Salesforce Career Conversations #11: Vera Loftis

Episode 11: Vera Loftis talks to Lee and Theresa about her Salesforce career growing up in Bluewolf and her next exciting venture with Solution Junkies.

Lee Durrant: Hello, it's Lee Durrant here again with the new episode of RODcast. I'm joined by my co-host, Theresa. In this episode, we spend time with Vera Loftis, who is Salesforce royalty, so you're in for a bit of a treat.  

She talks us through her career at Bluewolf, where she rose to be the managing director of the UK Bluewolf before they were acquired, and how she's getting on now through COVID. Her plans for the future with her new company and what she thinks will happen in the ecosystem. 

Vera Loftis: Hi. Thanks for having me. 

Lee: Thanks for saying yes. I'm honoured. 

Lee: I should tell everybody, we're still in the middle of the COVID thing, we're in the middle of lockdown, so this is a chat about your career in Salesforce, which will inspire a lot of people. It'll also have a COVID-related lockdown theme to it too. 

Let's talk about your career if you don't mind, up until COVID. What we normally ask is how you got into Salesforce.  

Vera: Of course, and I'm probably interesting in that I fell into it. It's the easiest way to describe it. When I was in school, I thought I was going to be this very glamorous marketer PR person. All of my internships in college, I had internships with publishing companies doing PR. I did marketing for a magazine, and it all seemed fairly glamorous at the time. When I got out of school, I was a marketing coordinator for a not-for-profit, which was slightly less glamorous, I'll be honest. It's quite funny because, at the time, I didn't realise not-for-profits work in a very lean environment. 

I was young, and I wanted to do all of this ambitious stuff. When I started the role, it was described to me that this is marketing plus. I was like, "Marketing plus? That sounds interesting." What they meant by marketing plus was marketing plus customer service. We ran an alumni club in New York, and there was a part of the appeal for being a member of the club. It had a tiny hotel, I think, 12 rooms - half of my job was giving people tours of the hotel, and answering the call when they ran out of towels, and things like that. 

It got to a point where I thought, "I've probably delivered enough towels. I don't think I'm doing the marketing as such." I was just looking for a change. At that point in time, I didn't know where to go from there. I was an English major in school, so I already was confused about what I wanted to do when I grew up. Then when this marketing job didn't pan out to be exactly what I was hoping for, I just started looking around randomly. I was lucky in that my cousin was a consultant, not necessarily in the Salesforce space. 

He worked for Anderson at the time, but he said to me, "You should get into consulting." I went to a school where consulting was something that the smart kids did, so I had never considered myself part of that tier of hires.  

He broke it down for me; he was like, "Consulting is just problem-solving. It's somebody who can get into what people need, can get people to open up about how they need to operate, and then try to help them do that in a better way. We had a couple of conversations about it, and I thought, "You know what? I'm just going to go for it." 

He had put me in touch with Bluewolf. I interviewed at that time with Eric, and I remember I was so scared because I thought there would be all of these consulting questions. I had read online that they were going to ask me all of these strange things. To be fair, he did ask me one, which was how many ping pong balls I thought there were in America? I had prepared for how many tennis balls were on an aeroplane, but I hadn't prepared for that one. I had realised that, luckily, thank God it wasn't about mass. It was about how you work the problem through. 

I went back and googled the number, and I was about 50 times off. Luckily, that didn't keep me from getting the job. From there, I just fell into it. I remember my first day at Bluewolf; I hadn't heard of Salesforce.  

I started, and they put me straight on to an admin course. I think I came home that first day and thought, "Oh my God, I've done something wrong. What have I done?" I did not understand what people were talking about at all. At the time, Bluewolf did official admin training for Salesforce, so there were many partners in the room. There were people who had worked on Salesforce for a long time. 

They're asking these questions, and they might as well have been speaking a foreign language because I was utterly confused. 

Lee: Sorry to interrupt you. Can you timeline this? This is around 2007. I'm looking at your LinkedIn profile. 

