Salesforce Team Risk: The Leadership Gap That Breaks Organizations

Most Salesforce team problems aren't technical. They're organizational. And the companies that get it wrong usually don't find out until after the damage is done.

In this episode, Josh sits down with Mike Sommer, Founder of Business MRI and former IBM COE Practice Lead, to break down the five risks he sees quietly destroying Salesforce teams across Fortune 1000 companies.

What you'll take away:

- The #1 understaffed role in Salesforce organizations and why it causes everything else to fail

- How running Salesforce as a "tool" vs. a "platform" changes everything about team structure and hiring

- Why your growing backlog probably isn't a headcount problem

- What A players actually look like on a Salesforce team and why B companies can attract them

- The honest truth about asking your SI partner for objective advice

- How to take a clear-eyed look at your org's real foundation before AI amplifies what's broken

Mike Sommer is the founder of Business MRI and a senior enterprise architect who has spent 20+ years cleaning up Salesforce orgs after the plane has already crashed. This conversation is for Salesforce leaders, hiring managers, and anyone responsible for the health of a Salesforce investment.

Guest: Mike Sommer | Founder, Business MRI | Former IBM COE Practice Lead

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Website: https://businessmri.com

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The Hiring Edge explores hiring strategy, leadership, and the systems Salesforce-driven companies use to build exceptional teams. Follow on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

EPISODE KEYWORDS

Salesforce, Salesforce team, Salesforce hiring, Salesforce admin, Salesforce COE, governance, enterprise architecture, talent quality, Salesforce staffing, key person dependency, Salesforce risk

Transcript

Welcome And Guest Background

Josh Matthews 0:00

Welcome to the Hiring Edge, the podcast helping leaders navigate the age of AI, create teams that thrive, and build a workplace people never want to leave. Mike, thank you so much for being on the show. Today's topic is basically risk in your Salesforce team. So my guest today has spent decades inside some of the most complex Salesforce environments in the world. He's a senior enterprise architect at Business MRI. He's the founder of Business MRI, where he helps Fortune 1000 companies untangle org sprawl, build governance frameworks, and design Salesforce teams that are built to scale. Before that, he led Salesforce Enterprise Architecture and the COE practice over at IBM. He's worked with clients like Cornell University and major global enterprises across aerospace, telecom, and beyond. And he doesn't just know Salesforce, he knows what happens when Salesforce teams are built wrong. Please welcome Mike Summer. Welcome, Mike. Thank you so much. Nice to see you, Josh. Yeah, likewise. Why don't you just share briefly what you do at business MRI?

Key Person Dependency Risk

Mike Sommer 1:07

So the easiest way of describing it is we're in an independent Salesforce clearance practice. And what that means is we make sure that the foundation is right, both from the people point of view and the technology point of view before companies start um leveraging innovation or AI or try to start automating things. And so if that foundation is not stable and secure, you're building upon a shaky ground. And what happens and what I've been part of is cleaning up that mess. And so if we can help people to avoid those challenges and avoid those costs and mistakes, it would not only help the business grow, but it will also help ensure that uh people don't get fired and the executive team does not have to do a uh reshuffle and the business continues to grow instead of having uh significant stock issues because what they promised the market actually is not deliverable because they didn't check first before building. Yeah, and that's huge. The cost of doing this wrong and then having the board just scrap the whole thing, it's a really high risk.

Josh Matthews 2:12

Let's talk with risk number one as it relates to the people on your team. And that risk is the quit risk, it's key dependency. I think one of the most overlooked and devastating risks in Salesforce teams is over-reliance on a single individual. When one person holds all the institutional knowledge, undocumented configurations, integration logic, process rationale, their departure can paralyze operations. Talk about that.

Mike Sommer 2:39

It's a really common problem. And I would say one of the biggest problems that Salesforce customers have right now is that no one's in charge. And what I mean by that is not someone who understands how the system is running, but who makes the decisions? How do decisions get prioritized? And ultimately who's in the driver's seat is probably the most under-recognized, understaffed position in Salesforce companies. And so what's happening right now, and I'm just going to speak in generalities, is that a lot of companies treat Salesforce as a really expensive tool and they don't run it like a platform. And when you make that misadjustment and you don't run it like it should be, meaning an enterprise platform, you have individuals who have a lot of that thinking in their minds or on their laptops or in different files. And because it was never viewed by the company as being elevated to that core technology piece, it was never given the structure and the framework it needed to run. And so individuals were allowed to go and have the information stored in their own minds because there was no governance and there's no incentive from the company to make sure that that did not happen. And so how does a how does a leader of the organization or maybe someone who doesn't even really understand Salesforce? Right? Maybe it's a CFO. I'm not saying CFOs don't get it, but I'm just saying maybe it's, you know, a CIO who's not actually a Salesforce person. How do they make sure that there isn't this key person dependency? Talk about that if you can. I think it's a bigger decision than that. I think it's a conversation amongst the executives around whether Salesforce is going to be a platform or if it's going to be just a tool.

Josh Matthews 4:20

Can you describe so for some of our listeners, they might hear that and it means something different, likely to an enterprise architect than maybe to someone who's running a sales org.

