Insights from Gabe Arce on Leadership

Hello, my name is Sofia Lopez. I'm here with Gabe Arce here in Bogota, Colombia. Gabe is the CEO and founder of Talavera Solutions. Gabe comes to us with over a decade's worth of experience in helping organizations leverage technology to support their sales, operations, marketing, and services. Thanks for joining us. I know you have a lot of incredible insights to give us and I know there's a lot more depth into your background so I would like for us to start with that could you tell us a bit about Salesforce? Sure well I'll tell you about my background and kind of where I came from right I think everybody has an origin story and I like to think mine's a little unique in that sense I started off as a sales rep for a company in North Carolina well over 10 years ago, right? Fortunately for me, that organization had Salesforce to help manage all sales activities. And so that was my first foray into Salesforce as an end user, right? Now, at the time, I knew almost nothing about Salesforce. It was a very foreign word. But I... quickly realized that this platform was capable of making helping me be successful as a sales representative if i only use the functionality as it was intended to right long story short i eventually became a power user managers across the enterprise started to come to me it's like okay gabe how are you using this platform to help you realize all the success and helping you not just hit your quota but surpass your quota One thing led to another, I eventually found myself entering the realm of sales operations, marketing operations, where one of my responsibilities is to help tailor these sales and marketing technologies to support the sales and marketing initiatives and workforces of these enterprises and with the rest is history, right? I ended up figuring out, teaching myself through a lot of trial and error. on how to successfully do just that. So you mentioned trial and error. How do you think trial and error has shaped expertise, particularly navigating these new challenges like CRM administration? Early in your career, you said you didn't have a mentor per se. So yeah, maybe we could want to know. Yeah, of course. So I think the... biggest thing that the audience should be aware of is it's only been recently where a flood of content has emerged to help new entrants new professionals in the crm space um one get started and build the technical foundation um in order to be successful in this space um when i started I was very fortunate to have not just a manager but a mentor to give me the space to learn, right? Now, I think a lot of people in this space are naturally curious and have that willingness and appetite to grow and figure things out on their own, and so that was part of the course for me, right? But as you alluded to, yeah, there was a significant amount of trial and error, right? And in retrospect, how I wish I had a mentor to help me, one, accelerate my own growth, but two, to help me avoid many of the pitfalls that I found myself falling into. I remember this one example early on where I needed to cleanse and sanitize some of our account data in that instance, in the particular instance. And, um... Somewhere in my cleansing process, with an Excel of course, I ended up misaligning some of the external identifiers. Now I'm sure the folks listening to this recording might sympathize with this, but at that time I didn't realize the importance of having backups in case an error happened, which eventually I ended up doing because I had misaligned the external identifiers. I ended up uploading a faulty file and it created all sorts of havoc. In the CRM, 10,000 records with improper data at the end of the day. Thankfully, I had history tracking, but because I didn't have the original source file as a backup, I needed to go in and manually make the necessary updates. Talk about spending four or five days, 16, 20-hour days trying to fix everything. It's one of those things, one of those lessons you only have to do. Learn once and never again. Right. But this is the reason I share this is because this is something that from the gecko, any new team member, this is something I impart with them. If you're going to be doing any sort of mass data process, ensure you have your backups. Right. That simple guidance can save you weeks of heartburn. There I say heartache in preventing. an error of this magnitude right and i can go on and on but i think that's the one that comes to mind at this moment okay so thank you thank you for um sharing this journey uh i do have this question that's about like this self it's self-taught approach that uh you have been mentioning how has this uh influenced your leadership ideals and style to problem solving because you now have uh a a lot of employees under you and I think that's important for audience to understand how has this self approach helped you during this leadership and now you have to commence. Sure, so I think the one thing my background has conditioned me for is to be very comfortable with ambiguity and with Being at the forefront of how these technologies can be leveraged. Okay. Now, of course, there are pretty standard playbooks available now. And what I mean by that is, well, most organizations have a sales team, have a servicing team, have a marketing team. Great. Well, there's certain playbooks to get people, to get organizations up and running relatively quickly. A very basic sales cloud implementation. A very basic service cloud implementation, right? These are things that can be done relatively quickly to help organizations derive value from this platform sooner, right? But organizations are not all the same, right? And that's where the ambiguity and the need for customization starts to arise, right? And so for this, I believe every, not just every sales professional, but every technologist needs to have... a really good sense of comfort in this ambiguity, in this gray space, right? Now, when I was a team of one early on, I found it relatively easy, right? Because I was my own manager, if you will, at the end of the day. I was the only admin, and so I can navigate here. What I realized, though, is that might not always be the case for every new team member that comes along, right? In fact, I've worked with many team members where they were boxed in, if you will, to only handle a certain array of tasks and activities and were never really allowed to innovate or push the boundaries of what they could do with this technology. And so what I learned early on when I started to bring on more people onto the team is everyone needs to have. somewhat of a structured framework for their own development. And so when I was looking at, okay, how do I define this framework, I found myself looking into my own past. You know, what made me effective? What allowed me to be that trusted technical advisor? And what I came, what I found was my framework of the three core competencies. for individual contributors. Now the first one might sound obvious, and that's because it should be. The first core competency is a thorough expertise and understanding of the platforms and systems that someone is responsible for. In my case, it's usually been Salesforce, and obviously as I expand in my repertoire of technologies, those, the list of technologies ended up growing. But in the world of Salesforce, what this means is, hey, everybody who is on the Salesforce teams needs to be able to So understand fundamentally what Salesforce does, how to do very basic declarative configuration, things like setting up users, permissions, setting up very light data architectures, creating custom objects, custom fields, and understanding the utility of the declarative toolkits available to them, right? Not to get too specific, but understanding how to navigate and using flows, for example. Now, Everyone also needs to understand, okay, where does declarative, the point and click functions that Salesforce provides, where does utility end and where does programmatic custom development begin? And so understanding that chasm, that