Salesforce Admins Around the World with Megan Petersen

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast we’re speaking with Megan Petersen, a Salesforce Senior Principal Success Manager from the Sydney office. Megan is passionate about customer success at Salesforce and has been extremely effective in creating her own role in the company and scaling the program in Australia while activating the community across eight different time zones. She’s here to share her journey at Salesforce and provide some tips on how admins can connect with their community to maximize their success.
Join us as Megan shares her journey as a Salesforce Admin turned Senior Success Manager. We’ll learn about her passion for customer success and how she’s bringing the Awesome Admin message Down Under.

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

Customers want to connect with other customers.

“I started out as a Customer Success Manager in the Sydney office,” says Megan. She began with five accounts and has grown her department to over 50 accounts in the nine years she’s been with Salesforce. When she returned from maternity leave in her second year, she discussed the opportunity to create her own role. “I found when I was talking to our customers, that I was having the same conversations with them. That didn’t seem smart to me when it came to leveraging our customer base,” says Megan.

As Megan shares, “often I find our customers like connecting with other customers as much as they like connecting with us at Salesforce, because they can learn different things from people who are living it day in and day out, like themselves.”

Bringing the Awesome Admin message Down Under.

Inspired by the Admin keynote, Megan decided to help spread that message in Australia. “I loved the message. Given that I’ve talked to admins daily for the past nine years, it made so much sense to me that we had a team dedicated to the story around what our admins do and highlighting all of the excellent work they do every day,” says Megan.

“We have a really amazing community here in Australia. I’ve spent quite a bit of time over the past year trying to get immersed in the community. I’ve been a part of Salesforce for so long, but being part of the admin keynote opened my eyes to a lot of things that I wasn’t really paying attention to,” says Megan.

If you’re Down Under, you need to get down with Twitter.

“It’s phenomenal how many resources are out there to help you any given moment of the day. It’s not everyone’s thing to be part of Twitter, but if you’re not part of Twitter in the Salesforce community, you’re really missing out on a wealth of information and a connection with people,” Megan shares.

As Megan points out, “I don’t see a huge contingent of people in the APAC region — especially in Australia — being a part of Twitter. I’d love to see more people in our region getting into that medium and connecting with all of those global resources.”

Focus on fundamental, universal topics.

If an Admin in Australia was looking to grow that community, what topics or themes should they be writing about? Megan says, “There are universal, fundamental things. For example, everyone is in that transition to Lightning right now. That’s a big topic and seems like a very big mountain for some people to climb. I’d love to see more of the Lightning stuff come into the Down Under time zone.”

“We also have this awesome ‘Ask Salesforce Anything’ session that we run every week here. It’s like an open mic hour. We have experts from our team on that call, solution engineers, and VPs as well. You can literally call in and ask any question. It’s a great forum to connect with experts and other customers. You can get to all of that through the Success community,” says Megan.

The Success community is always there to support you.

Why should people join the success community? Megan says, “You shouldn’t have to email one single person to get an answer to a question. The success community is out there, available 24/7. You’re tapping into such a wealth of resources.”

“Apart from learning Salesforce stuff, I’ve seen so many amazing friendships come out of connecting in the community,” says Megan.

For more insights, make sure to follow Megan Petersen on Twitter (@MeganPTweets).

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