Latest / Pre-Sales Pathways / Niromal Perera, Senior Manager, Slack Product Ecosystem at Salesforce
Transcript
- Chris: Hey, Neera Mal, good to see you. Thanks so much for joining me on the show today. Niromal: Chris, yeah, it's really really happy to be here and thanks for reaching out. Chris: Yeah, no worries. Before we get into the career stuff, I want to say congratulations on the Slackbot MCP launch as well. saw reading the blog post just before this, were over 20 partners at launch, which is amazing. Niromal: Yeah, yeah. We were really thrilled with what the outcome of that and looking to get more partners and yeah, SlackPot is is the main thing right here, right now. Chris: Yeah, incredible. It prompted me actually then to look back at my LinkedIn. was like, when was it that I left Slack? was more or less bang on two years ago. Crazy that when I left the organization, Slackbot was just this peripheral feature that would just annoy you occasionally with reminders. But now it's so central to the product, right? A lot of that's the work that you and the team have been doing. Niromal: yeah, I mean two years the amount of product innovation has exponentially grown. The team is iterating like crazy and it's been really fun to see what the the platform's putting out and of course that means getting our partners involved. So yeah. I'm sure the product's changed. It's hard to recognize the product from having the dog food version being at Slack to being on the outside now. So yeah, it's been Chris: Yeah. Niromal: fun. Chris: Cool. Well, we'll, we'll, we'll touch on Slackbot a bit later on in the conversation, but wanted to start with your career and how you got into tech. And when most people think about tech, they probably think of San Francisco, you know, or, or, or at least the West coast as a location. But as I understand it, your first role took you to Chile. So talk us through that. Niromal: Yeah. That was my one of my that was my first real professional job. I was intern still in college and got joined a club meeting that I was part of and at the club meeting somebody was looking for an intern and I raised my hand and thankfully it was local to where I lived. I got brought on as a QA analyst on a team of four. they had a field service app. called in Dari. And basically, yeah, our our goal, the the client that they had was located in Chile at the time. They had offices and needed to make sure that their field service technicians could properly use their app and test and all that. with my honor Spanish two knowledge, I was the local translator for us to get around. And in Santiago I was able to get around a little bit enough to steer us away from any trouble. at a local dive bar. But as we left the city, I could not communicate with anyone. So my Spanish got us through a little bit. And it is funny, my wife jokes that she thinks that I said I was fluent in Spanish when I first started dating her, when in fact she took me saying I was the local translator to mean I was fluent, but I was not anywhere close to being fluent. But Chris: I love it. Niromal: yeah, it was a phenomenal opportunity and honestly that team is my boss there is led me to my first job after I graduated, so yeah. Chris: That's incredible. It sounds like such an exotic experience for your first role. I was thinking, yeah, when I had just finished university, I was getting to the end of it. I was doing like temporary work with a local agency and I was literally moving safes around. Like they put me on heavy lifting and I can't remember if we met face to face when we were at least once. I'm not the kind of person you would naturally pick to move. Niromal: Yeah. Yeah, y y you're a bodybuilder. Chris: It was anyone that's met me would know I'm not I'm not naturally a safe mover. So But you said so then that moved on to your led on to your first role talk us through that. How did that come about? Niromal: Yeah, I so my boss at the time he moved to a consulting company in San Francisco called Primitive Logic and Chris: Okay. Niromal: they boutique consulting firm, about a hundred employees at the time located in San Francisco. they did a lot of not necessarily staff aug, but at times they they had consultants and they'd bring you in to drop drop you into clients site and help accelerate the the project. and at the time my boss was like, Hey, are you looking for a job? And I was definitely looking for a job out of college. You know, I'm 22 years old. I don't have an idea of what I'm gonna do. And basically, yeah, I was their first college hire and that led to a few more college hires after me. And it was a great experience. My first day he drops Agile Project Management for Dummies on my desk and he said, You gotta finish this book in two weeks we're going to Scottsdale. And my first client, I was a technical analyst on an agile project management team in Scotts Hill and we were flying in and out, you know, every other week basically for about a year. So racked up the hotel points, racked up the Chris: Incredible. Niromal: airline miles. And that's also where my passion for maximizing credit card points came to be as well. But yeah, it was Chris: And so. Niromal: it was a phenomenal first experience. Chris: very much having to sort of learn it as you went along by the sounds of things. Niromal: Yeah, that's been a a recurring theme in my career is having to learn things on the spot and having to do new things and learn things from scratch basically. Chris: Interesting. And do you enjoy that pressure? That's like, sounds quite intense, get the book and then two weeks later, you're on the ground delivering the work, Niromal: It Chris: but is that how you best operate? Niromal: Yeah, I think so. it's funny. My my college mantra was learn by doing and they implemented this policy of like half the class was theory and you learn about it, but the other half was application. And I think that's kind of where I got this concept from. And yeah, I I love being on the edge of my seat. I love