Bala Balabaskaran shares his firsthand experiences crafting automation solutions that were pivotal to Salesforce's expansion in the 2010s. With Salesforce onboarding 700 representatives annually, Bala, former VP of GTM Technology and Operations at Salesforce, offers invaluable insights on growth strategies. His expertise in this area led him to become the Co-Founder and CTO of Fullcast.io.
In this episode, Bala Balabaskaran shares his firsthand experiences of crafting automation solutions that played a pivotal role in Salesforce's expansion during the 2010s. At that time, Salesforce was onboarding 700 new representatives each year. Bala, who previously served as the VP of GTM Technology and Operations at Salesforce, provides invaluable insights gained from developing growth strategies in the company. His shares his expertise in this area led him to his current role as the Co-Founder and CTO of Fullcast.io.
Quote:
“A lot of it comes from learning in the trenches at Salesforce — all the way from Going for Growth and our Fast Start planning processes. What does it take to get 400 people involved in a planning process? What does it take to deal with bad data? What does it take to deal with sort of effective data commissioning and who gets the right credit at the end of the day?”
Episode Timestamps:
*(02:00) - Ohana Origins: Bala’s Introduction to Salesforce
*(11:00) - What does the Ohana mean to Bala?
*(18:00) - What’s Cooking: Bala’s career post-Salesforce
*(24:00) - Future Forecast: What’s in store for the Salesforce ecosystem?
*(28:00) - Advice for aspiring entrepreneurs
*(29:00) - Lightning Round!
Sponsor
Inside the Ohana is brought to you by Qualified.com, the #1 Conversational Marketing platform for companies that use Salesforce and the secret weapon for Demand Gen pros. The world's leading enterprise brands trust Qualified to instantly meet with buyers, right on their website, and maximize sales pipeline. Visit Qualified.com to learn more.
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Introduction: Hello and welcome to Inside the Ohana. This episode features an interview with Baa Baa Basan, a season and technology entrepreneur and architect, and the current CTO and founder of Forecast. In this episode, BAA shares the knowledge he gained about operation and scalability during his time at Salesforce and how it continues to shape his career today. He delves into his experiences of developing automation solutions that facilitated Salesforce expansion in the 2000 and [00:01:00] tens a period when the company was onboarding 700 new representatives annually. And he also shares invaluable insights he acquired while working on STAR strategies for growth that hold relevance not only for large scale organizations, but also for small sales teams too. Stay tuned for an enlightening dis. Discussion ahead. But before we get into it, here's a brief word from our sponsor. Inside the Ohana is brought to you by qualified. Qualified is the pipeline generation platform for revenue. Teams that use Salesforce intelligently grow your pipeline by understanding signals of buying intent and having real time conversations. Learn more over on qualified.com. So please enjoy this interview between Baa Ba Bain, CTO and founder of Full Cast, and your host, Dan Darcy.
Dan: Welcome to Inside the Ohana. I'm Dan Darcy, chief Customer Officer at Qualified, and today I'm joined by Bala. Bala. How are you?
Bala: I'm doing great, Dan. How are you?
Dan: So I wanna dive right [00:02:00] into our first segment, Ohana Origins. How did you discover Salesforce and what started your journey?
