Episode 17: Salesforce Career Conversations Dave Atkins with ROD. Dave has worked in IT since 2003 and moved into Salesforce in 2017. Dave shares his story as both a candidate and employer in the technology space and why money shouldn't be the main motivator when it comes to your career.
Lee Durrant: Hello, it's Lee Durrant here with another episode of RODcast where, as you know by now, we dive into people's Salesforce careers to find you little nuggets of inspiration that might help you in your Salesforce career. I'm pleased to say that joining me today is Dave Atkins, who I've known for a long, long time. Hi, Dave.
Dave Atkins: Morning Lee, are you well?
Lee: Good, good, good. Thank you so much for agreeing to share your Salesforce career with us or your career before Salesforce as well, and then obviously, any little tips you've got along the way will be brilliant. I was thinking perhaps you can, I know you and I go back a long way, perhaps you can give us a high-level intro about you and then before we dive into where it all began, and then bring us up to date. A little intro would be great.
Dave: Sure, yes. Okay, where it all began? Well, I came through a software background, usual sort of development and design way back in the day. I was introduced back in the mid-'90s, to something called CRM. Now, I'd never heard of it. Nobody else appeared to have heard of it, and it was something entirely new. It took some time for that to, shall we say, come to fruition and it was quite weird, really because the first real introduction to Salesforce I had, I was working for a software company, and they wanted to try out CRM. I did a bit of research and came across this thing called Salesforce, which was in its very, very early stages then.
Lee: Yes, if you're talking mid-'90s, they didn't start til '99.
Dave: It was '99. Yes, '99 they started. I think this by then was probably about 2000, 2001 something like that. Strange thing was that one of my colleagues in my present company said the same thing and he described it as when Salesforce was nothing more than a glorified address book which was way, way back.
We adopted that and obviously, in those days, you didn't have the infrastructure around it that you have today so everything we did, we did ourselves, we found that it was very customisable and it worked well, it worked well as a sales tool. Something that we could track customers on, track their purchases, and their prospects but it was a very, very simple system then. I just moved on through.
Dave: This was a company called GAVS. Which I think you may remember.
Lee: I remember GAVS.
Dave: That's right and I was working with them and really, it was an internal system we needed to use something to track sales. That's how I got my first taste of CRM and of Salesforce.
Lee: It fell on to you that it's to be that person to get it to work?
Dave: Yes, I was literally chief cook and bottle washer. Everything, I had to do. We did it ourselves and obviously coming from a software background, it was interesting for me to do that and interesting for me to become involved in the business side of it. How we use CRM.
Lee: As I said before to you, I'm going to go off on tangents here, but I looked at your profile even though I've known you for a long time and I kind of know your profile well because obviously we've worked together for so many years in terms of me either recruiting for you or finding new jobs so I know your profile. More often than not you refer to yourself as a project manager.
Dave: Yes.
Lee: T hat leads to my first question that is a bit off-topic in terms of your career anyway. If you're called a project manager but you're doing what you did with Salesforce, there's so many different things you can call yourself because obviously to do what you've done just to build that from nothing for GAVS, sorry, it's so much more than project management, isn't it?
Dave: Yes. It was a lot more and that continued for probably five, six years with various CRM packages. I spent a lot of time with something called Avaya Interaction Center, and again, the original position that they asked me to do was a technical position, and then I ended up managing the entire project. That was my introduction to real project management, which I thought, "Wow, I quite enjoy doing this," and that's when I'd finished that project. I then decided that I try and angle my career more at project management than the technical side and that's really the sort of widening of the stream there.
One of the problems as a technical project manager, is that companies tend to use you when things go slightly adrift, shall we say or they don't have the expertise, you suddenly ended up being a techie again. Certainly, in those days, it probably doesn't happen quite so much these days, although you still dabble.
Lee: The reason I bring that up is because I think if you've had a vast career like you have, and you're looking around or what have you, you see they can sometimes come across as I don't know what this person is, they look they've done a bit of everything and I think hiring managers and recruiters can get a bit confused as to what you are. I'm wondering whether there's a tip there about writing a CV for the job you kind of-
Dave: Absolutely.
Lee: -rather than a whole big list of everything you've ever done. Do you know what I mean?
Dave: Yes, absolutely right. In fact, that is a trap that I've fallen into a few times when I've gone for a, certainly a few years back anyway, gone for a position as project manager or even program manager. They've looked at my CV and said, "Oh, you're a techie." I said, "No, I'm not. That's my background but I'm a project manager". I've gone through the print stuff, the agile stuff, but that is, you're dead right, that's a top tip. If you're going to go for a position, make sure your CV reflects that position. Don't let it waffle on about I've done this and done that in other sectors. Make sure it's to the point. If you're going to be a project manager, you're a project manager.
Lee: Yes and obviously, without not saying you're saying this, but without fabrication, though you just maybe it's just taken away all the noise that's not relevant to that particular role, or because we do get that a lot actually in the Salesforce space with someone is, let's say, they say they're an admin and they've done some development, and they want to be a developer but the CV smacks of I'm an admin.
Then line managers, which I'm sure you've been in that situation yourself. You're not reading CVs from top to bottom, your skimming. You're too busy and it's very quick to just go well, that person's an admin not developer or that person in your case is a techie, not a project manager. That's it. That is first really good tip. Thanks very much. I remember then, that you worked for a company called Lagan that were a CRM company, but I'm guessing not cloud, obviously, not Salesforce.
Dave: That's exactly right. Lagan were a Northern Ireland-based CRM company that dealt exclusively in the public sector. It was an interesting period in my life, actually, because I did a lot of travel all over the world working with different governments and different government departments, companies, countries where we were putting in quite a sophisticated CRM system. Throughout the UK. We put it into just about every local authority you can name. Also places like San Francisco, and the most interesting for me was New Orleans just after Katrina. We put it in there. That was an experience. Probably the details of which are for another day, but yes, it was interesting.
Lee: No, I didn't know that. That's quite interesting, isn't it? You're getting to see the inner workings of these government systems all over the world. You must have had a high level of security clearance for that?
Dave: Yes, yes, I did. That came into fruition later on as well when I dealt with the UK security side of things as well. It's strange, you never set out to actually do this and say, right, this is my plan. This is my career path and whatever. It's just how things drop. You've got to be ready to take those opportunities and equally ready to realise your own requirements and maybe even your own limitations. Sometimes you just got to say, no, that's not what I do. That's not what I want to do. That's not what I want to get involved in. Equally, you say, well, yes. When something comes across and you think that sounds interesting then you go for it. You go for it 100%.
Lee: That's actually really good advice. Especially in this Salesforce world, we are living in probably even more so. Salesforce has always been an industry where there have been more opportunities than there have been experienced people I think that's been exacerbated by COVID and Brexit. More recently, it just seems like if you are a Salesforce person you have any kind of experience there are so many opportunities out there that it's probably difficult to sit still and not have your head turned every five minutes by the likes of me.
Probably good advice to know what you want and try and tune out the rest of the noise. That would be another little nugget for people. Like a lot of people I speak to they've certainly had a long career. Two things you said that I think resonated, you look back on the career and go blind. It looked like it was all a plan, but of course not necessarily. Also, you didn't plan to get into Salesforce. It just happened to be a system that the company you were working for wanted to implement.
Dave: Yes, absolutely. John Lennon said that life is what happens when you're busy making plans and that's exactly how it turned out.
Lee: On that note, what did you think your career was going to look like before Salesforce came along and you then went down that road?
