Jeff Roy

I think for the most part, the things that become important as you grow in a business — which are the ability to consolidate different systems into a single view of the customer, pulling in information from financial systems, and as an example, if you were a technology company like we were, pulling in information from places like Redshift about how people are using the product — and having that cross-referenced with all of the customer-facing data your organization is producing around how you’re marketing to that customer, how you’re selling to them, how you’re supporting them after they become a customer, and being able to see that in one place, becomes increasingly important as you grow and scale.

Sam Donaghey

This podcast is brought to you by Fast Slow Motion, a team of expert consultants that have helped hundreds of growing businesses build scalable systems on the HubSpot and Salesforce platforms. To learn more, visit fastslowmotion.com. Welcome to the Fast Slow Motion podcast, where we teach you how to build a business you love while enjoying your life.

I’m your host, Sam Donaghey, and today I’ve got the pleasure of introducing Fast Slow Motion’s Director of Partnerships and Alliances, Todd Cooper, and Salesforce Area VP, Jeff Roy. Todd, Jeff, it’s great to have you here. Welcome to the show.

Todd Cooper

Great to be here. Thank you so much for having us.

Sam Donaghey

Todd is the Director of Partnerships and Alliances at Fast Slow Motion, where he leads the development and management of strategic partnerships to drive business growth. And Jeff is an Area Vice President at Salesforce, where he oversees the small and medium business segment and focuses on helping growing businesses leverage Salesforce’s platform to achieve their goals. In today’s episode, Todd and Jeff are going to be discussing the impact that Salesforce can make for business growth.

Todd Cooper

Amazing. Thank you so much, Sam. Jeff, thank you for being here, buddy. Really appreciate your time and looking forward to having a chat.

Jeff Roy

You bet. Thanks for having me.

Todd Cooper

To get things started, Jeff, can you tell us a little bit about your background — both personally and professionally — your current role at Salesforce, and what brought you here?

Jeff Roy

Yeah. I’ve been working for Bay Area technology companies more or less my entire career, primarily in customer-facing roles. I have a little bit of technical background — I academically studied to be a BSA, or business systems analyst, back in the day, and took a lot of courses on database design. I’ve been with Salesforce off and on for about 17 years now.

I started as an account executive working with our customer-facing teams way back in the day. I’ve left and come back twice, so I’m a double boomerang. I went to work with LinkedIn in the early days, helping open up the Canadian office in Toronto, which was their first international office. Then I came back to Salesforce for a great four-year run with our Marketing Cloud business. Then I went to seek my fame and fortune in the startup world, working as a CRO with a couple of different startups, before recently rejoining Salesforce in our core business.

Todd Cooper

You mentioned growing businesses — that’s obviously our focus as well. We’ve been in business for almost 11 years, focusing passionately on the growth market segment. A ton of our clients — over 2,000 — many of those are in the growth market segment and we continue to grow them. Why do you think Salesforce works so well for businesses at that stage of growth? And what does it give those businesses in terms of a resource and a platform to continue growing and scaling?

Jeff Roy

It’s an interesting question. I’ve actually been a customer of Salesforce several times — having used other CRMs, then migrated to Salesforce as our company grew and got more complex. So I have a unique perspective on this because I’ve seen it both as a Salesforce employee and as an executive at a couple of other companies.

I think for the most part, the things that become important as you grow — the ability to consolidate different systems into a single view of the customer, pulling in information from financial systems, and if you were a technology company like we were, pulling in information from places like Redshift about how people are using the product — and having that cross-referenced with all of the customer-facing data your organization is producing around how you’re marketing to that customer, how you’re selling to them, how you’re supporting them after they become a customer, and being able to see that in one place becomes increasingly important as you grow and scale.

