Budget Your Business
Budget Your Business - budgeting for every aspect of your small business - is a show for small business owners with less than $50M in revenue. If you are looking for actionable advice, practical tips, and techniques to budget every aspect of your business, this is the podcast dedicated to you. We host finance experts, subject matter experts, and small business owners to share their perspectives on planning for your business. Think of a deep dive for every part of your business and how to plan for it. Budget Your Business is hosted by Scott Geller who will share his experience working with corporations and small businesses, and guide you down the path of planning the financial future for your small business.
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Budget Your Business
Maximizing Salesforce: A Small Business Blueprint with Ken Balog
Podcast questionnaire link (Thanks!!): https://bit.ly/bybSurvey
Salesforce isn’t just for Fortune 500 companies anymore. In this episode, Ken Balog demystifies the powerful CRM platform and shows how small businesses—even those with just 3–5 users—can unlock big value. Ken walks us through how to identify your business’s biggest pain points and let those guide your Salesforce strategy. From integrating QuickBooks to managing reps and automating marketing, Salesforce can be your single source of truth—but only if you implement it right.
Ken shares why DIY isn’t the way to go here (even nonprofits get help!), how to think about licensing costs and features, and what internal team members should be involved in the setup process (yes, even your CFO). Bonus tip: want a better deal? January and July are your best friends when negotiating with Salesforce.
Book Recommendation: Entrepreneurial Transitions: From Entrepreneurial Genius to Visionary Leader by Roy Cammarano
Podcast Recommendation: Freakonomics Radio
Find out more about Ken Balog: kbalog@cloudqnect.com or https://www.linkedin.com/in/kenbalog/
There are very few platforms out there that can grow with you as a business as you grow and as you become older. Salesforce has that capability and really is one of the few that can, and the beauty of that is you learn one system, you're on one system.
Scott Geller:Hello and welcome to Budget your Business, the podcast for small business owners who want to learn how to financially plan for every aspect of their business. I'm your host, scott Keller. Today I'm joined by Ken Balog of CloudConnect to talk about Salesforce and how to plan for maximizing the impact of Salesforce for your business.
Ken Balog:Hello Ken hey Scott, how are you doing?
Scott Geller:Good, good, glad to have you on here. Thanks for joining me. Yeah, for folks who are meeting you for the first time, could you share a little bit about who you are and what you do?
Ken Balog:Yeah, I'm Ken Balog. I'm one of the partners in Cloud Connect. We're a Salesforce consulting partner. All we do is Salesforce mainly a lot of custom development work, devsecops, marketing cloud, lately a lot of their AI, which is called AgentForce, and Data Cloud and things along that end. We work with most of our clients, our Fortune 2000 type entities and above. So that includes federal, state, local governments, large nonprofits. We do have a number of small businesses that are clients as well. So we do work with a number of clients, helping them implement and get started with Salesforce and or growing it and helping them grow up. As far as my background is, I'm entrepreneurial from the beginning. Pretty much. I've either been a partner in or helped start six different companies, four successful exits and the largest one that I was part of. We grew that company to about 525 employees before we sold.
Scott Geller:Yeah, you've been around the business block a few times, Ken.
Ken Balog:Yeah, that's what the gray hair tells that.
Scott Geller:I wasn't going to say that, but okay, that's fine. Well, thanks for that, ken. And if I start at the real basics, salesforce is again. It's most basic. It is a CRM tool, but with a whole lot of flexibility in kind of what and how you use it. Am I at least starting off in the right direction here?
Ken Balog:Yeah, I mean they started off as a CRM and have enabled so much more. I mean you could literally do everything in a business on Salesforce, or one of the native applications does build on Salesforce. So we've helped one company actually do that exact thing where they started up the company and it's a mail order food type thing and literally built everything in Salesforce. They don't use any other applications.
Scott Geller:Interesting and that's exactly where I want to kind of start with this is it's very customizable, right, and you can really take in a lot of different areas. So do you mind expanding on that a little bit? Of sure, it might have started as a CRM, but what can you really do?
Ken Balog:with it. Yeah, like you said and we said, it started as a CRM or I'll call it almost a contact management system, but on steroids. You know, before Salesforce came along, people were using ACT or, you know, we were all using our gosh. What was it called now? The Palm Pilot.
Scott Geller:Oh yes, oh yes.
Ken Balog:So we were all using stuff like that. Salesforce took it to another level and allowing you to track opportunities, track the entire sales process, track as a customer, what they're buying, what they're doing, et cetera, every time you talk to them, and being able to schedule all types of things with that. So that's great. But if all you're going to do is use it as a contact management system, you're leaving 99% of what it can do for you on the table and you're paying a pretty hefty penny for just a CMS and what it can do is literally, like I said, just about anything you do in your business.
