I know what you’re thinking. You’re reading the title saying to yourself “C’mon Cheryl, yes it is, in just a few clicks I can add a field. What are you talking about?” In theory, yes, you are correct. However, I wanted to share an example from a recent User Group Meeting that may not be so simple. One of our new members--who is also a new admin--was asking for help adding a field. The admin’s sales team requested a field called Billing Frequency on the Opportunity with 4 Choices: Annually, Quarterly, Monthly and Ad Hoc.
After discussing the request with her it became apparent the technology wasn’t the problem, it was the requirement itself. She showed me their org. They had three opportunity record types with three page layouts and nine profiles. She wasn’t sure which opportunity record type this field should be on, where it should go on the page layout, or who should have access. We looked at the record types and page layouts and we could make an assumption, but we all know what happens when you assume…
I explained that she needed to refine the requirement for the field with the sales team. I helped her draft an email asking everything she needed to know to a new field. She sent the email while still at the user group meeting and approached me after one of the presentations as the sales manager had already responded. It turned out the field should only be on two of the three record types, it should always be required for one of the opportunity record types when it’s closed won, and should only be required for a certain opportunity type when it’s closed won. There was also a requirement that only sales and sales management should be able to change this field, and all other users would have read only access to the field.
The sales manager also asked if he could get an email anytime an opportunity was closed with a Billing Frequency of Ad Hoc. He also asked if there was a way she could load the data in for any closed opportunities from 2015 for one of the record types.
After reading through her email with her the simple additional field requirement became:
· Add a field to two record types and page layouts
· Set up field level security for the field
· Create a validation rule to require the field in the certain circumstances
· Create a workflow rule and email template to fire when an opportunity was closed where this field was filled in with a certain value.
· Extract opportunities with criteria mentioned in above validation rule with ID’s so sales could update spreadsheet
· Load data into the Billing Frequency Field
From the above you can see why adding a field can be more than a simple request, especially if you are adding a field to an object with multiple record types, page layouts, with multiple profiles. This is why I always use the 5 W’s of Salesforce Administration when reviewing enhancement requests from users:
· Who - Who wants the request, who should be able to use or view the new configuration.
· What - What will they do with the data collected in the configuration? What is the long-term goal?
· Where - Where should this configuration be available?
· When - When should this configuration be available, when should it be required?
· Why - Why do they want this new feature, what is their end goal and how will they use it and how will it benefit our business?
When the admin I mentioned above started asking her business users the 5 W’s of Salesforce Configuration, she was able to assist them faster and more efficiently. She was able to determine what was needed upfront by asking the right questions.
What questions do you ask your business users when they submit a request to make a change in Salesforce? I would love to hear from you!
As always, thank you for reading!
Cheryl
Showing posts with label Salesforce Admin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Salesforce Admin. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 27, 2015
Sunday, August 30, 2015
Falling in Love...With Service Cloud
I fell in love with Salesforce Service Cloud nearly a decade ago in 2006. I was working at a startup managing an org as a Solo Admin with around 50 users, which were mostly from Sales and Marketing. There were a few departments within customer support: Service Center, Field Service and Engineering. Each of these departments had a shared Salesforce license they could use to login to see what the customer purchased or where they were in the sales process. However, these shared licenses only gave them read only access.
The Service Center Team sat in the office answering customer calls and emails. The Service Center was also responsible for handling escalated issues, meaning if they couldn’t resolve an issue through the phone or email and it needed to be escalated, they would make sure the question or issue was being resolved in a timely manner by Field Service or Engineering. Everything they were doing was tracked in spreadsheets or emails.
The Field Service Team was out in the field servicing our customers on site. The service visits were both routine visits and from service calls. Everything this team did was tracked in a separate set of spreadsheets. These also weren’t real-time so we had instances where two field service members would end up on the same property in the same day because data was only getting updated once a day.
My first few months at this startup company were really spent getting the Sales and Marketing teams up and running on Salesforce. I had to do major cleanup of roles, profiles, fields, objects and data. I also rebuilt all of their reports and dashboards and helped them define KPI’s. It was around that time that the company moved into a bigger office. Up until that time Sales and Marketing sat in one office and Customer Support and Engineering sat in another.
