A Tale of Two Salesforce Instances | Demar Amacker, The Muse

Ken Babcock (00:01.098)

Hey everyone, welcome to the Change Enablers podcast. I am super pumped to have Damar Amaker here from the Muse. He's the VP of B2B operations at the Muse. We've gotten to know Damar over the past couple months. He did a webinar with my colleague Rocco, and for good reason. In 2022, he's recognized as one of the top 25 RevOps leaders by revenue.io. He's an expert at

data systems, all that nasty stuff that sales teams get into and have to deal with. We're gonna talk more about that today with a very specific example. But I couldn't help but notice when Demar joined the pod today, he's got his little SF 49ers hoodie on. I've got the Golden Gate Bridge behind me. It's actually the week leading up to the Superbowl. You're probably gonna hear this at a later date, but big.

Big time for San Francisco tomorrow.

Demar (01:02.828)

Yeah, I feel like I only record webinars with Tango when my teams are in the championship. I don't know if you remember my last podcast with Rocco was the week of the World Series and I was cheering on the Diamondbacks who I am an alumna as well. So hopefully better luck this time than the first result, but I won't hold it against Tango either way.

Ken Babcock (01:24.451)

Ha! Yeah.

Yeah, I don't know, man. It's one of these things where like, you know, two data points starts to make a trend. So I'm really pulling for the 49ers so that when we bring you back the third time, you're not like, no, you guys are bad juju. I need my teams to win. But I am rooting for the 49ers. I'm a Buffalo Bills fan. I've got Bills paraphernalia around my desk. I am just so sick of being beaten by the Chiefs. So I need somebody to beat the Chiefs. And so I'm hoping.

I'm hoping it's you all.

Demar (01:59.884)

Yeah, it's a revenge matchup for us as well. So hopefully we get over the hump this time.

Ken Babcock (02:04.15)

Yes, yes, you got this. Well, cool, man. Well, I'd love to jump in because, you know, I think you've got a pretty interesting anecdote to share that we're gonna really explore the ins and outs of this particular story. But before we jump into that, I always like to start with our opener, which is, you know, you might be a little biased, right? But the question I always ask is, what do you think is the most underrated operations function? Now,

Given that you're in rev ops, you might be biased. You can even change function to like role responsibility, however you wanna take it. But what do you think?

Demar (02:42.36)

I mean, I think that it's probably process improvement for me. When it comes to sort of the things that no one really wants to do, but everyone needs to do, it's designing sort of the right set of actions and processes that are going to lead to the best result, you know, reducing friction across teams, you know, creating efficiencies.

Process design is not something that I think a lot of people, you know, spend a lot of time on because it's tedious and, you know, it takes a lot of peeling back layers of the onion to figure out the core of the problem. And I think that's why a lot of times we stay so surface level with problem solving is we don't get to the core of the why. So I like to go through the sort of like five whys, you know, level of questioning just to figure out like, because oftentimes you get to the point of like, oh, we've always done it this way, right? So it's like.

It's painful to make changes and it's painful to, you know, it's obviously appropriate where, you know, we're on the change enablers podcast, but I think change is hard for a lot of people. And the person usually tasked with that is someone central in operations. And I think that's that for me is, you know, now that I've moved to a more broad business operations role at the muse, I see the challenges that, that operations faces across the business. And it's not just revenue all the time. It's, you know, sometimes it's implementation and onboarding and sometimes

you know, it's more top of funnel, but I do think that as you're fixing the process, you have to find the core of the problem. And I think that's sometimes the hardest part of it is getting to the root of the issue

Ken Babcock (04:24.258)

I totally hear that. I mean, even with Process Design too, it's like, it's one of these like delayed gratification events where it's like, all right, I'm going to invest all this time upfront that will pay off over the longer term, right? But I think what's so challenging sometimes, especially when you're, you're putting out fires and you're running from one area to the next is like, you just don't have that, that time dedicated to the stuff that's going to pay off in the longterm, you've got all these short-term fixes that you're trying to pull together.

