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Cindy is a Salesforce Platform Manager with 13+ years experience with the Enterprise & Unlimited Salesforce.com editions globally. She has held various roles in her career, including Solution Architect, Business Analyst, System Administrator, and Project Manager. She’s an overall Salesforce and cloud enthusiast who has decided to share her story with us here.
Before I tell you how I ended up where I am today — a Pittsburgh-area native living in Los Angeles, who studied Marketing in college, and now managing the Salesforce Platform for a global corporation — let me take you back in time to 2003.
Some fun facts about 2003:
Salesforce was just four years old, and wouldn’t go public until the next year.
It was the year of the very first Dreamforce, with 1,300 registered attendees. (To put that in perspective, last year’s Dreamforce had over 171,000 attendees!)
It would be another 12 years before Trailhead was born.
Linkedin was just a year old, Facebook wouldn’t launch for another year, and Twitter for another three years.
And as you might have guessed, it was also the year I was first introduced to Salesforce. At the time, I was in a sales team admin role and the company I was working for adopted Salesforce through the acquisition of another company that was already using the platform. At that point, I was interacting with it as a sales team user and performing very basic admin tasks for my boss. The next year I moved into a sales role and Salesforce became just another tool I used to get my job done.
Then, in the summer of 2005, the company I worked for got acquired by a competitor, who also adopted Salesforce as a result of the takeover. I saw an Assistant Salesforce Admin position had opened up at the new company. I was pregnant with my second child at that point and felt like I needed a change. I wanted something with a little more stability that also fed my interest in technology. Plus, I figured learning something new would be a good thing for me at that point in my career, so I raised my hand for the role and dove right in.
Remember, Trailhead and most of the social media we use today didn’t exist, so the Salesforce community was much smaller and harder to connect with than it is today. I was learning by trial and error, and a lot of great mentoring by my manager.
Later that year, I attended my first Dreamforce and left totally in awe of the community and the passion represented there. It was at that first Dreamforce that I started to feel a real sense of excitement for this new career path.
In the spring of 2007, my manager broke the news to me that she was leaving the company. I was sad to lose her as a manager, but also a bit panicked wondering what would happen to my job.
The next thing I know, I got a call from the Senior Vice President of Sales. I had only interacted with her via email and in meetings, but had never spoken to her directly. I thought for sure I was going to be laid off. I picked up the phone and she nonchalantly said, “Hi there! I just wanted to introduce you to your new manager and by the way, you’re in charge of Salesforce now.” I thanked her for the opportunity, but in my head thought, “Oh my gosh, I feel like I know nothing. Am I really ready for this?”
It turned out that I knew much more than I thought I did, and was ready to rise to the challenge. After a few months of smooth sailing, I had my ‘aha’ moment. I realized that being an Admin was really something I loved and was good at doing. I felt confident in a way I hadn’t before that Salesforce was going to be the future of my career.
I should mention that from the very beginning of my Salesforce Admin work, I worked out of my home. My manager and I worked in different cities, Alice, was in Boston and I was in..., and every day we worked with sales teams all over the world. And because Salesforce is cloud-based and has secure login from anywhere, my home could be my office, which meant I didn’t have to choose between progressing in my career and being a mom.
I could get on a 6 a.m. call with one of our east coast teams while my kids were getting ready for school, go do the ‘mom thing,’ come back and work, go do the mom thing again, and maybe hop on a call at 10 p.m. with our Asian team once the kids were asleep. There were long days, but I was working from home, and was able to balance both my professional and personal life.
I worked on Salesforce from my home office for almost eight years. I was grateful then, and I’m even more grateful now that my kids are older, because I see how valuable those years of continuous learning were for my career. With such a rapidly evolving platform, being able to stay in the ecosystem all that time has helped propel me to where I am today.
Thirteen years after I took that first Assistant Admin role, I’m still blazing my trail with Salesforce. I’ve been a Salesforce Admin, a Salesforce Technical Project Manager, a Salesforce Consultant, and a Salesforce Platform Manager.
A lot of things have changed in my life since 2005, but Salesforce has been a constant, providing me constant opportunities to learn, grow, and challenge myself in a rapidly evolving ecosystem.
It doesn’t matter what your background is, educational or professional, if you have an interest in technology and a passion for learning, Salesforce is the perfect outlet to bring that to life. Anyone has an incredible learning platform available to you in Trailhead and a global Ohana to help you find your way.
You have all the tools you need in front of you, more tools than I could have ever wished for when I was just starting out. Now, you just need to get out there and go. And there’s no better place to start than Trailhead!
