Have you ever found yourself puzzled by the Salesforce ecosystem and its complex nuances? Our co-host, Vanessa Grant, is here to shed light on the mysteries surrounding how to find your place in the Salesforce ecosystem. Literally, the last session of Dreamforce, Vanessa shares her session with us.
We discuss her unique take on the Dreamforce abstract submission process, stirs up a conversation on the lack of vetting for sessions. We also dive deep into the importance of smaller sessions and the varying experiences of customer and vendor attendees. By the end, you'll have a grasp of the different roles and skills needed in Salesforce projects, and insights into the opportunities and challenges of navigating the Dreamforce experience.
Battling the fear of embarking on a Salesforce career? Vanessa shares her strategies for overcoming this fear, along with her experiences with researching Salesforce job roles. We delve into how these skills can transfer to other tech stacks, and why connecting with people on a human level can make all the difference. We open up about overcoming obstacles, managing noise, and the misbelief that one has to be uber-technical to pursue a Salesforce career. We further talk about effective strategies for career planning, and the importance of being persistent, focused, and curious.
Vanessa reveals her secret strategies for organizing learning, tracking successes, and managing failures. We also discuss the importance of physical health, mental resilience, and daily meditation. So, gear up to explore the Salesforce ecosystem, battle career fears, and devise strategies for success. Trust us, this episode promises to leave you informed, inspired, and ready to conquer the Salesforce world.
Have you ever found yourself puzzled by the Salesforce ecosystem and its complex nuances? Our co-host, Vanessa Grant, is here to shed light on the mysteries surrounding how to find your place in the Salesforce ecosystem. Literally, the last session of Dreamforce, Vanessa shares her session with us.
We discuss her unique take on the Dreamforce abstract submission process, stirs up a conversation on the lack of vetting for sessions. We also dive deep into the importance of smaller sessions and the varying experiences of customer and vendor attendees. By the end, you'll have a grasp of the different roles and skills needed in Salesforce projects, and insights into the opportunities and challenges of navigating the Dreamforce experience.
Battling the fear of embarking on a Salesforce career? Vanessa shares her strategies for overcoming this fear, along with her experiences with researching Salesforce job roles. We delve into how these skills can transfer to other tech stacks, and why connecting with people on a human level can make all the difference. We open up about overcoming obstacles, managing noise, and the misbelief that one has to be uber-technical to pursue a Salesforce career. We further talk about effective strategies for career planning, and the importance of being persistent, focused, and curious.
Vanessa reveals her secret strategies for organizing learning, tracking successes, and managing failures. We also discuss the importance of physical health, mental resilience, and daily meditation. So, gear up to explore the Salesforce ecosystem, battle career fears, and devise strategies for success. Trust us, this episode promises to leave you informed, inspired, and ready to conquer the Salesforce world.
And now the number one audio program that helps you to hire, get hired and soar higher in the Salesforce ecosystem. It's the Salesforce career show with Josh Matthews and Vanessa Grant.
Josh Matthews:Okay, welcome everybody. This is your friend, josh Matthews, and I'm here with some wonderfully amazing people. Hi everyone. I'm me. I run the Salesforce recruitercom, co-host this show, and I'm going to be part of one of Fred Kedenna's podcast, and I'll let him talk about that a little bit later. But first what is the topic of the day? My dear friend Vanessa Grant.
Vanessa Grant:Well, today we're going to talk about how to find your place in the Salesforce ecosystem, which was a topic of, actually, the last session of Dreamforce which I delivered.
Josh Matthews:Well, I'm excited about that. I've been searching for five years now, speaking of which we just hit five. Literally, the business hit five years last Sunday. So we're all celebrating in our own special way here at Salesforce staffing and the Salesforce recruitercom. But I got to go to one of your sessions. I didn't get to go to all of them and I did miss the last one, so I'm very excited about the information that you're going to be sharing with us.
Josh Matthews:A couple of quick announcements before we totally dive in and get some knowledge. We just released yesterday a podcast that I put together. I think it was on Thursday I went to Roman in Yerba Buena Park and chatted with six or seven folks. They were all terrifically, wonderfully nice people, thoughtful, intelligent and at different stages and positions in their career and with their involvement with Salesforce. So we spoke with the Salesforce AE, we talked to a vice president of technology, we talked to associate director of marketing for an international company. We talked to a lot of different people, and that got released yesterday.
Josh Matthews:So if you're listening live or if you're catching this episode maybe it's your first episode you haven't listened to any others If you just check out the one that got released just yesterday and by yesterday I'm talking about October 3rd. It's a short one, it's only 30 minutes, but we get to hear perspectives on people's favorite thing or biggest aha about being at Dreamforce. We also get to understand people's involvement, different things that they're learning at the Dreamforce event and some of the best career advice that everybody got too. So that's awesome and definitely check it out. But today's an exciting day because this is going to be a Vanessa Grant sharing some deep knowledge. Let's go, vanessa, let's just dive right into it.
Vanessa Grant:Well, actually, since we're on the subject of things that people learned at Dreamforce, I have a little bit of a controversial take to share, which I was actually. Now that we've got a few folks here and this is going to apply for my controversial take and also for some of the things that I'll share later. This is not the Vanessa Grant show. Please, if you have feedback or opinions on things that I say, please share. But I'm curious what you guys think. So, if anybody who's actually done the speaker abstract submission for Dreamforce and it's a couple weeks away from Dreamforce, I don't feel like a total ungrateful jerk for talking about this stuff at this point. But the abstracts when you're submitting a talk for Dreamforce we're talking you need a short title and like a 200 character abstract and, as we know, like 60% of the session's dreamforce is here or like.
Vanessa Grant:Yeah, it was like 200 characters.
Josh Matthews:It's like a tweet.
Vanessa Grant:Yeah, it was like a tweet and so 60% of the sessions at Dreamforce and there were hundreds of sessions were about AI, and so I think it's really easy for folks to sound like an AI expert in 200 characters. It's not that difficult. Also, they didn't have a cap on how many submissions you could put in, so you could throw in. I mean I think I threw in nine. I got three of them accepted, which was amazing. But also I have concerns that, especially with the layoffs that they had at Salesforce, that a lot of the sessions that we had that were accepted I don't know that they were properly vetting.
Vanessa Grant:So my concern here is that Dreamforce is kind of touting itself as like the big AI event of the year, but on what expertise If there's nobody actually making sure that the content is consistent, if there's nobody making sure that the content is accurate, nobody actually enforcing slide reviews? So that's a big problem that I wasn't sure if I should throw it on LinkedIn and I know there's only kind of like a smaller set of people that listen to the podcast, but I would really hesitate to say that. You know, folks that went to Dreamforce really got a comprehensive understanding of AI through the sessions that they saw there. Like I'm sure there were a few AI experts, but like I don't know that that was the spot.
Josh Matthews:Yeah. So look, I'm looking at this room here and some of the folks that I know for a fact have been there. Of course you were there. I was there. Fred Cadena was there? Janine Markhart, was there Anyone else on the show right now? If you were on the, if you were at Dreamforce and have a thought on this, do me a favor, just go ahead and raise your hand and we'll get your perspective. Let's ask Fred what do you think?
Fred Cadena:Yeah, no, I couldn't agree more and I think that you know. Obviously they build it as the largest AI conference in the world, ever in the universe. But I don't think it just extended to only AI sessions. I think there was a general lack of vetting of sessions. In general, I was pretty disappointed, like I was disappointed with my Dreamforce experience, like it was great for me from a business development standpoint, a networking standpoint, that got a lot of business out of it, a lot of great conversations.
Josh Matthews:But the con, you smoked some good cigars. Smoked some good cigars, yeah.
Fred Cadena:I hosted a couple of nice happy hours.
Josh Matthews:That's right.
Fred Cadena:But I mean it was a successful conference, but for the content it was maybe one of the more disappointing Dreamforces.
Fred Cadena:And I don't know if it was vetting. I submitted six. I didn't get any this time around. I've spoken to Dreamforce before but you know I talked to a lot of people like even that's presented there and the usual rigor around reviewing content, reviewing, you know, the slides, making sure things are tight. I don't think it happened this time, especially for you know people that have spoken to Dreamforce a number of times. I think if you were a first time speaking you've got a little bit more eyes. But I think it was a bit of a trust environment this time and I think the result was not as good a quality of content.
Josh Matthews:Okay, so Janine, what do you think?
Janeen Marquardt:Yeah, hey, I probably agree with what I'm hearing from the others.
Janeen Marquardt:I submitted a number of sessions, none of which necessarily said AI, because back when I was formulating my ideas it was free, the big AI push. They were probably more general interest. But I definitely know people who submitted sessions that had the words slash letters to AI and then they got accepted, who really had no idea what they were talking about and really had very little content that had anything to do with AI. And then I also know people who submitted sessions, like Fred, for example, who really know their stuff related to AI but said the words like chat GPT. And that meant I know about this because I attended one of his sessions, that it was the last streaming, that was phenomenal, and kind of asked a friend, asking on behalf of a friend, like why isn't this in A dream force? But if you weren't knowledgeable and you didn't know and you weren't careful and you said the words chat GPT, which happens to be a competitor when we take it all, like it's the Kleenex of chat GPT, right, yeah, Jello.
Janeen Marquardt:Right, it's become like that. It's a competitor and so you've got to be really careful in the way you say it, because it's chat. Gpt is a brand name of open AI and so, unfortunately, people who actually really are knowledgeable and have a lot to say about the topic might have been weeded out because of something really simple that if Salesforce had just come back and said, hey, we really like this topic, we hear you're really knowledgeable, we'd like to just sort of rewrite this abstract a little bit so that we're being more generic about it.
Josh Matthews:Yeah, we could make great content, so right, you're just going to pick someone else. I mean, yeah, that's not going to coach you into your session.
Janeen Marquardt:And I think that goes back to what Fred was saying in terms of you know the way that we sort of the sort of going back to the rigor around the content, and so, okay, let me ask you guys this though Let me just ask you this then guys, you know the rigor around the content.
Josh Matthews:I totally get that, and I am not an expert on this, because I go to Dreamforce and I get the full pass and I go in and the sessions I go to are basically like Vanessa, right, I'm just too busy to actually attend too many of these things. When I go to a couple I went to a few, you know, I went to a few. You know, if I know you, I go to your session and that's about it. The rest is like events, clients, conversations, podcasts, marketing, all sorts of different things, right? So I go there with a different mindset than some of the attendees. But I would ask this group, because you all seem Vanessa, fred and Janine you all seem to agree on this subject, so I don't know that it's necessarily actually controversial, vanessa, if you've already got two people on your side, right?
Vanessa Grant:Well, it's hard to talk that you know something against Dreamforce, but, like there was, even I heard a story about how there was somebody who was presenting about flow I mean not even like an AI topic and that they were outright wrong about like three things in the audience. Like corrected the speaker mid session, which is embarrassing if you're spending $2,000 for a ticket to go sit at the session.
Josh Matthews:Yeah, Was this and was this like a small stage? Was this a big stage?
Vanessa Grant:No, no, no, no, I wasn't at that particular one, but just the story itself. Like that shouldn't happen.
Fred Cadena:Yeah, Well, and I think that's, I think that's part of the problem Like what I wish and I said this, I think, Janine, when you were on my podcast a couple of weeks ago, if not, it was another time on a recent podcast I did some Dreamforce, but I wish they would have fewer sessions and bigger spaces. There were more people that I talked to that couldn't get into things they wanted to get into because the spaces were too small. And, you know, I think they have a lot of focus on being able to say you know, we've got numbers, we've got, you know, X number of hundreds of sessions, thousands of sessions, whatever, versus bigger rooms with more quality.
