What do you do?

As an ‘adult’ (in quotes, because I still don’t really feel all that grown-up), one of the questions that you inevitably get when meeting new people is “What do you do for work?”. As a Salesforce administrator/developer/business analyst, I’ve struggled to come up with an easy way to answer this question.  In fact, I can explain the jobs of pretty much everyone I know (including the guy who makes DC to DC converters), but I still struggle with my own. So what’s the perfect Salesforce admin elevator pitch?

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First, let’s think about what are the elements of a good elevator pitch. Your pitch needs to be concise, but with enough detailed information for your listener to understand. Brevity is difficult when your job can entail everything from password resets and new user setup  to multi-step approval workflows and building visualforce pages.

You also don’t want to overwhelm the listener with too many technical details in the short amount of time you have to pitch yourself. Even though some admins don’t think of them selves as technical people, there are a lot of developer-y and computer-science-y terms that we use daily that could get lost on your audience.

So while I can’t write your own elevator pitch, here are the key elements that I try to inclue in mine: My opening sentence always includes “Salesforce.com” – if your audience has heard of the company or software, it makes the rest of the conversation very different from if they haven’t. After that, I explain what my company uses Salesforce to do – a high-level explanation of departments that use it & why. And I close with how I support efforts within those different departments.

Do you have a great elevator pitch? What elements do you include to make sure your pitch works?

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