Salesforce Career Advice from Amanda Perkins

Welcome back, Salesforce users, trailblazers, and Titans! As you know by now, Salesforce Radio, hosted by Ben Miller, is your destination for insights, news, and connections within the Salesforce ecosystem.

In Episode 3, Ben is chatting with the owner of Amanda Perkins Consulting Inc. Amanda has worked in the Salesforce space under different roles for a decade and is now helping businesses bridge the gap between technical and practical Salesforce solutions.

Join us in this podcast as Amanda shares her career journey and explains how she went from selling solutions like Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, and Pardot to independently and remotely assisting businesses with Salesforce implementations for their unique requirements.
In this episode, Amanda takes us through:

• What it’s like to work at Salesforce
• How to begin your career in the tech industry (even if you don’t come from a coding or developer background)
• The fundamentals of starting your own business and working remotely

Want to learn more? Check out the highlights from this discussion below.

How did I get started on my Salesforce Path?

Amanda: I started my Salesforce journey 10 years ago. I had just finished university studying a business degree in Canada. I wasn’t feeling the regular path of management consulting, accounting, or CPG marketing, so I found myself in the sales training program at Coca-Cola as my first job, which was a big name to have on a resume.

I found the job to be individualistic. You had a territory and would see customers, but there wasn’t much of a team aspect. I realized that this was what I was really looking for.

I had a friend who was working at Salesforce. He said you gotta come over here! It’s fun and a great place to work. He helped me interview, and I got the job, which was great because it started me on this trajectory of getting into the tech ecosystem without being a developer.

With Salesforce, I learned skills in communicating with different types of companies and meeting their needs. So, I enjoyed the entire job and everyone I worked with.

Ben: And before that, when you started looking for jobs like working at Coca-Cola, was tech something you were thinking about or wanted to get into?

Amanda: Sales was enjoyable because I relished being with people, presenting, and solving organizational problems. The extent of my tech skills was an HTML page when I was a kid, which was my creative side more than actual coding. Sales was a good starting point for a career leading to much value over the long term.

Ben: Yeah, I say this often! For some people, Salesforce is the brand they carry with them whether they work for the company or not or work in the ecosystem. However, so many people who have nothing to do with the tech world know very little about Salesforce. It’s funny that many people have interacted with Salesforce across many brands without knowing it.

Amanda: I’ve had a fantastic employment journey with Salesforce.

I was at Salesforce for about three years in the sales area, working my way up from sales rep to business development rep, where you are just cold calling and carrying a territory as an account executive. After those three years, I realized that I enjoyed the implementation more than the actual sales side.

That’s when I moved to a company called Traction On Demand, which was a large Canadian-based implementation partner for Salesforce. It was amazing working for them as the whole company focused on Salesforce implementation.

The rate at which I learned how the platform can be used across all industries was super cool. You can see that Salesforce is applied to almost every sector to solve different problems. Even if the problem was in one industry, you could use the solution in another. I was learning a ton over the four years that I worked there. It was so fun to solve many different problems with the platform that way.

Ben: So, when you got that job, what was your official title?

Amanda: I started as a junior project manager, and it was a good entry point for me because I was not technical. I didn’t want to build on the platform, but I’m very organized, and in that role, I also acted as a business analyst at the same time, so I was gathering requirements and managing the project scope, budget, and timelines.

At the time, I was thrown on a hefty project that covered four or five clouds and was worth many multi-million dollars of business. It had stalled when I joined it, so I focused on trying to help the project move forward by making the adults make decisions. In this way, we could progress the project and get it completed.

Ben: You mentioned that you were not technical when you started in that position. Where do you see yourself, and why are you technical now?

Amanda: I am technical enough to be dangerous in the way that I understand all of the technical terminology. I know how to evaluate different technical solutions. I can build and configure on Salesforce up to a point, but the minute you say Flows, I may not be able to do that yet. However, I can do any process automation and know what’s possible to do.

If I have the right team, I can explain in a lot of detail what needs to get done, how it should be tested, and all the different considerations for it. I can do that because I was paired with some amazing solution architects, and we acted as a team.

Ben: What is your current position? Tell us a little about the type of projects you are working on now and what you are doing in the ecosystem.

Amanda: I’m the owner of Amanda Perkins Consulting Inc. I am a sub-contractor to other Salesforce SI partners and sometimes a strategy consultant.

