Wed, 25 April 2018
Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast we’re with Bill Martinez, CRM Manager at 2U and co-leader of the NYC Developer User Group to find out what it’s like to be an Admin with a developer background. Join us as we talk about what it’s like to be an Admin who develops, how to own your Admin persona, and the key to effective project planning. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Bill Martinez. From pseudo-code to Apex. Bill had a rather unusual dream when he was younger, he wanted to be a CIO: “I knew that technology was in my DNA, and that’s one of the reasons why I’m here today.” It’s a little far off from Superman, and it all started with a programmable calculator. “I had a TI-92 in high school,” Bill says, “that taught me how to program in pseudo-code languages, and that’s when I knew I wanted to spend a lifetime in technology.” Calculators, however, are still a far cry from Salesforce. Bill was working on another CRM system that they knew they wanted to replace. He knew the business challenges that the Org had, including permission splits and marketing automation needs at integration points. “I grilled the Salesforce rep on projects that I knew took me one to three months, and to my surprise, he was able to configure them in Salesforce in real time,” Bill says. Understanding the power of Salesforce. Moving over with six years of experience on another CRM, Bill thought that Salesforce would be relatively easy to learn, “Boy, did I learn,” he says, “not so much because it was complicated but because it was so feature-rich.” The Marketing and Sales features that they had previously built in-house were now much easier for Bill to build on his own, and the flexibility was astonishing. Bill’s company started with an outside consultant to help with configuration, “they did a combination of point and click configuration as well as some custom code, to the point where when I originally took the Salesforce Admin exam I failed it because we had so much customization in our Org,” he says. “I learned the application because I was hungry for it,” Bill says, “I was the senior administrator and I wanted to prove to my boss that I could be the go-to technology guy.” Bill went to the official Salesforce training, while at the same time he was working the project with business analysts, the Salesforce architect, and the project manager, AND he was responsible for doing data loads, migrating the data from the legacy system. “That’s where I really understood the power of Salesforce,” Bill says, “as the different Sales or Service Organizations needed customizations done we were able to do that on the fly.” Coming up with a development plan. “When you’re doing business requirements,” Bill says, “the business often doesn’t understand where an Admin ends and where a Developer starts.” It’s important to remember that most people wear multiple hats at the same time. That’s doubly important when you’re creating business requirements. “I always lean towards point-and-click configuration— you want to keep your application as simple as possible,” Bill says. You want to have a good conversation with your business area about what feature sets they need so you can have a clear picture of what they’re trying to do. “When I look at enhancements, I look to see whether it brings revenue to the organization, or if we can save money through process improvement.” Trailhead
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 really helps more Admins find the podcast. Plus, we would really appreciate it. Love our podcasts?Subscribe today or review us on iTunes!
Direct download: Interview__Im_An_Admin_Who_Devs_with_Bill_Martinez.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 8:54pm PDT |
Mon, 23 April 2018
Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast we’re with Mary Scotton, the VP of Evangelism at Salesforce, to talk about what it means to be a builder, both on the platform and in the community. More about this Insights session: how Mary helped build the Big Green Button and the non-traditional paths to becoming a builder. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Mary Scotton and Gillian Bruce. Making more people into Builders. “To me, being a builder means that you are a creator and not just a consumer of technology,” Mary says, “you become the person who controls the internet, who made that page do the thing you wanted it to do.” It can be incredibly empowering to change your relationship to technology, and Salesforce as a platform is looking to enable new types of builders. As Mary puts it, that’s why she came to Salesforce twelve years ago, “to create the type of platform I had seen in other technologies but do it on the web and put those tools on the cloud.” That was a long time ago (in Salesforce years), but what attracted Mary to the job was the amount of building there was to do. For one thing, it meant there was a lot of job security, but for another, it meant that she could really have a big impact. “What gets me up in the morning is this idea of enabling people who are not programmers to build business apps,” Mary says, “I love the idea that someone who doesn’t have a programming background can be successful building applications for their business.” The birth of the Big Green Button. One Gillian’s fondest memories of her first time making an app was using the Magic Green Button, and that button was created by none other than Mary Scotton (co-designed with Sarah Franklin). Ultimately, the question it asked was “what are you trying to track?” For Gillian’s first app, it was the use-case of trying to manage her wedding. “People are intimidated, they don’t know if they can build a warehouse management app or whether they’d want to, so we break it down in terms of what is something in your life that you need to track?” From there, you just need to build out all the metadata, what the object