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How Erick Mahle Is Using AI to Transform Mortgage Lending
Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Erick Mahle, VP of Revenue Operations & Digital Transformation at Lendz Financial.
Join us as we chat about how he’s using AI to drive digital transformation and how he started FlowFest, the largest global Salesforce Flow competition.
You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Erick Mahle.
Solving business problems with Salesforce
Erick was always interested in technology as a kid, helping his dad build computers. However, he originally started his career in marketing. Everything changed when his manager asked him to take over Salesforce for his organization and he saw what he could do with declarative solutions. “I thought it was the grownup version of Legos,” he says.
In his role at Lendz Financial, he’s combining those problem-solving skills with the power of AI to spearhead digital transformation. The mortgage lending industry is full of complicated business processes that need to be checked and re-checked, so it’s the perfect place to put new AI capabilities to the test.
How AI can streamline mortgage lending
If you’ve ever bought a house, you’ll know that getting a mortgage is incredibly complex. With so many steps and regulatory requirements, Erick and his team are using AI to streamline these business processes and limit costly errors. They call it Project Lexi.
Obviously, with mortgages involved, they’re not ready to turn everything over to AI just yet. However, they’ve already found several wins by eliminating handoffs with automation and training the AI to flag potential problems.
For Erick, the key to any successful digital transformation initiative is to focus on the humans you’re supposed to be helping.
FlowFest, the largest global Salesforce Flow competition
Erick also runs FlowFest, a competition where Flownatics can strut their stuff. It started with the idea that although Trailhead is great at teaching you how to build things, a big part of your job as a Salesforce Admin is to fix broken flows.
Contests are put through several rounds of debug challenges, culminating in a livestreamed event where the finalists race to be the first to find a working solution for the final flow. It’s basically an esport, complete with live commentary and dramatic photo finishes. They just did their first in-person FlowFest at Mile High Dreamin’, and it may be coming soon to an event near you.
Erick had a lot more to share about how he’s thinking about AI and some of his favorite FlowFest stories, so be sure to listen to the full episode. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast.
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Full show transcript
Josh Birk:
Hello, admins, your guest host Josh Birk here. Today, we welcome Erick Mahle to talk a little bit about AI, digital transformation, and a lot about one of his projects, FlowFest, and how people can learn Flow in a really fun and interactive way. So, without any further ado, let’s go welcome Erick.
All right. Today on the show, we welcome Erick Mahle to talk about, of course, probably a little bit of AI since that’s what we have to do these days and Mile High Dreamin’ and FlowFast. Erick, welcome to the show.
Erick Mahle:
Well, thanks for having me, Josh.
Josh Birk:
So, let’s start with your early years. Did you always want to get into software?
Erick Mahle:
No, I had no idea I was going to get into software. Although, when I was a very young kid, my father used to build computers and I know I used to do a little bit of the same as well like getting all the video cards, the motherboards, getting all the components, joining them together. But that wasn’t something that stuck with me throughout all these years. So, I went to school for marketing, but somehow ended up as the accidental admin and here we are 15 years later.
Josh Birk:
Got it. Well, that kind of segues to the next question. How did you first get introduced to Salesforce?
Erick Mahle:
Well, since accidental admin is the default answer for most folks…
Josh Birk:
Right.
Erick Mahle:
I will basically say, I joined a company as a marketing analyst. It was a small company. And like most small companies, you get to wear many hats and they basically said, “Hey, we have Salesforce, why don’t you manage Salesforce?” And really had a great experience there. We had brought in my boss at that time who was a Silicon Valley-type global sales director, and he really challenged me a lot. He used to say, “Hey, at SuccessFactor, Salesforce used to do this, or at Zuora, Salesforce used to do that.
And really, challenged me to kind of reverse engineer Salesforce and I found a lot of joy in that. I thought it was the grown-up version of Legos. I remember when the first time I successfully wrote a formula field, I went to the software developers because we were a software development company, so I went to the software development team and said, “Hey, I’m a developer now.” And they were like, “No, you’re not.” And I’m like, “Okay, maybe I’m not right.”
Josh Birk:
Right.
Erick Mahle:
But the passion was there to play around with it declaratively, and then just from there went to the consulting side, many years on the consulting side, then back client side and kept playing around with all these new tools and trying to keep up with all of the different features that Salesforce continuously tends to roll out.
Josh Birk:
Nice, nice. Yeah, very old. I think he was my skip level boss for a while, but Mike Rosenbaum at Salesforce famously, I’m probably getting this wrong because it’s been quite a few years, but I think it was something along the lines of, we sell Legos, but people build Millennium Falcons, right? It’s like what you can put together with all these components. It’s the really cool part of the platform.
Erick Mahle:
It’s true.
Josh Birk:
And it’s also my old boss and friend Dave Carroll used to say, “We have the one true platform because you’re allowed to build on top of it.” And it’s this constant theme when I talk to people, right? Like especially back on the developer side, people who have to create Java servers and put all these connections together and run up a database, like the simplicity of putting a custom object together and then just using it. It’s a… Can I say, I’m an evangelist so I can say it’s a certain kind of magic.
Erick Mahle:
It is. It’s almost like an operating system of its own. You have so much that Salesforce takes care of for you that a lot of times people can take for granted, especially on the declarative side. It’s folks just have to log in, get their login credentials and they can go to setup and start building things right away.
Josh Birk:
Yeah. How would you describe your current job?
Erick Mahle:
Exciting for sure.
Josh Birk:
Nice.
Erick Mahle:
No, actually it really is quite exciting. So, I’m in mortgage lending now. I was working beforehand as the Senior Director of CRM at First Advantage, which is a global leader in background checks and drug screenings and so forth. So, if you got a job recently, chances are your employer probably went through First Advantage, which I think Salesforce is now a customer of First Advantage.
Josh Birk:
Got it.
Erick Mahle:
So, but that was an interesting time. I got to learn a lot of the corporate world. I got to know a lot of working with different departments, really having to get creative to get things done and get things accomplished and budgeting and all of these things that a lot of organizations had to deal with over the past couple of years.
And during that time in came the President in Lens Financial that had been kind of courting me for a couple of months and he’s like, “Look, we’re growing. We’re growing really fast.” Still, very small organization like when I joined, we were in the mid-30s, now we’re 50 employees all within less than a year. But he basically was raising a round of investment to kind of take the company to the next level and he’s like, “Help me put a budget together for what a digital transformation would look like to be able to really take Lens to the next level.”
So, really when he finally got the approval and he got that round of investment cleared, he’s like, “When can you start?” And we’ve been on the run over since, working on really exciting projects including AI and several other things. So, it’s been fun to be able to go pedal to the metal and really trying to put something exciting together.
Josh Birk:
So, first of all, I want to give that person props because in so many corporate environments they say things like, we need to do a digital transformation, but they don’t fund it. So, congratulations…
Erick Mahle:
That’s a lot of names.
Josh Birk:
… on them doing it right, without saying names or companies or large insurance companies I might’ve worked for in the past, anyway. Actually, I can’t complain about that. They did give me a salary, I guess.
Erick Mahle:
Yeah.
Josh Birk:
Technically, that was their form of ending it. Tell me a little bit more about AI and about how you see that as part of this digital transformation.
Erick Mahle:
Yeah. So, there’s a lot that’s going on there, right? So, the key thing that we’re working on, Lens Financial’s, project LEXI. So, Project LEXI on the surface is basically our digital lending ally. It’s a character that we’ve come up with. And what we’re trying to do is really build an engine behind the digital transformation that we can put a customer 360 project together and have that database and try to learn from that as much as we can.
