Episode 2: Amanda Beard-Neilson Salesforce Career Conversation with ROD. From accidental Salesforce Admin to CTO in ten years. Follow her journey here.
[Below is a transcript for your benefit. Please excuse any typos.]
Lee Durrant: Hello, it's Lee Durrant here. Welcome to RODcast, the podcast where we get to meet and chat with some truly fantastic people from within the Salesforce ecosystem. My goal for this podcast is to help and inform people who either already perhaps work in the Salesforce ecosystem, or maybe you're thinking of breaking into it, to understand what's good about it, what could be better, where there are opportunities, and what some of the most amazing people in this space, how they got into it, where their career took them, and what their plans are for the future. Hope you enjoy it, and please help me to reach as many people as possible within Salesforce by leaving some comments and sharing. All feedback welcome. So yeah, hope you enjoy.
Lee Durrant: Hello, and welcome to RODcast, with me Lee Durrant. In this particular episode we are talking with Amanda Beard-Neilson, who's been in the Salesforce industry for 12 years. Her journey has gone from Accidental Salesforce Admin, to CTO, which is unbelievable. Obviously I wanted to understand how she got into Salesforce, and what her journey's been like, and if there're any tips for you guys out there. So without further ado, I hope you enjoy the episode.
Lee Durrant: So hello Amanda. Welcome to our podcast, and thanks for agreeing to do this. How are you mate?
Amanda: Hello Lee, thanks very much for inviting me to do this. I'm really well actually. It's a nice summer's day, so what's not to like really?
Lee Durrant: Yes exactly. And, as I say, just been talking to you off the podcast, but just to let you know, and people listening as well, this is a bit of a podcast to find out the journey of people like you and your sort of legendary status in Salesforce, and kind of how it began, and what's happened to you over the last, I want to say 10 years, I'm not sure exactly how many years-
Amanda: It's 12 years actually I've been playing with Salesforce, so quite a long time.
Lee Durrant: Yeah. So that's what the questions are aimed at really, just so people listening can understand how you got into it, and what's happened since, and all that sort of stuff. So really I'll just get straight into asking you some nice questions, and obviously, your Salesforce journey starts at the beginning, so what were you doing in the lead-up to Salesforce? So what was your career, and what was your perception of what your career was going to be before Salesforce fell in your lap?
Amanda: Yeah, very very different actually. I had a sort of sales, marketing and PR background before Salesforce came into my life. I didn't have at all any aspirations of IT. My background from my studying was business studies. So I had a very business-orientated starting of career, and I worked in sales, I was classically trained in sales. Really understood the whole methodology of two ears and one mouth, and use it accordingly, which has really helped actually for a lot of those life skills, when it comes to talking with clients afterwards as part of this world, and really helping to understand what their pains are, what their requirements are. Listening's a massive skill for that, so even though you might come from a different direction, it doesn't mean that you can't change direction. And they also now say that, when you have a career now, you might have very different careers, maybe up to five different careers as part of your whole career journey. So even though you've started from a different background, it doesn't mean that you can't change direction. And I think it's also very healthy for a person to change direction because it can keep you sparking, and keep you interested in doing something. And keep you learning as well.
Amanda: Yeah. No, so that was my, my background was actually in business, and that's how I actually ended up discovering my interest being in business development.
Lee Durrant: I was looking at the degree you did. Because so many times you look at people, and perhaps their degree is kind of not relevant to what ended up happening to them. But I would've thought a degree in business administration has been quite relevant for you?
Amanda: It was. And in fact, as I suppose, I'll tell the story of actually me growing up really, because as a kid, you get school reports as a kid, and many of the school reports would come through like, "Amanda's a lovely girl, she likes to chat." Hence what we're doing here. And so my dad would read them and he would think, "Well, that's really nice, she must be stupid." It's true. And sort of, "Well, maybe she could be a secretary when she grows up." And, "Oh, she seems to have a flair for languages, maybe she could be a bi-lingual secretary." So this was my background. And so I did well in GCSEs, so okay, I'll do A Levels. And it was so I just sort of fell into education, and kept falling into education again. So I did A Levels, and then I got the A Levels I needed, so okay, I'll do a degree. And I was the first in my family to do a degree.
