Salesforce Admins Podcast

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast we talk to Katherine Clark, Vetforce Product Manager at Salesforce. This is the third episode in our Behind the Customer Stories series for the Admin Keynote at Dreamforce. We’ll find out about her story and how she connects experiences for her users.

Join us as we talk about how she connects Vetforce members with the skills and careers that they need as a solo Admin, with the help of automation.

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

Coming home to Vetforce.

The last time we had Katherine on the pod she told us about how she found Vetforce and how that opened up the Salesforce ecosystem for her. Now we’ve found her in an entirely different position— working at Salesforce managing the Vetforce instance.

When Katherine first saw the job posting, she figured she would share it to find someone else in her network that would be a great fit. “As I was reading through it, I realized that role would be me coming home,” she says, “I would be helping others in the military community do the same thing I did and find their dream role as a Salesforce Admin.”

The Vetforce redesign process.

“I came into Vetforce at a really interesting time,” Katherine says, “they were right in the middle of this massive redesign project of Vetforce.” Vetforce is run on Salesforce built on Community Cloud, “but it had been designed many years ago and was just ready for a facelift.” When she came onboard they were in the design phase, “it was great for me, as an Admin, that I got to see everything from conceptualization and research to an end project. It gave me so much appreciation as a project manager to see what such a large redesign encompasses.”

The redesign process was based on feedback from the Vetforce community. For one thing, they had received the feedback that members preferred time-bound tangible goals, like “I want to become a Salesforce Administrator,” or “I want to become a Salesforce Developer.” From there they can jump into becoming an Advanced Administrator or a Pardot Consultant on their own and advance at their own pace. If this sounds a little like Trailhead to you, you’re right, and Vetforce has several integrations with the platform.

How automation helps Katherine as a solo Admin.

One of the defining features of Vetforce is the strong community they’ve built. “Something that really helps our community thrive is harnessing the automation that Salesforce provides,” Katherine says, “we use Community Cloud to set up the groups and set up a real place for our members to connect, but then also because of our integrations we’re able to pull in information from other systems and other places.” That lets them automate the delivery of their benefits so, for example, if they see that someone has earned 100 Trailhead badges they can automatically place them in a new group in Vetforce.

This kind of automation is really important to Katherine because she’s a solo Admin. “There’s nobody at the desk next to me that I can turn to and ask questions,” she says, so using things like cases and knowledge are big timesavers to help her members get connected to Salesforce skills and careers as quickly as possible.

The future of Vetforce.

“Number one on my innovation horizon is Einstein Bot,” Katherine says, “I’m really excited about the power of it and what it can do for our community.” We did a three-part series on Einstein Bots for Admins, so we definitely share in the excitement. The personalization is really exciting, especially for a unique community like Vetforce.

Personalization and customization is the name of the game for communities, and there’s a lot that Katherine can do as an Admin without having to get a developer involved. “I really enjoy being able to, on a Monday morning, pull in a component and give our community members exactly what they need at exactly the right time.” Just like with Lightning App Builder, custom components are the backbone of what makes a community like Vetforce tick.

Coming to the Dreamforce stage...

“Last year, after Dreamforce was over, I posted a photo of the Marc Benioff keynote with the message, ‘I don’t know how Dreamforce next year is going to live up to this Dreamforce,’” Katherine says. This year, Gillian featured Katherine’s story in the Admin Keynote, bringing to life all the ideas we’ve talked about it. If you didn’t catch it in person, be sure to tune in online to catch Parker Harris, Mike Gerholdt, Gillian, Katherine, and more. “We’re really excited for everyone to see inside our front door,” Katherine says.

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The Trailblazer Community is #LivingtheDream and bringing the best of Dreamforce to you! Join a Global Gathering near you to connect, learn, have fun and give back with Trailblazers like you. Register for a Dreamforce Global Gathering at dreamforce.com/globalgatherings

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Direct download: Katherine_Clark_Connects_Experiences_at_Vetforce.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 4:13pm PDT

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast we’ve got Nana Gregg, VP Senior Salesforce Administrator at JLL Technology Solutions and Salesforce MVP. She’s the second person featured in our Behind the Customer Stories series for the Admin Keynote at Dreamforce. We’ll find out how she uses Salesforce to drive innovation in every part of her org.

