Episode 1: Gemma Emmett Salesforce Career Conversation with ROD. Her journey to a Salesforce Solution & Technical Architect over the last ten years, and the inspiration behind "Ladies be Architects".
[Below is a transcript for your benefit. Please excuse any typos.]
Interviewer: So joining me today is Gemma Emmett who is a bit of a Salesforce legend and, correct me Gemma, if I'm wrong, but an MVP now as well?
Gemma Emmett: Yes. Yeah. Recently minted.
Interviewer: Minted? Nice.
Gemma Emmett: That's the term people use.
Lee D: Oh, right. I didn't realise. Okay. Thanks for joining me on the first one of these. So let's be kind, go gentle on me. Well, I want to just have a chat about the 10 or 11 years I think now, that you've been working Salesforce and the journey you've been on, which I think is pretty crazy having had a look at your background in terms of the kind of companies you've worked for and how you started and where you are now. So that we can share that with people and people that are out there that are thinking of maybe getting into Salesforce, how to do it and follow someone like yourself, really. So remind me, is it 11 years?
Gemma Emmett: It is 11 years, and I think actually I remember you guys were one of the first firms of recruiters that I actually got in touch with just as I was finishing off being an administrator and moving into consultancy. So we've been speaking constantly over that 10 year period, and it's just incredible to see how that market has grown for the recruiter firms as well. It's just been incredible.
Lee D: Your story is unique, yet not. There are other people on similar trajectories. If you think 11 years ago, correct me if I'm wrong, but your first exposure to Salesforce, was that at Dun & Bradstreet or did you do it before that?
Gemma Emmett: It was a Dun & Bradstreet. Yeah. It's quite funny actually because my background was always data analysis, so I was working on spreadsheets and pulling reports, and I made a mutual decision with a previous employer to leave and look for a job, and they said, "You're going to be in sales ops, and we're early adopters of this thing called Salesforce." So I'm like, oh great another place I can pull reports from. Great. And then I started to understand fairly quickly that I wouldn't have to be pulling reports and putting them all into spreadsheets, that it was all online and that my job was so much more than pulling data and analysing results now, it was more supporting people with the tool and the role evolved because I was pulling data and helping to keep people, helping to keep the sales pipeline as accurate as it could be by supporting people. Then for me, I realised I really enjoyed doing that, and I really enjoyed looking after Salesforce, and I really liked the idea that it was online and that you didn't have to install it on any computers or anything like that. That's how it started. And as I started to learn it, Dun & Bradstreet were prepared to invest in me going on courses and doing the certifications, which were quite new back then, I think this is 2008.
Lee D: They were called something completely different then, weren't they? I mean I think the administrator has always been the administrator, but the way that that's evolved has been crazy over the 11 years.
Gemma Emmett: Yeah. And now we're looking at 25 plus certifications, back then we were probably looking at about five, just the strengths of this platform has actually enabled people like myself and my colleagues who've been doing this 10 years to grow our careers in the same way, not just for experience and videos, because back then we didn't have Trailhead. We learnt through bitter experience, and we learnt through delivering training ourselves to people. Back then we'd have to train people yourselves. We learnt from documentation and videos, and now you can actually get hands-on with it on Trailhead. So a very different way of building your career on Salesforce now that you have Trailhead.
Lee D: Again, I think a lot of people might be in the same boat here and although you did go to uni and do a degree, didn't you?
Gemma Emmett: Yeah.
Lee D: Was it your plan to, obviously the data analysis stuff you were doing, was that always the plan to get to do that? Something in IT?
Gemma Emmett: While I was at university, I had friends who had full-time jobs. Being a student was fun, but I think I'd got to the point where I wanted to break out of academia and come into the big wide world and make my own money and look after myself a bit. I'm quite an independent person, so that was the decision, not to continue with things like masters or anything like that. But I did do a technology degree. I was one of about five or six women who graduated from my class in 2005, which frighteningly enough is nearly 20 years ago.