Quick Wins For Knowledge Redundancy

Mike Sommer 4:33

When something is run like a tool, it means that you have individuals who are responsible for building on it, for innovating, for capturing business requirements, but it's really done as a replaceable function, meaning if a new tool came in tomorrow that was better, it could just simply be replaced. What I mean by a platform is it is a core function of the business. So if you think of companies that run SAP, they made a decision because of the cost in the investment that everything that could run through SAP was running through SAP because it was a core foundational unit of the business. Sure. For companies that are using Salesforce well, they've made that same decision. They said, hey, Salesforce is our core platform for this function, and we're not moving away from it. So we're going to treat it and we're going to fund it. We're going to put the right people in place and we're going to give it the maturity that it needs to have a seat at the table. When companies run things like a tool, those individuals who are running Salesforce are not involved in decisions and they're not treated as an individual who is given the recognition and the seniority or the prioritization to sit at the big boys' table. And I think that's the biggest difference between the tooling idea and the platform idea. And if you run it like a platform, that key man risk is distributed amongst the entire group because it's a group conversation. It's not an individual conversation.

Josh Matthews 5:56

Let's figure out a quick win. Okay. So I think you just shared it. It starts with a conversation. It could start with a conversation with you, could start with talking to the product owners, product managers, and so on. There's a single admin. I mean, can they just start with some simple things like creating loom videos about how the system works? Sort of educational training. If I'm hit by a bus, watch an hour of this. Is that a an okay place to just for a quick win?

Using AI Without Getting Fooled

Mike Sommer 6:24

I would also say if you have only one admin, spin up immediately a delegated admin, someone who can walk alongside, someone who can learn from someone who can be that advocate, that sounding board for the admin, and incentivize them to lean in and to participate. And so that way you're already creating redundancy that if something happens to the admin, you at least have someone else who can log into the system and get some of the work done. So I think that's key. I think the second thing is everyone who's using the Salesforce platform should have some level of education and everyone can bring a different skill set to the table. And so if someone's really good at recording or looms, or someone's just a naturally gifted educator, give them an opportunity to record and to document in a way that is encouraging to their way of thinking and to what they do. And it doesn't have to be the person who's the admin who has to do the admin recording. It can be someone else who participates and make it so that everyone benefits from leaning in and participating. And don't make it a mandatory activity, but make it something that everyone gets to have a shared experience and uplift everyone.

Josh Matthews 7:32

Okay. Can I ask about an AI angle on this? Sure. This certainly isn't to replace an enterprise architect. Like, fair enough, right? But I mean, there are tools out there now, like Perplexity Computer, that can go into your Salesforce org and it can look at the whole dang thing and it can kind of figure it out and break it, like talk about it and break it apart.

Mike Sommer 7:54

I think it's a great way to learn how the system works. It's a great way to dig in and see things that you don't see natively. The biggest challenge is a lot of these tools, and there's a podcast I was listening to this morning comparing 5.4 thinking versus Opus 4.6. And so, you know, that's the benchmark as of March 26. They both performed the same task, but gave very different results. And so by having multiple tools and comparing them against each other is actually probably one of the smartest things to do. And so, you know, a lot of the tools on the app exchange, you know, those that are touting AI functionality, let's be honest, they're rappers. They are using an engine or an API call from one of the core AI engines. And if they are using a tool that doesn't work well, they're going to give results that are not great. And so I think that's one of the biggest challenges is is AI something you should be using? Absolutely. But you also need to have someone who's in the room who understands what good looks like, who can point out this result has nothing to do with what reality is.

Understaffing Versus Backlog Reality

Josh Matthews 9:04

It's all the hallucination filter. Yeah, that's great, man. So let's move on to risk number two. Okay. Not risk is an understaffing risk. Many organizations are perpetually behind on Salesforce work because they haven't hired enough qualified people relative to scope to the scope and the complexity of the instance, the platform grows, the team doesn't. Now, you can imagine this is the land that I live in most days of the week. And there are some real negatives that come from it, not just not getting enough done or having 700, you know, Jira issues that you've got to see too and having a massive backlog. The sales team having to wait and wait and wait to get the things that they need so that their team can go out there and sell, whatever it happens to be. But one of them is burnout, right? Serious burnout. I interviewed someone about two weeks ago. She does really well. She makes $180,000 a year. She's working 70 hours a week. She would happily take a $135,000 job and let go of all that extra money, $45,000, just to have a regular 40-hour week because of the burnout. This company is going to eventually, if not today or tomorrow, but certainly within the next couple of months, lose someone who has all that IP in their head, like we talked about in risk number one, right? So how do you go in when you go into an organization? What are some of the first things that you do to determine if they have enough staff? We'll get to are they the right staff in a minute, right? So we'll cover that soon. But how do you figure that out?

Mike Sommer 10:54

Whether they have enough staff? Yeah. I'm going to flip that question for you a little bit, and this is the reason why. When I oftentimes hear people say there's not enough staff, what they're saying is the backlog they have is too much, therefore we need to bring people in to bring to rectify or to remediate the backlog. My question is, is the backlog even relevant? And so if I can just share with you a story, because I think this is relevant. Please. I was working with a Fortune 5 company, and they were implementing Salesforce, and they're spending like a million dollars a week on development, and they completely reverse-engineered Salesforce to be a CPQ first solution.

unknown 11:38

Okay.