Some of the integration capabilities, customization capabilities, and data analysis capabilities of Salesforce are sort of what set it apart. And those things become more important as a business gets bigger and inherently more complicated. That’s why we’re particularly well suited to the growth segment — because as a business hits 150 or 200 employees, being able to make data-driven decisions and take all these disparate systems and start to tie them together becomes, like I said, increasingly important to guide and steer the company. I’ve lived through that, moving from other systems to Salesforce as we got bigger. That’s why it’s such an interesting opportunity for customers of that size — those are the types of challenges they’re often working through.

Todd Cooper

That makes a ton of sense. And you’ve lived through it on the other side, so you have the ability to have that conversation with clients and show them the art of the possible, right? And how they can continue to grow. You never outgrow Salesforce — you can grow exponentially. We run our entire organization on Salesforce. So the opportunity to reduce tech stacks and debt, consolidate, and have a lifetime solution is really a game changer.

Jeff Roy

Yeah. And I think some of Salesforce’s more recent releases on products specifically designed to be a more out-of-the-box solution for smaller businesses is something we’ve made a lot of progress on recently as a company. But prior to that, I think there were a lot of — and still are a lot of — really good options for really small businesses. If you’re a 10- or 20-person shop, it’s natural that companies would start on an alternative solution.

But then you do get to a point when you’ve got information living in a whole bunch of different silos and you want to start to customize a CRM like Salesforce to really meet the specific needs of your business and the way your processes work. You want to be able to report and run deep analysis on the information that lives in your CRM to drive the decision-making process for the executive team and the rest of the company. And those things become harder to do with tools that are more specifically oriented toward the down-market.

Having lived through it, companies often outgrow those tools at a certain size. And one of the reassuring things about moving to Salesforce is that you’re never really going to outgrow it. We have the largest companies in the world running on Salesforce. Customization, configuration, and integration opportunities are essentially endless — which comes with additional complexity. I wouldn’t want to be naive and pretend otherwise, which is in large part why it’s really important to have a great partner like FSM.

Todd Cooper

In your conversations with clients, especially this year in 2024 — we’re coming out of an election in the States at the time of taping this — what factors have you seen throughout this year that have either influenced or maybe slowed down customers across different segments and industries as we’ve worked through the economic issues and the election? What have you seen as either holdoffs or accelerators for growth?

Jeff Roy

I’m going to point out a couple of pretty obvious ones that are well documented and talked about pretty much everywhere. The first is that I think everyone is trying to figure out what AI means for their business and whether there are ways to drive increased automation or efficiency. Even if they’re not at the point where they’re looking to implement it themselves, the very fact that it’s being talked about so much and that there’s so much innovation happening from so many different technology companies — you look at the advancements Salesforce is making, you look at what the Googles and the Metas and the OpenAIs of the world are doing — it’s changing really, really fast. And I think that is causing a certain amount of uncertainty with CIOs and CTOs who are delaying decisions about what their technology infrastructure should look like in the future because they’re waiting to see how it plays out. That’s a pretty understandable position to be in, and it’s certainly a pretty big influencing factor.

And I think macroeconomically there’s some uncertainty around the administration change coming and how that plays out for business. You do hear that a little bit. But I think the other probably biggest factor outside of AI is that companies are really struggling to figure out what the levers for growth are. Growth is the imperative for most businesses, and for most industries it’s been a little harder these days than perhaps it was four or five years ago. I think the efficiency gains that a lot of companies were looking to achieve — getting lean — have largely been realized. Companies have gotten through that and are now very much back in a growth mindset: okay, we’ve leaned out as much as we can. What do we need to do to get back to the growth numbers we were looking to achieve at the board and executive level? So I do think people are increasingly trying to get back to a growth mindset and figuring out what it means to grow the business in the coming year.

Todd Cooper

So to that point — take us forward a year. Where do you think we’ll be?