So I really appreciate that perspective. And maybe we'll jump into that with a little story. So when we were prepping for this pod, I appreciated an anecdote you shared, and that's what we're gonna explore today. But to give everybody some of the context of your role and what you're doing today at The Muse, maybe at a high level, paint the situation for us. You talked a little bit about something that.

you know, it gives a lot of our end users anxiety, implementing, maintaining Salesforce, but there's something unique in your situation. Can you just share that with the audience?

Demar (05:31.864)

Yeah, absolutely. So when I joined the Muse about six months ago now, we had just gone through a Salesforce merger of two instances, which was a lead up of about a year of kind of two Salesforce instances existing alongside of each other when the Muse acquired a company called Fairy GodBoss and put those businesses together.

they kept some of the stuff separate, right? And so part of the challenge that I came into was I got here right after the merger of the Salesforce instances happened and didn't get to participate kind of fully in the planning and preparation work for such a big undertaking. And not to shame anyone that was in place before I got here, but they decided to do it from a cost

your cost savings measure over a sort of weekend rather than the recommended sort of six to 12 weeks of really project planning. So yeah, it was two instances of Salesforce with separate processes, separate users, separate everything, separate flows and objects and five to 10 years of maturation from a Salesforce perspective on either side.

So all the junk, right? All the deprecated fields, all the deprecated flows and processes just got meshed together. So it was broken on both sides, and then it became a third, even more broken mess when the two instances were put together.

Ken Babcock (07:19.763)

And again, we don't want to throw anybody under the bus. But did you know you're inheriting this project? Was that part of the interview process? It's like, hey, we're bringing a lot of systems together here, you're the guy.

Demar (07:32.568)

Yeah, I love a challenge and it was something that was made very clear to me that it was going to be a bit of a cleanup project when I got here. They were about two months into the sort of, I like to call it kind of messy world when I got here. The transition was facilitated by an expiring Salesforce contract. So ultimately it was, you know, it was, you know, time.

time came down to it and they had to make a decision really quickly to shut one off to avoid the increasing cost of multiple Salesforce instances. I think it was short-sighted in some ways to look at the cost immediately for a $50,000 call it done the right way transition.

as opposed to having someone come in and play whack-a-mole for months after the fact to clean up the messes. So I do think that the proactive approach would have been probably less heartburn across the business, but I think cost savings won out.

Ken Babcock (08:46.83)

Mm-hmm. Yeah, and well, and also too, like if you're, if you're truly trying to like merge these two cultures into sets of goals and systems and missions and all these things, like, you know, you kind of want to keep it under one house. But, you know, when you were looking at the two, when they were sort of separate, how different were they? I mean, you know, there's, there's obviously some familiarity. Oh, I know this is Salesforce. But given the

the personalized nature of the tool. I mean, did these things even look the same?

Demar (09:22.66)

I mean, down to even like, so obviously the out of the box, the Salesforce objects, those matched up, accounts, contacts, leads, opportunities, those were being used in similar fashion. Then at the field level, you know, they weren't always, right, so, you know, even something as commonplace as something like an account type had multiple.

iterations over time of definitions of how that field was being used on both sides. So the flows and dependencies and all of the downstream sort of connective tissue, I like to call it, that as soon as you have one object that has a lookup relationship to another object, you've now created a connection across multiple objects. And then you times that by 10 objects across 10 lookup fields across those objects.

And you have, as I described, this kind of mangled mess of yarn that is sort of trying to, just trying to be connected. And at some point, those associations were all, someone was aware of all those associations, but as the Salesforce instances change hands from a rev ops perspective, as the strategies change from a sales leadership perspective, things

just have changed so much from the original intent of that. So documentation wasn't there, and we're just kind of chasing the cord back to the wall, kind of one object at a time to really understand what is the same on both sides, what is different on both sides, and then what are the sort of newly created kind of synapses that are there because we put these two things together and tried to...

quickly say, oh, well, that looks like type on this side, that looks like type on this side. Let's put those together, because that clearly is gonna be the same definition, even though the pick list on one side has 10 options and the pick list on the other side has five options, those pick list values now have, the third scenario is now one pick list has 15 options that are a combination of both, right? So it's stuff like that, that wasn't fully baked before the merger was happening.

