Salesforce has this belief, its the Ohana belief. What does it mean and how does a hawaii saying relate to a tech company? It is about family and working together to help each other. The dog eat dog world that can be the tech industry can have a very negative impact on the idea of joining the tech world. This week I attended the Texas Dreaming convention in my hometown of Austin Texas and what made this convention stand is how everyone even people I had never met were more than willing to help and discuss and make you feel like you belong there and this helped in my pursuit of learning the Marketing Cloud and Pardot.

Texas Dreaming is all Salesforce focused, for those of you who don’t know Salesforce is a massive beast. There is so much you can do and so much you can learn and this is where this event shined. Each of the small panels was about 45 minutes long and were very focused on delivering this information.  I attended quite a few of these panels, learning about Pardot, Marketing Cloud ,Einstein Analytics and IoT. These panels contained so much information that will definitely be helping me on my Marketing Cloud certification journey.

One of the best ways for me to gain knowledge outside of the panels was just sitting down and just talking with anyone. If you asked people “what do you do with Salesforce.” I met people who were just getting started on their journey, CEO’s looking for people, companies looking to expand their services, or people wanting to get further along within the salesforce ecosystem. I talked to quite a number of these people and it was amazing just how open they were to sharing knowledge about the topics I wanted to learn about. Many times when I have gone to other conventions it was always met with a little hesitation from people when I asked for info on a topic cause I think there was that overhead of dog eat dog everyone has to know everything and not share info. I never understood that and I felt this convention ignored that type of mentality.

One of the main reasons I was there was to expand upon my knowledge of Marketing Cloud. After talking with some Salesforce Trailblazers, Community Leaders, Meet Ups, CEO’s and a ton of other people I came to the conclusion that I needed to pursue this certification because of my background in Marketing and all of the Email Marketing and Integrations I have done in the past. I have worked with Marketo, Mailchimp, Constant Contact, Facebook Analytics etc etc etc. When I would ask about Marketing Cloud / Pardot at meet ups,Texas Dreaming, and other tech events this was usually the reaction I would get from people…

I am not entirely sure why people in the Salesforce world feel this way about Marketing Cloud or Pardot. Coming from the extensive marketing background that I have gained over the years, I still don’t understand why when I went to panels at Texas Dreaming they were very empty when it came to Marketing Cloud or Pardot. Something else that made me scratch my head is the many businesses I talked to, they told “We are having trouble finding anyone willing to do marketing cloud or help us with our email marketing.”  So cards were exchanged, and hands were shaken.

I also recently purchased a udemy courses on Salesforce Pardot / Email Marketing and will be going all in into that after I complete the trailhead courses. The reason for this is cause many times when I have done work for companies or pursued something, it was because there was a need for it and with hearing from multiple people that they are having trouble finding people to do it or people are not wanting to do that type of work. I go for it, supply and demand my friends, there is a lot of demand but not enough supply and with my knowledge already in Marketing I can hopefully bring new things to the table.

What I took away from this conference and decided with pursuing the marketing cloud was that it was something I believe I can be very good at. I have been going after it with trailhead and been fully moving through it because of the fact it makes sense to me and doesn’t scare me. I know from talking to the many people at Texas Dreaming, if I have any question they will all be around to answer it.  In a few weeks I will hopefully be following up with a blog post about my Marketing Cloud Certification so be on the lookout for that but until next time thanks for reading.