Mike Sommer 11:43

And so Salesforce came in and said, What are you doing? Like you're building a system that is taking away all the value and benefit of what Salesforce has, and you're building something that's becoming a monstrosity. And so they kept on adding more and more staff because of the technical debt and just chaos they were creating. Sure. That the system ended up finally blowing up. And when they went back, and you know, I was brought in to do the retrospective of like, what happened? You know, okay, the plane has crashed. What happened? The issue was they were trying to take their old ways of thinking, their ideas of how a sales environment should run, and they were trying to replicate it into Salesforce. And they were not industry leading when it came to their sales methodology. They should not have been reinventing the wheel. If anything, they should have stopped because their sales methodology was horrible and said, okay, we're going to leverage what's out of the box, and we're going to change our ways of doing business to leverage what's natively built in Salesforce. When they launched the service cloud version of this, the SVP for this company said, you're not to change a single thing unless you can come to me and prove otherwise. And this person's been spotlighted at Salesforce's Dreamforce multiple times. And the reason they did that is because they realized that Salesforce had some really good functionality, that if they only leverage the best practices and out of the box, they did not need as many people. But they could change the business process to map to those best practices and actually do better. So the first thing that I typically do when clients say we need to hire people is let's understand what your processes are, if you even understand what they are, and see if there's a way of simplifying to remove that technical debt just by improving and upserting and bringing in the best practice of how you do case management or opportunity. Instead of being it being customized with 500 different versions of it, what is the one version or what are the multiple versions that will cover like 80 to 90% of your use cases? Focus and fix on those first. And now you don't need to remediate the backlog. And so I look at it a bit differently that it's not a staffing question, but it's more of a business operations approach. And then once you get that business operations, you can then bring in the people to backfill and to fix the pieces that are actually critical versus getting people to fix things that don't matter, which leads to burnout. Because if an individual understands that what they're working on is of the highest and most critical focus for the business to be successful, they can get things done faster, they can get things done with more inspiration and excitement. But if they're working on a backlog of stuff that doesn't matter, and it's just noise and it's just silly changes that business wants because business wants, and no one's questioning to say, should this even be here? Because no one's in a driver's seat making those hard decisions.

Talent Quality And Change Resistance

Josh Matthews 14:34

They're majoring in minor things, is what's happening. And it's a nightmare and it's expensive, and it keeps people up at night, and their job satisfaction declines greatly. I mean, I think it's safe. Basically, what I'm hearing from you is look, who wants to work 70 hours a week, you know, building uh a double wide, yeah, right, in a tornado park. Okay. Like that doesn't make sense. Let's instead build the highest quality product by following best practices and also, you know, having a good business process. I know Vanessa used to quote one of her favorite quotes back in the day was always, and I'm gonna botch it, but it's always something along the lines that, you know, tech just amplifies what you've got, right? And so if it's a bad process, you're just going to amplify that bad process to the nth degree a hundred times, a thousand times, ten thousand times a day. So we don't want to do that. Okay. This really takes us right into, I think, the next salient point here, which is talent quality. And I would kind of combine that almost with talent quality and team composition. Because what you've been talking about is let's forget all this backlog for a minute. Let's start with a good BA. Let's look at this information. And I get that you guys have liked clicking things in the top right corner here 10 times in a row for 15 years. That's not how we do it anymore, right? We don't want to do that anymore. It doesn't make sense anymore. I know we went through a massive, massive adjustment when I was at Robert Half. We'd been using a 25-year-old, I think it was a 25-year-old home-built system, right? And then we got Salesforce. It's like that ability to, you know, when you've got 10,000 people, 30,000 people, whatever it is, all of a sudden using a new product, even if it's being rolled out over six months, it's it's it's devastating when all of those processes change. How much do you think people are just simply afraid of what it's going to mean for their legacy personnel that are Luddites and just are resistant?

Mike Sommer 17:00

Unfortunately, I think it's a huge impact. And I think that there's a lot of force movement that's happening right now where those who are resistant to change are going to find it very difficult to either continue in a current role or to find a new role. And so I think one of the best moves right now is where you bring someone who really thinks differently and pair them up with someone who thinks traditionally. And it's not an age per se, but typically it's it's a younger person who has just a different way of approaching a problem. And you pair them with someone who is maybe more of a traditional architect or someone who has built the system from back in the day when Salesforce first launched and thinks, well, we built it this way to start, so I don't want to change it. And who has investment in the idea? And so long as you can facilitate and get those two or get those groups to work together, it's amazing what you can get because you end up with a much better outcome.

