Yeah. So there, there's that kind of expertise, if you like, around Salesforce and, and the, the new RCA suite of products. Mm-hmm. I'm, I'm a big, big believer though that there's a real value add where the SI knows an industry really well as well. So we focus on certain sectors and I I think when you're talking about lead to cash and pricing and what you sell, how you sell it. Yep. I think that industry knowledge also is really valuable. Is that still the same going forward? Massive. A hundred percent. Yeah. Yeah. Even more so I think because, you know, the, the marketplace nowadays has enough sort of technology providers that are industry specific, right? Yeah. We, we've acquired some in the past. So, uh, you know, that sort of capability and knowledge within the partner community is really important. So having some specific, um, focus and understanding of a, of a, you know, a vertical and how they operate is Yeah. Is really important. Because the, just from a terminology perspective, I know that might sound simple, but aligning terminology and Yeah. Knowing where the customer's driving it, it allows you to sort of accelerate programs. Yeah. Much Better. I mean, I, I sit in workshops with some of our architects that are focused on things like telco Yeah. Communications. Yeah. And it, it feels like they talk a different language to me, you know? Yeah, absolutely. So, so there's that industry actually knowing what the customer's challenges are. That's right. But then unlocking the best from the platform to be able to meet that with a, you know, a really great solution, essentially. That's, that's exactly it. Because every customer in every industry, whilst revenue is enormously important to every one of them, they view their revenue differently and they, yeah. They, you know, they have a different viewpoint and point of view in terms of that process. Um, so having industry expertise in, in that is, is, is vital really for Yeah. For our, for our partners for sure. So it's exciting looking forward, you know, we're, we're super Exciting. Yeah. We're quite early in. We've got, um, some, some great projects happening Yeah. Around RCA now. We've got a lot of experience in that space. But I think going forward, I just think the, the breadth of the suite of products now will allow us to do so much more for our customers and deliver so much more value. Yeah. And I think with those sort of bigger, more complex programs of work comes a more important, it's always important though, to work closely with Salesforce with the customer. Yeah. But I think that's just gonna be, um, even more so as we look forward now to the new suite of RCA tools. A hundred percent. I, I, I do think we're kind of at a tipping point at the moment where, you know, there's, there's been an evolution in the market for some time now where we are really looking at sort of centralized platforms to run all front office, all back office in a real consistent way. It's the way to do it now. I think particularly with the rise of AI and laying on an effective agent. Yeah. You know, a agent architecture that's really Important. So it's all to play for this year. It's pretty exciting. It is. Uh, look, I look forward to it. Yeah, me too. Thank you for your time. Yeah, no problem. Christian. Pleasure. Thank you. Thank you.

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Thank you both for being here today in Salesforce, tava London. What an exciting time within Salesforce ecosystem. Salesforce has launched an amazing and advanced package calls Revenue Cloud Advance. Now it's an exciting for everyone in the ecosystem. Tell us a bit more about what's Revenue Cloud Advance is about. Amazing. Um, happy to. So, revenue Cloud Advanced is our latest iteration built upon, uh, years of customer feedback because voice customer is very important to us. Uh, the strategy that we are taking this time around is our customers have been asking us for a flexible solution that can be applied across multiple channels. So that's why we've built an API first solution, uh, that's designed to work across any industry, any size of customer and any revenue model, right? So, uh, with customers who are looking to go on a journey with Revenue Cloud, they'll start to see the flexibility in which you can start deploying new channels, the way you can actually recognize new forms of revenues and actually start building out new go-to-market models very easily using our platform. Exciting. What do you think, Jack, you like anyone else within Min Consulting, always excited about the new innovations of Salesforce. We follow every single product launch closely. I'm sure you've been to all events, watched all training materials of Revenue Cloud Advance already. So what's your view and what's your take on Revenue Cloud Advance so far? Yeah, no, like as, uh, Michael said, um, the product is very much a, um, an a a I led, uh, in terms of its solutions. So it allows you to deploy the, um, you know, the pricing engine or the product catalog into a commerce site or a customer portal. Um, what I also like about the product is it's gone beyond sort of the, the quote to order and in into the world of, you know, being able to do the sort of post order processes as well. So that's looking at order orchestration, fulfillment, um, connecting to your, you know, professional service automation tools, uh, your, your actual product platform as well for, you know, the, the tech companies out there. Uh, and also looking at kind of that 360 view of asset lifecycle management, which is a very powerful, uh, tool set within the, within the product as well. I really, I'm really happy that you brought that up actually, because when we look at this, the vision is to go far wider and far deeper than just a CPQ solution or a billing solution, right? So if you take the product, um, um, PCM, right, uh, or product Catalog Manager. That's right. Uh, so we are, we are looking at addressing the challenges that customers have in between getting product information into a singular place. In this case Salesforce, right across multiple channels. So you've got your ERP, you've got your PIM solution, but customers are expecting more of a product data center management type capability where you can work across catalogs, be able to do mass updates. Same thing with pricing, right? So we're going a lot deeper in that space as well. You've got, uh, pricing procedures where you can drag and drop and move things around and actually simulate how that changes without actually having an administrator go in and make manual changes or create records to test to see what the actual end result is, right? So for us, we're gonna continue innovating in all these different spaces. So we expect to see customers being very satisfied in terms of being able to understand, Hey, I can really manage my entire product catalogs here and sort of punch out to any repositories that I need in the future. Same thing with pricing, same thing with orders and add, add, right? So the vision is is absolutely huge and we, we absolutely wanna leverage the knowledge that our partners have because we take partner feedback very seriously as well and have, uh, enjoyed, uh, strong collaborations with yourself so far, which is great. Sounds amazing. Um, so Jack, you've got great experience on delivering number of Salesforce CPQ projects today, RCA Revenue Cloud Advance being new, you are well excited to start the journey, continue on the implementation cycle of doing Revenue Cloud Advance now. So what's the difference really between Revenue Cloud Advance and Salesforce CPQ today? Well, I guess number one is obviously the, the, the architecture. So like, uh, as, as Michael said, um, within sort the Salesforce CPQ manage package, it was very much a linear process, um, in terms of, you know, going from like a lead to a, an opportunity quote and order. But in the, in the sort of the revenue cloud on core, uh, on core product, uh, we now have a more of a ability to kind of deploy pricing engines to a specific objects. For example, you can, you can know, you can do some quoting, um, as well as some ordering. Uh, and you can also look at pricing effectively any, any object within, within Salesforce due to the kind of the architecture of the context definitions and the pricing procedures. Uh, so that's really useful for some of the customers that look at like, pricing at like a work order, um, perspective as well as well downstream. Um, but also the, um, I guess I guess the, the kind of unlocking of some of the other capabilities around contract lifecycle management as well, um, is really powerful. Um, you know, looking at red lining clause libraries, uh, these are all bits and pieces that typically you'd have to bring in different, you know, um, either technologies or, or products. But also it's now more of a, a complete solution. Um, for, for the revenue cloud, I think that's a great point because again, you know, the idea of customers starting from a quote then, then ultimately is negotiated through an approvals process, generating something that is actionable, IEA document that can be signed by customer, going into a contracting phase, and then ultimately coming out with an order at the end. I think that's great for a lot of customers, but for some customers, um, and this is relevant of industry because every business is different. You may start from a contract negotiation to begin with, have a framework of what customers may be expecting from a product analog perspective, locking down contracted pricing and so forth. And then from there, drawing out actually quotes that, you know, effectively, uh, fulfill the obligations that was agreed by a contract. Perhaps a good opportunity to ping a question back at you, Jack. Um, do you, have you seen any interesting, uh, go to Cash designs as part of your journey with, uh, revenue Cloud so far? Yeah, so I think, um, actually on that point around sort of like the actual process is initiated from a contract, obviously you have them customers that have like more of an RFP process. So for example, they may be going through a, an customer onboarding process to get to a initial contract, and then from there, we are then initiating some of the, the quoting for, you know, um, orders of effectively during the, the life cycle of that RFP process. So that's a, you know, a very, something that was very challenging or you maybe limited a little bit with, with Salesforce CPQ managed package, but now due to the kind of platform capabilities of Revenue Cloud, uh, advance, you're able to kind of just, you know, go away and, and, and look at those and, and tackle those, those use cases. So it's a, it's allowing that, that flexibility of when a, when a sale starts, it doesn't necessarily have to start at a lead. It can start with a quote, it can start an order, it can start with a contract. It's, it's very nonlinear compared to sales or CPQ. Absolutely. Sounds like Revenue Cloud is advanced. The, that's the name says that Revenue Clouds advanced. So, so there's quite a few things you guys spoke about, um, as the current feature sets offered by Revenue Cloud, certainly being very much advanced to what CPQ offers today, if there are three or four things that stands out today, so anyone watching this video should know about, what are the things you would say, what used to be certain things that were add-ons before now comes built in, are some of the features which customer has raised through Success Channels, our partners giving feedbacks to you guys now evolved into a Product Suite's gonna benefit the customers today. What would that be comparison of RCA versus Salesforce CBQ? I think from, from my perspective, so Salesforce, CBQ in terms of its advanced order management capabilities is fairly limited, uh, during the sort of post-sale order process. But now with the, uh, introduction of like A DRO, so the Dynamic Revenue Orchestration, allowing you to take sort of the commercial products, uh, and decompose 'em into technical product products for fulfillment is a real value add to many customers out there, including the, the tech, the tech customers. Um, some of the, the feature gaps, which I think have been solved around sort of, um, MDQ, it came with some limitations due to sort of the performance of the package and some of the, the volumes of quotes for, uh, quote lines for certain customers. That's, um, being mitigated through the, the instruction of like ramped ramp deals, uh, being able to do flexible pricing year throughout, you know, the different years. So year one, year two, year three, um, but also, um, this usage, um, based pricing as well in terms of the design from a selling mechanism, uh, but also being able to rate usage and bill usage through, through the platform is, is, is, yeah, definitely a, a leap forward. Thank you for saying that. Um, I think for us, revenue Cloud advance is far more than just your traditional quarter to cash tool system, right? So if you think about it, uh, you've got contracting capability built into it, and then we're going really deep into contracting. So you can bring that in as part of a sales journey, which is very natural because you wanna make sure that your contractual terms are agreed at the same time as the commercial terms. Uh, Jack pointed out, uh, dynamic Revenue Orchestration, which is our order management capability. Again, I think that's a really important one to highlight because when we think about sales, we think about Happy Path, customer looks at out what our offerings are, products and services they choose to buy, they negotiate, they agree terms, they sign, and ultimately gets pushed down to ERP and then everybody forgets about it, right? That's not necessarily the case because a lot of customers may have a change that they wanna make after they've placed an order or perhaps, uh, delivery wasn't perfect, so they want to have some sort of, uh, you know, credit memo raised. There are a lot of these things that are, you know, I would call them circular journeys within a quarter cash journey where it's not a, you know, start from point A finish at point B, but rather you have to be able to have a platform that can deal with every single permutation, every single outcome that may happen as part of delivering on the promise that you made to the customer, and then collecting, uh, from, from that, uh, from that exercise or activity. Makes sense. So Revenue Cloud Advance sounds as exciting as anyone watching this video, right? So the other buzzword we hear a lot is Revenue Cloud billing, RCB. So when does RCA Revenue Cloud Advance Stops and RCB Revenue Cloud Advance begins? I'd probably say that it doesn't really stop. It's probably a very nice circle. Um, at least that's our point of view. So if you were to purchase Revenue Cloud Advanced, you would get a capability call invoice management, and that's to solve the biggest issues that most customers have, which is to connect the correct order with the correct invoice. So if your customer phones up and asks a question, you can have a very, uh, competent conversation with the customer to say, this is what was delivered, this is what's on the invoice. If there's anything that needs changing, at least you find out right then and there, right? So really quick, you don't need to delve into multiple systems. Revenue Cloud billing, which was introduced in February, 2025. Um, so just a few months as, as of today, um, extends that capability even more, right? So customers are expecting a modern billing solution that can deal with all the different revenue models that we just talked about for Revenue Cloud Advanced, right? You've got subscriptions, you've got, and that's constantly changing, right? Customers can buy more. Um, you've got usage elements that are constantly being monitored, and then they need to be rated and then ultimately billed correctly at the end of that journey. So what comes with Revenue Cloud billing is the offering that makes us unique and different in the market is that it's a platform that you can then tailor to your specific use case. It comes straight out the box that is easy enough to, um, uh, implement from, from most of the standard use cases. But as we all know, customers have all sorts of interesting and varied business requirements, which is where that Salesforce platform that underpins all of this becomes really important, right? Because then, uh, implementation partners can take customer requirements and tailor it. So that tool is designed to make it as flexible as possible for any outcome that the customer's expecting. Sounds great. Totally makes sense. It Does make sense. Yeah. So like connecting that front end and backend is really important. I think, um, you know, a lot of challenges customers have is around, you know, errors from like handoff from a, you know, A CRM to a an ERP. And now with all that data flowing within, within Salesforce, organically from a kind of a lead to cash process, allows the, the end users to, you know, start that journey from Salesforce, even if it's a customer coming in via, via portal, all that data surface at an account level and able to start initiate that process. Great. So we've spoken about Revenue Cloud Advance, we've spoken about Revenue Cloud billing, let's talk about customers. So who are the ideal customers for Revenue Cloud Advance today? Um, maybe Jack, do you wanna take this one, Chris? Yeah, I think the, there's been a bit of a shift actually in terms of the, the product. So for example, you know, you had products that sat there that were very much, um, vertical in terms of their alignment to, to customers. But now in terms of revenue cloud on core, it's very much more of a ho horizontal approach. IE um, there's the solution that allows you to, um, you know, it can be enabled for customers for any industry, uh, any channel, uh, any product line. Um, so in terms of the, the capabilities, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's a change in direction. Um, in terms of the architecture, I dunno what you think, Michael. Amazing. I'm glad that you picked up on that. So for us, it's meant to be a horizontal platform, right? So across an industry, any size, uh, but to us it's also important to understand and recognize that businesses are continuously evolving with global changes, right? Yeah. So, you know, uh, it's almost a, a, a memory nowadays, but, uh, COVID, when COVID happened, I distinctly saw two types of businesses, the ones that were prepared with a go-to-market platform or tool, and the ones that were scrambling to try and get one in place, because you suddenly went from doing business in person, being able to shake somebody's hand and to close a deal, to suddenly doing everything remotely. Nowadays you've got supply chain disruptions, right? So there's a lot of global events that impact businesses on a daily basis, and you need to be prepared to be able to change at a, you know, at a moment's notice. And I think that's where the value comes, right? So businesses, I think by and large, there are a lot of commonalities even across different verticals because a lot of those, um, ex um, sort of experiences are informed from a B2C space, right? Like, how you buy today has changed from how you would buy 10 years ago. Your children today, of course, probably wouldn't know anything about some of the experiences that you had growing up, right? So it's this exactly the same in the bus in the business world, and I think as you get younger and younger people into the workforce, their expectations on how business is conducted, how they actually can go and buy from their suppliers is changing. So I think that horizontal approach that we're taking, that's the reason why we're doing it. And of course, we've, again, we've got the backing of so many customers telling us exactly what they want. Salesforce customers are not shy about being vocal and telling us exactly what they need, and we are really grateful for that because, you know, customer feedback is number one for us, right? So that's why we've taken the approach that we have such A closely connected ecosystem, isn't it? Exactly. It's also great to hear that the product is catered for customers of any verticals and any industries. Is that what you're saying? Yeah. Um, makes it more powerful, makes the reach of the product and the benefits, uh, much wider than specifically focusing on certain industry type or a certain customer type. Yeah. That's amazing. Um, I can actually add to that. Um, the capabilities within Revenue Cloud are also being consumed in some way, shape or form by the industry clouds that we also have, right? So if you think about Communications Cloud, energy and utilities cloud, uh, if you are a customer of those verticals, absolutely look at the verticalize, um, sort of packaging that Salesforce has provided, because it gives you a lot of value. But at the same time, if you've got consultants that have worked on revenue cloud projects, they can absolutely assist customers in those spaces as well. So we've tailored parts of Revenue Cloud for certain industries, um, as per the requirement of those industries. So it, it's, again, we do have a horizontal approach, but for customers who need dedicated vertical specific needs, Salesforce is ca catering for those as well within those industry clouds that we provide. Sounds Exciting. Um, so we spoke about customers and let's talk about preparation sites. So now I'm, I'm a customer, well excited about the product as anyone else in this room. Now, preparing for such products does take a certain amount of time and effort. So preparing for revenue cloud advance project, what kind of things should a customer look for and watch out for, and what are the things they must do in the preparation process? I think it really depends on their current situation, right? So that we'll have Salesforce customers with Salesforce managed package CPQ managed package. We'll have customers that maybe only have the sort of the sales cloud and service cloud stack, or they may have a CPQ tool that sits off platform at the moment. So it really depends on the, the situation at the moment. I think our, our approach is to understand where they're looking to go in terms of like future needs and business needs, and look at the, kind of the considerations for, like my, for example, if it's a sales or CPQ to RCA migration, it may be that you start small. We, we, you know, obviously from experience we're working with customers in this space around starting small, chunking up the, the kind of, um, I guess the, the functionality, um, for the, for the customer, whether that's looking at a specific channel or a specific product or a specific region, and then working our way into, to moving things from, from CCP sales or CPQ into, uh, revenue cloud OnCore. That's perfect. I think if I, if you don't mind me adding a couple points there as well, I think it's a great point about looking at where your starting point is. I would say also, uh, making sure that your organization is pulling in the right direction because nobody undertakes a project like this, uh, without some consideration, right? It's usually transformative. It changes a lot of things in the business. It changes how you engage your end customers. So, uh, make ensuring at, at the bare minimum, your C-suite is all in agreement and how you wanna move forward is really important. And then there's two layers to that. There's the tangibles. So making sure things like your product data is all cleaned up, your pricing data is, uh, you know, again, tidied your customer data is correct. And then also there's the intangibles, which is why you're doing what you're doing. Yeah, right. And both things can be really supported by a really good partner in this case, I would say, I mean, consulting have been a great partner to Salesforce in this respect, but definitely consult your partners, uh, in this journey because they can really help you with things like assessments, alignment, change enablement, change management, uh, and those things are really important to get right upfront because then that makes the deployment of the technology much easier, of course. 'cause then everybody's aligned and pulling in the same direction. Exactly. Like you may have like a, a customer that has Salesforce CPQ, and they may be, it's very mature in terms of its, um, solution. It's been around for six, seven years and the, you know, the business has changed from there. They may moved from a subscription, you know, pure subscription play into sort of now looking to think about go, go to market with transactions and usage. And so we don't wanna have this sort of like lift and shift model. We wanna take a very consultative approach and looking at the business needs, looking at what they have today, and looking how we optimize the solution before migration into to RCA. Perfect. So now customers have gone through the preparation journey, as we both have nicely spoke about. Now they have to pick the right partner, the ideal partner to work with. So what kind of things should a customer look for in the ideal partner? Uh, from Salesforce's perspective, uh, we certainly look at partners that have delivered on revenue cloud projects before. So that includes Salesforce, EPQ, that includes, uh, Salesforce industries. Uh, we have the ability to track those, uh, within revenue Cloud, we're also tracking things like enablement sessions and webinars. So if you've got partners attending those, we are tracking those as well. And then of course, we are looking at what partners are outputting. So if a partner has a great demo, for example, if they've built assets accelerators, there are a lot of partners that are doing that. So I would say, you know, definitely, uh, talk to your Salesforce account executive who can help you give you a steer. This is from the Salesforce viewpoint, of course, right? Uh, but definitely talk to your AEs talk toes. They'll be able to give you a good guide because there'll be different partners based on region, uh, partners based on vertical expertise, right? So we wanna make sure that we are, we are giving you options so you can take a look at, and of course, uh, continue exploring, um, those partners on the app exchange. Uh, post a conversation with the ae of course, um, and reach out and have a conversation with the partner. Yeah, right, because cultural fit is really important too, right? Just because they're competent at delivering the capability doesn't necessarily mean that they'll be able to work well with you and extract the best out of you, because that's really, really important. Right. So those, those are my suggestions, but um, would love to hear what your thoughts are. Yeah, I think, I think for us it's, um, it's, yeah, like you said, cultural fit is really important. So making sure we manage the expectations early on in terms of what we are looking to achieve in X time and what are the business outcomes, what are the, you know, the KPIs that we're looking to realize is really important. And so we, we do like to start with that sort of like, you know, open book, I guess, sort of discovery approach in terms of what, where, where we are looking to go in terms of target state, and then let's look at where, where, where we need to kind of drive business, uh, improvement quickly and time to value is really important. We also wanna make sure that we release something that's getting constant feedback so we can actually, you know, improve upon that as well. But yeah, start small, very agile, um, and then grow, grow out in terms of capabilities for sure. Actually there's a good opportunity for me to ask a question to both of you. Um, what do you think, um, has changed since the days of implementing Salesforce CPQ and Salesforce billing to Revenue Cloud advanced with Revenue Cloud billing? Have you seen any evolution in your own practices and how you actually engage, uh, delivery projects? Of Course. Um, I'll go first if you don't mind, Jack. So the evolution of the new product launches led to how we cater for various skills that required to deliver revenue Cloud advance. So what used to be a specialism in a single product, our vertical was good enough to deliver a Salesforce implementation now requires some expertise in the vertical at the same time expertise within the product specialism. When I say product specialism, I'm talking about someone who's got expertise and experience in delivering customer journeys before, how to best to go about designing the best in the market, more interactive customer friendly journey using the product specialism now available in Revenue Cloud advance. So putting all that together, which now requires a successful project, requires not necessarily a leader or a lead within the team who has a specific product skill, but also about sub-products that offered by Revenue Cloud advance, such as dynamic product configurations. Or it could be the journey build. It all requires its own skillset. So we have now upskilling all our team to have such specialism. So when we do a revenue cloud advance, we in a position to have a specialist for each sub products that Revenue Cloud Advance offers. So when we do a project, it's more of a joint agile team together with various specialism working together, which is slightly different from what we used to do before. Yeah, no, I totally agree. Like in terms of the resource profile, we've had to look at kind of, um, I guess the different segments within the sort of lead to cash process. So for example, looking at kind of quote to order, so the quoting, the pricing, the product catalog management, uh, versus the contract lifecycle management, the billing capabilities, the advanced order management capabilities, and looking at five tune our resource profile and our skill set to, to kind of succeed on these, these types of implementations. It's been amazing. Thank you both for your time today at the Salesforce London Tower. Thank you, Michael, for your insight from sales Salesforce. And thank you Jack from in consulting for all the information you shared. Thank.

