In this week’s episode we’re joined by Sohail Sikora, Salesforce CTA and Founder of December Technologies. In the episode he shares insight into his early career and the 14 years he spent with Salesforce itself. Sohail explains the roles he played in that time, explains his involvement in the foundation of the CTA program, and what his own CTA experience was like.
He describes what he saw in the very best Salesforce professionals he worked with when he was the Vice President, Services Lead, a role that saw him oversee hundreds of Salesforce specialists. Finally, Sohail talks about his current business, December Technologies and the problems they are solving. He discusses why there is a need for vertical CRMs in regulated industries, why he isn’t building on Salesforce, his approach to building a team, and what he is most excited about for the future.
You can follow Sohail’s journey on LinkedIn here:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/sohailsikora/
Check out December Technologies here:
https://www.linkedin.com/company/techdecember/
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We hope you enjoy the episode!
Ben (00:01.858)
Sohail, welcome to the show.
Sohail Sikora (00:03.874)
Thanks for having me, Ben.
Ben (00:05.346)
My pleasure. I’m really, really excited. Thank you so much for joining us and taking out the time to chat. I’ve got a lot of questions, you’ve got a really interesting career. You’ve done a lot, seen a lot and been around the ecosystem for a long time. But I always like to look backwards and start at the very beginning. So, where did your interest in IT come from and what did your education and early career look like?
Sohail Sikora (00:29.79)
The interest was, I wouldn’t say forced, but was brought to my attention. Both my parents were bankers in India and they were part of the early modernization of the banking system and they were both selected to introduce computers into the bank that they worked for. And I remember my father coming home one day and saying, “you’re going to learn how to use these things because this is what’s going to run everyone’s future”. It was the summer of seventh grade and he signed me up for these computer lessons which were starting to take hold in India. And I only went because all of the classrooms and the labs were air conditioned and you could spend from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m, and when it gets to 120 degrees in summer in India where I came from, trust me, that was the best place you could be, so very basic motives to learn computers, which was the air conditioning. But we know one thing led to another. And then I did some extra work on computers during my college years and undergrad years. I did some freelance work, jobs, et cetera. And then after I graduated, that seemed to be the only path forward. I originally wanted to be an Aerospace Engineer. And when I did not get an acceptance into an Aerospace Engineering program, that door was shut. And looking back, I’d say it was a smart decision.
Ben (02:07.301)
So what did you study?
Sohail Sikora (02:09.622)
So I actually studied a Bachelor’s in Electronics, so that’s what I did. It was an undergraduate program where we mostly studied things about AC, DC motors, transistors, things of that nature. My final semester elective was actually in radar systems, which was a godsend for me because I used to love aeroplanes and then to have an elective that allowed me to study how radar systems work was great. I enjoyed every moment of it. But as with any EE program, there was a fair bit of programming involved. And we had a final semester paper which had some level of programming. Pascal, I believe, was a language that we used back in the day. And so one thing led to another. I did some extra computer work during my undergrad years, I learned how to code in C, C++, 4GLs like Dbase, FoxPro, et cetera. And it seemed to be the only option after I graduated.
Ben (03:17.55)
So your first role was as a Programmer, that was your move into the workforce?
Sohail Sikora (03:22.65)
My first role in my life was actually as an Instructor teaching people how to program. And it’s something that I’ve held very near and dear to me for all my life. I love mentoring and coaching and teaching because I think it helps you learn and get better. Even today if I’m teaching someone something, and if I’ve taught something in a certain way, someone will ask me a question that will force me to take maybe a 15th look at the same problem, then I might come up with a new way to solve it. So it’s something that I’ve always loved doing. But that was my first role. My first role was actually working for this firm in India where we built computer curriculums, capitalising on the boom that was taking a hold in southern India for computer coaching of all, you know, types.
Ben (04:23.31)
So then how did you transition into, I guess, I’m presuming that would then move into a delivery focused role in your career?
