Scaling Pro Services Without Breaking Delivery Quality (Randy Wandell)

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Welcome back to the podcast. Today we are joined by Randy Wendell, VP of professional services at Vantage Point. Randy, welcome to the podcast. >> Glad to be here. >> Could you say what you guys are currently doing at Vantage Point? >> Yeah, so Vantage Point is a very small consultancy that focuses primarily on financial services and Salesforce. We do do some HubSpot stuff particularly around marketing hub and sales hub but our primary focus is Salesforce. >> And when you walk into a professional services organization, what are the first clues that tells you that this is a team that going to scale smoothly? >> When you first step into a professional services organization, you kind of take a look around and you take a look at the talents there. And you're always going to have talent at varying levels of capability. I I just started here in June of last year. What I like to do is is I like to go in and just have a one-on-one with everybody and just kind of touch base, get to know them personally, just kind of have conversation with them, and then set up um one-on- ones with them and just kind of over time evaluate their capabilities.

And I come from a technical background, unlike most people who sit in this chair. So it's easy for me to talk to folks on a more technical level than somebody who maybe comes already from a management side. So I can have those down in the weeds type of conversations and ask them how their projects are going and ask them how things are going and then if they have a challenge I can say oh did you did you try this type of thing. So just from a capability perspective that's what I like to do. It's worked well for me. I've I've been at multiple consultancies and um it also kind of reinforces the bond between manager and I tell everybody that reports to me I'm not going to ever ask you to do something that I either haven't done or am not prepared to do. So I keep my technical chops very very honed and skilled. So if I had to step in on a project tomorrow I could. And in the financial services CRM work, what are clients asking more today?

Is it speed? Everybody is asking for AI. It's comical because I can go to any customer and it it crosses industries and I can go to any CEO and say, "Hey, what do you should you be doing?" "Oh, we should be doing AI." AI. What What do you want to do? I don't know. Okay. Hey, well, you might want to figure that out before you say that you want to do AI because that's that's kind of a fairly generic term. It's kind of a fairly generic thing, AI in general. I mean, it could be as simple as using, you know, a notetaker for for your meetings. That that's AI, right? Or it could be some really agentic thing where you're having AI agents actually do work for you and stuff like that. So, probably ought to figure out what you want to do with AI before you just say, "Yeah, I want to do AI." >> Do you think it's a bubble?

I don't I think that most people are looking at it the wrong way. I I look at AI as a tool and the way that I describe it to my customers is if you go to your toolbox in your house and you look in there, you probably have three or four screwdrivers. Why do you have three or four screwdrivers? Well, because they all they have different purposes, right? So, that's the same way with with AI. Different LLMs have different purposes. So yes, you can lock into one LLM and probably get the bulk of what you want to do, but there are always those edge cases where you have to reach out to do other things. I give them some scenarios of why I use three different um LLMs, how it relates to, you know, just kind of how I work. And once you make that argument, the light bulb goes off and goes, "Oh yeah, this this really isn't a people replacement thing.

It's a capability enhancing thing." Which that's the way that people need to look at it. I think that far too many people are looking at it from a people replacement thing and a cost-saving thing. It's it's cost-saving in the sense that it makes people more efficient and helps them work better. And if you look at it from that perspective and dive in and do those type of interaction with AI, you can become extremely efficient. I've done some work um internally here on our Salesforce or I keep my my skills honed and when I was in a more technical role, I'd have eight or 10 developers working for me in combination of nearshore, offshore, and onshore. And I'm singly with with an LLM now capable of doing all the work that that entire team did in the same amount of time. That is how you gain efficiency. It doesn't mean that those people go away. It means you can take on more work.

Now you've got 10 people freed up to to take on more work versus, okay, well, I've got these people and I have one guy that's sitting there all day writing out requirements to keep these 10 people busy and you're really not exercising that person's total skill set. So that's the way I look at I think that's the way that companies should look at it. It's it's more of an efficiency gainer than it is a a people replacer. I also see it like a amplifier almost >> to the work that you are doing. >> Yeah. >> If you had to pick one root cause behind most delivery pain, what would it be? Is it scope? It's scope related, but it is lack of fully understanding the capabilities within the platform that you're that you're building on. And it it could be HubSpot, it could be Salesforce, Adobe, whatever.