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Hello. Thank You very much for taking some time to talk to me. Um, so you head up Alliances I here in the uk. I Salesforce has got a nice big healthy ecosystem. You run that you report to Zara. Um, can you just talk me through why it's so important that the ecosystem is thriving and why it's healthy and how you work together? Well, I, I, more now than ever before, um, our ecosystem is now vital, absolutely vital for our customers and for Salesforce. We want joint success for both our partners and for, uh, our customers and obviously for Salesforce as well. So it really doesn't matter whether you are a large GSI, you're a management consulting, you are one of our smaller boutique partners, um, or an ISV. It's really important that we have all of these partners in our ecosystem that they're all successful. It means that we can all be successful together. Yeah. And they All can add value in a different way, I guess. Yeah, I think we sit in that, that RSI pop, you know, we're UK based, but we do operate in the sort of GB to enterprise space. You class a Salesforce, so we work with kind of global companies. Um, we often get referred in by Salesforce. So what are the key factors when Salesforce are looking at an, an account and a strategic opportunity? Obviously you're invested for that to be successful. Yeah. So what are the factors when you think, what's the right partner fit here? Great question. Um, we have to, first of all the, the priority is to think about what the landscape is within the customer or the prospect. Yeah. Uh, we don't want to tread on any toes. We wanna leverage the existing relationships that you might have with that customer and that we, that we might not have at that, at that precise moment in time. So it's really important to think about what the current landscape is. Then we would look at, um, potentially if it was net new, we'd look at the expertise. We'd talk to the customer, understand what their criteria was on what a successful relationship, uh, looks like with a, with an implementation partner. So we will look at, um, whether they've got industry expertise Yeah. The references they've got and whether they've done it before, the capability that they have across our, um, agen enterprise platform. And really thinking about putting our, putting ourselves in the customer's shoes, what good looks like for them. Then we would look at the partners that we have in the ecosystem and make recommendations of the type of partners that we think that would suit that customer. That's really interesting. I mean, when, when we engage with a customer, we think pretty much the same way. Yeah. That we've got the right experience here. Can we talk the language of this business? Have we got the right experience on the platform as well? The expertise. Is there a good cultural fit? I always think of it as like a recruitment driver. Really important. The cultural fit. Yeah. Yeah. So a cultural fit I think is important. And then scale. Can we, can we deliver this? Mm-hmm. 'cause often these projects might have 10, 15 people on for a year. Mm-hmm. And that's exciting. But I think we're invested then we're kind of co-invested, aren't we in, in being successful together. Yeah. Now we're two years old. Happy Birthday. Just couple Weeks ago. Thank you. Two years ago there wasn't really agent force, right? No. And looking out to the next two or three years, and this is what I'm thinking about now, what, what does our role look like? Um, how do you see Salesforce, obviously you are moving to a consumption model and everything. I think the relationship needs to be even closer. Mm-hmm. How do you see that evolving in the next 12 to 36 months? How do you think Yeah. Is gonna Change? So there's a couple of really good points to unpack there. The first one is, um, our customers more than ever are want to understand what Angen Enterprise looks like. What does an agent look like in their business working with their humans? And quite often they just dunno where to start. So coming to any one of our, uh, you know, anybody in the tech industry to understand how do you start small? What, what's the end goals look like? How do you bring that, uh, agen labor and human workforce together, and how do you bring that in to give them the best value that they can? It's, it's a complicated process, and we need our partner ecosystem. We need Salesforce, we need our management consultants to, to help understand what that path looks like. So that's, that's really exciting. That's lots of opportunity there to, to be the trusted advisor for our customers. Um, and I think Mint can do a great job there. Yeah. And it's happening at PACE as well. Yeah. Right. We're all kinda learning. This year's been incredible really. I think only a couple of months ago we did some content here about the, the change in our delivery model. Mm-hmm. It was going from a kind of project to, um, managed services. There were the kind of two offerings that you had as a, as an si, Lakers. Now it's a, a much longer term relationship where you're continuing to evolve those use cases for agents. And I think with you guys having consumption based pricing models, now that relationship I think needs to be even closer. So the customer, Salesforce, the SI all working really collaboratively with a kind of long-term vision. I, I do not know where we'll be in a year, nevermind three. Yeah. But we are, we're investing quite a lot in innovation at the moment. How do we deliver for our customers? So how can we use AI ourselves? Absolutely. And then how can we add value for our customers as well? So, you know, other accelerators, other user cases, is it, you know, can you get to a point where we can almost lift and shift use cases across industries even? Mm-hmm. This is the exciting bit I see with, with Agent Force. Yeah. But when we sit here in a year, who knows what we'll be talking about. Exactly. But even if you look at, um, Salesforce as Customer Zero, where we are using agents extensively now across our own internal systems, um, how we're interacting with our partners, and you'll, you'll see the opportunity now how you can use AI to help you be even more successful. And when you are delivering, and actually just talk, picking up on the consumption model, we over, um, you know, over, over the next few months we'll be looking at what we can do going into fiscal year 27 and how we can bring that, uh, the intimacy between, uh, Salesforce, our customers and our partners all the way through the sales cycle. All the way from where that lead was created, where we've started to talk about a concept where the customer and then how we can work through the sales process and through delivery, making sure that we're seeing time to value Yeah. And making sure that they're consuming Yeah. Being successful. Absolutely. Yeah. It's, it's important that we are working lockstep with our partners all the way through that process. Yeah. Listen, thank you very much. It's been great. Pleasure to You. I love, I love the support that you provide from it as well. So thank you for you team. It's a real pleasure. Thank you. Good. Nice to see you. So.

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The last two years. Um, exciting, emotional, A whirlwind, my God, A blur, I think is probably the shortest way I can answer that. When We originally started the business, we weren't quite sure of what was gonna happen. We had a dream and a team and ultimately it's been up and up and up and up and up since we started. Proud Of so much. We've achieved through let's, you know, building the team, building our, all our internal systems and processes, all the great customers we've worked with, all the great projects we've delivered. I feel I've been in a permanent state of mild shock at just how much we are getting through and what the team is, is achieving. There've been tough parts, but it's been a journey. It's been pretty amazing, if I'm honest. I Think for me, mins highlight is just seeing where the company has come from in the last two years in such a short space of time. To see it grow so rapidly, um, into something that is really, really fantastic has been a real, I think, pleasure to watch that Mince highlight of the last two years. I think winning the Rising Star Award at the Regatta last year, that was amazing recognition. So, so early in our journey, it was a real standout moment. Mince highlight, I think is having a customer on stage at World Tour. Um, I think World Tour is such an incredible event and to really put a stake in the ground and have people talking on your behalf is really, really powerful. Looking at the, uh, app exchange reviews of Mint Consulting and seeing those Cs SATs and the five stars and just reading things from our, that our clients have said about, um, you know, smooth implementations, about really enjoying working with Mint. I think that's possibly the thing that stuck out for me, most of all, is that clients have actually have enjoyed working with us, and I think that's, uh, just a, a lovely thing to hear. Favorite memory of the last two years? I think generally seeing the team grow and the culture, um, and then getting everyone together in summer in Darby for our kickoff. Um, there were over 20 of us and we have partners there, so it's a bit of a family affair and we, we had our house band, mint Balls of Fire, So we recently played, played a gig to a sort of captive audience of our, of our colleagues. Um, so that was, that was a real highlight for me as well. My favorite memory could only be one Mint Balls of Fire debut in July, 2025 as lead as a lead guitarist. It's been really excited to see, and we have an album coming out later on in the year. Watch this space. A favorite memory for me was actually day one, actually starting day one, uh, at Mint. And knowing at the very beginning it was me and you, Sam, and, uh, just knowing that it was gonna be incredibly successful and the future was gonna be really exciting. A celebratory sound that represents, uh, n being two years old. Yay. Woo God. Cool.

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So we're here today at Salesforce Tower in London. Uh, really glad to be joined by the lovely Dan Aldridge from Salesforce. Dan, can you tell us a little bit about your role? Yeah, well, first of all, thanks very much for having me. Absolutely delighted to be speaking to you. Yeah. So I'm, uh, RVP of Service Cloud in the uk covering a number of industries, uh, retail consumer goods, um, manufacturing, automotive and, and energy utilities. Dan, tell us how is technology changing in the contact center today? It, it is a very rapidly evolving area. I, I think, um, Sam Altman said something like four years ago that generative AI would have the biggest impact on customer service as a job function within organizations. And, and we're really kind of seeing that come into fruition. But there's, within contact centers specifically, there's a whole bunch of other stuff happening as well. We're seeing a real convergence between, um, CCAS and CRM and joining up, uh, you know, what was a lot of legacy telephony solutions with CRM customers are moving away from on-premise telephony providers to, to, um, uh, to cloud-based CA solutions. And the reason why they're doing that is AI like it to be able to deliver a gentech transformation of a contact center, they need to be able to have cloud-based contact center solutions, which are integrated with their CRM systems. And that is driving a huge amount of the engagements that we're having with our customers at the moment. And that, in turn, is transforming into agent use cases. 'cause 90% of our agent force, uh, customers who are live and using it are customer service use cases. And they, in many cases, they've done that by connecting their CA solutions with their, um, with their CRM systems. And like, and then kind of moving beyond that and looking at all of the technology now that's enabling self-service. So not just ent, but, but customer portals, um, you know, being able to, uh, chat bots and, and, uh, you know, WhatsApp and all of the other digital channels that are available is, it's taking out the really simple tasks out of the contact center and it's therefore really evolving the role of the contact center agents. So they're less now dealing with the really simple tasks. 'cause they're being automated, the really easy ones are being automated and what's left is quite a complex role. Often cases now are actually taking longer than they used to, which is, you know, as an ex contact center leader like me, that's like, that's the opposite of really what you would be looking for in a contact center 10 years ago. Now what we're seeing is complete automation of the simple ones and the more complex ones being dealt with by the service agents. So the skill level of the s service agents needs to go up. And, you know, some of our customers now, they're talking about becoming the first, um, organizations in the UK to pay a contact agent, contact center agent 40 KA year, because that's the level of skill the job requires. Now they've taken out 60% of the cases from the contact center and what's left are just difficult. So yeah, really exciting time. Technology's playing a huge part in that transformation. And where would you say customers are in that journey right now? Yeah, hugely, hugely variable. I think what we're hearing from, um, we, we, we've got some amazing customers who are really like, we call them trailblazers. They're really like leading the way in AI adoption and creating a world class customer experience that is super automated, super efficient and, and really unique to their organizations. But we've got an awful lot of customers who feel like they're a long way from that. Like they really feel like, uh, they're not ready to, to adopt generative AI and a agentic ai. They feel like they've got some much more fundamental issues that they need to solve before they can get there. Um, the great news is that we've got lots of customers who've been in that position who've made that transformation and, and it's not as complicated as, as you might think, and we've been able to do it several times very quickly. And there are absolutely nuances and, you know, challenges to be able to do it for every organization, which is why you need to work with an, an amazing, uh, partner like Mint who can help you on that journey. Because I think utilizing their experience is absolutely critical to making sure that you're getting the most out of your investments, making sure that you're delivering value to your shareholders as soon as Possible. And would you say there are some customers who maybe have certain technology that they're just not using it to its full potential? So potentially there's some features there that they aren't yet utilizing? Always, Always. And, and that's part of the transformation. Um, sometimes it's just simplifying a complex landscape that's built over many years, you know, of legacy systems that maybe don't talk to each other, it's existing systems that they're maybe not using to the fullest, uh, capability. Um, and that's again, like really why, if you can bring someone in from the outside with the experience and and skills to be able to do that assessment and see where you are and give you some real advice, you can also, you know, consolidate a lot of the things that you've got and, and reduce that spend as well as make that transformation up the, you know, CX maturity curve. And I guess, what's the importance of partners that you have mentioned working with Mint, obviously, but where do you see them playing, uh, in terms of trying to progress customers or help customers move up that maturity scale? Yeah, we, we've seen on a number of occasions really going, a partner's able to go in with a fresh set of eyes, look at the landscape within a customer organization, do an assessment as to where they're at in terms of maturity along that kind of curve from mm-hmm. You know, leading up to ag agentic build a plan, which is very, you know, step by step delivers value at each stage and enables customers to very quickly get a return on investment that enables them to keep building on that and go into the next level. And, and I think where customers have tried to do it themselves, they don't have the outside experience to be able to do it. Uh, and that, uh, you know, causes delays and inefficiency. So, And we'll often talk about obviously getting to the top of that scale at the top of that curve is great, but actually you've gotta get the foundations right to be able to adopt things like AI, et cetera. Exactly. And where we've seen, like some of the examples of those challenges might be, you know, your, the knowledge customers will say the knowledge database isn't good enough to be able to be u to, to point AI at it and get, get usable answers. What we've done with customers is just simplify that process, pick your top 20 knowledge articles to start with, like build out a FAQ style use case that can then deliver the, the, the proof of concept and you can then grow it from there to include returns, processes, warranties, where's my order? Whatever, you know, like it, it's, it's all about simplification usually to start with, get the foundations in place in a, you know, in a limited way and then you can grow from there. And what's your favorite thing about the job? My favorite thing about the job? Well, I, I always, when I've had a really good day at work, it's always because I've been with customers and like every customer is different, every customer has different challenges and it's not easy. It's a challenging, like we, we sometimes maybe we try to make it seem like it's easy, but it's really not. 'cause you know, every, every customer is different. And just spending time with customers, getting to understand how their businesses work, what their strategy is, and then, you know, helping them, you know, find a way forward with technology that will help 'em deliver that strategy. I mean, that's the, And I guess for customers, there's a lot of partners out there as you know. How do you help them navigate through that partner ecosystem to try and choose one that's a good fit for them? Yeah, I think there is definitely an element of industry knowledge. So depending on what industry those customers are operating in, like my, my instinct is always to, to to match them with a partner who's got a lot of experience specifically from that industry as whilst there's, we, we do do a lot of cross-fertilization between industries and that's, that's really important. I think have like having, uh, a partner that's got experience across other organizations within an industry has really proven to, to help accelerate projects. It just makes things often a lot quicker, but not nec sometimes it's not just that. Like I, I think it's because you can learn an awful lot from adjacent industries and industries with very similar challenges. So it's, it, it's a, the industry, but I think b the specific problem and challenges that that customer has got and what, you know, which partner has, has helped other customers with the same challenges before. And again, field service is very different to service. So that's a specific type of skillset that's required as well in that? I think so. Think, yeah. No, definitely. And, and, uh, there are areas of field service, which are huge topics in themselves, like optimization, you, you know, like it's a very complex area. So, um, it, again, going back to, you know, what's the specific challenge and strategy of the customer, therefore, which, which partner has the right skills and experience to help? Is there a lot of excitement around agent force for voice? Huge amount, huge amount of excitement because like we, we talk about it a lot, like lots of people love to engage through digital channels like WhatsApp and they like to self-serve and do things themselves, but it's still a huge part of, you know, the population want to be able to pick up a phone and make a call. Uh, so the, you know, and that is, is always the most expensive channel. So agent force for voice is gonna have a huge impact on contact centers and, and the customer experience as a whole. I think. Dan, it was really great talking to you. Thank you so much for your time and we must do it again Soon. Absolute pleasure, Vanessa, as always. Thank you very much.

1136535475

Hello, I'm Ed from Mint Consulting. Really happy to be here today talking to Phil from Salesforce and Rich from Mint Consulting, all about the, the world of field service. So Phil Field service, really exciting part of the Salesforce platform. Kind of a long way from sales in a sense, getting into the real kind of operations field, operations from, from clients. Can you tell us about the Salesforce offering in that area? Yeah, so it's, uh, quite a broad and, uh, mature offering around field service that Salesforce have. Um, it's around for many, many years, and it's quite broad in that it covers lots of different types of field service operations from those that are more customer facing to those that are more, um, asset facing. Um, and also across the whole, um, uh, I guess gambit of, uh, people involved in the, in the field service process from those, um, dispatchers through the field service engineers, um, even through to interfacing with the customer in terms of keeping them informed of their, of their service appointment. So it's quite a, a broad solution. Yeah, and I, I guess it's, it's there to help, uh, customers with potentially complex operations that can enable them to manage things in a more structured, orderly way. There's quite a lot for customers to get to grips with, I guess with, uh, with everything that the platform offers quite a steep learning curve or, Um, I wouldn't say it's necessarily a steep learning curve. I mean, you have to understand, I mean, these people understand their own, uh, operations, uh, very deeply in how they're an operations work. And really, um, the Salesforce field service product is designed to really support those processes, um, and, uh, meet the customer where they're at with their own, with their own processes. Um, and just to iteratively make, uh, make them better, make them faster, make them smoother, um, and, and to really improve the, the life of dispatchers on a daily basis, improve the life of field service engineers and overall give, you know, give the customer a better experience. Sure. So Rich, if I can turn to you to get your thoughts on it, as somebody who's, uh, gone through or managed implementations a number of times for, uh, field service and Salesforce, can you remember the, the first implementation that you did? And how was that getting to grips with it? Um, I do remember my first field service implementation, um, fondly, but it was, yeah, it was, I guess from an implementation perspective, there's quite a lot to get your, your head around and it is, is quite different from the other areas of the platform, like the, you know, the more traditional kind of sales cloud and, and service cloud side of things. Um, you know, as Phil mentioned, you know, these, these field service organizations that, that we, we've, you know, we work with, they have very clear ideas about, you know, how their business works and, and what they want. So from an implementation perspective, it's, it's, it's getting to understand which, you know, which areas of the platform you can use to meet certain needs and perhaps where you might use one thing over another. So I think it's, it's, it's understanding what's in there. 'cause it's a very deep product. There are a lot of tools in the toolbox, so it's learning, you know, which tool to use for which job really and, and, and how to enable and unlock what the customer is hoping to achieve. Right. And I, I guess that is something for the customer to get, uh, their, their heads around, you see both indicated. They, they would obviously know their operations very well if they're used to sort of running it in with often sort of quite manual processes. I, I suppose, uh, but then they, is there much for them to learn to understand how the Salesforce product is gonna enable 'em to run things in a, in a different way? Is do people find that intuitive or, I think it's, uh, these projects are never just a sort of a system change or a system implementation's quite often. Quite a big sort of business shift and a big business, um, adjustment. Um, you know, quite often these com these organizations are coming from world where things are done quite manually. You know, they're running out spreadsheets or on whiteboards, or you're on systems that don't have the kind of automation and optimization capabilities of Salesforce, where perhaps dispatchers are picking up jobs and manually dropping them into open slots on an, on an engineers schedule. Whereas in a, in a sort of Salesforce world, you want more sort of automated and optimization tools available to you and that, and that requires a little bit of, uh, a little going on, a little bit of a journey, I think, for some customers, um, from sort of letting go of the kind of control that they have at the moment and sort, sort of trusting in, in the sort of rules and, and the priorities that you're giving. They're giving the platform to make the, the, the sort of its own decisions. Um, so yeah, I think it's, it's, it's sometimes a bit of a mindset shift and, and, and, um, business process change for, for the organization to kind of understand what, 'cause as, as we mentioned before, it's, it's not just touching one area, it's, it's everyone from the people booking the, the appointments through to the people dispatching them, the engineers in the field and, and the customer that's receiving the service. Sure. And a lot of variables in, in there, right? A lot of moving parts, uh, things to kind of coordinate and, and optimize, uh, which I guess for a complex operation, pretty hard for a, a human being to get their heads around and, and process efficiently. You know, part of the point of, of using the automation and there's a lot of, uh, complex and clever calculations going on behind the scenes. But does that mean sometimes the optimization engine then might be producing like a counterintuitive result, or people might be scratching their heads wondering why it's telling them certain, certain thing? I think if you, if sometimes if you look at a, an, an individual decision that the optimiz miser has made, sometimes that might not make perfect sense. It might be not intuitive what a human would've done, but I think you need to think of it sort of more holistic holistically than that. You know, the optimizer is powerful and it's looking at the entire schedule for every appointment, for every engineer, not just for the current day, but often to the future as well. And it's, it's taking into account the rules you've given it and the priorities you've given it, and things like, you know, what skills engineers have and what, um, what needs a customer has. So it, you know, it's sometimes the decision it's made about a single service appointment might not make sense, but if you look at it as a, as an entire schedule, an entire, uh, optimized, um, schedule, then it, it makes more sense. Then you've gotta look at sort of high level sort of metrics. We've, we've asked it to reduce travel time overall has, has the optimization reduced travel time, not, not looking at an individual one and saying, actually the engineer had to drive quite a long way for this one because overall the result might be that you've significantly reduced travel time as an example, right? So try to unpick that logic is, is difficult, but actually having a step back and looking at the overall result is perhaps the way to, to kind of, uh, uh, test it out essentially. I think. So I definitely agree with that. Rich, I, you know, I, I speak to lots of customers and sometimes you hear messages coming back from customers where they want to achieve something very specific. They'll say, well, actually we, we don't want engineers passing each other on the road. They don't see a point to why would an engineer that looks like it's causing more travel? Um, but actually when you drill down to the next level of detail, actually, when you consider parts availability and skills and availability and, and all of the other things and other, other work involved, then it may be very, very valid reasons for that to happen on in, in real life. It's why you have to, when you look at, at your, um, your schedule and decide actually is it a good schedule or not, you need to look at it as, as rich said, very holistically. Um, and you also need to be very careful about how you measure, because I always, I always say, you know, you get what you measure. If you just say, right, I wanna minimize travel, then yeah, you will, you will minimize travel. Mm-hmm. But you could also end up with unhappy customers. So you have to create that balance. And actually it's good that you can also consider things like, you know, your, your field service engineer, your employee in, in the way you measure your, um, your schedule and how good that schedule is. Um, so you're really looking at it from a lot of different, uh, different perspectives and some of those perspectives can conflict. Um, you know, we talked a little there about, um, you know, um, travel and customer satisfaction. Well, actually you minimize, you minimize travel potentially that means the customer has to wait a little bit longer for their field engineer increasing their customer dissatisfaction. And, and actually you can directly kind of compare those two. The more travel you get, the faster your, you know, your customer gets serviced, the happier they are. So you need to determine exactly what that balance is. And this is not just across, in those cases, two, two aspects. You probably would be looking at, uh, five or 10 or 12 different objectives that you're trying to achieve, Right? So important for customers to think about that, you know, if they're considering a field service implementation, what, what are their business objectives? What do they really want to get from it and plan accordingly. Yeah. And understanding where they are now, I think is the first stage of that, Right? Yeah. And then they've got a, a baseline to, um, measure it against. Yeah. Uh, I'm sure. Any other sort of tips from either you, I guess in terms for people looking to implement this, what sorts of things should they be preparing for Have having the right partner? I think that's a right, you know, a very important aspect of this. Uh, and having the, the, the partner with the right experience. Somebody who's done this before knows the right questions to ask you to, to get the, the, the detail, um, and, uh, that really has the expertise to go and deliver. Mm-hmm. Uh, so look at their, their, um, what customers they've worked with in the past and what they've achieved with those customers is, is really important. Yeah. I guess that, yeah, being in a, in a safe pair of hands like that you're, uh, essentially that can become a much less daunting experience for people to, to get into and we can lead people through an implementation and, and up to an implementation in, in a more sort of structured and, and orderly way. Yeah. And any thoughts, rich on that? I'd say, um, you know, don't expect to just to, to re-implement what you're doing today in Salesforce and, and have, and have a good result. I think, uh, part of the, any, any good project involves a level of transformation and sort of trying to think in a new way to get the most outta the Salesforce Salesforce platform. So I think, yeah, don't, don't think about what do we do today and how can we replicate that completely on Salesforce? And if it doesn't work in exactly the same way we, we failed, I'd say that that would be a failure. Um, you know, you need to be thinking more about how you can harness the sort of power and the tools that the Salesforce platform gives you to sort of unlock, um, you know, the capabilities that it, that it gives you rather than just trying to, trying to recreate what you have at the moment. Sure. I guess that's a common theme for Salesforce implementations in, in general, that we, we do always recommend that people, you know, use the platform, uh, as it's intended, rather than try to kind of bend it or, or customize. And I guess that's even more, uh, nowhere more important perhaps than in this world of field service where, where there's a lot of, uh, clever calculations going on that you, I guess could inadvertently subvert if you Yeah. And I think part of that is showing customers what's, what's possible and, and perhaps challenging their, you know, showing 'em how things can be done on, on the, on the, on the Salesforce platform and perhaps, you know, the best practices to adopt rather than, and perhaps challenging requirements that would involve things like, you know, customization or, or bending the platform out out of shape. 'cause you know, like you say, we try to do, try to avoid that, that way we can, um, things like, you know, Salesforce does releases multiple times a year, and we want our customers to be able to take advantage of those rather than having to sort of support customizations that have been made. Yeah. Great. I I guess you would, uh, subscribe to that point of view completely. Yeah. Just try and avoid, uh, bending the system, you know? Yeah. Obviously the, the, the field service solution has been implemented across just to our every different, um, industry and feel service organization that you can imagine. It's rare that we come up with, you know, new concepts that haven't been implemented in some way already. The system is very flexible. Um, but yeah, trying to keep customers between the, you know, between the lanes and to, to, um, not not reinvent capabilities is, is, is really important. And as you know, as, as a, as a Salesforce employee, I really appreciate working with partners that can guide customers down the route of configuration and not customization, right? So with that right approach, that right mindset, working with the right partner, you can also provide that, that guidance. Yeah. Um, companies can really expect a smoother implementation. Yeah. And look, look to accrue the, the business benefits, which are pretty considerable for, uh, that, that's quite a big prize basically for, uh, streamlining operations. And it's, it's also about future proofing. You know, the system becomes, has far less technical debt. If you don't put in extensive customization, it's far easier to maintain in the long term. Um, it's a much better way of doing things, The right approach, right partner, right mindset, easier implementation, easier maintenance, better business benefits. Yeah. Great. Well, thank you Phil. Rich, really good talking to you both and really good to get your insights on field service, and hopefully that will be useful for companies out there that are, think you of going ahead and implementing it. Thanks, ed. Thank you. So Phil, field service for Salesforce is obviously a very well established products, very powerful product already, but lots of exciting things happening in the, in that area still. What, what can we expect from the product moving forward? Yeah, I mean, what's, what's been happening and is happening now is really how, um, how AI is influencing the product, you know, from top to bottom. It's influencing the, the, uh, experience that the, uh, engineer has. So giving them a pre-work brief at the start of the day. So delivering that through AI and reading out some, telling them exactly what they're doing through to, you know, the end of the day their, their post work brief and creating that automatically. So using AI to, to fundamentally create the, um, uh, the wrap up of, of each job. Um, also things like the way the dispatcher inter, uh, interfaces with customers. Um, actually a lot of that process of things like rebooking appointments that can also be automated through AI as well. Um, so that's all happening now. Um, but I think what's what's particularly interesting for me is, you know, what's coming in sort of in three years, in five years, in 10 years, um, and what I see in the market is really a, an starting to be an adoption of, of robots to do jobs. I mean, we see customers out there with robotic dogs or drones gathering information, uh, and I see that's a, a very interesting direction for the kind of field service market to take. Mm. Um, and also an interesting, uh, perspective from Salesforce as to how we can support that, that area of the, of, of the, of innovation. You know, how we can, for example, task a robot to go and do a job rather than a human resource to go and do a job. How can we capture the information that comes from that drone or robotic dog and, and analyze it and determine, you know, as part of the inspection that that, uh, robot has done what follow on work needs doing. Um, so those areas I think are particularly interesting. Yeah. Really exciting. And all things that, uh, are only gonna help companies make their operations more and more efficient and ultimately deliver much better service to their, their end customers. Yeah, absolutely.

