Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Stuart Werner, Principle Instructor at Salesforce, and Feroz Abdul Rehman, Senior Manager of Technical Curriculum Development at MuleSoft.

Join us as we talk about two new Trailhead Academy courses that can help you harness the power of automation and transform your business.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Stuart Werner and Feroz Abdul Rehman.

Enroll in Trailhead Academy

Trailhead Academy is a collection of certified instructors who offer specific trainings you can take, as an individual or as a member of a company, to come up to speed on various Salesforce products. We brought Stuart and Feroz on the pod to share details about their new classes, both of which are focused on automation.

ADX301: Automate No-Code Solutions Using Flow

Admins are getting more and more interested in Flow, and there have been a lot of folks who cross-register for the class aimed at developers. However, one piece of feedback Stuart has heard a lot as an instructor is, “I know how to click but I just don’t understand why to click.” And so he got together with some other instructors to come up with a class to help admins learn how to think like a developer and use Flow.

The class starts with the basics of development: variables, control statements, algorithms, “all the fun stuff that might not be in a Salesforce Admin’s toolbox,” Stuart says. From there, they move on to look at specific use cases and learn how to analyze requirements and whiteboard a solution. By the end, you’ll be making powerful, automated solutions in a snap with Flow.

ADX350: Build Salesforce Hyperautomation Solutions with MuleSoft

“Hyperautomation is the new frontier,” Feroz says, “[it’s] all about the maximum amount of automation you can build into your daily processes that helps people focus on what’s really important.” It’s not just about saving 5 minutes here or there, it’s about finding all of the places where there’s potential for automation across your organization.

In the class, you’ll learn how to use all the automation tools Salesforce has to offer, from Flow to MuleSoft to Einstein Bots, and how to connect them together. The goal is to give you the skills you need to deliver business transformation through end-to-end automation solutions that improve the employee experience, deliver value, and drive innovation.

If you’re already familiar with some automation tools but you’re trying to figure out what’s next, this class is perfect for you.

Be sure to listen to the full episode to learn about how Feroz and Stuart approach teaching and why classes are a great opportunity to put yourself out there. And head on over to Trailhead Academy to get started.

Podcast swag

• Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Learn more:

• ADX301: Automate No-Code Solutions Using Flow

• ADX350: Build Salesforce Hyperautomation Solutions with MuleSoft

Social

• Stuart: https://trailblazer.me/id/stuart-werner

• Feroz: @FRehmanSFDC

• Salesforce Admins: @SalesforceAdmns 

• Gillian: @GillianKBruce

• Mike: @MikeGerholdt

 

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to LeeAnne Rimel, Senior Director of Admin Evangelism at Salesforce.

Join us as we talk about the biggest mistakes admins make and what to do to avoid them.

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

What’s the biggest mistake new admins make?

About once a year, LeeAnne gets asked the same question: what are the biggest mistakes she sees new admins make? And LeeAnne is a great person to answer this question. She’s worked at Salesforce for a long time, including a spell as a tier-three support engineer. She’s seen literally thousands of implementations and, you’ll be glad to know, she has an answer.

“The biggest mistake that I see Salesforce Admins make is not asking why,” LeeAnne says. That means putting on your business analyst hat and understanding what’s behind what you’re trying to build. Not just how you’re going to implement it, but why you’re being asked for it in the first place.

Measure twice and cut once

Let’s take a common request: you’re asked to add a new field. LeeAnne points out that the bulk of your work is actually going to be done in the discovery process, where you’re interviewing stakeholders, talking with users, and understanding how it fits into the business process already in place in your organization. Is this something other business units will use? What will be the reporting requirements for this field?

That’s why business analyst skills are such a point of emphasis in the Salesforce Admin Skills Kit. When you ask why you’re building something, you’re trying to understand how it affects the user, how it affects the business units, how it affects the organization, and how it affects other dependencies. Only after you’ve got a firm grasp on all that and written your plan down on paper do you start to actually build something. In short, LeeAnne is a big proponent of “measure twice and cut once.”

Your time to shine

You might feel hesitant to push back on requests because it makes you feel like you’re saying no. But just building whatever’s been requested and not taking the extra time to understand the context means you’re missing out on opportunities to shine. It could be that several business units need to track something similar, and you can actually make a solution that works for everyone across your organization, or give them reporting they didn’t know they needed.

If you need help brushing up on your business analyst skills and getting a comprehensive understanding of what makes a solid discovery process, we’ve got you covered. Check out the links below and remember: always ask why.

Podcast swag

• Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Learn more:

• Salesforce Admin Skills Kit

• Trailhead: Learn About Discovery

Social

• LeeAnne: @LeeAnndroid

• Salesforce Admins: @SalesforceAdmns 

• Gillian: @GillianKBruce

• Mike: @MikeGerholdt

Full Transcript

Gillian Bruce: Welcome to the Salesforce Admins podcast, where we talk about product, community, and careers to help you be an awesome admin. I'm your host today, Gillian Bruce, and we are going to be joined by podcast frequenter, LeeAnne Rimel, my amazing teammate who had a really interesting thought for an episode, and I agreed that it was an important topic. So, I said, "Come on on the podcast, LeeAnne, let's talk about it." It's all about the biggest mistakes that admins make. So, without further ado, let's get LeeAnne on the podcast. LeeAnne, welcome to the podcast.

LeeAnne Rimel: Hey, Gillian, thanks for having me.

Gillian Bruce: Good to have you back. Now, I wanted to dig into something that you and I had a quick chat about the other day and I thought, "Hey, we should probably bring this to our listeners." This came up for you because you had just done a presentation to a group of students learning about technology in Salesforce, and it's all about the biggest mistakes that admins make. Now, I'm sure everyone's wondering what are the biggest mistakes. So, LeeAnne, can you give us a little more context about this conversation and this idea in general?

LeeAnne Rimel: Yeah. It's one of my favorite questions to get asked. I feel like at least once a year, usually more, someone asks me this question, whether it's on a panel, it's often when working with students who might be entering the Salesforce ecosystem in the next year or so. The question is always what's the biggest mistake you see Salesforce admins make, or what's the worst thing you can do as a new Salesforce admin. Understandable question, right? People want to avoid possible missteps, and totally makes sense.
   I have an answer for this because, Gillian, you and I have worked together for a long time. I've been at Salesforce for a long time. I've seen thousands of customer implementations. I was a tier 3 support engineer once upon a time for Salesforce which you spend a lot of time untangling maybe different things that have been built and understanding why they were built. I was a sales engineer after that for a while, again, often working with existing implementations and trying to understand why things were built a certain way. So, I feel like pretty sure about my answer, what's the biggest mistake, it's after many years, 15 years of seeing thousands of customer implementations, and the great thing...

Gillian Bruce: What's the biggest mistake, LeeAnne? I want to know. This is buildup.

LeeAnne Rimel: We've got the buildup. Well, okay. The great thing is that it's something that you can do or you can avoid this mistake whether you're a brand new admin or you're a really tenured admin. The biggest mistake that I see Salesforce admins make is not asking why, is not diving into their business analyst skills, is not evaluating why a solution needs to be built before they build it. And so, the great news is that no matter where you are in your Salesforce admin journey, you can ask why. As we grow our business analyst skills, as we grow our admin skills, we grow our language and our methodology and our toolkit of how we ask why and how we build out those solutions. But on your first day as an admin, if someone asks you to add a checkbox, you can ask why, and I really strongly recommend you all do that.

Gillian Bruce: Yes. So, I a hundred thousand percent agree with this and I think it's really interesting because a lot of times when you think about, "Oh, I'm scared about making a mistake when I build something or I'm scared about making a mistake in this implementation," that is actually, that's fine. Those are good mistakes to make because you learn something. It's like this idea of experimenting and continuing to iterate. But before you even get there, before you build anything, really understanding what it is you're trying to accomplish and what's the problem you're trying to solve.
   I mean, LeeAnne, you mentioned business analysis skills. That's one of the 14 skills in our Salesforce admin skills kit. It's also, if you look out there at job titles, when people are looking for Salesforce admin jobs, a lot of time you see business analysis even in the job title itself. There's kind of this magical marriage between business analysts and Salesforce admins, and if you have both of those skills at a very core level, it's going to enable you to be amazingly successful in your role. So, can you talk to me a little bit about that, more about that business analysis skillset, and how you employ that before you start building something in Salesforce?

LeeAnne Rimel: Yeah, absolutely. I don't know if anyone else's parents ever used to tell them the rule about measure twice, cut once, right? It's a good attitude to bring to building solutions as well. A huge amount of your work, let's say you're going to build an automation, business automation for one of your business units. The bulk of your work is not going to be the clicking around in Salesforce. The most meaningful and valuable part of your work is going to be conducting those stakeholder interviews, creating your process map, asking good questions about what needs is this serving, creating your user stories, really understanding the solution that you want to build and asking good questions about often as admins were approached by maybe heads of business units, "Hey, we need to track this. We need to add a field for this." That's a very common request. We need to add a field for this.
   It's not about saying no. It's about asking why. It's about saying, "Help me understand what is the business goal this is serving. Who does this impact? Do you want to report on this?" There's a lot of questions to ask so that when you build it, you're building the right thing and you're on that right path. So, I think really developing those business analyst skills is such a key. You mentioned it's one of the key skills for an admin or an admin skills kit, and it is so incredibly important is honing those skills of understanding why are you building something, how does it affect the user, how does it affect the business unit, how does it affect the business, how does it affect other dependencies. And so, if you slow down, if you measure twice, cut once, but I guess in Salesforce, it's like measure 10 times. Write it down, document it, make your plan, and then you build the solution. Then you add the field. Then you build an interior user experience.
   I think that that's just, it's so important. When we talk about making mistakes, just growing any skillset, you're always going to look back on things you built. You're going to look back on the first flow that you built and say, "Hey, I could have built that even more efficiently. I could have used subflows in a different way." Or, maybe you're going to look back at and develop more and more efficient formulas to write or more performant dashboards to create. That's really great growth to have and those are very okay paths and great paths to be on. But this exercise of Asking why, you can start from day one.

Gillian Bruce: So, actually on that, LeeAnne, so let's say I have been in an organization in a Salesforce admin role and I've been just kind of taking orders and just adding fields when people ask me to add fields or building the thing because they tell me that's what they want to have built, and I haven't done a lot of asking why. How would you go about trying to change that and shift that in my current role? Because it's a little weird to all of a sudden just change and be like, "Well, why do you need that?" And then people be like, "Well, why are you asking me why I need it? You just do what I tell you to do." How do you combat that?

LeeAnne Rimel: Yeah, I think that's a really great question, right? I think we approach this with a lot of empathy for our end users. I think that's always a great way. Writing user stories is kind of an act of empathy because you are imagining that you are that user working through a system and trying to accomplish a task, right? And so, I think approaching it in that way, it's not about, "Hey, you have to give me the right answer or else I'm not going to build you this thing you're asking for." It's, "Hey, I want to better understand. I'm interested in better understanding how you need this to perform. What's the problem that this is solving?" because there might be other groups you can interview as well. There might be a chance if you've got one sales group is requesting a field, is that a field that has a similar need in other business units and other sales processes, and maybe it should be a different... Instead of having multiple fields for each sales unit, maybe it's one field or maybe it's a custom object.
   So, I think just approaching it with empathy for your users is generally a good attitude to have, I think, and just saying, "Hey, I know," and you can say, "Hey, I know this is a little different than before. We're trying to make sure that we're building the right things in the right place to benefit everyone in the company, to benefit you. I want to make sure this is going to perform the way that you need to perform." And so, that might mean asking more questions about their expectations around reporting or expectations around flexibility in the future of that field or that request, but I think just being clear with how you're asking and why you're asking. So, just like you're asking why, it's okay to give them the why of why you need the why,

Gillian Bruce: It's why on all of the levels, all of the whys.

