Eric Berridge Transcript
Clint Betts
Welcome to the CEO.com Show. My name is Clint Betts. On today's show, I talk to Coastal CEO Eric Berridge, who is a two-time author, TED speaker, and co-founder and former CEO of Bluewolf, an IBM company that was acquired in 2016. That was a firm that he built over two decades as the original, the original, and we talk about this and his relationship with Mark Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce. They were the original and preeminent consultancy for Salesforce. Today, Eric is the CEO of Coastal, which used to be called Coastal Cloud, which again is a top Salesforce consultancy. He knows what he's doing in this. He's actually written two books. His latest book is Customer Obsessed, which redefines customer obsession for the tech era. And he continues to educate and give voice to other entrepreneurs building customer-obsessed businesses. We get pretty deep here on customer obsessions. This was a really fascinating in-depth interview, if you're really interested in how do you give your customers the very best experience possible. Eric knows a lot about that. And so, let's talk to him.
Eric, thank you so much for coming on the show. It's an honor to have you. You recently went through a rebrand, which we're seeing now here with Coastal. I love it. I was on your site actually earlier today. Well done. What all went into this rebrand, and maybe you could help us understand branding in general and how you think about how a brand tells a company's story.
Eric Berridge
Yeah, that's a great question, Clint. Our company's been around for over a decade, and it started out as Coastal Cloud. It was back when the cloud was still relatively new, and it wasn't as ubiquitous in the marketplace as it is today, so it was a differentiator for us. We were also founded in Palm Coast, Florida, which is a place a lot of people haven't been. Not to be confused with Palm Beach, Florida, founded by Tim and Sarah Hale. They started it as this local company and employed a lot of people locally in the Palm Coast area. They did a lot of work with Salesforce, obviously, but also with the state of Florida around things like emergency management and contact tracing and vaccine management during Covid, and the company really blew up and became a national organization over the course of that decade, became one of Salesforce's top partners, and our brand actually was stuck behind what we'd actually become. We were now doing programs and projects with eight different industries across a vast array of Salesforce clients, multi-cloud, and complex implementations. We have a team of over 600 people now, nationally, running these programs, but our brand still looked like we were founded by this couple in Florida on the beach. For us, the branding exercise was really an evolution, and dropping the cloud from our name made the statement that the cloud is how people operate today; it's not something that we have to declare, and we're coastal. We're coast to coast, and we're the top provider of services in the Salesforce ecosystem in North America. It was a really fun process.
Clint Betts
Yeah, that's incredible and well done. Again, I think it looks beautiful, and the site looks great as well. Tell us about what it means to be the top Salesforce provider in North America.
Eric Berridge
It's really all about what your customers say about you. If you go on Salesforce's App Exchange or you go on to independent third-party research sites like G2, they consistently rank us number one, and they rank us number one based on the satisfaction that they have around our services, around the number of certified consultants that we have in the marketplace in North America, as well as the various skill sets that we bring to the table. As you know, Salesforce is not just one product; it's a portfolio of products. It's actually hundreds of products. To maintain skills across that portfolio in a broad enough way to serve an enterprise client requires us to have those skills on staff. And we're 100% onshore; all of our folks are certified. We're a W2-based organization, so we use very few contractors. Those things, put together with what customers say about us on these sites and in the marketplace, are what put us in that number one position.
Clint Betts
You've written a book called Customer Obsessed, and you also have a podcast of the same name, if I'm not mistaken. What does it mean to be customer-obsessed? Obviously, that's been successful, and whatever strategy you're using has been successful, being ranked number one in all these different categories. What does it mean to be customer-obsessed?
Eric Berridge
It probably means that you're really annoying. What do I mean by that? We all live our lives as consumers, and I'm probably the most annoying consumer there is because if a brand shows me something or takes me through a process that isn't incredibly intuitive and doesn't immediately get me engaged or interested, I'm pointing it out. I'm the type of consumer that I hate when someone hands me a receipt. I don't need a receipt. You know what I just bought. I want that transaction to flow seamlessly. If you're customer obsessed, you are looking for every single nook and cranny in your customer journey, and you're doing everything within your power to iron it out, to shorten the cycle, to make that process seamless. If you go back to the beginning of the internet, and you look at something like when Amazon first came out with one-click ordering, that was a seminal moment.
Clint Betts
Yeah, for sure.
