Erick Mahle’s Pro Advice on Salesforce Consulting

Welcome to Salesforce Radio, your destination for insights, news, and community connections within the dynamic Salesforce ecosystem!

In episode 9, Ben Miller chats with Erick Mahle, the VP of Revenue Operations and Digital Transformation at Lendz. Erick has extensive experience as an independent Salesforce consultant in the RevOps field, so join us to learn about his career trajectory over the years.

This story is inspirational to professionals who want to take that first leap and kick off their careers as Salesforce consultants. So, keep reading for all the highlights from this podcast, and find out about Erick’s thoughts on Salesforce’s features that spark AI creativity, as well as what it takes to thrive in independent consulting in 2024.

Ben: Welcome to Salesforce Radio, Erick! It’s nice to have you here.

Erick: I’m glad to be here after doing a webinar with you last week.

Ben: So, a little bit of a background for everybody. Erick and I did a Salesforce Ben webinar on the RevOps “build” versus “buy” dilemma. Maybe we’ll talk about it a little bit today.

I’ll put the link to the webinar and the recording in the comments. Everyone should check it out! It was a really good discussion, and one of the great things that came out of it was I met Erick and he was nice enough to be a guest on the podcast. So, thanks for coming on.

Erick: I’m glad to be here. Always good to have these conversations.

Ben: One of the things that we’ve been doing on this podcast is getting a feel for how guests get to where they are today? I would love to start with your story of how you came into Salesforce and then the RevOps ecosystem. Or was it the other way around?

Maybe you could kick off with that?

Erick: The beautiful thing about RevOps is that it is just like Salesforce. It finds you! I was just talking last week about coming across people with different kinds of backgrounds. For example, I’ve worked with people who have backgrounds in political science and music.

But, my story actually comes from the side of marketing. When I finished college, I graduated with a degree in marketing and joined a company that wanted an internship. I talked them into a part time job with a 90 day review, which would eventually go full time because I had bills to pay at this point.

One of the many hats that I wore at this company was being the Salesforce admin. Lo and behold, 90 days came and went, and they were dragging their feet about giving me an offer. So, I found another job at a software company.

I was doing marketing here and ran trade shows that got me traveling on the road a lot. But one of the many hats I wore at this company was also as a Salesforce admin. I had an opportunity after two years at this company to start my own thing.

So, I decided to pursue the Salesforce side of things, and go into independent consulting. Next, I grew and scaled my Salesforce independent consulting business over the years. That was in 2013!

Over 2013, 2014, and 2015, I started hiring people and got up to 9 employees. I had to take some time off in 2019 and went back to independent consulting. Then, all the planets aligned, and I decided to jump to the client side in 2021.

This is when I became senior director of CRM at a global HR tech company. I got to see everything from the other side, which was a very interesting experience. I reported under revenue operations, with the passion that I got from Salesforce, where we we could build things and help businesses become more efficient.

I could be that tip of the spear that we were talking about in the webinar the other day. The one that helps bring the tech stack together with the strategy, processes, and everything else. I managed to find that here at Lendz as the VP of RevOps today.

Salesforce is just a fantastic tool for it! We all know this by now. But the passion was from helping streamline processes, and as RevOps started gaining a lot of traction at my last company, I reported on it. I knew it was a career that I wanted to continue to grow into and help influence road maps.

At Lendz, we got a chance to do some digital transformation with the implementation of Salesforce from scratch. We’re migrating off legacy systems to tie everything together and start with a blank slate. After 14 years, it’s great to be able to start with a blank slate and put all those learning lessons or mistakes that we want to avoid into practice.

It’s been an exciting journey! I have nothing but thankfulness for all the things I got to live and experience.

Ben: It sounds, at least from the short version, an exciting journey. Some things happened! When you were in that first job, did you apply to it because it was a marketing company?

Erick: It was a software-first job, but I graduated in marketing. I was looking for marketing opportunities. Unbeknownst to me, I was bitten by the bug of the accidental admin and then just kind of started diving into it further.

Ben: So, when you went to the second company after 90 days at the first, were you looking for Salesforce roles, or was it also a coincidence that there was that common denominator in company number two?

