Welcome to the sixth post of my Salesforce Career Success Journey series. This series is focused on sharing our career journey and to encourage others to pursue/continue their career on the Salesforce.com platform. I am truly inspired by her leadership/involvement at her company and her drive to develop her Salesforce skills.
If you would like to share your Salesforce Career Success journey, submit here.
Name: Mary Tagler
Company: RMB Capital Management
Job Title: IT Systems Analyst
Which Salesforce certifications do you have?
Admin, Advanced Admin, Developer
How many Trailhead badges do you currently have?
15
Describe what you do at your company.
I am our Salesforce Admin for financial services company with 122 employees and 3 different business units; all of our employees get a license. We’ve doubled our headcount since we went live with Salesforce. There are two others with admin licenses, but I do 99% of the work as they focus primarily on other things. I do most things soup to nuts related to Salesforce – requirements gathering, project management, design and build, deployment, and end user training. We do use outside consultants at times, but I’m the internal project sponsor when we do.
I collaborate heavily with my fellow business operations folks – middle office, compliance, operations, marketing, etc. to deliver solutions for our client-facing groups. As one of a two-person IT team, I also help out with other applications and initiatives as needed. It could be anything from application administration to assembling phones for a rollout and crawling under desks to hook them up.
I also sit on a few committees and project teams. One is our financial planning standards group. My background is financial planning (I’ve been a CFP for almost 15 years) and that keeps me close to what’s going on in that space. Another is our training & development committee, something I really enjoy collaborating on. About five years ago, I created a professional development program internally; I handed that program over to HR in 2015, but am still involved as much as possible. I’m amazed at how the new coordinator has really grown the program in just a year. Last, I sit on our IT steering committee, which discusses large-scale projects and prioritizes their execution.
Give us a snapshot of how you got your salesforce career started and/or how your career has developed.
I left my company for a few years because I thought I wanted to be a lawyer. When I came back, I moved from the client side to the business operations side. A colleague and I felt strongly that we needed to address our IT platform and a made a case that CRM should go first. We worked with our COO to pitch the project and the management team gave us the green light. I was lucky, I spent the first six years with the company working closely with our founders and knew our business inside and out. That helped us make a compelling case for a change. If you don’t know your audience, I highly advise doing a lot of homework before asking them to make a big commitment like this.
Naively, we thought we’d do CRM in a few weeks, which included a migration of data from our old CRM of nearly 20 years. Then, we’d knock out two more large system conversions and in 8 months we’d be done. WRONG. We were so used to WYSIWYG systems that no one considered ongoing administration of Salesforce or the other systems we were rolling out and hadn’t figured out product ownership. Since I led the Salesforce implementation internally, it became my responsibility by default. It wasn’t until my first user group meeting and soon after my first Dreamforce that I went down the rabbit hole and really started to develop my Salesforce admin skills and work to grow and improve our Salesforce ecosystem. I’ve heard the term accidental techie and that fits me to a T. I’ve always had an interest in technology and have been very vocal about the user experience; until this role, I never had the chance to actually guide it.
In 2014/15, I decided to take it to the next level and used the certification study group to get my Admin, Advanced Admin and Force.Com Developer certifications in the 8 months. Now, I’m looking to get outside of my comfort zone and learn more than just the declarative side of development. I’m trying to learn Flow and want to join the RAD Women group in the near future.
What advice would you give to someone who is developing their career on salesforce?
Use and abuse the community and pay it forward when you can. I could kick myself for not getting involved the first 1-2 years I used Salesforce. Everyone is amazing – funny, knowledgeable, passionate.
Are you a leader or member of a user group?
I’m a member of the Chicago User Group led by Denise Carbone and Gina Skocilich.
Please name 1 person from the Salesforce community that you’d like to thank for supporting you on your journey.
Denise Carbone, the Chicago User Group Co-Leader. Had I not felt so welcome on my first visit, I’m not sure it would’ve propelled me to involve myself more in the community (or come back to more meetings). Although, I’m not going to lie, it was really hard to choose one person.
What’s the one Success Community group you can’t live without?
Why Salesforce Admins Drink (sometimes you just need to vent to others who get it)
Follow Mary on:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mtagler
AnnieForce 