Eric Berridge
It used to take you 20 minutes to buy something online; now, it takes you eight seconds. Being customer-obsessed means looking for opportunities to improve the customer experience every single step of the way. It can be annoying. Consumers, buyers, and brands tend to accept mediocrity, but the best brands and the best experiences come from organizations that don't accept mediocrity. They come from organizations where there tends to be a leader that is obsessed with defining the value that their customer is getting, is obsessed with the packaging, and is obsessed with the colors in their logo. It is a full package, but being customer-obsessed is all about being incredibly obsessed about how organizations experience your brand.
Clint Betts
Who do you think does that really well? What brands stick out to you as an example of how they make this experience awesome, they're obsessed with their customer, and they care about everything they put out? Are there any brands that immediately stick out in your mind?
Eric Berridge
There are the obvious ones, like Apple. They invented this whole concept. Steve Jobs, may he rest in peace, would look at everything through the customer's lens. Then you have organizations like Zappos, which, early on, defined themselves around the customer. I think Salesforce does a great job. They are one of the biggest metrics that Salesforce looks at internally, and I spent two years inside of Salesforce; I've been in the ecosystem for over 20, and their attrition. It's a metric that matters to them, and they measure it daily. "Are we losing customers? Why are we losing customers?" And they tend to back up the truck with resources to make sure that customers stay on their platform. And this is a highly complex platform that can be difficult to use because it's so powerful. So I think they're a great example. The local bookstore is a great example. What experience are you actually looking for? I don't like trolling through catalogs of digital images. Sometimes, when I'm trying to buy something, I want to go into a warm environment and actually speak to someone about, "Have you read this book?" Or "Have you heard about this author?" There are consumer experiences that are in our daily lives, and we tend to get so focused on digital, but let's remember that those brick-and-mortar experiences are really important ones, as well. Going back to Apple for a second, when Apple first opened the Apple Store, they opened it in a period of time when everything was going online. When Dell was the darling of Wall Street, selling boxes that were made to order, over the internet, click to buy, and Apple announced they were going to open the Apple Store, their stock went down like 10% that day. Like, "What are you doing? You're going back to brick and mortar." Apple knew that you have to have a multichannel approach to a customer, and that's another big piece of being customer obsessed is meet the customer where they want to meet you and think about a multichannel approach, and that will lead you to probably come to the conclusion that brick and mortar isn't dead.
Clint Betts
There's a lot of truth to that, actually. As CEO of Coastal, how do you decide where to spend your time? What wins each day? Is it customers? How do we improve the customer experience? Does that win every day? And so that dictates how you're going to be spending your time and where in the company you're going to be spending your time?
Eric Berridge
That's a good way of looking at it. The view of "just give your customers what they want," though, is not the right way to look at it. Particularly as a consultancy, it's our responsibility to lead the horse to water. It's our responsibility to promote ways of working and best practices to clients that will ultimately deliver the best customer experience. That sometimes flies in the face of expectations that clients have at the outset, so we spend a lot of time helping our teams to have tougher conversations with clients to get them to see the light from time to time. You have to remember, as a consulting firm, we're dealing with a multifaceted organization a lot of times, and they're bringing different departments to us. You might have the sales department, the IT department, and the legal department involved. In any engagement, we're dealing with a couple dozen people at a minimum, and they all have different views, and they're not perfectly aligned. Getting to true customer success is helping to build that alignment with that organization, using our experience and best practices in a way where it's collaborative and it's positive, and there are results that we're all trying to achieve that we're aligned around, and we ultimately get to an end goal, which is a go live or is the realization of the ROI that the project set out to achieve. Back to your question, which is, where do I choose to spend my time? Waking up every morning, thinking about customers, and knowing where our customer opportunities are is certainly one way where I prioritize my time, but I also prioritize my time a lot around how we're going to deliver these experiences to our customers on a consistent basis.
Clint Betts
What do you read? What reading recommendations would you have for us?
Eric Berridge
Every morning, I do Wordle and Connections. That's how I start my day. That's how I get my brain... That's my own meditation. In the morning, I'll read various "newspapers." I am a big fan of the New York Times. I read the San Francisco Chronicle because I'm originally from the Bay Area. I do all that online. I look at what's going on in the market. I read things like The Atlantic and The New Yorker, which tend to be longer time commitments, but I will touch upon topics that are very relevant. There's so much out there on AI right now that you can always find a good article that's a great perspective on where we are really going with AI. I read about our customers, and I love to read fiction. I'm a big fan of American fiction. I'm a big fan of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Clint Betts
The greats.
Eric Berridge
The older I get, the longer I've been in the business world. I've been at this now for 30- more years. When you go back and read that stuff, you realize there are so many business lessons in the great works of fiction.
