Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS
Salesforce Career Converstions #8: Adam Weekes
Episode 8: Adam Weekes talks about his Salesforce journey from CRM Manager, to owning his own Consultancy and now being the Chief Visionary Officer at Aotrom.
Lee Durrant: Hello, it’s RODcast time with me, Lee Durrant. Today’s special guest is Adam Weekes, who’s been in the Salesforce ecosystem for 12 years I think. So, we’ll have a good old chat with Adam about his career and how we got into it, and the difference for him in working as a contractor, then permanent. Loads of tips for you guys – looking into the Salesforce ecosystem for those of you that are in it and want to listen to someone who’s risen to the ranks of Director as a Salesforce customer.
Lee Durrant: You’ll be pleased to know I have a little bit of a cold, so I won’t be talking quite so much in this one. And apologies if I’m slightly more nasal than usual, but hopefully it won’t spoil your enjoyment of having listening to this podcast. Thanks. So, Hi, Adam. Adam Weekes, welcome to the podcast mate, how are you doing?
Adam Weekes: Thank you. I’m well, thank you.
Lee Durrant: Good, good, good. Thanks for joining us today, I know you’re really busy as you have been for many, many years. So, I think you’ve heard of these before, I asked you to have a little listen, but just to let you know, this is really about us talking about your career in Salesforce. How you got into it and what’s happened to you since, and perhaps any little tips or thoughts along the way that people listening could use, really. So, usually, the first question is actually, ‘what are you doing right now?’ And then we’ll go back to the beginning.
Adam Weekes: Yeah, I suppose, right now I’m still in my home office where I spend an awful lot of time, chatting with you about Salesforce. That’s probably the highlight of my day, because I’m quite an evangelist about the Salesforce ecosystem. And if anybody’s ever met me at some of the events, they’ll know I can talk the hind legs off a donkey when talking about Salesforce and the associated exciting pieces about that. But that wasn’t really answering your question, I’m sure.
Adam Weekes: So, what am I doing right now? I’m helping organisations to implement Salesforce, which is quite a broad topic, of course. So more specifically, when you see particularly smaller, you look at the SMB side of the market there; you see this propensity to think, you’ve got a choice between Salesforce, which sounds expensive and it looks maybe complex, and then you’ve got… I won’t mention any, but there are plenty of other CRM solutions that you can look at that all have a variety of strengths and weaknesses. Some of them are really good in certain areas, and you know, some in particular around the implementation are really simple – you pull out your credit card and 10 minutes later you’re working. But there are limitations to that.
Adam Weekes: So, when you look at the difference between Salesforce as a CRM solution or as a platform really, and some of those others are more entry-level solutions, as I would view them. The big difference is that platform piece, you’re buying into a whole ecosystem there. But what that does mean is, you can’t just switch it on and say, ’Great, now we’ve got a CRM’. When you look at the Salesforce website, they’ll tell you some fantastic metrics about… you’ll see a 41% uplift in sales and your efficiency will go up, your costs will go down and everything, all of those things are potentially true, but they aren’t necessarily true to be fair of any CRM mouth box.
Adam Weekes: So, you can instal any CRM and then think, “Fantastic, we’re now going to be super-efficient: we’ve got CRM,” the reality is you’re not. What you’re probably going to see is actually a drop in efficiency because you’ve got new processes to learn, new systems, new ways of working, et cetera. So what I try and do is work with my customers to think about their processes, what are they trying to achieve, which is obviously usually selling services or goods in an efficient way. And getting visibility, and then operating their business with as much insight as they can, and that’s where Salesforce really comes into its own.
Adam Weekes: But it’s all about reworking your business to be efficient and then using Salesforce as a tool to support that piece, as opposed to just thinking it’s not a shrink-wrap product. It’s not like Microsoft Word, you can’t just install it and start typing in something, and then there you go; there’s your novel. You have to really think about, what is it we’re trying to achieve, how do we go about doing it? And that’s really where Salesforce is, what I would view as a couple of steps above some of the simpler, lower-priced options, which absolutely have a place in many businesses.
Adam Weekes: But when you’re thinking more forward maybe, and you’re thinking about how can we progress our business, how can we take our business to the next stage? We want to get super-efficient, we want to get better visibility of our pipeline and our operations. We want to increase the volumes of inbound leads, we want to increase coverage and conversion, et cetera, that’s where Salesforce can help, but only if you have an understanding of why you want to do these things and then how to go about doing them at a business level first, and then at that technical level, and that’s what I’m doing now.
Lee Durrant: And obviously that’s not how you started out, so if we go back to, and I can’t remember, I’m trying to thumb through your LinkedIn as we talk. When did it all start for you, then initially, what were you doing prior to getting into Salesforce? Because a lot of people saying this and this podcast that people that have been doing it for a long time didn’t necessarily get into Salesforce deliberately; was it something you fell into by accident?
Adam Weekes: It was more of something that helped me out at the time. So my first intro to Salesforce was around 2007, I think…
Lee Durrant: [crosstalk 00:05:56].
Adam Weekes: … that sort of time. Prior to that, straight out of college and everything else, I’d started off as a developer and then gone into business analysis from there. I ended up working for a company; I worked for the UK division of a multinational who produced fuel pumps and engaging equipment. And I was looking at some of the operations, so they had a whole bunch of field staff that we would be on about, and we used a whole bunch of different systems to try and make the field service engineers, et cetera, as efficient as possible.
Adam Weekes: As things do, situations change, and I was asked to move into a sales and marketing operations role. Which was something that at the time was relatively new to me. I mean, I was very fortunate that I had people around me that were incredibly helpful in helping me to understand the essence of what sales and marketing are, and how they work together and all this sort of good stuff. So whilst that aspect was new to me, they wanted somebody that had a transactional view of the world and could help them get some of their systems working a bit better and some of their processes, so that’s what I started to do.
Adam Weekes: It became quite clear quite quickly; we needed some sort of mechanism, which meant we needed a CRM. So you don’t go straight into it from email and excel sheets, certainly in 2007 to 2008, you didn’t suddenly jump into using Salesforce. So what we did is we invested in an air system called Act. I’m not actually 100% sure if this is still a thing or not, it became Sage in part. But it was a very much a client-based application. I think at the time there was a bit of a competition going on between Act and GoldMine, and I think for whatever reason we chose Act.
Adam Weekes: We installed it on the sales guy’s individual laptops, there was no mobile other than laptops, so they all had mobile data cards in their laptops. At the end of every evening, they would sit there at the hotel or whatever, and update the CRM and then hit the sync. That would come back to the little server we had underneath the desk somewhere and then provide us with the information.
