Salesforce Admins Podcast

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast we’re speaking with Davina Hanchuck, Senior CRMs Analyst at Instructure.

Join us to learn about how to work on a team of Admins, using the Lightning Readiness Report as an opportunity to clean up your Org, and the case for switching to Lightning ASAP.

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

Working on a Team of Admins

Salesforce Admins superfans may recognize Davina as a repeat guest. Since last we spoke, she has moved from being a solo Admin for a small company to a large Enterprise Org with a team of five Admins. “There are five different people making customizations constantly, so trying to communicate with each other and keep up with everybody else is doing as well as what you’re doing and making sure you’re communicating effectively is super important.”

The team is divided into specialties that they each own, so Davina is in charge of Salesforce CPQ. Every year, however, they switch which department they support and which focus they have. This lets them learn the entire system while only focusing on one piece at a time. Davina has found this extremely useful: “As a solo Admin I dealt with so much of a broad spectrum that I wasn’t really a master of anything, whereas now it’s such a small part of the Salesforce instance that I’m focusing on that I get to master it even more.”

As five people trying to coordinate their activities, Davina’s team relies a lot on effective communication. Slack is a favored tool that gets a lot of heavy usage, but their main tool for collaboration is decidedly low-fi: they all sit together in an open office. Getting feedback or bouncing ideas off of someone is as simple as turning to her neighbor. Or shooting them with a Nerf dart.

Beyond that constant flow of communication, they also make sure to document all of the changes they’re making to Salesforce in Salesforce itself. Davina will be running a session at Dreamforce on just how Instructure does that, so come on by and learn all about it.

Using the Readiness Report

Davina’s team is implementing Lightning in a massive Org and they started by downloading their Lightning Readiness Report, which was “75 pages of awesomeness.” They also needed to dive into their third-party integrations, making sure that all the apps that they use would be compatible. After taking everything into account, they’ve decided for now to focus on just moving the Sales team to Lightning.

The Readiness Report helped them get the leverage they needed to do some much-needed cleanup all over their Org, going through the Accounts, Opportunities, Quotes, and Contact Objects. At the end of the day, Davina had personally archived 580 fields and consolidated eight Page Layouts. “The whole Lightning rollout allowed us to give some focus to the cleanup that we’d been needing to do for some time,” Davina says.

Rolling Out Lightning, Bit by Bit

Now, Davina is focused on customizing Lightning Pages for each sales team, “It’s fun because there’s so much you can do with the Page Layouts now that you have to shift your mindset as an Admin over to thinking like a UI designer.” You have to put your marketing hat on to really look at how users are going to work with your implementation and what’s good for them. “You can get your users so excited about Lightning by just showing them what’s out of the box without even customizing it, so then once you get in and you start customizing it for their processes it’s like confetti.”

For now, Davina is working with four beta users from the Sales team to perfect it: she turned them loose on a raw unaltered version of Lightning and set up a chatter group for them to leave feedback, “Post in here everything that’s weird, everything that hurts, whatever you love and whatever you hate.” She then used that feedback to customize the Pages to work for how her users are working.

“Once we started working on the Lightning rollout and our marketing team got wind that the sales team had access to Lightning they got a little jealous,” Davina says, but marketing has been promised that they’ll be next in line and the support team is chomping at the bit as well. Going slowly, department by department, is the only way to get such a big Org transitioned, but “at some point Classic is going to be your old product,” Davina says, “why would you waste all that money on something that’s going to be old?”

For more insights, make sure to follow Davina on Twitter (@davinahanchuck)

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: Teaming_Up_with_Davina_Hanchuck.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 7:40am PST

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast we’re speaking with Marcus Torres, Senior Director of Product Management at Salesforce focused on Lightning Components.

Join us to learn about the best way to use Components in Lightning, how to get executives on board with the transition, and the new features coming for Winter 18.

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

The Magic of Components

Marcus has had a lot of roles at Salesforce over the years, from Mobile to Force.com and now onto the Components area of Lightning: “I’m really trying to bring value to our customers and help them customize as easily as possible.”

Classic Salesforce is a page-by-page model— as Marcus says it’s just “tab tab tab tab tab tab tab. For anyone that’s used Classic Salesforce, that’s what they know and, to some degree, love.” However, if you wanted to change one of those pages you needed to rewrite it and overwrite it and own that customization.

