Tammy Ven Dange of Roundbox Consulting chats with Nicole Aebi-Moyo, Salesforce Consulting Partner at SalesFix about their consulting services for Not for Profit clients.
In this interview, we learn about:
- 00:19 About SalesFix
- 01:46 More about Nicole
- 03:03 What does SalesFix do?
- 06:23 Saleforce Partner – Technologist vs Partner
- 07:37 SalesFix ideal client size?
- 09:35 What makes a good Salesforce Partner?
- 11:34 Final Thoughts
- 13:44 Salesforce and Re-platforming?
- 16:06 Contact SalesFix
Links and Resources:
- More info about SalesFix
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Tammy regularly helps Not for Profits make IT investment decisions. Let her know if you need some help.
Tammy Ven Dange is a former charity CEO, Association President, Not for Profit Board Member and IT Executive. Today she helps NFPs with strategic IT decisions as an independent consultant. She does not take commissions nor sign partnership arrangements with vendors.
Video Transcript with SalesFIx (Minor modifications have been made for clarity)
About SalesFix
Tammy Ven Dange
Today I welcome Nicole Aebi-Moyo, Salesforce Consulting Partner at SalesFix. Nicole, welcome.
Nicole Aebi-Moyo
Hi, great to be here.
Tammy Ven Dange
So first of all, Nicole, for those of us that don’t know anything about SalesFix, tell us more about the company.
Nicole Aebi-Moyo
Sure. So we’re a Salesforce partner, so that might need some unpacking. But Salesforce global multi-billion dollar company develops the product, right, develops Salesforce.
And then there’s a network of partners around the world. And Salesforce is one of those. We’re based here in Australia.
My role is to lead the work that we do with the for-purpose sector. So we do work with the for-profit and the for-purpose sector. But the vast majority of our work is with Not-for-Profits, education, and government organisations.
Tammy Ven Dange
Okay. And how big’s your team? People ask me that all the time.
Nicole Aebi-Moyo
And I kind of struggle. It’s a bit like Winnie the Pooh counting the trees in the Hundred Acre Wood. You never get to the same answer.
I reckon there’s about 30, 35 of us. And we’re spread across Australia. We have a team out in the Philippines as well, and a couple of people in India.
Tammy Ven Dange
Okay, great. And are you geographically dispersed throughout Australia as well?
Nicole Aebi-Moyo
Fairly dispersed, particularly because at least two of us at the moment, not myself, but two of us are whizzing around Australia in caravans and working out of caravans. You can really say that we’re based in two main areas. Our headquarters are up in Brisbane and Queensland.
I’m based in Melbourne. Those are probably where the two biggest pockets are, but we have people in New South Wales. I can’t remember where Karen is at the moment, but yeah, we have people all over the place.
More about Nicole
Tammy Ven Dange
Okay. And so how did you get involved in SalesFix?
Look, I’ve been doing Salesforce stuff since about 2008 when I worked for a Not for Profit in London, and I just fell in love with the solution.
And then I moved to Australia and I kind of bounced around a little bit between a variety of partners, including some fairly big ones. And whilst I enjoyed the sort of the big corporate world to start off with, it wasn’t really my background. It wasn’t somewhere I was particularly comfortable.
And so after a while, I started to look around and kind of think, well, “Where will I be happier?” And SalesFix had been, like I’d been connected with Jason, the CEO and founder for some time. We’d worked together a little bit on a project together.
And I just reached out to him and there was a natural kind of coming together of values and morals really. And yeah, I’ve been here nearly five years. Yeah.
Five years to the day nearly. And that’s my second longest job ever. Right.
It feels very collaborative as an organisation, very non-profit like in the way that we work together. We’re very non-competitive. We’re very much about the organisation, the people most foremost.
So, yeah, it’s a great place to be.
What does SalesFix do?
Tammy Ven Dange
What specifically does SalesFix do?
Nicole Aebi-Moyo
If I talk about the bit that I do, that’s probably the most relevant to you and the people that might be watching this video. So I, as I say, I lead the for-purpose practise. So I kind of set the scene of where we’re going to specialise and where we’re going to focus.
So we, of course, work with a whole range of Not for Profits in particular, but our real area of expertise is in fundraising and what you might call advocacy or programme management. So we do a lot of work with organisations that work with other people. Right.
We’re not necessarily big when it comes to animal charities or, you know, sure, in the fundraising space, yes. But our biggest outside of fundraising, our biggest piece of work is really in those organisations that might deliver mental health support to individuals or work to advocate for aged care or disability carers or whatever, or even organisations that provide services to asylum seekers and refugees.
So we’re quite focused on that sort of model of service delivery and support to people.
Tammy Ven Dange
Now, you mentioned advocacy earlier, and then you mentioned some things that make me think about case management.
Are you doing both?
Nicole Aebi-Moyo
Yeah, so a bit of both. So advocacy, and that means a whole range of things to different people, of course.