Josh Matthews:It's a Chinese menu. It's a Chinese menu, right, it's like, who knows if that stuff on page five is even good, right, Exactly Like what's that? What do you guys actually cook here? Don't give me the 10 page menu, yeah. Do you guys think that some of it's just the topical? Right, AI is new. Right, I mean the stuff's new. Okay, it's been around for 20 years, but has it? No, Not, really, Not in a usable way, right, so it's so new.
Josh Matthews:And so who in Salesforce has that knowledge to vet this stuff out? Right, and if it's a 200 character, you know if it's from a tweet, how are they actually making their decisions? Now, I know that they allow feedback. Right, Salesforce is big on feedback. They want to know, right, so I would encourage anybody who's feeling like they're on this side of Vanessa's perspective on this and I'm not on any side because I don't know. I tend to believe my friends, so I believe you and I guess that makes me on your side, but you can communicate with Salesforce. They want to know.
Josh Matthews:Hey, what's up with? Like Janine, I went to your session and like I could barely hear anything because there's another 50 people packed smack up against us and microphone. You know speakers from three different sessions, all pointing at the crowd. You're trying to filter out the conversation Like it was. It was a challenge. You had to really lean in, speak up, hold that mic, close power, talk. So I'm with you on the small sessions. Small sessions are great. You know what we do. A show like this. It's going to have a reach of probably, at the end of the day, of about 500 people. Right, Compare that to spending I don't know how many weeks days, you know hours practicing a session to do it at Dreamforce. Get a crowd of 20, 30, 40 people, you know, is that like. It's barely worth it. I think that's why I like this format. But it's worth it. If you've never spoken at Dreamforce Now you can say you're a Dreamforce speaker. So there's some credentialing that comes with that or some sort of third party confirmation.
Vanessa Grant:It's awesome, I mean that way, I mean. I'd have to drop $2,000 on a ticket because I sang for my supper.
Josh Matthews:Yeah, yeah. So I mean fair enough. And if you've already got a good presentation ready to rock, then great. You know I'll be doing a session out at Florida Dream and Fred, you've got a session there, right, what's? Your topic on Is it the session you did in the Midwest?
Fred Cadena:I mean, it's an evolution of it. So it's still on leveraging General AI to make your Salesforce solutions better. But you know the technology has moved a lot in the four months between Midwest Dream and Florida Dream and so if you wait to see me at Midwest Dream, it'll be a different session in Florida.
Josh Matthews:Yeah, yeah. Do you guys think that when people go to Dreamforce and by the way, I'm going to, I'll just tell everyone my session it's going to be sales negotiating skills for Salesforce professionals. So that's what it is and that's like that's the kind of stuff. I could talk about that stuff all day long. So putting that together I don't think it's going to be too difficult.
Josh Matthews:Practicing is always, you know, time intensive, but I don't think it's going to be too difficult for me to put that together. But, boy, it's so much easier when you run at once, and so if I go to another Dream and Event or even DF next year, then it's already done, you know, and then, yeah, it saves two grand. That's great. I'm kind of curious how many people here think people are going to Dreamforce to get a general sense of the way and the direction technology is moving and to understand sort of a handful of the potential of certain products or the potential of certain technologies, versus I'm going there specifically so I can learn how to do this one thing and bring it back to my office. What do you guys think?
Vanessa Grant:When I was internal I mean when I started my Salesforce journey I was a product owner for a small team at a SaaS organization. For the first seven years of my Salesforce career I went to Dreamforce twice in that capacity and that's all I did, okay.
Josh Matthews:What about you, Fred?
Fred Cadena:You know, I think it's a little bit of both hand Again, like taking those of us that are like Salesforce consultants and ISVs and those out of the mix. But on the pure customer side, most people that I talked to have a couple of very specific things features, new products, whatever they want to deep dive on, and then kind of this, like you know, chinese menu of here's another dozen things that I'd like to try to get a little bit of knowledge about. That's typically what I've seen in people that grab them and are really trying to get the most out of the education, and the vendors too, and the experts.
Josh Matthews:Okay, all right. Yeah, I mean, look, if I had a final thought on it, not the final thought on the show, but final thought for me, it's just that this stuff's so new, you know, it's just so new, and I think people get all excited and ambitious when they're going to do their session. The fact is, is the 40, what? Was it 40,000 people that went to 45,000 people, or was it 25,000?
Vanessa Grant:I think it was like 40,000.
Josh Matthews:Yeah, like 40,000 people, right, like out of it's not 40,000 experts showing up, it's not. It's not a thousand expert presenters either. We know that because we covered that three sessions ago with Janet, with Janet Elliott, right, a lot of these folks. And look, I've gone to a ton of different sessions, particularly at dream and events, versus dream force events, and some of them are spot on and some of them I just think, man, a 400 word blog would have been fine, right, I don't know what you guys think, but I really think it's like oh okay, you know, cool, this was live, I got to meet you. The thing I'm usually most curious about a presenter is like can I get one little bit of information and can I go say hi, can I make a relationship out of this? But I'm a recruiter.
Fred Cadena:And it's funny, it's one thing that I had on my to-do list and I still haven't done. But those of you that were dreamporers and still have the event app they were recording everything, or at least they were taking in and transcribing everything for hearing impaired, which was awesome, and we're there. You saw them in front of the room, but I think they used that same feed to generate these AI summaries and they were in the app and I meant to go back because there were a lot of sessions I didn't get to and I wanted to see to your point, Josh, about could this have been a 400 word blog? How many of those sessions that I went to could I get the meat from those AI summaries? So I haven't done that yet, but that's on my to-do list.
Josh Matthews:Yeah, I think there was something like. I just got the email today and it might have been the second one, because I don't know but they're setting some stuff out which is 250 plus. Episodes of Epic Learning are waiting for you on Salesforce Plus. Are those dreamforce sessions they're talking about? I think that's what that is.
Vanessa Grant:Yeah, I think it's a lot of the keynotes, especially for industries or products like roadmap things. I think, it's like the official Salesforce sessions.
Josh Matthews:Okay, yeah, yeah. Well, I don't know, vanessa. I just think AI is really new and some people fake it until they make it, and other people fake it and fall in their face, and it sounds like some of these folks just fell in their face.
Vanessa Grant:Yeah, like I said, I just get concerned and, if anything, I would consider this kind of a PSA to just make sure that you're vetting whatever information it is that you're seeing, make sure that it's from a trusted resource and find a couple sources that agree with it, especially with something that's new.
Josh Matthews:Yeah For sure. Like you don't want to put 200 hours of work into getting something set up, only to find out that you've just engineered this whole thing to spit out terrible information. That's the one thing you don't want. So, of course, everybody test, vet and verify and double check, and, to your point, I think that Dreamforce should do that. I just don't, I just, you know, and I can't speak for them. I just don't see them doing that, right.
Josh Matthews:But I'm with you, fred, I'd love to see fewer sessions, bigger crowds, because it's hard to have like 45,000 people. What do we have in common? Let's face it Foo Fighters, right, like that's the, that's the session that we almost all of us have in common was the Foo Fighters session. You know, I don't think I even got to most of the keynote. So you know, having fewer sessions means more common knowledge being shared, right? You know, cut the sessions in half or by a third or something like that, and then have bigger, bigger things going on. So any other thoughts on it, vanessa? I mean any other perspective on this before we move on to the primary topic today?
Vanessa Grant:No, I just wanted to get that off my chest now that we're a couple of weeks away and I guess I don't want to sound like a complete jerk, but being like, oh yeah, look, I got to speak at Dreamforce and I think you know half of it was, you know, questionable. But like a couple of weeks out, I'm like, okay, let's let me bring it up.
Josh Matthews:Yeah, look, when you get to scale right, dreamforce is basically going to become the internet. Like, you have to verify the information that you're getting. There's just too many people that aren't checked without editors. This is what you know. This is why I mean at least I don't know about nowadays but newsrooms used to have editors, believe it or not, and they used to make sure that it was just the facts in the news. They don't do that anymore.
Josh Matthews:Everything's editorialized, but you know that's how it used to be, and you can't do that with bloggers. You know everyone's got editorializing, giving their opinion, and you and I, vanessa, we spoke about some of this. You know, like someone, that we know that's really kind of positions themselves as an expert on AI, and even that's questionable. So we do see this right. They're called posers. Just call them what they are. They're called posers, and so you got to watch out for the posers. And how do you do that? Well, you listen to this show and we'll set you straight. How about that? Or just call Vanessa late at night and ask her. You can do that too.
Vanessa Grant:Well, actually you're kind of touching on some of my material here already, Josh, so it might be a good segue.
Josh Matthews:I think it is hey, real quick. Since we're getting close to the top of the hour, I thought I'd just share real quick a few jobs that we've got open right now. So we have at thesalesforcerecruitercom we have an awesome Salesforce architect position. We just signed the new client today. We hung out with them at Dreamforce. These are wonderful folks. It's a fully remote job, it pays well and you'll get to work with a singular primary client, at least to start with, and you know them and you probably like them.
Josh Matthews:This is a worldwide brand name entertainment company that you would get to support through this organization. They're looking for someone who can bring some leadership to the team. It's about 15 people in the practice and about five people dedicated to this one client. But ideally they're looking for someone who can come in get a lay of the land. Don't walk in, mr or Mrs Bossypants, just come in and read the situation and get a sense of it and then, over time, begin to share your expertise until everyone's looking at you for the answers and now you're full blown Mr or Mrs or Ms or Ms or they or whatever architect. And I think it's a great company. I think the world of the owner, I think the world of the CEO. These are wonderful people and I'd stick my neck out for them.
Josh Matthews:We also have a couple of new positions coming down the pie. These should be coming down next week which is a BA go figure, a BA. Finally, we don't place a lot of BA's, so I'm looking forward to supporting this role. It's sort of a BA slash lead consultant, ba slash junior, someone sort of on their way to solution architects somewhere in there, about 150 K or something like that. So not a 200 K job, not 120 K job. And then we've also got just a good, steady, solid, advanced admin slash configuration pro, or what I call the no code pro, who can come in this is probably 120 to 130, 135 K to help build out some of the awesome stuff that they're doing for one of their primary clients.
Josh Matthews:So those are coming down the road. We also have an account executive role with a client and a few other things. So you can always check out the salesforcerecruitercom. Another announcement we have a brand new website. Now we've got about 50 or 100 tickets left to get this thing spicking, span and the expand exchange looking, feeling, running smoothly, all of that stuff, but it's new. Visit, check it out and give us feedback. You can give the feedback directly to me, you can share it with Steven Gregor, who's on the show right now listening. So definitely check out the new website and then, beyond that, I would just say let's rock, vanessa, it's your floor.
Vanessa Grant:All right, so I did a session at Dreamforce. It ended up being the last session of Dreamforce because the lights came on. It was one of those you know you don't have to go home, but you can't stay here, kind of moments.
Josh Matthews:That reminds me of finishing a marathon pretty much last. They were like they were. The police were pulling the barricades and I'm like no MF or I'm still running here and bleeding all over the place.
Vanessa Grant:Well, actually, I was transitioning from two sessions. I had two sessions back to back, one at three, at 3030, and I had to go down the escalator to get to my last session and all the like Salesforce employees were lined up to make us leave the building, and I had to like elbow through and be like no, no, I have one more session, guys, you have to let me back in the building. So yeah, I do. I do feel that. So my session was called find your place in the Salesforce ecosystem, and basically was touching on some of the obstacles and sort of the plan that I laid out in order to figure out where you belong.
Vanessa Grant:There are a lot of different roles in the Salesforce ecosystem. I really truly believe that there is a place for everybody on these Salesforce projects. You can't just deliver Salesforce with just technical resources. You know. You do need soft skills, you do need people who can communicate, you do need people who can do project management, and so it can be a little overwhelming at first, and so I figured I would bring some of my tips and tricks here. The first thing that I touched on, though, with everyone was first acknowledging that, if you are listening to this show, if you went to Dreamforce, you were already on the path, so I think a lot of folks start off going how do I get started If you are actually accessing resources? You're already there and it is important to acknowledge where you are. First and foremost, congrats, you've started on the path. But the next thing I would like to do is just real quick.
