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

And Then My Worlds Collided…The Beautyforce Concept

For as long as I’ve been doing Salesforce Administration work I've always tried to figure out how can I make my two favorite things, Salesforce and Makeup work together. I was never sure what that meant, but I always thought it would be cool if I could introduce my makeup friends to Salesforce somehow and my Salesforce friends to the world of makeup.  I had pretty much resolved myself to the fact that my worlds would always have to remain separate and I would never find a way to incorporate makeup into Salesforce or Salesforce into makeup.

It was sometime in late January when my team and I started really looking at Salesforce1 and how our company could use it and what we would have to do to get our company and our org ready to use it.  We don’t have chatter on and I wanted to play with some things with publisher actions to see how things would work conceptually so I opened up a new developer edition org and started to build out a custom object and create some publisher actions.  I wanted to create something cool to test out the power of publisher actions and the power of Salesforce1.  At first I was starting to re-build my own org more declaratively but that would be so time consuming and challenging I wanted to start with something a bit simpler.  Maybe something that didn't have to do with my day job. I started to think of ideas that had to do with the Financial Services Industry but I wasn’t sure if I wanted to go that route.  I happened to be working from home and decided to take a break from ‘Salesforcing’ and go back to organizing my lip products by color and type.

As I was sitting on my bedroom floor sorting my lipsticks, lip glosses, lip pencils, lip primers and lip balms I was also entering information about these products into a google doc so I know what I have as far as product, what I thought of it and which skin tones/lip type it works best on.  It was so time consuming to do this.  I remember thinking “I wish they had an app for this”.  And BAM it hit me like a pile of bricks.  I could create something in Salesforce1 to track this information.  And there it was.  My longtime dream of combining Salesforce and Makeup was sitting right there in front of me and I didn’t even realize it.  I decided right then and there sitting on my bedroom floor surrounded by hundreds of lip products that I was going to try and build this app.  I wanted it to be more than just a place to track makeup products.  I had a flurry of ideas running through my head of how Salesforce1 could work for makeup artists, hair stylists, colorists, beauty bloggers/vloggers, salon owners and your average makeup/beauty consumer. 

I wanted to run my idea by a few people so I reached out to a few friends in the beauty/makeup community that I know and asked if they wanted to grab cocktails over the weekend to talk about an idea I had.  I had cocktails with three of my friends; a makeup artist, a salon owner and a beauty blogger.  I told them of my idea and I explained Salesforce1 to them and showed them potentially how it could work.  All three of them thought it would be an incredible idea especially my friend who does blogging.  She tracks everything in notes on her iPhone and it’s not very organized or user friendly. 

My friend who owned the Salon thought it could be awesome for different reasons.  Right now he has to have these large areas in his salon taken up with computers for scheduling and for looking up color cards and client history and they take up so much space.  His dream is remove the whole front desk and the ‘colorist console’ and replace it all with iPads/iPhones.  He asked me if I thought the app could do that.  My brain really started to wrap itself around this idea and I told him that I thought it could or at least I hope it will be able to!

My friend who is a makeup artist; we both are obsessed with Uber.  We take it all the time especially after a late night in the city and we always say why isn’t everything as simple as Uber.  Why can’t I push a button on my phone and everything be there in front of me less than 10 minutes?  We’ve spoken about this idea before the idea of having an app where someone is sitting at their desk at work and they decide they need their makeup or hair done.  They can open an app request a type of beauty service at a specified location and then someone picks up their request and does their hair, makeup or whatever service they requesting. 

My friend, the salon owner turned to me and asked “So what are you going to call this thing?”  That was a good question, I originally thought of makeupforce, but this was so much more than that.  It involves the whole beauty world.  A light bulb went off in my head.  I turned to my friends and said “Beautyforce”. 

I left my friends that night feeling more energized than ever about this idea.  The next day I jotted down everything I wanted in this app.  The list was huge; two full pages back and front in a notebook.  I then decided this needed to be broken up into separate sub-apps that fulfill a different use case, but all centered around the same thing, beauty/makeup products and services.

Unfortunately for the past month or so I have been working 60 hour weeks at my day job, plus the Financial Services User Group, plus my blog, plus mentoring so sadly this app got put on the back-burner.

I resurrected it last week and started building it again and have a shell of what it would look like from the first “sub-app” which would be the one potentially used by both the beauty blogger/vlogger and regular consumer. 