Sohail Sikora (04:32.571)
I was an independent consultant slash Developer for a long part of my career. I would say almost until I started my employment at Salesforce, I was actually somewhat of an IC slash independent contractor. I learned a lot of things along the way, Java and a lot of AI technologies is a platform called C Beyond, which a lot of people who came from that time know about it, but I don’t know if people remember it anymore. And all of the boom in the app servers like WebLogic and WebSphere and so on, I learned how to run those platforms, operate them. So for a long time, I would say up until mid 2006, I was an independent contractor slash consultant, doing a lot of hands-on development, design. In fact, my contract role prior to me starting my career at Salesforce, I did development, design, production support. It was the closest thing to a full stack Developer slash DevOps person that you could think of. And I don’t think DevOps or full stack was actually a term back then. But that’s what we did. Like, I worked for a car manufacturer as a contractor under the guidance of a more senior resource and a couple of additional like you know temp staff org resources. We pretty much ran the entire integration platform for this car manufacturer here in North America. It was a lot of fun. You know, I mean, your day could be writing code, talking to the business or you know, doing production support at night. You know, I’ve done weird stuff like, you know, cut over from WebSphere to WebLogic or deploy, you know, new JVMs on Red Hat Linux and learned a lot, the nuts and bolts, so to speak, so.
Ben (06:37.178)
So if you look back at your early career now, are there any lessons or moments that you think kind of set you up for success?
Sohail Sikora (06:47.567)
I would say obviously my father recognising that computers were going to play an oversized role in my life was definitely one of them. The second one was, a friend of mine brought me into a job, I would say my first year of undergrad, like the summer after the first year, where we would go door to door selling a new brand of soda that was being launched in India. So that taught me, I mean, it’s like 120 degrees and you’re going literally from store to store trying to convince them to stock your brand. And the deal was that for every 10 crates of soda that we purchased from the distributor, we got 11th crate free and that was our margin basically. So, we would sell 11 crates but pay only for 10 and then we would divvy up the money. That taught me a lot actually. I would say that taught me the importance of, there’s a time in everyone’s life where you focus on learning, not so much on what you get out of it in terms of money and things like that. I probably lost money on that job because I would take an allowance from home just to fill gas in my motorbike and stuff like that. And I don’t think I ever paid my folks back that money. So it was not a very well-run P&L, but it definitely taught me the value of, going door to door and grinding it out. In fact, it’s something that evolved into me, when people would later on in my career ask me, what’s your secret for a long career? I was like, yeah, you can be brilliant, but most people actually make long careers out of attrition. Like you really need to have the ability to last it out there if you want a long and a fruitful career. If you’re going to pack it in, I know this is an Asiapac podcast. I’m going to use a cricket term. I think careers are like test matches, right? You really got to dig in for the long haul. It’s not like a 2020 game of cricket, which is done in a couple of hours. So I think those are two big things that I learned from my early career which I continued. On my first job I actually learned a very important lesson in life. The job that we had was with the startup with the education and the person who was running that startup had finished his Master’s in the United States and come back to India and he was a big fan of Stephen Covey and Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, things of that, you know, the book. And the one concept that I took away from that and I hold dear to my heart even today is, you know, the circle of influence versus the circle of concern. So I try to always focus on things that are within my influence and not really worry so much on things that are concerning, but not something that I can influence. It’s wasted calories in my opinion, so I think that’s a good lesson for anyone at any stage of their career. Right. It’s a, “what can you control? How can you control it?” And there are so many factors that you can’t control.
Ben (10:00.000)
And back to your cricket analogy, you are going to get a few ducks throughout your career, right? But it’s about staying resilient and keep plugging away until you get your next century.
Sohail Sikora (10:17.011)
Oh absolutely. I mean, the best of them bat at what? Like a 52, 53% average, like that’s like just a little over one in two shots. I would say most people with a decent middle management career are probably doing much better than a 52% average. So, you know, as far as sporting analogies go, I’d say, yeah, that’s very accurate. You’re going to get a few ducks in your life. You’ve just got to come back the next day, show up the next day, and keep going.
Ben (10:55.85)
Absolutely. So when did when did you first hear of Salesforce?