Josh Matthews:I just want to be like yes, I just want to like put an exclamation point on that. Right, yeah, that's so cool. Like people come up, people message me, say on LinkedIn hey, Josh, I'm looking for help, what's something I can do to help my career, whatever? I'm like well, you're already doing it. You're reaching out to experts and seeking their advice. Well, keep doing that. So I love that point.
Vanessa Grant:Absolutely, and, as I talked through some of this stuff, please feel free to chime in. This is not comprehensive. This is just my own experience and there's nothing set in stone here, so I'd love to hear from folks that are on our panel today If there's anything else that you would add. Jeanine actually was there for the session live. I'll have some thoughts on it, but the first thing I covered, though, was that there are some obstacles to look for while you're on the path, things that could actually block your path, and I wanted to also acknowledge those before I got into kind of the process. The big obstacles that I pointed out was the first one being you don't know what you don't know, and the story that I shared with that was when I started moving into a Salesforce career. I initially thought I'm not technical enough for this.
Vanessa Grant:I had managed a team but they were all developers and administrators and I just thought maybe there's just not a spot for me in a Salesforce career. And then I got sat next to I was doing like some consulting and somebody sat me next to the IT business analyst and I asked her oh, what's a business analyst? And I just never heard the words before. So having an understanding of vocabulary, job roles and even product offerings and starting there is really important, because if you don't actually know what's out there, you can't actually dig into it further. So first obstacle is you don't know what. You don't know Any thoughts.
Josh Matthews:Yeah, learn the language right, Learn the colloquialisms, understand the glossary of Salesforce and there is one, by the way. You can Google Salesforce glossary of terms and you'll find it. So that's really important. It's a great point.
Vanessa Grant:And I think it also extends beyond Salesforce. There's products, there's job roles, but it's also agile. So much of Salesforce is agile project delivery. So Googling what is scrum? My whole career started when I Googled Salesforce business analyst because I didn't even know that was a role that existed before, but it set me on a path. So big obstacle is just acknowledging that there's probably a lot you don't know and starting to get the words together to start researching. Next obstacle that I threw out and you touched on this a little earlier, josh is noise. So when we're talking about noise, I'm talking about chat GPT posts. People are just kind of I just need to post on LinkedIn, so I'm going to use chat GPT just so I have some content on my LinkedIn feed People posting old news. So going into old blogs that probably have old information, and also attention seekers those kind of more click baity folks that maybe are not the resources you should be looking to in order to expand your Salesforce knowledge and dig into the types of careers that are available in Salesforce.
Josh Matthews:Three things they don't want you to know. It's like who's they and what are you talking about? Yeah, I'm with you. I'm not a fan of the click bait stuff or the look. It starts in middle school and sometimes it doesn't end until they're in the grave, this like living by likes thing. So yeah, you got me there.
Janeen Marquardt:Yeah, actually, vanessa, on your first point, the whole you don't know what you don't know thing is actually a really good point and not even realizing the whole technical thing. I think a lot of people go into Salesforce and they're like I have to get my admin cert and I have to be technical and I have to know everything about Salesforce in order to have the Salesforce career. But if you want to be a project manager, for example, you might not need to get your admin cert. You might. It depends where you work and you might be able to get that on the job.
Janeen Marquardt:But I think it does behoove somebody to do that research and try to understand what their skill set is. They may already have the skills that they need to transition into Salesforce without getting certified, for example. So it does make sense to do some research, do some informational interviews with people who are in this world, if it's something that's of interest to you. Not every role is technical. Not every role requires you to have technical certifications, and I think that we've created a weird situation where there's people who are jumping in and saying I have to get all these certifications. It doesn't necessarily make sense to do that, so just want to throw that out there. If anyone wants to talk to me about those some more, I'm very happy to have those conversations.
Vanessa Grant:I think there's it kind of and this is where I'm like cut through some of the noise. If you are just kind of paying attention to the loudest people in the room, it almost kind of feels like a lowest common denominator, like, okay, I have to get my admin certification, I have to do. The next is platform app, and there isn't necessarily the same formula for everybody, and that's where, if you understand more of what the universe looks like, so that you can see what feels good, it's better than just kind of, okay, well, these other people did this thing. I guess that's what I have to do.
Josh Matthews:Yeah, there's so much of that, right, I mean people, just if people just took a breath, take a beat, sleep on it, you know, do a little bit of research for yourself, it just it makes a world of difference Anytime someone can really pause. And I don't mean research to the point of analysis by, you know, process by analysis, because that can happen, right, definitely, can happen Absolutely. But when you're looking at something like, for instance, a BA role or a project manager role, product owner, whatever, you don't have to own the Salesforce product, you don't have to PM Salesforce projects either, right? What I love about those roles, that's just, in every tech stack, pmba, like they're in every single tech stack, and so that's transferable. What's really interesting from my perspective in the seat that I'm in right now, is I'll talk to Salesforce customers and we're starting to work with more and more Salesforce customers, not just Salesforce partners, which has been our traditional, you know, 70% to 80% of our business. So I'll talk to a new client and I'll ask them what they want. They might say and I'm not quoting my recent client who wants a BA right now, but this is an example of a typical conversation Okay, so what are you hoping to find kind of quality of trades, experiences, backgrounds, tech skills, all that stuff for this next hire and they'll say, well, I think I need a BA, but it would be really, really helpful if they had some experience in Salesforce. Now they're going to hire someone to do BA work for only Salesforce, right, and they're thinking it might be nice for them to also have some experience in that. That tells me one thing. It tells me that they're open to people who aren't familiar with Salesforce. Now, I don't recommend hiring those people. I just don't, because you don't have to right. It's like you're going to sell your house and it's 6% that you're going to have to pay the combo of realtors to part ways with. Well, you can get Jenny who sells two houses a month, or you can get Marsha Keys who does 35 houses a year, or 100 houses a year. Guess who's better? Guess who knows more people? Guess who's faster? Guess who's going to get better? Offer the one with more experience, right? So you know. But I am.
Josh Matthews:There's a this thing that you were talking about you don't know what you don't know. Same goes for the hiring managers. They often don't know what they actually need, right, and so when they don't know what they need to know but don't know, and then the candidate doesn't know what they know and then they all, like, jump in to to you know, work together. Honestly it's, they might love each other, but it's not going to be a very successful first six months. It's going to be harder to launch in general.
Josh Matthews:So you know, you've got to know what, you've got to know what you don't know, and figure that out. But you also have to when you're actually on the hunt for a job. You need to figure out what these hiring managers know and don't know, because you can offer them something really special and magnificent. Oh, did you know that I did an XYZ project that you know integrated these four different clouds and we did it in this trick way and it was amazing and it might it might mean nothing to them, right, that cool thing that you did. So you got to vet this stuff out.
Janeen Marquardt:Yeah, but again, depending on the role you're playing, I would rather get somebody who has business analysis experience and I can teach them Salesforce. Then get somebody who has a Salesforce certification but no business analysis skills, because Salesforce is actually easier to teach. If you don't have any business analysis experience, I'm not going to hire you. I don't care if you've got a Salesforce certification. That's useless to me.
Josh Matthews:Yeah, Vanessa's throwing up a hundred percent sign for those who aren't aren't live right now. I really agree. Great points, Vanessa.
Vanessa Grant:So the last obstacle that I threw out was fear and limiting beliefs. I think and, man, you know, salesforce is not great at this because they've got their whole marketing vehicle with you know the MVPs and the Golden Hoodies and I think that there's a real danger of putting people on pedestals when the reality is we're, all, you know, human beings underneath. You know the trailblazer hoodies, and it's so important to be able to connect with people in this industry just because there is so much you don't know. Even if you're 10 years in, there's still going to be a lot you don't know.
Vanessa Grant:And my personal belief is that it is a lot easier to ask your friends for help when you connect with people on a human level than it is to ask people for help when you put them on pedestals. And, man, almost every conference, I get a tweet like a week or two later that's like oh, I saw you at such and such conference, but I was afraid to say hi, like, if, like, don't make decisions out of fears. Basically what I'm saying like you don't, you know, you want to address it, you want to run towards it and it actually I would say maybe the fear might be your best vehicle for finding your passion. I mean, we talk about me being freaked out about doing speaking sessions. I still shake when we do this podcast, josh, believe it or not, like I still start off the first thing.
Josh Matthews:Are you freaking, kidding me? No, I forgot, are you for real. You are the. You're hysterical, you're killing me, you get nervous coming up here. It's like us and our friends.
Vanessa Grant:I know.
Josh Matthews:That's so funny and you're so chill and relaxed. No one knows.
Vanessa Grant:I don't, but I don't let it stop me as the point you know it's the you can acknowledge that, that you're, that we're worried about things, but don't let those things limit you. Don't put people on pedestals, don't say I can't do that or that's too hard, like. Don't let that stop you.
Josh Matthews:Yeah, yeah, you got to do it. And every time you do it, I mean it gets a little bit easier. And even if it doesn't, I mean I've heard stories of actors and musicians who like to this day, puke before they get up on stage, like every show, like it's part of their ritual. Do you guys remember that movie? Any given Sunday it had Al Pacino, jamie Foxx, great movie, yeah, great movie. Cameron Diaz was sort of the nasty new owner and I think it was Jamie Foxx's character always puke right before he took the field right Like it was, and it became a joke, like a meme or something like that. So you know, it's okay, it's.
Josh Matthews:I liken this stuff to like go into the gym even when you don't want to, right. If you, just if everybody in their life just did the things that they want for the most part, for the most part they'd be destitute, right. It's only the. Every time you look at someone at a high level, someone who's had to whatever level you want to measure it by right, it just doesn't matter but in your eyes has achieved some level of success. What you're looking at is someone who either, you know, was a member of the Lucky Spurrem Club and just like had gotten born into a bunch of money and tons of opportunity and all these things. That doesn't mean that they're not a good person, right, and that doesn't mean that they didn't work hard, but chances are.
Josh Matthews:Whoever you're looking at, who's really successful. Two things that they've got. One they're smart. Like you can't get around that. That's the level of ability, capacity that they have the ability to learn, the ability to remember and the ability to synthesize that information to make good decisions. But the other quality that they have is they did things that were scary. They did things they were afraid of.
Josh Matthews:Some people have a lot of fear. Some people have very little fear. It doesn't matter. Whatever you're giving it's like and this is all scientific guys Like. Our capacity for joy as individuals is limited. It's a genetic quality. Everybody's got a friend who's like so chill and even kill. You can't tell if they're having the best day of their life or the worst day of their life unless they tell you, because their range of emotion, the depth with which they feel it, is a thin bandwidth. Let's call it 10% out of 100. Other people I know Casey's one of them, by the way who has a capacity for joy that I'm jealous of like, truly like, envious of right. It's just how it is. People have these different levels and the same thing goes with fear.
Josh Matthews:But you must do the things that you're afraid of or they will always keep you down. The longer you wait we talked about this about four months ago, about how time feeds fear, right the longer you wait to do the thing that you're afraid of, the more you're feeding into that fear and making that thing that you're afraid of bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger, until it's just like it feels like you can't do it. This is the. This is a procrastination, but not really. It's paralysis. You put something off so long you fed fear for so long. There's no way you can overcome this stuff. You know what I mean. So to Vanessa's point, and I think it's a great point. I love that you brought this up in your session. I love that you're bringing it up now. Do the things that you're afraid of, and I'm not just saying go bungee jumping, I'm saying talk to strangers. Here's one smile at people, smile at strangers, try that one on.
