Episode 18: Salesforce Career Conversations Peggy Schael with ROD. Peggy talks about her career in Salesforce and how she progressed to co-found a training platform to help others to become certified.
Lee: Hello, it's Lee Durrant here again with another episode of RODcast, where, as you know by now, we dive into people's Salesforce careers to find you, hopefully, little nuggets of inspiration that might help you in your Salesforce career. I'm really pleased to say that joining me today on the podcast is Peggy Schael who is the co-founder of WeLearnSalesforce. Hi Peggy.
Peggy: Hi Lee, nice to meet you, and thanks so much for having me here.
Lee: I'm really, really thankful that you've agreed to join. I think I saw what you do on LinkedIn and thought it's quite interesting. We'll see if we can have a quick chat and share some of your story or even all of your story with people that are listening and want to be inspired perhaps as to what happened in your career and how you got to where you are and what you're doing, and maybe how that can help them as well. I was looking with interest. Maybe a little overview for us first and then we'll go back to the beginning if you like. Do you mind just telling us a little bit about what you do right now and then we'll rewind?
Peggy: Yes, yes, of course. I'm more than happy to share my story and I have to add, this is my very first podcast, so please be gentle on me.
Lee: That's okay. I won't ask anything too tough but yes, you fire away.
Peggy: As you introduced, I'm Peggy Schael and I am a Salesforce trainer and have been a Salesforce trainer for many years now, and a bit over, I think two years ago, we founded WeLearnSalesforce, our online Salesforce learning platform where you can go and watch video tutorials and get Salesforce certified or do a Salesforce certification training and prepare for the certification and all of that is provided in video tutorial format. You can watch pretty much any time from anywhere you are. That's where I am right now.
Lee: Where you are right now, brilliant. I'd be interested to find out how you got into it but maybe before that, what were you doing pre-Salesforce? What was your career up to that? I had a look obviously I could see a bit of HR recruitment in there back in the day.
Peggy: Yes exactly. It's probably not what you expect, someone being in the Salesforce trainer role. I pretty much stumbled into Salesforce. It's one of the stories I've already shared and how I got into Salesforce. I worked for various management consulting companies before I moved into Salesforce. They were mainly roles around event management and human resources and recruitment and staffing, and then a little bit of project management. Pretty much roles that had to do with working with people and getting things organised. Mostly what we called back-office jobs where you would just really work behind the scenes and get people out there.
It had literally nothing to do with technology or in IT and CRM systems, maybe Excel spreadsheets, but certainly, nothing to do with CRM systems or anything like that. I thought this is pretty much where I'll be working for the rest of my life. Then what happened was that my partner and I, we moved back to Australia. We lived in Australia before and then decided to go back to Australia. We left our jobs, we left everything behind, and moved to Australia. Then I had to look for a new job in Australia, specifically in Sydney. I was looking around and then I came across yet another consulting company.
They had a job opening for a Salesforce project manager, and I thought, "Okay, I have a bit of project management experience," but Salesforce, I had no idea what Salesforce was.
Lee: Peggy, just a rough idea when this was?
Peggy: This was in 2013. It's been a few years back now. Time flies.
Lee: Yes, well, you're not wrong. Nearly 10 years ago then I suppose. Did you get the opportunity then with your project management experience?
Peggy: Yes. I think what happened was I had no idea what Salesforce was. I Googled it, I looked it up and I said, "Okay," I had a very rough idea of what it was. I applied for the job and they did invite me to a job interview. They eventually hired me as well. I realised that it wasn't because I had any Salesforce experience or I had huge project management experience. It was more around skills of problem-solving. Then the can-do attitude, the enthusiasm, and passion probably hiring managers are looking for. I think that's what they were looking for.
They said, "We needed someone as a project manager who can manage our Salesforce instance and to improve certain functionalities and business processes and just really help with that whole process. I think because of my previous experience that I already had in abroad in all of these, let's call them transferable skills, that's probably why they hired me, not because I had IT background or because I had Salesforce experience at all.
Lee: That's the interesting thing about Salesforce, isn't it? You speak to a lot of people, not just on these podcasts, but just as part of our day job; Salesforce seems to be quite open to welcoming people that you wouldn't say are “IT people”, that they're business people perhaps that just can come in and, and as you say, with the right attitude and problem-solving skills, they can learn Salesforce, so that's also huge.
Peggy: Yes, yes, exactly. I think it's more how you approach things and pretty much the attitude you bring to it and being open to learn something new and to look outside the box and just come up with some ideas and solutions and make things work. Then you will find a solution. You will find out how things can be set up and can be embedded into Salesforce to make work for the business. It's really everything coming together, right?
Lee: Yes, that company-- we don't have to name names or anything but did they have Salesforce administrators that you could, as a project manager, manage, or did you still have to learn, to roll your sleeves up and do the complicated stuff?
Peggy: Yes. The funny thing of what happened was that there was this IT guy, he was pretty much the Salesforce administrator. I learned how to use Salesforce and how it worked from that guy and then from my boss at the time. She also showed me what she already knew about the system. They were all relatively new to the system and they just used a very small part. I just did on-the-job training pretty much and just clicking around and just getting to know the system all by myself. Then what happened is that my boss at the time, she asked me if I wanted to attend a Salesforce administrator training and I said, "No."
Lee: Oh, did you?
Peggy: No, I don't want to do training. I'm a project manager. Why should I go to training? It's an admin training, but I'm a project manager. I'm just supposed to get the features that people want improvements for and then work with the IT department, like those project management things that you do to put it in that rough sense. No, I don't want to do it. I don't need it. She kept asking me over and over, said, "Do you want to go?" Eventually, I said, "Okay, I'm going to go and do that training." I didn't know if it's really going to help, but sure I'd go.
I have to admit, as soon as I went into this training class and the way how the training was delivered and we were walking through and all those things I learned throughout this training, they were literally eye-opening. I never thought it would actually be that good, but I realised that I learned so many things through the training in aspects that I would have never learned throughout the job because in an organisation, you always only use a certain part that that organisation needs at the time. You don't necessarily get exposed to features of other areas that the organisation doesn't really need.
You don't necessarily know what you may be missing out on if you never get exposed to that. That's what I realised throughout that training that-- and I came up with all these notes. I think I can't remember how many pages I wrote down two, three, four, five pages of notes that I wanted to improve. I realised that there were certain things that we set up in the system that could have done in a much better and more effective way than they were set up at the time. It literally opened my eyes and it just, I don't know, open the sky to all those possibilities.
Of course, you can't implement all of that right away but it just gave me all these ideas and inputs. The funny thing I realised later that attending that training would later literally change my entire career.
Lee: Wow, okay. We'll get to that because it's an interesting point, I think, that you make. I've definitely spoken to, as you were at the time, I suppose a project manager and project managers would look at the Salesforce admin course and think, "Well, why would I need to do that?"
Peggy: Yes, exactly.
Lee: It does sound-- Maybe they should change the title of it because an admin sounds like a huge step down for project managers, isn't it? I think people probably think that if I'm going to go down that road, then people were going to see me as a Salesforce administrator when I think really, correct me if I'm wrong, that Salesforce administrator course just gives you a massive overview of the whole thing, doesn't it? And it gives you just a great grounding to go on from there.
Peggy: Absolutely. Yes. What I also realised later on in my Salesforce trainer career, with people attending the training that a lot of those people attending were people from organisations in not only administrative roles but also project managers, product managers, business analysts,