Ken Balog:You could probably run on Salesforce, from your accounting system to inventory, to services, being able to track. Say, you're a, you have an HVAC company and you want to be able to send out your people on jobs, on appointments. Well, right within Salesforce there's native applications that can literally give you the best routing as well. Your technicians, say, they take home one of the company vans every night, they can log on in the morning and the first appointment is is set up and then all the maps and everything, and it's giving you the most efficient system possible. So you know, those are just some of the examples you can do.
Scott Geller:Very, very interesting Now for me and I think for some people, hearing it can do everything can be a bit intimidating. Now as a business owner, and if I have Salesforce and maybe I'm starting off early or maybe I've been using it for a little bit at the more basic levels or CMS or CRM how do I figure out what I want Salesforce to do for me?
Ken Balog:Yeah. So I would think about it in what are your pain points right now, what are your biggest pain points, and then look at solving those. So if your pain point is bringing in new leads, you might have a marketing need. If your pain point is you just have five, six different systems and all the data is in each one and there's no cohesiveness to it, and all the data's in each one and there's no cohesiveness to it, that's a story that we see a lot, where people then will come into Salesforce and be able to migrate all of those into one platform or using Salesforce as your what's the right word? A total source of truth.
Ken Balog:So, your source of truth is really so, one system has to be your source of truth. For a lot of companies, they use their accounting system as a source of truth Not always the best, because your sales team doesn't need, and nor should they have, access to your accounting system.
Scott Geller:I'd like to confirm I agree with that one, Kim. Yeah, please keep going.
Ken Balog:Yeah. So having one system where you can have all contacts in every department of any client, prospect, et cetera, as well as be able to track leads and opportunities and all of that, that's the power that it can bring in. And then, anytime you make an update in Salesforce, that update would spread to any connected systems so you can integrate just about any platform into Salesforce. Right now I will say you know a lot of small businesses. They start off with, you know, the CMS, the customer, the CRM side of the business and quickly we'll add one of the first ones. We see a lot is a lot of small businesses are using QuickBooks. So QuickBooks has an integration into Salesforce Easy and now you're able to generate invoices. You have all of your accounting information in Salesforce as well as keeping it in QuickBooks.
Scott Geller:So you can feed it back and forth, right, so you can send the invoices out from Salesforce, but it kicks it into QuickBooks and then you can kind of pull that data from QuickBooks back into Salesforce so that you have what I'm seeing. What I'm hearing is one screen, if you will, where you can kind of see all that rather than quick jumping over to QuickBooks, jumping back to Salesforce. Am I saying that correctly?
Ken Balog:Yeah, yes, exactly. So you can do just about everything you need in Salesforce the. You know from a sales team then can, and you can have parameters put on it who gets access to what information. And so you know your sales team can be seen up to the moment, daily, of where they are against their quota for the month or quarter or however you do, and that gets fed directly into a dashboard Every morning when they log on. They can see where they are. They can see what their day looks like, what's currently in the system plan, all different, anything that got assigned to them overnight, et cetera. So management has the ability to do something. And or hey, somebody called into customer service last night and they want to talk to a sales rep. It's on your calendar for night. We were able to access your calendar, see, okay, 930 appointment is set. Here's what they said during that call. It was all recorded, transcribed, et cetera. It's all there.
Scott Geller:So if I have all these other or all these, I thought if I'm a small business, I have these other systems and I'm, you know, thinking about my pain points. Are there some that are a little easier to kind of get with, or is it truly just what is my biggest problem?
Ken Balog:To me. I always look at it as what is my biggest problem. The difficulty in starting is more getting making sure you have the right implementation partner, because while you could subscribe, get your licenses today on Salesforce and you can start using it, it's really not as valuable until you customize it to the way you do the work and to do that you need an implementation partner, somebody like a Cloud Connect or another SI to come in and help you, sit with, you understand, and really they should be part of the whole buying process. When you're interested in talking to a Salesforce rep, a lot of Salesforce reps will recommend an SI because they might work with certain ones and have for years, and it's just the way it is. Other times you can bring along somebody who you want to be your implementation partner and they can help guide you as to here's what you want to be your implementation partner and they can help guide you as to you know, here's what you want to look at.
Scott Geller:You know.
Ken Balog:So some of the for instances. You don't need to buy everything right away.
Scott Geller:Okay.