Clint Betts
Even in the way Hemingway wrote, using him as an example, the simplicity of it and the beauty of the simplicity of it and the way you can really make a point and get things across without having to be super... He would write in two sentences, which a lot of authors, particularly back then, would use three pages for.
Eric Berridge
I'll never forget my high school English teacher. We were reading Hemingway's short stories, and there was one that was called Up in Michigan. There was a line that he made us read ten times, and I could never figure out why. The sentence was, "Nick looked at the fish. Period." And he was just trying to show us that Hemingway used brevity. He economized words to get messages across. That's incredibly relevant to business today because this whole thing is a communication exercise, getting people to communicate with each other. The better you do it and the more efficiently you do it, the faster you grow, the more customers you have, the tighter your messages are, and the more you can get groups of people to align around a common vision, which is about communication. We spend so much time, in the corporate world right now, sitting behind screens, looking at PowerPoint presentations that are riddled with bullet points and abbreviations and acronyms, and they're wordy, and no one's really reading it because you're looking at the slide, but you're listening to what someone's saying, so you're confused. If people can get to the point and articulate things in a more concise way with persuasion, we'll get more done.
Clint Betts
You mentioned Apple before, but nobody's better than that at Apple with the brevity and the simplicity, but still a powerful message that comes out of that. That's actually really fascinating. I agree with that. People need to read Hemingway.
Eric Berridge
We came up with a solution here, Clint.
Clint Betts
Go read Hemingway. Why not? It's incredible. He's an incredible writer. Maybe the greatest ever, actually. You mentioned earlier that you've been reading a lot about AI in the Atlantic New Yorker and other publications. What's your take on it? How is it affecting your business? How is it affecting the businesses of your customers?
Eric Berridge
It's been coming for a long time. I spent some time inside IBM for about three and a half years, and IBM was ahead of the curve on this stuff with Watson. The challenge back then was people's data; it was everywhere. And I think, obviously, last year, with the launch of ChatGPT, was another seminal moment where the world woke up to AI. It's incredibly powerful. I'm not one of these individuals who is worried about the displacement of jobs. I think it's actually going to be the opposite. There's a lot of research that shows that if we can start using these AI models correctly, it's just going to increase productivity dramatically, which is going to increase creativity dramatically. If you look at the history of time, going back to the pre-Industrial Revolution, we're just doing things faster as a society, and we are dishing the work that is less valuable, if you will, to automation. Talk about writing a press release that can take a PR department a week. It could take ChatGPT five seconds plus some editing, some revisions, plus some criticism from the team. But if we're shortening those cycles, it means more communication. It means that we can now put our brains to work on bigger problems, and I'm a big believer in it. I think organizations are going to struggle to adopt it correctly because it is the wild, wild west right now, and there'll be a lot of failure. Hopefully, none of that or very little of it will be too dramatic, but in the early internet days, people failed to put shopping carts up. It was hard. To truly apply AI to your business correctly is still going to take a lot of thought leadership and adoption, but it's powerful.
Clint Betts
Don't you think people who are like this are going to take away jobs? Maybe it will, but it would also create jobs. That's what every major technology has ever done in the history of the world. It's taken jobs, but it's also created far more jobs than it took. Don't you think those who think "AI can replace employees" are thinking about it wrong? And you basically just said this in a different way, but AI is like a tool for those employees to be more productive. It's not a replacement as much as it's an enhancer.
Eric Berridge
Something else that I'm really passionate about is we're going to know when AI wrote something versus when something is really original. We just will. We're humans. We are pretty good at identifying things, and I think the power of brand in the world of AI will be around authenticity. That's what we're going to buy. Suppose AI can do all the stuff that gets us ready to be incredibly authentic as a brand, as a person, an employee, or a parent. Awesome. We want to be our true selves at work. We want to be our true selves in our daily lives. And that's what people are going to buy. That's going to make people successful. It's going to make us better communities. That's the trick. It's funny, my daughter's a college student or one of my daughters, and I asked her... I have a son who's a computer science major and a daughter who is a liberal arts major, and I asked my son, "Do you use ChatGPT to do your homework?" He said, "Yes, absolutely I do, Dad." I asked my daughter, "Do you use it to write a paper?" And she said, "No, I can't." She said, "It takes me more time to rewrite what AI does for me than it does for me just to do it myself." Now, she's a writer. Her true self is to be authentic through her words, so that's how she's expressing her authentic self. He's just trying to get work done. We're going to pick and choose our spots, but I think authenticity is still going to be this characteristic that we're going to seek out.
