Meet Bernd Drothen, Pre-Sales Expert, former Vice President of Solution Engineering at Salesforce (Austria and Germany)

My guest today spent nearly two decades at Salesforce, most recently as Vice President of Solution Engineering for Germany and Austria. He played a key role in growing Salesforce's presence in these countries from the very early days. Now, he's excited to share his expertise with startups and established companies as an advisor. Bend has been involved in something very interesting: external hackathons where companies looking for a specific software solution asked various competitors to engage in a hackathon in order for them to assess which solution would be a better fit, faster to implement, more adaptable, etc.

In this episode, we talked about how to use hackathons to help potential clients evaluate software systems. Bernd shared how Salesforce won 80% of the deals when they used this method, which they refined over time. This type of activity was targeted towards large customers where the order value was very high. Salesforce would say to the customer, "To truly understand the difference between our system and the competitors, and to experience what it's like to work with us, let us run a hackathon where you get to try setting up the system and perform the most important use cases." Potential customers often found this to be a great idea.

Salesforce divided the customer team, which often consisted of technicians, salespeople, and managers, into smaller groups where they were given different challenges. Salesforce was skilled at building a culture with the potential customer, not coming in as teachers, but more as people who helped them along when they got stuck. They became good friends. They handed out swag like mugs, t-shirts, and hoodies, and they set up a Salesforce coffee truck outside the office. At the end of the hackathon, they had internal champions present Salesforce to the decision-makers in the management team.

It's fascinating. Organizing such hackathons with customers is beneficial for everyone involved: good for the customer because they make better choices, good for Salesforce as they learned more about the customer, and good for product development because there's nothing better than spending time "on the floor" with customers and seeing how things really work. 

The question in my head after the interview was: Shouldn't large enterprise systems - especially if your target audience is developers - always be sold like this?