Jon Cline, who joins to talk about the People First Method, is a Salesforce architect and soft-skill coach.
Main Points
- Why projects fail and what can help solve the problem?
- The intangibles in Salesforce technical projects
- Examples where soft skills can turn into hard money by making projects more successful.
Links
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Transcript
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[00:13] Hello everyone. This is Xi Xiao. This is yet a new episode of Salesforce Way Podcast. Today I'm sitting with a new guest. His name is John Klein. Hello, John. Hello, Xi. Nice, nice to see you again. See you again. Yeah, it's been quite a long while. So, John, would you like to quickly introduce yourself? My pleasure. So, I like to say I was born at a very young age, but only some people laugh at that joke. But I I have about 24 years in the Salesforce ecosystem. I started out as a customer back in 2003. I became a a consultant in 2008. And now have fourteen certs. I've worked on over a thousand projects, and I have gained a lot of insight into kind of the the nuts and bolts of being a consultant and being in the weeds with technical projects. So happy to be here. Thanks, thanks. Is it a real number over a thousand projects? It's a real number. Okay, that's a huge of our experience. So I heard you have a a coaching courses, right? So it's more around the people skills. Would you like to open that up a bit? Yeah, I think I mean I think the inception will help people understand the context of this. You know, I when I became a consultant in '08, I was an individual contributor, right? I was working for another consulting company
[01:43] and. I noticed very quickly because prior to that I was a Salesforce customer, right? And so I noticed very quickly that I had a slightly different perspective when I would get into projects. Like when I was on a team, we'd be working on a particular problem. We'd go into, let's say, for example, a discovery call. And I would always have a slightly different set of high priority questions than the other people in the meeting, and I thought that was interesting. For example, my questions I might go in where other people, let's say, we're talking about Salesforce Cloud project, and they're talking about products and they're talking about pricing, and and I wanted to go in and I wanted to talk about. Culture and values. I wanted to talk about what kind of incentives does the business want to build out to motivate the right behaviors and sales motions inside the platform. And I just found that that was interesting that people didn't ask these questions because I find them to be actually much more important than the semantic data about what are their product names and prices and things like that. Because if we don't get the if we don't get the incentives right. In the sales process, then there's a lot of unhappy customers, and there's a lot of you know boundary jumping and nefarious things that can happen on the sales team because the money motivation is so significant. So, using that example. I also saw projects that didn't go great. You know, I saw
[03:14] large projects within the public media space that I was working on, for example, that that weren't going well. And the primary reason wasn't because we we didn't have our technical chops in order. The primary reasons was because communication was breaking down significantly. We were not asking the right questions in some of these calls to actually surface the risks in the project, and. So, taking that information, as I started to build my own practice, I was essentially had a decision to make: Do I want to hire people who already know Salesforce, who already know this business? And just by the nature of my business at the time, I really couldn't afford to get people who were already experienced, and I was a little bit suspicious of that because the people who were already experienced typically focused on the more mainstream, standard discovery questions and priorities in a project, which I was a little bit suspicious of because I saw where that has gone. And I started to do a little research as well, seeing the impact on that with regular, you know, other tech projects that Salesforce just inherits from. So because of that, I started to consider, well, what if I got someone, for example, one of my first team members, I found on a volleyball court. I was playing sports. I found that he was really good under pressure, that he didn't react poorly to the other team, even when they said you know rude things to him
[04:44] in the context of a game, and so he and he had a little technical skill because he was doing some social media marketing. And so I asked him if he'd like to learn Salesforce, and he said sure. And so he became essentially my first test. And so what I did is I said, I wonder if I can take him from not knowing anything about Salesforce, and train him on the intangibles first. Of course, backstop him and teach him Salesforce and such. We didn't have Trailhead at the time, and so I would just kind of share anecdotes of how to do things, and then I would teach him the intangibles: how to ask good questions, how to spot risks, how to create artifacts and avoid vaporware, how to make his work visible and valuable to the client, how to tell a story with a demo. All of these aspects. And he became a really solid consultant within six months, and today he actually is on staff at Salesforce as a solution engineer. Ah, okay. So that was the inception, and so that was kind of my the beginnings of this. And I thought I actually like this better when I don't have to ask someone to unlearn what they've gotten used to, because a lot of people in the Salesforce world, in the they they can kind of they can cut corners. They can do things. For example, if you've been on a consulting project, how many consulting projects actually focus on documentation? As a core part of their delivery,