When we moved into our new office we were put into quads of desks. My quad mates were the Service Center Manager, the Field Service Manager and the Accounting Manager. On the third day of being in our new office, I walked into what seemed to be Customer Service chaos. Everyone seemed to be running around and upset. When I asked what was going on, I was told that the master spreadsheets that were saved on the shared drive with customer visit and call information had been corrupted. They had a few local saved versions, but they were a few days old, so they were trying to piece the data back together. The information contained in these spreadsheets contained critical data for these teams that tracked who had an open issue, who was attending to it and when a customer last had a service visit.
I offered up my services to help restore the data in the sheets based on emails and notes. As I was looking at the data in the spreadsheets something clicked in my head. This information belonged in Salesforce. These teams were working with the same customer data as Sales. Why should customer data be in all these separate places? I remembered something I heard about at a Salesforce event that finally made sense to me at that very moment, “A 360-degree View of Your Customers.” That is exactly what we needed to have and I was determined how to figure out how to use Salesforce to give us that 360-degree view.
Later that day as most of the chaos settled I started to do a bit of research on how customer service used Salesforce. I found some really good articles on the help section from Salesforce about Cases, Web to Case and a brand new feature called Email-to-Case. I had never used Cases before, but I thought, what the heck, why not try it out and see what the data would look like with a few of our customers.
I looked at the spreadsheet and configured their process right into cases. I was excited to see that cases operated like Leads, Accounts, Contacts, and Opportunities, which were the objects I was most familiar with at that time. I could add fields; have page layouts and record types. In a few hours I had a working prototype of what I thought would be a good solution for the Service Center team. I loaded cases from a few of the customers that called in frequently to see what the data looked like. I created a couple of reports so I could show them how they could look at the cases in a detail view or at a high level through a metric.
A few days later, when things seemed to be a bit calmer I approached the Service Center Manager and asked if I could show her something in Salesforce. I showed her what I built out with cases and explained the idea of web to case and email to case. I also showed her some documentation about CTI systems, Self-Service Portals and connecting Salesforce to them. The Service Center Manager loved everything I showed her. We spent an hour or two each day over the next week perfecting what I had built and showing a few other people on the team.
Since the Service Center Team was using a shared license that only had read only rights we needed to purchase 15 licenses to fully get them on board. Our plan was to build something out and “wow” the management team so they would sign off on this expense.
The following week, I sat with the Service Center Team manager in the CEO’s office along with the COO explaining to them everything we built and our proposed plan. Phase I was going to be getting cases up and running, a data migration of existing calls, setup of web to case and email to case. Phase II was going to be creating an escalation process and bringing on Field Service and Engineering Teams. Phase III was to look at doing a self-service portal and CTI integration. The CEO and COO loved everything we built so far and our phased project plan. We got sign off on the additional licenses for Phase I and Phases II and III would be put in the budget for the following year.
Building out Phase I took about two weeks including the data load. It was really exciting to see Service Center Team members entering cases while they were on the phone as well having the ability to see if a customer had any open cases with us right when they called. No guessing, no searching multiple spreadsheets. Everything was right there for them on the screen in Salesforce.
The changes we made for the Service Center also ended up having a very positive impact on Sales. In the past, Sales Reps would sit with Service Center Team members to understand if any of their clients were calling in or if any had issues that were up for renewal or a good candidate for a new product or upsell. Sales no longer had to do that. They had the information at their fingertips. It was immediately apparent to everyone in the company how efficient Salesforce was making our Service Center Team.
A few weeks after our go-live with Phase I, the CEO and COO met with me and told me to go ahead and purchase additional licenses for Field Service and Engineering and start work on Phase II and they would see about getting budget for a portal as well as a CTI phone system for Phase III. Phase I had proven to them that the spend now would save money in the long run due to the efficiency it brought the teams supporting our existing and expanding customer base.
It took just another few weeks to have Phase II rolled out which allowed us to have escalation process right on Salesforce as well as gave a unified system where Marketing, Sales, Service Center, Field Service, and Engineering were looking at the same customer data. It was an incredible experience for me to see the value of my work right in front of me.
About a month after we went live with all of the service teams on Salesforce we started building out monthly and weekly metrics. I used to do all of the reporting for the company so I knew that the average “Time to Solve” for Service Center was just over 2 business days. After having these teams on Salesforce for just over a month it was brought down to less than a day. The average “Time to Solve” was 6 hours, I did the numbers three different times, just to make sure. When I clicked “Run Report” and saw those numbers, that’s when I knew, I was in love. I had become the biggest fan of what was known in 2006 as “Salesforce for Service & Support”, now known as the very robust Service Cloud. The amount of efficiency I could bring to end-users was nothing short of incredible. Not only did I become a fan, so did my end-users. The customer service teams loved Salesforce and actually helped me get to my first Dreamforce in 2006, but that is a story for another day.