Ken Balog:Salesforce rep is going to try and sell you as many licenses as possible. That's their job. They're very good at it, they know how to pitch it, they know how to present it, et cetera. But you may not need say, marketing cloud right, you may need to get going with something else right away and then look at Marketing Cloud. Or maybe you do use Marketing Cloud along with the CRM and you put off doing a QuickBooks integration for a while. There's just certain things you need to look at and be cognizant of not spending the money on licenses that you're not going to use.
Scott Geller:Gotcha.
Ken Balog:So if you don't have somebody in the marketing department that can handle and learn Marketing Cloud, yes, you can outsource that to people like you do with us. They outsource that piece or they bring in one of our Marketing Cloud specialists onto their team on either a project basis or a staff augmentation basis and we help their team learn it and educate them over a period of a few months to a year or more, and that way their team can learn by directly working with somebody who's been doing it for years.
Scott Geller:Right Bottom line is you recommend don't do it yourself. Right, Don't take a DIY approach here.
Ken Balog:Yeah, them in. Don't do it yourself right now, don't, don't take a diy approach here. Yeah, even I mean we've got some small, small clients I mean I'm talking three, four licenses, and even they small non-profits that we help out, things like that. Even they know and they they don't try and implement it themselves, gotcha.
Scott Geller:Okay. Well, let's touch on that implementation a little bit. I decided to go with it.
Ken Balog:How long does this process take? Well, yeah, that depends on how much you want to bring in from your other systems and how much you want Salesforce to do. It can take a month, it can take six months, depends how many people All the things you're looking for it to do and replace. And during that time, it's really important that your team goes through as much pre-training as possible. One of the beautiful things Salesforce has is the Trailblazer community. You can go on there and take as many educational classes, free, on-demand classes, and you can get your certifications, if needed, or badges, et cetera. But it allows you and your team to at least get bootstrapped and if you do that, heading into the implementation and training, you're going to be that much far ahead.
Scott Geller:And if I'm thinking about, you know in my business, if I'm going down this path again, through this implementation, who should I think about including in this process within the business?
Ken Balog:Yeah, Well, part of that goes again on what you're going to be integrating, however, obviously sales, anybody that's touching sales.
Ken Balog:So if you have a customer service department or marketing department, anybody that interacts with your clients should be part of this, should be part of this. I also always try and tell clients bring in somebody from accounting, cfo or somebody there that, just so they can start seeing the capabilities of Salesforce and what it can do for the business. Because when they can see that there's these integrations for the accounting side and some of the tracking again of quotas and how the company's doing, et cetera. We have some clients that are private equity or venture capital companies and they're able to set up a parent-child relationship. So every one of their portfolio companies has their own Salesforce instance but they've created reports that are mandatory from each of them. It's all automated so it's all being generated through Salesforce and pushed up to the parent continuously, so the parent is always able to see what the child's doing and how they're doing, et cetera. And also then if, when and if they ever do sell that company, they're able to quickly take that piece and say, boom, okay.
Scott Geller:So it's almost like it's like pieces of the pie. Right, you can take this piece out and hand it to somebody else easily and it kind of disconnects and moves along.
Ken Balog:Exactly so. Again, it is extremely powerful, powerful, and what happens is for a lot of companies. You really need to make sure you're talking to a good Salesforce solutions architect who understands all the solutions that are out there, and then share with them what your pain points are and let them recommend some things to you. Sure, salesforce will do that. The Salesforce rep will bring in a solutions architect to talk to you. They're both Salesforce employees. You might want to engage a third party who can maybe direct you in some different ways. So like, for instance, salesforce runs on a February 1 to January 31st. Well, their biggest discounts you get are in January and July.
Scott Geller:Yeah, end of the year and in the middle of the year, right Before the before the before us finance folks close the books.
Ken Balog:That's right. So you know, we advise a lot of clients. If you can, if you can do it sign an agreement in January and or or July.
Scott Geller:Okay, and, by the way, thank you for for bringing your your accountant or CFO. I appreciate that. Throw out there that it Usually the last people that are brought in because they feel like they don't have any say or they don't need to be involved in any kind of IT or sales stuff.
Ken Balog:So thanks, ken. I always part back to years ago but had a CFO and his first response was always no. When you ask for money, it was always no. And then he'd be silent for a little bit and then he'd quickly come in and say but tell me why you think I should allow this budgetary something that wasn't budgeted? You know, if it went through all the budget process that's fine, you know, but if it's something different, so you got to. You know, I kind of like that, I like the no first, but tell me why.
Scott Geller:But tell me why. Yeah, give a chance to tell the story and plead the show.
Ken Balog:Yeah, and even if it's a no, at least you've now shared something, so that could be. It might be a yes at some time in the future, right.