Josh Matthews 17:58

I feel no, it it does. And I think it brings up a really good point, which is a is uh another risk that's talent quality risk. Too many B and C players, right? I really enjoy building teams of A players where everyone's an A. And you generally wind up with pure personnel, they feed off of each other, they tend to be collaborative and a little competitive, and that's not bad. You know, it's not necessarily a bad thing, it just kind of depends, but it's the right makeup. But I think if you have someone on your team, whether they're a Salesforce user or a Salesforce professional, and they're resistant to good change, because there's change for change's sake, and no one likes that, but they're open to good change. It's got a real reason behind it. If they're resistant to it, they're automatically at least a B player, right? People who are resistant to change or to positive change are automatically B players if they're not open-minded, right? I'm not saying everyone has to be a yes person, right? They can have their perspective. But when there's friction, when the higher ups have made a decision, this is how we're doing it, we've taken Mike Summers' advice and we're moving forward in this direction. Anyone who's resistant is providing unnecessary friction. We need to look at that in a big way, because this is the talent issue. And talent is not just, I know where all the clicks are and how to, you know, I'm an architect or I'm a developer. Okay. Great. But there are talents about being a particularly gifted person on a team. You document, you know how to communicate, you don't spend, you know, 60% of your time trying to solve something that a quick question would have resolved in 30 minutes. Right. There are all sorts of talents that people bring beyond just the skill set. So there is a talent quality risk with a lot of organizations. I think a lot of rapid hiring during growth bases has often prioritized speed over quality when it comes to hiring, right? And it's like, well, we need them. We need bodies, cheeks in the seat. Whereas someone I used to work with 20 years ago used to say husks. Just get some husks in those chairs. So when we rush to hire en masse, it can be very difficult for quality to always be there if the process isn't right. And all of a sudden, now you're carrying underperformers whose skill ceiling is just too low for where the platform and the business is going and has grown. So talk to me if you can. What do you do when you go in and you might let's face it, you don't have to do a massive survey to figure this out. You just have to have some meetings and start talking to people, right? But I am imagining that you do utilize some sort of process to evaluate if people are growing with the company or not. They should stay or not.

Mike Sommer 21:04

Yeah, and I think this almost bends a bigger question. And I I understand what you're saying of the A players and B players. I'm wondering if there's a better term we can use to describe the people that were capturing those. No, fuck that, dude.

Josh Matthews 21:19

No, fucking you're an A player or you're not. You're good in this position. Because look, I'm gonna sorry, I'm just gonna get passionate for a second. Here's the reality, man. Someone's good. Now, that doesn't mean they're alpha. That doesn't mean like, oh, they're super smart or they've got an MBA from some great school. Like, that's not how I'm defining an A player. I think defining what an A player is is probably a better thing than trying to come up with a new concept because everyone can understand that's an A player, a B player, and a C player. This person's a Hammenager. They clock in at nine, they're out at five, other people are bringing in new ideas. And I'll give you an example. I had a guy book a call with me yesterday. He's an admin. I don't just Take calls with admins because I don't place a lot of them and I reserve most of my conversations for executive search or for my clients. But he booked it. And I liked the initiative. I was like, okay, man, I'll spend a few minutes with you. And we talked. And he's interested in maybe getting a new job because he's feeling like the company might not be growing and it might not be allowing him to have the kind of security that he wants in two or three years. And now this guy's got an MBA and it's from a good school. And he's a smart, nice, likable guy. And he has demonstrated a willingness to put himself out there. He got on my website, he clicked a client meeting and booked me. Brave, right? And I said, look, I'll give you, I'll give you a couple hints here on what to do. First thing, just so you know, you can go to ChatGPT and you can type in and say, I need career advice. Communicate with me as if you are Josh Matthews, the Salesforce recruiter. And guess what, guys? It'll work. It'll sound like me. So that's one little quick, easy cheat that you guys can have out there. But the main thing that I tried to guide him to is look, you don't want to stay an admin. Your role or a lot of the responsibilities in your role, they're going to be gone by the end of the year. You're not going to do them anymore. Right. So here's what you do lean into being an analyst. Do a report that no one's even thought of doing that shows some sort of insight that's going to get elevated from your boss all the way up to the head of sales or head of GTM or whatever. Right. Do something spend extra time, non-billable time. And find a way to pay for yourself by saving them money or helping them to acquire a new business. Right? Find a way to do something easier in the system. This guy's going to do it, man. This guy's going to do it because look, I don't have an MBA. I know that MBA programs don't all teach the same things. I think that there's a lot of good quality information in there. I talked to some folks with MBAs, and I I'm sometimes totally lost. And I wish I'd kind of wish I'd done at least a few courses. But at the end of the day, I found just as effective, awesome people doing the same kind of work that someone with an MBA has, right? And this guy, they're not teaching him this. They're not teaching him, go write a report, Mr. Admin, you know, and elevate it, et cetera, et cetera. So people need recommendations on this. But the thing I'm trying to make here, Mike, is that if he does that, he's an A player. If he doesn't do that or something like that, he's a B player. If he's just trying to hang on to his job, he's a B player. If he's trying to make the company better, he's an A player. If he produces actual work and he's intelligent enough to actually get results from his efforts, he's an A player. If they try really hard and they don't get results, it's a B player. So it's a really simple, simple thing. And I'm you I apologize going off like this on you. There's nothing wrong with that. But you know, I warned you.

