Senior Director of Education Cloud, Salesforce

I'm Omar Garriott, COMM 'O2. I'm senior director of Education Cloud for Salesforce. In the case of non-profits or education institutions, which is the side of business I'm on, a lot of them are using Salesforce for fundraising, for managing communications to their donors, to their supporters, to parents and keeping them engaged. And then, also we're seeing a lot of really cool customizations to a platform that's really open and easy and flexible, easy to customize with clicks not code. And schools in particular, are developing purpose built things that would solve their specific needs. The tools in the tool belt are no different than what you would need at any other big enterprise service company. We're doing, in the case of schools in particular, and K-12, peer references go a long way. So we try to not just get customers on board with us but make sure we understand what they're doing and leverage those as much as we can, so that other districts and schools can sort of see what they're doing. There's a big, sort of, not necessarily herd effect but peer learning element to what we're doing. And we don't want to so much be top down saying this is the solution you should use, but rather, look at all this innovation happening. Do you wanna be a part of this community? There's really no typical day. So I worked for Salesforce for about four years in San Francisco, where I also worked for other tech companies. And then I moved out here to Crozet, Virginia to be closer to Charlottesville and the Blue Ridge Mountains and closer to family. And they've let me go remote with my job. So it's a little bit hard being a leader and being this far removed. I have to take lots of trips back to San Francisco. But a typical day would be me waking up, later than I would in a normal job because I'm on west coast hours, right? So my emails don't start pumping in until about eleven, 11:30am. Although, I do wake up to a bunch of stuff sent the previous night. And so, I'll be getting through those in my pajamas. And then, eventually, meetings happen twelve to seven or eight non stop. I'm trying to get some work done in between. But it's a, it's a heavily remote culture where there's a lot of video conferencing and stuff like that. So, I kinda have to be on for most of the day.