doing new things and as you can see from my career, I think you'll probably get into it, but I I change my career path every four years or so, it seems like. And to do a new job. So yeah, I enjoy it. Chris: Cool. Well, speaking of which, so you've been working in this sort of delivery role doing sort of agile software development. What comes next? What's the next change for you career wise? Niromal: Yeah, then I even at that company I moved into like more of a business analyst role from the technical analyst role. Did that Chris: Okay. Niromal: for a little bit and eventually moved to I followed my boss to another company which was more on the accounting consulting firm. It was a private firm here in California called Arminino. Another great experience and I was put onto an integration team. So that there were your sales teams and they sold the accounting ERP softwares, the Concurs, the Coupas, the Intax of the world. And then the team that I was on would put in the connectors to make these multiple, these, these applications talk to each other. And so my experience was managing these engineers, managing the projects, as well as implementing some of the connectors myself. So I got a little bit technical there and had some good experience as well. Chris: Yeah, and like I said, a bit technical, but it sounds like it's all post sales, not very much pre-sales in there. how did the solutions engineering side of things crop up? Niromal: Yeah, I gotta thank LinkedIn for that. I think my experience just led itself to pop up on the algorithm correctly for a hiring manager at Slack at the time and I didn't even see the message for a couple of weeks, I think, before I reached out. I was not looking for a job, but then I saw the opportunity and I've been here ever since and super grateful that you know, I got that opportunity almost nine years ago now. Chris: Amazing. So had you heard of either Slack the company or the solutions engineering role at that point? Niromal: the my Scottsdale client that I was on had was using Slack and Chris: Okay. Niromal: that would have probably been twenty fourteen time, so pretty soon after Slack was born. but I had not heard of the solution to the engineering role. And I had not used Slack. So yeah, it was a lot of new things for me. Chris: Interesting. And so then you move over to Slack. What did that transition feel like having gone from working pretty much completely post sales into a solutions engineering world? Niromal: Honestly that transition wasn't too difficult for me. I didn't feel like post sale to pre-sale, you know, even though I was on the post sale role, I was brought into some discovery calls with clients and scoped out some of the work. So I was used to that. I think the hardest part was learning the product. And once I learned the product, then everything else kind of gelled a little easier. But how does how learning the product and then how to do discovery, as you know. The key to a good SC is discovery and being curious, learning, wanting to learn more and really just trying to have a conversation with someone. Those were some of the key early skills. but it was also just a really fun time to be at Slack. I looked around and it literally felt like an all-star team of the best SCs in the industry, coming from all the big tech companies at the time. So yeah, I definitely felt honored and very lucky to to be in that position. Chris: Yeah, amazing. And so when you've been in this solutions engineering role for a while, I actually remember when you first announced that you were moving into business development. And to be honest, it was the first time I had heard of someone making that transition. So how did that come about? Like, was that on your radar for a while? What was motivating you to make that particular move? Niromal: Yeah, no, I I don't think it definitely hadn't been on the radar for a while, but I my my interest started getting piqued first when I heard we made a deal with Atlassian to Chris: Mm-hmm. Niromal: acquire the IP for Hip Chat. Chris: Mm-hmm. Niromal: And that was a big move at the time in the industry and for us as a company. And that's when I learned like, the business development team was the one that led that deal. I was like, this is really interesting. I'm kind of interested in figuring out how to work with partners and on deals and things like that. and naturally as an SC, one of the key skills you learn is you learn the product security. You learn how to deal with objection handling and how to basically allow make these customers from highly regulated industries feel safe using your product, right? And Chris: Yeah, of course. Niromal: with with that Security and compliance is a big component for Slack. And to move up in plan to our enterprise plan, a lot of folks rely on an API that connects to our DLP and e discovery providers. And so as an SE, I was oftentimes honestly selling those products as well as Slack. And Chris: Mm-hmm. Niromal: with that knowledge, I learned a lot about our security compliance program and all the partners we worked with. And there happened to be an opportunity that came up. to manage that program and I was very open with my managers. They wanted me to stay at Slack and they were open for my growth and my movement internally and kind of worked on it that way and I interviewed well and moved into that role. So yeah, that's Chris: Amazing. Niromal: that's how it started. Chris: Cool. And so you sort of were inspired by this story about the Atlassian deal. actually remember that that was very consequential for the time, like really big in the market more broadly. You had these skills working with some of the Slack integrations and particularly the security side of things that this role opened up. For some people who are maybe new to business development or partnerships, just Help folks listening to this show sort of understand broadly the scope of Business Development and Partnerships. Like what are the sorts of things that and that part of the