Episode 5: Launch, Launch, and Relaunch with Dan Darcy

Read full transcription…
Sean (00:02):
Welcome everybody to our fourth edition of How I Launched This. Today, I am pleased to bring to the big stage Dan Darcy. Dan currently is the Chief Customer Officer at Qualified, a rapidly growing, fast growing ISV in the Salesforce ecosystem. They specialize in customer engagement, specifically web to lead engagement and improving conversion rates. CodeScience is a Qualified customer. We’re big fans of their mission and what they’re doing in the marketplace to help their customers.

Sean (00:37):
And Dan has recently joined over after a very long and successful career at Salesforce. So when I asked Dan to join me today, not only did I want to learn about what’s happening at Qualified, but also wanted to leverage his many, many years of experience launching products at Salesforce and what he learned over that period of time.

Sean (01:02):
If you’re not familiar with Dan, you might have seen him before. He’s been on the big stage at Dreamforce for many, many years. He worked for Marc Benioff directly as his personal sales engineer, as they would think about and create new offerings and bring them to life and iterate on the solutions in the marketplace. So he’s a super talented individual. Dan and I have known each other for many, many years. And, Dan, I can’t thank you enough for joining us today and giving back to the overall community. So welcome to How I Launched This.

Dan Darcy (01:35):
Thank you, Sean. And it’s great to talk with you again, of course.

Sean (01:39):
Awesome. So I think maybe the first question on everybody’s mind is, how the heck did you become Mark’s SE? And before we might want to answer that question, give us a little bit of background so the audience knows who you are. What’d you study in school, what’d you think you were going to be when you grew up, and how the heck did you find yourself presenting in front of like 30,000 people for a few years year, over year, over year?

Dan Darcy (02:02):
Well, I mean, I’ll start with school. I went to Santa Clara University, local Bay Area, great Jesuit college. I studied marketing there. For a while I thought I wanted to be an architect because I just love being creative and thinking through bigger visions, which is funny that then obviously lends itself towards software. But I found myself at Salesforce, luckily through a friend. The CEO right now of Crunchbase, his name is Jager McConnell. He’s the one who reached out to me and says, “Hey, look, I know you can do this. Think about this.” It was a product marketing role back in the time. And he said, “Hey, I have a role open on my team. Why don’t you come on over? And let’s see what you can do.” And so I was lucky enough to get the job through a lot of Jager’s coaching and I owe a lot to Jager for that.

Dan Darcy (03:03):
And in terms of how I got to be with the big man, Mr. Benioff, it just happened to be just randomly one … I mean, I’m sure he’s seen me presenting at what was Cloudforce Santa Clara way back in the day. That was like our biggest event back in 2008, where like 1,000 people showed up at Santa Clara. And I think he saw me present a demo, and I think from that point on he tapped on my shoulder to present to a specific customer and build out a demo for him, and then it went from there.

Sean (03:42):
Awesome. Well, starting off in product marketing specifically at Salesforce is one of the hardest skillsets to do well. I have done multiple webinars on that and throughout my 10 years of helping is that that is a really hard skill set to get right, so I very much appreciate that craft in the storytelling that goes involved in it.

Sean (04:07):
When we were doing our prep, I had asked you, “Hey, can you maybe think about a theme that you want to showcase?” And you didn’t even hesitate. You were like, “Let’s talk about launch, launch and relaunch.” And really, what you were trying to articulate is you never get your market fit right the first time. It takes iteration and practice. Could you go a little deeper on what you mean by that and how you actually applied it in the real world?

Dan Darcy (04:39):
Yeah. I mean, you hit on it just right away. Storytelling is really, is an art and a science at the same time. And I think if you think too much on a story, then you can really get lost and convoluted in the story. So one of the key factors … and gosh, we’ve launched, I don’t know, hundreds of products at Salesforce and features and whatever it is, you name it. Everything is a product, if you treat it that way — everything is a story. Everything has a story. And how do you perfect that story?

Dan Darcy (05:21):
Like I said, there’s a science to it, but then once you launched it, it becomes an art, and really that creative storytelling aspect to it. So that’s why I’m like, the biggest key lesson that I’ve always taken away, and I still espouse to a lot of folks that I work with is this launch, launch, relaunch factor, and really trying to help craft the storyline.