Adam Weekes: It was my role really to make that process work efficiently, and that’s where it became more and more evident. The technical side of things was important, but that was more like a hygiene factor, it just needed to be there and to work, and needed to be easy for the sales guys to use. I’ve got a lot of input, not mostly constructive, from the sales teams about ease of use and about other considerations I had with the systems. It’s a fairly small team, so we all knew each other well. So there was no holding back on the feedback.
Adam Weekes: I had to learn quite quickly about how the sales teams and sales like to work. And we got that working quite well actually. So as the business progressed, and I got more proficient at doing these things, they asked me to move into the European division and basically do the same there. The challenge there is that Act simply wouldn’t scale that big, because it was quite a large operation now. So we’re talking about, I think it was seven or eight European countries, something along those lines and just as many languages and currencies and everything else that you have to deal with.
Adam Weekes: So thinking about how we can do this, I decided to fall back on my old techie hat as it were, and designed a system that used Excel files that were mapped back into a SharePoint site. So they were all interlinked with each other, and anybody who’s ever done that will know that’s great in theory: in practice, it breaks constantly because people modify the files and since they’re not in the exact right place for things to work properly anymore. I mean, I ended up spending two or three days every single week just trying to get the forecast pulled together.
Adam Weekes: Then you’d sit in the weekly reviews with the leadership team, you’d present this file to them in summary and the individual leaders from the countries would look around and say, “Oh, no, sorry, that’s out of date now.” So the whole process was really pointless, so that’s the point where I really started to push and say, “What we really need here is some form of hosted application that will help us all work collaboratively, all at the same time.” This really is the essence of what a proper CRM is like, whether it be Salesforce or Dynamics or whatever else you choose, the reality of it is if you don’t have that insight, you can’t drive your business. So the sales teams were never really able to have that proper deep discussion with the leadership team about what their funnels really were, because they never had visibility of it themselves.
Adam Weekes: So that’s when the decision was finally made to invest in Salesforce. And at the time I didn’t really know much about what Salesforce was or any of the other CRMs, particularly in any real detail, so had no preference. Salesforce seems nice, so that’s what we went with [inaudible 00:11:01] nice history.
Lee Durrant: Not necessarily the cheapest option or can you remember that [inaudible 00:11:04].
Adam Weekes: Well I think at that stage I probably wouldn’t have been overly involved in that. I mean I would have had some form of input, but certainly I wouldn’t have been a decision-maker back in those days around that kind of decision. So I mean, I look back on it now and think, yeah, it was a well-run company and I think the leadership team at the time recognise that, yes, there is an investment required. The investment is beyond what some of the other options were even back then. The difference is, they could see the value I think, and we had a good implementation partner as well that came in and helped, and Salesforce themselves came in and helped.
Adam Weekes: I think it wasn’t too hard to create a meaningful business case and say genuinely, if we do this, yes it will cost more upfront, but the returns will be higher. And luckily they were. I mean, the transformation was huge and that maybe was one of those pivotal moments for me as somebody that experienced firsthand the challenges of not having a decent CRM, and working with other members of the team who were frustrated that they didn’t get this information, they couldn’t get this data accurately and on time. Suddenly switching to this environment where everything was real-time, where you could literally be on a forecast in caller, on the weekly calls.
Adam Weekes: You’re going to have the screen up, you can sit there, and you can say, “This is showing as it should have completed last week, but it hasn’t. What’s going on?” At first, it took a little while for the sales leaders to adjust, the old for want of a better term, excuses came out, “Oh, that’s not quite up to date.” I think we were very lucky that we had a leadership team locally that really understood what the CRM could do and how it worked, and they would literally say, “Well, update it now then.” And they would sit there refreshing the screen, and everyone could see; is it updated yet? Have you done it yet?
Adam Weekes: Then obviously you get past the old excuses and everything else, and you start getting down to the crux of the matter, and you have more honest conversations. Obviously, I’m not suggesting that salespeople are narrowly dishonest.
Lee Durrant: Sounds interesting, driving the user, adoption, and then not having an excuse anymore – something they’ve probably leaned on for years. Obviously, it must’ve been difficult for some of them, but clearly for the business it was a good way forward, obviously.
Adam Weekes: Yeah, I think it was… I mean, I recognised it as a huge transformation because I experienced it and I worked with people that experienced it. I mean, speaking to some of the sales leaders at the time, I think they had mixed feelings about it, once I started to realise the value more. So as much as they were being put under pressure to keep their information up to date, I think it became evident quite quickly that it wasn’t their personal task to do that.
Adam Weekes: So they started to realise, actually, they can do their own forecasting calls in the exact same way with their local teams. And so they can get the get the report up, get the dashboard up, whatever and look at it and say, “X, Y, Z sounds good, but I can also see that this is now overdue, can you update it?”
Lee Durrant: Yeah, brilliant.
Adam Weekes: So I knew they would get it in the next day, or next week, or whatever, if it wasn’t.
Lee Durrant: Would you say to that first project then, was that the biggest challenge, to get the salespeople, if it’s sales that you’re using and offices for sales was back then, getting them to buy into it. Is that the biggest challenge?
Adam Weekes: Yeah, I think it probably was then, and to be fair, it probably still is now. I think the technicalities when you think back 12 years, whatever, the technicalities were a little bit easier because there was just so much less of the system. It was a simple sales management system back then, wasn’t it really? SRM whatever we were calling it, and it was pretty basic in what it did. It did it well, but it was pretty basic. You look at it now, and you think it’s literally unrecognisable now, the old funny dark red colour thing and then it went blue and now it’s completely different again.
Adam Weekes: And it’s not just the fact that it looks physically different, you know, the breadth of the ecosystem as well as the platform now, is absolutely vast. But generally speaking, the technicalities aren’t really the challenge that you get when doing the implementations. I mean, yes, you have data migrations to deal with, which is always fun and games. And you have integrations with other applications and processes, et cetera.
Adam Weekes: Generally speaking though, someone’s done it already, and I suppose that the community around Salesforce is unlike any other application I’ve ever worked with, including some very high in enterprise and some low-end SMB by systems, et cetera. There’s nothing like the Salesforce community to help each other out extremely willingly, so whenever you get stuck on something, you’ve only got to ask and lots of people will really go out of their way to help you find a solution, which is obviously fantastic.
Adam Weekes: But then, if the technical side of things is easy, why do so many CRM implementations fail? Not necessarily the household ones, of course, obviously. But, it’s the soft part of things that’s easy, that is easy, it’s the process change that people don’t necessarily fully understand if they’re getting behind it. It’s the change of behaviour, from all functions, not necessarily just sales or marketing, or operations, or whatever: the whole business needs to get their head around a slightly new way of working. What I think is a much better way of working, a much more enlightened, informed way of working, is about making sure people understand there’s no more updating, just putting things into outlook.
