Salesforce Admins Podcast

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast we’re speaking with Daniel Peter, Lead Engineer at Kenandy and Salesforce MVP. If you’ve looked at anything Salesforce-related on Twitter, you’ve probably come across something Daniel posted, and we got a chance to talk about how you can build your community presence.

Join us to hear about how Daniel approaches Twitter and uses that to really be a leader in the Salesforce community, as well as how he bridges the Admin and Dev divide.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Daniel Peter.

The Power of Community

Daniel started with Twitter and Salesforce around the same time, in 2009, when he was working for Safari Books Online as both their Salesforce Admin and Dev. In the beginning, it was just about engaging and sharing, “There’s not really any other community that’s as fun as Salesforce,” Daniel says, which makes Twitter especially useful “both to learn and stay on top of new information, and also spread that information to other people.”

For Daniel, using Twitter is about staying actively engaged with new ideas. You keep reading and learning, and a week (or a month, or a year) later you connect some dots and get somewhere new. He carves out an hour every day to stay up on the industry because it moves so fast. “There are some network effects about how doing this over time builds and synergizes and you get a new understanding you can share with other people.”

Approaching Twitter as an Experiment

Daniel cops to having a Twitter strategy, even though he hasn’t put it into words before now. He compares evaluating what he’s going to post to art class, where you look at your work to see if it’s visually balanced: “I take a quick look at everything I post to make sure that it’s not rubbing me the wrong way.”

The default on Twitter is to be repetitive and consistent, but Daniel thinks that “you need to fight that default and always be looking for new ways to do things.” Instead, you should approach Twitter with a spirit of curiosity and experimentation, finding what sticks and continually tweaking your approach.

Admins from a Dev’s Perspective

Daniel started on the platform as both a Dev and an Admin, and he was drawn to Salesforce because of how quickly spending your time with it can translate into impact.  “It’s the really the ability to build cool things very quickly: nobody likes to feel like they’re wasting their time with non-value-added activities, but with Salesforce a very high percentage of every hour you spend building something is value-added.”

As someone who is more on the Developer side of things, a big difference he sees is that even though Devs do a lot of Admin activities, they don’t have to play the role of the Business Analyst or Internal Champion within their companies. When he was playing the role of both Admin at Dev at Safari Books Online he still had to know who within the company was going to get the requirements and champion it. At the end of the day, “You can configure and develop things all day long, but if nobody’s using them what’s the point?”

For more insights, make sure to follow Daniel on Twitter (@danieljpeter)

We want to get your suggestions for guests on the podcast, and we need your help! So tweet your guest suggestions, support, etc. to @SalesforceAdmns to help us get more Awesome Admins on the podcast.

We want to remind you that if you love what you hear, or even if you don't head on over to Apple Podcasts and give us a review. It's super easy to do, and it helps more Admins find the podcast. Plus, we would really appreciate it. 

Direct download: Mastering_Twitter_with_Daniel_Peter.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 8:40am PDT

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast we’re speaking with Rod Dixon, Senior Manager for the Setup Platform, and Shane McLaughlin, Principal Demo Engineer for App Cloud Product Marketing. On this episode, we’re focusing on what you can do to be successful “under the gear” in the setup menu.

Join us to hear about all about the Setup Platform and how it makes life easier, better, and more efficient for Admins everywhere.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Rod Dixon and Shane McLaughlin.

What Lead Rob and Shane Under the Gear

Shane’s been at Salesforce for about three years, coming from Solution Engineering where he worked with large energy companies around the Houston area. With Salesforce, he builds the marketing demos. So anytime you see things for the Salesforce platform at a World Tour or Dreamforce he either built it or is running it. He’s the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain.

Rod is a Senior Product Manager at Salesforce, primarily responsible for the Setup Experience— everything under the gear menu, and everything regarding setup and configuration of the overall platform. They’re in charge of the Object Manager that’s in the Summer 17 Release, which he’s really excited about. “All the Objects are unified the way that Classic never was,” says Rod, which helps eliminate moments of asking yourself, “Do need to I scroll up or down to get where I want to go?”

What the Object Manager Can Do for You

The Summer Release and Object Manager are a game changer. They’re focused on streamlining the process, making it faster and more efficient while also cleaning up the interface. Where you used to have one page with a large number of subsections, the Object Details, and related lists are now broken up into individual pages. Object Manager also has a dedicated tab, which allows you to get back to where you were much faster, letting you look at your work and quickly make adjustments.

Another huge change they’ve made is to replace pagination with infinite scroll. It might not seem like a big change at first but, combined with the Find in Page feature, you can find anything that would’ve normally appeared on another page, simply by typing it in. Combined with new, more powerful sorting feature, Rod says these changes “provide the ability to quickly filter and locate exactly what you’re looking for.”

