Salesforce Admins Podcast

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we’ve got the Monthly Retro for October.

Join us as we review the top product, community, and careers content for October, take a look back at Dreamforce, and share our favorite things about Fall.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation from our Monthly Retro.

Learn MOAR

The Learn MOAR Trailmix is live and, if you complete it from now through Nov 30, 2022, you’ll unlock a community badge and be entered to win 1 of 5 Cert Vouchers- see link and Learn MOAR page for all the details. Get up to speed with the upcoming release!

Dreamforce highlights

We did a little thing in September we like to call Dreamforce. Maybe you’ve heard of it? Mike hosted the Admin Keynote and it was amazing. Gillian was working on a lot of the broadcast stuff and interviewed Jennifer Hudson and Kara Swisher. It was a whirlwind of excitement, information, and celebration, with a little bit of Admin Karaoke thrown in for good measure.

Blog highlights from October

There was a lot of quality content in October, but we wanted to highlight David Giller’s excellent post about how to make a career change to Salesforce Administration. The biggest thing is to in there and try to do things on platform. “That transitioning of your career can be big and scary,” Gillian says, “but if you just start chipping away at it, it becomes a lot easier.”

Video highlights from October

LeeAnne Rimel has been hard at work in the Expert Corner, and her video with Adam White about screen flows is chock-full of helpful tips. Adam came from the community: he was such a Flownatic that he was eventually hired to product manage it. There have been so many innovations with screen flows that this video goes over so you really can’t miss it.

Podcast highlights from October

If you haven’t listened yet, we had one of our favorite guests on to talk about one of our favorite topics. Domenique Buxton is the creative force behind Cloudy, Astro, SaaSy, and the rest of the cast of Salesforce characters you know and love. In September, we also did a special podcast on the story of the #AwesomeAdmin movement that we think is really special.

Just for fun

Mike and Gillian also talk seasonal drinks and some fun facts about Fall.

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Category:general -- posted at: 3:00am PST

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Jennifer Cole, Manager of the CRM & Analytics Team at 908 Devices.

Join us as we talk about business processes, Jennifer’s latest presentation at Dreamforce, and why it’s so important to understand everything about a problem process before you try to implement a solution.

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

Admins are problem solvers

Jennifer swapped to a smaller company in order to make bigger decisions about how the Salesforce ecosystem there would be run, and she’s had the opportunity to hire her own team of Awesome Admins to support that vision. “I’m glad I like hats because I wear a lot of them,” she says, “but I think, as an admin, everything we touch is problem-solving.”

For her Dreamforce presentation, Jennifer focused on what she did when her company came to her to improve their order entry process. And while she was approached by people who wanted specific things fixed about it, she knew from experience that she needed to broaden her perspective. One technique she uses is to start from the initial request and find out who that person is chasing and asking them the same questions about their process, and then the person they chase, and so on. That way, she captures the entire business process and all of the problems that need solving to make it run more smoothly.

When roadblocks aren’t actually roadblocks

One question that Mike raised on the pod is what to do when it seems like a big obstacle to teams working together is that one business unit simply isn’t on Salesforce. “That can be a false roadblock,” Jennifer says, “I know that’s often what admins hear but I don’t see it as a dead end.”

Often, those teams are curious about how moving their process into the system can streamline everything and plug into the powerful automation and analytics tools Salesforce has to offer. The key is to convince them that you can do things to make what they’re already doing better, rather than coming from the angle that what they’re doing is wrong.

Why understanding the problem makes solving it easy

In Jennifer’s talk, she went over how Flow and MuleSoft Composer helped her make big changes to her organization’s business processes. But how did she get there? The first step was to chart out the problem she was trying to solve in a more detailed way. “Think about the entire workflow and the elements needed for success,” Jennifer says, “and if those elements have a risk of not being there or not being complete they become a section of the problem that I have to also solve to make the whole process work.”

While it’s an important first step, understanding the problem is only part of the process of actually solving it. You need to decide what will be your “source of truth” for each record, even if that’s in different systems for different pieces of information. “It’s a slow process but once you have that down, identifying the tools and the way the data moves becomes the easiest part of all of this,” Jennifer says.

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Direct download: Solving_Business_Problems_with_Composer_and_Flow_with_Jennifer_Cole.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:00am PST

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Domenique Buxton, Executive Creative Director for the Trailblazer Ecosystem and Trailhead Brand at Salesforce.

Join us as we talk about the history of the colorful cast of Salesforce characters and where you can find some “Hidden Saasys.”