Vanessa Grant:Yeah, and you know what the story that I told for this particular one was that I had and I talked about it earlier in the year, but I had dinner last not this last stream force, but the year before with Susanna, who's like the lead architect of Angelist ad sales force. She runs the architect keynote. I don't know the first thing about technical architecture, but we connected on a human level and talked about our backgrounds and my mom's Colombian and her mom's Colombian, but she was adopted so she'd never met her mom. Next thing, you know, five months later, we're both taking a trip to Colombia and reuniting her with her mom and, like, that is my friend now.
Vanessa Grant:That is somebody I've connected with on a human level and she knows so much Salesforce stuff too. It's just so much easier to reach out and say hey, like, yes, we talk about all these other things, but, by the way, do you know, is there an update on this thing? Okay, cool, like it is connecting with people, not just because you want something from them, but also connecting with people on a human level, because, at the end of the day, the thing that we all have in common is we're all human beings and we're all fallible. We're all different, we're all interesting.
Josh Matthews:I don't know about that. I know some pretty uninteresting people.
Vanessa Grant:Well, they're just not authentic enough, is the problem.
Josh Matthews:Maybe that's what it is. Maybe that's what it is. Yeah, it could be.
Jason Zeikowitz:Jason Could be Well. I think that's a great example right there, vanessa, about overcoming that anxiety of actually talking to someone. And I was thinking of a quote about if you're living in the future, you have anxiety. If you're living in the past, you're depressed. So you just have to be present to be peaceful.
Josh Matthews:And, buddy, I just said that like a month ago. That's from a Chinese quote that my sister sent me.
Jason Zeikowitz:I didn't know I was so cool, but no, it's okay. But I think you know, you just were present in that example, vanessa, just being present, not becoming overwhelmed by oh, what should I say to this person, but just by, you know, being present, finding that commonality, and that's what happened from there. So, as far as if you have, if people have a fear of talking to others or talking in front of a stage, just getting exposure. Getting exposure to do hard things, all right, challenge yourself to do hard things. Try to purposely get people to say no to you. So purposely try to be rejected on things. This way, you're exposing yourself to rejection. Take cold showers. Cold plunges are the latest thing, and it's all about how you talk about exposure therapy exposure therapy, exactly exposure therapy.
Jason Zeikowitz:So you're like teaching yourself how you're able to overcome challenges.
Vanessa Grant:You know, Jason, actually this brings up an interesting, an interesting story about how we met. So, Jason, do you remember?
Jason Zeikowitz:Yeah, yeah, I'm interested from your perspective.
Vanessa Grant:So I was. I really just kind of came on the scene, I would say around pandemic time and very randomly I believe it was on LinkedIn, maybe it was Clubhouse, but I think it was on LinkedIn this random guy, jason, was like hey, I'm trying to have the virtual coffees with like 200 people in the Salesforce ecosystem because I'm just starting my journey. Do you have 15 minutes to like have a cup of coffee virtually? And that is how Jason and I met. And now he's here.
Josh Matthews:How can you not love this guy? Honest to God, jason's a special guy like for real. We just like I love that.
Jason Zeikowitz:You have to play the numbers and you have to be patiently, positively persistent. So I pretty much I just treated myself like a CEO of my own company and the CMO and I sent those messages out to many, many people and about like one third of them responded and one third of those people set up a coffee with me. So I just played the numbers and eventually got my hundreds of coffee chats and from those coffee chats it was interesting because at first I was in awe of the people I was talking to and eventually people were who I was chatting with were saying well, I don't know if I'm qualified to talk to you because I just I'm just starting with the ecosystem. Like, well, I'm just starting too. And by me having conversations it was boosting my own confidence by realizing, as, as we've talked about in the show, wherever you are in your journey you're on day one, someone's at day zero start talking about it.
Josh Matthews:Exactly. You know, I did the same thing, jason, except my goal was to talk to five people, 200 people. Man, that's bold, I love it, and I did the math real quick. That's 50 hours. 50 hours of conversations with 200 people, good for you.
Vanessa Grant:And he was memorable for sure, of course.
Josh Matthews:Of course.
Vanessa Grant:All right, I'm going to move into the action plan. The action plan had five steps in it. The first one and I'll touch on this is to get focused. So you know how do you find out who you want to be? What's your first bit of research going to be? So think of things about like what do you like? What sounds cool? Do some research on products, roles, tasks, industries, learn the vocabulary, words, and also be open to where this takes you, because it can evolve as you learn and experience new things.
Vanessa Grant:You know it is a continuous learning journey and I think the big takeaway is that you're not beholden to others' views of you, including your own, and with every one of my action steps I had a do and a don't. So the do forget focused. My big takeaway for everybody in the audience was to get on the app exchange. So I always talk about getting on the app exchange. The app exchange is you're going to find every consulting partner and every ISV that partners with Salesforce. You can filter by industry, you can filter by location and you can really start researching companies.
Josh Matthews:And by rating.
Vanessa Grant:Yeah, and well, forget the rating.
Josh Matthews:I know it was a joke. It's an ongoing joke here. I know it's like a running joke at the show. We don't have guns at a jump in today, yeah.
Vanessa Grant:But it's really starting to look at what companies are doing in the Salesforce ecosystem. So the app exchange is a great place to go. You know, I mean to date myself is kind of like yellow pages, but it's a great spot to start your research. I also think it's a good spot to start maybe earmarking companies that you might be interested in working for in the future, especially if you're possibly interested in consulting or, you know, if there are certain industries that you're focused on. I also think that Trailhead has a good spot if you go onto it, called Career Paths, which is a good. It's not comprehensive, but it's a really great start to start understanding some of the most popular career paths in the Salesforce ecosystem.
Josh Matthews:So those are my. Yeah, it's pretty cute too. It's kind of cute how that whole system is put together.
Vanessa Grant:I think yeah, and my thing don't forget focused, don't do what I did, which is, as soon as somebody says something cool, all of a sudden you're dropping money on classes and things that you probably shouldn't be committing to at this early point. So my first example was somebody's like hey, I just started a marketing cloud class and I'm charging a hundred bucks a month for it, and I was like that sounds cool, I'll buy it. And then all of a sudden, you know I'm $500 in it. Never taken a class before, it was all self-study. And I'm like what am I doing here? You know, there was just so much to learn that I didn't laser in on my focus on the things that I should have been doing. I was trying to do too many cool things at once because when you do start digging in, there can be a lot of distractions. So prioritize focus.
Jason Zeikowitz:Yes, and I want to jump in as far as like saying the reason why I'm so enthusiastic about informational interviews because you have to start with the end in mind. So, before you start learning everything, get that survey about what's out there. So that's what I was doing about informational interviews. The Salesforce seems like a thing. Is it real? Is it a cult? It seems like a cult. Okay, it is, but it's cool, and so that's why, from those informational interviews, I was able to get as like get the best type of quality research as I could firsthand experience.
Josh Matthews:I think a lot of this is like be curious and be suspicious, right, like, you get to be both. There's nothing wrong with having like being both. Right, it's street smarts, right? Is this a good use of my time? What in to both your points Like what do I expect to get out of this at the end If I spent my time somewhere else doing something differently? Will that impact in a more positive way to accelerate my learning, my knowledge, my decision making, my career, all of these things? It's?
Josh Matthews:We talked about economies a couple of sessions ago, two, three sessions ago. Right, like how we're always in an economy, whether we know it or not. Right, like, if you own a house, you're actually in the rental market economy. You're just not making any money on it because you live in the house, but you're still in that that economy. So it's the same idea. It's like you have everyone's got as many days, as many minutes, as many hours as everyone until they die, right, and so how are you going to use that and what's the benefit?
Josh Matthews:So this is about being really efficient and I would almost go so far for certain people not everybody, but there are certain people, I would say the highly distractible, the highly influenced. You guys know who you are, right. The easily sold to, the gullible right Must take the reins of this wild horse like you just have to, and you must be ruthless with it, because your horse bucks more than the average horse If that's sort of your MO, their positive qualities to being that slightly easily distractible or easily sold to or, you know, overly curious, to the point where you know you're just like a really dull Swiss army knife and no tool really works that great Right, like you can do that. You can be a dilaton, I think it's a good word to use. But you must be ruthless with your attention. And when you look at all of the successful people that you know either through their own fame, you know, you see them on the news, you see them on stage or you read about them in the paper. They're wealthy, they're successful, they've achieved, you know, high levels of things. You're wealthy you could be the Pope still a high level of achievement, right. But every single one of those people was ruthless in what they focused on. They had boundaries and barriers. They think of the racehorse that's got the blinders on so it doesn't pull them off their line, right? So just do that. So how do you do that? How do you get ruthless? And I would.
Josh Matthews:I would posit that the first thing that you have to do is get really good at saying no to yourself, and then you've got to get really good at saying no to other people. No, I'm not going to jump on YouTube shorts and waste away the next four hours. You could say that to yourself. I've had to tell myself that more than once, right or no, I'm not. I just did this recently.
Josh Matthews:For years I was doing presentations for the Tech Academy out of Portland, oregon, you know, and I'd go down there, live and be anywhere from like 20 people to 200 people that I'd do a presentation for, like a career session, something like this show sort of, but live, and I love helping these folks. Can I do it right now? No, I can't. I don't have the time. I have other responsibilities. I've got other people counting on me to deliver on certain projects, certain clients, all these sorts of things, so I can't do it. I want to do it, it's fun, it gives me some sense of significance and it allows me to feel like I'm really helping a lot of people. But I have to say no because that's a Friday. I'll never get back right.
Josh Matthews:So say no to yourself, say no to other people. But to do that isn't easy, but there's a trick. I have to do this at night because I don't fall asleep very easily. I'm a bit of an insomnia, a famous insomniac. It's gotten better, and one of the things that helped me get better is I've taken a little trip to fan and cutting out coffee for my diet. Someone told this to me, I can't remember who, maybe even someone on the show. It was giving yourself permission to sleep, right. So I'll tell myself my head hits the pillow and I'll say okay, josh, you had a good day. Buddy, like you get to sleep, like you've earned this, let's get some rest now. It's okay, you can close your eyes and you can fall asleep. I actually have to tell myself that, or I won't do it. So you can give yourself permission to say no. Nothing bad's going to happen when you say no, like it's not. Anyway, that's all I got to say about that.
Vanessa Grant:Thanks, josh. Well, after you're focused, my next step in my action plan is to get connected. So you have a direction and then you want to get connected, which means get your social media feeds and email to serve you. It's not all about feeding the social media machine, it's also about getting from the social media machine. So what I mean by that is start connecting with people on LinkedIn so you could do it the way Jason did.
Vanessa Grant:The way I did it was I started connecting with people that had Salesforce in their bios, but I focused on MVPs. So there's actually a whole page on Trailhead that's a directory of Salesforce MVPs and a whole of Fame members, and you can even filter by their region. You can filter by their products that their specialists at. I also looked up Salesforce Champions. I looked up Salesforce X20 certifications because I figured that they would probably be enthusiastic about Salesforce. Sometimes I think connecting with local professionals is really important because they'll know of any local activities, recruiters and even non-Salesforce people. So a lot of times in the beginning of my journey, I ended up connecting with people that were good at LinkedIn optimization or good at Agile and project management and, of course, just IT business analysts, since that's where I wanted to focus my career.
Vanessa Grant:The other thing I would say as far as getting connected is finding those events and the local community groups.
Vanessa Grant:So if you go to, if you do a search for Trailblazer community groups, you should be able to find, hopefully, something local to you. But if not, there's also a Salesforce events calendar where you can see not only TDX and Dreamforce but also the Dreamin' events. I literally never heard of a Dreamin' event until I ran into Eric Drashfield on Clubhouse one day and he's like hey, do you want to have virtual coffee? I can tell you a little bit about the community and I was like fantastic. And next thing, you know, I know all about Dreamin' events. But getting connected to others in the community via LinkedIn, via your email. So if you want to go onto the Trailblazer community boards and start signing up for any updates to those boards, if there's topics that you're interested in, but start getting your LinkedIn feed to start serving you so you can see what's going on in your area, see what's going on that you might be, that might be worth going to so that you can expand your learning.