And from an AI perspective, we have fairly ambitious visions with what we wanted to do and how we’ve been tackling over at Lens is that we’re kind of dipping our toes in the water first, trying to see what we can get away with. I think we’re still very much… We’ve grown in phases. We’re still very much in a prompting phase. Everything is a very grounded prompt to get what we want and be able to derive insights that we’re looking for.
But we’re starting to look at more serious things like building our own LLM or like training our LLM models to be able to have more specific things going on, evaluate our data, make sure that we’re on, make sure that we can identify trends and make sure that we can identify red flags early on. And really trying to bring all of the process efficiency that we can. Our industry, the industry that has so many steps and so many things that we have to take.
And what we’re looking for LEXI to do is to be an extra eyes over the shoulder to say, “Hey, is there anything that you potentially missed? Is there anything that you have to be concerned with in order to make this deal go through?” And that’s kind of one of the key things that we’re looking to use LEXI for at Lens.
Josh Birk:
Like this is a history of good data. If you see something that looks like it might be moving into bad category, let us know.
Erick Mahle:
Exactly. And in addition to other things as well, we want to be able to use optical character recognition. So, we’re actively looking to be able to build OCR. And when you’re… Anyone that’s listening here that’s bought a house or that’s considering buying a house, get ready to send an avalanche of documents. We will want to know about the 20 cents that you have at the bottom of your couch and where has that been for the past five years?
Josh Birk:
Yup, yes.
Erick Mahle:
So, there is a lot of documents to go through, a lot of processes to go through. So, really being able to evaluate all of that and trying to make sure that, “Hey, everything’s in the norm here,” right? Everything looks fine. Or, “Hey, here’s something that doesn’t add up.” Anything that could raise the attention of whether it’s the processor, the underwriter, just to make sure that we increase the… Continue to increase the quality of our processes without affecting our efficiency or our pull through ratios.
Josh Birk:
Yeah, two thoughts come to mind. One is, first of all, I’m glad to hear the concept of getting mortgage getting into the digital age because when we bought our condo here in Chicago, my friends who had just gone through this themselves were like, “Well, you need to do one thing, bring two pens and a sandwich. You’re going to be in a room for a really long time. It’s going to be a pain if that pen runs out of bank.”
But also, back to how you’re talking about training your own LLM, I think that’s an interesting trend because we’ve had these conversations internally at Salesforce about, “Do we build our own models? What bottles do we use? Do we use the open models?” And the answer I think has been a hodgepodge of these things. But the interesting thing is you need an AI that knows about mortgage and mortgage processing and what a good document looks like. You don’t need one that knows how to cook a rotisserie chicken.
Erick Mahle:
Now, for everyone that’s listening to this podcast, please imagine the forward-looking statement slide, strolling through as Josh is going through these items.
Josh Birk:
Right, right. Although, I suppose back to the sandwich joke mightn’t be handy if it can cook a rotisserie chicken for you too. How often do you think you personally use AI for work?
Erick Mahle:
There’s definitely a frequent use of ChatGPT within our organization, within a couple of users. It’s actually something that we just started talking about putting in accepted AI use guidelines for all employees because it is something we have to be very mindful of.
Josh Birk:
Yup.
Erick Mahle:
I think at an individual like ChatGPT level, we have the ever occasional simplify this or change this JSON into tables for me because I don’t have the patience to do it otherwise. There are use cases like that. Now, with regards to LEXI and the built models that we have, several times a day. So, typically, we’re introducing LEXI internally right now as a culture building tool as well.
So, instead of LEXI, people being worried about this LEXI tool or what it can do where we started a kudos channel. So, basically, LEXI is giving out kudos to the teams who…
Josh Birk:
Nice.
Erick Mahle:
… managed to get loans in the fastest or people who log the most calls by the halfway through the day. So, there’s a lot of that which helps us also understand kind of getting our feet wet, kind of how does this work, what can we get away with, what can we rely on? And really set that step-by-step foundation of where we really want to take this.
Josh Birk:
Yeah.
Erick Mahle:
So, I think as a small organization and having seen this in the past myself, things can get very expensive very fast if you’re loose with perhaps just grabbing vendors right off the shelf saying, “Hey, I can promise you all of these things and just give us all your money,” and the next thing you know this is something that we as a customer didn’t fully understand what we needed. Maybe the vendor was maybe just too aggressive into getting the business because let’s be realistic, if you ask for someone who is 10 years of AI experience, so that’s optimistic to say that.
Josh Birk:
Right.
Erick Mahle:
Everything’s so new that trying to be one of the early adopters without breaking the bank is definitely something that we’re cognizant of and we’re just trying to make sure that we’re taking the right steps, checking everything off and then saying, “Alright, now we’re comfortable with making the next move, the next level up.” And ultimately, integrate that all together.
Josh Birk:
Yeah, I don’t think of at least three-fourths of anytime I talk about AI to audiences. One of the things I include is, if you do not have an acceptable use policy, like now it’s back when social media suddenly took us all by surprise, didn’t realize it could do as much good as harm. And your company was like, these are the things you probably should not do on Twitter. It’s out of the gate. That’s the time to start thinking about what do you think people should or should not do with it.
It’s funny you say the ten-year AI thing, and this is as I often do, and I get in front of a mic date myself. In my early days, Flash was still a primary motivator for application building, shall we say. And I couldn’t get into Flash because I was a JavaScript nerd. And I learned Perl, I was kind of a programmer by default and Flash just didn’t make any sense to me. But it was always a red flag when somebody would ask for five years of Flash experience when Flash had only been invented three years ago.
Erick Mahle:
Yeah.
Josh Birk:
I just didn’t submit that.
Erick Mahle:
It’s a pain that we all have to go through. It’s just hysterical. I see it in some of the Slack channels or some folks on LinkedIn feeds calling out some of these posts and it’s ridiculous. They’re out there. People are just like, “No, no, no. We want the most experienced person in the world to give us 15 years of experience,” and something that came out like a year ago.
Josh Birk:
Right. Unless you’ve been at Stanford working on this very quietly without telling anybody, you have not been doing this for 15 years.
Erick Mahle:
Yup.
Josh Birk:
All right. Well, let’s change gears a little bit because we first met, I did an AI talk for you all at Mile High Dreamin’. When did you first start getting involved in Mile High Dreamin’ itself?
Erick Mahle:
So, it was last year, 2023. I had been running FlowFest for two years by that point.
Josh Birk:
Okay.
Erick Mahle:
And I guess, we’ll go into the insides of FlowFest for anyone that’s not familiar. But everything that we’ve done with FlowFest was an online event thus far. And we had a couple of regional conferences, organizers such as Mile High Dreamin’ and a couple of other green events. And they were always reaching out and they were like, “We really like what you’re doing. Can we do this in a conference setting conference?”
Josh Birk:
Yeah.
Erick Mahle:
And Mile High Dreamin’ was the one that worked like the timing, the dates, everything that we needed. So, we decided to give it a shot last year in 2023. And we learned a lot of taking an online format into an in-person format. And this year, when you and I got a chance to meet, it was our second run at it, which we managed to improve a lot. I think we had a great time last year. We had an even better time this year. So, yeah, it was exciting to participate in it.
Josh Birk:
Before we get into the mechanics of it, what’s kind of the origin of it? What was the inspiration for doing that?
