Episode 6: Salesforce Career Conversation with Jackie Heath and ROD. Jackie started her career as a trainer in Siebel and switched to Salesforce when she thought her career was over. Thirteen years later she is the Director of the Trailhead Academy at Salesforce.
Lee: Hi, everybody, and welcome to the latest edition of RODcast. In today's episode, I'm chatting with Jackie Heath, who has worked in the Salesforce ecosystem in the UK for 13 years now, as of recording in October, 2019. She's risen through the ranks to her latest role, which she's got a very long title, at the mothership itself, and has got a fantastic career where she can help guide you with what she's done from training to being a contractor, to working with an end-user, to working at partner, to now working for Salesforce. Hopefully, you'll really enjoy this episode. Thanks a lot guys, and hope you enjoy it.
Lee: Joining me today is the ... Let me get this right, the delivery director for the Trailhead Academy at Salesforce, Jackie Heath. Hello.
Jackie: Hello. Hi, Lee.
Lee: Thanks for joining us, I really appreciate you doing this. Did I get the title right, because it is a mouthful, isn't it?
Jackie: You did. It is a mouthful. It's a bit longer, so you've used the abbreviated version.
Lee: Wow. Yeah, because it was the EMEA bit that I didn't add onto that. So as you know, and you may have heard in some of the other ones, this is a chat about your career to date, really, as you've been in Salesforce for, I'm blushingly groping for ... It's over 10 years, isn't it?
Jackie: It is over 10 years. It's coming up for my 13th year, in fact, in the ecosystem, not necessarily working directly for Salesforce. But yeah, 13 years.
Lee: That is fantastic. As you well know, my prior question will be, or my first question will be, what were you doing leading up to getting into Salesforce?
Jackie: So I'm going to show my age here a little bit, which is embarrassing. But when I graduated, the world was really moving from DOS to Windows. So that does really date me. Before I got into the world of Salesforce, really, I was kind of in IT training and IT support roles, primarily for law firms, before I started my journey with Salesforce.
Lee: So even ... Because you went to university, I believe.
Jackie: I did. I went to ... Well, I'd say I went to Oxford Poly. It is a now a university, but when I was there it was a Polytechnic. My degree is completely and utterly unrelated to what I do now, really. My degree was in hotel and catering management. I'm often asked how did I make that transition? One of the things I would say about my degree, whilst it was based on the hotel and catering industry, it was very much a kind of business studies degree, applying it to hotel and catering industry business type things. So I had a friend who did do a business studies degree as well, and we did almost identical topics. Except when she had some coursework to hand in, or a project to do, she could pick any industry she liked, our industry always had to be something related to hotel and catering management in some way.
Lee: I don't want to put words in your mouth, but did you sort of all into the training side of things then?
Jackie: I did. I did, completely and utterly. So whilst the world was moving from DOS to Windows, it was also, when I graduated, a recession. For graduates, it was really quite challenging to get jobs as graduates back then. I know many graduates might say that sometimes it's quite challenging today, as well. But I applied for a job to be a graduate trainee trainer, and I got the job, because what this particular company had set themselves up was to basically help people, again, law firms, typically, moving their legal secretaries across from typewriters and Word Perfect for DOS over to the Windows world, and using a mouse, and using a GUI user interface.
Jackie: So I got that job that way. I have to say, I put my degree down to that, because one of the things we did often, we were often videoed giving presentations to our tutors, who were, at the time, pretend bank managers, and things like that, because we had to put a business case together around why they were going to fund our next catering venture. So kind of standing up, and talking to people didn't phase me, because I'd had plenty of practice during my degree. Apparently that won me my graduate place in this company, and really started my career in teaching and enabling people. It's always kind of stood me in good stead, even though I kind of moved away from that. I've kind of always come back to that, which I think you might see as we go through.
Lee: Absolutely. Well, I was wondering, then, how you go from that to becoming, to getting involved in some way with Salesforce, then? I'm looking at your LinkedIn, so forgive me if it's not completely correct. But, it looks like around about 2002, maybe, is that right?