It could be anything. But fully understanding and comprehending what that capability is before you start into a project. Most companies go into a project with the thought process of we're going to completely rejigger and we're going to come out of this and and we're going to have this new widget and it's going to be fantastic. And inevitably what they ultimately lean towards is just lift and shift. And that doesn't really exploit new technology. It just takes the the problems you have in your existing system and puts it in the new system. So not understanding that yeah, you don't have to do it that way in the in the new world. You can do it a different way. And I I've been at this for 40 six years. That's the biggest thing that I've seen. Whether it is back in the the 40 byty green screen time frame, the the client server time frame or now when we're in the SAS time frame, it it's just not understanding fully what you're moving to. Regarding AI in Salesforce, you've posted about Salesforce agent force and where Gen AI helps and doesn't.

Where do you see AI genuinely improving workflows right now? And where do you think it's still brittle to trust? >> The Salesforce Agent Force stuff is getting better. One of the one of the issues with with agent force is you're you're kind of locked into an LLM, right? And if you remember, not all LLMs are the same, right? So you're locked into this thing that maybe isn't the best for what you're trying to do with it. So the response time of your agent is not what it should be. I mean all you have to do to see that on display is to go to Salesforce's help and you're you're guided right into an agent and that agent tries to help you and you type something in and it's like okay I'm going to go get a coffee and donut now cuz it's sitting there spinning. That's a horrible user experience.

So I think that that's the biggest part from a agent force that's brittle and the thing that you mentioned I was posting we wrote a a lightning component specific to Salesforce that kind of addresses some of that user experience type of thing. We don't do anything agentic. We don't create records. We we created something that basically lets a user ask questions about a record and its related data or basically interrogating the data with natural language and that returns a result back to the to the person generally speaking in you know a couple seconds. That's a decent user experience. Typing something in a box and waiting a minute or two or three not a good user experience. Is there any boring but powerful practice that you've implemented recently around delivery or resourcing? I guess from from a boring perspective um you know in in the professional services industry particularly in software everybody is some kind of agile or hybrid agile and one of the things that is very time consuming and and nobody likes doing it is writing user stories and so we we have used that component that we that we've built to kind of streamline and and help out with that. You don't have to be as prescriptive in in what you capture from the the customer to get a meaningful user story out.

We've we've built it in such a way that it'll give you a user story and acceptance criteria and actually tell you kind of how to solution it and about how long it should take to build it. So that's the the mundane thing that's that's the thing that nobody likes to do is spend time writing user stories. We've tried to streamline that a little bit internally. When you look at the company goals, what if you could let's say fast forward 10 months would be a good achievement for the company? >> Yeah, we're not an organization that's looking to get purchased by anybody. Our goals is to just kind of continue to land customers, continue to service customers, and continue to to create great win stories. I mean, if I came out of the back of 10 months and had 10 or 12 solid customer success stories, that that's a huge win. Another thing I've learned over my time frame is you're you're not going to be successful in every project you do. There's just some things where either a the customer is not a fit for your organization.

So, there's always things that contribute to a project's failure that are to some extent out of your controls. If I could come out of the, you know, 10 months and every project I'm working on and every project that I I take on between now and then, I come out with a good win story, that's a solid one. >> I always like to ask my guests about one piece of advice they would give. What's yours? >> Well, having been in this industry for 46 years, don't be afraid to reinvent yourself. I have reinvented myself multiple times over the course of 46 years. I I came into the industry right at the tail end of 80 column cards and went through the 40 by 80 green screen stuff IBM mini era into client server and all of those languages that service the climate client server arena coming out of that I I had some Java experience which got me over into the Salesforce world and so now I'm running client side Java in uh in lightning components don't be afraid of of changing don't ever become stale because as soon as you become come stale, you have no marketable skills.

And so continue to stay a breast of what's in the marketplace and don't be afraid to look for new capability or new new things to kind of go and learn because if you don't, you are going to be left behind. >> Change is key. >> It is absolutely it is. >> Okay. And if people want to connect with you or learn more about Vantage Point, where should they go? >> They can visit my LinkedIn page. Just look up Randy Wandell. I think I'm probably the only one out there. I've got relatively unique name. So, um, just just look me up. Uh, and I'm happy if you have questions, just ping me and I I'll be more more than happy to answer. >> Perfect. I will add also a link so people can check you out. And thank you guys for watching. We'll see you in the next one.