LeeAnne Rimel: But it's like if I'm going to ask you why, it's fair to provide some additional background on why, what I'm going to do with that information to make you my partner in it because that makes you my partner. If I'm like, "Hey, can we collaborate on this for a minute? Can we have a little interview?" We talk about stakeholder interviews. A stakeholder interview doesn't have to be like, "Oh, we scheduled an hour on the calendar that's titled stakeholder interview, and we're following this template." A stakeholder interview can be, "Hey, sales user that I work with, can I sit down with you for 15 minutes and ask you some key questions about what's difficult for you?" Or, it can be putting a user story together and then gut checking in with one of your stakeholders. Those are all business analysis. A lot of the interpersonal skills that many admins are so strong in, those are all business analysis skills.

Gillian Bruce: Yeah, and it's all before you start solutioning at all. I think one of the things that I heard you say, especially focusing on the empathy, like you said, it establishes the relationship with your users, but it also establishes with your leadership, it shows that you're thinking more big picture about where the business is going and how Salesforce can fit within the context of that. I think we've talked about this a fair amount on our team to various groups of admins, but really as a Salesforce admin, especially given the current environment that we're all in, we're asked to do more with less. This is a moment and this is an opportunity to really demonstrate that you do understand the business goals, you can connect the business goals with the skills you have and the technology skills that you have to deliver really impactful results pretty quickly. And so, I think especially tapping into this idea of don't make the mistake of not asking why you go into this, this is a really important thing to think about right now.

LeeAnne Rimel: Absolutely. I think it's an opportunity to uncover some gold mines really as an admin for where you can add value to your organization. Earlier I mentioned thinking about the user, thinking about the business unit, thinking about the enterprise, when you ask why and when you dive in and when you conduct stakeholder interviews and when you understand the context of these requests, it helps you understand the business and the things that are pains for the business and how you can potentially create solutions for those. That's an incredibly valuable place for a Salesforce admin to be, and it's a really smart place, career-wise, to be, to be positioning yourself to understand, okay, I see that we're wanting to dive into analytics more across these parts of the business, because not only does asking why help you build a better solution, you're the Salesforce expert, probably not your leadership structure, probably not your business unit leaders.
   And so, if you're building a solution that someone sketches out for you and they said, "Hey, I want you to build this exact solution for me," you might be missing some opportunities to really expand what that solution looks like and better serve the needs of the business. And so, the more that you ask why and you try to expand that and really create the right solution, it can just be an absolute career goldmine for admins to position themselves as really valuable to the organization and is really tied into the organizational goals.

Gillian Bruce: Well, and I mean understanding what different parts of the businesses need and understanding what Salesforce can do or what you can do with Salesforce as an admin. I've heard stories before where an admin says, "Oh, well this business unit was using this specific app for this process. They didn't realize we could do that in Salesforce which we already pay for. So, I'm going to just save us a bunch of money and say, 'You don't have to use that anymore and it's all going to be in Salesforce.'" You talk about a business understanding the value you can bring as an admin, that is huge.

LeeAnne Rimel: Absolutely.

Gillian Bruce: Yeah.

LeeAnne Rimel: Yeah, I think what you're talking about is kind of doing an audit of systems, right?, And so if you're looking for projects as an admin or trying to understand where you can add value, that is an incredible place to look for value ads, because if you are on, say, Sales Cloud or Service Cloud, you can create custom objects. You have platform access, right? I remember working with a customer and they were using I think Sales Cloud, and it was when they realized we were working together and they were showing me the different systems they used and the different places that they tracked things, and they were using, I think Evernote or something to track customer stories and it was how they were tracking, and they had this whole kind of complex template and they were adding Salesforce record IDs and it was a whole thing.
   I was like, "Oh, let me show you how we track customers first," because of course we do it in Salesforce. There was this moment where someone from the leadership team was a little resistant, like, "Okay, well, that's not the deal that we're talking about right now. We don't have any additional budget for that." It's like, "Well, actually, you're already paying for everything you need to create a customer stories app because we have a free app on the app exchange. You've got platform licenses. You've got access to this already." And then the admin there really advocated that and ported that over and made that one of their projects, and it was such a big win for that team. And so, I think as an admin, when you're putting on your business analyst hat, part of it is when you're conducting these interviews, when you're understanding what the company priorities are, when you're understanding where your stakeholder priorities are. Where are those opportunities to build great solutions using the tools you already have?

Gillian Bruce: Mm-hmm. I love that. That's a fantastic story, and yeah, again, it really demonstrates, hey, you use those business analysis skills as an admin. You never know what kind of things you're going to discover. I mean, talk about a leader who would not appreciate that, right? Oh, I'm already paying for a thing so I don't have to pay for this extra thing. We can get rid of that and just continue to pay for what we're already paying for. Yeah, especially given the world as it is now, that's the huge kind of impact that we can have as admins using those business analysis skills.

LeeAnne Rimel: Discovery is such an important, when I say ask why, really if you're Googling for and looking on Trailhead for content, asking why is really all about discovery. It's a huge part of it is discovery, and we'll share in the show notes some great Trailhead resources and admin resources to dive into that further. But doing that customer discovery, because your users and your business unit leaders are your customers, it's so illuminating because we assume that we know what people... Sorry, there's my dog. We assume that we know what people are doing as they're working with Salesforce all day, but we don't. That's why Mike Gerholdt, our colleague, coined the term SABWA, Salesforce administration by walking around, and that's another form of discovery. It's doing those interviews and research into how are people using Salesforce and how can we make their life a little better.

Gillian Bruce: Well, I know Riley's very passionate about this. I can hear that she cares a lot about asking why it's good. So, I just, I love everything you shared, LeeAnne. I think that this is a really valuable aspect for all of us to think about no matter where we are in our careers, especially as Salesforce admins. If you're brand new, your first day on your job as a Salesforce admin, what are the top few questions that you would ask?

LeeAnne Rimel: Well, if you're brand new as a Salesforce admin and you're dealing with an existing implementation, I think some of the most important questions you can ask is help me understand why was this built, help me understand why you're using this, or who's using this, and making sure you're asking the right people, right? That's a huge part of identifying your stakeholders and identifying who would ask. Make sure you're asking the right people. Make sure you're interviewing your power users as well as people who have admin rights and things like that. Sometimes power users are using things in a way that wasn't originally architected, but it's providing value for them, so you want to make sure you figure out how they're using a text field or something like that.
   So I think asking those questions, help me understand how is this built or why was this built, what was the goal for this, are you still using this today, when you sort of untangle that. Then I think at a really high level, if it's your first day at a company, understanding, and this is the questions when I meet with my leadership or have the opportunity to meet with leadership, I always want to know, what's top of mind for you, what's keeping you up at night, what are your top three things on your mind right now. If you ever have a chance to sit down or to meet with anyone in your leadership structure or in leadership in other parts of your company, or as your stakeholders, those are great questions to ask. You can expand outside of Salesforce. If you're a Salesforce admin at a company, it's great to ask questions about Salesforce, but also it's important to understand what's keeping you up at night, what are your top three goals and priorities right now, what's on your mind, because it might be things that you can help impact with your Salesforce implementation.

Gillian Bruce: Yeah, it's your job as the admin to connect the business goals and the overall goals of your leadership with what you and Salesforce can do together. I think that's a really important point. Well, LeeAnne, it's been so fun to have this excuse to talk about this very important topic with you on the podcast. Any final thoughts you want to leave with us before we end, we wrap up today?

LeeAnne Rimel: Every admin is a business analyst and has the power to be a strong business analyst and to continue to build those business analyst skills. One of the most important elements of being a business analyst is curiosity with that customer discovery. I think admins, it was curiosity that likely led you to learning this new skillset and learning how to be a Salesforce admin and exploring all these different tools and features. So, lean into that curiosity. You already have everything it takes to be a business analyst. Lean into that curiosity.

Gillian Bruce: I love that. Great note to end on. Thanks again so much for joining us today, LeeAnne. I appreciate it.

LeeAnne Rimel: Thank you, Gillian.

Gillian Bruce: Huge thanks to LeeAnne for taking the time to join me on the podcast today. Now, if you want to learn anything that we mentioned on the podcast, including resources about how to do discovery and how to ask why, please check out the show notes. We've got some great Trailhead content there, some great content in general to help you understand how to kind of hone those business analysis skills. We've also got links to our Salesforce admin skills kit, which has a whole section on business analysis. As always, if you want to learn anything more about being an awesome admin, you can go to my favorite website, admin.salesforce.com, where you'll find the skills kit and all kinds of great blogs and videos and more podcasts actually very closely related to some of the topics we talked about today. So, check it out.
   As always, you can join the fun on Twitter by using #awesomeadmin or by following @SalesforceAmns, no I. You can find myself on Twitter @gilliankbruce, my cohost Mike Gerholdt, @MikeGerholdt, and our guest today, LeeAnne, @leeanndroid. Hope you have a wonderful rest of your day. Thank you so much for joining us, and I'll catch you next time in the cloud.

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Rakesh Gupta Senior Solution Solution Architect at IBM, a six-time Salesforce MVP, evangelist, Salesforce coach, and the creator of Automation Champion. 

Join us as we talk about how to fit blogging into a busy schedule and what to think about when you’re writing about a solution.

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

The birth of Automation Champion

We’re big fans of Rakesh’s blog, Automation Champion, so we brought him on the pod to find out more about the man, the myth, the legend. When he first got started, he would answer questions from the community to see if he could find solutions with automations that didn’t require code.

Rakesh started saving these answers in a gigantic Google Doc which he would share over and over again, but he started thinking that maybe there was a better way. The same questions would come up, time after time, and it would be really handy to put all the answers in one place. That’s when he took his first steps into the blogosphere.

Why you should start blogging

Mike is doing a little blogging of his own about, well…blogging and why admins should start doing it. So we wanted to get some tips from Rakesh about how he fits writing into his busy schedule.

The first thing Rakesh does is block out a couple of hours each weekend to plan his content schedule and research new topics. “I try to write [a post] four or five times before I publish it,” he says, “if I understand it well then anyone can, too.” He goes to the Trailblazer Community to look for new questions and, believe it or not, he still has material he has gotten to in that Google Doc.

It’s important to have confidence in the fact that your perspective matters. No matter where you are on your Salesforce journey, you’re going to have a unique perspective and a unique way of solving problems. As Rakesh says, you need to realize that there’s an audience out there that will resonate with the way you, specifically, explain things.

How Rakesh writes a new post

When Rakesh is writing a new blog post, the first thing he does is jump into his Developer Sandbox to see if he can get a solution working. He especially wants to make sure that he’s testing with enough records to tell if it will be useable at scale.

Most importantly, Rakesh tries to frame his solutions in terms of tangible business problems that anyone can understand. He’s always thinking about the perspective of someone who is new to Salesforce: will they be able to understand and implement this solution? If not, he’ll go back and make some edits.

Finally, Rakesh does a regular session on Saturdays called Salesforce Flow Office Hours. “Trying to build a Flow is the last step,” he says, “the first step is to spend time thinking it through, you have to create a Process Flow Diagram or write something down on paper so you understand how it works in real life.” If you want help with your Flows, hop in a session on Saturdays at 10 am (US Central Time).

Podcast swag

• Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Learn more:

• Build a Blog: A New Series to Help You Jump-Start Your Own Admin Blog

• Automation Champion

• Sign up for Salesforce Flow Office Hours

Social

• Rakesh: @Rakeshistom

• Salesforce Admins: @SalesforceAdmns 

• Gillian: @GillianKBruce

• Mike: @MikeGerholdt

Full Transcript

Mike:  Welcome to the Salesforce Admins Podcast, where we talk about product community and career to help you become an awesome admin.
 This week, we're talking with Rakesh Gupta, a six-time Salesforce MVP, Author, Salesforce Coach and Avid Blogger on Automation Champion and he's been working on the Salesforce platform for over 10 years. So, I love that we get into quite a bit of blogging talk on this episode. I know Rakesh is super into automation, but with the launch of the Build a Blog series, I really wanted to pick his brain on what he does in terms of cadence and writing and unique content. And maybe being a little bit vulnerable and putting content out there that you got to revise. So, we do talk a little bit of automation, but you should be sure to check him out with the Salesforce Flow Office Hours, I want to get that right, that he hosts every Saturday and, of course, his blog which I'll link to in the podcast. But for now, enjoy this conversation that I have with Rakesh. So, let's get Rakesh on the podcast.
 So, Rakesh, welcome to the podcast.

