Gotta Wear Shades - Episode #207 of CloudFocus Weekly

Machine transcript generated in 2026 from the episode audio (Whisper speech-to-text with automatic speaker separation). Speaker labels are automatic and may be wrong in places. Timestamps shown every few minutes.

00:10 Jason Atwood: This is the 207th episode of CloudFocus Weekly for the third week of February 2015. This episode is titled Gotta wear shades.

Guest: CloudFocus Weekly is brought to you by Clone This User.

Jason Atwood: Clone an existing Salesforce user with a click of a button by the desktop or in the excellent Salesforce One mobile available for free on the AppExchange or go to www.clonestuser.com, which will bring you to the AppExchange and you can try it out for free. I'm your host Jason Atwood, join me co-host 207 times in a row. Justin,

Justin Edelstein: Gotta make a pic. Edelstein. I'm doing my pics right now. That is probably the perfect time to do it. I've got it. I've got it. I've got it. I've got a pic. Excellent.

Guest: Awesome. We have an agenda today.

Jason Atwood: We're going to talk about the blog post of the week. and then we have called the power of communities, talk about that, and then we have a, kind of an interesting article that, you know, one of those like, oh, it's a headline article, but then you read it and it's really, it's a little bit about stock price and whatever, but I thought it was a good jumping off point, so it's called why Salesforce has passed its prime, which is kind of like, ooh, gotta read that. Gotta read that one. Gotta read that. That's it. Thanks for watching. Bye-bye. Then we'll talk about the main points he makes. I think we, because we know Salesforce very well, and I think maybe it's an interesting side point, I told the homework for the podcast was to come up with some things that Salesforce does right and to come up with some things that Salesforce could do better in.

Jason Atwood: Needs improvement. is the category. And so I thought we would talk about them. So sort of, you know, take the article as a jumping off point to get to that and then we'll make our CloudFocus Pick of the Week which you will have to make.

Guest: I already did. Okay, great. Alright, starting on blog.arcasync.com. The Power of Community, the newest blog of the week. It's saying a play-by-play of highlights from the Salesforce Success Community.

Jason Atwood: Basically talking about just a lot of things that are happening in the Success Community that you might or might not know about. A little bit of love for us at Arkus for our participation and including CloudFocus Weekly, a full mention in the blog post. It was crazy that a blog on Arca Sync would mention the Arca Sync. That's two weeks in a row. When did it get mentioned last week? On the Howie blog? So, also talking about some of the sort of splinter groups off the community, like the Girlie Geeks group which were...

03:12 Guest: The Okay. okay.

Justin Edelstein: Salesforce I'm a beau because no it's because you have I have this mic you have this mic With the B league my the oldest snowball. a's It's probably.

Guest: But like you have to continue to actually read it. It's all to get these clicks to

Jason Atwood: Get this nice big ad of Emerson at the top the a the Like five main point.

Justin Edelstein: I read thanks for summarizing this because I yeah, I mean nuts going through the it's terrible So here are the five main points.

Guest: One is kind of, this is not one, this is prevalent in all of of them.

Jason Atwood: And I think we should just quickly talk about the five main points and then get into our points. the right and wrong one is net sweet taking customers yep sure this is the the weakest I feel of all the points it's like well yes if you're in a a market that's maturing that everybody has customers right at this you know a certain point there's no new customers to go get so then people take each other's customers so net sweet taking customers away from sales force Honestly, I'm not hearing that on the street. There's no data in the article to support this case.

06:41 Justin Edelstein: Right. It's just like they're taking customers. You know what I can say, you know, our customer is taking Deloitte's customers. Yes, we are. And Microsoft. Deloitte, look out. Here you come. IBM's consulting. Anderson consulting. Look out, Praiswatercouborouse.

Guest: We're taking your customers.- Look out!

Jason Atwood: Okay. We got your customers. The next one I'm a big Salesforce fan, but I'm not an apologist. Curly, a lot of this is an issue, and something we're going to talk about.

Justin Edelstein: But... Now, with that said, he's... What do you get for $7? That's right. He's comparing Salesforce.com Enterprise Edition at $1.25 a month a user to Insightly. He's not comparing Group Edition. or the platform type of license. He's comparing the Enterprise Edition, like one below the top, versus whatever insight he gives you or Zoho gives you, Zoho at 28 user a month.