Adam Weekes: You can’t keep local spreadsheets, I mean it was a bad practice anyway, but now with GDPR it’s a risky practice. You can’t keep local copies of data like you used to. You can’t allow the salespeople or anybody to extract an Excel list and start emailing it around; it just creates an absolute nightmare from a compliance perspective. And that’s where the CRM helps out hugely. In fact, it’s probably one of the only ways you can make that viable in any decent size business. But, yeah, getting people on board, helping them to understand the value to them as individuals, the value to the business. Helping them to understand that this is how things work now. And, you think back a few years, that was a big challenge for everybody.
Adam Weekes: I think when I look at the more recent implementations, there are more people who understand the value and benefit of it now. And there are more who just expect to work that way. As the new generation of salespeople has come up through the ranks, they’ve always used the CRM, whereas previously it was… I mean, I can remember back when it was Rolodex’s in the boot of the Cavalier.
Lee Durrant: Yes.
Adam Weekes: Oh yeah. I get that so much these days. I think that really helps because people’s expectations are different now, and so when you come to them and say, “We’re going to put you on this fantastic CRM,” the first question that sometimes you hear is, “Well, I hope it Salesforce.” You don’t get quite as much pushback as you used to, but it’s still important to have a process around that, to help people through that change. You think about change curves and everything else, they’re every bit as relevant now as they used to be, it’s just a bit easier from people’s experiences.
Lee Durrant: So obviously that was your first experience of it, and like you said, at the time you weren’t looking to Salesforce or something else. So at what point did you have that feeling that this system, this ecosystem, is going to be my career moving forward? Did that happen about that same time or did it take a few years and a few different roles for you to then decide, now I am a Salesforce person? Do you know what I mean?
Adam Weekes: To be honest, I’m still waiting for that moment.
Lee Durrant: Okay.
Adam Weekes: All these years later, I’m still waiting.
Lee Durrant: Certification and everything you’ve done and you’re still not convinced?
Adam Weekes: Yeah. Well, I’m convinced, there was never a conscious decision to say, ”This is my career now, this is what I want to do.” It’s just something I always seem to come back to, even when I’ve departed very slightly. I distinctly remember getting an email saying I needed to do a maintenance exam to keep my certifications. And at the time I had three or four or something like that, and I thought to myself, “I’m deliberately just going to let them lapse. I don’t want to be doing the same hands-on work anymore.” Because at the time I was in a management position and I was really enjoying working with the team and helping them to get the results.
Adam Weekes: I thought I’m going to deliberately let them lapse because that will help me progress more in the management side than it will on the technical side. And I think within just within a few weeks I had that little niggle thinking was that the right thing to have done. And it wasn’t long before I went back through and redid every single one I’d let lapse, and a whole bunch more besides. I think I’ve got something like 11 or something as of right now. And I think to myself, even if I wasn’t doing this, I’d probably keep those current and maybe continue to expand them just because it’s something that really interests and excites me partly from a, like this is a, “Wow, look at what they’re achieving,” from a systems perspective point of view.
Adam Weekes: It’s really impressive when you take a step back and when you can appreciate what goes into it. When you stood inside a data centre with your finger in your ear looking at the raw and feeling all that, and you’re thinking, “This is really impressive stuff.” When you load a couple of million records in 20 minutes and you think, you couldn’t do that a few years ago on SQL Server; it’s just so impressive. Then you stand back and look at it and think, “this is amazing”. But when you look at the transformational effects it has on businesses, particularly maybe on the smaller end where they’ve got less resources to spend, but they can spend wisely. They can invest smart, in a tool like Salesforce, and they just get these phenomenal results, which makes it an absolute transformation for business.
Adam Weekes: It’s not like when you go from desktop base words to Office 365, there’s an obvious improvement in many different areas. It’s a hundred times more significant than that, and I think that’s why I keep coming back to this, because I guess I’m really more focused on the business transformation side. And I have personally not seen any tool that can make a bigger transformation than Salesforce has. You can go and implement great big systems like SAP and Cebu, but the amount of money required to do that, the level of effort required to do that, and then the impact of that, it’s more money, it’s more effort, and the impact is less than if you just set about implementing something sensibly in Salesforce.
Lee Durrant: It’s interesting what you said as well about, it’s something I hear a lot over the years I’ve been in this ecosystem on the edge of it. It’s not the first time I’ve heard someone say, “Oh, I want to go management route or whatever, and therefore I don’t need certifications.” I’m interested to see, because obviously you’ve been through so many different positions in your career so far, and you’ve got to the level of director and higher than that in certain companies where obviously you’re recruiting.
Lee Durrant: So I’m going to jump around a bit and ask you that certification question because, I think it’s relevant based on what you were saying a minute ago, having let them lapsed and then realising you want to go and do them. What’s your advice to people that maybe are thinking the same thing, “Oh, I don’t need the certifications because I’m a project manager,” or “I want to be a transformation manager or just the manager.” Do you think it’s wise for them to keep their hand in and getting [inaudible 00:23:04]?
Adam Weekes: That’s an interesting question. I think there’s probably a few different answers when you think about it from a few different perspectives, and obviously it’s a personal decision, but I would say yes, keep the certifications. So even if you’re in a position where you don’t think you need, or you’re actively making a point of not wanting to use them. If you continue to get dragged back into technical discussions and you really don’t want to be, you might think, if I let my search lapse – which is part of the reason I let mine lapse – I can get away from that, and I can progress differently. Yes, that may or may not work for you, but I would suggest for most people, keeping those certs current is a good thing. Even if you just have administrator, at the very least have something like certified administrator.
Adam Weekes: When you think about authority within a chain of command as it were, there’s things like legitimate authority where you can draw an org. chart and you are someone’s boss. And you can have technical authority, all that sort of stuff, and it’s all about credibility within the community. So if you are leading a team, particularly if it’s like a matrix team, I think if you’ve got even just one or two basic certs it immediately helps give the people around you a level of reassurance that you at the very least understand the basics of what the conversation is about. I think they’re worth keeping from that perspective.
Adam Weekes: I think as well it’s worth thinking about if you’re at the start of your career and you’re wondering, is it important to get certifications? At the start of your career, I don’t think you’ve got any choice but to. I’ve been a hiring manager many a time, and being very clear with applicants, we want to have a level of certification as the barest minimum for an entry-level role. I would always say, “I want you to prove that you can get certified administrator. I don’t mind if he did it the week before, so I’m not worried about how much experience you’ve got because you’ll get that on the job. I don’t want you to, or necessarily need you to, have a list of certifications as long as your arm. If you want to, great, and we can help you get those normally.