Dan Darcy (05:45):
And a real world example of that is just once you launch something, it’s not just let it go and forget about it. It’s a living and breathing story that you need to then understand the feedback that came from the audience that you were trying to talk to, and then incorporating that feedback into the storyline and then re pitch that to another audience member.

Dan Darcy (06:09):
And you when you think about Salesforce, we always talk about stakeholder engagement, stakeholder theory, where it’s like what do our employees think? What do our customers think? What do our partners think? What our investors think? Really getting that mix of those different audiences and personas of when you’re trying to pitch whatever product you’re trying to pitch and incorporating that feedback so it really encompasses this higher-level messaging is really important. And you don’t get that by just doing it once and letting it go. That’s why I said it’s like launch, launch and relaunch, get it up to a great point. Let’s launch it, let’s see how it goes. And then keep incorporating that feedback over time.

Dan Darcy (07:02):
We talk about Dreamforces and you see all of the “perfection” sometimes that people like, how does Salesforce do it onstage? Well, I mean, there’s a lot of hours of really launching those products over time. Whether we launch it to a set of 12 customers in a room, or we launch it to a smaller conference or we launch it to a third party conference and we just try new messaging and new things. And sometimes we’ll be like, “Oh, that didn’t really work. It missed the mark,” or, “That was awesome. Let’s hinge on that message and narrative, and really then bolster that when we get to the big stage.”

Sean (07:52):
And part of the thing I took picked up on is some of the world tours were designed to go in advance of Dreamforce. So you could do a lot of trial balloons and test a message, and/or test a product and get that real-time customer feedback. And then they kind of became too big. So you had to make an adjustment and maybe go down in smaller groups.

Dan Darcy (08:15):
I mean, yeah, exactly that. And even, I know I was talking about the different personas and the perspectives of the audiences that we were working with, but think about the geographic messaging as well too. A message that works in New York is different than Atlanta, than Chicago, than San Francisco. And then London, I mean, think of it internationally. Then APAC, areas like Sydney or Tokyo. And so that’s where when you battle test this messaging and you take it on the road, per se, it’s super fun to see how the message evolves. And then that, it’s your point. That’s why we had these world tours was our testing grounds and the at-bats before Dreamforce, the big stage where we focused everyone’s eyes on it, 30,000 plus, and 1 million plus people online. It’s just, it’s pretty awesome.

Sean (09:13):
Okay. So we’re locked into the theme for this discussion. Thank you. I think it’s exciting to go a little deeper on. Let’s talk a little bit of an idea gets started, or maybe it’s a relaunch of a product or maybe sales is doing really well with a solution and you want to really highlight it at Dreamforce. Walk us through a couple of things. One, what was the process to get it elevated to your and Marc’s level, and who are the team members involved that brought that idea to life? I think if we can help the audience think about here are the key team people to pull in on a launch, and here’s why, they could get a lot of value from your experience.

Dan Darcy (10:03):
Look, to answer your question outright, everyone is involved in the process of really thinking about this. And when we sit in a room before these big events, I mean, we plan these things even at the beginning of the fiscal year. We’re like, “What’s going to be our message for Dreamforce, and/or what’s going to be our message for whatever conference this may be?” That question is put out there into the universe amongst product managers, product marketers, the sales leaders, I mean, the marketers, everyone is involved in this, including Marc himself. And one of the things I’ll say that I really loved, it was a huge lesson for me that I learned from Marc and George Hu, who’s the COO of Twilio, was this message around staying relevant.

Dan Darcy (11:00):
What’s happening out there in the world? What’s the overall higher level message? Where do we see our customers focusing their energy on? And it really does revolve around what the customer is feeling. For example, when artificial intelligence came out everyone’s like, “Well, gosh, I don’t even know what that means, because it feels like a very loaded term.” So how do we define what AI means for our customers and how is Salesforce then staying relevant with where the market is going and bringing our customers into the future with AI. And that’s where we launched Einstein, and thinking through that.