looks like, what the page looks like, what the page layout would be, what the permission set would be. That’s how you can make something quickly and see the power of Salesforce: “you didn’t code that page or write the logic to save that data but yet you can do that with the Big Green Button.” Making the simple things simple and the hard things possible. Mary’s work enabling new communities and new people to the Salesforce ecosystem has had a lot of lasting impact. For new builders, it means you can have a bigger footprint in your company, and seeing those opportunities. “I think people succeed when they are proactive,” Mary says, if you see a department that’s still tracking things on spreadsheets or (heavens forbid) on paper, you can figure out how you can help that department be successful without asking someone else to do it for you. If you want to help another department, you just need to spend time thinking about the data model and the rest of it takes care of itself. You’re not investing months of work, just a day or so, and that means you can grow your value and your presence in your company. That gives people from a business or project management background the ability to bring that mindset into being a builder, or, as Gillian puts it, “that’s Admin magic.” That’s not to say that you can just press the Big Green Button and have everything figured out. You can get 80% of the way there, but sometimes you just need to bring a friend. Making a Developer friend can do a lot for you. “The guiding principle for the platform has always been to make the simple things simple and the hard things possible,” Mary says, and the tools we have are always getting better. Be A Builder: admin.salesforce.com Trailhead
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 really helps more Admins find the podcast. Plus, we would really appreciate it. Love our podcasts? Subscribe today or review us on iTunes! |
Wed, 18 April 2018
Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast we have Rebecca Aichholzer, National Commercial Manager at BrandIQ and Brisbane Women in Tech Leader in Australia, as well as a recent Golden Hoodie Winner at the Sydney World Tour. Join us as we talk about how to get the most out of your implementation partner, working with Apex, and what to do about imposter syndrome. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Rebecca Aichholzer. Behind the Golden Hoodie. Bec is a recent recipient of the coveted Golden Hoodie, so we thought we’d find out more about how she came to join the Salesforce Ohana in the first place. Her company works with pop-up shops, the kinds of temporary stores that appear in malls and shopping centers. They were using a booking system, but she needed something more powerful and Salesforce was just the ticket. “We looked at our entire process, from where we took a lead all the way through to actually invoicing the pop-up retailers and for us it made sense to go with a system where you could see the entire process: from capturing a lead all the way through the opportunity pipeline into creating contracts and sending invoices at the end,” Bec says. This made it easier for her team’s sales managers and others to collaborate and keep track of their work. Getting the most out of your Salesforce Implementation Partner. So Bec’s company found Salesforce, but actually using it was a different matter altogether. “I don’t come from a technical background so I didn’t know what we actually needed— I remember sitting down with our SI partner at the start and saying, ‘I don’t know what I don’t know.’” She sat there and tried to absorb all the information she could, how every field was put together, how every form worked, every formula, and just about everything else. “I was another accidental Admin,” Bec says. The thing was that as the implementation started picking up steam, there were definitely moments where the power of the platform became clear: “As we scratched away at the surface, there were these lightbulb moments where you realized, ‘Oh my God, I can now do that,’ and it cuts out hours worth of work, or you can use a particular object to build on where it was previously all manual handling.” Bec’s team was spending hours and hours manually creating contracts every day, so to be able to just press a document and create a document was absolutely amazing. “I also realized there’s this amazing community, the Ohana, the ecosystem that is Salesforce— it’s not just a platform, it’s everything, it’s the support network it’s reaching out to people, it’s the Trailblazer Community,” Bec says. Building a community and overcoming Imposter Syndrome. “I entered this journey with Salesforce about four and a half years ago at a time when I didn’t understand the technology,” Bec says, “but I’ve never been immersed in a platform the way I had to be with Salesforce.” She tried to learn as much as she could about the platform by herself, but she realized that she needed more support in the community, so she started attending the Brisbane Women in Tech User Group meetings. “I realized that I felt like an imposter, like I was pretending to be in technology when I really was using a technology-based platform,” Bec says, “but I kept thinking that I was a fake.” However, when Bec started going to these WiT meetings she realized that she wasn’t alone in having these kinds of feelings. “The IT industry can be strongly skewed towards males, so it was great to hook up with a network of other like-minded people, share my story, and have them say, ‘No, you ARE in technology, this is who you are and what you’re doing.’” From there she ended up co-leading the meetings, “If I can give back to the community as much as the community helped me, that’s the best thing that I can do.” Bec’s Trailblazer Story Trailhead
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 really helps more Admins find the podcast. Plus, we would really appreciate it.