Adam Weekes: But I think certified administrator is one of those things that, I’m carefully wording this piece, it’s relatively easy compared to some of the other ones. I think if you are interested in any part of Salesforce as a longterm career, you need to be prepared to invest in yourself. So that’s not necessarily a financial investment because I think it’s only like $100 or something like that, so it’s not a big amount of money to ask somebody to spend on themselves: £80, or whatever it works out to be. It’s more about proving that you’re prepared to use your own time to go away and use the almost limitless resources that are available freely to everybody to learn about Salesforce, and to prove that you’ve learned the basics.
Adam Weekes: If you’re turning up saying, “I’ve got three years Salesforce experience,” for example, once you’ve moved on a little bit. And I have had people do this and say, “I’ve got three, four, or five years of Salesforce experience. I’ve got all these things I can do with these projects under my belt, but I’ve got no certifications.” Yeah, it makes me wonder why. It’s quick; it’s easy. Lots of organisations use them for gating, so if you haven’t got those certifications, your CV is not getting through to the next round anyway. So it wouldn’t matter if you had 20 years experience, if you haven’t got that certification, and particularly if you’ve got a talent acquisition team who are generalists, and they’re looking at CVS and they’re saying, “Well, you haven’t got this certification I’m told you need,” your CV is not going through. And given the level of effort required to get those, it’s so small, you have to wonder why people wouldn’t.
Lee Durrant: That’s a really good point… sorry to interrupt you, because we’ve had that over the years, obviously if you’re a specialist, your niche, you can see that someone’s amazing but they just haven’t done the certificate. The advice is, you’re going to have to get them, because obviously the person that isn’t specialised in that is going to be looking for just certain words that are not there, then that box isn’t ticked, and he’s not going through. So that can be quite frustrating for the candidate because they think, “Well, I can do that job, I just haven’t done that certification.” So I think that’s probably a good point I will then press home with people, but also I think if you’ve been on the other side of that, then that’s good advice.
Adam Weekes: Yeah absolutely, I think there’s something else we should consider about this as well, it’s not just a one-off: you do an exam and you get it, great. You prove you can answer multiple-choice questions. They do get quite challenging actually when you get some of the high levels. By the time you are getting up to anything leading up to architect top level, they’re really genuinely quite challenging, and some of the specialist’s badges are quite involved as well. So having those, it is a badge you can wear, you can display that with some pride and say, “I may or may not be a good fit for your organisation, I may, or I may not have the experience required to do the role you want me to do, but at the very least you know, I know my stuff, I can come in and learn your industry. I can learn your business, I can learn your culture.” So it’s a great thing to be able to display that.
Adam Weekes: Plus of course, the certification programme itself is really, really well thought out, it’s quite different to a lot of the others I’ve seen, with other large scale, ERP top platforms in particular. But the benefit here is that you can go on to Trailhead, and I’ve probably mentioned this a hundred more times because anybody who’s listening to this thinking, how do I get into Salesforce? Go to Trailhead, just Google Trailhead, sign up for a free account, and then just immerse yourself in all of the courses that pique your interest. Absolutely, just surround yourself, you can do hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of online courses – all completely free. And they are genuinely very, very good, and it’s a fantastic way to upskill yourself without any physical, real investment other than your time and your effort.
Adam Weekes: But they also use Trailhead for maintenance exams now as well, so every four months or so when a new version comes out, or every two months or something like that, you are asked to go and effectively re-certify yourself just to demonstrate that you’re not just letting it lapse. I mean, the last time I picked up my first certified administrator was in 2009. When I look back at the system as it was then and look at even just SoundCloud as it is now, they’re a world apart. So what I’ve had to do is learn lots of new things as I’ve gone along, and because I’ve been involved in the industry for pretty much all of that time, I was doing that anyway, but keeping the exam current by doing the maintenance certifications demonstrates that.
Adam Weekes: So it used to be that you had to pay for them, I don’t think you have to pay for any of them now, from a variety or maybe one or two. For the maintenance thing you used to pay once a year, but now certainly for most of them, it’s free. Just go into Trailhead, link it to your web assessor account and then just do a few modules each time. The benefits of doing that is, because you know, the release notes are for each cloud are free up to 600 pages each, and often they will cover off things that you have no interest in or your current employer or current contract doesn’t cover, so you don’t pay too much attention to them.
Adam Weekes: But what the Trailhead modules do for each version is cover off the highlights, what’s the headline changes in this version, new features that you might want to take advantage of. New capabilities, or maybe new limitations, features, retirements, whatever they will get covered in there, and it helps to keep you really, really current. Then if you’ve maintained your certifications over a number of years, you are demonstrating to a potential recruiter or employer that you are committed to this ecosystem, and you are committed to investing in yourself because of course, you can’t expect others to continue to invest in you if you aren’t investing in yourself.
Lee Durrant: Yeah, brilliant. Now I genuinely thought there’s a pay for “I want this stuff.” I know Trailheads are free, but I remember back in the day when [inaudible 00:31:31] was a couple of grand. You said about $80 or $100, is that the cost to get…
Adam Weekes: Well, for a certified administrator, I mean, don’t quote me. I think it’s $100 to do the exam. They do get pricier, I mean, I’ve done a few little while ago that were about $400 each, and I know if you are…
Lee Durrant: [crosstalk 00:31:52].
Adam Weekes: Yeah, I mean it’s only when you get up to the full technical architect level of which most people don’t, and it’s extremely challenging to get even close. But I think they are a couple of thousand dollars because they’re in person and all that sort of stuff, but by far the bulk of them are very low cost, and that’s only for the initial exam as well. So it used to be that you had to pay an annual fee to maintain your certification because you had to then do two/ three main exams a year, whatever. Now if I remember rightly, they’re all on Trailhead, or certainly, the majority are on Trailhead, but I haven’t had any that haven’t been recently. So when you do your maintenance exams now you are not paying the annual fee anymore.
Lee Durrant: Fantastic. If someone’s really looking to get into it, it’s not really any excuse in terms of, like you said, the amount of stuff that’s available for them on Trailhead. But I guess then the other side to it is trying to get that first bit of experience, because this is different now, I think to people that want to get into Salesforce versus someone like yourself perhaps that you had the opportunity because you were working somewhere, and they were going to get Salesforce. Do you have any tips, kind of off-script again here, but would you have any tips for how someone could get an experience having maybe done some Trailheads and got to go an idea to I one?