Dan Darcy (11:39):
But in terms of like, who brings that up? I mean, it’s definitely a team effort across the board. And then obviously you have the different teams quarterbacking, like product marketing would help quarterback a lot of the launch messaging and really driving this along, getting the right feedback and making that all happen. But it’s definitely a team effort. And it doesn’t just appear out of nowhere. It’s like we have to be intentional with that meeting and bringing out that conversation. So, I mean, like I said, it could happen anywhere.

Dan Darcy (12:15):
Sometimes it even happens with our customers. Us being on the road a lot, we’ll hear our customers say these certain terms and things over time. And then all of a sudden we’re like, “Well, what do we think about this? How do we bring that into Salesforce? We’re hearing this on as a theme now amongst our customers.” So even the customer is involved with how we think about launching whatever the latest messaging or product that is coming to market.

Sean (12:42):
Got it. So the team’s assembled, you start locking in on an idea and you start elevating one that you’re going to do a demo with, with Marc on a stage. And in our prep conversation, you then shifted the conversation and the focus. You were like, “Marc really would then narrow in on, A, designing the narrative and then locking down on one message he wanted to present with you together, not multiple messages.” And that was a core tenant. That was impactful for you, and I’d like you to [crosstalk 00:13:23] back why.

Dan Darcy (13:24):
Yeah. It all starts with the one message because then everything that we create, the content, the conversations, the whatever it is, whatever it is hangs off of that one narrative. And how does it keep tying back to that? So for example with Einstein, let’s just take that AI example that I was leveraging. There could be a ton of different messages of whatever the angle would could be. But once we hinged and we tested the messaging that was out there, we found that one narrative in one message. And then what we would do is we would build the slide deck to tell the right story. And that would hit at the heartstrings and drive the right level of motivation for our buyers to move towards AI, to then take advantage of like, “Hey, here’s Einstein new for everyone today, and talk to us about how you can incorporate this into your tech stack.”

Dan Darcy (14:31):
Once the deck was built, then we would also build a demo and showcasing exactly that storytelling aspect of, what’s a day in the life of how Einstein would then help enhance and make you a superhuman in your everyday life through Salesforce CRM? And that storytelling would come out in the demo. And then we would do a video working with a customer, and we’d find a customer that hits on that same message, and then they’re telling it a different way.

Dan Darcy (15:08):
And we subscribe to the philosophy of, you have to hear something seven different times in different ways for it to really sink in as like, where do you think the world is going? And yeah, I mean, that’s a prime example of just … and it was awesome to just see this in action, because sometimes I would work with the video team and like, they’re like, “Show me what you’re doing from a demo perspective and how you’re telling the story. Wow, that’s awesome, let me see how you’re doing it with the customer.”

Dan Darcy (15:37):
And I’d see the customer like, “Okay, well, how do I incorporate their talk track and their thought process into my demo as well?” And then we would do the same with the deck, and working with Al Falcione, who is the SVP of corporate messaging for Marc for a very long time. And we would all collaborate on really telling the same story that really hit the same message. And so it was really great when it all came together.

Sean (16:04):
One of the arts and disciplines of product marketing is taking a proactive and definitive position. And once you do that, you lock in on a message. You just decide on one, everybody then can get behind that and iterate. If you don’t do that step, it gets confusing and blurry and people can’t go faster. So it’s super important to take that step. It might be the wrong step, and that’s okay. Sometimes Salesforce has launched a product when it wasn’t even a product. They’re like, “We’re just going to iterate on the message and we’ll figure out and refine the product downstream as well.”

Dan Darcy (16:44):
Yeah, and we would do that same exercise of making sure the message was in sync, even if the message was not the right message for the market at the time. And then we would take that feedback and then rebuild everything again and tweak it and then relaunch it again. So launch, launch, relaunch. If there’s one takeaway from today’s podcast.

Sean (17:05):
Awesome. And so then it would get to Marc, and Marc’s no easy critic. You talked about in our prep call how then he would take all the work and he might change it to up-level it, the message to the CEO or board level. Spend a little color on that process, because that’s a unique skillset in and of itself.