Direct download: Interview__Rebecca_Aichholzers_Trailblazer_Story.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 7:30am PDT |
Mon, 16 April 2018
Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast we’re talking to Zayne Turner, Lead Developer Evangelist for Salesforce, to talk about what SalesforceDX means for those of us who don’t necessarily think about coding every day. More about this Insights session: the meanings of mysterious acronyms revealed, the ideas behind what DX does, and working with your Developers to co-build together. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Zayne Turner and Gillian Bruce. Why SalesforceDX is really about managing change. Zayne recently gave a talk at TrailheaDX about SalesforceDX and what it means for Admins. We thought that it was pretty great, so we wanted to get her on the podcast and talk through the ideas she presented. “Something that’s really exciting about DX is that it’s really trying to help us change how we can move our metadata around,” Zayne says, “it helps you manage how you change your environment.” This is especially helpful when you’re trying to iterate something because DX keeps a long-term record of what you’ve done to your Org. It’s giving you more options. “Right now, how you get at those tools is through the command line, largely,” Zayne says, but it’s important to take a look at what’s possible so you’re ready when those tools evolve. Acronym mysteries revealed. “At its core, the Salesforce Developer Experience started as, ‘Let’s rethink how can we enable to build on the platform,’” Zayne says. The Salesforce CLI (Command Line Interface) has been around for awhile, but now in combination with changes about the platform, SalesforceDX, we can now do new things in new places. “There’s another piece,” Zayne says, “which is how we manage changes and deployments. The functionality behind SalesforceDX is bringing new things into our app development lifecycle.” This is what she gets into in her TrailheaDX talk. There’s a whole new environment called a Scratch Org, which lets you experiment with changes in a temporary environment that looks a lot more like Production but is more temporary than a Sandbox. With this and other changes, it’s important to keep up with the terms and what’s possible so you’re ready when new tools are added to work with them. Building together means everyone wins. The other aspect of keeping up with SalesforceDX is that it forces you to think about how you interact with your Dev. If you want to get started, the best place, as always, is Trailhead, where there is a whole series of SalesforceDX content. If you learn together, you can have a conversation about what’s doable and how you can look forward to the future of your Org. The key is to engage with your Developer and see if the tools work for you. The goal is to work together and co-build, with the Dev setting up the Scratch Org so the Admin can go in and build, and then ultimately the Dev pulls the changes into production when they’re right. “You’re going to discover new things about how to the tools do and don’t work for your team,” Zayne says, “Admins know their orgs and that knowledge is what you need when you’re starting to look at how DX can help you move changes between environments.” Trailhead
Blog
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 really helps more Admins find the podcast. Plus, we would really appreciate it. |
Wed, 11 April 2018
Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast we’re talking with Tiffany Oda, Program Manager of Community at Salesforce, to find out more about some exciting Community events coming your way along with all of the amazing upcoming TrailheaDX content. Join us as we talk about how you can find a Global Gathering event happening near you and all the great content we’ve got planned. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Tiffany Oda. Get ready for Global Gatherings 2018. Tiffany is a Program Manager with the Trailblazer Community Team. She started last September, and she’s already gotten a chance to go all over the world and experience community events in France, India, and more. Getting out into the world and meeting the many varied and inspiring members of the community has been a crash course in what the Salesforce Ohana is all about. If you didn’t get a chance to attend TrailheaDX, there’s a wave of Community events headed your way via your local User Group in the form of Global Gatherings. “We started these events in 2017, but we wanted to bring more of the content and the conference itself all around the world,” Tiffany says, “this year, it’s not only individual groups, but community