Join us as we talk about how her passion for learning grew her career, how she gets other members of her company to see her as more than an IT resource, and the power of community.

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

Have you heard of this thing called Salesforce?

Nana’s origin story is going to sound familiar to longtime listeners of the pod. “I had started out at a company as an executive assistant and transitioned to several positions over the years. One day they came to me and said, ‘Hey, we’re about to start using this software called Salesforce for our marketing and we want to put you in charge of it, so here you go,’” Nana says. She was soon off to an Admin class and the rest is history.

“I fell in love with Salesforce really quickly,” Nana says, “the ability to own the org and work with the different business users to identify their processes and see what we can do to make things useful for them.” For her, the platform was exciting because it allowed her to engage with all sorts of new problems in every area of the organization.

How Nana worked her way up to VP without a college degree.

“I don’t have a college degree,” Nana says, “but I think one thing that has got me here has been a hunger to learn and a hunger to do the best that I can for the company that I’m working for, and for the community as a whole.” That serves her well in her current role because at JLL the Salesforce team is really the backbone of the organization. They need to know a little something about everything: marketing sales, service processes, project management, finance, and more, in order to make those systems work together.

“Throughout my career what I’ve been eager to do is to get myself so ingrained in the company that I’m not just seen as an IT resource,” Nana says. Instead, her team’s focus is on being a part of the whole, using Salesforce to keep the business running smoothly. “Being somebody who is literally touching every department and understanding all of those processes,” she says, “you become invaluable to the groups that you’re working with.”

The Flownatics.

One of the things that Nana’s team has built is a cost allocation process with flows. If someone logs time for a business unit that’s not their own they need to transfer costs, with variations based on what country they’re living in. This process was always done manually with spreadsheets, but Nana sat down with the finance team to understand what evaluations they were making. They were able to automate the process to create cost allocation records that can be turned immediately into journal transactions.

“I never knew that when I became a Salesforce Admin I would need to learn finance, but I did,” Nana says. “I learned finance concepts and accounting concepts because I had to implement this AppExchange package, and that has made me a better administrator because I can talk to those teams and understand what they’re asking me to do.” These days, Nana and her team have taken to calling themselves “Flownatics” because it seems like they can solve almost anything with a flow.

Nana’s process for prepping for new releases.

When it comes to new releases, Nana’s process is evolving. “Up until about two releases ago I still printed them out,” she says, but now she works digitally. The first thing she does when a new release comes out is to hit the highlights: she looks at the major areas of focus that they use in their org. Within the first week, she sends an email to her boss breaking down the changes by how easy they are to implement. There are the things they can just make happen without affecting end users, but there are also the things that need a process around them if they want to use them.

“What I want is to get the newest release over a weekend so by morning I can come in and send an email with all the cool new functionality,” Nana says. She wants people to get excited and stay excited about the system by seeing that the Admin team is constantly innovating and improving things for their users. She even got her boss to start doing Trailhead and he’s become a Lightning advocate for their organization.

Why you get when you give in the Salesforce Ohana.

When Nana talks to people who are new to Salesforce world the number one thing she talks about is getting involved in the community. “There is such a huge world out there of people who just want to help,” she says, and she experienced it for herself when she went to a “Meet the MVPs” session at a past Dreamforce. She went to another session where she was encouraged to speak at conferences. “When you’re able to help someone that fills your own bucket,” she says, “the more I give the more I get from it and I grow as a person.”

Join us for the Salesforce Admins Keynote at Dreamforce!

Tuesday, September 25th at 11am PDT: Parker Harris, Mike Gerholdt, Mary Scotton, Gillian Bruce & special guests will share amazing admin stories, incredible demos, and fun surprises. Join us live in Moscone West or watch online. Add it to your agenda: http://sforce.co/df18adminkeynote

Join the podcast LIVE!

We’ll be taping LIVE at Dreamforce on Thursday, September 27, 11:30 AM in Moscone West, Room 2002. Bring your Lightning Round Questions & add it to your agenda: https://sfdc.co/cl2u6v

Attend a Global Gathering near you!