Eventually my career grew and a few years later I was bringing thousands of customer service users onto Salesforce at a billion dollar financial services firm, building out self service using portals and communities, integrating with entitlements systems and lots of other fun complexity. My favorite projects over the past 11 years of working on the Salesforce platform mostly involve Service Cloud.
I even rolled out Service Cloud for a team I was managing a few years ago where we were managing thousands of Salesforce Users. We used it to manage requests and our internal escalation process. Service Cloud can bring efficiency to teams doing any kind of support work, not just customer service.
Now, a question for you, the reader, when did you fall in love with Service Cloud? I would love to hear your story.
As always, thank you for reading. See you all at Dreamforce!!
Monday, October 6, 2014
My Sessions at Dreamforce
I am so excited for Dreamforce 2014! This is the first year I'm presenting and I'm presenting five times! Here is the list of sessions where I'm presenting.
Monday
Admins and Business Analysts: Agents of Change
1:00 PM -
1:30 PM
Moscone Center West,
Admin Theater Zone
Tuesday
10:15 AM -
10:35 AM
Moscone Center West,
Admin Theater Zone
11:15 AM -
11:45 AM
Moscone Center West,
Community Lounge
Wednesday
11:00 AM -
11:40 AM
Hilton San Francisco Union Square,
Plaza A
Thursday
8:30 AM -
11:00 AM
Moscone Center West,
2020
These are sessions that I will be attending and you should too!
Monday
9:00 AM -
10:00 AM
San Francisco Marriott Marquis,
Golden Gate A,B
I'll be in the Admin Zone at Mascone West for most of the day, so come by and say hello, especially since it will be my Birthday :)
Tuesday
1:30 PM -
3:30 PM
Moscone Center South,
Main Keynote Room
9:00 AM -
10:00 AM
Hilton San Francisco Union Square,
Grand Ballroom B
5:00 PM -
5:40 PM
San Francisco Marriott Marquis,
Yerba Buena - Salons 10, 11, 12
Thursday
2:00 PM -
3:00 PM
Moscone Center West,
Product Keynote Room
See you in less than a week!!
Cheryl
Tuesday, April 22, 2014
How I Got My Yes and Fulfilled My Dream of Becoming a Salesforce Administrator!
Since I posted my blog post last month on “All it takes is one yes”, the most common question I’ve gotten is how I went about getting my yes and how I was able to really make the jump from secretary to full-time Salesforce Administrator. In honor of Administrative Professionals Day I thought today would be a great day to share this story.
When I had made the decision that I was ready to move-on from my company the first thing I did was get a resume ready. I spent most of a weekend working on it. I spent a Saturday afternoon in the Library reading books on Resume and Cover Letter writing. I took out two books from the library that I thought would be useful guides for me. I spent about 2-3 hours writing up my Resume and Cover Letter. Once I had these written up I posted them on Monster and Careerbuilder. I was sure I had a good resume and cover letter and that someone would contact me. About two weeks had gone by and no real bites. I had also applied to a few jobs on both sites with very little to no response back. It was very frustrating.
I decided to reach out to a few friends from the NYC Salesforce User Group and send them my resume to see what they thought. One of my friends got back to me and told me that I wasn’t highlighting my Salesforce Experience enough. The way my resume was set up was that I had an objective then talked about my work experience under each job I had. Listed in two bullet points under my secretarial role that I was doing Salesforce Administration and explaining what I had done.
My friend sent me a copy of his resume and the first thing I noticed at the top was under the objective there was a skills section listing out in three columns his experience. Each column was for a different overall skill set and then listing out the specifics. Underneath that there was a list of different project accomplishments relating to both Salesforce and a few other systems he had worked on. Then underneath that was his overall job experience where he listed his title, company worked for and duration of the position. All of the meat and potatoes was as at the top of the resume. I really liked this format and I knew this format could call out my specific Salesforce skill sets without hiding them underneath a secretary title. I spent another weekend updating my resume to look like my friend’s resume. It was definitely time well spent.
