20 Years in salesforce my highlights and learnings from an amazing journey…
By: Cyril Treacy
Tags: Career Change, Career Advice, Philanthropy, Giving Back

The Journey :

Hi All, December 18th 2000 I took a massive leap of faith with a small startup worth $10 Million after reading a newspaper article about three execs John Appleby , David Dempsey and Fergus Gloster leaving Oracle Ireland to join a CRM startup called salesforce.com . I spent two days researching salesforce and Marc Benioff and Parker Harris the co founders they even had SSL accelerators useful for slow dial up and ISDN lines companies used at the time….

I was EMEA Employee 13 , approx 110 globally and joined to form the support department , Fergus and Martin Moran gave me the opportunity of a lifetime though I did not know this in 2000 , our office 2001–2004 was Powerscourt House the 2nd best garden in Europe and a fun place to be in a tech startup , below myself aged 28 in our office early 2001 with John O’Keefe CRM consultant and CSG employee number 1 , I used to do deployments during his holidays and he did support cover on mine , he is now in Google at Looker. Erika Woodcock our first office manager helped design our end of software rug.

I Handled my first case number 5781 on December 19th 2000 created by Ronan Copeland AE for for Glen Dougal Subject Integration issues — Can we link into word/excel. Link into invoice generation system….

I delivered the first International Admin 201 training course in 2002 to Eagle Global logistics and Cable and wireless attendees including John-Adrian Pipe while they waited to migrate to Siebel and are now a salesforce customer again I worked for Kieran Carrick a great manager who I learned a lot from.

I had 5.5 great years in Support and training some days handling up to 75 cases myself and learned that the customer is always right and the only person who can fire you or the CEO as a vendor , also that if you do not know the answer its ok to say I need to research that issue and come back to you later , give yourself permission to be fallible.. I enjoyed teaching , my mother was an Art teacher and sharing knowledge is an enjoyable vocation and I trained hundreds of early admin users in EMEA and fellow staff , my rule was always be helpful as all my colleagues , Dominic Dinardo our first ever Solution engineer I trained on salesforce became my boss and mentor years later. In my early days we did Volunteering with https://www.citywise.ie/ and my first VTO activity was a sports day in Kildare with the kids showing them sports like rugby etc, years later we taught them to code from 2014 onwards , I also did work with homeless charity helping feed and clothe folks in Dublin city centre https://www.dubsimon.ie

I decided to move into Pre sales area after talking to Dominic in 2005 and became an Solution engineer and found my forte I loved problem solving for difficult customer challenges in 2009 I helped grow Service cloud 405% and 250% the year after that , I have been invited to five peak performers and four chairman’s clubs as a top performer in the company from Maui to Miami to Mykonos . I spent 13.5 very growing years as an IC,manager and leader building out platform ,Service cloud ,communities,commerce and enterprise architect teams 8 of my hires are now managers including Vice presidents and 9 of my hires are Koa club 10 year plus veterans .

In 2019 I decided I wanted to give back to changemakers as my primary role and moved to salesforce.org under Rob Acker who leads our social impact arm selling industry specific solutions to non profits and Higher education customers , more details here Fundraising 360 Blog

I had been a keen athlete in school running cross country and Dave Dempsey rekindled my love for running along the river in Powerscourt grounds on our lunchtime runs , this led to much running fundraising over the 20 years including Dublin 4 marathons in memory of my mother Lizanne Treacy who died aged 61 in 2004 for Irish cancer society have ran with teams from Darren Brennan and my brother in law Bobby McCoy in 2008 to over 20 colleagues in 2016 , 5 Connemarathon’s for Cancer care west with Marco Nuti and colleagues . Over the years my fundraising has raised well over $100,000 dollars for great cases with salesforce matching since 2000.

To my many amazing colleagues many of whom became good friends over the last 20 years thank you 🙏.

Salesforce believes values drive value so I will explain my learnings through our four key values

Innovation :

I learned early on that salesforce expects you to evolve so set myself a goal to grow 10% a year and innovate for the business and myself . Some examples over the years bringing Admin 201 to europe ,launching premier support in europe , I initiated an Ignite with Aaron Tunesi and his team with coderdojo.com to redesign their website around personas and you can see this clearly in their website today which helped them grow their movement , in 2017 we launched a new form of hands on training called Campfires for Communities and also in 2017 a PRM Hackathon to help launch a new product . In 2018 I went back to Smurfit business school to learn about Innovation,strategy and leadership . in 2019 a Hackathon I ran with Sarah Thomson resulted in Mentorfinder an einstein based mentor matching application used by over 1000 employees during 2020 and now with plans for global use . This year we launched Campfires for Fundraising and Long term management for salesforce.org customers.

