You’ve had your Salesforce org for months or even years. It’s gotten the job done. Over time, you realize that those initial solutions are no longer cutting it. Productivity is stagnating and you want to take advantage of the new features Salesforce has released post-implementation.
After going live on Salesforce, it can be tempting to sit back and bask in the glory of your new org. However, slowly but surely your processes will become outdated as the system develops, reducing your productivity potential.
If you aren’t a Salesforce professional, finding the exact areas of improvement in your org can be a long, laborious process. That’s where Hubbl Diagnostics comes in.
In this episode, Chris Bruzzi takes us through the importance of diagnosing your org’s inefficiencies and laying out actionable steps to post-implementation org optimization. Hubbl’s diagnostic tool scans your org and compares its setup to similar industry solutions, offering their findings as suggestions for your team or Salesforce consulting partner to develop.
Check out the video below and join us on the trail to unmatched post-implementation productivity.
Don’t have time for the full interview? Here’s what you need to know.
The Highlights
What is Hubbl's mission?
0:37 - Our mission is actually to uplift the entire ecosystem out there—enable all the admins, architects, and businesses to get ahead of their growing cloud complexity.
0:47 - It's much different story now than it was 15 years ago when I got started where everything was a net new implementation and everything was really easy to build. Now we're working around a ton of complexity that may be there from your own company, but maybe partners that were working with you. Having to deal with that complexity build up, that technical debt, there needs to be some way to help folks and that's where Hubbl Diagnostics come into the play.
How does five years, 10 years, or even just two years post-implementation look different from day one?
2:57 - Think about building a house. When you have a nice clean field, you can build that house, exactly as you want. You can architect it, build it and everything's great. But then you want a pool, but “Oh man, we don't have room for that over here.” We're gonna need this shifted over here, and we have to work around what you have. You want an addition too?
3:22 - . . . what happens is you could end up building a Frankenstein-type of a solution where, every decision along the way made sense, but when you take a step back and look at what you've built over the years, it could be really complicated.
3:39 - A business wants to be able to come to their Salesforce team and say, “Hey, I got this great new idea, this priority that I want to put out there, and it's gonna make us revenue as soon as we get it out there. Can you go do this next week?” And you have to say, “Actually, there's a lot of prerequisite work. We have to clean this up, remove this, then put this in.” There's an impact on when that business can realize the results. Trying to keep that clean along the way is really important for that purpose.
At one time, Hubbl’s predecessor was one of the biggest Salesforce service providers. How did you go from that to Hubbl?
5:48 - I was part of a company called Traction on Demand. They were a Salesforce partner, both for services and building products. They actually got acquired by Salesforce's professional services team, but . . . all of the technical intellectual property was not part of that acquisition.
6:11- We funneled that out into a separate company, and one of those pieces was a predecessor of Hubbl Diagnostics. We were using this at Traction On Demand . . . Think about it from a [Salesforce] partner's point of view. Walking in, a customer that might have a solution already. When the partners are creating their statement of work, . . . if they're assuming a really clean new org, there's one estimate. But if it's a really complex beast, I should probably add some extra steps to that statement of work.
6:45 - That understanding really helps to make sure that you are aligned with your customers. We were using this in our pre-sales process to identify risks and topics to talk about with our customers. We were also using it in our managed services, where you wanna be proactive about keeping the health of your org up to snuff.
7:09 - Then we said, “Wait a minute. It's not just Traction that could get value from this. Why not bring this to all Salesforce customers so they can keep their orgs healthy along the way?”
8:14 - . . . there's not always one business stakeholder that knows everything that's going on in the org. . . you might have a piece of the puzzle in one person's mind, another person's mind. You keep having to talk to all these people [to] piece it together. But some of that's just based on memory. There's not always great documentation about this too.
8:46 - This is where technology can always help and . . . do this objectively and really quickly through automation.
You've had the opportunity to do diagnostics and see the schematics under the hood of a lot of different orgs. How are you leveraging all of that information to provide a bigger picture?
9:19 - As a company you are really familiar with how you've used Salesforce, but wouldn't it be great to understand how everybody's used Salesforce to figure out what some of those best practices are and where those patterns are?
9:32 - Being able to scan all these orgs, of course, we share nothing specifically, but in an aggregate. 9:37 - We can help customers understand through objective data, what are other folks doing in their orgs? 9:43 Are you more complex than them . . . and is that appropriate for your business model?
9:54 - Our second step is based on that to actually help you decide how to remediate some of those challenges. What if we found complexity or security issues in your org? We can actually guide the ecosystem based on some of that data to say, here's what other folks [do who] have similar problems.