Erick Mahle:
So, it was really interesting. I had the opportunity to participate in, I think this was peak pandemic, and someone organized the Zoom and said, “Hey, I have a couple of flow challenges and I want to see who can finish them first.” And I think there was, I don’t know, some basic raffle prize or something like that. And I love the idea and I had a conversation with them. I was like, “Look, I think we can do this much bigger and more importantly in a fun educational way.” I know we’re talking about AI. I know that that’s the hot topic right now. I still think that there’s so many foundational things…
Josh Birk:
Yeah.
Erick Mahle:
… in order to make AI work, right? Whether it’s data modeling or data cleanliness and all of these things. And I think especially for the declarative side of folks, I think knowing how to use automations properly is a crucial thing. Everyone has a flow course, right? Everyone, there’s just so much content out there and we wanted to do something that’s educational that is also entertaining at the same time.
Josh Birk:
Okay.
Erick Mahle:
And I remember I had pitched this to Ben McCarthy over at Salesforce Ben, and he’s like, “Hey, I’m on board. What do you think? How many people do you think you’re going to get on this?” I was like, “Look, maybe we get 10, maybe we get 100 people.” He even sent me the screenshot of the WhatsApp message after we held the first one because the first time around, I think we got 2,000 people that registered.
Josh Birk:
Nice.
Erick Mahle:
And quickly, once we opened the registration, we realized that we kind of had to up our game. This isn’t going to be 20 people hanging out in a Zoom conversation. So, we put our heads together and we managed to put the events online. And effectively, it’s a series of challenges that folks have to go through. And the final challenge, the folks that pass the first qualifier round, they go into the final challenge.
So, we’ll have something like four to six competitors on the final challenge. And then, they have to screen share. So, if you think eSports, we’re there just watching and commentating as we see people be given a challenge on a flow and they’re building it out and you’re seeing how folks interpret challenges differently or solution design things differently.
And it’s great because we get a chance to point out the different ways of approaching a challenge. And sometimes, the pros and cons of it. Equally, one of the key things that we love about FlowFest that we don’t see anywhere else, and we were talking and trying to tell the Trailhead folks to see if they could incorporate something like this is, Trailhead gives you directions on how to build flows. But as an admin, one of the most crucial things is fixing broken flows.
Josh Birk:
Rest.
Erick Mahle:
So, in FlowFest, we will have challenges where the flows are broken at the beginning and the challenge is to fix whatever is wrong and debug it successfully.
Josh Birk:
Got it.
Erick Mahle:
So, yeah, ultimately, it’s just a really entertaining way to learn some more about flows and we try to do every FlowFest or challenge around recent feature releases and so forth.
Josh Birk:
So, first of all, I want to go back to what you said about AI is important, but it’s an important part of the platform. It’s not… I know it’s the big marketing push right now. I go back to the Legos thing, right? AI is another Lego. It’s another Lego set that’s very powerful one, but it’s going to be way more powerful if you leverage your flow skills, if you leverage your data security skills, if you leverage your data management skills.
So, 100% agreement there. Let’s dig a little bit more into the challenge. So, you have teams, they get an org, and then how are you presenting the challenges to them? And you said some are debugging challenges, but what are some of the other challenges that they go through?
Erick Mahle:
Yeah. So, the online and the in-person format have their own deviations. But ultimately, what competitors will be given is that there will be a list of challenges and the team that’s organizing the event, myself and several other flow experts, everyone that has been a FlowFest champion has come back to help building the future challenges, which is cool.
So, ultimately, you’ll have a series of challenges and we’ll try to list it almost as if it’s a certification exam question. All very scenario-based like Universal Containers is looking to accomplish X, Y, Z. So, effectively, there’ll be these four challenges. You’ll have your own dev org. So, we provide all of these instructions. We have a managed package that you’ll install, which basically will nuke all of the dev org’s data and install a fresh data set, so that way we know everybody’s using the same data.
So, please don’t install this managed package in your production environments. And I don’t think I’ve put enough disclaimers now, I probably put more in there, just in case. So, you’ll set up your managed package, you’ll have the data normalized, so all competitors have the same data. And then, they’ll have a series of challenges.
Now, the challenges, we provide an unmanaged package that has… We try to simplify as much as we can. So, every challenge will have a flow already built for it. So, effectively, all they need to do is just build on top of that. We tell them…
Josh Birk:
Got it.
Erick Mahle:
… you don’t need to go anywhere outside of the flow canvas for any portion of the competition. And the final element in every challenge is a subflow that pushes your work to our host org. So, we actually do receive all of your work. We’ll receive a couple of submission variables, which helps us check to see if at an early pace, if we see all the right numbers to see if everything’s done correctly.
Josh Birk:
Yeah.
Erick Mahle:
And then, we also get the XML so we can look at things like have you used loops? Have you used… Is there any DML inside a loop? We could really kind of pin down what you have there. And then, when you do the final challenge, we’ll have a judge’s review of the work.
So, I have actually someone looking in, like we’ll usually tell them like, “Hey, there are a couple of things that are off limits.” For example, you can’t have unofficial SF components in there. If we start seeing Apex sections, that’s not… You’re not giving everyone a fair shot because you thought of installing Apex actions in their invocable actions that you could, try to use to skip some steps. That’s not fair game.
Josh Birk:
Right.
Erick Mahle:
So, and ultimately, short of they’re not being anything like brazenly, bad practice like DMLs inside a loop. Then, typically, if everything’s correct and they got the numbers correctly, then we will name the winner.
Josh Birk:
Nice, nice. Now, having seen you in person, I got to compliment, you’re a really good pitchman during this. You’re really keeping the audience engaged, you’re keeping the audience very excited, you’re pitching the teams next to each other. I’m curious, how did that work in the online version? Like, were you just sort of a talking head that was kind of like doing an MC for the whole thing?
Erick Mahle:
You barely got to see me on the online version. You go back and walk any of those, you’ll barely see me. I have to give credit to Ben McCarthy.
Josh Birk:
Nice.
Erick Mahle:
So, he was the MC for most of those. And I was mostly in the background running logistics.
Josh Birk:
Got it.
Erick Mahle:
And making sure that everyone was up and running. We would have our panel of judges. We’d be coordinating internally, so there would be a Zoom meeting that all of the competitors would be in. So, everyone’s running the first part of the competition there. We do our housekeeping rules. We share the challenges. If anyone has any questions, we try to address it there.
And then, in the parallel track there will be… We use StreamYard, so it’d be the live stream, and then that is a group of 12 folks. And then, for the qualifier rounds, which are those challenges where we don’t know who’s going to go in the final round yet. Then, Ben McCarthy would have guest speakers like Jen Lee was there at the last one.
We had several like Flownatics will be doing presentations on, “Hey, here’s the latest Flow releases” or any specific presentation that we want to bring in. And then, usually, there’s the turnaround point where we’ll bring the finalists for that final challenge in because then they’ll jump in on StreamYard, so they can screen share.
Josh Birk:
Yeah.
Erick Mahle:
And then, at that point, because now we’re only managing four folks, I’ll jump in and I’ll be commentating on what they’re doing. So, I’ll usually be operating StreamYard and kind of switching between screens and be like, “Oh, look, here, something’s interesting. Here’s a different approach to this or a different take.”
Josh Birk:
Nice.