There is a lot of work still yet to be done on this app and a lot of it will need development to accomplish the overall vision I have.  I just don’t have enough hours in the day to accomplish this on my own.  For those of you who have helped me on the community so far you know that I’ve been working on this from the hours of 11 PM – 1 AM a few days per week as that is really the only free time I have.  If anyone would like to help me out with this let me know.  I’m completely open to partnering with someone from the community on this and sharing the overall vision of each app. 

Here are a few screen shots:

Anyway, I would love to know what all of you think of the overall idea and if anyone has built anything like this on Salesforce1. 

As always, I appreciate you taking the time to read and share your thoughts.

Thank you,

Cheryl 

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

All it Takes is One Yes

Last Friday evening I was winding down my work week and getting ready to watch some Netflix when I heard my phone go off. I looked down and saw it was a direct twitter message from a new friend that contacted me because she read one of my blog posts. She was looking for some advice. She is currently a secretary doing both secretarial work as well as Salesforce Administration work. I really wasn't doing anything that exciting so I sent her my phone number and told her to give me a call.

A few minutes later my phone rang and I could hear the sadness and frustration in her voice. I asked her what was wrong. She started to tell me that her manager told her that her secretarial duties were more important than the work she was doing with Salesforce. They were also not going to give her a raise this year even though she took on a substantial amount of work by maintaining and configuring their Salesforce org. Her manager isn't willing to pay for training or help her get her certification. She has been going to a free certification class on her own time in the evenings through her local user group. Her dreams of attending the Midwest Dreamin' event were also crushed. Her manager gave her the famous line of “you're just a secretary.” I tried my best to provide some words of wisdom, but I knew I had to help her, I just wasn't sure how. I promised that I would get back to her if I figured out a way that I could help her.

Once I hung up with my new friend I started to think back to when I was a secretary. I remembered being a distraught twenty-four year old hiding in a stall in a ladies room crying my eyes out. I had just finished my first Salesforce project and my manager had promised if I did that successfully he would put me on track for a promotion to Salesforce Administrator. I had worked so hard on this project, sales reps as well as sales management loved it. I had over a dozen emails from various people within the sales department thanking me for their new way to track customer visits and interactions as well as all of their new dashboards.

The week after we rolled out the new functionality to Sales, my manager put a meeting on my calender to discuss my “career”. I was sure he was going to tell me that he was going to promote me or I was going to be moved into another department to focus on Salesforce Administration. Unfortunately I was completely wrong. My manager told me that I was “just a secretary” that completed one small project and that didn't warrant a promotion. He was also having trouble grasping why I even wanted to do anything other than get him coffee. He told me since he started managing me a few months prior he barely gave me any hard work like my previous manager and I should be grateful that I have an easy job.

I felt so betrayed, like my whole world was crashing down around me. All I wanted was to be a Salesforce Administrator. I held in my tears until I left his office. I made a bee line for the ladies room, locked myself in a stall and just cried. After I had no more tears to even cry, I came out of the stall, dried my eyes, washed my face and made my way back to my desk. I sent my manager an email that I wasn't feeling well and was going home.

When I arrived home, I decided to call one of my heroes from the Salesforce User Group I mentioned in my previous blog to see what they thought. I was so happy that he took my call. I explained to him everything that happened with my manager and how betrayed I felt. I will never forget what he told me. He said “Just because this jerk said you're only a secretary doesn't mean you are. In my mind if you completed that project on your own, you already are a Salesforce Administrator. You should look for a new job.” I felt so much better after speaking with him. I remember thinking that he was right, I should look for a new job.

I decided at that very moment that I was going to fully build my whole career on the Salesforce platform regardless of what anyone told me. I knew what I wanted and I was going to go after it. I won't lie, it wasn't easy. I had several “no's”, but I finally did get my one “yes”. That one “yes” changed my life. I no longer had a Secretary title. I was the company's Salesforce Administrator with business cards and everything. I am forever grateful for someone taking a chance on me.

If you're reading this and you're in a similar situation to where I was or where my new friend currently is, I'm here to tell you that I believe in you. You can do this and if you're doing things like I was doing in the Salesforce platform, you indeed are already a Salesforce Admin.  I'm going to do my best to try and help you. I want to see you get your “yes”.

I wasn't exactly sure until today how I was going to help the people reaching out to me. I decided today that I was going to share more of my story, so I can help the community understand what it was like for me as well as others in a secretarial type role that aren't being mentored or compensated for their work, knowledge or skills. I'm reaching out to the Salesforce Community with hopes of you helping me help people that have a similar story to mine. If you or your company are hiring for entry-level Salesforce Administrators please send me an email cdfeldman80@gmail.com and I'll connect you to the people that have reached out to me. Let's help these people get their “yes”.