groups are actually joining together to do mega-meetups.” New Trailmix, new content, and new swag. In terms of how they bring TrailheaDX to the world, “the most important thing is the content,” Tiffany says, “we created a Trailmix specifically for the Community Group Leaders who are hosting the Global Gatherings, and in that Trailmix there is curated content from TrailheaDX.” The goal is to put those leaders in the driver’s seat, giving them the resources they need to make an agenda based on what their group members want to see. “Of course, swag is amazing, so we created special swag just for the Global Gatherings,” Tiffany says, last year they had special socks and tin mugs, “and I’m actually really excited about what’s coming for TrailheaDX 2018 but I don’t want to give out any spoilers.” Unfortunately, you’ll have to you’ll have to come to an event to find out what’s in store for this year. Get involved with a Global Gathering near you. So around now you might be wondering how you can get involved and find the Global Gathering nearest to you. The answer is that they’re already happening, right now! They started April 9th, and they’ll run through the end of May. They’re happening in 37 countries, “from as close to home as the Silicon Valley Dev Group to all over Europe, Asia, the Pacific, and more,” Tiffany says. If you want to check for yourself, there’s an interactive map on the TrailheaDX Global Gatherings website showing all of the locations so you can find the one closest to you. Tiffany thinks it’s well worth attending no matter what your level of experience is,“If you’ve never been to a meeting before, or if it’s your hundredth meeting, it’s just a great place to meet people, network, and connect with the amazing Trailblazer community.” Links
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 really helps more Admins find the podcast. Plus, we would really appreciate it. Love our podcasts?Subscribe today or review us on iTunes!
Direct download: Interview__The_TrailheaDX_Global_Gatherings_with_Tiffany_Oda.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 6:06pm PDT |
Mon, 9 April 2018
Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast we’ve got the one and only Mike Gerholdt with us to discuss his TrailheaDX presentation on navigating your Salesforce career. More about this Insights session: why building a career is more like collecting puzzle pieces than following a map, and the advice that Mike gave to his friend who is looking to change careers. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Mike Gerholdt and Gillian Bruce. Connecting the dots of a career. If you hadn’t heard, we threw a little party in San Francisco called TrailheaDX, and Mike gave a talk about forging your Salesforce career. “One thing that everybody has in common in our Ohana is how we came to Salesforce and how we are navigating the way that we find the jobs we love,” Mike says. “There’s times in your life where you listen to something, it catches you, and you’re drawn to it for the rest of your career, whether that’s a mentor or a speech or a philosophy,” and for Mike that was Steve Jobs’ commencement address in 2005: “you can’t connect the dots looking forward, you can only connect them looking backwards, so you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in the future.” Mike started his career in retail selling hats, found his way into test assessment in the mid-aughts, and eventually ended up at an assessment company where he met a Salesforce Admin who put him on the path that landed him in his career (and on this podcast). “My path and how I got here are different,” Mike says, “you can’t look at the things people did to put the puzzle of their life together, you have to look deeper: what did they learn while they were doing it? What was their takeaway from doing a job?” Mike’s advice if you’re just getting started. Mike recently sat down and reconnected with a longtime friend who was looking to change careers. Now, his friend doesn’t necessarily view himself as a techie, but Mike pushed back: “Everything we do with Trailhead you can do, you have the business acumen so let’s get started.” So Mike sat down to put together some links to get his friend started with Salesforce. The first link he included was to the YouTube video about Ohana culture because that’s really what it’s all about. The next few links were for Trailhead, a Trailmix, an explainer about what a Trailmix is, all that. But to wrap it all up, Mike included two Trailblazer stories: the amazing video about Mark Tossel, and the Salesforce Admins episode where Mike interviewed Zach Otero. The point being, if these people can do it