I have bridged the gap between the business technology side and the people, process, and organizational design side. It’s been a natural progression as I am sub-contracting to four companies. It sounds like a lot, but they are all distinct types of work.

I’m helping two partners build up their practice. With my experience from Traction On Demand, I have seen many different types of projects, so I can help them scope projects, know what statements of work should look like, and figure out how to resource projects.

I have been doing more nonprofit work for the other company since last year. It’s been really great for me to learn how Salesforce applies to that industry. I am the bridge between the business and the technical partner for nonprofits to facilitate decisions and help move processes for bigger projects.

Ben: That’s really cool to hear!

It’s also interesting to hear about your nonprofit’s case. What have you found interesting about the nonprofit space? Where do you see the opportunity for yourself there?

Amanda: There was another organization that I was working with last year. I was doing a lot of the hands-on building of the nonprofit solutions using Salesforce.

Nonprofits are doing such wonderful work, but I notice that the solutions are still quite complex. Unfortunately, Salesforce is a very technically complex platform that can do many things. However, it’s a difficult platform to maintain if it’s not set up correctly for a small nonprofit that does not have a lot of resources, a center of excellence, or even enough budget for one admin.

It’s an interesting balance. I’m always trying to manage the nonprofits by looking at what resourcing they have and what Salesforce solution will be best to adopt, use, and be valuable.

Ben: Yeah, and I think from what I have seen, there is a huge difference in the industry between nonprofits who maybe implemented Salesforce in the last two to three years and those who have now been on Salesforce for a long time and those that came into Salesforce because there was a great offering for nonprofits.

Do you have any advice for nonprofits thinking about going to Salesforce or nonprofits who have been in Salesforce for a long time but need to see the value they believe they can get?

Amanda: For American nonprofits, there is a free platform called Give Lively, which was built by philanthropists. It’s a giving platform, a page where donors can visit to donate money.

I have implemented that now for a few different clients, and it has a native integration with Salesforce. As a free platform, it works very well. It has good support and integrates into Salesforce, so you can modernize your giving structure, especially for lean nonprofits.

I have been implementing a combination of the Nonprofit Success Pack and the project management module.

The data structure makes sense; everyone generally gets it, it gives them the reporting they need, and they can connect where the money is coming in and where the money is going out. I have done that four or five times, and it works!

Ben: I often see people coming in at the next stage, where they have had Give Lively and the basic architecture in Salesforce for the nonprofits. But they hadn’t done any big implementation projects.

Sometimes, that is a good place to be! You’re not trying to do things too fancy. You’re trying to do things in a normal way.

People will have Salesforce for one or two years. Then, they will come to Titan and explain that they have been accepting donations, getting leads, generating documents manually in a back office, and printing them out for signatures.

However, they want to combine that, especially by using Flows, because they have been with the system for a while and understand they can start automating things.

Sometimes, the nonprofits will also approach Titan as they want a user “zone” for donors to log in and see their information, and Experience Cloud isn’t always the right solution for them. They look to Titan to make a gated form interface where donors can update information and interact with the nonprofit.

The nice thing about using a tool like ours is that the maintenance is low, and we are integrated with Salesforce. So, I appreciate you talking about a trifactor and how that’s good for many people initially.

Amanda: I say that too because I had some nonprofits buy a lot of the platform right out the gate, but doing it all at once is hard and overwhelming.

I appreciate the value of learning Pardot, Salesforce, and Tableau over time. However, many of these nonprofits do not have the capacity at the forefront to implement Tableau and probably don’t need it until there is some large organization with massive reporting needs or extra data sources that they need to bring in.

For the best interests of nonprofits, they should start small and grow into the platform.

Ben: I think that makes a lot of sense. What are some of the other industries you have worked in, have found interesting, and have gained a lot of value from Salesforce?

Amanda: One of my favorite projects was at a US immigration-based law firm. We categorized all of the different visas needed to immigrate to the US. We created all the steps, from not having a visa to getting one, in Salesforce.

It was so smart because all the different categories have fairly standard steps, and a lot of visa processes are not transparent.

The goal of this law firm was to add transparency for anyone putting an application through, and it made so much sense. We were able to build a portal so people would always know when they needed to share a document, provide new information, the general timing, and guidelines of how long things take once the application is with the government.

I liked working on that project. It was hard and complex with many lawyers, but they were a good group. I felt proud of that project because of how it turned out.

