This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Quip expert Maren Engh, Education Lead for Quip at Salesforce, to learn more about this powerful tool that works within Salesforce to help you and your team do all of the things.
Join us as we talk about this powerful collaboration tool (that is not a toothbrush) and how you can use Quip to take your team’s work to the next level.
You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Maren Engh.
Maren came to technology through hospitality: “I was working at a hotel, and our technology was super old school—we were running Windows 98 in 2015,” she said, “and I thought there has got to be a better way to improve the guest experience.” She started researching tech companies and eventually landed at Salesforce.
This desire to want to help people and improve the customer experience carried over to Maren’s role on the Quip team. Quip tries to help companies collaborate faster by reducing meetings and emails through integration. “We integrate spreadsheets, documents, live chat,” she says, “and now people are able to work collaboratively inside of Salesforce.” As opposed to other tools like Google or Evernote, Quip allows you to work collaboratively in real-time on top of documents that also bring in third-party data. With the Quip component, you can do that without ever having to leave Salesforce.
The Quip Lightning component is brand spanking new, so we wanted to get Maren on the show to help you understand how it can be helpful for your org. If you think about sales accounts, for example, you have your notes, the calls you’ve made, a list of the top people within that company that you’re reaching out to, and then all of the conversations you’re having outside of Salesforce. With Quip, you can share all of that other stuff right there in the record, so everyone can be on the same page.
The great thing about the component is it also connects with Quip. That makes it easier for people on your team who aren’t necessarily Salesforce savvy to collaborate with the chosen few that eat sleep and breath records. “Sometimes I get brought in after we’ve acquired a new customer,” Maren says, and so she’s added to a Quip document. “I don’t have access to a lot of the sensitive data in Salesforce, but I do have access to the things I need in Quip.”
Quip integrations have some powerful implications for you and your team. You can bring in project trackers, Kanban boards, and more, all pulling data live from Salesforce. For doing something like collaborating on slides, this can be an absolute game changer. You can even add polling to specific things in your presentation to get instant feedback.
If you’re trying to envision how Quip can help you with your day-to-day workflow, think about your inbox. “What is something in your email right now that doesn’t need to be there, that’s gone back and forth a million times with fifteen versions of the same document,” Maren asks. Something like meeting notes or even a project plan is a good place to start. There’s a lot you can do, and Quip has a great channel of video content to help you become a collaboration master.
Gillian Bruce: Welcome to the Salesforce Admins Podcast, where we talk about product, community and careers to help you become a more awesome Salesforce admin. I’m Gillian Bruce. Today on the podcast, we are talking about collaboration. And collaboration at Salesforce means Quip. Nope, we’re not talking about the toothbrush that you’ve heard on all of your other podcast ads. I know that I have heard a bazillion of those. We are talking about Quip the collaboration tool from Salesforce. It is such a very cool powerful tool that I use every day. In fact I run the entire podcast on Quip. I work with all my team on Quip, in terms of creating presentations, organizing projects, all of the things, that I wanted to get an expert on Quip, Maren Engh, who is the education lead for Quip for our customers, to get her on to explain what Quip is and to get this admin perspective of why you should think about using Quip if you have not started using it already. It’s a great tool, it works extremely well within Salesforce, you can pull Salesforce data within Quip, and vice-versa. It’s awesome.
Gillian Bruce: So without further ado, let’s get the expert on. Let’s welcome Maren to the podcast.
Gillian Bruce: Maren, welcome to the podcast.
Maren Engh: Thanks so much for having me.
Gillian Bruce: So happy to have you on, because we’re gonna talk about a really fun topic, Quip.
Maren Engh: Yes!
Gillian Bruce: So we haven’t really talked about Quip on the podcast before. I know that this is a tool that I use every single day, in a zillion ways to work with my team, and I’d love to help our admins understand a little bit more about Quip, and get into all that. But before we do, since you are a new voice on the podcast, I’d love to help our listeners know who you are, and I wanna know, by asking you the question I ask to kick-off every podcast. Maren, what did you want to be when you grew up?
Maren Engh: Oh, man, I wanted to be so many things. When I was a kid, I wanted to be an astronaut, then a bit later in life, I wanted to go into the Norwegian Foreign Service because I’m Norwegian. But then somehow I fumbled into hospitality and then technology.