Erick: I think it was just a common denominator. That second company was where it sparked off because, after my first couple of months there, we hired a global director of sales. I reported to him and he would tell me “look at success factors, Salesforce was able to do this for us. Our Salesforce was set up in this way.”

He would find screenshots of dashboards and I found the passion of reverse engineering them and researching how we could do it well. I started realizing this passion I had, and I was equating Salesforce to be the grown-up version of Legos.

Even though I still play with Legos as a grown-up, it’s the ability to build things and help systems become more efficient in Salesforce. Helping folks streamline and know where to focus their attention just by leveraging technology is something I became incredibly passionate about.

Ben: That’s super interesting! How many users were in that first organization you were managing?

Erick: We were a small company, like three users. The second company, which had a global director of sales, had about twenty five users. So, we were still a fairly small organization. We also have an office in India, but none of them were in Salesforce at the time that I was there.

Ben: Did everyone have one or different roles? Did you have management, support, and sales teams? Who were the people you were working for on the Salesforce side?

Erick: At the time, all our users were in sales. We had a marketing team of two people. So, we struggled to put a case together. I know the company has now grown considerably since, and they got some DC investment. I’m sure that their Salesforce environment is far more utilized.

But funny enough, I spoke to someone a year ago and they said they still use an opportunity for formulas that I put together. I was impressed something survived!

Ben: Meanwhile, you would have done it differently today?

Erick: Oh, absolutely. I’ve built stuff six months ago that I called “tech.” It’s just one of those things you learn the more get invested. It’s a continuous journey.

But Salesforce is also just rolling out so much functionality. Half the time, you build something because you didn’t have access to it. Tell me anybody that implemented Salesforce before 2017, and I can immediately point out an org that probably has a ton of old Apex sitting there because Flows weren’t as flexible as they are today.

Ben: That’s a really good point, and it’s one of the things I wanted to build on a little bit more when we were doing the webinar. I didn’t get a chance, since we were talking about the “build” versus “buy” model. What year did Flows got introduced into the ecosystem?

Erick: I don’t remember when Visual Flows came in. I want to say it was around 2012 or 2013. I didn’t dabble with Visual Flows.

Lightning Flows came in around 2017. That was the whole new canvas we’re used to seeing today. That’s where things took off because it was tough, and people listening who have more experience than I do with Visual Flows can probably correct me fairly quickly.

You couldn’t call a Visual Flow as easily as you can call Flow today. You could probably leverage Process Builders, but that came around, I want to say, in 2015. Again, you were limited with what you could do with Flows compared to today.

Ben: I’ve only been in the ecosystem since 2020, but even then there was still resistance towards everything going to Flows. I remember when the announcement came out that Process Builder is getting deprecated, etc.

People were a bit upset and they didn’t have full belief in it. Now, it’s only a couple of years later, and everyone is saying they need help with Flows.

I get on a call with people and they mention they are the top Flow guys, and that’s how people feel now. They’ve already started to master Flow. It’s cool to see that development happen quickly where, people went from being wary about the tool and now using it to create automation in Salesforce.

Erick: One of the key things that I remember, especially with Flow, is the great Uncle Ben quote from Spiderman, “with great power comes great responsibility.” And that’s what Flow is, right? It’s great power for someone who’s not a programmatic developer. There’s so much power to harness in there.

And especially if you start talking the unofficial components and all of these things that could exponentially skyrocket the functionality, before you have to write a single line of code.

The key challenge that Salesforce has in its hands is how to make it simple enough to be point and click, like building an original Workflow or Process builder was. The user interface for someone who’s never built automation in Salesforce with Workflows, there’s very little that you can get wrong.

Flows are just hard to contain and make it as simple, right? A lot of people are usually intimidated by Flows because it’s a blank canvas. It looks very simple at the beginning. But once you start getting into variables and all the different elements, how do you keep it simple? And, especially after deprecating, right?

If someone is starting out in the Salesforce ecosystem today, they can’t do anything with the old tools. They have to learn, right? There is so much functionality that, Salesforce has this challenge on their hands to make it attainable to and as easy as possible for everyone. Even for the most basic use cases.

Ben: You touched on this idea of before a certain time, there’s some Apex sitting in the system, somewhere and it’s doing something. Or maybe it’s not doing anything at this point. But, it might do something one day and no one’s gonna know what happens.