Sohail Sikora (11:01.626)
I would say mid 2006. I knew what CRM was because I actually worked on the CRM and integration platform for a car manufacturer here in North America. So I understood the concept of CRM, and I kind of knew a little bit about Siebel CRM, which was like the de facto standard at that time. But I had not heard of Salesforce until one of the recruiters reached out to me and started talking to me about this new company and they have professional services and they want to expand into the enterprise. And they felt that my knowledge of integration with web services and backend systems would be valuable. Plus the fact that I had some domain level knowledge, like I understood what a lead meant, for example, you know, you didn’t have to explain that to me. So they felt that it was a good fit as their enterprise team, consulting team was getting ready for growth. That’s when I first heard about Salesforce. I’m a first generation immigrant from India, I came to the United States to work on an H1B visa. And so I had some visa status things and really my first meeting I told the recruiter, “I’m sorry, I can’t even talk to you right now. Maybe call me back in four months or if my situation changes, I’ll call you back”. And sure enough, like my paperwork moved from one step to the next in two and a half months after our first conversation. So I called him back and said, “hey, my situation has changed and if you guys are still interested in it”, he was like, “yeah, absolutely, we’re still interested. Nothing’s changed”. And that’s when I first heard of them and followed along a series of interviews before I accepted my offer.
Ben (12:53.466)
So what was it that attracted you then? Because obviously, I guess at that time, there would have been lots of different companies out there hiring, lots of different options. I guess the concept of what Salesforce were looking to achieve would have been different to what a lot of companies at that stage were looking to achieve. So did you see it as an amazing opportunity or was it just another job at that point? And was there an element of risk to it, I guess?
Sohail Sikora (13:18.71)
I don’t think there was an element of risk there because I was being hired to do more of what I was already doing, which is integration, backend systems, make a CRM platform, talk to the core systems backend and things of that nature. But I really didn’t know much about Salesforce or Silicon Valley or San Francisco or startup culture. I’d say I was, and it probably worked somewhat in my favor and somewhat against me, as in I was completely ignorant of, you know, how to approach this. But what really interested me was the interview process didn’t seem to be overtly focused on, can you write like this weird algorithm to do something in Java? I’m like, I don’t see how I’m actually going use that in my daily life, right? I had spoken to a couple of other firms. One firm was like, “write a Java program to figure out how many different phone numbers you can create from a phone keypad”. I’m like, “I don’t know, what’s the function here? Because I know phone numbers are not generated sequentially”. I had worked for a telco in my life prior and I knew how phone numbers get assigned. So I was like, “this doesn’t actually make any sense”. But Salesforce was not like that. They were very focused on how I can, they were really focused on my, you know, EAI and systems integration work. And that was something I was very comfortable with. So it just seemed like, you know, a good thing to do. And I mentioned visas. I had gotten to a point where I was like, I’m going to try and maybe focus on my career, and if things don’t work out and I have to go to a different geography, Australia, New Zealand or you know, somewhere else, Singapore, I think Salesforce was just getting ready to start an office in Singapore at that time. It was a really attractive proposition for me, Canada. I was like, if I’m not going to get my green card here in the United States, I might as well be with a company that has some international exposure. That way, I could probably just go, like relocate to another one of their offices and continue building my career. That actually was really the big driver for me to take my first job, the job at Salesforce.
Ben (15:51.966)
And so you were hired, so integration was your kind of niche at that point. So you were hired as a Developer?
Sohail Sikora (15:56.334)
No, I was actually hired in the role of a Technical Architect, but as far as leveling guides go, I don’t even think Salesforce hires people at that level in any more in ProServe, or they did for a while, but they don’t anymore. But yeah, it was pretty far down the leveling guide for me. My first year and a half, I wrote code C-sharp. Remember when I started Salesforce, there was no Apex and there was no Visualforce. There were S-controls and you could essentially write your own web app and expose it using a custom tab. On my first Salesforce implementation, I actually did 85% of my work was writing.NET and C-sharp code for a credit card processing form, which you couldn’t do natively on Salesforce at that time.
Ben (16:57.466)
Crazy isn’t it when you think like that? Because obviously everyone now knows Salesforce for what it is, but you were there. Like you said, I didn’t even know that there wasn’t Apex back then.
Sohail Sikora (17:05.598)
Yeah, there was no Apex, there was no Visualforce. You could write code in JavaScript using something called S-controls. So if you had to build some custom UI, you could build it in JavaScript. S-controls allowed you to call the API, the Salesforce API. But other than that, I mean, if you had to do something custom, let me put it this way. If you had to write a batch process, you had to write it on some other platform and then ETL the data in and out of Salesforce, there was no Apex batch. So yeah, that’s how I started my career. In fact, my first two engagements, I did very little actual Salesforce work. I did some of the usual setting up a custom field and workflows and there was no, I don’t even think, there was no process builder, it was just workflows and field updates. So I was a huge fan of outbound messaging when I first started my career at Salesforce because it allowed me to send a message to a backend system, then I could write code in multiple languages on the middle tier. So it was a lot of fun.
