A sincere perspective of my Silverline Journey so far
Pros
After spending a decade at Silverline, there are many things that have inspired me to be the best Director of Sales, VP of Sales, Chief Revenue Officer, and finally Chief Growth Officer I can be. That said, the most inspirational is the pleasure of working with some of the finest people I’ve ever known. Two of our core values we have are to “celebrate each other” and “try and have fun.” You’ll see this in almost every aspect of how we work each day: from the collaborative spirit of our teams working to deliver the best solutions for our clients, to our favorite extreme: twice a year flying hundreds of people around the country to NYC or an exciting destination for our company meetings. Employees who spend most of their time working in remote teams can meet face to face, enjoy a few days off and do volunteer work for the local community as part of our Silverline Cares initiative. We do this for our annual summit meeting and our year end holiday party. Does Silverline throw amazing parties? Absolutely. But it’s not for vanity’s sake, rather an opportunity to be together, celebrate each other, and show our employees and their families how much we care about the contributions they are making to the company’s overall success. Another one of Silverline’s core values is to put our employees in a position where they “are always learning.” Silverline will be one of the first Salesforce users in the world to roll out MyTrailhead company wide. There are internal study groups for just about every single Salesforce product available, all managed by Silverliners that care passionately about helping their colleagues. Our industry teams are constantly putting together content to enable our customer facing colleagues to be more confident and credible in the field. All of our new employees are paired with a buddy when they join Silverline. We continue to improve upon an already efficient onboarding process and we are launching multiple programs to support both our new, existing, and potential leaders, all designed to empower our employees and set them up for success. Finally, Silverline’s brand and reputation within the Salesforce Ecosystem is also something I am proud to be associated with. In 2019, we became the first Salesforce SI Partner ever to attain a to achieve a perfect partner score from the Salesforce Alliances program. We could not have done this without every single employee from delivery, sales, marketing, operations, and HR all contributing. After all, “we are better together.”
Cons
Yeah, we’ve definitely made our fair share of mistakes along the way. There is truth and validity to many of the negative reviews on glassdoor and I won’t refute that. These past two weeks have been some of the most difficult in my career here, reading recent glassdoor reviews describing the ways Silverline has let my former colleagues and friends down. Their frustrations are real and I am sure they would have rather stayed here if the circumstances were different. We are growing very quickly, especially in the last 18 months. We have a lot of work to do and our teams are excited about it - and we are making progress. That said, it’s been a struggle to have all of the right infrastructure in place to support that growth. So what have we done? We started internal initiatives to improve our existing processes, which wasn’t always communicated properly. We hired more managers to manage all the new people coming in and we didn’t have an opportunity to provide adequate training for everyone. Smart people from across the Salesforce ecosystem started showing up in droves, bringing processes they learned from their previous jobs. Furthermore, we went from a company was predominately NYC based to one that is now 75% remote across more than 30 US states, including Hawaii. As you can imagine, challenges we never could have predicted occurred and both client and employee satisfaction were impacted. Even with the best intentions, we disappointed some of the very people that helped Silverline get to this point. I get a lot of questions about why we are growing so fast. There are many reasons for this, but the most important, I believe, is this: Silverline has a tremendous opportunity to be known as the premier industry thought leader that is helping to shape one of the most important technology transformations of our lifetimes: allowing companies to operate their business out of thin air. The notion of any person in the world with a mobile phone having the computing power that once belonged only to large corporations and the government is radically changing every aspect of our lives. I started my career at IBM in 2000, where their first computers helped get humans into space. That inspired humanity. Salesforce today is going to allow us to help our pharma clients speed up cancer drug research, our healthcare provider clients improve the care of our fellow citizens, and our financial services clients provide a more effective way to manage our finances. This wave will serve all of humanity. I want to be a part of this, don’t you? Growth allows us to take advantage of this opportunity, by making Silverline a more robust organization with better supported employees that will provide amazing success for our customers'. I get it, this is not for everybody, but I am in and I know many of my fellow Silverliners are with me.
