Obituaries to Architecture: My career journey to Salesforce (Part One)

If you asked me as a child what I wanted to be when I grew up, the job title “Salesforce Solution Architect” never would have entered my brain. Is this because Salesforce wasn’t invented yet? Yes. Is it because the Cloud wasn’t a thing? Also yes. Is it because the World Wide Web wasn’t even in the public domain? These are facts.

I would have told you, a writer.

Growing up, I saw myself writing articles for the New York Times. Or writing best selling books. Or maybe even starving, making ends meet in some big city, writing anything that anyone would pay to read. I started college in 2001, declared as a Journalism major from day one because for my first 18ish years of life, that was just where I saw myself and my future. I tested out of Freshman English in college and got a sweet refund check for those 3 credits (which I’ve probably paid back like 4 times by now in student loan interest, cool cool). My life plan was affirmed.

But then somewhere in my first semester I learned that, to be a successful journalist, I would probably have to interview and interact with people. And my ambivert self was like, Ruh roh. This is no good.

That freshman year, I was required to take a lecture on Advertising which was – because of the amazing professor – undoubtedly my most interesting course in all my four years of undergrad. I consider(ed) myself creative, and “Advertising” seemed like the perfect blend of writing and art, with a little bit of psychology mixed in. Mad Men did not exist yet, and for the record I’ve never watched that series. My life path took a slight fork, I declared an Advertising concentration with a PR minor, and all was well.

I graduated cum laude from the University of Maine, into one of the worst job economies ever so no employer gave a single shit about the cum laude. It took me some time, but I found a part time job as an Advertising Sales Assistant at Maine’s largest newspaper, the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram. I was one of very, very few of my peers that actually found a job using my college degree. At least for 20 hours per week. I was required to join a union, and I learned cool things like how to paginate the pages of a newspaper, how to meet a deadline, and how to write Death Notices.

Yes, that is correct – obituaries are part of the advertising revenue stream of the newspaper. And while it does seem really heartless that this concept kind of likens an obituary to an “advertisement” of death what’s even worse is that they cost a ridiculous amount of money PER WORD. But I digress.

I worked at the paper for 3 years, eventually moving up and out of Obits and into a sales position. It was exactly then that I became a full on introvert and started job searching.

Because of my new found sales background, I was able to secure a job in non-profit as a program coordinator. I worked for a year at a large national non-profit, putting on events and raising money. While it was for a great cause, seeing the inside of a mega non-profit definitely had its ups and downs. (Again, topic for another day.) Finally, after one too many down sides, I peaced on out of there after only about a year.

My next job I found posted on a random remote work website, the opening was for a Marketing Specialist. Truth be told, I was not sure how much I specialized in Marketing at the time but because I still had some stellar writing samples from college and could HTML the crap out of my MySpace layouts, I was in. I started working for a financial services company that did online training. My focus was communications and marketing – including marketing automation.

I spent over 3 years at this company, doing all the things: SEO, paid search, websites, press releases, email communications, trade shows. I was 26 years old and real ready to move up the corporate ladder. So when we went through a CRM integration to our new marketing automation tool (Engage B2B), and then migrated to a different tool (Eloqua) – I rolled up my sleeves. (Here it is! I buried the lede right here, you’re welcome!) Then, I had a baby, got postpartum depression, and learned that the corporate ladder basically becomes a steep cliff when you’re a new mother. Nice.

Have you ever quit a job mid performance review? 10/10 do not recommend. Unless your company also sucks, then 10/10 DO recommend. (Disclaimer: this company no longer exists as it was acquired by a government agency which is why I feel comfortable speaking harshly about it. The company laid off my entire department while I was on maternity leave, expected me to pick up the work of those other employees when I returned, and had me training the new guy that they hired in above me who barely knew how to use a computer. Don’t ever let yourself be treated like you have no value, personally or professionally.)

I was 29 years old, jobless, with a mortgage and a brand new baby. Great times were had by all.

Luckily, the stars aligned and about a week later I got a call with a job offer at a local University. It was a huge pay cut from my previous salary, but also a huge increase from my then actual salary of $0 per year, so I took it. My first day of work as a Marketing Manager, a blog post I had written about the sad state of maternity leave in the U.S. went viral. I feared I would get fired for that, until I remembered I worked in marketing and viralness is kind of like, the point.

I joined UNE at the perfect time, and I will be forever grateful for the almost 8 years I spent there. Higher education, as a workplace generally, is really tough (IYKYK). But, I was the first hire for an internal startup that was being built to manage the operations of online degree programs. They hired marketing positions first because they were smart. I worked with a consultant and a teeny, tiny team for the first year or so as we built out our operations. It was actually pretty great, even though the work was hard.