Dan Darcy (17:29):
I mean, absolutely. I mean, you think about our daily lives and how we spend our routines doing the things we’re doing, and sometimes the messaging that we’ll create or the things that we do is very tactical. It really does solve the need and it’s right. It’s just too tactical and it’s not strategic. It’s not going to hit at the heartstrings of the CEO. And how I was talking about this earlier, when we were talking about the different personas, like employees, customers, there’s different vectors to all of this, partners, shareholders, not only do we have then geographic, New York, London, Sydney, we also have industries, the industry message.

Dan Darcy (18:18):
Then you also incorporate the personas. Sometimes as a product marketer, you’re trying to sell to the VP of Sales or the VP of Service. So your messaging really hits there at that point. But Marc is always like, “Well, if we’re pitching this, we’re pitching this to the CEO. And so the CXO, and you’re not thinking big enough.” And that was always one of the … for the Salesforce folks who have worked closely with Marc is that was always the biggest thing, is it was always the Marc, “Are we thinking big enough,” factor, and is our messaging big enough really to hit at the heartstrings at the CEO, the CXO level?

Dan Darcy (19:00):
And so Marc just has an incredible way of really speaking to everyone and upleveling the message. And so I will always challenge and say there’s this message of the five whys, where if you keep asking why you dig down into like, exactly why the thing is. I would say the ask the five, are you thinking big enough, five times. And keep going bigger and bigger and bigger, and hopefully you’ll land in the space that where Marc thinks, so.

Sean (19:35):
Very interesting. Okay. So that’s the background, and kind of sets the table nicely. So then we get into what I’ll call the decisive moment of the conversation and a pretty big decision point for you and Salesforce in general, and that was back in 2010. You guys brought this little thing known as Chatter to life, and it was new, it was very early and there was a little bit of players in the segment, but it was an entirely new thing wrapped around a CRM or wrapped around sales and Service Cloud.

Sean (20:16):
And I remember the time trying to figure out what the heck we were going to do with it. And you picked this as the one to highlight in this conversation. And I think it is a great way to tie everything back of terms of, you have to launch something, you have to pick a narrative, you have to lock on a message and you need to get customer and customer feedback. So I think I recall you were prepping for not only that, but also in parallel, a meeting with a company called Toyota, and you guys had to come up with a meeting for that, a theme for that meeting and a message. This concept of Toyota friend came to life. Where the heck did that incubate from?

Dan Darcy (21:02):
Yeah. Yeah. So gosh, think back 11 years. The world was going social, Facebook was becoming a hot new tool. Twitter was becoming a hot new tool. And I mean, if not hot already. And if you think about it, why could you do and keep in touch and connect with all of these people in your social personal lives, but you couldn’t really do that in your business life, and forget extending beyond just people. What if your data, your records could be talking to you and could tell you when they’re updated or that a certain thing needed to happen with an account. Thinking about your accounts, contacts, and opportunities in a sense chatting at you.

Dan Darcy (21:59):
And so I’ll first start with Chatter because I think it was such an interesting paradigm shift for people in the industry at the time. And inside of Salesforce, CRM, Sales Cloud, and Service Cloud it was just, you had your username. Mine was D Darcy and it was there, but what if we were to put a picture next to a username, and all of a sudden we had a profile and we can conversate inside your business application around a particular object or record, or an account, or an opportunity that we’re trying to work on. And all of that is tracked in one location. That obviously is now not a foreign concept for everyone, but back then it was such like a, “This is crazy. There’s no way this is going to happen.” And I remember-

Sean (22:52):
Why would you do that? Stupid.

Dan Darcy (22:54):
Yeah. Why would anyone want to do that? And so Marc was so passionate about this, and rightfully so, because I mean, talk about a person before his time. I mean, fast forward to today where Salesforce’s intent to acquire Slack is happening. And then he even just mentioned in the news, he’s going to re factor everything to be a Slack first mentality. And that’s really like, conversational inside a company is the now the new operating system. Definitely a man before his time in really thinking through Chatter.