then you can too. Step back and learn from top to bottom. “As you’re navigating your career, a lot of people only think about how to get to the next rung, but you forget that sometimes the rung you’re at is pretty awesome,” Mike says. Getting farther in your career will come, but you also need to enjoy where you are right now. Instead, focusing on adding skills and really diving into where you are now. “What I tell a lot of people that I mentor is that once you have the badge, go build and replicate that,” Mike says, “oftentimes people get too caught up in checking things off of a list, but the ones who take a step back and learn things top-to-bottom are the ones who go far.” There’s nothing wrong with planning where you’re trying to go, “but if you plan it out you might be missing other things that come up,” Mike says, “and they could be wonderful opportunities that you’re missing out on because they’re not in the plan.” Trailhead
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 really helps more Admins find the podcast. Plus, we would really appreciate it. Love our podcasts? Subscribe today or review us on iTunes!
Direct download: Insight__Navigate_Your_Salesforce_Career.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 4:34pm PDT |
Wed, 4 April 2018
Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast we’ve got Maggie Jolitz, Director of Operations Services at NPI and AppExchange superstar, who will tell us all about her experience with inheriting Salesforce orgs and how to make them successful. Join us as we talk about what she’s learned over her career about how to deal with inheriting orgs, including how to compare options when choosing between solutions, the power of the AppExchange, the strength of online resources to help solve problems. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Maggie Jolitz. Why Salesforce is for builders. In 2004, Maggie was working for a family-owned owned business who wanted to shift to a startup. They brought a marketer in who recommended Salesforce, “I didn’t know anything about Salesforce at the time but I went online and I saw that they had an event in Orange County, California and I lived in Kansas City at the time and thought, ‘Wow, you know what? Who doesn’t want to go to Orange County, California?” When she went to the event, there was everything from keynotes to breakout sessions and birds-of-a-feather tables for people working in similar departments. “Everybody was really enthused and was offering lots of amazing suggestions, it just seemed like it was a creative tool,” Maggie said. After that, she dove in and started building stuff, implementing solutions for Support and Sales and creating custom objects to help with implementation. She got involved with the AppExchange in 2006 and had a ton of “Ah-ha” moments: “there’s so many different ways to solve a problem in Salesforce.” She moved on to a Salesforce consulting partner where she put up 27 different orgs over the course of 2 years, and then kept working with more startups and building her career. First steps for inheriting an org. “What most companies who implement Salesforce don’t realize is that you really need a Salesforce evangelist guru on your staff so you get the full ROI out of it,” Maggie says. “When I inherit orgs, I find that they somehow forgot to download the best-practice implementation guides,” she explains, because even though Salesforce is a powerful and customizable tool, “if you don’t put it together in the right then when you get to the end to try to do analytics or reports you realize all the mistakes you made.” The first thing Maggie does when she starts with an org is to go the AppExchange and download the basic things she needs to understand what’s going on. Some questions she asks: “What are the differences in the Profiles we have? What are the fields that we’re using (and that we’re not using)? What do the best practices dashboards look like and how can I use them to show leadership what works?” Basically, get the AppExchange tools for Admins into your org and start using them, including Field Trip, Profile Comparator, and Metadata Search. “If you’re inheriting an org, you don’t know the history of what’s been done,” Maggie says, “so having the right tools available to you is priority number one.” The importance of communication in implementation. “When I start the first thing I do is build some way for my users to reach out to me,” Maggie says, to open up channels for feedback. She says to her users, “this is where you tell me the things you hate about Salesforce and the things you love about Salesforce and any ideas you might have.” This helps her figure out how to