Demar (11:45.08)

which led to, as I mentioned, lots of games of whack-a-mole trying to decide, oh, does this flow, should it get turned off? Should this validation rule be deactivated or reactivated to ensure that just the business logic across the whole system was not stepping on each other, like on itself, just from a process standpoint. But also, there was no standard of

what do I do, like what do I need to do to do my job at the end user level? So that was that was partially, you know, you know, there's all there's all the ancillary stuff that, you know, that there's a loss of trust, a loss of, you know, just, you know, faith in the system as a whole. And then, you know, that that's where you end up with a loss of usage.

Ken Babcock (12:35.71)

Yeah, there are so many things I want to unpack in there. The first being, I mean, of course, there was, you know, if there was no documentation, at least there was a subject matter expert, right? There was one person you could go to figure out the whole instance. I'm saying that sarcastically.

Demar (12:52.512)

No, no, yeah, and that's the thing is there was there was, you know, Salesforce is often compared to sort of a Lamborghini in your driveway that, you know, can can, you know, do a lot of amazing things, but you have to have someone there that is giving it the right care and maintenance and, you know, driving it the right way. And that wasn't the case for

either the Ferry YardBus or Mew's side. So it's, you know, the ownership and accountability around these things fell across multiple functions, marketing, sales, account management. And so operations was really there to unify the vision, the standardization of the, you know, the process for even something like lead flow or...

you know, opportunity management, which seems like it's, it's kind of commonplace, you know, uh, state, you know, moving pipeline stages and things like that. Every sales team is doing some iteration of that, but unless it's clear and concise and, uh, understood by the end user, it's, there's going to be breakdowns, right? And, uh, you know, in, in the process and that's where you, you know, you get the, uh, the, the data, um, you know, quality, you know, failing.

Ken Babcock (14:10.058)

Yeah, totally. Well, I don't have a Lamborghini in my driveway, but maybe when we launched this podcast and we hit it big, man, there's going to be two Lamborghinis in some driveways somewhere. Um, really helpful to think, you know, think about what it means to bring together kind of these two companies. Cause I feel like these, these types of systems are probably the things that are often overlooked, you know, and then there's also probably a decision you have to make of like, are we going to take

Demar (14:16.196)

Maybe.

Ken Babcock (14:40.118)

one team's culture around process and how they handle it and make the other team conform or vice versa? Or are we gonna pick and choose the best? I mean, how did you kind of approach that? And was there maybe once you did that inventory, was there a glaring like, oh, this side has it down, let's do it that way? Or was it a little bit of a mitch mash?

Demar (15:06.948)

Yeah, I think it was a bit of a mismatch, you know, taking the best from, you know, either of them, you know, one example I come to that comes to mind is, uh, the Muse was using, uh, a more 3d version of products and price books and opportunity line items and things like that, like really backed by the Salesforce CPQ, but the, the fairy Godwav side was, was more two-dimensional. So it allowed us to.

bring Fairy Godwass products into a more 3D view, but there was a lot of growing pains when it came to our looker reporting, like our just overall kind of business retention data was just wrong, for lack of a better word. Like it was, you know, we were under-reporting on the products that we weren't including in certain...

rules and things like that because they just didn't have that dimension in the other sales system. So looking at historical trends on data, it was really hard because there was no apples to apples. So once we got to a place where the data could be apples to apples for any future deals, it was an uplift because the 2D view versus the 3D view was obviously much more insightful.

On the flip side of that, account management wasn't really something that the, the muse team was, was doing inside of Salesforce. They were using, you know, kind of a hodgepodge of different account management tools, including Excel and Google docs to, to manage their accounts. Whereas there was much more of a strict task kind of management.

you know, account management workflow that we adopted from the very god-boss side. So, while the team, you know, had, you know, many differences in kind of their, kind of their approach to Salesforce, there were enough common threads because it was an acquisition of a competitor. So a lot of the, the what we're selling was, was similar. So that made it easier. But, I would say that the hardest part was.

