We recently hosted our first W.I.T. Republic: Women In Salesforce virtual event. These meetups provide a platform for women navigating the Salesforce ecosystem, to offer advice, tell their stories and network with like-minded individuals.
For our first event we were joined by two fantastic speakers, both experienced Salesforce professionals: Anna Pappas, Senior Director, Financial Services GTM Lead for Salesforce at Capgemini, and Devin Spence, Solution Architect and Founder of Seelman Consulting.
Partnering With Salesforce
Anna started the event by talking about how your professional journey can get you to one of the greatest modern day tech companies. Providing a bit of background into her career, Anna mentioned how she began as a marketer in the manufacturing industry, then moved to product management in industrial products, and has also worked in banking and sales in consulting.
Throughout her career two things have remained consistent:
- The need to know who the customer is, and everything about them
- The requirement to deliver an excellent customer service
…. Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Anna emphasised how Salesforce goes beyond CRM, to encapsulate an entire platform delivering a true customer 360 experience. Salesforce has understood that businesses from a digital transformation perspective require more than just a front office, they want; integration, analytics, security, IoT and collaboration.
Discussing how Capgemini work within the Salesforce environment, Anna segmented their activities into four sections:
- Innovations; proliferation of technology
- Omni-Channels; exponential growth of channels and business touchpoints
- Technologies; emergence of new online, and ecommerce platforms
- New Business Models; a new wave of Challenger banks, FinTechs and BigTechs
To hear Anna talk in detail about these segments, watch the video of the event here.
Finishing her presentation, Anna highlighted the market opportunity for this industry: the financial services industry is growing at 22% and is the fastest growing industry for Salesforce.
Fighting Back Against the Transformative Pandemic
The second speaker of the event, Devin Spence, provided a narrative for how to turn the events of the current pandemic into a positive, alongside as a manager how you can support your team members, and finally the impacts of the pandemic as a woman in tech.
Devin spoke about three key aspects that will help you to become an all-star consultant, during the pandemic:
- Being an active listener
- Transition to a ‘true partner’
- Keep the engagement
As a manager, to effectively support your team members during these uncertain times, Devin emphasised the importance of things other than billable hours, how mental health days should be mandated and to successfully manage a team, you first need to lead by example.
The final topic of Devin’s presentation focused on how to keep your sanity as a woman in the tech industry. With the pandemic creating extra pressures on industry professionals, Devin discussed the following factors as a way to prevent the position of women in tech from both stagmenting and reversing to how it was in the past.
- Flexibility
- Reflect on what’s important and prioritise
- Accountability
- Lend a hand where you can
During the networking session both Anna and Devin spoke about the challenges they have faced throughout their career in the tech industry, and how these can be overcome. It was also emphasised how the position of women in the industry is changing with Anna commenting: “Women today dominate in a lot of these areas, it may not feel like it but I promise you, there’s a lot more women in technology today than there have ever been.”
As always, we’d like to thank everyone who attended the event as well as our brilliant speakers, this was a great start to the Women In Salesforce series. If you’d like to speak at our next Women In Salesforce event, don’t hesitate to get in touch!
