Hello, everybody, thank you so much for being here.
Today.
I'm with Amy and this is another installment of the trailblazers, we love webinar series.
My name is Andrew Dunker with cloud adoption solutions.
Amy, thank you so much for being here.
Thank you so much for having me and do anything for Shannon.
Yeah, of course, right.
Now, we're really so excited to have you here.
And like, Shannon, like, just really admires you.
So it's gonna be a great conversation.
So maybe we can start with like, you just telling us how you got started in the ecosystem?
Like, what was that first step you took?
And how did you end up here?
Sure.
So I think that my story might be quite similar to a lot of people in the ecosystem in that
it was kind of an accident, I was in sales, I was one of the rare sales reps that actually
loved putting my data into Salesforce.
Yeah.
And so you know, I was seeing results from that I was making more sales, I was killing
my quota.
And I became kind of like a poster child internally, for the secret sauce, right?
And I was like, Nope, I literally just put it in this thing.
It tells me when to call someone.
And there I am.
So I then went to work for another company that did not have Salesforce.
And I can't tell you like the heartbreak that it caused me.
I went to my manager, and I said, if you do not change what we're doing, meaning by Salesforce,
I'm going to pull out every hair on my head in your office.
So please make the change.
So they did it.
They bought it.
And then they came to me and said, Guess what?
You're the only one here that's ever used it.
So you're going to help this consultant figure out how to implement it.
And out of my mouth came Sure why not?
But in my mind.
What did you just agreed to?
You're an idiot.
And I loved it.
Implementation my great I trained everybody and asked to be the admin and was told no,
no, no silly girl, you're going back to sales, this is going to it.
So I kind of bucketed my Salesforce during this, but it was always in my brain.
And I've said it several times over the years, it just kind of scratched an itch in my brain
that I didn't know existed, right?
Trying to find a way to make this path.
I wasn't intact, I didn't know how to do it or if I was even qualified to do it.
And I live in Ohio.
So there wasn't really a concept back then have Ohana and the largest Salesforce ecosystem,
I had no clue.
So I just took a chance and quit my job, changed my resume, put it out there.
And lucky for me.
Within two weeks, I was contacted by a recruiter was on my first Salesforce project at you
know GE Lighting in Cleveland.
So it happened that fast.
And I just made the decision and jumped in.
And here we go.
There we go.
Yeah, that's fantastic.
And as someone who's like really plugged into like the Salesforce community, and like very
active, like, what is to you like your favorite Salesforce resource?
Like what's a place for someone who's learning and is new, like, what's the place where they
should go?
Well, new people, I always give them two pieces of advice of advice.
First joined Twitter, because that's where everybody is even, you know, the mass exodus
that happened a few months ago with changes, but we're still on there.
That's a great way to make connections.
And it's really low barrier to entry.
And as far as you start following people who you look up to or you want to connect with,
and we're all open.
Like that's how I started my career.
I had my little list of Salesforce rockstars and follow them on Twitter, and I would DM
them and they would respond.
And so now you know, all these years later, not only are we friends but you know we help
each other strategize, we help each other get jobs, things like that.
So that's the number one thing I can piece of advice I can give to newbies, and then
of course, Trailhead is a great resource when you're starting out and trying to get your
hands around the platform and understand things and then be farther in my career now I love
you know, I'm not so much hands on keyboard anymore these days but my favorite site to
go to is unofficial SF.
Yeah.
I love it.
I love the solutions that they come up with.
It's a bunch of you know, exhale scores and just people active in the community coming
up with great solutions.
So
yeah, Totally.
And as someone who is like an admin extraordinaire, like you've, you've seen everything like what
is like the best kept Salesforce like products secret?
Like what is something that you think okay, like every business should be using this people
aren't utilizing this enough
I'm gonna say something very controversial.
I immediate I was lucky enough to to start my career immediately jumping into consulting
right so as a result, I've been exposed to a ton of different works.
Yeah, I would say the most underutilized Salesforce feature or functionality or product is core,
just basic out of the box Salesforce what it's supposed to be used for.
I can't tell you how many times I see an org and it's been customized to death and it does
all these great things.
