Marcus Smith: Put the Task in Front of a Customer - Would They Pay for It?

Marcus Smith runs CloudTrails, a Salesforce consultancy, and came to it from industrial engineering. Asked to describe the deliverable in two sentences he needed one: long term peace of mind in Salesforce. The sharpest thing here is the test he uses to kill work, and how ruthlessly he points it at his own invoices. Key takeaways The lean test. Print the task, put it in front of ten customers, and ask which lines they would actually pay for. Everything else is overhead you are billing for. Documentation and internal project management never reach a client invoice. They are real costs. They are not deliverables. Four paid-search metrics is enough. Clicks, top impression share, click-through rate and conversions. He runs a business on that. Platform dependence is a risk he actively engineers down. Ads pulled, a Microsoft account suspended, co-selling arrangements that shift under you. Data lake projects fail on politics, not technology. Clean systems stop letting people hide what was never clean. He capped the company on purpose. Roughly twenty-five people and one hundred and thirty customers, with no exit in the plan. On this page The test that kills work Four metrics, and why more would not help Living inside other people’s ecosystems AgentForce and the three questions that deflate it Capping the company People, ideas and sources mentioned Questions this episode answers Go deeper The test that kills work You put this task in front of a customer, would they universally be willing to pay for it?— Marcus Smith This is a lean manufacturing habit dropped into a consulting business. Every task in the process gets held up against a customer who has no loyalty to your internal preferences. Most of them do not survive. The uncomfortable half is that he applies it to work his own team enjoys. Documentation is useful. Internal project management is necessary. Neither is something a customer would choose to buy, so neither appears as a line on the bill. Four metrics, and why more would not help Clicks, top impression share, click-through rate, conversions. That is the whole paid-search dashboard for a business of this size, and he is unapologetic about it. The argument is not that other numbers are meaningless. It is that a small company gains nothing from a report it will not act on. Four numbers produce decisions. Forty produce meetings. Living inside other people’s ecosystems Building on Salesforce means co-selling, partner programmes and a route to market you do not own. Marcus has had ads pulled and a Microsoft account suspended, and he treats both as the cost of the tenancy rather than an outrage. The first word in change is no. So you roll something out new to 30 people, you hear 27 versions of no and three versions of yes.— Marcus Smith What he does about it is quieter than a complaint. He deliberately engineers down the share of the business that depends on any one mega platform, so that a suspension is an inconvenience rather than an ending. AgentForce and the three questions that deflate...