Digital disruption and TrailheaDX
Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfesson started writing about the impact of AI and machine learning (ML) almost a decade ago. They teach at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and their early books, “The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies,” and “Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy,” provided deep insights into how the era we live in would unfold. We saw a lot of their ideas on display recently at TrailHeaDX Salesforce’s developers’ conference in San Francisco.
In a recent interview with McKinsey, McAfee says that few executives, even the ones pursuing digital futures for their organizations, have sized up the potential impacts,
Even though they see a lot of disruption coming, I still think that many really smart, well-managed companies are underestimating the scale, scope, and speed of disruption this time around.
Perhaps the greatest challenge all leaders face is better separating the threats from mirages or the things that will and won’t change about running a business in light of advanced technologies, for instance,
Articulating a compelling vision that will attract talent, customers, and stakeholders; being true to that vision; and managing the culture that you’ve created to go tackle those visions. Those are deeply human skills, and leaders who are good at them are going to become even more valuable.
The clear implication is that machines are doing the rote work and humans have to gravitate to the higher value add activities. That’s what makes Salesforce and TrailheaDX so interesting. From the outset the founders, Marc Benioff and Parker Harris, intuitively understood the importance of culture-building. They’ve always strived to make the business about something bigger than making money or even building a great company.
We all know about the company’s famous 1:1:1 business model in which it donates one percent of its profit, product, and time to charitable causes. While the fundamentals of the model haven’t changed, perhaps in a nod to Brynjolfsson and McAfee, Salesforce has broadened the culture quest to encompass as much of the outside world that’s relevant to its mission as possible.
They now talk about the Ohana, a Hawaiian word for family and like any well functioning family, they concentrate on the success of their members. This translates into the vision of Salesforce’s Trailhead as a training vehicle for users but more broadly as an approach to helping people develop the skills needed to secure good paying middle-class jobs.
Fundamentally, Salesforce may be a very successful technology company but it is also a strong culture play. In fact, the company and its products apply McAfee’s digital disruption analysis well. Products like Einstein and the Analytics Cloud help customers to grow into a world of relationships dependent on analysis and statistics rather than gut instinct while simultaneously offering a vision of a culture focusing on the customer and the employee.
All of this came into focus at TrailHeaDX conference in San Francisco. Trailhead, the product, is a self-paced learning and certification environment that teaches all levels of users about the Salesforce platform, Lightning. The platform offers users ways to develop and maintain systems based on no code, some code, or a lot of code depending on the task and the user’s ability.
But more than this, the digital disruption has enabled app developers to take much of the work out of being a customer. We used to talk a lot about the customer experience until we learned that customers value plain old vanilla competency in their dealings with us and not a grand show. It was a subtle change and we discovered we can only be really good at the blocking and tackling if we can anticipate customers’ needs which exposed the need for AI and ML. By successfully anticipating customers we can shorten the interaction time and demonstrate our competency.
But note that this change requires building capabilities into software which is not trivial and is, frankly, best done by the software itself and not a coder. That’s why the platform has become such an integral part of any software vendor’s arsenal. It’s also why something like Trailhead has become a vital part of Salesforce’s overall offering.
My two bits
It all fits together but we aren’t at our destination yet. The digital disruption should be considered as the mountain we need to climb before we get to the promised land. Platform technology frees us by generating running code and splicing together analytics, process flow, and quite a bit more. With our new freedom we can devote more resources to dealing with the interpersonal parts of customer relationships that people are good at and machines are not. It would be a mistake to think that we can reap a technology dividend by simply removing people from all of our processes. That’s why, to do the people part we need a people focused culture within a business and this includes the people we call employees.
So, in my mind, TrailHeaDX was a lot more than a developers’ conference. It certainly was that but if that’s all you got from it, next time bring your boss and culture visionaries because even if they can’t write a line of code, the culture part is large.
Revisiting show season
Show season changes the CRM market, it always does. One day you’re in the vanilla application software space and a week later you understand the need to incorporate social media, or analytics or machine learning or you see a need for enhanced integration and development through platform services. It goes on.
Today, in the wake of Oracle, Salesforce, Microsoft, and many other companies’ trade shows, we’re again taking a look at the available suites. But this time, we need to think less about what’s been added and how well integrated the components are.
With Oracle now a year into rolling out its cloud strategy, we can’t say we’re in cloud computing’s early days any more. We’re in a race to computing as a ubiquitous utility like electricity, water and natural gas.
