Salesforce Implementation Advice for Trailblazers with Cyril Louis

Welcome to Titan Talks, your destination for best practices and advice from all the great Salesforce MVPs that enrich our community.

In this session, Alice Meyer chatted with Cyril Louis, who discussed his take on Salesforce implementation. Cyril is a 5x Salesforce MVP and the founder of Mavericx.

Cyril has attended many Salesforce events, such as World Tours, Dreamforce, and Dreamin’ conferences. He also has loads of advice on generative AI and the benefits of Net Zero Cloud. Keep reading for all the highlights from this session, and find out what Cyril has in store for Mavericx in 2024!

Alice: Welcome Cyril! It’s an honor to have you here with us today. Can you tell a little bit about your career journey in Salesforce and some of your early influences?

Cyril: First of all, thank you for the invitation and the opportunity. I started in the Salesforce ecosystem in 2010. It’s been a long journey. I initially landed in the CRM ecosystem by studying on Oracle. This was when I realized that developing and implementing fast projects on the CRM legacy vendors was quite complex.

But back in the day, there was a solution where you could deploy a modification on the CRM without coding. It was like a revolution, and we called it “on-demand,” but it was actually the beginning of what we now call the Cloud platform.

So, when I realized that, I said I would like to continue in this way – with the cloud solution.

Back in the day, it was already Salesforce! So, in 2010, I started to focus on the Salesforce ecosystem.

Alice: Tell me a little bit about your journey at Mavericx. What’s Mavericx about? And how does your leadership style contribute to its success?

Cyril: Mavericx is an implementation partner for Salesforce. We share our expertise and experience with customers. This comes from all the years of implementation for our consultants. Feeling courageous enough to launch the company has been a long journey.

I wanted to bring trust and transparency to my customers and feel that core value in the company I was launching.

Regarding the leadership style, it is about being open and transparent with:

• The people working with me internally
• The customer
• Partners in Salesforce
• Other implementation partners
• Solution partners like Titan

It’s about being fair enough and transparent to say we know how to do that or we don’t know how to do that. We want to work together to make your initiative a true success!

Alice: What do you think are the key decisions that have shaped your career and got you to this place you’re in now?

Cyril: One of the key decisions was to rely on mentors on my new career path.

For example, if it’s new, you have no clue where you are going. So, finding a good mentor who can guide and coach you is key.

In my position, one of the main challenges was impostor syndrome:

• Feeling that I am not expert enough
• I still have to learn a lot of things
• I’m not ready to start anything
• I fear to learn anything

Finding a good mentor who can guide and coach you with tips can reassure you with key decisions. So, find a supportive mentor or guide.

And the second one was to be more involved in the Salesforce ecosystem and the Trailblazer community. It helped me in my position to be involved in those Salesforce or Dreamin’ events.

Being a speaker helped me realize that our customers and ecosystem were expecting tips, tricks, and experiences. They don’t need you to be an expert on everything. They want to learn from our best practices. So, we shared, and sharing is caring. We also saw people ready to help us.

You can also rely on the community when you have a tricky question. I also realized that with a mentor in the community, there is no barrier.

Alice: That’s really well said. If I were to summarize that, a lot about what you’re saying is to be open to collaboration and learning from others. Whether they be a mentor or getting involved in a community where you can both give but also get back some skills.

Cyril: It’s the community! We have a lot of competitors.

We can be seen as competitors on the market, but the brands are competitors. And the people? The people can work together. We change, we go from company A to B, and we will move, you know? It’s a small world! So, just be nice to everyone and answer any questions. Then, tomorrow, they will also be happy to help you when needed.

Alice: Of course, one of the great things about the Salesforce community is all of the wonderful events that go on:

• The Dreamin’ Events
• Dream Force
• World Tours

What events do you like the most? And what events are you involved with this year?

Cyril: Every event is great for me. Not for the same purpose, so I have different types of targets.

When I attend an event like a World Tour, it’s not really for the content because the content of Salesforce will be product announcements or marketing presentations of the product.

My goal when I attend a World Tour is to connect with people. It’s networking:

• Connecting with people
• Connecting with companies
• Connecting with ISVs
• Connecting with my competitors

Networking is my key target for any World Tour event. This is why I really like to attend.

For the Dreamin’ events, I have another KPI. It’s enjoying the community. The Dreamin’ event is organized by the community itself, not Salesforce. The content is really different. We are keen to dig into topics and are not afraid to say that a part is not the best or that the product could be better.

We love the platform so much that we are not afraid to say something when it is not that good. For the content, it’s really different at the Dreamin’ events, and the atmosphere is super friendly. You can connect with different people around the globe. So, this is super great.

