Scott Billows (00:02.798)
Okay, well, welcome Matt. Episode number two, here we go. Yeah, we made it through the first one and we're on to number two. the last conversation we had was great. Maybe just a super quick recap. We talked a little bit about the history of the company, the journey that we've been on, the journey that Salesforce has been on since we became a partner back in...

Matt Hui (00:07.641)
Good to be here, Scott.

Scott Billows (00:32.398)
2010 and you know, here we are. I guess we technically are now in summer of 2025 and we're talking about just before we got into the recording, you and I were just chatting about some of what Salesforce has been up to. So why don't we talk a little bit about that to start? I mean, there's a number of topics we could pick up on. Maybe we can.

talk super quickly about just this most recent acquisition that they've done. You had brought up some of the sponsorship that they're doing, so we can talk about that. But why don't we just start with, I guess it's now a couple weeks ago, they made a big announcement after being pretty quiet for a while in terms of acquisitions. So why don't, I'd love to get your thoughts and just capture some ideas around sort what this.

Salesforce acquisition trend has looked like maybe over the last few years and the most recent one they announced a few weeks back.

Matt Hui (01:35.725)
Yeah, so for those who don't know, the most recent acquisition being Informatica, is effectively Salesforce acquiring Informatica, which was a pretty large acquisition. Informatica is an ETL extract, transform, load data tool, a data cleaning tool, which I'm with you. This is kind of the first big move that they've made in a little bit since the big Slack acquisitions, since the Tableau, since the Quip, MuleSoft.

But Salesforce is known for making these big acquisitions. So why now? Why'd they do it? This is my perspective on it. Would love to hear your take on it. I think it's double down, triple down on where they see AI fitting into the enterprise software space. And to have good AI and not just a chat bot or not just a

whatever, insert this AI tool here, being able to really have it fully integrated into your corporate tech stack and your enterprise tech stack, be it large organization or small organization, you need clean data. So I think that's number one. It just solidifies their thinking that data is the linchpin of any organization, and without good data, clean data, you're not gonna be able to produce valuable AI insights as well. So that's number one. And I think second to it, trends that we've seen.

whenever Salesforce acquires or picks up a new product, there's a long kind of a runway, if you will, in which business as usual, they operate kind of independently. And I think that is actually something that has not taken away from these organizations because Informatica, Slack, Quip, MuleSoft, they all have their own customers before. And I think something that Salesforce does really well is the integration of the two while still giving them runway to still serve their customers.

Then you look out one, two, three, four years, then maybe it gets sold, co-sold, or integrated into the platform. But I think it's overall, it's an exciting, a really exciting acquisition. It's a really big acquisition in this kind of AI world that we look at as well, especially with AgentForce. But that's kind of my take on it. What's your perspective?

Scott Billows (03:51.01)
Yeah, I would agree. think, you know, was it last September that they made the big announcement around Agent Force? And they did that at, I mean, leading up to Dreamforce, but, you know, it was everything was, it was official at Dreamforce last September. And, and, I mean, I think just on the, on the consumer app side of things, man, we've seen so much transformation happen and so much change happened really within.

Matt Hui (04:01.007)
Mm-hmm.

Scott Billows (04:21.022)
Google and, and, and thropic and, open AI and, and, even, guess, you know, a big extent, what Elon's doing over at X and with, with their grok product. And so just all of this consumer facing stuff, which is then also, much of it is, being consumed within the enterprise and Salesforce. I mean, part of me thinks this is actually a defensive play for them in that,

You know, they've launched Agent Force. They've now, think they're, I think I read last week or the week before there, they're now kind of on their third iteration of Agent Force. so, you know, Salesforce historically has been very well known for managing a big piece of that customer data, but all the data that they don't manage on platform today, being able to train on that data, they're going to need.

you know, some pretty strong plumbing that connects into these other enterprise systems. yeah, having, rather than partnering, let's go out and actually acquire and provide that infrastructure to their customers. I see this, you know, I'll maybe take the pessimistic side of it. I see it maybe more as a defensive play for them to just like really be able to lock in.

on getting access to all that data that they want to train against. it's a, yeah, I guess I look back over my career and there's been, I've had the, I guess, fortune to have gone through a few of these sort of big technology changes, know, social, mobile, maybe mobile then social, it probably had the order inverse there, but you know, mobile then social and just the,

Now we're seeing just all this, this agentic transformation and it's, every cycle has a lot of hype. This one seems to just have, know, sort of uncontrolled hype in terms of just what's happening. And so it's going to be interesting to see where it goes. What are your thoughts on, I guess, even within our customer cohort that we work with and what we're seeing there?

Scott Billows (06:43.18)
you know, interest slash adoption of AI and where do you, where do you see that going in the next year?