Erick Mahle:
And use a couple of my fellow Flownatics to kind of pick apart what we’re seeing. And if we see something that’s interesting, especially if something that we haven’t thought of, the nice thing about the online competition is that you really get hundreds of competitors. So, sometimes you see things that you haven’t thought of, which is exciting to be able to share with the crowd that’s watching.
Josh Birk:
Yeah, do you have some favorite moments or some things that you’ve seen from the challenges?
Erick Mahle:
When we first introduced this live final challenge, which I think was FlowFest V4, you couldn’t have planned this out. So, we roughly came up with the rules that if you submit that you’ve completed the challenge, we’re going to do a judge’s review on screen, will ask you to kind of go through to show us different parts of the flow. And if you get it wrong, then you go to the back of the line and anybody that says they’ve completed the challenges, then we would go and review theirs.
Josh Birk:
Got it.
Erick Mahle:
So, we don’t want to motivate people to just kind of immediately submit, and then kind of like…
Josh Birk:
And hope for the best, yeah.
Erick Mahle:
Yeah.
Josh Birk:
Yeah.
Erick Mahle:
So, this guy had submitted and he got it wrong. There was something hysterical when he ran the debug, it was a screen flow and it said something like, you have 30 opportunities in your org and 70 closed one opportunities. I’m like, “That math does work out.” I was like…
Josh Birk:
That’s not the right Venn diagram there. Nope, nope.
Erick Mahle:
Exactly. I was like, “There’s something, there’s off here.” So, and it was funny because it suddenly became tense and everyone just kind of like, all of the judges kind of lit up because we’re reviewing the next guy and it’s like suddenly the heat is on, the pressure is on, and everyone’s just kind of like, “Alright, what’s going on? Oh, yeah, another one’s ready for submission, if this guy doesn’t make…” And it was literally kind of end of World Cup.
Everyone’s just kind like it’s the end of the second half and everyone’s just counting the seconds and they’re just kind of like, “Who’s going to win?” And it turns out that the second guy also had gotten something wrong. So, the first one comes back and actually had fixed what he needed. So, taking the FlowFest Champion title.
Josh Birk:
Nice.
Erick Mahle:
And it was just something how it all worked out. It was just tons of fun and excitement and new adrenaline. I’ve organized six of these online and the two Mile High Dreamin’ ones and your adrenaline is running at a million. You needed a solid 72 hours just to bring yourself down to a normal human level. So, with everything going on, it was just so exciting. It was a really great experience to be able to be a part of that.
Josh Birk:
Nice. That’s awesome. Is there any place people can see previous versions?
Erick Mahle:
Yes. So, Salesforce Ben has listed most of the FlowFest videos, live streams, so you can check most of them out there. We tried on Mile High Dreamin’ last year, and you can find it somewhere on LinkedIn. I don’t recommend you do or have a lot of patience because one of the things we learned was that you can’t do 10 million things at once.
Josh Birk:
Right.
Erick Mahle:
So, I literally just had two webcams connected and one facing different parts of the stage and the sound quality was atrocious. We only found that out later. It was just we’re like, “Alright, less than one. If someone’s going to do video or we’re going to try to live stream this, we need a separate team.”
But this year, the Mile High Dreamin’ folks did have a video production company, so I know there’s video being edited. I don’t know what the final video is going to look like, but I know it’s in the works. So, check out the Mile High Dreamin’ YouTube channel. Maybe, by the time this airs, then it’ll already be out there.
Josh Birk:
Awesome. Future plans. Do you have a home at Mile High Dreamin’? Are you going to keep going there? Are you going to do more online things? Or we might, we see you at a TDX or a Dreamforce in the future?
Erick Mahle:
Well…
Josh Birk:
That’s probably more of a me question. You’re like, “I don’t know, Josh.”
Erick Mahle:
Nice. Look, I think, it’s incredibly exciting. The online ones is an incredible amount of work.
Josh Birk:
Yeah.
Erick Mahle:
And I would not be able to put any of this together if it wasn’t for the awesome Flownatics or previous FlowFest Champions folks that help put this together, build the managed package, all of these things, it’s quite a lot. And the Mile High Dreamin’ folks are also super helpful in helping organize that. So, Mile High Dreamin’, I think it’s an awesome home, so to say. And the timing works out well.
I know a couple of other Dreamin’ events, like I mentioned earlier, came one in specific both times. There was just schedule conflict. It is just a really bad time of the year because I’m usually traveling, and we just couldn’t make it on that alone. But we’ve had interest. If anyone’s interested, I’m happy to try to see what we can do. TDX would be definitely the goal.
Josh Birk:
Nice.
Erick Mahle:
Because I think there’s a ton of potential, everyone that goes, seems to have some really good feedback. Not only like, sometimes people are like, “Yeah, this is awesome.” And sometimes, people come, I’ve never had someone like, “Well, well, this sucks.”
Josh Birk:
Right.
Erick Mahle:
What we’ve had and I think was really interested is that people are passionate about this stuff. So, they’ll come and be like, “Oh, you know what? It would be a really good idea or here’s something that I didn’t see over, I was hoping to see.” And we look at that and a lot of the comments kind of comes around on things that are like video production, right?
You need a video production team, an AV team running this if you’re going to be sharing screens, if you’re going to be commentating all of these things. So, it’s something whether I think we’re getting enough traction with Mile High Dreamin’ that maybe for the next year we can do a sponsorship package for Mile High Dreamin’…
Josh Birk:
Nice.
Erick Mahle:
And if there’s a sponsor that picks up that tab, then we can invest in all of these big things.
Josh Birk:
Uh-huh. Uh-huh.
Erick Mahle:
But naturally, Salesforce has Salesforce+. They have amazing venues for admins and developers like TDX. If it’s something that… If there’s somebody that can pull this off at its fullest and show the full potential of what FlowFest can be, I have no doubt that a venue like TDX would be it.
Josh Birk:
Awesome. Erick, I’ve got one final question for you. What is your favorite non-technical hobby?
Erick Mahle:
My favorite non-technical hobby is absolutely flying. I am a private pilot.
Josh Birk:
Wow.
Erick Mahle:
So, I’ve made the poor financial decision to getting my private’s license. And with my pilot’s license since 2017, I’ve been flying around Southeast United States…
Josh Birk:
Nice.
Erick Mahle:
Bahamas, all those things. I just need a poor excuse to fly, and I’m on my way to the airport.
Josh Birk:
And away you go. Nice. My dad’s a pilot. He was a co-owner in an aerobatic biplane. And I can tell you for a fact, I do not know, I do not have any fear of roller coasters anymore after he did, I think it’s called the reverse Immelmann. You know what I’m talking about? Or you go straight up?
Erick Mahle:
I see. I don’t fly acrobatic, but I know exactly what that is, yes.
Josh Birk:
All the engine… Nothing like the silence of air around you while you’re here. So, I totally get the thrills. Totally, get the thrills. Erick, thank you so much for the great conversation and information. That was a lot of fun.
Erick Mahle:
Yeah, it was always fun having a chat with you, Josh, whether it’s in person or over the podcast here. Thanks for having me. And yeah, hope everyone enjoys it.
Josh Birk:
And that’s our show. Now, if you want to learn more about this podcast and the life of a Salesforce admin in general, head on over to admin.salesforce.com. And, of course, you can subscribe to this podcast using the podcast client of your choice. I want to thank you for listening, and we will talk to you later.
The post How Erick Mahle Is Using AI to Transform Mortgage Lending appeared first on Salesforce Admins.