Josh Matthews:That's it, vanessa. I love that. Listen everybody, anyone who's listening right now. You get to choose who you're connected with, right, you got to be real careful. I don't know if you guys remember like going to a brand new high school or middle school or something like that, or even a new job in your 20s Everybody. This sort of thing happens more in your 20s, early 30s, when you join the company or you join the high school. Someone reaches out and you make a new friend and within about I don't know two weeks or a month, maybe even two months, you realize this is not the friend for you. Like this person is going to drag you down their sewer rat in business. Do you guys know what that means? A sewer rat?
Vanessa Grant:I grew up in New York, so yes, Okay, all right.
Josh Matthews:So someone who's just going to bring you down, somebody who just wants someone to bitch and complain and wants them on their side, right? Misery loves company and oftentimes the people who will reach out first aren't always, like you know, the like Reese Witherspoon from election movie. That's a dumb reference, but they're not like these happy, awesome, bubbly people who just can't wait to, you know, meet new people and help others. A lot of times, there's people who are miserable, that are looking for connection, and so you got to be careful who your first connections are, and I love this idea of checking out the MVP list. It's easy to get to trailheadsalesforcecom and you can even go forward, slash hashtag need and then reach out to these folks because they're connected and there's some third party confirmation that these are good people. Right, so they're already proven.
Vanessa Grant:Absolutely, and also by being connected to the thought leaders. Your LinkedIn feed all of a sudden is going to have all the latest Salesforce news. It's going to have all the latest Salesforce events and the things that come out of those events. That's where I think the big value is is how do you cut through the noise and find the thought leaders who are really on top of what's going on in the Salesforce ecosystem, so that you can start being on top of what's in the Salesforce ecosystem?
Jason Zeikowitz:And also want to call out that those people may be vet. You're not yet, so you don't know if they're going to be accepting your invitation request and also remember you. So another reason I was remembered I've been that says I make notes, I send messages using that LinkedIn feed as my CRM feed. It helps me, my future self and the person I'm talking to. So sending a note letting them know hey, I'm interested in Salesforce as you've been successful in your Salesforce career and I'd love to learn your lessons and I'd love to hear your advice for someone in my shoes and that's in the thank you note after the chats. This way it's a reminder for them, but also it's a way to have your own and I natural intelligence, make a summary of that conversation and it helps you better remember that information and get key insights as you're forming information.
Josh Matthews:It does and you can go one step further. And that's just a set of reminder. 30 days out, 60 days out, and however you want to do it, you can just put a little to do on your calendar, call Gilmart, whatever, but follow up because you can make all these. Some people are really good at being the point at the end of the stick. They love meeting new people and they're terrible at maintaining relationships. Don't be that person. You're trying to cultivate something here, Right, it's like I don't know if anyone's ever done like their own starter yeast or something. Well, you got to feed that baby or it's not going to work. And then there's no bread, so you want your bread. You got to feed the. You got to feed the Scooby.
Vanessa Grant:Yeah, I had that pandemic hobby as well.
Josh Matthews:Okay, it is a pandemic hobby. It's too funny.
Vanessa Grant:The one thing I did note, though, was that there are some don'ts with connecting with people on LinkedIn. One is you don't want to get banned by LinkedIn by making too many connections over the course of a week. I think LinkedIn has a limit of like a hundred during the course of a week but you don't want LinkedIn to block you and think that you're a bot. But I also have noted and it's surprising to me how many people do this. But they see that there's this LinkedIn feature called content creator, and they'll turn it on so that people can only follow them, but then it inhibits people from actually sending connection requests. And there is something about the LinkedIn algorithm where, once you hit about 500 connections, you do become a little bit more visible in people's feeds. So I would make sure that, especially if you're just getting into it, you don't want to be listed as a content creator unless you're actually a content creator of some sort.
Josh Matthews:That's right. Or, and you know, I would say there's no need to switch to it until you're well over 5,000 connections. I don't think most people are going to get to 5,000 connections in their lifetime. On LinkedIn, Most people aren't Right. Some people have, like you know, Jordan's got an incredible number of followers, but it's an easy way to get people to accept without having to see other people's feeds Right, so that's why they do it, so people can follow you. But you don't necessarily have to interact and have connection. You just click on a button. Anyone can just follow you and it's easy. So I'm a follow. You know I'm a content creator and so my thing says follow. But, Vanessa, do you want to tell them how they can connect with someone instead of just clicking follow on LinkedIn?
Vanessa Grant:If you do see somebody that has followed there, there should be like the three dots which will or I know sorry, it says more Sorry. If you click the more button, it'll give you the option to connect with them or send them a connection request.
Josh Matthews:Yep, so you can just connect. You can still do it. Anyone that you're following you can still reach out to connect. Usually, what I'm seeing, you know, I don't know what it works out to, but I mean I have some days where, like you know, it's rare, but some days no one's trying to send me an invite. Some days I wake up and there's like 60 in there, right. So the more content you create, the more people are going to follow you. But the majority of people who are trying to connect with me, it'll say that they already follow me, right? So the cool thing about the follow is that people can like is this someone I really want to connect with? And you've kind of watched them for a little bit? And then, if it seems like it could be a valuable relationship, and then you can go ahead and extend.
Josh Matthews:The one thing that I will say I just want to get this in here because I see this all the time, and no offense to my friends from India, but most of them, I see this only from Indians, okay, and I think it's just a normal thing in India, but I see it here and I find it very annoying. I'm just going to say it right now I'm going to get it off my chest, whether you like it or not. Don't just say hi, josh, or don't say hi Vanessa. It's like, yeah, and who are you? What is this all about? What do you need from me? Like, don't make me say hi. How are you? Like I'm not going to do it Right, like I'm just not going to do it.
Fred Cadena:So we're all ugly. Even worse, which is my. I was going to say don't just send a blind connection request to somebody that you don't know like.
Josh Matthews:Personalize it, put a reason in there for me to want to connect with you, yeah, yeah, it's like when I'm looking at who I'm accepting and I only accept about half the people who reach out just because I like my feed, nice and lean, right, I want to be. When I put a message out, I want it to go out 100% to the people who need that information. Okay, so I'm generally not connected with people outside of Salesforce. There's a handful, maybe some recruiters and things like that and some hiring managers, but for the most part these are. You know, I'm looking first thing.
Josh Matthews:Is it obvious that you're a Salesforce pro? Does it say it in your little byline under your picture? Or did you write a message that says hi, I'm interested in Salesforce, or something like that? You don't have to be a Salesforce pro. If you're curious about Salesforce or you're telling me that you're getting into it, sure you can follow me. I'll follow you back. It's all good, right? No problem. But if I can't tell that you're a Salesforce professional, I'm assuming you're trying to sell me something and I don't really want to buy anything. I don't need it. So tell me right.
Vanessa Grant:I will say so. Sorry, fred, I actually do the other way around For the most part. Unless it's somebody that I truly do want to be connected to like that, you know, I have maybe I've seen them speak or I attended one of their webinars or read their blog I usually won't personalize it Me. I'm kind of more of the shotgun approach, because if I see that they have Salesforce, I think that headline is important but I really just kind of accept anybody at this point and then just kind of unfollow people if I see on my feed that they're not really adding anything to it. That's usually the approach that I go, just because for me, the idea of writing a 250-character intro for like every single connection I send and I still send probably I don't know, at this it's less these days, but like when I'm on LinkedIn regularly, I'll usually send about 10 requests a day and just send it. If they don't respond, then I don't necessarily care at this point.
Josh Matthews:There's another million people right.
Vanessa Grant:Yeah, but I will say in the beginning, it is more important that you are a bit more diligent about who you're connecting with so that you can get access to the right information.
Josh Matthews:Agreed. I think content creators, people who give presentations or podcasts, right, blogs or particularly active running a business can get away with it right. So you've got 12,000 followers, you can get away with it. People are going to just see, like I just pulled you up, vanessa, do you want it without looking? Do you want to guess how many mutual connections we have?
Vanessa Grant:I'm going to say probably 500 something.
Josh Matthews:It's 1,143. Wow, and what's crazy about that is that means that you've got about 10,000 people that you're connected with. That are probably good, smart, active people that I'm not. That's how disparate this ecosystem. It's so widespread. You want to feel small? Go to Dreamforce like for real. It's incredible that we're not connected with 5,000 people instead of 1,000. I find that incredible.
Josh Matthews:I rarely reach out and try and connect with people on LinkedIn. If I am doing it, it always has a message 100% and more times than not, there's almost always a follow-up message if they actually accept my connection request. So you can do it in a very deliberate, determined, planned out way. That's how I do it. But I use LinkedIn for business. I'm finding candidates and I want the best of the best, and I'm finding clients and we want the best of the best. So that requires vetting lots of conversations If you're just trying to build your network, because someday you can learn something from someone, or someday maybe you guys will work together or someday maybe you'll hire them. It's just a different game. It's the same field. It's just a different. It's like playing kickball instead of baseball. You use the same field. Kickball's more fun.
Vanessa Grant:Janine, did you want to throw something in?
Janeen Marquardt:Yeah, I mean not that we haven't beaten the conversation with a dead bat or whatever or something, but I mean I think everybody has a different purpose on LinkedIn.
Janeen Marquardt:I mean, josh, you're a recruiter and people are going to reach out to you differently and et cetera. But I think in some ways, like Vanessa, I'm also a clicked coach or just a mentor, and so people come into contact with me a lot until they'll reach out to me and they'll want to connect. But I also won't accept a lot of those contacts because there's not necessarily two-way mutual value. Fine, you can follow me, I get the same content, but it doesn't help me to connect to you if you're just starting in the Salesforce ecosystem. So there's kind of an imbalance. So I try to be a little bit cautious because I don't want to expose my 2,000 connections of people who I've been working with for 30 years to people who might just be looking to market or reach out and just try to leverage you, as I'm trying to protect my connections, my true connections that I've worked with, that I've known from people who are brand new and looking for a job.
Josh Matthews:You can do that. There's a button you just click and hides everybody. You know that right Like you can just go in and set it so no one can see your connections.
Janeen Marquardt:But also part of the reason that LinkedIn is valuable is so that people let I am connected to can meet each other. So you've got to find the balance between using the network of each other so that Vanessa and Fred can find each other through me and leverage my network and leverage me to meet each other, but also then expose them to people who are just looking to find a job through me, who I don't really know, and I can't vouch for somebody who I don't really know. And so I think there's Totally, you've just got to find the right balance. And so I'm sitting on a couple hundred connection requests to people I don't really know but who've met me, because they've come to a talk I've done or a podcast or my clicked coaching or something like that, but I don't know them personally. So I think you've just got to figure out what's the right methodology for you and make sure you're kind of trying to just apply whatever principles make sense, right? So I think that it's pretty.
Janeen Marquardt:I think it's a pretty challenging question. I came up in an earlier day before these things existed, and then helped build them. So I'm wary of social media enough that I try to be cautious. I don't put my whole life out there. I use each type of social media for its given purpose and I don't post my personal life on LinkedIn and I don't post my professional life on Facebook. And yes, I'm on Facebook because I'm not old, so those kinds of things. I think it's pretty difficult to maintain those separations if you try to.
Josh Matthews:Yeah, I'll tell you. Look, this is a really good point. I'm glad you're bringing this up, jenny, because you're right and you said it the platform, it's a platform. Everyone knows what a platform is. Platform means different people are going to use it in different ways. That's all. That's practically the definition. And so, yeah, a recruiter is going to behave differently than someone who's trying to sell their life coaching right, or their fitness coaching or their whatever it is. I don't know what it is. Yeah, yeah, it's good stuff. Cool.
