Matthew Frank is the Director of Technology Evangelism over at Blackthorn.io. In this interview we share some mutual opinions and experiences on evangelizing technology, especially Salesforce, and the impact it can have on the community.

Being a natural showman, he came into evangelism easily and combined it with a love for marketing. He puts the customer at the center of every project he does. 

Tune in to hear more from Matthew about his vast experience and what his current role looks like, including various aspects around event management.

Show Highlights:

• Why learning Apex is key to getting into the Salesforce ecosystem.
• How Matthew found his way into marketing.
• What Blackthorn.io does.
• What Matthew does day-to-day in his Director role.
• His unique perspective on the beginning of the pandemic.
• What he’s learned about how to host successful virtual events since the pandemic began.
• How Salesforce can help you improve your attendee experience when you host virtual events.

Links:

• Matthew on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewlfrank/
• Matthew Trailblazer: https://trailblazer.me/id/mfrank12

Episode Transcript

Matthew Frank:
When I was in college, I was still very focused on broadening my mind from a liberal arts perspective. That meant, studying sociology, popular culture, religion, what really at the end of day, what made people tick?

Josh Birk:
That is Matthew Frank. Director of technology, evangelism over at Blackthorn.io. I’m Josh Birk, your host for the Salesforce developer podcast. And here on the podcast, you’ll hear stories and insights from developers, for developers. Today, we sit down and talk with Matt about his experiences in technology evangelism, including event management and other things like the pandemic and getting COVID and all sorts of fun stuff. But we are going to start, as we usually do, with his early years.

Matthew Frank:
So, when I started my career in the early 2000s, CRM and cloud technologies were still very new. At least in the nonprofit industry or in the education world where I was working. And so, I was dealing with a lot of these very old, one premise, put it in the back of a dusty closet systems and hope to Yoda or whatever it is that you pray to, that there was a Cat5 cable to plug it into the wall. This is bringing back terrible memories from those people. And, with each progressive role that I had, vendors would come and go and they’d say, “Oh, well, if you’re managing 30 different classrooms, we’ve got a great classroom management technology.” Or they’d say, “If you need to process tuition payments, we’ve got a great tuition processing technology.”

Matthew Frank:
But it never spoke to each other. None of these pieces of kit were designed to work in tandem with each other, to provide the user with an overall view into who they were working with and what their data looked like. I had to learn Crystal Reports, which to this day, I still love Crystal Reports. I know that’s a weird thing to say, but the control you had was fantastic.

Josh Birk:
Back in the day, there was basically no second place. If you really wanted advanced reporting, you went with Crystal.

Matthew Frank:
Exactly. And it was great. In 2005, I was on top of the world with that. But, with each new piece of kit, each new vendor that came across my desk, I started to resent the technology that I was presented with, because it wasn’t moving things forward. It was just accommodating more work arounds. And I started to learn, “Oh, there’s this thing called Salesforce and it has a bunch of different open APIs that we can connect to. And oh, you can build custom objects. And oh, an object is like a data table. Okay. I can build all these things together.” Workflow rules, process builder. So, I had reached a point where I actually wanted to start building my own apps on my own on Salesforce. And then, I realized there’s a whole partner ecosystem out there and got a job with a partner that worked in the nonprofit industry and haven’t looked back ever since.

Josh Birk:
Gotcha. True story. I worked for a startup, which was sort of like an early… It was going to be like an early cloud vendor play. The idea was that, you could store doctors’ credentials in the cloud effectively. And so, you could make it easier to move from job to job and hospital to hospital, this kind of stuff. Really scrappy startup. It was me and two other people who had just lost their jobs in the Dot-com bust and one week we couldn’t figure out why our application is just so slow and the network is so slow and we’re just not getting anything done. Well, it turned out that the… Kind of going back to the terrors of being attached to that Cat5, the servers that we were using belonged to the law office that our employer had borrowed space from and somebody had converted one of the servers into their. I believe… I try to keep the show not too blue, but I believe it was their porn FTP server.

Matthew Frank:
Nice. No.

Josh Birk:
And, that’s what was killing all of our traffic. So, there’re various reasons to embrace the cloud format when it comes to application development. That’s a very strange one, but that’s kind of my version of the, “I hated the back office server”, kind of thing.

