From piano to software, Kendra Stapleton knows how to spot the patterns and share that insight with others. The Georgia resident is joining Boyer’s team as a senior functional consultant for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales and Power Platform.
A required computer lab in college morphed into a full-fledged career for the musical-minded Stapleton. She graduated with a degree in piano and voice from Oklahoma Baptist University, but it was her natural talent in computer class that ultimately directed her future career as a Dynamics 365 consultant.
Her analytical brain picked out patterns in technology that others missed, and she easily got 100 percent in all her computer labs. Her professor pointed out that others struggled to pick up on the tasks that came naturally to her. At her professor’s prompting, she started working in the computer lab during her junior and senior years of college.
“To me it was a no brainer. This is common sense,” Stapleton said. “ I never had to be taught. I just picked it up by osmosis.”
The same thing happened shortly after graduation, when she offered to help a friend train his new team on basic computer skills. She quickly started learning the nuances of other technology, teaching herself one system after another.
“Things are common sense to me that aren’t to other people,” she said. “Seeing how tables all connect and how they all relate to each other. To me, it all clicks and makes sense and it’s repeatable. There are patterns in all technology.”
Stapleton has met several others in technology with a musical background and says they make great programmers.
“You think it’s artistic, but music is very mathematical and analytical,” she said. “You pick out patterns.”
That’s how she taught herself programming and system administration. Stapleton spent about 25 years working with an IBM solution known as Lotus Notes and Domino. She has been working within the Microsoft Dynamics world for about 6 years now, ever since her company merged their CRM solutions to all come under the Microsoft umbrella.
“It’s just like stepping stones through a career,” she said.
“(I like) making life easier for the smaller businesses. They need someone that can get in quickly, listen to them and give them value right away.”
Kendra Stapleton, Dynamics 365 consultant
When a Paris-based company bought out the flooring company where Stapleton worked, they merged all their existing CRMs into one Dynamics CRM. She became the product owner for all of CRM globally, working closely with her colleagues in France and making good use of her high school French.
Stapleton didn’t much care for the on-premise version of Dynamics CRM, especially as she tried to navigate the different CRM requirements for each country. Everyone had to use the same fields, whether or not they were useful to that region. For example, the CRM in France still had to show state and zip code, and the U.S.-based team had to maintain the same list of languages as their French colleagues needed.
“We had to do everything the same globally, and that was very exhausting,” Stapleton said.
When they migrated to Dynamics in the cloud and added the Power Platform, they were able to hide irrelevant fields in each country’s CRM.
“When we went to the cloud, then we could slim things down. We could really be way more efficient in our CRM,” she said.
That move to the cloud — along with the addition of the Power Platform — generated a wave of popularity for Microsoft Dynamics CRM.
“I’m happy to be on that wave,” Stapleton added.
Stapleton ran across Boyer on LinkedIn while looking for a new job. At the time, she was working for a large Microsoft partner as a Dynamics 365 consultant. She wanted a job where she could get to know her team better by working closely together on many projects and quickly provide value to the client.
“I want you to tell me your problem, and I want to fix it,” Stapleton said. “(I like) making life easier for the smaller businesses. They need someone that can get in quickly, listen to them and give them value right away.”
A few side projects she’d done for nonprofits especially piqued her interest because she liked the feeling of doing something “for a greater good.” When she discovered that Boyer had a large nonprofit client base, that clinched the deal for her.
At Boyer, Stapleton is a Dynamics 365 Sales senior functional consultant. She’s already started working on a few different projects. She’s excited to have more control of a project and be able to add value to a client quickly.
“I can really manage it start to finish, from concept to delivery to enhancements and pull in people when I need help,” she said.
Stapleton lives in Atlanta, Ga. with her husband. They have four children ages 17 to 25 and homeschooled all four kids.
Outside of work Stapleton loves traveling. She’s been to Europe, Mexico, Canada and most of the U.S. states. She also loves baking and even mills her own fresh flour to make all the family’s bread and baked goods.