Josh Matthews:What else have you got there? Hey, can we just do a quick thing, because one of my friends who's on this show, she's not having the most magnificent, wonderful day ever, so can we just do this as a little crew? I thought this would be fun, and we all, everyone who's got speaker access. So that's me, fred, that's Steven, and, and, oh, jason, we're going to get you back here at it. There we go. Can we all unmute for a second? Yep, all of us. It's all on mute, okay. And on three, we're going to say love you, janine. One, two, three.
Jason Zeikowitz:Love you.
Josh Matthews:Janine, I love you, janine. There we go. Just a little love from us to you All right.
Janeen Marquardt:I appreciate that.
Josh Matthews:You got it, kid. Oh all right, that was nice.
Vanessa Grant:I don't know how to segue the presentation.
Josh Matthews:You don't know how to what.
Vanessa Grant:I don't know how to segue out of that, though, in fact, to the presentation and scene. Well, we love you, Janine. I'm excited to see you on Sunday, oh that's cool.
Josh Matthews:You guys are going to see each other when.
Vanessa Grant:Uh, I'm, uh, I'm going up, uh, to the Oakland area um, to spend a week with my new team, because I have a new job.
Josh Matthews:Fantastic. Yeah, let's do that, let's segue into that and we'll wrap up the thing and take a couple of questions.
Vanessa Grant:Okay, Cool, Um so, uh, well, I, I, I guess. How do you, how do you want to start? I started like segue off the segue, but, um have, I have three more steps on the action plan, but I know we're running out of time as well.
Josh Matthews:No, let's just crank through, let's go.
Vanessa Grant:Okay Cool, Let me just crank through and we can talk about my new job next time. Um all right.
Vanessa Grant:So, uh, first get focused. Next to get connected. My third step is get informed. Um, this is again part of that learning the vocabulary, and one of the things that I noted here is that you'll know, I think, that you're on the right path If you find yourself engaged with the content. So, like the first time I saw Ashfin again speak about digital transformation, or I saw Ian Gott speak about business analysis is like the first time. I really felt myself kind of like white, knuckling my chair and getting really excited about content, um, and the things that I was learning, whereas, um, I sat through like a mule soft presentation and I was just like, nope, this is not for me. Um, I don't think there's any don'ts on this step, because it's really just about learning more about yourself and the things that you like. I do think it's important to be able to pivot quickly, though, and then I can move on to the next day and go through that All right.
Josh Matthews:Yeah, great.
Vanessa Grant:So you're focused, you're connected, you're getting informed, your feet is serving you. The next thing is to get organized. Um, there is a lot of information and so it's going to be overwhelming, which is why I think it's really really, really important at the stage and really any stage on your continuous learning journey to get organized. Um, otherwise there is the possibility of kind of having that fear of too much, that analysis, paralysis, um. So things that I've done that have been really helpful is, um, you know, at the beginning, once you're starting to connect with all these people, you are going to be inundated with webinars and conferences and cool resources that people are sharing. I made sure to make make it really organized in my browser. So if there's any links that maybe I didn't have time to review, or if I reviewed them and thought they were really cool and might want to go back to it, I saved it in my browser.
Vanessa Grant:I also have a Google drive that I call continuous learning and I have folders there for all sorts of different topics that are Salesforce related. So roles, um, I have a folder for consulting, I have a folder for part dot, and I don't even need to necessarily need to know part dot today. But if I came across a good resource that somebody shared, I just kind of saved it on there. Um, the other thing that I recommend is getting a snagit license or some sort of license for something where you can record rep webinars or record classes.
Vanessa Grant:Um, you don't necessarily you don't want to be necessarily be sharing out any copyrighted information, but if it's something that you might not be able to review today, um, you could always let your recording kind of run in the background and save that recording for when you might need it later. So an example of that for me was as a consultant I had to implement Salesforce maps. At one point I did not have all the time to learn everything about Salesforce maps before. I had to meet with the clients and start talking through the discovery process and what they needed. But I had a whole folder at that point on all the cool resources that I had gotten on Salesforce maps that I'd never looked at. But it was really easy for me to access and certainly took a lot of the edge off as I was going through this.
Josh Matthews:Yeah, it's so smart being and being organized is. It's a skill set and it's also a gift. It can be a talent. In other words, right Like I'm not a particularly talented organizer, um, of my own files and things like that. I, you know, I need help people, I really need help. Thank God I've got it because they work for me and they help me. So there's that. So thank God for that. But the thing that I've used for well over 10 years that has helped me stay as organized as possible for sort of the free flowing brain that I've got where you know, like just absorbing a lot of stuff really quickly and then kind of forgetting about it until I need it and nothing's in the right drawer.
Josh Matthews:I use Evernote and what I love about Evernote is everything is searchable, right, and when you go to uh, let's say you go to a session, let's say you come to my session or Fred session or one of Vanessa sessions, doesn't matter, and there's a slide presentation, you can take photos of every slide and then you just dump that all into Evernote from your phone, boom, and then all of those words that are inside of photos are also.
Josh Matthews:You can find them. Right, it uses, it uses. I forget what the name of the tech is, but it's basically reading um and converting the photo to a searchable text so you can take a photo of a stop sign, put it in Evernote type in stop Guess what? You're going to get a picture of a stop sign that comes up that you put into your database. So that's a really great way to stay, stay um well informed. You know, just keep all of your notes in one place, and if you're bad at organization, because of that, the power of its search, search functionality and the ease of its use, I find it way easier than Google drive Um, all your stuff's right there. So that's what I do. If your brain's a little bit like mine, I definitely recommend checking out that product.
Vanessa Grant:And the one, but oh sorry what's that?
Jason Zeikowitz:Well, similar product is Notion. I don't think it's able to do the photo text reading capabilities. I have to check into that.
Josh Matthews:Yeah, so it's already. It's already losing. Well, I already lost the battle. Why are you bringing up stuff that's losing there?
Jason Zeikowitz:Jason, here's the advantage of Notion that I love about it is that you can be able to link records together. You can make a database in there so you can actually use it as a CRM to be able to create pages for people, and then you can be able to tie those uh records to content and then put notes in that content, and so I use it as my book list. So I go to someone recommends a book Okay, cool, let me put this in this. Something, uh, you know for me to read. Cool, I'm reading, I'm putting my notes in here, or this is presentation, this meeting it's. I have a page for that, I have a tag for who's speaking and it's all searchable as well.
Josh Matthews:There you go. So you you can do exactly the same stuff in every note, but you don't even need to tag anything, because you can just type in their name and it'll all come right up. Yeah.
Vanessa Grant:And the big thing I wanted to say about the getting organized is the thing that I where I screwed up and this was advice I'd gotten from Michelle Hansen, who's an MVP and an amazing community person, but I screwed up on this one is that when I started getting involved in the community, she told me make sure to start documenting your own accomplishments as well. I did not. I have totally lost track of things that I wrote three years ago. Uh, I, I don't know that I kept track of every speaking session I've done at this point, and so I think it's really important, as you embark on this journey, to also start tracking your own accomplishments in this ecosystem as well.
Josh Matthews:Get those it's super smart, let me. I'm just going to read something real quick so that people know what the real differences between notion and Evernote. They're both cool, interesting products, all right.
Josh Matthews:The main difference between notion and Evernote is that Evernote is a note taking tool that allows users to keep their files organized in one tool, whereas notion is an all in one project management software that helps you keep your notes and work all in one space. So it's a little bit of a different. It's a little bit different. I thought I'd just share that real quick. I used them both.
Fred Cadena:I tried. I tried to switch from Evernote to notion and to me the killer feature in Evernote is the web clipper, where you can go in and a web clip and just take the content of page and take all the ads and stuff out. Uh, notion doesn't do that. Notion has a web as a graph.
Jason Zeikowitz:It's not as good.
Fred Cadena:Okay, it's not as good, it doesn't. It doesn't do the same kind of like page scraping that Evernote does. That Evernote does, and that's why I I pay for both great apps.
Jason Zeikowitz:What I like about, hey Vanessa notion is if you listen to podcasts, there's a podcast app called sniffed SNIPD that lets you take clips of podcasts. So this wonderful podcast right here. If you want to take clips on it, you can listen to it and sniff, double, type your earbuds or press a button on the phone and it makes a clip for you and that syncs to notion in real time, uh-huh.
Josh Matthews:No, that's very cool. Nice, that's slick. And Vanessa, my um reptile brain already forgot what the last thing was that you said before I interrupted. Sorry, oh, can you say it again?
Vanessa Grant:What about, uh, about also organizing your own accomplishments? Oh, yeah, yeah.
Josh Matthews:Yeah, yeah, you know we've talked about this before, but my guess is that most people listening to this podcast have not necessarily listened to every single episode, and there's about 26, 27, 28 of them right now, so that's a lot of hours to get through. So let me just share a best practice around this. Right, you can do it every day. More likely, it makes sense to do it at least once a week, or minimally once a month. And you just go. You type up a little thing. I call it failures and accomplishments. I include the failures, people because we learned from failure and when we ignore them, we don't learn as well and we don't learn as quickly. So there's nothing wrong with with failing. Ask Michael Jordan Okay, he's got a lot to say about that how many free throws he's missed in his practice, which is a great, great story. Great other little thing. So you type in okay, what did I do wrong this month? Where did I fail? And I was doing this early on, when I started the business, and some incredible learnings came from it. Right, it's like oh, I was working with clients that were so slow to respond that, despite having 10 job orders with them, I didn't place a single person. Okay. So what were the qualities and things that happened? What were the signals that this might be this way? I typed it up. Where did I fail? Well, I didn't fire him soon enough. We do fire clients from time to time and they're not very good clients. So write down all of your failures. Where did I fail? I could have listened better. I interrupted too much this month. I did whatever. It is what, and it's usually a behavior or it could be a specific thing you did. The behaviors will encompass every. You know everything and then there's the specific results from those behaviors. Then you do your accomplishments as well. So successes, successes and failures. What did I do? Well, I closed this many deals and I reset to this many people and I, you know, helped these many people. Or I finished this project, or I wrote these flows, or I learned how to do this in marketing cloud. I had no idea how to even do it, but it was hard and I stuck with it, and then the result was I got a pat on the back for my boss and the client was really happy, and blah, blah, blah. So you get the chair like not just what the successor failure was, but who else did it impact? Who is affected by your lapse of success, of good decision making that caused a failure, right? And who did you impact by your positive decision making, good decision making that helped other people as well?
Josh Matthews:Track all that stuff. And when you get to the end of the year, it's an interesting Sunday afternoon read by friends, right to go through, because you'll be like holy shit, I can't believe how much I accomplished this year. Look at all this stuff. And, by the way, if you want to raise and you're not capturing this information, you know, if you can't remember it, your boss won't, and so when you go and walk in the door, you better have the information. You better know what you did. You better know why you're worth the 20k pay raise or whatever it is that you're asking for, right? So track that stuff Religiously.
Josh Matthews:Start now. In fact, if you're listening to this, whether you're pull over pull over your car, you know. Pull over your electric bike, right. Grab your phone, open up your calendar and schedule Sunday night 8 pm, every Sunday, or whatever you want to do successes and failures list and store it in Notion, or store it in Evernote, or store it in Google Drive, where it doesn't matter, and then set that to repeat every week. Do it now.
Josh Matthews:People Do it now. Don't say, yeah, that was neat, that's a really good idea. Screw you, it doesn't do anything if you do it like that. Sorry, look, I don't mean screw you, I just mean like it's not going to do anything to people. Okay, I'm trying to be a jerk here, but just do it. And that means do it right now.
Josh Matthews:The number one thing I ever learned from going to doing this Tony Robbins thing when I was 30 years old, which is 21 years ago, I stayed up late. I spent 200 bucks. I stayed up late 3 am. I spent the 200 bucks on the cassette tapes, got through half of them in my life changed and it was really awesome and not joking, I get changed dramatically. And the number one thing that I learned from from that cassette number one was once you make a decision to do something, do something about it right then. Don't leave the desk, don't put the phone down, don't like make the phone call, put something in the calendar, google search, like, whatever the thing is that you're oh, I want to learn piano. Great, figure that out. Block out the time to learn how to learn the piano or get on and start looking at pianos or whatever. Phone a friend who's got a piano and say can you show me a couple of things? Do something about it. Do something about it. Do it right now.