And Dreamforce? It’s magic. I used to say it’s like Disney World for adults and professionals in the Salesforce ecosystem. Everybody during the wake of the course is so friendly, happy, always smiling, and super easy to connect with. Plus, the content is amazing. You have access to great speakers.

So, I cannot choose one event.

Alice: Sometimes, more informal connections can also be a wonderful way to connect with like-minded people in a more relaxed setting, which is awesome.

Yeah, so all the great minds of our generation are currently talking about AI in the Salesforce community. Now, you mentioned Dream Force and the great speakers. Pretty much everything last year was on AI and this year we’ve seen it become the hot topic.

We have the Einstein Assistant that’s just come out. So, what’s your take on this topic in the ecosystem and the world?

Cyril: Salesforce has been in the AI area since 2016. It’s been a long time. It was much more predictive AI in the past. But now, the fancy topics are around generative AI thanks to the main things to open AI and the democratization of ChatGPT.

Now, many people use it daily, so we want to see more use cases that apply generative AI to businesses.

Salesforce, of course, had to jump on generative AI. But you know that Salesforce for Salesforce Plus is also a key value. They highlighted tests on the usage of generative AI.

This is a key differentiator in integrating external elements or generative AI solutions.

Alice: Yeah, these are some fascinating points, especially when it comes to generative AI. There are, of course, still concerns about ethics. It’s a hot debate. There are questions about security.

Do you think Salesforce is doing a particularly good job when it comes to balancing the integration of generative AI with that trust layer so that people can feel secure while leveraging this new technology?

Cyril: Yes, as with everything that is new, you have both sides of innovation. You have the fear of missing out. You just want to jump on that and not be late for the train. So, I need to find some use cases for generative AI. On the other hand, companies are saying it is brand new. We should pay attention to what we are sending to that system. The data that we store is personal and critical.

So how do we ensure that? Salesforce is waiting for the system to be ready. They are providing an additional layer to simplify the transition of the usage of generative AI with security:

• Data Security
• Data Encryption
• No Retention Policy

It’s truly a facilitator for new companies to jump on in. On top of the security layer, as you said, they also come with use cases like the Einstein Copilot that will help you leverage generative AI.

Alice: I also love to talk about another topic in contemporary times: Net Zero Cloud solutions. How important do you think they are? And how easy is it for businesses to implement them?

What do you think the future of Net Zero Cloud solutions is?

Cyril: It’s a worldwide commitment today. Some governments are putting more effort into controlling the impact on the ecosystem, Earth, and energy.

It’s the case in the US and in Europe. We have plenty of action in Asia Pacific. So, we have plenty of initiatives where countries are forcing big companies to track their impact and the carbon impact on earth. Today, not all companies are forced to do that kind of tracking, but the trend is that everyone will be impacted. So, we need a solution that is easy to implement and tracks our impact on energy.

Net Zero Cloud is quite easy. You can start really simply by analyzing your consumption and how you consume the energy. The roadmap and perspective you can have with Net Zero Cloud are beneficial. The first advantage is tracking the data. Based on the data and analyzing it, you can plan objectives to reduce your consumption. And based on that, in the end, you have your consumption, and then you have actions to reduce.

When you have reduced enough, you can take another type of action to achieve net zero because you cannot reduce to 100% because we all need energy. So, you will reduce first, then target net zero by buying positive carbons to compensate for your consumption. The Net Zero product also has this kind of marketplace where you can support some eco programs to compensate for your carbon footprint.

It’s about optimizing, reducing, and then compensating!

Alice: In closing, what do you think is next for Mavericx? What does the future hold? What are some exciting opportunities coming up for you?

Cyril: I’m always excited to work in new areas. For next year, my personal target is to do fun projects that can have an impact. I want to do more Net Zero Cloud projects.

Another one is finding use cases where we can rely on Blockchain and NFTS for loyalty programs. It’s an innovative project. I will try to find someone who would like to rely on innovation and trust us to play in that half. Maybe more Net Zero can steal more Data Cloud and hopefully, I can use cases with Blockchain and NFTS.

Alice: Yeah, that’s fascinating. I also think that Blockchain and NFTS are maybe something that’s flown under the radar a bit with all this AI stuff.

I’m also super interested to see what happens with that trend over the next couple of years. So thank you, Cyril. It has been an absolute pleasure talking with you.

To everyone who’s gonna be watching this, we here at Titan are spending 2024 talking to all the greatest MVPs that enrich our community and Salesforce influences.

And yeah, it’s been wonderful to chat with you, Cyril. Have a great day.

Cyril: Thank you, goodbye.

*Note: This article is an edited transcript of the interview with Cyril Louis.

We hope to see you soon!

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