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By Mike Gerholdt
4.7
199199 ratings
Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Erick Mahle, VP of Revenue Operations & Digital Transformation at Lendz Financial.
Join us as we chat about how he’s using AI to drive digital transformation and how he started FlowFest, the largest global Salesforce Flow competition.
You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Erick Mahle.
Solving business problems with Salesforce
Erick was always interested in technology as a kid, helping his dad build computers. However, he originally started his career in marketing. Everything changed when his manager asked him to take over Salesforce for his organization and he saw what he could do with declarative solutions. “I thought it was the grownup version of Legos,” he says.
In his role at Lendz Financial, he’s combining those problem-solving skills with the power of AI to spearhead digital transformation. The mortgage lending industry is full of complicated business processes that need to be checked and re-checked, so it’s the perfect place to put new AI capabilities to the test.
How AI can streamline mortgage lending
If you’ve ever bought a house, you’ll know that getting a mortgage is incredibly complex. With so many steps and regulatory requirements, Erick and his team are using AI to streamline these business processes and limit costly errors. They call it Project Lexi.
Obviously, with mortgages involved, they’re not ready to turn everything over to AI just yet. However, they’ve already found several wins by eliminating handoffs with automation and training the AI to flag potential problems.
For Erick, the key to any successful digital transformation initiative is to focus on the humans you’re supposed to be helping.
FlowFest, the largest global Salesforce Flow competition
Erick also runs FlowFest, a competition where Flownatics can strut their stuff. It started with the idea that although Trailhead is great at teaching you how to build things, a big part of your job as a Salesforce Admin is to fix broken flows.
Contests are put through several rounds of debug challenges, culminating in a livestreamed event where the finalists race to be the first to find a working solution for the final flow. It’s basically an esport, complete with live commentary and dramatic photo finishes. They just did their first in-person FlowFest at Mile High Dreamin’, and it may be coming soon to an event near you.
Erick had a lot more to share about how he’s thinking about AI and some of his favorite FlowFest stories, so be sure to listen to the full episode. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast.
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Full show transcript
Josh Birk:
Hello, admins, your guest host Josh Birk here. Today, we welcome Erick Mahle to talk a little bit about AI, digital transformation, and a lot about one of his projects, FlowFest, and how people can learn Flow in a really fun and interactive way. So, without any further ado, let’s go welcome Erick.
All right. Today on the show, we welcome Erick Mahle to talk about, of course, probably a little bit of AI since that’s what we have to do these days and Mile High Dreamin’ and FlowFast. Erick, welcome to the show.
Erick Mahle:
Well, thanks for having me, Josh.
Josh Birk:
So, let’s start with your early years. Did you always want to get into software?
Erick Mahle:
No, I had no idea I was going to get into software. Although, when I was a very young kid, my father used to build computers and I know I used to do a little bit of the same as well like getting all the video cards, the motherboards, getting all the components, joining them together. But that wasn’t something that stuck with me throughout all these years. So, I went to school for marketing, but somehow ended up as the accidental admin and here we are 15 years later.
Josh Birk:
Got it. Well, that kind of segues to the next question. How did you first get introduced to Salesforce?
Erick Mahle:
Well, since accidental admin is the default answer for most folks…
Josh Birk:
Right.
Erick Mahle:
I will basically say, I joined a company as a marketing analyst. It was a small company. And like most small companies, you get to wear many hats and they basically said, “Hey, we have Salesforce, why don’t you manage Salesforce?” And really had a great experience there. We had brought in my boss at that time who was a Silicon Valley-type global sales director, and he really challenged me a lot. He used to say, “Hey, at SuccessFactor, Salesforce used to do this, or at Zuora, Salesforce used to do that.
And really, challenged me to kind of reverse engineer Salesforce and I found a lot of joy in that. I thought it was the grown-up version of Legos. I remember when the first time I successfully wrote a formula field, I went to the software developers because we were a software development company, so I went to the software development team and said, “Hey, I’m a developer now.” And they were like, “No, you’re not.” And I’m like, “Okay, maybe I’m not right.”
Josh Birk:
Right.
Erick Mahle:
But the passion was there to play around with it declaratively, and then just from there went to the consulting side, many years on the consulting side, then back client side and kept playing around with all these new tools and trying to keep up with all of the different features that Salesforce continuously tends to roll out.
Josh Birk:
Nice, nice. Yeah, very old. I think he was my skip level boss for a while, but Mike Rosenbaum at Salesforce famously, I’m probably getting this wrong because it’s been quite a few years, but I think it was something along the lines of, we sell Legos, but people build Millennium Falcons, right? It’s like what you can put together with all these components. It’s the really cool part of the platform.
Erick Mahle:
It’s true.
Josh Birk:
And it’s also my old boss and friend Dave Carroll used to say, “We have the one true platform because you’re allowed to build on top of it.” And it’s this constant theme when I talk to people, right? Like especially back on the developer side, people who have to create Java servers and put all these connections together and run up a database, like the simplicity of putting a custom object together and then just using it. It’s a… Can I say, I’m an evangelist so I can say it’s a certain kind of magic.
Erick Mahle:
It is. It’s almost like an operating system of its own. You have so much that Salesforce takes care of for you that a lot of times people can take for granted, especially on the declarative side. It’s folks just have to log in, get their login credentials and they can go to setup and start building things right away.
Josh Birk:
Yeah. How would you describe your current job?
Erick Mahle:
Exciting for sure.
Josh Birk:
Nice.
Erick Mahle:
No, actually it really is quite exciting. So, I’m in mortgage lending now. I was working beforehand as the Senior Director of CRM at First Advantage, which is a global leader in background checks and drug screenings and so forth. So, if you got a job recently, chances are your employer probably went through First Advantage, which I think Salesforce is now a customer of First Advantage.
Josh Birk:
Got it.
Erick Mahle:
So, but that was an interesting time. I got to learn a lot of the corporate world. I got to know a lot of working with different departments, really having to get creative to get things done and get things accomplished and budgeting and all of these things that a lot of organizations had to deal with over the past couple of years.
And during that time in came the President in Lens Financial that had been kind of courting me for a couple of months and he’s like, “Look, we’re growing. We’re growing really fast.” Still, very small organization like when I joined, we were in the mid-30s, now we’re 50 employees all within less than a year. But he basically was raising a round of investment to kind of take the company to the next level and he’s like, “Help me put a budget together for what a digital transformation would look like to be able to really take Lens to the next level.”
So, really when he finally got the approval and he got that round of investment cleared, he’s like, “When can you start?” And we’ve been on the run over since, working on really exciting projects including AI and several other things. So, it’s been fun to be able to go pedal to the metal and really trying to put something exciting together.
Josh Birk:
So, first of all, I want to give that person props because in so many corporate environments they say things like, we need to do a digital transformation, but they don’t fund it. So, congratulations…
Erick Mahle:
That’s a lot of names.
Josh Birk:
… on them doing it right, without saying names or companies or large insurance companies I might’ve worked for in the past, anyway. Actually, I can’t complain about that. They did give me a salary, I guess.
Erick Mahle:
Yeah.
Josh Birk:
Technically, that was their form of ending it. Tell me a little bit more about AI and about how you see that as part of this digital transformation.
Erick Mahle:
Yeah. So, there’s a lot that’s going on there, right? So, the key thing that we’re working on, Lens Financial’s, project LEXI. So, Project LEXI on the surface is basically our digital lending ally. It’s a character that we’ve come up with. And what we’re trying to do is really build an engine behind the digital transformation that we can put a customer 360 project together and have that database and try to learn from that as much as we can.