A Power User’s Experience with Object Manager

Shane has a lot of experience under the gear in his job making demos, so he can speak to how these changes impact his day-to-day. “This job tends to be churning out a lot of things, more than any regular admin would be doing in terms of creating Objects.”

In the past, even though he tries not to use Classic, he’s had to go back and forth a lot in order to get things done quickly, but switching back and forth was still time-consuming. With the Object Manager, the workflow is so much smoother— he can make a few Fields, look at what he’s made to figure out what to build next, and it’s easy to get back and do that.

Collecting Feedback

How does the Setup Team continue making improvements that they know will have a big impact? “For us getting out and interacting with Admins is extremely important,” Rod says, “We want to hear from and interact with Admins as much as possible to see how we can improve the overall experience.”

They use everything they can to try to and capture anything that might be helpful: Chatter, Twitter, Idea Exchange, Communities, and more. As Rod puts it, “All roads come into the Setup Organization and provide us input to figure out what direction we need to take.” Everything under the Gear is really focused on convenience, so they’re always looking for new ideas for what can help Admins do things easier and faster.

For more insights, make sure to follow Shane on Twitter (@mshanemc), or find him and Rod on the Success Community.

We want to get your suggestions for guests on the podcast, and we need your help! So tweet your guest suggestions, support, etc. to @SalesforceAdmns to help us get more Awesome Admins on the podcast.

We want to remind you that if you love what you hear, or even if you don't head on over to Apple Podcasts and give us a review. It's super easy to do, and it helps more Admins find the podcast. Plus, we would really appreciate it. 

Direct download: Under_the_Gear_with_Rod_Dixon_and_Shane_McLaughlin.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 7:23am PDT

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast we’re speaking with Matt Bertuzzi, Salesforce MVP, author of Lightning Sales Ops, and host of the One of These Things podcast. We caught up with Matt at the Salesforce World Tour in Boston and had a great conversation about Lightning and why you should jump in and make the switch.

Join us to hear about how Matt gained insights into how to own the front end of the funnel by focusing on reducing friction.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Matt Bertuzzi.

Writing the Book on Lightning

Matt does an extraordinary amount of things, from being a Salesforce MVP to hosting a great podcast to authoring a new book, Lightning Sales Ops. Still, and the end of the day, “I’m a Salesforce Admin number one, and the other stuff is things I do after six o’clock.”

When Matt started his book in May 2016, he sat down with a neat arrangement of index cards that outlined everything he wanted to say. Originally he had planned for just one chapter on Lightning, but when he started to get his Lightning material together, he realized he was onto something. He started showing Reps his demo Org, and they demanded that he make the switch. As Matt says, “The Reps are the ones who convinced me that it was a legitimate game changer. They pulled me into Lightning.”

The Key Journey of the Book

As Matt puts it, “The book is the story of making Salesforce work for Sales Development Reps.” In writing it, Matt tried to think like a Business Analysis person, so he organized it in order of a Rep’s workflow. He feels that Devs, in general, don’t spend enough time thinking about how to really optimize the workflow for their frontline users. “How can we as the tinkerers behind the scenes, as Admins, support reps with automation, customization, and UX?” With Lightning App Pages, we can start to think like a UX designer and make a big impact on what people do every day.

For Matt, the reason to add Lightning is not to make your job easier, but to make your actual users’ lives better. “In my experience, users are contently unhappy,” so to get started he asked a bunch of Sales Reps to describe what a day in the life of using Salesforce is like. They’d say “it’s miserable, it’s clicky, and it’s tedious.” Matt realized that those Reps never got any mindshare from the Admin team: “What ‘perfectly happy’ sounds like to an Admin is actually just that they’re not complaining.” The truth is that absence of complaints is actually not a sentiment— it’s not the same thing as the presence of happiness.

Focus on Reducing Friction

When we’re Admins, we often think about how we can make all ten things that a user needs to do easier. However, what we don’t realize is that there’s one or two of those things that they need to do 80% of the time. Matt realized that we need to take the top things that people do and make them incredibly easy. If the other things are a little clicky, that’s OK because we’ve reduced friction. It might be the difference between 70 clicks and 40 clicks but, in the long-run, making the things that you do 60 times a day more efficient will do great things for adoption and perception.

People worry about adoption when they think about switching over to Lightning, but the truth of the matter is that your users will go with whatever helps them get things done faster. Lightning’s features can be a big help with that because the interface is more “3D.” If you get an inbound lead, wouldn’t you, as the Rep, want to know if this lead is already a contact? Wouldn’t you want to know if their email address is associated with a current customer, so you don’t approach them as if they don’t know you? You can do all of this with one tab open in Lightning, but, as Matt says, “I’ve never seen a Salesforce Classic user with one tab open— it just doesn’t happen.”