Mike Sommer 25:12

Well, the reason I bring that up, Josh, is A players want to work for A companies. And the reality is not all companies are A companies. I think A players like to work for B companies and turn them into A companies. Yes. I mean I found that over and over again. I I completely agree, but there's also a lot of C companies. And a company that's trying to hire an A company or an A player needs to be realistic of what kind of environment they're inviting that person into. And so that's crossing the gap of that calling it A, B, and C is because everyone likes to think of themselves as the best. But benchmarking can get against what? And so if the personality of the A-type is or A player is someone who leans in, understands that they don't know everything, is teachable, is willing to take risks, is willing to step outside to publish, do, achieve, produce an outcome, that is, I agree. But if the companies are such that they are, you know, for example, is working for uh a state and we were doing some work for the Department of Taxation. And when I asked them about innovation, they said, Oh, we have a big initiative this year. I said, Well, please tell me what it is. And they said, We're gonna move from three pieces of carbon copy paper to two. It's going to save us paperwork. We can change the machines we feed it into, it's gonna be all this much more efficient. And I'm thinking, an A player, someone who is truly leaning into what's possible, is gonna look at this company and say, there's no way I'm gonna work for them. So if a company that is in that mindset is trying to say, well, I only want to hire a players, the reality gap seems to be pretty significant between those two ways of thinking of where they currently stand.

Josh Matthews 26:55

Well, sure. And the reality is that they need to first think about how they turn their company into an A company. Because you're not wrong. You know, I mean, we're not all gonna be Google and Apple, right? And we don't have to be, right? We don't. We we we just simply don't. But you can do so much with your organization, and it really starts with the people, right? And this is the this is the tricky part, right? You have to have someone who's in the decision-making seat, a single person who has decided to set a higher standard. And when they set that higher standard, I mean you could take any sports team, any sports team out there, I'll take Williams F1 racing team. Okay. So what did they do? They went from last in F1. Okay, so then they invested in a new uh director, okay, and he brought in some better practices that allowed them to attract more investors, which allowed them to get more money so they could go go get Carlos signs. But I'm just describing what every team does. They re get more sponsorship, they sell more t-shirts, they get a good player, they sell more jerseys, they make more money, they can invest in more and more and more. There's there's no person out there who walks into the worst team on the NFL and turns it into a Super Bowl champ. It's a five-year plan, it's a six-year plan so that you can grow and grow and grow. But the idea is an A company, maybe it's not an A company yet, but what attracted Carlos Sainz to Williams was that one, they knew where they were. They're willing to admit it. We know we are a mid-tier, mid to low tier team. Our goal is to be top of the mid-tier teams in two years. That's the goal. This is how we're gonna do it. Do you want to help us grow like that? Okay. So they sold the dream. And so if you're a B company that's trying to be an A company, you must have the dream to begin with. And then you must sell the dream. And then you kind of get the talent. And sometimes it's stock, and sometimes it's money. You know, some people are coin operated, and other people just want the opportunity to be like, look, we don't know how to do this. We heard you're pretty awesome. We know you've done it at these three A companies. Come on here, we're gonna make it worth your while, usually with money and respect.

Empowering A Salesforce COE Leader

Mike Sommer 29:26

So one of the key things that you said, and what Williams did is they brought in, I believe, a new team principal. Someone who was given the keys to make those changes. And so if we look at this from a Salesforce perspective, companies that make the decision that they're going to run and they're going to fund and they're going to empower Salesforce to be a seat at the table can have that discussion and conversation where even if the company is maybe not trying to be that a company, or if they're not trying to evolve, that Salesforce platform can become the engine that can become the amplifier for the business to actually achieve more. Because if it means that you sell more, it means that you have uh higher margins, if it means that you get more outcomes from all your activities of what the platform can provide, the business will follow suit. And so one of the core things and one of the key roles that a company needs to hire for Salesforce is someone that I call the director of the COE or the director of Salesforce. They need to be given not only the position, but the political power to become that stopgap, to be that voice of influence, to say, I hear what you're wanting, business, and I understand it's a priority for you. This is what our mandate is. This is what we've been given as our marching orders. I'm happy to work with you, but we have to take something off the table. Now, if you want to go tell marketing that they can't get their new marketing engine because your priority is more important, I'll work with you, but you have to convince the other team to give up their seat or the executive team to release more money. But now they have the responsibility upon them because everything's transparent and everything's out in the open. And a good team principle will bring the team together because they're all marching towards the same direction. And that to me is the biggest problem with Salesforce, is right now it's being run by people who have no seat at the table. They have no ability to say anything other than yes. And it's probably the single biggest point of failure. And what most companies end up having to pick up the pieces from is they never gave that person a chance to drive the car. Instead, they put money into the engine or the developers and they just start building more. They give more influence to the people who are the decision makers who are sitting in the backseat, then no one has their hands on their wheel and they wonder why.