Rakesh Gupta: Thank you for inviting me, Mike.

Mike:  It's been a long time coming. I feel like I've read a lot of your stuff. But for those people, the less than 1%, I would say, of the community that may not know everything that you do, can you just give us a brief history of how you got into the Salesforce ecosystem?

Rakesh Gupta: Sure. My name is Rakesh and I'm a Senior Solution Architect working at IBM. I started my career as soon as I got out of college in India as a [inaudible] developer. Then I was fortunate enough to join couple of Salesforce community events that happened around that time, lead by Kalender Patel and other Salesforce evangelist in India, and I learned about Salesforce. Right after that, I found the recruiting application work and I started learning Salesforce and working on Salesforce platform and I involved in community. That's how I learn and get most of the knowledge and use cases that I put on my blog on automationchampion.com and how then later I started user group in Navi Mumbai, which called as Navi Mumbai Developer User Group. And in 2016, I started Automation Hour with Jennifer Lee and David Litton to help community to learn Salesforce automation process builder/Salesforce flow by using Salesforce use case that everyone implement in their org.

Mike:  So you do a few things. I feel like you hit on some really good parts. According to your site, you're six times Salesforce MVP. Holy cow. That's nothing to shake a stick at.
 Let's start with your blog. So Automation Champion, I know I promise you this, everybody on Admin Relations Team has read at least a couple of 100 posts on Automation Champion, and it's such a great site. I'm going to start with the site because I'm also doing a blog series that I will link to in the show notes encouraging everyone to start an admin blog. What caused you, on top of everything that you're doing, to go, "You know what? I'm going to start an Automation Champion site and I'm going to write blog posts for the community?"

Rakesh Gupta:I started this blog post when I was in India and I was posting page three Bollywood parties' picture initially. It was started as [inaudible] and then as soon I just started my Salesforce career, I come to know about, there are lots of community people, they are looking for solutions like for example, initially we have success.com, success.salesforce.com or developer.salesforce.com and I hunt those website to find use case, help people to solve their problem using automations without writing code. Some of them, you can able to do the code, but there are lots of possibilities and Salesforce introduce workload. Then ability to launch a flow from workflow and then later process builder. Now Salesforce flows. So there are possibilities that the solution and use cases one has can we solve without writing code. So what I initially did is I started writing those into a Word document 10 or 20 pages what document step by steps and posting into the Trailblazer community.
 And then later I realized, and then I found that lots of people have same questions again and again they're asking. And I started sharing the same Word document and I have Google Drive, which is approximately one gigabyte having 1,000s of those use cases. So I thought why not? I can put this in a format that everyone can take a look and implement it and if they have any questions they can reach out to me. So that is rakesh.workplace.com started and later I think it's true [inaudible] in the sales, he gave me an idea to change this because I'm doing most of the thing for automation. So change it to automationchampion.com.

Mike:  No, it's cool. I love it. And some of these are rhetorical, but I would love to know some of the questions that I get asked. Because I feel like as a fellow blogger, these are things that we know but you talked about you also did automation hour with Jennifer Lee and Jennifer Lee's on our admin relations team. And she writes a ton of automation stuff too. What was the unique value that you were like, you know what, I got to put this out in the world even though there's other people doing stuff like it?

Rakesh Gupta:Well that's a very hard question.

Mike:  I know.

Rakesh Gupta:So initially, see I'm from the background that coming from, I don't have lots of technical background in my family. My father is a retired teacher and my mom is housewife. So I see that people is struggling to getting into ecosystems and getting the use case that they are trying to solve by going through some articles. Because one thing that I believe is there is a user for every use cases, there are person that require the same intensity that you solve a challenge. For example, there are products, there are laptop, there are different kind of laptops and there are audience for each of them, there are movies then audience for each of them, those categories. So likewise, that's what I believe. If there are different people, how I can make myself unique in that front is when I get a requirement or use case from the community.
 Most of these use cases is come from the community and what I put is I put my thought how an individual who don't know anything don't have lots of technical background now like me and how they can solve this challenge. So that's where I started putting the process flow diagram. So let's take this requirement first, try to understand the use case. Don't jump into the solutions. You don't have to go and directly solve this problem, take this use case and then try to build a process flow diagram. Either you can do a paper and pen or any diagramming tools available in the market.
 So by doing that, you spend some time in the building, the pseudocode that call in the programming or you can use that's also in the logic building. So once you have that, now let's break down in the step by step. So what do you need first? What you need second and what you need third? So that you will able to understand not just by copy pasting the scenarios you have, it is matching with my scenario and implemented, you can able to solve it so that next time when you get the different requirement, you can do the same exercise one more time by yourself and you can able to solve this.

Mike:  I think you nailed it. There's so many use cases out there and there's so many reasons to share what you do that I'm surprised your Google Drive last as long as it did before you started the blog.

Rakesh Gupta:I still have lots of scenarios in my Google Drive that I have in my Twitter list to put into the blog post in a blog post format and there are lots of community people who is helping me to put this into the block right now.

Mike:  Well so let's talk about that because I think one of the things that if you're creating content for the community and running, you go to automation champion, you look at it and you're like, man, that must take him millions of hours a week to do. What does that look like? How do you categorize that time in your life to get that content out the door? Because you're busy, you're doing stuff, you're flying around the world, you've got a day job.

Rakesh Gupta:I spend my weekends to plan for at least next two weekends so that I am ahead in the content planning. So usually on every Sunday, four to five or four to six central, I spend two hours just to going through my content knowledge base that I have in my to-do list. So what else I can take this week or next week and try to implement for the community. And there are lots of other things like I write the blog post on Salesforce Flow, Salesforce religious and mainly part of related things. So I categorize them and there are some architect things as well. I started writing, so I categorize them and see what is most valuable thing that one can learn from me and my experience and I take one and start researching it, breaking it down, writing it, and trying to read four or five times before I publish so that if I understand then anyone can understand this,

Mike:  That's real similar to what I used to do too. I remember I used to do it on Saturday mornings because Sunday evenings usually my brain is mush. So I took advantage of that Saturday morning wake up brain, let's plan some content stuff. That was always fun.

Rakesh Gupta:Saturday morning I run Salesforce office hours for community 10 to 10:30. So I spend.

Mike:  So you just do more because you're not busy enough?

Rakesh Gupta:So every Saturday, 10 to 10:30 central, I spend 30 minutes to people if they have any questions come and try to solve online at the same time. And sometime I teach them how to think through this scenarios use case and how they can utilize their knowledge and they can learn something new. Some of the people when I talk to them, the problem, the major challenges that I see is they don't understand the data model and then there is something that I help them to learn. You can go to the Salesforce is schema builder that you can use to understand how the objects are connected, how this wheels are connected so that when you go and do the query it is very easy for anyone.

Mike:  You know this as well as I do for every problem or every challenge that you're trying to solve for in a business, there's probably three or 400 different ways to solve it in Salesforce. Are you ever concerned that you're not putting out a piece of content that's right?

Rakesh Gupta:Yes. If I agree, yes. Sometime when I saw some scenario that Jen or David or someone else put on this website, I feel like, this is good. And I think that is the opportunity for everyone to learn because no one is perfect. So that's where I see community and my friends like, this is the other way that you can think to solve some problem that I never think and this is good for me to learn and think about. There are different approaches as well that can solve and maybe that is more efficient way. And it did happen many times. So I make a note of it and next time I try to see if I can do solution differently or this is the best solution.

Mike:  I found myself at least, and there's different years depending on the iteration of the Salesforce release where depending on what the product or feature is that you're writing about, it could really change and it could really dramatically impact the solution that you wrote about maybe two years ago or even a year ago. And I think you're probably running into that a lot with flow and orchestrator and especially with some process builder. What part of working in automation do you find the part that you really want to write about the most?

Rakesh Gupta:You nailed it and you said very right. So Salesforce now move into the process builder to Salesforce flows. And last year Francis and Monira, we wrote at least 150 blocks, convert 150 blocks a process builder to Salesforce flows. And nowadays, I try to update all those blocks whenever you see there are new UI here and there in Salesforce, new variables. So I try to update those every day.

Mike:  Not because anything's changing or different, I say that tongue in cheek.

Rakesh Gupta:It is part lots of people following it and I feel like if I provide an hour a day to update those so it'll help for at least one people that would be I think sufficient.

Mike:  Absolutely. I noticed you mentioned your bio, you've been working on the Salesforce platform for over 10 years. In looking back, so let's see, it's 2023 that put you back to 2013, can you remember a point in time where maybe it was a feature or something that you learned that really felt like it was a turning point for you where you looked at that and was like, wow, this is a thing and it just changed my career?

Rakesh Gupta:It is. In 2013 when I was initial involved in community and I found lots of use cases that can automate, but again everyone providing the solutions using APEX code and that time I started learning about Salesforce Visual flow is what's calling us cloud flow designer/visual flow. So I started investing my time and you cannot imagine, some time I spend eight to nine hour a day or maybe whole night just to thinking about the solution that how one can solve because there was very less blocks and information available in the market and that was one of the game changing point for me in my career that helped me to think through what can be possible without writing code and that give me lots of knowledge, even information about the platform, knowledge about the platforms and help me to grow in my career. And that's how I started writing my blocks as well as books in Salesforce Process Builder and Salesforce flows.

Mike:  So you mentioned you used to write and probably still do maybe, I don't know, we'll find out a lot of what would turn into blogs on Google Docs. What is your process for creating content from the moment that Rakesh has the idea to the moment that Mike sees it as a post on automation champion?

Rakesh Gupta:So the first thing is I have lots of ideas. So I write it down and if the idea is I feel like could it be a business use case? And this is a very business use case. So I started first implementing in my Dev Sandbox where I can just try to see if it can be possible and test with at least 10 or 100 record to see if that is working and if that is working, that is again the success for a blog. If not, and it happened many times. So then that's the first thing that I do. And then next step is to start writing a blog post, which is basically now I have a format to think about how I can put in a format, like what business scenario that I convert this use case to, and then create a process flow diagram and think through and person who just joined Salesforce how he can see this use case and if I write in this week and he able to read this and try to implement.
 If not that's let's try to change it and try to add as many as step little steps, little a diagram or highlights so that one can implement easily in their org.

Mike:  Quite extensive. You mentioned Salesforce flow office hours, so on top of just everything that you're doing and you're super busy writing content, you decided to take, is it 30 minutes? 30 minutes?

Rakesh Gupta:30 minutes.

Mike:  On Saturday and do that. What are some of the things that you're accomplishing in office hours?

Rakesh Gupta:One, the couple of things that I accomplished is helping people and there are so many people that reach out, they were not able to build. There was one person from South Africa, he is working for a nonprofit and he just joined Salesforce a week ago and he was trying to build the flows and I built that flow for him on live-

Mike:  Wow.

Rakesh Gupta:... In the same sessions. And he was very happy because he said that it's going to help for his nonprofit tremendously. And then I helped couple of people, lots of people on the call to help them to understand and I feel I got happy when I see that people understand how to implement a flow, it's not writing, just go and try to build the flow. That is the last step. The first step is you have to spend timing in thinking it, you have to create a process flow diagram or you have to write down your thinking into a piece of paper so that you understand how this actually implement in real life and then implementing is the last step.

Mike:  I think sometimes people jump ahead, I'm sure you see that, right? They want to jump into a solution already and you need to back up and think about everything that you're trying to do. Especially now with some of the capabilities of flow, the amount of what you can achieve in a single flow compared to what Process Builder was and even backing up into the days of Workflow builder is just in incredible.

Rakesh Gupta:Yes. For one example a couple of months ago, you cannot able to query the get element by saying that, "Hey, can you give me all opportunity where account ID in the list?" Now Salesforce has that feature in flows where you can say, give me all opportunity where ID in the list. So these are the lots of things that one has to understand and think that this can be also possible with the flows like sorting and there are few other new features. So one has to keep up to date and think how they can implement this while thinking or designing a solution yielding flows.