Jason Atwood: And here's what I think the thing is, it was the article comes from a place called Fit Small Business. So I kind of like the thing about Salesforce that you know good or bad is that $125 enterprise edition is the same edition that you and I use for Arkus and the same edition that you know some of the biggest companies in the world use that same hundred like that same that they might pay less or more than $125. dollars in fact it's one of my issues with Salesforce but but It's a scalable solution. I don't feel like Incitley could be used by Deutsche Bank.

Justin Edelstein: Or maybe by a couple of people there.

Jason Atwood: Maybe by 2B. I feel like you're kind of comparing. You're comparing a very good license and a very high price compared to $7.

Justin Edelstein: But are you really looking at its scalability across an enterprise? Yeah, probably not. When you're looking at Zoho and Nimblin and Citely and not throwing NetSuite onto this as an example, which would have been smart considering the first point was NetSuite stealing their customers. Why not throw NetSuite on here? Same thing with dynamics. Why not throw dynamics on there? Why choose these lower end quote up start just just to throw out some things and slightly I had to go to the plate. So I'm doing my own research Hundred custom fields.

Jason Atwood: That's it. Seven dollars a month. Yes. There's some limitations there, huh? Yes Well, you do get things like Quick QuickBooks online integration mail shipper integration Google Contact and Calendar sync custom branding A hundred,000 records.

09:44 Guest: Oh. I have what though? I don't know.

Jason Atwood: Let's see down here.

Justin Edelstein: You're talking about... As opposed to... You get branding. What are you talking about? As opposed to... You get custom branding.

Jason Atwood: You get 500 custom fields per object. In this particular edition. Right. Well that's the thing. Anyway, so I just don't like that comparison. So let's keep going on. Alright. His reasons. Next up is they spend too much money on marketing.

Justin Edelstein: So that's the reason why they passed their prime? Yeah. While I can agree with the statement, spending a lot on marketing, I don't think they spend nearly as much as like Microsoft, for example. I don't see Salesforce commercials splattered all over television. I don't see a Super Bowl commercial for Salesforce this year, at least. because we have seen it in the past, but I don't, I mean, they're comparing them now to Workday. So once again, like I wish that he would have, his comparisons, like anyone to any product. Yeah. Like if you're going to say, well, NetSuite's taking market share. Then in the next section, show me what NetSuite costs. And then in the next section spends this much on marketing and is growing by this percent. All right. How much does workday cost and what does it do?

Guest: The other thing that I think it's a little bit off in this. Man, we're ripping this guy. Yeah, it's all right. Not a good article.

Jason Atwood: No, it's not. Again, I think it's the more the article is more of a thing for us to then talk about the good and bad of Salesforce. You know, way to God is there without being like, hey, let's just talk about the good and bad of Salesforce. But what he does is compare the revenue growth. 28.3 with the spending of revenue on sales and marketing. Now here's the thing, he's combining sales and marketing. My guess is, if you ripped apart that number, 51.3. That's percent, 51.3 percent. Yeah, but it's a combined of sales and marketing. My point is, what part of that is sales? Right. And what part of that is marketing? Because we know that sales force spends a lot. on sale. Yes, they do. They have a huge sales force.

Jason Atwood: Correct. Amazingly enough. So again, not a very good comparison. And the last of his bad points was that it, oh sorry, two more. Need to adopt a social selling. He basically saying that the old, the lead, conversion, account, contact, opportunity is like old school sales methodology and doesn't take into account sort of social selling.

Justin Edelstein: Salespeople using LinkedIn, Facebook, Google Plus. But I guess, but I think that's... Everyone's using Google Plus to sell things. All the time.

Jason Atwood: But what I don't understand is that he doesn't explain what social selling is. No.

Justin Edelstein: So he's a sales model. But within $7 a S&P month you get it. It's part of the listing that you set. It's there. You said you get social selling. Social selling. Right.

12:47 Jason Atwood: What does that mean? I know. Don't you still need to capture the data about that person? Maybe their connection to social profiles and things like that's a little bit more rich than Salesforce Which we can all agree to as as I was posting and ranting about the LinkedIn thing still being in beta Like so big beta sign on it. I'm like this has been two years. You can take the beta off this pretty bad integration It's not testing anything. So anyway, I thought that was pretty weak. And then high stock market valuation. It's worth a lot of money. They do talk about, you know, losing money based on gap accounting or whatever. I'm not gonna get into their valuation. I don't know why that would make it. I mean, he's making a lot of comments about pricing and product, but then, and you know, the pricing is too high.