That’s one of the scary things about it. Were you teaching yourself Apex at some point? Did you ever need to call Apex in Salesforce automation or is it something you stayed away from?

Erick: I’ve dabbled a little bit with Apex, enough to learn that I have no passion for it. I’m not here to knock on Apex. I absolutely love Apex and think it’s a fantastic thing.

Throughout my consulting years, I’ve learned enough to know when is a better time to go to Apex versus Flows. I’m the guy who runs FlowFest, but there are very common times when Apex may be a better solution.

I’ve tried to grow my skill set. For this reason, I did the platform developer one certification. I had zero intentions of becoming a developer, but I wanted to understand enough about code to know when to leverage it.

Then I could call a developer. Back when I was in consulting, I’d find an independent developer that did consulting on the side. I would give them the requirements, and show them what we need to happen immediately. Then the developer would wave the magic wand and return with a fancy LWC or whatever we needed to make Salesforce work.

Ben: It’s interesting because some people who aren’t developers are comfortable with the idea of using Apex so someone else can put a line of code into their Flow. But, for some people, it’s something that’s very foreign to them. They don’t know how they should relate to development in Salesforce because they don’t have these tools yet.

Salesforce developers as we know are in high demand as there’s still plenty of things for them to do within an org. Admins are afraid of introducing development into the work although not so many years ago, it was a necessity for them to do many different things.

Erick: Yeah, five or six years ago, you immediately hit a brick wall the second you wanted to do any sort of configurations. This was intentional with Salesforce because the demand for developers was so high in the mid 2010s. There weren’t enough people to do the work the customers needed.

Salesforce saw there’s only so much a platform could scale because we’re starting to get limited by the pace customers can customize these things. So, Salesforce made a massive investment in developing this declarative tool, which you know is Flow, to give more possibilities to folks who aren’t developers.

That was a big landscape change, but then again, don’t fool yourself. For all the things that Flow can do, code can do that much more. It’s not like we’re closing the gap and eliminating the need for developers, but there definitely is a whole extra step before you make the jump to developers.

I’ve heard a couple of folks trying to go straight to code before they learn Flows. That’s an odd career decision because you should learn the natural progression of the tools available to you. It’s such a large ecosystem in which you find many interesting use cases and career paths.

We’re just taking it in and learning as we go.

Ben: The accidental admin story is much more popular, and you hear about it a lot more than the accidental developer, right? It’s a different trajectory. Whereas, someone like you, were you interested in technology? You mentioned your interest in Legos. That’s more the engineering or problem solving side. Were you interested in tech and computer software before you got out of school and went to work?

Erick: I had no idea that I was going to end up in tech. I grew up playing computer games in my house and my father was a big computer guy.

But on my end, I didn’t associate with it at the time. Salesforce completely caught me. I figured it out as I started dabbling with it and seeing the possibilities. I started, and it began sucking me in. It’s this little black hole that Salesforce manages to get all of us in.

Next, I’m learning more, and feeding my appetite for all of these things. I was intentionally breaking dev orgs to replicate issues of people from LinkedIn. I wanted to see if I could solve the issues. Back then, we didn’t have Trailhead, and all the things that young kids have nowadays.

Salesforce tools have an interesting effect. It challenges your creativity to find solutions for things. So, that’s just something I never saw coming.

Ben: Tell me a little bit about when you were a consultant. What kind of work were you doing? What kind of organizations were you working with? And how did that inform the way that you operate now, such as going back into a company and running a Salesforce org?

Erick: I’ll start by saying that anybody who’s listening should give Salesforce consulting a shot. I’ll put the caveats, too, because it’s not for everybody. However, one of the beautiful things about consulting is that you’re drinking off a fire hose every day, and you get exposed to so many different use cases.

As someone who’s passionate about RevOps, I find it interesting to see companies, their processes, how they operate, and how they get connected to a platform. Salesforce has different features and functionalities, so it challenges your creativity and your know-how as you get exposed to all of these things.

Sometimes, you come in, and Salesforce is already implemented. It can show you great uses of functionality or how a team got around a common challenge that you may have with a standard object.

Consulting is just this wonderful area of learning and being able to get experience in things that work versus those that don’t. The downside to that for everyone listening and the already practicing consultants is that you are drinking from a fire hose.