And they don't even have like the sales path setup.
Like it's just little things like that, that are overlooked for the next new thing.
You know, the release comes out, Oh, we got to implement this, this, this this this?
Well, your foundation is broken.
Right.
And so let's start there.
So I think that's the best kept secret of Salesforce is core functionality.
Yeah,
that's a wonderful responsible we haven't heard yet.
So yeah, I love like the Back to Basics.
That sounds great to me.
It does a lot out of the box.
And I don't think people realize that, you know,
yeah, absolutely.
I will never send a grade sets.
It's a fantastic notion.
As as someone who's like really plugged into like the Ohana the community.
I know that you know, a lot of people in Salesforce, you know, what, what's it prediction from
you?
Like, where do you see Salesforce going in the next couple of years?
Even just a small prediction.
It's great.
Yeah.
I think that I guess it's probably clouded by my vision.
And my interest right now is a I think that it's going to really, you know, Einstein prediction
builder was kind of that little taste.
And you know, even that is some people are having a hard time wrapping their minds around
or getting useful experience from it.
But I think all of the advancements in the in just the past three months in AI, I'm very
excited to see what happens with Salesforce.
I'm, I'm longing for the day, and maybe this already exist.
I don't know, or somebody can make this exists with chat.
GPT.
But I want to be able to dictate my tasks into Salesforce.
And that even opened my laptop, you know what I mean?
So yeah, really cool.
Yeah, I think something like that.
I think it's gonna really help automate a lot of sales people's jobs.
I'm hoping for the better.
Yeah, absolutely.
It sounds great.
And I know, AI plays a really big role in the way that we're like, kind of looking at
our sales processes in the future.
So hopefully, Salesforce is like a big part of that be great.
So as far as like outside of Salesforce, like do you have any hobbies?
Or is there like a book you're reading or anything that you like, can give a recommendation
on that.
You're like, Hey, this is really cool.
And I'm like this.
I'm, like, kind of obsessed with AI at the moment, like all of my brainpower and anybody
that's ever met me for even half a second or follows me on Twitter understands my love
for Michael Jackson.
Sure.
Mer, there's actually a marriage of AI and Michael Jackson on YouTube that I follow it's
JG vision media, and they take lyrics to the song.
And every image is generated by AI.
So you get this kind of reimagined it's very creepy.
Very creepy.
But you know, like Billie Jean, the AI generated video for Billie Jean is captivating and mesmerizing
to me.
So that's kind of where my interests are right now.
I'm just fascinated with the change in AI and everything that it can do and trying to
wrap my mind around that.
Yeah, it's really really interesting.
That's for sure.
For the people who are watching this, we'll we'll add a link so that you can see the Michael
Jackson AI videos.
And then if you want to reach out to Amy and talk about it, somebody's gonna like it.
Someone out there will like it.
Absolutely.
Well, any you know, tell us where you're going to be next.
Like what are you going to be up to?
Where can people find you or what events are you going to?
Yeah, I'm I'm very saddened to learn that my favorite Salesforce event, Indian dreamin
was just announced, but I'm not able to make it's going to be in at the end of April.
So I won't be there.
So I don't know what my plans are.
For the summer.
I haven't made my really solidified plans.
My eighth is having a dream and event for the first time and I'm not going to be able
to go to that because of vacation, but everyone can always find me on Twitter, and LinkedIn
for sure.
Or just direct Like, um, you know, very responsive as anyone else.
Yeah, that's, that's great.
Well, we'll put links to all of your social media down below so that everyone can reach
out to you.
But Amy, thank you so much for being here.
Like, it's been really nice to talk to you.
And I just hope that our viewers like you know, just listen to this conversation and
feel inspired.
So yeah, thank you so much for being here today.
Thank you for having me.
It was fantastic.
Yeah, and
everyone back at home.
My name is Angela of Pet Adoption solutions.
One more time.
100% women on Salesforce partner.
If you have Salesforce needs your questions, please reach out to us.
If you have questions for Amy or you want to connect with her online, please do.
But otherwise, have a wonderful day and thank you so much for being here.