Demar (17:31.444)

was the things that we took for granted that we thought would be the same across and had to actually rewrite new standard logic around because it wasn't right in either side before. Like it was like a chance to say, okay, scrap both. Let's start from square one and say, this is how we want it moving forward because now we have new sales leadership here. We have new marketing leadership. We have new, you know, just overall executive leadership that wants to put in there.

Ken Babcock (17:49.439)

Yep.

Demar (17:59.652)

their processes and their kind of culture. So it was an opportunity to really reset on things that we couldn't come to agreement on one side or the other being kind of the better practice.

Ken Babcock (18:13.198)

And that totally makes sense. I want to shift a little bit to think about some of the stakeholders of this. So you have sales reps, sales managers, you mentioned a new leadership team. How was this, and I want to focus just on the existing system before we get to the solution, but the existing system, how is that affecting these folks?

Demar (18:20.095)

Ahem.

Demar (18:38.096)

So I think it starts with the end user, obviously, right? If they don't feel like they have a clear understanding of the expectations set by them, by the sales managers and the account management leadership, then there's gonna be a breakdown in sort of the, the what's being done at the end user level. So there's the first disconnect, right? And then those sales managers are then accountable to

you know, our, you know, executive leadership team who, you know, they're being counted on for, you know, forecasting and retention numbers. But when none of that data is, is really accurate, it kind of, you know, it leads to sort of, you know, a breakdown between what they can communicate with, with their executive leader. Right. So I think it's, it's a.

I think at the end of the day, if you don't get it right, good data in, good data out kind of thing. So you have to get it right at the end user level. But as far as the stakeholders impacted, if it's bad at the foundation, you're building a bad process on sand, it's going to fall apart very quickly. And sometimes good leadership can mask that and can do what they can with what they have. But

The deeper the questions that you have, the more sophisticated the strategy that you're trying to implement, the more you need, like it's, I'd say like one of the most sort of difficult questions for an operations leader or operations professional to hear is a question that they don't have data.

to support retroactively, right? So it's like, oh, I don't have a time machine and I can't jump in and say, well, we, you know, let's go track in real time, all of our lead sources, you know, effectively, but I could put some in place, something in place now to make sure that for everything in the future, you know, so it's like, shy of a time machine, you really have to have, you know, you have to have some, you know, some foresight and some patience from the people that you're working with to get it right moving forward.

Demar (20:56.612)

that, yeah, that's the, you know, there were many an anxiety, you know, uh, you know, written night where I was trying to solve problems that I didn't have the, the time machine to go back and solve for. So, um, it's, yeah, that I would say that's, that's the hardest thing is, is getting, uh, you know, getting at data that you don't, you, you know, you didn't have the proactive foresight to, to go in and, you know, put in place. And then, you know,

scrambling for the answers that you can't answer because you don't have the data to back it up.

Ken Babcock (21:32.398)

So I'm gonna keep adding to our list. We need Lamborghinis, we need time machines. So those are the two things so far. By the end of this episode, we're gonna have a laundry list of things that, Damar, you and I need. So, you know, Rocco and I actually chatted about this a couple weeks ago on our State of Change Enablement podcast. And I think one of the tough things too with reps is they're not incentivized.

Demar (21:37.892)

We need time machines.

Ken Babcock (22:01.87)

They're incentivized to close deals. They're not incentivized to like, find the workaround to get the right data in, right? Like no rep is given commission based on like correct data entry. And so what that means is like, you need to make it turn off your brain easy to follow a process, to enter data correctly, to have confidence in that data that then, you know, managers and leadership can also have confidence in and start to trust. And so.

You know, as you're sort of revamping this process and thinking about, okay, let's combine these, let's come up with a solution, how do you make it just dead simple for reps to follow this new process?

Demar (22:44.56)

So I think it's twofold. It's establishing documentation and really writing down in black and white what the steps are for a given process. So it's SOP development. But the second piece of it is giving them visibility into, we call it our sort of...

you know, you don't like it's the board, you don't want to have your name show up on, right? It's, you know, the out of compliance report around, you know, opportunity fields not being filled out or lead fields not being filled out or things like that, that help with process adherence. But that can only go so far because then you just stop going and checking that dashboard. So you really do have to collaborate and get the buy in for because oftentimes, as operations leaders, we are not the ones enforcing

you know, with the end users, those rules, because we're not their direct managers. So you have to have a partnership with, you know, sales leadership and sales management across the board to be able to, to a, align on what, you know, if we only have them do one thing, like what's the one, what's the end goal here? Like what, what do we, what are we having them get done and B, how do we get there? You know, as simple as possible removing steps, removing fields, they have to fill out.