Matt’s Own Transition to Lightning

Matt’s company is relatively small, so the usability acceptance testing is pretty informal, “but really I tried to pull a Mike Gerholdt: bring a cup of coffee, close my mouth, and open eyes, and watch how users use Salesforce.” A turning point came when he realized that nobody was using the great button hack he had made because his users only needed to do that action once a month, if that. Instead, he realized that he needed to focus on cutting clicks in half on the other 29 days.

For Matt, “You should judge your Admins by how much friction they can take away from their users.” Instead of looking at capabilities or performance, it’s about focusing on efficiency: “How can they make the process bend around the user?” Salesforce is a tool to make sales and do business smarter and not an end unto itself.

For more insights, make sure to follow Matt on Twitter (@mattbertuzzi)

We want to get your suggestions for guests on the podcast, and we need your help! So tweet your guest suggestions, support, etc. to @SalesforceAdmns to help us get more Awesome Admins on the podcast.

We want to remind you that if you love what you hear, or even if you don't head on over to iTunes and give us a review. It's super easy to do, and it helps more Admins find the podcast. Plus, we would really appreciate it.

 

Direct download: Lightning_Sales_Ops_with_Matt_Bertuzzi.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 11:31am PDT

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast we’re speaking with Barry Roberts, the co-leader of the North England User Group. Barry has an amazing story about how he began his learning journey with Salesforce, and how the Salesforce Admins Podcast helped him find his community.

Join us to hear about how Barry approaches learning, explains what an Admin actually does, and what he’s working on for the future.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Barry Roberts.

What to Do with a Two Hour Commute

Barry walked up to Mike at the 2015 Salesforce World Tour to tell him about how he listened to the Salesforce Admins Podcast every day on his 2-hour (!) commute, and now he’s a guest on the show. Barry comes from a construction background, “Where if you want to learn something, you get told, ‘Go and learn it yourself.’”

Barry started out by learning from the videos that came with the initial package they bought from Salesforce, but when those ran out, he couldn’t figure out how to find out more since this was before Trailhead existed. Instead, he lucked out when he discovered the Salesforce Admins Podcast, which lead him to more podcasts and eventually to an entire community: “All of the sudden I wasn’t this single person trying to learn a system.” Now he spends his time as a co-leader of the North England User Group to try and give back to that community. He is dedicated to helping other Admins get started with Trailhead at Salesforce World Tour 2017.

Giving Back Through The Salesforce Community

The Community Answer Board is a great place to get started trying to give back, but it can be tough to contribute if you can’t set the speed record for getting the perfect screenshots. Instead, Barry suggests trying to get involved with your local User Group. “I find that when you answer a question, it normally generates more questions,” which makes the experience more social. The real magic happens when you’re helping someone, and another person with even more experience steps in to take your own knowledge even further.

This social approach also helps with the Answers Community. For Barry, “It started off as the Google of Salesforce— if I had any question I would ask it there,” but it has become more than that. “As an English person, it’s quite hard to say the word ‘awesome,’ but I’ll throw it out there.” It’s now a great way to make friends and connect over common interests with people across the globe, whether it’s about finding someone to answer a question or finding someone to chat about baseball.

Explaining What an Admin Does

Barry has a bit of a reputation for getting his friends and family started with Trailhead. “One of the hardest things to explain is what a Salesforce Admin does,” so his solution is to get the people in his life to do the “What is the CRM” badge. When we pressed him about it, he defined the job of an Admin pretty succinctly: “To define business knowledge and implement that into a software solution.”

At Salesforce World 2017 we found that almost half of the attendees were first-year Admins. If you’re looking for a secret sauce for how to get more badges and certifications, it comes down to curiosity and persistence. Barry does most of his learning at night and on weekends. “It’s a little embarrassing, but it’s become my hobby.”

If you’re looking to become more involved and work towards being an MVP or a User Group Leader, you just need to jump in and get started. People undervalue what they know, but you’d be surprised how much you can help. As Barry says, “The Admins I meet tend not to have IT backgrounds,” and those varied viewpoints are incredibly valuable to the industry.

For more insights, make sure to follow Barry on Twitter (@sfdc_beard).

We want to get your suggestions for guests on the podcast, and we need your help! So tweet your guest suggestions, support, etc. to @SalesforceAdmns to help us get more Awesome Admins on the podcast.

We want to remind you that if you love what you hear, or even if you don't head on over to iTunes and give us a review. It's super easy to do, and it helps more Admins find the podcast. Plus, we would really appreciate it.

 

Direct download: BCA_EP_340.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 12:46pm PDT

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