Some people maybe reading this post wondering why I'm even trying to help these people reaching out to me.  The Salesforce Community has given me so much over the past almost 10 years that I'm just trying to "pay it forward" a little bit.  If I can give back 1/10th of what this community has given me through the years I will be a happy person.  

I would also like to be clear that in no way am I looking for any compensation, as I do have a full-time job. My compensation will be the first phone call I get from someone that I helped that is able to quit their job and live his/her dream of being a Salesforce Administrator.

As always, thank you for reading!

Cheryl

The Salesforce Community & The Best $200 I Never Spent

I can't remember exactly how I found out about Salesforce User Groups, but I definitely remember the first one I ever attended. It was sometime in early 2005 and I was still working as a secretary as well as doing the Salesforce Administration work. I was trying to get myself promoted within my company to just do Salesforce configuration and administration. My new manager seemed open to it, but only if I could complete a project. The project was for Sales to track more information and have additional reporting and metrics.

I had been working on this project for two weeks with the hope of getting a promotion and a raise. I had about 90% of the work done but I was stuck on two formula fields. I just couldn't get them to work correctly. I had one that I couldn't save because I was getting a syntax error and another that wasn't displaying the proper result. After about two days of being completely frustrated I found myself on my way to my first User Group meeting. On my way to the meeting I stopped at an ATM and withdrew $200.00 for the purpose of potentially paying someone to help me get my formulas in working order. I wasn't sure what the going rate for a Salesforce consultant was, but I figured the $200.00 would be sufficient and an investment in my own career and future.

I wasn't sure what to expect out of the User Group as I really had never been to anything like this before. When I arrived, there were nice people to greet me and tell me where to go. I sat down and was delighted to find out there was going to be a presentation on reporting as well as a partner presentation. I was surprised how much I learned in just a few minutes of listening to someone talk about some key metrics and reports admins should create for their organizations. I couldn't believe that this whole thing was free. I felt like I hit the jackpot.

After the presentations ended they had a networking session with snacks and drinks. I approached two people that were quite active in the discussions during the presentation and introduced myself and told them of my formula woes. They walked me over to an area where we could get an internet connection and I setup my laptop. I showed them what I was trying to accomplish and my error message. Within 2 minutes they helped me save my formula formula and correct my syntax error! Hallelujah! Within another 5 minutes they walked me through how to properly use one of the formula functions to get the correct result in my formula. Hooray! I was in business and could move forward with my project!

After my formulas were saved, I pulled out my wallet and asked how much I owed them. I was secretly praying and hoping that it wasn't more than $200.00. They looked at me really funny and explained to me the purpose of the User Group. My new heroes explained that the User Groups were about helping each other and their payment was to see me grow my skill-set. I couldn't believe it I only had two more small pieces to do on the project and then I would have completed my first Salesforce project!

It would be hard for me to articulate in words how my first User Group experience made me feel. I have never forgotten that feeling, the two people that helped me or the purpose of the User Groups. If you are reading this and have never attended your local user group, I highly encourage it. The User Group program has evolved so much since I first attended in 2005. There are so many groups in various cities as well as groups specific to non-profits, developers and verticals. I promise, it will be worth your time.

For those of you wondering, I did finish my project and the Sales teams loved it. Unfortunately, my manager didn't think it was enough to warrant a promotion. I did eventually end up spending that $200. I purchased a new suit that I could use for job interviews. If you read my previous blog, then you know what happened next. Onwards and upwards as they say!

I would like to dedicate this post to those in the community leading user groups, answering questions, writing blogs, training people and helping others. I have built my career on Salesforce not only because its a great platform but because of the great community surrounding it. Thank you. I wouldn't be where I am today if it wasn't for all of you.

See you at a User Group meeting Soon :)


Cheryl

The Best Thing I Built on Salesforce: My Career

Dear Mr. Benioff,

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

Potential Solution for Reporting on Salesforce Opportunity Approvals

To all who read this:

I'm not a developer, I have no idea how to write code, however I have a really good understanding of what a trigger is, when it should be used and etc.  If you're curious, I'm a Technical BA at a large financial services firm here in NYC.  

Here's our challenge:

We rolled out approvals on opportunities January of 2008.  Our user base has grown immensely as well as our use of opportunities and enforcement of getting approvals on discounted opportunities.