Jason Atwood: Okay, I don't know. It's probably the one I won and won't argue with because I'm not gonna argue about pricing of stock.

Justin Edelstein: Yeah, I don't know how that says someone's past their prime. Right.

Jason Atwood: More so, I thought this was an interesting way to kick us start us off into a conversation about things that we think that Salesforce is doing right, and things we think they're doing not so right. We actually wrote wrong, I'm gonna say wrong.

Justin Edelstein: I will put the... You did three of each. Yeah, I did. I did three and two.

Guest: I always do more work than you do.

Jason Atwood: I think that the thing I want to say, first of all, is we are completely and utterly biased. So if you're just turning in this podcast because someone sent it over to you and said, oh, these guys are reviewing Salesforce and what's right and wrong about Salesforce? This ain't the podcast for you. Justin and I have a combined 20 something years doing the Salesforce. We make our living doing Salesforce consulting. We're about as deep in the Salesforce consulting you can get. So we're, now that's not to say we can't be honest and we can't say things for what they're worth, but we're very biased. So we're. Our comparisons of NetSuites and Microsoft Dynamics and all that are next to nil. We don't getting into that business. It's not our business. So we know one, but we don't know the other side and it is a massive piece of our life.

Jason Atwood: So we're very, very close to it. I just wanna put that out there. I don't want, to be like,

Justin Edelstein: It's a massive piece of our life enough. Deidrei So much so that we podcast about it.

Jason Atwood: Matt I think we actually have done 207 podcasts. Deidrei Is that what you're trying to say? Matt Yes. Deidrei Okay. Matt Well, I think 60% of the content of CloudFocus Weekly is Salesforce based.

Justin Edelstein: May 55%. 55% Deidrei Where are you gathering that metric from? Matt I'm sorry.

Guest: Kohan Peter Cohen. He told me. Kohan. Anyway.

Justin Edelstein: So I thought we'd then name some things that we think they're doing right and some things wrong one A shift in understanding that a lot of these so-called upstarts who were mentioned in the article that are going to challenge Salesforce are going to be glared from the ground up this way. Mobile. Right. And API first. Thanks. What does API first mean to you? To me, it means every feature that Salesforce is building is supported through the API. They think building API, first. So don't just throw something... Sorry, I'm using the words to describe it. Don't just build something. without the ability to connect to it through an integration. So don't just build like a point solution that's available through the user interface without thinking through the ramifications of somebody wanting to integrate and leverage that feature in another way.

16:33 Jason Atwood: So, or putting a different UI on top of it or something along those lines. making it available to both internal applications. So API doesn't just necessarily mean external, it also means internal. So writing Apex and triggers and things like that, you can access the API so you can do some of the work yourself as well as external.

Guest: And the fact that they've even started doing,

Justin Edelstein: They've even built features API only,

Jason Atwood: Which is kind of. I mean, actually it's a little frustrating because you tell people about, hey, oh, you want to track this, this and this. Well, there, there's only an API for it. Right. and you can do it by the API, but you really can't do it. In fact, you know, the permissioner was born of something and actually calling this user was born of something that are available in the API,

Guest: But no user interface to do so. Right.

Justin Edelstein: Okay.. that's a good one. Mobility, I think while they've had a mobile app for a while, they're now going back. Yeah. and rethinking the mobile strategy, you know. Well, I think that this is a right. It could also sort of go in the wrong category of the whole, like, too much hype around it. You know, run your... Round of two to the core. You know, run your business from your phone type of stuff. Like, I don't really think that that exists, but... It does, if you have a very small business. If you have 100 custom fields. If you have a hundred custom fields. And custom branding and social selling, then mobile. All right, so that's my deal. Mine is,

Jason Atwood: My good one is they're adaptive. I guess the same lines, we didn't write these together, but adapting and innovating.- companies that will keep producing the Zune for many many years even though the Zune is as dead as a doornail.

Guest: You know it's actually an interesting case.