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

A new galaxy of Salesforce characters

Domenique’s title is a bit of a mouthful these days, so she usually prefers to just say she’s Astro’s mom. But if you want to know the real history of Salesforce characters and mascots, you have to start with SaaSy. For those that didn’t get a chance to behold them in all their beauty, they were a “no software” symbol with arms and legs. “If it wasn’t for SaaSy, we wouldn’t have any of the other characters,” Domenique says, and you need to understand that SaaSy could dance.

In 2014, Domenique was helping plan Developer Week. They always tried to make these events fun and that year, they decided they were going into space. Salesforce1 had just been released and it felt like new galaxies were out there waiting to be explored. And so, a charismatic astronaut named Astro was born, but as Salesforce changed so did their outfit: a racecar driver for Lightning, a raccoon for Trailhead, and it wasn’t long before Astro had some friends.

When a brand is like a hug

“The characters are like a big brand hug,” Domenique says, “all the characters want to help and be there for you to light the way. The characters are like beacons where they’re shining lights on ways to move forward.” The characters in many ways are essential because they make Salesforce feel more welcoming like you can do anything, and that there’s a community there to support you and have fun along the way.

As Domenique says, creating a character for each role is all about celebrating purpose: why we do what we do and shining a light on all the fantastic makers that comprise the Salesforce community. “The characters’ journey has been towards purpose, and their purpose is to help you unlock yours,” she says.

Crouching Astro, hidden SaaSy

If you have sharp eyes, you may have noticed something familiar in Salesforce creative content over the years. Domenique and her team loves putting in some “Hidden SaaSys” whenever they get the chance. The rims on Astro’s moped, for example. “It’s an Easter egg, but it’s also a nod to where we’ve come from,” she says.

One thing that might be on the horizon is an in-person Cloudy appearance. The thing is: we need your help. Make some noise on Twitter and let the world know that the people are crying out to meet Cloudy. “Cloudy is the secret sauce,” Domenique says, “she knows everything about the cloud and makes the whole thing work.”

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Direct download: A_Brief_History_of_Salesforce_Characters_with_Domenique_Buxton.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:00am PST

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Marti Pirkle, Director of Commercial Systems at Cloudmed, and Lisa King, Marketing Automation Manager at Experity.

Join us as we round out our Best of Dreamforce series with a look at their Dreamforce presentation about how to migrate two orgs seamlessly.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Marti Pirkle and Lisa King.

When two become one.

We thought that Marti and Lisa put together an amazing session for Dreamforce ‘22, “No-Code Solution for Day 1 — Share Faster to Migrate Smarter” The talk is based on their experiences sharing data between two orgs and what prep work they did before Day One that enabled get the new org started without a hitch.

This all started in the Spring, when Marti found out that Lisa’s company was going to be purchasing her company. “We were tasked with making sure we could see all the information of each Salesforce org on day one of the acquisition,” Marti says, and so they needed to come together and make a plan so they could hit the ground running.

Working around NDAs

One of the biggest challenges that Marti and Lisa faced was the fact that, before the merger, there were NDAs in place that limited what information they could share with each other. They only had eight weeks to make a plan and execute on it, but they couldn’t send files or data back and forth.

“Luckily, we both knew we were in the same industry, we were both in the healthcare space, and we found out that we shared a commonality, an external database called Definitive Healthcare,” Lisa says. They could also talk about the metadata and structure of their orgs, which enabled them to get a lot done even with the restrictions they were dealing with.

No code, no problem

Obviously, Lisa and Marti had to become fast friends. However, they also developed more than a few tips and tricks to same themselves time and hassle along the way. They created a quick system for sharing small, tweet-sized updates between client success teams on the page for each account. That made them easily reportable, inline editable and show up in list views. “When they saw the information being reciprocated, that’s when the lightbulb went off for people,” Marti says, “now, I don’t have to call someone, I just know.”

Their data merger was so successful that it was actually Lisa and Marti’s managers that pushed them to turn their experience into a presentation and pitch it to Dreamforce. And even more amazingly, they did it without code. “I am a developer, I love to write code, but we did this without code,” Lisa says, and no middleware. They used formulas, flows, and all the other tools available to everybody in Salesforce, and didn’t have to issue licenses or do training in each other’s orgs. Instead, everyone could just see the data they needed to see in the org they were trained on and comfortable with.

Listen to the full podcast for more tips on the power of Flow and why Marti and Lisa are both major Flownatics, as well as what it’s like to put together a Dreamforce presentation.

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Direct download: Best_of_Dreamforce__Migrate_Smarter_with_Marti_Pirkle_and_Lisa_King.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:00am PST

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