Ben (18:14.734)
Wow. So you were hired as a Technical Architect and obviously that was in 2007. So what other roles did you hold within your time at Salesforce?
Sohail Sikora (18:25.398)
I’d say, I mean, I got promoted a couple of times and, you know, the work was similar, but you know, in larger in scope and potentially important. But eventually at one point, I expressed a desire to start managing people and, you know, expanding my career prospects from rather than just be an individual contributor. So that happened. I eventually managed a pretty decent sized team, about 80, 85 Architects. Before I left professional services and joined the platform product team as a Product Manager. And that was again, I went from managing people and client facing work to now, you know, building internal. And it was pretty deep into product management because I started my product management career at Salesforce doing some CDC, the CDC API or Change Data Capture API. So that required me to take a look at the Salesforce platform under the covers of the Salesforce platform to see the guts of how it was built. And it’s amazing what you, it’s amazing what they do on the platform and it gave me a, how do I put it? It gave me a newfound appreciation to how easy it makes the life of other people, you know, when, or especially the people who use it to, you know, at their enterprise. Yeah, it’s pretty amazing how things are built under the covers.
Ben (20:10.454)
Yeah, it’s a pretty unique view, right? So many people work in the ecosystem, but so few people get to see under the bonnet.
Sohail Sikora (20:17.182)
Yeah, which I did, enjoyed every bit of it, but it was weird kind of timing. I had gotten my green card along the way, but I’d spent at that point close to night. I was at my 10th year, almost at my 10th year anniversary, and then an ISV came knocking and they were like, “we’d love you to consider coming and taking on a role with us”. And I wanted to learn the different things I got. I was getting, I had done a lot of pros of work. I had now done like about nine, maybe 10 months of product management. So I kind of was getting the hang of it. But this was an opportunity to take on more of the responsibility of delivering the overall end-to-end product. And so I took that opportunity and I left Salesforce. I’d say about a month, maybe a few days less than my 10th anniversary, I actually left Salesforce to go join this ISV, which was interesting in itself.
Ben (21:26.134)
And you went back to Salesforce.
Sohail Sikora (21:28.114)
I did, I did. I spent about six months at the ISV and then took a two month break to do some personal reasons. Then someone that I had worked with and I respect a lot at Salesforce asked me if I’d be interested in coming back. And I said, “sure, why not”? We definitely have a conversation. Had a conversation and decided to come back into a similar role, it was pro-serve, but it was specifically leading the financial services where they go within professional services. And that was an interesting four years as well. So yeah, I did go back to Salesforce and spent another four plus years there. I did get my 10 year anniversary out of the way. For those people in the ecosystem, Salesforce calls the 10 plus years Club as the Koa Club. So I did make it to the Koa Club. I got a bunch of jackets and bags and all that fun stuff and was I think actually one of the last Koa Club Events that they used to have in San Francisco with a black tie dinner and all of that I remember going to pretty much the last one because yeah, it was the last one because after that, the next year we were all in lockdown and I don’t think they brought that thing back after that. So who knows it might come back at some point in the future, but you never know.
Ben (23:02.006)
Hopefully, because I imagine it’s some achievement being with a business like that for 10 years. So it’s great for people to be able to enjoy and to celebrate that. But if you look across your two periods at Salesforce, is there one major achievement that really stands out amongst them all?
Sohail Sikora (23:09.723)
It was fantastic. So here’s the thing. I think one of the things when you’re an employee of Salesforce really is you kind of see the spotlight to your customers and your partners. And rightly so. I think that’s the right way to do it. So I would say there’s not a lot I can publicly talk about in terms of the work that I did, but I’d say being part of the team that brought the CTA certification to the world would definitely go down as one of my top three. The second one would probably be taking on delivery responsibilities for what was probably the largest Salesforce-led ProServe implementation, and that happened to the last two years of my life at Salesforce. And then the third one is really all the relationships that I built. I mean, I know it started as a CRM company and now is a platform and there’s a lot of things to Salesforce today, but some of my best friends are people I met at Salesforce. I met my wife who I’m married to right now at Salesforce. So there’s a lot that Salesforce has given to me, both professionally and personally, but I’d say the relationships, the CTA, and probably working on one of the largest Salesforce-led pro-serve implementations was probably three big things. There’s a lot more that we did, but some things you can talk about, some things you can’t.