It can be stressful and in some ways not for everyone, but it can teach you a lot about over committing and and not taking in more than what you can. You will also learn to work better with stakeholders and set reasonable expectations.

People will come to you as the expert with all the asks and wants in the world. They see the Salesforce commercials and think it’s just as easy as Matthew McConaughey configured in 30 seconds, and ask, “Why are we not live with this yet?”

I’m sitting here while they’re looking to me to set those expectations. I have to say what we reasonably need to consider and go for it. It’s not easy, right? Part of the consulting is learning how to work with stakeholders, setting reasonable expectations, and working within the lines of what you have, which typically is the project’s budget.

I absolutely love consulting, it gives great exposure to many different aspects that help you grow as a professional, not only in the technical side of Salesforce, but beyond as well.

Ben: What are you doing today with your users? Who are the users that you’re interfacing with, and what are they doing in Salesforce?

Erick: I absolutely love it here at Lendz because one of the things is that we get to work with all the departments. We are a small organization with a good culture. Everyone’s trying to help each other out.

We work with different sales folks, the marketing team, and the operations team while trying to understand the processes they’re doing. We have a lot of things going on, but at the same time, we understand and bring them together piece by piece. Then, we prioritize work.

It’s very rare to do these things, but we have been able to knock down the urgency of something or stretch out a project, especially if we want to do it right, like switching to our current system. The operations team is currently using it and migrating them out of it is one of the key things that I’m working hard to redo.

We initially built it all on a flat object, and we’re trying to switch that around.

Lendz colleagues and I are not immune to coming in on a Monday and sharing what we learned, and now we all have to jump onto a new project. For us, it’s a good thing to ask, “What are we going to reprioritize?”

We learn this in consulting. Department life time is essential and we need to dedicate 20% of the time that we have to a specific project, and come hell or high water, this 20% is untouchable. Some other things may move around, but we keep working forward to improve on the process while still delivering long term projects. It helps us not get derailed.

Ben: When you arrived at Lendz, were you in charge of the initial implementation of Salesforce?

Erick: Yeah, the team’s sales were basically on Outlook and Excel spreadsheets. We wanted to bring that into Salesforce and build a foundation. We hired a CRM manager so he could take the foundation board while I looked into the company as a whole with all of its technology platforms.

That was part of day one. We already had a transformation budget that we put together last year.

My coming to Lendz was a carefully calculated thing. I was talking to the president for several months and we put a budget together. He was looking to do a round of investments and he said he wanted to put this Salesforce transformation in there.

He wanted me to help him understand how much Salesforce cost, staffing wise, technology platforms, and everything else. It was a large departure because it’s rare that you get to be this involved early on before you’re hired. In this case, I got to propose the budget that would solve the solution, and what we need to execute to make it happen.

I’m out of the norm right now, but it’s an interesting position to be in. I’m thankful that we were able to put that all out in the open before joining.

Ben: How long ago was that? When did you join Lendz?

Erick: I joined in January, which was only four months ago. During this time, we managed to get Salesforce up and running, and we set up a couple of things with AI, which is exciting. We were able to come up with customized greetings and are halfway through migration to get the operations team in Salesforce.

We’re running fast, which at times is tough, especially coming from large organizations and a lot of bureaucracy. It could take much longer to execute things like this.

Ben: That’s a huge accomplishment to go live in a couple of months. What are some of the things you would recommend to organizations that are live with Salesforce? Maybe they’re planning on going live, and they’ve had some big delays.

I speak to people all the time who are involved in these kinds of never-ending Salesforce projects. What do you say to them about budgeting and expectations? How can they manage that on their own or with a partner?

Erick: I’ve learned you can’t take things personally. There’s a lot that we can fix with Salesforce capabilities. If we get a little more budget and help, there are all these other things that we can do.

The most that you have to learn, especially in large organizations, where people above you are making these decisions, that with regard to finances and budgets and all these things is that you can only work with the tools you’re given.

There is a lot to talk about, such as:

Maybe we can dive into these topics throughout our conversation. But at a fundamental, learn to stand your ground. Companies can either tell me all the requirements that they want delivered or can tell me the time that I have to deliver on the things.

