Salesforce Career Conversations #11: Vera Loftis

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.