transition, it matters a lot. If you're a developer, obviously you need to know and be an expert in how to program, how to run, how to code, how to optimize and write Apex. how to create lightning web components. So the scope of this competency is broad. And because Salesforce is always innovating and pushing new updates, it's never ending, right? What a great problem to have. So that's the first core competency. Second one is data literacy. What is Salesforce, but a very sophisticated UI and automation layer on top of a database, right? So we have to understand, one, the data architectures involved. You have your core standard objects. But beyond that, if an organization has committed themselves to customize the platform for their organization, there's probably a list of custom objects there, custom object tables. And within those, you have to understand fields and the relationships between the various tables. And that gets you started, right? Now. You also have to understand what data actually lives in these tables. It's not just enough to know the architecture. Knowing the data housed in the system is very important. And you have to understand how this data is evolving and changing through the sheer usage of the platform. Because what that then allows you to do is start to derive generative insights into the data itself. And from there, that bleeds in very nicely into... The third core competency, which is an understanding of people in process and understanding of the business, the teams, the users that you're there to support. Right. Every organization is different. And so for that reason, every technologist, every sales professional needs to go in and have an understanding of, OK, how is my technology being used currently? How is it not being used? And take a step beyond that and say, hey. What's the purpose of these various teams I'm here to support? What are their KPIs? How are they measured? What are their pain points? You take all of this to then be able to bridge the gap between technology and organization, right? And only then do you position yourself to truly be an effective technical advisor to help leverage technologies to produce... the desired business outcomes, all right? And so this framework is the framework that I give everyone on my team. And usually I share this at the point of interviewing them because fundamentally every person needs to be responsible for their own growth. They can move as quickly or as slowly as they're comfortable with. This framework is their guide. Okay, thank you. That's very insightful. It's very nice to see this framework and how you've been using it and how it actually has come to work. It's not just on paper. It's not just a theory. But seeing this framework, I think the characteristic that is the factor between all your employees is for them to have insight. I think that's very important, and I really like the sound of how you manage your team. Thank you. tuning in into what you're doing today. Why Latin America? Sure. Yeah, like what's the difference is there between programmers? Sure, sure. So I'll answer the first part of your question first, and then obviously I'll dive into Latin America. One of the aims of every organization in my experience has been growth, right? And there are different challenges with different stages of growth right the challenges that a startup or small business faces is significantly different than one that a multi-billion dollar enterprise faces right sure there's some shared commonalities but they're fundamentally different um and some some of it is a function of size when you're a small company of 10 15 20 employees yeah i normally see that There are significant financial constraints, right? A small business, a startup may not be able to hire a dedicated team just for their sales force or just for their sales and servicing technology stack, right? And so one of my aims here is to make talent accessible, right? And there's different challenges with that, and I'll dive into it in a moment. Because I want to talk about some of the challenges on the enterprise, for example, right? And enterprise is usually has already started, right? They have their tech stack either really well established if they're at the forefront, or they're trying to get their tech stack at a state working scale with them, right? And so in that case, it's more, it's a blend of strategical guidance, as well as, well, how do you organize your... team dedicated to support that infrastructure to scale with that system right and then it becomes one more of technology operations developer operations if you will right and so when I'm going into an organization I normally try and figure out at what stage of their growth they're and what's the level of maturity within these various systems you And from there, we can create a roadmap, a strategic roadmap to help these organizations really make use and derive value from the technologies they're already investing in. Or in some cases that they're about to invest in. Everyone feels good when they have a plan in place before making a large investment. And so I'm here to be that partner. Now, why Latin America? Well. Going back to my experience at Axos Bank, where I helped grow the Salesforce ecosystem, the Salesforce practice, from maybe 50 users in a given month to 1,500 users in a given week, right? Pretty massive growth and adoption. It taught me a few things, right? And For us to scale effectively and efficiently, we had to explore outside of the U.S., as most organizations, I think, find themselves doing. And we tried. I tried working with technical talent, technical team members from across the world. And what I found is that we saw the most success with developers in Latin America. Much of it a function of consolidated time zones, right? But two, the reality is that there's a lot of very talented people in Latin America, right? And so I owe a lot of my team success while at Axos to my Latin American team members, right? And of course, that's how I became familiar with the space. Now, as of the last year, year and a half, I did start to observe some friction, normally in the terms of longer lead times to fill in open slots that I had available. Right now, as the head of that practice, I don't usually have a luxury of waiting two, three, four months to backfill in a role or fill in a new role. Right. I have projects. that I need to start and I need to deliver by a certain target, right? The market doesn't wait for anybody, right? If we as an organization are moving fast enough to hit certain milestones because of a market opportunity, we're in cold water, right? And so as I started to explore, right, I figured, you know what? There must be a better way, right? How can I go ahead and condense the amount of time to one identifying talented team members or prospective team members? And two, how do I reduce the amount of time to onboard them to get them started? right the old adage time is money right uh and i think a lot of my peers across various enterprises can relate to that right and so i figured why not explore for myself right and so that's what i did right and what we're finding in colombia and in mexico which is where we're we're focused on right now is yeah there is a very open pool of talented technical professionals here in these areas. And more often than not, they're more than excited to talk to us, right? Pair that with the technology, the talent community that we built in-house, where we invite people to put in their talent profiles, and it allows us to augment our own observations, our own commentary in terms of the capabilities and the cultural dynamics that they bring to the table, that's allowed us to shrink the amount of time for us to recruit and fill roles on behalf of our clients by over 75%. So instead of waiting four months, we're bringing that down to weeks, right? And that's really the goal, right? Because our partners, our clients can't always wait to fill in roles. They need those roles now. Right. And in terms of capabilities, a lot of developers on our team are some