[06:15] I mean you laugh because most people they it's an afterthought. Like I only give documentation as part of my project if the client specifically asked for it. Which I think is so dangerous and is such a poor delivery to the client because how are we enabling them for reentry when we pass the project over to them and maybe they get a new staff person, maybe they don't look at that particular feature for six months and now they want to reenter and figure out okay what were we doing here and what was the reasons why. Well, now the org isn't that self-descriptive to be able to put together and stitch a story across five, seven different. Components. I'm using a little Apex. I have a little, you know, listener for a web service. I have some flow. I have some objects, you know, fields. I have some reports. I have some list views. I mean, you're going to expect them to draw all that together by themselves and figure out the story that we were intending to tell with this particular process. So that's one example. And I wanted to do things differently, primarily because I wanted to move the needle on, on making projects more successful. Hmm. So, John, you started to say there are some intangible features or points in the project, and a lot of team members didn't focus on that, or even was not even aware of those things. But you thought it's very important, and you focused on those. You even pulled your first
[07:46] member in the company that to to train him as like a new piece of paper who has no Salesforce background at all, right? So you tested with that, and then you also mentioned the. A project needs documentation, but that sounds like a different angle. Is it like something other than the intangible? Is it? I would still. I think you're right in the sense that it turns into a. It turns into a tangible aspect, right? That's an artifact, as I would call it. But the reason I think it's relevant is it focuses on solving a clear intangible problem. So the the work inside Salesforce is the is the solution, like the tangible solution to people. I need I have a process in Sales Cloud that I delivered in the app. That's what the client looks at. The intangible problem is how do we enable the client to clearly understand what the reasoning was? The reasoning was why we deliver this solution the way that we did. Some of the trade-offs that we made, so they can consider other options that we contemplated but intentionally declined. And enables them to support it on a long term basis by recognizing they have a reference they can go back to. They can drop it into Notebook LM. They can actually you know leverage AI to quickly understand what are we doing with this particular feature set across my solution design. That's an intangible problem we're solving in the competence and confidence of the client stakeholder. And that's why I
[09:16] highlight it as an example is because we have to include the intangible needs of the client in our scope of what we're supposed to deliver in order to be successful. Because if a client doesn't understand clearly what's happening and what they've received, it's difficult for them to accept what it is, and therefore it's also difficult for them to to pay. For what they've received, because they don't comprehend it, so they end up paying invoices because they trust you. But if that trust ever breaks down, or that staff person moves on and another one comes in, and they start asking, "Hey, we've paid half of this project over fifty thousand dollars. What do we have to show for it?" And now it becomes a more difficult story to tell that new person of what we delivered. Have we delivered fifty percent of the project? And it goes beyond that. In order to get to that point of understanding what the client needs, let's just take a typical conference room conversation. Okay. We come into the meeting. There's ten people at the table. Okay, great. You know, there's the CEO, the VP. Okay, great. The first question to ask ourselves as a consultant is, what's what's been happening in this business and at this table before I ever got here. Right, that's like the homework you should have been done, even