Bala: Salesforce for me was all Maria Martinez. I mean, she was the one that talked to me about Salesforce. I had worked for her at Microsoft and I left Microsoft to go do a startup and Maria actually was in town as it was wrapping up that startup, opening up the Seattle office for for Salesforce, and she said, I want you to talk to a few people cuz I have this problem. I'd like you to help. And so that's kind of how I got introduced to Salesforce. You know, I was in the Microsoft bubble and yeah, Maria was the, the, the person that kind of pulled me in. Oh, that's great. And
Dan: now Maria Martinez, just for the, the listeners and viewers are, she's the coo COO at Cisco. Yeah. COO at Cisco now. Yeah. Which is, she's had an incredible journey. She was the. You know, basically head of customer success at Salesforce for a very long time. But gimme the details. You know, what, what was your [00:03:00] job, you know, what was your title? What was your first initial impression? When
Bala: Maria called me, she said, Hey, look, I've got a team of people that are trying to figure out processes around org 62. I said, what is org 62? Like, I'm interested. And, and, you know, and then as I, as I got talking to people, Just understood this, this behemoth of, of an internal instance that we had that was, you know, a showcase of Salesforce, of sales of Salesforce. Yeah. Yeah. And it was a, it was a great showcase for everything that the platform can do, but it's also a great showcase for how people can get things wrong on it and can, you know, and, and from a scale standpoint struggle with how to sort of move the organization forward. So she had known me at Microsoft coming in from the product side. So I've never worked in an operational role. And, uh, her point to me was, Was, I want you to take a look at this from a product perspective, like how would you use automation to solve this problem? And that was kind of how, what got me interested in it. The scale of the issue seemed like it was the right time for Salesforce as it was, you know, we [00:04:00] were scaling like crazy around the 2012 timeframe when I joined. And so it was really interesting problem for me to dig my hands in there. It was a quite meaty one. So that's how I got started. And then we actually had a team called Go to Market Scale. That was the, the name of the team that Maria had created. So I took over that team, working with it to sort of look at all the pre-sales, sales and post-sale processes on top of our internal instance and just kind of scaling it. And after about six months of that, we figured it was too big for one person to handle. So we kind of split the sales and the post-sales. Uh, so I took on more of the, the sales side of the house. Okay. And, uh, inherited the annual planning cycle, which we used to call fast Start or Call for growth. And that was working with over 400 people across the company to build out territory models, the compensation models and and so on for the sales team, and then also all of the product owners that worked on processes on all 62. The internal instance of Salesforce. And the operational side of it. So [00:05:00] the field operation side, so you know, regular day-to-day management of territories and accounts and data quality and all of that fun
Dan: stuff. Yeah, I mean, so go for growth is, is definitely a behemoth project. And I mean, you know, if you think about our calendar Salesforce's fiscal year start date is Feb one, that's when everyone needs to hit the ground running for the new fiscal year. Go for growth planning starts when?
Bala: July, August. July, August. Yeah. Yeah. Because part of the process was actually updating data, cleaning up data, and doing all of that stuff. So we used to go through this massive data projects for a month and a half or so, and then you start building out, you know, what the growth plans are, building out territories, capacity models, how many people are we gonna hire? What roles are we gonna build? So all of that process took us a good six to eight months to kind of get in place. And then we would February 1st, you know, for school, we would deploy it after the start of the fiscal year and things would sort of settle down around March, April. So we got a couple.
Dan: And then [00:06:00] you took a vacation for a couple of months.
Bala: Basic, we're back at it again. Yeah.
Dan: Yeah. Well, ball, I want you to brag a little bit because I know you've had incredible success during your time at Salesforce, but what would you say is one of the biggest successes you've had while working at Salesforce or something that you're just really proud of? So I
Bala: think the, my time at, uh, Salesforce, I really focused on kind of turning this, what was a very heavy manpower spreadsheet, kind of a, a problem into a lot of automation. So we had great support from our IT organization, Ross Meyer and, and his team to really look at the problem and, and build out automation that would sort of help us deliver territories and quota plans and things like that. Before school, believe it or not, off until that point, they, they hadn't delivered territories or quarter letters by scope, right? So when, you know, the year kicked off it, there was still some time before the, the reps understood what they were selling and so on. So the automation took us about a couple of years to build and put it place. And, um, happy to say that when [00:07:00] I exited that role, that was the first time in like 17, 18 year history of the company that we had actually delivered territory in Bico. So that was quite a big uplift in terms of automation. But we learned a lot. You know, we learned a lot about how we can do this at scale. Salesforce was growing and you know, I think about 600 or 700 new reps every year in, in all parts of the business. And we were acquiring companies that in the exact target was an acquisition around that time. Yeah. So we were just adding to the team and continuing to do that with people is just not possible. And, and so automation was the way out and that's really kind of, you know, I drove a lot of that project with Ross and the rest of the team to sort of build that out for, for Salesforce internally that, I mean, that's incredible. So on the opposite side of the spectrum, what would you say was your biggest lesson learned?