Adam Weekes: I think if you’re in a role, or if you’re not in a role at all… So if you’re in a role away, they aren’t using Salesforce, obviously, you’re going to get challenges if you want to get experience of doing that. If you’re between roles or if you’re maybe a school leaver or college leaver, uni or whatever, and you’re looking for your first role, again, quite challenging. There are limited options available to you, there are apprenticeships and things that Salesforce run, I don’t know the details of those, but they do run these apprenticeships games for, I think for university leavers. Where they will help you get all of that and then get you into your first post, et cetera.
Adam Weekes: But I think that obviously, you can’t have thousands of thousands of people going through those, I think it’s handfuls or hundreds certainly. So I think in some regards, if you can’t find anywhere to do volunteering, for example, there are lots of segments in the not-for-profit area, where Salesforce is used. So they might be interested if you want to go along and help out, that might be… Again, you can’t have thousands of people all doing that. So what I would suggest is that you create your own environment. So as well as Trailhead, which gives you a Trailhead orgs, you can go along and sign up for a developer edition account, this is completely free. You just go to, I think it’s developed@salesforce.com, and sign up with your Gmail address or whatever that gives you a complete, I think it’s enterprise edition of Salesforce. As long as you’re not using it for production stuff, you can go in there and do what you want with it.
Adam Weekes: So this is the same version of Salesforce that huge multinational companies use. I don’t think there are any real limits. I mean, there’s limitations on the amount of physical dates you can put in it, but generally speaking, it’s all there, so you can go in there and start giving yourself jobs to do. So Trailhead is absolutely fantastic, because if you follow trails and if you get down to the level of doing some of the super badges. I set you projects and I do not walk you through it step by step, they give you an end goal and ask you to get there, and some of them are genuinely quite challenging. Plenty of them are relatively simple and once on the way up to that level, but it’s a great way of learning about it. Then get yourself a developer edition and then just get in there and start doing stuff.
Adam Weekes: Thinking about, if I were implementing this at a fictional company or at my current company, how would I go about doing it? And you can sit there and build it out and get exposure to it. And obviously you’re going to have to accept when you go for your first Salesforce role, you all looking for a junior admin role. There are companies that will take people on, you don’t need a huge amount of experience to get certified administrator without wishing to sound too derisory, if you do all of the Trailhead modules and have a little bit of a plough in a developer edition of org, you can get your certified administrator badge. That then immediately puts you ahead of the curve in terms of other people.
Adam Weekes: Maybe if there’s a hundred people and only 10 of them have that certified administrator, I’m speaking to those 10 first, and that’s the same for most recruiting managers. So, yes, it’s hard, but find a way to do it yourself basically, and then see if you can get that first entry job. Find a good recruiter, it’s always a good thing. Don’t scatter gun, don’t speak to 50 different recruiters and hope that they’ll all get your CV far and wide, that doesn’t work. I mean, obviously I’m going to suggest speaking the results on demand, not just because we’re talking, but because I think that’s a good approach. But, yeah, I think, go along to user groups as well if you can, if you’re able to get into something.
Adam Weekes: They’re obviously very busy sometimes, but if you can get into some groups, go to those as well because you will hear experiences about how other people have done things joining the communities as well. I realise I’m sort of scattered, and loads and loads of things to do here, but there’s a whole bunch of community stuff that I mentioned earlier on. Sign up for your developer edition, you’ll get access to all of those for free join into the groups that you think might interest you. You’ll find a lot of people super, super helpful, more than happy to help people out. Reach out to people on LinkedIn, I know that’s not quite as easy, particularly if you are maybe just a school leaver and you’re trying to find people on LinkedIn to reach out to. But if you look on LinkedIn they’re ways to find people that are open to these sorts of discussions. See if you can tap some people up and ask for advice, you may find that that leads to something.
Lee Durrant: Yeah, especially in my experience as well, if you want to reach out to people that work at Salesforce, you can reach out to enough people that they would point you in the direction of customers, they might give you a chance to as an apprentice or something like that. But also with what you said, I think said a really good tip is, whenever it is that you create on that free version of Salesforce, get it on your CV because it’s what people are going to want to see that.
Lee Durrant: If they’re looking at this, let’s call it a CV and it doesn’t say anything about Salesforce, it says a couple of Trailheads and maybe says into one, but nothing else, you want to put in there, the project you’ve done and what you’ve created, some way quite high on your CV because that’s going to jump out at people. That’s a really good tip. I still didn’t realise you can get that free edition, you can get an easy go, but I forgot about that.
Adam Weekes: Yeah, absolutely. It’s one of the fantastic things that Salesforce does to help the people out in the community. I’ve not seen many orgs take it to the level that Salesforce have. I mean obviously, it’s self-interest that drives it of course, but at the end of the day, it’s a shared interest which is really good. I mean if you look at my CV now, I don’t put any reference in it to Trailhead modules or anything like that, I do have a public Trailhead profile, and you can go in there and see how many points I’ve got, how many badges I’ve got. See how many ranges I’ve clicked round through, and see which super badges I’ve done and all that sort of good stuff. It’s a fair amount because I’ve been doing it for a while.
Adam Weekes: But I think if you are just starting out, you need to promote what you have got. So for me, I’ve got certifications and experiences and other things that I can put on my CV, that are more relevant for the roles that I would be interested in this point in my career. But if I didn’t have any of that, I would put onto my CV what I do have. So if I have whole bunch of super badges, and I wouldn’t necessarily stick it on the front of page one maybe, but sort of fairly near the top there, I would mention it in… you know, you put like your a certification and accreditation section, I don’t know if people still do that and CVS, I’m probably old fashioned. But somewhere, put the fact that you’ve got certified administrator, if you have, put that quite prominently.
Adam Weekes: Then also put in a link to your Trailhead, just say, if you’ve done a bunch of super badges. Some of them are really difficult, and I know you know a lot of people that have struggled with those that have been working with Salesforce for years. So if you’ve gotten through some of them, that’s something that’s worth mentioning because it does mean something and people will understand what it means if they’re in this industry.
Lee Durrant: Yeah. Brilliant. I appreciate it, we’re spending more time talking about how to help others in your career, it’s been very helpful so far. So going back to you for a bit then, I’m trying to remember where you’ve been and what you’ve done, you’ve worked for obviously Salesforce customers, have you worked at the partner side before, a member?