Jeff Roy

I think the rate at which AI is changing and evolving is something I have not seen in my 25-plus year career in technology. We’ve seen a couple of major innovations — the shift from desktop and mainframe computing to the cloud, the shift from desktop and cloud computing to mobile computing. Now we’re seeing the shift to AI. And I think this change is happening faster than any of the others I’ve seen. I also think it’s probably much, much more meaningful for businesses and for individuals. It’s probably the biggest technological paradigm shift we’re likely to ever see in our lifetimes.

So I think that is going to continue to accelerate. I really do. Google’s got a really interesting Notebook LM product that somebody shared with me the other day. What we’re doing internally with Agentforce is legitimately evolving at a daily and weekly rate. So I think what will happen over the next year is this will go from the conceptual to the practical. Businesses are really going to start to implement actual agents that are doing meaningful things for their companies, automating things that were never before automatable. I think that is going to accelerate through the next 12 months.

To summarize: I think we’re going to see a move for a lot of companies from the conceptual to the practical. These agents are going to be doing real things, producing real ROI, and driving real productivity and efficiency gains versus what is right now largely conceptual and theoretical for a lot of businesses.

Todd Cooper

Yeah, absolutely agree. And it’s really an exciting time to be a part of it too.

Jeff Roy

It is. It’s just a little daunting and a little exhausting — because for somebody who’s closer to the finish line of their career than the starting line, it feels like starting all over again. That’s how significant the change is. But to your point, it’s a huge opportunity. It’s super exciting. You just have to embrace the change and know that everybody’s going through it at the same time. Commit to learning — I try to spend a couple of hours a day, or certainly a few hours every week, listening to podcasts like this, reading what I can online, playing around with new products, trying to stay on top of it. You just lean into it and recognize that it’s part of being in the technology industry, and part of running a business is being aware and keeping abreast of what’s new.

Todd Cooper

You’ve got to embrace it, like you said. And it is going to absolutely revolutionize the way that everyone does business. The sooner you can embrace it, spend time with it, and learn it, the better — it’s going to be very important for every business and every person.

Jeff Roy

Right. I think so. There’s a famous quote about technological paradigm shifts like the one we’re going through, which is that you have a tendency to overestimate impact in the short term and underestimate the impact over the long term. If you think about the shift to the internet, I think that was true. I was working during the Y2K bubble, and I think everybody got really excited really early about the implications of the internet, and that took a while to manifest. Platforms like Facebook and Google that have changed the way that we live and work took another eight years to reach meaningful critical mass. The consumer internet really started to gain momentum about eight or nine years after the Y2K bubble burst.

I think that will happen faster with AI. But I do think we’re in for a bit of a trough of the hype cycle right now, where there’s been a lot of initial interest and everybody saw the potential of what a large language model can do when ChatGPT was initially released. And I think people are a little disappointed in certain cases with what it’s actually doing for their business today. But over the next year, like I said, we’re going to see a lot of conceptual become practical. We’re going to start to see these autonomous agents working alongside human beings doing full work. And that shift from hype to reality — which took eight years for the consumer internet — I think is going to take a lot less time for AI. It’s moving that much faster. So I think over the next 12 months, we’ll really start to see that play out.

Sam Donaghey

How accessible is AI for small and medium-sized businesses today?

Jeff Roy

I think more so than probably most realize, but it depends on what you mean. AI is kind of a broad catch-all term.

If you look at the predictive capabilities of AI, a lot of those things are really achievable today. Most major software vendors have them. I think one of the first things you need to do is take stock of the tools you already own. Every company has for the most part invested in a host of different technology solutions that they’re paying companies like Salesforce for. Really knowing and understanding what’s available from those vendors you’re already working with is a big and very important first step, because there’s no need to invest in additional things until you know what you’re already getting for what you’re already paying for. There’s a lot of predictive capability built into these tools — opportunity and lead scoring, using AI to proofread emails, a lot of interesting companies in the language and copy space doing really meaningful things for their users. So I think pretty much every business could start leveraging those predictive capabilities today.

