You can’t have commercial excellence without digitization. Technology is so present these days that you need to be up-to-date with everything. You need to fight for your customers, especially with all the supply chain disruptions and how competitive the landscape is today.
Join Victoria Meyer as she talks to Martijn van Noordennen about commercial excellence and digitization in the chemical industry. Martijn is the senior director of the industry go-to-market for Salesforce. He also has a long history in the chemical industry with Shell Chemicals.
Discover Martijn’s career and his love for all things technology. Learn how he got into the chemical industry and how Salesforce is more than just a CRM. Find out how you can improve customer experience with good commercial excellence today.
This episode is sponsored by Net at Work. Visit www.netatwork.com to learn more.
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Martijn van Noordennen: The Future Of The Chemical Industry With Digitization And Commercial Excellence
In this episode, I am speaking with Martijn van Noordennen, who is the Senior Director of Industry Go To Market for Salesforce. Martijn has a very long history in the chemical industry and spent a big part of his career at Shell Chemicals, which is where I got to know him. We are going to be talking about commercial excellence, the customer experience and more. Martijn, welcome to the show.
Thank you very much, Victoria. It’s a pleasure to be with you.
I’m glad to have you here. Let’s jump in. What is your origin story? How did you get started in the chemical industry? How did you take that leap from being in the industry directly to where you are now with Salesforce?
It depends a little bit on how far back we want to go. If you go way back in my family history, not many people know that my granddad took over a firm from his dad that was selling bleach. That was the start of our small chemicals business that my father then succeeded my granddad in. They bought these full truckloads, among others from Shell, for example, solvents. They then repackaged that into smaller packaging and sold that to retailers across the Netherlands.
That’s my very first exposure to the chemicals world. I then thought, “I’m not sure if this is the industry that I wanted to work in,” because there are health and safety issues or concerns around that. I went through high school and dropped chemistry in third grade because I felt I couldn’t calculate. It turns out, that wasn’t it. I just had to work a bit on it. I studied law, then worked in IT training for a while.
I then joined Shell, initially not in chemicals, but my second job in Shell was in chemicals. The rest is history because I fell in love with the industry and all the technology that’s there. I always thought I liked information technology, but I found out in the chemicals industry that I like all the technology. I love figuring out how a blend works and why if you put this molecule in on this end, it comes out as another molecule on the other end. I find that fascinating.
It’s a great industry for problem solvers. You then transitioned to Salesforce. That seems like a big leap.

Commercial Excellence: Going into the chemicals industry can act as a reset to your career. It’s fun and can re-energize you. If you love chemicals and Salesforce technology, this will be a great industry for you.
For me, it felt more like going full circle. I always joked that I’m a geek at heart. As I said before, I love technology. This was a way for me to rekindle that interest that I’ve always had when it comes to computers and information technology. That was the sector I worked in before I joined Shell. To tell you the truth, in my last role in Shell Chemicals, I was responsible for commercial excellence globally. One of the things in my agreement was the platforms and technology that we use to do our daily work in the commercial space. By sheer luck, I stumbled on the Salesforce technology. We did an implementation that extended quite broadly and I fell in love with the technology.
The time came that everybody goes through. There’s a funny story behind that but I won’t tell it here about me and my midlife crisis. I’m now midway through my career and figuring out, what do I want to do with the second half of my career? How am I going to enjoy that? I’ve got twenty years more until I’m at the Dutch retirement age. I just want to have fun and do things that energize me. Not that the chemicals industry wasn’t energizing me, but it was such a reset. The end of that tale is that I got to combine two things that I absolutely love. One is chemicals and the other is the Salesforce technology. The rest has been history for six months because I haven’t been with the company for very long.
I remember Salesforce in the early days when it was a very simple and basic CRM in a SaaS model, which was new to the industry at that time. It was pretty basic. I know Salesforce has extended what it does and how it reaches.