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Hello, I'm Ed from Mint Consulting and I'm delighted to be here today talking to you, Matt from Salesforce and Rich from Mint Consulting, all about the wonderful world of field service on the Salesforce platform. So Matt, if I can start with you. Sure. Can you tell us a bit about the Salesforce offering in the field service world and how it's doing out there in the, in the market? Yeah, Happy to. So, um, field service is on a bit of a roll at the moment. So we've recently passed, uh, a billion dollars of revenue in, uh, in, in total revenue for field service, which makes us the biggest field service platform now available in the market by, by market share. And I think that's mostly, uh, down to our strategy of how we take the product to market, which is broken down into five core pillars, right? So you've got customer experience working, asset management, scheduling, the mobile workforce and operational excellence, which is you kind of analytical view of, of how things are going. And, um, because of Salesforce's innovation and AI capability that's woven all the way through the platform, we're able to innovate on AI in all those, those key areas. So, and that's really changing the game for us in taking that product to market because now we're able to put AI in the conversation of field service where largely because it's such a manual process of people going out to do, to do that work, we're now threading AI in to take a lot of the load of that repetitive, you know, low value stuff and, and let the AI do the heavy lifting, um, which is resulting in things like, um, the amount of time spent doing scheduling is dropping up to 40% and engineers are spending up to 30% less time with admin, which is driving significant result in being able to do more jobs in a day and actually do the work that humans are good at, which is the complex hands-on stuff. And AI is taking the heavy lift off. That's great. That sounds, uh, really powerful stuff. I mean, it's a very complex, uh, area. I'm sure a lot of companies out there with their big operations, a lot of moving parts, a lot of variables within that. So I can see that having AI in there has gotta be a massive benefit to try and help optimize and help people to run the operations. Yeah, You, you, you're totally right. So a field service overall is, is a complex discipline in and in itself. Um, I mean even just on the scheduling end, if you've got more than six jobs in which you are gonna schedule, you've got one person to do that in a day. There's more than a billion combinations. So just the maths alone is a complicated problem. Let the AI handle that and the the platform handle that and you focus on the customer and that's how you drive real, real return and real results for, for your organization, but your customers as well. Great. And, and I guess, um, I mean there's obviously a lot of competition out there and from what you're describing, Salesforce is really kind of ahead of the game and putting in a lot of, uh, innovation, but there's also a big benefit, I guess, that it sits within the wider Salesforce platform, which ends up, up well with the processes, kind of either, uh, either side. Could you talk a little bit about that, that flow from Yeah, of course. So we are, we are kind of unique in the marketplace because the Salesforce platform holds, um, solutions like sales service, marketing integration and other areas. But if you think about the journey of how you get to field service from the start, perhaps you've sent them a marketing message about a promotional product that you want to sell, the customer uptakes that they then transact the, um, the business with you through Sales Cloud. You've managed all that through there. Um, the customer's now using your product, but they run into issues which, which happens in life. Um, they, they phone up service cloud handle is the case of it and, and, uh, uh, and the voice conversation and everything else. But then field service steps in and then is able to schedule an engineer, figure out what's wrong with the, is with the asset in which you are, you are working with. And then we close the loop by sending the report to say, this is what we've, what we've done. Having that all on the platform, that entire journey makes the whole, uh, the whole process far less complex, uh, much more integrated and it's a much better experience for the customer because they're not going, well, hang on a minute, I've got to go into this system over here to figure out what we sold you in the first place, all that lives in Salesforce. And so diving down into that data makes the job much quicker, much easier, and and and seamless for, for everybody involved. Yeah, that does sound very, very joined up and comprehensive. Yeah. Yeah. As a solution. So you've obviously done a quite a few implementations of field service. So how is the product from the perspective of somebody actually, uh, doing that implementation work? I think it is one of those products, you know, there's, there's a huge amount in there. As Matt mentioned. There's the sort of five pillars, uh, field service implementation is gonna touch every part of, of a customer's business. It's not just that their engineers are gonna do something slightly different, really, or they're gonna book things slightly differently. You know, it's, it's end to end from booking the job through to getting it to the right, the right person to do it through, to getting it out into the field, making sure the job's done right first time, and then sort of reporting on what happened afterwards. So it, it's, it's a big transformation for business. And quite often companies are coming from a world where things are very manual, are done, the spreadsheets. Mm-hmm. So moving to a world where things are optimized and there's a lot of automation and, and intelligence involved is it involves going on the journey, I think, you know, understanding what's possible and how it fits into a customer's business. 'cause every business is, is different. Even if they work in similar, similar industries or do the same things, their, their priorities are often different and the way they use the platform is often different. So it's, it's no one size fits all, I think. And there's a lot of tools within field service for different applications. So I think from a, from an implement implementation perspective, it's understanding what fits where and when to use certain things and not others. Again, there's no one best way to do anything really. It's, it's using the tools in the best way to get the best outcome for the customer. Mm-hmm. And what sort of companies and and use cases do we tend to see? I guess it has a lot of different applications. Yeah, I guess anywhere we, you are sending someone out in the fields, fields to, to do, whether it's, you know, reactive kind of, um, fixes and repairs and things like that, or whether it's proactive maintenance. I've seen it used in the kind of industries you'd expect like telecommunications and, and energy and utilities. We've also seen it used in, in healthcare, you know, people going out to hospitals to maintain and fix hospital equipment in sort of operating theaters through to like even hospitality, sort of making sure that, um, holiday homes are, are clean and, and, and ready for the next guests to, to turn up and enjoy the holiday. So any way you can think, there's a use case of sending someone out into a physical location to carry out a piece of work. You know, field service perhaps has a, has a role to play there. Yeah. And a, a big role to play in trying to keep the operations as efficient as possible. And there's a lot of cost in there for a lot of organizations. That's obviously gotta be critical, but, but also delivering really good service and making those end customers, um, yeah, kind of feel well, well served, I guess. And I Think that's where, again, field service comes in because it's, there's never one priority. It's not always just getting somewhere there quick or keeping the customer happy or minimizing travel time as an example. Often organizations are balancing all three things, you know, they wanna minimize the travel time 'cause that costs money. They wanna keep customers happy, they want to get there as quickly as they can. So again, it's very, we'd be very difficult for a human dispatcher to, to, to manage all that, you know, just dragging and dropping onto, you know, they're gonna find a gap in the schedule and probably drop it on. Yeah. Whereas the optimization logic can, can, as you said Matt, you know, there's, there's so many possibilities that it can take these objectives into, into consideration to choose the right person to carry out a piece of work based on multiple factors, not just do they have a gap in the schedule and can they get there? It's, you know, are they skilled to do the job? You know, are, aren't you minimizing the travel? Can we get 'em there quickly? So it's often a lot of factors in play, not just, not just one or two. Great. And, uh, do you find from the companies that we, that we talk to, do they feel that they can kind of, I guess there's, there's a lot going on behind the scenes to produce the schedule? Yeah. Uh, and do we, do we have sometimes a challenge from a customer if they actually get surprised by what the scheduler tells them, or, I think so it's, it is a bit of a journey and it's a bit of a leap of leap of faith sometimes, particularly for customers that are coming for a world where things are very manual, it's up to an individual dispatcher to choose exactly who they're gonna give it to and why. And also I think sometimes when you look at the optimization and what it's done to a particular job, it might not make immediate sense. But what you gotta what think about is the optimizer is looking at absolutely everything like the entire schedule, not just for the current day, but off into the future. All the different possibilities, the objectives that it's been given, the rules it's been given. And sometimes it might do things that a human might not expect it to do, but often that's because a human can't think in the number of dimensions that Salesforce is, is thinking in to get to the most optimized schedule. So yeah, there's a bit of, you know, don't underestimate the amount of kind of business change it involves. It's not just a, a system change, you know? Sure. It's a bit of a mindset shift. There's a bit of trust involved and customers have to go on the journey, I think, um, to, to get the best benefit from the, the tool. Yeah. I, I, I guess that's part of the, the point of implementing it is, is dealing with things that the human mind is gonna actually struggle to, to, to wrap around. So that's exactly of the benefit. If They were sort of, if, if it was just doing what a human dispatcher could do, then you know, you wouldn't see the sort of benefits that you can get by, you know, having a fully optimized and automated scheduling engine like field service. Sure. Okay. And Matt, we talked about, um, you know, thanks for all the, the information about the, the offering and how it is out there in the market. I mean, what, what can we expect from the product going forward now? Um, so I already talked about how AI capabilities woven, um, all the way through it. And to support a lot of that, we're investing quite heavily in some of the core features of the, of the platform. So, um, the, the optimizer in itself, you, you've already talked about how, uh, it's looking at, at everything. We are grossly increasing the performance of, of that to make things sharper and quicker so you can get to decisions, uh, much faster. We're also doubling down on our asset capability as well. So in the past we would, uh, mostly look to assets as a kind of a nominal value, right? So we, we know what the asset is, we know the serial number, but we can take that much further now by introducing things like IOT so the asset can tell us when there's a problem. And then based on the thresholds that you've set within the system, you can auto dispatch an engineer if it breaches a threshold, maybe it's got too hot or it's run too many cycle counts, something like that. The, the optimizer picks up that work order, that it's broken the threshold and it plans it. So in theory, a human doesn't have to be involved in all of that, but they can manage the output to the customer and let them know that they're coming to, to make that, make that really, really easy. Um, in, in some other areas as well around customer experience, we've got capabilities now for customers to reschedule their own appointments, which still respect your own scheduling rules. Um, so it's an appointment that works for them and works for you. Right. Um, which means that we are still fronting off with a customer to, to make sure we've got that, you know, that that white glove touch, if you will. Right. Which is a differentiator for, you know, the operational end for Yeah. For field service businesses. More, more time saved for the operation and for the customer. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, fantastic. So, great. I mean, really interesting discussion. Really nice to hear these insights from the, the product itself and also what it's like in the kinda real world to, to implement in a, in a gen, in a kinda real client company situation. So really exciting products, amazing that it sits within that wider Salesforce platform and can be part of kind of a seamless end to end process and really exciting to hear where the product's going and what we can expect to see in the future. So yeah. Matt Rich, thank you very much. Thanks very much.

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So Janine, we've been working together for a couple of years now. Um, just taking it back to the start, can you tell us a bit about why you started this transformation of work? Yeah. So at System C we had, um, a, a number of, uh, subsidiaries, um, all operating in, um, in isolation, if you like. And they all had disparate systems. So the timer come to, um, start to unify the way that the teams worked, bring some consistency, um, and bring a single, single source of truth. So, uh, a single CRN made made absolute sense at the time. Um, so that was the reason we decided to do it at that time. And why did you feel that Salesforce was the right solution? It was a fairly easy decision, to be honest, because, uh, one of the subsidiaries that we, um, we already had, uh, used, uh, Salesforce, um, and it worked really well. Um, they did use Sales Cloud, um, but they didn't have CPQ, so that would've been, um, an addition for us, but something that we absolutely needed. Um, so, so yeah, it made, it made absolute sense and, you know, Salesforce is best of breed, so it was a really, really easy decision for us. And when it came to the partner selection process, um, why Mint? So Mint were recommended to us, uh, by our Salesforce account manager. Um, however, I did look at other potential partners. Um, so I'd met with a couple of other partners as well. Um, but when I met with, uh, Sam, um, I just got a real sense of, um, honesty. He was very genuine. I think the other selling point for, for Mint, uh, was the team itself. Uh, we had quite a lot of help from Rich, um, and from Jack, uh, Jack in terms of, uh, CPQ. Mm-hmm. Obviously very, very new to us. We'd never used CPQ before and he made it very, very easy. Walked us through it, the benefits that we'd get from it. Um, and then from an architectural perspective, uh, rich was a huge help. Um, he actually helped us to do, um, our, uh, as is and to be architecture, which made a huge difference to us. It helped us make decisions in terms of what we did and didn't want from Salesforce, which was great. Um, so, you know, having the two of them on board and, and really taking not just myself, but the team through it, it really made a, a big difference to them. And I think that helps with the downstream impact as well. That whole architecture does. Governance does at the beginning as well. It does. Yeah, it does. It does. And if you were to look back at the start of this journey, what lessons have you learned from that? What would you, if there is anything that you would do differently? Lessons. Yeah, I think a couple of things for me, um, more internally, I think I would have brought, um, additional different expertise on board. I would've brought in, um, business analysts and, uh, dedicated test manager. Okay. Because I think we utilized the, the consultants that we, we had brought in. Mm-hmm. But I think it overwhelmed them. It would've made it a much, um, a much more straightforward and, and easier process if I'd have had those expertise in that were just dedicated to, you know, working with the different stakeholders in terms of mapping out those processes. And equally on the test side. Testing was one of the, the biggest elements of the, the project, um, and took up quite a large amount of time. So having additional resources would've helped massively. Mm-hmm. And what would you say would be the most, um, I guess, valuable benefit that that's been delivered back to the business with this pro, with this project? Oh, it's in spades. So because we, we had a number of different subsidiaries all working in different ways. Mm-hmm. Uh, Salesforce has brought, um, unified business processes, um, a single source of truth in terms of the system that we're using, um, handoffs to different systems because we've done a number of integrations. Um, and it's also meant that because we've cleaned our data, um, to do the migration, um, we now are working with a, a single source of data as well that we now maintain as part of, um, the adoption of Salesforce. That was great, Janine. Thank you so much speaking with us.

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Maria, thank you so much for speaking to us today. Uh, what a momentous day for us. It's go live today. Very exciting. Yeah, very exciting day for Mint and Dogs Trust. So take me through the grand ambitions of Dogs Trust. Well, we've actually just launched our new five-year strategy. Um, over the last few years, we've seen more and more dogs being looked to be relinquished into our organization, so we've got a really big plan to try and prevent that from happening. Um, we know that a lot of dogs come into our care because of behavior problems. Um, we see about 30,000 owners a year that come through our behavior services, but we've actually got plans to kind of take that tenfold. So we want to be able to support lots and lots more owners when they're facing crisis, thinking about handing their dogs over to us, and how we can support them. Amazing. And what role is technology gonna play in, in your mission? So we do a brilliant job when we have a dog and an owner in front of us. We're really empathetic. We're really kind. We're really good at resolving people's problems, but we have very manual-heavy processes, and systems and services. So by, leveraging technology, we know that we're gonna be able to help lots and lots more people, which is the ambition. It's to make sure that we can help as many dog owners that are struggling as possible. So talk to me about, why Salesforce and why Mint. So we've had Salesforce as part of our tech stack at Dogs Trust for a number of years, but we've been using it in a very siloed way, so every department uses it slightly differently. Um, and what that means is that, being able to speak to each other and work effectively as a team has been really difficult for us. So the value that Mint has brought to the organization is to come in and really help us think about where do we want our, processes and our efficiencies to be in five years' time? How do we wanna speak to our customers? How do we want a frictionless customer journey, but also really good user experience for our staff? Yeah. That's really important as well. Our staff work really hard, and actually, we just wanna make their lives as easy as possible. Yeah. Um, and we thought we had a good idea of what we wanted to build and what we wanted those journeys to look like. But actually what Mint were able to do was come in, understand our business, and really help us build something that is going to be sustainable, for the next few years, we're gonna be able to build upon, but also give us the best product that we could've, like much, much better than we even envisaged right in the first place. Looking back now before the project, what, what advice would you give yourself? Honestly, I would've brought Mint into the process earlier. So when we were doing the requirement and the discovery phases, we were doing that kind of very much between ourselves, and I think had they come in earlier and been able to add that value, A, the process would've probably been quicker, more streamlined. I'm not sure that we would've ended up with a better product, 'cause I'm really pleased with what we've ended up with, but I just think that journey would've been easier for us. Yeah, absolutely. Um, and, and it does help. It absolutely helps from a partner perspective as well to be brought into a deal, a lot sooner. That definitely helps. So if you were gonna give me kind of a, a headline, you know, this is the value, this is the overall value that this, transformation is gonna bring to Dogs Trust, what would that headline look like? I think it's twofold. So I think there's the staff experience, and the feedback that we've had from them has been resoundingly positive in terms of what difference this is gonna make for them day to day. Um, so that's what I'm really excited about. But ultimately, this is about how many dogs we can help, how many owners that we can help when they're really facing crisis, and the system that we've built has e- has, has enabled us to be able to do that so much better than we ever could have envisaged. Amazing. Thank you so much for speaking to me, Maria. No problem. Great to speak with you.