[10:46] right. Yes, but I actually don't. I I don't find that people ask that question. The homework they do is they go online, they learn maybe what is the business, what what are the products? You know, the five P's are what I've been told, right? So you look at like who are the who are the people, like what are their roles on LinkedIn? What's the product they sell? What's the process by which they sell it? What's the profit? How do they make their money? Right, and then the five P can be a variety of things. I tend to use what's the politics, which is an intangibles questions. So, for example, if I'm in that meeting, and let's say I ask a question that says, "How do you guys like your salespeople?" You know, to keep track of what they're doing. Basic question. It's a process question. Now, let's take two scenarios. Let's say, for example, I'm in that call, and the person who tried to do the Salesforce project and failed, and cost the company over a hundred thousand dollars in failed time and effort across his team, he's sitting at the table. He's there, and he doesn't like the fact that I'm here because he wanted to finish. And what's the potential that he possibly has sabotage on his mind? Ma could be high, right? Definitely fifty fifty. And there's another other a couple other mountains. What if, like for example, the person that he works with, who knows about all
[12:16] the product details and works with the customer every day, but her title is called office manager, and so she's not very respected inside the organization. And so, before I got there, she's been mocked because she manages everything in this crazy spreadsheet with lots of colors. But she gets the job done, and she figures out how to serve the client. These are all things. There's numerous other examples of this. You know, the new CIO could have just been hired a week before I got there. We don't always know. And so these these motivations and these incentives and these internal political battles they actually matter because when I ask a question, it's not just empirical facts that people are giving me. They all have agendas and motivations about what they say and what they don't say, and in fact, who they invite to the table and who they didn't invite to the table. Because there might be people that are really, really critical to my success in this project, who were not even at the table. Right, I need to find out who they are. And I need to figure out how I get what they have, because they're the ones who are closest to the customer, and the pie in the sky ideas that one executive is going to give me, and the pet projects that another one is going to give me, and the. Subversive, sabotage-oriented direction that another person is going to give me. I better know how to sort all that out because I can't take everything at face value. Because unfortunately, these are people and they have motivations
[13:47] that go far beyond my motivation of just being successful in this project. And if I don't have the lens, To be able to look out in a people first way, to recognize that not everything I receive is signal. Some of it is noise. Some of it is actually not intended to be helpful. Some of it is actually because they want to use me as a pawn to get back to them because they should be right, not them. And they want to make sure and use me to publicly humiliate them in the meeting. I I thanks John. I think you have given a really good example, and this is something. For myself, I I need to keep practicing and remind myself because I understand what you said. There are all these people. They have their background. They have their incentives. They might hide some information from you for one reason or another, right? Which could be critical for you. But there was so much this hidden information around you in that new company you are going in. That's like dimensions of different information. How you can't pull all the information. You can't prepare everything. Ah, perfect, right? Yeah. So, so do you have like patterns to extract as much as information in your people first course? Or how do you do that? Yeah, it's a very good point because we're talking about kind of the depth of human experience, right? There's a lot there. Yeah. the The amazing thing though
[15:17] is there there tends to be a snowball effect. That you can create. So think about it like you know, it's like layers, you know, like a or like a target, like a concentric circle, right? So you start on the outside, and as soon as people start to recognize that you're paying attention to these things on the outside, they tend to invite you one more ring in, one more ring in. So here's an example. Let's say you've asked everybody in the in that same meeting. Prior to this, you have a solution design document that you're using as a collaboration device now, not just for the purpose of providing it to the client as part of the delivery. But you know that there's some people who won't share what they want to share in that meeting because somebody's going to interrupt them. Somebody's gonna have some snarky, sarcastic remark about like, oh my gosh, I can't even believe we still do that, and they're gonna get embarrassed. So they're not gonna say anything if they're if they're even at that meeting, or they possibly weren't even present at the meeting. So the solution design doc is an artifact that we can use and provide ahead of time to a larger group of the team. And say, hey, any topic that you think is relevant here, I have a table of contents I've already put together. I'd love for you to add comments, to add a couple sentences. They might have. Added some detail to say, well, one thing that's unique about our products is that we don't actually have a fixed price. We work on a sliding scale depending on the industry