When you get into some of the more generative stuff — where you have an autonomous agent that can reason and work independently alongside human beings — that’s probably going to take a little more time, because there is some data readiness that you need to have in place in order to feel like an agent can reliably produce the outcome you want. There’s some governance that you have to put around that, and that governance is going to change from company to company. So I think there’s more work that companies need to do to get ready for this next wave of generative AI, which is largely going to be agent-based.

The thing is, leveraging a system like Salesforce inherently creates structure around your data that allows you to be more data-ready than a lot of companies realize. It’s great for generative AI to get layered on. Using Salesforce as an example, you can turn on these agents, point them to the data that lives inside of Salesforce today — like case or knowledge-base data — and then set controls using natural language to tell the agent what it can and cannot do. Setting up those guardrails is shockingly easy. I’m working with one organization where they’re implementing this technology today with a lot of partners like FSM doing these implementations, and a lot of the feedback we got is, this is crazy how easy it actually is to set up once you get in there and play around with it. Now, your data needs to be structured in a system like Salesforce for you to take advantage of that. But if it is, you’re probably closer to being ready for this than you realize.

Todd Cooper

Very exciting. So Jeff, if I’m a business owner looking at Salesforce as my CRM and potentially as a way to revolutionize my business, what would you tell that business owner about Salesforce that would really change the way they look at their decision?

Jeff Roy

I’m going to go back to my college years and when I started studying information systems, because I think there was a principle taught to us then that is very true now and is likely true for most technological changes or considerations — and that is: start with the business outcome in mind. The business should drive the technology decision, not the other way around. I’ve rarely seen people implementing new technology for the sake of implementing technology work out well. So I would say start with the business outcomes in mind, work backward, and then build the technology strategy that supports getting to those outcomes. That’s a really important rule of thumb for any business owner.

Once you’ve done that, it’ll become much more apparent where the quickest wins and highest-probability-of-success projects lie. But outside of that, I think it’s really important to look at your business processes in general and have an honest conversation about where you can drive efficiency and where there are likely productivity gains. The more time you spend in those planning stages, the better the implementation of your technology will be. And that’s the great advantage of working with a technology partner like FSM — you guys can help companies through that planning process and then guide them through the actual execution and implementation.

I see a lot of companies underinvest in the planning and self-exploration they need to go through as a business to really understand where they can drive efficiency. Intuitively, everybody will know that their systems are a mess, their data is a mess, they’re doing everything on pen and paper, they know they need to get it into a system. But I think you need to take it one step further and really map out your process from beginning to end. Here’s our pen-and-paper process today — where can a system help us automate and drive efficiency into some of this? How would we design it? Versus just intuitively deciding we need to implement a system, not going through that process, and then turning on the software and expecting it to automatically solve the problem. It requires a little more thoughtfulness and being deliberate about that planning stage.

The benefit of having a partner like FSM early is something I see companies overlook. I’ve done it myself — you intuitively know it’s a problem, you buy a piece of software to solve it, but you don’t spend the time to really think about what you actually want the software to change about the way you’re doing things today. And then you just recreate the same mess you were doing manually inside of a system, and you don’t really get the efficiency gains you wanted.

Todd Cooper

Yeah, the intentionality behind that thought process is so important. And I love your idea of starting with what you want the result to be and working backward to build that out.

Jeff Roy

Yeah, I’ll give you an example. I was an executive at a startup — the last company I worked at — and we changed from one CRM to Salesforce because the legacy CRM we were on was great software but limited in functionality. We decided we needed to move to Salesforce for integration and reporting analytics. And what we effectively did was just recreate the way our old system was configured inside of Salesforce. It didn’t really do anything differently, and it didn’t offer us any productivity or efficiency gains initially, because all we did was recreate what we were doing in the old system inside of Salesforce.