My position as Marketing Manager led me directly down the path to Marketing Operations as I became the owner of our Hubspot marketing automation platform. One budget year later, we decided to move to Pardot because it was massively cheaper and we thought “Par-dough” sounded fancy. Turns out, Par-DOT became my gateway into the Salesforce world. Pardot was acquired by Salesforce some time after I stood up our environment, and when I became Director of Strategic Marketing Initiatives in 2013 my mission to get Salesforce CRM for our team was born.

I traveled to my first Higher Ed Summit in 2013, after the birth of my second child. (Don’t ask me how my second maternity leave went: TLDR it was no good.) I came back from Tempe, Arizona glad that I didn’t live in a place that gets to be 110+ degrees in June. And also on a mission to adopt the platform for our operations.

By this time, our unit was profitable so we were able to finagle budget for a transition onto Salesforce. By finagle, yes I do mean that I bought our first 4 licenses with a purchase card because the subscription was under the purchase limit of $4,999. But by no means did we have the ability to hire any additional resources, like an implementation partner or even a Salesforce Administrator. And back in 2013/14, no architecture existed for Education specifically so all of the functionality had to be customized for our business model.

Because I had been the person to configure our marketing automation, and who set the data integrity standards of our lead intake process, who fixed our initial CRM implementation after our partner failed us, and who had the responsibility for running all reports on our KPIs, I was uniquely positioned to hire myself as the team’s Salesforce Admin. I received a stipend of $0 – in fact, the only bonus to this role was that most of the work should be done after business hours when my regular job duties completed.

This was about the time I decided to go back to grad school to get my MBA. (Now you might be wondering if this blog post is actually the story of how I drove myself insane. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t.) The glass ceiling was real and I was told that without graduate credentials I would be unlikely to move beyond a director title in a University setting. In fact, without a masters I was “lucky” to be in a director role in the first place.

After a year or so, aka the hardest year of my life that I have very little recollection of, I was able to hire a full time admin to help take over some of my evening moonlighting. I eventually became Assistant Dean for Finance & Strategy of what turned into a fully-online College, where at various points I oversaw marketing, admissions, student retention, product development, market research, and operational technology. But, as was no secret, Salesforce was always my favorite. Our team was small but mighty. We migrated to Lightning, then to EDA, then got nominated for a Salesforce Higher Ed Summit award. I stayed as product owner for our platform through my tenure at UNE, and continued to dabble in administration after hours no matter my actual role.

I overstayed my time at UNE, for sure, and that might be my one biggest career regret. The person I probably owe most of my success to for putting my on the architect path, our first implementation partner Ned, told me I was an outdoor cat being forced to be an indoor cat. I was scared to leave because it was what I knew and it was secure. So I stayed, even though Ned was right.

There are a number of reasons I could state as why I left my job at UNE. But, to distill it to the most important one, it was that I left to follow my heart. I love the Salesforce platform, and I love the higher education space. I went to an edTech conference once where I acquired a t-shirt with a tag line that read, “Advancing the industry that advances every other industry.” That was one of my favorite t-shirts ever, because it is true. If you contribute to positive changes in education, your impact is exponential even when it feels tiny. You are literally impacting the world for the better, because we only really advance through knowledge and learning. I mean, how amazing is it to get to say that you do that?

I am a firm believer in Salesforce for Higher Ed because I saw the massive amount of inefficiencies that exist in Higher Ed operations firsthand. And it wasn’t just my former University; I see the same challenges (and new ones!) in my current role working with a diverse group of clients across the industry. Education is an industry rooted deeply in tradition; who makes all decisions by committee; who slowly, methodically, and then even more slowly allows change to sometimes occur. Hampered by federal policy and accreditation, the value of education is now thrust into the limelight due to the student loan debt crisis. Where do all those tuition dollars go?

Time to value is key, and Salesforce brings the value. Anyone who tells you that their Salesforce investment isn’t worth double its return in acquired and retained students either a) doesn’t have the right architecture or tech stack, or b) doesn’t know how to run that report.

Becoming a Salesforce Consultant in Higher Education has allowed me to spread my impact not only across the U.S., but globally. I work for a respected employer who, I can truly say, makes me feel respected and valued every day. I am so grateful that my path led me here.

I’ve never met a person whose road to Salesforce wasn’t long and winding, with some strange detour that bestowed upon them the Accidental Admin title. There are straighter paths to Salesforce now, at least for the young interns I get to work with, but CRM 101 was not a course offered back in the early 2000s. Most of us early adopters got here through a stroke of luck or chance or maybe even just out of organizational necessity. I never would have dreamed, back in 2005 when I was reformatting death notices, that some day I’d find myself creating Flows and learning to write an Apex class. But what my professional career has taught me is that nothing is out of reach if you’re willing to work hard, step outside of your comfort zone a little, and follow the path that is laid before you.

It’s never too late to become a Salesforce Trailblazer. In my next post, I will provide even more details about my transition from Accidental Admin to Actual Architect, including tips for where to start if you’re a newbie on the platform.