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So we've been on this transformation for quite a few years now. Um, can you tell me what iteration, uh, of it you're at? Yeah. So we've been building on the foundation that we put in for our supply teams, which was mainly Service Cloud. Um, and we've been implementing field service, so that's to do with our managed service operation, mainly out in Denmark. And then we've also been putting in Marketing Cloud and Data Cloud. So it's very much kind of building on what we've already had and then how we move forward. And we at Mint manage quite a large Salesforce platform free from your, uh, from your property onboarding, uh, and owner team to your property management, uh, services team across Europe. Um, I would say you're one of our largest managed services clients at, at Mint. How do you say where the relationship has excelled? So I think two key parts. So the first one is we have a really honest relationship with each other. Um, we really value the feedback that the Mint team give us on our technical implementation and how we can improve that. And then we also work together through dedicated sprints. So we look at specific business outcomes and challenges that we need to do, and we re-lo- like relocate the Mint team and the Awayz teams, whether that's the business operations or the technical operations, and we come together, um, to work on specific business outcomes that we need. And we've seen really great success in having that really focused time and working truly as a cross-collaboration. Have you got a name for that? It's called the Config-a-thon. I think another point, Ness, that's really good about our work, ways of working with Mint is regarding how we're so open as a team in terms- Mm-hmm ... of feedback. Like, we're very respectful of how we can get better and how you can help support us there, taking a lot of, um, time from the technical perspective- Mm-hmm ... to support on what else we can do and, and innovate in our products. Yeah, and we really look to Mint to help us develop our own internal team. So we've gone on a journey over the years of bringing in some expertise into our organization, and we look to the partnership to help grow our internal people and see how we can complement each other. So Jess, can you tell us how Mint has helped you with your field service operations? Yeah, of course. So this year is our first full year of having some fully operation across the whole of Denmark for our peak, um, arrival season. So Mint, uh, and the collaboration with Awayz, we've seen an improvement in our Trustpilot scores. We've seen an improvement in our cleaning scores and feedback. We've reduced the time and the cost for cleaners and technicians from a traveling perspective to get out to different properties across Da- Denmark. Yeah, and I think as well as that, we've done a lot of work within the optimizer. Mm-hmm. Um, so we've really kind of tried to understand how we can get the most out of the tool working together. So you've transitioned from, uh, another partner over to Mint. Can you talk to us about what that process looked like? Because some customers can be quite nervous about that transition. Mm-hmm. Yeah, so we had quite a large stack as we've talked about. Mm-hmm. And we had a very complex stack as well. So it is, I get it, it's nervous to try and change partners after so many years. Mm-hmm. Um, but the onboarding process with Mint, it was incredibly thorough. It was insightful. I think it was... It gave us a lot of confidence of what you can bring to us as a partnership. Um, we talked a lot about our technical architecture, both Awayz outside of the Salesforce tech and so to undergra- understand all the integrations, and we talked a lot about our customizations and the tools as well. So it was an intensive couple of weeks, but I think it very much enabled Mint to establish themselves as a partner, show what you can give us, but also getting really into the, the nooks and crannies of our Salesforce platforms. And what would you say is the best thing about working with Mint? So I'd say the best thing is that we have a really, um, common understanding of what we're trying to achieve. Mm-hmm. Um, and we, we very much see the Mint team as an extension of our own team. Mm-hmm. Um, so we very much like to work together on challenges and the difficult conversations that need to take place. Um, and I think the rapport that we've managed to build up, um, is, really comes through on that. Um, I think also we spent a lot of time explaining the business, um, of what we do at Awayz and the strategic goals that we're trying to achieve. Um, so it always feels like we're kind of in line trying to get to the same outcome. Mm-hmm. Um, and we've also been able to leverage things like an out-of-hours service- Mm-hmm ... during our peak arrivals, um, to make sure that our guest and owner experience is the best it can possibly be. Jess, anything to add? Um, I think similar what I said earlier about- Mm-hmm ... how we've worked so closely, where we've built a really good relationship in terms of that feedback element. So tell us why things aren't working. Mm-hmm. Is it because we need to improve our tickets if we're not giving the re- best communication from the Awayz side? And it's been really open and honest, and we have such... We have the consistency with the team and the same people that really understood our architecture. And I guess all of that is crucial as well to your changeover days across all of the, all of the properties across Europe, et cetera. So I'm assuming out-of-hours helps with that as well. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, making sure that guests can arrive into clean properties- Mm-hmm ... is absolutely fundamental to making sure we're giving the best guest service. Um, and being able to lean on a partner like Mint is absolutely fundamental to our success in that. Jess, Lucy, thank you so much for your time. Great to see you as always. Lovely to see you as always. Thank you for having us.

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Just arrived at Hailing Island on the South coast, uh, doing a mint Salesforce volunteer day, and we're gonna go and clean the beach. So the Final Straw Foundation is a charity based on the south coast of England. We started up about five years ago, um, as a direct reaction to the amount of rubbish that we were seeing washed up along our local shores. There's loads of plastic, um, loads of other stuff as well, you know, glass tires, all this kind of stuff. We've picked up something like 42,000 tons of rubbish off our local shore in the last five years. So that's a huge amount. We do loads of work in schools too, so we go in and do workshops in schools. We also run, um, a beach schools program where we actually get kids out onto the beach. Um, it's just great to, to get volunteers out and it's, it's really about awareness. I think lots of people think that, um, plastic pollution in particular is a problem that's not in England so much. It's a broad, you see, you know, this awful footage of rivers of plastic flowing out to sea. That's the like, main thing that I think people realize when they come on a corporate beach clean particularly is they suddenly go, oh my God, there's loads here. And it's a lot of, it's really tiny stuff. It's like microplastics, which are really problematic for the environment and for wildlife too. So it's a really great kind of awareness to you.

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So high. So high. Don't my trouble for God. Don't know my trouble for God. Oh, trouble so, so high. Don't, don't. So.

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Hi, I'm Dan Collins and I'm an account executive at Mint. Dan is like, uh, a little's brother to me. Our account executive. My, my, uh, my apprentice learning the ropes came to his unbelievable amounts of energy and enthusiasm. Loves meeting people, loves working as part of our team. Loves delivering for customers. Uh, yeah, he's brilliant. He has a fantastic combination of being analytical, um, with that entrepreneurial spirit. Oh my gosh, Dan has just like, totally excelled in his role, uh, in sales and he's just embraced it and just, he's just gone like a, like an arrow and I love it. It's great to see Dan Dan's brilliant at building customer relationships, um, and really understands, uh, the people, the right people to bring into different gigs. What can I say about Dan? Dan is, you know, super enthusiastic. Uh, he's come from a delivery background, so although he is in sales, he knows what he's selling and he knows, you know, he's selling the right thing. Dan is brilliant. Uh, enthusiasm is really infectious. Uh, clients love him. He can't do enough for clients and they see that and they really appreciate what he does and he really listens to the client as well. Uh, I love reading through Dan's sales proposals 'cause I can really tell that he's listening to the client and he's really kind of answering their needs and configuring the proposals to what is actually gonna give them value. Hi, I'm Dan Collins and I'm an account executive at Mint.

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Hi, I'm Ed Foster. I'm Chief Operating Officer for Mint Consulting. Ed is the brains of the operation. He is the person that I feel is gonna keep our feet firmly on the ground. Ed's a great person. He focuses a lot on making sure that the customer gets exactly what they've subscribed to and ensuring that the all projects we work on are delivered on time and on budget, but also it's customer service with a smile. Ed is the ying to my yank. He's amazing when it comes to detail and quality delivery and just being all over every piece of detail that there is and his outcomes are just first class every time. Ed is an excellent ops lead. Um, he's very good at being the adult in the room and keeping all of the, uh, resources in check and moving forward and doing what they need to do. Uh, unbelievable Brain of Great Britain. Um, uh, incredible mind and dedication and commitment. Ed, a safe pair of hands. Everyone probably says that. Again. I've worked with Ed for a long time, but again, he's just rock solid. You know, people will just deliver. Hi, I'm Ed Foster. I'm Chief Operating Officer for Mint Consulting.

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Hi, I'm Elle Elle's, a superstar. Can't go wrong. She knows so much and she's so friendly and so approachable. Um, she's one of the best people I've ever worked with in that role. Bubbly, fiery always delivers Brilliant at building relationships, does exactly what I need her to do. She is, uh, really, uh, proactive, really personal, gets on well with a whole range of people, and she's gonna be absolutely instrumental in building our partnerships and relationships. Al is a really inspirational lady to me. Uh, she's got, um, an amazing track record in Salesforce ecosystem and she's just incredibly warm and encouraging and supportive. Al again, yeah, worked with Al for a long time. Just amazing at like creating partnerships, uh, that deliver value for both, both parties. I'm al I run alliances and marketing for mink consulting.

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Hi there, Jack Holiday, senior Solution Architect at Mint Consulting. Jack's a superstar. Jack is a person that understands how a solution could be built, but also understands how a business could be utilizing this in the most optimal way. And for someone that's younger than 30 and they've got the experience that he's got, he's a superstar. Jack is the eight rockstar. Being with, uh, I've been working with Jack for I think six or seven years. It's probably the quickest rise to solution architects that I know. And of all the people that I've worked with, I think customers love him more than anyone. Awesome. Jack is a hero, um, a sales hero, and also I can never out drinking Jack's mind is constantly worrying, always coming up with ideas, always innovating, uh, and again, is really good at, at mapping out their client requirements and figuring out what we need to do actually to build solutions for them. Apart from the Great Hair, Jack is, uh, is got, probably got more certs than anyone I know. Super bright Jack's a rockstar, you know, he's young, but he's got so much experience, he's got so much passion for what he does. He's our revenue cloud expert. Jack Holiday senior solution architect at Mint Consulting.

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Hi, I'm Louise Nivan, resourcing and PMO Lead Min. I laugh more in her company than I have with anyone else. I think Louise is someone who is so dedicated to her job, so focused on making sure that the customer gets the right resources at the right time. She's a perfect person to be able to support mint's growth, Hungry for knowledge as well. She knows exactly what she needs to do in the role and how she needs to support her colleagues, and, and she's amazing. Louise is our PMO resource manager. She knows people, she knows how to resource teams. She knows how to put it together and run it. Awesome. Louise is our resourcing guru, you know, juggling everything that a resourcing person has to making sure we've got the right people on the right projects. She has amazing ability to, to, to plan, uh, to juggle things. Her role is gonna be to make sure we get the right people on the right, uh, projects and the right clients to make sure that we deliver successfully, to make sure people have really fulfilling, uh, uh, work to do in their time with, uh, in Mint Consulting. Uh, and she, she's great at sort of managing the impossible, basically making all these pieces fit together. Hi, I'm Louise Nivan, resourcing and PMO lead at Mint.

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Hey, I'm Rich Law, head of Solution Architecture at Admin Consulting. So Rich, I've worked with hand in hand in a lot of our implementation engagements, um, an excellent practice lead, knows his Salesforce really, really well, and is also good at managing a group of implementation resources. Rich is one of my favorite people. He is someone that you can truly trust. He's somebody that, um, customers love a lot and it's very hard for customers to not really like Rich with how engaging, with how, uh, focused he is with customers. But most importantly, rich is someone that gets the job done no matter what the task Head of solution architecture. The ultimate best with the customers knows Salesforce better than anyone. Uber. Uber, awesome Architect Rich is kind of been the sort of mentor over the last couple of years for me. Uh, and kind of someone who really drew me to kind of the mint, uh, consulting. He's amazing at listening to clients and getting the clients to talk in the right way in the workshop environments that, that we do. And he can. His ability to, to gather, uh, and assimilate vast quantities of information at lightning speed just never ceases to amaze me. Rich has got an amazing brain. Everybody falls in love with him. All of the clients, he's just quirky and off the chart, intelligent. Hey, I'm Rich Law, head of Solution Architecture at Mint Consulting.

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Hi, Sam Joyce, founder and CEO. Very proud to say of Min Consulting, Warm, inviting, uh, great leader. Sam is a guy you can trust. I've worked for Sam for a good two years and he's been my mentor. I think he's one of the best people in the world to be able to listen, but also give you the real truth. Sam's a boss. I've worked with Sam for a long time now and you know, although he works in sales, you know, has clients, you know, he has clients at the heart of what he does, and he just wants to deliver the best for them. What to say about Sam? Um, I'll be nice. He is a leader and he knows exactly what he wants to do with Min, and he brings in the people that he wants to work with and the people that he trusts. Sam is an excellent sales guy. He's very good at getting to the sort of the root of what customers need, and he's very good at managing that whole process and engaging, getting us into that business Very genuine. Um, has a really good balance of understanding, uh, the market that he operates in and kind of the, the people that he's working on a day-to-day basis. He's got real vision, uh, a huge amount of drive, uh, real people person. He's absolutely the right person to get the right team around him and to develop the relationships that, that we need to be successful in this marketplace. Hi, Sam Joyce, founder and CEO very proud to say of Mint Consulting.

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Hello, I'm Trevor Hackett and I'm a solutions architect at Minute Consulting. What doesn't Trevor know? Genius knows the market so well. He's been in telecommunications since before I was born. Um, he's a person that we can truly trust and understand what the right thing is at the right time for the right customer. Trevor is the personality. Mr. Telco lives and breathes. It speaks a different language. No, Salesforce industries, velocity Technical, but gets business. He can join the gap between technical and business, like no one else. A wealth of kind of knowledge and wisdom. Uh, and again, someone you really look up to in kind of the, the kind of architectural market. Trevor is a mine of information. He knows more than anybody I, I've met about the telco industry in in particular. And he's really able to have these deep probing conversations with the client about what it is that they need to be achieving in their organization. How will the parts of their organization need to fit together and, and work together harmoniously and therefore, how we then need to kind of configure a Salesforce based solution to meet what they need to do. Trevor's, uh, resident Boffin. I'm mad professor. If you want to know about Telco, speak to Trevor. Hello, I'm Trevor Hackett and I'm a solutions architect at Minute Consulting.

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So Rich at Mint, we offer something that we call the mint. MOT. What's that about? So that's typically for customers that are already using Salesforce. You know, someone might have had Salesforce for a few years, and it's really understanding how they're using Salesforce from a sort of technical and I guess functional, uh, perspective. So, you know, looking at how they've implemented Salesforce, what features they're using, how well it's been implemented, whether they've, you know, customized things, written a lot of code, for example, the quality of that code, whether there are security vulnerabilities, whether there's a lot of technical debt, but also understanding things from a business process perspective. So how are they actually, how their business runs on Salesforce, what's working, where there are particular pain points, and where there are areas that they're, you know, they're, they're not using Salesforce to the best, its best, uh, advantage. Okay, thank you. And the, the Mint MOT is is something that we can either offer as a standalone piece of work, or sometimes it's folded into a, a broader discovery phase as, as one of the, the questions that might need to be answered in, in such a phase. Yeah, so typically if we're doing a discovery phase for a project where our customer's already using Salesforce, we'll need a good understanding of how their existing salesforce org works so we can understand how we're gonna build or extend what they've already got. Right? As you say, it can be standalone customers sometimes come to us with particular issues they're having or, um, things they want evaluated and, and it can be done as part of a standalone exercise as well, right.

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Rolling. Uh, I'm delighted to be joined here today by my colleague Jack Holiday. So, Jack, can you describe your role? Uh, yeah, Jack Holiday. So Lead Solution Architect, uh, mint Consulting. So accountable for the overall sort of functional design, uh, for our customers. Um, my role is very much split across pre-sales, uh, building implementation and then ensuring kind of delivery success and Salesforce outcomes for our customers. So Jack, I know you've worked with a lot of clients in this sector over time, uh, and you've got to understand a lot of the, the common challenges and some of the trends in the industry and that's helps Mint consulting form a really strong point of view in this particular part of the, the market in this, uh, industry sector. What would be some of the common challenges that you see from working with companies in this area? Yeah, so like in the last sort of like, you know, couple of couple of months, we've kind of been working a lot with, um, some of the sort of merger and acquisition cus uh, customers. Um, so, you know, these are customers that are maybe acquired, you know, various different smaller business units in the last sort of, sort of 12 to 18 months. And they all have kind of multiple CRM systems as they're going through these kind of merger and acquisitions. They're building up, you know, top level sort of licensing costs. All these different customers have, you know, various business units on various, you know, different financial systems, different selling mechanisms, different approaches to how they sell and consume, um, you know, um, their products and services in terms of their end customer, which is causing kind of data silos between functional teams across the, you know, the marketing, sales, sales ops, provisioning. And it's really a, a challenge for the sort of the, sort of the c-suite team to kind of look at the kind of top level reporting and understand the sort of revenue forecasting and, and making database decisions from that. Yeah's Brilliant, I guess it's not easy for them to manage across a, a number of different parts of the business operating in different ways with different systems. And, You know, you, you hear it quite a lot when we go into the workshops like, um, you know, there might be a sales, um, account manager that's in sort of the, the retention team and he is trying to get a kind of view of a, a single view of a customer and he is gotta talk to like five or six different people in the business across sort of, you know, inside sales, across legal, across finance, across fit provisioning, and, um, all of that, you know, it's time consuming, right? And, and all for just that one meeting to kind of look at how they can make sure that, you know, this customer signs up for the next 12 months. Instead, if you can bring all that data to one source, you know, you can quickly get a view of that customer, you can get a view of inbound cases in terms of any sort of, you know, high priority cases that haven't been looked at. We can get a feel for the health of the customer before going into those conversations without needing all of that input from the, the different sort of, uh, stakeholders and, and the time that's consumed for that as well. Right. So I guess with those, those challenges with those companies that have kind of grown over time in, in this way, we're seeing Yeah, as you are saying, Jack disparate systems, uh, disconnected processes. Yeah. Uh, really quite sort of suboptimal. Yeah. And it really, you know, there's, there's crucial parts within that whole lead to cash process as well. So, you know, from, uh, marketing to sales that handover is very disjointed. You know, who, who, how do you define a marketing qualified lead is always kind of a, a big, um, conversation in, in our workshops and understanding that actually what is, you know, what is the level of that lead being qualified, uh, before it's handed off to sales. And then sales qualification of that lead as well. You know, there's a lot of wasted sales activity in that, in that handover piece. And our job is to kind of really understand that today. Yes. I suppose if those marketing and sales processes are not well joined up, that could have implications, you know, as you say, wasted effort on the sales side, wasted effort. Yeah. Presumably that's just too many or, or poor quality leads perhaps getting through to sales. Yeah. Haven't been worked through a proper process exactly That. Yeah. Okay. So you're seeing quite a few customers that are looking for help from us, I suppose to Yeah, definitely. And I think, I think one of the biggest sort of challenges in that area as well at the moment is it kind of comes back to the sort of disconnected systems, is the fact that, you know, there is no single source of truth. So the marketing team have kind of, you know, they've gone out and purchased this really nice shiny new tool for their front end, but they've got this kind of, um, you know, in, you know, data in their sort of CRM system that's inaccurate, you know, it's missing some of the key information to be able to qualify that lead or un understand that that customer to a point where you can maybe go in for like a net new, or it's like upsell cross sell opportunities. They're really lacking the ability to kind of use all of the capabilities from their marketing tool in terms of upsell and cross sell, uh, marketing campaigns. Right. And that upsell and cross-sell thing. That sounds like a key thing, especially I suppose for the, these companies that you were talking about where they're acquiring different businesses and if they're not on a common platform, if they're working in different ways that that must make it harder for them to identify those cross-sell upsell opportunities. Exactly That. So like, you know, you literally might have sales teams sitting in different, you know, core CRM systems, um, they're all working what is the same lead and having different conversations and engagement with different stakeholders in the end customer. And really we wanna bring all that data into one single source of truth so that, that they can start to really collaborate on that specific account and really, you know, bring the right people into the business to kind of make those, um, you know, you know, produce all that collateral to support the sales team as well. So that could be even someone having an understanding of that customer six, you know, six to 12 months ago, and they're looking to kind of, you know, renew or, or upsell and cross sell, and they're lo they've lost that visibility because it's sitting somewhere else in a, in a different system. Okay. Interesting. So you've talked about the companies that you see that, uh, are looking for help from us to, to resolve these challenges where they've got the, the disparate systems and disconnected join or, or disconnections, I suppose, between marketing and sales and, and issues where different parts of the business are operating in different ways. Uh, are there other common challenges that you're seeing with the customers that we're working with? Yeah, absolutely. So within the high tech, um, market specifically, you know, a lot around revenue leakages at the moment, and, and that's across sort of marketing, sales, sales to provisioning, provisioning to billing. You know, I'm seeing a lot of this in terms of, you know, one of the key topics at the moment is actually, you know, a lot of the high tech customers are unable to actually launch new product offerings because the systems they have today can only support perpetual one time sales. And actually a lot of the, the market is moving towards subscriptions, you know, recurring revenue models and actually even carving out usage based pricing for some of the, you know, enterprise level customers they have today. So instead of kind of charging for a product, it's more charging for access to that product, as it were. You've mentioned revenue leakage is a particular challenge. Could you expand on that a bit? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So in terms of revenue leakages, um, it kind of sits across the whole lead to cash lifecycle. Um, so for example, at the very start it's, you know, slow to introduce new, new products, uh, launching new products, unable to kind of, um, keep up with customer demand and competition because of the archaic systems that they have been using internally. Um, so this could be product launches for new revenue streams. So for example, it could be that you are traditionally very much more perpetual licenses that you're selling, or one time sales, but you wanna shift to subscription or you maybe already kind of implemented a subscription model, but now you're trying to carve out sort of a usage based, uh, pricing model as well. So instead of kind of charging for the product, you're charging for access to the product, as it were In, in terms of the overall trends then that you're seeing, we talked a bit about the acquisitive nature of this, this sector. What, what are the other trends that you see in this area? Yeah, so, um, at the moment in terms of the trends, um, obviously I've, I've spoken a little bit about recurring revenue. Um, uh, as I mentioned, the sort of shift to sort of subscription, you know, it allows for higher margins over the lifetime. It's not just a one out time transaction anymore. You know, we've got amendments, uh, within turn we've got renewals, uh, we've got cross sell, we've got upsell. And actually the dynamics changed quite a bit. It is very much sort of traditional lifecycle is, you know, you've, you've, you've got an opportunity, you quote, you order, you hand off to your ERP system. But now a lot of that work is being complete by kind of sales and sales ops in terms of retention, renewals, um, cross-sell and upsell. And therefore a lot of that data needs to be at the sort of the, um, the front office as it were. And that sits within CRM and that's, that's why we're using, you know, capabilities such as CPQ billing and it's all kind of managed within one system, uh, being your kind of Salesforce CRM, So, you know, meet with the way that the, the market and the, the companies are evolving and, and needing to evolve to stay competitive. Um, is it just a case of switching Salesforce on and, and it'll work or? Yeah, no. So obviously, um, there's a lot of work that goes into sort of the, there's a define and design stage and actually probably before that stage in terms of discovery to really understand, I guess the, the strategy for the business moving forward, uh, especially with the products and pricing, uh, and the services they offer. Um, so we spend a lot of time within discovery really trying to unpick some of those, you know, deviations of sort of standard in terms of, you know, we've got x number of customers on legacy pricing models that's, uh, you know, very attractive for the end customer, but it's actually causing a lot of downstream, um, costs to, to the business as it were. And how we can start to shift those onto sort of subscription models where it's a lot more, um, you know, easy to consume the pricing, offer the services and, and less, um, emphasis on downstream support. You know, a lot of the software market have had, you know, customers that are, um, were, you know, customers there right from the very start in terms of the startups, and they may be on this bespoke pricing model, these bespoke pricing terms, and they're continually supporting these, these customers. And it's, it's kind of trying to make that move into sort of subscriptions and a more, you know, a pricing model that's easy to consume, but also easy to serve for the kind of the whole business end to end. I mean, we, we've got all this understanding of the common challenges that you see in the sector and, and how the industry's moving and some of the trends and the potential future challenges that our, our clients need to prepare for. Uh, I guess that's helped us really form a solid point of view from the mint consulting perspective and, uh, a really good approach to helping our clients actually address some of these things. Can we perhaps talk about how we do that a bit? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So like, um, I've, you know, a lot of traditional consultancies go in kind of the, the, the sort of pen and paper draw out all the different processes, um, you know, look at kind of the pricing models in, in, in detail. Um, we kind of want to flip that on its head and kind of look at kind of what good looks like for you as a customer. And so bringing in a lot of our assets and material that we've kind of, you know, documented from experience over the last sort of, you know, five to six years, uh, within, within, within lead to cash programs and, and look at kind of how we can, um, you know, really sh you know, show the art of the possible in terms of the product offering. So with that Salesforce CPQ or billing, looking at the kind of the product structures and, and models that are supported out of the box, um, effectively giving 'em that sort of orientation of the product so they can see the art that possible. And then start to sort of narrow down their product structure based off off those of those Models. Yeah, that sounds key. 'cause I, I guess a lot of our clients might have some sense that they, that they need to, to rationalize, they need to change and move towards a new model, uh, but may not know exactly what that looks like or how that could be achieved. So being able to show that must give a lot of value. Exactly. That. And like, um, you know, products and pricing really does get at the heart of your business. You know, it's, it is sort of, it needs to include a lot of different stakeholders, a lot of different sort of lenses in terms of marketing, sales, you know, sales, operations, um, finance, legal, all need to be part of that, that journey in terms of lead to cash. Mm-Hmm. Um, and you know, a lot of people, you know, you know, you get everyone into a one room and kind of understanding the product life cycle and, you know, there's a massive gaps in terminology between what a product looks like for kind of marketing, uh, versus what a product looks like for finance. And, and that's fine, but it needs to be a kind of taxonomy across the, across the business to really understand what that product looks like as it's going through that lead to cash process, Right. But facilitating that process and then getting people aligned on, uh, on, you know, what collectively they, they think is gonna be the right thing for them in the future, what they do wanna do, what they don't want to do, and then playing back, playing that back to them. Exactly that. And it's like, that's where the value of Mint is really, is really understanding their business processes, understanding their products and pricing, but kind of facilitating those, those sessions to really simplify before we start to systemize the product. Yeah.