Bala: I think the, the inherent complexity and the tribal knowledge was something that I didn't expect, right? So you go in and when you approach the problem as an automation problem, you kind of miss out [00:08:00] on so much of the tribal knowledge that's built into org 62. And it almost felt like every little thing you touch impacted some team somewhere. And so that, that I think was one of the biggest learnings for me approaching a problem like that. You know, I was a product guy before that, so for us, we didn't have to look at how the system was implemented. We just built new features and that was, you know, perfectly the way we approached it. But with, with this sort of environment where you have all of the businesses and processes running on top of it, it was always interesting in learning experience for me to sort of understand all of those relationships, all of the unsaid, undocumented. Kind of
Dan: things that happen. Yeah. I mean, I'm, I'm actually curious on that, you know, with the tribal knowledge, how do you take tribal knowledge and code it into software? How did you think about that?
Bala: I'll tell you an example of something that we, we needed to do before we started the automation, right? So we, we would think about sales policies and we were about a 4,500 salesperson organization at that time. Yeah. But we didn't have sales policies written down, right? And there was [00:09:00] no policy organization that looked to standardize how things were written down and so on. So a lot of it was assumptions that the ops teams were the creators, the arbitrators and the executors of policy. And it was none of it was written. Mm-hmm. So one of the first things that we had to do was actually say, okay, let's get people in a room and actually start writing down some of the critical policies that were looking at automation. Yeah. Because without that, it's, it's impossible to scale it. Right. And cuz everybody came in with their own assumptions and as you know, sales and especially in field ops, Every interaction is emotionally charged because, you know, this is how the sales team makes money. So, yeah. You know, it's livelihoods. Yeah. There's a, there's a winner and there's a loser and Yeah. And we have to arbitrate that. And, and doing that without written down policies and thought process into it was a, it was, uh, was a problem. And so that's one of the first things we solved is let's write it down. Let's publish it so that everybody knows here are the rules of the road.
Dan: That's that's pretty, that's pretty crazy. That's awesome. Now, if you could [00:10:00] go back to Bala just starting out at Salesforce, what advice would you give yourself?
Bala: I think, you know, one of the things that I learned to do through my tenure is actually take things a little bit slower than I, I, I, I actually intend to do. I was like, you know, I, I want things to move fast and. Salesforce was a startup culture, so why aren't people making decisions and getting things moving? You know? That was kind of the way I approached it, not realizing that the organization is actually pretty large and huge behind this, this sort of facade of a, of a startup. There was so many things that was going on. Which is, you know, big, huge credit to, to Salesforce to be able to behave in that way. But it also meant that you could, you couldn't, you know, just make changes on the fly and move things quicker. So that, that was a big learning for me to just slow down and, and really understand the organization first before getting into, into the job itself.
Dan: So I ask this question of all my guests because everyone answers it a little bit differently, but I wanna ask you, what [00:11:00] is the meaning of ohana to you? What does that mean for you?
Bala: For the longest time, I didn't know what it meant, you know, the word ohana, but, but the feeling I can describe, right? Yeah. And, and the feeling for me is the incredible relationships that you build working in a company like Salesforce, that like, I haven't worked in a place that was as conscientious about how people treated each other. You know, I came from unnamed, previous large companies that there were was just cutthroat, kinda, you know, everybody was waiting to stab you behind your back kind of, yeah. Culture, that competitive culture and, and so on. And that was not the case at Salesforce. It was very, very comfortable to me. And, you know, people cared about each other. People cared about your personal situations that you were going through. There to support each other. So I had an incredible team that were, you know, I had some personal issues going on with my family when I was at Salesforce and health issues as well. And the first people that I would turn to are my teammates, and they would say, no problem. We've got you. We, I, [00:12:00] I wouldn't even think about doing that somewhere else. You know? Yeah. But that was the comfort that I think Salesforce had built as a culture at Mark, you know, is. Generally a quite warm guy and it sort of flows down from him, I think. Yeah. As you, as you work in the organization, you understand that
Dan: a lot more. Yeah. I mean, well, I mean, to your point around the competitiveness, I would say we were competitive in beating the other competitors in our market's, and so that was not internally, but not internally is you're a hundred percent right. It was all collaborative around. Achieving a goal. Everyone was focused. And I mean, your point around, um, really caring about each other was so spot on. I mean, that, to that point, you know, even when we were talking in the earlier things and how we've been, you know, our, our time at Salesforce together, you were there from 2012 to 2016, plus I, you know, obviously was there at the same time, but I feel like I know you, even though we didn't really interact that much. Right. That's right. And, and it feels like that we're still on the same team in that regard. So,
Bala: And even, you know, folks like Brian, it was so, I was [00:13:00] so comfortable to just ask Brian for a meeting and I say, Hey Brian, I've got this problem. Can you give me your advice on this? And he was very open, you know, and, and yeah, just having that level of accessibility to, uh, folks like Brian Milam.