Matt Hui (06:49.229)
Yeah, I think, I mean, there's a lot of kind of runway in history that we can go look back at, what has been a revolutionary technology that's gone out and how has that been adopted. And I think within our customer base, I mean, we serve a lot of the mid-market sized customers and lower enterprise and strat customers.

I kind of break into three phases. There's the education phase, there's the adoption phase, and then there's acceleration phase. I think there's still so much work that's still being done on that adoption and education phase, those one and two, to be able to really realize the value of AI. I think in general, there's still a lot of unknown and a lot of fear, as with any change, as with any revolutionary technology. And I think this is revolutionary. Absolutely, this is the...

I mean, think of the development of electricity, development of the internet. Like this is one of those because artificial intelligence, which we've seen in movies, we've seen kind of just, it's this walk-in robot talking, takes over the world. You've seen those, certainly. But I think underlying all of this, there's really just a whole ton of productivity that can be kind of pulled from this that we've never been able to utilize before.

Scott Billows (07:57.004)
Yeah, Terminator type stuff.

Matt Hui (08:11.951)
to be able to save humans for high value items, high value things. So I think within our client base, certainly there's still a lot of fear and I think it's the job of ourselves and I guess any SI to be able to share and address, okay, how can this be solved? It's not a displacement or replacement, it's an augmentation. But I think over the next year, AI is gonna change even more so. So you look at the last one year ago,

today to one year from now, it's going to be so drastically different in which I kind of mirror it to during COVID, the amount of transformation and digital transformation was everybody's favorite word during COVID, the amount of transformation that happened then, I'm going to mirror that to this, which is we will notice so much more, perhaps some forced adoption, some out of necessity and needing to do more with less. We're going to see that. So that's kind of my...

Scott Billows (08:41.186)
Yeah, for sure.

Matt Hui (09:09.741)
Word enters.

Scott Billows (09:10.39)
Yeah, yeah, and I would agree with that summation. think the, you know, as you, as you were sharing that, I was thinking back to, you know, let's, let's, go back and, know, maybe you weren't in a spot yet in your life, Matt, where sort of that transition, like where mobile came into the, into the workplace. But I was there and it was very interesting because the, adoption was individual, it personal. You know, you got a cell phone, you would.

call your friends or call your loved ones. It was a better way to communicate than what we had before. But in terms of adoption within the enterprise, I suppose it was used for work, for making calls, but until all the mobile apps showed up, I guess that really aligned when Steve Jobs announced the iPhone, it wasn't central to the enterprise. It wasn't central to the workplace.

And I would say, I mean, I know for myself and I know because you and I talk about this a lot, like, you we use these AI tools within the business, but in a very informal way. You know, if I'm writing something or if I'm, you know, we use the Google stack. So Gmail now has this button within Gmail that you can, you know, enhance your email and it presents.

an option that you click the button, it rewrites your email and you can accept it or reject it. So informally, we're using it. I mean, we have a, I would say an informal AI strategy where we will use AI tools when they make sense, but we've not actually gone out and implemented AI tools right across the board.

Matt Hui (10:39.279)
Mm-hmm.

Scott Billows (11:03.692)
the features that are showing up within tools like Google and within even, I suppose within Salesforce to some extent. But I see that flipping. I would bet every single one of our customers, their employees, their leaders, they're using these AI tools to just speed up the work that they're doing to make things easier for themselves. Even when I think about

doing a podcast. Well, what's an agenda? I could go and I could flip back through X or I could flip back through LinkedIn and I could look at articles that I read over the last week and try to remember where they were so that I could bring some context into a conversation like this. Now you just feed it into one of the tools and give me a summary of the top 10 articles in the Salesforce ecosystem that were published in the last week and boom, there they are. so just the speed at which

we can get things done. just allows for more time in the data to go and do more productive activities. So I see that happening right now. And I think there will then just become this moment in time. Is that in the next year? that a year and a half out? I don't know exactly what that time horizon looks like, it'll just be so compelling. And that will happen within the Salesforce tools. I think right now we're still kind of in that

early adopter phase and in terms of its capabilities and all the use cases that Salesforce is claiming it can address, it's just not as apparent to our customers. But that day's coming and I think it's coming pretty quick. So why don't we just change gears? You had mentioned before we jumped on today, you were talking about some of the advertising that you're seeing.

Matt Hui (13:00.111)
Yeah.

Scott Billows (13:01.292)
Salesforce put their logo on and certainly it's an interesting topic. give me kind of your top two or three that you're seeing Salesforce put their logo in terms of advertising.

Matt Hui (13:14.659)
Yeah, and I think it's actually, it's a commonality across a lot of, at least what I watch on TV. You're seeing a lot of SaaS products link themselves to celebrity sponsorships or celebrity endorsements. I mean, I've seen Salesforce commercials. The two partnerships that you and I were chatting about before we hopped on here was one, F1. So everybody, I think F1 really took off and I know Scott, you.