Jason Atwood: There will be some very good book written in 10 years from now about Microsoft and how Microsoft started. where they went, what they became, and nowB what they're changing into because they are, if you want to study a company, a software company, and like sort of DNA change, they're doing it now. They're changing a lot of stuff. They have a new leadership, they're going and they're changing a lot of stuff that Microsoft, you would think of Microsoft being sort of the worst case scenario for. So I'm. They're an interesting company that way. They're going to subscription model, they're going to cloud, they're going to privacy, they're going to security. I mean, they're never doing before because they kind of own the market. Anyway, I think Salesforce has a good track record of adopting new things as they come along, adapting to new technologies.

Jason Atwood: And and making them part of their thing and also building on stuff and then also knowing when to let go. Again,

Guest: The example was two years ago, the Dreamforce,

Jason Atwood: It was two hours and fifteen minutes do a drinking game and end up drunk with the amount of times that you do a chatter. Like they get that sometimes you know you get a cool thing but doesn't mean you just drive it home for five years. You gotta okay it was good but now it's a little more interesting things. You know ideas is one and there's lots of products some would consider failures and some would consider but sort of... They're moving and constantly changing.

20:05 Guest: And maybe there's some speed bumps in that. All right, give me a wrong. They're wrong.

Justin Edelstein: I wrote acquisition strategy, although I don't think that that accurately depicts what I'm trying to say. Because I feel like the strategy of acquiring technologies and people through acquiring their companies. is great and works in a lot of cases and helps to fill gaps. But when Salesforce does acquire a company, it takes them a really long time to take what they've acquired and make it. Apparent to the users of the product why they acquired that company now, that's not to say it's their Responsibility to always say R. Oh, we acquired this company and all of a sudden you know, boom here you go Here's this new thing But it seems to take a while to get things like when they They bought intranet to get I was really up to speed You know when they bought I'm Tiva to get I'm I mean it took an iteration and then another iteration to now what it is as live agent like there was a whole middle step of it being on platform but not quite on platform and here's it's a big path that they go down almost every time where something.

Justin Edelstein: Comes on platform and then needs to change again a whole nother development cycle around it and it's multiple multiple.

Guest: I can cite many examples of this having. Exact target is one that's a, that's a current sort of pain point. But you. Know, and it's interesting about that.

Jason Atwood: I don't mind that that happens. I guess if I were Salesforce, I'd be more upfront about it. Like, but how do you continue selling something by saying, hey, this is really-really cool thing we bought. We bought it for all these great reasons. Primarily a lot of what you don't even know about. But... We're going to bring it into the platform and at the end of the day it's going to be better than it was and it's going to be integrated into Salesforce and you're really going to like it. But the next year and a half, I'm going to continue selling it to you and it's kind of going to suck. It's going to go down and it's going to get worse and the features are going to get worse and it's going to be slower and it's going to be harder to deal with and you're not going to like that for about a year and a half.

Jason Atwood: But the end of the year and a half.

Justin Edelstein: Maybe two years what you're saying is all Pulling the like sarcasm away from it. But what you're saying is that those are the facts like that is right happens So that's what I'm saying about the wrongness of it.

Jason Atwood: But it's that they don't, they're not front about it.

Justin Edelstein: Well, they'll keep selling you Salesforce content until Marc Benioff decides on a whim, this thing's free. Right. Oh. You mean that huge mega pitch you came in a week ago to Kitch me on Salesforce content? At $35 per user per month? Is... is... is... is free now? Right. Oh, okay. Well, but again... And knowledge. Now you really don't need to buy like... Every user needs a knowledge license. Right, you know. A couple.

23:07 Jason Atwood: Right. Well, I mean it is... If anybody's paying attention to how Salesforce does stuff with their pricing, it's, you know... It's I think it's using the people who will pay for things in advance using their wallets to fund the product. So they buy something, they sell it as a separate product, they get enough feedback on it, and then as they iterate on it, they turn it into something that's usually free. I mean, it's, it almost happens so many times you can just predict it. Alright, so that was your wrong. Mine is... you Alright, I was wrong. All right. Well, that's okay. I guess I had getting into too many markets products so going on the that same thing it's like it seems like a lot of balls in the air and I'm not sure that the growth and the amount of people and the amount of Acquisitions and bringing them all together is really as smooth or as good as it could be a lot of clouds I'd kind of like them to to more focus on less of the, you know, there's so many of these things and there's so many offices and it just, it feels like the company at some point doesn't know what the other side's doing at all and I think that's from the acquisitions.

Jason Atwood: Like there's all huge divisions of Buddy Media. It's already when you're trying to add one.