That weekend I updated my resume on both monster and careerbuilder and applied to some open positions. My friend’s suggestions worked! That week I heard back from two of the companies I applied with and got a few calls from recruiters about open positions. I had two interviews setup! Hooray!
I would love to tell you that one of those two interviews lead to a job, but they didn’t. I completely bombed my first interview. I was no nervous. The person interviewing me was asking me extremely technical questions that I didn’t even understand. When I didn’t understand what he was talking about I would like down and say “no I don’t know how to do that, or no I’ve never seen that or dealt with that.” The person interviewing me told me to get a few more years of experience under my belt and then reach out to him. I felt like a complete failure. I started to second-guess myself and wonder if I was ready to move into a full-time Salesforce Admin role. I decided that I would go for the next interview a few days later and see how that went.
The second company I interviewed with went a lot better. The role was for a salesforce administrator but instead of reporting into technology the role was reporting into sales operations. I understood all of the questions being asked and was able to respond to all of them. The person interviewing me told me that she really liked me and was going to set up a second interview for me with her boss and two of her colleagues. The second interview I had went great as well. I was able to answer questions and even call on my own Salesforce experience when they were talking about some of the challenges they were having. After following up a few times after my interviews the hiring manager told me they put the position on hold. She did tell me that if they hadn’t put the position on hold that I would have been their first choice. That made me feel really good and helped me to keep going.
I went through another round of applying for jobs on every job site I could possibly find. I also started applying for all Salesforce Admin jobs. Even if they said they wanted five years of experience I applied anyway. I decided it was better to get my resume out there even if I didn’t fit their qualifications exactly. That was one of the best decisions I ever made. I got more interviews this way. Let’s face it, in 2005, Salesforce had only been around for six years so not many people had five years of Salesforce experience.
It was coming towards the end of the Summer and I was still interviewing and applying for jobs. I had interviewed with about 8 different companies and no offer yet. I learned something new during each interview, something that would make me better for my next. I learned how to answer questions better so I became more confident. I learned that it was ok to say “no I haven’t dealt with that situation exactly, but I know I can learn.” I was searching one evening on Monster when I saw a job for a Field Operations Manager/Salesforce Administrator for a start-up company in the NYC suburbs. They were looking for someone with 1-2 years of work experience and 1-2 years of Salesforce experience. I applied for the job.
A few days after I applied for the position at the start-up I got a call from their operations manager. He wanted to bring me in the following week for an interview. That weekend, I was at a family barbeque telling my family of my upcoming interview and my Mom told me she had a really good feeling about this one. I did too. A friend of the family gave me some advice, she told me to walk in there like I owned the place, like the job was already mine. I decided to do just that. I was going to be confident, poised and knowledgeable on this interview. I decided that I was going to ask them what their biggest Salesforce challenge was and see if I could solve it for them.
During the interview I was able to answer all of their questions and at the conclusion of the interview the operations manager asked me if I had any questions. I decided to go for it. I asked “What’s your biggest challenge with Salesforce?”
He looked at me and I think was a bit taken back by my question. He turned the computer screen around on his desk and showed me the Administrator profile. They had 50 users and 28 were administrators because they couldn’t figure out why when they moved a user into a service role and profile they could no longer see accounts owned by sales managers. He then showed me his dashboard which had all of these error messages on it where reports weren’t rendering. He also told me that because there were so many system admins that they had duplicate fields, duplicate (similar) picklist values and a big giant mess. Essentially they had Salesforce for just over a year but the person who started the project of implementing it had moved on before they could finish so they had a lot of stuff that wasn’t working, people had too much access and they weren’t really sure what it could do.
I spoke to him briefly about his first issue with visibility, I explained org wide defaults for objects, sharing, roles and profiles. He seemed to get it. Unfortunately he had another meeting but he told me he did want to continue the conversation and bring me in for a second interview with his boss, the COO and a few others the following week.
Instead of sending a generic thank you for interviewing me email, I decided to send a plan over on how he could fix his Salesforce org and some things he could do right away to move people out of the admin role and eliminate so much risk. I also offered to take a day off from my current job and work with them so they could “try me out.”
The next day the Operations Manager called me. He couldn’t believe that I sent him everything I sent him in just a few hours after our meeting. He took me up on bringing me in the following week. I took a personal day from my current secretarial job and arrived at what I knew would be my next employer ready to get started on fixing their Salesforce org.
