So my travel was supposed to be finished until mid-June, but alas, I find myself this week in San Mateo, CA for 4 days of administrator training for Salesforce.com. Salesforce.com is a very robust customer relationship management Software as a Service platform. We’ve decided at Doba to move our CRM (marketing, sales, and service) operations onto this hosted platform over time. We’ve been testing it in a limited fashion for the last several weeks.

In the past 5.5 years, we’ve built A LOT of software that originated from our “internal tools” roadmap–software to manage sales processes, billing processes, marketing processes, service processes, etc. Over the next many months, we’re going to work towards fulfilling those internal needs via the Salesforce.com system rather than building our own software. In essence, we’re working to stop building software that isn’t our core business, and leverage other platforms and software that are out there.

Let me say this: I’ve told quite a few people that we’re doing this, and a few of them have said, man, that Salesforce.com is expensive. We can build our own tools better/faster/cheaper. To that I say: no you can’t. Not even close. In my class with me is the Salesforce administrator (yes, at larger companies, they separate out that role) for AMD. Yeah, this AMD. And several other large companies from around the country. Salesforce Professional starts at $65 per user per month. They have a Group edition that’s even less. For that much hard money, not even counting the opportunity cost and distraction factors, you can’t build 1% of what this platform does off the self. And even if you need to customize it (a standard objection to not building things yourself. The whole “customizing it will cost us more than just building it ourselves” argument), it’s still so much more efficient to leverage the base of other software.

So my advice? If you’re a software company, build software that you sell. Build your competitive advantage. Anything else your business needs to operate and function? Buy it. And Salesforce.com is a dang good place to start looking for the whole CRM world. What I’ve seen here at Salesforce.com training is extremely impressive. Totally changing my build vs. buy viewpoint going forward. If you need bookkeeping/accounting, you buy Quickbooks. If you need word processing, you buy MS Word. If you need anything related to full lifecycle (leads to accounts to opportunities to service cases to service solutions) CRM, buy Salesforce.

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I hope you watched that interview with Bill Gates and Steve Jobs from Wall Street Journal’s All Things Digital conference.

While I watched it, there were 2 things that Steve Jobs said that I liked so much I typed them out so I could share them with everyone. Steve and Bill were asked by an attendee what advice they could give him to continue to find success at his 100 employee new digital media company. Steve said:

People say you have to have a lot of passion for what you’re doing, and it’s totally true and the reason is because it’s so hard that if you don’t, any rational person would give up. It’s really hard. And you have to do it over a sustained of time. So if you don’t love it, if you’re not having fun doing it, and you don’t really love it, you’re going to give up. And that’s what happens to most people actually. If you really look at the ones that ended up being ‘successful’ in the eyes of society and the ones that didn’t, often times it’s the ones that are successful love what they did so they could persevere when it got really tough. And the ones that didn’t love it quit. Cause they’re sane. Right? Who would want to put up with this stuff if you don’t love it. So, it’s a lot of hard work. And it’s a lot of worrying constantly. And if you don’t love it, you’re going to fail. So you gotta love it, you gotta have passion. And I think that’s the high order bit.

The second thing is you gotta be a really good talent scout. Because no matter how smart you are, you need a team of great people. And you’ve gotta figure out how to size people up fairly quickly. Make decisions without knowing people too well. And hire them and see how you do and refine your intuition. And be able to help build an organization that can eventually just build itself, cause you need great people around you.

When he said those things, I said to myself, “Amen brother Steve!” Especially the part about having the passion. And perseverance. And even about how sane people quit. So I guess that means it’s the insane people that keep going then. And I’m still going, what does that say about me?

Finally, they were asked by another attendee about how science fiction deals with concepts like the metaverse, the Matrix, and other sort of far-out science fiction type stuff and what parts of this they thought would be a reality in the next 5-10 years. His answer was great:

I don’t know, and that’s what makes it exciting to go into work every day. Because as we talked about earlier, this is an extraordinarily exciting time in the industry. And lots of new stuff happening, so I can’t even begin to think of what it’s going to be like 10 years from now.

Great thoughts. Great time to be alive to watch all the extraordinary changes happening in the world. Love him or hate him, Steve Jobs is one cool and wicked smart dude.

Whether you hate Apple and love Microsoft, or hate Microsoft and love Apple, or hate them both (I don’t think many people would love them both), you need to watch the joint interview of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs that they did at the Wall Street Journal’s All Things Digital conference a few weeks ago.

Here are two guys that have such a history together. They have changed the world and the lives of Billions of people. I watched this last night and I found myself thinking back to when I got my first computer, a Franklin PC 8000. I remembered when the computer lab at Burley Jr. High was full of Apple IIe’s and my friend Nate and I were lucky enough to have the teacher (Mr. Waite) let us be the first students to use his PC that he brought in from home and stuck in the corner of the room. And when we used that PC to write our first computer program in GW-BASIC. (A game based on the Domino’s Pizza advertising campaign of Avoid the Noid). And when I saved all my money from my various summer jobs to buy the latest greatest 386 computer at the time. And then the time freshman year in college where everyone was talking about how cool it would be when the Pentium computers started shipping. And the time almost 2 years ago when I ‘converted’ to Mac and haven’t looked back since. And really about 1,000 memories that made me realize how intertwined my life and everything I do have become with technology and computers and software–and that Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and their innovation, passion, and ideas are behind a lot of this intertwining.

Anyway, you can download the Podcast right to iTunes. You can also click on the icon of Steve and Bill on the All Things Digital home page.

Enjoy, it will bring back memories.