Navigators on the Road: WITness Success 2024

Summer is a great time for Salesforce conferences! Last week I took advantage of Navigators’ support for work-life balance and combined a road trip with my teenage sons (through Chicago, Detroit, Toronto, Niagara Falls, and Cincinnati) and a visit to WITness Success in Louisville.

This conference is the Women in Tech event for the Salesforce ecosystem. Its sessions focus on personal and professional development more than technical skills, although there were sessions for that too. As with any conference, the opportunities for networking and socializing with like-minded people are also a highlight. Everyone has a story to share, and everyone is interested in hearing about and supporting your journey. I met others who were attending their first conference, and had only started learning about Salesforce in the last year, or who had been attending for years and had instigated the start of many education user groups in the Northeast. I also got to meet in person with my co-worker, Katilyn Fairfield, after working together for the last several weeks, since the start of her fellowship with Navigators through the Hiring Our Heroes program.

The organizers’ intentionality around being inclusive extended to the selection of the Brown Hotel as the location. The hotel was opened over 100 years ago because the founder, a wealthy capitalist, had been denied service at another local hotel, because his appearance didn’t match that hotel’s standards. It’s a beautiful place, with a stylish and restored two-story restaurant and bar, and ornate windows inside the break-out rooms. There’s a sweeping view of the Louisville skyline from the top floor, where one of the attendees organized a daily morning yoga session.

During the sessions, I learned a few new approaches to battling imposter syndrome, being your own advocate, and how to recognize that the structure you may need in a work environment differs from another person’s need. I have heard “fake it till you make it” many times, but this time I heard a reframed version that is “face it and you’ll make it,” which is more honest and encouraging to me than the original. My favorite presentation was Allie Lawler’s session called “Awesome Autistic Admin.” She included lots of stories about how people who are neurodivergent can benefit from having a variety of options for training, communication, assigning of action items, and other accommodations, and how an organization can benefit in return from those accommodations, by receiving increased productivity, retention of staff, and diversity of viewpoints, which lead to greater understanding of people in all stages of projects. These concepts were brought up again in other ways and by other speakers, like Cara Weese’s “Innovation Through Inclusion” and Michelle Storm’s “Inclusivity by Design.”

If you’ve been to a Salesforce conference before, you have probably seen a Demo Jam. Each vendor is given three minutes in which to present their product, and then the audience votes on the best one. Sometimes the presenters include a skit or costumes; sometimes it’s a straight demo.

A new feature this year at WITness was the Ally Jam. Instead of presenting a product, sponsors were invited to present on how they are an ally for under-represented or under-supported groups in the Salesforce community. Navigators’ own Hayley Tuller presented on our methodology for training, promoting and paying staff in an equitable and objective manner. When she publicized our performance-based pay scale, the room burst into applause even though the presentation wasn’t yet complete. A few minutes later, there was another, longer round of applause when Hayley and Navigators were recognized as the first-ever Ally of the Year!

It is challenging for women and minorities to rise to the top professionally if they aren’t able to receive the same training and consideration as others. Navigators has successfully reduced the likelihood of and opportunity for bias by making an objective list of required skills, distributing ownership of the review of those skills among all qualified staff, and tying promotion and incentives to a publicly-posted pay scale. And it’s all tracked in Salesforce! It’s part of our commitment to radical transparency, and we hope it won’t always be unique in the Salesforce consulting world. I heard a few of the speakers in later sessions reference some of Hayley’s points, so it seems like the message is getting out there. Maybe we’ll hear a similar story from another ally next year, when WITness Success is back in Louisville on August 19 and 20, 2025.