of the best in Latin America. Right. I mean, they're building our technology or internal technology stack at a record pace. Right. And so the point is, we're seeing a lot of great we're seeing a lot of great engagement from the talent basis in Mexico and in Colombia. Okay, thank you. That's quite an achievement, I could say, as a leader, managing different cultures in that sense. And I think I'm opening this to my question is, how do you ensure the cultural integration of near shore, offshore teams with your onshore team while maintaining productivity? You just said that it raised 75% of onshore. Correct. But how do you do it? Sure. So this is a function of how do you scale successfully? How do you scale a technology team, technology operation successfully? In order for an organization to scale, it's important to have frameworks, best practices, all whilst still maintaining some level of agility. Okay. Now, as I alluded earlier, one of the things that made my U.S. team work really well with my Latin American team members is a condensed set of time zones, right? People being able to work with an incredible amount of overlap, right? If you're on the East Coast pairing you with our Colombian team members so that it's the same. eight of five nine or six whatever your work day looks like same thing on the west coast pairing you with someone in mexico so that your eight of five nine to six is the same when you have that amount of overlap it's easy to communicate there is no need to jump on an 8 p.m call because of vast differences in time zones right and so when you have that overlap the communication is it becomes more organic and When you foster a team culture of communication collaboration, that leads to accelerated outcomes, right? If there's a blocker, everyone's online to be able to solve it quickly. If there's a question, someone's always online to answer it for you. You don't have to wait 24 hours to get it resolved. And so that speed matters a lot, right? Especially if the team is responsible for innovating. This is different from more tactical roles or more tactical teams that have to handle very basic troubleshooting and tickets. If you have to innovate on behalf of the business to support strategic initiatives, you need that collaboration. And so that's part of what makes it effective. And the other one is cultural too. I think regardless of where you're at, regardless of the country, Your best Performers want to keep on growing, right? They want to ensure that there are growth opportunities, either from a technology side or from an organization perspective, right? All of the best developers always wanted, what's the next project? What's the hardest thing I can tackle? Give me a problem that I can go ahead and showcase and exercise my skills, right? As a leader, I have to be on the lookout for those opportunities and give it to... The folks that are up and coming or the folks that have demonstrated those skills and then help them continue to accelerate their growth, right? That's part of my leadership, my technical leadership strategy to ensure that as projects come in, I make sure that the right people are placed on them. And then there's that balance between putting people that are really good at a known factor and then putting on some of the up and coming so that they can exercise and strengthen new skills. That's amazing. hearing you talk about your company and your team members. I feel like even if you just listen to this podcast, you can just jot down a few of the things, what a leader is and how he speaks of its team members. And I think that's very, very important. Regarding back to Salesforce, how do you see Salesforce in five years, especially like with this new... invention, what calls artificial intelligence. How are you implementing this so that your framework, your cornerstone doesn't shift? Yeah. Great, great question. Oh, man. And I think that's worthy of another podcast in and of itself. In fact, I think it will be. What I'll say briefly is the following. With the rise of frontier LLMs, Think JatGPT or Claude. This is transforming pretty much every technology space pretty aggressively. The CRM space is no different, right? If you look on the news, if you're close to the Salesforce space, you now know that agent force is at the forefront. Salesforce is investing billions and billions of dollars. in either acquiring companies that bring new functions, new capabilities to their tech stack, or two, investing in internal innovations to go ahead and augment and allow for generative AI capabilities within the platform. The biggest use cases are around sales and servicing, or more specifically, virtual agents for sales and servicing. And I think if the current... pace of innovation continues, we'll see something tangible within the next 12, 24 years, or excuse me, 12 to 24 months, right? If not sooner, right? So the question here is, I think the question that most organizations are asking themselves is, well, how do I position myself to take advantage of those technologies, right? Now, I think my team has heard me ad nauseum on this front. But if you want to prepare yourself for the future, for these new innovations, for these new capabilities, you have to ensure you have a very stable and robust foundation. And I think this is where a lot of organizations need a fair amount of help. In terms of Salesforce, this means having your sales cloud implemented, have your service cloud implemented at the very least, and making sure that it's fully functional. Right. If you still have teams working out of Outlook and shared inboxes and that those conversations are never making it away to CRM, any virtual agent that comes across the line is not going to be able to reference that without a huge development effort. Right. But if all your email traffic, for example, is already funneling into your service cloud, your conversation is already there. Your data architectures are supporting that. And if you're. labeling your cases and routing your cases appropriately, well, that's adding additional metadata that a virtual agent and LLM can go ahead and assess, right? And then if you have the foundation, you find that the data required to fine tune and tailor these virtual agents for the purposes of your business becomes much easier, right? Same thing goes on the sales side, right? If your leads are not coming through automatically into your sales cloud, well, you're in trouble. All right. One. Because there's usually a delay. And then two, how do you expect a virtual agent to go ahead and reach out to these prospects in real time if the data doesn't come organically and in real time? So, again, there's very basic things that a lot of organizations can go ahead and do. And if they haven't done the time to get ahead of it, to catch up is now. Right. Because if you don't, you're going to be left behind. and be outcompeted by the organizations that already have a foundation in place and are actually already looking on how to implement these new generative AI functionalities. When I work with my partners, that's really my goal. If you're not at that level, get you there as quickly as possible because you'd likely want to take advantage of these virtual agents that are coming online very quickly. So thank you for mentioning all these aspects of... artificial intelligence i think it's one of the the topics the trending topics nowadays in in tech and um now like adding a bit to the the fundamentals of salesforce and why it a what makes it special um if salesforce introduced a ground a groundbreaking feature tomorrow what would your approach be in you integrating it to your existing architecture and framework? How does it compare to other companies per se? Great question. So I think for that, I have to describe my view of Salesforce. And at the very least, their CRM offerings. Of course, I'm biased, right? My entire career has been Salesforce, right? But I have yet to see a platform that is as flexible and as robust. As the Salesforce suite of clouds. But here's the problem there. The problem is that