Mike:  I think back to the days of when I was excited just to build a workflow and somehow Daisy chain all of them together with a checkbox and now that's very simple flow. So as we wrap things up, we talked about your blog, you're super busy. And I'm being selfish here because I'm also writing this Build to blog series that I'll plug again, for somebody thinking about starting a blog and not necessarily on automation, maybe they're going to write something on page design. There's so many features, there's so many topics to write on. If you were to give them piece of advice, what would that be?

Rakesh Gupta:First, remember there is a audience for each content, even though that content has written 200 times or 2000 times does not matter. There is a audience for everything and there is a person who match with your frequency. It is possible that if I explain to you something you can able to understand, but not every people, maybe it is possible that the way that you explain he can or she can able to understand. So that is very first thing one has to understand before writing content. And then second is write the genuine content. Don't copy paste from here and there.
 Write something meaningful that a business problem can solve. If you write something around business problems, it'll be very, very helpful for anyone and reader can easily relate. And if you break down in the step-by-step, which is very, very helpful for anyone who implement, for example, if someone comes and say, hey, how do write Apex class that look for encrypted fill and do the query because that query cannot be done in the Salesforce flow. So if you're writing a Apex class, if you're providing the court, that is good, but if you're provide entire court with the test class and the step by step explanation, I think that is where people get success with the content creation.

Mike:  Nailed it. I have nothing more to say. There is a piece of content for everybody and I could not agree more. I think that's great. Rakesh, we love reading your site and I'm so appreciative that you have the passion behind doing what you do on the site and hosting office hours and writing books and creating trainings like it. It's really fun to find that level of passion in what you do and then be able to translate that into fun bit of work to do outside of your day job, which I know probably doesn't feel like work. So thank you so much for coming on the pod, sharing your information. I appreciate that and I will be sure to link to your site in the show notes.

Rakesh Gupta:No, thank you so much Mike. Thanks for inviting me. This is my dream comes true. I listen your podcast from when you started as a button click admin. And from that day, I am a big fan of you, so thank you so much for inviting me and it is a pleasure.

Mike:  That was a fun conversation with Rakesh. It was good to catch up with him. Awfully busy person running a blog and doing office hours and I even saw an sight the written a few books, so holy cow, that's a lot of contributions. But if you'd like to learn more about all things Salesforce admin, go to admin.salesforce.com to find more resources, including all the links, which I will include the special link to that build a blog series that I've got going, which I will definitely pull some snippets for this. And that goes all summer long that we mentioned. Be in the show notes. And of course there's also a full transcript for you to read in case you missed part of it. You can stay up to date with us on social. We are at Salesforce. Admins, no I on Twitter, my co-host Gillian is on Twitter. She is at Gillian K Bruce and I am at Mike Gert. So with that, stay safe, stay awesome, and stay tuned for the next episode. We'll see you in the cloud.

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Muralidhar Krishnaprasad, EVP of Engineering, Next Gen Customer 360 Data Services at Salesforce.

Join us as we talk about Data Cloud and all of the exciting innovations coming to help admins own all the data in their org.

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

What is Data Cloud?

Muralidhar is in charge of Data, AI, and analytics platforms at Salesforce, and we wanted to bring him on the pod to share the awesomeness that is Data Cloud.

 

Right now, we tend to keep our data in many different pools. Between Sales Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Service Cloud, and outside sources, we don’t necessarily have one single source of truth for what’s going on between a customer and your organization. Currently, getting something even close to that requires a bunch of legwork to migrate data back and forth. It’s expensive, complicated, and presents extra layers of security challenges for your business.

Data Cloud looks to make all of this a lot easier. You can bring all your data to the same place, with Salesforce at the center of it all. It’s simply a game-changer for everything from analytics to building applications to decisions and everything in between.

How Data Cloud empowers admins

While all of this sounds amazing, what does this mean for admins? With everything in one place in Salesforce, you’re finally able to manage all your org’s data and not just what’s already on the platform.

However, that means you get up to speed on the Data Cloud concepts:

1. Bring data in

2. Transform the data

3. Harmonize the data

4. Generate insights on that data

“As an admin, knowing that lifecycle of the data and how you can control and administer it will be the big work to be done,” Muralidhar says. But getting a handle on that will make it easier to protect your data and help your org use it in new ways.

How to get ready for Data Cloud

If this conversation has gotten you excited about Data Cloud, there are a few things you can do to get your org ready. Muralidhar outlines three steps you can take:

1. Identify the systems you want to integrate with, both inbound and outbound.

2. Make a plan for how you want to use the data and the security you need to protect it.

3. Decide which users will need to access what.

Muralidhar recommends starting small and limiting the scope at first, and then expanding as you make things that work for you. He goes over some use cases, including how one bank saw a 35x (!) ROI on their marketing and the insights Mike’s favorite pizza chain, Casey’s, were able to uncover by looking at their data in new ways. 

If you’re as psyched about Data Cloud as we are, there’s already a Trailmix to help you get started and even more resources on the way.

Podcast swag

• Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Learn more:

• Trailmix: Get Started with Data Cloud

• How One of the Biggest Pizza Chains in the U.S. Found the Secret Sauce to Increase Customer Loyalty and Revenue

• Data Cloud Resources

 

Social

• Muralidhar Krishnaprasad on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mkrishna/

• Muralidhar Krishnaprasad on the Trailblazer Community: https://trailblazer.me/id/mkrishnaprasad

• Salesforce Admins: @SalesforceAdmns 

• Gillian: @GillianKBruce

• Mike: @MikeGerholdt

Full Transcript

Gillian Bruce:  Welcome to the Salesforce Admins Podcast, where we talk about product, community, and careers to help you be an awesome admin. I'm your host today, Gillian Bruce, and we have a very special guest, I'm sure all of you have been hearing about Data Cloud and all of the exciting innovations coming in that space from Salesforce. Guess what? We have the leader at Salesforce, our EVP of Engineering, NextGen Customer 360 data services at Salesforce.
 Joining us on the podcast, Muralidhar Krishnaprasad, otherwise known as MK affectionately here at Salesforce. He and his team have been developing these super exciting products, and I wanted to get him on the podcast to talk a little bit more about what these mean, what they are, and how we should start thinking about them as Salesforce admins. So without further ado, let's get MK on the podcast. MK, welcome to the podcast.

MK: Thank you, Gillian. How are you?

Gillian Bruce:  Oh, I'm wonderful. I am very, very happy to have you on the podcast today, and Mike is with us today as well.

Mike:  Yes, hello. It's going to be an awesome podcast. Can't wait.

Gillian Bruce:  We're going to have a data party on the podcast today.

Mike:  It's always a data party.

Gillian Bruce:  Okay, so MK, let's, before we get into it, can you just introduce yourself to our listeners and a little bit about what you do at Salesforce?

MK: Absolutely. Hi, my full name is Muralidhar Krishnaprasad. I also go by Murali or MK for short. I'm the executive vice President for engineering. My team, we deliver the data cloud that we are going to be talking about. Einstein that you guys might already know, the whole AI platform and then the analytics efforts with regard to Datorama and many others in Tableau and many others as well. So overall, think of it as data AI and analytics platforms being delivered here, and I've been here in Salesforce about four plus years. Prior to that, I worked at Microsoft building most of the Azure infrastructure dynamics and many others. And then I started my career before that at Oracle, building databases.

Gillian Bruce:  Okay, so you're a busy person these days because all those products you just mentioned that you're working on at Salesforce, there's a lot going on there.

MK: Absolutely. Really, yes. There's a lot of news you would've heard as well as we are also doing a lot of integrations across Salesforce and across the industry as well.

Gillian Bruce:  That's great. Okay, so let's dig into it. MK, can you explain to us what is Data Cloud?

MK: Yeah, in simple terms. So think of it as an admin. You're going to have various clouds today, sales cloud, marketing, commerce and so on. Problem that we often run into is businesses want to be able to really know what their customer is doing because a customer is not dealing with sales, cloud service, cloud marketing, they're dealing with your business. And so that means you really need to know what they have done. Have they ever opened an email you have sent them? Do they have service cases? Did salesperson make a call and try to sell them something or have they been on your website trying to browse something and purchase something? And this is common across all industries. It's not related to just finance or health. It's literally like every industry that you can think of goes through this motion.
 And so it's more than important more than ever. It's important as companies transition into the digital enablement in digital selling, that you need that single source of truth of what the customer has done with your business. Now that's easier said than done because today if you have to do that, that means you need to create sophisticated EDL pipelines. You need to go create data lakes or warehouses, bring all that data, create new models on top of it, redo all your security on top of it, and then again, figure out a way to take those insights back into these planes of engagement. And that's not just expensive, complicated, but also as you can see, everything you have done with regard to security, with regard to the data models, et cetera. And Salesforce kind of has to be re-done again, maybe multiple times because it's not just done once for data, you need to do the same probably for your ML stack.
 You need to do that for your eventing stack, you need to do that for everything to create a Lakehouse and so on. So people end up repeating this complicated maneuver four or five times. So what Data Cloud is really trying to do is to make that really easy where you can bring data from all these clouds and other sources right into the Salesforce platform so that as admins, you still have control of all that data and more. While being still open that you can now do all of these operations, whether it's a Lakehouse, whether you want to do ML with Einstein or other tools, whether you want to do analytics with Tableau or other tools, you want to build new applications, you want to do eventing, you want to do decisioning. It's all together in this platform. So that's going to be the power of data cloud.
 It has the ability for you to really bring that single source of truth about your business in one place, all managed through Salesforce platform concepts, and be able to enrich all these planes of engagement so your service person knows exactly what that customer has done with your business. Your marketer has all that data that it can do to personalize your engagement. Your salesperson will know exactly what they have done, whether it's a website or other places, and of course your commerce, you can personalize their purchase experience and buying experience. And now with Tableau and MuleSoft, you can bring all the data together and Tableau, you can really analyze that as well. So that is the power of Data Cloud.

Mike:  Wow. Coming back from vacation, I find it funny that we can sit and have a data conversation and talk about lakes and lake houses, and you could totally do a podcast that people would think we're talking about vacation homes, don't you?Help my vacation brain boil this down for admins, what should admins know about cloud besides the Lakehouse?

MK: Great point. So I think as an admin, you need to be thrilled that data is not leaving your ambit because before, if you think about it as a Salesforce admin, you are only administering your cloud, but most of the businesses ended up taking all the data outside. And so your security layer was gone right there, and all the business semantics you created is also gone because they're going to get recreated somewhere else on some other platform.
 With Data Cloud, you become that owner of all the data in the enterprise as well as all the Salesforce data in one place. So as an admin, you need to, number one, learn the data cloud concepts. So there are notions of bringing data, transforming data, harmonizing data, and generating insights on that data. And then Data Clouds allows you to be able to plug into various systems, including all the Salesforce, obviously all the Salesforce tools and clouds as well as external systems too. So as an admin, knowing that lifecycle of the data and how you can control and administer it would be sort of the big work to be done.

Gillian Bruce:  Okay. So get a little bit of work to do to get our arms around what data Cloud means for admins, but I like how you set it up there about how understanding, hey, it does give you... you're in control. I mean, all admins are control freaks, so that's a really good way of putting it. But in some ways, the idea of Data Cloud, MK kind of shifts the idea of what Salesforce can do.
 Can you explain a little bit about what is that shift and from someone who's maybe been an admin for a few years and hey, I understand that I have a fair amount of data all in Salesforce so that my service people and my sales people can all see what's going on with this specific account. How does Data Cloud really change that and shift that?