Scott Geller:So, kate, we've touched on a couple of times around that, danced around a little bit of the cost and I'm not an expert in Salesforce but looking up doing a little amount of research, it's typically priced on a per user anywhere from 25, maybe up to $500 per user, based on kind of the level you're using. And then you start putting on the add-ins. You threw out the. I think you mentioned the marketing piece. I'm sure there's other pieces. Am I kind of getting the bright ballpark where, if you're going down this path and you have, say, you know, 20, 50 employees, you should be looking to spend several thousand dollars per month on this?
Ken Balog:Yeah, You're probably looking at. I mean, you've got at 500 a month per person. You're probably already have a lot of things in there, so you might have a marketing cloud or you definitely have some add-ons. It's not the basic system, so you've already put in some additional features at that price. But, yeah, you can be spending easily spending thousands of dollars a month on Salesforce and they have some like agent force. I never adopted a new name, Something called communities. I forget what they call it now, but it's been a few years. But I've always been a community and it's been a few years.
Ken Balog:But I've always been a community. They have some applications that are transactional, so there's a fee based on when it's used and how often it's used.
Ken Balog:I see, for instance, to $10 per month per person that has capable of accessing it Again. So if you're a small business and you have, you don't have any of your own salespeople. You use manufacturer reps. Maybe you manufacture something. Those manufacturer reps have the ability to access Salesforce your Salesforce in a community standpoint. So the licenses itself are cheaper but there's an add-on fee for them per month. But it's still cheaper than them having a full Salesforce. Gotcha.
Scott Geller:And with this investment, one is implementing it to the monthly cost. Three might be adding on to it over time. That's a significant investment, especially for a small business. Based on what you've been sharing with us, it sounds like you see the return on that. You see companies the more they lean in, the more they use it. That they're able to maximize the impact of that. Even a couple thousand dollars a month Is that the way to think about it.
Ken Balog:Absolutely. There are very few platforms out there that can grow with you as a business as you grow and as you become older you as a business as you grow and as you become older. Salesforce has that capability and really is one of the few that can. And the beauty of that is you learn one system, you're on one system, you get three updates annually included in your licensing, so you're always on the latest and greatest, and then you add in what other pieces you need to as you grow. You know so, for you know initially you might be using constant contact for doing. You know your broadcast emails and things like that. You know that's really just doing that.
Ken Balog:If you really want to tie in the true marketing and a journey of leads and clients and trying to upsell them, et cetera. That's what Marketing Club can help you do and track it all and know that, hey, this client has clients and trying to upsell them, et cetera. That's what Marketing Club can help you do. And track it all and know that, hey, this client has. You know that this client bought this and this. Well, saleswork can look at that and tell you that other clients that bought that and that also bought that. So you should be contacting them, your SalesWork should be trying to pitch them on this and it has the ability to tell you here are the things that they liked, if you've done some of that research. So knowing that the client liked something, that makes it easier. Hey Joe, you know Sally over down the street. She's using Salesforce and she has been using this too, the same thing you're doing. But she has this feature. You don't. And here's what she said about it. So that's the power of you getting a platform like Salesforce.
Scott Geller:I see I personally have not had a lot of experience with it. I've had some experience with their. I work with a lot of staffing companies with their staffing company version called Target Recruit. This has been really helpful Cam for me personally and, I'm sure, for our listeners, of how to approach this, how much it might cost really. How do you get the maximum value out of it?
Ken Balog:Yeah, yeah, and I would you know, as you're starting to look into it, ask yourself what do you want out of a platform? Just go wild, you know, write it all down and then you can parse back, Then start what is must-have, nice-to-have type things and break that list down. But yeah, I've been using Salesforce since 1999, when they started.
Scott Geller:Okay, so you've been with it for a few years then.
Ken Balog:It was funny. I met with them when they were about 30 people um in their office on in san francisco. Um, they had rented a whole floor of a building and they're only like 30 people.
Scott Geller:I'm like, yeah, a lot of space here, so we plan on growing plan on growing yeah, should have bought their stock then yeah, right, yeah, always easy to look back and play the stock market game. Well, ken, this has been really helpful, like I said, for me and I'm sure our listeners appreciate the insight on Salesforce. And as we wrap up today's episode, we asked for one to three immediate takeaways that our listeners could literally put into place in their business as they walk away. That our listeners could literally put into place in their business as they walk away. It could be something on Salesforce. Now, you've been an entrepreneur your entire career. You've worked through you mentioned six businesses, so I'm sure you've been through a few budgeting processes, so I'm going to leave this open, however you want to take it, but yeah, we'd love to hear a couple of takeaways.