Josh Matthews 31:53

Amen, Mike. Amen. I mean, you know, it's I'm listening to this, right? And I'm thinking, yes, Mike, yes, exactly like that. Because what you're talking about is actual empowerment. You're spending all this money on people. How come someone's not in charge? I mean, how many product owners have to go talk to the VP of IT and genuflect every time they need something or want to tell them something? I mean, it's ridiculous. Yeah. Right. And by the way, we see it in our industry, recruiting, headhunting, right? When we interact with talent acquisition teams, internal talent acquisition teams, there's probably 5% of them. Now, these are hardworking people, and I'm not knocking them, but there's maybe 5% of them that have enough clout in any of the companies to push back on the hiring manager and say, your responses are too slow. I don't want to work on your recs. They have to work on their recs. They're a salaried employee, right? They're forced to work with bad hiring managers and taught to fear them. Taught to say yes. And then they wonder, they look around at the team and they're like, why is our team average? And you think, oh, it's the recruiting. Okay, well, yeah, it is. It is, but is it really go one level up? Oh no, it's the empowerment. It's the lack of education, the lack of training, the lack of empowerment, the lack of investment, the lack of decision making. And it all flows down from the hiring managers and those cultures that you're talking about. I mean, I worked Fortune 500, man. I saw for years this fear of bubbling something up. Right? I can't believe he moved. I can't believe he moved either, man. Um, it's weird. Anyway, he's there, and then the teacher says, Who's brave enough to ask Lewis a Mr. Hamilton a question? Who's brave enough? And it kind of hit me. I was like, Because I don't I don't think like that. Like asking a question is brave. Asking a question is you want an answer to something. Like you're curious and you want information, right? But I guess it's true. Like some people are terrified one of raising their hand. Everyone knows public speaking is the top tier, right? People don't want to push back and they don't want to ask the right questions. They're afraid for their job. And it is a culture that starts, I think, with the board and the CEO, and it rolls all the way down. You know. Let's keep going here. I I could talk about this for another hour, but we don't have another hour. We've got 20 minutes. I do want to stop there and I'd like to ask you, Mike, about something that you kind of brought up. I I was asking you before the show, what's the number one thing? Because we talked about some of these things like poor execution, governance, failure, this sort of thing. Is what you were just describing, this sort of single point, this sort of single director, this person who has decision-making authority, who is strong enough to push back, articulate enough to make sense to the C-suite. Is this the number one thing that you try and fix in organizations, or are you starting with the tech first?

Mike Sommer 35:25

If I can be honest, it it's not the people, it's not the tech. It's uh it's a lost shared trust. And what I mean by that is there's no central place that people can rely upon that reflects the reality of the business, of the company. You have everything from documentation, which I think is absolutely needed, but it's in someone's shared drive, or it's on a lucid chart or a visio, or it's in someone's mind. And so everyone thinks, okay, it's documented, we're good enough. The problem is if you don't have a shared vision, a shared capture of what your system really is that is tied to your production environment or to a UAT environment, every decision that you make has an unknown impact, and you don't know that if your decision for work stream one or for moving or making a change has any impacts in anything else. And so that I think is the absolute biggest problem that exists today is no one wants to take a good hard look of where the starting point is to understand are they above or below their peers? Do they have complexity that they really shouldn't have that they need to focus and fix first? Or are they in a place where they really can put the, you know, put the pedal down or bring in agent force, bring in AI, bring in innovation because they're stable. And that to me is the absolute biggest risk the companies have right now. And a lot of companies are getting advice from people who have an incentive to tell them a skewed representation, not because they're doing anything wrong, it's because they're coming at it from a different lens. And so I think the biggest challenge is for individuals or for those who are making decisions to have an objective source of truth that they can then make decisions on on what's right for the business. So, where do you start with that?

Josh Matthews 37:25

I mean, I think it's this is call Mike Summer at businessmri.com. The best place to start. Look, not everybody who listens to this show has an interest in reaching out and getting help. And that's oftentimes why they listen to this program. It's like, oh, get a little bit of advice. I can start with something. But let's be clear, Mike. You're an expert at this. I think it's a safe place to plug. Where can people find you? What's your what is your website and how do they get in touch with you?

Mike Sommer 37:53

Sure. So the first thing I'd recommend is someone goes to scan.businessmri.com. It's a three-minute self-assessment and it shows you kind of where you're at and whether you're in a place that can scale or if there's some areas that really need to be addressed before you do anything. It's free, it's objective, it takes the Salesforce architecture best practices, it takes 20 years, 75 projects worth of learnings. And it's really here to provide that ability to look at reality. It's like stepping on the scale. You can't lie when you see what it is and you can make decisions from there. I think the biggest challenge right now is for those who are leading to take an honest look at whether they want to see reality or if they want to just continue going down the path of red and fix the problem when it comes up.

Josh Matthews 38:42

So red pill, blue pill is what you're talking about.

