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

Marcus Smith runs CloudTrails, a Salesforce consultancy, and comes at it from an industrial engineering background - designing business processes and stripping out the things customers do not pay for. Asked to describe his deliverable in two sentences, he needed one: "Long term peace of mind in Salesforce." The sharpest thing in this episode is his test for killing work, and how ruthlessly he applies it to his own invoices.

In this episode

• The lean test for cutting waste: print the task, put it in front of ten customers, and ask which line items they would actually pay for
• Why documentation and internal project management should never show up on a client invoice
• The only four paid-search metrics he tracks - clicks, top impression share, CTR and conversions - and why that is enough to run a small business on
• Operating inside other people's ecosystems: Salesforce co-selling, getting ads pulled, getting a Microsoft account suspended, and deliberately engineering down his dependence on mega platforms
• AgentForce as the current existential bogeyman for his clients, and the three questions that make the hype evaporate: is your data ready, do you know what you want it to do, and are you comfortable with 70% accuracy on the way to 97%
• Why data lake and ETL projects fail on organizational politics rather than technology - clean systems stop letting people hide what was never clean
• Capping the company at roughly 25 people and 130 customers instead of chasing an exit, and why he does not pretend his employees are family

"You put this task in front of a customer, would they universally be willing to pay for it?" - Marcus Smith on the only rubric he uses to cut waste

"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 on software rollouts

"Go find something that you can do by yourself that you just have to measure and you can't lie." - Marcus Smith on how running for distance keeps his ego honest as a leader

Connect with Marcus Smith and CloudTrails at cloudtrails.com - he mentions a roughly ten-page Salesforce Truth Report there, built from about 2,100 support tickets, covering what 25-to-100-person companies actually ask for. He is also about to get a lot more active on LinkedIn.