Matthew Frank:
And you would think, that industry is typically very forward thinking with technology.

Josh Birk:
Right. Exactly. Yeah. But apparently not the lawyer’s assistance or whoever.

Matthew Frank:
No. Not at all.

Josh Birk:
Who we accidentally busted in the investigation that follow. Not our intent guys. We were just trying to get a [inaudible 00:04:43] done. So then, how… Okay. I have a couple follow ups there. How did you find learning the programmatic side of it? Was Apex your first programmatic language? Or did you have other things to kind of build off of that?

Matthew Frank:
No. Apex was the first one.

Josh Birk:
Wow.

Matthew Frank:
I dove into the deep end when I came to that. And, by no means what I consider myself a proficient developer. And that’s not my role and that’s really not where I’m going with my career. But, having a functional knowledge of Apex and a functional knowledge of the programmatic side of Salesforce was… It was sort of eyeopening to me. I got it a little bit with Trailhead, which is a fantastic tool. And like many people have said on this podcast and others, it was their gateway into learning all there is about Salesforce. But, until I sat down with a few people who were product managers and developers and sort of saw the ins and outs of what a dev console was and how you could use it effectively, I didn’t realize the power behind it. And to this day, one of the first things I tell people who are entering into the Salesforce ecosystem is, learn Apex. It will change your life.

Josh Birk:
Yeah. The number of times… And this is before. There’s a lot more we can do with flow and some things like that. I’ve been able to go into an org and just fix something with three lines of Apex. Like, force this data change onto something like that. And that’s a dangerous power. But, if you know how to have it responsibly and you have that in the back of your head, it can save you so much time. Even just as an admin, as long as you’re a little bit comfortable with that debug console.

Matthew Frank:
Oh, totally. Totally. And in my experience, I like building things using declarative methods whenever I can. Especially, because I work a lot in the nonprofit space and I volunteer quite a bit with smaller scale organizations that may not have the technical bandwidth or even the personnel to support a lot of code on the back end. But, sometimes it’s just easier to write two, three, four lines of code and get it done.

Josh Birk:
Yeah. This is why I’m both dangerous and when I have system admin approval and an org, but also kind of regret it when I don’t.

Matthew Frank:
Well, have you ever logged into an org and all of a sudden you realize everyone has system admins in there?

Josh Birk:
Yeah. Which is also why I would make a terrible admin. Because, I’ve created a few of those works. Anyway, next question.

Matthew Frank:
Next question. Not reliving those nightmares.

Josh Birk:
Exactly. So, I think I’m hearing this a little bit. But, because I was kind of… The question I had in mind at first was like, when did you first get into marketing? But it kind of sounds like, you’ve always been headed in that direction, that you’ve kind of had this holistic, platform development, customer concept as you’re moving forward. So, was marketing something you kind of sought out for? Or was it just something you just grew into?

Matthew Frank:
I grew into it. It’s interesting. My sister went into marketing and PR deliberately and she’s fantastic at what she does. If you ever see any of those, she’s a contractor with a department of transportation for the federal government. So, if you see any really cool like, “Don’t drive while you’re high”, that’s her agency. So, she’s really good at that. But, we’re also very competitive.

Matthew Frank:
And so, I actually started off in customer support. And then, as I got proficient in Salesforce, got proficient in the different apps that I was supporting, I realized that the company I was at, “Oh hey, we don’t really have any success management or account management going on.” So, “Okay. Why don’t I just sort of slip into that role?” And then it was, “Oh. Well, we don’t really have enough SEs to support you in account management or success management.” So, I learned how to demo products and configure them and write customizations on the backside of it. And then from there, it was, “Okay. Well now you’ve sort of outgrown this solutions engineering role, what’s the next logical step?” And that was product marketing.

Josh Birk:
Gotcha.

Matthew Frank:
Where I was able to take a lot of the different aspects of solutions engineering, customer success, account management and demoing, which was actually my favorite part of being an SE and sort of flip it on its head and take the RFP side out of it, which made me so happy.

