“I’m originally a creative writing major, which makes it very, very strange for me to be where I am,” said Monica Lorey, one of two Salesforce administrators at James Hardie Inc., a fiber-cement product manufacturing and sales company.
Like many college graduates, Monica’s job has nothing to do with her degree. And if you asked her in college what her career goals were, she never imagined herself working for a fiber-cement product company, much less as the Salesforce administrator for that company.
In the world of enterprise software, and more specifically, customer relationship management tools (CRMs), Salesforce is king, with 21% market share and 5.1 billion in CRM product revenues, according to the website, Apps Run the World.
Salesforce and other CRMs are necessary to manage data at large, global enterprises like James Hardie, which employs more than 2,500 people and generates close to $1.8 billion a year in revenue.
So, what does a Salesforce administrator, or admin for short, do? They are the ones who make sure that a company’s existing Salesforce instance is running smoothly and meeting the organization’s needs.
Although James Hardie, a company with about 500 Salesforce users, has two in-house admins (Monica and a counterpart), they don’t have a developer for more intricate and demanding projects. Before Skuid, James Hardie outsourced that work to a developer group, which required a lot of time and money.
As the company expanded into more markets across the country, members of the sales team grew frustrated because it took too long to enter and track the data they needed.
That’s when the company bought Skuid, a cloud-based, code-free platform that works with Salesforce and other CRMs to give users the power to create their own unique apps, completely customized for their business.With Skuid, Monica was able to create apps using the company’s data in Salesforce.
Now, the sales team is able to input the data they needed quickly and with little effort. Skuid worked so well that she realized it would be a good fit for creating apps across the organization.
Because she didn’t have to write code, Monica was able to create 178 Skuid apps and systems that seemed impossible to the sales team, including data entry, opportunity management, onboarding tracking, forecasting and custom dashboards for rep KPIs, mobile efficiency, admin management, and others.
Now, because she doesn’t have to write code to build the kinds of apps she needs for business, Monica can spend 30 minutes putting together a tool that a rep requested and then make adjustments as needed until it’s just right.
Then she can expand its use to the entire company. People like Monica are known in the tech industry as a citizen developer, a term that has been trending in the technology field for the past few years. It’s someone who, thanks to the rise of low-code platforms, works with their IT departments to create new business apps for their company.
Technology research firm Gartner, which coined the term, predicted the rise of citizen developers back in 2011. According to the website Business 2 Community, 8 out of 10 businesses rely on citizen developers for simple IT fixes.
“I’m all about problem-solving and challenges,” says Monica. “And so, having that ability to solve problems myself, it’s very convenient, and it makes you a rock star. We didn’t have to wait six months to get this done.”
To her, working with Skuid is a lot like the creative writing process. It allows her to be as creative as she wants, and to be able to revise each app until she is happy with the final version.
It may not be what she originally set out to do in college, but with Skuid’s no-code platform, it allows her to let her creative juices flow in ways she never imagined. Ready to create enterprise apps that meet every users’ needs, without code? Request a one-on-one demo today.