Clint Betts
You gave a TED talk about what you just mentioned, where we should be looking at the arts and humanities for talent and not just from the STEM fields. As we work in technology and as technology progresses, I think that'll become more and more important.
Eric Berridge
Right. Because AI is going to provide a lot of our... It's going to be the basis for our technology. It's going to become our interface. You can tell a machine how to program something. If you can tell a machine what you want, I think that... And I'm not saying there aren't jobs out there for engineers, computer programmers, or architects. This stuff is still wildly complicated. AI can do it faster. It's going to crash the car faster, too, if you have bad architecture. So I'm not suggesting that, but I am suggesting that if you have communication skills, if you can write concisely, as we talked about a few minutes ago, if you can persuade... How do you get a group of 60 people to agree on where you're going to go on the hike? Organizational skills, community-building skills, having a vision, and being able to express passion. These are the things that will drive an automated world, and emotion becomes way more important in the workplace when the machine's doing all the rote tasks. That's why an education in the humanities is necessary, or that's why if you want to be a poet in college, go for it. There'll be jobs out there for you. I truly believe that. It pains me when I see certain universities or schools like cut the budget to the liberal arts or the humanities because everything's going STEM. What kind of people are we putting in the world? We need that mix. We need that diversity. And the workplace... Everyone we hire nowadays who's in their early twenties is a digital native, anyhow. In 1972, if you had given a Cobalt programmer an iPhone, they would've been lost. But we bring someone into Coastal today who's a history major; we can teach him Salesforce in about two weeks. That's a true story. Now, do they have the business skills yet to be a top producer in our organization? Not yet, but we can teach them the technology much faster today than you could ten years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago. That's how I feel about the importance of a broad-based education.
Clint Betts
How have you handled this whole work-from-home, hybrid, or everybody back at the office that every leader's had to go through post-pandemic?
Eric Berridge
No one's figured it out. It's a problem, actually. There's an opportunity for people. I just had this conversation with an ex-colleague of mine today. I'm at home right now. That's cool. I had probably eight meetings today on Zoom. We all looked at each other on our screens, but there was very little extemporaneous creativity that happened in my day today. I didn't bump into someone in the hall and get quickly caught up on what's going on in their lives or in their department. I didn't come up with that idea. I didn't grab someone, but I brought them into my office and whiteboarded them, which is an issue we're having right now. That is the power of collaboration, and organizations are stuck right now because there are either organizations that are like, "You can work from home whenever you want," or there are organizations that are saying, "You have to be back in the office three days a week." In this generation, the mandate of anything never works. Try to ask your kid to go do something; they'll do the opposite. There's an opportunity for organizations to build physical environments that people want to go to, specifically to collaborate in the manner that I just described. I haven't seen it really happen anywhere yet. It's where we want to try to take Coastal over time without mandating anything. I think there are certain times when you just get more done when you're together as a team. You certainly have more fun.
Clint Betts
How do you define culture, and how do you manage culture, given that we are not all in the office every single day?
Eric Berridge
It's harder to do it in a remote environment. When you get people together, the relationships they build and the bonds they make are lifelong. So we plot those things out. We do a ton of stuff like this, but we all know what our next get-together is. We do an all-hands event every year when the entire company comes in. We just planned that out a couple of weeks ago, but we don't have a traditional office culture. Now, I will say the other thing you need to do more consistently if you don't have an office-based environment is you have to clearly define your values, and you have to constantly remind people what those values are. You manage the culture around how true we are to those values if that makes sense.
Clint Betts
Yeah, for sure. What are Coastal's values?
Eric Berridge
They're simple. Respect, innovation, collaboration, and fun. But we talk about them, and we highlight them on a monthly basis as we talk about customers. We try to tie a value to a customer narrative.
Clint Betts
As CEO, how do you handle this kind of responsibility? It feels like, or maybe it's real, maybe it isn't, where you're being asked to comment on more than just what's happening inside of your company, but what's happening in the world at large? What do you think about that? How do you manage that? How do you decide when you're going to speak about something that really doesn't have anything to do with Coastal, but your employees care about, your community cares about, all that type of stuff?