MK: Yeah, great point. I think what you're looking at is certainly today your sales and service is in the same place. If you install in the same org, that is your sales and service can see all that data and you can put the right security, et cetera. But more often than not in any enterprise setting, there's a lot more data out there. We cannot bring that into Salesforce today because either it's a scale problem or it could be other issues related to their backend systems.
 A simple example, your website clicks. You can bring in tons of information with everybody clicking on their website. You cannot bring that in easily today into your sales or service cloud. And if you look at all the other backend files or SAPs or other enterprise assets that are existing, again, it's very hard to bring all that data in because today our force.com is built on a transactional platform and transactional platforms have their limits.
 They're awesome for transactional consistency, but they're not great at large data scale. And so what Data Cloud is really trying to do is to bring the world of big data, big processing to the Salesforce platform. So that is really that foundational shift it's actually doing. So that means you can now bring in all your data from your web, your mobile. For example, recently one of our big automotive partners went live where they're now trying to feed us all the IoT signals from all their cars, all the EV cars is now sending signals to our data cloud, and we are able to process that signal, filtered the right signal, and then either create an email to be able to send saying, oh, congrats crossed 10,000 miles on your new EV car, or if that signal had any defects in the car, we are able to go create a service case on. These kind of scenarios are net new.
 And similarly, we have a gaming company in Japan, which we all know allow, where they're bringing over trillions of rows of data into the system because this is all their player stats. This is everything that the players have done with their commerce system and so on. And now they want to generate new insights so they can drive better sales, better commerce. And so those are kind of new scenarios, net new scenarios that Data Cloud is going to go enable. It's going to make your marketing better, it's going to make your service so much better because you know more about the person, what they have done. It's going to open up new avenues in your sales process because you can get their web clicks or other kind of information into the sales cloud. And certainly you can personalize your commerce experience.

Mike:  I was kind of excited when you said that because one of my vehicles, I get a monthly email on it's health, it's not electric, but I think it's from Salesforce. So I'm going to go with that because that would be really cool. So it sounds like, it's not like lightning flip a switch and here we are, but I think there's some stuff that admins need to do to help their organizations and just organizations in general, prepare. Could you MK could kind of touch on some of that?

MK: Yeah, I think it's a great point. I think what as an admin you need to do first, like I said, understand what Data Cloud is, but second is really understand what sources you want to bring data from into this data cloud, which org you want to obviously install the data cloud in first and then you may have business unit considerations, geo considerations and so on. And so we are introducing new concepts that you should be aware of. There's a new concept called Data Space, which allows you to have a data cloud and then still split the data within that via business units. It's a security concept and also you need to understand what are the layers that Data Cloud needs to go interface with. For example, it could be I have a marketing cloud here, I have a commerce here, I have these two sales cloud or two service Cloud.
 So which data to bring in and how do you want the insights to go? And there is a whole setup that you need to do around that. And same with Tableau, but more important than that too is in most enterprises, we don't live in our own world. People end up having their own warehouses or their own ML systems as an example. And so knowing those connections also would be helpful as well. And Data Cloud makes it easy for you to connect to all these systems and yet as an admin, you retain all the control and capability on which data should be exposed, who should have access to that. So that's kind of like the big one I would say. So to prepare, know the systems you want to integrate with both for ingest as well as going outbound, know the kinds of data and the security that you want to add on top of it and make sure which users are going to access more.

Gillian Bruce:  So I mean what I'm hearing here in terms of preparing is thinking about the flows of data, which data, I mean, would you go into setting up Data Cloud already with knowing the questions you want to answer, like say, Hey, I want to be able to get more people to buy this product by implementing Data Cloud, I'm going to be able to know when to target them. Or I mean, can you give us a little bit more of an example of what use cases might spur someone to want to implement and set up data

MK: Cloud? Yeah, great question. I think what we have seen success come is what you mentioned, Gillian, which is steel threads. If you have a clear steel thread the business wants to make happen and starting there, starting small and then building on it is better than a gigantic project where I'm going to bring in 50 different sources and not know how to use them. So I think what we have seen, great success. Obviously last year, data Cloud started off building our sort of go to business market in the marketing area, and now we are expanding beyond marketing. And so a lot of success we have seen is threads where people say, I have all this data. I want to bring in my marketing data, my sales service or external data. By the way, data Cloud today we have hundreds and hundreds of customers live on it.
 We are already seeing over 60% to 70% of the data is non Salesforce data coming into Data Cloud. So which is interesting should be exciting for your admins because now you have more data under management that you now can control. So the steel thread coming back, the steel thread to have to be able to take this data, create an insight, and then activate through a marketing channel, it's straightforward and it's very powerful too because your scenarios can be very powerful.
 I'll give a very simple example. This is an open thing that InterBanco, this is a digital banking customer in lata. What they did with Data Cloud was to just instrument all their mobile apps. So they had 60 different applications in their banking sector and before Data Cloud they would create all these new campaigns, just bombard the people, and the rate of click was very low because imagine you get keep getting spam all the time, you're just going to start ignoring emails from these businesses.
 Instead, what they did was a simple thing. They said, okay, I can use Data Cloud, put the SDK in my mobile and web app. Let me just start collecting people's click trends, which is like, okay, which pages are they clicking for how long? And then they created this very simple insight in Data Cloud that said, okay, if they clicked a lot on let's say insurance pages or mortgage pages or whatever other things, and they were able to quickly categorize them because what they found was they had a hypothesis that if people buy a new vehicle or planning to buy a new vehicle, chances are you're going to be roaming around more in the insurance pages. Or if you are interested in new home, you might be looking at the mortgage page, right? Very simple logic. And so they created a simple insight that just, think of it like a group by, to say, if I clicked on insurance, you're an insurance lover.
 So every day then they took that information, just hooked it up to our marketing cloud journeys. They would do a campaign specific to each of those areas. They saw you would not believe it, 35X ROI just doing that.

Gillian Bruce:  Wow.

MK: Instead of their scattershot, like send email to everybody thing, they sent much less emails to targeted people, and they saw huge returns on investment. And so they allow this now. And so that's a great example of one steel thread end-to-end that people have done. And we have seen similar things in various other customers as well.
  For example, there's a small pizza chain in Midwest, US, Casey's who just took people's buying habits on a daily basis and they were able to then create these personalized discounts. They found out that people drink Coke tend to buy this pizza and all sorts of interesting correlations from that data. And then they were able to then target them with the right offers and they saw, again, huge sort of increase in their engagement from their customers. So these, I would say start off with a steel thread, one or two steel threads, which are very clear on what data sources you need, what kind of outputs you need to do, and then go implement it and then build on it. I think that's the best way I would advise.

Mike:  I just have to pause for a second because everybody probably knows I live in the Midwest and the fact that Casey's uses this is now just above and beyond for me. Also, Casey's pizza is phenomenal. So MK, I don't know where you're based, but you need to come visit me in Iowa and we need to have some Casey's pizza because it's probably the best pizza you're ever going to have, and it's from a gas station. And it's a topic of conversation in the Midwest when people pass through. But yeah, I've also used the Casey's app and gotten very specific coupon things that I was like interesting. I have no idea how they would guess this, but if they're looking at my purchase history and every time I buy their breakfast pizza or so, holy cow, you just changed my life knowing that Casey's uses this.

MK: Yeah, and that's coming from Data Cloud, all the processing, all the things you buy, everything is going through Data Cloud.

Mike:  That's so cool. That's so cool. I mean, I'm a huge Casey's fan anyway.

MK: That's awesome. Yes. See if I'm coming to the Midwest-

Mike:  Gillian also knows that just about every podcast food gets mentioned on it. I wasn't even the first one to mention it, Gillian.

Gillian Bruce:  I know. Well, I could hear your wheels turning as soon as MK talked about Casey's Pizza. I feel like you've even talked about it on the podcast before.

Mike:  You have no idea how good their pizza is.

MK: And there is a press release also that we did late last year that you can reference to your customers to go look at it.

Gillian Bruce:  We'll put it in the show notes.

Mike:  Speaking of things to put in the show notes, MK, could you provide some admins with tips or resources on where they can get started learning about Data Cloud perhaps maybe while they eat Casey's Pizza?

MK: Yes. I think if you go to salesforce.com data cloud, we have a lot of materials there. We are also preparing New Trailheads as well. There's already a Trailhead that you can take and there are more coming along the way. And of course we have the standard documentation that can help them as well for them to use Data Cloud. The main thing to realize in Data Cloud is it is a Salesforce cloud that can really change your business. And so learn how to bring data, how to harmonize, and then how to create the insights of it and then push it back into all your systems.

Gillian Bruce:  Oh, that's great. MK, I so appreciate you taking the time to chat with us today and demystify Data Cloud for admins, and I have a feeling there's going to be a lot more in this space.

Mike:  Seriously, and I'm going to use Data Cloud today when I order pizza or maybe tomorrow.

MK: Right. Whenever you eat Casey's Pizza, think of-

Mike:  Oh my God, I am going to start racking up some data in Data Cloud for guys.

Gillian Bruce:  You got to show us what insights you're getting or is that like too going to expose your habits too much? I don't know.

Mike:  I will willingly give anybody that wants to visit me a demo of the Casey's app in my backyard if we can order pizza.

Gillian Bruce:  I love it. MK, thank you so much for joining us and I really appreciate all the work that you're doing in this really important space. And we didn't even talk about anything AI or Einstein related, so we'll have to do that on another podcast. But thank you to you and your team for all the great work that you do, and we look forward to hearing from you again very soon.

MK: Sounds great. Thank you both. This was a great conversation. Again, we you'll see more of Data Cloud and more of Einstein Automation, Tableau and all of that coming through the next few months and years.

Gillian Bruce:  Huge thanks to MK for taking time out of his very, very busy schedule to chat with Mike and I. It was also fun to do a podcast with Mike. It's been a while since we've done one of those. I hope that you got some good ideas and thoughts and questions from some of the things that MK shared with us about Data Cloud. I mean, it is one of the most exciting areas right now in Salesforce ecosystem of innovation, and it really opens up some exciting possibilities of what we can do as admins with our declarative capabilities to really bring in the power of data and have those truly connected customer experiences.
 So I hope that your wheels are turning and I look forward to hearing your questions or your feedback, and I bet later this year we'll get MK back on the podcast to talk a little bit more about how Data Cloud has continued to innovate and then maybe get him back on to talk a little about some of the AI stuff that he and his team are working on. Because you know everyone's talking about AI these days.
 Well, if you want to learn more, I highly encourage you to tune in or visit in person, TrailblazerDX, which is happening next week, March 7th and 8th in San Francisco. You can absolutely still register. There are spots available. If you can't join us in person, not to worry, you should definitely tune in on Salesforce plus. We'll have a live broadcast both days. You may see me on the broadcast a few times. We're going to have some really exciting interviews with people who are there on site, and we're also going to have some really in depth fantastic product coverage. So we're going to have a whole keynote dedicated to Data Cloud. We're going to have some really special announcements in our product space, so I definitely recommend that you tune in. A lot of that content will also be available on demand post to the event.
 And as always, if you want to learn more about how you can be an awesome admin, make sure you check out my favorite website, admin.salesforce.com. There you can find great content in all forms from blogs, podcasts and videos, all the things that you could want, including career resources, product pages, check it out. We put a lot of thought and effort into that, and it's all for you to help enable you be an awesome admin.
 Thank you so much for listening to us today. If you're on Twitter, you can follow #awesomeadmin or you can find us @SalesforceAdmns. You can find myself @gilliankbruce, my co-host Mike @MikeGerholdt. And if you want to connect with our guest today, MK, you can find him on the Trailblazer community or on LinkedIn. We'll have those links right there in the show notes. Thank you so much for listening, and we'll catch you next time in the cloud.

 

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Lynn Guyer, Manager, Salesforce Practice at Forefront Telecare.

Join us as we talk about how she was able to build a no code, out-of-the-box solution for one of her organization’s biggest operational challenges.

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

Scheduling on-call hours for a telehealth organization

Lynn started out as a Salesforce user before she ever found herself sitting in the admin’s chair. That gives her a lot of insight into what things are like on the other side of the screen. So whenever she’s building a solution, she’s really concerned with how it’ll impact other users and what the experience is like for everyone involved in a business process.

As a telehealth organization, they have staff across many different time zones who have to be on-call at certain times. They needed to know who was covering which shift, that those people knew their schedule, and that every shift was covered. She tried a couple of the industry standard solutions to see what they were like, but they each had some significant shortcomings. Ultimately, Lynn decided the best course of action was to build something of her own in Salesforce.

Why research should always be the first step

While Lynn was in her research phase, she looked at each of the existing on-call management solutions to understand their workflows. How many clicks it takes to do certain tasks, whether you can reuse different elements of the schedule week-to-week, and what it looks like from different users’ perspectives. This research really helped her to spec out exactly what she needed and how it should work.