Dan Darcy (23:34):
And we didn’t know at the time, to your point around this whole podcast, what we’re talking about, we didn’t know how to position this. I think we had … we did. We did. We had ideas, but this, it was a prime example of launch, launch and relaunch, because when we first launched … and I think some of the things, and this is the stuff that we learned along the way. We didn’t really get any customer feedback or have the lead up into Dreamforce about the messaging, because this was such a secret project.

Dan Darcy (24:06):
Internally it was called CSN, Corporate Social Network, and we didn’t know what to do with it. I mean, we did, but you know what I’m talking about. It’s just, we didn’t want to let this out. So our very first initial, I would say, we showed it to a few customers beforehand to get some basic positioning, but never in broad audiences. And the very first time we launched this was at Dreamforce. And we called this the Facebook for the Enterprise. And I think a lot of people at the time didn’t really understand it. Again, the same thing, everyone was like, “No, there’s no way your corporate life is going to go social. It’s a time waster. It’s not the right thing to think about. Whatever. How do you do this?”

Dan Darcy (24:58):
And yeah. I mean, we launched it, and then we took that on the road and we still had smaller feedback sessions and we refined the message. And it’s funny, to this day, and I remember talking to you about this in the prep session, I remember a customer — it was extreme validation at a top company that I can’t mention. He was like, “I remember when you guys came and pitched Chatter to me for the first time, I thought you guys were crazy, but now I see the way. And I totally understand. You guys, I mean, this is why Salesforce is magical. You’re bringing us into the future of that key message.”

Dan Darcy (25:35):
And so we launched Chatter. And then one of the things I’ll say is one of the very first bigger customer pitches was with the CEO of Toyota, Toyota San. And this story is also mapped out in Marc’s Trailblazer book. And it’s where at the time Toyota was a little bit trying to relaunch their brand because they had some issues with some of their cars and the brakes failing. And obviously that caused a lot of great shame to the CEO of Toyota, Toyota San. And he had to go before Congress and apologize. And obviously in the Japanese culture, that’s a huge shameful thing. And so he was open for a new way of thinking and an innovation.

Dan Darcy (26:31):
And so Marc called me one night and he was like, “Dan, we need to build a demo to the exec team of Toyota. They’re coming to my house and I want to show them the way, and I want to incorporate social, and I want to think about how, not only can their company be social internally with their employees, but how their cars can be social and how can their cars talk to the network, and how can their cars chat. Like, ‘The tire pressure is low,’ or, ‘There’s gas stations close to near here.’”

Dan Darcy (27:14):
And again, think back to 2010, the internet of things did not exist. And how did cars chatting on a private social network where all of a sudden you as a Toyota owner like you, Sean, you have a Toyota, your daughter has a Toyota, your son has it, your wife has a Toyota. Then you log into this portal or this community where it’s your own community of your cars talking to you. And then you taking advantage of the cars, and then imagine dealers in that community as well. You can conversate with the dealers in that private community, just for you and your family of cars, right?

Dan Darcy (28:00):
So that was just such a huge foreign concept. And we built this demo out showing like how, not only can their employees, Toyota employees really take advantage of Chatter and stay connected with Chatter, but their cars also being social. And your car is your friend. It is not your enemy that’s going to kill you, it is your friend. And your friend wants to conversate with you saying, “Hey, I need my tires filled,” or, “The brakes are lowering. We should get this replaced,” or whatever, engine lights, whatever that may happen, whatever data was coming off of the car Chatter could then capture those signals and events and then surface it up to the owner.

Dan Darcy (28:46):
And again, it was such a great, innovative, thoughtful thing that Marc really, really thought about. And that’s where I had an incredible team of SEs and product marketers helped me build out the demo and we presented it to Toyota. And that was something that came … obviously it takes time for that technology and all to catch up, but we’re seeing it happen now in this day where our cars are talking to us.

Sean (29:14):
11 years later, I buy a Toyota in December and have Toyota Connect. And it does a lot of those things for me, right from my phone. I can lock it, unlock it, start it, all that cool stuff that didn’t exist, but that was early, early launch of that. And-

Dan Darcy (29:33):
Sorry, going back to the launch, launch, relaunch, we relaunched that that story of Chatter really embedded into Toyota as a customer story, and that’s where also people started understanding that a lot more, right? And that was the next Dreamforce. So this is, again, we’re relaunching Chatter in what we call the social enterprise at the time. And I know we had talked about that. It’s like that social Enterprise, that Toyota is becoming more of a social company and connecting everything together so that we can have the right conversations.