Justin Edelstein: Account executive manager relationship with the customer, but they can't be the ones who actually can sell the full product line.

Guest: The product lines is immense at this point.

Justin Edelstein: So if you're talking to someone and you wanna buy your Salesforce license, great. And then if you wanna tack on, you know. exact target it's like oh let me get the exact target account executive in here let me get the work.com well I think work.com is fully rolled in at this point but at one point it wasn't

Jason Atwood: You could sit in a meeting with like four sales people from Salesforce all dealing with different products and different different like sales engineers to demonstrate the product.

Justin Edelstein: And they bet on cloud computing the sales pitches were educating people on the cloud. It wasn't even so much like, it was like, like, a given that the product was good, it was, we need to educate you on where your data is being stored.

Guest: That was like the first thing, to even get people beyond what is the cloud. You have to buy into the vision and the educational aspects of the cloud, and now it's- That's a footnote.

26:15 Justin Edelstein: It is a footnote, and I feel like that's like- That's where they're rooted and they stuck to it. I think they pulled it, that data residency thing It's still in there like it's not multi-tenant, but it's still in their data center right, but that's like saying it only has one wheel But it's

Guest: Still a car

Justin Edelstein: Is Platform I mean you can then argue like is my Amazon server instance Cloud or not you. You have a man you have an Amazon service instance or ours. Where's our where's our website running?

Jason Atwood: It used to be in a dedicated box, which is actually a physical hardware, which is not cloud.

Guest: I don't know. It's not cloud. It's just not cloud. It's just not cloud. It's just not cloud.

Jason Atwood: When you evangelize the cloud so much and then you pull out a There put together I think it's now 38 39. Well, I mean there's probably probably note that Numbers are releases and that's impressive. I mean I I used to write code I Never I you know here at Arkus we develop things and keep up with stuff That engine that they have created for software development three times a year and the release notes and the documentation and the getting it out- there and releasing across what used to be a few pods and now is 1920-30 pods. I mean, it is impressive and that they can keep going at this pace and keep up and even with this last release was a big one. There's a lot of stuff in there that we've been waiting for for a long time.

Jason Atwood: You know, I think it's- that limits them from doing, that cycle is tough to stay in line with and also do a big project that takes more than three months. But it is extremely impressive that they both. pulled it off and Parker Harris. Yes. Yes, I did that talked a lot about that It's it's extremely and all and even their architecture anyway that that to me is a huge It's a huge piece of Salesforce that you can't take away and slightly doesn't have that right? You,,,,,,,,,,, a good one. All right. Big splash marketing stuff for a lot of better. We have this argument every year at Dreamforce out of touch.

30:45 Justin Edelstein: And I always, this does stem, mostly from Dreamforce, but sometimes in their presentations, just in general, I feel like there's sometimes just out of touch with the with the living in the audience. I mean, there's 100,000 people a dream for us and stuff that they present during the a the a the,

Jason Atwood: A and a a that and and a that That defines my life. a bit of a little bit of R... a, and Part of their, innovation strategy is always be pushing the edges and so in order to, get people to sort of of think about and to start talking about and to be moving towards the next thing they have to constantly be. Talking about the next thing they can be sitting there going hey guys you know what, you know what's really what were really important this year leads,

Justin Edelstein: Leads, are really really important this year what what I'm really talking about here is like and you can do you can do this too Oh.

Jason Atwood: Especially had two a big thing this is a dream force thing had to be things one the keynote was way off and it was. At I mean as much as it's all the splash in circumstance now it was completely off for 99.9% of people in that audience and I thought that was a shame considering the year before with all the stuff on the nonprofit was like so heart wrenching this year felt like oh well last year we were all about nonprofits nonprofits, but big business. That was one. The second was the Wave Analytics. The way they presented it during Dreamforce, and I was at Dreamforce and I went to Keynote, was not the way it is. And it's very disappointing now to look back at what the Wave analytics platform is, productized, how you could do it, all that, and the way they presented it.

33:47 Jason Atwood: Because they presented it as a every company.

Guest: It's you. You're on the road. You pull up your Wave. You look at this. You see the opportunities.