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One, take one. How would you describe the essence of our approach and methodology? I guess our approach is, you know, making sure that we get enough information upfront in the process to really understand, you know, what a customer's business does, what their priorities are, and what they're looking to do with Salesforce. And then defining what a project looks like, just enough information up front so we can start the project and not getting too bogged down and having absolutely everything defined and before we even make a start. Yeah, I like that. I think that that just enough approach is helpful, isn't it? Because it, it allows us to a degree of predictability, which our clients, you know, need, don't they? They, they need to understand what this program of work is going to look like, and they've got finite budgets and, uh, and, and timeline expectations and, and so on. But as you say, yeah, if we spend too much time doing a lot of detailed, uh, definition upfront, then that, that delays things unnecessarily. Right. And things will change, I suppose. Yeah, to a degree. During the course of the project, quite Often you can spend months to finding something project, but by the time you come to implement it, it's changed or, you know, so there has to be a degree of flexibility. Um, and quite often it's, people can't make decisions on things or really decide on detail until they've seen things start to take shape. So, yeah, it's good to get underway. Obviously, you need a certain amount of steering and direction and design up front to make sure you head off in the right direction. Yeah. But then, you know, we, we kind of try to be as agile as we can so we can change course, take new information into account as we go. And, and also as the client sees the system start to progress and develop, they can make more informed decisions about where it should go really. And as they can see, see things come together, they can start to understand, all right, well that's how, that's how Salesforce works. That's how we can adapt to use it. That's a big part of our job is, you know, showing what's possible going in with the best practice view of how a particular organization and a particular industry should use Salesforce. Um, and, you know, the worst thing we could possibly do for a customer is take what they're doing at the moment and rebuild it on Salesforce. You know, that's, that's, that's possibly the worst outcome that we could have. So, Absolutely. Yeah. What, what, what would be the point? Yeah. How would that change and improve the, the business Customer's investing a lot of time, a lot of money, and the Salesforce platform, which obviously does things in a particular way, uh, has been designed to work like that, is tried and true and tested, right. So ideally, you know, we can show the customers how Salesforce works and you know, it's not always a hundred percent, you know, each business is different, and there'll be things that we have to take into account and maybe do differently. But by and large, our approach is to use Salesforce in a standard standardized way as we can without bending it too far up shape. Yeah. Helping our clients work with the platform and not against it in a, in a sense, I suppose. Exactly. We talk quite a bit about the four Ds that we, and that's essentially how we break down the, the methodology into, into stages. Yeah. Can you tell me a bit about those? Yeah, so it's kind of four stage process each begins with a D. So, um, the discovery is the, the, the first phase really, and, and that tends to be, be involved when we have a, a project that needs, you know, the scope is not clear or it's complex. There's a lot of, you know, integrations with the systems. There's a lot of different areas of Salesforce in use, right? And that's really, you get into grips with, you know, what is the scope of this project? You know, how are all the elements of Salesforce, how are all the areas of the business gonna use it? You know, what do those high level processes look like? How does, how's this gonna flow end to end? You know, if there are other systems that are involved, be they kind of legacy systems or systems that need to be integrated with, you know, what does that look like? So where we really need to, at a high level, get a view on what is it we're delivering, what's the scope? Yeah. What does that look like in terms of a Salesforce solution, um, and what does that look like? Like in kind of in times of, in terms of a project timeline and yeah. Things like that. Okay. So yeah, I, I guess quite often, we'll, we'll come across a client that has, you know, that started to form a vision, uh, but still has quite a lot of open questions. Yeah. Um, right. Like, and I guess our discovery phase can really help kind of, kind of flush those questions out, bring 'em to the surface, and, and we can help facilitate with the customer, get, get answers to those sort of key strategic questions. Can you tell me some of, uh, about some of those sort of common strategic questions that people have that we can help to answer in discovery phases? Yeah. Well, I guess where we usually start is, you know, there must be a reason that a custom, you know, very few people move to Salesforce, you know, there's usually a driver behind it, you know, whether it be a customer that's looking to, to grow and they're kind of outgrowing their existing systems. They might have like, pain points in the business that are kind of stopping them achieving what they need to achieve. So really it's, it's starting from the point of, you know, what are the kind of the drivers behind, behind doing this? You know, which areas of your business are you, you know, is it sales? Is it marketing? Is it, is it customer service? You know, is it field service? You know, which, which are the areas of the business that that, that are driving this? And what is causing, causing the problems? Right? And from there, we can start to understand, you know, how we could improve things, um, using Salesforce. So, you know, there's no point. Again, like I said, there's no point just redoing what they do at the moment on a different platform. We need to understand, you know, what needs to be improved, what are the objectives, and then we can define and design, um, a sort of Salesforce solution to kind of improve those. And, and also making sure that those kind of KPIs are measurable. We can come back at the end of the project and say, you know, we met that objective and, you know, we were looking to improve our lead conversion as an example, and, and it's gone from a certain percentage up to a, to a higher percentage. Yeah, sure. And, and of course that's gotta be helpful to our clients who, you know, they're, they're putting in quite a considerable investment in some cases for the, the bigger programs of work and building that business case and, and knowing how they're going to actually realize the return on investments to be really key for them. I'm sure, you know, Salesforce is, it's a big powerful platform that covers a lot of ground these days. And as you said before, there's a lot of things that people could do. Yeah. Um, so I, I guess discovery helps kind of focus them on the most important things. Yeah. And, and with any platform there, you know, it's things that Salesforce does very well and is designed to do. And there are areas that, you know, we, we don't necessarily recommending using Salesforce for. Uh, and customers might have existing systems that kind of cover those capabilities. So we're, again, it's understanding, you know, where Salesforce fits in terms of what the customer needs to do and how it fits in with the, the other systems that may, may exist as a alongside it. So again, that's where we start to think about kind of integration strategies. You know, Salesforce doesn't exist in a vacuum. It always exists or in, in a bigger project that we tend to get involved with it, it exists within a existing architecture of, or landscape of other systems that we need to understand, right. How Salesforce connects and fits into that. Our approach should always be kind of a roadmap approach, you know? Yeah. Replace one bit at a time, you know, grow Salesforce, uh, over time, over over multiple releases rather than, you know, throw everything out and try and bring everything in in one sort of big bang release. It's often less risky. And I guess commonly in organizations, clients we work with, you know, they, there can be complexity in organization, there'll be different stakeholders within that organization with, with kind of differing objectives, uh, and maybe wanting to do things in a different order. But I, I guess in discovery we can kind of bring them together and show them what, you know Yeah. What the order could look like and help kind of bring them to kind of consensus essentially. Yeah. It's quite often a, an an illuminating process and it's, it's a part of the process I particularly enjoy because it's a chance for a business to get all that out on the table and discuss it. And quite often, you know, everyone's busy doing their day jobs, things work the way that they work. Quite often the existing systems take up everybody's time just to keep them the lights on and to keep them working. So it's kind of an opportunity for a business to, and all the stakeholders involved to take a step back and think about, is that the best way to do things? You know, why have we been doing that when we could do something different? Everyone in the room, typically when we have one of these sessions has got a, you know, they're very aware of what the problems are. 'cause they deal with 'em all day, every day. And I think it's almost quite therapeutic for people to have a forum to kind of air that Yeah. And see that it's being listened to and have a sort of solutions put forward for improving things. Yeah. And exactly. And, and then we bring to the table, obviously the experience we've seen in the, in the industry, working with other clients, what we know the Salesforce platform can really help with. Um, and, and yeah. And feed that in and, and, and help them arrive at that right. Kind of prioritization and roadmap and then play it back to them. And then that, that gives something of real value, I think. Yeah. So how, how is definition different from discovery? So definition is the next level of detail down from the discovery. So the discovery should have aimed to establish that, you know, the scope of the project, a high level timeline, what we're aiming to achieve. The definition is really getting down to the level of detail we need to start an implementation. So that's typically where we'll start, uh, defining requirements in the form of user stories so we can actually start the projects and have enough detail to start building Salesforce for the customer. And those user stories they describe, um, what each role in the business needs to do in which part of the process and how's that formed for User. So, so typically, yeah. User story follows a sort, sort of a common structure and it's written from the perspective of a user of the system. It basically describes what the system needs to do for that user. So, you know, as a sales person, I need to be able to create an opportunity so I can manage my deal. Mm. Is a, is a high level example of what a user story might look like. And there'll be lots of user stories that make up the, the requirements for the project. And they both ensure that we can put a solution together during a solution design together during that, um, that definition period so that we know how we're using Salesforce and how it'll be implemented, but also when it comes to testing so the customer can make sure that what's being implemented works for them and, and gives the structure to the testing that they do. Sure. And I do like the structure of that user story and getting people to think about, you know, what they need to achieve from that particular part of the process. And it helps, uh, helps focus them And, and coming back to something we talked about in the discovery, uh, discussion, um, sometimes what we don't want to do is have the clients do things exactly as they're doing them today, but just in a different set of screens on, on Salesforce. And I suppose getting them to think about the objectives of the process helps them think about that, you know, they can achieve a really good result using the Salesforce platform, but maybe not quite in the way that they thought they would. Yeah. In some ERs, you know, we, we might challenge a cus a customer of way they do things at the moment. Um, so they can adopt the way that the Salesforce platform does things. You know, that quite often a customer will do things in particular 'cause that's the way they've always done it, right. There might be a better way to do it or there might be they get more benefit by adopting the way that the Salesforce works. And also that's quite often where we'll come up with kind of, we'll bring our own best practice user stories rather than giving our customer a blank sheet of paper and saying, what do you want? 'cause the tendency is always for a customer to describe what they've already got so we can give them a vision of this is how we would see that looking. And then it's a sort of a collaboration to ensure that that makes sense for the business. And I think sometimes you actually do demo the system along the way. Right? Yeah. I mean, it's very hard for people who have, are new to Salesforce to understand, you know, what that means, what the implications of a, of a design decision might be without actually seeing it in practice. So wherever possible we'll get Salesforce on the screen Yeah. And actually show a customer what that looks like and what what it means for them and how it would function. Yeah. And that's great. And the, and the way that you encourage the clients, you know, to, to raise a point if they see something that you are, uh, demonstrating and say, oh, that's quite different from how we work, then, then we can explore that in Yeah. More detail and get underneath that and understand, okay, why is that? It should be, it should be a, a collaboration. It shouldn't be a case of us coming in and and forcing something or, you know, forcing something on a customer. There needs to be a, a, a total open collaboration. That's the, the best way that this could work. And us coming with our Salesforce knowledge and best practice a client has obviously got the best understanding of how their business works and how what, what they need and what their priorities are. And we should meet in the middle and hopefully come up with the best solution and the best project approach for everybody. Okay. So we've talked about the definition phase and, and what we'll get at the end of the definition phase. Uh, and then obviously we're then ready to go into the next stage, the development stage. Yeah. So the next next process is to take that, um, definition the user stories that have been defined into, into development. So actually that's when the customer starts to see things come to life. And we tend to do that in agile fashion. We work in two week sprints where we'll take the user stories that have come up with the definition phase, prioritize with a solution design against them. And we will, we will build those user stories and at the end of the two weeks there'll be a, a playback to the customer where they'll be able to, you know, get a demo of what, what's been built. And that's an opportunity for them to see the system come to life, but also to give feedback and kind of steer the process. Yeah. And I love that part of the, the, um, the methodology actually in, in that part of the approach. It's very engaging approach, isn't it? It's not like, as we were talking about earlier, we're not gonna, uh, do uh, spend kind of weeks or months even doing very, very detailed designs before anyone sees anything. We keep that momentum going. We get something in front of the, the client quickly so that they can give that, that feedback and they can start to really imagine it being used Yeah. In their, in their business. I think you said earlier, rich actually that um, it is genuinely hard for any client, any company to completely visualize how a system needs to look before they see some of it. Yeah. And quite often, as soon as a client sees it start to come to life, that's when you know, things start occurring. You know, the decisions can be made and, and that really low level detail, it's much easier to put together once you start to see the, the bones of the system come together. And, and the other thing I like about the approach you're describing is that, um, I mean we talked about it being an engaging approach and pe people starting to imagine using the system and that's gotta help with adoption ultimately. Yeah, I think it gets people bought in early, you know, they, they don't feel like they've suddenly our systems arrived at the end of a project that they've, they've got to use that, you know, they've been involved all the way through from the definition through the development into the deployment, which is the, the next phase. Yeah. And they've, they're engaged. They feel that they've been consulted, they've had their say, they've been able to give feedback and seen that feedback taken into account. So it, it definitely helps to build adoption once the system goes live. Absolutely. And we all know business change management strategy is really important for these transformation type programs. So, so yeah. Half the battle I guess when we got that engagement and we got those, uh, advocates Yeah. For the System, you get people Excited as well, more than Anthony, you know, if they start to see the system come to life, they can get excited about the, about the, about the go live and being able to get their hands on it and actually use it. Absolutely. So let's go onto that then. Uh, you talked about deployment, that's the next, the next d after our development stage. There's quite a lot of work, uh, on the client side actually to get ready for the deployment as, as well. Right. What, what are some of those activities And user acceptance testing is, is a big one there. So the, you know, the development phase is finished, obviously we'll do our own testing, quality assurance testing as we go along. But this is the chance for the customer to get their hands on the, the fully developed solution. Um, you know, run through the, their test scripts and make sure that what's been built will meet their needs ready for go live. It's a chance to familiarization but also to ensure, you know, that the system does what it needs to do, meets the requirements that have been set before we get into the sort of go live activities. And, uh, I know we always work very closely with our clients to help make sure they're getting prepared for, for this work, uh, and giving them some guidance on this. I think different clients have different experiences of working on these sorts of projects and some clients, you know, may already have a user acceptance testing methodology and a, and a test manager, the clients less so. Yeah. But we do give, give guidance and, and help clients kind of prepare for the work that needs to be done to, to test and, and ultimately implement and get the value from the system. Yeah. It's a key system, key phase of the project. So it's in everyone's interest that they, everything's tested and customers happy before, before things go live. Yeah, Absolutely. Um, and making sure that they're getting ready for the, the training and uh, and planning for adoption. 'cause you know, ultimately to get the value people need to use the system in the way that it's planned. And then, um, and then we, we, we talked about at the start of the project actually getting the objectives out, the business KPIs. Uh, and if, if we have that ethos throughout the program, then ultimately, you know, the client's gonna be able to measure the value from the system and measure the achievements. Yeah. It keeps everyone focused on the outcomes of the project. You know, it helps with prioritization as well. 'cause when you know what the, the system needs to deliver, it's very easy to evaluate something, you know, new scope item for example, whether it's gonna meet one of the objectives or not. And also once the system goes live, if those objectives are ideally measurable, we can ensure that though the metrics that have been agreed are, are improving. And Yeah. And if they're not, you focused on, on why that is. Yeah. And, and certainly a, a key point is, is scope control for these programs of work. As we said earlier, uh, there's a lot of things that could be done, not necessarily all of them are going to help meet the objectives, but by starting those objectives, getting people focused and, and behind those, as you say, that is a good, uh, basis to evaluate any changes that people might come up with. You know, are they helpful to achieve the objectives or, or not. If not, yeah. We may delicately suggest that they're, they're left to a later phase or Yeah. That's why it's so important to have those objectives agreed upfront. Yeah. 'cause as you go through a project, you know, businesses change, you know, these projects o over time. So it's good to be able to evaluate, you know, new scope item or a change that's been requested to really identify, is it gonna help hit one of those objectives that's been agreed or is it perhaps something that could come in a later phase? Yeah, absolutely. And having everybody, all of us, ourselves, client teams, uh, all collectively working to those objectives, you know, has got to ultimately be the, the recipe for success of the program and for delivering value, which ultimately is what we, what we want to achieve for our clients. Exactly.

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Trevor, I, I feel from the, the conversation that, uh, I've learned a lot from talking to you about how Salesforce industries and Communications Cloud is different from what we might have known in the past from Salesforce platform or, or what the Salesforce platform can offer cross, uh, industry. So, you know, really interesting, uh, and you described a lot how communications cloud can be of, of real value, you know, in the right way to this particular industry sector that we're, we're talking about. Um, but there's a lot in that platform, right? So I'm guessing it's not just a case of just switching on Communications Cloud and it'll be a, you know, exact fits and I wish work. Yeah, yeah. What, what are the considerations then? So I think there's, there's three areas that I'd sort of highlight. I'm sure there's more than that, but that's a good way to sort of start to get a feel for it. The first is the approach you take to modeling a product and the offerings and promotions and discounts you put over the top of it. Um, and there isn't one way of doing it. So, for example, I can model, um, my iPhone, um, with attributes against it. So I can say, here is a product, it's an iPhone. It could have two fifty six gig, five 12 gig, a terabyte of storage in it, terabyte of storage sounds terrifying. Um, it could have red, blue, green colors. Um, so I could model that as one product with attributes against it, and then have an engine that goes away and prices it and then slap offerings over the top. I could also model each of those different combinations as a distinct product. So I could have like the red 2 56 gig, the blue five 12 gig, et cetera. And the selection between those different approaches, um, very much depends on a number of other factors about the deployment architecture, about what the product modelers want to see. So there's different stakeholders that will want different approaches pursued. And it's really just a question of sort of balancing those three things, um, to come back to product and offering. There's not just the idea of attribute based modeling. You can also bundle things together. You can have flat modeling, you can have linear modeling. There's a number of different ways without getting too much into the detail of representing, you know, your products and offerings to the outside world, right? So that's the first point. The second point is you can have a number of different shapes of deployment architecture. So I can just use the straight cart with agents operating it and people phoning in. I could have a, an OmniScript, which is sort of a, um, more customer friendly guided journey through provisioning change, um, cease, et cetera, home move as one, as another example. That could be on the digital commerce platform that could be embedded in a website. There a number diff of different options there. And unfortunately not everything works on every platform. So there'll be be, for example, if you're using digital commerce, um, some of the models for promotion, discounting, et cetera, uh, are not usable in all circumstances. So you kind of balance the first balance point is between your deployment architecture and your product modeling approach. So you need to have a sort of a reasonably solid view of how you're gonna expose this out to the world now and next, right? In choosing between different approaches to do product and offering modeling. So that's the first thing. And then the second thing is that you've got different stakeholder communities. Mm-Hmm. So your product modeling, um, your product management team will have a particular vision of the ideal of how they would present those things up to their customer base. Yep. The operations team wanna keep the lights on Mm-Hmm. And they may have a different preference in terms of how you deploy and what you use for your product model and your offering model. Right. So, and there's a, there's usually about three or four different stakeholder communities that all would have an ideal solution, but your job is to find the kind of the best compromise in the middle, which isn't necessarily the perfect solution for your product management team. It's not necessarily the perfect solution for your operations management team. Right. But it's the best compromise. It's really something in the middle that is the least offensive to those and ideally delights. Right. But basically the, the reason why this session was sort of titled the art of SFI is that you are compromising in your modeling, in your deployment architecture, in your, um, delivery to different stakeholders within the organization. Um, and that's, that's really where it becomes a little bit art as well as science. Mm-Hmm. Right. Finding that best fit in terms of how things are presented to the customer versus how that, how the data is then used and broken down and used in operational delivery Absolutely. Ultimately, and, and making that that flow seamlessly. Uh, okay. No, that, that makes a lot of sense, Trevor. I can see why there's a, a real art to, to SFI arts To Yes. And, and we have a, a significantly more detailed view of each of those three corners of the triangle, right. And some of the things that you need to think about in deciding how to balance these, these different constraints in the best way possible. So, and, and again, going in with that, that with a ready point of view, your, your view of what good looks like is a great starting point. Yes. To, to show an end to end vision that can work for the customer and then tailoring that and need and getting all stakeholders on board and, and aligned with, with the version that will work for that particular company. But the key, the, the absolute key take home is that there isn't one, you know, this Fits all. No, no. It's not a one size fits all. Absolutely. Not for Sure. And, and it will be very much so we've got a lot of, um, standard sort of process, more work that we can lean on, but in assembling the right solution for customer. Yeah, absolutely. And those don't represent the answer, but they, they constitute a framework, I suppose, a basis for analysis, which helps guide the, or helps the clients along the journey to arrive at the right version that works for them and still gets the best use out of the Salesforce Platform. And this is, this is another sort of important selling point for the discovery process that we like to go through there. There are whole sections on product and offering modeling. There are whole sections on sort of the operations management side of at CPQ and Om, and we won't deliver the right solution until we've been through that process with the stakeholders in front of us. Right. Explained what it means and why it's important and then come out with a solution. Yeah. And, and I think that does resonate with our, our clients. I think they do really appreciate the approach, you know, having seen you in action and, and talking to our, our clients and, and talking their language. And they seem to really appreciate the opportunity to, to talk about their business, to go through these points, uh, and to see it perhaps in a, in a slightly different light and take, take the opportunity to, to look at, uh, how they want to operate in the future and, and, and see them, uh, uh, see the possibilities of, of what they can do with the Salesforce platform, if it's harnessed in the right way. Yeah. Indeed, indeed. Great. Really interesting. Thank you. Thank you.