You watch, you follow the circuit. But F1 really took off, I think, post the Netflix series. And that's where you really got a lot of viewership. So Salesforce is used by F1 and certainly is a technology product they use. But the one that I, and I watch a lot of golf. I like to call myself a hack because I'm not quite good. Actually, I'm really not good at golf, but I enjoy playing golf and I like watching golf.

And Salesforce recently announced a partnership with Live Golf, which is kind of a competing golf league to the PGA Tour, which is what most people would be aware of. And where I really think that this converges, because I've also seen workday commercials on TV with Idris Alba and insert other kind of celebrity sponsorships, Salesforce, Scott and Matt McConaughey, why do I think they're doing it? I think it's more so just the celebrity endorsement. I think if you look at

the underlying trust factor. These are reputable names. are reputable kind of, again, industry names, at least in Hollywood and in that space, that they're able to help with that, even tied back to the AI adoption, that education and trust layer. These are known quantities. Everybody has a, be it relationship, be it through watching this person act or whatnot, and they really, it is certainly influential.

So I think if anything, it goes to show the trust side of SaaS products, because the reality is it's very difficult to market. It's not a physical, tangible product. It's digital product. So that's my take on it, is that they're trying to make it physical and try to build trust and tie relationships with end users and customers to that of these, I guess, celebrities or actors and whatnot. And Salesforce does a great job attracting the who's who in the zoo.

Matt Hui (15:41.505)
at Dreamforce, they're biggest and I think I saw this year they've got some actors in there as well. So yeah, mean, what's your perspective? Why do you think they're?

Scott Billows (15:42.165)
yeah.

Scott Billows (15:48.396)
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. mean, you know, it probably is rooted in sort of the bigger than life personality of Mark Benioff. I remember on the prior pod that we did, I mentioned the first Dreamforce that I went to. I sat pretty close to the front. And Will.i.am was sitting, I don't know, like 10 seats away from me and which I kind

thought, that's kind of cool. Like, Will.i.am super close. you know, it's like, and then I thought, well, what's Will.i.am doing at a technology conference? And I've had the, I've had the pleasure of going to Dreamforce many times over the last 10 years or 15 years. And it's, you know, I mean, it's always, it's kind of the who's who. You got all these celebrities there. And I think it's, it's partly Mark Benioff style, but there's also a method to the madness. It connects.

their brand to a consumer in a way that is different from just selling to the CIO and selling to the IT department of a large enterprise company. So it is interesting to see some of their brand partnerships that they've done. I think 2SalesForce is now such a big name. remember

Shortly after getting into the Salesforce world, I would spend most of my time explaining, you know, who Salesforce was and what they did. Now, I mean, bet if you walked down the street today and just, you know, stopped the random person and said, hey, have you ever heard of Salesforce? Chances are they, I would put it at 50-50 that they've heard the name. They may not be able to explain what Salesforce is or what they do, but they've heard the name. But you you go back 10 years.

You'd be lucky if like one in a hundred people that you stopped on the side of the street would know what that brand is. you know, maybe, maybe it's been part, they've just kind of gotten out to this size and scale that they're, it's just critical to keep their logo in front of as many people as they possibly can at all times. and so, but, yeah, it's interesting to see some of the things that they are doing. And I would say they, they, they tend to.

Scott Billows (18:13.806)
partner with their customers and they make a really big deal of the relationship that they have with these customers and the benefit that they have with these customers and what they've been able to accomplish. yeah, it's interesting.

Matt Hui (18:28.269)
Yeah, and I guess if you think about it this way, Salesforce still, I think you're right, they're humanizing the brand, trying to connect with consumers of all levels, and I think it's also just a bit of a culture shift too in that they're not just selling to CIOs, CTOs. In fact, some of the most influential people that you and I have seen in sales cycles too are often the end users, are often the people who are using the system, and when you're able to humanize the brand,

Let's put it this way, Salesforce as of 2023 was sitting at 22 % market share. So perhaps they've got more now, but think about all of that upside opportunity. And if they can even just hit more people and help influence a decision, I mean, I think it's better, it helps with their product development and helps them grow their market share as well. So again, let's put it this way, it's not random. It's not random that they're doing this and it's not just because it's a cool.

Scott Billows (19:22.178)
No, no, no, not at all. No.

Matt Hui (19:26.239)
It's a cool name or raises some eyebrows. It's certainly intentional.

Scott Billows (19:30.158)
Well, there used to be this saying, I haven't heard it for a long time, but it was, you're not going to get fired for choosing IBM and you know, what IBM was doing. I don't believe they actually were out marketing that slogan, but there was a well-known slogan that you're not going to get fired for choosing IBM. I think Salesforce is in that same spot now. You're not going to get fired for choosing Salesforce. It is best in class, best in breed. So.

