Interview: How Rebecca Aichholzer Powerlifted Her Salesforce Career

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast we have Rebecca Aichholzer, National Commercial Manager at BrandIQ and Brisbane Women in Tech Leader in Australia, as well as a recent Golden Hoodie Winner at the Sydney World Tour.

Join us as we talk about how to get the most out of your implementation partner, working with Apex, and what to do about imposter syndrome.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Rebecca Aichholzer.

Behind the Golden Hoodie.

Bec is a recent recipient of the coveted Golden Hoodie, so we thought we’d find out more about how she came to join the Salesforce Ohana in the first place. Her company works with pop-up shops, the kinds of temporary stores that appear in malls and shopping centers. They were using a booking system, but she needed something more powerful and Salesforce was just the ticket.

“We looked at our entire process, from where we took a lead all the way through to actually invoicing the pop-up retailers and for us it made sense to go with a system where you could see the entire process: from capturing a lead all the way through the opportunity pipeline into creating contracts and sending invoices at the end,” Bec says. This made it easier for her team’s sales managers and others to collaborate and keep track of their work.

Getting the most out of your Salesforce Implementation Partner.

So Bec’s company found Salesforce, but actually using it was a different matter altogether. “I don’t come from a technical background so I didn’t know what we actually needed— I remember sitting down with our SI partner at the start and saying, ‘I don’t know what I don’t know.’” She sat there and tried to absorb all the information she could, how every field was put together, how every form worked, every formula, and just about everything else. “I was another accidental Admin,” Bec says.

The thing was that as the implementation started picking up steam, there were definitely moments where the power of the platform became clear: “As we scratched away at the surface, there were these lightbulb moments where you realized, ‘Oh my God, I can now do that,’ and it cuts out hours worth of work, or you can use a particular object to build on where it was previously all manual handling.” Bec’s team was spending hours and hours manually creating contracts every day, so to be able to just press a document and create a document was absolutely amazing. “I also realized there’s this amazing community, the Ohana, the ecosystem that is Salesforce— it’s not just a platform, it’s everything, it’s the support network it’s reaching out to people, it’s the Trailblazer Community,” Bec says.

Building a community and overcoming Imposter Syndrome.

“I entered this journey with Salesforce about four and a half years ago at a time when I didn’t understand the technology,” Bec says, “but I’ve never been immersed in a platform the way I had to be with Salesforce.” She tried to learn as much as she could about the platform by herself, but she realized that she needed more support in the community, so she started attending the Brisbane Women in Tech User Group meetings. “I realized that I felt like an imposter, like I was pretending to be in technology when I really was using a technology-based platform,” Bec says, “but I kept thinking that I was a fake.”

However, when Bec started going to these WiT meetings she realized that she wasn’t alone in having these kinds of feelings. “The IT industry can be strongly skewed towards males, so it was great to hook up with a network of other like-minded people, share my story, and have them say, ‘No, you ARE in technology, this is who you are and what you’re doing.’” From there she ended up co-leading the meetings, “If I can give back to the community as much as the community helped me, that’s the best thing that I can do.”

Bec’s Trailblazer Story

• https://youtu.be/BypgmzjyBlo

Trailhead

• Apex Basics & Database module: https://trailhead.salesforce.com/modules/apex_database

Twitter

• Bec: @bextabooo
• Gillian: @gilliankbruce
• Salesforce Admins: @salesforceadmns

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