10:24 - But the real ultimate goal of where we're going with this is predictive intelligence using machine learning. . . . [our tool] takes that pattern and helps a customer make decisions on what [to] do next . . . Am I not fully utilizing Service Cloud the way that I hope to? How can we help guide them based on what we're seeing out there?
Let's say I'm a business. We use Hubbl, we get diagnostics. We're starting to get a good picture of our challenges. Now, what do we do? How does the work get done?
13:45 - We don't do the work ourselves. We're trying to help enable folks out there.
14:04 - Now the great thing about this is we can actually proactively find faults before you hit your production environment. This is helping you deliver better quality solutions based on an experience data set that is way beyond what you could possibly hope to have in a single human being anymore.
14:25 - Also the thing to keep in mind is Salesforce is constantly evolving. You might have created a best practice solution today. But a year from now, Salesforce releases . . . a better way to solve this problem. You want to be able to find where there are opportunities to shift to a newer solution and get better efficiency there.
14:49 - What our tool does is we offer all those suggestions to you as recommendations. You can use that to empower your own team to go solve those problems yourself, to ensure a level of quality security compliance from both your own team, or if you're working with partners you can see what they're doing too.
15:27 - . . . You want to retain the documentation after any analysis that's performed . . . Some service companies may try to retain all that information as a way of creating a dependency. . . . When we do a service, we provide all of the documentation that we create internally to the customer. When we finish the service, you get to keep it. So I think that's really helpful.
What is your advice for a business going into Salesforce for the first time?
16:34 - What's great about Salesforce is you can get started with something small, maybe one team. . . . We think that Salesforce is going to be a single place where we can go, let's move this one team over and get started. And you can expand from that.
16:59 - The thing that I just love about Salesforce is you're using Salesforce to help manage your sales process. But you've got these licenses, so why not build something else on it? You're already paying for it. You can start to build some custom apps that you might have on some various systems and start to migrate those over too. Once you have built that expertise, either internally or with a Salesforce partner, there's no reason why you shouldn't be able to get more value out of it for the money that you're already paying.
Say you're an executive at a company and you have a few hundred staff. They're using Salesforce, but they're not happy with it. You're not able to get a good sort of productive environment going. What do you do at that point?
17:47 - Yeah the first thing is to figure out why they are not happy with it. Is this because it's slow? . . . Or maybe like we were talking earlier, there've been piecemeal solutions that are interacting in a way that's causing some negative impact on your users.
18:12 - So getting to the bottom of the reasons why they're not happy with Salesforce will be the first step here. And then, addressing those.
18:28 - And I know that a lot of the times there's always new business requests coming and you wanna keep up with them, but if you don't take a moment to make sure that your org is properly maintained, it's gonna take you longer to meet those business requests. So factoring in time to keep your org healthy is really important along the way.
What do you do once you've got a grasp on it and your Salesforce works like a finely-tuned machine?
19:11 - I hope that lasts forever. But you have monitor . . . and make sure that the health stays up there. There's a couple of different things that you're gonna want to monitor. One of them is, even if you don't change anything in the system, you might be changing access for people.
19:33 - . . . if you take a step every maybe quarter or so, to just take a look at your org, make sure that everything is restricted appropriately and you're not excessively putting out permissions that could cause damage to your org.
19:50 - But also, like we were talking earlier, Salesforce is always evolving. You want to monitor your org to make sure that you're staying up to date with the new stuff that's coming from Salesforce. . . . You want to take that all in and decide what is important for your business to stay up to date with.
What do you think the next 12-24 months of operating on Salesforce is going to look like?
21:06 - I'm an optimist. So right now, I've got a little bit of uncertainty about the economy, so I'm gonna say in those 12 months, this is gonna bounce back and people are gonna be thinking about, okay, great, I might want to invest more in certain areas.
21:29 - But folks are going to be wary because of what's happened recently and make sure that they are spending money efficiently. And so what that means is they're going to try to get the biggest bang for their buck out of their investments. And for Salesforce in particular, keeping that org healthy and properly maintained is gonna be important so they don't get back into a situation where things are actually causing a more negative impact to their business.
How are we going to get AI to work in the most effective way? That's something we're experimenting with constantly.
22:43 - What is interesting . . . is everybody's talking about AI—What's real and what's not?
22:52 - There are some really valid use cases and real technology that is available right now, even on the Salesforce platform. There are a lot of companies talking about the art of the possible . . . but some of these challenges may take a little bit longer to prove to be reality. But obviously every business is thinking about this.
23:15 - What's great about Salesforce is that there are components built into the platform with Einstein. The new GPT offerings help a customer jump into this world without having to make a huge investment outside with data scientists. You can actually use features on the platform to get AI value out of your existing Salesforce solutions, which is really exciting.
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