And from an AI perspective, we have fairly ambitious visions with what we wanted to do and how we’ve been tackling over at Lens is that we’re kind of dipping our toes in the water first, trying to see what we can get away with. I think we’re still very much… We’ve grown in phases. We’re still very much in a prompting phase. Everything is a very grounded prompt to get what we want and be able to derive insights that we’re looking for.
But we’re starting to look at more serious things like building our own LLM or like training our LLM models to be able to have more specific things going on, evaluate our data, make sure that we’re on, make sure that we can identify trends and make sure that we can identify red flags early on. And really trying to bring all of the process efficiency that we can. Our industry, the industry that has so many steps and so many things that we have to take.
And what we’re looking for LEXI to do is to be an extra eyes over the shoulder to say, “Hey, is there anything that you potentially missed? Is there anything that you have to be concerned with in order to make this deal go through?” And that’s kind of one of the key things that we’re looking to use LEXI for at Lens.
Josh Birk:
Like this is a history of good data. If you see something that looks like it might be moving into bad category, let us know.
Erick Mahle:
Exactly. And in addition to other things as well, we want to be able to use optical character recognition. So, we’re actively looking to be able to build OCR. And when you’re… Anyone that’s listening here that’s bought a house or that’s considering buying a house, get ready to send an avalanche of documents. We will want to know about the 20 cents that you have at the bottom of your couch and where has that been for the past five years?
Josh Birk:
Yup, yes.
Erick Mahle:
So, there is a lot of documents to go through, a lot of processes to go through. So, really being able to evaluate all of that and trying to make sure that, “Hey, everything’s in the norm here,” right? Everything looks fine. Or, “Hey, here’s something that doesn’t add up.” Anything that could raise the attention of whether it’s the processor, the underwriter, just to make sure that we increase the… Continue to increase the quality of our processes without affecting our efficiency or our pull through ratios.
Josh Birk:
Yeah, two thoughts come to mind. One is, first of all, I’m glad to hear the concept of getting mortgage getting into the digital age because when we bought our condo here in Chicago, my friends who had just gone through this themselves were like, “Well, you need to do one thing, bring two pens and a sandwich. You’re going to be in a room for a really long time. It’s going to be a pain if that pen runs out of bank.”
But also, back to how you’re talking about training your own LLM, I think that’s an interesting trend because we’ve had these conversations internally at Salesforce about, “Do we build our own models? What bottles do we use? Do we use the open models?” And the answer I think has been a hodgepodge of these things. But the interesting thing is you need an AI that knows about mortgage and mortgage processing and what a good document looks like. You don’t need one that knows how to cook a rotisserie chicken.
Erick Mahle:
Now, for everyone that’s listening to this podcast, please imagine the forward-looking statement slide, strolling through as Josh is going through these items.
Josh Birk:
Right, right. Although, I suppose back to the sandwich joke mightn’t be handy if it can cook a rotisserie chicken for you too. How often do you think you personally use AI for work?
Erick Mahle:
There’s definitely a frequent use of ChatGPT within our organization, within a couple of users. It’s actually something that we just started talking about putting in accepted AI use guidelines for all employees because it is something we have to be very mindful of.
Josh Birk:
Yup.
Erick Mahle:
I think at an individual like ChatGPT level, we have the ever occasional simplify this or change this JSON into tables for me because I don’t have the patience to do it otherwise. There are use cases like that. Now, with regards to LEXI and the built models that we have, several times a day. So, typically, we’re introducing LEXI internally right now as a culture building tool as well.
So, instead of LEXI, people being worried about this LEXI tool or what it can do where we started a kudos channel. So, basically, LEXI is giving out kudos to the teams who…
Josh Birk:
Nice.
Erick Mahle:
… managed to get loans in the fastest or people who log the most calls by the halfway through the day. So, there’s a lot of that which helps us also understand kind of getting our feet wet, kind of how does this work, what can we get away with, what can we rely on? And really set that step-by-step foundation of where we really want to take this.
Josh Birk:
Yeah.
Erick Mahle:
So, I think as a small organization and having seen this in the past myself, things can get very expensive very fast if you’re loose with perhaps just grabbing vendors right off the shelf saying, “Hey, I can promise you all of these things and just give us all your money,” and the next thing you know this is something that we as a customer didn’t fully understand what we needed. Maybe the vendor was maybe just too aggressive into getting the business because let’s be realistic, if you ask for someone who is 10 years of AI experience, so that’s optimistic to say that.
Josh Birk:
Right.
Erick Mahle:
Everything’s so new that trying to be one of the early adopters without breaking the bank is definitely something that we’re cognizant of and we’re just trying to make sure that we’re taking the right steps, checking everything off and then saying, “Alright, now we’re comfortable with making the next move, the next level up.” And ultimately, integrate that all together.
Josh Birk:
Yeah, I don’t think of at least three-fourths of anytime I talk about AI to audiences. One of the things I include is, if you do not have an acceptable use policy, like now it’s back when social media suddenly took us all by surprise, didn’t realize it could do as much good as harm. And your company was like, these are the things you probably should not do on Twitter. It’s out of the gate. That’s the time to start thinking about what do you think people should or should not do with it.
It’s funny you say the ten-year AI thing, and this is as I often do, and I get in front of a mic date myself. In my early days, Flash was still a primary motivator for application building, shall we say. And I couldn’t get into Flash because I was a JavaScript nerd. And I learned Perl, I was kind of a programmer by default and Flash just didn’t make any sense to me. But it was always a red flag when somebody would ask for five years of Flash experience when Flash had only been invented three years ago.
Erick Mahle:
Yeah.
Josh Birk:
I just didn’t submit that.
Erick Mahle:
It’s a pain that we all have to go through. It’s just hysterical. I see it in some of the Slack channels or some folks on LinkedIn feeds calling out some of these posts and it’s ridiculous. They’re out there. People are just like, “No, no, no. We want the most experienced person in the world to give us 15 years of experience,” and something that came out like a year ago.
Josh Birk:
Right. Unless you’ve been at Stanford working on this very quietly without telling anybody, you have not been doing this for 15 years.
Erick Mahle:
Yup.
Josh Birk:
All right. Well, let’s change gears a little bit because we first met, I did an AI talk for you all at Mile High Dreamin’. When did you first start getting involved in Mile High Dreamin’ itself?
Erick Mahle:
So, it was last year, 2023. I had been running FlowFest for two years by that point.
Josh Birk:
Okay.
Erick Mahle:
And I guess, we’ll go into the insides of FlowFest for anyone that’s not familiar. But everything that we’ve done with FlowFest was an online event thus far. And we had a couple of regional conferences, organizers such as Mile High Dreamin’ and a couple of other green events. And they were always reaching out and they were like, “We really like what you’re doing. Can we do this in a conference setting conference?”
Josh Birk:
Yeah.
Erick Mahle:
And Mile High Dreamin’ was the one that worked like the timing, the dates, everything that we needed. So, we decided to give it a shot last year in 2023. And we learned a lot of taking an online format into an in-person format. And this year, when you and I got a chance to meet, it was our second run at it, which we managed to improve a lot. I think we had a great time last year. We had an even better time this year. So, yeah, it was exciting to participate in it.
Josh Birk:
Before we get into the mechanics of it, what’s kind of the origin of it? What was the inspiration for doing that?
