alumni

Growing up, Carrie Bosworth never thought that she would work in an office-like setting. She told us, “My parents don’t work corporate jobs. I always thought I would be a pro athlete, a coach or a teacher”. In fact, Carrie was a Division 1 athlete at Jacksonville University where she played on the women’s volleyball team. After graduating from Jacksonville University, Carrie went straight into coaching the same team she played on as an alumni of Jacksonville University. While managing the start of what she thought would be a long coaching career, she also taught second grade. “I loved my time as a coach and helping out student-athletes that were in the same shoes I wore not long before, but I wanted more,” said Carrie. She decided to take a personality test on Monster.com. “I took the test several times and each time the result matched me with a career in sales. As many times as I tried to adjust my answers, my competitive side would shine through and I was continually pointed in the direction of sales,” said Carrie.

In July of 2006, Carrie got her first job in sales at Quest Software. She told us, “Quest was headquartered in Laguna Beach so I took the job thinking that the worst-case scenario would be to play a lot of beach volleyball and surf while also trying the sales thing out. I was only 26 years old, and I found out I was pretty good at sales and excelled quickly!” While at Quest, Carrie worked with Rochelle Lauda who was the top Enterprise AE at the company. Rochelle saw the potential in Carrie and knew that she had a bright future ahead of her. “Rochelle’s husband, Daren Lauda, worked at Salesforce at the time. Rochelle encouraged me to go work for a bigger company and connected me with her husband. They are a big reason why I am where I am today,” said Carrie.

In December of 2010, Carrie moved to San Francisco to start her next career journey at Salesforce. She started as an Account Executive helping Salesforce’s customers at the small to medium size businesses under the leadership of Adam Gilberd. She didn’t know it at the time but Carrie would work on Adam’s team for the entirety of her 7+ year career at Salesforce. “After a short stint in the small to medium space, I quickly moved into the mid-market segment. I stayed in this mid-market segment for the next 7 years. I started as an individual contributor and then was promoted to a Regional Vice President role, and one of the first AEs to be promoted to RVP managing the same team I had worked on as an AE. As an individual contributor, I was primarily selling our Sales Cloud, Service Cloud and at the time paid Chatter solutions. My territory consisted of a ton of prospects that had never heard of Salesforce before. I really credit my sales acumen to those 4 years as an Account Executive. It was in this role that I got to educate prospects on not only what Salesforce was, but also what the cloud was and run a cycle from cold prospect to closed as a new customer!”, said Carrie. It was then, after 4 years of consistent success as an individual contributor, that she was promoted into the Regional Vice President role. She told us, “Adam was an amazing mentor. He and I met every quarter for the duration of my time at Salesforce and he took a vested interest in me and my career. He was always extremely helpful, positive and candid and he really helped shape me into the leader I am today. I actually had received another promotion to the General Business segment to work under Michael Basch prior to taking on the RVP role. However, it wasn’t long after that Adam ran into me in a Salesforce elevator and told me he had a role on his team open and that I needed to come back to MidMarket — so I did!”