Vera: Yes, it must've been. 

Lee: You got an idea of how it works right at the beginning of it? 

Vera: Yes. This is a good testament to Salesforce, a little shout-out here. By the time I finished that week because the admin course back then was a week, I came home on the Friday, and I was like, "Pfft, I get this. This is great. I could go do this." It was a completely different attitude towards it. In that week, my perspective on not only Salesforce but I think technology completely shifted, which was amazing. That was the first moment where I thought, "Yes, I think this is going to be a good move." 

Lee: That's usually my next question. That was when the penny dropped, and you thought, "Yes, this is me"? 

Vera: Yes, which is funny because if you had asked me when I was younger, what I thought I was going to be when I grew up, and you had told me it was going to be A, a consultant, and B, in technology, I would have laughed at you. People who work with me can tell you I'm not necessarily the most tech-savvy person. I struggle on a Zoom call, but I do know how to configure Salesforce. I don't know what that says about me. That was the beginning of what will inevitably be the rest of my career. 

Lee: You mentioned Eric. Bluewolf had an interesting policy in the early days, in that it didn't look to hire experienced consultants, from what I've heard. 

Vera: That's absolutely true. I remember because I was quite young and quite green back then, I remember my first day on the job, Eric came up to me, and he's like, "What do you think you're going to do for us?" I was like, "Oh my God, I was hoping somebody was going to tell me what I was going to do because I have no idea. I don't know what you people do." It did take a little while for Bluewolf to work out what to do with me, just because I was so out of my depth, I think. It was interesting because Eric took a chance on a lot of young kids at that time. 

It's down to what you make of it. I think those companies are amazing for the people who are self-motivated and can just work things out. Remember, because no one knew what to do with me, I was doing database entry for my first couple of months. We had a system called OpenAir, which was for time tracking. I was just literally going through and cleaning up data, and calling PMs, and saying, "You've got two hours left on your project. Is that an accident? Do you want to close it out?" Then I quickly realised I hate this. I cannot continue to do this. 

I would loan myself out to the other architects and salespeople. I would just say, "Look, take me on your meeting. I'll go, I'll take your notes. I'll do all the stuff you don't want to do. I'll do all of your config, all the grunt work." Then eventually, that turned into a role, and then that was the birth for us, at least, of what the business analyst role became. My job in the early days, I ran something called BA University, which was all about trying to repeat that process in an accelerated way. 

How you take kids either early in their careers or right out of school and turn them into productive consultants by teaching them how to configure, take notes, and act in a meeting. All of that useful stuff, which was quite fun because you did get to see people, almost become a completely different person in the span of six months, which is inspiring. 

Teresa: I suppose an unusual way, but a very good way of doing it because it's almost the people that are self-motivated like you where you're just thinking, "I cannot do this data entry role for the rest of my life". It spurs you on to want to go and learn more and do more. I suppose from a consultancy point of view, you want those people that are motivated to go out and do that and seek out the projects and the challenges. It's a foundation. 

Vera: Definitely. 

Teresa: Just out of interest, do you remember the first Salesforce project you managed to get your teeth into? Does that stick in your mind at all? 

Vera: Yes. It's funny. I can tell you about almost every project I've been on. I get quite personal with them, which is not advice I would give to anybody else. I can remember my first big deal. It was funny because we went through a process. It was quite a big oil and gas company, and they had a lot of due diligence, as you would imagine. I think they interviewed seven or eight PMs. At the time, I was maybe six months into that role specifically. They'd interviewed everybody by phone. Thank God for me, because I looked about 12. 

They put everybody through the wringer and then told Eric, "We've picked Vera to run the project." I remember we kicked off in our offices in New York, and they came. You could tell the shock on their face when they realised who they had picked. The smile on Eric's face when he saw their reaction was hilarious. To be fair, they had done massive amounts of due diligence. I think we had to interview two or three times, so they couldn't go back and say, "We didn't want a kid."  

It was intense. Probably it went on for a year, which back then,