organization is responsible for. Niromal: Yeah, I at the end of the day, you know, Business Development is another arm that's here to help sales. Like we want to make sure that customers are buying the product, but the way I think of it is business development adds another value add to the product to help sales sell. So Slack being an e open platform and an open ecosystem, we are working with hundreds of partners that your customers may use their product for. And we're helping to increase the value for Slack itself. so building integrations like you mentioned Slackbot. we worked with 20 partners to connect their MCP servers into Slackbot or MCP client. And again, that's helping increase that value of Slack. It's helping increase the value for the customers, they're using tools that they're comfortable with all in one place. And that's the crux of business development. But within BD, there are so many different arms. So I'm on the product partnership side. So I focus on getting those product integrations set up. But Then there's marketing folks, there's sales folks that have quotas. there's strategic partnerships folks that work on the deals like that Atlassian one I mentioned. and so yeah, there's there's a wide, wide range of them. And at Salesforce, we kind of have the entire gamut of BD. Chris: Yeah, yeah. And Salesforce such a famous company, For platform and ecosystems is probably the, you know, one of the most mature, maybe the most mature in the world. In terms of roles, you know, people are going to be thinking about roles. If most listeners to this podcast will be in a pre-sales or solutions engineering role. So they're sort of familiar with, you've got the account executive and then the SE as the technical counterpart. What would be some of the common roles within business development? think you already mentioned business development manager. Like, is there an equivalent of an SE within that world as well? Niromal: Yeah, yeah, I I rely on that SE role daily. so yeah, I've now moved into kind of the equivalent of an AE role, managing the partnership as a whole. But I work really closely hand in hand with the partner engineering team. And maybe not every organization would have a partner engineer or a technical partner engineer. they have a few different names, but yeah, that is my technical counterpart. They are in the weeds with the partner. working on the API, developing, providing developer docs, creating the API docs for the the partner to build on, and unblocking them as as they go through the build. Chris: Yeah, got it. And we had discussed before, I think one of the roles that seems familiar maybe on the surface level, at least to me was developer relations, but developer relations really is more focused on scale. It could be any developer, even, you know, one or two person company building on top of a particular platform. Whereas you guys, you're really working with named companies, specific companies that are partners and you're going deeper with those as opposed to doing stuff for... you know, all of the external developers out there, is that right? Niromal: Yeah, exactly. I mean it it's an interesting dynamic because what DevRel puts out could be useful for our partners. At the end Chris: Of course. Niromal: of the day, they're working on making the developer experience better. So they created developer sandboxes which our partners are able to utilize. but yes, developer relations are really for the overall developer, whereas business development is focusing on the the company, like you mentioned, and the strategic partners. Chris: Yeah, that makes sense. And we mentioned the Slackbot MCP project a couple of times, the launch there. Maybe one thing that would be helpful for the audience who are less familiar, like it would be great if we could look at that particular launch and like what were some of the main milestones or activities that you and the team were involved in that led up to that. Niromal: Yeah, so I guess from the time I got involved, basically we we have our internal product teams. They're the ones obviously building the product and developing and putting it out and launching. But because our platform product team relies on partners to develop on it, that's when they bring our team in, our product partnerships team in. so once the API is at a a testable, usable level. That's when they'll loop in our team. We will work myself and our partner engineering team. We'll get on a call, we'll figure out, okay, what's the pitch? Do you have developer docs? okay, here when when are we going live? And what are the go-to-market motions planned? Those are kind of the main things we need to work on. So after we have that kind of set and zone date, we'll work back from that and we'll say, okay, if we need If we're launching, you know, August 3rd, by July 20th, we need the apps submitted. Okay, what do we need to what does a partner need to do to get the app submitted? Okay, well, follow the developer docs. Here are all the the guidelines and milestones we need to hit. Here's the artifacts we need from a go-to-market perspective, video, screenshots, demos, quotes, So it's it's a lot of like cross-functional work where we're working with marketing, we're working with legal to make sure that partners have the right pilot agreements signed to get access to this pre-GA feature. we'll work with product, of course, to provide feedback as partners are testing and have concerns or questions or something's not working correctly. and so it's a really nice iterative cycle, and now we've Done it a few times where we've got a a good rhythm going with product and our cross-functional partners. but yeah, it's it gives partners a chance to get in with with us early and and build. Chris: Yeah, amazing. And as you're describing it, there are some parallels with the sort of standard sales cycle, right? Rather than sort of end customers, you're selling to the partners, but you're getting them excited about the opportunity to work together. You're