With Lightning, however, everything is a Component, and you can combine those Base Components into an Experience Component. It’s like getting a set of Legos that you can put together to make bigger things. You don’t need to rewrite the whole page to get different functionality, you just put your own custom Component alongside the stock ones, and they can listen to each other and interact in ways that were never possible in Classic.

“People have gotten past how they know Salesforce as a page with fields on it. Now what they’re doing is trying to put a lot more into a single view.” If they know that someone working on a page not only needs to see data but also interact with some Elements key to that role, they’re just placing it right on the page with custom Components that also give the Admin control of that flow. There’s even a custom Component implementation someone has made for tracking their craft cocktails.

How to Drive Lightning Adoption

When it comes to rolling out Lightning, Marcus notices a lot of commonalities between users. People are first of all excited about the new technology, the new UI, the features that are available, and how they’re going to use them. “But,” Marcus says, “there’s a Yin to that Yang: fear of change.” People learn Salesforce their way, and some have been using it for almost twenty years, so it can feel like a big risk to go away from what you know.

To help with this transition, Marcus recommends starting by learning what’s new in Lightning. The Lightning Now tours offer two days in an immersive program that makes sure that everyone knows what’s in Lightning, what’s coming, and how to use it. “That advocacy that you need to create needs to be both top-down and bottom-up,” so you need to know how to pitch it to both groups. Showing the higher-ups a side-by-side of the Dashboard in Classic vs. Lightning makes the case pretty clear— as Marcus says, “executives love pretty pictures.”

What’s New for Winter 18

For Winter 18, Marcus’ team is delivering over 25 new base Components. For comparison, the last couple of releases have had around four per release, so it’s a massive bump up. “These Components just work,” says Marcus, and they’re focused on giving Devs and Admins abilities that feel like magic.

One Developer Component coming out is called the Lightning Picklist Path. It’s like the Path that you already know, but instead of having to go to setup to create a custom path with fields and help text you just make the visual of a path and base it on a Picklist and it’s done.

The new Lightning Report Builder is also amazing. “From the day I walked into this company five years ago to three months ago, any time I had to create a Report I just hated it.” The new Report Builder, however is a joy to use, and Marcus actually finds himself looking forward to working with it.

For more insights, make sure to follow Marcus on Twitter (@mtorres_tweet)

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: The_Magic_of_Components_with_Marcus_Torres.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 2:54pm PST

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast we’re speaking with John Kucera, VP of Product Management at Salesforce. Join us to learn about the power of Console Apps, revamping Setup and Object Manager, and what’s coming up in the future.

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

Becoming the Secret Alfred

John started out building access databases in supply chain, “because my job was to figure out how to make sure we didn’t run out of 2,000 different brands of Pepsi.” Yes, with all the different sizes, brands, Kosher laws, and recycling laws, there are actually 2,000 different brands of Pepsi at any given time. John’s job was to negotiate pricing for the labels for all of these different brands, but the problem was they didn’t know how many they were buying at any given time.

After that project, John ended going to business school, but after doing some consulting realized that he didn’t like doing that at all. What he really enjoyed was building software, and that’s how he ended up at Salesforce. “The company is just so innovative and so willing to take big bets,” and over 9 years he’s got to be there for everything from Chatter to mobile and Salesforce One. “Now, with Lightning and Einstein, it’s just continually fun and interesting opportunities to build tools that people care about and use.”

John has 181 logins for Salesforce Orgs, and those are just the ones that he’s saved. As Mike says, he’s the secret Alfred for all the Salesforce Admin Batmans that are out there. He started with a free lead scoring app, back in the early days of marketing automation when that kind of thing cost at least $1,000 a month. The latest app is the Lightning Adoption Tracker (also free), which tells you how many people in your Org can use Lightning, and how many people are using Lightning and not switching back.

The Power of Console Apps

Being the Product Manager of them definitely influences his opinion, but John is a huge fan of Console Apps. “They’re the fastest way to work.” You used to have to pay for them, but in Lightning, they’re free. You also used to have to check a bunch of permissions boxes for each user, but now you just add profiles.