Mike Sommer 38:45

Exactly. I mean, there are some people who just unfortunately have the mindset of, I'll fix it when it breaks. And others, you have the mindset of, you know, something doesn't feel right, something feels off. The team's in a place that if I don't put them in the right position, we could have some significant layoffs in the near future because our cash flow position is not looking good. And if we don't fix the fundamentals, if we don't improve our way of doing business, our efficiencies, if we don't bring in AI or tooling, whatever that thing is, they can see far enough down the road because maybe they've experienced it to know it's coming. And so I think that's really the red pill. Blue pill, is you would say, is this is coming. This is going to happen. And companies that don't think it's going to affect or impact them or their people are going to be rudely awakened. You know, we wake up every morning and hear some of the world's best companies laying off their employees. You know, you look at Jack Dorsey's company, I think um, you know, he he has uh Cash App and a few other big companies. They laid off, I want to say, 40% of their workforce. And it wasn't because the business was not doing well, they just found that technology was doing better. And so they said, hey, we'd rather let everyone go in one fell swoop so that we can make decisions and move on than drag it on for the next two, three years. And so I think companies that are proactive can get in front of this and can help to ensure that their teams and their staff are being put to the highest and best use. And the people that maybe have skill sets where they will be replaced, or the the skill sets or the tasks that people are completing can now be done better and more efficiently using AI or other tools, can be given the breathing room to upskill into higher value activities and things that can leverage the innovation that's taking place, but they don't have to wait for the axe to fall to move first. And so I think that's the biggest thing that's happening right now is for companies to take a hard look and go, do you want to be proactive or do you want to wait and clean up?

Fixing Team Composition And Contractor Mix

Josh Matthews 40:48

Let's cover one more point here, okay? Sure. I I'm really interested in the idea of team makeup, right? So there are there are teams that just, you know, sometimes they're understaffed, sometimes they're overstaffed. Sometimes it's just the wrong mix. And I think that's a little bit what you were, just a little bit of what you were just talking about. So wrong team composition. And that can include wrong mix of skill set. It can also include wrong mix of pull time versus your, you know, your contractor mix. So beyond skill and headcount, organizations often get the fundamental composition wrong, the wrong type of role types for their phase, the wrong balance of FTEs versus contracts and consultants doing jobs that should be owned internally, right? So can you talk about that? Do you do you come across this at all, you know, in your analyses of these businesses? It's like, oh my God, they've got X number of contractors, and maybe it's because it's some rule in California that means that they can't, you know, do this with their fund if they don't have X number of employees. Like there's all these weird rules, right? But what are you finding out there?

Mike Sommer 42:11

I see it all the time. Oftentimes they either have too many full-time people in the wrong skill sets, or they have individuals that really should be brought in as specialists for a specific purpose and they should be brought in and they they might be a higher rate, but they've done it before. Therefore, you're going to get to your result faster. And I've oftentimes heard companies saying, Oh, we need to hire a technical architect, or we need to hire an enterprise architect. And then when you dig in and ask, Well, what are you trying to do? You realize that they're asking for the wrong skill set, they're asking for the wrong purpose, and they may be asking because they really have a six-month project where they need someone of that caliber, but they don't need someone full-time. And the rate they're offering for the full-time is something that would be more applicable to like a first-year solution architect and not someone who's been doing this for 20 years. And so I think the reality is no one seems to be pushing back of why are you hiring and why do you think you need this skill set? And why does it have to be full-time, or why does it have to be contract? I think those are the honest conversations that you can truly only get to when you understand one, where your current reality sits. And so your current reality is you're a hot mess and you need to fix those fundamentals and understand what your processes are to clean up 15 years of technical debt, or maybe you need to start again, bringing in a technical architect to try to put the wet spaghetti back in the box is probably another use up for that person. And if you get them, a good technical architect will go, I'm not putting my name on this because what you're trying to do is going to hurt my reputation, and you're trying to find the wrong skill set versus having someone come in and say, I understand what you're trying to do, I understand the business outcomes, I understand the value, I understand that we're going to take from this career. Stake to this state, and it's going to help the business improve like this. Those are where you can have those individuals do full time because now they're invested in the overall success of the business. Versus having someone come in and I mean the amount of calls of like I need a TA. Okay, you realize that that's a very hard skill set to find, and you're offering $75 an hour, there's a good chance you're not going to get this person. So I don't know where they're getting their information, but there seems to be a significant disconnect between the full-time who should be owning that truth layer, bringing keeping all that core information into the business and making it a value add for the organization, versus bringing in those people that you need to do specific tasks that hiring for full-time doesn't make sense because it's not a full-time rule. You don't have enough complexity to keep that person going. You've got a six-month project, but someone really good can now help you leap forward.

Why SI Incentives Can Increase Risk

Josh Matthews 44:55

And so it's a very common issue. I see it a lot with Salesforce customers. It's not an SI problem, but with Salesforce customers, it's often, I need an admin developer architect. And when you break it down, it's like one, why would you pay architect money for admin work? Right. And why would you get why do you want developer communication skill sets for an admin? Some of you guys are awesome, but a lot of you, you know, come on. So the reality is, is they get it wrong. And what they really need is six weeks plus 10 hours a month of an architect, right? And then the admin or the consultant to build what they need, and then someone to maintain and just provide a little bit of oversight and maybe some dev, maybe some dev. That just complicates, you know, three times a year, it complicates things, right? So uh it's a very, very common and very, very normal thing. Mike, how can how can SI partners do better? And and by that I mean like a lot of these challenges that you're facing, I'm assuming you're going into Salesforce customers, enterprise level, Salesforce customers, they are often originally served or currently being served by an SI partner in some way, shape, or form. I mean, are SI partners actually doing a good job overall to help prevent this high risk? Is it even their job to advise on it? What advice would you like what advice, like, okay, so someone just spent three million dollars on a new implementation? It's a big deal, but it's gonna be everything for this company. What should that SI partner be telling them to do to protect this instance from getting off the rails in two and a half years or even in the next six months? Can I give you my honest take on this?