They have bought a gazillion companies that provide them with new technology. The company is 22 years old. If you ask me what is hindering this company most, it’s that it is still seen as a CRM provider while it is so much more than just CRM. It is a low-code or no-code software platform. I often compare it to Lego, where you can build anything you want with the technology that we provide.
One of the parts of my role that I currently have is to widen the aperture of our customers and our prospective customers to think differently about technology and what that can unlock and unleash for your company and to also think wider of Salesforce and think of everything that the company has to offer.
It seems like it would be a pretty big shift going from an energy and chemical company to Salesforce, which is a software and service company. What has stood out about the company in terms of maybe what’s different or what’s the same?
Many things are the same, and then there are a couple of different things. The things that are the same are the wonderful people that I’ve worked with. I’ve got great, talented, smart, and driven colleagues in Salesforce. I used to have those in Shell as well. What I also like is in Salesforce, they call it Ohana. In Shell Chemicals, I used to call it my family because there is that family feeling. The people are very supportive. That has not changed. By virtue of the size and longevity of the company, Shell is much more structured because it was founded by engineers. If you look at Salesforce, it is still very much a startup at heart. That has been one of the things that I have had to adjust to.
The thing that's hindering Salesforce the most is that it's still seen as a CRM provider while it's so much more than that. Click To TweetThe way that I went into the company was by thinking, “Let me take the mindset of a researcher. Let me be somebody who goes to a foreign tribe and tries to observe what is happening and make meaning of that.” I figured before I started, that was a better way to experience this jump than maybe to continuously compare, “In Shell, we always used to do things like this, and now I have to do it like that.” If you talk to colleagues of mine now in Salesforce, they will probably say, “He does always mention how in Shell we did it this way.”
As an anthropologist, which is how I now see myself, this startup mentality that Salesforce has is both a real strength of the company and is also a bit of an Achilles’ heel because everybody is always ready to step up and help you with things. It also means that sometimes actions are a bit more focused on the short term and getting things done now. I’m not the only one who was hired out of an industry to go and work within Salesforce. There are more folks like me in the team where I work. We all take that experience of taking a bit of a longer view.
There’s a famous story of one of the Salesforce executives coming to Shell. One of the senior Shell executives thought they would start some small talk. Over coffee, they asked, “What are your plans there for the next 10 or 15 years?” The Salesforce exec goes completely white and starts to explain, “I’m lucky if I know what’s going to happen in 12 years, 18 months from now, all bets are off.” That is the pace at which technology moves in the software industry. I’m still getting to grips with how far ahead we can look, how far ahead we must look, and how much more at the moment, I need to just seize the opportunity as it comes.
We’ll get into it, but it’s interesting because you bring in that depth of expertise in the industry which Salesforce needs to make its business more relatable and to be able to apply the innovations, the technology, and the services that Salesforce brings to bear with what the chemical industry needs. It’s hard when you’re working on two different timeframes and when pace means different things at different sides of the equation.
It’s hard, and at the same time, it’s interesting. It is intellectually challenging to be able to figure out how am I going to explain this concept to the person that I am sitting in front of today? How can I make sure that what my colleagues are working on the technology side in Salesforce, then I translate that into concepts that are familiar to folks in the chemicals industry or the oil and gas industry?
I could see that it was a challenge. It’s different languages, so to speak, and different frames of reference.
That every industry has, from that perspective, it’s not alien at all. I get a lot of fun out of racking my brain over how I am going to explain this in a way that the other person not only understands it but also accepts it as a view that they think sounds right.

Commercial Excellence: Shell, by virtue of the size and longevity of the company, is much more structured because it was founded by engineers. If you look at Salesforce, it is still very much a startup at heart.
I’m going to turn a little bit over to where a big part of your core experience has been, which is around commercial excellence and the customer experience. I’ve been talking with people on the show and outside the show with clients about this topic. You’ve been focusing on this area for a long time. What do you see as most critical? What makes it important? What’s critical about it now?
