We recently held the final Women In Salesforce virtual meetup of 2020. Speaking at the event we were delighted to be joined by two experienced female Salesforce professionals.
The event was a great way to round out the year with insightful advice and guidance shared between both our speakers, Gisselle Nuñez, Senior Solutions Architect at Synaptic Advisory Partners and Lynn Grande, Salesforce Architect at Southern Cloud Solutions.
Building an Effective Story Backlog via Strategic Relationship Management
Gisselle kicked off the event by giving a talk on how to build an effective story backlog via strategic relationship management.
Speaking from her own experience Gisselle highlights the importance of themes – labels that track high-level organisational objectives – to building an effective backlog. Themes provide business context for decision making and help you to navigate the course of your organisation. Throughout your project themes should be referenced frequently. With regard to agile, themes help to explain to members of the organisation why you are doing things.
Gisselle goes on to mention the need to acknowledge soft skills during the refinement/requirement gathering sessions to make sure that you are filling the organisation’s need sufficiently. Having seen so many processes as a consultant it can be easy to make assumptions based on previous projects, soft skills allow for a point of quality assurance to deter this from happening.
As part of a Soft-Skill Strategy Gisselle emphasises:
- Empathising
- Being aware of office culture
- Offering praise
- Being an advisor
- Encouraging collaboration between participants
You can listen to Giselle discuss this strategy as well as the MoSCow prioritisation technique here.
Salesforce Staffing “Grow Your Own”
President and Salesforce Architect at Southern Cloud Solutions, Lynn Grande centred her talk around her own experience starting her company.
When talking about where to find Salesforce professionals for your team, Lynn emphasises that you can find them anywhere, you cannot always predict opportunities or know all that exist. The key traits to look for in order to do a Salesforce role are: perseverance, curiosity, problem-solvers, the ‘debugging’ / local brain and commitment.
After finding your team the next step in the journey of growing your staff is training them in the skills they need. Lynn mentions that the responsibility for this lies with both yourself and your employee. You must provide them with the opportunity and resources to learn – be that monetary or time – they in turn must put forward the effort required towards their professional development. When training your employees Lynn highlights the effectiveness of giving real-life scenarios to cement learning.
Lynn goes on to emphasise the key aspects of becoming a mentor to your employees:
- Trust
- Vulnerability
- Honesty
- Delegate
- Reward
- Having boundaries
- Having your own mentors
Taking these steps to grow your Salesforce staff will ensure that you have employees you can count on, energy within the team, and successful collaboration.
We’d like to thank our two fantastic speakers as well as everyone that attended for making the final Women In Salesforce event of the year a success.
If you are interested in speaking at an event or have a topic you would like covered at the next meetup, get in touch today!