Josh Birk:
So, that’s kind of fascinating to me. Because, I feel like we have parallel but different routes to evangelism itself. Because, I went the hardcore programmer consultant, the guy in the room who can explain tech without making people cry kind of thing. And then, just sort of flip that into evangelism, which has a lot of those same verbs. I just don’t have to… It’s instead of 12 month long project, they’re three week long projects and the other. And instead of having to hide all my code, because somebody now owns it, I get paid to show all my code. So, it was pretty easy transition. Sounds like you kind of had that, almost that exact same thing, but you were constantly going down that consultant aspect of it. Like, talking to the customer, talking to the account, making sure that the experience is right. And then, flipping that over to the advocacy evangelism part of it.

Matthew Frank:
Yeah. That’s exactly right. So for me, it was always, how can I put the customer at the center of every project that I’m doing? And, I’ve always been a bit of a showman. I play a little music, done some cooking stuff. And so, evangelism has that aspect to it and it sort of fell into my lap a little bit more easily, than say going down a dev route, would at least for me, because it would’ve been a little bit of a left turn.

Josh Birk:
Yeah. I remember one of the earliest pieces of advice I got when I was doing workshops. Quentin Wall, who is probably taking pictures and I don’t know Peru right now or something like that. I don’t know how he made a career, but I believe that’s his passion at this point. But anyway, he’s like, when you watch people talk to audiences, you’ll hear some and they’ll sound like a teacher. And what you want to do is, hear somebody who sounds a little bit, at least a little bit like a showman. Give them that little sparkle, give them that little sizzle. And first of all, they’re going to have more fun. And second of all, they’re probably going to remember what you’re saying. And that always stuck with me like, “Yeah.”

Matthew Frank:
You know there’s a term for that, right?

Josh Birk:
What’s that?

Matthew Frank:
Edutainment.

Josh Birk:
Yeah. Well, what I often tell people when I’m coaching them for speaking is, if you’re having fun, your audience is probably having fun.

Matthew Frank:
Completely true.

Josh Birk:
So, get that good feedback loop in.

Matthew Frank:
Yeah.

Josh Birk:
Tell me a little bit about Blackthorn.io. What does the company do?

Matthew Frank:
That’s a great question. And, thank you for asking. So, Blackthorn is an ISV partner of Salesforce. We have a number of apps built natively on two Salesforce itself. They’re all available in the app exchange. They have engagement at the heart of what they do, and that engagement lives in a bunch of different avenues. So, we have our events management tool, which is possibly what we’re most known for. So, that’s everything from meetups and chapter events, courses and classes, all the way through to large scale conferences. You could even run a world tour on there if you really wanted to and that would all be native to Salesforce. There’s payment processing, which is our first and oldest app. And that leverages a really deep Stripe integration, authorized at that PayPal integration as well as about a 100 plus other gateways, if we really wanted to.

Matthew Frank:
And, it’s everything from billing and subscription management to Stripe checkout, incorporation, payment schedules, you name it. And again, all of that native within Salesforce. So, you can do all of your output reporting, your general ledger reporting, transaction management, accrual accounting, all of that inside of Salesforce, which is a game changer for a lot of finance teams. And then, we have an SMS app for text messaging and communications with customers, members, students. But, it’s built to surround our payments and events applications. So, if you want to have really good communications with people while they’re on site at a conference or texting them confirmation codes, check in, QR codes, those sorts of things, that’s really what it’s built for.

Matthew Frank:
And then we have a data compliance app and this is the simplest, smallest app that we have. But especially for data compliance officers in the world that we live in, where there’s GDPR, there’s the California Data Protection Acts, there’s one in Canada, Australia, New York has a new one and there’s about six or eight other ones that are working their way through state legislatures right now. This allows you to detect and either delete or mask data, before it even enters into your Salesforce org and provides you with a report of what that data was, so that you know how to tackle that problem going forward and you can see if it’s systemic. So, really we’re trying to connect companies and their constituents through engagement tools via Salesforce apps.

Josh Birk:
Gotcha. Okay. So, I think we pretty much talked about this. But very specifically, how would you describe your day to day job?