it is customizable to a fault. For every requirement that you need to support, there might be two, three, four ways to actually bring it forward. And so this is where the admins or developers need to bring that expertise. to guide the organization, to guide the project team as to what will serve best and what is the most scalable. In terms of positioning, not just myself, not just the company, but my team members, who may be working for Talavera or may be working for one of our clients, I need to ensure that they have the foundational skills to understand how to best configure and customize this application on behalf of their clients so that they can position themselves to be able to figure out how to apply these new features, new tools to the environments that they're working in, right? One rarely happens without the former, right? You have to have those foundational skills. You have to have a good understanding of the best practices because those you can take anywhere, any organization, any industry, and then apply them. Okay. So understanding Salesforce has been quite a very insightful task for me, and I hope for our listeners as well. But given, let's say, unlimited resources, I know you work with enterprises of up more than 5 billion, and you also work with startups of just 1 million. But if you did have unlimited resources, how would you reimagine? your current Salesforce infrastructure to future prove it against emerging challenges that we've spoken about? So I think to answer that question, we actually have to take the reverse approach. And what I mean by that is, what if I didn't have enough resources? What if I was faced with certain constraints? Because here's the thing, constraints is actually a... a prerequisite for innovation in my mind, right? And so for that, I have to go back to the basics, right? If I'm running my own enterprise, I know that at the very least I have a sales function, I have a servicing function, I probably have a marketing function as well. Okay, how do I ensure I have, I can use these technologies to make... Any sales rep, any service rep, or any marketing person, 10 times more effective. That's the thought exercise that needs to occur. Okay, if I can leverage Service Cloud so that one of my servicing folks can handle 10 times the number of conversations in a day, then I need to ask myself, okay, what needs to be done to get to that point, right? That could be as simple as, okay, let me write all email. all SMS, all phone, all WhatsApp traffic through the platform. And that way the agent can go ahead and handle any conversation regardless of channel. Okay, great. That brings us to level of efficiency. Next, what if I review these conversations and identify core topics? Okay. What if those topics, what if I can create a virtual assistant that handles Most frequently asked questions. Would that shave off 50% of the interactions that eventually end up getting handled by a human? Sure, that's additional efficiencies, right? So conceptually, these are the sorts of exercises that I undergo with myself and with my clients. The next part is, well, how do I make this happen, right? I know that I need to implement these technologies and leverage it to operationalize my business. Okay. And this is, I think, a fundamental challenge just in the technology spaces in general, recruiting and finding the right team members and or partners to help them materialize this vision. Now, an enterprise probably has a team of recruiters vetting out candidates as they apply. A small business might not. A startup might not. And so my approach here is, look, we already have a community of professionals, many of which we vetted. Right. Most of these professionals are eager for the next opportunity. They want that challenge. They want the responsibility to help these enterprises bridge technology with operations. I'm here to just bridge that gap. Right. All while providing my clients sound guidance as much as I can and bringing forward. All of the learnings that I spent a decade accumulating, either directly or indirectly through the teams that I've led, right? So that they don't have to hit those pitfalls, so they don't have to make those mistakes, right? And again, if my clients are winning, I'm winning, right? If my partners are winning, I'm winning. It's a win together, lose together. There is no middle ground, right? I only win if my customers win. So that's the mentality of not just myself, that's part of the culture of Talabeya Solutions, and inherently that's the culture that my team members bring to the table. I think it's something to admire, this view you have in the culture of your company. It's something that we don't see very often and I admire. I admire you for that. And coming to the talk about your team members, for our listeners, how do they contact you? How do they contact your team if they're interested in working or asking for advice, etc.? I feel you're a very open company in that sense, and I think our listeners would want to know that. Totally. So... For any developer, engineer, analyst, admin who is interested in these opportunities, right, in joining our group, they can simply go to our website, www.talaverasolutions.com, and head to our talent community, register, create a talent profile, at which time all the open opportunities will become available and visible to them. And they'll see everything and have the ability to raise their hand for any open opportunity. Our team then goes, we have conversations with everybody. And obviously, if there's a fit, we let them know, right? And even if there's not a fit, it doesn't end there, right? One of the things I'm a big proponent of now is strengthening these talent communities that we find ourselves a part of. It is very common for us to... A sponsor, an individual certification. if it's appropriate, right? And they don't necessarily have to be on our team. As long as they're a part of the Talavera community, they're eligible for many of these benefits, right? Now, obviously, it's not exhaustive, but we do have monthly, if you call them giveaways, right? Monthly lotteries where, based on who's selected, is eligible for one certification a month, right? Again. We want people, we want everyone we talk to to get better. And so that's part of that vision. If there is a partner, a potential client or executive out there that wants to get a hold of me, they can fill the form on the site or just email me directly. Gabe at TalaveraSolutions.com. Happy to schedule a call with them. Happy to have a conversation. See where it takes us. Right? Very open. Thank you. Before we wrap up, do you have any final thoughts on or advice for aspiring entrepreneurs and Salesforce professionals? I think it goes back to my earlier comments around the core competencies. If you're a Salesforce professional or just a technologist in general, it's imperative that you stay on top of the latest updates. for the systems that you have an affinity towards. It could be Salesforce. It could be other platforms, right? Always trying to figure out how to get better and more effective with these technologies. Two, do not forget about the data, right? Understand the data, how it's been stored, structured. And then three, the people matter the most. Every technology team is to support some set of user base. It's imperative that as a technology professional, you understand your user base, right? The more you understand them, the more you understand what they go through, their pains, the quicker you're going to find opportunities to bridge technology with this user base, right? That's your North Star. Yeah. Thank you, listeners. We encourage you to keep up with... these podcasts. It was an honor to have Gabe with us and learning from him. Again, if you want to partner with Gabe and get in touch with him, you can get in touch with him via email at gabe.talaverasolutions.com or go into the site www.talaverasolutions.com, fill out the form, and they'll be happy to respond. Be on the lookout for more episodes and thank you for having us. Bye-bye. Thank you.