[16:48] and the volume and the income margins of the company. Okay, great, that's really important information. And so I've been managing it in this spreadsheet with all these formulas and blah blah blah. And here it is. So let's say I see that. And that person's going to be in the meeting, and I'm. We've gone fifteen, twenty minutes in the meeting, and that person has never talked during the meeting. I've done my homework. I saw the artifact before, so now I specifically say, "Well, I appreciate the team. I don't want to call them out yet, but I appreciate the team sharing with me that in the solution design doc that you guys have a very unique pricing model, that you price on a sliding scale, and that your price is relative to the industry and blah blah blah. And I have a few questions about that. Can we discuss that? So first of all, I want you to think about how does let's say this was the office manager. She added that detail. How does she feel right now? The fact that she yeah she spent a little bit of time investing in that document, and I spent time going through what she did, preparing questions, and now I'm raising the issue. Appreciated, right? Appreciates. She feels she feels appreciated, recognized. She feels seen, probably in a way that her own peers in the business may not recognize her. Especially the executives because sometimes they just have a perspective about people lower on the hierarchy, and they don't respect that role as much. Okay, so now she's starting
[18:18] to feel like, and now she raises her hand. Well, I can I can share more information about that. Oh, thank you, please. Okay, so now we're having a conversation. Now, what about the other people at that table who were also quiet and haven't raised their voice because usually when they do it, they get interrupted by the highest paid person's opinion, and so they don't get to share. How do they feel now that I'm recognizing the office manager and giving her space? They get encouraged. They feel encouraged. Yes, they're like, "Hey, this person might operate differently." Than what I'm used to in this business, and so the the beginning starts to it starts to be contagious where people are like I like that, I like being recognized, I like seeing that my information actually counts, and so this is a rinse and repeat process that you start of slowly doing, and then we might change venue to say okay after the meeting's done, they come up to us at the end and say I I have a few more things I can share with you, maybe we can schedule a one on one and I'll give you a reverse demo. Perfect. That's an invitation to an inner ring, right? Closer to that idea of transparency, vulnerability, where she can actually share all the scabs, the wounds, the bruises inside the business. Because I also need to know those things if I'm going to succeed. So the key here is if I go in. To this meeting, with what my Trailhead training has given me, right, with what my
[19:48] technical background is given me, I'm focused on the product. I'm focused on Salesforce, on fields, on flows, on automations, on on reports, right, on all these elements. But I I I miss the cues to recognize that I mean how often have you been in a meeting and there's people at the table who have never said anything and the issue was never raised and they were never engaged. Many times, many times, and the question is like, why were they at the meeting if they had nothing to contribute? And I believe they did have something to contribute. It's just that no one actually had the skill to get them able to contribute. Right, right. I totally agree, and also this is one of the important parts in this podcast is the soft skills. I'm really glad that you have the course. You you tend to help people to really learn all these things, and I guess these are from your experience, right? You they are from my yes. Hmm. And they are from experience. Brief us, like, like what this course is about. Thanks for all the introductions. I I understand it's really important, but I'm also interested in. Hey, if I join the course, what can I learn from that? Sure. Yeah. So the course the course is organized into 24 separate vignettes. Right, so essentially, has they're like, you know, they're like little classes, right? So, and essentially, what they focus on is in the in
[21:18] the middle, we have seven artifacts. Right, so the middle of the program are the seven artifacts, things like the solution design document, a test plan workbook. These are aspects where this is how you make your work visible and valuable to people. This is the result of your work, both technical and intangible, working together. And then I I wrap that with the beginning of the course is talking about right the vital role of culture and values, how to put on a people first lens before you go into that meeting. And then the second, like the third set. So the middle is the artifacts. What do we need to produce to protect our work, to ensure it, to make it easy for people to come in and out, to recognize what's happening, and to provide a complete delivery to the client. The first half is how do we smoke out and turn on that lens, and really what I'm trying to convey there in the first part as well is you know how to be consultative, not compliant. For example, how to deal with another vignette is how to deal with very very improper requests that people make of you. I want you to do this. I want you to do it this weekend. I don't want to pay for it. We already talked about it. Get it done. Right? How do you deal with that? It's called. This is what I can do because people aren't used to saying to hearing no, and so we have to find a way to say no by saying yes. And so I give them a strategy and a formula to do that. So this is the key in the beginning. Then we have the artifacts, and then afterwards are more sophisticated ways