911796929

So Trevor, we, we, we all know the Salesforce platform is very extensive, very powerful platform. Uh, and there's, there's a lot within the platform. We hear a lot about Salesforce industries, particularly with regard to the telecommunications area. Can you tell me a bit more about what Salesforce Industries is, is all about? Okay, so Salesforce Industries, um, kind of extends across sales quote order and service space. So it's really a series of solutions that are sort of built up, tailored towards specific industries. So, for example, communications Cloud is relevant for telco space, right? And Communications Cloud being a part of the Salesforce industries Offering, being part of the Salesforce industry offering. So there are different industry solutions built on the, sort of the core of Salesforce industries and Communications Cloud is the one that's relevant to the telco space, right? Um, and it is built to deal with some of the complexities that you would find in a typical telco. So for example, the offering and product model, um, that a telco uses. So a product is a thing that I could buy, like, I dunno, a teddy bear. And an offering is the commercial wrap around that. So that I will offer this through my website, um, to specific types of customer for $20, $30 or whatever, something like that. And much more complicated offering and product structures sort of arise in telco. So you have bundles of things. If you buy broadband and telephony and TV together, then on a 24 month contract, then I will discount these products. I can also have a, a promotion over the top. So the first six months, the broadband is half price, things of that nature. Mm. So the beginnings of it was an understanding that in, um, telco, the offering and product structure is quite a bit more complex than it would be say for fast moving consumer goods. So like an amazon.com, typically I just go and buy a thing and that's it, and that's the end of the transaction. That doesn't really work for, um, for example, the telecommunications industry where things are a bit more complicated. So it sort of started as a capability to quote and order, um, more complex bundles of things, and also things where like one product depends on another product. So you get a variety of sort of much more complicated scenarios that need to be dealt with. And that sort of started the, the, uh, evolution of the Salesforce industry story to build something that could deal with that, but also do it in a catalog driven way. Mm. So, you know, you could build all of that in a flow and you could have a different flow for, you know, any different combinations of things you could envisage, but it's, it's difficult to actually launch a slight variance of something you already do because, you know, there's a lot of heavy lifting to do. So the ideal was to actually represent it in the catalog, which can inform the quote story, but also the order management story where you are breaking commercial things down into technical things, figuring out the order in which you need to execute things underneath to actually deliver the fulfillment of that product. It becomes quite complicated quite quickly. Right. And I guess the genius of Salesforce industries was to build a catalog driven solution that can cope firstly with a quote toward a story, um, in a way that, you know, the time to market is quite low. I can configure something in a catalog and almost immediately launch it and push it out into the wider world. So that's sort of the quote toward a part of Salesforce industries. It also extends into sales space, extends into service space, and you can deliver a kind of a customer 360 view to your agents who are maybe doing sort of service assurance, answering questions from customers, things of that nature. Right? And there is also things like flex cards that make it much easier for you to build a kind of a, a 360 degree view for agents to use that shows them, you know, who's calling, um, what cases have they raised in recent history, what products do they have, how has that performed over time. Um, it's just built to quickly build up industry solutions, um, for customers, right. Um, and deal with the complexities that are really specific to individual industries that you, you might not find and are just a, a straight retail scenario, like an amazon.com or something of that nature. Right. Got you. So I mean, great that the platform, Salesforce platform is, has been extended in that way and can, can help companies, uh, address these particular challenges, but it yeah, it sounds like there's a lot in there. So, uh, I'm guessing it's not a simply a case of kind of switching it on and it's gonna work for every company. It must be quite a lot to think through to implement it. Yeah, so that's, um, something that we cover in the art of SFI, um, specifically. Okay. It's a question of balancing, um, your product model against your deployment model, against future intent. And that's something that we cover in a, a later session. Right. Um, but yes, it's, it's more of an art than a science. Okay. Definitely. We'll, we'll come back to the, the point then. So, uh, so you've described Salesforce Industries and Communications Cloud and, and how that, uh, introduces a lot more platform capability from Salesforce to help address the particular needs of this particular industry. Is that always going to be the right solution for a company in this space? No. No. So we have a kind of a checklist that we work through, um, for indicators that might suggest that an SFI solution is appropriate, and if we don't get ticks against one or more of those items, then it would suggest that it's perfectly sensible to go with the sort of the core revenue cloud sort of CPQ solution. So, uh, examples of that might be more complex offering product model structures, you know, products that depend on products. Mm. So for example, um, my broadband, if I wanna have a TV service with a telco, that TV service might depend on that broadband service, right? So when you're starting to see more complex, um, relationships between offerings and products of that nature, then that's an indicator. Okay. That SFI is appropriate as opposed to the Amazon, if you, I always come back to that, but the Amazon model of I wanna buy a phone and that's the end of the transaction and you know, it's done, it's one time, right? It's the sort of the more complex recurring, um, models where we, we tend to sort of point towards SFI. Okay. Um, also it's, um, SFI is very good through the digital commerce platform for sort of new customer new provide journeys. So the process of onboarding and exposing journeys to customers. So OmniScript is perfect for that. You can do that through your existing website, you can do that through Portals, OmniScript being a part of the communications. Again, I'm either three letter acronyms or I'm, um, obtuse product Is, okay. Trevor, I'm keeping up just about I think. Sorry. Um, but yeah, so there's, there's a few indicators in that thing also, you know, the, where you have that complexity and you want that catalog driven solution to, if you were using like CPQ, the standard CPQ flavor, you would typically do your order management, um, orchestration plan in flow. So you'd say, do this, then do this, and do this in a quite programmatic way. Um, as, as I was mentioning previously with the catalog driven approach, it tells the engine how to decompose the commercial into the technical Mm-Hmm. And that's another indicator of sfi. So if, if you are just selling a teddy bear, you send it out, you don't care what it, how it was stitched together, the it was made of. Whereas in telco, you are often breaking broadband into here's an access piece, here's A-P-P-P-O-E piece, here's a number of different things that need to be brought together to realize that commercial where you have decomposition and relatively complex decomposition, that's an indicator of SFI. And certainly if you want to build your orchestration plans and fragments and then dynamically assemble them, that's an indicator of SFI. Okay. So there's a quite a number of things on the checklist. There's A a lot to, to think through, Isn't it? Um, and, and it's generally, you know, a sensible way of differentiating the sort of the straight revenue cloud CPQ model from, um, the SFI model. Now, I should say, I should make it clear that this is sort of a snapshot January, 2024, the product is evolving. Um, things are increasingly sort of moving into core, and the answer to that question will be different in six months. I have no doubt. Right. Um, but at the moment with distinct CPQ engines, um, the one in revenue cloud versus the SFI model, um, we have a checklist that helps us to decide, right, go this way or go this way. Yeah, of course. True. You know, Salesforce doesn't rest on its lowest evolving and improving, enhancing The platform. It's very annoying for people doing certification. Yeah. Uh, good that we all like the, uh, challenges, but, uh, okay, so that, that, that does sound like a, a really key decision, something that needs to be got Right. You know, thought through properly. So great that you've kind of evolved that, that framework and that that checklist set of criteria for helping. And, and in the same way with architecture, you, you have to look to the future a little bit as well. Yeah. So if for example, you determine that my offering today is relatively simple, there's not much to it, but in the future I wanna start doing, you know, more complex, uh, bundling, um, I will have product dependencies in the future, et cetera, et cetera. That should be an indicator that maybe it's better to start with SFI rather than to um, have to then transition phase two to phase three or whatever. Yeah. So asking those searching questions of, of the client and discovery about and where they're taking the business, It can be an expensive advice not to think of where I envisage I would be in 12 or 18 months. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Great. Really interesting. Driven, thank You.

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So I'm very happy to be joined today by my colleague Trevor Hackett, who's our lead solution architect for the telco industry. Trevor, I've often heard you talk in a lot of depth and a lot of enthusiasm with our clients in the telco sector, uh, about their, their business, and about how they can make best use of Salesforce. You, you talk with a lot of enthusiasm and a lot of knowledge. What is it about the telco industry that has such a, a fascination and interest for you? Well, I think, um, basically it's one of the most challenging spaces in terms of operations management. So the first aspect that's worth bringing out is if you like, some of the most complex challenges to solve, and telco is the place to do it in. Um, it's also a large and incredibly growing sector, and the final thing to bring out is that it's very dynamic. So the problems that you were solving five years ago won't be the problems you're solving today or in five years time. Now, the obvious flip side to that is that you need to be continuously learning, and sometimes you do that with your customers, and sometimes you do that through other mechanisms, but that, that is something that you need to stay on top of. But I think that, you know, the challenge of the space and the dynamism of the space are the things that really appeal to me. Right. Interesting. That that really comes across in the interactions that you have with our clients, and they, they seem to have, uh, definitely appreciate that and, and respond to that. So, I guess, you know, you've done a lot of projects with a lot of companies. Um, you've, you've come across a lot of common challenges between the different companies in the sector, and you've also got a really good handle on the, the trends, uh, in the industry as well. I suppose that's really helps you to form, um, or helped us as mid consulting to form a, a solid point of view on the industry and, and develop an approach. Absolutely, and it's, you know, it's heartening to see how you can differentiate, um, as an individual and as a consultancy by stepping outside of the immediate problem that is being set by the customer. So the first thing is to understand the industry and trends in the industry. Mm-Hmm. So for example, in the alt net space, many of the providers are starting up just putting fiber infrastructure into a local area and then selling broadband to their customers. But the first step on from there is to actually separate their wholesale and retail businesses. Right. And, you know, if you understand that that's happening and also that there are other things with mediator platforms coming along that helps to sort of set the scene for what they're doing now, but also present an image for where it will go to three, five years into the future. So firstly, having an understanding of industry trends helps you to solve the problem they have now, but also suggest the problem they will have three, five years out and also build for that in what you're engaging in. Now, I think the second aspect also is that if you just focus on one area of the enterprise, you're probably missing other things that are going on. So one of the things that we try to do to differentiate is actually look at the whole enterprise architecture, right? So for example, if you're building an order management solution or service management solution, if your technical inventory isn't good, then the probability is that that solution won't work. So if you know that that's an issue you need to look at, and you can identify it, you can talk to the customer about the brief of what they want you to look at, but also tell them other things in your estate need to be looked at so that you can actually build a solution that delivers. I guess the other point also is building a joined up solution. Mm-Hmm. So for example, your plan and build function builds fiber cast a premise. You know, you're gonna do that six months in advance, so you should be telling the customer we're coming and trying to engage them through sort of marketing into sales, right? So that you are selling something to them that will be able to, you know, generate revenue rather than just putting fiber in the ground and forgetting about it, and then not really utilizing the knowledge in your business. Yeah, I can, I can see how that would be present a really fascinating challenge architecturally, right? I mean, as you're indicating really important that you consider all of that stuff upfront, uh, and make sure that those architectural foundations are, are put in place. When I say architecture, I suppose we're not just talking about the technology, right? No, it's, it's, and, and the, the real secret sauce, it's the combination of the business and the architecture. Yeah. So, you know, architecture on its own is software. You know, people like me like building that stuff, but it has to actually meet the purpose for the business. Yeah. And, you know, those two joined up in both directions is, you know, the holy grail that you are aiming for, right. And hence, those business conversations that you have early in the, the piece are really critical, right? Yeah. And, you know, the discovery piece that we will typically do will go through the whole business from, you know, in the case of a telco, the consideration of where to build all the way through to marketing, to sales, to quote, to order to service. So, Trevor, from all your experience and working with our clients in this space and talking to the different companies, what are the kind of common challenges that you see in the sector that clients want to talk to us about? Well, they generally have, even if they don't necessarily articulate it in that terms, they have, you know, a need for capability and they have some KPIs that they want to deliver against. Mm. So for example, we want to be able to launch a new product on this stack in like weeks instead of six or 12 months. So today, when we want to launch a slight variant of a broadband product, it can take us like 12 months of heavy lifting code configuration, building new integrations. We can't survive as a business in that way. So we want something that will deliver us the time to market of like a couple of weeks just going into a catalog, configuring a change to our existing offering, and then pushing it out into all the various different channels. Mm-Hmm. So you'll find a few KPIs like that. Um, for non-functional order management, service management, it's things like fallout rates. So we've configured an offering, we've push it into our order management function, and for whatever reason it doesn't successfully provision. We've got un unhappy customers. Similarly, with service management, we don't have a good understanding of what's in, in the ground. So therefore, when a customer phones up and says, my broadband doesn't work, it's not very easy for us to actually understand why that is the case. Right. So the, the usual first point of call is a series of business KPIs against the operational functions of the business. And at the moment, they're appalling. So that can be the driver towards, for example, a Salesforce, Salesforce industry's transformation, right? But that's where it's starting from. Okay. And then beyond that, you'll find evidence of things like a business that isn't joined up. So, for example, put the fiber in the ground. We know we're gonna do that in six months time outside Trevor's house, but no one's talking to Trevor about buying broadband. Mm. Which is, you know, a lost opportunity. Right. And a lot of those, those kind of views of how the business should join up across, for example, plan and build marketing to sales to service, um, it's more siloed in those businesses and that's a lost opportunity. Right? Right. Right. So there's, there's quite a bit of that. Also, sort of stepping into the future, um, you know, the business might be constructed to work in a particular way. So an AL net, for example, focused on a local area. They dig up the ground, they put the fiber in it, they sell broadband in, you know, this local town, whatever. But in the future, they would be looking towards, if they're following industry trends, the possibility of doing wholesale retail separation. Right? So they could sell their fiber capacity to other retailers who could piggyback over it. It's also something to consider if they're looking at an acquisition strategy two or five years out. So you could plug into a mediator platform and then a talk talk or a sky or a Vodafone could use that, uh, capacity. So a risk, um, in building the perfect solution for today is that you're not thinking far enough out to be able to sort of easily transition to one of those models. So they need, you know, the best, best in, uh, class Rolls-Royce solution to drive order management assurance and those things today. But also you should be building it in such a way that it's easy for them to change their supply chain positioning for, you know, trends that are in the market. Right? So having an eye on those industry trends and knowing what the clients, our clients need to be gearing up to, to Absolutely. To Stay competitive. Yeah's really important. And The worst case sort of, you know, scenario is just to rock up with a blank sheet of paper and say, I can do SFI, what do you want? Right? The real value comes from understanding all of those pieces and then maybe doing discovery process where we go through how does your business work today? Here are some industry trends that we see coming down the pipe that Right. We'd be interested in knowing your views on. And then building a solution that obviously does the Salesforce and the Salesforce industries faces, right. But also gives them a view of their wider estate and where there may be areas for improvement. So Trevor, we, we talked a bit about some of the challenges and the common challenges that you've seen in, in your extensive experience with working with clients in this sector, uh, and also the strong handle that you've got on the industry trends. So I, I guess that's helped you form a really strong point of view Yes. For us at admin consulting on, on the industry, uh, and has helped you prepare to, to help our clients address these challenges and prepare what they need to prepare to, to respond to these trends and be ready for the, the, the future. Can you tell us more about our approach there? Sure. So we, we typically look to do a two week, uh, discovery engagement. The first thing that we do in that is just to go through a few views on industry trends on, um, the relative priority of different KPIs in terms of things that they're looking to improve. And just test our understanding with the sort of the business and the executive team to make sure that we're on the same page in terms of this is how we see things in the future for your business potentially. And also this is where we think you are focusing on in terms of improving things that are not great today. Mm-Hmm. So that's usually sort of the first part of that journey. And from there, we then go through a kind of an architectural walkthrough from the very beginnings of thinking about, for example, with an alt net, where to put fiber through to marketing, to sales, and to service. And we kind of go through each of those areas, even though that not necessarily implemented on Salesforce, and in some cases definitely shouldn't be implemented on Salesforce. But it's really just getting an understanding of the entire process from the very beginning through to the, the end, um, of a service journey with a customer so that we can identify areas that, you know, could have an impact on the things that we're being asked to build, but also, you know, a key part of that can be input for their architecture function to go away and look at, for example, you know, is technical inventory in a good enough shape? Is it available, is it complete, is it accurate? Because if it isn't, it will have a bad impact on the bits that we build. Um, also things like, you know, plan and build, how you actually represent the different states of fiber and what that means for a quote to order journey, for example. Right. So it's really sort of validating, um, an understanding of the business, where it is and where it's going, and what's important to it, and then going through the moving parts non Salesforce and potentially Salesforce, um, to really get a feel for how those things should plug together. Right. And I know every, every client's different to, to some degree, but I, I, I suppose your knowledge of the common challenges in the industry trends has, has helped inform that strong point of view. So you have a really good idea on of, of what good looks like Yeah. For a client. So do you typically bring that into those conversations? Absolutely. So that, that whole discovery exercise is shaped by, you know, an understanding of industry and understanding of enterprise architecture best practice. Right. And also a deep understanding of the, the parts that we are actually sort of looking at, which will be around Salesforce and Salesforce industries. Yeah. I should make the point, um, that in all of these engagements, I always go in thinking, I know this, I know this, I know this. The reality is we are always discovering new things from customers. Yes. So that the worst thing that you can do, and as I said with telco, it's an extraordinarily dynamic industry. The worst thing you can do is go in with swagger and arrogance. 'cause very quickly that will get deflated. Yeah. And it, It won't Work. Right. And every engagement, certainly in the, um, in recent history for me, I've been through, you know, I've gone in thinking I know this, and I come out thinking, actually, this is different. This is more complicated. There are different ways of approaching this. Yeah. So it's always, it's always a learning journey, because if it isn't you, you're probably not suited for Telco. Right? No, no. I, I I, I, I get that, uh, that really rings true. Uh, and I think, you know, it, it's great that you have that, that that model. 'cause it's a good starting point and a good focus, isn't it? Uh, otherwise, you know, I guess it could be quite overwhelmingly, you know, they're, so, as you mentioned, these, uh, these companies and the industry and their, their challenges can be quite complex. So starting with a complete blank piece of paper and scratching heads thinking, you know, where do we start? Uh, would be pretty tricky. But going in armed with that model is a great anchor, isn't it? A good sort of starting point from which, and It, and it is a combination of the three things expand Yeah. The industry, um, trends, best practice enterprise architecture for an entire telco. Yeah. Not just the BSS part, not just the Salesforce Salesforce industries part. Um, yeah. You, you need to bring all of that together to really deliver the best possible solution otherwise, right. Yeah. Things won't go well. And, and, and I, I love the, what you're saying before, I mean, having, having that humility as well to make sure that we're listening to the client Yeah. And being really receptive to Their particular, I Have content I have to remind myself every time, humble, because they've always got stuff to teach you. Yeah, absolutely. All, all learning and helping them, but it's, you know, it's great that you know the way that you're helping clients along this, this journey. And I, I think they just appreciate having that, that structure brought in. Yeah. Uh, and that different viewpoint. Yeah. And, and yes, we, we kind of balance the, um, the, the solid understanding of the enterprise architecture, but also I think we, we delight in the specificity of our, um, designs and implementations. So we, we go deep into, um, design to validate that, you know, all all parts operational and technical are on the same page. So, Trevor, from the conversation then, we, we talked through some of the common challenges that you've seen in the, the industry trends. And I can see how that's really helped you to develop a, a really strong mint consulting point of view, uh, uh, on this industry and, and how best to, to leverage the, the benefits from the Salesforce platform and how that's helped hone our approach. So could you maybe summarize our approach as to how we help our clients address these challenges? Absolutely. So, uh, it starts from the sort of the three things, the understanding of industry and industry trends, the view of best practice enterprise architecture across an entirety of a telco, and the deeper understanding of Salesforce, Salesforce industry solutions for the BSS part of the stack. So given all of those three things, we sort of go into a typically two week discovery process. The first day of which we're talking to sort of the exec leadership team about, you know, this is a view of where your business might be going. This is what we think are the important areas where you, from what you've told us so far, there are issues where you have KPIs to improve. Um, this is what we think your estate looks like. Is this broadly correct? So the first day of that engagement is really just about sense, checking our understanding, looking at wider industry context and trends and the intent for the wider business, but also the enterprise architecture and the particular solution we've been asked to come in and look at. And then the remaining of that discovery process is really just going through that architecture piece by piece, starting typically for a telco with plan and build, working through marketing, to sales, to service, to actually deliver a joined up solution. And also identify areas outside of the Salesforce domain where there may be things that need to be improved.

911798109

You talked about deployment, that's the next, the next d after our development stage. There's quite a lot of work, uh, on the client side actually to get ready for the deployment as, as well. Right. What, what are some of those activities and User acceptance testing is, is a big one there. So the, you know, the development phase is finished. Obviously we'll do our own testing, quality assurance testing as we go along. But this is the chance for the customer to get their hands on the, the fully developed solution. Um, you know, run through the, their test scripts and make sure that what's been built will meet their needs, ready for go live. It's a chance to familiarization, but also to ensure, you know, that the system does what it needs to do, meets the requirements that have been set before we get into the sort of go live activities. And, uh, I know we always work very closely with our clients to help make sure they're getting prepared for, for this work and giving them some guidance on this. I think different clients have different experiences of working on these sorts of projects and some clients, you know, may already have a user acceptance testing methodology and a, and a test manager, other clients less so. Yeah. But we do give, give guidance and, and help clients kind of prepare for the work that needs to be done to, to test and, and ultimately implement and get the value from the system. Yeah, It's a key system, key key phase of the project. So it's in everyone's interest that they, everything's tested and customer's happy before, before things go live. Yeah, Absolutely. Um, and making sure that they're getting ready for the, the training and uh, and planning for adoption. 'cause you know, ultimately to get the value people need to use the system in the way that it's planned. And then, um, and then we, we, we talked about at the start of the project actually getting the objectives out and the business KPIs. Yeah. Uh, and if, if we have that ethos throughout the program, then ultimately, you know, the client's gonna be able to measure the value from the system and measure the achievements. Yeah. It keeps everyone focused on the outcomes of the project. You know, it helps with prioritization as well. 'cause when you know what the, the system needs to deliver, it's very easy to evaluate something, you know, new scope item, for example, whether it's gonna meet one of the objectives or not. And also, once the system goes live, if those objectives are ideally measurable, we can ensure that though the metrics that have been agreed are, are improving. And yeah. And if they're not, you know, focused on, on why that is. Yeah. And, and certainly a, a key point is, is scope control for these programs that work. As we said earlier, uh, there's a lot of things that could be done, not necessarily all of them are going to help meet the objectives, but by starting those objectives, getting people focused and, and behind those, as you say, that is a good, uh, basis to evaluate any changes that people might come up with. You know, are they helpful to achieve the objectives or, or not? If not, yeah. We may delicately suggest that they're, they're left to a later phase or Yeah. That's why it's so important to have those objectives agreed upfront. 'cause as you go through a project, you know, businesses change, you know, these projects o over time. So it's good to be able to evaluate, you know, a new scope item or a change that's been requested to really identify, is it gonna help hit one of those objectives that's been agreed or is it perhaps something that could come in a later phase? Yeah, Absolutely. And having everybody, all of us, ourselves, client teams, uh, all collectively working to those objectives, you know, has got to ultimately be the recipe for success of the program and for delivering value, which ultimately is what we, what we want to achieve for our clients. Exactly.