helping them work through the specifics of that, you know, with your partner engineering team, working through some of the technical side later on, your legal team, helping with terms for things like early access and pilot agreements. Did you find that your work in Solutions Engineering was helpful, did it set you up for success in this role? or were there transferable skills? Niromal: Yeah, I mean this this role this role is so good that One of my managers literally was hiring only SEs Like she only wanted Chris: wow. Niromal: She wanted an SE for this role. And I think it's because the As an SE you learn the product inside out better than almost any other role. that's obviously not the product itself, a PM itself. so yeah, I think learning the product as an SC being able to ha have an executive level presence in customer calls and then having that cross-functional experience, navigating complex deal cycles with multiple stakeholders, all those transition really nicely in into the BD role. Chris: Yeah, amazing. Cool. So looking back over your entire career, I would love to know if there are a couple of traits that you think have really driven your success so far. Niromal: I I would say definitely networking. That is one that helped me early on in my career, especially. Always take a call. Like always, if somebody's offering you a chance to meet or interview or whatever it may be, always say yes. Learn about the opportunity. Never say no from the beginning. because you never know what kind of doors may open or Who you need to know at some point down the road. I think that all that all helps. But then also I I just touched on it, but learn the product really well. Like as soon as you become a SME in something, you become invaluable to your team or the organization. And that's what kind of led me to BD in the first place. My SC managers at the time told me, hey, Nirmal, you've got a good like array of knowledge across everything, but I really want you to specialize and go deep in something. And I ended up focusing on security very much very well. And that's what led me to to manage the security partnerships on the BD side in the beginning. So yeah, I would say specialize, learn the product and definitely be open to networking. Chris: I'd love to explore the networking in a bit more detail. think many SEs are probably guilty of being a bit too reactive in that regard. Certainly that was the case with me historically for most of my career. It's like you only really think about your network when you need it. But you really got to be putting in legwork ahead of that time. Is there any sort of tips that you would have or anything that you've done specifically in terms of doing that networking a bit more proactively? Niromal: I don't outside of like general events and sce events, there's a lot of meetups I know in in the city, in a lot of major cities, not just San Francisco. but staying connected in the company also. So I like Chris: Yep. Niromal: to I like to I like to do things that are outside of just my regular SC job at the time or BD job at the time. Getting involved with ERG groups or getting involved with other like social type of groups. I was part of a group most recently where we helped acquired employees coming into Salesforce. Salesforce obviously is acquiring a bunch of companies over the years. And that transition into a large 70,000 person company can be jarring and challenging for a lot of people. And so there's a group created to help make that transition easier. And by joining that group I was able to meet a lot more people in the corp dev. and some other internal Salesforce teams that I would have never met if I didn't you know kind of go out of my comfort zone Chris: Amazing. Yeah, we used. Niromal: of just that role. Chris: Yeah, nice. I remember at Slack, used to have an app, I think it was called Donut that would pair you up with Niromal: Yeah. Chris: people from elsewhere in the company for coffee chats. And I always loved that. You you would get these like serendipitous meetings with people from totally different business units, totally different line of work. Often it's really helpful. And we also had, I mean, I was for my last few years at Salesforce, was remote. I was based in, in Scotland and there's no office here. So all of the employees in Scotland were remote, but we were reasonably active in terms of Social stuff, we'd do a get together once a quarter. And again, that was really helpful to meet people from different parts of the business working with different products or working in different functions. Niromal: absolutely. Yeah. I I look back and obviously now so many of our OG Slack people have moved on to to other roles, but they might still reach out from another capacity, whether it's for a partnership or helping with the sales deal or something. And I look back in our DM and I'm like, yeah, I I messaged that person through Donut or I messaged that person or had some sort of relationship with that sales leader. so yeah, it's it's fun to look back and have that history also. Chris: Yeah, definitely. I think one of the other things that people don't necessarily appreciate with the internal networking is I felt for a long time actually solutions engineering sits at the intersection of so many different parts of the business. You we do a bit of product marketing, a bit of sales, a bit of product. And that means that the role can take you in loads of different directions career wise, right? It's your own career as testament to. But you need to do a bit of networking in order to make that happen, right? If you're thinking about moving into one of those adjacent roles, it helps to, like you did, have a conversation with your manager, but have a conversation with the hiring manager and sort of even, you know, long in advance of a role necessarily opening, it could be really helpful just to reach out and get in touch with someone from that team, ideally the hiring manager, and let them know that you're sort of interested