Salesforce Trailblazers We Love: Alex Gomez

Salesforce Trailblazers We Love: Alex Gomez

The Salesforce Ohana is truly something special, isn’t it? Join us as we introduce you to some of our favorite trailblazers. Today we introduce well-rounded and platform-oriented Alex Gomez, who shares how he got his start in the Salesforce ecosystem, his favorite Salesforce resources, the best-kept Salesforce secret, his Salesforce prediction, and more!

Visit Alex here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-gomez-58984997/

…and while you’re here: if you’re having Salesforce user adoption challenges, we have a brand new guide that takes you step by step through the principles of teaching adults technology, and drives you to develop a plan for implementation. It’s got room for you to make your own plan – check it out: https://cloudadoption.solutions/teach…

Contact us with your Salesforce challenges at info@cloudadoption.solutions – we love to help!

Cloud Adoption Solutions is a 100% woman-owned registered Salesforce partner, specializing in implementation, integration, and optimization for Technology, Healthcare/ Life Sciences, and Financial Services/ Professional Services organizations in the small and mid-commercial sectors.

 

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

SPEAKERS

Sam Teele, Alex Gomez

Sam Teele
And we’re back with another episode of Trailblazers we love. Really excited today to have Alex Gomez. Alex is a five star Ranger. He worked for Salesforce themselves for three years and has also worked as an independent contractor. So has a great perspective on Salesforce and on the broader ecosystem. Alex, how are you doing today?

Alex Gomez
I’m doing great. Thank you for asking.

Sam Teele
Good to see you again. last saw you at Life Sciences dreamin’, the inaugural dreaming event for the life sciences; it was great having you there.

Alex Gomez
Yeah, it was great. A great experience in there was a great event.

Sam Teele
Yeah, well, we were so glad to have you in. And so yeah, I just to get right into it. You know, you’re such an interesting story about how you got started with Salesforce, I’ve done so many things. Tell us a little bit about how you got started with with the Salesforce ecosystem and your experiences with it.

Alex Gomez
Right. So it was like around six years ago. So my I would say, you know, my mainly focus was in cloud computing. So I have a master’s degrees, and I had an opportunity to do an internship with IoT and different cloud providers. So in Bluemix, and Microsoft Azure, and an AWS. So essentially, we would like testing devices and all of that. So at that point in time, my life, so I moved to the States, because my family, and I was looking for different positions related to cloud, and it was really difficult to time to find positions in IoT, because it was mainly research, you know, like the pros in there was more more of type of like r&d. So research, just like POCs, I was talking to a friend, and they told me, you know, they knew somebody in Miami that they had a, you know, cloud computing company computing company, so maybe it could apply to that company. So that company ended up being sale for so I knew what Salesforce was, because of, you know, one of my courses that I took during the university, so they explained what a CRM was on our ERP and all of those systems. So we actually had to a pro it using a sap, I think, was sewer line or something like that at a time. And then I had an idea of what cell phone was, but I didn’t know much about it. So you know, they wanted me to be a consultant. And you know, because of my experience in technology, they thought that would be a great fit. So I took that opportunity. And within three months, I realized that, you know, the benefits of using Salesforce, so that was bargain to sell some late 2017. So we were using classic at the time, or doing migration to lightning, where I saw how fast you can put together, you know, a company business processes, you know, in the cloud, really fast. I knew, like, a little bit expensive, because of the licenses, but that trade off of like you can actually, you know, implement your business logic, or, and customize it in a really, really fast pace. Well, but what caught my attention. And yeah, I started working as a consultant for that company is called Skype, the Skype planner, they’re a great company. They’re based out of Miami. And they were like a silver partner at the time.

Sam Teele
Yeah, so just, you know, it’s really cool and comprehensive perspective going from, you know, a consultant to working with Salesforce directly to being a contractor. And I know that you’re working on some exciting things. I don’t know how much liberty you are to discuss that but, um,

Alex Gomez
right. So essentially, you know, I love silver. So that’s the first part I love, you know, implementing, like learning new things, I like helping clients on everything has to sell for the people, the ecosystem. So my dream, I actually, you know, what I’m working on right now is trying to create a pro, you know, to help customers with with their business processes. I have, like different ideas on you know, some POCs that I’m working on, but that’s actually what motivates me. So I’ve been doing consulting, I think consulting for like, six years, you know, with different tiers of partners. I think, you know, you need like certain skills or certain things you have to be really good at. So I think what really motivates me is like, you know, creating a pro that will like help clients automize their, their processes.

Sam Teele
Yeah, it sounds really exciting. Um, Looking forward to hearing more about it as you continue to work on that and having you back on here to tell us more about that. Just to get it into, I know you’ve used so many of these different Salesforce resources. But do you happen to have a favorite one, by any chance?

Alex Gomez
I don’t have a favorite one, I will say, you know, the resources that I use, they are a combination of like books, a trailheads channels on everything. And it really depends on the type of thing you know, or the technology or people that you’re trying to learn. So for instance, Silver’s has a training for a training camp, something like that, for partners are really good. So they give you models, in the same way that they do it for trailhead, you actually, you know, I think they have a community dedicated to all like, a community group dedicated to that. But I use a combination of them. Like for instance, for development, like coastal development, I think Apex hours is a great resource they have like everything in their mind, you know, mostly mostly free. If you want to take the architect route you can do like, there is a YouTube channel called our ladies be architects. And there are like a couple of books that are really good for like architects, and of course, all of the, you know, the, the events and all of that, but also a combination of them. Like, you know, what?