Sean (30:09):
Yeah. And that was, I wanted to close off on. that became the incubator for relating an individual customer back to the broader theme, broader message, which is you have to create a social enterprise of your products, your employees and your customers to just create better solutions into the marketplace-

Dan Darcy (30:31):
And your partners. And your partners too, right?

Sean (30:33):
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And that definitely was impactful for me once I got my mind around it as well. I started executing around it, and ISV started investing. They liked it. They wanted to be part of that story and mission. And really spotlighting that I think is super, super cool, Dan, so thank you for walking us through that.

Sean (30:59):
I wanted to highlight too that just because Salesforce goes into a space, doesn’t mean it’s perfection out of the gate. And it also opens up opportunities. So Slack as a company wasn’t even founded until 2013, and a good specialist, just in that area, look what they’ve created in not only going public, but a massive acquisition by Salesforce, all of eight or nine years later. And it shows how important that is of that type of technology, that segment, as well as it opens up opportunities for others to add tremendous value.

Dan Darcy (31:38):
Yeah. I’m excited for Salesforce and us as an ecosystem, just because of thinking through the power of Chatter, the best of Chatter and the best of Slack really coming together and bringing the best of both worlds. It’s just going to open up a whole new world, and help Marc honestly realize his vision of what he’s had in his head for a while.

Sean (31:59):
Yeah. Amazing. So Dan, you’re onto a new journey. You joined the Qualified team, your teamed up back with Craig. In your new role, what do you focus on? How are you trying to make an impact? Give us a little color there.

Dan Darcy (32:14):
Yeah. Look, I think in terms of Qualified.com, it’s really fun. I’m having some of the best times I’ve had in my career. My job is really focused on the customer success side of the house. So everything post-sales and really making sure that our customers realize the true value in ROI of the tool that they’ve selected with Qualified. And so for the folks who are listening, what Qualified really does is helps turn your websites, especially in the B2B space, into a true selling machine and revenue asset by engaging in the right conversations.

Dan Darcy (33:01):
If you think about your website as your digital storefront and people are coming to your website, I mean, in the traditional model, like for a lot of marketers, they drive a bunch of traffic to the website and the goal is for them to complete forms. Then you put them into … you either respond to them or put them in a nurture campaign, and then they get back to you at a later point. Why not engage in the conversation with the visitor who’s on your website at the moment in time that they’re there by saying hello to them and engaging them and finding out whatever, the info that they need.

Dan Darcy (33:36):
And so that’s where Qualified is able to help really help our customers connect with their customers in a really a whole new way. And just engaging in that conversation and being right there and driving more Qualified leads into the funnel. So it’s pretty awesome. It’s pretty awesome.

Sean (33:56):
How big is the team?

Dan Darcy (33:58):
So, we’re about 50 folks right now, continuing to grow. We just announced our series B led by Salesforce Ventures, and it’s a pretty huge vote of confidence. We’re purpose built for companies who use Salesforce and more specifically Sales Cloud. We take advantage of all of the routing rules and all of the target accounts and really respect all of that sharing and routing in Qualified so that when a visitor hits your site and you know it’s a target account, boom, everyone in the company knows that this target account is on your website. You should be engaging in the conversation. So it’s fun.

Dan Darcy (34:43):
I mean, and I’m having a blast. It’s fun to be part of the ecosystem. Now, it definitely was a difference in leaving the mothership, but I love all of my Salesforce friends and family. As you know too, Sean. Right. And just really being here. It’s still one big Ohana. It’s awesome.

Sean (35:02):
Well, Dan, thank you very much for sharing and giving back. I hope this discussion inspires the next entrepreneur to take a leap or then maybe the next Chief Product Officer or product marketing team to think a little differently, think a little more strategic, think a little bigger about solving cool customer problems out there.

Dan Darcy (35:23):
And thank you for having me. And it’s great to see you again, Sean.

Sean (35:27):
Take care, Dan.