If they give me all their requirements and need all of these requirements met, I reserve the right to tell them when we can deliver the project with the resources that we have. Equally, if a company is going to put time on me, then I reserve the right to tell them what I can deliver within that time.

Therefore, if budget remains a constant and this is all I have to work with, then I have to tell the company what I work with and not what I was doing to myself. By setting this barrier I’m not over committing or setting unrealistic expectations.

Ben: I hear that. There are so many horror stories about how people have gone into these situations of the never-ending implementation, and people lose sight. Then, they compromise into a never-ending project.

You mentioned AI in there. I’d love to hear a bit about where you’re thinking to take AI in your org.

Erick: We’re learning and experimenting. One of the interesting ways that we’re experimenting is to put an ultra-personalized sign-off message at the end of each newsletter. We’ve started using Flows and open AI, which hopefully we will be able to show how to do this with a prompt builder, and automate this episode for Salesforce soon.

Ultimately, we’re using Flow to capture basic information about a contact, such as:

We use this type of information to build a prompt and a user story for the newsletter. It is interesting because the president and I were discussing if we should put it at the top of the newsletter? If we did, people would see it but we decided to add it as a conclusion so the newsletter was not affected.

Most probably people are not going to read it, but if they do, their minds are going to be blown away! It was an interesting first use case for us.

One of the key things that we’re starting to look into doing as well as a side project is creating a virtual character. A lot of folks have done it externally. If you want a great example, there’s Virgin Voyages, the cruise line. They created Vivi, a ChatGPT character you could interact with. It’s all powered by a live agent in Service Cloud, which is a really cool thing.

We’re trying to do it internally. If we have a digital system that can help guide folks and give them a daily kind of greeting. For example, it could say, “Here’s some things you may might want to focus on. Right here are the candidates that might be the perfect folks to reach out to today. Consider adding them to your sales engagement cadences or specific cases.”

Maybe we could gamify it to say, “Hey, this past week, you were only in the top three with getting your connects on. Your colleagues are doing better! What are we going to do this week?”

We want to use more of these personified experiences that gen AI can give us to help build this culture within our organization. For now, that’s what we’re doing.

We’re also working on some larger projects that are exciting, that I don’t have full liberty to discuss. But they do involve more technology and basic Gen AI, like document recognition and other automation to speed up our processes.

Ben: What are you doing to equip yourself to make sure you have the resources to build things like that?

Erick: It’s a lot of trial and error. There are some basic materials out there. One thing that I’ve learned is that people don’t understand what they’re going to use AI for. There’s a lot of conversation about AI and how it is going to automate so many things. We’re trying to see what works and what doesn’t.

I can tell you right now the newsletter greeting took far more time in development than we wanted. The problem was not making the technology work, and more about fine tuning our project into something that we could actually be comfortable with using. We even had to use GPT4, which is far more expensive than GPT3.5.

To get to a quality that we could use in an email, we ran and fine-tuned the prompts for weeks at a time before we said the newsletter could be in an email address. It was trial and error, and we dedicated time for revising, where possible, to see whether we could genuinely use it.

The way that AI should be looked at is that it is a good tool to augment what you do. It’s not supposed to plain automate. For example, if you’re trying to use AI to plain automate, you’re gonna have a limited success rate because it’s just not there without proper training.

It’s going to take a ton more effort to try to get AI to do anything believable or useful that you’d be willing to sign off, especially externally. Even if it’s predictive AI.

Predictive AI has been around for a long time. I’ve been running models for a long time, worked on some personal projects to use past Formula One data to figure out what the qualifying results are gonna be using predictive AI. And again, the quality of the data comes back again to haunt you if you don’t have your ducks in a row.

Ben: You’re in a big advantage right now with your current work because it’s a clean slate.

Erick: I’m in a clean slate with thirteen years of experience in a business where every individual and organization has a unique, external, and unique identifier. We were fortunate enough to be granted access to the entire database of all the companies and individuals in real estate.

We’re working on some tools to help with fraud prevention, and it’s very hard. However, we’re finding ways to screw up the data here. I’m looking at it from the perspective of having to deal with old junk data.

So far, it’s been exciting. With everything that I complained about for years in Salesforce, there’s almost no downside right now.