Matthew Frank:
Evangelism is one of those really funny ones. But the way I view it is, I get to create a space in the Salesforce ecosystem where we can have a baseline level of excellence to have a conversation about engagement applications. That’s how I think of evangelism, at least from a Blackthorn perspective.

Josh Birk:
Gotcha. Now, almost anybody I’ve ever interviewed for an advocate or evangelist role, one of the things I’ve warned them and I’m going to throw this over the table and see how you react. One of the things I’ve always warned them is, if you expect a nine to five job, this not the role for you.

Matthew Frank:
No. Oh man. I’ll give you an example. Today… So, I’m based out of Denver. So Mountain Time, love it, got my Rocky mountain high going on. So, I started today at 5:00 AM. Well, because I normally start at seven and I start East Coast hours, because we have people all over the world and I just want to sure I’m available. But, I’m going on a trip to Europe to meet with our partners and customers and various countries very soon. So, I wanted to coordinate with our local team in the UK, just to make sure everything was [inaudible 00:15:51].

Josh Birk:
Got it.

Matthew Frank:
I then moved directly into doing some competitive analysis and doing some sales enablement with our growth team, which is part of our revenue division. That then moved into another podcast recording. I promise it’s not a competitive podcast.

Josh Birk:
We’re all one big happy family.

Matthew Frank:
We’re all one big happy podcasting family. It then moves into content developments. So, I’m writing different pieces for different outlets, larger scale blogs like Salesforce bend, but also some smaller outlets too. I’m working with you now. And then, I actually have some live presentations with a partner in Australia and another in New Zealand that I’m doing tonight. So, I’m working from basically five to about 9:00 PM and that’s a fairly normal day in this. Because, if you’re trying to do evangelism in a global reach, you have to be available when people are up.

Josh Birk:
Yeah, exactly. And, it’s one of the things I’ve loved about doing this podcast. But at the same time when you’re in India, you’re in India.

Matthew Frank:
Exactly.

Josh Birk:
I’ve told people, you’ll have also days where, maybe you get the afternoon off. Maybe you don’t have those crunch and then you’re going to have days where you, one of the other lines I’ve been famously repeated for is, you’ll have days where success means you just got to change your zip code. You spent the whole day just moving your bags around and you ended up in X, Y, Z, wherever X, Y, Z is.

Matthew Frank:
Yeah. Aren’t those days or weeks where you’re living out of a suitcase super fun?

Josh Birk:
It depends on where and how. There were always aspects. I think that my most grueling travel years was when I was doing the workshops. Because, I would have two to four cities in two to three week period kind of thing. And for one thing, they were never monotonous, even though it was the same material, over and over again. But every crowd was a little bit different kind of thing. But at the same time, it’s like, when you’re stuck at the motel six, three miles from Houston proper kind of thing and there’s absolutely nothing to do after the event. So, it has its ups and downs.

Matthew Frank:
It does.

Josh Birk:
I think I’ve always said I like traveling, but I still hate airports.

Matthew Frank:
Well, that’s… So, airports are the worst part of traveling. I know we’re going to go… This could go into a weird little aside on all of this. But, it’s not being on a plane. I don’t mind that. It’s not being on a train. It’s the process of getting through an airport, it is soul sucking. It is.

Josh Birk:
Yeah. It really is. They’re designed for airplanes. They’re not designed for people. And they remind you of that. I don’t know how the architecture does it, but the architecture reminds you, you’re not the important part here, which is… Yeah. Totally. Well, speaking of traveling. So, March 2020 was… 2020 was an interesting time. I still remember the day I woke up, went to my laptop and had True North dreaming keynote for my morning, which had been canceled, I think two weeks before or I canceled on them, honestly. I can’t remember who won the tag team at that point. I think it was all inevitable. What was your early reaction to the pandemic?

Matthew Frank:
So, I was living in England at the time.

Josh Birk:
Oh wow.