Lynn and her team took their requirements to their Salesforce Account Executive and Solutions Engineer, who suggested they look at Scheduler. It seemed like a perfect fit—it could store and manage all the data they needed but, in order to implement it, Lynn needed to learn Flows. 

How Lynn skilled up quickly in Flow

There are a lot of great self-guided resources out there for learning new skills in Salesforce, but Lynn’s a working mom so she wanted something with a lot of focus tailored to her specific needs. A small group live class proved to be the perfect solution, allowing her to pick up the skills she needed in just a few weeks.

In the full Flow, the request comes into Salesforce from Experience Cloud as a record, which kicks off a series of Flows that check who’s on call, text the people who need to know, assigns the correct user to be the owner, and puts the information correctly into a schedule that everyone can see. In the end, Lynn was able to build a solution to her organization’s problem entirely in Salesforce, without code, made entirely with out-of-the-box features and add-ons.

Lynn is a big fan of keeping things out of the box.“Salesforce does all of the testing for you—that’s what you’re paying them for,” she says, “you’re paying them to test their code for you to use so you don’t have to test your code every release.” Building solutions like this makes them much more reliable, easier to maintain, and you get to benefit from the improvements Salesforce makes with each new release.

Podcast swag

• Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Learn more:

• Salesforce Admin Skills Kit

 

Social

• Lynn on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lynnag/

• Salesforce Admins: @SalesforceAdmns 

• Gillian: @GillianKBruce

• Mike: @MikeGerholdt

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Erick Mahle, Senior Director of CRM at First Advantage.

Join us as we talk about what 2023 looks like for admins and why we have an opportunity to stand out as efficiency experts.

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

Doing more with less

Erick has seen the ecosystem from a number of roles over the years, starting out as an admin, later working as a consultant, and now on the client side of things as Senior Director of CRM at First Advantage. His wife just landed a role as a junior admin, so he even has the perspective of someone breaking into Salesforce for the first time and starting their career.

It’s a challenging time for a lot of folks, with layoffs and more pressure on everyone in the tech space to do more with less. And we brought Erick on the pod because he recently wrote an insightful article about just that and we wanted to get his thoughts on why admins are optimizers.

The formula Erick uses to measure efficiency

Erick and his team recently implemented Einstein bots in an unusual way. While they were looking into using this technology for customer service, they realized that they could also use it for their sales department, too, to help qualify and assign leads. They also created a screen flow that shows key things in the opportunity that are missing, which helps with the data cleanup needed to do predictive analytics in the future.

The tricky thing about improving efficiency is that there’s not necessarily a clear moment where everyone realizes how much work you’ve done. Erick and his team came up with a formula to track how much efficiency is gained from their projects: they count the number of full-time employees involved in the task they’re improving, the number of times per week that it occurs, and the number of minutes it takes to perform it. This gives them a quick way to evaluate the efficiency gains they could make with automation, which helps them prioritize projects and demonstrate their value to leadership.

How to build trust

To get the ball rolling, Erick recommends the group exercise “Start, Stop, Continue.” You give everyone three colors of Post-it Notes and ask them to write on one color what we should start doing, on another what we should stop doing, and on the third what we should continue doing. You put them up on the wall and talk about them as a group, which opens the door to specific, actionable projects where Salesforce can make a difference.

The most important thing, Erick recommends, is to identify the low-hanging fruit from these suggestions and deliver on them quickly. Once you’ve built that trust, you’ve opened the doors to more feedback, more suggestions, and more wins for Salesforce at your organization.

And if you want to show off your Flow skills, Erick invites you to FlowFest on February 22nd. It’s a 50-minute, hack-a-thon style competition to find the “One Flow to Rule Them All.” It’s free to compete and free to spectate, so join in the fun!

Podcast swag

• Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Learn more:

• FlowFest - Feb 22nd

• Salesforce's Ecosystem in 2023: A Year of Optimizations

• Start, Stop, Continue Template

• Salesforce Admin Skills Kit

 

Social

• Erick on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/erickmahle/

• Salesforce Admins: @SalesforceAdmns 

• Gillian: @GillianKBruce

• Mike: @MikeGerholdt

Full Transcript

Gillian Bruce: Welcome to the Salesforce Admins Podcast, where we talk about product, community, and careers to help you be an awesome admin. I'm your host today, Gillian Bruce, and we are talking about 2023 today. It's been an interesting time, challenges, opportunities, all kinds of wildness happening within the tech space.
Some of us maybe feeling a little weird about the year ahead, but I wanted to get Erick Mahle on the podcast because he shared something on LinkedIn a few weeks ago that really kind of challenged me and had some new ideas I thought that were really interesting to bring two Salesforce admins specifically about what's possible this year and how you should view yourself in this time of change in terms of what you can do and the value you can bring an organization, and really finding ways to demonstrate that. In fact, there are some amazing opportunities for us as Salesforce admins in this space, in this time. Without further ado, let's get Erick on the pod. Welcome, Erick, to the podcast.

Erick Mahle: Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.

Gillian Bruce: Erick, I want to introduce you to our listeners a little bit to give some context to the conversation we're going to have today. Can you share a little bit about your Salesforce ecosystem journey and where you're at today?

Erick Mahle: Yeah, of course. Back in 2010-2011, I was the accidental admin. My background was actually in marketing and sales. Working for small software companies, you naturally get the hat of becoming the Salesforce admin. Always liked it. Equated it to the grownup version of Legos and building things and putting things together. After a couple of years, an opportunity presented itself for me to become an independent consultant in 2013. I pursued the consulting side for several years. I've ran a consulting firm for several years. I've done independent consulting for a couple of years, up until last year, where another interesting sequence of events outside of my professional life kind of lined themselves up.
I took a full-time position as a senior director of CRM at First Advantage where I am today. I've gotten a chance to see the world from the consulting side. I'm getting a great opportunity to see it from the client side, and even the wife that recently got picked up as a junior admin. I got to see even someone trying to get started in the ecosystem recently. It's been an interesting year, especially the last one, to be in this ecosystem and see and the perspective that I had to gain from it.

Gillian Bruce: Thank you for sharing that. You've got such different perspectives from each chapter of your career so far. Congratulations to getting your wife in the ecosystem. I know that's what we do as Salesforce professionals, right? We just want to get everybody in there with us.

Erick Mahle:Exactly right.

Gillian Bruce: I wanted to talk to you today because you posted something really interesting on LinkedIn, and I wanted to get you on the podcast because I think especially as we kick off this year, it's a challenging time for a lot of folks. We've all seen the headlines. We've all heard about layoffs. We've maybe felt the strings getting tightened a little bit in the tech space, maybe put on some pressure from our leadership about trying to do more with less. Really I wanted to talk to you about this idea of really delivering success now in this environment.
Tapping into some of the things that you shared on LinkedIn, I wanted to start with what's your overall outlook for 2023 for Salesforce professionals? You're on the client side now. You're actually in a position where you're hiring folks. Can you talk to us a little bit about how you see the outlook for the year as a Salesforce professional given everything that's going on?

Erick Mahle:I think there are the positive marks in it. There's a lot to look forward to, especially as a Salesforce professional. Because in this environment, in this economy that we're currently in, we hear a lot about companies tightening their spend. Unfortunately, a lot of the big companies are doing layoffs, all of them within their own reason. But where our rise to glory as a Salesforce professional comes in optimizations and being able to use the systems that we have today better. It's certainly something that I can talk about from my experience at First Advantage. Over the last six months or so, the overarching theme is how do we get more of what we currently have?
We've been able to drive tremendous efficiencies and simplifying processes, consolidating applications where we can and functionality where we can. I think in many ways at First Advantage, we even saw a positive in terms of end user experience. And to be quite honest, my direct report, senior VP, he said it and he's like, "Look, the stuff that we're doing is helping save jobs too, because the savings that we're getting from this and everything is helping make the business case for everyone, not only to help people become more productive, be able to do more with less, but also financially."

Gillian Bruce: I think you hit on a lot of really interesting things there, I mean, especially when you think of the role of being a Salesforce admin, right? I mean, the idea is to help the business become more efficient by using Salesforce solutions and getting creative in terms of how to figure out how to streamline certain processes, how to deliver data better so that people can work more efficiently and get more deals done faster or help serve more customers quicker. Can you expound upon a little bit some of the things that you've seen specifically Salesforce admins or any Salesforce professional do tactically that have really, really helped deliver that efficiency, deliver that success?

Erick Mahle:Automation is one of the biggest things. For us, one of the key things that we've done that made a significant impact was a pretty significant undertaking for our company in the short timeframe was to implement Einstein Bots. We use Einstein Bots. We're going to start using it for customer service, but we actually initially started using it for sales to filter out leads and qualified leads accordingly and using that to be able to assign to folks. That level of deflection helped save a lot of times. It saved a lot of meetings that our BDR team had to go and qualify them and see if they were a real lead, if it was a genuine prospect, and who it needs to be assigned to.
Just the number of meetings that we're saving on that because the bot is able to take that on. That's a fantastic thing that we can do there. We've also done a couple of really interesting projects. We did one called Opportunity Insights, which was really exciting. We basically did a ScreenFlow that shows key things in the Opportunity that are missing. We really want to focus on data cleanup and helping them. We want to get into predictive analytics in the future and all these things, and it starts with a good foundation. We created this little widget that tells them, hey, you're at this stage. Here are the things that we see that you still don't have.
We even do things like, "You marked your competitor as other. Are you sure other? Have you found out anything since you've marked this?" There's a lot of things that we're doing that I think are really helpful in driving more visibility and helping people be more tactical into where they need to put their focus on in Salesforce.

Gillian Bruce: I love that. I mean, those two things you described, personally I love that because those are things that admins can do and deliver completely by digging into the technology and being able to build that out. Einstein Bots have been around for... I remember, I think we did podcasts about it when they first came out. It was three years ago, four years ago maybe. Such a great way to provide a very simple solution that just takes a little bit of thought and build out from an admin. I think the other thing too that you talked about, about basically delivering data and getting those insights that are surfaced.
Again, these are things that Salesforce admins, this is in our wheelhouse. This is what we do. Can you talk a little bit about how you view especially the power of a Salesforce admin within any organization? How do you demonstrate this value to your leadership? Or in order to get more resources or to really make the case for investing more maybe with expanding the use of Salesforce within other parts of the organization, what are some things that you've seen work?

Erick Mahle:One of the interesting things that we started doing internally is that we came up with a basic formula to track how much efficiency we'll gain out of different projects. We actually put that on the other departments when they're asking us for efficiencies in Salesforce and to calculate that for us or put a rough guess. It's three components to the formula. It's the number of full-time employees involved on whatever task we're doing, the number of times per week that this task in particular occurs, and how much time per task per each individual task. We multiply that out and we calculate how much time we could technically save if we were to automate.
An easy case here, sales reps have to put their activities on a spreadsheet and send it to their sales managers or have a half an hour meeting every week with their sales managers. Let's just say it's a small organization, 10 FTEs. Each one of them has to do a 30-minute report. Once a week, you're at 300 minutes right there, if my math serves me. If you put a dashboard together that tracks all of their tasks and activities, you immediately save 300 minutes right there. As the company starts getting more on board with what we're doing and how we're prioritizing, they start actively. It's almost like a game.
On our dashboard, we have who's made the most recommendations and that we've been able to put in there. We highlight it. It's become a little bit of a game. People are like, "Oh yeah, I want to be able to save my time." I tell them, "You know I'm not going to be able to prioritize this until I can put some efficiency to this," and really helping to shape that. It's been an interesting initiative that's catching a lot of traction internally. It's exciting. That's a big one that's making a difference for us.

Gillian Bruce: I love how it's gamified almost. It's like a competition like, "Oh, you want me to work on your idea? Well, then you need to help me fill out the rest of this formula so that I can prove that this is going to deliver real value." I mean, gosh, it's such a clear combination of factors that then... I mean, it doesn't take a lot of explanation to really understand how that works, right? Pretty clear. I'm just imagining happy leaders who are like, "Oh, you saved us 300 minutes a week. Oh, you saved us multiple hours every week." You guys give internal awards of like, yes, I delivered the most impactful solution this week.