At Traction on Demand, I transitioned into a product manager role where we were building a Salesforce solution for our delivery team. Over time, we could see a requirement and could pull user stories ahead of time.

With a company like Traction on Demand doing a hundred projects all at once, there are so many similar requirements and solutions that we should be able to recycle the best solutions for those requirements.

Ben: Were you around for the project to come to fruition, and did you see it implemented?

Amanda: It was implemented, and we were iterating on it at the company.

However, Traction on Demand was going through a transition phase. They were prepping to sell, and there were two directions that the product could have gone.

I decided to leave Traction before they sold to Salesforce because I wanted to try the independent contractor life. I ended up going to Costa Rica for 6 months, where I met more digital nomads working remotely. They inspired me to do this, too.

That’s what kicked off this whole idea of how to work and live. I feel like I have gained enough experience within the Salesforce ecosystem. I have worked on at least five major projects across PM, QA, and BA roles, and I managed teams of developers, delivery teams across multiple geographies, and managed products. I felt I could take a step back and start Amanda Perkins Consulting Inc.

Ben: That sounds like a lot of fun! Do you have any other people on your team, or are you just consulting?

Amanda: It’s just me right now. I have thought about bringing other people on, but I have also been trying to keep my life simple because I moved to Portugal. If I were to grow, I would build a solid Salesforce BA team because that is the biggest gap in the market right now.

Ben: On that point about the BA team, who would be a good person to start pursuing that type of work?

Amanda: People who have a natural curiosity to understand different processes and why things work the way they do. The person that I am looking for asks extra questions like:

• Why was this process set up in the first place?
• Is it working well?
• What’s not working well?
• Who’s involved in changing processes?
• Have you tried different things in the past that have worked well?
• Are you hitting your goals?
• Is it working to make money?
• Are people hitting their quotas?

Taking that next level of understanding the business processes with these questions will completely change the solutions required for a business to operate.

There is also an important element of critical thinking skills required. For example, you need to understand when a client says X, but what they mean is Y. This comes from experience because you start to talk to so many different businesses, seeing the same thing happen usually over and over again.

A combination of those two skill sets makes for a strong BA.

Ben: What is the next step?

Amanda: So, there are two parallel steps.

The first step is to go to stakeholders and ensure that what you hear is correct and that you are on the same page. As consultants, we live and breathe Salesforce requirements. These are the structures we find normal. But for clients, this is all new. They are not used to Salesforce projects, so you have to be patient with clients, and you do have to repeat yourself, and that should be expected.

So, you are confirming with stakeholders and driving them down any decisions they need to make for the solution to balance meeting requirements without a ton of technical debt.

Then, you have to balance the requirements with your solution architect. Like on any project, 10-20% of the time is hard, and negotiation will be needed to align on some balance. Sometimes, the solution will be super custom, and that’s the way it has to be, but you have to make sure that everyone is on the same page that it will be custom and what that means for the organization to support it long term.

The other element of the BA is also to wear that change management hat and explain to a client that to achieve all solutions, there might be extra costs like hiring an IT department to manage the solution.

Ben: This brings up something I have experienced at times. I work with different implementation partners from around the world, ranging from really small to pretty big organizations, and occasionally, when chatting, the SI will discuss the client’s roadmap. They then ask if I can connect with the customer and show them a form, document generation solution, or something they are currently missing with Salesforce.

Sometimes, when I get on the call with the client, they start throwing out all sorts of things, or I show them things that I think could be interesting. And all of a sudden, they say – we want it all.

For me, that’s great because you get to show someone all the different things they could do. The question is, will they be able to implement it? Because, for me, it’s a loss if they don’t implement it. It’s nice that they signed up with us for a year, but if they did not get through the project as much as they wanted, the relationship would not stand.

Amanda: Totally! You can tell the client they can have everything, but budgets and timelines will increase. Additionally, do you have people who can manage this project alongside us as fast as you want?

There’s always the option of that, but realistically, there’s very rarely an organization that says we can throw five more people on this project with all the dollars, and our timeline can push out by a month or two.

As a consultant, I always give it as an option because you let the client decide, but you have to explain what’s needed on both sides for it to be successful.

Ben: When I came into the ecosystem and sold some of these solutions to Salesforce customers, one of the things I realized was seeing the urgency of big companies to find a solution and then seeing how long those implementations can take.

People will come to Titan and say they need a solution for the end of the quarter or next month.

