carsales around the globe – Daniel Griffin

Dan, what is your role at carsales?

I’m the Salesforce Team Lead. I have six people in my team and we manage the Salesforce Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. We use this platform to house all our business-to-business account information and the Sales and Support teams use it daily. A lot of account management lives on that platform, and it is also connected to our finance platform.

You recently spent a bit of time overseas - can you tell us where you were and the project that you’ve been working on?

A few months ago, I went to Chile for three weeks. We’ve been working with chileautos for most of the year, supporting them with the migration from previous platforms and bringing them onto Salesforce as well as NetSuite, which is the finance solution that we use. ?

Over the time we’ve worked together we really wanted to understand their business, the changes they wanted to make and understand any unique parts of their business. For example, there are some unique regulatory things in the finance space as Chile has different tax and reporting requirements to Australia so we had to ensure that we would be compliant with these.

Leading up to the migration we implemented some customisations and changes and started training the Finance and Commercial teams remotely for a couple of months. So, it was early mornings in Australia and late afternoons in Chile. I then went over there for the data migration and some more in-person training.

Why was this project important?

The driver was our vision to have a consistent financial platform for all our businesses globally and to streamline reporting. As more and more subsidiaries have recently come on board the platform, it’s now time to roll out that migration internationally. The goal is to have a consistent approach and ideally migrate processes onto the same platform where it makes sense to do so. This gives us a better ability to support the businesses and provide better tools to run at scale as well.

What was it like to work from the chileautos office?

Everyone was super lovely and welcoming. You could really feel the camaraderie everyone has for each other. I also have to say, the chileautos office is a lot smaller than the carsales office in Australia. To be a part of that team for a little while and feel so welcomed was phenomenal. The language barrier was hard at times, but I guess my Spanish got a lot better {laughs}.

Have you picked up any particular Spanish phrases?

Hm, I don’t know if I have a catch phrase. Perhaps ‘de nada’ (don’t worry about it) and ‘toto esta bien’ (it’s all good).?

What were your first impressions of Chile?

It was an interesting vibe in Santiago de Chile. When I was there, there was a referendum one week and then a public holiday another week. So, the vibe went from political discussions to holiday mode quite quickly. It was good to see a different city and different way of life.

What would you say are the biggest differences between Melbourne and Santiago de Chile?

Where we were staying it felt dense. Compared to Melbourne, we have the bay, where as Santiago de Chile is more inland. You can see the Andes Mountains as a backdrop of the city, which is pretty cool.

Did you manage to get to see the country a little bit outside of the city?

During the week the hours were pretty long but I got out to see Santiago de Chile and explore whenever I could.

On the weekends, and this is credit to the team at chileautos, we went to a winery and also went to Vi?a del Mar, which is a really lovely costal city with lots of history, art and culture.?

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