John’s team adds a lot of polish to everything they do, and for Lightning Console Apps they’ve had the opportunity to rethink the little things. One example he brought up is tabs. In classic, when you had too many tabs open you had this weird scroller that you’d need wait on, but in Lightning they’ve created a popup menu and added keyboard controls. There’s no more right-click-new-tab necessary, either. If you left click it automatically opens a new tab, and both stay loaded.

Why Lightning is Always Getting Better (and Faster)

John is also on the Lightning Now Tour, so he’s had a lot of chances to talk to customers from all over. “Our customers are geniuses, they always have new and interesting ideas and new and different questions,” John says, and the one thing he’s come away with a new appreciation for just how many different ways that people use Salesforce. From those who dive deep into Translations to others who dig into the Data Model or Components.

This diversity of uses and thinking is possible because, ultimately, Salesforce is a settings-driven platform. Instead of writing code, an Admin can just use Setup to make things happen, and they’ve tried to emphasize that in Lightning. As John says, “We give you the power so you don’t have to write code.” They’ve also added Aliasing in the Setup Tree, so you can find everything by its name from Classic: “You no longer have to speak Classic and Lightning.”

The Winter Release also comes with new Trailhead styling, which even extends to Setup. They’ve also used the redo as an opportunity to tighten up the visual presentation of information, making things just a little bit better everywhere. But most importantly, it’s even faster: “In every single release there are hundreds of people whose who job is making Lightning faster.”

For more insights, make sure to follow John on Twitter (@nothackedjk)

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: Console_Apps_with_John_Kucera.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 9:59am PST

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast we’re speaking with Michael Orr, the Senior Director in charge of Lightning Adoption at Salesforce.

Join us to learn about why Lightning is all about action, the magic of quick actions, and the new excited changes that are coming down the pipe with the Winter release.

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

The Lightning Tour

Michael became a Salesforce Admin twelve years ago, “and I’ve been administrating something ever since.” However, for the last two years he’s been working on Lightning, and now he’s focused on helping Salesforce customers get everything they can out of Lightning.

“Building Lightning is like a rebirth of the product in many ways; we get to rethink and redesign all the pieces of the product that have been there for so long.” During the process of doing all that, Michael’s hit the road touring and talking to customers with the Lightning Tour. Getting feedback is an invaluable part of the process, and “some parts of it they almost know better than we do.” They’ve done over 40 cities so far, with more on the way. As Michael says, “we don’t have to guess what’s important to people, they tell us.”

The Lightning Tour is especially useful when the local user group shows up, because they ask some of the best questions. The happy hours and other user group event are especially memorable and fun because “we get to meet all the people that we interact with virtually in the flesh in different cities around the world.”

The Magic of Quick Actions

When Michael was on tour on the East Coast, they were asking people whether they had used quick actions or created a global quick action, but to his surprise few had actually played around with that feature. It can save your users a lot of time, so it’s one of Michael’s biggest Lightning pro tips.

In Lightning, quick actions are preconfigured actions, created declaratively, that let you do something like create a record with preset defaults. They were originally created for a feed-based design, “but in Lightning we’ve jailbroken that feature.” You can put a quick action in the header bar, or in the global header, so you can have access to quick actions no matter where you are. This lets you do an action while you’re working on something else, “which makes Salesforce a lot more like an operating system in the cloud.”

So Why Lightning?

If you have Classic and it’s working, why switch? Classic was amazing and innovative for it’s time, and as Michael says, “If we rewind the clock ten years, the idea of being able to just put data in the cloud and not worry about it was pretty revolutionary.” That was ten years ago, however, and it’s time for something new.

The real shift from Classic to Lightning is a shift in mentality. Instead of being focused on record keeping, where it was all about the huge amounts of data you were saving to to the cloud where it will be safe, the focus in Lightning is on actions. The goal is to “allow the user to first of all really see and understand what’s most important about a particular thing that they’re working with, and then take action quickly and have those actions accessible to the end user.”

Trying to enable action isn’t just about the end user, it’s also about the Admin. You can configure things that you could never touch before. As Michael says, “You can create experiences that are tailored to a specific role or profile in ways that you couldn’t in Classic.” With the new design changes coming in the Winter release, it’s a great time to switch.

For more insights, make sure to follow Michael on Twitter (@orrdeal)

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: The_Lightning_Show_with_Michael_Orr.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 12:59pm PST

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