The Trailblazer Community is #LivingtheDream and bringing the best of Dreamforce to you! Join a Global Gathering near you to connect, learn, have fun and give back with Trailblazers like you. Register for a Dreamforce Global Gathering at dreamforce.com/globalgatherings

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Subscribe today or review us on iTunes!

Direct download: Nana_Gregg_Delivers_Innovation_at_JLL_Technology_Solutions.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 9:48pm PDT

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast we chat with Carlos Umana, Principle Business System Analyst at BMC Software, to kick off the Behind the Customer Stories series for the Admin Keynote at Dreamforce. We’ll learn how he champions productivity in his large organization, and how he picked up admin skills from a developer background.

Join us as we talk about how using the declarative has helped Carlos create scalable solutions for his large organization, and the secret to collaborating with a large team.

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

Going from dev to admin.

Carlos started off working at a mortgage company working in research and development, working with smaller CRM tools like Act!. As soon as Carlos and his team found Salesforce, they knew that they had what they needed. “It was hard for me because we were a 100% custom shop from day one,” Carlos says.

“My background is on development, so I had to go from thinking about code to the admin model of clicks, not code,” Carlos says. “That was a game changer because of the scalability of it,” he says. Picking up those skills was tricky, but resources like the Buttonclick Admin and Jeff Douglas “helped me translate that from a technical perspective,” he says. Trailhead arrived a little later in the journey, but it was obvious to Carlos how great of a resource it was from day one.

Working effectively on a team.

BMC is a big organization, so we wanted to know what strategies Carlos uses to manage a big team of admins. “Managing SFDC is a team effort,” he says, “one of the challenges is that there’s a lot of change approval— we need to consider all business units.” There are a lot of different stakeholders, so they need to rely on each other to make sure that they’re supporting everyone.

Governance is tricky over such a large organization. Carlos and his team have a monthly meeting with stakeholders to go over the requests from each business unit. That can lead to adjustments or changes in how the work gets done. “We’re an Agile shop, so we try to deliver iteratively and as fast as possible,” he says, so they can vet everything and refine it. “Sometimes you just need to rely on the people around you and hear them out,” he says.

Carlos’ productivity tips.

Keeping productive with all of these different demands on his attention is tricky, but Carlos keeps his priorities straight. “I try to create a checklist for what I want to accomplish today, where if I only finish this I feel like it was a good day at work,” he says. “I know I have to complete 55,000 things, but these four today would make me feel good.”

As far as favorite apps that help Carlos get more done, he’s a big fan of SalesEdge by Savo, which renders content in your opportunity based on the stage that you’re in. LeadData lead-to-account matching has also been really helpful for leveraging account information on the lead. Finally, Andy and the Cloud’s Declarative Rollup Summaries tool, which improve customization and give the reps the information they need.

What’s “development” in Spanish?

Carlos originally joined the Salesforce Latin America Community to just keep up with what was going on in that region. He’s bilingual, and so he figured he could keep up with the conversation. He noticed, however, that a lot of questions in Spanish were going unanswered. He thought to himself, “I know Spanish, I know the answer to this question, why don’t I just answer this?”

“But when I answered it I noticed there were certain words that were tricky,” Carlos says, and he started to research the translations for Salesforce-specific terms. He’s still working on a specific glossary, but he’s learning and helping people with their problems, too.

Join us for the Salesforce Admins Keynote at Dreamforce!

Tuesday, September 25th at 11am PDT: Parker Harris, Mike Gerholdt, Mary Scotton, Gillian Bruce & special guests will share amazing admin stories, incredible demos, and fun surprises. Join us live in Moscone West or watch online. Add it to your agenda: http://sforce.co/df18adminkeynote

Join the podcast LIVE!