Ben (25:05.306)
Well, I’ve got three questions all that cover each of those. So just the first one, when you say the largest Salesforce led, I appreciate you can’t talk like dollar value or anything like that, but in terms of when you say largest, are you talking user base?
Sohail Sikora (25:19.558)
It’s actually largest in multiple ways. It’s user-based, it’s complexity, it’s somewhat of a regulated industry. And from a Salesforce professional services standpoint, it was a program that the Salesforce ProServe team was leading, at least for the first two years of that implementation, maybe three years, because I left, I think, towards the last, towards the latter half of that implementation. But really, from the day the contract was signed to actually standing up the entire team of Architects, Solution Architects, Business Architects, getting the Developers onboarded, and handling client expectations at the same time and making sure that whatever we design and develop will actually scale, working with the product management and engineering organisations because I don’t think they had ever, they had some other large customers before, but I don’t think any of their large customers use the platform as extensively as this customer did when we started the engagement. And I’m still aware of the engagement today, but they’re really using everything, right? I mean, there’s very few customers that, of that scale, that use pretty much every part of the product stack, including MuleSoft, Marketing Cloud. I think the only thing they don’t use is Commerce Cloud, honestly, they use pretty much everything else that there is to use in the Salesforce ecosystem.
Ben (26:57.362)
Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, now I can see why that was such a big project.
Sohail Sikora (26:58.218)
Yeah, yeah, in multiple ways it was, I would say in any which category you look, it was probably the largest for Salesforce and one of its very first.
Ben (27:12.574)
Yeah, well, and then on the CTA part, so you mentioned you were involved in kind of standing that up. What changed for you both professionally and personally when you became a CTA?
Sohail Sikora (27:24.042)
Yeah, so, you know, obviously the Trailhead team today with Suzanne and everyone else, they do an amazing job, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Karen Hennessy. I don’t think she’s at Salesforce anymore. She’s moved on to other things, but she brought this amazing team of partners and internal employees together. I was part of a pretty large team. We put the questions together. I remember writing a whole bunch of the multiple choice questions and answers for the integration section. But honestly, when I got my CTA, nothing actually changed for me the first maybe year or two years because nobody really knew what it was, right? And I believe I was like the ninth CTA to be certified. And for me, there was nothing about CTA prep. None of these things, there are study groups nowadays and there are people that give up two years of their life. For me, it was like, I got an email saying, hey, you want to sign up for the beta because you helped write some of the questions. I said, “yeah, sure, why not?” I remember I was actually taking my family out on vacation and we were flying out on a Saturday, a Sunday morning, and I actually drove two hours on a Saturday morning to a test centre. And because it was beta, you actually had to do like 225 multiple choice questions to get past stage two. It took me like two hours to get through the whole thing. And then when I was on vacation, I got an email saying, we’d love to get you in and face the panel and here are some of the dates available. I remember that was the only time I actually logged in to work on my vacation because I got the email on my handheld device and I had to go find a place with some better, you know, cell phone reception so I could connect like my, the 4G puck that I used to carry because I had to send a request for travel approval to my boss saying, hey, I need to go to San Francisco for this. Like, can you approve it? And I just walked in, you know, I saw a room, the panelists, like eight, nine people. I knew about, I knew five of them, the four that I didn’t know, I was like, “okay, whatever, we’ll see how it goes”. And that was it. But two years after I got my CTA is when people started realizing what it meant for the ecosystem. And I think not being able to get as many through is what finally forced people to start being like, “wait a second. Why are only, you know, I don’t know, like 35, 40% of the people who appear or pass, like what is so cool, what is so amazing about this?” But fast forward all these years, I think being a CTA panelist, you know, and a panel judge as well as a CTA and using it in my career, it just really helped me become a better problem solver. Right, like it also helped me learn the art of pattern recognition? Because at the end of the day, unlike other platforms where pretty much you can do whatever you want, Salesforce has a sandbox you can play in, so to speak, and there are things it does to prevent you from getting out of this little box. And really as an Architect working on the Salesforce platform, it makes you better at looking at the problem and saying, “oh, here are the four things I need to do to address this issue for this customer”. And it really helped me become a lot better at that. And it helped me solve things a lot faster too. So yeah, I think more than the CTA, the process helped me become a better Architect and a technologist. And that’s something that I’m super grateful for.
