People Behind the Certs – Esha Garg – saasguru

SG: Let’s get started. Why don’t we start from the beginning? Please tell us about your education/ career before entering the Salesforce ecosystem.

Esha Garg: I was a GL Bajaj, Greater Noida student who loved to participate in co-curricular activities. I liked to design, and my favorite subject was Computer Graphics. When I was in my 2nd Year Of Btech, a session regarding Cloud Computing occurred at my college. I was really blessed that I could attend that session. It was the beginning point of my Salesforce journey. 

Because of that session, I gradually stepped into Salesforce learning, where I started making objects, fields, and relationships on the Trailhead. Trailhead is so amazing. It became my best friend. I started doing Trailhead day and night. I spend a lot of time making my hands dirty and learning more stuff on the Trailhead.

Then I went to one of the biggest community events in the World, India dreamin (@sfindiadreamin), founded by Vinay Chaturvedi (@Vinayforce), where I met various Salesforce evangelists and experts. I attended live sessions, increased my networking, and got motivated to the next level. It was when my motivation was at its peak, and I was ready to spend my whole day and night learning Salesforce with full dedication. One day workshop was organized by Surbhi Narula (@NarulaSurbhi), wherein she announced a campaign #She4Her. 

This campaign, #She4Her, boosted me up. There I got a mentor, and I began learning Salesforce more in-depth, from Admin to Developer.

SG: That’s awesome. Now we would love to know what was the tipping point when you said, “I want to make this change,” and what was the trigger for that?

Esha Garg: My BTech was almost completed, and I got an opportunity to get hired by evaluating my knowledge at an employer connect event. It is a true saying that if you dedicate yourself completely, you will be gifted what you deserve. I got placed at Dazeworks.

I started my journey as a trainee at Dazeworks. Great mentors and their inspiration helped boost my confidence and made me a better me today. I even got an opportunity to be on an interview panel within six months from Employer connect to TrailheaDx in December ’19.

TrailheaDX 2019 helped me in exploring myself. I showed my excitement, gave back to Ohana by painting my Salesforce shoes, and made a cake for the TrailheaDX inaugural event. I even got Cody from @kavindrapatel as a winner of the rangoli competition.

I had so much experience and great hands-on learning in a brief span. This was the time I felt to be a true TRAILBLAZER – The one who learns and helps others in learning. I began to deliver a lot many sessions in various Trailblazer community groups. I delivered sessions in M.I.E.T. and other places as well.

Soon, I started learning Pardot. Jenna Molby’s (@jennamolby) blog helped me deeply dive into various other things. Do check her blog at http://jennamolby.com. 

It was a marvelous experience for me. Now, I understand I was at a great pace of learning, and seeing many hungry minds in my local area, I thought, why not lead a community group and bring Ohana together to educate our community? This is what I love the most, i.e., giving back to our beautiful community selflessly.

I transitioned to New Delhi as B2B marketers’ Trailblazer community group leader and started educating my community.

SG: What motivated you to deepen your knowledge of Salesforce, and what was the driving force behind this progress?

Esha Garg: It was then I met Shibu Abraham(@shibua) over Twitter and asked whether he could teach me Marketing Cloud. And the best part of that day was that he selflessly agreed and took a lot of time to dive me on the Email Specialists Certification Exam. It was an excellent kickoff to my Marketing Cloud learnings. He helped me a lot and cleared all my doubts, and yes, I finally completed my certification exam successfully.

SG: You achieved many certs along the way. And you have also started BlazeYourCertification. Can you share your experience with us?

Esha Garg: I would love to. One day, I discussed with my friend Arpit Vijayvergiya (@arpitvijay95) that we see many Trailblazers as a student learning a lot from #Journey2Salesforce but struggling to get certified to shine their resume and hunting for job opportunities as well. With that note, we started the #BlazeYourCertification series together and gave a proper roadmap to our Trailblazers to get Salesforce Administrator certified.

Blaze Your Certification series involved proper planning. Its basic aim was to provide proper guidance and a roadmap to the students. We tried our best to solve our attendee’s doubts. We helped them in scheduling their exam and was successful in devoting time from our daily routines as well.

RELAXED, MOTIVATED, CONFIDENT: These are the basic requirements you need when you are going to appear for the exams, and we tried our best to provide the attendees with proper counseling through 1:1 sessions as well.

EXAM TIPS: We provide them with all the guidelines about appearing for the exam. Not just preparation, we even motivated them to grow further by giving them a digital card.

With a successful season 1, we planned to do it on a monthly basis, and it made us feel so proud when we saw our attendees getting certified. And we even got a tremendous response in our 2nd and 3rd seasons too.

SG: What do you enjoy most about being the World’s youngest MARKETING CHAMPION?

Esha Garg: I received the news of the #MarketingChampion tag by Salesforce as a surprise. I cannot explain enough how happy I was that day. It blessed me as rain blessed flowers during spring. It made me happy as a child gets happy on receiving 1st prize in his class. 

Seeing my name as Marketing Champion made me elated. It was one of the happiest days of my life. 

Having the tag of the World’s youngest #MarketingChampion builds a great motivation inside me to show my love to my community, to help my Ohana, and to make them feel loved, as I have been feeling by being a Trailblazer.

With a lot many learnings, Shibu Abraham (@shibua), my mentor, gave me an opportunity to deliver a session in his email specialist Bootcamp. Participants joined the Bootcamp globally. I delivered a session on Email Deliverability. It was a great experience to be one of the speakers amongst such wonderful and knowledgeable people.

With that, I took a step forward in the Marketing Cloud but never stopped giving back again. It took me a long way to study Pardot and get my hands dirty on it, and finally, I cleared my Pardot Certification Exam.

Looking back again to educate my community, I came up with Pardot Specialists Bootcamp and was able to fetch experts out there to deliver excellent content to our Trailblazers with my Pardot expertise also in it.

SG: How do you keep on learning more and more about Salesforce? 

Esha Garg: Salesforce Learning is not an end; It’s a continuous journey. I continue my learnings through S.F.M.C., Technical Marketers sessions by Salesforce, and S.F.M.C. lookup answers, wherein I get to know more about use cases and hear many solutions from our experts.

This is just a small journey with a lot many learning. But I look forward to interesting ways to educate our community and give back to our Ohana in any way possible.

Check out Esha Garg’s Twitter link : https://twitter.com/narulasurbhi/status/978967243403898880?s=21