Implementing Complex Systems
To use his own words, Nigel Dalton and Salesforce “go way back”. Nigel was working in a start-up in San Francisco. Two buildings over, there was another start up a bit further along in the journey than the one he was employed at. That company two doors down was Salesforce.
Nigel has a bachelor’s degree in social science, is an AI thought leader and is now working for ThoughtWorks, a global consulting company that has realised that tech involves people.
I first met Nigel when we worked together at REA group. It was there where I found out why he is described as the ‘Godfather of Agile’. He was embarking on a journey that was unfamiliar to him. Nigel described his career prior to that as mainly focusing on “fixing broken things”, however his position at REA was the complete opposite. REA was experiencing significant growth, and Nigel was tasked with accelerating it to a quicker pace.
Nigel and I sat down to discuss some things that I had written in White Paper in preparation for writing The Platform Owner’s Guidebook. We explored the bitter pill that many companies on the CRM implementation journey must swallow: You can have the shiniest piece of technology in the world, but you have to have the right people around it.
To explain this using an analogy, I compare SalesForce to be like a gym membership. I joined a gym at the Herald in Melbourne in the early 2000s and didn’t go once in the first two years. After finding the motivation to really get into it, I broke my coccyx falling off a dirt bike, showing off in front of my kids. It got me thinking about how much time I had spent on a gym membership compared to how much value I got out of it. Much like this membership, a big seller like Salesforce does a great job telling you all the things you could do with the platform, but it doesn't do them just by turning the key.
Being a social scientist, Nigel gives me more context.
“It is the same as a Sum-Cost Fallacy. You reflect on how much you have spent and think ‘I better do something with this now!’ It is the same as streaming subscription services. Human indecision plays a big part in all of this.”
Nigel is also the chair of the Lean Enterprise group. His experience has taught him that the ‘continuous improvement’ mindset that people need to embody to succeed in platform development is a hard one to instill.
“People often just say ‘I want this fixed and for it to be fixed forever.’ You have to warn them that there will be further improvement required ahead.”
To use the gym membership analogy once more, it is not enough to purchase a membership and expect results. Day in and out, you have to run on the treadmill and do your bicep curls. There is a long road ahead.
Thus, when investing in a CRM platform, you have to do your research to determine whether it is fit for purpose. One of the issues that Nigel and I discuss is finding the right level of investment for your goals.
“There's a bunch of 56-year-old white guys running organisations who are deeply frightened of the mobile phone,” Nigel says. “There is often a misunderstanding about what the technology is and what it can do. This means the people in charge will write a million dollar check to make it happen without understanding if it is valuable.”
To resolve this issue, it is important to put the end customer at the forefront of all decisions. Nigel suggests posing the question: would this impact a customer’s experience with your company? This is the crux of all considerations when investing in tech.
Nigel reflects upon a time at REA before I arrived, where the company decided to go ahead on a tech investment based upon a value stream that would help to manage conversations with property developers.
“We met the value stream from one person’s perspective, but it wasn’t how other people worked. We proceeded to build an entire scaffolding of Salesforce that no one used.”
When I landed at REA, I recall looking under the hood and analysing the engineering behind this. It was technically brilliant, but totally useless.
Another problem with CRM is that often there is resistance from employees to engage with the software.
“I can remember having some tough conversations with people when introducing CRM,” Nigel tells me. “They would say ‘you are going micromanage me’ or ‘I am skilled in the art of relationship building and that's why you hired me, and now you want to micromanage my tasks by making me enter data into this field.’”
My rebuttal to this resistance is that Salesforce is not about micromanaging, but it is a tool that a person can use to enhance their customer service. It can be used to facilitate. Nigel, who hosts his own podcast Australian AI, also argues that CRM is essential in developing automations.
“Collecting data is the starting point to the development of AI. That is where CRM comes in. Collect, connect and collect are the fundamentals of AI and those fundamentals are anchored in the collection of data.”
This collection of data is also essential for start-ups. If you are attempting to scale up, you need to keep track of who you have called and approached. While you may be a small organisation, the issues or disconnect that occurs between 3 people quickly amplifies when the company grows. This is also compounded by the growing nature of a WFH population, fueled by Covid and globalisation. Gone are the days of the war room wall full of customers. These things need to be on platforms, so that people can interact with employees online.
While the work from home shift has been momentous in the past few years, Nigel also thinks there has been historical changes in the world of business and management.
“Lately I have been reflecting on the incredible changes in understanding of how things work in business. A century ago, the world of physics changed after 250 years of Newtonian thought. Now it is all quantum mechanics. We’re having the same moment in management thinking today. We’ve gone from a very traditional command control belief that was handed to us 100 years ago, to a world with a whole new dialect.”
This paradigm shift in the world of CRM is exemplified by Nigel through the rise of new terms. Scaffolding, first and foremost, is a key concept that represents this change.
“Scaffolding is radical. It’s removing the fantasy that we held about how easy resolving customer problems would be if I were to buy Salesforce,” Nigel thinks.
This “scaffolding” prepares the foundation for the complexity of your CRM tool to sit on top of.
Nigel also brought up that with this shift came another techno social term: cognitive load. The theory describes that if you load too much stuff onto people, you’ll break them. In many cases, team size and workload are determined by the amount they can manage. He asked whether I believed the use of CRM could overcome the impacts of cognitive load for salespeople, to which I would answer yes. There are thousands of data points a salesperson must consider. Product, customers, maintaining relationships and information. A system would undoubtedly help overcome the mental task of remembering this information.
But while Nigel understands that there is obvious value in using CRM, he does not want to portray it as a simple endeavor.
“When I was growing up, I was always told keep it simple stupid, but issues seem to pop up relatively often when things were oversimplified... the customer is never a simple problem in any business.”
If you are embarking on a CRM journey or are struggling to implement complex systems, Nigel’s bottom line is this: form a clear goal and keep the customer in the forefront of your mind.