Head of Salesforce

After the unexpectedly rapid departure of its previous project managers, I took over a badly received migration from ZohoCRM to Salesforce and built the systems and processes to drive user adoption across all departments in the business and led the team of external contractors in developing, testing and deploying business critical functionality.

I worked closely with the existing external Salesforce development agency to understand from their perspective demands on their resource, challenges in our collective process and opportunities for improvements, and merged our internal daily Salesforce standups with their team to ensure an integrated approach and coordinated strategy. I set up a common Jira board to provide me with the immediate insights I needed when communicating progress and problems to the C-suite.

Despite being technically intense, this was also a very people-focused position in which I led workshops and sessions across the business to understand in detail the workflow of every department to translate into user stories for the dev team. As a result of my interaction with its users and demonstrating that I was listening and responding to user feedback, sentiment towards the product softened and gradually more workflows were migrated onto Salesforce as its stability and utility were proven.

I built strong and productive relationships with our Salesforce account management team, and was fortunate to receive support and guidance from my CTO and Salesforce’s own platform architects from the Professional Services Team - but after we acquired a smaller business with an existing CRM specialist in place, I was also pleased to retire my Salesforce hat and return to my software duties!