Meet Sarah: New Lead Salesforce Consultant
Sarah Berkery brings fifteen years of Salesforce experience, spent making the platform work for the people actually using it. She's built and fixed Salesforce systems across various implementation partners and government, including Australia's federal Department of Health, and now she's ProQuest's newest Lead Functional Consultant.
Here's what she's learned along the way, and why it matters if you're thinking about your next Salesforce project.
Sarah on Salesforce, then and now
Sarah's first brush with Salesforce was at a digital media company in the US, where the sales pipeline needed fixing and nobody quite knew how. She stepped in, worked out what the business actually needed, and built toward it, formal training or not. That instinct never left her.
Salesforce has changed a lot since. "It used to be very 'you get what you get,'" she says. Now it can adapt to how a team actually works, without losing sight of what leadership needs from it.
It's also given her more room to make each build genuinely different. "There's so much more uniqueness that you can present to each client, that it really suits them and how they work and operate," she says.
Get that balance right, and the business case for it looks after itself.
Her honest take on AI
Sarah isn't anti-AI. She's just not precious about it either.
She's encountered many AI-generated user stories that read fine at first glance, but actually end up being lackluster upon closer inspection. These are the types of outputs she wouldn't want to put her name to.
Her rule: use AI to get a rough shape down fast, then do the real thinking herself so the end result actually fits the client, not just the prompt. This echoes how ProQuest thinks about AI in delivery, treating it as a tool that speeds up the boring bits, never the one making the calls.
Why she picked ProQuest
Sarah applied to ProQuest but what sold her was simple: everyone she spoke to during the application process actually liked their job, and nobody had an ego about it.
She enjoys that at ProQuest, you're hands-on with everything, end to end, on a project. You come out the other side a genuinely well-rounded consultant. You learn a lot along the way, from the project itself and from the people you work with. It ends up being a meaningful experience.
Outside the office
Sarah is a big Pearl Jam fan, having seen them live over 47 times. She enjoys reading what she calls "crappy" mystery novels on the beach, the fun kind, not the cheesy kind. And she has a genuine soft spot for Australia's Big Things, giant roadside statues, especially the giant prawn parked in a hardware store car park on the Queensland–NSW border.
She's also partial to a good bowl of chips, and swears by a Lebanese spot in Brisbane called Byblos, home to her go-to dish, batata harra.
Welcome to ProQuest, Sarah.