I know you have a lot of incredible insights to give us and I know there's a lot more depth into your background so I would like for us to start with that could you tell us a bit about Salesforce? Sure well I'll tell you about my background and kind of where I came from right I think everybody has an origin story and I like to think mine's a little unique in that sense I started off as a sales rep for a company in North Carolina well over 10 years ago, right? Fortunately for me, that organization had Salesforce to help manage all sales activities.

And so that was my first foray into Salesforce as an end user, right? Now, at the time, I knew almost nothing about Salesforce. It was a very foreign word.

But I... quickly realized that this platform was capable of making helping me be successful as a sales representative if i only use the functionality as it was intended to right long story short i eventually became a power user managers across the enterprise started to come to me it's like okay gabe how are you using this platform to help you realize all the success and helping you not just hit your quota but surpass your quota One thing led to another, I eventually found myself entering the realm of sales operations, marketing operations, where one of my responsibilities is to help tailor these sales and marketing technologies to support the sales and marketing initiatives and workforces of these enterprises and with the rest is history, right? I ended up figuring out, teaching myself through a lot of trial and error.

on how to successfully do just that. So you mentioned trial and error. How do you think trial and error has shaped expertise, particularly navigating these new challenges like CRM administration? Early in your career, you said you didn't have a mentor per se.

So yeah, maybe we could want to know. Yeah, of course. So I think the... biggest thing that the audience should be aware of is it's only been recently where a flood of content has emerged to help new entrants new professionals in the crm space um one get started and build the technical foundation um in order to be successful in this space um when i started I was very fortunate to have not just a manager but a mentor to give me the space to learn, right? Now, I think a lot of people in this space are naturally curious and have that willingness and appetite to grow and figure things out on their own, and so that was part of the course for me, right?

But as you alluded to, yeah, there was a significant amount of trial and error, right? And in retrospect, how I wish I had a mentor to help me, one, accelerate my own growth, but two, to help me avoid many of the pitfalls that I found myself falling into. I remember this one example early on where I needed to cleanse and sanitize some of our account data in that instance, in the particular instance. And, um...

Somewhere in my cleansing process, with an Excel of course, I ended up misaligning some of the external identifiers. Now I'm sure the folks listening to this recording might sympathize with this, but at that time I didn't realize the importance of having backups in case an error happened, which eventually I ended up doing because I had misaligned the external identifiers. I ended up uploading a faulty file and it created all sorts of havoc. In the CRM, 10,000 records with improper data at the end of the day. Thankfully, I had history tracking, but because I didn't have the original source file as a backup, I needed to go in and manually make the necessary updates.

Talk about spending four or five days, 16, 20-hour days trying to fix everything. It's one of those things, one of those lessons you only have to do. Learn once and never again. Right.

But this is the reason I share this is because this is something that from the gecko, any new team member, this is something I impart with them. If you're going to be doing any sort of mass data process, ensure you have your backups. Right.

That simple guidance can save you weeks of heartburn. There I say heartache in preventing. an error of this magnitude right and i can go on and on but i think that's the one that comes to mind at this moment okay so thank you thank you for um sharing this journey uh i do have this question that's about like this self it's self-taught approach that uh you have been mentioning how has this uh influenced your leadership ideals and style to problem solving because you now have uh a a lot of employees under you and I think that's important for audience to understand how has this self approach helped you during this leadership and now you have to commence. Sure, so I think the one thing my background has conditioned me for is to be very comfortable with ambiguity and with Being at the forefront of how these technologies can be leveraged.

Okay. Now, of course, there are pretty standard playbooks available now. And what I mean by that is, well, most organizations have a sales team, have a servicing team, have a marketing team. Great. Well, there's certain playbooks to get people, to get organizations up and running relatively quickly.

A very basic sales cloud implementation. A very basic service cloud implementation, right? These are things that can be done relatively quickly to help organizations derive value from this platform sooner, right? But organizations are not all the same, right?

And that's where the ambiguity and the need for customization starts to arise, right? And so for this, I believe every, not just every sales professional, but every technologist needs to have... a really good sense of comfort in this ambiguity, in this gray space, right?

Now, when I was a team of one early on, I found it relatively easy, right? Because I was my own manager, if you will, at the end of the day. I was the only admin, and so I can navigate here. What I realized, though, is that might not always be the case for every new team member that comes along, right?

In fact, I've worked with many team members where they were boxed in, if you will, to only handle a certain array of tasks and activities and were never really allowed to innovate or push the boundaries of what they could do with this technology. And so what I learned early on when I started to bring on more people onto the team is everyone needs to have. somewhat of a structured framework for their own development. And so when I was looking at, okay, how do I define this framework, I found myself looking into my own past. You know, what made me effective?

What allowed me to be that trusted technical advisor? And what I came, what I found was my framework of the three core competencies. for individual contributors.

Now the first one might sound obvious, and that's because it should be. The first core competency is a thorough expertise and understanding of the platforms and systems that someone is responsible for. In my case, it's usually been Salesforce, and obviously as I expand in my repertoire of technologies, those, the list of technologies ended up growing.

But in the world of Salesforce, what this means is, hey, everybody who is on the Salesforce teams needs to be able to So understand fundamentally what Salesforce does, how to do very basic declarative configuration, things like setting up users, permissions, setting up very light data architectures, creating custom objects, custom fields, and understanding the utility of the declarative toolkits available to them, right? Not to get too specific, but understanding how to navigate and using flows, for example. Now, Everyone also needs to understand, okay, where does declarative, the point and click functions that Salesforce provides, where does utility end and where does programmatic custom development begin?

And so understanding that chasm, that transition, it matters a lot. If you're a developer, obviously you need to know and be an expert in how to program, how to run, how to code, how to optimize and write Apex. how to create lightning web components. So the scope of this competency is broad.

And because Salesforce is always innovating and pushing new updates, it's never ending, right? What a great problem to have. So that's the first core competency. Second one is data literacy.

