My journey into Salesforce

Before Salesforce

Until 2012 I had never heard of Salesforce. My world up to that moment consisted of supermarket and consumer sales data. I used to analyse data and provide clients insight into how their brands were performing.
It was a rather predictable and established world. Personal growth and increasing experience was often driven by “who do you know” attitude. Self growth and learning was not that straightforward.

Looking back at that time though, I learned a lot about dealing with demanding customers often asking for the impossible. Learning how to translate customer queries into easy to digest and useful visuals became an art.

My first Salesforce Experience

However in 2012 my world changed. I was hunting for a new job and I received a description of a new role that was similar to what I had done before. But the recruitment agency asked if I liked to work with computers. This new company was going to roll out a new system and I was to help with it. They were rather vague about it and even in the interview they couldn’t explain too much about it.

But sure, I said, let’s go for it. Having learned Microsoft Access through rather boring books and trial and error, I thought how much more difficult could this be.

I still remember the first day on the job. I was told to be early as a meeting started at 08:00 and I was needed for that. They warned before hand that it would not be a normal HR introduction first, but rather straight into the job. What happened blew my mind.

For the following 8 hours I got an in-depth introduction into the world of Salesforce by an very experienced American Developer. Phrases like users, profiles, fields, page layouts, objects and set up were throw around as if I knew what it was. I scribbled numerous pages of notes trying to keep up. It was the most challenging first day on the job I have ever had. It became the first day of a long and steep learning curve, that is still going strong until this day.

I stayed for a couple of years as System Administrator before deciding to take the plunge and become an independent Salesforce Training Consultant. Luck was on my side that I landed immediately a great long term contract that gave me great exposure to a Sales Cloud Implementation.

Since then I have been amazed at how much Salesforce has grown, how it has helped me grow and how constantly changing and challenging it can be. Every now and then I look back at my time before Salesforce and think about where I would be. I don’t think I would ever have had the excitement, challenges and opportunities as I have had now.

So where am I now in my journey?

As an independent training consultant, my time is split between training budding admins and developers the wonderful world of Salesforce through an Administrator Certification Course and writing bespoke training for end users depending on which client I am working on at the time

Through all my training, I try to bring them the Awesomeness of Salesforce and the Salesforce community and get them hooked up for the rest of their working career.

What will my future bring?

Well, I am working hard to get more certifications under my belt, which hopefully means I can diversify my training scope. Extending knowledge will be highly driven by Trailhead and attending as many meetings, conferences, webinars and training sessions as possible.

One thing is for sure, you will never have a boring day with Salesforce