In May of 2017, I was tasked with migrating my Client Services team from ZenDesk to Service Cloud...in a month and a half! Prior to this, I don't even think I had a Salesforce login.

I've learned pretty much everything I know about Salesforce from Trailhead. At first, I used Trailhead mostly for trouble shooting, but then I started diving deep and following the trails. I also use Trailhead as an on-boarding tool. I don't have to develop and implement Salesforce lessons for new hires, I just point them to Trailhead and say, "Follow these steps, I'd like you to have these badges earned by the end of the first quarter so you're ramped up and ready to go!"

The biggest gain for our company from using Service Cloud is the data alignment, just keeping everything in one place and making it visible and viable for all parties. Now my team will write about a work order and pass it off to the sales account rep and it gets stored in Salesforce properly and everyone knows what the path flow is. Everyone is on the same page as a company and everyone can see the same information.

I have three employees on my team of seven, who are close to being Salesforce Admins thanks to Trailhead. They're able to jump on a call and help our clients troubleshoot in ways that go above and beyond what our clients expect. I am able to have a staff that is extremely Salesforce centric and savvy because I was able to give them a world-class Salesforce education with Trailhead.

Companies need to secure their Salesforce investment with an educated workforce and you can do that with Trailhead. It will pay dividends. Because of Trailhead, I was able to save my company roughly $150k by developing our case system, service consoles, and community by myself...in three months! If I didn't have Trailhead, I would have had to request budget to hire a consulting company to do all of that for me.

I'm finally getting the point where I feel like I can give back to the Trailblazer Community. I've started answering questions posted to the Community and it's a great feeling to read the email digests at the end of the day and see a question that I know I can help with! When I first started, I asked a lot of questions and now I can pay it forward and answer some too.

Trailblazing is about not staying stagnant, it's about moving forward, doing something new, having fun, growing, and bringing your team along with you so they can grow even further than you.