Mike Wheeler: Alright. So today I'm joined by Rebecca Youngquist and Nicole Looker, sisters who've entered into the Salesforce ecosystem and I'm so excited to meet them both. So how are you both doing today?
Rebecca Youngquist: Oh, you know, it's another busy Monday definitely. I think there's a song, "Manic Monday" that's pretty much it. I'm wrapping up finally and kind of enjoying this quiet time. Now my husband took our dog out for a walk, so it's very quiet in my house, and it's kind of nice.
Mike Wheeler: Awesome.
Nicole Looker: Yes. Also doing great. Yeah. Happy Monday.
Mike Wheeler: Okay. So one of you had posted, both of you actually posted about your upcoming talk on Mile High Dreamin' and caught my attention because I was tagged in it. And I wanted to hear more about your story. It's interesting to have a couple of siblings enter the ecosystem, and so I don't know who wants to take point as far as kind of doing the intro of how you discovered Salesforce and how that journey worked out. So one of you start and the next one add on, however you feel led.
Rebecca Youngquist: Go ahead, Nicole, because you're the one who did it.
Nicole Looker: Yeah, I was gonna say, I'll kick it off because it's a very interesting story. So my entry into Salesforce is 100% by accident. It's another case of the accidental admin that had happened. My background is actually, I have a bachelor's in finance, and I entered into my professional career in insurance. So I was doing like underwriting claims, working with different professionals in that area.
I did take on a lot of data work, though, in that role, and a lot of like account management and just understanding the data and reporting inside of insurance. And that is really where my drive to keep going and get further in the data area started. So eventually, I moved on from insurance, because underwriting is very monotonous, and not what I wanted to be doing for the rest of my life.
And then I got a job as like a contract analyst, and I was working with a lot of account managers out in the field. And I was able to understand the sales process, what they were doing to drive new business, renew business, work with different customers, and kind of be the intermediary to get things from finance approved for those customers.
I ended up getting a lot of experience just working with the sales process and really driving forward and being innovative to make sure that our customers had what they needed. From there I transitioned to a financial firm called DTCC. And I think they have been with Salesforce like since 2009 but they ended up wanting to hire me because of my background, working with the account managers and the sales professionals there. So I entered into a reporting and project management role at DTCC. And very heavy on the Salesforce front end.
So I became a Salesforce front end super user, identifying like problem areas and inefficiencies and trying to help our sales and account management teams be more efficient inside of Salesforce. And it really piqued my interest into all the opportunities that were there, both on the front end side and the back end side, because my job eventually turned into taking what our front end users were experiencing, needing, wanting, turning that into some technical stuff to take to the admins and the developers, having them build it, and then doing the training and everything for our front end users in Salesforce and being in the middle of both worlds and seeing it from both ends, is very interesting. So I was able to really understand the front end of Salesforce before deciding to make the pivot to become more technical.
And it was there that I got to go to Dreamforce for my first time in 2019 before COVID happened, and all the chaos there, and I remember at that time Salesforce was offering, you know, the free certifications when you go to Dreamforce. So, my manager, he was like, let's all study for the Admin exam. I know we don't have a lot of like back end technical experience. But we're all very strong on the front end and understand the sales processes and the reporting and how to translate business requirements.
So that is where your courses enter for all of us. We hopped on Udemy and downloaded all of them, and purchased all of them, and we like studied our butts off to be able to pass that at Dreamforce. And I was able to do that on the first day that I was at Dreamforce, and then I drank the Kool-Aid the rest of the week. And I was like, okay, this is it. Let's go from here.
And then, when I got back about, I don't know, 4 months later is when COVID, like really stuff, started to come down, and all the things were getting turned off and shut down, and no more traveling and everything. And my husband had the opportunity to move out here to Colorado with his job. And then I ended up transitioning to a Sales Ops manager for a small startup.
And that opened up my career to becoming a product owner ever since. I'm with a different company now, but in that role I was able to just like open up, dive in, learn all the technical, apply all the technical things that I learned, and the rest is history. And then from there I'll let Becca chime in, because she got to be along for the ride, and then, when it was her turn some more doors open for her.
Mike Wheeler: Yes, thank you. Yeah. How about you, Rebecca? What was your journey like? And at what point did your sister tell you? Hey? You need to look into Salesforce? Or how did all that play out too?
Rebecca Youngquist: Oh, gosh! Right off the bat my sister like came at me, and she was like "Yo check out what I do for a living. This is kind of amazing," but almost similar, but like it was also kind of intentional for me that I knew that I was gonna go into Salesforce at some point. I just didn't know to what level it was gonna happen. I started off, I was in the military prior to all of this I was from the year 2016 to 2021 when I retired.