Jason Atwood: And it ain glared at. It might be that in three years, but it ain't that now and I thought that was a shame because they really took a product that's, you know, that nine people have access to because of the pricing and whatever and they kind of made it look like everybody had it and I thought that was a shame. So I totally agree with this point. Mine, I'm just going to go to two. I guess the pricing selling strategy. Like, I feel like, I think If past is prime, I think their selling strategy is past is prime. It's a very old school software sales. Like every software license is a negotiation and nobody pays this price. It's always a talky talky. We get down and they have tons and tons of sales people and it just feels very 1950 like sales.

Guest: Not. That's a lot.

Jason Atwood: 2015 sales. Maybe that's just my opinion. It feels just very salesy, old school salesy and not like, you know, there's other companies out there. It's like the price is the price and here's the features and here's the stuff and yes, we can talk about other stuff. But that I'm not, I don't love. And the pricing I think, again, the pricing of sort of it just being this. It's this price, but it's not really a price. It's always this negotiation and this and that. I think that actually gets in the way of the software.

Guest: Maybe you can't do business with Coke and IBM and GE. I don't know. I don't have, I mean I buy Cokes and whatever.

Jason Atwood: But maybe you can't do business with them in an open, fair, transparent market. But like the way that they're doing, now, it doesn't feel, it doesn't feel like the rest of the company. It feels very based and the second one I was just gonna throw in there, since you didn't have an extra one for the wrong and then we'll get into the last right one, is customer service, which is something that. We've done an entire podcast. Podcast about. Yeah, it is something, something that I, I take very seriously. Like I am someone who like. When I get great customer service, I talk about it from the world. I'll even have a quick books online has great customer service. Saturday, call them up, spent two hours on the phone with them, a live human being, went through screen share.

Jason Atwood: That's customer service. That's like support. part. You know, companies like MacSales or OWC that I bought on Sunday morning. I'm looking for a product to upgrade my wife's MacBook Pro and it's Sunday morning and I jump on a chat and the person was on it, gave me the right information, boom, boom, boom.

Guest: You know, here you go. Didn't upsell, didn't try to upsell too much. Just said,

Jason Atwood: You know, I said, can I get a lot of speed out of new, you know, more RAM? They're like, not really. You don't see speed out of RAM unless you know, you have too little.

Guest: It was. Brilliant.

Justin Edelstein: Well, I'm going to counterpoint you.

Jason Atwood: Well, let me just say this is something that has been getting much better. That their customer service has been, at times, years ago, terrible. But it's been getting much better. They've been focusing on it. I know they have because I've talked to the executives and whatever. And it has been getting better. They have been putting more effort into it. They've been putting better frontline people. Well, they've been in, they've been. They've been taking them back from outsourcing. They've been making their ticket system better. They've listened. So I think that that's something that, but they, if I compare them to the companies that I consider the best of customer service, they don't fall on that list. They fall on the list below that. And I feel like for this type of company that outs customer S that sells customer service software.

37:24 Jason Atwood: I feel like they should be better than everybody else. They should make Rackspace look like terrible customer service, which is almost impossible because they have some of the best in the world or your kapanga or whatever. There's so many companies I could name that just have amazing customer service. It costs money, but you can do it.

Justin Edelstein: This is not gonna counter. Well, I had a recent good experience with their customer service and support so...

Jason Atwood: But I deal with their support all the time and yes, it, it's been getting better.

Justin Edelstein: You know what they don't do though? Because you mentioned Konga and I think you know just to throw it shout out to Konga as a really great app exchange partner. and they have fantastic support. What you can do with Konga is just give them a call at random any time and be like, how do I do this? And they will spin up a go-to meeting and show you and do it with you right then and there. You can't do that. with Salesforce support. I don't know how that scales necessarily, but like you can't just call them out of the blue and say, I don't know how to write this formula help.

Jason Atwood: Right. Well, but again, I think we'll get to our last part. We'll get segue into the next one. But let me talk about. Let's go back to customer service. I don't expect them to have that type of support. But I do expect that when I put, and you know, this is like the age old thing, when I put in the ticket, please email me. And when it says now at the bottom, how do you want to be contacted? Email. And I check email and I put in my email and I say, please email me when this ticket is done or for updates or whatever.

Guest: And I get a phone call. Yeah.

Jason Atwood: That's not that's that's not what yeah I'm not talking about getting on a go-to and showing me how to do 17 hours worth of configuration I'm talking about isn't that great customer service that is great customer Well, yes great customer service goes above and beyond but above and beyond doesn't have to be like we do everything for you It has to start with like doing

Guest: The things you're supposed to be doing right.