If you look at the chemicals industry or maybe the economy at large, you’re familiar with the term supercycle. We’ve been in this upcycle for quite a long time. Whether it’s seven years or nine years, I wouldn’t debate that right now, but it’s longer than anyone expects this. That means that everyone who invested has manufacturing challenges and supply chain hiccups, and you need to fight for your customers. That’s all true.
It’s that cutthroat environment that we had after the financial crisis when we could almost hear the cracker grinding to a halt, where you could hear the steel ticking as it was cooling down. All of a sudden, almost overnight, we had to reduce capacity in our industry. It’s that kind of downturn we haven’t seen for quite some time. The reason that I mentioned this is a lot of people who have been in commercial roles or who are now in leadership positions may not have experienced yet what that means.
When I was still in Shell prior to the pandemic, we thought, “Now it’s going so well for this industry. There must be a downturn coming.” We themed it like Game of Thrones, “Winter is coming.” We talked about: how do we prepare for that, what kind of scenarios can we already think through, and what kind of playbooks can we put on the shelf that we can take off, dust off, and start running with once it happens? Then pandemic hits and everybody falls out, and now this will be the end of the month. The opposite happened. For example, plastics. There were actually more demands than we thought.
Now we’re coming out of that. We have all kinds of supply chain disruptions. What we’re seeing now is with the war in Ukraine, energy prices are going up and raw materials prices are going up. As a consequence, we’re now seeing that it is quite likely that some geographies will head into a recession. That’s where the big litmus test will happen of who has gotten commercial excellence right. If you haven’t, winter is really coming. If you have prepared for this, then you might now start to out-compete those competitors that earlier, you were struggling to compete with. It’s a fascinating time that’s coming our way, and it makes me even more passionate about commercial excellence and the digital transformation that links to it.
How do you see that time together? How much of this transformation is digital or how much of customer or commercial excellence is digital?
I would say all of it but I’m biased, of course, working for the company. There’s one other characteristic of the chemicals industry that I would like to point to. You could pull it wider and say it’s a process manufacturing industry. Typically, in this industry, we make money by sweating the assets. We run hard and we run full. That’s how you maximize your margin.
With supply chain disruptions, some areas will head into a recession. That's the big test for who has gotten commercial excellence right. Click To TweetThe effect of that is that many of these organizations are, at the core, not customer-centric but asset-centric. I’ve often joked that we run a molecule evacuation organization. We created something and we produced the molecule. “Let’s get it out of the tank as quickly as we can. If we can get a great price, good, but we still need to clear up the tank.”
That is certainly true of the majors. As you go deeper into the specialty companies, they value their product and margins, and it’s less asset and volume-focused. That’s important but it’s more about how they extract the value and the margin out of it. When I was at Shell, I sat in some conversations with people like, “We have no idea how this other company could make money given the number of people they have and the number of products they have,” and then it’s like, “Oh no.” You then flip over it.
As I’ve consulted with some other companies, it becomes much more obvious where it’s true marketing, understanding product differentiation, product placement, and customer experience differentiation. There’s more than the product that’s valuable. That value comes not necessarily just in loading your assets.
That’s very true. Exactly what you just said there, that used to be my slogan. There are no commodity products, only commodity salespeople. There’s always something that differentiates you from your competitor. It may not be the molecule but it can be everything around it. It can be your supply chain. It can be some of the services that you offer next to it. It can be the person that picks up the phone when you call to make an order. That could be your differentiator. If you know what those differentiators are and you’re able to find that out, then you can also see, “What’s the price? How much of a premium can I command for that thing that my customer values so much?”
That’s interesting, Martijn. You’re singing my song. How does that translate to Salesforce?