Erick Mahle:We haven't gotten to the point of handing out awards yet, but certainly it's useful in our company. Because while I'm not going to say it's rare, but I would say it's uncommon, our Salesforce team actually reports under sales operations where I think the majority, not a vast majority, but the majority would be under IT. Sales operations is actually measured under efficiencies. Our KPIs are to drive X number, X percentage of efficiency across the board, across the different teams. It was a perfect fit in terms of how we wanted to track this, because it immediately just helps put on the dashboard, hey, here's how we're doing as a department on one of our main KPIs. It was a big game changer for us, to be honest.

Gillian Bruce: Well, I think that's interesting you talking about the org structure a little bit and having the Salesforce admins and the Salesforce team sit within sales operations or revenue operations versus just a traditional IT. I actually don't know. I've talked to many admins who actually sit more in the sales or RevOps land versus IT, and I think to your point and the way you just described it, I think there's a lot that if you're sitting in a traditional IT space, learning a little bit from that sales culture, from that competitive culture, from that very drive efficiencies, KPIs, I think that might be a really good methodology to think about, especially if you're not currently in that space.
Because again, it's the idea of proving efficiencies and really demonstrating the value there. I think that's a really great point. Listener, if you are living more in an IT world, take some tips here from Erick. Think about that sales perspective.

Erick Mahle:I'll add one thing, because I've seen in my consulting days companies that they want to get ambitious and do things with Salesforce, but there's just not enough buy-in. If everything that we talked about right now seems like far-fetched like, our sales team or is not going to get behind this or whatever, one thing that usually gets the ball rolling, it's an exercise, I can't take credit for it, but it's called Start, Stop, Continue. It's out there. It is a super simple exercise that will get people talking. You get everyone in the room. Everyone writes their own things they need to start doing, need to stop doing, and things that we're doing today that we want to make sure we don't lose.
And then usually we do them on Post-it notes, and then usually we'll collect all the Post-it notes and line everyone up. And as soon as you start seeing common threads, people start opening up, "Oh, I'm not on the only one that thinks about this. Oh yeah, no, no, no." Suddenly everyone becomes a talker and starts sharing things. And just like that, you get a list of priorities of what's bugging them the most about the CRM. You didn't have to push people to come and give you information. You just naturally draw it out of them. The key piece effort is that you have to execute, right? They've trusted in you that they could share all of these things.
Whatever it is, find the easy pickings and deliver, execute, and that will start the snowball effect of, "Oh, you delivered on this. Oh, I wonder what else? Oh yeah, by the way, this was never working very well before. Can we redo this, or can we figure out a way? Because I have to click here and then go there to click this and say this and say that, can we streamline all of that?" Suddenly now the dialogue starts and you start to change the culture of how sales folks look at Salesforce. I just wanted to add that in, because a lot of times I know companies have a struggle to get people on board culturally. From my experience, it's a great way to make this accessible for everyone.

Gillian Bruce: I love that. It's a great tip. I have been through many a Post-it note feedback sessions in my time. And it is. It's an amazing way to just get the brains working and get the wheels turning about, oh, what's possible? Again, like you said, I'm not the only one who feels this way. Oh, there's some themes here. I think especially given the environment that we're all in, asking to do more with less, it's such a great way to really enable that prioritization that's so important when we're trying to really focus, be efficient, and really find ways to deliver those impactful results very quickly.
Great tip. Erick, you talked a lot about automation, and I know you're working on a really fun community event focused on automation. Can you share what you're working on with us?

Erick Mahle:Of course. This will be our fourth time doing this. It started as a bit of a wonder if it was going to catch on. But at the end of February now, we'll be hosting our fourth FlowFest. This is a global live competition hackathon style where we're going to put I think over 200 competitors from across the world for a chance to be the FlowFest champion. We're going to put them through a series of challenges, and we'll get to do a final head-to-head battle, which is going to be new for this FlowFest. Typically, we get over 2,000 people that have signed up. It's really exciting. For us, we treat it as an educational event.
All of the exercises, we provide a breakdown of all the challenges afterwards. If you want to try to put yourself in the shoes of the competitors, competitors when they register, they get to select the country that they're representing, the companies that they're supporting. If you want to come support your company, support your country, there's space for everyone. We'll be more than happy to have you if you're interested. It's www.flowfest.fans, F-A-N-S, or just look up FlowFest hashtag on LinkedIn. It's trending pretty well. Come join us on February 22nd and maybe you'll pick up a couple of things, or maybe you'll teach us a couple of things too. We'll see.

Gillian Bruce: Oh, that sounds like so much fun. I cannot wait to join. I will for sure be there. Thank you so much for sharing that with us, and thank you for organizing such a fun event.

Erick Mahle:Yeah, yeah. It's funny, because the person who I've started with, the founder of Salesforce, Ben, Ben came to me, I remember, and he sends me the screenshot of the text message. Every now and then he's like... He asked me, he's like, "How many people do you think will show up on the first one?" I said, I don't know, maybe 10, maybe 100 people. I think we had something like 1,600 people register on the first one alone. It kind of was a little bit of an overnight sensation. We had to re-engineer that competition.
We're like, we're not just inviting 10 people on a Zoom and sharing a PDF. We actually built a managed package and an unmanaged package to support the competition. Everyone that competes submits their flows to our main organization, so we get to do the flow review right on the spot and be able to assess if they got everything right or not. It's been one of the most fascinating things that I got a chance to get involved with during my time in this ecosystem.

Gillian Bruce: Oh, that's so cool. I love that you're running it on Salesforce. That's even better. That's the best.

Erick Mahle:That's how you got to do it. It's got to all be powered by Salesforce.

Gillian Bruce: I love it. I love it. Well, FlowFest coming up, what'd you say, February 22nd?

Erick Mahle:February 22nd is the next one.

Gillian Bruce: Another thing I know in your role, Erick, you have helped build Salesforce teams. You have a Salesforce team. For folks out there who maybe are transitioning, maybe they are looking for a new job, or they are thinking about it in this space, what tips do you have for them as they're moving to their next Salesforce role?

Erick Mahle:For me, one of the big things that I'd recommend is that as you're going through the interview process, make sure you understand the team that you're working with. Make sure that you're taking on a challenge that unless you have double digits years worth of experience and you're going into a leadership position, make sure that there's someone more senior than you in that organization, because you really want to make sure that you're continuing to learn. That's on the client side, in particular. If you're on the consulting side, you're going to have tons of peers that you're going to be able to learn from.
Anyone that's been on the consulting side knows that you're learning from a fire hose there. Drink from a fire hose every single day. But on the client side, make sure that there's a structured team. If you're talking to the HR person and you're the most qualified person when it comes to Salesforce there, that could be a bit of a red flag, especially if there's no one else on the Salesforce team. There's a lot of companies there. Tips for employers here as well, Salesforce salaries is a tricky subject. We can make a whole podcast on this, but don't try to spend less and get someone junior because you really want someone that has experience to be able to help you out.
Especially anything that you want to solve in Salesforce, there might be four or five different ways of delivering it. You really want someone that has been there, has that experience, and can also say, "You know what? Here are the four different alternatives. This is the one that I recommend because this is what's going to be scalable. We won't run the risk of having to undo six months worth of work six months later when you want the next step to revisit this." Look out for your own career interests. Make sure that you're going into a place where you can continue to grow. Equally for employers, make sure that you're starting a team with the right person.
I think actually the Salesforce numbers are one Salesforce FTE for every 50 users. I think those are the recommended numbers. Realistically, if you're joining in as a junior admin or what have you, you want to make sure that there's another admin. If you're the second FTE, you really shouldn't be looking at a customer that has less than 100 users or you run the risk of getting into a place that you may not be able to learn from too much. Some of those interesting things that you want to consider when you're looking for opportunities.

Gillian Bruce: I think those are some really interesting tips, being able to demonstrate selecting from a few different options and why you would select that option as a solution. And then I love the tip from the employer too. I think we do often have questions of especially people who are new to the ecosystem or trying to get their first role, we know it's challenging because you don't have the experience and everybody wants the experience. On the flip side, especially if you're trying to get your first role, you don't want to be the only Salesforce person at that organization. Because if that's your first role, you're going to be overwhelmed and you're not going to have anybody to learn from.
I think that's a really interesting perspective. Look for the team that you want to be working with and who you want to be learning from. And then for the more seasoned folks, really being able to understand how to translate your experience and your expertise in those interviews, in that process, in terms of evaluating solutions and explaining the why and all of that. I think those are some really great tips.

Erick Mahle:Equally, just another way to phrase it as well, is that you were mentioning, just like it may be your first job or your first venture in the Salesforce ecosystem, you have to imagine this could also be the company's first venture into hiring a Salesforce expert. They might not necessarily know what to expect, and they might be trying to figure out as they go. That is something that you also got to keep into consideration. Maybe cut them some slack, but also be aware of the position that they're in to see if that fits into what you're looking for.
Just because this is a first entry level job and they also are looking for their first hire and they don't know what they're looking for, this might not necessarily mean it's a win-win for you guys. It might mean that not a lot of people will know who they're looking for and maybe an employment opportunity will come up, but that may not necessarily mean that in the long run this will work well because you're going to be effectively take the weight of the entire CRM on your shoulders without someone to validate ideas with, or sometimes you can't share company internal information.
Even though you can try to go to Salesforce community groups and all of these things, there are certain things with your use cases that you might not be privy to share. If you don't have someone internally that you can count on, that may put you and ultimately the organization in a tricky situation in months to come.

Gillian Bruce: Well, and then you're also charged with explaining and consistently advocating for Salesforce, right? Because oftentimes if it is the case that the company is brand new about Salesforce and you are a brand new admin and this is your first job, you have a lot on your plate because you also have to explain consistently the value of Salesforce and why they should continue to invest in it, which is a lot to do. I think that's some of the themes that we've been talking about right now, Erick, is talking about how you deliver those efficiencies and prove those efficiencies and what you've been able to deliver value-wise.
It takes some experience to do that, and it's not an immediate thing. I think especially the current environment that we're in, figuring out how you can deliver that success now to your organization, it's knowing the tactics and the technology and how to do it. It's also knowing how to explain it and how to demonstrate the value up the leadership chain and make that argument for more investment and more resources. I think those two things are really important, and you've talked about both of those.

Erick Mahle:I've been in this ecosystem for 13 years, and I've used the same quote across all 13. The best way to summarize this is Uncle Ben's old quote from Spider-Man, with great power comes great responsibility. It rings true every single time. With a tool as flexible and as powerful as Salesforce, again, as you're coming up, you do want to make sure that you're working in an environment where you can assess everything that the tool can deliver and be able to identify which is the best path forward. Yeah, totally.

Gillian Bruce: I love it. It's great when we can have a quote from Marvel. Is it Marvel or DC? It's DC, right?

Erick Mahle:I think it's Marvel, but someone might correct me terribly fast once they get to hear this.

Gillian Bruce: My husband will be very angry at me if I got that wrong, which I probably did anyway. I mean, it's a great quote. It is. It's true. The power of the platform is immense, and it's more than just the platform, right? It's the power of the role, and then the role that you have within your organization to help your users and to help the organization as a whole. Erick, before I wrap, if you were to have one message to share with any Salesforce professional, Salesforce admins, Salesforce developers, anybody working in the Salesforce ecosystem for 2023, what is the one message that you want to deliver to them?

Erick Mahle:This is the year of optimization. This is the year of learning tools that will help you optimize, help companies consolidate. We're talking about automation like Flow. Flow Is just blowing up right now. You have integrations with systems. If you want to get a connector, there's a lot of great no-code connectors out there that allow you to start connecting your database with others. We talked about the example that we use at First Advantage of using Einstein Bots to be able to deflect and spare employees from having meetings and save that by running qualification process ahead of time. This is the time to increase your skillset and things that can help optimize an organization.
It doesn't necessarily have to be technical, because it could be your BA skills. Improve your skills. Put your skills to the test of documenting processes, find gaps that are there that people are having to do things, duplicate data entry in one system here and then go into other system there, and try to make the case to help bring those efficiencies to light, not only to make your business case, but to help the company do more with less. I think that's the theme of this year. It's do more with less. That would be my big feedback to anyone that's listening.

