💃 My Favorite Client as a Salesforce Consultant 🕺

Good morning, Salesforce Nerds! I recently had dinner with a client’s executive.

He was personable, charming, and a great storyteller. He was like Dave Chapelle holding court with a bunch of young comics.

He made everyone at the table feel like he was speaking directly to each of us. Like we were his beloved grandchildren. His message centered around his principle that people are what makes businesses tick.

His stories mesmerized us. They made our tech jobs feel performative art.

And we knew we’d become a story he told at a future dinner- he’d refer to us by name and distill the value of our contributions into sticky anecdotes.

He was a people-oriented executive. A very successful one. And we felt fortunate to be in his presence and to learn from him.

Then he said something we never expected….

A Good Executive

We were four hours deep into seafood towers, 30-day-aged 16oz filets, and lobster mac and cheese.

The last group in the restaurant, we nursed our nightcap old fashioned highballs 🥃 and lush cabs 🍷.

And as he reached for the check, he dropped the unexpected on us-

“This is my last month at the company, I will phase out over the next 30 days.

Next week, we are bringing in a new CTO. He is an incredible talent, decades in tech, and will lead this project to a strong close with you all.

I will depart to my family and my boat. I promise to come to the Go-Live celebration with you all. And you will be in good hands until then…”

😶

You could hear a spider fart. The silence covered the room like a degenerate bear trader covers their short positions.

The thought of him being replaced during our project was tough to stomach. He was a champion of his people, ERP partner’s people, and the Salesforce partner’s people.

In fact, the legacy Salesforce org was a perfect reflection of who he was as a leader. Here’s what I mean -

Years prior, the 💽 Classic → ⚡️ Lightning conversion produced a Lightning org that was made to look and feel like Classic-

🤦 There were minimal Page Layout sections. Rather, like Classic, it was a ton of fields and you just kept scrolling and scrolling (you Classic-heads remember this, right?!).

🤦 The Activities were “hidden” on a separate tab.

🤦 Lightning Web Components were developed to replicate the look and functionality of Classic 🤯.

Why? Why would you eschew the best that Lightning has to offer and apply a retro-skin so it looks like Classic?

Because the executive making the decisions was a people-person.

The sales and marketing folks who had been doing the same thing for 10yrs and could not bear a change.

He understood tech was his responsibility. And he also understood tech was their to serve the business people.

He was focused on serving people, and it made him a very successful executive 🙌.

WHAT NEXT?

Also A Good Executive

His replacement was also a career tech executive. He was also charismatic, smart, and well-spoken.

And there were many more similarities.

Also, there were differences….

One specific difference that ruled them all - he was a tech security enthusiast.

While his predecessor was a people person, this new exec’s secret sauce was protecting companies from the risk and danger of being hacked or technologically compromised.

I mean…he wasn’t wrong. This was a multi-billion dollar public company that, to a hacker, looked like swiss cheese 🧀 to a mouse 🐭.

And this person built their career on securing high-profile enterprises. Getting companies out of tricky security situations that us app-builders just don’t think or care about.

The Salesforce project came to a screeching halt.

The Salesforce partner was made to produce a security audit report (SaaS, my friends, takes care of a huge chunk of this for you. All of a sudden, the $200/license seems reasonable). As well, no more sharing of our “consultant” license - we’d each need our own licenses to login (yeah yeah, this should’ve been day 1 😑).

We worked with the network/infrastructure team to turn on Microsoft SSO. The ERP team had to perform their own audit. The rest of the business applications had to go through the same security checklists.

The users hated it.

Convincing the CEO and board was easy - “do you want to be on the national news because your customer’s information was hacked and you can have it back for $20 million ransom?!”

That’s a death sentence for the CEO of a public company ☠️.

And, honestly, all perfectly reasonable concerns. In the decades of existence, this company treated security like you treat that rattle in your car- someone should fix that…but whatevs 🤷🏻.

In just a few months, major risks were identified and remediated. It was a legitimate risk that needed to be addressed asap.

But boy did we miss the old CTO who loved people and didn’t give security a whiff….

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