I spent a good part of the morning fixing their role hierarchy, creating sharing rules and moving users out of the administrator profile. By noon I had moved over 20 people out of the Administrator profile and you know what they didn’t even notice because they were able to see the correct Accounts, Contacts and Opportunities. After lunch I spent the remainder of the day fixing reports and dashboards so they would run correctly. I also added some more charts to the dashboard for some key metrics I thought they’d want to see. I also made a list of duplicate fields and ran reports on usage and sent them to the Operations Manager so he could let me know which fields could be merged. I also told him about the data loader and that once he made that decision that I could easily load the data on the back-end to the surviving field so no data would be lost on purging fields.
At the end of the day the Operations Manager called me into his office. In his office was the COO and the CFO of the company. He was showing them everything I did in one day. They couldn’t believe it. The COO was so happy that her dashboards were running. The CFO was so happy that she could see all of the correct opportunities and didn’t have to be in an admin profile anymore. We spent the next 15 minutes going through my plan of how we could clean up the duplicate fields and picklist values. At the end of the conversation the Operations Manager got up and picked up a piece of paper off of his printer and handed it to me. It was an offer letter! The CFO went back to her office and came back with a check. Not only were they offering me a job, they were going to pay me for the day. I of course signed the offer letter right then and there.
Sometimes all it takes is a little thinking outside the box to get your Yes. If you’re reading this blog and still waiting for your Yes. I’m here to tell you that I believe in you. I know you can do it.
I was so excited when I started this job. On my first day, they gave me business cards! I don’t know why that was so special to me, but it was. It was like you know you’ve made it when...you have your own business card. My first few months were spent re-implementing their org and fixing their issues. After that was complete I worked on some cool projects regarding routing and invoicing. You can see more about that on Button Click Admin!
As always thanks for reading and Happy Administrative Professionals Day!
Cheryl
Friday, April 4, 2014
My Dream at Dreamforce & How the Salesforce Community helped Make it a Reality
If you've read my blog about how I built my career on Salesforce then you already know that I’ve worked in the financial services industry for more than half of my Salesforce.com Admin/BA career. Prior to this I spent time with a B2C startup and a large Healthcare company. What this means is that approximately 85% of my career has been spent in a Highly Regulated Industry.
One of the Dreamforce ’13 highlights for me was the Financial Services Industry Day. I found the sessions really useful, informative and geared towards people like me. I remember thinking after each session “Yes, I go through that”, “Yes, I’ve dealt with that”, or “Yes these people understand me and don’t think I’m insane. Hooray!”
After the day ended there were two people that I sat next to for most of the day through various sessions and we decided to grab something to eat. The nature of our conversation naturally turned to our Salesforce orgs. We all had similar roles within our companies, however we were all in completely different Financial Services sub-sectors. We had so many common challenges within our implementations or even with compliance or regulatory. After I left my two new friends during the walk back to my hotel I smiled to myself and thought “I wish I could talk to people like this all the time. I wish I could meet up with people from my industry a few times a year and talk shop. These are my people, they get me.”
As I was riding in the elevator up to my hotel a light went on in my head. There should be a Financial Services Industry User Group. Then I started to wonder if I could start something like that? Would Salesforce be supportive? How would I do that? Would anyone be interested in this?
The following day I was speaking with Roger Mitchell from Silverline about my idea for a Financial Services User Group to see what he thought. He was the first person I really vocalized this to so I wasn’t sure what to expect. He was extremely supportive and even offered to help me if I decided to move forward on this idea.
About two weeks after Dreamforce I was still thinking about the idea of a Financial Services User Group and was wondering how Salesforce would feel about this type of group. I was attending a regular MVP Office Hours session in December when Josh and Jarrod mentioned if we ever had any MVP questions we could always tweet them. Later that day I took advantage of their offer and asked them if there were any MVPs in the Financial Services Industry. In a few short hours they had connected me with Denise Carbone who leads the Chicago User Group and Geraldine Gray whom I already knew from the Girly Geeks events at Dreamforce.
Within a few days I had conversations with both Denise and Geraldine about my idea for Financial Services Salesforce User Group. They were both extremely supportive of the idea were willing to give me tips and general advice. Denise offered to connect me with Matt Brown at Salesforce about my idea. I had a very successful conversation with Matt a few days later! He thought it was a great idea and that there would be a lot of interest. All I had to do was let him know I was ready to move forward and he would get me setup.