Oracle was the last cloud holdout, the last company that led with its legacy on-premise products. Today they’ve reinvented themselves to offer infrastructure, platform and applications or any combination as services. They might talk a good game about supporting legacy customers forever, and that will be necessary, but they’d like nothing better than to convert the legacy base to cloud infrastructure. And make no mistake about it new cloud based apps is the eventual goal. Much the same is true of Microsoft whose end user products like Office are now being delivered by subscription even if some of the software still resides on the desktop.
Salesforce was, of course, born in the cloud and it hasn’t suffered through a transition though for almost 20 years it has been undeniably causing one. The disruption impacted everyone else but the next disruption, or whatever we’ll call it, is affecting even Salesforce. With typical poise Salesforce is taking it all in stride and is even taking a leadership position.
The disruption turns form purely delivering technology to focusing on how it is used. The focus is very important to Salesforce and all the others because it will have a direct impact on how much of its services (we used to call it software but this is now) get bought and deployed.
So we see increasing emphasis on learning how to develop apps and administer them even to the point of opening up the training platform, Trailhead, to enable partners to develop training programs for their custom apps.
In the background there’s also an effort to standardize on processes that deserves attention. Back in the day, a process was carved in stone. Your organization used a 7 step sales process or maybe a 5 step one. Introducing a 7-step process into a 5-step organization was enough to set off a riot. It was something you did only very carefully if at all. In that era there were sales methodology companies (still are) and there were software companies and each would tell you their products were agnostic. They were too, with a little coding.
But today it’s different. The introduction of AI and machine learning has made both methods and applications secondary. Yes they’re still important but, no, they don’t rule the roost. Everywhere sales people seem to be sidestepping the argument about which method is better in favor of adopting an attitude of doing what the AI system suggests is the next thing needed to advance a deal. As it should be.
Platform based CRM with robust partner communities and their apps have brought us to the point of fully integrated and automated business processes. Customization has never been easier thanks to the platform too. The next step in our journey will be inventing new business processes that derive from our need for, and attempt to be, more agile, to flexibly approach new opportunities.
That’s what has been most interesting to me about show season. Each vendor has, in it’s own way, made a tacit nod to the primacy of data and analytics for automating processes. In that event, they’ve also begun closing the door on business processes that momentarily pop out of the automation sluice and into a spreadsheet or other manual thinking.
The change isn’t only recognizable in sales though selling is a big beneficiary with solutions that include SFA, CPQ, admin functions, AI, ML, compensation management and gobs of graphically rich reporting. Marketing is a rich area with its newfound abilities to identify, target, hand off, score, and journey map. And service has its own rich tool set most significantly analytics married to multi-channel abilities to take customers from beginning to end of a support journey without necessarily bringing in a human.
In all of this businesses are freeing up employee time for higher-level tasks that add value to customer experiences well beyond getting a deal or a right answer. This is where the customer facing jobs of the future will come from. They will demand more and different people skills as well as technical mastery.
That’s why this show season has been a turning point. I think it will be looked back on as the time we began a more disciplined approach to customers and employees as people who interact with technology, not just as various flavors of technologists.
Mud season
It’s mud season here in New England that time of year when everything merges into an amorphous mess. The grey sky merges with a grey landscape made into slop by continual rains and dirty grey melting snow. It’s hard to tell where one thing ends and another begins but eventually the sun comes out and dries everything, the sky becomes distinct from the horizon, plants bloom from the firming ground and order is restored. What better time for Amazon and Salesforce to announce another partnership?
I have to say I read the press release and articles from Tech Crunch and ZDnet several times in order to separate things because I was confused. The announcement from Salesforce and Amazon today said that Amazon Connect and Salesforce Einstein would work together to provide an intelligent service offering to Amazon’s service customers. Ok, I get it, but why?
Amazon has been climbing the value chain in cloud computing for some time. Initially its AWS service provided infrastructure as a service that enabled legions of businesses to ditch the computer room and run their operations in the cloud. Additionally, the company ate its own dog food by building a customer service cloud offering that not only supports its internal needs but increasingly supports third party customers, the most recognizable among them include, GE Appliances, communications company Bandwidth, and AnswerConnect.
Amazon has other CRM components as well and relationships with Zoho, Zendesk, Freshdesk, and others. Today’s announcement pairs Salesforce’s Einstein AI tool with AWS Connect to produce a savvier version of Connect. There are and will be more integrations of multiple solutions across product lines, for example both Salesforce and Amazon have IoT offerings and we can expect more news on them in the near future, I think. But there’s a part that I still don’t get, a part that makes me think of mud season.
Historically, Amazon has pushed into new industries and markets with economies of scale, its ability to deliver something at lower cost than others in the space and consolidate market power. AWS was and is a great case in point. Unfortunately, the strategy is also one of accelerating commoditization in which only a few survive and the trend is to make a living on razor thin margins and, once the market is consolidated, reduce innovation. I understand commoditization, it’s a facet of capitalism but innovation has to have a place too.