Gillian Bruce: I love that. That’s great! That’s great, so okay, help me a little bit. How did you go from hospitality to technology? Because I’m always, actually, I hear of a lot of people who’ve gone from hospitality to technology, and it’s always in a different path. So tell me about yours.
Maren Engh: Yeah, that’s true, that’s a good point. I was working at a hotel and our technology was super old school. We were running Windows ’98, in 2015. It was really tragic. But I thought, “There’s gotta be a better way to better the guest experience.” So I started looking at tech companies and I wanted to move to San Francisco, and turns out there was a lot more in the world than I thought there was. So I just started interviewing, reaching out to companies, and ended up here.
Gillian Bruce: That’s awesome. Well, welcome, we’re happy to have you.
Maren Engh: Thanks. Thank you.
Gillian Bruce: All right, so I always heard something in that, that is very similar to one of the top qualities that makes an awesome admin, and that is wanting to solve problems and improve the customer or user experience.
Maren Engh: Yeah.
Gillian Bruce: So it’s a very strong theme. So let’s talk about that a little bit, because Quip really falls into that bucket. So can you give us just a super high level overview of what is Quip?
Maren Engh: Yeah, so Quip is Salesforce’s collaboration platform. We were acquired about two or so years ago by Salesforce, and we just help companies collaborate faster by reducing meetings, reducing emails, and trying to get everyone on the same page literally within Quip. So we integrate spreadsheets, documents, live chat, and now with Salesforce, people are able to work collaboratively inside of Salesforce. So we’re bringing the unstructured data of Quip, if you think about meeting notes or thoughts and opinions that you might have with meetings or whatever, and bringing that into that Salesforce ecosystem where you can have those conversations, without necessarily needing to input that data into those required fields.
Gillian Bruce: That is so cool. So I think, one of the things that I think is really interesting, is we’re familiar with a lot of apps in that space, right? Some people use Google, some people use Evernote, there’s all kinds of different things that people use to capture things like meeting notes-
Maren Engh: Yeah, yeah.
Gillian Bruce: -for example, since you mentioned that. How is Quip different than some of those?
Maren Engh: Yeah, that’s a really good question, we get that a lot. So I think one of the things that people really gravitate towards is the ability to work in real-time on top of documents that also bringing in third-party data. So previously, before we did our new Quip component inside of Salesforce, people were able to bring in records and opportunities into Quip docs and have conversations on top of that through comments or conversation panels, or private chat messages, as well. And now when we look at having the Quip component inside of a Salesforce opportunity, I don’t know a lot of tools that can do that. So we’re able to really deeply integrate with Salesforce in that way.
Gillian Bruce: So bringing the Quip capabilities into Salesforce’s core platform, as we like to say, that is pretty new, right?
Maren Engh: Yes! As of last month.
Gillian Bruce: There we go. Brand new.
Maren Engh: Yeah.
Gillian Bruce: So tell me a little bit more about how that works, and how as an admin I might think about using that a little bit.
Maren Engh: Yeah, absolutely. And one of the things we talk about a lot is with sales account plans, for example, if you think about what you do to go and make that sale, and you have all of your notes, you’ve made a lot of calls, you might have a list of all the top people within that company that you’re reaching out to, and you might be having a lot of conversations on top of that that happen outside of Salesforce. So what we do is inside of Salesforce, you might have your opportunity, your records, whatever, and then you’ll have a little Quip component there with a document that everyone has access to, has access to that opportunity or that record, and they’ll be able to see that history of the sale and your meetings and everything else that you’re sharing within that document, which can also be accessed through Quip, as well. So it’s not just within Salesforce, it’s also live in real-time in your Quip account, as well.
Gillian Bruce: That’s awesome.
Maren Engh: Yeah, which is great for me, because I don’t have access to a lot of Salesforce information in Salesforce, in our instance. But I can see that information within Quip.
Gillian Bruce: So that’s actually an interesting use case. So if you’ve got folks that maybe aren’t really using Salesforce every day the way that we all want them to, right? Because of course we’ve trained our sales people and trained everybody and got them in there, and of course they use it every day like we want them to. Not always happening. But maybe it might be a good thing to think about. “Well hey, maybe it’s easier for them to learn how to use Quip and maybe that’s an easier on-ramping experience for them.”