Ben (31:29.491)
Yeah, that’s consistent with a lot of people that I’ve had on the show. Especially now you say people invest two years of their life. Like obviously the outcome is what everyone wants, but the reality is going through that study, that practice, that drilling through that process, makes you a better Architect, no matter what the outcome.
Sohail Sikora (31:48.431)
Outcome is not in your circle of influence.
Ben (31:52.33)
That’s it. And then your third point was about relationships, right? And the relationships you’ve built and kept from your time at Salesforce. Now your last role, or one of your last roles, I think you were VP Services Lead, which I imagine the size of the, the U S market, the talent in the US market would have seen you work with some of the very best Salesforce professionals in the world. What really stood out to you about the best, what could they do or how did they approach things that was different from your average person?
Sohail Sikora (32:25.874)
I would say the first thing, the best in this ecosystem do better than anyone else is really not assume that there’s only one way to solve a problem, right? I’ve seen a marked difference between people who take a problem and say, oh, we got to build all of this stuff on the platform versus someone looking and saying, I don’t think Salesforce is a good use for this particular problem statement, let’s figure out the best way to do this or solve this problem. Parts of it may be on the Salesforce platform, but parts of it may not. And that’s what the best do better than anyone else. So that’s, I’d say that’s probably the biggest differentiator. And then being an employee, obviously you have some advantages. Like you can look at things, you know, under the covers that are not exposed to the outside world, you have somewhat of a better access to engineering and product leadership. Not necessarily by a lot, but enough that if stuff gets really serious, you probably have a few more eyes to help bail you out or teach you a lesson without it coming at the expense of the customer. And I’d say those are two pretty great advantages, being in ProServe with Salesforce while working on that platform. And I think that’s true for any company, right? You could say the same thing if you were at IBM or Oracle or Microsoft, or, you know, it’s just that having that backend access is definitely makes a huge difference.
Ben (34:17.002)
And is it the case of the best operators knew when to leverage that?
Sohail Sikora (34:22.326)
The best operators knew when to pick up the phone and phone a friend, right? And a lot of times, phone a friend is just a Slack message or pre Slack, it was Google Chat. But yes, you knew when to ask for help and you knew that someone would have faced this before or something similar before, right? You alluded to the fact that I was a services leader in the last year and a half of my career at Salesforce, I actually brought all of the Technical Architects in North America together from the various acquisitions, you know, both from the prior model metrics acquisition to Commerce Cloud being acquired, DemandWare. So I had a team of like, you know, about 600, 650 people or rolling up into me geographically North America, Canada, US. And if you were someone who worked on that team and you were faced with this technical challenge on the platform, you’d probably have four different answers to how to solve that problem under 15 minutes of you asking the question. So that, beyond relationships, just that having that knowledge and that epicenter of all of the knowledge in one place. I was a huge advantage and I always encourage people on my team to use it, right? And then share it back, right? It’s not, it’s one thing using the knowledge that you get from a colleague or coworker, but you also want to give back and that’s, I always encourage that.
Ben (36:10.874)
So you, obviously, you’re leading huge teams, working across major, major projects, and then you took the decision to leave Salesforce and start your own business, which I can imagine day one was very different to what you’d been experiencing at Salesforce in terms of having to set up your own desk and go from there. So what was that transition like, and what was the thinking behind that decision?
Sohail Sikora (36:36.814)
The transition wasn’t necessarily bad or difficult because being in ProServe, as long as I was, I always had a remote job. I always chuckle when I see these massive Twitter and LinkedIn discussions on remote versus hybrid versus everyone has to be in the office, I was like, “this was our life for like 15 years before it became a real thing for most other people.” So for me, really it was, I used to wake up and saunter onto my work from home desk anyway unless I was getting on a plane. And that had stopped the last two years of my career because of the pandemic and no one was flying anywhere. And customers realised “yeah, you can pretty much get the similar or better productivity and not have to spend all this money on travel dollars”. And so it was like, you pretty much worked out of your home office. So that transition wasn’t too bad. On the business front, it’s definitely been interesting because what I set out to do is when you don’t have the big logo behind you, people definitely listen to you because they look you up on LinkedIn. They’re like, “OK, this person probably knows a little bit of what they’re talking about”. But there’s a huge difference between that and then getting a signed contract. So that’s definitely been a very interesting ride. But I wouldn’t be here today without my co-founder, Jason Stone, who’s also a CTA and spent a lot of his life at Salesforce. But together, I think we’re headed in the right direction.