Dan: That was, yeah, that, that's what I was gonna say. Brian Milam under the, now COO at, at, that's Salesforce, who has taken on a lot more responsibility, but yeah. You're right. And, and he would, he would open up and, you know, had an open door policy and I felt like that was, that permeated everywhere, which That's right. Was pretty incredible. So now speaking of that, are there any special, you know, ohana moments that are a little behind the scenes that you'd like to share? I think
Bala: for me, you know, I've, I've brought on a bunch of folks at Salesforce when I was there and the people that were there, I learned a lot from them. And, you know, I was coming into this from a product guy coming into an operational world and, and everything I, I sort of understood and learned, uh, from the, from the people there. And to me the, the biggest success of that is where all of those folks have gone on to [00:14:00] have, you know, really rich careers at, at Salesforce and also in the, in the startup ecosystem. And I talk to them all the time and those relationships still remain. And so for me, I think the, at that point you didn't really, you know, there's not a moment. Like that, but it's, it's sort of a continuous, you know, realization of, of the relationships that we built at Salesforce. Right. For me, even today, somebody called me and said, Hey, I'm finishing up 10 years at Salesforce.
Thank you for hiring me. And I, that's great. You know, and, and, and that to me is not just one moment. It's like, it's sort of continuous. It's still happening. That's the, that's the incredible
Dan: part about it. I, I love that. How many Dreamforce have you been to? I did four Dreamforce. Yeah. Yeah. Now are there any special, you know, Dreamforce stories? What, like what was your first Dreamforce and like your impression there?
Bala: So, honestly I was a events guy as a product person in my previous roles and previous companies. So, I was averse to going to events. Yeah. So I [00:15:00] approached it that way the first time I went. Yeah. But it's not an event. It's sort of a cultural event. Right? Yeah. It's not like a, like a broadcast event from a product company.
Dan: An experience, if you will.
Bala: That's right. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. And so that was the big light bulb bulb for me. It's like, wait a minute, this is not like other tech company events it should go to where they're just broadcasting you what they're building. This is bor about connecting and so on. So I enjoyed the four that I attended. A lot of it was actually customers asking us in my, my, in my role about how we solved the problems that I was responsible for and they were very interested to see how we scaled it. Like how did you apply Salesforce technology to that problem? Yeah, so that was very exciting for me, kind of learning about customers that are going through the same kind of challenges that we are and be able to share what we do. I think tho those were, those were really exciting moments for me. That's
Dan: Let's get into our next segment. What's cooking? So Bala, you're now obviously the co-founder and CTO at Full Cast. Talk about how you got to where you are now and what your journey's been like.