Lee Durrant: Really?
Amanda: Yeah-
Lee Durrant: Oh brilliant-
Amanda: Yeah, they had been apprentices, or my mom actually went to secretarial college. It was not a thing for any of the family, no expectation. Especially no expectation for me to go and do that. Again, they thought I was going to be a secretary, and I was going to marry someone in insurance, because I would then get cheap premiums.
Lee Durrant: Yeah, well no, surpassed all their expectations, which is fantastic.
Amanda: Yeah.
Lee Durrant: Okay then, so obviously you got your early career then doing the sales stuff, which as you rightly say, has given you that ability to communicate, which is fantastic. So what was the first taste of Salesforce? I'm going to guess it was using it then in a sales role, is that right?
Amanda: Well, yes and no. It was, I guess I was working in a business development team. At that point I'd actually had enough of doing the pure sales part; I was over with the targets, because targets always move. And I was kind of over that. So I'd said, in this particular role, "I will help you build the team, I will build processes. I will help build a whole library for responding to RFPs and the whole procurement side of things." And then I was helping with all of that, and my director turned around one day and said, "We don't know who our customers are. We need a CRM." And I looked and went, "A CR what?" And so, good old Google. Get onto that, and started looking up things. Saw things like dynamics in Sage, or something back there. And saw Salesforce. And this was 12 years ago. And I looked at Salesforce, and I had a little play with it, because there were demos and you could have a little look around. And it was quite simple back then. And I thought, "You know what? I can get this, and I don't get lost; I can go back to the home. Look, little dancing man: that's a lead. Okay, good. And here's a coin, that's an opportunity. Great, I get it. So if I can get it, another sales user is going to get it; a colleague will understand this."
Amanda: And so we chose Salesforce, because of what I saw and I liked. So-
Lee Durrant: Amazing.
Amanda: Yeah, I know. That was quite impressive really. So we bought it in, and we got involved with Salesforce who helped to actually build it, and I became sort of the analyst/PM who ran around and collected the data we needed, would capture the information, would test things, who would suddenly start seeing in front of me this system being built. And the beauty of Salesforce is like the magic that happens in front of you as a customer who sees it for the first time. And where they go in the setup, and they go, "Oh, you want to move this stuff around?" When they start playing with the page layouts, it's such a simple thing, but it brings a customer onboard. Because one minute you're going, "I don't really like it, it's not really working for me because it doesn't do this, this and this." And they go, "Okay, click click click click click. Refresh. Now, how does that look for you?" And, "Oh, it's amazing."
Lee Durrant: Yeah, because I suppose people 12 years ago, and whilst that doesn't sound like a long time, and I remember, well I'm sure other people that are old enough will remember when IT, if you wanted something to be changed, it just took forever. So the fact that you could do something like that so quickly is quite exciting isn't it? Well it was then, it probably still is now, to be fair.
Amanda: Do you know what? It still gets customers every time now, because they see it, and they see the changes straight away, and they're like, "Oh, okay. That's really cool. Cool." And the adoption part just starts falling into place, because they're now having that sort of responsive element to it, and one minute they're, "I don't really like this. Okay, I can change it. Oh, you really can. Wow, that's really cool." It also can be dangerous, because at that same point, they start thinking moon on a stick time. They go, "Can we do this?" And, "Can we do that?" And you're like, "Oh, hold on."
Lee Durrant: Oh I'm, yeah. We're guilty of that here. I mean I, because we use Salesforce as well and have done for 10 years, and we definitely did that: "Oh, can I put that button there and this button there? And what if this and that?" And you have all these ideas that actually end up as being a waste of time. But, I guess that's where your experience of listening and maybe pushing back comes in handy.
Amanda: Yeah, it does. And you start learning. I mean since that moment of watching this system come alive, I then went on an admin course. I then became the admin for the company, and helped people do all the training.