Maren Engh: Yeah, absolutely. And sometimes, I get brought in for different parts of the cycle, after we’ve acquired a customer, I might need to get in there for training, and I’ll be added to a document that I’ll get to collaborate on. I don’t have access to a lot of the sensitive data within Salesforce, but I do have access to what they give me access to within Quip. So that’s a really nice part of that integration.
Gillian Bruce: That’s cool. I didn’t even think about that, and so I’m like, “That is a great example of a way to get people collaborating with the Salesforce platform.”
Maren Engh: Yeah.
Gillian Bruce: Without necessarily having to go into Salesforce itself.
Maren Engh: Yeah, absolutely. And admins will have a number of ways that they can work within Quip and Salesforce, so there will be different opportunities for them to create templates and add certain templates to different accounts and so on.
Gillian Bruce: That’s awesome.
Maren Engh: Yeah.
Gillian Bruce: That’s so cool. So Quip does a lot of things. You mentioned spreadsheets and documents. What are … Like, there’s also Slides, which is something I know that we started using. I love Slides.
Maren Engh: Glad to hear it.
Gillian Bruce: It’s so much easier to collaborate on those versus Google Slides, I’ll just tell you, it is a whole game-changing experience. So what are, when you’re thinking about a traditional service like that, what are the things that you can do in Quip, right?
Maren Engh: Yeah.
Gillian Bruce: So you’ve got docs-
Maren Engh: Yeah, exactly, so we have documents, which I don’t really like to call documents, more like a canvas, because it’s a blank page or a template that you can work off of, but you can really add in so much other content to that, like images, and we have these third-party things we call live apps, which you can add Kanban boards and calendars and project trackers, I manage all-
Gillian Bruce: Love the project trackers. It’s my favorite thing.
Maren Engh: Yeah, me, too. Oh that’s so good, I’m glad to hear that. I use the project tracker all the time. And then we’ve recently launched our Slides feature, so we can actually create and collaborate on decks within Quip. And I’m not sure if everyone uses them for that big screen conference type of Slide deck, but what I find it most useful for personally is working on smaller presentations within my team or to gather feedback for projects and things like that. It’s a great way to present something very easily and they can build them so quickly, but you can also bring in things like those live apps, like the project trackers and Salesforce information, as well.
Gillian Bruce: Yeah, it’s definitely, the Quip Slides has been an amazing innovation just that our team has been using a ton. And I highly suggest it for anyone who is constantly having to share information across different, maybe smaller teams, or even broader teams. It is so easy to use, it’s really, really cool.
Maren Engh: Yeah, and on top of that, too, we have this polling functionality so whenever I present a lot of decks to my leadership team, and I’m like, “Hey, can you give me some quick updates on if you think this image works well here or if this is the language I should be using?” And you can literally poll people and get feedback pretty instantly, which is great.
Gillian Bruce: Yes, because we all know that we get tons of feedback, especially when we’re creating presentations, and what not.
Maren Engh: Oh yes.
Gillian Bruce: That’s great. So let’s talk about, we talked about a couple of use cases. We talked about being able to access Salesforce data within Quip, talking about collaborating in Slides. What are some other really common use cases for someone who hasn’t used Quip that’s like, “Okay, you can do X, Y and Z, these are the things that will really help you improve your work experience, make you quicker, make you more efficient.”
Maren Engh: Yeah, one thing I always start off with when I do trainings is just asking, “What is something in your email right now that doesn’t need to be there? Maybe it’s something that’s gone back and forth a million times with 15 versions of the same document, but you’re not really even sure where the final version of the doc is?” And often that comes up as meeting notes, or when you’re collaborating on a project plan for an upcoming project in the New Year, for example, or new quarter. So a lot of times, I talk to our customers about just starting their meeting notes with their boss inside of Quip, so putting the date, using that “@ mention key” to tag them in it, add a date, add some tasks, and alternatively, if you’re feeling a little more adventurous, starting a project plan where you can use some of those live apps, like the Kanban board or the project tracker.
Gillian Bruce: Yeah, just that collaborative note taking. So I use it for the podcast, so as you all know, I run the podcast in Quip for the most part. That’s where I do the show prep docs, I share it with you, the guest.
Maren Engh: Yeah, that’s great.
Gillian Bruce: And it’s so much easier because you can just do it in one spot, versus the back and forth and the emailing.
Maren Engh: Yeah.
Gillian Bruce: And I can share it externally, which is really nice.
Maren Engh: Yeah, exactly.