Vanessa Grant:All right, that's all I wanted to say, all right, well, I've got my last step and then that's the end of the action plan. So get so. First it's get focused, then get connected, then get informed, then get organized. Lastly, it's get social. So share, contribute, build in public, post, comment, be authentic People are very attracted to authenticity and it'll also help attract people who might share resources on your interests if you post about them.
Vanessa Grant:And it doesn't necessarily have to be LinkedIn or Twitter. It could be mentorship, but could be networking, it could be conferences. I know what you know when Q is on like Q talked to me about how she didn't feel like she was a content creator, and so I talked about my journey, how I started kind of considering myself as a content amplifier. So if I saw something that was really useful and cool along in my journey, I shared that. I thanked people publicly. You know, sharing what you're up to, what your next steps are and what you learned will also attract people who will also give you additional information along the way. So it's it's. It'll also help you document your journey to as you're going through it.
Vanessa Grant:The big thing I would say not to do is to you don't want to steal content. I think grabbing somebody's really good post and switching out a couple words is also stealing content. You don't want to be a parrot, so certainly research. If something does look interesting, make sure that it's an informed decision before you repost it and also don't be afraid to look stupid Like. Share your failures as well. You know there's somebody that might be able to learn from it. You know, one of my most popular posts like was after I had failed the service cloud certification like three times and then a video and then eventually passed and made like a comic out of it just because I was. I thought it was funny and people you know it really resonated with a lot of folks because I rescheduled the thing like 20 times in between those three failures as well. So I do think that it's helpful on your career journey and finding and getting connected with those resources when you actually build in public.
Josh Matthews:Hey Vanessa, have you thought of maybe this is such good content? I was thinking you should maybe try and get a session at Dreamforce to share this stuff.
Vanessa Grant:I closed Dreamforce with this thing.
Josh Matthews:I know, I know I'm just being funny. I love this session, man. This has been terrific and it might be a little bit tricky to follow it because I butt in a lot and we've had some tangents and stuff, but we are trying to do. You have hold on, jason, do you have slides on this, Vanessa, or anything like that you do? Are they public, like, is there a link that we can share where people can access this stuff?
Vanessa Grant:Yeah, I'm happy to share it All right, that would be cool.
Josh Matthews:Yeah, that would be cool. I think it's really awesome. I just I love this content and it's so straightforward and it's just. It's a roadmap you want to trail. Well, vanessa, just laid it out for you, everybody, everybody, and whether you're getting started or not, you could take half of these points. Whether you could be an executive in a career that you already love that just wants to get better, you can still use half of this information to get better. Jason, go ahead.
Jason Zeikowitz:Yeah, I just want to clarify one point that Vanessa made about the reposting thing.
Jason Zeikowitz:I think it's excellent Just as we're talking with invitations how you want to grow a network cautiously. You want to repost cautiously, not just like say everything, you're saying nothing. But I do want to also encourage people that reposting is a way to eventually become an awesome person, like a fraction is awesome, as Vanessa Grant is. So if you ever want to reach that awesome level, before you're a content creator, be a content curator and before that, be a content commenter and before that, be a content consumer, so be a consumer, get that information so that you're first getting the information, that you're understanding the terms, you're immersing yourself in the environment, then you can start to comment and that'll get people introduced to who you are. You're giving back, you're paying forward, you're letting them know how the information is being received, you're helping those posts and then you are reposting what you feel is relevant for your network to be able to see. As Janine was saying, you want to make sure that you have people in your network that you want that you know would be helped by this information.
Jason Zeikowitz:And then you can be competent enough to have your own words come to life.
Josh Matthews:Yep, that's the way it goes. I love this term content amplifier. I love that, vanessa. I've never heard that before, except maybe by you a few weeks ago or something like that. I think it's terrific. Guys, it's already 7 0, 5 out here on the East Coast and that means we've been chatting for an hour and a half. That's a nice, solid session. But sometimes when we have these programs, people have questions that they want answered. So I'm just going to check in with Vanessa real quick. Did you receive any questions over the past week that people wanted to answer it on the podcast?
Vanessa Grant:I do have one question.
Josh Matthews:Okay, and before we go ahead and ask that, let's just share if you're still listening to the show. If you have a question you want to answer live, we've got a few more minutes we're happy to spend some time on it. All you've got to do is raise your hand, we'll bring you to the stage and if you're feeling a little shy, you can just send a DM to Vanessa Grant and she'll read it aloud and we'll do our best to get a good response for you. All right, vanessa, go for it. What's the question there?
Vanessa Grant:All right. The question I got was I recently went through a few rounds of interviews to reach no. It's clear the candidate pool at this moment is really competitive. Any advice for weathering a tough job market?
Josh Matthews:Hmm, that's a good question. That's a good question. I mean, I've got some advice, but let's hit the panel first. Vanessa, Fred, Jason, Stephen, Janine. Any recommendations? Otherwise I'll just take it.
Vanessa Grant:I think you should just pick it, Josh.
Josh Matthews:Yeah.
Vanessa Grant:Janine.
Janeen Marquardt:Yeah, I mean, as somebody who's a candidate myself, I would say be patient and cast a wide net. Just keep interviewing. Yeah, just keep interviewing. Don't. If you think you know I'm in round four, I'm in round five, just keep interviewing, don't stop. Don't make assumptions. Be open to the possibility of ending up with multiple offers. If that's the case, great, yeah, yeah.
Josh Matthews:I think that's really good advice. Look, I mean I could probably talk for about an hour on this subject, but I'll try and keep it nice and lean, all right. So the first thing that you have to do in a competitive job market is you have to exercise your body and I'm not even joking people, I know it sounds weird, but you must exercise your body and you don't have to thrash yourself with an inch of death. But you better go on a 25 minute walk every day, like you got to do something to keep your attitude up. There's no like not having a job, or being in a job that you can't wait to get out of, or being in a job that you're not making enough money and you're just every month you're getting further and further into debt. Or maybe you have a job and you don't like your boss, and maybe you have a job and like you're just not respected, like it affects you, it will bum you out and it will be demanding and costly to your mental health. And so the first way to take care of your mental health is take care of your physical health, right, I think everybody who's on this panel and anybody's listening to this show, everybody knows someone who's going through something physically Right. Someone's got cancer. I know about three or four people that have cancer right now, right, some of them got a hard problem, some of them's parents not well, or you might just have COVID, or you might just feel sick, or you might have a bad Achilles heel, or like it doesn't matter. So taking care of your body is critical, and the proof is in the pudding. They took a number of people who were depressed and half of them didn't get anything and no one was working out right, no one was exercising. They took half these people and they put them on an exercise program. They took the other half and put them in to not physical therapy, psychology. They talked to a therapist, social worker, therapist, whatever and the results were the same. The same amount of people got better doing both things. An exercise is free, so do that. You must protect your mental health, okay.
Josh Matthews:The other thing is you have to put this stuff where it belongs, which is like we were talking before, not up on a pedestal. If I get this job, it's gonna solve all my problems. Well, that's bullshit. It's not gonna happen. You're gonna have new people. You're gonna have new challenges. You're gonna have new demands. You might have to work longer hours. The money, which seemed really great, might not seem so great six months from now or 12 months from now, as everything costs 10% more down the line, right? So don't think that this job that you're after is the panacea for all of life's ills, but it's an important thing, right? So, number one take care of your body. That consequently takes care of your mental health. I think it's the number one thing you have to do to stay in the game, right? The other thing that you have to do in a tight career, in a tight market and I don't it's tighter. I wouldn't say it's tight okay, like it's tighter than it was, but I wouldn't say it's tight okay. And I think it's a much actually average, normal, regular, balanced ecosystem right now where you can actually find some people. But finding the very best of the best is always going to be a struggle. It's still gonna be difficult.
Josh Matthews:Whoever asked this question, I wanna tell you something too congratulations If you made it three or four rounds. You really did something great there, like you did a good job. But you've got to ask yourself what did you potentially do to blow it? Now, I had a candidate, and I don't mind if he's listening to this. I doubt that he is, but I had a candidate and he blew it in the final interview. It was his to lose and he blew it.
Josh Matthews:So you've got to keep your shit together, people, right? Don't say dumb things, don't start making crazy requests until you have a signed offer. Just don't do it. Right Like. You can be authentic, you can be yourself and you can speak your mind, but you better be fricking eye on the ball for what you want.
Josh Matthews:You want the job? Well, play the interview game, and I'm not saying lie. Absolutely don't do that. Be authentic, be real, be yourself. But if you've got personality challenges, if you've got a problem with your personality, or if you've got focus challenges, right, like someone scattered all over the place, or if you've got insane demands like you wrote yourself the perfect job description and you're almost ready to get this job that meets about half those requirements.
Josh Matthews:You need the job because you don't have one. Don't go in there saying, oh and I want this and I want that and can I do this and can I do that before you've got a signed offer, because that's just stupid. So I'm just saying this because most people who don't get the job after three or four interviews. Look, they don't get it, not because someone's necessarily better than them. They get it because they drop the ball somehow somewhere. Right, like, getting a job is deep. It's a big thing, it's a huge thing.
Josh Matthews:You might not have gotten the job already simply because you didn't know that the person that you're competing with is a Golden Hoodie MVP, and they want $20,000, $30,000 less than you. Sorry, you're just gonna lose that battle. Potentially potentially not always, but more likely you probably would. Okay. So if that's not you, if you don't have all those credentials, if you don't have all of that background, if you don't have all that experience, if you're not the best communicator in the world, if you don't know how to articulate your successes, if you never recorded your successes and failures for the past year, what are you gonna have to talk about? How will you know, right, if you didn't practice your interviewing, how well do you think you're gonna do in the interview, right? So take stock, don't lose heart, but take stock. What could I have done different? And then make that decision to do it different. And then, before you do it differently, live in an interview, practice it 10 or 20 or 50 or 100 or 200 times so that you're good at it. Okay, that's the thing to do in a slightly down or tightened job market, right?
Josh Matthews:Basically, the summary is exercise, take care of your mental health, don't quit, don't give up and make sure that you're actually assessing yourself accurately. Don't beat yourself up. You're not a loser because you didn't get the offer. You're a winner because you made it two, three rounds. You can make it one round and you're still a winner. You can make it no rounds. You can be sending stuff out to 500 companies and not get a single interview right.
Josh Matthews:It doesn't mean that there's something wrong with you. It just means that there's probably something wrong with your resume, probably something wrong with your LinkedIn profile, or maybe a lot of people that I talk to that are feeling deep, deep, deep frustrations around not getting job offers or not getting interviews actually aren't applying to the jobs that they're qualified for. You gotta get back to basics. Are you even qualified for this? If not, why not? Where are the jobs that you are highly qualified? Did you try to pick something so far outside your industry that someone else is going to be the obvious choice? If you're not the obvious choice? You're obviously not going to be. It's not going to be a quick, easy hire right. So what are you applying to that? You're getting the nose on, fred. We'll kick it to you.
Fred Cadena:Yeah, no, and I think you were going in the direction I was about to take it, because the person's reference in the question one interview series where they did three or four interviews and they didn't get the role. And I guess my question or my question back would be is that one experience or is that something that's played out a dozen times, six times? And last time I was in the job market actively looking for a role was probably two years ago and I intentionally took some time off after being in an SI for four years and I really and Josh, this is when you and I first met. You know this I talked to 50 SIs. I'm not joking, I'm not exaggerating. Some of them were like one conversation and it wasn't going to be a good fit. Some of them went two or three conversations and we decided to kind of part at that point. Some of them went the distance. I ended up with three really solid offers from three great SIs, but it is a lot of work.