in the work that that team does. You want to know a bit more about it, and then you'll be on their radar, you know, if and when something does come up. Niromal: Exactly. Yeah. The BD team I had already been working with just on a day-to-day basis as part of my SE role itself. So I had those relationships already and then this just accelerated it even more. but yeah, n always always be nice to people also. It never hurts. You never know when you need somebody's support. Chris: Yeah, absolutely. And on the product side of things and product knowledge, you mentioned that it's actually been really useful for you to be able to specialize. You came into Slack as probably one of the more technical essays in terms of background, and then you gravitate towards the security and compliance integrations. And that ultimately is what gave you the move or contributed to the move within business development. But do you have any more thoughts in terms of specialization? Obviously some essays are a bit... wary of that because particularly earlier in their career, they might not know which area excites them the most or where they want to specialize. But yeah, do you have any thoughts on how people weigh that decision between being generalists or choosing which parts of the product or parts of the market to specialize in? Niromal: Yeah, I I this was definitely hard for me. I think I've had I had two or three different managers over the course of my tenure tell me to specialize and I just couldn't figure out where to do it. I'd Chris: Yeah. Niromal: never I never felt necessarily str strong or passionate necessarily about one specific area. but I think it just kind of naturally just came to me as my day to day went on. I I think that's the the thing is you don't need to force it. It's not something like, I need to go specialize right now. Like just let it come to you. Follow what you enjoy doing and where you get most excited about. And I think that passion will naturally come out. And that's when you can figure out, I I feel like I did really well on that. Like let me lock in there. or let me double down on this a little bit more. so yeah, I I wouldn't say it there's not there's no like secret sauce to it. I think it was just it kind of fell into place where I was doing a lot with security and this kind of led led itself to to to be that. Chris: Yeah, yeah. I love that idea though, being guided by what you're passionate about, what you've enjoyed on your deals. I'm being based in the UK, the industry here is massively tilted towards financial services. And that was always something that just doesn't excite me at all. Like it's so, I find it so abstract. I could just never get that excited about it. Whereas, you know, a couple of the companies I worked for earlier in my career, they were all to do with productivity and collaboration software and sort of remote working. And that was a common thread that I just found. kept being pulled to, found that really interesting. so, you for me earlier in my career, I very much specialized more on the product side than the industry side. But I think, like you said, it's really important to, to, you know, choose something that you're to be interested in, right? Rather than force it. It makes it a lot easier to keep the momentum up. Niromal: Yeah, and then it doesn't even feel like work. Like those early days at Slack was really fun. I couldn't believe that we were getting paid to to B S Cs at that time. It was just a great, great opportunity and yeah, didn't feel like work at all. Chris: Yeah, amazing. So Nirmal, the last question I had was, Is there a piece of advice that you would give to listeners of this show? in particular, know, people who may be interested in following a similar path that you have? Niromal: Yeah, I I briefly touched on it previously, but I think the the main things are say yes to conversations, say yes to people, and when you're in a role, really learn that product so that you're invaluable. When you know the product really well, you can go to pretty much any cross-functional role. And the SC role really helps you sets you up for success to know the product well. You can't be on a call with an AE on a million dollar deal and get something wrong, right? Like that's we were really counted on. And I like to think of ourselves the SCs were the wide receivers in football seasons around the corner. I'm big football fan. SEs are the wide receivers on the field. When the when the quarterback throws them the ball, they have to catch it. If they don't catch it, the team doesn't win, everybody looks bad, the play call looks bad, nothing works. So same thing when you're on a call. And you get that question, the A lobs it over to you, or the the CPO asks you a technical question, you have to be on the ball and get that right. And if you do, you make everyone look good and the deal will have a better success rate of closing if you're able to provide the answers because you've built that credibility and trust with the the exec. So yeah, that's Be genuine, be yourself, but learn the product really, really well. Chris: I love it. Noor, this has been a super interesting conversation. Thank you so much for joining me. A couple of takeaways for me. I love the fact that your sort of approach to learn by doing within the role and really like rolling up your sleeves and wanting to get involved, being open-minded about what sort of work that you take on. And yeah, like I said, I didn't know anyone that had gone into business development when I was at Slack. So I was really impressed when you first made that move. And it feels like that's been a common theme in your career is these. big bets and like you said specialize in something that you're motivated about that you find interesting. Niromal: Yeah, no, it's it's been great. Love chatting with you. Always a pleasure to see you. We should do this more often. but yeah, thanks a lot, Chris. Appreciate the time. Chris: No worries. Cheers, nevermind. Bye bye. Niromal: Thanks.