Becoming Inevitable: How SEs Build Visible, Repeatable Impact
Mahathi Deapoli, a Principal SC at Salesforce Public Sector with 9.5 years of experience, shares how she built visible, repeatable impact by proactively learning AI, building a LinkedIn presence, and operating at the next level before being promoted. She describes how self-directed curiosity about Einstein and generative AI led to high-profile opportunities including delivering a keynote demonstration at Dreamforce. Her core message is that career advancement requires intentional action, community building, and sharing your playbook with others.
Summary
In this PSC Unscripted episode, host Allison Mlick interviews Mahathi Deapoli, a Principal Solutions Engineer at Salesforce Public Sector, about how she built visible and repeatable career impact over her 9.5-year SC career. The conversation covers Mahathi's turning point approximately two years prior, when she felt she had plateaued in her domain expertise and began asking herself how to stand out in an organization full of incredibly talented people.
Mahathi describes a deliberate strategy of scheduling 20-30 minute calls with two new colleagues per week to learn about their career journeys. This networking, combined with inspiration from a senior VP's talk about the human element of sales and business, helped her identify a focus area: AI and Einstein, well before the generative AI era. She began self-educating through Andrew Ng's foundational AI courses on Coursera, experimenting with ChatGPT, and investing months into understanding the technology from a use-case and impact perspective.
This self-directed learning led Mahathi to start posting on LinkedIn twice a week with simple, accessible AI content aimed at making the topic approachable for non-technical colleagues and customers alike. She describes being surprised by the internal visibility this created, noting that consistent presence in people's feeds — including leadership — led to her being tapped for opportunities such as supporting Army, Air Force, and education sector deals.
Her growing reputation earned her a spot at Dreamforce, where she learned Salesforce's new AgentForce technology and returned to lead demonstrations, build reusable assets, and run 'ask me anything' sessions. This compounded into being selected to deliver a major segment of the Public Sector keynote at Dreamforce, which she describes as a defining career moment involving high-stakes visibility in front of thousands of people and top leadership.
Mahathi credits her promotion to Principal SC in part to consistently operating at the next level 6-9 months before the promotion was formally granted — a principle she now shares as her primary career advice. She also discusses building a LinkedIn brand creator app on Claude as a side project, and leading a South Asia Force DMV business resource group. She closes by emphasizing that career growth is not a solo effort, and that her next focus is mentoring others and sharing her full playbook without gatekeeping.
Key Insights
- Mahathi argues that consistent LinkedIn posting — even on simple, accessible topics — created unexpected internal visibility, with leaders directly reaching out to her as the go-to AI person simply because she appeared in their feeds regularly.
- Mahathi claims that she began educating herself on foundational AI and Einstein well before generative AI became mainstream, motivated partly by career insecurity and the fear that CRM expertise alone might become irrelevant.
- Mahathi argues that the path to promotion requires visibly operating at the target level 6 to 9 months before the promotion opportunity arrives, so that the advancement feels obvious and inevitable to decision-makers.
- Mahathi describes a deliberate networking practice of scheduling 20-30 minute calls with two new colleagues per week, which she credits as the initial catalyst for discovering what she needed to pursue to differentiate herself.
- Mahathi argues that publicly posting opinions on LinkedIn forces deeper learning because it creates accountability — she had to go back and research more thoroughly to ensure her content was genuinely useful, which accelerated her own expertise development.
Topics
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