What is Salesforce, but a very sophisticated UI and automation layer on top of a database, right? So we have to understand, one, the data architectures involved. You have your core standard objects. But beyond that, if an organization has committed themselves to customize the platform for their organization, there's probably a list of custom objects there, custom object tables.

And within those, you have to understand fields and the relationships between the various tables. And that gets you started, right? Now. You also have to understand what data actually lives in these tables.

It's not just enough to know the architecture. Knowing the data housed in the system is very important. And you have to understand how this data is evolving and changing through the sheer usage of the platform.

Because what that then allows you to do is start to derive generative insights into the data itself. And from there, that bleeds in very nicely into... The third core competency, which is an understanding of people in process and understanding of the business, the teams, the users that you're there to support. Right. Every organization is different.

And so for that reason, every technologist, every sales professional needs to go in and have an understanding of, OK, how is my technology being used currently? How is it not being used? And take a step beyond that and say, hey. What's the purpose of these various teams I'm here to support? What are their KPIs?

How are they measured? What are their pain points? You take all of this to then be able to bridge the gap between technology and organization, right?

And only then do you position yourself to truly be an effective technical advisor to help leverage technologies to produce... the desired business outcomes, all right? And so this framework is the framework that I give everyone on my team. And usually I share this at the point of interviewing them because fundamentally every person needs to be responsible for their own growth. They can move as quickly or as slowly as they're comfortable with.

This framework is their guide. Okay, thank you. That's very insightful. It's very nice to see this framework and how you've been using it and how it actually has come to work. It's not just on paper.

It's not just a theory. But seeing this framework, I think the characteristic that is the factor between all your employees is for them to have insight. I think that's very important, and I really like the sound of how you manage your team.

Thank you. tuning in into what you're doing today. Why Latin America?

Sure. Yeah, like what's the difference is there between programmers? Sure, sure. So I'll answer the first part of your question first, and then obviously I'll dive into Latin America. One of the aims of every organization in my experience has been growth, right?

And there are different challenges with different stages of growth right the challenges that a startup or small business faces is significantly different than one that a multi-billion dollar enterprise faces right sure there's some shared commonalities but they're fundamentally different um and some some of it is a function of size when you're a small company of 10 15 20 employees yeah i normally see that There are significant financial constraints, right? A small business, a startup may not be able to hire a dedicated team just for their sales force or just for their sales and servicing technology stack, right? And so one of my aims here is to make talent accessible, right? And there's different challenges with that, and I'll dive into it in a moment.

Because I want to talk about some of the challenges on the enterprise, for example, right? And enterprise is usually has already started, right? They have their tech stack either really well established if they're at the forefront, or they're trying to get their tech stack at a state working scale with them, right?

And so in that case, it's more, it's a blend of strategical guidance, as well as, well, how do you organize your... team dedicated to support that infrastructure to scale with that system right and then it becomes one more of technology operations developer operations if you will right and so when I'm going into an organization I normally try and figure out at what stage of their growth they're and what's the level of maturity within these various systems you And from there, we can create a roadmap, a strategic roadmap to help these organizations really make use and derive value from the technologies they're already investing in. Or in some cases that they're about to invest in.

Everyone feels good when they have a plan in place before making a large investment. And so I'm here to be that partner. Now, why Latin America? Well.

Going back to my experience at Axos Bank, where I helped grow the Salesforce ecosystem, the Salesforce practice, from maybe 50 users in a given month to 1,500 users in a given week, right? Pretty massive growth and adoption. It taught me a few things, right?

And For us to scale effectively and efficiently, we had to explore outside of the U.S., as most organizations, I think, find themselves doing. And we tried. I tried working with technical talent, technical team members from across the world.

And what I found is that we saw the most success with developers in Latin America. Much of it a function of consolidated time zones, right? But two, the reality is that there's a lot of very talented people in Latin America, right?

And so I owe a lot of my team success while at Axos to my Latin American team members, right? And of course, that's how I became familiar with the space. Now, as of the last year, year and a half, I did start to observe some friction, normally in the terms of longer lead times to fill in open slots that I had available.

Right now, as the head of that practice, I don't usually have a luxury of waiting two, three, four months to backfill in a role or fill in a new role. Right. I have projects. that I need to start and I need to deliver by a certain target, right?

The market doesn't wait for anybody, right? If we as an organization are moving fast enough to hit certain milestones because of a market opportunity, we're in cold water, right? And so as I started to explore, right, I figured, you know what?

There must be a better way, right? How can I go ahead and condense the amount of time to one identifying talented team members or prospective team members? And two, how do I reduce the amount of time to onboard them to get them started? right the old adage time is money right uh and i think a lot of my peers across various enterprises can relate to that right and so i figured why not explore for myself right and so that's what i did right and what we're finding in colombia and in mexico which is where we're we're focused on right now is yeah there is a very open pool of talented technical professionals here in these areas.

And more often than not, they're more than excited to talk to us, right? Pair that with the technology, the talent community that we built in-house, where we invite people to put in their talent profiles, and it allows us to augment our own observations, our own commentary in terms of the capabilities and the cultural dynamics that they bring to the table, that's allowed us to shrink the amount of time for us to recruit and fill roles on behalf of our clients by over 75%. So instead of waiting four months, we're bringing that down to weeks, right?

And that's really the goal, right? Because our partners, our clients can't always wait to fill in roles. They need those roles now. Right. And in terms of capabilities, a lot of developers on our team are some of the best in Latin America.

Right. I mean, they're building our technology or internal technology stack at a record pace. Right. And so the point is, we're seeing a lot of great we're seeing a lot of great engagement from the talent basis in Mexico and in Colombia. Okay, thank you.

That's quite an achievement, I could say, as a leader, managing different cultures in that sense. And I think I'm opening this to my question is, how do you ensure the cultural integration of near shore, offshore teams with your onshore team while maintaining productivity? You just said that it raised 75% of onshore.