Matthew Frank:
Yeah. So, my wife and I started to see the wave of COVID sort of coming across Europe, country by country. And in February, we actually had went on a small vacation down to Portugal, because at that time they hadn’t even had their first reported case. Of course the day after we got back, they were like, “Oh, Lisbon is a wash with COVID.” So, March was really interesting. One day, we knew that we were going to have a lockdown at some point, but we didn’t know what day it was going to be. And then, Boris Johnson gets on TV and he’s like, “Hands, face, space. That’s it.” And starting on Thursday, everyone in your homes. So I got on the train, went to my office, asked my boss, “Hey, can I bring home this computer monitor? Can I bring home this and the other?” And they’re like, “Yep, because we don’t know when we’re coming back.” And, maybe that was a difference in messaging. In the UK it was, “You’re going home and you’re staying home.”

Josh Birk:
Right.

Matthew Frank:
So, I heard from friends here in the US that they were like, “Give it a couple weeks, enjoy your time at your house, get through your DVR.”

Josh Birk:
Yeah. Unfortunately like so many things in the states, it was very much a patchwork. I have to give Salesforce props for the early days, weeks and months of the pandemic, that very quickly moved into this weekly, all hands meeting with executive leadership, which was this dial tone of, “Here’s what we know about the pandemic and here’s what we’re thinking about”, kind of thing. And honestly at the time, it was more reasonable conversations than I was getting from anything else.

Matthew Frank:
Right.

Josh Birk:
And then the other thing, it was like no nonsense. It went from no travel and that was March to go home. They did not mince their words, they did not mix their messaging and they went right for it. And, I think it really helped a lot of people early on to have that strong leadership kind of thing.

Matthew Frank:
Yeah. I’m a little envious of that. Just because of my personal situation, it wasn’t that definitive. Especially when I was on a work visa in another country.

Josh Birk:
Oh God. Right.

Matthew Frank:
Well, we actually were brought back in April 2020. So, about six weeks after lockdown started, maybe seven, we were told, “Hey, you’re coming back.” So, after three canceled flights in four airlines, I was on a British Airways flight, 787 jumbo jet. So, big plane, 16 passengers.

Josh Birk:
Wow.

Matthew Frank:
And we were spread out.

Josh Birk:
I was going to say, that’s like a sci-fi movie right there.

Matthew Frank:
It was crazy walking through Heathrow airport, where everything is closed and you were the only flight out of that terminal that day. It was like, being in… Do you remember that movie, 28 days later?

Josh Birk:
Yeah.

Matthew Frank:
It was like that minus the zombies. But at every point, you fully expect the zombies to come out.

Josh Birk:
Totally expect the zombies. Exactly. And since we’re talking pandemic, how would you rate your recent COVID experience?

Matthew Frank:
Four out of five stars, Josh. I was very lucky. In that for me, it was a relatively mild case. But, my wife and I caught it at overlapping times and we had very, very different symptoms. It was not an experience I’d like to repeat. Certainly losing my taste for a week was not great. And, I think I may have mentioned this to you before we even started recording, my brain went to, “Okay. Astronauts also lose their sense of taste when they go to space, because clearly I think I’m qualified to be an astronaut.” And what they do is, they put Siracha and hot sauce on everything and that’s how they taste it and it makes it really good. I’m like, “Well, I have a bunch of hot sauce on the fridge and let me just stick that on there.” I didn’t taste anything, man. I just burnt my tongue.

Josh Birk:
Yeah. A solid strategy though. It makes sense. Just painful.

Matthew Frank:
Yeah. How was your recent experience with COVID?

Josh Birk:
My recent experience, I was lucky I did not lose my sense of smell, other than my normal lack of smell, because I have chronic seasonal allergies. I’m allergic to cats. I live with two cats. Obviously, I’m qualified to be an astronaut too.

Matthew Frank:
Seems like you might be making a rod for your own back there.

Josh Birk:
Little bit there. And, the way my wife would describe it is that, she’s like, I just have to… I eventually have to say, we have to talk about your narcolepsy. Apparently, I would just basically collapse on the couch and just start snoring and just fall asleep. So, I was sleeping 10 to 13 hours a day and not voluntarily. I couldn’t say like, “Okay, I’m go to bed earlier. I’m going to go to bed later.” Now the body just did whatever the heck the body wanted to do. So, one out of five. Do not recommend.

Matthew Frank:
Do not recommend. Service was poor.