After hanging up with Matt, I typed a quick email to Roger asking him if he had time to talk later this week about the Financial Services User Group and that I was ready to move forward. Roger got right back to me and told me to set something up and include one of his colleagues, Maggie Rupel. We had a 20 minute conversation that went better than I could have ever imagined. Not only were they willing to help promote an event, but Silverline was willing to sponsor and host the event. I will never be able to communicate in words how much this meant to me. My little Financial Services Salesforce loving heart swelled with joy after this phone call.
After my call with Roger and Maggie, I reached back out to Matt and had him get me setup.
On my way down to the Saleforce1Tour in January I was making a list of all of the things I was going to have to do by February 27th to get this User Group rolling. The list was mighty, long and overwhelming.
While chatting with a few people at the User Group booth I ran into Adam Ady, whom I knew from the Developer User Group in NYC. He mentioned to me he recently transitioned to a new role within Financial Services and he was thinking of trying to get a bunch of other Financial Services Salesforce people together to talk. I told him that “great minds must think alike” and that I needed some help. I asked if he would be my co-leader and he said “Yes!” We started to tell more people after the event about our newly formed User Group. There wasn't a single person we told that wasn't supportive or willing to help in some way.
Shortly after the Salesforce1 tour ended I remember thinking Erica and Matt aren't joking when they talk about Salesforce having the best Community in the world. In just a few days I had so many people willing to help me and guide me. There were other User Group leaders offering their tips and suggestions, there were people sharing the link to the registration on their twitter or community pages.
We had our first meeting as planned on February 27th and it was a huge success. A bigger success than I could have ever imagined when I was talking to Roger at Dreamforce. For the first time ever people in the Financial Services Salesforce world were sharing their ideas, experiences and challenges with Salesforce. And you know what, we were right. We all do have the same challenges and we are going to solve them together and be successful together.
Our Financial Services Salesforce User Group Community page now has over 400 members and we’re gearing up for our second in person meeting in early May as well as our first virtual meeting.
Thank you to everyone who helped along the way. We couldn't have done it without you. This community really is like a second family.
Thanks as always for reading and sharing,
Cheryl
Monday, January 27, 2014
The Best Thing I Built on Salesforce: My Career
During the Q&A session on the last day of Dreamforce, I really wanted to ask you a question but I was too shy. I wanted to ask, “Did you know that you were going to change my life?”
A few hours after Dreamforce ended I was still thinking about this question and more so the question of where would I be if Salesforce wasn’t invented? I was having a late night breakfast with some new Dreamforce friends at Denny’s and looked up and asked everyone sitting at the table with me, “What do you think you would be doing if Salesforce didn’t exist?”
My new friends went around the table, each telling their story. Everyone had some great ideas of cool stuff they might be doing in or out of the technology world. They turned to me waiting for me to speak and my answer was, “Probably a hair dresser, makeup artist and/or a secretary.” It was one of the first times I said it out loud. I never said it before because I was afraid or embarrassed of what people would think of me. I was concerned that they might think I wasn’t good enough to be the Lead BA at a large financial services company because I used to play with hair and makeup for a living. In the past, I would start telling my story at the part where I ended up on a Salesforce project in 2004, but not the part about how I ended up on the project in the first place. One of my new friends looked at me and encouraged me to share further.
My story really starts back in 2001. I was working at a top salon in my area blowing out hair 10-12 hours a day. I was known for my blow outs. I would have people booking me weekly to get their thick, curly, unruly hair blown out smooth for a special event or just for the weekend. I was also working part time as a makeup artist on the side, which was my real passion, but the blow outs paid the bills. I would take any chance I could get to put makeup on someone. I loved that feeling when I would put makeup on a woman who didn’t feel good about herself who suddenly realized that she was beautiful. It wasn’t the makeup, it was that she saw herself, really saw herself. That was and still is my favorite part of makeup. I always tell women “I didn’t make you beautiful, I just made you look in the mirror.”
It was a hot day in June when I was blowing out one of my regular clients on a Friday afternoon when I felt pain like no other in my right shoulder. I finished my blow out and let the salon manager know that I needed to cancel the rest of my appointments and head to the doctor. I knew something was really wrong. I was right. I had severe inflammation and a slight tear in my right rotator cuff. My doctor told me the repetitive motion of the blow drying had caused the injury and that I should probably look for a new career. I was devastated. I went back and spoke to my salon manager the next day who offered to give me an office job temporarily until I could find new work.