Fred Cadena:This is, if it's one experience where you went the distance, like you said, or like I think Vanessa said I'm not sure who, you don't know who your competition was, you could have just gotten beat out or, like Josh, you said you could have beat yourself out of it, but make sure you're casting that wide net. And the tighter the job market, the wider the net. And I'd refer also back to something Vanessa said in her presentation. That's why you build the network. You build the network so that when you're out looking for things, the best roles I've ever gotten have come from people that I've networked with. And I would say, for people that aren't this active job hunter, that are still in the passive role, now's the time to lay that groundwork.
Josh Matthews:Absolutely. I love all that, fred Guys. It's listen, let me just get empathetic for a second. I'm sorry, it's hard. I've been there. It's scary, okay, like I understand the level of fear. It feels oppressive. It's like there's a gorilla on your shoulder not a monkey, but an ape weighing you down. You don't feel all of a sudden, you don't feel like you've got control over your career. So what do you start doing? You exert your control elsewhere. You start controlling your children. You start controlling your partner or your spouse. You start being snippy to cashiers, like it's a bad road. Don't go down that right.
Josh Matthews:Happiness comes from gratitude. So take stock of what you have been able to accomplish and give thanks, whether that's to yourself or to your family or to a higher power, if you believe in that Right. Give thanks and have gratitude and get ready for the next one. Okay, let it go. Learn something, move on, keep going, keep going. You know Stephanie, who's on our show a lot, vanessa, right, like what did it take her? Like a year? Oh yeah, she ended her first thing but she didn't quit.
Vanessa Grant:Yeah, I was actually gonna throw in a little trick that my friend Payman Lumb taught me as far as keeping up that positive attitude and kind of coming from a place of gratitude for the things that you have. So she created a WhatsApp group for me. It was just me and her and she called it Vanessa's Joy Box and then she left the group. So it was just me and this WhatsApp group called Vanessa's Joy Box, and anytime somebody says something nice to me on the internet or I have a friend call me, or I think there was one time I was on the phone with Janine for like two hours and I saved the screen capture capturing that we were on the phone for two hours. Just little things that I could look back on, that I could just scroll through and make me feel good about myself.
Josh Matthews:Vanessa, that is the coolest thing. That's so much cooler than a dream board Like for real. You know, doesn't have to have Ferraris and boats, it's just people. That were nice, nice experiences Also. Let me share this too, cause this is a really great practice. I'm not particularly consistent about it, but you know, anyway, I'm just not that consistent about it, but I have my good streaks from time to time and it's having like a daily meditation practice.
Josh Matthews:Casey and I try to do this. She could talk right now. She'd be like, well, we haven't done it in two weeks, that's true, so we did it. Oh, I guess we did it a little bit this morning actually, which was cool, where you just go back and try and think of two or three memories, that where you just felt great, right, and usually when I'm doing that I'm thinking about my children and I'm thinking about my kids and they were little and or you know a friend who was kind, you know, or getting to go to a special place out in nature and just that moment, and just kind of live in that space for about a minute each.
Josh Matthews:Do that two or three times, and then we'll do a little bit of energy, breathing stuff, and then we'll spend a few minutes literally three minutes, one minute each for a future memory, right, so that you can imagine it. And then you want to like, feel it, sense it, truly experience it. And the beauty is your brain doesn't know the difference between imagined and real. That's why we can wake up from a nightmare and have a shitty day Because, as far as you know, that happened. As far as your brain know, you know it didn't happen, but as far as your brain knows the effects, the same right. You're having cortisol and adrenaline pumping through your body in the middle of the night while you're having some scary dream or something right? Well, you get to control this when you're awake that's the good news. And you get to put yourself in an almost dream state of imagining what it's going to be like when you accomplish X, y and Z, or just imagining something nice and beautiful that you want to experience that you haven't yet, right? Whatever it is.
Josh Matthews:I'm usually thinking about things like you know, the growth of the business, or how will it feel when I'm done writing the new pages for the website? Or like it can be small and task oriented, like that, or it could be, you know, like, oh, I really want like this, about 30 different boats that I want to buy and I'm not going to buy any of them right now, but like there's like 30 boats I love, I just think that's so cool and I just imagine myself on the back of one of these boats, anchored off the Bahamas, with, you know, all of our kids jumping in the water, like, so you do those things and it'll lift you up for what lies ahead in this unknowing thing that happens in our waking world called life right. So, no matter what you've got to cover, it Absolutely.
Vanessa Grant:And it's a Tony Robbins thing, too, like remember he made an impact on me in that he spoke at Dreamforce 2016, before he even got involved in the community, and one of the things that he said that always stuck with me is that you can't be grateful and sad at the same time. You can't be grateful and angry at the same time.
Josh Matthews:That's right.
Vanessa Grant:So, on gratitude, you will change how you feel.
Josh Matthews:Absolutely, and that's a terrific point, vanessa. Thanks for reminding all of us. Go ahead, jason.
Jason Zeikowitz:What needs to be grateful for is not just the future, because you're right in that the brain doesn't know the difference between the future and the present. So if you're imagining the future, you're giving yourself that confidence that you are that person, that is your identity. So this way you can overcome that posture syndrome. But you want to be careful, because you may lose momentum, you may lose motivation, thinking oh, I've already done it. So you don't want to just fall in love with the destination. You also want to love the journey, because that never changes. You are the means. There is no end. And so you want to love the process, have a process that you could be able to do, give yourself energy I love. Your first bit of advice was to work out you want those healthy half-course. I really just cannot.
Josh Matthews:Jason, you really broke up there a little bit.
Janeen Marquardt:Can you just?
Jason Zeikowitz:repeat that last little part. Well, I was going to say that there's the motto of work like a workforce, but the problem is that workhorses will eventually run out of energy. Humans, biologically in nature, we are actually stronger than horses, because we have the ability to run further, if not just faster in the moment, but we can be able to go further. We have that endurance. So consider about being able to have habits that don't kill you but bring you to life.
Josh Matthews:Yeah, the habit of putting one foot in front of the other and keep doing that Right.
Josh Matthews:Loving the process. Yeah, that's a wonderful point. A beautiful point too. I've seen this with family members, people I love, people I'm very close to, who have set out to do something similar to what I'm doing now. They had a business, they made millions of dollars. They thought they'd be happy when they got there. Anyone know the end of the story? I think you guys do. They weren't. They got there and they weren't happy, and it was a hard road to get those achievements and they got there and it's like now, what?
Josh Matthews:So, jason, what you're sharing is critical and it's just like that quote, that Chinese quote from earlier. It's about living in the present. So what can I do now? What can I do right now to serve me best? And sometimes that's like well, maybe I need to just not apply to jobs for a week, take a break Instead of looking at jobs and what's out there which, by the way, let's face, it isn't that far off from watching YouTube shorts. It can be addictive. Maybe it's this one. Maybe, just like playing Blackjack, I'll flip the card. What's this opening that I could apply to Get away from that for a little bit and really analyze.
Josh Matthews:What do I really want to do? Why do I want this. Why have I made it important? Is my back against the wall? If not, why not? Why must I make this a must? It's got to go from I want to it it's a must. And when it's a must, it means that it's going to affect you. It's going to affect a lot of people your family, your kids, your friends, the clients that you'll take on, the company that you're going to commit to and work hard, when they're paying you for your knowledge and experience and execution. So you've got to make it a must. Put your back against the wall and then do absolutely everything that you can, and don't expect it to be easy.
Josh Matthews:I also recommend strongly, strongly, strongly, strongly Feed your mind. Feed your mind with how tos, not just the tech stuff, not just the trailhead stuff. You can read atomic habits. You can read the 10x principle. You can read the obstacles, the way. These are three great books. They'll take a little bit of time to get through, particularly if you're actually pausing and then putting into action the recommendations that these knowledgeable authors have shared with you. So invest in yourself and feed yourself. So you've got to feed your knowledge about how to be better, more efficient, how to make better choices, how to actually make decisions and then how to not quit and go down the road. So I strongly recommend doing that. I recommend a morning routine that involves some of this meditation, some of these audio books, walking exercises. You can do it all in about 30 minutes, right, or an hour in the morning before you even start your day, and you're going to start your day right.
Josh Matthews:Let's bring this wonderful episode to a wrap. We will be back in two weeks. I think we've got a guest. I can't remember if we do or not, but I'm sure it's going to be interesting. Give everybody enough advance notice and I strongly recommend, if you're listening to this podcast right now, you do a couple things One like it, subscribe, ring the bell, all that normal stuff and if you're using a platform like Apple where you can actually review the podcast, would you do us a favor and review it?
Josh Matthews:We've had some exceptional advancements in our listenership over the last month. In fact, I want to say it's grown by about 25, 30%, which is fantastic. I attribute that to Greenforce and all of us passing out tons of stickers. So maybe that's what it is, but if this is your first time listening, we appreciate you getting all the way to the end of a two-hour episode. Good job, I don't think we're going to split this into two. So what that means is there probably will not be a released podcast two weeks from now. It'll probably just be one big as long two-hour session, this one, next week, and then we'll pick this back up.
Josh Matthews:And in the meantime, if you've got further questions, definitely scroll through the titles on the podcast, because we answer a lot of the questions that you have have been answered already. All right, you just got to kind of dig through. Read some of the titles again. There's about 25, 30 episodes up there. And the last thing I want to do is just say a huge thanks to Vanessa. Vanessa and I. We've known each other for several years. You've been part of this show for I don't know what is it like three years now? Four years? Is it four years? I think it's like four.
Vanessa Grant:I'm like three.
Josh Matthews:Three, I don't know we yeah, I think it was. I think it's three years now and I think it would be right around three years, this month, something like that. So Vanessa, who's a dear friend of mine, clearly you guys can tell, since you've been listening, she knows her stuff. It's not the easiest thing to walk this walk that she has in her own career and distill this information down. You heard about her ability to organize and research and learn. She's a pro at it and she's distilled this stuff down for you in this episode and in her presentation and in, hopefully, the PDFs, the slides that I'm hoping we can release. She's put this stuff together for you guys to help you.
Josh Matthews:So do me a favor and throw her a like or thank you whenever you can and whatever she says, just follow that advice. It's strongly recommended. In other words, face your fear right, make good decisions, invest in your learning all of these things that we talked about tonight. So thank you, vanessa. Thanks also to Jason we love your insights. Thanks, janine, we love your insights as well and all of your contributions to the community. Thank you to all of our live listeners and a special thank you also to my friend, fred Kedena. Fred and I actually recorded a different podcast this morning. Fred, why don't you just take a moment and tell people where they can listen to this podcast and others that you've created?
Fred Cadena:Yeah, absolutely Thanks, Josh. I'm really excited to make the announcement. My podcast, the Banking on Disruption Podcast, talks a lot about fintech banking in the Salesforce context Recently went through a format change where we have a section at the end called Quicktakes. That used to be just two people, Now it's a roundtable and Josh has agreed to join the roundtable. So if you can't get enough Josh on his podcast, I hope you will tune into the Banking on Disruption Podcast. You can find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, wherever you get your podcasts. Last couple of episodes two weeks ago we had Janina's a guest, Two weeks before that, Vanessa. So a lot of the same content. Love that you got here. Invite people to check it out. Thank you very much.
Josh Matthews:Thanks for sharing, Fred, Vanessa. Any final words?
Vanessa Grant:No. Thanks for letting me share. Believe it or not, this was a 20 minute session, so I appreciate all the feedback that you guys also put for this. Make for good conversations. Love it, thank you.
Josh Matthews:Well, that just tells me one thing is that I talk five times more than I should. Oh, oh well. Incredible session. Thank you, vanessa, thanks everybody, thank you audience. You guys rock and keep up the good fight. We'll be back in two weeks. Have a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful early October. Enjoy the fall. Bye for now.