922120918

We've talked about the definition phase and, and what we would get at the end of the definition phase. Uh, and then obviously we're then ready to go into the next stage, the development stage. Yeah. So the next next process is to take that, um, definition. The user stories that have been defined into developments are actually, that's when the customer starts to see things come to life. And we tend to do that in agile fashion. We work in two week sprints where we'll take the user stories that have come up with the definition phase, prioritize with a solution design against them, and we will, we will build those user stories and at the end of the two weeks there'll be a, a playback to the customer where they'll be able to, you know, get a demo of what, what's been built. And that's an opportunity for them to see the system come to life, but also to give feedback and kind of steer the process. Yeah, And I love that part of the, the, um, methodology actually in, in that part of the approach. It's very engaging approach, isn't it? It's not like, as we were talking about earlier, we're not gonna, uh, do uh, spend kind of weeks or months even doing very, very detailed designs before anyone sees anything. We keep that momentum going. We get something in front of the, the client quickly so that they can give that, that feedback and they can start to really imagine it being used in their, in their business. I think you said earlier, rich actually, that, um, it is genuinely hard for any client, any company to completely visualize how a system needs to look before they see some of it. Yeah. And quite often, as soon as a client sees it start to come to life, that's when you know, things start occurring. You know, the decisions can be made and, and that really low level detail, it's much easier to put together once you start to see the, the bones of the system come together. And, and the other thing I like about the approach you're describing is that, um, and we talked about it being an engaging approach and pe people starting to imagine using the system. And that's gotta help with adoption ultimately. Yeah, I think it gets people bought in early, you know, they, they don't feel like they've suddenly our systems arrived at the end of a project that they've, they've got to use that, you know, they've been involved all the way through from the definition through the development into the deployment, which is the, the next phase. Yeah. And they've, they're engaged. They feel that they've been consulted, they've had their say, they've been able to give feedback and seen that feedback taken into account. So it definitely helps to build adoption once the system goes live. Absolutely. And we all know business change management strategy is really important for these transformation type programs. So, so yeah, half the battle, I guess when we got that engagement and we've got those, uh, advocates for The system, Get people Excited as well, more than Anthony, you know, they start to see the system come to life. They can get excited a a about the, about the, about the go live and being able to get their hands on it and actually use it. Absolutely.

922121708

So how, how is definition different from discovery? So definition is the next level of detail down from the discovery. So the discovery should have aimed to establish that, you know, the scope of the project, a high level timeline, what we're aiming to achieve. The definition is really getting down to the level of detail we need to start an implementation. So that's typically where we'll start, uh, defining requirements in the form of user stories so we can actually start the projects and have enough detail to start building Salesforce for the customer. And those user stories they describe, um, what each role in the business needs to do and which part of the process and how has that formed the user? So, so typically, yeah. User story follows a sort, sort of a common structure and it's written from the perspective of a user of the system. It basically describes what the system needs to do for that user. So, you know, as a sales person, I need to be able to create an opportunity so I can manage my deal is a, is a high level example of what a user story might look like. And there'll be lots of user stories that make up the, the requirements for the project. And they both ensure that we can put a solution together during a solution design together during that, um, that definition period so that we know how we're using Salesforce and how it'll be implemented, but also when it comes to testing so the customer can make sure that what's being implemented works for them and, and gives the structures to the testing that they do. Sure. And I do like the structure of that user story and getting people to think about, you know, what they need to achieve from that particular part of the process. And it helps, uh, helps focus them and, and coming back to something we talked about in the discovery, uh, discussion, um, sometimes what we don't want to do is have the clients do things exactly as they're doing them today, but just in a different set of screens on, on Salesforce. And I suppose getting them to think about the objectives of the process helps them think about that, you know, they can achieve a really good result using the Salesforce platform but maybe not quite in the way that they thought they would. Yeah. And some ISTs says, you know, we, we might challenge a cus a customer of way they do things at the moment. Um, so they can adopt the way that the Salesforce platform does things. You know, quite often a customer will do things in particular way 'cause that's the way they've always done it. Right. There might be a better way to do it or there might be they get more benefit by adopting the way that the Salesforce works. And also that's quite often where we'll come up with kind of, we'll bring our own best practice user stories rather than giving our customer a blank sheet of paper and saying, what do you want? 'cause the tendency is always for a customer to describe what they've already got so we can give them a vision of this is how we would see that looking. And then it's a sort of a collaboration to ensure that that makes sense for the business. And I think sometimes you actually do demo the system along the way, right? Yeah. I mean it's very hard for people who have, are new to Salesforce to understand, you know, what that means, what the implications of a, of a design decision might be actually seeing it in practice. So wherever possible we'll get Salesforce on the screen Yeah. And actually show a, a customer what that looks like and what what it means for them and how it would function. Yeah. And that's great. And the, and the way that you encourage the clients, you know, to, to raise a point if they see something that you are, uh, demonstrating and say, oh, that's quite different from how we work, then, then we can explore that in more detail and get underneath that and understand, okay, why is that? It should be, it should be a, a collaboration. It shouldn't be a case of us coming in and, and forcing something of, you know, forcing something on a customer. There needs to be a, a, a total open collaboration. That's the best way that this could work. And us coming with our Salesforce knowledge and best practice. The client has obviously got the best understanding of how the business works and how what, what they need and what their priorities are. And we should meet in the middle and hopefully come up with the best solution and the best project approach for everybody.

922122239

Um, discovery is the, the, the first phase really, and, and that tends to be involved when we have, uh, a project that needs, you know, the scope is not clear or it's complex. There's a lot of, you know, integrations with the systems. There's a lot of different areas of Salesforce in use, right? And that's really, you get into grips with, you know, what is the scope of this project? You know, how are all the elements of Salesforce, how are all the areas of the business gonna use it? You know, what do those high level processes look like? How does, how's this gonna flow end to end? You know, if there are other systems that are involved, be they kind of legacy systems or systems that need to be integrated with, you know, what does that look like? So it, but we really need to, at a high level, get a view on what is it we're delivering, what's the scope? Yeah. What does that look like in terms of a Salesforce solution? Um, and what does that look like? Looking kind of in times of, in terms of a project timeline and yeah. Things like that. Okay. So, yeah, I, I guess quite often, we'll, we'll come across a client that has, you know, that that started to form a vision, uh, but still has quite a lot of open questions. Yeah. Um, right. And I, and I guess our discovery phase can really help kind of, kind of flush those questions out, bring them to the surface, and, and we can help facilitate with the customer, get, get answers to those sort of key strategic questions. Can you tell me some, uh, about some of those sort of common strategic questions that people have that we can help to answer in discovery phases? Yeah. Well, I guess where we usually start is, you know, there must be a reason that a custom, you know, very few people move to Salesforce, you know, there's usually a driver behind it, you know, whether it be a customer that's looking to, to grow and they're kind of outgrown their existing systems. They might have like, pain points in, in the business that are kind of stopping them achieving what they need to achieve. So really it's, it's starting from a point of, you know, what are the kind of the drivers behind, behind doing this? You know, which areas of your business are you, you know, is it sales? Is it marketing? Is it, is it customer service? You know, is it field service? You know, which, which are the areas of the business that that, that are driving this? And what is causing, causing the problems? Right? And from there, we can start to understand, you know, how we could improve things, um, using Salesforce. So, you know, there's no point. Again, like I said, there's no point just redoing what they do at the moment on a different platform. We need to understand, you know, what needs to be improved, what are the objectives, and then we can define and design, um, a sort of Salesforce solution to kind of improve those. And, and also making sure that those kind of KPIs that are measurable, we can come back at the end of the project and say, you know, we met that objective and, you know, we were looking to improve our lead conversion as an example, and, and it's gone from a certain percentage up to a, to a higher Percentage. Yeah, sure. And, and of course that's gotta be helpful to our clients who, you know, they're, they're putting in quite a considerable investment in some cases for the, the bigger programs of work. And building that business case and knowing how they're going to actually realize the return on investments would be really key for them. I'm sure, you know, Salesforce is, it's a big powerful platform that covers a lot of ground these days. And as you said before, there's a lot of things that people could do. Yeah. Um, so I, I guess discovery helps kind of focus them on the most important things. Yeah. And, and with any platform there, you know, it's things that Salesforce does very well and is designed to do. And there are areas that, you know, we, we don't necessarily recommending using Salesforce for. Uh, and customers might have existing systems that kind of cover those capabilities. So again, it's understanding, you know, where Salesforce fits in terms of what the customer needs to do and how it fits in with the, the other systems that may, may exist alongside it. So again, that's where we start to think about kind of integration strategies. You know, Salesforce doesn't exist in a vacuum. It always exists or in, in, in a bigger project that we tend to get involved with it. It exists within a existing architecture of, or landscape of other systems that we need to understand, right. How Salesforce connects and fits into that. Our approach should always be kind of a roadmap approach, you know? Yeah. Replace one bit at a time, you know, grow Salesforce, uh, over time, over over multiple releases rather than, you know, throw everything out and try and bring everything in in one sort. Big bang release. It's often less risky. And I guess commonly in organizations, clients we work with, you know, there can be complexity in organization. There'll be different stakeholders within that organization with, with kind of differing objectives, uh, and maybe wanting to do things in a different order. But I, I guess in discovery we can kind of bring them together and show them what, you know Yeah. What the order could look like and help kind of bring them to kind of consensus essentially. Yeah. It's quite often a, an illuminating process and it's, it's a part of the process I particularly enjoy because it's a chance for a business to get all that out on the table and discuss it. Yeah. And quite often, you know, everyone's busy doing their day jobs, things work the way that they work. Quite often the existing systems take up everybody's time just to keep them, the lights on, to keep them working. So it's kind of an opportunity for a business to, and all the stakeholders involved to take a step back and think about, is that the best way to do things? You know, why have we been doing that when we could do something different? Everyone in the room, typically when you have one of these sessions has got a, you know, they're very aware of what the problems are. 'cause they deal with 'em all day, every day. And I think it's almost quite therapeutic for people to have a forum to kind of air that Yeah. And see that it's being listened to and have a sort of solutions put forward for improving things. Yeah. And exactly. And, and then we bring to the table, obviously the experience we've seen in the, in the industry with other clients, what we know the Salesforce platform can really help with. Um, and yeah. And feed that in and, and, and help them arrive at that right. Kind of prioritization and roadmap and then play it back to them. And then that, that gives something of real value, I think.

922122972

So to why did you engage with Mint and what made us different? So, towards the end of last year, uh, I knew I wanted to move away from our current managed services provider, uh, just because there was sort of a changing focus. I was aware of Mint, um, because I'd worked with Sam Mince founder and CEO or back in 2014 when we first implemented Salesforce. And I think our paths have crossed and aligned, uh, you know, many times throughout those 10 years. I first contacted Sam, um, and I was kind of instantly, I guess, energized by like his vision for the company, what he wanted to achieve, getting the right people in place, et cetera. And then slowly as the team started to form, I recognized some faces from, um, you know, previous, uh, engagements I'd had, uh, on Salesforce projects. And I could see slowly Sam was building, you know, a pretty, uh, uh, killer team there with like years of knowledge and experience. So, so making the decision to switch to Mint was actually really easy. Um, the intro calls I had with the team prior to committing, um, gave me like amazing confidence that, you know, v VX was gonna be well looked after, and then kind of going on from there. The onboarding process was just, um, yeah, completely exceeded my expectations. So yeah, that was the, that was the decision really. It was Sam, the team and the, the energy and enthusiasm that, um, I could see from everybody that I was, uh, meeting with. If you, Of course you have the onboarding, uh, you know, from professional service to managed service, what about the engagement now with the managed service team? How do you find, Um, great. So I have, like I say, the weekly standups with you guys, but you know, I'm, I'm never limited to just that. Um, and then I have monthly one-to-one calls with my account manager at Mint. Um, so I speak with Dan. Um, we just have a quick catch up about, you know, is there anything, any feedback I've got for him? Um, is there, uh, anything that I'm not getting that I want? Um, all of those sort of things. And, but again, with Dan, I know I can call him whenever I need him, but honestly, um, I haven't needed him. Uh, the service has been amazing. I haven't had anything but positive feedback so far. So that's always, always a, you know, a, a plus. Um, and then we also have monthly business reviews as well, so that's with the wider team of Jack and, and the, with the technical team on the, on the PS side of things. Um, and that's, uh, sort of a deeper dive into let's look at the priorities that we set out at the beginning of the project or beginning of the year. Uh, where are we at? Let's look at our monthly, um, utilization of hours. Um, how are we getting on, is there any backlog cases, technical debt we can pick up, you know, make sure that we're fulfilling, fulfilling all the hours, uh, that sort of thing. So that's kind of like, yeah, a bit more of a, a business review, um, which has proved, um, you know, super useful. So we've, we've had a couple of those so far, far since I started three months ago with the Mi Mint team. And I think it just keeps me honest as well, you know, looking back at the priorities I set myself and have we reached them. And interestingly enough, I was looking at them just yesterday, and I think we had like five key objectives, um, that we set out at the beginning, and I think we just ticked off number two, and we're actively working on number three already, you know, three months in, that's not bad. So, um, yeah, so it, it's, it's been, it's been great. Um, I couldn't have asked for a better, um, experience so far.

949129460

Hi, Dan. Hi, ed. Nice to meet you both. As you know, I'm relatively new to Mint A Market. I can already see how Mint has always customer in mind. And that reflects on our five star CSAT survey as well. Customers raving about our industry expertise and Salesforce knowledge and experts that we bring in, both on the pre-sales on the delivery side. So Dan, you have wealth of sales experience. Um, you deal with different type of customers every day. Do you, do you have to deal with different customers differently? I think fundamentally the approach we always take is we're looking to make sure that we offer the customer the best chances of success. And that's across the board. Not just to one customer, not just to a different customer in a different industry. We want success across the board. So with that in mind, the approach we tend to take is always a customer driven first approach. And with that we always tackle these things with a similar kind of mindset where we're wanted to really understand what the customer's saying. We're really wanting to understand what the customer challenges are. We're really wanted to be empathetic with the customer in the way that they're seeing the world and the challenges that they have with the pressures that they have. Now, they might change between different organizations, but fundamentally the way that we want to approach it is very similar because ultimately we're all working towards the same goal of customer success. But that said, I know Ed, you've worked quite often in the client side of this. I have piece, I have indeed, Dan. Yeah, actually, yeah. For, for quite a long time before moving into consultancy, I was on the client side. Actually. It definitely gives me a, a, a a perspective and it makes me very determined that as, as Mint, you know, we are, um, going to be the kind of consultancy that I always wanted when I was on the client side, and I'm really pleased to see that happening. And, and what you were saying just then really resonates with me because when I was client side, I saw a lot of, uh, consultancy, uh, pitches, worked with a lot of different consultancies and projects. And a key thing for me was that the consultancy needed to, to listen to what I was trying to achieve. Um, obviously bring in their own expertise, uh, and put me straight, really easy to be put straight, but at least had that listening mode to start with so that we could get really clear on the, uh, objectives and that I could get comfortable that they were actually going to, um, kind of be tackling the right problem, I suppose, and applying their expertise in, in the right way to support what I needed. So yeah, really key what you're saying actually about, uh, about listening in, in the right way and um, and focusing on the particular client. And I think also added to that, it's from a sort of sales perspective, it's not just about going in and listening, it's about the preparation as well. I think behind that, of going in with a point of view, understanding the business model, understanding the market that they're operating in, understanding who you are speaking to as well. 'cause different stakeholders of course have different perspectives, I suppose, of procurement, for example, versus marketing team. And I think having that kind of view of going in understanding who you're speaking to really does help, Certainly. And, and consultancies will certainly have their own methodologies, uh, kind of tool toolboxes, I suppose tool, tool bags and things that they'll actually bring to the table. But if they haven't taken the time to understand the context, then they're not gonna be able to apply those methodologies and approaches in the right way for that particular client to, to meet their objectives. Right. So yeah, getting off, getting the relationship off to the, the right start certainly, uh, is, is absolutely key there. Then obviously we move into the delivery and, and Nathan, you are taking on that, uh, uh, delivery director role. And the client relationship is obviously something that is not just in a sales cycle, but something that continues right away through, uh, delivery and, and ongoing. Totally. And the thing that I can relate to is one of my recent car buying experience. I say a recent, but a story behind it. So few years ago I wanted to get myself a car. I, I picked up a, uh, a Mercedes car, which is nothing special, just a, a standard car. Now I had my share of bad car buying experience and I understand every industry is different, although the customer engagements I always challenge. It doesn't have to be right end of the day, for many people, buying a car is one of the biggest financial commitment or expense they're gonna do. So the experience someone goes through or buying a car doesn't have to be as bad as I had experience in the past. This car buying experience went by, like this car rang up the dealer, they took down my details. A few minutes later, I have a call from a knowledgeable person who doesn't, who didn't, who greeted me by name, didn't ask me what I wanted, instead went through the options or what I was interested in, challenged me on things which I thought was must-haves on my list. They made me realize, understand questioning in a right way to help me understand as a really a must haves for me. Long story short, we went through the details. I liked the car, and then a week later, me and the wife get down to the showroom to pick up the car. The handoff process was smooth. They again greeted us by name. When we left the showroom, they took a video of us. Um, and the thing that I import, like really very much in the pre-sales side of things is that the point, I made the call and the person actually called, called up to gimme the options of buying the car. He actually followed up with a personalized video. A camera pointed his face to say, Hey, my name is John, and put a face to the name. And he had a little walkthrough of the car. And at that kind of touched me when I bought this car. Um, and then the day after the transaction is over, I picked up the car, I drove it home. I had a call from this individual just to check in to see how I was getting on. Now look back, the thing that actually I really enjoyed in this transaction was they treated me equal as any other customer. It wasn't like I was buying exceptionally fancy Mercedes car. It was a normal standard car. But the experience I had, the way they treated me was standard. They treat, they made me feel important. The information they gathered was well utilized. They never challenged me or asked me the question more than once of anything that I have said in that process. And they never pushed me to buy something I didn't wanna buy. The options provided was very tactical and it made sense for me. The engagement journey was very smoother. And then the, the extent they, they went above and beyond to record a video to actually show the face of the person I was interacting with and showing me a car and a video. And I said to myself, let tell you what, they got themselves a loyal customer eight years later. I wanted to change my car, guess what I did? And went back to their same brand, right? And I got myself a different car from the same brand. And I want our customers to feel that and go through that, right? Different consultancy, different implementation, different projects, but the experience, they have never have to be different, right? They should always feel important, they should always be challenged in a right way. They should always be given options and they should always made fail, feel that they are under control, but for the right reasons. But also taking advice and, and expert guidance from consultancy like Mint. So that regular proactive communication, making sure the customer knows that they're being listened to, that's going to, uh, build a lot of confidence right. In the, uh, in the project. And it sounds like in your experience, you felt as a customer that your time was being used wisely, uh, and efficiently, uh, and that you were being listened to and, and that yeah. That obviously has really cemented that relationship from the sounds of it. I think that's a great ethos to bring into our delivery, uh, methodology here at at Mint. It really resonates a lot, Massively. I think it also resonates quite a lot because it shows consistency of communication from the initial conversation that I would potentially have with a customer going through the motions of understanding what are the challenges we're trying to solve and building the solution around that, and then presenting it back to the customer. That we have that continuity of communication. We're listening to them, we're understanding the problems, and we're putting ourselves in the shoes of the customer as well. And I think in that scenario that you've been in, it's almost like they've truly understood you as a person. It's not just, hi, this is Nathan who come to buy a car. This is hi, this is someone that we really want to work with and have a relationship with and obviously sell a car to. And it just shows that that's worked off really, really effectively by being transparent and showing trust and listening and communicating effectively and you become a loyal customer. I think that's pretty powerful. Yeah. Okay. I think for me, uh, a view on the, the customer relationship would be, it's, it's, you know, when we talk about the customers, a lot of people involved, right? Potentially on some of the big projects that we, that we work on. And it's not just a relationship with a person who, you know, signs off our invoices. It's actually all the way through the, the team, right? And it's how we run the, the, the standups with all the project team and the client project team people working together. Uh, and I think, and my role at Mint, the thing I I've loved hearing most is our clients give me the feedback saying that they really like working with the Mint team. Yeah. And they're hearing that feedback from their own project teams. Uh, and yeah, for me that's, you know, absolutely perfect. Yeah, I agree from my side as well, having regular phone calls with customers and cadences, I, I kind of always engage with customers in a way where I'm available twenty four seven, they can call me WhatsApp, email, whatever it is. And they feel really, really valued at the fact that they can continually communicate with us regardless. And I think that's really, really valued from a customer, especially early on as you're trying to build a relationship. 'cause it builds that trust. And once we've built that trust with us as a brand, then hopefully that consistently carries through projects and then leads to future work for us as well. And we continue building really cool solutions in the future. I've heard a couple of customers say this already actually, is that they don't see our team, uh, once we've got into the project, they stopped seeing us as Mint and they start just seeing our people as, as all as one team really. It's their own team. Uh, and that shows in the interactions. I think in the, with how the, the projects are run. People are not operating in kind of branded silos. It's just one team. Everybody knows what each other needs to do and the dependencies, uh, and how each team member needs to help the other team members, whether you are got the client brand or the Mint brand, you know, it doesn't matter. We're just working as one team. So when I hear from the customers that that's the impression that they're getting and that they see it working smoothly in that way and that their people are having an enjoyable experience working with Mint. And yeah, that, that for me means we're doing a really good job, Ties massively to the overall goal. Like going back to kind of what I mentioned at the start, what we want to do, I guess here is create success across for all of our customers that we work with and as well for ourselves. And I think that's the best way of doing it. Completely done.