If we could have gone back and done it all over again, what we would have done is map out the entire process step by step — from a lead to cash scenario, where we’re generating a lead through marketing, closing the deal, and invoicing the customer. What are all the steps and touchpoints along the way? What would we like to change about that? And then design Salesforce to do that from the outset. Instead, we just recreated the old configuration inside of Salesforce and had to go back and redo all of that work. That cost us a ton of time.

We eventually worked with a great partner and got the implementation into a really good spot, and it fundamentally changed the trajectory of the company. But it took us a full year when it probably would have been a month or two if we’d done the heavy lifting up front.

Todd Cooper

Good point. As the company grows and you’ve got the CRM and everything in place the way you want it and things are working harmoniously — what are some of the ways Salesforce can grow with the company? As the company continues to scale, what do you see with a lot of these businesses in terms of how Salesforce grows with them and helps them grow?

Jeff Roy

Yeah. Having done startup and scale-up life — taking a company from a couple dozen employees to a few hundred — one thing I’ve learned to appreciate is that businesses inherently get much, much more complicated over time as they continue to grow. What that means is different data sets, different systems, new teams, competing interests. It’s harder to diagnose and understand what’s going on inside the business as a result.

To figure out the path to growth, what you should prioritize, where you want to make investments, where you might want to reallocate capital, cancel a project that isn’t working — whether it’s a product you’re building, a product you’re supporting, a new market you’re entering, how your pricing and packaging is working, what the customer sentiment is toward a service you offer — knowing and understanding all of that just gets harder and harder over time.

So I think one of the things Salesforce does — this is lived experience and my personal perspective — is that integrating these systems into a single view of your customer is something Salesforce is uniquely good at. We have integration layers and products like MuleSoft that allow you to take all of these disparate systems and mash them up with your account, contact, and opportunity information to really allow you to make effective decisions.

That was one of the big benefits I saw at my last company. We were flying a little blind on which markets we should enter, what we thought we should build from a product perspective, what was actually working and not working. It was hard to make true empirical, data-driven decisions. It was much more intuition and gut feel. We would go and talk to the teams, run what reports we could, but they were often very limited in what they could tell us. And there was often a lot of confirmation bias — we’d have an assumption, run a report, and look for things that just confirmed what we already believed versus being able to stress-test whether the assumption was actually accurate.

Once we were able to do that, we realized our assumptions weren’t always accurate. A really obvious example: we were selling a product internationally all over the world — online software as a service — and we realized that our pricing and packaging for certain markets was not translating to local currency. We had a lot of users in those markets as a freemium product who weren’t converting to paid customers because they had to pay in USD. In a lot of developing countries, that conversion was too high.

So we ran some simple pricing and packaging changes, marketed to those customers because we had their email addresses, and were able to drive massive gains in those markets by just adjusting our pricing and localizing it. We didn’t even bill in local currency because we didn’t have the accounting capability to do that — we just changed what we were charging in USD in those markets to make it more palatable. It seems like an obvious thing to be able to report on and understand, but like I said, these businesses get more and more complex.

Once we moved to Salesforce and were able to actually run some analysis on it, we definitively and empirically knew it was true. We adjusted our strategy, ran some simple email marketing campaigns, and drove a multi-million dollar outcome for us — which was significant. That was the result of pulling in different information sources, mashing up AWS information and our billing system in NetSuite, all into Salesforce using an integration layer, and then being able to run those reports from Salesforce once we had all of that information in the same place.

Prior to that, we had to run reporting separately in three different places and then try to make sense of it. There was a lot of internal debate about whether what we were seeing was true. Once we saw it empirically, we were able to shift strategy and drive a real, meaningful outcome.

So I think integration is a big one. Additional customization and configuration — the ability to configure Salesforce is essentially infinite, as you guys know. And we have a huge partner ecosystem. One of the amazing things about Salesforce is that our integration layer extends to the partners who build on our platform, and there really isn’t anything you need to do in Salesforce that you can’t find a partner who’s built something to allow you to do.