I was in the Navy. I was a nuclear engineer, and I was an instructor, and I was teaching students how to start up and shut down reactors. So I was doing something completely unrelated to what I kind of stumbled into here. But like during my out processing, there's like a 6 month period where the veterans program is kind of like, hey? Let's start looking at what you want to do for a living. What do you want to do as a civilian? Do you want to keep on doing like nuclear stuff? Do you wanna do something totally different? And at the time I was still in school, at Penn State for business, so I was earning my bachelor's degree still and I remember my sister and I like our relationship throughout the years, has just gotten like we've gotten very, very, very close. And my sister's like, "Yeah, I do this thing in Salesforce. You should check it out like just log into Trailhead. Make an account like it's free. Who cares like if you end up paying? It's perfectly free."
But I hopped on there, and I'm very much driven when things are gamified for me and Trailhead gamifies it, you get your stuff done, you get badges, you get achievements along the way, and I got very hooked very fast. And then I decided, like probably I think, March of 2021, that I was like, I have to be a Salesforce admin, not knowing at the time the impact that COVID had on the job market, and how Salesforce had like blown up because people are like, "Oh, as a Salesforce admin, you can be fully remote and work from home. And it's great. This is amazing."
And I was entering into a pool of highly competitive people just like me, and very driven very strong candidates who had, like years of experience, kind of like Nicole did where she started somewhere, and she already had that front end user experience. So people were like, yes, I want her because she knows kind of how to translate that front end to the back end. And so I think I submitted like 150 plus applications to random places that like I did some research on. Because at that point I was like, I just need a job like I need a job after the military. I need to do something. And then there's a company they're called Promethean. I will credit them with jump starting my career all day. Even though we parted ways. I didn't want to, but we had to just due to the changing nature of like the job requirements. And like the way the economy was, they restructured, and I had to leave but my manager at Promethean, and I'm gonna tell her to listen to this. So, Deirdre, this is a hundred percent for you. She and her recruiter, found me randomly on LinkedIn. They found my application that I had submitted like months prior, and they were like, we have to talk to this girl. So I talked to the recruiter, and the recruiter went and talked to Deirdre, and they were like, you have to talk to this girl her energy's the same. I know she has zero experience in anything whatsoever, and it was for a sales operations analyst role which also to credit my sister in this point.
In every job interview I have ever been in ever since 2021, the one piece of advice I have ever gotten, and that has stuck with me like every single time has been: Start on the front end of Salesforce before you even think about touching the back end. Because if you don't understand how your users are using it, how in the world are you gonna understand how to build it for them? So I chose Sales Ops to get into like, basically because it just seemed like the right fit. My sister was like, "Yeah, do it. It's gonna be great." So I did it.
Promethean found me, and it was supposed to be a sales operations job like do some reporting, pull some data. Do this thing. And I was like, all right cool. It's gonna be great. But then it turned into they had a Salesforce development team that really needed help with the administrative side of things because their developers were just, they were bogged down with a lot of stuff that they were working on. So Deirdre kind of handed me over to the developer team and was like, "Here, go for it." And then I realized that I was in this position to start figuring out what was gonna happen with my career like, right from the get go. It was like 2 months into my job. I was like what am I gonna do? How do I do this? And then Nicole sends me your courses on Udemy, which I used 100%. I didn't even know about Focus on Force at the time I didn't know about that. I knew about nothing but Mike Wheeler's courses on Udemy, and how incredible they were. So I also got all of them studied my butt off I think I spent 3 days straight, like studying, took the exam pass on the first try like easy peasy lemon squeezy, and as soon as I got that first certification and a taste of like kind of like that rush, you get right after you get that email. It's like congratulations. Your certified administrator. Like all of a sudden, it was game time to start getting through all the other certifications, and also take what I learned and apply it to what I was doing, because Promethean really transformed, like every single part of my career, and I probably would have been a lifer there, had it not been for the fact that, like COVID, changed their business operations, and they had to just pivot. And I don't fault them for that. But they changed like the whole entire, like progression of my career, and they launched me into Quest. Next is where I end up going after 2 years and doing a couple of projects. But Quest was like they wanted a senior admin. But then the role ended up, not being like what we were thinking that it was going to be just as it was just a not a good fit for me and my manager and I talked about that like at length, and we decided that it was either I moved to a different department in the company to be able to get what I needed from that role or look elsewhere. So I eventually parted ways with Quest to just find something that like would challenge me and push me like further. And then I found Leap and Leap has been life changing, to say the least. It has been I am learning things that I've never thought possible in Salesforce. I'm like, I'm doing things that like I figured that people in their 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th years of like doing work in Salesforce would be doing. I'm doing that now, and I'm like it's forcing me out of my comfort zone kind of like the best way possible. And I'm collaborating with a lot more people. I'm like my sister and I. I think we talk weekly on like the challenges, but also like the really cool parts about being at like a startup company and being a solo admin like a startup company on top of that. And it's just the whole, like everything. I could go on and talk to you forever about all the stuff I did in the middle. I could talk about the courses I take in the Vet Force, the Trailhead, all the certifications I've gathered along the way, but ultimately, like being in the military and then changing pace from that fast pace to this fast pace, and then watching my career kind of explode right after I stepped away from Promethean, has been nothing shy of like incredible. And that's kinda how I got to where I am.