Bala: Yeah, so a lot of the learnings that we've incorporated into full cast, both me and my co-founder, the Missioning, we've worked together at Microsoft, at Salesforce, and now at Full Cast. So we've been working together and, and we've been eating around this sort of operational problem. Set me from the product side, him from an operational standpoint. At the beginning, and then our roles kind of flipped, but, but really kind of the, the idea of a revenue operations problem space, right? And what we mean by that is how do you put together a go-to market plan and how do you execute it and how do you keep these two worlds kind of tied to each other and communicating with each other? Because one of the, one of the big shifts that we've seen in the industry, of course, is the, the SaaS business model has essentially changed. What used to be sales where you made a deal and you're done. Yeah. Collected, you commissioned and you moved on. [00:17:00] Now the, the idea of a sale is the right to make money, right? Yeah. And so now you have to make sure that your marketing team, your customer success team and, and the entire sort of revenue pipeline is able to work in a, in a common strategy and actually deliver on the, on the revenue goals that you have. And that's really created a need for a revenue platform. And that's really the problem space that we we're addressing. And so a lot of it really comes from learning in the trenches at Salesforce. You know, from all the way from g g and our global growth and our fast start planning processes. What does it take to get 400 people involved in the planning process? What does it take to deal with bad data? What does it take to deal with sort of effective data commissioning and who gets the right credit at the end of the day? Your coverage models, roles or overlays, like all of that. That kind of problem is really what Full Cast is about, and that's what we, you know, support our customers with today. Yeah. You know,
Dan: it's interesting. I mean, [00:18:00] I, I, I love hearing that story around the, the, the rise of a revenue platform and operations. I mean, You know, clearly that's qualified. That's what we think about all day. And you know, I work with a lot of marketers and, and with the silos you get into like, oh, well this is a marketing qualified lead and this is a sales qualified lead. And Right. And, and really at the end of the day, what we're trying to, what, what any company's trying to do is just trying to, you know, help solve a problem, bring revenue in the door. So yeah, this revenue layer is really an interesting, you know, concept that has evolved. And I love seeing that. And I. It's great to hear, you know, companies such as Forecast really coming through in helping solve those problems. Cuz it does, it does, you know, go across everything from, to your point, the top of the funnel to the bottom of the funnel and then to the success funnel if you will. Right. You know, that continues on because obviously, You know, in my, in my role as the, the head of customer success, it's, you know, revenue is still extremely important and keeping that base in place is really important, so, that's [00:19:00] right. Yeah. But you know, what, what challenges are you seeing now and, and how are you applying what you've learned at Salesforce to those challenges?
Bala: The biggest learning for me was when we were looking at the problem at Salesforce, right? It was, it was heavily handled with what I call spreadsheets at elbow grease, right? Yep. You got a bunch of analysts together, you give them a bunch of spreadsheets and said, go to t, and they would, you know, crank off numbers. The spreadsheets would fail, but you know, they'll, they'll break it apart into small chunks and email it to like 400 people. Get it all back. Put it all together. Yeah. This was kind of the model that was used to handle it and clearly, you know, there's a better way to do it and, and, but, but people weren't really sure whether you could automate it. Right. There was so much variability. In the ways that you carve territories. There's so much variability in the ways that you sort of build comp plans and so on. The question was, you know, could you build a platform to do that? Could you do that in a way that the platform can actually support that [00:20:00] variability? and the learning for me at Salesforce was, yes, it, it can be done. And we did it at Salesforce and we scaled all of those processes. And that was kind of the premise of taking that and, and then enhancing that with what we're doing at at Pocast. The problems are the same, right? Mm-hmm. Whether you're a five person sales organization or we are a 5,000 person sales organization, it's just at some point it becomes painful enough that you need automation to kind of, you know, you can't just keep throwing bodies at it. So that was, for me, I think the, the biggest learning and the proving point that you can apply automation, you can't apply ai, you can apply technology mm-hmm. To kind of address that, that space and, and give teams the agility, right? I mean, that's really what we're after is, Market changes are continuous. Yeah. Your go-to markets are volatile, right? No longer is it that you build a plan and you roll it out for the whole year and you don't make any changes. That that world is gone. Now you're continually tweaking and changing and adapting to the market, and as you do that, [00:21:00] you have to be able to deploy that and get that working in your transactional environments and, and that problem was, was. Where things were getting stuck and that was what my team used to do at Salesforce. So really kind of automating that is, is the premise that we, and that I've taken from what we did at Salesforce to, to what we're doing here.
Dan: So what's next for you? Full, full cast, and like how are you thinking about shaping the future?
Bala: So we're definitely in the Salesforce ecosystem. You know, a lot of the things that we interact with, a lot of our data, et cetera, comes from Salesforce. And I think one of the interesting arcs that we're seeing now is with generative ai. And what, what did that, right? I mean, you saw the announcement that Salesforce did of course, with generative ai.
Bala: But for us, from a planning and on operations perspective, what does that mean? Right? Could we provide the sales managers and the ops teams with a similar experience from a planning perspective, from a uh, management perspective, right? Could we drive that kind of interface? So I think that's where everybody in the space [00:22:00] is really looking at what's happening there and, and the changes that Salesforce is making as well. To really understand. Understand. I think it's a, it's a transformative model. It's sort of the iPhone, you know, kind of moment for us. Yeah. Mobile with generative ai and so everything is likely to change and all the models that we used to, you know, our dashboards even real anymore for Yeah. Yeah. Those are the, are the, those are the kind of fundamental questions we're gonna be asking ourselves.