That’s why I see mud everywhere. Can a company that started as a retailer spin off so many tangential businesses and continue to dominate all of them? Can CRM dissolve into a Salesforce-Oracle-Microsoft-SAP-Zoho and now Amazon soup of similar offerings and still offer differentiation?
My cautious answer is yes and not because of anything that Amazon is doing but because Salesforce is in the mix. Salesforce has a smart and notoriously short attention span with which it innovates a new idea and just as the rest of the market picks up on it, moves on to another object that it shines up and spotlights. Salesforce did this with social, mobile, IoT, analytics, and now its artificial intelligence offering, Einstein. With this strategy Einstein could end up powering a lot of customer facing solutions in service, sales and marketing.
This approach seems to be what Salesforce needs right now. As it is approaching $10 billion in revenues, it is, I think, also reaching a ceiling on what it can sell by itself and truth be told, it has been in this spot for some time. Selling through partners does two important things. It greatly enlarges the number and quality of its revenue streams but it also leaves Salesforce more or less free to do what it does best.
Salesforce has rapidly become the innovation engine of the industry. Its ideas drive markets and its technology is in many cases first among equals (check out the Magic Quadrants, I am not making this up). As long as it can maintain this position as the high value innovator through core technologies like its Salesforce1 Platform, Salesforce can be the exact opposite of Amazon. Where Amazon goes for the low cost commodity position, Salesforce captures the high-margin ground of innovation.
Is that a sustainable business model? Ask Thomas Edison.
CRM and government
Over the summer multiple events have pushed me to the conclusion that CRM and government are natural complements and that it’s just a matter of time before they meet. It would represent a huge opportunity for the industry and my full thoughts are available in this white paper.
The common denominator is people. Whether we’re dealing with government or with business people want and expect individualized attention to their needs and importantly, they socialize their ideas about products, services, and government in much the same way.
Business quickly adopted CRM technologies over the last two decades while government has been steadfast in its outdated approaches. The differences in adoption rates between business and government can be traced to some of the disquiet we see in the political arena for example, the populism manifest in the Brexit vote and in the American presidential cycle.
Where the approaches are similar
The government approach was also the business approach until social media and CRM emerged as potent business forces in the last decade. Communication was through broadcast media usually in print media, and it was also one way. Capturing the voice of the customer/constituent was not often attempted partly because it was slow and expensive. If you wanted more you had to deal with a representative that didn’t have your best interests in mind. A visit to your local Registry of Motor Vehicles in the U.S. is usually all the proof one needs.
But when social media came along, we all discovered how quickly an individual could influence a large audience. Some businesses got burned by the criticism and adopted CRM and its associated tools as fast as they could but government didn’t. Perhaps the relative scarcity of elections gave politicos the mistaken belief that there would always be time to fix something that broke. The recent Brexit vote in the UK should disabuse all of us of that belief.
How they differ
Business no longer waits for things to break and a quality regime based on the work of W. Edwards Demming has been a strong influence. Today we build quality into the manufacturing process eliminating defects before they occur or engineering them away. We build intuitiveness and ease of use into everything because we know that if we don’t a competitor will. This is where business and government diverge. There is often no alternative to your local, state, or national government though recent events show that the public is growing increasingly comfortable with “none of the above” as an option and that’s turning normal government functions into mush.
Now, here’s the rub: CRM can’t help all of this, at least not immediately. If we’ve learned anything in the CRM age it is that we need to always be testing our assumptions, gathering data, and analyzing it to figure out next best actions and to discover new opportunities to serve. CRM does all of this very well, but its effect is not immediate. The trust involved in successful CRM takes much iteration to bear fruit.
Getting started
This is exactly why its time to apply what we know about CRM and customers to government and constituents. The one-way communication model between government and the people that was successful throughout the 20th century has fractured. People have been trained to expect nearly immediate response delivered to their personal devices on almost any subject. Print and broadcast media can’t do this partly because their business models place gates between people and information.
Additionally, the journalism business model, which relies on advertising, has taken a hit from the rise of the Internet and the media now chases the controversy around a story rather than the story itself in order to attract the eyeballs that advertisers crave. Chasing controversy is less costly for the news gatherer but it often leaves consumers poorly informed or, even worse, informed about only one side of an issue. CRM would help to partially disintermediate news media from government further democratizing democracy in the process.
Implementation
How to pay for CRM in government is a tricky question. Many parties inside of government appreciate the status quo with its rules and procedures that make getting even simple things done quickly difficult. They’d have to be convinced of CRM’s appropriateness, seeing it as a benefit rather than a threat.
