What the Early Days of Salesforce Can Teach Today’s Sellers (Part 1)

Introduction to the New Selling Economy

0:00 Somewhere out there right now, a sales rep is walking into a meeting and sitting across from them is a buyer who already knows more than they do. That's no accident. AI has created the biggest shift in selling in 30 years. And millions of sellers and the leaders behind them are living it every single day. I'm Yosh and this is The Selling Economy, a show about the people in the middle of that shift and the stories of what's working now and the lessons that they've learned along the way. The Selling Economy is presented by AnyTeam, the team behind every rep.

0:36 We are live in The Selling Economy. This is a show about the biggest structural shift in B2B selling in 30 years. The buyer has changed, the selling hasn't. And we're going to be talking with real operators who have built the B2B sales book. And we're really excited to talk about the future of AI and B2B selling. I could not imagine a better first guest. This one is personal. Joe Williams, welcome to the show. Joe, you and I go way back 25 years now, working at Salesforce in the trenches. I'm so excited and thankful for having you be our guest, but more importantly, the long friendship we've had.

1:11 Yeah, Jeff, I got to say I'm honored to be the inaugural guest. I love the format. I love that it's going to be a no-nonsense approach. You know, me as a

Early Days of Salesforce: Selling Challenges

1:19 Person, I'm very no-nonsense from the beginning. That's how I sell. That's how I interact. And like you said, we our relationship transcends the business. you're a friend and over decades. So, uh, it's a pleasure to be here. So, hey Joe, take us back to the early days of Salesforce. What was selling like and help the audience understand kind of, you know, what you did, what you had to do to to be successful to take some of these really, really big and monstrous deals over the finish line. Yeah. Well, it didn't start out that way, right? This was right after the dot bust. So, you know, Salesforce.com was not an exciting opportunity as far as the businesses we were trying to sell.

1:58 We were going right after the large enterprise class deals and the model itself wasn't heard of and the way in which we sold, you know, we were evangelizing as much as we were selling, right? Because it was a different approach, a subscription-based model, a hosted model. So, the client data would be outside the firewall, which a CIO, a CTO was not used to at that time. So it was uh very interesting times to be presenting or selling the product in which we did and again when we joined Salesforce it was 20 25 million in revenue. It wasn't the big behemoth you know known entity in the world of SaaS that it is today. Well, I remember just walking down in Manhattan and going into

User-Centric Selling: Focusing on End Users

2:38 To company's offices and sitting down with the CIO and they, you know, would would kindly and kind of pat us on on the back, give us a nice handshake and say, "Hey, come back later when you have some some enterprise features or come back when you have an on-premise solution." Uh, sure enough, that changed over the years and much credit to to you and the teams, the people that that were just resilient and really pushing that this vision that Mark had. tell us maybe a little bit more about kind of that experience of just working with these these early early adopters.

3:05 Well, as you remember, I focused on the financial services, right? So, that's a regulated industry. So, when we're talking about data and the housing of their data being outside the firewall, that was a really big big hurdle for them to get over. And we felt like the way to be successful was to go after the grassroots end users because the only real solution out there at the time from a packaged application perspective was Siebel. And Siebel was a big fat install. It was as we used to call it a pig in memory usage on the desktop and end users. It was slow screen-to-screen navigation. They hated it. But corporate was pushing it. It managed it. So that's what they had to use. So we were going after a very different audience with a very different value prop. We didn't have all the functionality that a full service CRM sales was requiring, but we had a very nimble application, a user interface that was different than anybody had seen in the past. And so we focused on the end users. We figured we really were betting on the fact that the business leadership could trump the IT leadership when it came to making the final decision and ultimately we were right but you know we also matured the product along the way to win over the hearts and minds of it eventually as well. I think that's really interesting build for the user the focus on that user the focus on on helping them be successful uh with an application those users that were coming out of out of Siebel I remember just that the their frustration level was so high and Salesforce offered them this this this new sense of enjoyment relief this this system that they could actually feel that it was it was kind of one of them.