Let’s say the future belongs to those specialty chemicals companies that you spoke about earlier. It’s their lifeline to understand how their products create value for their customers. We’re moving away a bit from the majors. That’s true for most of the chemical industries – that we see a generational shift coming, where you see some of the folks that have run the company for years are now starting to think about retirement. Younger people are coming up. What’s interesting is that it also creates a difference in buying behaviors because people are used to buying stuff online in their personal lives.
When I was still with Shell selling my Salesforce implementation, I would ask people, “Which of you sometimes buy something online?” All hands would go up. Then I would ask, “Who of you is able to control the temperature of their house here from this room?” More hands would go up. “Who can switch on the lights from their mobile phone?” Some hands would go up. “Who can operate their alarm system from here?” Hands would go up. I said, “Why is it that when you walk into this building and you switch on your computer, you find it acceptable that we take you back to 1985?”

Commercial Excellence: There has been an upcycle for quite a long time. It’s longer than anyone expected for this product. You have your manufacturing challenges and supply chain hiccups. You need to fight for your customers.
If you think of the ERP user interface, I’m not talking about the functionality. It’s brilliant at what it does, but if you look at the user interface, it is not the way that we’re used to working with apps and websites, etc. What you see is that those people that are now coming through the ranks in this industry, they expect that.
If you, as a company, are unable to either give that to your customers simply because you haven’t had the need to invest in it or even scarier, with the skills shortage and the labor shortage that we see around the world in different markets. If you’re not able to compete for talent because they think, “Here I have this clunky user interface that they make we work with. There I have something much closer to what I’m used to in my daily life,” guess what they will choose?
It becomes a bit of an imperative that you have a user experience and a customer experience that is very close to what we often refer to as consumer-grade, what you would expect when you go on the market as a consumer to buy something. This is where I believe Salesforce is uniquely positioned to deliver that and deliver it fast.
Low time to value, make it quick. You open the box, you start configuring it, and it just works because that’s what the company was founded on 22 years ago. Those companies that invest in that will have a bigger chance of winning and competing in the market. At the same time, it plays into commercial excellence. If you think about it, when you started progressing, did you start with some kind of CRM?
No, but I moved to one somewhat quicker than an established company would have. No, I didn’t but I quickly realized I needed something.
That’s exactly where I was going. Why did you feel you needed it?
At the end of the day, it comes to having everything all in one place, being able to visualize what I’m doing with my clients, and being able to have clarity, tracking, and analytics. I don’t need super powerful stuff. It’s not like I’m serving millions of customers. Part of it was because I felt like I had to. I had a certain base of experience where I said, “Okay, at some point, you need a CRM system. This is just what you need.” CRMs today do so many things for a small business at a very low price point.
It is imperative that you have a user experience and a customer experience that is very close to consumer-grade. Click To TweetThis is something that I see with loads of customers. That was the real a-ha for me. When I joined Salesforce, I got to look at many different kitchens. What you see is that many companies do have CRM. They’ve invested in that, but then if you look at how people actually collaborate, they still put stuff in spreadsheets, then they link to each other or visit reports. It gets typed up in Word or some other application and stored on a hard drive.
That has a risk because if the person leaves or, God forbid, something terrible happens, you don’t have access to that information anymore. It also slows down your base of collaboration and your base of innovation. I’ll give you an example. When I was still at Shell, Shell was also rolling out these circular molecules. They take used plastic, put it through a paralysis unit, clean it up, paralysis oil goes into the cracker, you know the drill.
That’s advanced recycling.
Exactly. When you start thinking, “Who do we want to sell this to?” Normally what would have happened was that we would have to do a survey with sellers. “Do you know anyone who might be interested?” Now, because all of those visit reports were in our Salesforce instance, we could just do text mining. We looked for words like green, renewable, circular, sustainability, and sustainable, and out came all of the customers where these words popped up in the visit reports. If you store everything in your mail program, whether it’s Outlook, Google Mail, or on your hard drive, you might be able to get to it with today’s search functionality, but it will be infinitely more difficult.