Erick Mahle:
So, it was really interesting. I had the opportunity to participate in, I think this was peak pandemic, and someone organized the Zoom and said, “Hey, I have a couple of flow challenges and I want to see who can finish them first.” And I think there was, I don’t know, some basic raffle prize or something like that. And I love the idea and I had a conversation with them. I was like, “Look, I think we can do this much bigger and more importantly in a fun educational way.” I know we’re talking about AI. I know that that’s the hot topic right now. I still think that there’s so many foundational things…
Josh Birk:
Yeah.
Erick Mahle:
… in order to make AI work, right? Whether it’s data modeling or data cleanliness and all of these things. And I think especially for the declarative side of folks, I think knowing how to use automations properly is a crucial thing. Everyone has a flow course, right? Everyone, there’s just so much content out there and we wanted to do something that’s educational that is also entertaining at the same time.
Josh Birk:
Okay.
Erick Mahle:
And I remember I had pitched this to Ben McCarthy over at Salesforce Ben, and he’s like, “Hey, I’m on board. What do you think? How many people do you think you’re going to get on this?” I was like, “Look, maybe we get 10, maybe we get 100 people.” He even sent me the screenshot of the WhatsApp message after we held the first one because the first time around, I think we got 2,000 people that registered.
Josh Birk:
Nice.
Erick Mahle:
And quickly, once we opened the registration, we realized that we kind of had to up our game. This isn’t going to be 20 people hanging out in a Zoom conversation. So, we put our heads together and we managed to put the events online. And effectively, it’s a series of challenges that folks have to go through. And the final challenge, the folks that pass the first qualifier round, they go into the final challenge.
So, we’ll have something like four to six competitors on the final challenge. And then, they have to screen share. So, if you think eSports, we’re there just watching and commentating as we see people be given a challenge on a flow and they’re building it out and you’re seeing how folks interpret challenges differently or solution design things differently.
And it’s great because we get a chance to point out the different ways of approaching a challenge. And sometimes, the pros and cons of it. Equally, one of the key things that we love about FlowFest that we don’t see anywhere else, and we were talking and trying to tell the Trailhead folks to see if they could incorporate something like this is, Trailhead gives you directions on how to build flows. But as an admin, one of the most crucial things is fixing broken flows.
Josh Birk:
Rest.
Erick Mahle:
So, in FlowFest, we will have challenges where the flows are broken at the beginning and the challenge is to fix whatever is wrong and debug it successfully.
Josh Birk:
Got it.
Erick Mahle:
So, yeah, ultimately, it’s just a really entertaining way to learn some more about flows and we try to do every FlowFest or challenge around recent feature releases and so forth.
Josh Birk:
So, first of all, I want to go back to what you said about AI is important, but it’s an important part of the platform. It’s not… I know it’s the big marketing push right now. I go back to the Legos thing, right? AI is another Lego. It’s another Lego set that’s very powerful one, but it’s going to be way more powerful if you leverage your flow skills, if you leverage your data security skills, if you leverage your data management skills.
So, 100% agreement there. Let’s dig a little bit more into the challenge. So, you have teams, they get an org, and then how are you presenting the challenges to them? And you said some are debugging challenges, but what are some of the other challenges that they go through?
Erick Mahle:
Yeah. So, the online and the in-person format have their own deviations. But ultimately, what competitors will be given is that there will be a list of challenges and the team that’s organizing the event, myself and several other flow experts, everyone that has been a FlowFest champion has come back to help building the future challenges, which is cool.
So, ultimately, you’ll have a series of challenges and we’ll try to list it almost as if it’s a certification exam question. All very scenario-based like Universal Containers is looking to accomplish X, Y, Z. So, effectively, there’ll be these four challenges. You’ll have your own dev org. So, we provide all of these instructions. We have a managed package that you’ll install, which basically will nuke all of the dev org’s data and install a fresh data set, so that way we know everybody’s using the same data.
So, please don’t install this managed package in your production environments. And I don’t think I’ve put enough disclaimers now, I probably put more in there, just in case. So, you’ll set up your managed package, you’ll have the data normalized, so all competitors have the same data. And then, they’ll have a series of challenges.
Now, the challenges, we provide an unmanaged package that has… We try to simplify as much as we can. So, every challenge will have a flow already built for it. So, effectively, all they need to do is just build on top of that. We tell them…
Josh Birk:
Got it.
Erick Mahle:
… you don’t need to go anywhere outside of the flow canvas for any portion of the competition. And the final element in every challenge is a subflow that pushes your work to our host org. So, we actually do receive all of your work. We’ll receive a couple of submission variables, which helps us check to see if at an early pace, if we see all the right numbers to see if everything’s done correctly.
Josh Birk:
Yeah.
Erick Mahle:
And then, we also get the XML so we can look at things like have you used loops? Have you used… Is there any DML inside a loop? We could really kind of pin down what you have there. And then, when you do the final challenge, we’ll have a judge’s review of the work.
So, I have actually someone looking in, like we’ll usually tell them like, “Hey, there are a couple of things that are off limits.” For example, you can’t have unofficial SF components in there. If we start seeing Apex sections, that’s not… You’re not giving everyone a fair shot because you thought of installing Apex actions in their invocable actions that you could, try to use to skip some steps. That’s not fair game.
Josh Birk:
Right.
Erick Mahle:
So, and ultimately, short of they’re not being anything like brazenly, bad practice like DMLs inside a loop. Then, typically, if everything’s correct and they got the numbers correctly, then we will name the winner.
Josh Birk:
Nice, nice. Now, having seen you in person, I got to compliment, you’re a really good pitchman during this. You’re really keeping the audience engaged, you’re keeping the audience very excited, you’re pitching the teams next to each other. I’m curious, how did that work in the online version? Like, were you just sort of a talking head that was kind of like doing an MC for the whole thing?
Erick Mahle:
You barely got to see me on the online version. You go back and walk any of those, you’ll barely see me. I have to give credit to Ben McCarthy.
Josh Birk:
Nice.
Erick Mahle:
So, he was the MC for most of those. And I was mostly in the background running logistics.
Josh Birk:
Got it.
Erick Mahle:
And making sure that everyone was up and running. We would have our panel of judges. We’d be coordinating internally, so there would be a Zoom meeting that all of the competitors would be in. So, everyone’s running the first part of the competition there. We do our housekeeping rules. We share the challenges. If anyone has any questions, we try to address it there.
And then, in the parallel track there will be… We use StreamYard, so it’d be the live stream, and then that is a group of 12 folks. And then, for the qualifier rounds, which are those challenges where we don’t know who’s going to go in the final round yet. Then, Ben McCarthy would have guest speakers like Jen Lee was there at the last one.
We had several like Flownatics will be doing presentations on, “Hey, here’s the latest Flow releases” or any specific presentation that we want to bring in. And then, usually, there’s the turnaround point where we’ll bring the finalists for that final challenge in because then they’ll jump in on StreamYard, so they can screen share.
Josh Birk:
Yeah.
Erick Mahle:
And then, at that point, because now we’re only managing four folks, I’ll jump in and I’ll be commentating on what they’re doing. So, I’ll usually be operating StreamYard and kind of switching between screens and be like, “Oh, look, here, something’s interesting. Here’s a different approach to this or a different take.”
Josh Birk:
Nice.