prioritize and categorize her work. The next step is to hit the whiteboard: “I divide the whiteboard by division of the company and I start cataloging what the system does,” Maggie says, which helps her get a big-picture idea of what’s going on. Keep focused on the right questions to get the best answers. While Salesforce’s flexibility is a major strength, but how do you decide what to use to implement a solution? For Maggie, it’s about relying on the strength of that amazing Salesforce community to find out what other people have done and what works. At the same time, she’s always asking herself, “How can I make this simple? Because, at the end of the day, I have to manage it.” The other key is to know what you want to measure when you’re getting started. Ask that question, “What’s the business problem we’re trying to solve?” It’s easy to get excited about how easy it is to get in there and do stuff, but you need a broader perspective. “I find out who my power users are, I find out who my naysayers are, and I actually bring those two types of people together in a focus group. I want them to feel like they’re a part of this; like this is their tool for them and I’m just the facilitator who will put it in their hands.” Trailhead
AppExchange:
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 really helps more Admins find the podcast. Plus, we would really appreciate it. Love our podcasts?Subscribe today or review us on iTunes!
Direct download: Interview__How_Maggie_Jolitz_Manages_Inheriting_Orgs.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 6:40pm PDT |
Mon, 2 April 2018
Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast we’re discussing the Salesforce World Tours (coming to a city near you) with Rebecca Saar, Marketing Manager for Admin Relations at Salesforce. More about this Insights session: all the exciting things in store for the Salesforce World Tours and how you can get more involved with your community. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Rebecca Saar and Gillian Bruce. Coming to a theater near you. If you haven’t been to a Salesforce World Tour, “it’s a great opportunity for Admins to come experience the Salesforce magic in person,” Rebecca says. In particular, the Trailhead experience has been growing and growing, and it’s a great place to start your day and earn some badges. There’s also the theater, “where you can learn from your fellow Admins,” Rebecca says, and booths where you can get any questions you might have answered. “Dreamforce is incredible, it’s awesome,” Gillian says, “but it truly is awesome in all of the ways,” it’s enormous and maybe even a little overwhelming. The World Tour is nice because it’s a scaled-down version, so it’s a great way to dip your toe in the water and see what Salesforce events are all about. Plus, it’s free. Bring questions because we have answers. One of the most important things you can do to get the most out of World Tour is to come prepared, Rebecca says, “because there will be people on-site who can answer them.” That’ll be people like Gillian and Rebecca, but also Salesforce Community experts who are volunteering their time to give back. It’s not just Admins that you’re there to work with a connect with, either. There are product experts, like the Product Managers we talk to on this podcast who will be there to talk about their specific project and get feedback. The Salesforce secret sauce (it’s community). “There’s so much more than just the World Tour content that happens around a World Tour,” Gillian says. This year, we’ll have an area focused solely on how to get connected into your local user groups: the Community Coves. We talk a lot about the “Salesforce Secret Sauce,” which is the community, the love, and the generosity that encourages everyone to help each other and connect. “World Tour is kind of like a mega user group,” Gillian says, “you can show up and absorb information and whatever you want to participate in is there for you.” A lot of local User Groups will be organizing fun events around World Tour as well. In DC, there will be a Women in Tech Happy Hour right after the event; and in New York, there’s a huge User Group event with Salesforce Product Managers the night before. “I think a lot of User Groups take advantage of having so many people in the same area who are from the ecosystem but working on different things,” Gillian says. Don’t miss out on the fun. Salesforce World Tours https://www.salesforce.com/events/
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 really helps more Admins find the podcast. Plus, we would really appreciate it. Love our podcasts?Subscribe today or review us on iTunes! |