When I started asking you, “Why did you ultimately start with CRM?” The answer that I expect is things start falling through the cracks if I don’t compile them, track them, and do all the things you said. That’s usually where it starts. I would call that the first-order effect of your investments, where the music is playing. Where getting a lot of ROI of your investment is the second and third-order effects. Those are the things like this text mining that I just spoke about or other use cases that you unlock by making that initial investment.
How does that tie into commercial excellence and the customer experience?
Let’s start with commercial excellence. Suppose you have a molecule that can go to ten different customers. As it usually goes in the chemicals industry, you have a finite supply in any given month. How do you then decide which customer gives you the biggest benefits and the biggest margin? You could probably still run that on spreadsheets. If you add some extra layers of complexity, “When is my next contract negotiation with this customer coming up, or are they in the market for more? How many opportunities do I have with these customers? Does that change the choice that I would make?”

Commercial Excellence: A lot of startups get CRMs because things start falling through the cracks if you don’t. If you don’t compile and track all your things, that’s where it starts. That’s the first-order effect of your investments.
When you add those levels of complexity, that’s when digital and commercial excellence start to hit each other because, with the current state of technology, it is easy to visualize those kinds of dimensions of a larger data set. That’s not rocket science at all anymore. It’s quite difficult if you want to do it in a spreadsheet, but if you use tools that are slightly more advanced, it’s a lot easier. If you do it on a platform, for example, the Salesforce platform, it’s easy to take data from different parts of your system and combine that.
You not only know what’s my net back on this customer or how much margin do I make on this molecule to this set of customers, but you can also pull in, where do I have other opportunities? Can I tie this into my negotiation? Can I command a premium because I can tell this customer, “I’ll give you this molecule now, but then you have to promise me that you’re also going to buy that molecule from me?” Me making those kinds of package deals or leveraging all of the negotiables that you have, that is commercial excellence. That is ideally powered by digital because the technology is out there now to enable this.
In your role, is it primarily chemical companies across the industry to just better use these digital tools with their customers?
Yes.
What are the barriers? It would be easy to say, “Everybody gets it,” but this is where the world is going and yet we know there are barriers. I talked to many companies who aren’t embracing digital yet. Maybe they have components of it. They’re not fully tied together. When you implement a system, change management is huge.
I’ve had people say, “It’s all going to be better when we get X.” The system, whatever it is, is not the magic pill. It’s the fact that people have to engage with it and put the information in and extract the information out. What are you seeing when you go out and you’re talking to customers? Are they receptive to this? Are they skeptical? Where are the barriers?
First of all, I very much agree with what you just mentioned. I always refer to it, “If you build it, they will come,” that quote from a movie. Many people think that way. To be honest, and I’ll probably be stepping on a couple of toes here, a lot of the people in this industry are engineers, so they love technology. They think, “If I build a system, then indeed my life will be better.” They forget that there’s a human and a behavioral element.
With technology today, it's really easy to take data from different parts of your system and combine that. It's not rocket science anymore. Click To TweetI think users and pulling users along on your journey is definitely a barrier. Very often, people talk about the customer experience, but I always try to explain that there’s a yin and yang, a dark and light that cannot exist without each other. The customer experience is the flip side of the coin, which is the user experience. You need to get both right if you want to be successful with your digital transformation.
The second thing is probably that, specifically at leadership levels, people have grown up and engineers have grown up with building assets. I’ve had these conversations with many clients as well, where physical assets, they are completely comfortable making a back of the envelope calculation and say, “If we put in a heat exchanger of that size, and maybe we use this kind of steel for the pipes, then the furnace needs to have that dimension.” They can do it all in their mind. They also know, “Here I have to look out because this decision that I make may have repercussions later for the bottlenecks or operational availability of my kits, etc.” They are really comfortable.
