Meet Trailblazing Partner David Bloom of LevelJump
By: Holly Rushton
Tags: Salesforce, Isvs, Entrepreneurship, Careers, Trailblazer

“Be in or be out.” That’s what Trailblazing Partner David Bloom lists first as advice for anyone looking to be part of the Salesforce world, and he takes his own advice seriously. Even from an early stage in his career, he always knew he wanted to help people be better at their jobs, leading to founding his own sales enablement and readiness company, LevelJump.

I’ve had the opportunity to see David bring home a Dreamforce Mega Demo Jam win as well as share his knowledge with others in the ecosystem, and his authentic and infectious love for what he does is indisputable. Learn more about David in this interview.

Trailblazing Partner David Bloom of LevelJump

Tell us about your journey to where you are today.

David Bloom: My journey started in pre-med way back in the day, but I ended up in the healthcare and pharmaceutical industry, working in sales, marketing, and product management.

I was always involved in sales, and over the years I realized what I really loved was helping people be better at their jobs, so sales training was a natural fit. Eventually, I left pharma and opened up a training and coaching consultancy, then sold that and joined Salesforce on the go-to-market side. After a few years there, I saw the power of the ecosystem and realized that there was this huge opportunity for a tool to help sales reps get to productivity faster. I figured I could marry my love for training and coaching with the enormous potential of the Salesforce Platform — and LevelJump was born.

We definitely sense your passion for helping people be better at what they do. What else do you love about your job?

DB: The most important thing for me is the people that I work with. And with LevelJump, I get to work with some great people every day. I’m incredibly proud of the LevelJump team, but also the great customers and partners that make my job so much fun. My goal is to make people great at what they do, and give people the best chance they have of being successful in their chosen role. Right now, that means helping salespeople and go-to-market teams get onboarded and trained really fast and helping them be successful. But that’s just today. Tomorrow it might be something completely different, but I’ll always try to make education better and help empower people to do what they want.

David Bloom (far left) and the LevelJump team.

What have been some of your challenges on both a professional and personal front?

DB: Balancing my work and my life, and balancing being a leader, but also a husband and a dad. There are so many challenges with a tech company, but finding the time in the day is the hardest. It’s especially difficult because your work is never done, so you can just work 24/7. It takes a conscious action to switch off and focus on your family, and that can be challenging.

The other big challenge is evolving as a leader at the pace that a growing startup demands. The needs of a small company are really different from the needs of a company going to market, and again from a scaling business. Evolving as a leader to meet these needs is a constant challenge because you always feel like right as you get good at something, the organization needs something completely different.

How have you been a pioneer and a leader?

DB: I don’t know that I’m a pioneer or a leader. I am most proud of our involvement in the community. For example, we’re a big proponent of the Upside Foundation and SickKids. We pledged 1% of our equity to help SickKids’ VS Limits initiative, a fundraising campaign to raise $1.3 billion to build a new hospital. I’ve been a real evangelist about that because not only is it a great cause, but I love the ethos of as tech companies grow, they give back to the community that raised them. In a similar, albeit more professional, vein, I founded the Toronto chapter of the Sales Enablement Society to give Toronto enablers a place to gather and swap ideas and best practices.

When it comes to LevelJump internally, I try to lead based on our company values. We all worked together to come up with a framework for how we want to work together and we ended up with #WeTEACH, or Transparency, Experimentation, Accountability, Customer-centricity, and Human / Philanthropy. Since it was our team who came up with these values, I think it’s my role as a leader to try and embrace them every day.

David Bloom (center) and the LevelJump team pledge 1% of the company’s equity to the SickKids Foundation.

What are your thoughts on the state of equality, inclusion, and diversity in the tech industry?

DB: This is obviously a problem, and I’m happy that we’re beginning to see some lumbering efforts to solve it. For an industry that’s constantly talking about being data-driven, and ‘on the bleeding edge’, and ‘constantly innovating as we build a better future’ the gross gender inequality, exclusion, and uniformity in technology is embarrassing. What era are we even living in? Our collective corporate structure operates like an ad agency in the 60s. Not having gender equality at every level of your organization is like having a workplace where it’s OK to smoke in the boardroom. It’s outrageous.

So then what steps do you take to promote equality, inclusion, and diversity at your company?

DB: We actively pursue gender equality and inclusion on every team and at every level within our company. Not only because it’s the right thing to do, but also diverse teams are better across the board. A big part of why LevelJump’s been able to punch so far above its weight class is the gender and ethnic diversity we seed through every team. Our goal is gender parity as we grow, especially at the board and advisor level.

We also established a “Ladies of LevelJump ‘’ committee that meets regularly to discuss ideas to increase diversity and promote equitable hiring in our organization. We set definite goals, and then develop strategies to meet these goals.

You’re in the business helping others learn, but how do you continue to learn and grow?

DB: I tend to learn best from people, so I always try and meet with a few people who can teach me something new every week and every time I’m traveling. I’m also a big reader, both of blogs and articles, but also books and novels. I also listen to a lot of call recordings from sales and customer success to learn and grow from my own team.

David Bloom (center) brought home the 2018 Dreamforce Mega Demo Jam trophy.

What does being a Trailblazer mean to you?

DB: Being a trailblazer is to me all about empowering and inspiring others first to engage with the community, and second, to help them become trailblazers themselves. To me, it’s a responsibility to help bring businesses to the wider world, and hopefully, offer my advice and guidance to people along that journey.

What advice do you have for other potential and upcoming Trailblazers?

DB: Be in or be out. If you want to be part of the community, be part of the community. Do it right, go all in. It’s not just a box that you check on some application. Like any community, with Salesforce and Trailblazing you get out what you put in. If you’re only in it for a logo on your integrations page, then that’s all you’ll get. But if you’re committed to making genuine contributions to make the community better, then the community will reward you in spades.

My other piece of advice is that this is truly a community. The better we can all make it, the more we’ll all win. It’s a ‘high tide raises all boats’ sort of situation; as you invest more of your time and resources into it, that investment actually gets leveraged to help everyone.

It sounds like you invest a lot of your time in the community, but what do you do in the hours outside of that?

DB: Outside of work I devote all my energy to my family. If I’m not at the office, you can usually find me at a dance class or watching tween shows with my three daughters. I try and teach them some of what I’ve learned from working in startups, like how important it is to be truly passionate about what you do. Mostly though, I just try and keep up with them and my wife, the real trailblazer of the family.

Check out LevelJump on AppExchange today, and learn more about David and other startups in the ebook How It Starts: Finding Success in the Ecosystem as a Startup.