And then automating, finding ways that we can simplify, have field updates happen sort of in the background. And the biggest thing around that all, at the end of the day is, reps, they do have one goal, right? Like making more sales, but if it's not crystal clear to them as to the why of why you want them, like the bigger picture of, you need to fill out this,

opportunity record to a T with these fields so that it enables X, Y, Z. Where it just feels pointless as just like monotonous task that they just have to add to their day, it doesn't get through, right? But if they feel like they're a part of the bigger picture, they can start to understand the strategy behind it. I've had some of my best breakthroughs when they...

Ken Babcock (24:47.457)

Mm-hmm.

Demar (25:03.28)

they, like you see that light bulb of, oh, they get it. Right? I'm not pulling, I'm not pulling them up the mountain. Right? Like I'm, I'm actually, I'm behind them on this, you know, helping enable them because, because they get it now. They don't, they don't see it as just more process for process sake.

Ken Babcock (25:20.686)

I think that's a great takeaway. And the things I heard from you is like, obviously define, document, make the process visible, showcase the why. Like why do we expect you to do this? Which is, it just missed so often. It sounds so straightforward, but so many teams miss that. And then, the last piece, like you said, drive that process adoption. Once they understand the why, they know what it is. How do you make sure that they're following along? I think those are all great takeaways.

So we sort of painted the picture of what you inherited. We painted the picture of how we get these stakeholders to kind of follow through on realizing a new potential with one instance. Talk to us a little bit about the solution. Like where did you end up? What was the outcome of this project? And the more specific the better. I mean, our audience.

knows this type of stuff inside and out. So don't hesitate to go deep here.

Demar (26:25.176)

Yeah. So I think at the end of the day, what we ended up with was a much more simplified version of our schema and our just overall Salesforce deployment. Um, because what we realized was there was just a bunch of, a bunch of bloat, a bunch of deprecated objects, a bunch of deprecated stuff in there that was just clogging the pipes. When, and when we realized we, we really simplified it down to like, are we, are we able to

do these things, like get the job done with half the objects in place, right? Like these dependencies that are tied to these lookups and these related fields and all this stuff, like is it necessary to do what you want to do right now? If not, let's pair back all of the stuff that's not mission critical and then build it back up. Because at the end of the day, we are starting to hit limits on object limits in Salesforce.

We just built this snowball up and up and up and bigger and bigger, but then we didn't realize that the core of what we were trying to do is still the same of push more people through the sales cycle more effectively and more efficiently and treat them obviously better as customers. We realized we could do all of that with a much more slimmed down version of what we had. The different managed packages that we had over time with.

Ken Babcock (27:25.102)

Mm-mm.

Demar (27:50.576)

uh, you know, with, with different apps that we'd have bombora and whatever. So we just, we simplified the, what we were working with. So it, you know, we just looked at every object and said, do we need this object? Do we not need this object? And then once we had eliminated the objects we didn't need, it was, it was easier to go down to a field level and understand within Salesforce, where is this being used and how can we reduce the overhead of, you know, of this whole footprint, because if you saw the, if you saw the schema when we started, it was.

hundreds of objects connected to hundreds of objects, maybe even thousands of connections at that point exponentially. So for us, we had to simplify it. We had to get to a place where everyone understood all of the inputs and outputs of the data within Salesforce, because with it being our source of truth and just one of the places where data kind of flowed through, we had to make sure that we had all objects that had flowed in from other systems.

that we weren't using. It was like no one, like five years ago, no one even knew that like, what this object was doing anymore. So we just got rid of it. So simplifying down to a place where, you know, we could kind of build it back up from, you know, what do we need today to really scale the right way.