Matt Hui (19:37.977)
Thank

Matt Hui (19:51.47)
Yeah.

Scott Billows (20:00.47)
to appeal to an extremely wide audience, you've got to go wide in your marketing. we've certainly seen them do that over the last couple of years with some of these partnerships with F1 and now Liv. So that's an interesting one. All right, well, listen, what else we got?

Matt Hui (20:21.901)
Yeah, and I guess just like something that sets them apart that over and above any other SaaS product, Salesforce is fantastic at connecting with their end users. I I think about the mascots that they've got, the branding around their Ohana, their website. is, stack it up against your next favorite SaaS product. It's head and shoulders above everybody else from marketing. I mean.

credit where credit goes, they are marketing wizards. it's a great product, they're skilled at that.

Scott Billows (20:52.174)
For sure. Yeah.

Yeah.

Scott Billows (21:01.55)
Yeah, absolutely. If maybe a bit of a book plug, Benioff wrote a book, I think it's called Beyond the Cloud. I'll have to double check. But I think it's called Beyond the Cloud. it's the early stories of Salesforce and sort of through their rise. But it's, you I categorize it as just their guerrilla marketing tactics. There's this one famous story that I remember.

Matt Hui (21:19.535)
Mm-hmm.

Scott Billows (21:30.942)
that is in the book where Benioff, used to be at, sorry, he used to be at Oracle and he started in a role that when he exited was much lower down the hierarchy than where he left at. as he moved his way up through the organization, story goes, he really performed, he became...

a senior executive reporting directly to Larry Ellison. And when he told Larry that he was leaving to go start Salesforce, it turned into a little bit of a pitch as well. as the story goes, Ellison invested in Benioff. So Benioff, presumably Larry Ellison's blessing leaves, goes to start Salesforce. And got invited some number of years later to go to the annual Oracle Conference.

And it was held in San Francisco, same spot that Salesforce hold their Dreamforce event. And as the story goes, it was just hours before Benioff was to get on stage. Ellison pulled the pin and said, no, he's not speaking. so, I mean, Salesforce was downtown San Francisco. So Benioff got his whole crew together and they went and rented a restaurant.

Seemed to recall they had quickly put together signs, they had people out on the street saying, hey, if you're going to this keynote, like come over here. And they filled the restaurant and he basically delivered his keynote in the restaurant. so, yeah, he's got the showmanship nailed. He's very dynamic when you see him speak live. And so, a lot of just that.

Charisma that comes through in their in their brand comes comes from him. So it's It's pretty cool. It's pretty cool to see what they're doing and And it's you know, it's great. I think it's just great for you know, if you're a customer You know, you've made this investment in this technology. It reinforces the decision that you've made by seeing that logo You know all over the place. So

Matt Hui (23:45.785)
Well, I think that's a great segue maybe to our last point here that makes you feel confident in your decision and the commitment tying it back to Belmar. What kind of company are you trying to build, Scott? What do you want? If you had to share one thing with the market, what do we want to be known for? How would you answer that in tying it back to Salesforce?

Scott Billows (24:12.396)
Yeah, yeah, that's a great thought. Well, we have on our website and we have this, you know, our team communicate this message and we really try every day to live it is to partner with excellence. So, you know, we see ourselves as a partner in this journey that our customers are on and we want to do with excellence. So, you I think if we are delivering high quality work,

And through that process, managing customers' expectations and being very aware of the needs they have, the challenges that they face, and just being a really good partner, I think we're going to be here for a long time doing that because people like to work with brands that they trust and they want to be associated and known by companies that are

know, maintaining their values and really helping them to succeed. you know, I really think that as an organization, we do do a good job of that. I would, you know, I want to give our team a lot of props for that because we've got, you know, 30 plus people on our team that really care very much about the success of our customers. And so it's...

Yeah, it's a privilege to be able to participate in this and to lead the team and to really see our customers continue to come back to us because of the very positive experience that they've had. So, yeah, so guess when I think about the future, it's just, let's just continue delivering just high quality service and deliver excellence for our customers. And in doing that, we'll...

We'll have a lineup of people that want to work with us and employees that want to come and work for us. And that's a fun place to be.

Matt Hui (26:16.237)
Yeah, that magnetic attraction where you want to just get be a part of that as well. I think that's a great way to end this here. And I think certainly in the future, some stories that would be very valuable for people to hear is the successes, but also the pains. What are those things that we've seen over the years that kind of set people up for success when they consider implementations and technology and whatnot?

It's a great way to end it. Scott, thanks for doing this and have a good one.

Scott Billows (26:49.358)
Alright, Matt, episode two, that was fun. yeah, we'll certainly tuck in those topics in future pods. So thanks for doing this today.