4:35 Tell us about kind of, you know, what what that that entailed in terms of just making these users successful and how did you do that as as a as a person in the field selling Salesforce? Well, it's interesting because I'm one of them, right? When we're focused on the end users, we're all sellers, right? We all have a bag. We all have a quota and we all know how we have a way of going to market regardless whether it's financial services company, pharmaceutical company, product based company, we all have the same mindset. So, I'd align myself with the end user and say, "Look, what are you really looking to do on a daily basis?" And they're like, "Dude, just make it easy for me." You know what I mean? Half of these sellers were just frustrated with the requirements that corporate was placing on them to update records that they saw no value in. So, we would present them a very lightweight, very simplistic way of tracking their daily work schedule, their flow of business, and they loved it. We look at where we are today. I think we're back to the future where we're able to focus on that end-user capability and the real value

The Evolution of Selling: From SFA to CRM

5:33 That that person brings to the table or the sales engagement. The seller is getting inundated these days with stuff that doesn't allow them to sell from a humanistic way. And uh that's what we did. We we gave them back that control. We gave them back the art of selling, you know, back in the day early on. And it became a fanatical response like end users loved using Salesforce in the early days. My role at Salesforce was I was your your services person. So I helped build a team that would deploy Salesforce. A part of deploying Salesforce was to build integrations to to core core applications that they had either on premise or other cloud-based applications. And that integration required workflow. The advent of the AppExchange spawned a whole genre of of applications of which then now you would have all of these kind of pre-connected pre-certified applications where a sales ops or RevOps team could now stitch together kind of end to end a whole bunch of apps and workflow. Did it change it from like being a system that was built for the user to now being a system for ops and management? We had many many different systems connected to Salesforce. I would say tens to 20s of different systems connected to Salesforce.

6:48 Truth be told, at best we were an SFA, a Salesforce automation solution. We were not a full-service CRM when we began. So we were really focused on that end user seller. From a corporate, you know, perspective became very instrumental because we became the database of record for the entire enterprise. But because of that, it got more complex. It was obviously very hard to unseat once we got in. But it also became more of a a drudgery for the end user. There's so many things connected into Salesforce today. It's not just a selling solution. It's more of a database of record and there's a lot of value in that, but there's a lot of complexity that goes along with that. That's what we need to plan for. That's what we need. It wasn't about selling the product capabilities or functionality. It wasn't about selling ROI or business case. It was like what are we really trying to do from a business perspective? And if we achieve that, we'll be fine, right? Like you always had that end user in mind.

7:38 You always had success, the client success. Listen, early on, we didn't have success managers at Salesforce. You were the closest thing that we had to that. You would always in the car ride home outside of being the customer. You're like, Joe, you got to really worry about how we're going to deploy this and how it's going to actually get delivered. You know, that was one of the things that you and I had an alignment on. I remember those days dearly. Uh we didn't have Slack or communication tools. It was it was phone, text, and in person and take our notes and and drop that in email and obviously use Salesforce to to be able to to track all that. And the one thing I remember about about you was the focus that you had also on really building champions. U so these were like end-user individual sales reps and in order to get a large deal I remember the program or campaign that would be just a brilliant marketing campaign. Uh if a rep were were to do that today which is get handwritten notes from from end users and build a box of notes and then send it to to to the champion. I remember you doing that at uh at ADP and that was just brilliant and certainly I grew an appreciation for the art form but also just the the empathy you had for these users and that you were really there to to help them not to to try to sell them. Yeah. It wasn't necessarily a strategy.

8:52 It was just kind of my persona how I am as a person, right? Like I love interacting with people. I like to feel like we're delivering real value. And you know when you have those quotes from the end user it's so powerful to be able to go to your champion and go look it's not me selling this this is what your people are telling you right and it I remember just a compliment we were selling to major accounts in ADP and the head of major accounts at the time was John Lmanuso and he was tough I used to work for him before I left sales I left ADP went to Oracle from Oracle I did my first startup and then from there I went to Salesforce so you think he would be nice he was really the toughest guy but he stood up in front of the executive committee when we were getting close to the close and said, "This guy knows our business better than we know our business." And that was like a huge compliment and it's because I spent the

The Changing Buyer Landscape

9:38 Time in the trenches with the MADMs, the major account district managers, and I knew what they were struggling with. And it just made things easier and it just validated the power of relationship because it took it to a new level at that point. And you know, Russ Frerieden was a board member at the time and he was impressed by that. And it also downstream we didn't have to worry about price. When you have that kind of validation that you're the right tool for the right solution for at the right time, it's not about price. The value is there. Yeah. Let's let's talk about how the how the buyers changed. I mean, that was a different world selling. Uh, right. The buyers were not empowered with the information that they have today. So, maybe you can kind of walk us through kind of your perspective on on how buying has changed and really why you you think selling hasn't changed all that much yet.