Bala: And I think, I think from a transactional perspective, Salesforce is, is, has taken the lead and, and driving that. And for us, you know, could we do the same from a planning perspective? Could we do the same from a administration or an ops perspective? Like how does this change our landscape? Is really the, the problems phase that we're, we're working on. So that, that part is excited. Yeah. It's, it's a whole new world. Thanks.
Dan: I mean, extremely exciting. And it's funny, I, I was thinking, oh, I should have an AI question for you because I know that's hot, but it's glad that, I'm glad that you actually let us there already, cuz everyone's always asking, especially around the generative.[00:23:00] Ai, like, right. And I, I do look at this as you're right. Transformational in the, in the entire SaaS market, just like mobile was, right? Like, how do we think everyone was like, how do you think mobile first? Now it's like, well, how do we think, you know, AI first, first, and, and, and how do we adapt our, our world to that? And what does that mean for our platform? And, and it's not just a feature that people release, it's, it's actually something that is just part of the, the, the actual
Bala: makeup. It's, it's much more fundamental, right? Yeah. And it's gonna change the user interaction with, with software as we know it, enterprise software as we know it. And I think as Salesforce is smartly catching on to that and saying, okay, we've gotta, you know, have a model for the transactional pipeline and how we handle that. So I think it's, that's, that's very exciting. I think it's gonna change. The ecosystem pretty considerably. All of the apps in the, in the broader ecosystem is going to have to think about that, going to have to think about how to interact with Salesforce in that way, Einstein in that way, [00:24:00] and, and, uh, feed into that. So I think it's a, it's a whole sort of uplift Yeah. For everybody in the, in the ecosystem.
Dan: Let's get into our final segment, the Future Forecast. So Bala, what do you envision as the future of the Salesforce ecosystem?
Bala: So I, I've always kind of looked at the acquisition of Slack, you know, with, with, with the idea that when, when Salesforce made that announcement, and they also bought MuleSoft as well, which was sort of two different models, but for me, the old enterprise integration model and did, right. Yeah. And, and really this conversational model is really what's gonna drive a lot of the business processes and workflows and things like that. So I think there is a really powerful way in which, you know, you were talking about data in silos and how they integrate with each other, and I really think that that layer is how it's gonna change, right? And essentially [00:25:00] it's gonna be that conversational layer that's gonna drive business processes. It's not just for collaboration, but it's actually. Can I tell my systems in the background, like, go do this, run this work for me, get this results done, you know, move this person from this role to this role. And as a sales manager, can I just do that on Slack? Why can't I do that? Right? And yeah, and I think that that is a interesting sort of honor concept to, to, to look at, especially with generative ai because that just changes the model into what Slack already does really well, which is bring people together. And allow for these kind of business processes to be built on top of it, right? Yeah. 10, 15 years ago, we would build that on top of an AI enterprise integration layer. Mm-hmm. Well, I think that's, that's gone. I think what we're gonna do is really build it on top of this conversational layer, which, which I, I'm excited.
Dan: That is the vision of what Salesforce wants to do. So that's pretty, I mean, yeah, I agree with where that's going. Obviously there's a long road ahead of, of, of [00:26:00] driving that type of collaboration, you know, and, and business processes at the collaboration layer layer. But we're gonna get there and, and you know, that's the fun thing as a startup is that.
Bala: That's where the ideas are spurred. And you, you have a platform now to sort of start building great new ideas on top, similar to what, you know, the app exchange did for us, right? Yeah. And, and so I, I'm, I'm excited to see where startups are gonna take that on top of the Salesforce ecosystem. Absolutely. Yeah. You know, slack as well as even, even supporting those kinds of conversations. So today, for instance, sales managers would do a bunch of operational tasks and they would go look at a dashboard, they'll go click through some wizards to to, to get something done. Well, we want that model to change, and if that changes, then you, your learning curve and all of this kinda enablement problems, a lot of those things get solved right away. Yeah, because people are very comfortable with the conversational model, and if we can do that, then I think that that changes the game.[00:27:00]
Dan: Yeah. Can you give us a prediction of what Salesforce looks like in the future?