Lessons learned : Constantly improve yourself every year you should grow and learn new things as a lifelong learner and good things will come from this. Find mentors both in and outside your company most people don’t charge for their advice and agreed what you both want from mentoring relationship it’s not just a coffee it’s learning new skills and gaining insights from joint experiences , Fergus has been a great mentor to me for 20 years now.

Customer success:

I have so many customer stories from 20 years of helping them solve complex problems and challenges at global brand names like Spotify, Eurostar, Net-a-Porter,TripAdvisor, KLM, Finnair,Qlik and many more , it’s been an honour to serve them I helped Qlik grow from 2008 into a leader in BI solutions guiding their COO Joe Francis and CIO Mark Childs over many years in a successful partnership with Niall Brady their AE . I helped Spotify’s head of technology Christer Edvardsson build a world class B2C service cloud deployment through many scale challenges and helped Eurostar CIO Antoine De Kerviler achieve the holy grail a single customer view with just four platforms from the 20 they started with . My latest project is perhaps the most important Vaccines for the world with GAVI COVAX platform for 189 countries .

Lessons learned : Customers buy from people they like and trust , you need to earn this through deeds and actions , my advice is be curious and challenge orthodoxies as customer success is a mix of technology, people and processes All three must be open to change for any project to succeed, even failed projects can help you build trust as they see you going above and beyond to deliver the project , you need to bring the customer with you on a journey and agree an up front contract to ensure mutual expectations and success .

Equality :

1218 hrs or 152 working days volunteering logged many of these around equality to children around STEM .

My own daughter Roisin wanted to learn to code aged 7 and the journey and learning this brought me on is detailed here in a blog post from 2014 . I met coderojo at the Dublin web summit 2013 and helped them deploy salesforce.org CRM this grew to 8,000 hrs of VTO in 16 countries and $300,000 in grants , myself joining their board and helping them scale from 200 dojos in 20 countries to 2342 dojos in 114 countries today . A highlight for me was seeing the first dojo in Kenya at the karibu centre in Thika in 2016 here setting the dojo up the picture .

I also sponsor four children at Saint Martins School in Nairobi as education is the great equaliser for equality Dare to change a child’s life here we helped the school setup two computer labs and thanks to the efforts of Miguel and kelli Milano we sponsor 500 plus children

St Dominic’s college Ballyfermot , we ran an Ignite to help school operate better 730 hrs of employee VTO , $125,000 in grants and $18,000 of employee giving and mentoring and coderdojo classes we have ran for four years now , we recently provided 200 laptops for covid study at home , I have been on the school board since 2018 and delighted four of the girls made it to Trinity college studying Law,pharmacy and OT , see the impact this mentoring and technology exposure has on the girls Video . Salesforce Dublin just launched an apprentice program this week , I hope some of the girls take advantage of this opportunity.

Trust :

trust is fundamental to salesforce and our most important value of all , Customers trust us with huge quantities of private data that we must protect for them and give them insights on . I was involved in helping to create our trust website after customers requested more visibility it is it us having an issue or the salesforce service in emea , it was often a dug up ISDN line or a damaged subsea cable(True stories) , not our service that had an issue I did have to wake Parker Harris in the very early days a couple of times, now we can run the entire salesforce system from our Dublin office with a NOC in place.

One trust story is about a project that was going wrong a Car rental space disrupter providing Car hire to third party websites was using Iframes an old and unsecure method we had removed from communities but as this company did not own the 3rd party websites they could only use iframes for now with a migration plan to use another secure method . They had tried and failed to go live twice and project was at risk of failure , the only option was to modify the login page used by all users of salesforce with a small adjustment we would have to code and get approval from security teams on , a massive ask . I made the ask and the GM of communities Mike Micucci provided the developers to help solve problem and on third attempt the customer went live successfully , it’s my favorite trust and customer success story .

Trust lessons learned 1st go the extra 10 miles when trust is needed , like the story above as everything is based around trust , 2nd lesson hire the best people in fact they should be better than you , Fergus Gloster used to turn down a lot of my support hires in final round interviews and I eventually asked him what I was doing wrong . he said I was hiring support reps , I should be hiring future talent for the company who can go onto greater roles and grow with the company , this massive learning meant I looked for the top talent I could find and hired from non traditional backgrounds and many of these support hires into entry level jobs are now top SE’s and sales leaders in salesforce today . 3rd lesson technical people need different forms of motivation as Daniel Pink says its Purpose ,Autonomy and Purpose Video here