Jackie: Yep, pretty much. 2006 was Salesforce. So I was kind of one of those people, I fell into CRM. So I didn't fall into Salesforce, but I did sort of fall into Salesforce by falling into CRM, to be honest. I started working for a software company, and they, actually, were using Siebel at the time. So Siebel CRM at the time. Literally, within one month of taking on a job for this software company, to manage a kind of quality assurance team, actually, at the time, I took ownership of Siebel, knowing nothing about Siebel, knowing nothing about CRM. But what I did know was we needed to track what we were doing within this CRM to give visibility to our engineers and our sales teams around how we were tracking and fixing problems with our software.
Jackie: So I took ownership of Siebel, and shortly thereafter, I had two Siebel developers kind of work with me and we kind of improved their Siebel implementation in house. One of the big projects we did was actually a migration of Siebel six to Siebel seven. It's actually Siebel 7.5, but I won't get into those number details. Literally, we had just done that transition, and probably about one month after doing that migration project, we had a new leadership team in the company that I was working at. They said, "Right, we're going to rip out Siebel, and we're going to replace it with something called Salesforce." I'm going to be really honest with you, at the time, I thought it was the end of my career. I really did, because I googled Salesforce, and I googled jobs that you could get if you knew Salesforce. I think in Europe, this isn't in the US, but in Europe, I think one job role came up.
Lee: Wow.
Jackie: How have things moved on since then?
Lee: Absolutely. You say 2006, that doesn't seem like that long ago, does it?
Jackie: No.
Lee: Crikey. How wrong, obviously ... Well, at the time you were right. But to look where it's taken you. It's unbelievable, isn't it?
Jackie: Yeah. Absolutely.
Lee: So your first project, then, was to be the person that ripped it out, and put in Salesforce?
Jackie: Yeah, absolutely. So it was a part of kind of ripping out Siebel and replacing with Salesforce, I sadly lost my two Siebel developers, so it was just me. I did work with a professional services team, and they happened to be a Salesforce team. Yeah, we took our Siebel implementation and migrated over to Salesforce. Once we did that, I was the kind of lead administrator programme manager for our Salesforce implementation within that company.
Jackie: Did a couple of projects after that as well, migrating our finance team from an old finance system to Sage, that then integrated with Salesforce. So yeah, that was really my baby. That was my first project, and my real baby. I absolutely loved our Siebel implementation. I was the Salesforce go-to person from configuration, setting it up, to doing projects, to training salespeople, sales team, you know. It was just a ... If you got a question about Salesforce, go ask Jackie.
Lee: Yeah. No. I'm assuming, then, that you ... Did you get the job ... Because you made a move, then, to a partner, didn't you? Or maybe a lesser-known partner to a lot of people now.
Jackie: Yes.
Lee: But yeah, is that how that worked out then?
Jackie: Yeah, pretty much, absolutely. That's how it worked out. I mean, I stayed working for that company for a long time. But felt that I needed to progress my Salesforce career. At the time, I thought the way to achieve that was to become a Salesforce consultant, which I did, and joined that partner, which lesser-known now. Don't actually exist now, but were definitely purchased by a rather bigger partner of today.
Lee: Well, it's like the Russian doll, though, isn't it? Even that one has been bought as well-
Jackie: Well, absolutely, subsequently, over the time, absolutely, yeah.
Lee: So it's interesting looking at that as a timeline. So from 2006, when you googled Salesforce jobs, and there was only one in Europe, to joining that company we're referring to, because I was around then, in the Salesforce space, and even then, there were more jobs than people. So how quickly it went from nothing to, I'm guessing, hundreds, thousands of jobs on Google. Not that you were probably googling it then. But the growth has been crazy.
Jackie: Absolutely.
Lee: So if we go back a little bit then, that moment, if you can remember a moment when you realised, Salesforce, this is my career now, I'm here for the rest of my career, perhaps, did you remember that moment?
Jackie: Yeah, no, I do, honestly. It was probably six months of working with Salesforce as a product. I've always worked in some way with technology companies. But I've never truly considered myself a techie. What I realised back then was how Salesforce had really kind of democratised how businesses could work with technology.
Jackie: For me, that was a really niche world, for me,