Gemma Emmett: So the first roles that I had were in statistics. I worked for an exam board, and I worked for a fire service, and I was pulling data, and that helped me to get to understand in context a lot of the concepts about databases that I've learned at university. But I never expected to fall into something like this. Now I feel like I'm kind of set for life. It's not something I ever want to get out of doing. I'm very happy doing Salesforce.
Lee D: It's funny because a lot of people I know like yourself I've known for as long as I've known you. I've known you 11 years now. They never, back then, people didn't necessarily deliberately get into Salesforce much like in my industry, no one really wants to get into recruitment, but you end up doing it. But now people are deliberately trying to get into Salesforce. Maybe there will be some people from that period that knew what they were doing, but there seems to be a lot of stories of people that fell into it and are now in that legendary status that you're in, which is great.
Gemma Emmett: Yeah
Gemma Emmett: The accidental admin.
Lee D: Yeah, accidental architect now, isn't it? Surely that's the title.
Gemma Emmett: Yeah, it's now changed.
Lee D: So the journey then from you to, Dun & Bradstreet was first and then I believe you moved to Access Point, didn't you? Which if I remember right, it was a... still are perhaps a small consulting company?
Gemma Emmett: Yes. I actually accepted a role with an end-user. It was an insurance company, and I was all ready to go. I'd sign the paperwork and everything, and then I was encouraged to have a chat with somebody about a customer-facing role instead. Up until that point I'd never been customer-facing other than part-time jobs while I was at uni and things like that. So I was a bit nervous, and I had my job interview in the Holiday Inn at Handy Cross in High Wycombe and thought, why am I having a job interview in a hotel.
Gemma Emmett: But the guy was really friendly and explained what the role would be, and he said you'd actually be going in and out of different companies and helping them to implement Salesforce so you get quite a variety and it was really appealing. So I decided to go for it. I decided to take that job instead and I was there for a good year or so, just getting my feet on the ground in the consultancy world before starting to enjoy that, realised that was what I wanted to do and then moved into another role where I was able to work on bigger implementations or corporate implementations and my first foray into enterprise-level implementations as well. So that happened over the course of a few years afterwards.
Lee D: When you look at your profile now and tell me if I'm being a bit harsh here, but it looks like you planned this perfectly and there was always your plan to go from an end-user to a small consultancy to a slightly bigger consultancy, and the plan all the way through to where you are now. Was it deliberate, or did it just happen that way?
Gemma Emmett: Yeah, it happened that way because actually I would say... I wouldn't say that my career growth was necessarily aligned to Salesforce growth in its entirety, but there is an element of that. Because Salesforce has been growing in popularity, I would say it's really in the last five years it started to go postal in the UK where you've got a lot of enterprise deals being sold by Salesforce and therefore a lot more outcry for experienced talent to go and implement those enterprise-level projects because Salesforce is selling them faster than we can produce resources to actually deliver them.
Gemma Emmett: I would say in terms of that, I think I tended to think about what I wanted from each job. In the beginning, it was, I want some experience. I want to do some projects. Then it became, oh I want to do Service Cloud now, so I'll do Service Cloud. Then it became, I'd like to do Service Cloud where it affects 250 plus people because knowing that you've been part of designing something that makes them more productive and helps them enjoy their day better, is really quite a motivator.
Gemma Emmett: So I started chasing the dopamine in some ways because I worked out what motivated me and eventually I even gravitated towards Financial Force and went there for three and a half years to do ISV work because I knew the application and I was really gaining a good understanding of the consultancy sector. So I really wanted to gain more experience in that, and with each successful project, that was something else that motivated me.
Lee D: It was interesting, because when I was looking at... if you tick the boxes of what someone would want to do in Salesforce from the beginning through to where you are now, and it's obviously nowhere near the end. You've done the end-user, you've done the small consultancy and a slightly bigger consultancy, you've done contracting, and then you've gone to a huge consultancy, and then you've gone to an ISV. So you've tried everything at the moment, haven't you? I noticed,