Mike Sommer 47:05

Yeah, Ben, I want it. I would have the conversation with a client, not the SI.

Josh Matthews 47:11

Yeah.

Mike Sommer 47:11

I think fundamentally the consulting model, the management consulting, the SIs, lawyers, accountants, people who do things per hour are about to be replaced by a model that is focused on outcomes and delivering value in the quickest possible way and not per hour billing. This is already happening in a lot of major industries. The entire mid-market, so to speak, of the eyes have all been consumed by the larger, you know, IBM's, extensions, Salesforce, TCS, call it what you will. It's actually reduced. It's it's a very large group of people. And also for the small shops, they need to bill. Their business model is they sell for X, they pay Y, and they make the margin. And fundamentally, that is not in the best interest of the customer because if you know how to do something, like if I go to a lawyer and if a lawyer says it's $5,000, but I know that they've done it a hundred times, it's a template, they can get it done in five minutes, where they use an AI tool. I want them to pass on the savings to me. I don't want to pay for $5,000. I want to pay for an outcome. And so I think that same thing is going to be happening in the SI industry. I think the biggest problem right now is a SI is always going to say yes on whether something's possible because they need to have cash flow coming in, especially as everything's changing. And so if you're asking the SI to give you an objective point of view on whether you should or should not build something, if building means money for them and build and the no means no money for them, you have to ask the honest question, where do you think they're going to lean? And so I think that's why it's so important to have a an individual or someone who is not incentivized to tell you something that is going to put more money in their pocket on critical decisions on what you need to do with the business. Because if you build something that is a three-year-long, silly complex program, that's a really big project for that SI to keep funded and to keep their team busy and for them to continue to grow. Versus if they said, you know what, a lot of this is out-of-the-box functionality. A lot of this is actually going against and creating complexity that you don't need as a business. You're better off taking that investment and putting it over here or reinvesting in your people or bringing in other skill sets or bringing in other tools. That's going to be the best benefit for the business. And so I think the SIs are going to be in a difficult place because even if they want to tell the truth, they have a business to run. And so that would be my gold nugget for those companies that are listening. Understand that everyone has a perspective they're sharing because they have a business model that's either moving them towards recommending a path or not.

Josh Matthews 50:01

We've got one question. Prakash wrote, Mike, do you find clients are more open to native app exchange solutions now versus custom builds, or is the default still to build from scratch?

Mike Sommer 50:15

I think it depends on what the client's trying to do. And if they're a more dev-oriented company, meaning they want to build everything themselves because that's just the way they're they think, or if they're more of the mindset of if someone else has built it and it's 80% to where I want it to be, it's good enough because it's so you finding a mix so your clients are like half and half. I try to guide them more towards leveraging tools that are already built to satisfy that business need. Because if you do something custom dev, you're responsible for fixing it and keeping it going. And sometimes you're building things that don't need to be built.

Final Advice And How To Connect

Josh Matthews 50:49

I actually had a conversation with my perplexity computer yesterday about this, which was all about should I go and do a ClaudBot system? I've got another terminal, build it out. It can do 20% more stuff than I can do on Perplexity Computer or my stack with Manaus and some of these other other tools. And it's like, yeah, but one, you don't know.js or anything else, Josh. And I think you already know that. And then also, do you really want to maintain all of these things? Because it's going to be on you. So maybe, maybe, but you could probably get away with the 80% and 80% less work. So yeah, it makes sense, man. It makes sense. Mike, any final words? Where can people find you? How should they connect with you?

Mike Sommer 51:37

I mean, you're more than welcome to reach out to me through LinkedIn or reach out to me through businessmri.com. And I would just encourage those that are listening to not lose hope with these changes that are coming from AI. And this is an opportunity to share your perspective, to share your voice with the leadership. Yes, you might be in a role that traditionally has multiple layers between you and the executive team. But if you come to the table and say, hey, I learned something, I built something, I have a proof of concept on something that's going to help our organization leap forward, they will listen. They will pick up the phone, they will sit in a room, they will have a coffee, and that's probably one of your best career moves of going above and beyond and bring a different perspective than maybe they currently have. And to go outside of your job description and to be aware that there are politics, but politics get trumped when you bring something that truly moves the business forward. And so I would say don't be afraid of AI, embrace it, use it every day, seek mentors from those that you can walk alongside with, where you can actually help them see things they don't see in their own careers. I think this community is really one where everyone has an incentive to do the best and lean into helping others because we've all been helped. And so reach out, connect, and if someone doesn't respond, don't take that as a no. There's a lot of noise, just keep going and it will connect.

Josh Matthews 53:03

Wonderful. Thank you, Mike. You're welcome. Thanks, LinkedIn people. Thanks, viewers, thanks, listeners.