Ben (38:27.202)
So your business is in the banking space, right? And I believe your idea is for vertical CRMs for regulated industries and your target market is banking. So why do you think there’s a need for these regulated industries to have vertical CRMs?
Sohail Sikora (38:47.854)
Sure. My target market today is our banks, community banks and credit unions, I would say under five billion in assets under management or AUM. There are a few reasons why. One, when you’re a customer of that size, you’re obviously not going to outspend, you know, the JP Morgan Chases and the Wells Fargos of the world, right? Like I think JP Morgan Chase is on track to hiring like, I don’t know, 5,000 Engineers or something next year is what they claim to want to hire. A small bank is not going to hire 5,000 Engineers. But at the same time, in order for you to be able to serve your consumers and be their preferred financial partner of choice, you really want to be able to compete with better products, better service, and that should become your differentiation. So how do you give a better product and a customer service and a differentiated experience to your consumers without having the money to spend the billions of dollars on tech? The only way you can do that is by going and acquiring newer software platforms that help you do these things in one place. And that’s what we aim to build for a bank slash credit union. It’s our goal that in our target segment, a customer should be able to get up and running on our platform in under 60 days with as little customisation as possible. And it shouldn’t need to. We are not trying to build a platform that allows a customer to build whatever application they want. If they want a low code platform, you know, to do something else, there are many, many platforms to choose from. That’s not what we want. We want to build marketing sales and customer service for a bank or a credit union under five billion with one login in one place with one database. So that’s our goal and we feel that will help these institutions go a lot faster and actually be able to punch above their weight class, so to speak, when it comes to competing against the larger banks for their customers’ share of wallet.
Ben (41:12.25)
So the next point I think will surprise a lot of people because you mentioned you and your business partner both Salesforce CTAs both with a long history in working for Salesforce, working with the platform, but your business isn’t built on Salesforce, which, and you’ve kind of answered this in a way, and when you were talking about the best architects earlier, you know, they look at other things, but to everyone listening to sort of probably been the obvious choice for you to go and build on Salesforce. Why didn’t you do that?
Sohail Sikora (41:42.426)
There’s a couple of reasons. One, I don’t even think we could even if we wanted to, because Salesforce doesn’t really have an ISV program that allows me to build marketing sales and customer service in one place for a segment of customers, and then offer that up as a platform license. So it’s just, it’s not even possible even if I wanted to. So that was the primary reason. The second reason really was we worked long enough at Salesforce to know what it’s great for. And in our situation where we hope to have a multi-tenant platform with many customers in the future, things like release management and rolling out upgrade and stuff like that. I spent about six months, I told you, at an ISV. So I’ve kind of lived that life for a little bit, even if not as much as I would have liked to. We knew enough that it was not really something that we wanted to take on. My co-founder and I both have similar backgrounds prior to our life at Salesforce, and really for us, the ability to control our destiny in terms of how to roll patches out, do upgrades, what we can roll out, what we can roll back. We really wanted total control over that and not be at the mercy of the metadata API, so to speak, which is really not very complete if you think about all of the other platforms like Marketing Cloud and so on. So it really was not something that we could have actually used to build a long-term business. Now what we lose out is obviously the reach of the app exchange and the ability to go and tell everyone, yeah, we are built on Salesforce. Like, you know, we are secure. We, it’s SOC 2, Type 2 compliant, GDPR, et cetera, et cetera. So we, there are things that we gave up, but we willingly gave them up because long-term, I don’t think you could actually run a fully integrated marketing sales and customer service platform, just because it kind of cannibalises some of Salesforce’s business too, right? Like not that we are in any way, shape or form a competitor to Salesforce. I wouldn’t even begin to think about that for many, many years down the road. But the reason why Salesforce wouldn’t allow it is for obvious reasons, right? Salesforce wants their customers to use Service Cloud and Financial Services Cloud, and those are all great, but the scale at which we are doing it for the customer segment that we’re going after, they really can’t afford software licenses that allow you to do all of that. So price is also a huge differentiator, right? I mean, we’re talking to banks that have four branches and 60 employees, right? They are not going to be able to afford like $100,000 worth of licenses every month. The solution to solve their problem looks a lot different than a Salesforce or a HubSpot or even dynamic CRM. Any one of the big enterprise ones, right? It’s they require a different type of solution. And that’s why we chose not to build on Salesforce.