Adam Weekes: Not a huge amount. No, no. I mean, I wonder whether this is something I’ll do in the future, I don’t really know. But other than how I work now, most of my experience of Salesforce has been as an end user, and traditionally that’s where I’ve just felt most comfortable. I think if you think about the desire to help businesses transform, if you base yourself in an end user, you can really make a huge impact on that one user. If you base yourself, at a consultancy may be, a consultant, partner, or ISV, or whatever, you can potentially have a huge impact on multiple businesses. So maybe that’s something to ponder longer term.
Adam Weekes: But most of my career to date has been with end users. I’ve worked with some fantastic consulting partners over the years. I mean, it’s quite fun to be there, to be responsible and accountable for delivering huge step changes to businesses using tools like Salesforce.
Lee Durrant: I can imagine as well it’s something that, I don’t know myself obviously, but having spoken to people. When you’re at the end user, you tend to get to see it from beginning to not the end as much, but the business as usual side of it. Which could be quite fulfilling I’d imagine more than perhaps being a partner, where you might just jump in and out, not really see the beginning or the end of different projects. I bet whether that’s something you would agree with, but that’s the impression I get sometimes.
Adam Weekes: Yeah, absolutely, I like that aspect. When I think back to my days working for a Danaher company, they had something they called the Danaher business system. Which is sort of… if you think Six Sigma, you’re not a million miles away. So we would go and do kaizen events. We would go and spend maybe a week focused on a particular department, and we would do all the analysis, and then you get to the end of the week, and the theory is you’ve implemented your change or certainly hopefully you’ve implemented it.
Adam Weekes: There maybe a few little bits that you take away, but generally speaking, the idea is you spend that week laser focused on improving something. You get to the end of that week and appreciate that this isn’t your department, this maybe not even your business unit. So this could be another company in another country. You can be anywhere in the world helping them implement some process change. When you get to the end of that process, you are partly responsible. A process owner comes in at that point as well of course, but you’re also as a person who oversaw the change held accountable and responsible for you for maintaining that improvement.
Adam Weekes: So obviously everything that you’re measuring, everything you were saying, we’ve reduced waste by or something like that by 20%. Now, you have to continually monitor that to prove that you’ve sustained your 20% reduction, because if it starts creeping back up. Because the moment everyone stops focusing on it, it all starts to go back to old way, you’ve wasted all your time doing it. You’ve identified a better way, started to do it and then just let it lapse as just pointless.
Adam Weekes: So what we would do is we would literally, for I think it was for three months or something quite some period. You would be on those calls every week looking at the numbers and if it started to slip back, you would go back and help them get it back on track. That’s certainly something that you get far more of with an end user because you are there and quite likely you are responsible, it’s your job to make sure that you get these changes implemented, and that you get these improvements and you make them stick and you sustain them, because if you let them slip you’ve wasted everyone’s time.
Adam Weekes: And certainly what you’ll find is that the consulting partners, not necessary for any fault of their own, of course, if you’re paying healthy amount per day for a consultant partner to come in and help you out. Once a physically implemented something, how much time do you want to pay them to help you sustain it? Probably not a huge amount because what is the point? Typically you’ve got to have a budget in everything and you’re thinking, “Right, we need to buy this in now.”
Adam Weekes: But yeah, so it is a slightly different perspective as a consulting partner you come in at a set point, you get done what you’ve been asked to get done. You invoice for it, and then you have an interest in making sure that they are happy, and the change is sustained, but there’s only so much you can do free of charge as it were. So you do tend maybe to move on to the next project, and just through sheer business, don’t have time to go back and continue to check on old projects and things.
Lee Durrant: [crosstalk 00:45:25] Salesforce is customer success team comes in, they know it got appreciate… That’s probably an obvious question, but once your SIS has done an implementation, and it’s a goodbye from them, does Salesforce keep in touch with the end user and say, “How’s it going?” Are they the ones that push in that retention and making sure that the changes are sticking?
Adam Weekes: To some extent maybe, not really in the same way, I wouldn’t have thought personally. The customer success team, particularly if you’re in into the enterprise zones, where to be fair and most of my experience is, you will have a success team. So you’ll have an account exec, and your account exec will spearhead potentially quite a large team. I mean, I’ve known teams that have been up into the 10, 12 people, all assigned to an account.
Adam Weekes: Now, you wouldn’t see them all particularly frequently, but what you will commonly see, is that you will have an account exec, and you’ll have a solutions engineer that you’ll see when you start talking about changes and things like this. Salesforce are really are quite good in helping you to understand the potential, so they do workshops that could spark and ignite two different sorts of levels. They’ll come in and they’ll do walk the floor exercises with you.
Adam Weekes: So they’ll walk around with some of their analysts and they’ll talk to your staff and they’ll look at what you’re doing. And of course, I mean it’s obviously not fully independent, but it is fairly independent because it’s not your consulting partner and it’s not you. So they’ll just go around and ask questions. And quite often what they’ll pick up on, it’s little bits and pieces that maybe you were just glazing over because you can’t see the wood for the trees to some extent maybe.
Adam Weekes: They’ll come back with a written report that says, “Have you considered doing this, this and this.” And half of it, you think, “Yes, I have considered, it’s on the roadmap.” and the other half you might look at and think, “Actually, maybe there’s something in there.” So they have a success team that’s there maybe to help guide you if you think more about at the strategic level. So when you’re thinking how can Salesforce help our business grow and evolve and respond to market changes. How can we get more value from the investment we make?
Adam Weekes: If you’re just running your sales teams on it, I dare say you’ve got a super efficient sales team, if you’ve been doing it a while and you’ve really gotten into it. Is your marketing team really well aligned to though? If they’re off using HubSpot or whatever else, how well integrated is it. Could those two teams be better aligned, because if you can get… particularly sales and marketing, they’re the two teams, where if you can get them really well aligned. If you can get Pardot or marketing cloud in there, I mean, the uptick in efficiency is unbelievable.
Adam Weekes: I’ve seen this firsthand, it’s quite phenomenal and what you can achieve when you get those teams really well aligned and pulling in the exact same direction. But the same is true maybe of operations and finance, et cetera, all of their opportunities to expand. And obviously, when you think about it in Salesforce’s point of view, they’re thinking, “Can we sell you more licences? Can we sell you additional clouds,” et cetera. I mean, I’ve never seen Salesforce do a hard sell, everything that’s recommended or suggested is done with a mutual success in mind. There’s no point whatsoever in this success team saying, “Why don’t you consider this?” If they know it’s not really for you, then why suggest it at all.
Adam Weekes: So the success team is very much there, they can really be a strong partner for you if you manage them well. If you just speak to your account exec at renewal time, ignoring all the reach-outs in between, which no doubt you’ll get. You’re not leveraging that value, so Salesforce has a whole bunch of resource available to you, particularly if you’ve got a premier success plan when you can start using the accelerators, there’s an awful a lot available to you effectively for no cost as such. And obviously, someone somewhere’s buying, but you’re not shelling out money. You’re not raising invoices to get a resource on site.