10:24 Yeah, that's been a rant of mine. If anybody follows me on LinkedIn or the companies I've been working for over the last five or seven years, I've been talking about the buyer process changing immensely and the lack of change on the selling process. Right? And it again, I'll say this, it doesn't matter what or who you're selling. There's nuances of different markets, but if you're in a sales position and you have any kind of prospective buyer, that buyer now is so much more enabled than they've ever been in the past for a lot of reasons. People are more comfortable with technology in general. When I first started selling, there was no such thing as a cell phone. There was no such thing as the internet.

11:02 I would drive to a pay phone with a longer cord to pull into my car to call into the office for messages and hope I had a lead. Like, so things have changed immensely. But back in those time, buyers were beholden upon the sales process that we put on them. The sales professional was expected to direct and mandate the process in which the sale happened. And buyers would follow that. They had to. We would not do demos unless we felt we were ready to. We'd literally tell a buying organization, "No, we're not doing a demo." Today, a buyer would tell you like, "Get out of my office." Because they're so much more empowered now. Selling has to change how they engage. And I think what's most important is when they engage a seller, excuse me, a buyer to know where that buyer is in the process because they're not at step one. If you engage a buyer as if you're just meeting them for the first time and just talking to them for the first time and introducing your product and they're already three steps into the process because they've already looked at your product, they've looked at all the, you know, recommendations, they've looked at your competitor, they've looked at pricing and you engage them at step one, you've immediately frustrated the buyer.

12:07 Yeah, that is a huge huge challenge. And I know that a CMO that was always something that that we would try to solve for is is how do we enable sellers to to have the right information so that when you engage that lead, that buyer, that that qualified person, you engage with them in a way that you know a little bit about what they're they're interested in, a lot about what their their business is about, and that you don't go into that conversation cold. Because think about how much time is wasted when you go into a conversation cold, especially if they have already, like you mentioned, engaged on the website. They understand the use cases and the problem you solve. Really, it comes down to like how do you build trust and how do you build a champion in this this user, this prospective customer that can ultimately lead to a long-term relationship between you and the company that they work for.

12:56 Yeah. So, there's a couple things just outside of technology. Being genuinely curious is something that is a humanistic approach that'll never go away with AI or any of the things we're going to talk about later in this call. If you're genuinely interested in the person you're talking to and what's good for them and their company and the role, you get a lot more back, right? And people can tell if you're reading off a script or if you're being very genuine in your questioning and your discovery process and then layering the technology onto that. I think we have a unique opportunity specifically with AI to be enabled before we get on the phone to know where they are in that process to know what they've looked at and understood that and quite frankly the tech stack that's in available to the sales rep these days doesn't necessarily service the sales rep in that way.

13:42 There's a number of login that he or she have to do. There's a number of things that we have to update that as a sales professional you don't look at as it didn't help me prepare for that engagement. and didn't help me be value added to that buyer at that point in time where they are in that process. And I think that can greatly change with the onset of AI. Yeah. It's it's kind of like reps are in this kind of AI tooling trap, right? So, uh you you open up your computer, you go to your monitor, and there's an AI app or an AI feature in every single app.

14:14 So, the question is for a rep, what do you utilize and what tool is going to help you do your job? I think it's a it's it's a really interesting kind of conundrum that organizations and RevOps teams and managers and even reps are faced with is like you log in what do you use to to help you get your job done? It's interesting too because in earlier times what I hated most is having to update the systems and update the people because as you went up market as you sold bigger deals and larger enterprise deals it wasn't a salesperson it was a team and this is internally you have a number of people that need to be updated on what you did like I can remember coming out of a meeting it was just me in the meeting but there's like six different people in three different time zones that I need to make sure had the same feeling that I just had coming out of that great meeting. It was a great meeting. And so now I'm in the car. Am I going to remember everything that happened in the nuances? Am I going to be able to key that into a CRM? Am I be able to deploy that across the people? I think that's one of the greater opportunities that AI presents to ourselves is the ability to keep everybody in sync and everybody up to speed. And you know, quite frankly, if I'm logging into Claude or OpenAI myself, I didn't fix any of that. I didn't do anything that really updated everybody. I use it to help automate some of the things I need to do singly, but I think there's a bigger opportunity at hand from a pure platform perspective where everybody is kept in sync and up

Building Trust in Sales Relationships

15:36 To date. And that's why I'm excited to be involved here, but we can talk more about that. But I think it's one of the professions that people talk about AI displacing jobs. If anything, sales is the perfect place for AI to deploy and not displace the job, but it augment the job where I get back to the humanistic approach where I get back to the real value ad, which is my facetime with the buyer and building those relationships and that trust. Yeah, that's touches on a great a great point here is is is trust. How do you build build trust with with a buyer today? What what what are the steps that you have done in the past and what would you do today differently than what you did before?