Mike Wheeler: Awesome. Yeah, it's a great story. And you know, in looking at your LinkedIn profile, I had seen that you had done training on nuclear reactors. And to me, it's like, that's a lot more high pressure situation than anything you'll find in the Salesforce ecosystem. But being a trainer and you've done training, then how has that informed your learning journey? And how do you approach learning you mentioned taking my courses? But how do you structure the challenge of trying to attain a certification. How do you lay that out in your own mind with that training background that you have as well.
Rebecca Youngquist: So with the training, I think the number one thing that I learned about myself in the military and about a lot of my students was that visual learning and having visual stimuli in front of you is tremendous in solidifying, like really complex like processes in your brain. Like I could, I could talk to you all day again about like starting up a nuclear reactor and like what you're watching now. But in my first 12 months of training, we were in the books, not doing anything other than like jamming info into our brain and like memorizing things. And then I got to my 13th month of training. And all of a sudden we were on a submarine that had a working reactor. And they put you in a little room. And they're like, all right. Tell me how you're gonna do this. You're just like, Oh, my God! But the first time that I saw it happen, and I watched like my over instructor kind of walk through everything and tell me like this is why we do this. This is what we're watching, like. Everything clicked into place immediately. All that memorization, all that stuff that like I never thought in a million years I would ever use ever again. It was just foundational stuff came back into my brain. And I was like, this is, this is what I need like is to be able to identify my own like method of learning, I guess, is what it's called. There's another like technical term for it. But identifying my own method of learning and then identifying the method of learning of the people that I'm training, because, like not many like not everybody is a visual learner. But I have learned over the last couple of years of doing like implementations and trainings with sales teams is that they like to see what needs to be done. They don't want to be talked at. They don't want a 75 page PowerPoint presentation, or PDF on like what's happening. They want you to show them what needs to be done, and it's a lot more interactive that way. And I feel like that kind of makes things kind of stick a lot better. So I think, with your courses in particular, and with Trailhead even to being hands on and like stepping through all of the things like in that order, and seeing how everything works and not just being talked at with words on a PowerPoint presentation has been instrumental and game changing for me. So I take a lot of that, and I apply that to how I kind of like I learn, but as well as how I teach others when I'm training them.
Mike Wheeler: Excellent. So, Nicole, I wanna ask you about. You know you have more experience on the platform, and you saw your sister coming out of the military some point you said, Hey, you should check out Salesforce. What do you look for in someone, whether it's your sibling or anyone out there, and I think I was kind of guilty of this. Early on in my own career. I just was approaching everybody, cause I was so excited about the opportunity that Salesforce presented like. Do you have a pulse? You should try Salesforce because it was so attainable. But in your own mind, what would be the top 2 or 3 characteristics of someone that will excel in the Salesforce ecosystem. What would you think that would be.
Nicole Looker: Yeah, absolutely. And that's a really good question. Because I think it's more than just like technical skills. In my opinion, like most of us, especially growing up with technology, we can learn the technical stuff. We can learn how to build a simple flow, create a field build a validation rule, like most of us, are pretty savvy in that matter these days.
Nicole Looker: But to be really good at Salesforce it's about a few different things. Number one problem solving and critical thinking and kind of going off of what Becca said. It's understanding the like why, like, why are you doing it? And what is it gonna affect and like when you build something and you show somebody why you built it, and what it's going to solve for them. It just opens up a lot of eyes and avenues and the growth and everything just like really, really changes. So problem solving critical thinking. Number one, number two.
Anybody working in Salesforce really should have like a good way to manage relationships with all of your stakeholders, even if you're on a large team and you're on a team with like a hundred admins. Still, being able to have those soft skills to talk to the people you're working with to collaborate and then talking to the people that you're building and developing and making process changes for is very important. Becca and I both are in a very unique situation where we work for startup companies. We're the only Salesforce person. So our stakeholders are VPs, they are C-suites. They are analysts. They're everybody that works in Salesforce all day, and we support all the teams in it. Not just sales, not just partnerships, not just marketing. It's everybody. So we really have to be able to manage like those relationships with everybody. And that's really, really important.
And then time management and prioritization are also key. We get, I can't tell you how big my queue is like my Jira board is probably like 500 things long. So being able to like, manage that and prioritize and get things across the line is also very important.
And I think a lot of people trying to break into the Salesforce ecosystem like they want their certification. They think that's what's gonna like break them in. But it's a lot more than just that, like having those soft skills in the background in other areas is really valuable. So I know Becca like really well, obviously. And I know her work ethic, and I know her ambition, and I've seen her like all of her studies and her critical thinking that she had to do. And she teaches people and collaborates really well, so I thought it'd be a perfect fit for her to apply all of that, and then learn all the technical.
Mike Wheeler: Excellent. Yeah, a lot of soft skills coming into play there. And it's kind of like the technical, you can train someone those things, and you can train soft skills to a certain degree. But some of that is kind of a natural aptitude that you can build upon.