Bala: So, I, the, the couple of interesting ideas that the startup world have been torn around is what does a post CRM world like? Do we, do we still need a database in the, in the old sense right? Of customer information and things like that. In that sort of collaborative world, what does a C r M even me anymore? Yeah, and I think that's, that's an interesting arc that, that Salesforce is, is sort of looking at. I don't know how far along they are in that sort of product arc, but I think that I sort of see a world where this old idea of building a database, a contact database, and a account database and all of that, I think that's gonna slowly go away because most of that information is repeated in every single CRM. There's no reason for it to be. And, and so I think there's an interesting angle there from a, from a Salesforce perspective in terms of what does that mean? What does the pocr world look like? Does it just become this collaborative layer on top, like data sources yet may exist [00:28:00] or may not exist in the future?
Dan: Yeah, I mean, that's a really, I mean, you know, a a hundred thousand foot view, an awesome way to look at it too. Right? So, so what advice do you have for any aspiring entrepreneurs out there?
Bala: You know, entrepreneurship is not for everybody. We tell that to everybody that we hire in the company. We say it's not a, it's not a job, it's a lifestyle.
Bala: And that is, you know, because you live and breathe this thing 24 hours a day. Yeah. And, and as entrepreneurs it's very exciting. Uh, cuz Salesforce ecosystem is a very exciting place to be. But it's a, it's a, it's definitely a lifestyle as opposed to a job. You can't approach this like a job.
Dan: Well, I mean, that's definitely, I mean, going from Salesforce to. You know where I'm at now, it's, that's 150% true. So that's, and I, and I enjoy every single moment of it, cuz it is one of those things you live and breathe, but it's, and, and it keeps you alive, you know, if you feel really alive.
Bala: So, and, and you feel a sense of ownership of the problem and you also see the impact of the things that you do, the decision that you [00:29:00] make right away. Right? Yeah. You're not waiting a year and a half, two years to see how things turn out. The things are, it's, it's sort of a. An interesting high, but you live it.
Dan: Yeah, you definitely live it. Now before letting you go, let's have fun with a little quick lightning round. You ready? Secret skill that's not on the resume.
Bala: I am a wildlife photographer, so I, I travel to places to take pictures of, of endangered species, and that's something that, uh, I enjoy a lot.
Dan: That's incredible. Do you, how, how long do you sit in blinds for, you know, I mean like, oh, days.
Bala: Days. Like, I did a trip to, uh, the Canadian Arctic to go take pictures of als, you know, the unicorn worlds. And we were there for four days or cave out on, on sea ice, and we saw them once.
Dan: Wow. That is, that's an awesome story. I love that. Yeah. Yeah. Best way to spend an evening after work.
Bala:. Take, take my camera out and go take pictures. And, and [00:30:00] that's, that's sort of my, my sort of piece is, is be able to capture wide light. Hey, you know, it's nothing about that is under your control. The birds are not posing for you or whatever, so it's just, you just surrender and just deal with it.
Dan: I love it. Favorite brand of anything?
Bala: Of anything? I'm a sports nut. I'm, I grew up in Toronto, so the Toronto Map believes is my, my team and my jam.
Bala: So, you know, it, I, I dressed up my daughter the second day. She was born in, in leaves uniform, so. Oh, that's great. I love it.
Dan: I love it. Love it, love it. I mean, well, the Maple Leaf is definitely very Canadian. You know, it's good. You just won front row seat tickets to your dream event. What is it? It's the
Bala: Toronto maple Leaf in a standard cup final game. There you go.
Dan: Love it. Front seat. So Ball. Yeah. Let's see. Let's see what happens. Paul, this has been so much fun. Um, before I let you go, I'd let the listeners know where they can find you and if there's anything else you'd like to share or plug with us today, please, please do that.
Bala: forecast.io is is where I am right now and [00:31:00] valla@forecast.io is if you wanna reach me and, uh, you know, check us out and if you have a revenue operations problem, then we probably can help you. So check us out and, and do reach out if you have any. Well,
Dan: Bala, thank you so much for today and great conversation. Loved having it.
Bala: Great to see you. Appreciate it. Dan, thank you so much.
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