Adam Weekes: And the resource is pretty much top-notch as well, you’re getting some really, really smart people to help you out. I think everybody that’s got, particular if you’ve got premier success, and you’ve got a relationship with your account exec, you should be leveraging that. And don’t be afraid to ask, “What can you do for us?” If you’re not leveraging that, then reach out to them. If you don’t even know who they are, if you go into… I can’t quite remember it.
Adam Weekes: There’s a part in Salesforce… oh, the checkout you go into where it says manage checkout or something like that. It’ll show who your contact is, drop them an email, they’ll get straight in touch with you, and you can start the discussion from there, because they’ll be more than happy to come along and help you out.
Lee Durrant: Full of tips that I didn’t know, but then that doesn’t necessarily mean anything. One of the things I was going to ask you, which we touched upon it, I think at the beginning of this… we might not actually. But you’ve done a mixture of being a permanent employee, being a permanent recruiter of people and also being a contractor and recruiting contractor. Am I right, have you done all those things?
Adam Weekes: Yes, yes, I’ve had a good bash of all of those.
Lee Durrant: So what’s the difference? What does it feel like being a contractor versus being a full-time permanent person, and what’s your view on how that’s going in terms of everything to do with IR35 coming up and people that might be worried about that.
Adam Weekes: Oh, you hit on a real hot topic there, I think-
Lee Durrant: And we’re an hour in. Sorry about that, yeah.
Adam Weekes: That is fine. It’s fine. Yeah, that’s a really interesting one, and I think that’s another one that’s really personal to an individual. I think it changes. So I’ve worked with an awful lot of contractors over the years as well. I’ve been a contractor there for a good few years. To be fair my contracting experience is not a million miles off my perm experience, so I’ve not done a whole bunch of short contracts, so I’ve not contract hopped.
Adam Weekes: Generally speaking I’ve contracted for awhile and then found myself in an organisation that I enjoyed working with and who enjoyed me working with them. So you end up staying there for a year or two years or something like that. Then more than once I’ve switched into a perm role from that. So I guess my contract experience is slightly different. I’ve worked with lots of contractors who do it in the more traditional sense, that they’ll want to talk three, six, 12 months, whatever, and then they’re quite happy just to keep moving around and it suits their lifestyle at the time.
Adam Weekes: For me personally, I think it’s a young person’s game. As I get older, my mortgage gets bigger and as the kids get more demanding, I start to think, “Do I really want to be messing about doing this. Do I want to be going to a different site every few months. Do I want to have to keep messing about with accountants and figuring out the most efficient way of paying myself. Do I want to take the risk that I’ll get a contractor really not like it, or they’ll really like it and then have to leave because the project tends…”
Adam Weekes: I think at the start of people’s careers it’s probably more something that aligns better with that, maybe for younger people. I know plenty of contractors who are my age or older are really, really old Duffers who love contracting still, and who really enjoy that side of the lifestyle. I can think of at least one person who is constantly travelling the world, contracting in different sorts of areas and things, and absolutely loves it.
Adam Weekes: And whilst, he’s spoken to me about having a retirement plan, and that’s some way off. And as far as he’s concerned, he’s going to contract right up until that point, when he goes and buys his home and retires to it.
Lee Durrant: Oh, nice.
Adam Weekes: But yeah, I think there are strengths and weaknesses from all of those things. And I certainly think, being a contractor is now advantageous as it used to be. So previously you could pay yourself pretty much just minimum wage, was it about six or 700 pounds a month to make sure that your national insurance tiptoe over the rest, you can pay dividends.
Adam Weekes: Great, 11% tax, fantastic. I study two and a half percent if I’m thinking right. And as you’ve said, the spectrum of IR35 comes into play. If the taxman looks at you as a contractor and you’re working in a mid-size organisation upwards, as lots of contractors are of course. If they think you’re an employee, you’re now liable for, you know, between years. I don’t know the legal specifics, I just know that they’re massive tax liabilities in there, and potential fines. If you’ve done it on purpose, you get fined, as well as by the bank tax.
Adam Weekes: If it’s genuinely a misunderstanding, inadvertently paid yourself in dividends, they’ll just declare those as illegal dividends effectively. And it sounds harsh, but what it really means is you have to pay a whole bunch of extra tax. So I think that lots of people at the moment are either ignoring that and hoping that they’ll get away with it. I know some people doing that.
Adam Weekes: There are also lots of organisations certainly in the larger size that have made a blanket assessment, and I’ve just said everything’s in IR35 now. And if I’m remembering this correctly, what this basically means is they’re expecting everybody to basically come onto the books and pay employee level tax. Everything else you’re paying 40% tax plus your national insurance, plus everything else. But the real rob is that you are still a contractor, so you don’t get health benefits. So if you’re off sick, you aren’t paid, and you don’t get healthcare.
Adam Weekes: You don’t get paid holidays, you don’t get pension contributions, you don’t get employee recognition schemes, you don’t get bonuses. What they’re asking you to do is pay all of the same tax as an employee, but don’t get any of the same benefits. And quite a lot of companies are saying, “Well, it’s the same day rate?” So quite a lot of contractors are saying, “No it’s not, you’ve got to pay me an extra a hundred, 200 whenever a day to compensate me for all this tax that I’m paying.” So it’s certainly an interesting piece. I don’t know whether we will see changes in the budget coming up. It’d be interesting to see how the government responds to that because there’s been a lot of criticism of this approach.
Adam Weekes: But for me personally, it doesn’t affect me because I tend to work with multiple customers at the same time and have lots of things on the go. So I don’t look like an employee for any organisation I work with. But if you’ve been working… I wanted to say a bank or something, for a year or more, it’s difficult for you to say you’re not an employee. If they’ve given you a laptop and you’ve got a phone number there, and you effectively represent them, that’s a really hard sell to convince them that you’re not an employee. So I think it’s definitely worth, as a contractor getting proper advice proper legal advice, looking at your exact situation, your exact contracts. Understanding, are you likely to get into any trouble with that? So even if the employer says, “No, no, we’ve checked it, it’s fine.” Double-check it yourself personally, because it’s you that’s going to get it in the neck if things go wrong.
Lee Durrant: Yeah, very good tip. I’m well aware that we kept you for nearly [inaudible 00:57:08]. Let’s get to the fun things about the future then, and what you’re excited about for you and for the Salesforce world as a whole. Is there something that particularly excites you in the next few years?
