Q&A with Daren Tomey, Salesforce Veteran & AllCloud SVP of Sales, North America
As we enter the new decade, it’s astounding to think about how much Salesforce has evolved in the past ten-plus years. In particular, Salesforce solidified its position as the must-have solution for high growth organizations.
To better understand how Salesforce has become such a catalyst for growth and what we can expect going forward, we turned to AllCloud’s SVP of Sales in North America and Salesforce veteran, Daren Tomey. Daren is an entrepreneur, executive, sales leader and speaker with over 20 years of experience, including 15 years in the Salesforce ecosystem.
We sat down with Daren to learn more about his experience using Salesforce as a catalyst for growth, what excites him most about the future of Salesforce, his advice for sales leaders and what he looks forward to bringing to AllCloud in 2020. Here’s what we learned.
AllCloud: You have a lot of experience with high growth organizations and seeing them utilize technology to grow and scale. Based on that experience, what do you recommend to organizations on this path?
Daren Tomey: Setting the right foundation is critical for any organization to reach high growth mode. Specifically, organizations need to build strong foundations around:
- Culture: If you don’t have a strong culture, you will likely experience a revolving door of employees and will be stuck in a mode of recruiting to replace rather than recruiting to scale and grow the business.
- Processes: You need repeatable processes that are structured to drive meaningful productivity, not simply activities that may or may not move the needle for your business.
- Ideal Customer Profiles (ICP): Knowing what your best customers look like is essential for moving into high growth mode. If you don’t know what your best (i.e. most loyal, most profitable) customers look like, you may end up spinning your wheels going after the wrong targets.
- Core competencies: Finally, you need to be true and stay dedicated to what it is you do best rather than trying to be everything for everyone.
AC: How can organizations on this path use Salesforce as a catalyst to help them achieve their goals?
DT: There are many options out there, but investing in the right technology that can provide a solid and affordable solution throughout the journey from start-up to scale-up is critical. I have experienced this from both sides and can definitively say investing in the right technology upfront makes all the difference.
Once an organization selects the right technology, it sets the pace for adoption allowing them to build out the right plan as to how to use that technology for long term growth and ultimately the ability to scale. The beauty of Salesforce is that it is flexible and can help organizations be a catalyst for whatever goals they are setting to achieve both short term and long term, but it needs to be planned and managed well. That’s where AllCloud comes in.
AC: In your early days working with Salesforce, what took you down the path to want to learn more?
DT: As a user, I was hooked from day one. I appreciated and valued the flexibility of the Salesforce solution. I didn’t have any coding skills, but customizing it, creating workflows and building triggers was so easy and seamless. That was a true differentiator and it gave me a lot of power to grow processes to support the business.
AC: What are you most excited about on the Salesforce roadmap?
DT: I really like the way Salesforce is creating industry-specific solutions, such as their Consumer Goods Cloud, Retail Cloud, Health Cloud, and Manufacturing Cloud. Having these highly specialized, pre-configured solutions will help Salesforce customers by enabling them to truly build an environment for continuous innovation. Salesforce’s focus on industry-specific solutions allows customers to leverage the platform in a way that’s best for their business in order to scale and grow as quickly as their businesses need.
AC: What’s the #1 tip you would give to sales leaders considering the move to Salesforce?
DT: Don’t try to do too much too fast. Your business is changing rapidly, and so will your needs. Focus on getting the foundation established and then iterate from there.
At the end of the day, the most well structured Salesforce instance is only as good as the adoption and utilization by your team. Keep things with Salesforce simple as you roll them out so that your salespeople actually use it, arming them with data that will help them sell. Small short term wins breed long term success so that ultimately, a strong correctly built foundation is your path to thinking about Salesforce as a true Customer360º experience tool. That direction needs to come from the leadership down and the proper foundation should be built so that you are able to scale long term aligning to your organization’s business goals.
AC: Based on what you are seeing in the marketplace, what are you most looking forward to bringing to AllCloud clients in 2020?
DT: My primary goal is to take a business-first approach in helping our clients solve their challenges. We want to be their partner; I want to learn as much as I can about their business needs, goals and objectives. From there, we use the experience of our amazing team and deep knowledge of Salesforce, to map out a path for success using Salesforce as a catalyst for growth. This will enable our clients to achieve the success they desire as efficiently as possible.