Josh Birk:
Service was poor. So, the food tasted terrible. So, have you started getting engaged with people having to learn, because of what Blackthorn.io does with your events planning and all of that kind of stuff? Did you see a lot of shifts or any lessons learned moving into the virtual world of events?

Matthew Frank:
Oh, huge. So, especially for those organizations that we work with that hosted conferences with lots of different tracks and lots of different sessions that overlapped one another or there were competing sessions, that was a huge learning curve for the industry that we worked in. And, when I was working for nonprofits, part of what I did was event management. And, you get used to that on a conference stage. So, you’re going to have an admin track, a dev track and a sales executive track. And, there’re going to be four different periods throughout the day, where you have four different sessions that are offered and you can go between the different ones, but really they’re designed for who you are. Well, that whole world went away when you started to plan things digitally. You wanted to really streamline the process, keep people looking at a screen in a way that kept them engaged. So, how do you incorporate different aspects of an admin and a dev track together, so that you can have both of those audiences seeing content that is worthy of both of those audiences.

Matthew Frank:
And then, how do you incorporate polls, questionnaires so that nobody’s just staring at a screen and they become disengaged. It’s that old saying about television, turn on, tune in and dropout.

Josh Birk:
Yeah.

Matthew Frank:
People were doing that with webinars too. Zoom fatigue became a real thing very easily. So, it was all about how do you encourage engagement while keeping the sessions themselves at a manageable… What’s the word I’m searching for?

Josh Birk:
Like, making them consumable.

Matthew Frank:
Yeah. Really. It’s making them consumable, keeping them in an amount of time that’s more than bite size, but less than a lecture.

Josh Birk:
Right. And, did you find that a specific… We tried a lot of different things when it came to timing and format, but the lean was always like, “Go smaller, go shorter, go quicker, go snappier.” And I think it worked. But, did you find like a duration slash format change that was far more effective virtually?

Matthew Frank:
Yeah. So early on, Blackthorn like everybody else was trying webinars. And so, first it was an hour webinar and then it was a 45 minute webinar and then 30 minutes and 20 minutes. And starting six, eight months in, we realized people don’t want to sit through webinars anymore. And, internally we started to recognize that as well. So, we started crafting content a bit differently where we created bite size chunks. And these are all over our YouTube page as well, where we tackle a single topic, either go at a very high level or go very deep. But the goal was to make it in under five minutes. So that, somebody could get a taste of a topic that was important to them and then communicate back of, “Okay, but now I still have questions on A, B and C and we could go a little bit further with it.” But we found that, videos that were between 90 seconds and about five minutes really hit the mark, especially if they were in a series, maybe you put up them out on Tuesdays and Thursdays for a month.

Matthew Frank:
And, you were talking about how you create better flows for the month of February. And, that really worked for us and I’ve seen it work for several other organizations within and without the Salesforce ecosystem.

Josh Birk:
Got it. And, this is probably the one question I could have started with, and then just let you talk for 20 minutes. So with that, with the change of experience, with the change of the customer experience, can you highlight some specific ways that Salesforce can kind of help keep the viewer slash attendee at the centerpiece of everything?

Matthew Frank:
Yeah. So, Salesforce has this great thing called the app exchange. I don’t know if your listeners have ever heard of it. And, Salesforce does a lot on its own. It allows you to keep track of contacts, accounts, blah, blah, blah. And it’s really good at putting the constituent, whether that’s a member or a student or even a purchaser at the center of its data structure. But what it’s not necessarily good at on its own and that’s why I brought up the app exchange at the beginning is, providing engagement tools with constituents whom you want to keep involved with a certain process, webinar, what have you? So, in addition to looking at webinar integration tools, so you can track who signed up for this particular session or this one-on-one conversation and attribute that to a campaign and then you can do touch points. And what have you in your sales cycle, we also found people were bringing in document generation and surveying tools, So they could ask questions along the way.

