This is the ninth post in my blog series in which I will feature people I know from the community: Salesforce employees, MVPs, User Group Leaders, Partners, and honestly, anyone who I’m connected with who is willing to share with me the answers to five simple questions. I hoping that this blog series will help everyone out in the community get better connected to others who are either like them, can help them, are nothing like them, can’t help them, or are simply people they haven’t met yet! After all, a stranger is simply a friend you don’t know yet.

For me, one of the greatest strengths of the Salesforce Ecosystem is its people and the connections that are shared.

So, if you are brave enough, even if you’ve never met me in person, fill out this form and I’ll feature you in an upcoming post. (In case I have confused anyone, the questions on the form about our relationship refers to you, the reader, and me, the author, Eric Dreshfield, and not the featured person in this post.)  Just beware, by completing the form, you are giving me permission to use that information in a future post, as well as allowing me to interject some of my own thoughts into your responses!

And now I introduce Salesforce MVP, Lori Witzel.

What’s your job title? Senior Product Marketing Manager, Spanning Cloud Apps.
What does that mean you do?  I listen to and learn from Admins so we build SaaS data protection products that delight them, and I do educational outreach on SaaS data protection. (EFD – I love that statement…not just listen to, but also learn from…and then delight them!)

How long have you been involved with Salesforce.com (as a customer and/or an employee)? I’ve been a customer of Salesforce.com since 2005, a Salesforce admin from 2011-2014, and have worked for AppExchange ISV partners for more than 7 years.  (EFD – So what’s more enjoyable – being a customer or working for an ISV partner?  That’s a rhetorical question…you really don’t need to answer it!)

Bacon or sausage? Is this a trick question? (Bacon, of course!)

What’s more important: Who you know, or what you know?  It’s all about who you know. Everything I’ve learned, I’ve learned with and from other people. I may only know that person from what they wrote, but there’s still a person behind the “what I know.”  (EFD – And isn’t it a blast when you meet those people in real life?)

How did our relationship start, and when? We e-met through the Salesforce Success Community in 2014, when I was new to Spanning and was preparing myself for Dreamforce. I saw the Newbie Breakfast Group in my Chatter feed, and the #bacon theme, and it was the start of a beautiful friendship.  (EFD – They say that relationships started over pork products are the relationships that last a lifetime!  –  OK…I just made that up, but it sure sounds good, right?)

And now the bonus question – What’s one fact about you that few people know, that will surprise me and my blog readers? I was in Richard Linklaters’s first movie, “Slacker” (he went on to direct “School of Rock” among other things), and I play a very disturbed woman in a coffee shop about halfway through the movie. (EFD – That might explain a few things…)

You can find Lori on Twitter.