Eric Berridge
Those are the powerful stories. You want to try to relate to the company, and you also have to... I struggle with this sometimes, but I think great CEOs are always inclusive, and it's never about them. It's really about the employees. If you're going to use examples or stories from the outside world, you have to pick ones that you're pretty confident there's a commonality across the organization and the story you pick doesn't exclude. I am a huge golf fan. I've been playing golf since I was a little boy. I told a story about the Masters to the whole company last week, but I picked that because I was like, "You know what? This is the one golf tournament that pretty much everyone has at least heard of, and I'm not going to look like I'm picking this sport that no one knows about." We also talked about the women's basketball, the NCAA basketball tournament that happened a couple of weeks ago. We talked about Caitlin Clark. And we talked about the South Carolina coach, too, whose name escapes me right now, but that was a current event that I was pretty confident everyone had at least seen an Instagram post on or something. We talked about teamwork, and we actually compared Caitlin... Why did South Carolina win? And as great as Iowa was, and as great as Caitlin Clark was, South Carolina played like a team. Their bench scored 41 points in that game. They're bench scored 41 points, and Iowa's bench scored zero. We related that to teamwork, and when you're running a program with a client, make sure the whole team's involved and pass the ball because that's what's going to deliver the most value and the best ideas. I think outside narratives are key.
Clint Betts
Yeah, yeah. I think that South Carolina's coach is Dawn Staley, if I'm not mistaken. I believe. You have this podcast, Customer Obsessed. What do you talk about on there? What is it like? Promote it for us.
Eric Berridge
We're not getting headline actors on our podcast. I try to find people in my network and in my walk of life that I think have great stories and have had interesting journeys, and we always relate to the customer. We talk a lot about career paths and leadership and how to grow in an organization. I try to point out to our listeners things that they might not know about certain industry trends. We had a wonderful guest a month ago, Melanie Husk, who is the CMO of Baptist Health down in Florida, and we just talked about how health organizations market themselves. Most consumers don't think of health organizations as having big marketing organizations, but health organizations market themselves, and she talked about how she uses technology to do that. She's also been there for almost 20 years, so how do you survive in a big organization that long and still stay passionate? We talk a lot about passion. We look for funny stories. What happened in your business life that was just off the wall that had an impact on you? Who are the great mentors you have? We try to keep it pretty casual. It's not a headline guest. This is Monday night at the Comedy Club, but I love that.
Clint Betts
Yeah, that's incredible.
Eric Berridge
[inaudible 00:32:41].
Clint Betts
Oh, for sure. We'll put the link to your podcast in the show notes here so that people can check it out. Speaking of mentors and people who've given you a chance, we end every interview with this question, and that is: at CEO.com, we believe the chances one gives are just as important as the chances one takes. When you hear that, who gave you a chance to get you to where you are today?
Eric Berridge
Mark Benioff, who... I was this little peon at Oracle right out of college. I had no idea what I was doing. He was working at Oracle at the time, too, several levels above me, and we connected over something. I think he just recognized that I needed some guidance, and he literally took me to lunch one day, and... I won't even tell you what kind of car it was, but I was driving a [inaudible 00:33:32] old Acura Integra, and he took me in his car. It was much nicer. But we stayed in touch, and I ran into him several years later when he was starting Salesforce. I was in New York. I'd moved from the West Coast to New York City and happened to run into him, and he encouraged me to start a consulting firm around Salesforce, and this was before anyone knew what Salesforce was. This was when there were probably 50 people in San Francisco. So he's always been a big idol and mentor of mine. We've done a lot together over the years. But there are a lot more, too. Giving back, I get a lot of gratitude when people come to me, or I feel a lot of gratitude when people come to me and ask for advice or need career advice because, first of all, I'm flattered, but second of all, as you move on in your career, you realize that the people that helped you, you need to become that person. I love that. What's the tagline again?
Clint Betts
The chances one gives are just as important as the chances one takes.
Eric Berridge
Yeah, I believe in that 100%. I also had an interesting, at least for me, career development in then I started my career in the Bay Area, and then I really flourished in New York, combining the West Coast attitude with the East Coast attitude and looking at those different cultural nuances helped me understand customers better across a broader spectrum. It certainly helped me with my career because I was a little bit of a fish out of water in New York, being in the technology space. Everyone was in [inaudible 00:35:23] this state, so it was a differentiator.
Clint Betts
Are you still in New York?
Eric Berridge
Yeah.
Clint Betts
That's great. That's very cool. Hey, Eric, thank you so much. Seriously, that was incredible. Again, we'll link to your podcast, your book, and all that type of stuff. Everyone check out Coastal. Thanks, Eric. Thanks for coming on.
Eric Berridge
Thank you for having me. And best of luck. I love your show.
Clint Betts
Likewise. Thank you so much. Edited for readability.