[22:48] of actually, for example, turning chaos into compliments. Where you can take that crazy spreadsheet that has all kinds of crazy colors and formulas that people are using to get the job done, and turn it into a massive incentive device. Where you recognize the effort, the impact, and the hard work that someone has done in doing this to to receive you know to do what the customer needs and to achieve the brand promise of the business, without saying what many people would say, oh that is so crazy, I can't believe you guys are doing that, like like we're just gonna rip that out and replace it with Salesforce. We forget that that's a human endeavor. Someone has invested hours and hours and hours, maybe weeks and months of their lives, investing in that. Tool and even though it looks crazy to you and me, it's very important to derive all of the benefit we can out of it, rather than denigrating it and discarding it as though it's worthless, which I've seen a lot in the technical world. Right. So I teach people how to do these things and how to stop doing. Things that they're doing today that actually discourage this incentive of people being honest and transparent and vulnerable in that meeting. I'm actually sharing really important, but. Challenging things with you as the consultant or as the stakeholder, so that's kind of the the those are the examples of what you learn and what I'm what I really want people to recognize is that most people think soft skills. Are like
[24:18] natural talent. Like I'm not a professional football or baseball player because I don't have that kind of natural born talent. And they think that the same thing is true about whether I can facilitate a meeting, whether I'm a public speaker, whether I'm the one who does the solution design. In some cases, people just think I I don't have that talent, and so I defer to other people. And what I want to share with people is it's not only a talent. Yes, some people have talent, but they also become lazy with their talent, and they don't refine it, and they don't become better. You talk to many coaches, and they'll say if I have two players and one has talent, and one is willing to give effort, I'll take the guy or gal who gives me effort and work any day of the week over the person who has natural talent. And this is what we can do. We can actually grow and become dynamic, transformative, and uber powerful with our people-first skills by approaching it like it's a skill. Right, and I can work on it, and I can learn to say, "Okay, I can do that better." I can learn how to take the anxiety that I feel in my brain and flip it to enthusiasm. That's one of our third set courses, our vignettes, and I can recognize that my behavior shows the client what I. Feel, not my feelings themselves. So I now have control to convey the confidence,
[25:48] the patience, and the command of the meeting. No matter what I feel inside, whether I feel like I'm I should be here or not, imposter syndrome, whatever it might be, there are specific ways to train. To become commanding, even when I feel maybe a little bit scared in the moment. So that's what I'm trying to help people. Is I want to turn them into powerful people first individuals with a specific method. That is step by step and cumulative. They all build on each other. Thanks, John. I think you have already gave me a really good, not even an introduction, maybe a overview of the course content about. So, the people first method. Where can we find more information? Yeah, you can go to you can go to peoplefirstmethod dot com. And we have we have a few free items that people can dig into. Right, so there's a there's an item they can get a we'll put I'll send you the link you can put in the show notes. But there's a soft skills equals hard money guide which is free. So it helps people recognize how these soft skills not only help them bring more success to these projects and to their customers, but actually help them make a ton more money. Because if you think about your average project team, right? You have your you know your BAs, developers, blah blah blah. Who are the highest paid people on the call? Usually, the people who are customer facing. Right, and so the people who are customer facing,
[27:19] if you can become one of those people and actually do it way better than anybody else, you become the highest paid person on the project. So that's key. And also on our website we have an intro, the art of avoiding Salesforce failure. I'm speaking about it actually at Southeast Dreaming, at numerous Dreaming events this year. They can get that as a tester. So that has four of our key vignettes inside as a as a test. And I I just think it's for people who want to be the best, to be the highest paid, and to be the most successful in their venture. I don't see why they wouldn't explore it. Thank you, John. It's. Really great pleasure talking to you and also learn these things from you. Soft skills. It's I also personally think it's super important. Thanks a lot. Bye. Bye for now.