Sam Teele
That complete more, you know, check all your bases, let’s say, I would agree with you that it’s good day use as many different resources as you can. I’m curious if you have any thoughts on what are some underrated or what is an underrated Salesforce product? Everybody knows a sales and marketing cloud. But are there any Salesforce products that you think are underrated?

Alex Gomez
I will say CPQ. And the main reason why is like there are not too many people or they’re not like that, you know, those many consultants that know pretty well, the things that you can do with CPU. So I RMR, you used to say you don’t know what you don’t know, right? And there’s so many things that you can do with CPQ. And clients don’t realize that, you know, the benefits are improving sales processes, and all of those complex sales processes that they could improve if they use CPQ. You know, two years, like once, like, I remember, I saw apply, and they were using only a current contract, not even opportunities, and they were doing like, and I was like, asking them, where is the point of using cell phones use for account on quantity, you’re paying, like Sales Cloud license, and I think, you know, for their processes, like CPQ made sense, you know, there are so, so many complex rules for like coding and, and pricing and all that. So and I think the main reason is like, there are not enough resources, there’s no CPU pretty well, you know, come to the table and say we can like provide all of these features for like, your processes or reasons.

Sam Teele
So that’s really an interesting answer. And actually, somebody else mentioned CPQ. I talked to them a couple days ago, and one of these other Trailblazers we love. I am curious that you said that there’s not that many resources out there. So if somebody’s watching this, and they say, okay, CPQ is great, is the bee’s knees. How can I learn more about it? Do you have any advice to that person?

Alex Gomez
Yeah, I have tried to figure out myself, I think the the, the, your reason why it’s like, there are no so many resources are all CPQ. So you will be more of like connecting with people. So if I were to learn CPQ, I’ll try to get first hands on experience. So I’ll try to you know, join a team or a company that they use CPQ on learn from the experts. So there isn’t a certification, there are certain drills, but to me, the way you learn better is like by actually, you know, doing the work doing the job, you know how to because like the theory is like, it could be quite different to the actual like, you know, hands on? Of course.

Sam Teele
Yeah, that’s good advice. And I’m really curious about this as well. You know, having been in the Salesforce ecosystem in a number of different roles. Do you have any predictions for you know, where Salesforce is going in 2024? And if you don’t have a prediction, is there anything that you would like to see have a Salesforce employees waiting for?

Alex Gomez
Right? So I think, you know, my prediction, the prediction that I have, could be like the one multiple Bill half right. So first will continue to either prefer or they go to CRM. So they are probes so they have, you know, they have I think they like selfless was the first software as a system that was going on that came to the market bargain. It 95 pioneer of like multiple things through all the years, so I think they will continue to we are, you know, they go to CRM, mainly because they have been ahead of the game for multiple years, right, we keep like a close eye, you know, you know, or what watching older, like CRM providers. So just like HubSpot, they have, they have shown a tremendous growth, you know, throughout the years, but, you know, there’ll be my prediction in the chore chart, or mid term. So they’ll continue to either, you know, they go to CRM tool, I will say, I think for the 2024, they will be focused mainly on the AI. Race that like every company realized that’s a, that’s a person in the future. So, and I think multiple companies, not not only Salesforce are trying to figure out how to make the best use possible of AI. So they’re, like, I have seen like, multiple, you know, demos on, you know, conferences on, on events, where, you know, ai ai is the main topic of

Sam Teele
everything, everybody’s talking about AI now. So it is interesting, I agree with you that they’re investing a lot in AI, and seeing how it’s integrating into, you know, CRM with Einstein, and you know, how that could potentially save people a lot of time will be really interesting to see. Before I let you get out of here, I did want to ask you, if you had just shifted shifts at town a little bit. Any recommendations were What are you watching? What are you listening to podcast cooking show? What’s non Salesforce related?

Alex Gomez
Oh, I see. So I would like to recommend a book, which is called Atomic Habits. So I think that work is amazing. Because it gives you a perspective of life of how, you know, you can like, like, in the long term in the long, you know, like, it is more more important how you create those good habits that we’ll be adding up all the time, I will, like, you know, improve your performance and you as a person, so I never I saw once like a trailblazer. His name is David, they will do his from you know, I think it’s a Google Cloud technical argument back in the time, he was like, the, the Go tool, you know, for like, you know, watching YouTube and all of that. And I remember, like, I saw one of the YouTube videos when he was mentioning like, if you improve like 1% Like every day or like a tiny improvement, you’re not worthy, you’ll be like, like, how many times better right, and I saw the same concert on doubles. I realized he might give us upgradeable or he came with a with a good idea. I think it’s your perspective of like how making like small changes to your routine or that will give you a you know, an improvement that we all want in our life, not not only the technology, ecosystem or space, in our like personal Hill, like family, how you treat people like your relationships, everything, you know.

Sam Teele
Yeah. You’re the second person to bring up this book to me in the last couple of days. It’s very high on my list of reading for the next couple of weeks ahead. Well, thank you, Alex. I really appreciate your time today. I’m gonna go get atomic habits as everybody else should. Who was really great hearing your unique perspectives on Salesforce. Looking forward to talking to you again soon.

Alex Gomez
Thank you so much for your time. I’m inviting me to do the interview because our pleasure