Erick Mahle:
And use a couple of my fellow Flownatics to kind of pick apart what we’re seeing. And if we see something that’s interesting, especially if something that we haven’t thought of, the nice thing about the online competition is that you really get hundreds of competitors. So, sometimes you see things that you haven’t thought of, which is exciting to be able to share with the crowd that’s watching.
Josh Birk:
Yeah, do you have some favorite moments or some things that you’ve seen from the challenges?
Erick Mahle:
When we first introduced this live final challenge, which I think was FlowFest V4, you couldn’t have planned this out. So, we roughly came up with the rules that if you submit that you’ve completed the challenge, we’re going to do a judge’s review on screen, will ask you to kind of go through to show us different parts of the flow. And if you get it wrong, then you go to the back of the line and anybody that says they’ve completed the challenges, then we would go and review theirs.
Josh Birk:
Got it.
Erick Mahle:
So, we don’t want to motivate people to just kind of immediately submit, and then kind of like…
Josh Birk:
And hope for the best, yeah.
Erick Mahle:
Yeah.
Josh Birk:
Yeah.
Erick Mahle:
So, this guy had submitted and he got it wrong. There was something hysterical when he ran the debug, it was a screen flow and it said something like, you have 30 opportunities in your org and 70 closed one opportunities. I’m like, “That math does work out.” I was like…
Josh Birk:
That’s not the right Venn diagram there. Nope, nope.
Erick Mahle:
Exactly. I was like, “There’s something, there’s off here.” So, and it was funny because it suddenly became tense and everyone just kind of like, all of the judges kind of lit up because we’re reviewing the next guy and it’s like suddenly the heat is on, the pressure is on, and everyone’s just kind of like, “Alright, what’s going on? Oh, yeah, another one’s ready for submission, if this guy doesn’t make…” And it was literally kind of end of World Cup.
Everyone’s just kind like it’s the end of the second half and everyone’s just counting the seconds and they’re just kind of like, “Who’s going to win?” And it turns out that the second guy also had gotten something wrong. So, the first one comes back and actually had fixed what he needed. So, taking the FlowFest Champion title.
Josh Birk:
Nice.
Erick Mahle:
And it was just something how it all worked out. It was just tons of fun and excitement and new adrenaline. I’ve organized six of these online and the two Mile High Dreamin’ ones and your adrenaline is running at a million. You needed a solid 72 hours just to bring yourself down to a normal human level. So, with everything going on, it was just so exciting. It was a really great experience to be able to be a part of that.
Josh Birk:
Nice. That’s awesome. Is there any place people can see previous versions?
Erick Mahle:
Yes. So, Salesforce Ben has listed most of the FlowFest videos, live streams, so you can check most of them out there. We tried on Mile High Dreamin’ last year, and you can find it somewhere on LinkedIn. I don’t recommend you do or have a lot of patience because one of the things we learned was that you can’t do 10 million things at once.
Josh Birk:
Right.
Erick Mahle:
So, I literally just had two webcams connected and one facing different parts of the stage and the sound quality was atrocious. We only found that out later. It was just we’re like, “Alright, less than one. If someone’s going to do video or we’re going to try to live stream this, we need a separate team.”
But this year, the Mile High Dreamin’ folks did have a video production company, so I know there’s video being edited. I don’t know what the final video is going to look like, but I know it’s in the works. So, check out the Mile High Dreamin’ YouTube channel. Maybe, by the time this airs, then it’ll already be out there.
Josh Birk:
Awesome. Future plans. Do you have a home at Mile High Dreamin’? Are you going to keep going there? Are you going to do more online things? Or we might, we see you at a TDX or a Dreamforce in the future?
Erick Mahle:
Well…
Josh Birk:
That’s probably more of a me question. You’re like, “I don’t know, Josh.”
Erick Mahle:
Nice. Look, I think, it’s incredibly exciting. The online ones is an incredible amount of work.
Josh Birk:
Yeah.
Erick Mahle:
And I would not be able to put any of this together if it wasn’t for the awesome Flownatics or previous FlowFest Champions folks that help put this together, build the managed package, all of these things, it’s quite a lot. And the Mile High Dreamin’ folks are also super helpful in helping organize that. So, Mile High Dreamin’, I think it’s an awesome home, so to say. And the timing works out well.
I know a couple of other Dreamin’ events, like I mentioned earlier, came one in specific both times. There was just schedule conflict. It is just a really bad time of the year because I’m usually traveling, and we just couldn’t make it on that alone. But we’ve had interest. If anyone’s interested, I’m happy to try to see what we can do. TDX would be definitely the goal.
Josh Birk:
Nice.
Erick Mahle:
Because I think there’s a ton of potential, everyone that goes, seems to have some really good feedback. Not only like, sometimes people are like, “Yeah, this is awesome.” And sometimes, people come, I’ve never had someone like, “Well, well, this sucks.”
Josh Birk:
Right.
Erick Mahle:
What we’ve had and I think was really interested is that people are passionate about this stuff. So, they’ll come and be like, “Oh, you know what? It would be a really good idea or here’s something that I didn’t see over, I was hoping to see.” And we look at that and a lot of the comments kind of comes around on things that are like video production, right?
You need a video production team, an AV team running this if you’re going to be sharing screens, if you’re going to be commentating all of these things. So, it’s something whether I think we’re getting enough traction with Mile High Dreamin’ that maybe for the next year we can do a sponsorship package for Mile High Dreamin’…
Josh Birk:
Nice.
Erick Mahle:
And if there’s a sponsor that picks up that tab, then we can invest in all of these big things.
Josh Birk:
Uh-huh. Uh-huh.
Erick Mahle:
But naturally, Salesforce has Salesforce+. They have amazing venues for admins and developers like TDX. If it’s something that… If there’s somebody that can pull this off at its fullest and show the full potential of what FlowFest can be, I have no doubt that a venue like TDX would be it.
Josh Birk:
Awesome. Erick, I’ve got one final question for you. What is your favorite non-technical hobby?
Erick Mahle:
My favorite non-technical hobby is absolutely flying. I am a private pilot.
Josh Birk:
Wow.
Erick Mahle:
So, I’ve made the poor financial decision to getting my private’s license. And with my pilot’s license since 2017, I’ve been flying around Southeast United States…
Josh Birk:
Nice.
Erick Mahle:
Bahamas, all those things. I just need a poor excuse to fly, and I’m on my way to the airport.
Josh Birk:
And away you go. Nice. My dad’s a pilot. He was a co-owner in an aerobatic biplane. And I can tell you for a fact, I do not know, I do not have any fear of roller coasters anymore after he did, I think it’s called the reverse Immelmann. You know what I’m talking about? Or you go straight up?
Erick Mahle:
I see. I don’t fly acrobatic, but I know exactly what that is, yes.
Josh Birk:
All the engine… Nothing like the silence of air around you while you’re here. So, I totally get the thrills. Totally, get the thrills. Erick, thank you so much for the great conversation and information. That was a lot of fun.
Erick Mahle:
Yeah, it was always fun having a chat with you, Josh, whether it’s in person or over the podcast here. Thanks for having me. And yeah, hope everyone enjoys it.
Josh Birk:
And that’s our show. Now, if you want to learn more about this podcast and the life of a Salesforce admin in general, head on over to admin.salesforce.com. And, of course, you can subscribe to this podcast using the podcast client of your choice. I want to thank you for listening, and we will talk to you later.
The post How Erick Mahle Is Using AI to Transform Mortgage Lending appeared first on Salesforce Admins.
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