Todd Cooper

So, we’ve touched on this a little bit — but the capabilities in Salesforce are always expanding and growing. What is something right now that Salesforce is working on, or in the midst of, that you’re excited about? And don’t say Agentforce.

Jeff Roy

Because the whole company — the amazing thing about Salesforce is, and I would say this is part of Mark’s genius as a founder, is that he’s not afraid to make really bold decisions. Our entire company is pivoting with where technology is going. And this might sound like hyperbole, but I believe this to be true: all the ways in which we’re typically used to interacting with enterprise business applications — essentially a UI and workflow layer on top of a database, whether that’s Workday, Salesforce, ServiceNow, any of them — that is all going to change.

I think the traditional application layer we’re used to working with is going to be replaced by a natural language interface. You just ask the software to produce the outcome you’re looking for, and you no longer have to point and click or navigate through the application to get there. It’s going to query a data set in the background that needs to be structured and configured the right way, and it’s going to be able to instantaneously produce that outcome. And then you layer on generative and autonomous agents on top of that, and if they can reason the same way a human being can reason, it won’t even be a person querying that natural language interface. It’ll be an agent interacting with your information autonomously, or working in conjunction with a human being. That is essentially where we are today with today’s existing technology — and it works better and is easier to build than even I understood before I started learning more about Agentforce over the last couple of weeks.

The possibilities become wild. Imagine an autonomous agent working in accounting interacting with an autonomous agent in sales. I think there’s a world in which these agents are defined by a function and will work independently of humans and with each other. Humans are always going to be in the mix to make decisions and to oversee and provide facilitation for the agents. But it potentially frees us up to move faster as companies and achieve more. The optimistic case is that it ushers in a new era of productivity where every business, using the same resources they have today, can do way more and move way faster.

And I think that’s happening right now. There will be this agentic layer on top of Salesforce that allows agents to interact with your information — either inside of Salesforce or outside of it — and do whatever you tell them to, whatever you allow them to do, with that information.

I’ll give you another specific example of an agent I’m personally excited about. There’s a sales coaching agent we’re releasing in December — it will actually be able to take your recorded calls, study the successful ones, identify where they’re handled well, where the rep put themselves in the seat of the customer, where they had deep empathy, where they asked the right questions and prescribed the right solutions — and coach new account executives on what’s working and what’s not. Because it can study the outcomes of these conversations — did the deal close, was it a successful implementation — and all of that is tracked inside of Salesforce with the calls recorded, it can correlate those recordings with outcomes and coach sales reps on how to achieve the best possible outcome for a customer without a human being involved. That’s a huge productivity lift for myself and all my leaders. So I’m really eager to get my hands on that one.

Todd Cooper

Yeah, it’s game-changing. Agentforce on a macro level has the ability to absolutely revolutionize what we’re doing in business. It’s so exciting to be a part of this right now and to see what it’s going to do. And an example like that in terms of sales coaching is absolutely phenomenal. I’m excited to get my hands on that too.

Jeff Roy

A little daunting at the same time, because it’s all happening so fast. But everyone’s learning together. There are very few true experts in this stuff, so you just have to be kind to yourself and understand that we’re all learning together. Embrace the fact that this change is coming and do what you can to stay on top of it — without putting too much pressure on yourself to learn it all at once or feel like you know it all.

Todd Cooper

Jeff, tell us a little bit about a client that has grown their business and operations on the Salesforce platform. What does that journey look like? Where did it start, what happened in the middle, and where are they today?

Jeff Roy

This actually includes a really good non-Agentforce example, which is the advances we’re making in Slack — a really cool and exciting product that people use every day, so it’s very relatable.

The Brooklyn Nets are one of those success stories that we’ve talked about publicly. They were on stage in our SMB show at Dreamforce this year. They’ve revolutionized their business in two ways.