16:16 Yeah, I mean or is it the same? Yeah, it it's it's done differently but I think the same outcome is there is care. And when I mean care by you have a meeting, care to be prepared, care to do the research, care to be on point with people you're talking to. People are different, right? If there's six people on the call, there are six different personalities at best on the call, right? like you need to understand how to talk to people and you need to understand how to engage people and being respectful like if a person is afraid to make a decision to me as a seller as a professional I would say that's on me to fix right I either did not present correctly the right information to you know ally those fears or to let them know that I got your back because quite frankly most of my biggest deals that I've done they were betting on me and I'm not saying that from a cocky perspective was like they trusted me to say if this thing goes bad I have one throat to choke and it's Joe. And I was okay with that and I let them know that yeah I will be there for you and as well as I do there were bumps along the way early days at Salesforce Yosh. And we would fly out to wherever we needed to be to fix a problem. We would bring people out from corporate. I can remember internally breaking glass going look I don't give a crap what you think.

17:23 You're flying out and you're meeting a client and you're talking about why we missed that release and you're talking about why it's in the next release and why we're committed to that. You know we did that on behalf of the customer. That's how you build that trust. That's how you build that value. And so today I that doesn't go away, but it would be easier for me to do that today with the tools that are available to me than it was it was brute force in the past. It was just late hours and hard work and a lot of followup where things can be spoonfed to me now. Things can be positioned where I would have insight that would take me days or weeks of meetings to gain where I could get it in seconds here. Like so there's a huge opportunity for us in front of us.

18:02 Yeah. I I always thought about you as the quarterback. So you're you're you're the quarterback on the field. You're leading the team and the team that you had were your sales engineer. It was myself as a pro serv person. Uh it was my supporting pro-serve team. It was our partners that were were helping us and it was all the folks internally from product and engineering and IT and security that were all servicing the customer. But in order to orchestrate these these large deals, you really needed a quarterback through who could really see through through the forest uh and and look at all of these different landmines that were were happening because landmines could be planned by a competitor who's an incumbent. It could also be be planted by, you know, somebody's who's out at the company who is not yet a champion who we're trying to influence. But it can also be internally missing a product release, an escalation when there's a performance outage or a system outage. And I think you did a masterful job of just kind of leading the field, quarterbacking, making sure everybody was in sync, communicating, always going the extra effort to to to bring everybody engaged and involved. And I think that's a part of selling that if you haven't lived that that world, it is probably what in my view the most valuable part of selling is that that you're really not always selling. You you always are in service of the customer.

19:22 Yeah. And I took that role very very seriously, right? Like I have clients that we've sold multi-million dollar deals with that I still consider friends, right? Like I know what their kids are doing. Like I know what they're doing. They've jumped and changed different jobs. I'm not in an active selling role now. So I have no ulterior motive to be friendly with these people. But I genuinely enjoyed the time together and the risk that they took and betting on us because early days at Salesforce it was a risk. They were bucking it. like they were telling it, "No, we want this solution internally and you know we were doing some crazy stuff at the time. The early deals we didn't have a sandbox environment. We're telling a big bank, we're going to put hot fixes in place over the weekend and not tell you." They were like, their heads were exploding. Meanwhile, that same ride home. I'm on the phone with Parker Harris going, "We got to have a sandbox. We need to do this in a more strategic way." It was crazy times, but all of those interactions built that trust, built that value. All those times where we'd go out to Dreamforce and host clients, it wasn't just about the dinner and drinks. It was about getting close to people and knowing that, hey, they're a solid individual. They're going to be there for me just like I'm going to be there for them. We would have our, you know, as you said, our executive sponsors, our our mentors go to bat for us inside these companies. Like they they were breaking glass, too. And to be respectful of that, it wasn't an easy decision for an Anna Maria Gillian or a John to to go out against their leadership and say, "No, this is what I want." You know, so you have to be respectful of that. And again, back to the here and now. We have an opportunity to do that in a much more effective way.

20:55 That's the show. If this one sharpen how you think about selling, send it to one person on your team who should hear it. Follow The Selling Economy wherever you get your podcast and subscribe on YouTube so you never miss a conversation. To learn more about AnyTeam, visit anyteam.com. New episodes every Wednesday. I'm Yosh. So long. Thanks for listening.