Ken Babcock (29:06.114)

You know, this has come up now, we've had probably a few guests talk about pursuing simplicity. You know, complexity can be tempting because it feels smarter or harder. I don't know, I don't know what, we have all these biases that we say, oh, if we make this thing more complex, it's gonna either be more tailored, more robust or something. So I mean, in your opinion, like, what prevents us from?

Demar (29:19.526)

Mm-hmm.

Ken Babcock (29:35.042)

taking a step back sometimes and saying, hey, what if we just made this easier? What if we made this simpler? What if we made this clear? Like what's stopping people from doing that?

Demar (29:45.732)

So I think it's the work that we started with, going back to the very beginning, right? It's the understanding the core of the problem that you're trying to ultimately solve. And everyone has, and that's the sort of mountain that I'll die on, the hill that I'll die on. I don't believe that there is a sort of, you know, best in class sort of, you know, G2 or.

or, you know, Forester Wave for real. I think it's all smoke and mirrors when it comes down to it, because it's really about your implementation, where you're at in the journey from a customer, you know, SaaS complexity perspective. So Salesforce or HubSpot or Gainsight or Tatango, I don't think there is ever a right answer to that. That's the hill I'll die on. I think that it's all about where you're at in the journey, what problems that you're trying to solve, and, you know, software just adds more problems sometimes than it solves. So...

I think you got to be very intentional about looking at yourself in the mirror, not copycatting just because someone else is doing something. Does that serve your larger need? And if not, like, pare it back because at the end of the day, we only have so much mind share that we can really dedicate to, you know, I have 10 tabs open right now with 10 different sales tools. It's overload, right? And I can't stress enough that...

simplicity actually, you know, focus does lead to better results. And if you can, if you can do like, like the in and out example, right, like they do burgers really, really well, and they don't try to do chicken sandwiches, they don't try to do sloppy Joe's, they don't try to do hot dogs, whatever, like they do burgers really well. And like, that's what they built their, their model on. And so like, I feel like we are trying to do too much as operations professionals, a lot of the time, because we've become so niche, you know, ever try to carve out that they're part

you know, the, you know, the, the tech stack. But I do think that you have to be, you have to be intentional and you have to sometimes say no, because it's just, it's just not, you know, it's, it's not, it doesn't serve the business adding that, that one more tool.

Ken Babcock (31:50.462)

Yeah, I totally agree. We're speaking the same language. And I appreciate that you shared that, you know, that's the hill you'll die on. Because, you know, I tend to agree and I just keep hearing this theme come up with our guests as well. It's a common thread across a bunch of companies. Looking back kind of at the example that we talked about from your time at Muse, I was wondering, are there any learnings that you wanted to share from that?

Any advice you'd give to people listening to this and saying, oh my gosh, we have the same situation. Like, what would you advise them to avoid? What would you advise them to do?

Demar (32:33.056)

I think that you, like nothing can be done alone, right? I think you have to get the support of the users at the end user level. You have to have allies across the entire sort of workstream. So I think allyship and really asking the deeper level questions, it's not stopping at the second why, that maybe is, oh, well we've always done it that way. Or, you know, like.

So you get to the third, it's like, why have we always done it that way? Right? And it's like, oh, because, you know, at some point when we made the decision, it was a cost decision, right? And it's like, oh, well, okay. Well, let's, let's start from there as opposed to starting from, oh, like, yeah, that's, that's something that like just always been that, you know, it's like, and I feel like being, uh, like not afraid to, to make changes for, you know, cause I think sometimes, you know, you inherit processes and you inherit things.

from business logic from previous rev ops professionals or business ops professionals. And I think people are so respectful, right? They don't wanna mess up what was already in place or they don't have the time to really examine if that process is working effectively. And I think that's a problem, right? We don't have time because we get so stuck in like, we wanna do the next thing, we wanna do the next thing. It's like, sometimes you gotta look back and figure out like, what's the old adage?

If we don't understand our history, we're bound to repeat it. So it's like, how many times have we gone in these weird cycles of like, oh, well, that was a problem we solved already, but then it's come back around as another new problem, but it's not, it's just rehashed itself.