One is by using Data Cloud to consolidate — and I’ll try to explain this without getting too technical. One of the amazing things Data Cloud does is data harmonization. It takes me as a sports fan who’s purchased a ticket online, who’s buying something from the concession stand, who’s visiting the team website and purchasing merchandise, across all the different devices I’m using to do that — my work laptop, my personal cell phone, the in-store experience — and it learns and understands that all those multiple touchpoints are the same individual. It’s able to harmonize all those different digital touchpoints into a single profile of me as Jeff Roy, the Brooklyn Nets fan. Then it’s able to better understand my preferences, what I like and don’t like, and more effectively market to me and create a better customer experience — a better fan experience — both in the stadium and outside of it.

The Brooklyn Nets have done an amazing job using Data Cloud and their existing Salesforce footprint to harmonize their data. As an example, it could push a notification to someone who isn’t a season ticket holder but attends games regularly — if there’s unsold inventory for a game a few hours before tip-off, it can push a discounted ticket offer to fans like that person who are loyal to the team. It can make merchandise recommendations or in-stadium experience recommendations to their mobile device while they’re at the game, letting them know about a fan experience, a merchandise option, or a concession option that might be available. So they’ve harmonized all their data in Salesforce around all these digital touchpoints to create that fan experience.

They’ve also dramatically changed what they’re doing with Slack. Slack is quickly becoming the front end of Salesforce. Using both AI and our Elevate product — which essentially allows you to manage all of your opportunity, account, and contact information, review reports and dashboards, and have all that come to you via Slack, which is an interface that’s extremely easy to use and intuitive and something you’re in every single day anyway — BSE, which is the ownership group over the Nets, the Liberty (who just won the WNBA championship — congrats to the Liberty and the Barclays Center), and the Barclays Center itself, has done an excellent job of turning Slack into sort of the central nervous system of the entire business, which is in turn connected to Salesforce.

The outcomes they’ve driven with that are all about the speed and quality of decision-making and communication inside the organization. Conversations and decisions that would have taken them weeks to get to, they’re now able to make in days, because information flows through Slack so much faster. It’s much more accessible than if people had to go pull reports, add that report as an attachment to an email, send it to a group of people, and manage the responses. All of that can now happen directly in a channel — with a canvas that links all the assets, with the information directly pushing to the channel about the opportunity data, the customer data, or the report they’re looking for. It’s all stored and centrally managed in one place inside of Slack, easily accessible asynchronously as people do their work. And that’s led to a speed of execution that’s allowing them to move a lot faster and make better, higher-quality decisions.

Todd Cooper

Incredible success story. That’s literally impacting millions of people.

Jeff Roy

Yeah, they have a huge fan base. And I think the fan experience is something they’re able to better understand and curate at a very individual level — producing great fan experiences for their customers, but also driving great revenue outcomes for them as well.

Sam Donaghey

We always like to close our podcast episodes with a quote that provides some wisdom or advice to our listeners, many of whom are business owners or leaders. Is there a quote you’d like to share today?

Jeff Roy

Full disclosure, you guys told me you’d ask this question, so I did a little research and thought through some quotes that might be meaningful. I think this one is particularly relevant to the topics we’ve talked about today, in this age of AI where everything is changing and evolving really quickly.

This is from the founder of Walmart: “There is only one boss — the customer. And she can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending her money somewhere else.”

I think it’s really important that in this day and age of AI, we remember that at the end of the day, everything we do as a business is in service of our customer. Whether it’s AI or any other technology decision, we should ground ourselves in the fact that the customer is the boss.

Sam Donaghey

Well, that’s a wrap for today’s episode. A big thank you to Todd and Jeff for joining us today. We hope our listeners enjoyed the conversation too. Remember to subscribe to the podcast on your favorite podcast platform, or you can find archived episodes at fastslowmotion.com/podcast. And if you have topics you’d like to hear more about, or questions about what we’ve covered in an episode, you can send your requests and questions to us at fastslowmotion.com/podcastfeedback.