If the model for CRM adoption in business is any guide, at some point the benefits will outweigh the detriments. Establishing the balance between enough and too little CRM is likely to be done through trial and error. At some point breakthrough success will happen in one, or more likely, several locations thus creating the momentum for rapid adoption. Until then we continue living in a world driven by technology and social media but mediated by twentieth century communications. It is an unstable situation and it cannot last.
CRM and Brexit: teachable moment
The great thing about the software world that I spend so much time in is that it is very much a meritocracy, imperfect to be sure, but a place where merit is usually rewarded. That’s why the controversy over the Brits voting to leave the European Union seems so strange.
In CRM terms, the decision to leave the EU looks a lot like dissatisfied customers taking a walk. I just wrote a book about customer loyalty and the whole Brexit looks like a riff on the movie, “How to lose a guy in ten days” with Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaughey. Everything looked so good at the beginning and watching it all go south was sometimes funny but also sad.
If the EU could manage to find ways to alienate its constituents it didn’t miss many opportunities. In the vendor world could you imagine the same kinds of behavior? Over controlling, micro-managing, killing economies for the sin of over-spending, enabling chaotic borders, ignoring people’s feelings, and many other things drove the voting. At the end of the day, the vote wasn’t even close.
CRM was developed precisely to help businesses to avoid the beaucratization that can leave customers out in the cold. Its many modules are designed to capture customer data, analyze it, and help vendors to make important decisions about what to do next—all in an effort to retain customers and keep them engaged. CRM is about proactive personalization and contextual interaction, two things in short supply in the EU.
The Britons who voted to leave the union were not engaged in the European project. They’d spent the quarter century after the Maastricht Treaty absorbing the almost daily reality of big brother decision-making that too many didn’t think benefitted them.
Unfortunately, another aspect of life with CRM might have contributed in some small way to the vote to leave. I am referring to the understanding, honed by increasing reliance on subscriptions, that one can unsubscribe from a vendor and move on whenever the mood strikes whether or not the mood is justified. No muss, no fuss, no need to consider the aftershocks to the vendor. Unfortunately, we’ve increasingly become accustomed to chasing the newest thing that coruscates with effulgence.
But what works at a micro-economic level can be absolutely toxic when attempted on the macro plane. Governments are supposed to last and treaties are assumed to as well; they are the foundational elements on which we base decisions about the rest of our lives. They are never written in such stark terms as the GAAP accounting standards but those standards are a good example.*
What’s most frustrating about the Brexit is that so much has gone on for so long and the channels of redress are so narrow that the only seeming solution was the vote that occurred last week. But as I’ve written before it seems there is, or should be, a pony in that pile of manure and there is.
The EU was best when it did least. It was an economic union, a trading paradigm that enabled small countries to bypass the red tape inherent in national currencies and far too many border crossings each with their own rules. Computers can handle that work today and as for the rest of the EU? It would be nice if the EU members accepted that they’d overbuilt their union edifice, that what’s needed is less political union and simply more friction free commerce.
On another level, I sense a business opportunity for CRM that dwarfs anything yet seen. For several years, the vendor community has been heads-down focusing on the consumerization of its software. Making the software that mediates relationships with customers as intuitive and friendly as possible is part of what drives the digitization wave.
But a criticism of digitization has always been, for what purpose? The answer that is coming into view seems to be CRM for constituents rather than customers. Government outreach to citizens is too often bare-bones and decrepit. But what if we applied CRM ideas and technologies to government? No doubt there would be naysayers but I think their foot dragging would be in the service of a status quo that benefits too few and no longer works. It would be obvious and these naysayers could be discounted.
A CRM approach to government means incorporating all of the social, mobile, and analytic capacities we now have but on a grander scale. It means asking for more citizen participation in communities while promising better response and outreach. Importantly people could vote with CRM raising participation rates. I know this would scare a lot of politicians who depend on low turnout and sometimes even suppression, but there it is.
This political season is full of charlatans who are too in a hurry to knock things down and who haven’t a clue what to replace the old structures with. This is it: bring government into the 21st century using CRM technologies and ideas so that we never have a Brexit situation ever again.
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- The Four Basic Assumptions of Accounting
- Economic or Separate Entity: The company is treated as a separate economic entity for accounting purposes, even if it isn’t a separate legal entity.
- Monetary Unit: The only business transactions recorded are those in financial terms (dollars and cents in the U.S.).
- Time Period: Financial reports cover a specific period of time.
- Going concern: Financial reporting assumes, unless otherwise known, that the business will continue operating indefinitely.
Thanks to Carol Wiley, Accountingedu contributing writer http://www.accountingedu.org/gaap.html