I ended up being really good at “office work” so my salon manager came to me and said that she couldn’t afford to keep a full time office manager but her husband was looking for a full-time secretary. She handed me an application and told me I should apply. I saw the name of the company on the application and remember thinking, “Corporate America brace yourselves, here I come.”
My corporate life started in August of 2001. I started out answering phones, taking messages, keeping calendars, setting up meetings and arranging large dinners and travel. All pretty standard secretarial stuff. My manager started giving me more things to do, including database entry and putting together metrics for inventory, cost of goods sold, and customer service. I loved the metrics piece. It was almost like I was telling our company’s weekly story in an excel spreadsheet. I prided myself on those reports. It was my favorite thing to do every week.
By 2003 I was handling a lot of the sales and operations metrics for the company. The metrics came in various formats in which I had to scrub the data. The process would take me 3 days to put together the weekly reports for Friday’s review. So every review, we were viewing data from the week before.
It was sometime in late 2003 that I said to my manager, “Wouldn’t it be great if all of this stuff was in one system where we could just run reports?” My boss turned to me and said they were implementing something called ‘Salesforce.’ “You should be on that project,” he said. It wasn’t until I first logged into Salesforce.com in early 2004 that I realized the power of the platform. No one in my company showed much interest in it, but I immediately loved it! By clicking a few checkboxes I could add fields to reports, and alleviate helpdesk tickets that could take 3 weeks for a response! Within 3 days time I taught myself how to update report criteria and how to run my own reports.
I would spend hours each night reading about Salesforce. I immersed myself in the guide that we were given from our Salesforce implementation. In 2004, I convinced some disinterested people in IT to grant me Administrative access to our org. With that new authority, I created my first formula field that allowed us to drill further down into our contacts for information that we needed. That is the moment that opened my eyes to the power of what someone with little technology skills could do with Salesforce.
I knew this is what I wanted to do: I wanted to play with Salesforce all day and all night. But how could I do that? How could I make Salesforce my career? I searched Monster that night for Salesforce.com and there it was, my dream job. A start up company was looking for a Sales and Field operations manager to do reporting and manage their Salesforce org. Bingo! I applied, and I got the job!
By early 2006 I was doing all sorts of crazy formulas, validation rules, workflow rules, data mining and building business processes in Salesforce. Even more importantly improving business processes by using Salesforce. I learned everything about each piece of our business: marketing, sales, client support, finance and how to make each team more efficient with Salesforce always at the center of the equation.
It was a cold rainy November day in 2007 when my big break came. A recruiter from a huge financial services company called me. A mutual friend had shared examples of some cool stuff I was doing in Salesforce. The recruiter wanted me to apply and interview for a job they had open. I did so, and I got the job! I was astonished! Me, a hairdresser/makeup artist/secretary was going to Wall Street to work on a large team to do Salesforce Administration.
Just over 6 years have passed since that phone call. I’m currently the lead BA on all Salesforce projects at a top Financial Services company in New York City. In addition, I run day to day operations, make sure issues are handled appropriately, and support our end users’ needs.
At the conclusion of fully recounting this whole story at Denny’s, everyone encouraged me to share it, with the emphasis to give encouragement to those out there who want more themselves, and are wondering if they can make Salesforce a career. I hesitated to commit to writing my story down, as I wasn’t sure if I should.
I made up my mind to give an account of my Salesforce experience while attending the NYC Salesforce1 tour. I found myself telling it again at the developer meetup. A Salesforce.com employee overheard me and told me that there was someone who was working in an office manager role, that wanted to make Salesforce his career. This person struggled with understanding how to accomplish that dream. The Salesforce.com employee asked if I’d mentor this aspiring office manager, since I came from a similar place in life. Of course I agreed. I now realize that I need to tell my story. It’s not about ‘getting it off my chest’ or to impress anyone, but to help others.
If someone loves Salesforce, and is passionate in a similar way that I’ve been, if they want to make it a career but are not sure if they can, I’m here to say: If I can do it, they can do it!
You may have started reading this thinking that it is one of your numerous contributions to the non-profit world that changed my life. But no, it is not. It’s the fact that you started Salesforce.com. Salesforce changed my life. I could give you a giant list of things I’ve built on the platform, but what I really built on Salesforce.com was my career.
Thank you from the bottom of my heart.
All the best in 2014, see you at my birthday party, I mean Dreamforce.
Cheryl Feldman
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