Matthew Frank:
Or, they could prompt people with certain talking points or interest points throughout those different conversations or meetings. We also saw a really great uptick for those customers of Salesforce that are using experience cloud, where they’re using Salesforce CMS and embedding video content throughout, that they were using tools from the app exchange that allowed you to insert calls to action or jumping off points or deeper dive information points within those videos, and then allowing you to come back. So again, making what is normally a one way interaction, a two way interaction. So that, the consumer is able to take advantage of it. And the great part about doing this, whether it’s adding interactivity to videos, gamifying a webinar experience or even just finding a way internally of adding that confetti to the end of a path, when to a record, it was little things like this that we all learned along the way that really helped make Salesforce a platform for engagement throughout the pandemic.

Josh Birk:
Right. I love that particular example, because I can’t remember the first time somebody’s like, “Well, of course we have to have confetti when you completed a medal or a trail.”

Matthew Frank:
Of course. Right?

Josh Birk:
Of course. And it’s like, it does actually go back to some of the early design concepts of Trailhead because, one of the things I kept telling people was like, “Go play Pacman.” What just went into your head. It was Waka, Waka, Waka, Waka. Because, Pacman was designed around sounds that kept people engaged with playing. Because, that once you stop chewing those little pellets, you hear silence. And you don’t and the brain is like, “Wait. I want my pellets.” How about safety cloud? We’ve got VAX and mask policies, which are still changing. When we first started planning trailblazer DX, we had our sites on one whole set of policy and everything had changed by the time we actually went to show, “Have you worked with clients using safety cloud to move back into the real world?”

Matthew Frank:
Yeah. To a degree. We have… A lot of the customers that we’re working with, they’re really making that transition very slowly. Back into the live world of events or meetings, partially I think because they’re being advised to, by whoever is their risk manager or their legal services. But, there was a good amount of time there, where different states had different travel regulations. So, someone from… This was actually a great example. Last year at Tahoe Dreaming, one of the great dreaming events that we support, that takes place at the Harrah’s that’s in South Lake Tahoe, it is the backside of the Harrah’s, [inaudible 00:33:15] the California border. But the hotel itself is in Nevada. So, there were Salesforce employees who couldn’t attend that event or just people who worked in California who couldn’t attend that event, because the hotel crossed the state line.

Josh Birk:
Gotcha.

Matthew Frank:
So, there was a lot of different confusion when it came to that. But, for those of our clients and customers who are using safety cloud and different work.com pieces that were part of it as well, they were able to create a series of protocols that allowed them to dip their toes back into a little bit of event management, maybe people coming back to work, maybe opening if they own their buildings or they have spaces in their buildings where they could have different sessions with clients or what have you.

Josh Birk:
Gotcha.

Matthew Frank:
Maybe opening one room at a time and sort of experimenting and seeing how it was going. But the fact that they were able to do that on Salesforce, have those entry credential QR codes that they could automate and do multifactor credentials, that was really big for them. Because, they didn’t have to create all of those different protocols, create all of those different action plans from scratch. They were able to have a baseline to start that conversation and then configure it or customize it based upon their specific business needs.

Josh Birk:
And that’s our show. I did ask after Matt’s favorite non-technical hobby and it’s actually one of my personal favorites.

Matthew Frank:
Oh, I’m a cook man.

Josh Birk:
Nice.

Matthew Frank:
Yeah. Which is great, because I love my wife and she is way smarter than I am. She has many talents. And when she listens to this, I hope she hears me say all of this at the beginning. She can’t cook.

Josh Birk:
I will edit accordingly. Yes.

Matthew Frank:
He says that everyone, but he’s not going to edit a word out of that. I love cooking. That’s my yoga.

Josh Birk:
Got it.

Matthew Frank:
So, some people do that to relax, I cook to relax. So, I have cookbooks that are new and old, some in English, some in other languages, which can make things challenging, because the only languages that I’d speak are English and bad English.

Josh Birk:
I want to thank Matt for the great conversation and information and as always, I want to thank you for listening. Now, if you want to learn more about the show, head on over to developer.salesforce.com/podcast, where you can hear old episodes, see the show notes that have links to your favorite podcast service. Now, we are still running into a few COVID related pandemic problems when it comes to the production of the podcast. Turns out, when you’re trying to run a weekly podcast, taken effectively a 12 day nap is not exactly recommended. However, we’re hoping to keep the show going on weekly. If we do go on hiatus, don’t worry. It’s only going to be further week or two. So at the very least I will talk to you soon.