Ben: Is the newsletter live at this point? Are you using the Gen AI in there?

Erick: We’ve used it a handful of times. We’re still talking because we want to know how we want the message to come across. We’re trying to organize ourselves, whether we want to try to do it where the account executives can sign off with a message that says, “Hey, here are the messages that are going for this week.” It will show them a report to spot anything that they want to fine-tune before it goes out.

We’ve gotten to a point where it’s reliable enough and gives us good information, especially when we work with partners. It will call out which individuals within the partner group are doing the most.

For example, you can send a message to Mr. ABC and tell him “Mrs. DEF is crushing it this week! Reach out to us today and we will help you get there, too.” These messages are personalized, relevant, and fairly unheard of.

Still, it took us 12 weeks worth of reviewing newsletters and the messages that went out with them before we were comfortable with rolling it out. Hopefully within a month or two, because of other priorities taking place, we’ll get that singing on a consistent weekly basis.

Ben: It’s not my first conversation when talking to people who are involved within Salesforce, like building things, using it, or trying it out. We all know that Salesforce made a big push, at least from the marketing side, to talk about AI. It’s been cool for me to see the way that the professionals within organizations are building these things out.

I’m sure Salesforce is listening to what their users are doing in one way or another to see how they’re implementing this to get the next big ideas for where they can take things within the products.

Do you have a relationship with Salesforce? Have you been involved with Salesforce over the years from a corporate perspective?

Erick: I have a good relationship with a couple of folks throughout the years. Having organized FlowFests, I got to meet a lot of the PMs for Flows.

I’ve come across a couple of different individuals, especially those on Salesforce admin podcasts and a couple of others on blog writing.

It’s been interesting because I think Salesforce follows the Microsoft methodology in some ways. Remember when Windows 95 came out, and I know I’m horribly aging myself here, it was just filled with bugs, right?

And then throughout the years they released updates to stable it out and then, they conquered the market for many reasons. One of them being instead of going for perfection, they released something that’s good out there, and then made it better. Salesforce followed that to a decent extent.

You can see it with the IdeaExchange, where they put functionalities in there to find out what to prioritize next. They also listen to folks at Dreamforce. There are sessions where they will throw Salesforce at us and ask what are we doing wrong?

Salesforce will take those answers to heart and tell us they will see what they can do to improve the tools. Those true to the core sessions are known for being passionate. I like building relationships with these folks and seeing how they come along.

I got a chance to be on the pilot program for a couple of Flow functionalities that was 6 or 9 months ago. Those will be coming out in the upcoming release. There’s a lot of great things that Salesforce are doing right in terms of keeping up to speed.

Ben: Before we wrap up, any last words of advice for people who are listening?

Erick: Follow me on LinkedIn. I have all my stuff and thoughts on that platform.

Ultimately, my big example is not to lose sight of technology. We were talking about that on the webinar, and Ben McCarthy was kidding about how I somehow managed to bring Formula One into that webinar, and I’ll bring it back again for this podcast.

It doesn’t matter if you give us $500 million to build the best Formula One car in the world. Sure, this is the car that will go the fastest around corners. But if you’re using that car for dirt roads, then that car is not going to go very far because it needs smooth pavements, banked corners, and smooth air.

In that same way, a system will only do so much and only if it’s properly aligned with processes. For Salesforce professionals to excel in what they do, they must put themselves in the shoes of other stakeholders in the company’s processes.

So, being able to keep in mind, like, how does this fit big picture wise? For example, when considering what functionality and Salesforce to use, that’s probably one of the key things that will define an awesome professional.

Some people may call it BA skills, but it’s one of those crucial things to be able to do. I know I’m the RevOps guy talking, but it’s crucial. Trust me.

Ben: Well, Erick, it has been an awesome conversation! Appreciate this relationship, and I’m excited to hear where you take things over the next nine months in this new org. Let’s have a follow-up session in the future where you tell me where you went wrong.

Erick: Yeah, confessions! Whenever we release the confession version of this podcast, I’ll be here. I’ll be the first in line.

Ben: I love it. Thanks so much. It’s been wonderful.

Erick: Thanks, Ben.

*Note: This article is an edited transcript of the interview with Erick Mahle.

See you next time!

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