We then go to digital assets and then create a software platform. Suddenly, all of that comfort goes away because they see the cost. They very often approach it as a one-and-done investment. “I put this money in now, and then for the next 5 to 10 years, I will never have to look at it.” Unfortunately, that’s not how it works. It doesn’t work like that in your plant because you still need maintenance.
We like to ignore that part of it.
When you start it up, it comes to bite you. It needs a layer of paint, you need to look for corrosion, you name it. This is something that I’m trying to almost evangelize to people. If you think about the investment that you’re making in a digital platform, think of it as a digital asset where all of the normal CapEx management types of practices come into play.
It’s also pipes and heat exchangers. We just call them differently. They all have their little intricacies. It also means that some of the decisions that you make in your journey by saying, “Let me not invest in this right now,” may actually mean that they built what we call technical debt or stuff that you then have to fix later on.
If you have a good systems integrator or a rockstar IT team, they will guide you through that process. Unfortunately, I also see a lot of companies where this becomes an exercise where they rip all of the investment proposals apart with such scrutiny that ultimately it leads to stagnation, and people continue to debate here, “Do we really need it? How much would it cost?”

Commercial Excellence: Digital natives are those people that are now 30 to 35 and under. They have always had smartphones, tablets, computers in their lives from the moment that they were born.
What is interesting about it is that it’s hard for chemical companies and chemical executives who are used to saying, “If I add this heat exchanger, I’m going to get 10% more capacity or 24,” whatever the number is that they’re using. They see a ready translation to more volume, more dollars. Often when we talk about systems and digital tools, whether it be a portal to allow your customers to buy products, get access or whatever, they don’t actually see an ROI because “Am I going to make more sales?”
I think it’s this presumption and they don’t necessarily understand the value of the customer experience, tying that all together and what customers expect and will find easier. They don’t necessarily see that there will be an opportunity to create more value and maybe even more customer stickiness and, in fact, employee stickiness.
As you say, the user experience is the flip side of the coin there from the customer experience. Maybe there’s a view and it’s not expressed. Maybe it’s a bias that people are cheap and making it easier may not actually have value because I already have a team of salespeople, business people, customer service people, and whomever, and they’re doing fine right now. I don’t necessarily see the value of investing in a system that makes it easier for those people because business is going okay.
We’re almost full circle to where we started. In the last 7 to 9 years, you could get away with that, and maybe be my guest – try if, in this new era, you can still get away with it. At some point, you will find that you need to make a jump. Let me take Formula One. If you’re Max Verstappen, you’re always in the front of the race, but if you drive for Williams or Haas, how are you going to get there toward the front of the race if you’re not even anymore in the back, in the middle? You’re always lagging behind, and the effort that it will take for you to get back to the back. I’m not even talking about getting to the front of the race, and thus the investment that’s your financial incentive is exponentially bigger than if you’re able to hang on to midfield, to the back.
That is something that is often discounted. Again, everybody is entitled to their own ideas and maybe mistakes. I would love to talk to those executives in five years and see, “How has that served for you trying to ignore the digital transformation that all of society is going through?” There’s another podcaster besides you, somebody that I admire hugely and I listened a lot to. If you were on public radio, most of his podcasts would be beeped because he uses a lot of profanities. He’s Christopher Lochhead. Do you know him?
No. I have to go look him up.
I definitely recommend him to your audience. He has a number of different podcasts. He also has a newsletter that he sends called Category Pirates. With the writers of that newsletter, he started coining the concept of digital natives and analog natives. I find it very interesting because I see the shift happening and it ties into what I talked about earlier, the generational shift that we now see coming.
The customer experience is the flip side of the coin, that is the user experience. You need to get both things right. Click To TweetDigital natives are those people that are now 30 to 35 and under. They have always had smartphones, tablets, and computers in their lives from the moment that they were born. I see it with my kids. They were barely able to walk or speak, but they could already operate the iPad. You see it with your kids. You go on holiday and they’re on their phones the whole freaking day.