Right. But specifically, case management and programme management.
If you think of organisations that might support people who are going, who are part of the NDIS, but need some support to get better funding outcomes or to contest something or somebody that might be have been a recent arrival to Australia, not only do they need that one on one support, but they might need support in a group setting or through a more structured programme to achieve an outcome like, you know, obtaining employment or learning the language or whatever that might be.
So there’s the programme side of things and then the case management side of things.
Tammy Ven Dange
And so maybe it might be useful if you can provide some examples who are some of your clients right now?
Nicole Aebi-Moyo
Yeah, sure. Oh, good question. So well, probably on a fundraising side of things, we’ve worked with the Asylum Seekers Resource Centre, Eastern Health Foundation, so a foundation associated with a hospital, BirdLife Australia, we did quite a large migration for them.
And then from a more case programme management, we’re doing some amazing work with Origin Digital. So Origin, I love what they do. They provide mental health support to young people at the point of need.
Right. So none of this waiting 12 months to see a psychologist that you sit in a room with for an hour and then you go, well, I don’t like them. You know, it’s through a mobile phone.
It’s what the young people want. Right. So we’re doing quite a lot of work with them.
We’re doing some work with an organisation that supports, I can’t mention their name, but they support recent arrivals and refugees. So quite vulnerable people. And they provide a lot of really, really careful one on one support, people who’ve experienced trauma.
So you have some very delicate information and processes that we need to manage there.
Saleforce Partner – Technologist vs Partner
Tammy Ven Dange
OK, now there are some Salesforce partners that are legitimately technologists, and then there are others that have more of a consulting bent to them. Where would SalesFit fit in there?
Nicole Aebi-Moyo
That’s a really good question. I think we’re a bit of both, to be honest. So we have what I like about the organisation is that we balance our staff between people who are like purebred Salesforce geeks, right, who have got certifications as many as they can possibly get.
You know, they really, really know the platform inside out. And we balance that with people who’ve got, you know, potentially lived experience. So a lot of the people who work in the team I lead have come out of the Not for Profit sector like me.
Right. So, they’ve worked for a fundraising organisation. They’ve worked for a case management or an advocacy organisation and usually have become accidental techies because they’ve fallen in love with Salesforce.
And so we’ve got a good handful of people who’ve come to Salesforce in that way. And so we kind of balance that ability to talk the talk, to ask the right questions, to understand the processes and then translate that into the real technical solutions.
SalesFix’s ideal client size?
Tammy Ven Dange
- And as far as your ideal client goes, is it determined based on need, size, type of charity?
Nicole Aebi-Moyo
Yeah. Do you know what’s really interesting? When I joined Salesforce, I had a day with the team I was leading.
And the first thing I wanted us to do was define our ideal client. And as I thought about this kind of workshop activity in my head, I was like, well, they’re going to come up with size and industry and la la la la. Do you know what they came up with?
They came up with kind, doing good work, nice people to work with, you know, all of these qualities. And I just sat in the workshop going, OK, this is not where I thought we were going at all.
We work with a range of organisations. We work with fairly small organisations as well medium sized and verging into the larger organisations. I would say we’re not a big four replacement.
We’re not going to work with some of the larger enterprise organisations like big universities or whatever.
But typically, it’s not necessarily the size of organisation that determines whether we’re the right fit.
We have done work with Deakin University, for example, because the piece of work that they wanted us wanted to be done was contained, very specific, very technical and needed some real rigour.
They trusted us to deliver that. So what do we look for in a company? I always say when I’m talking to somebody new, you need to find the right partner.
And it’s a bit like a dating game. It’s an opportunity for both of us to determine whether we’re going to work well together. I think every Salesforce partner has got good Salesforce people working for them.
I’m not going to say there’s another partner out there that’s rubbish. We’re all great Salesforce people, but we all work slightly differently. And you’ve got to find the right partner that has the mechanism for delivering a project that’s going to sit well with you.
What makes a good Salesforce Partner?
Tammy Ven Dange
I play matchmaker a lot in my world. I don’t do delivery projects. I might help with design, but I don’t do delivery.
So, if I was trying to matchmake you, right now, I have probably half a dozen good Salesforce partners in mind that are in the Not for Profit space.
At what point should you be a better match than someone else?
Nicole Aebi-Moyo
For me, there’s two things. One is the values that we have. And one of the reasons, one of the real big reasons that I joined Salesforce was that values are actually part of our day-to-day world, right?
We don’t just have them on our website and ignore them. We live and breathe them every day. And that helps us make decisions.
It helps us support the team. It helps us deliver good outcomes. So the values are absolutely mission critical for us.
And if you’re an organisation that’s looking for a real value match, then that’s a good outcome.
The other thing I think that sort of influences a lot how we work is on what’s called our naked consulting approach. So there’s a methodology out there.
If you haven’t looked, if you don’t know what it is, go Google it and just be a little careful with your search terms. So naked consulting is about being vulnerable, right? I mean, there’s a lot to it.
