Marcus Smith: Put the Task in Front of a Customer - Would They Pay for It?

Marcus Smith runs CloudTrails, a Salesforce consultancy, and came to it from industrial engineering. Asked to describe the deliverable in two sentences he needed one: long term peace of mind in Salesforce. The sharpest thing here is the test he uses to kill work, and how ruthlessly he points it at his own invoices.

Key takeaways

• The lean test. Print the task, put it in front of ten customers, and ask which lines they would actually pay for. Everything else is overhead you are billing for.
• Documentation and internal project management never reach a client invoice. They are real costs. They are not deliverables.
• Four paid-search metrics is enough. Clicks, top impression share, click-through rate and conversions. He runs a business on that.
• Platform dependence is a risk he actively engineers down. Ads pulled, a Microsoft account suspended, co-selling arrangements that shift under you.
• Data lake projects fail on politics, not technology. Clean systems stop letting people hide what was never clean.
• He capped the company on purpose. Roughly twenty-five people and one hundred and thirty customers, with no exit in the plan.

On this page

• The test that kills work
• Four metrics, and why more would not help
• Living inside other people’s ecosystems
• AgentForce and the three questions that deflate it
• Capping the company
• People, ideas and sources mentioned
• Questions this episode answers
• Go deeper

The test that kills work

You put this task in front of a customer, would they universally be willing to pay for it?

— Marcus Smith

This is a lean manufacturing habit dropped into a consulting business. Every task in the process gets held up against a customer who has no loyalty to your internal preferences. Most of them do not survive.

The uncomfortable half is that he applies it to work his own team enjoys. Documentation is useful. Internal project management is necessary. Neither is something a customer would choose to buy, so neither appears as a line on the bill.

Four metrics, and why more would not help

Clicks, top impression share, click-through rate, conversions. That is the whole paid-search dashboard for a business of this size, and he is unapologetic about it.

The argument is not that other numbers are meaningless. It is that a small company gains nothing from a report it will not act on. Four numbers produce decisions. Forty produce meetings.

Living inside other people’s ecosystems

Building on Salesforce means co-selling, partner programmes and a route to market you do not own. Marcus has had ads pulled and a Microsoft account suspended, and he treats both as the cost of the tenancy rather than an outrage.

The first word in change is no. So you roll something out new to 30 people, you hear 27 versions of no and three versions of yes.

— Marcus Smith

What he does about it is quieter than a complaint. He deliberately engineers down the share of the business that depends on any one mega platform, so that a suspension is an inconvenience rather than an ending.

AgentForce and the three questions that deflate it

AgentForce is the current thing his clients are frightened of. He has three questions that take the temperature out of the room:

1. Is your data ready? Almost never.
2. Do you know what you want it to do? Usually not in a sentence anyone could build from.
3. Are you comfortable with roughly seventy per cent accuracy while it climbs towards ninety-seven?

Very few organisations get past question one, which tells you where the real project is.

The same logic explains why data lake and extract-transform-load projects collapse. The technology works. What breaks is that a clean system removes the hiding places, and somebody in the room was relying on those.

Capping the company

Around twenty-five people and one hundred and thirty customers, held there on purpose. No exit narrative, no talk of the team being a family.

Go find something that you can do by yourself that you just have to measure and you can’t lie.

— Marcus Smith

That last line is about running for distance, and about leadership. A measurement you cannot argue with is the cheapest ego correction available.

People, ideas and sources mentioned

Questions this episode answers

• How do I decide which work to stop doing?
• Should documentation appear on a client invoice?
• What paid search metrics does a small business really need?
• How risky is building a business inside Salesforce or Microsoft?
• Is AgentForce worth adopting yet?
• Why do data lake and ETL projects fail?
• Why would you deliberately cap the size of your company?

Go deeper

Every link above goes somewhere different. These are the ones not already mentioned above.

• CloudTrails, where the Salesforce Truth Report lives. It is built from around 2,100 support tickets and covers what companies of twenty-five to a hundred people actually ask for.
• Seth Trammell on measuring content against the wrong job, which is the marketing version of the same argument.
• Zeke Camusio on why the numbers most marketers steer by are wrong.

Find Marcus Smith

CloudTrails is the place to start, and he says he is about to become a lot more active on LinkedIn. More interviews at Unscripted SEO.

Cite this episode

Smith, Marcus. Interviewed by Jeremy Rivera. “Put the Task in Front of a Customer. Would They Pay for It?” The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast, 2025. https://the-unscripted-seo-interview-podcast.castos.com/episodes/marcus-smith-put-the-task-in-front-of-a-customer-would-they-pay-for-it