Up next in the Biography Series is GraceBlood’s Sales and Marketing Manager, Shandra Locken. Shandra first arrived in the EDI world in the spring of 2008, not knowing how to spell EDI. With the help of her colleagues, she was quoting VAN services and Liaison’s Athena web-based EDI solution within a few weeks. Had you asked her 20 years ago if she thought she would be selling EDI services someday, she would have said, “What is EDI?” That is always the first question as you may have learned from our blog. It’s our most viewed blog article ever.
Shandra grew up in the central valley of California and moved to Southern California as a teenager. After having a spent a few years attending college in Boston and working as a nanny, she returned to Southern California (back to warm weather) to finish school and earned her bachelor’s degree in child development from California State University, Fullerton. While attending college in California, she worked in sales for an Anheuser-Busch distributor, where she formed lifelong friendships and gained valuable work experience. Her intention was to continue her education and get her teaching credential and Master’s in elementary education but as these stories go, life had other plans. She met her future husband and wound up relocating with him to Reno, Nevada.
The next chapter of her life saw her managing school fundraisers for the American Heart Association. Although it was a great cause and she loved working with children, having recently married and about to start a family, she ultimately decided that the required traveling was no longer feasible for her. And it just so happened that an EDI company in the suite upstairs was looking for a sales rep – that was almost 9 years ago. Learning the EDI industry was at times very overwhelming and scary, but with the help of her manager and colleagues, she eventually settled in.
The following years saw another relocation, this time to Phoenix, Arizona, where she still telecommutes, the retirement of her manager, formerly the Director of Sales and a new title. As the Sales and Marketing Manager, Shandra is primarily responsible for sales, managing our relationship with Liaison Technologies, as we are one of their biggest resellers, and maintaining our marketing content and automation including our website, blog, newsletters and social media. All these years later, she notes that she cannot imagine doing anything else and feels fortunate to work with this incredible team of people.
On a personal note, she is the mother of five-year-old twin girls and just celebrated nine years of marriage. In her free time (which isn’t much), she is active in her twin club, Paradise Valley Mothers of Multiples, sells jewelry on Etsy and writes emergency medical grant success stories for the Ian Somerhalder Foundation (ISF) website. ISF’s mission is to “…empower, educate and collaborate with people and projects to positively impact the planet and its creatures.” A cause near and dear to her heart, since the grant program was launched in February of 2014, ISF has given grants to 581 agencies and has helped 1,236 animals in need of emergency medical care. When asked how she wants to be remembered, she says, “A good mother, a good wife, a good person. And someone who stood up for what was right and advocated for others when necessary.”
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