As we are enhancing our approval process we need to be able to answer certain questions:

How long does it take for an opportunity to be approved?  We currently do pull up some information from the approval process through field updates on the opportunity but that is not detailed enough.  

We want to really break it down.  How many times is an opportunity submitted for approval?  How many times is rejected before finally approved.  Why is it being rejected?  How many times are users being forced to re-submit due to pricing or product changes (we have validation forcing users to do this).  Who is the approver on the opportunity and how long does it take that one person to approve on avg? Who is the approver changed to?   Since we really can't answer these questions with out of the box reporting, I think I may have found a solution which would require a custom object and some APEX.

We have done some similar things with opportunity history reporting and case history reporting have found that these designs work well for us and how we need to look at the data.    

I posted something similar on Salesforce Answers, but wanted to also put it here.  Selfishly because I always wanted to start a blog, so I guess this is also my first post.

Here is the design, would love feedback if you've done this before. Did it work?  What challenges did you have?  

Design for Approval History Reporting

Problem: Salesforce currently doesn’t allow for reporting or metrics on approvals.  Our business needs to be able to report on how long it takes for one approval to happen, how many times it was submitted/rejected/approved, how many different approvers it went to.

Potential Solution:

Add a custom object called “Approval History Reporting” to be a child object of opportunities through a master detail relationship.

Add the following fields to the custom object:

Approval History Start Date/Time

Approval History End Date/Time

Approver – lookup to user

Approver Changed to – lookup to user

From Approval Status (picklist) – Submitted, Approved, Rejected, Recalled

To Approval Status (picklist) – Submitted, Approved, Rejected, Recalled

Approver Comments text field

Age = formula field to calculate Approval History End – Approval History Start, show number in hours

How this object will work

Records will be inserted and/or updated when certain things happen.

Scenario 1: Opportunity is submitted for approval

Upon initial submission of an opportunity to an approval process a record will be inserted into the Approval History Reporting with the following fields populated:

Approval History Start Date/Time – Time opportunity was submitted for approval

Approver – user selected as approver

From Approval Status = Blank

To Approval Status = Submitted

Scenario 2: Opportunity is Approved by Approver:

Existing record with To Status of Submitted will update to have an Approval End Date/Time of the time the stage changed

New record will insert with the following information:

Approval History Start Date/Time – Time opportunity was approved

Approver – user selected as approver

From Approval Status =Submitted

To Approval Status = Approved

Comments = any comments entered by approver

Scenario 3: Opportunity is Rejected by Approver:

Existing record with To Status of Submitted will update to have an Approval End Date/Time of the time the stage changed

New record will insert with the following information:

Approval History Start Date/Time – Time opportunity was Rejected

Approver – user selected as approver

From Approval Status =Submitted

To Approval Status = Rejected

Comments = any comments entered by approver

Scenario 4: Opportunity is Recalled by User:

Existing record with To Status of Submitted will update to have an Approval End Date/Time of the time the stage changed

New record will insert with the following information:

Approval History Start Date/Time – Time opportunity was Recalled

Approver – user selected as approver

From Approval Status =Submitted

To Approval Status = Recalled

Comments = any comments entered by approver

Scenario 5: Approver is reassigned

Existing record that is submitted with no End time will have the Approver Changed To lookup update to the new approver

Scenario 6: Opportunity is Recalled and User Submits Again

New record will be inserted with the following information

Approval History Start Date/Time – Time opportunity was submitted for approval

Approver – user selected as approver

From Approval Status = Recalled

To Approval Status = Submitted

Scenario 7: Opportunity is Rejected and User Submits Again

New record will be inserted with the following information

Approval History Start Date/Time – Time opportunity was submitted for approval

Approver – user selected as approver

From Approval Status = Rejected

To Approval Status = Submitted

Scenario 8: Opportunity is Approved and user hits validation due to product/pricing changes and is forced to submit again

New record will be inserted with the following information

Approval History Start Date/Time – Time opportunity was submitted for approval

Approver – user selected as approver

From Approval Status = Approved

To Approval Status = Submitted

** For Clarification on Scenario 8, our validation is on the stage.  If a user tries to close and an opportunity hasn't been approved or products/pricing has changed they will be forced to submit again.

One item to note is I'm also considering maybe adding a type field and inserting records when approvers change.  I'm not sure if that's necessary right now but that maybe an option for anyone trying to get more reporting on approvers and how often they change.