Gillian Bruce: Most of my guests don’t actually work at Salesforce, so. But yeah, it’s a very, very cool tool, and I think especially when we think of admins who are on teams developing apps, building out different parts of Salesforce, we gotta communicate all the time with different folks. With your developers, with your stakeholders, and having a tool like Quip to do that I think is a game-changer.
Maren Engh: Yeah, absolutely. And when you think about how often in a document and I just need to quickly mention somebody or reach out to somebody if I’m confused about a point they’ve made, I can just chat them within the doc or right on top of the document, and it’s just a much quicker way to handle my work, so I feel like I’m saving a lot of time every day.
Gillian Bruce: Like we just did before this.
Maren Engh: Yeah, exactly.
Gillian Bruce: You were like, “Wait, I don’t know about that question.” And I’m like, “Oh, it’ll be fine, I’m still gonna ask it.”
Maren Engh: Exactly.
Gillian Bruce: Yeah, that’s great. So what are some best practices that you have for folks that are starting to use Quip and are probably like, “Cool, so this looks great. How do I not break the thing?”
Maren Engh: Oh my gosh.
Gillian Bruce: “And make everyone’s lives worse off.”
Maren Engh: I promise you, you can’t break it. But my favorite thing to just talk about is, “Just try the @ mention. Literally right now, go into a doc, type the @ key by hitting shift number 2 on your keyboard, and just see what it does.” A whole pop-up menu will show up, you’ll get to mention people, dates, any of those apps that I mentioned earlier like Kanban boards, et cetera. You can set a task for yourself. This is just the most powerful weapon that you have within Quip. And beyond that, when you start to get a little bit more comfortable with Quip, you can start playing around with some of the formatting. We do have very simple formatting to make it easier to do your job better. But there are a lot of things that you can do, like creating columns or adding a process bar and adding different columns of different tasks for people underneath that.
Maren Engh: And I would highly recommend checking out our YouTube playlist within the Quip channel. It’s called, “The Quip EDU Playlist.”
Gillian Bruce: We will add it to the show notes, so it’ll be easy to find.
Maren Engh: Yes, let’s do it. And we’ve just started adding a lot of great video content there that’ll just show you some of those best practices, because we do have a, it’s called a “Secret menu”, like In-N-Out has, where you don’t really know all of the functionality it has at face value, but once you start digging, there’s so much you can do within Quip.
Gillian Bruce: Well and that’s part of the beauty of it, right?
Maren Engh: Yeah.
Gillian Bruce: Is that it’s not super intimidating at first glance. You’re like, “Cool, I can @ mention someone, and I can put a date in there, and I can put some different headings and stuff.” But then if you really get into it, you unlock all kinds of other cool functionality and combinations.
Maren Engh: Yeah, exactly. So I would just recommend just getting in there and trying it out. And there also is an apps and templates tab on the sidebar that can help people get started if you’re not sure where to start. We do have some templatized versions of documents that you can create right away.
Gillian Bruce: That’s awesome.
Maren Engh: Yeah.
Gillian Bruce: Okay, so I didn’t even tell you I was gonna ask you this, because most of the time, people think, “No, I don’t want to talk about that.” So what kind of exciting new things are you guys working on? Any fun, good, happy things you might be able to hint at for a segment?
Maren Engh: Yeah, yeah, well I can tell you right now, the most exciting thing is just expanding out of just the SalesCloud right now. Quip inside Salesforce is currently just available for the SalesCloud, so we’re gonna be expanding that this coming year, which will just make it so much easier for everyone to do their work within Salesforce.
Gillian Bruce: Cool. So no matter what cloud you’re on-
Maren Engh: Yeah, exactly.
Gillian Bruce: You’ll be able to do it.
Maren Engh: Yeah.
Gillian Bruce: I like it.
Maren Engh: Yeah, I’m pumped about that.
Gillian Bruce: Cross-Cloud.
Maren Engh: Yeah.
Gillian Bruce: It’s all about collaborating across all the things.
Maren Engh: All the things.
Gillian Bruce: So you might as well collaborate across clouds, right? I love it. I love it.
Gillian Bruce: So, I so appreciate you coming on to give us an intro-
Maren Engh: No, thanks for having me.
Gillian Bruce: And really dig into all the cool things that Quip can do. It’s not a toothbrush, it’s an app.
Maren Engh: It’s not the toothbrush.