Correct. But how do you do it? Sure.

So this is a function of how do you scale successfully? How do you scale a technology team, technology operation successfully? In order for an organization to scale, it's important to have frameworks, best practices, all whilst still maintaining some level of agility.

Okay. Now, as I alluded earlier, one of the things that made my U.S. team work really well with my Latin American team members is a condensed set of time zones, right? People being able to work with an incredible amount of overlap, right? If you're on the East Coast pairing you with our Colombian team members so that it's the same. eight of five nine or six whatever your work day looks like same thing on the west coast pairing you with someone in mexico so that your eight of five nine to six is the same when you have that amount of overlap it's easy to communicate there is no need to jump on an 8 p.m call because of vast differences in time zones right and so when you have that overlap the communication is it becomes more organic and When you foster a team culture of communication collaboration, that leads to accelerated outcomes, right?

If there's a blocker, everyone's online to be able to solve it quickly. If there's a question, someone's always online to answer it for you. You don't have to wait 24 hours to get it resolved.

And so that speed matters a lot, right? Especially if the team is responsible for innovating. This is different from more tactical roles or more tactical teams that have to handle very basic troubleshooting and tickets.

If you have to innovate on behalf of the business to support strategic initiatives, you need that collaboration. And so that's part of what makes it effective. And the other one is cultural too. I think regardless of where you're at, regardless of the country, Your best Performers want to keep on growing, right? They want to ensure that there are growth opportunities, either from a technology side or from an organization perspective, right?

All of the best developers always wanted, what's the next project? What's the hardest thing I can tackle? Give me a problem that I can go ahead and showcase and exercise my skills, right? As a leader, I have to be on the lookout for those opportunities and give it to...

The folks that are up and coming or the folks that have demonstrated those skills and then help them continue to accelerate their growth, right? That's part of my leadership, my technical leadership strategy to ensure that as projects come in, I make sure that the right people are placed on them. And then there's that balance between putting people that are really good at a known factor and then putting on some of the up and coming so that they can exercise and strengthen new skills. That's amazing. hearing you talk about your company and your team members.

I feel like even if you just listen to this podcast, you can just jot down a few of the things, what a leader is and how he speaks of its team members. And I think that's very, very important. Regarding back to Salesforce, how do you see Salesforce in five years, especially like with this new... invention, what calls artificial intelligence. How are you implementing this so that your framework, your cornerstone doesn't shift?

Yeah. Great, great question. Oh, man.

And I think that's worthy of another podcast in and of itself. In fact, I think it will be. What I'll say briefly is the following. With the rise of frontier LLMs, Think JatGPT or Claude.

This is transforming pretty much every technology space pretty aggressively. The CRM space is no different, right? If you look on the news, if you're close to the Salesforce space, you now know that agent force is at the forefront.

Salesforce is investing billions and billions of dollars. in either acquiring companies that bring new functions, new capabilities to their tech stack, or two, investing in internal innovations to go ahead and augment and allow for generative AI capabilities within the platform. The biggest use cases are around sales and servicing, or more specifically, virtual agents for sales and servicing. And I think if the current... pace of innovation continues, we'll see something tangible within the next 12, 24 years, or excuse me, 12 to 24 months, right?

If not sooner, right? So the question here is, I think the question that most organizations are asking themselves is, well, how do I position myself to take advantage of those technologies, right? Now, I think my team has heard me ad nauseum on this front.

But if you want to prepare yourself for the future, for these new innovations, for these new capabilities, you have to ensure you have a very stable and robust foundation. And I think this is where a lot of organizations need a fair amount of help. In terms of Salesforce, this means having your sales cloud implemented, have your service cloud implemented at the very least, and making sure that it's fully functional. Right.

If you still have teams working out of Outlook and shared inboxes and that those conversations are never making it away to CRM, any virtual agent that comes across the line is not going to be able to reference that without a huge development effort. Right. But if all your email traffic, for example, is already funneling into your service cloud, your conversation is already there.

Your data architectures are supporting that. And if you're. labeling your cases and routing your cases appropriately, well, that's adding additional metadata that a virtual agent and LLM can go ahead and assess, right?

And then if you have the foundation, you find that the data required to fine tune and tailor these virtual agents for the purposes of your business becomes much easier, right? Same thing goes on the sales side, right? If your leads are not coming through automatically into your sales cloud, well, you're in trouble.

All right. One. Because there's usually a delay. And then two, how do you expect a virtual agent to go ahead and reach out to these prospects in real time if the data doesn't come organically and in real time?

So, again, there's very basic things that a lot of organizations can go ahead and do. And if they haven't done the time to get ahead of it, to catch up is now. Right.

Because if you don't, you're going to be left behind. and be outcompeted by the organizations that already have a foundation in place and are actually already looking on how to implement these new generative AI functionalities. When I work with my partners, that's really my goal.

If you're not at that level, get you there as quickly as possible because you'd likely want to take advantage of these virtual agents that are coming online very quickly. So thank you for mentioning all these aspects of... artificial intelligence i think it's one of the the topics the trending topics nowadays in in tech and um now like adding a bit to the the fundamentals of salesforce and why it a what makes it special um if salesforce introduced a ground a groundbreaking feature tomorrow what would your approach be in you integrating it to your existing architecture and framework?

How does it compare to other companies per se? Great question. So I think for that, I have to describe my view of Salesforce.

And at the very least, their CRM offerings. Of course, I'm biased, right? My entire career has been Salesforce, right? But I have yet to see a platform that is as flexible and as robust.

As the Salesforce suite of clouds. But here's the problem there. The problem is that it is customizable to a fault. For every requirement that you need to support, there might be two, three, four ways to actually bring it forward.