I’m ready to go! I’ve got my team on Slack, and they are ready! We start spinning up POCs and gathering requirements, and the client disappears.

Sometimes, it’s hard for me to see so much wasted talent and people working on a project to make all these discoveries and go through all these different vendor evaluations. Then, the client gets sidetracked by the business as the solution is no longer important and is pushed to Q2. How do you deal with that?

Amanda: That is a really good point, as this happens all the time.

It happened on a recent project where I was meant to help with a new ticketing strategy. It would manage all the helpdesk tickets. The client had meant to consolidate teams and systems by the time I started.

As I continued to work on the project, the systems and teams were not consolidated, so that’s the great thing about a change order.

I also don’t get personally attached to projects anymore like I used to. I still take a lot of pride in the work that I do. There will be situations when changes are out of my control.

The stakeholder and I realigned what a reasonable deliverable is. I could still deliver value to the client, so I’m not going away, but it differs from what we originally agreed to.

So, it’s a little negotiation, but it’s that creativity to inform the client that I’m still here. The client still has a budget. It’s about finding out how to help the client with a reasonable goal that is maintained after I’m gone.

Ben: Interestingly, partners and projects have start and end dates. When I see a good project, a plan is built into it that gives the customers a way to gain independence.

Amanda: To be fair to the partners, the reason why they are not always like that is because resourcing projects is really difficult when you have smaller teams.

So, let’s say they are going to keep selling projects and plan when those next projects can start. It’s more profitable for the partners to take on the next big project than to stay on for a couple of hours a week to do hyper-care for a while.

If they planned well, there would be one or two people who stayed behind and helped with that hyper-care, but that’s not always a reality. That’s the difficult balance that partners are managing, but luckily, with Salesforce these days, there are so many people in the ecosystem that you could get creative with.

You can find people to support you, but they need to get up to speed on the solution. Many people in this world focus on Salesforce, so if you need someone, there is help.

Ben: Yeah, that’s exactly it! What have you seen change in the last years since you started, and where are things going in 2024?

Amanda: At Salesforce, I sold Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, and Pardot. That was my world, and now you can appreciate that there are many more clouds, industry verticals, specific solutions, and way more ISV partners that ever existed, like Titan, who have solutions that are easier to implement than the past methods.

So, we are innovating so non-technical business users can implement cool solutions.

Salesforce feels like they are at a point where it is very big, so I think it’s best to focus as a partner around an industry or niche where you can drive your journey as opposed to being something for everyone. It becomes difficult to understand all the solutions out there.

I want to see what this AI is all about, but my presumption now is that we are still at a point where an organization’s data is so messy that AI will not be that helpful.

Salesforce is the right company to talk about AI because it would be the backbone of it. However, we are still at a place where we are cleaning up the data.

Ben: I feel the same way and haven’t seen it in action yet, but I have seen it thrown around a lot. I’m excited to see what people can do with it. Were you at Dreamforce this year?

Amanda: I wasn’t at Dreamforce this year but attended last year.

Ben: The trust layer was a big discussion, and I’m excited to know what it will be like.

Amanda: I think it is definitely a focus on their latest earnings. As long as they don’t kill Slack, I’ll be happy.

Ben: Slack is great, and one of the cool things we have been doing with it in the last two to three years is how we communicate with our partners. We have channels for our partners where we give them most of our team support. It’s so fast and much better than emailing or opening cases.

Have you seen any good implementations of using Slack with Salesforce?

Amanda: At Traction on Demand, we had an amazing Slack and Salesforce implementation.

There was a win or celebratory channel for any time a deal closed, which was good for morale.

We could also look up Salesforce records in Slack. If you need to find customer information or project statuses, you can do a quick slash command to see it as opposed to navigating back to Salesforce.

The general file sharing that Slack does natively is amazing.

My favorite app at the moment is Loom. I do 80% of my job with Slack and Loom, which is unbelievable because I am in Portugal, but none of my team is. My team members are in India, Europe, and North America, so we operate under different time zones. We work asynchronously most of the time, so using Slack and Loom to talk through different problems has made my world super easy.

Ben: Yeah, I could cut so many apps out. I would stick to the basics with Salesforce at the center. Do you have any advice for listeners considering getting into Salesforce but wanting to find a niche in this place?

Amanda: There are a lot of amazing groups one could join!

*Note: This is an abbreviated and adapted transcription of the Podcast.

We hope to see you soon!

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