Ken Babcock (34:21.354)

like operational inertia is, I feel like, a widespread issue across companies because it's exactly like you said, people are respectful. People also just assume like, oh well, those are the rules, rules are rules. And it's like, well, somebody made those rules up at some point, right? That could be you. There's just, there is just so much inertia in how things get done that I think folks fail to.

to take a step back sometimes and say, okay, well, like you said, like, what is the why? Like, why are we doing this? And going deeper and deeper and continuing to ask those whys. So I really, I really.

Demar (35:02.172)

But I think that's a symptom though of where technology businesses and SaaS businesses are today, right? In this growth at all costs sort of mindset. And I think it's sort of the symptom of that being, oh, we have to go out and do more and we have to go out and we have to, you know, we have to re-innovate and whatever. It's like, we don't like, and so oftentimes when people build their 30, 60, 90 plans coming into a new role, the first 30 days is sort of.

you know, it's on paper as, oh, I'm gonna, I'm gonna learn and I'm gonna assess but like the pressure in those first 30 days to get quick wins to come in and, and make a change and you know, it's, you don't have, you almost can't afford to be thoughtful because the business is moving faster and faster and faster and your expectations are growing. And so I think we have to give the, give the remit to, to operations because if they're not, if, if operations pressures aren't going to stop and take that, that step back, like

who is, right? And so I think the, like the onus really needs to be at the leadership level to give that, give that lease to the operations professionals to move slower so that the rest of the business can maybe move faster.

Ken Babcock (36:19.438)

As a founder, as someone who did a lot of stuff in the beginning just to set things up and was out of my depth in a lot of areas, but I was like, hey, you know what? We got to do something here so we'll go do it. I feel like there are moments, and our team's pretty good about this, but there are moments where I have to remind folks who come to me and say, oh, but that's the policy. Or I want to make sure I wasn't not doing this the right way. And I'm like, well, hold on.

Whoever set this up was just setting it up for it to be there. Like there could be a new way of doing this. Like someone set the policy at some point. We can reset that. But no, I think what you mentioned about leadership sort of offering that signal of like, hey, we can always revisit the way that we do things if we think that it's going to prove valuable, I think is a really good way to kind of close the episode. I do have one.

Demar (36:54.874)

Right.

Ken Babcock (37:17.982)

Last question for you, a real zinger. Who is someone that you follow, whether it be social media, your read, otherwise, that makes you better at your job?

Demar (37:32.876)

I mean, I think that the beauty of operations is that it's a very peer driven organ is a sort of function. So like you like everyone's probably had similar challenges at some point in their, you know, their journey, whether it's at this company or that company. So I think the I say it's the community that I get to plug into. So I'm really plugged into two groups like, Repgenius and revops co-op and Wizard of Ops

It is a shared set of problems. You know, at some point we're all going to go through something that someone else has, and if you can't lean in on your network to help, you know, for just a quick, you know, how would you solve this? Like you're, you're doing it wrong because we're all like, everyone's out there, you know, just trying to make each other better. Uh, but that has led me to being able to, you know, to, to find the voices within the community that, that I actually, you know,

really appreciate. So people like Jordan Henderson, he's a rev ops leader that I really find insightful. It's very approachable types of insights. So Jordan, if you're not following him, and then like I said, just plug in with these communities that are doing amazing work behind the scenes, whether it's a channel focused on Salesforce specifically or...

resource, you know, tools and resources. Like there's so many ways that you can give back, but also get out of these organizations. So I think that's the one recommendation I'd have is just get plugged in with the ops community.

Ken Babcock (39:14.642)

Awesome. And my good buddy, Brad Smith, who set up Wizard of Ops, shout out to Brad. Demar, I wanna thank you for being on the podcast. I think this is gonna be a great one for the audience. I think people are gonna learn a lot from this. I think a lot of people are gonna relate to this one pretty deeply. So, appreciate you taking the time, spending more time with Tango, and go 49ers.

Demar (39:41.957)

Thank you Ken for having me and like you said, go 49ers, we'll see if it is bad luck or not.

Ken Babcock (39:48.259)

All right. Talk to you later.

Demar (39:50.372)

Later, mate.