Ben (45:22.454)
It makes a lot of sense. And you mentioned banks looking to hire 5,000 Engineers and things like that. What’s your stance on building like a team for your startup world, your product world? Like what’s your approach? What do you think is an optimal team?
Sohail Sikora (45:38.65)
I’ve been spending a lot of time, you know, following people on LinkedIn, Twitter, doing a lot of reading on, you know, what this will look like when it gains traction and, you know, we start landing multiple customers and we have to run a support team, et cetera. I’m a strong believer in hiring talented individuals and giving them responsibility for decent areas of the platform. I’d say we are probably going to err on the side of hiring fewer people, especially from an engineering standpoint, but spending more money on automation and tooling. We will be faced with the age-old SaaS challenge of growth and hiring people to sell and solution engineers and so on. We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it, but I don’t think this is an industry that necessarily lends itself to product-led growth. So we are going to have to invest in sales, and there we’ll make the appropriate investments when the time is right. But from an engineering standpoint, I’d say it’s probably going to be small teams of people who are empowered to make decisions, as long as they follow the frameworks that have been laid out for us as a company, we’ll always focus on that.
Ben (47:09.066)
And final question for anyone that’s interested in the business, like what are you excited about for the future of December Technologies? What do you see that future looking like?
Sohail Sikora (47:19.314)
Well, we are at advanced stages of conversations with multiple banks and credit unions now. We’re about 18 plus months into our journey since we first put hands to keyboard. And we’re getting to the point where we have an MVP that we can actually deploy to our first customers. But what I’m really excited about is all of this coming together on one platform in a shared database, right? It’s one thing to have a lead and then, you know, convert that lead into a quote and an opportunity and things of that nature, but it’s another thing to have the application come into one database. And, you know, if that application doesn’t get converted into a client, it’s then going to launch into its own, you know, marketing campaign. And that’s the other part, right? Like everything that we are building is being built for banks. So when you log into our platform, you see clients. You don’t see customers or this. If you log into the credit union version of our platform, you see members, because credit unions have members and banks have customers or clients. So those are all the small things that we are looking at, integrated to backend banking systems. It’ll be pre-built. Like if you are a customer that has, let’s say, a core banking platform from Fiserv, we’ll have, you know, working with our connector partners, we’ll have pre-built connectors to Fiserv. So you’re not going to have to come in and stand up, you know, a brand new integration platform and, you know, start doing things from scratch. So that’s really the exciting part. And then we’re obviously, you know, AI is the phrase or the place to be in. But everyone asked me that question, do we have an AI strategy? We do, but really for us to execute on our AI strategy, we are first going to have to get this industry away from PDF forms and actually have online data collection and acquisition. So it’s a little bit multi-step, but yes, definitely. there are things we are working on, both for document recognition, document generation, things of that nature. Some of the more easy to do things with AI today, like helping people write emails, things of that nature, we are working on that are exciting. But yeah, there’s a long way to go for this customer segment before we can have a true AI strategy that will make a meaningful impact, right? It’s one thing to say we have AI, it’s another thing to say we’re going to make meaningful, impactful changes to a banker’s life using AI.
Ben (50:13.162)
Yeah, interesting. Well, I’m really excited to see the business evolve and excited to see where things go. If anyone that is listening wants to reach out, pick your brains about anything throughout your career, lessons, experiences, journey, where’s the best place to find you?
Sohail Sikora (50:31.694)
I’m on LinkedIn, or you can, Sohail space Sikora, you can look me up, or you can try and follow me on Twitter. My Twitter handle is kind of awkward because Twitter used to implement the 140 characters. I called myself abbreviated talk or ABBREV talk. So yeah, I’m not active posting, but I’m an active watcher on Twitter. Yeah, feel free to reach out to me and I’d be more than happy to you know, give my two cents
Ben (51:15.986)
For sure. Well, thank you so much. It’s been a real pleasure to have you on the show and to hear more about that journey that you’ve been through in the ecosystem and everything that’s to come with your business.
Sohail Sikora (51:26.674)
Wonderful. Thank you so much for having me, Ben. And I look forward to continuing to work with this ecosystem and eventually building our own ecosystem when it comes to CRM. Thank you.
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