949130088

Ni, great to see you. I'm delighted that you've joined Mint as delivery director. Thank you. Uh, And delivery obviously is just so critical to, to what we do. I mean, delivering successfully for our clients is, is really what we're all about and what we, what we love to do. Uh, as, so tell me from your perspective, what do you see as the, the key things that, uh, are needed for delivery success? It's a great question, ed. The key things for delivery success is first understanding the customer. The crucial part of why they intend to start the project first, the objective they set for themself and how that fit into the underlying business objective or the goal the entire business has. And digging deeper into what this difference this project could bring in by having those, putting those pieces together will set us in the right path. Right? I think so. Investing that time right at the start, really to make sure that those objectives are, are clear. Exactly. That. And if you, if you think about from a project delivery perspective, it starts not just from when you start a project, it actually starts way beyond before that. If you think about pre-sales, when you get to meet the client, understand the requirements, the amount of homework the customer has done, and the people we bring in to help customer to extract their understanding of their, ask their requirements, and also us as being industry experts and the experts in the Salesforce space to come up with a creative way to solve that problem for them. And also picture us in a way that can be broken down into smaller pieces, Right? So even before we've actually started that official engagement with the client, but making sure those, uh, the foundations and those prerequisites are, are all in place so that we know we can get off to the right start. Exactly. That the importance of requirement gathering is not just about asking the customer what they want to achieve. It goes way beyond that. If you think about our mint pre-sales methodology, for example, we just don't bring the salespeople in front of the customer to ask those questions. We bring in experts like solution architects. It not just help the customer to work with and see the experts. They're gonna be working with the project, but also what it does is provides a continuity for the project right from the beginning, from the requirement gathering stage to the point we deliver that solution to the customer. There's a level of continuity from what was discussed or decision was made all the way through, and what led to fine tuning, refining, or getting to a goal that makes more sense for the customer. Right. And that continuity from the pre-sales process into the delivery process must really help actually, nothing gets lost or dropped along the, the way Exactly that. And, and I've worked in many organizations in the past where you have clever people working on the sales front, asking all the clever questions, but very often that information never get transformed or flown through the delivery team. We, they may very well have a exactly superpower delivery team as equally powerful as a sales team. That disconnect could make a huge difference in a delivery front, right? The project success very much depends on the level of information and, and the information that we gather from stakeholders all the way through, not just from the delivery side, Right? So the people that are involved in those early client discussions are very invested in it. They know they're gonna be involved in overseeing the, the delivery and uh, uh, gonna be really keen to make sure that it is successful with the way that we've put this in place at Mint with our processes. We make sure that we're not gonna be in a situation where the project team is, is lost or, or not knowing what it is that they're actually trying to achieve and deliver, and not feeling that they've actually in inherited something that they don't own, in a sense. So yeah, that, that's a really key part, isn't it? So, uh, what, what are the other things that we do at Mentor need to do going forward to, uh, make sure that we, we deliver successfully? Of course, there are a few things comes to my mind. There's few things that I would call out is defining roles and responsibilities. For example, when we say roles and responsibilities, more often seen as a, a project task where when you start a project, you, you try and understand what roles need to be done, where recruiting the right people. Mm. To me it goes beyond that, right? Right. It's not just about roles and responsibility of the actual people directly involved from the min side, but also the roles and responsibility of the people from the customer side who also be involved in a project and the involvement of the customer. The project can also vary from throughout the project, from various milestones to various phase, but being transparent at the early stages to help customer understand what kind of roles they need to fulfill and how much of that be required at various stages of the project could make a huge difference. Oh, for sure. Yeah. I can see that is absolutely critical. And I know that we do, uh, work quite carefully with our, our clients to make sure that they understand what roles they need to actually fill in the project engagement, which I think, yeah, it's very good. It, it really gives the client the sense that we've gotta work together collaboratively to get to their end goal, otherwise the, the project won't work and it gives them good transparency and visibility on their own resourcing needs. Gives them a chance to plan. Exactly. You know, that yes, they may have take people outta the business for a time to actually deliver on the project. And knowing that upfront and not being surprised part partway through helps 'em go in with open eyes. Yes. Um, making sure they've got all that internal commitment from the stakeholders and the, the top level, uh, people sponsoring the, the program and make sure that they've got that, that buy-in. Right. You've been on the other side of this as well. I have. You've been on the customer side, but if you think about amount of times you've committed to do exciting project with a partner and people have day jobs and you have other commitments to fulfill while this exciting project is ongoing, correct? Absolutely. Absolutely. We, and we always have to remember that our, our clients, you know, they've got to keep their business running while they're working on these programs. And, um, their resource time is, is really key, really important. So we, we have to make sure that they, uh, are aware of the project commitment needed, uh, and they plan for this. And obviously we try to plan a project with them in a way that makes the most efficient use of their time as we can. Um, really important that we work together on that. 'cause it, it, it has to be a collaboration, it has to be one team, doesn't it? Uh, it, it's no use if one party struggles or, or fails on a particular area. 'cause then Absolutely. Right. That can bring the whole thing down. So, so working together absolutely. For success, You said right li it's, it's always the one team, the whole project team, customer and min side are working towards single success, which is the project or the program success. There might be various responsibilities, individual hold in a project, and they're certainly held against that responsibility. How we fulfill that role and how we fulfill that task. Our responsibility should always come as a joint task together, as it could very well be mint handholding the customer to fulfill something, a customer coming with their ways or working an approach for Min to carry out certain task in a project. Yeah, absolutely. And yeah, certainly we're so dependent on each other for the task. These projects are, are complex, right? Uh, a lot of people need to do a lot of things seamlessly together, supporting each other along that, that journey, uh, and getting that right and establishing that really clear communication between the, the teams just makes such a difference, doesn't it? Exactly. And actually makes it a more enjoyable experience, I think for people going through what can be pretty intensive. Exactly. Periods of project activity. Uh, the other thing that comes to my mind, which, which worth raising, uh, here is the training and the change management aspect of it. 'cause right, with us doing multiple transformation programs with the customer, more often we come across how some businesses, uh, from a client side may or may not have a dedicated team or a process in place to carry out that change management and the training aspect, which becomes vital for the use of our adoption. Right? If you think about the program or the project, the entire success of this is based on the objective set by the business at the beginning, the outcome the project's gonna bring forward. And with this in mind, if you don't deliver those training or the change management and the communication that goes with the change management on the right time, the user might not understand, fully understand the reasoning behind the change and the benefit is gonna bring it to them and the business. Right? And given the, the sums of money invested in the, the program, we need to make sure that it is adopted and, and well used and that those benefits are, are realized. Right. I think one of aspect I think it's worth touching on for the delivery management, I always feel is that scope is so vitally important. You've talked already quite a bit about the, uh, objectives and the importance of establishing the objectives upfront, front. And I guess that does help control the scope if people are more focused on what they're trying to achieve. Of Course. So having a focus scope, you're spot on in saying that is having a focus scope very much he helps the project team to define what the success could be. 'cause more often we have creative people working together to solve a problem, which is where the objective of a project's been born. But that could lead to adding more complexity or adding more features or functionality to a project which could easily derail or expand the project to beyond what the project could deliver in a shorter span where the customer could recognize accelerated time to value come to my mind when we talk about these things, focus scope means we are able to deliver something more, more value driven for a customer with a shorter time span. So customer could actually accelerate the, the time to value the, the, the return on the investment or a commitment they made to the business or to Salesforce. Perfect. So yeah, eyes on the prize working together to, uh, achieve that and working collaboratively to control that scope, making sure we don't veer off and then we get to that value realization much more quickly together. Exactly That.

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Jackie, uh, we, we find ourselves, uh, working on a, a, a lot of, uh, major systems, implementation projects, supporting quite significant business transformations, uh, in, in some cases, in many cases, change management is often a, a, a key theme. So what's change management all about? Yeah. So you can have, um, the best system in the world, but without, you know, people engaged with it and adopting it, then it, it's almost useless. So it's really important at the very start to get the change piece right. So, um, yeah, it's vital to the success of a project really to bring people on board, get them engaged and bring them on in the journey with you. Right? Yeah, completely. I mean, companies are investing large sums of money in these, uh, implementations and, uh, yeah, I guess if the business users are not embracing it and adopting it and trying to persist in old ways of, of working without using the, the, the best capabilities of the new platform, then you, you're right, there's gonna be no business value there. The kinds of scenarios that we, we come across, I suppose it, it's not just a case of, uh, the top executives like telling the people in the organization that they have to change. I guess that's probably not going to work, right? Not in its own anyway. Yeah, exactly. You wanna engage people right from the start. So it, it oftentimes it's going to be a massive change. Different user groups will have different changes, um, put upon them. So we really wanna engage those people, make sure that they're aware of what's happening. They, we want to, um, you know, make sure that those that might feel a bit resistant to change, a little bit nervous about the change, really feel as comfortable as possible with that. Um, and yeah, so they get the most out of it. Right. And I suppose we, we do encounter, I think we can probably both think of, uh, projects and, and scenarios where we have had some of the business users maybe being more keen on the change than than others. Typically, I suppose with our, the, the CRM type implementations, you might have salespeople that have been used to working, uh, on their own, largely perhaps keeping their own notes. And it's quite a big change for them to actually follow a standard process perhaps, and work on the same system, collaborating with other people in, in ways that they haven't been used to before. As, as one example of, of change that we come across. Yeah, definitely. Um, there's different, you know, we've seen projects where people have been using spreadsheets and things, right? So having, having a CRM is an exciting change and, and there's obvious benefits to them, but in some other projects we've had people, um, or companies that, you know, some parts of the business are really happy with the way they're doing things and they see this change as a bit of a, um, maybe a, a step backwards potentially. Um, but what we, you know, always try and do is there are benefits for everyone. We want to show what's in it for them. So, you know, really highlight, um, what are you getting out of this project? So for your role, for your, um, business sector, what are the benefits of this change? So it might be things like, um, you know, the automated processes, things that were manual before will be more automated, a 360 degree view of a client, um, or their interactions with the company. So each user group, there will definitely be benefits with the change that's coming. So we wanna really point those out. Right. That's a, yeah, a really good point. Obviously if the, if anyone can, can really understand and, and see what the new implementation, what the change will mean for them and what they'll get out of it. And also, I suppose having visibility of what their colleagues are gonna get out of it. Uh, and the organization as a whole, that's, that's got to help with the motivation, uh, I suppose, yeah. Uh, for, for people to, to bring on the new system. So yeah, it, it, that does feel like it's, it's worthwhile a company investing some time and effort into actually working all that through and planning that, that, that all out, right? Yeah, there is, um, we recently did a session with a client where we did a bit of a brainstorm about how, um, how to approach change management. So we sort of brainstormed who's gonna be impacted. So a bit of an impact assessment, so right, what user groups are going to be impacted, how are they going to be impacted, and what do we need to, um, communicate with them to make sure that impact is, um, is lessened so, or explained appropriately. So things like, are there clients that are going to see different invoices, those sorts of things. Um, is marketing going to be doing something slightly different? Who do we need to communicate with? How are we going to communicate with them? Um, and what do we need to say and when so that, that transition is as smooth as possible. So you started with, uh, working out what the, the, the impact of the change would be and how that would be, and then how did that then evolve through the session? Did you start working on strategies to address those points and Yeah, we, um, sort of some activities that, uh, could help with that. So stakeholder assessment. So who needs to be communicating with these people? Sometimes it might be a organizational communication, so it goes out to the whole organization. Sometimes it might be by user group, so the marketing department, you know, specific communications to them. Uh, it might be client, you know, um, a client change. So we're communicating with them in bulk. And then maybe an individual account manager might follow up with those clients to talk about specific changes to them and when they might come about. Uh, we talked about, um, adoption metrics. So actually after all, we, we've done all this and we've implemented the change, how are we going to know it's been successful? So, um, how do we know the users have adopted the system? How do we know that they're engaging with it after it's been implemented? Um, you can do some really fun things. So I've seen clients that have had competitions where, um, you know, six months before it's rolled out, can you name the system? We're gonna call our new system something, what's the name going to be? Um, we've seen customers that have developed posters and put them up like superheroes, system superheroes and things, which are really fun. Yeah, that's nice. Engaging them in the process and, and building excitement and, and helping people participate and build excitement for their colleagues potentially and help drive the communication. Yeah, that, that's, that's nice. I can see how that could be really, uh, effective because I think, uh, often change management is bandied around quite often as a slightly nebulous concept. There's quite a bit of mystique around it, I think. But actually the way you're describing that, that brainstorm real tangible activities are starting to come out that I could see could be put into a quite a structured plan of attack. I think it's all about, um, letting people know what they need to know at the right time. So they are part of the journey. Nothing's being thrown on them as a surprise. They know their role in the journey and yeah, they know it at the right time. Yeah. Perfect. So that helps break down the barriers, I suppose. Uh, avoid the, uh, you know, the, the fear of the unknown. I, I suppose, and the suspicion that people might have if they know that change is coming, but they're not sure what it's about or it might affect them. So that communication must be really vital. Uh, and it's not a, like a one-off, one-time piece of communication. Is it, it would go right the way through the project cycle and start quite early, I guess. Absolutely. So yeah, making sure that the communication plan is across the project, like you said, and it's varied, so not everyone gets the same communication 'cause that get, that can easily be overloaded. You know, every week we have a communication that goes out. Um, it needs to be varied. It needs to be sometimes targeted to specific groups, sometimes to the whole org. Um, yeah, a real thought needs to go into how we communicate when and with who I think. Right. Okay. That's great. So that's a nice example and from of where Mint is helping the client to actually kind of demystify change and get some, a real tangible plan together that can be followed through to really make sure that they get success outta the, outta the program that they've embarked on. Yeah, Absolutely. Mm-hmm.

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Sam, you are nine months into Mint. Tell me about the culture. Tell me what you're trying to build here. Good question. Uh, so the culture at Mint, I think the values we're trying to build are honesty, integrity, uh, trust is a big word for us because clearly our clients need to trust us. Um, but really I think it's built on teamwork and the collaboration in the team. We're an amazing team now. The team's doubled in size since we launched the company in October. Um, so we're not a big team. We're 17 people I think now. Um, but those, I guess personality traits are right across all the individuals that we've got. And I think that is the sum of the team, if you like. Um, so I think we're building something amazing. We've got the right core. The challenge obviously is with scale is can we keep those values and that culture? Um, probably challenge number one, um, is we've got an amazing team now, right? The team's doubled since we started the company in October. Thank you very much. Yes, thank you. Um, but I guess as we grow and we find these like individuals with their own experience and expertise, I guess it's allowing them to do what they're really good at and trust people, um, to be the best that they can and be part of that team. And it's all about, you know, in the bigger projects when you're in Project Land about pulling in the same direction and trying to deliver successfully, I guess, for the customer, which like I said before is that's what's gonna make us successful. But I think the challenge lies with you, right? You are gonna be the person that's meeting these awesome people coming to work with us and we're gonna probably double or triple the company in the next year. So that's, I don't know, another 20 people that you're gonna find 25 people. Sure. Yeah. So how are you Lou, on camera? Gonna do that for me. Um, I stick to the plan. I'm looking for experienced people. Yeah. And obviously professional credibility goes without saying. Yeah. But fundamentally, when I first meet somebody on screen or in person, do I wanna sit next to 'em at a dinner party? I've a glass of wine with them. That's it. Down. That's the acid test. That is the acid test folks. Can you have a glass of wine with Lou? Yeah. That's a big yes.

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Hi, ed. Hello. Hi. Uh, so I just spoke to Sam about the highlights of, of the last year Mm-Hmm. Um, at Mint Consulting. And, and I thought operationally it'd be good to get your perspective on how we have grown, uh, over the last 10 months. Last 10 months, we have, uh, been a, a blur gone by, uh, very quickly. But yeah, a lot has happened in that time. Uh, and I think highlights for me must be the lovely customer feedback that we've had from some of the work that we've done and, and delivered for them, which has been great. Very gratifying. Uh, a lot of work obviously went in from a lot of people to make that a reality and make that happen. Uh, thinking back to when we started it, it started with quite a bit of preparation work up front for the, the first few weeks, certainly we, we made sure that we put in place robust policies, procedures, our internal systems, uh, we know obviously very important for our own operational running, but also really important for our clients as well, to know that they're working with, uh, a company such as ourselves that, that has these things in place that takes things like information security, seriously, that treat our staff in the, in the right way, and have all sorts of, um, policies that underpin that. And we have those foundations there, uh, and they're, they're interested in to know that, that we have all those things in place when they talk to us. So we did put quite a bit of emphasis on, on getting that ready and then building our internal collateral. Uh, we had a lot of experienced people, as, you know, join the team, uh, happily. So making sure that we, we used that, uh, and documented our approach, our methodology, uh, that we assembled the, the right frameworks and, and slide where so that we could go in and hit the ground running essentially when we got our first client engagements, which now I think back, uh, came up very quickly. Yeah, no, it did. Absolutely. And obviously the, the team is growing rapidly Yes. Much faster than, than any of us ever imagine. So how do you see us changing operationally as we grow? Great question. Uh, so you, you're right, it has grown very fast. Uh, we had got the right foundations in place and the right model, I think, to enable us to, to manage that and to, to deal with that. And it's worked very well for us. I mean, assembling the, the core team and then making sure that we worked with, uh, our partners as you know, uh, our friends in India that we've worked with for, you know, a good number of years now, and already have a, a really strong relationship and, and, and mutual trust and, and understanding and, and compatible ways of working. So, uh, having all that in place and figuring out how we would configure our project models to use the, the best from the people that we had in the immediate team and from our, our partners, has been really instrumental in enabling us to take on some, you know, some quite meaty, uh, pieces of work. So I think we'll, uh, moving forward, we're definitely going to build on that, uh, and grow on that. Uh, we don't, so we've got a model that is working very well. We don't wanna rest on our laurels. We certainly place a lot of stock in continuous improvement, doing retrospectives, making sure we, we learn anything that we can take from the experience that we're getting on, on all the projects that we're doing at any one time, uh, and that we just feed that back in. Yeah. And just make sure we're learning, growing, improving as, as we go. Yeah. Yeah. That continuous improvement piece is really important, I think. For sure, for sure. Bit of a bit of a personal question. Sure. What has it meant for you to be at Mint? Obviously you've got a very, very impressive career and, uh, for you, obviously you are a, you're a day Warner as well. How do you Yeah. How has it made you feel so far? I, I, I, I get emotional at this point. Uh, it's meant, it's meant a lot, a lot. Uh, it really has to me, uh, personally for sure. I think the key thing, uh, I suppose, 'cause I, I'd worked, I talked about before, I've worked client side before going into consultancy. Uh, so having that real opportunity to build on that background, what I learned on the client side, and also what, what I, I learned along the way on the consultancy side, working with a lot of great people, is that now I'm getting to put into practice what I always felt would be the right way for a consultancy to act and deliver services to a client. Yeah. If you see what I mean. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And being able to work with, you know, like-minded people to, to put that in place in the way we want to put it in place. That, that's, that's meant everything. Yeah. Brilliant. Thank you, ed. Yeah. Thank you.

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So, Sam Joyce Vanner and CEO of Mint Consulting. Uh, we are here at our kickoff today with everyone from, from Mint, new and old, uh, relatively speaking. Mm-Hmm. And, uh, you were reeling off some stats about highlights from the last Yeah. Nine, 10 months, um, since we launched in October. Um, talk to me a little bit about those stats. Yeah, so we started the meeting, well, today's FY 25 kickoff. Uh, our financial year runs from July. I founded the company in July last year. You were employee number one in October, which is Ace, uh, followed by Ed and Rich and a few more of the core teams. So really we're operational by November, so eight months. Um, clearly like any business and we always have as our clients, we have metrics that we wanted to try and record our success or failure or learnings and what have you. Um, so the FY 24 highlights was, you know, here's some things that we set out to do, how have we, uh, performed, but also other things that were a bit of a surprise along the way. Um, so that the, obviously the headline, you know, fiscal targets were over 200% of our bookings number. Uh, we've beaten our revenue target, so financially we're on an amazing trajectory, um, which in itself is a success. Um, but it's the other stuff. Um, it's the other stuff that's like really cool as well. So in the room today, I think we're at 19 people head count now for employees at, at Mint. Last year when we did this in November, there was eight of us. Yeah. Um, adding to that, the fact that we work closely with a delivery partner in India and one in Europe, uh, head count now on projects, essentially on mint payroll is 45. So after eight and nine months of trading, um, you know, successfully delivering some big programs of work now that's just awesome. And our culture's there as well. The core team, you know, we all, we all, we all gel really well. That gives me an immense amount of satisfaction. You as well. 'cause we, we used to talk about this a lot I think as well. We, we, last year we were able to fill Dunston just about this year we're at over capacity. Yeah. We filled the local hotel as well And local hotel. Yeah. And next year we're gonna Vegas. Right. Maybe just about, um, but, you know, head, head count and, and fiscal targets. Awesome. So really, really just kind of pinch yourself moment really. Is that, Is that what it means to you? Yeah, I mean that, that's one of the things, one of the big moments was winning the award Rising Star at Salesforce, and that's Salesforce recognizing the work that we're doing. So working closely with their teams, successfully, working with clients, getting CSAT that we've got five star only reviews now. Yeah. That is, um, that's awesome. Right? That's really, really, uh, I don't, I don't know. I mean, it's again, when we won that award, you, you were, were with her. There were four of us, weren't there? The awards evening, um, what a moment. Yeah, it's quite emotional really. Yeah. Um, well it was a massive stake in the ground. We are here, we are making an impact. Yeah. And what did they do? I think they give eight or nine awards away, and we got one of them. But, you know, been the shop's been open for six or seven months, so like Wow. Yeah. You work in alliances, you work closely with Salesforce. We've moved up now with Rich Partners. Yeah. That was a goal for FY 25. Yeah. Uh, and we did it in Q4 of FY 24. Yeah. Um, our partners are in India and Portugal. The guys in India we work really close with. It's, it's all, I had a call with the two guys that owned that business, uh, week before last. And they're, they're like a part of our team. Mm-Hmm. They, so, you know, it's the extended Mint team. That's how they're looking at it now as well. The majority of their, their team are working on Mint projects. Yeah. That's another massive accomplishment. Yeah. Um, and then operationally, you know, when Ed joined just after you, we set about setting up Salesforce and our finance system and Precursive to manage our team, time ed and his policies. And you know, by Christmas we were a mature company that is just weeks old. Mm. It's awesome. And we've gone through all these procurement processes with our clients, uh, and, and you know, we we're getting through them because we are geared up to deliver successful projects for our clients. And all these things are just, you know, milestones. I remember me and you talking about it loads. There's gonna be all these things that we're gonna do and achieve. Uh, so reading back through through that slide is a bit emotional for me Is awesome. Yeah. Yeah. Ffy 25. Well, Yeah. So obviously this is, this is, uh, our first proper kickoff. We're going into our first proper full, full fiscal year. Yeah. Year as of this month. Yeah. What, what do you see as for Our future? So, uh, fiscal targets we've increased. So our investors are very happy, especially if we hit them. I'm confident we will. Um, our headcount will probably be about 70 to 80 people at the end of the year and 12 months from now. That's awesome. Yeah. Uh, for a company that's, you know, traded for just over a year and a half, um, I dunno if we'll win more awards, but my ego would like it if we did. Yeah. Um, and you are doing amazing. You know, the brand I think is really well received in the market. People talk about Mint, like we've been around for a few years now. That's astonishing. It's really cool. Um, and, and all the team are loving it. You know, Karen was talking earlier about how much she just loves working at Mint and, and the team I think have really, um, just jelled and there's, there's already, I feel like there's already a way of working that's very mature for a company that's just entering its second year. So it's just what a journey. We've also not had to fight many fires. Not yet. Touch wood, which, which let's, let's hope we don't. Yeah. Uh, but again, that comes with experience, right? Yeah. We know the things that we need to look out for and we're looking out for them and we're trying to do it. Well, yeah. We're a new organization, but we're not a new team. Exactly. Exactly.

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