Adam Weekes: That’s an interesting one; there’s a lot of change going at the moment. Salesforce as has transformed itself from the plucky upstart that underdog into the behemoth that it used to mock. Which is interesting in its own right, but there’s a few areas that are high growth I think. And this is partly based on what people are telling me, and partly based on what Salesforce is telling me, and partly what I’m seeing myself. The two big growth areas I would see, actually probably three growth areas, just thinking about it now. CPQ I think is a big thing.
Adam Weekes: I think as CPQ, which historically have been big, big projects. I remember implementing what was big machines, which is now Oracle many, many years ago. It was phenomenally complicated and still is because it’s a hugely powerful, complex product. The ability to take something on Salesforce CPQ, which is far simpler to work with, and implement that without needing millions of dollars to invest in a huge, huge programme of works. I think that will be game-changing for some companies, smaller. There’s a big upsurge in the number of Telcos, for example, when the regulation change. Lots, and lots of small Telcos doing some great, great work.
Adam Weekes: Lots of those companies could really, really do with a CPQ tool, but historically they’ve been out of their reach for financial reasons. And you’ve heard the commercials around them they’re not cheap. I think what we’ll see is CPQ becoming more available to smaller businesses and I think that’s going to be phenomenal. I think that’s a huge, huge benefit to lots of people. I think we’ll also see marketing automation surging. So Salesforce, in particular, are quite keen to push part up quite a bit, and they think they’ve got a really good solid product there and quite nicely at B to B organisations and maybe some of the smaller ones more so as well.
Adam Weekes: Personally I agree with them, I think marketing automation in general is a big thing that’s coming up. Not just part of what we’ve marked in cloud as well, which is it’s a hundred times bigger and more complex, but also a hundred times more capable in certain scenarios and more consumer-oriented perhaps. But it’s not just about the clever, getting into a marketing team, get them sending clever emails and linking it back to your social posts, or that very, very clever, slightly spooky stuff that you can do these days. It’s about what I mentioned earlier, the alignment between sales and marketing.
Adam Weekes: So if you’ve got the sales teams on SoundCloud, if you’ve got your service teams on Service Cloud, and if you’ve got Marketing Cloud or Pardot in there as well, that combination in there. All being on the same platform because of course, some people seem to think that the different clouds are physically separate, of course, they’re all on one sort of one big thing. So you’ve got all of these users all working on the same platform with the same data, and the possibilities there are incredible. So getting people into that mindset about not just clever triggered emails and things in social posts, but linking them back to actionable data for the sales teams and for the service teams, et cetera, is a huge big thing, and I think now it’s going to be massive in the coming year or two.
Adam Weekes: Then the final one that popped into my head there is around analytics. I think the acquisition of Tableau was kind of interesting, and a few people raised an eyebrow thinking, “Well, how does this fit with Salesforce Einstein Analytics and they are slightly different products. They do have different use cases, and they can’t actually sit in parallel quite nicely if you’ve got a very big organisation. But yes, certainly analytics and the augmented intelligence piece, the AI Einstein stuff that goes with it, I think is going to be a really big piece for this year.
Adam Weekes: So if you’re in the middle of your Salesforce career and thinking, “What should I focus on next?” I would say either analytics, marketing or CPQ, and I think you’ll do well there. Just to have interest, if we just flip that around and think of one thing that’s I’m potentially not looking forward to, you’ve probably seen in the press as well at the moment. Lots of speculation about big purchases coming. And there’s a lot of talk about either Microsoft or Google might be buying Salesforce. This is an interesting one, it’s almost quite a hot topic when you see it coming up on LinkedIn. Lots of diverse opinions on there, which is nice to see.
Adam Weekes: Personally I’m not a fan of those two, I think it would change the platform, not necessarily for the better, but that would certainly be an interesting development if one of those companies did manage to purchase Salesforce. Seeing how that would evolve and seeing how that would impact the user community, would certainly be worth keeping an eye on.
Lee Durrant: Yes, that’s been a little whisper for years isn’t it. I’ve always sort of hoped as well that doesn’t happen. But I guess, I suppose we’ll have to keep on that. Anything else you want to mention? Again, I appreciate, I’ve kept you longer than I thought I would, but is there anything else you’d like to say or perhaps let people know where they can find you, should they wish to. I appreciate you’re on LinkedIn, it’s quite easy to find your name, is there any other ways of getting hold of you if people wanted to?
Adam Weekes: Yeah, probably the simplest way is his via LinkedIn that’s an omnipresent thing for a lot of us, no matter where we are and things everyone keeps telling presence up to date often anyway. If anybody wants to get hold of me that they’re very welcome to do so through LinkedIn. If they want one, a bit of advice or want to talk about anything else, absolutely more than happy to do that through LinkedIn, sure.
Lee Durrant: So you’re not one of those Salesforce people with more messages in your LinkedIn inbox and you can handle them at the moment?
Adam Weekes: No, and I think it’s an interesting time to be a part of the ecosystem system. I mean, if we think back to, well it was just a couple of years ago when there was a whole round of acquisitions, where the big consultancies started buying a whole bunch of middle-sized consultancies. Then the smaller consultancy grew to fill that gap, and then I think that gave a whole bunch of people great ideas about starting consultancies and then thinking, “Well, I can just want to consultancy for a year or two, and then somebody at Salesforce, or themselves, or somebody else will come along and buy me up, and then I can go retire to their Bahamas.
Adam Weekes: Obviously that’s not going to happen folks, there’s an interesting new clip before you. Yeah, there’s a huge raft of people. And as I said earlier, the Salesforce ecosystem and community is absolutely huge, and is very welcoming, and really a good place to be to engage. There’s an awful lot of people out there that you can get in contact with and that you can talk to either directly or just through general chat on some of the forums, et cetera. Yeah, we’re always keen to talk to people about Salesforce as you can probably tell by the fact of waffled on.
Lee Durrant: Yeah. Well, I was going to say, we could do more of this, which is kind of what I do say to people all the time, but perhaps we can have a follow up one day in the future. But Adam, thanks. Thanks very much for your time. It’s been brilliant, and no doubt we will all follow your career with interest. So thanks very much.
Adam Weekes: That’d be my pleasure. Thank you.
Lee Durrant: So once again, my thanks to Adam Weekes there for a very thorough interview, and loads of topics there for guys to pick apart and loads of great tips as well. I will share as many links as I can that relates to Adam, just talking about loads of Trailshead and free developer and things like that. Once again, apologise for my nasal-ness, but hope it didn’t spoil it for you. And thanks again to Adam, who was surely a great guest. Thanks a lot, guys.