But for me, the biggest thing is about saying, hey, we don’t know all the answers. We’re not always going to get it right. How are we going to work together when things go wrong?
Because they always do. And stepping into those difficult situations and saying, hey, this isn’t going well. We need to do something about it.
Or I don’t understand that. Can you explain it to me better? Rather than sort of glossing over things and letting them ride.
So yeah, for me, the two things, Salesforce skills. Yes, we’ve got Salesforce skills. We’ve got Salesforce experience.
Sure. But the values and our consulting approach are the two things that make us different.
Final Thoughts
Tammy Ven Dange
Thank you.
Just thinking about the future, is there anything else you’d like to share, about what SalesFix is doing at the moment?
Nicole Aebi-Moyo
I think there’s a couple of things that we’re really focussing on. Obviously, AI, as is everybody, right? But with the Nonprofit Cloud, which is the newish Salesforce solution, AI is baked into it.
We’re working with a number of our clients now, looking at how we can introduce it. And what I really love about AI is that it can be to solve these really kind of fairly small, but really significant problems. And I think in the past, even six months ago, people were like, “Oh, that’s for another two or three years down the track.”
And it really isn’t. You’ve got to be thinking about it now.
So, we’re investing heavily in that in terms of staff training and knowledge and enablement and so on, so that we can be presenting these options and solutions to our clients.
Then I think the other thing that we do quite well, we have a bunch of what I call widgets, which take the standard Salesforce solution, and just tweak and adjust it a little bit.
We found over time that we were building the same thing over and over again. And we went, well, that’s a little bit redundant.
So we have packaged those things up. And as we’re working with a Not-for-Profit, if we identify a need for that thing, here you go. And we don’t charge for those things.
They help us deliver faster. They have a better outcome for our clients. So it’s really a value add that we’ve identified of saying, hey, Salesforce on its own doesn’t, you know.
Classic example is around the quest and estate management. So when somebody dies and you hear about that, the best practise is to not use their contact record to track things moving forward, but to create an estate record, right?
And use that so you can, the estate of John Smith left you $30,000, not John Smith himself, right? That’s the best way to do it.
And so we built a widget that at a press of a button will go off and do all of the work to sort that out.
Salesforce and Re-platforming?
Tammy Ven Dange
Great example.
Going back to what you’re talking about for the Salesforce Nonprofit cloud, I’m curious about that investment, because I think one of the biggest concerns that a lot of Not for Profits have that are on Salesforce now is whether or not they’re going to be forced to re-platform and the cost of doing that.
What are you finding?
Nicole Aebi-Moyo
Well, first of all, there are about 60 or 70,000 Not for Profits around the world using Nonprofit Success Pack. It’s not going anywhere. You know, Salesforce isn’t talking about retiring it; quite the opposite.
And in fact, if you look at Salesforce more broadly as a company, they’re not in the habit of deprecating or unsupporting, that’s the word, common features, right?
They support APIs going back 20 years. So as an organisation, they’re kind of committed to supporting the technology.
And 60,000, 70,000, whatever the number is, Not for Profits aren’t, you know, I reckon it’s going to be 10 years before people have completely moved off Nonprofit Success Pack.
I think the driver will be around that innovation and velocity of that innovation.
Certainly Salesforce are not, I won’t say now, but in the future aren’t going to invest as much in Nonprofit Success Pack as they are in Nonprofit Cloud.
And there’ll be some key features that just aren’t, or technically can’t be available for the Nonprofit Success Pack, particularly around that AI stuff and predictive analytics and so on.
So I think, I don’t think there’ll be a forced migration at all. I think that will be driven by the sector and the desire to move to a solution that can do more for them.
And there’ll be some organisations for whom that’s just not applicable.
Like, I play in an orchestra, we use Salesforce. I have no intention of migrating the orchestra to the new version of Salesforce ever.
There’s just no need. There’s no need for that more rounded, complete solution. What we’ve got is perfectly fine.
And that will be the case for a large number of Not for Profits.
Tammy Ven Dange
All right, Nicole, is there anything else you wanted to share?
Nicole Aebi-Moyo
Oh, I think that’s ticked a lot of boxes. Yeah, covered a lot of ground.
Contact SalesFix
Tammy Ven Dange
I think so too. All right. Well, so if people want to know more about SalesFix, where should we send them?
Nicole Aebi-Moyo
So feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn. I very rarely say no to people, but do go take a look at our website, obviously https://salesfix.com.au.
We’ve got quite a few case studies there.
I also have a newsletter inspired by you actually to kick that off. So every month I share thoughts about the sector and so on. So feel free to subscribe to that as well.
Tammy Ven Dange
Nicole, thank you so much for sharing today. I learned a lot about SalesFix and what you do. And we just appreciate your time.
Nicole Aebi-Moyo
No worries. Appreciate the opportunity. Thank you.