Jason Atwood: Anyway, moving on. So the thing that we think we both agree that that sells for us, you know, that the right will end with a positive point.

Guest: Is community. Is community. They do community right.

Justin Edelstein: And better than the, I don't know. They eat their own dog food on it too. They use their own products. Yep. customer community, partner community, we're in both of them. Yep, partner community is much better. Partner community is great. Used to be terrible. There's a non-profit community. Yes, RLS Hub. Very, very well done. And these types of questions, the one I just brought up was, how do I write this formula? guaranteed you got a question about how to write a formula how to run a specific kind of report how to do virtually anything you throw it up into answers or you throw it into the community at certain groups like the right click admin group with the Please start with answers by the way. Who owes me a beer group? Steve Moel answer you.

40:30 Justin Edelstein: You throw that up into any of these areas and chatter our answers. You'll get your answer and oftentimes above and beyond what you would get from a support person actually always you get screenshots you'll get an example here is the formula is your field here the only difference is that

Jason Atwood: They won't do it on a phone call like making for you make your community yeah you make communities and the communities is amazing and not just starting no answers is a huge one. My favorite, and this is what our, I guess we are going back to the blog post here, is Ideas. I mean, Ideas to me is, wow, terrible pun, but it's a great idea. Like it's a product that I have used for, since they started it. I remember before Ideas was Ideas when it was, what was it called?

Justin Edelstein: I forgot. Crispy News. Crispy News. Good one.

Jason Atwood: And it is, not only do they allow for it to happen, which is obvious, any company can do that, and many companies have, but they pay attention to it, they take it seriously, and they're always looking to make it better, and they use it as a way to actually build their software.

Justin Edelstein: And that is... They brag about retiring points.

Guest: Yep, their whole point system.

Jason Atwood: And they build it to the product managers. The product managers have to retire so many points per release. I mean, it's really... There, and even this is newest release, which I haven't talked about, but the newest ideas release is much easier. It's easier to put things up. It's, you know, and I'm on the Idea Exchange all the time. I love voting on ones that I think are important. I love commenting on it. Because and I know after a billion years, well, let's say, what's been up for seven years? Yeah, something like that. I know after seven years that it actually works.

Justin Edelstein: Because I think there are ideas that are like eight years old. Thank you.

Jason Atwood: It actually works. It's not just a oh, just go throw it there. If you do vote, if you get enough votes, now you can see if it's under the point threshold, you can get above the point, you can get to consideration. And sometimes, I mean, I've had little ideas I put up there and the product manager go in literally an hour later and be like, oh, this is coming to the next release. And I'll be like, great. And I almost, you know, there's nothing better, a feeling that a company that size is listening in the community is something they do amazingly well. And we know some of the people behind it, it's great stuff.

Guest: So, wrongs, I guess.

Jason Atwood: And again, I think that's their strategy for customer service. I mean, they're, you know, it's like pointing to the community. They're also amazing, I don't know if documentation is part of the community, but. Their documentation their help documentation is pretty second to none. It's updated. It's great. It has tons of examples I mean how many times I go in and look for some you know that image formula to make an image of Mike I don't bookmark or anything just google it find it and then oh there it is. They got the 17 examples all right

Guest: We do not know what we're doing next time on CloudFocus Weekly. No, we don't do we not

Jason Atwood: We will come up with something fun and exciting. Okay, but for this time we're gonna do some pics We're finished up with a pic. So you actually found one. Yeah, good glared. What is this thing that you've never used in your life?

43:41 Justin Edelstein: I think I might want to install this in our sandbox and play around with it. It's called opportunity manager Okay, you only just can you tell me how you came up with this pic? Yeah, someone sent it to me in an email. People know I'm not good at this pex thing, so they just send emails. So what do you do?

Jason Atwood: Do you actually at the beginning of the podcast, you send off an email to the person and say, can you send me a pic? No, I get them and I just star them. Oh, you star them. Okay, so you go back to your old list. Okay, good. Yeah, yeah. So this... Oh! We need to do a podcast on NGO Connect. Oh yeah, we probably should.

Justin Edelstein: Why why you say that like just now like that just hate you now you couldn't wait till after we were done I mean we're transparent to

Guest: The listening community

Jason Atwood: Anyway, I'm also just throwing you under the gun so then you have to do it. Alright, let's go this opportunity manager. Yep.

