💃 Stakes, Decision-Makers, and Salesforce 🕺

Good morning, Salesforce Nerds! Happy October 🍂 🎃 👻!

The founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, has said he needs to make 3 good decisions each day.

And he shoutouts 🗣️ Warren Buffet, CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, who has professed he needs to make only 3 good decision per year.

Berkshire Hathaway’s market cap is $1T. Amazon’s is $2T.

🤔

With trillion dollar stakes, clearly good decisions have been made.

As Salesforce professionals, your role is to support your decision-makers - executives, managers, leaders - to support them making great decisions like Bezos and Buffet.

Understanding the relationship between stakes and decision-makers will make you an invaluable resource, and will separate the good and the best Salesforce professionals.

Here’s what we mean 👇

SCENARIO

Big Decisions. Big Stakes.

🤔 “Should I create the infrastructure to have the ability to ship to any house in the US within 2 days?” (Bezos, Prime Shipping)

🤔 “Should I sell my proprietary, internal tech tools to external customers?” (Bezos, AWS)

🤔 “Should I buy See’s Candy, and invest $1BB in Coca-cola?” (Buffet)

🤔 “Should I sell 50% of my AAPL holdings, my largest and most profitable investment?” (Buffet)

There are huge stakes involved in these decisions. A loss could mean a drop in stock value, huge write downs, firing entire departments, or the board firing you 😳.

Of course, Prime Shipping and AWS turned out to be pillars of Amazon’s $2T market cap.

But what if those decisions were wrong? Behold-

Do you remember this gem of a failure from Bezos? This bad decision cost them about a quarter-billion dollars.

Big decisions. Big stakes.

What’s this look like in your Salesforce ecosystem?

THE DECISION MAKERS

Salesforce Decision Makers

Do you know who is making the decisions in your world? You need to develop a strong radar to identify decision-makers, as they are responsible for the success of the business, and they will influence the success of your projects and your career.

If you’re a consultant-

👉 Your CEO or managing partner is deciding which horizontals to bring to which verticals to penetrate and grow, and who among the partners will be responsible for making that successful GTM.

👉👉 You need to be an expert in the horizontal, vertical, or both.

👉 Your partner, practice lead, or senior manager is deciding which resources will lead which projects based on skillset, capacity, and client’s LTV.

👉👉 You need to make the manager’s job easy - have a wide skillset, manage your utilization effectively, and retain clients

👉 Your client executives are deciding which technology to invest in, which vendor to implement it, and how much to spend.

👉👉 You need to make the client feel good about their decision - Salesforce is the right CRM, you’re the right resource to implement it, and the money is well-spent.

👉 Your client’s VPs of Marketing and Sales are making business process decisions - how to map legacy statuses to new statuses, the threshold for converting Leads to Opptys, and what is the SLA to follow up with a new lead.

👉👉 You need to advise, consult, and influence your client to make good decisions with gap analysis, pros, cons, and impacts of each choice.

In-house resources are influenced by similar decision-makers, just on the otherside of the equation.

To find the decision-makers in your world, one good indicator is that they sign the checks 🤑. As well, knowing your audience is a cheat code 🙌.

THE STAKES

Salesforce Stakes

Behind every WSOP bracelet is someone who pushed their chips knowing they could lose everything. It’s a calculated risk.

Behind every decision-maker is stakes. Things to be won or lost (or not made worse…a legit 3rd outcome).

Here are some examples of stakes in your Salesforce world -

🥩 The money 💰 a business is investing into their CRM.

🥩 The new leads a business will sell to.

🥩 The accessibility of resources to support, maintain, and enhance their CRM.

🥩 The adoption rate for new revenue-driving business processes.

🥩 The uptime, SOX compliance, and auto-updates inherent to enterprise SaaS.

Ultimately, stakes can be rolled up to money and risk. How much you spend, what your return is, and what are the odds of success. Those are the stakes.

To be the best Salesforce professional you can be, consider the revenue, expenses, and risk profile for each choice.

The best decision-makers are focused on the financial outcomes, and their likelihood, of their decisions. You should be too.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Takeaway

Sonny Vaccaro was a young marketing professional with a new shoe brand, who decided that, rather than pay a few players a few dollars, instead pay one player ALL the dollars. That one player was Michael Jordan and that incredible decision is immortalized in the movie Air.

Fast forward - John Donahoe was the CEO of Nike up until a few weeks ago. He decided Nike would be better off focusing on a DTC model (direct to customer).

He was wrong. Over John’s 4yr tenure as CEO, Nike’s market cap has been nearly-halved. And John is out of a job.

Decision-makers deal with big stakes.

As Salesforce professionals, it is your duty to identify decision-makers, and set them up for success to make great decisions.

SOUL FOOD

Today’s Principle

and now....Your Salesforce Memes