Gillian Bruce: For anyone who listens to a lot of podcasts like I do, you hear Quip ads all the time.
Maren Engh: Oh my gosh. Yes.
Gillian Bruce: So I’m always like, “Wait, but that’s the toothbrush.” So the non-toothbrush Quip is really, really fun, and it’s great. I highly encourage everyone to dig in there, take a stab at it, it is really fun to use. I use it for personal life stuff, too.
Maren Engh: Oh yeah, me, too.
Gillian Bruce: Which is great.
Maren Engh: Planned my wedding on it.
Gillian Bruce: There you go. Project plan that, I’m sure.
Maren Engh: Exactly.
Gillian Bruce: That’s awesome. Well thanks so much for coming on and joining us. Before I let you go, I’m going to ask a lightning round question.
Maren Engh: Oh boy.
Gillian Bruce: All right, so first thing to come to mind, no right or wrong answers.
Maren Engh: Okay.
Gillian Bruce: So since it’s Winter time in the Northern Hemisphere and it has been so ridiculously cold in San Francisco, poor San Francisco.
Maren Engh: Yeah.
Gillian Bruce: Let me caveat that. What is one of your favorite things to do to keep warm in the Winter?
Maren Engh: Oh man. I’m probably the worst person when it comes to this. I go to Tahoe the second Winter comes, I’m like, “Let’s go to the snow!” So that’s probably not the answer you’re looking for, but.
Gillian Bruce: Well it’s probably some après-ski activity or something, right?
Maren Engh: Oh, I do love a good après-ski.
Gillian Bruce: There we go.
Maren Engh: Get a glass of wine, some nachos.
Gillian Bruce: There you go, that’s, nachos are warm. There you go.
Maren Engh: Yeah, that’s true.
Gillian Bruce: I love it. Well Maren, thank you so much again. I so appreciate you joining us and explaining about Quip and I look forward to seeing what else happens.
Maren Engh: Thank you, thanks so much for having me.
Gillian Bruce: Huge thanks to Maren for taking the time to chat. We had so much fun talking about Quip and collaborating together on the podcast about collaboration.
Gillian Bruce: So if you are new to Quip, there are many resources to help you get started. I would highly recommend that you start with Trailhead. So there’s an entire trail focused on Quip called, “Collaborate with Quip.” There is also a great playlist of YouTube content that Maren mentioned, it’s called, “Quip EDU”. The playlist link is in the show notes. We also have a great article, “Top 15 Pro-tips to master Quip.” The link is also in the show notes, so make sure you check those out.
Gillian Bruce: So some top takeaways that I got from our conversation with Maren is, “Hey, if you’re not using Quip, do it.” It is awesome. It’s a great way to really work together with your team in real-time. If you are brand new to Quip, here are some things you can do to get started. Open up Quip and just type the @ sign. That is going to bring up some amazing live apps, which are all tools that you can bring into Quip. Things like project tracker, or even just @ mentioning a person notifies them and gets them into that space that you’re working in immediately. There are so many cool apps though, like I love the project plan, the Kanban board, those are all embedded right there within Quip so you can use them.
Gillian Bruce: There’s also the chat function, so in whatever space you’re working in, you’re able to collaborate real-time with other folks by @ mentioning them and having a conversation within a doc. That way you’re not emailing back and forth, different versions of a file, or making multiple comments that are hard to track and see. So make sure that you get in there and test Quip. It’s a great way to work with your different teams. So like I said, we’ve got a lot of great resources to help you get started. We’ve got that trail on Trailhead, make sure you get that, link of course is in the show notes.
Gillian Bruce: Had a great time talking to Maren today. I hope you all have an opportunity to check out Quip, it is a fantastic tool. And I also want you to remember to subscribe to the podcast, and share it with your friends. If you subscribe, that means that you get the brand new episodes every Thursday delivered directly to your platform of choice for podcasts, so make sure you do that. As always, if you want to learn more about how to be an awesome admin, check out Admin.Salesforce.com, that’s where you can find blogs, webinars, events and even more podcasts. You can find us on Twitter, @SalesforceAdmns, no “I”. Our guest today, Maren, is on Twitter, @MarenLEngh, that’s M-A-R-E-N-L-E-N-G-H. Link is in the show notes. And you can find myself, @GillianKBruce.
Gillian Bruce: Thank you so much for listening to this episode, and we’ll catch you next time, in the Cloud.
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