Ken Balog:So, first of all, for small business, first and foremost, cash flow is king. So you've got to understand your cash flow and if you're a small business and you're selling to much larger corporations, many of them are not going to pay you on a net 30 basis, so you've got to be thinking about am I 45?
Ken Balog:Am I 60? Or are there discounts I can give if they pay quicker, etc. Because cash flow is the name of the game. So, number one, understand that. Number two I mentioned, if you can do it, buy your licenses on Salesforce in January and July or any of the other quarters is also not a bad time. Again, they're on a February 1 to January 31 fiscal, or any of the other quarters is also not a bad time. So, again, they're on a February 1 to January 31 fiscal. So think about that.
Ken Balog:There are applications in Salesforce that can immediately help you and again, this is where an SI, strong solutions architect can really guide you. There are platforms that make the implementation and utilizing Salesforce. They've gamified it so they have things that really get your people into using it. A few years ago, we helped a concrete company implement Salesforce. Through the process, we ended up doing a lot more. They tied in a number of their systems. They had an old boys network. They had reps that had been doing it for 30 plus years the same way and a lot of those reps did not want to use Salesforce. Now they look back on it and say, wow, this made my life actually easier. Again, just utilize a strong solutions architect to help you decide what you want to do gosh, I.
Scott Geller:I like those uh. The cash is king is always a good one. Thanks for the pricing recommendation on on when, when to buy and in the value of using one of those uh implementing it or architects, is really helpful. Thank you again, also like, so the ask is I enjoy a good podcast or book recommendation. Do you have anything for us there?
Ken Balog:I'm from a book standpoint. I actually listen to a few podcasts here and there, mainly when I'm driving, but I don't drive that much.
Scott Geller:You get to work from home now, right yeah?
Ken Balog:So it's. You know I definitely don't listen to nearly as many as I should, but as far as books go for the small business owner, it's an old book. It was written during the 1990s. It's called Entrepreneurial Transitions by Roy Camerino. It basically, as you read the book and that gives the analogy of your business like a child you have your infancy years, you have your toddler years, you have your teenage years, you have your adult years and it really, you know, years ago we brought Roy into one of the companies because we were growing 20% to 200% every year. Just, you know, when you're growing like that, you just try and mitigate anything really bad happening.
Scott Geller:Right.
Ken Balog:You ride the wave as long as you can ride it. And Roy came in and well, we read his book and for those in the management, everybody was like has he been in this company, has?
Scott Geller:he been watching us.
Ken Balog:It was like, it was immediately like oh my God, so Entree Round Transitions by Roy Cameranos, definitely one.
Scott Geller:I've not come across that one, but that is, you've intrigued me. That's on my list now.
Ken Balog:So I probably have. I have a copy or two lying around here, I'm sure Another one is by Bob Thede. It's leading with questions and this is something I really got into over the last four or five years, maybe maybe longer than that. Yeah, it's probably five to 10 years early in my career. I didn't ask enough questions. You hear something and you want to go run and do it, fix it or make it happen. I would encourage everybody to read Leading with Questions and any of his other books and anytime anybody's asking you a question, ask a question back to get more information.
Scott Geller:Yeah.
Ken Balog:And or to clarify stuff. Make sure you're not putting something out that's either going to hurt you or more. So I I would highly encourage his books. Uh, I've been a big fan in red mall as he keeps coming out with them all right, great well, those are two excellent examples, ken, and then, I'm sure, one podcast is freakonomonomics. I love.
Scott Geller:Freakonomics yeah.
Ken Balog:I just have always been into that. Read the first book eons ago.
Scott Geller:Yeah Well, this has been great, Ken. Where can people maybe find out more about you in case they have a Salesforce or entrepreneurial interest?
Ken Balog:Yeah, feel free to contact me at Cloud Connect. It's C-L-O-U-D-Q-N-E-C-T and it's K first initial last name, k-b-a-l-o-g, at cloudconnectcom. Feel free to email me there. You can also, on LinkedIn, find me. I live in the Richmond Virginia area where we're headquartered, and I'm sure you'll be able to easily find, especially if you search Cloud Command.
Scott Geller:Well, thanks for joining me today, Ken. It's been a real treat.
Ken Balog:Yep Enjoyed it, thank you.
Scott Geller:All right, folks, that's it for today. If you liked the show or found something useful, text somebody right now and say, hey, listen to this podcast. I recommend See what you think and get back to me and hopefully they can benefit from something from this show as well. I'm Scott Geller and I hope you join me next time for Budget your Business.