And so this is where the admins or developers need to bring that expertise. to guide the organization, to guide the project team as to what will serve best and what is the most scalable. In terms of positioning, not just myself, not just the company, but my team members, who may be working for Talavera or may be working for one of our clients, I need to ensure that they have the foundational skills to understand how to best configure and customize this application on behalf of their clients so that they can position themselves to be able to figure out how to apply these new features, new tools to the environments that they're working in, right?

One rarely happens without the former, right? You have to have those foundational skills. You have to have a good understanding of the best practices because those you can take anywhere, any organization, any industry, and then apply them. Okay.

So understanding Salesforce has been quite a very insightful task for me, and I hope for our listeners as well. But given, let's say, unlimited resources, I know you work with enterprises of up more than 5 billion, and you also work with startups of just 1 million. But if you did have unlimited resources, how would you reimagine? your current Salesforce infrastructure to future prove it against emerging challenges that we've spoken about? So I think to answer that question, we actually have to take the reverse approach.

And what I mean by that is, what if I didn't have enough resources? What if I was faced with certain constraints? Because here's the thing, constraints is actually a...

a prerequisite for innovation in my mind, right? And so for that, I have to go back to the basics, right? If I'm running my own enterprise, I know that at the very least I have a sales function, I have a servicing function, I probably have a marketing function as well.

Okay, how do I ensure I have, I can use these technologies to make... Any sales rep, any service rep, or any marketing person, 10 times more effective. That's the thought exercise that needs to occur. Okay, if I can leverage Service Cloud so that one of my servicing folks can handle 10 times the number of conversations in a day, then I need to ask myself, okay, what needs to be done to get to that point, right? That could be as simple as, okay, let me write all email.

all SMS, all phone, all WhatsApp traffic through the platform. And that way the agent can go ahead and handle any conversation regardless of channel. Okay, great.

That brings us to level of efficiency. Next, what if I review these conversations and identify core topics? Okay. What if those topics, what if I can create a virtual assistant that handles Most frequently asked questions.

Would that shave off 50% of the interactions that eventually end up getting handled by a human? Sure, that's additional efficiencies, right? So conceptually, these are the sorts of exercises that I undergo with myself and with my clients.

The next part is, well, how do I make this happen, right? I know that I need to implement these technologies and leverage it to operationalize my business. Okay.

And this is, I think, a fundamental challenge just in the technology spaces in general, recruiting and finding the right team members and or partners to help them materialize this vision. Now, an enterprise probably has a team of recruiters vetting out candidates as they apply. A small business might not. A startup might not. And so my approach here is, look, we already have a community of professionals, many of which we vetted.

Right. Most of these professionals are eager for the next opportunity. They want that challenge.

They want the responsibility to help these enterprises bridge technology with operations. I'm here to just bridge that gap. Right.

All while providing my clients sound guidance as much as I can and bringing forward. All of the learnings that I spent a decade accumulating, either directly or indirectly through the teams that I've led, right? So that they don't have to hit those pitfalls, so they don't have to make those mistakes, right? And again, if my clients are winning, I'm winning, right? If my partners are winning, I'm winning.

It's a win together, lose together. There is no middle ground, right? I only win if my customers win. So that's the mentality of not just myself, that's part of the culture of Talabeya Solutions, and inherently that's the culture that my team members bring to the table.

I think it's something to admire, this view you have in the culture of your company. It's something that we don't see very often and I admire. I admire you for that.

And coming to the talk about your team members, for our listeners, how do they contact you? How do they contact your team if they're interested in working or asking for advice, etc.? I feel you're a very open company in that sense, and I think our listeners would want to know that. Totally. So...

For any developer, engineer, analyst, admin who is interested in these opportunities, right, in joining our group, they can simply go to our website, www.talaverasolutions.com, and head to our talent community, register, create a talent profile, at which time all the open opportunities will become available and visible to them. And they'll see everything and have the ability to raise their hand for any open opportunity. Our team then goes, we have conversations with everybody.

And obviously, if there's a fit, we let them know, right? And even if there's not a fit, it doesn't end there, right? One of the things I'm a big proponent of now is strengthening these talent communities that we find ourselves a part of. It is very common for us to...

A sponsor, an individual certification. if it's appropriate, right? And they don't necessarily have to be on our team.

As long as they're a part of the Talavera community, they're eligible for many of these benefits, right? Now, obviously, it's not exhaustive, but we do have monthly, if you call them giveaways, right? Monthly lotteries where, based on who's selected, is eligible for one certification a month, right?

Again. We want people, we want everyone we talk to to get better. And so that's part of that vision.

If there is a partner, a potential client or executive out there that wants to get a hold of me, they can fill the form on the site or just email me directly. Gabe at TalaveraSolutions.com. Happy to schedule a call with them. Happy to have a conversation.

See where it takes us. Right? Very open. Thank you.

Before we wrap up, do you have any final thoughts on or advice for aspiring entrepreneurs and Salesforce professionals? I think it goes back to my earlier comments around the core competencies. If you're a Salesforce professional or just a technologist in general, it's imperative that you stay on top of the latest updates.

for the systems that you have an affinity towards. It could be Salesforce. It could be other platforms, right?

Always trying to figure out how to get better and more effective with these technologies. Two, do not forget about the data, right? Understand the data, how it's been stored, structured.

And then three, the people matter the most. Every technology team is to support some set of user base. It's imperative that as a technology professional, you understand your user base, right? The more you understand them, the more you understand what they go through, their pains, the quicker you're going to find opportunities to bridge technology with this user base, right? That's your North Star.

Yeah. Thank you, listeners. We encourage you to keep up with... these podcasts. It was an honor to have Gabe with us and learning from him.

Again, if you want to partner with Gabe and get in touch with him, you can get in touch with him via email at gabe.talaverasolutions.com or go into the site www.talaverasolutions.com, fill out the form, and they'll be happy to respond. Be on the lookout for more episodes and thank you for having us. Bye-bye. Thank you.

Transcript for:Insights from Gabe Arce on Leadership

Transcript for:
Insights from Gabe Arce on Leadership