Justin Edelstein: Bye algo works is a visualization of, and I'm sorry if I don't 100% get this right, the folks at Alga works, but a visualization of your opportunities. So you get to sort of see your opportunities in a different way, not just in like in the forecast view, not just in list views, not just in a dashboard. But it allows you to take a good look at customizable lists of your opportunities, dragging and dropping opportunities around, looking at things by stage. And they allow you to even update things, and there's charts and graphs that are included in this tab. It's like a native... Looks like just a really nice little visual force page for visualizing opportunities in a different way. Looks nice. I'm just taking up the little screenshots here.

Jason Atwood: Looks nice, right? Looks nice. Not too shabby.

Guest: Kinda you know what reminds me, it reminds me of forecasts. That's what I was saying, it's kind of like the forecast view but... Oh, did you say that and I wasn't paying attention? Yeah I did.

Justin Edelstein: But kind of nicer. Who's it by?

Jason Atwood: AlgoWorks. And how much is it? It is free.

Guest: That's That's pretty good. It's a good price. It's a nice price. I like it. It's a good job on AlgoWorks. 100% native, 100% free. So mine is free as well.

Jason Atwood: This was my pick last week, but we ended up not making picks. It would have made a little bit more sense last week, but it actually still makes... As much said so for those of you don't know and haven't been around for the last 40 years There's a little program on NBC on Saturday nights called Saturday Night Live that just Saturday night what yes Saturday Night Live is it live? It's live TV about an hour and a half It's an hour and a half show, but there's only about 10 minutes of content in it That's not true. It's kinda true. We're going to do good content. Good content, yeah. So they celebrated their 40th anniversary last weekend.

Guest: Fantastic. I watched the entire thing on Hulu. I watched it live. In two episodes. You watched it live live? Live live.

46:41 Justin Edelstein: As it was happening with commercials. How many commercials? Not that many. It was SNL.

Jason Atwood: It was good. It was both. Subs by www.zeoranger.co.uk Awesome and terrible to watching it because some some of it was just awesome those great guest stars I the thing I didn't like is they actually showed all the guests at the beginning. They shouldn't like red carpet No, no, not anything red carpet. I just thought they're like opening credits So I saw all, all the people were gonna be in it.

Guest: It was left. Left no surprise, but there was some great people There's some people who have aged Brilliantly!

Jason Atwood: That guy looks exactly like Eddie Murphy from, and then there are guys who look...

Justin Edelstein: Because that one's always terrible. That was terrible. Well, Californians is always awful.

Jason Atwood: But then why put it on SNL? I don't know. So to go along with this, they put out an app on, I guess, iPhone and other devices. What's nice is it is all of their sketches. So you can search for, find all the music videos. the thing in the box, I don't even know if I can say that. They're all available, you can search, you can find them, you can play them. It's literally one of the best video, like you can just go grab stuff, it starts playing instantly. Look how fast that just starts playing. Like there's not a lot of like, to it. It's actually a very fun app. I was I picked it because of the SNL 40, but then I went back to it. I was actually playing some of my favorite favorite clips and things.

Jason Atwood: It's called SNL. It's free. It's from NBC Studios.

Guest: And it is good. You should check it out.

Jason Atwood: Speaking of things, you should check out. Check out Justin at Just Eddlesee. Check out me at Jason Atwood and at Arca Sync on the Twitter. Facebook.com slash Arca Sync. You can follow us there where we post all the podcast. Ooh, there you go. I just I merged them. We're in the success community group. We have our own group in there if you want to see what's going on or vote or ping us or talk to us.

Guest: We're on LinkedIn, Google Plus. Remember, if you want to subscribe to the podcast, the best way to do that.

Jason Atwood: ITunes or Stitcher, these are two great places. Or on your, you know, Instacast or Downcast or what are you using nowadays?

Justin Edelstein: I just yeah the newest version of it I'm using I moved over to downcast Really been enjoying it good for you downcast You know what your big thing is that doesn't matter to me is less thinking yeah, it doesn't matter do not Does not do podcasts on my iPad? Oh, that's a shame. So it does not matter to me. It's terrible.

49:52 Guest: It's an addiction. It's an addiction. Well, that's the addiction from Justin Dyson saying,

Jason Atwood: We'll be back next week and until then, enjoy those cloudy days.