I still remember my daughter, the first one that got a phone. She got a smartphone because that was the age that she was getting it. I remember saying, “If I knew that you would never be going to actually make a phone call, why did I get you a phone?” My kids have the phone icon buried. If I’m trying to borrow somebody’s phone to make a phone call because my phone is someplace, I’m like, “Can you please pull up your phone because I can’t find it.” They don’t use their phones. They use all the technology, whether it be FaceTime or something else, to make connections. They are digital natives, no doubt.
This is interesting because what that means is that they experience the world from a digital perspective first, whereas you and I are more analog natives. We experience the world in a different way, and that has all kinds of profound effects on society, digital transformation, and these generational shifts. How do you get your company and your organization ready for both customers and employees that are digital natives?
You also see it playing out in the war in Ukraine. This was something that he pointed out in one of his articles. I thought that was fascinating. On the one side, you have Putin, who is restricting access and trying to control the narrative. He doesn’t understand that he cannot because people will install VPNs and they will still get access to news, specifically the younger crowd.
The older people only watch television, so they get all of the propaganda, but the younger crowds don’t, and that’s the future of this country. He also doesn’t say much publicly about how he feels about the war. You then have on the other side Zelensky, who from day one started doing blogs in the street, communicating. All of the support that we now see for Ukraine is truly heartfelt. We feel like they’re on the good side of history and we want to be with them on the good side of history, but why do we feel like that? Because he approached the war in a completely digital fashion. He communicated about it so opposite to his opponents.
We’ll need more time, space and distance, and some historians who are able to look at sources 10 or 15 years from now. I think one of the conclusions might be that this is what won Ukraine the war because they were able to harness that global support with the use of digital technology. The other folks on the other side of the conflict of the war, the invaders did it old fashioned. They did it the analog way. We’re seeing that analog doesn’t work anymore or only for a certain generation.
That’s right. We’re at a disruption point, if you will. We’re right at an inflection point in society, but also in the industry. It all follows and flows in terms of how people learn, use and engage with new technologies and what it means to the future.
That’s what I urge customers to do. You don’t have to buy Salesforce products but think about how you are going to be successful in this new world, in this digital-first world selling to and hiring digital natives. If you take anything away from this show, just think through how you are going to do that with your organization. From there, you can start plotting the rest of your corporate strategy, but this should be an important part of it.
That’s right. That’s awesome. That may be a good wrapping point for us because we’ve gone quite long, and we have a lot more to talk about. I’m going to have to have you back on so that we can continue the conversation. We have a few more conversational tracks to follow. Your point of thinking about how you invest for your digital natives of the future is critical.
I totally agree. I would love to come back here, Victoria. I’ve really enjoyed this.
This has been great. Thank you for joining us, Martijn. I appreciate you joining the show.
The pleasure was entirely mine. Thanks for having me.
You’re very welcome. Thanks, everybody. Like, listen, follow and share. We’ll see you next time.
This episode is sponsored by Net at Work, a premier technology consultant and solutions provider that specializes in Next Generation Chemical ERP, CRM, HR, eCommerce and related business management applications. For 2 decades, their team has been helping companies unleash the power of their business through the transformative use of technology. Visit www.netatwork.com to learn more and be sure to visit their team at the Specialty Agro and Chemicals America event June 28-30 at Booth #307.
Important Links
- Salesforce
- https://www.Salesforce.com/eu/customer-success-stories/shell-chemicals/
- https://CategoryPirates.Substack.com/p/quick-take-volodymyr-zelenskyy-vs?s=w
About Martijn van Noordennen
Martijn has ±30 years of commercial experience of which ±18 years was with Shell – where Martijn worked in Chemicals and Aviation.
In his last role in Shell Chemicals, he was responsible for Commercial Excellence globally and amongst other things implemented Salesforce globally.
Martijn joined Salesforce in October 2021 as an Industry Advisor – focusing on Energy and (Process) Manufacturing.
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