We’ll be taping LIVE at Dreamforce on Thursday, September 27, 11:30 AM in Moscone West, Room 2002. Bring your Lightning Round Questions & add it to your agenda: https://sfdc.co/cl2u6v

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Direct download: Carlos_Umana_Champions_Productivity_at_BMC_Software.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 8:09pm PDT

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast we’re joined by Matt Vickery, Salesforce Administrator at the Washington State Housing and Finance Commission. We’ll hear how he’s using Salesforce to help get people into homes

Join us as we talk about how Matt got into Salesforce, and how it’s simplified and streamlined processes for his team.

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

From philosophy professor to public servant.

Matt originally went to school for degrees in philosophy and history. He was aiming to become a philosophy professor, getting his masters and working towards his PhD, “but a couple years in I realized that was not for me,” Matt says. He ended up in Seattle with a job in mortgage lending and that got him connected (and eventually working for) the Washington State Housing and Finance Commission.

The commission was overhauling their databases to find a solution that was more modern and de-siloed, “and since I was the techiest person in my division, I was put on that committee,” Matt says. Spoiler alert, they went with Salesforce. “In that process, I learned that I really really liked databases and what they could do, and how fun they could be to work on.” When they realized they’d need a full-time administrator Matt threw his hat in the ring. He had some low-level admin experience managing their loan reservation system in SQL, and the rest is history.

Matt’s learning journey.

Going from maintaining a small SQL database to being a full-time Salesforce admin wasn’t necessarily an easy path. “Our company’s very people-focused, so we made sure that worked with a company that could have people on site throughout the whole implementation,” Matt says, “so I got to work with them a lot and they did a great job of helping me understand how databases and Salesforce works.” After absorbing that for a couple of months he took the admin class in San Francisco, “and now it’s just going into my sandboxes and tooling around and seeing what I can do,” Matt says.

Working with overlapping needs from different departments.

“Our main mission is to create, support, sustain, and maintain affordable housing the state of Washington,” Matt says. They run a tax credit program focused on building housing for low-income families, elderly, farm workers, and other targeted populations. There’s also a separate program to help first-time home buyers with down payment assistance and first mortgage programs that offer more favorable lending terms to help families get into their first home.

There are several divisions within the commission in addition to the Home Ownership Division, including Asset Management and Compliance, and (of course) Finance. All of these different groups overlap in some ways and not other, “so when we were looking at databases we needed something that allowed us to silo something off, as well as have some integrations and overlap between the two,” Matt says. “Since we’re a state agency we need to keep records and good data,” he says, so that they can see how their work is having an impact. Salesforce was the obvious answer, but they needed to needed to build the processes to create the flexibility they required.

How Matt simplified data for his team.

When it came to actually breaking down processes in their Salesforce org, they identified some redundant work that was happening between divisions. They sat down and charted out who needed what information and, most importantly, when they needed it. The history of the data is really important to how the Housing and Finance Commission works, so it’s not just the changes but how that data came in, originally. Then they used process building to implement those data transfers.

“We started to identify other places in our system where we were actually entering the same bit of data over and over again,” Matt says. A bond, for example, has an official closing date and, tied to that, a maturity date. “There were a number of places where we needed to have that visible,” he says, but you had to continually put that info in when you were making reports. “We didn’t need seven people entering the same data into seven different objects,” he said, “so we found the base record and built processes and flows so when it gets edited there, it will populate everywhere else it needs to be.”

All of these changes have been great for Matt’s team because they know where to go to get reliable data and don’t have to worry about duplicates and mixups. “It’s made a lot of people’s jobs easier,” he says, “so they can start to focus on the more important stuff rather than the record creation and making sure the data gets transferred to the proper places.”

Join us for the Salesforce Admins Keynote at Dreamforce!

Tuesday, September 25th at 11am PDT: Parker Harris, Mike Gerholdt, Mary Scotton, Gillian Bruce & special guests will share amazing admin stories, incredible demos, and fun surprises. Join us live in Moscone West or watch online. Add it to your agenda: http://sforce.co/df18adminkeynote

Join the podcast LIVE!

We’ll be taping LIVE at Dreamforce on Thursday, September 27, 10:30 AM in Moscone West, Room 2022. Bring your Lightning Round Questions & add it to your agenda: https://sfdc.co/cl2u6v

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Social

Love our podcasts?

Subscribe today or review us on iTunes!


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