Gillian Bruce: I think that's great. I think it's actually a pretty empowering message to share with anybody working in the Salesforce ecosystem, especially Salesforce admins, because we can do this. We got the tools. We got the skills to do it. I really appreciate you, Erick, you coming on the podcast and sharing your outlook, sharing your expertise with us today. Hey, let's look forward to a really strong 2023 for the Salesforce ecosystem.

Erick Mahle:Yeah, it's a pleasure being here. We can talk Salesforce all day. Big pleasure. I'm happy to help share my message and hopefully this gets to help a couple of folks. If one person gets something out of this, I'm more than happy already.

Gillian Bruce: Excellent. Well, thank you so much, Erick. Appreciate it.

Erick Mahle:Likewise.

Gillian Bruce: Huge thanks to Erick for taking the time to chat. I loved some of his ideas about what the outlook for 2023 is for Salesforce administrators I thought were pretty inspiring, pretty optimistic, gave me some interesting ideas about how to think about the role of a Salesforce admin in this current climate of everyone trying to do more with less and trying to really drive efficiency and deliver success, prove the value that you're bringing to the organization. The formula he shared about how he calculates the efficiencies delivered by what he and his team have built I thought were really interesting, focusing on prioritization.
Doing that sticky note exercise, I haven't done that in years, but I think it's a wonderful idea, and I want to bring it back to our team here at Salesforce to help us because we're all under this exercise right now of really trying to streamline and really, really focus on being efficient. Hope you had some interesting ideas that came from what you just heard with Erick. If you have some comments or some questions, I very much invite those. Please, please share those with us. You can share them with us on Twitter. We're @SalesforceAdmns, no I, or you can share them with us on LinkedIn, the Trailblazer Success Community.
You can find us everywhere. We'd love to know your feedback, get that conversation and keep that conversation going. And as always, if you want to learn anything else about how you can continue to be an awesome admin, check out my favorite website, admin.salesforce.com. You'll even find the Salesforce Admin Skills Kit there, which touches on some of the things Erick mentioned earlier about it's more than just your technical abilities, it's also the skills like business analysis and data analysis. Those are things that are going to be really important as we focus on really delivering impact and efficiency this year.
And as always, you can find myself on Twitter. I'm @GillianKBruce. You can find Mike on Twitter. He's @Mike Gerholdt. You can find Erick on LinkedIn. He is very easy to find. He's got some great content that he's sharing on there, including information about FlowFest, which is happening very soon. Definitely make sure you put that on your calendar and check it out. I can't wait to check it out myself. It sounds really, really fun. I hope you have a wonderful rest of your evening, rest of your afternoon, rest of your morning. Thank you so much for listening, and I'll catch you next time in the cloud.

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Shirlene Chow, Senior Director of Workforce Development Programs at Salesforce.

Join us as we talk about the programs she and her team offer to help people get started in the Salesforce ecosystem, connect with mentors, and develop their careers.

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

Turn new knowledge into a new job

A common piece of feedback we hear is that while Trailhead is great at helping people skill up in the Salesforce ecosystem, it’s hard to figure out the next steps. How do you turn your new knowledge into a job opportunity?

That’s why we wanted to hear from Shirlene Chow. Her Workforce Development team is all about helping people with those next steps, connecting them with mentorship, interviews, free vouchers for certification tests, and more. The jobs market has been a little tough recently but that makes it a perfect time to skill up into something new.

Why mentorship is so important

Shirlene’s team offers a Salesforce Fundamentals program with classes happening all over the world and, while most admins don’t need to brush up on the basics, maybe you know someone who’d like to learn.

For those more experienced in the ecosystem, the Trailblazer Mentorship program matches you with a Salesforce veteran who can help you 1-on-1 with your job search strategy, your resume, your interview skills, and more. There’s also a new program called Mentor Circles program that puts you in a group setting with several peers and mentors for a longer period of time. Think of it as group coaching.

In almost every #AwesomeAdmin story we hear, Mentorship is one of the key ingredients for success, so we really want to put the word out there so you can take your career in a new direction.

Other programs to help you grow your career

Shirlene and her team also run the Trailblazer Career Fairs, which are now virtual events happening on a global scale. We put you together with engaged recruiters from some our closest strategic partners so you can learn about their organizations and what they’re looking for in a candidate. From there, there are group networking and one-on-one breakouts with individual recruiters. New Career Fairs are happening all the time, so check the Trailblazer Connect Hub for details.

Finally, we wanted to highlight the Salesforce Pathfinder program. It’s a 4-month intensive program to give you the practical skills you need to launch your career. “The goal is to help you be well-rounded,” Shirlene says, “not just with Salesforce technical skills but also business skills, how to work in a team, how to do things in an Agile format, and how to practice your active listening and speaking and presentation skills.”

If all this sounds good to you, take a look at the resources we’re linking to below. And if you want to get involved, you can get listed in the directory and start mentoring other Trailblazers.

 

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• Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Learn more:

• Salesforce Admin Skills Kit
• Salesforce Fundamentals
• Trailblazer Mentorship
• Career Fairs
• Pathfinder Program

Social

• Shirlene: @ShirleneChow
• Salesforce Admins: @SalesforceAdmns 
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• Mike: @MikeGerholdt

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

Join us as we review the top product, community, and careers content for January, and talk about New Year’s resolutions.

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

Blog highlights from January

The march toward Spring ‘23 continues, and we’ve got your back with content covering everything in the GA, Beta, and Pilot. Mike wants you to pay close attention, especially, to some enhancements for reports and dashboards. And a reminder that MFA auto-enablement is coming with this release!

• Jen’s Top Spring ’23 Release Features for Admins and Users

Video highlights from January

Staying on the theme of Spring ‘23, we wanted to point you toward Release Readiness Live. There are so many notes with any new release, but we highlight the important information that admins need to know, all in one place.

• Admin Preview of Release Readiness Live, Spring '23

Podcast highlights from January

Check out Mike’s episode with Janet Elliott from this month. We talked about her first public speaking gig, which happened at a little event you might have heard of called Dreamforce. Since then, she’s given many talks at many events, so we brought her on to find out how you too can get started as a Salesforce speaker. Gillian interviewed Kat Aquino, who gave us a fascinating look into what it’s like building a Salesforce org from the ground up to support a multinational event—the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games in LA.

• Finding Your Voice with Janet Elliott
• Supporting the LA28 Games with Salesforce with Kat Aquino

Just for fun

Mike and Gillian reflect on their less-than-successful past New Year’s Resolutions.

 

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• Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Social

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• Gillian: @GillianKBruce
• Mike: @MikeGerholdt

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Janet Elliott, Manager of Solution Architecture at Kicksaw and 2022 Salesforce MVP.

Join us as we talk about finding your voice and why you should become a Salesforce speaker.

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

Why you should speak at a Salesforce event

Janet got started in the ecosystem as a project manager and admin for Salesforce in 3 BT (Before Trailhead) a.k.a. 2011. Eventually, she moved into becoming a Solution Architect. Along the way, she’s been a speaker at multiple TrailblazerDX conferences, Dreamforce, and more, which is why we wanted to bring her on the pod. “Speaking about Salesforce is something I’ve really found a passion for,” Janet says.

You might wondering, with so many great speakers at Salesforce events, why anyone would want to hear from you. The truth is that there are relatively few people compared to the number of slots at all the different Salesforce events. We’re looking for new voices, and Janet has a lot to say about how you can get started as a new speaker.

Overcoming imposter syndrome

“I got a huge confidence boost from the first time I spoke,” Janet says, “because I realized that people were interested in what I had to say and I didn’t need to be an absolute expert on the topic beforehand.” It just so happens that her first time was at Salesforce, in front of hundreds of people—quite the way to rip off the band-aid.

One big piece of advice Janet has is to attend as many events as you can, something that’s a lot easier to do with more events offering virtual options. As you’re sitting in the audience, think about how you’re listening to the speakers. Do you want them to succeed or fail? Are you judging them harshly or are you rooting for them? That’s how you manage imposter syndrome (which is totally normal!): realize that the audience wants you to succeed.

Tips for talks

You don’t need to be an expert to speak about a topic. Give yourself permission to say “I don’t know the answer to that but here’s where I would start looking.” People don’t want to hear from you because they don’t know how to use Google—they’re there to hear your story and learn from your experiences.

Finally, as Shakespeare said, “the readiness is all.” You need to put time and thought into how you prepare for your talk. Janet recommends rehearsing a few times and recording yourself, so you can sit in the audience’s chair and see how you’re coming across.

Janet has a lot more great tips about picking topics, finding your story, and where to get started so be sure to listen to the full episode.

 

Podcast swag

• Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Learn more:

• Salesforce Admin Skills Kit

Social

• Janet: @ItsMeJanet_E
• Salesforce Admins: @SalesforceAdmns 
• Gillian: @GillianKBruce
• Mike: @MikeGerholdt

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Lynn Simons, Senior Director of Security Awareness and Engagement, and Laura Pelkey, Senior Manager of Security Customer Engagement, both at Salesforce. 

 

Join us as we talk about security and security awareness for admins.

 

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Lynn Simons and Laura Pelkey.

Build good security habits

We wanted to start 2023 off right with a focus on security. Because there’s always a new threat on the horizon, Lynn reminds us that good security is really about understanding the broader concepts and building good habits. That means having a handle on ideas like the Principle of Least Privilege, and then putting them into practice as you set permissions and access in your org.

 

When it comes to getting started with security, Lynn has three main tips:

 

1. Lean on resources already out there to help you, like the Salesforce Admins blog you’re reading right now.
2. Think about the security impact of each new Release.
3. Be an advocate for security in your organization.

 

Lynn and Laura have some specific tips for each of these, but the big idea is that security is really a state of mind. Understanding the broader concept of limiting access will help with the little things, like defaulting to the most restrictive data access when you’re building permissions, or making sure you periodically deactivate unused accounts.

Engage with other teams in your organization

Laura recommends that you look for ways to actively engage with security and IT beyond the Salesforce platform. Not only will it make it easier to get help when you need it down the road, but it also helps you understand how the pieces of the security puzzle fit together in your organization.

“Salesforce user credentials are probably one of the more targeted things that attackers might be after,” Laura says, so looking at threats outside of Salesforce, like phishing, is crucial to the security of your org. Educate your users and help them understand these threats and why they’re so important. Interface with other departments to get the information you need—for example, so you know someone’s leaving your organization and you need to remove their Salesforce access.

Planning for the worst-case scenario

Despite all your planning, things can go wrong and you need to decide ahead of time what you’ll do in the event of a breach. “Every company that has a good security posture has instant response plans already in place, and remediation plans already in place for many different scenarios,” Laura says.

Talk through what you should do in any likely scenario with stakeholders and your IT team. For example, if one of your user’s credentials get stolen, who should you tell first? Being proactive about security will only reflect well on you—don’t worry about coming across as a Chicken Little. “If one of our Salesforce Admins came to us with a breach remediation plan,” Laura says, “I would be so excited.” 

Podcast swag

• Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Learn more:

• Get Ready for Multi-Factor Authentication: Prepare Your End-Users
• Get Ready for Multi-Factor Authentication: Plan for Auto-Enablement
• Security on the Salesforce Admins Blog

 

Social

• Laura: @LauraPelkey1
• Salesforce Admins: @SalesforceAdmns 
• Gillian: @GillianKBruce
• Mike: @MikeGerholdt

Full Transcript

Mike :                                                 Welcome to Salesforce Admins podcast where we talk about product, community, and career to help you become an awesome admin. And hey, we're kicking off 2023 by talking about security and security awareness for admins. We want you to be security minded this year as you always are. And to do this, we're bringing back a couple of my favorite guests. Everybody's my favorite guest, but Lynn Simons, who is Senior Director of Security Awareness and Engagement at Salesforce. And Laura Pelkey, I bet you have ran into Laura and Lynn, Laura Pelkey, who is Senior Manager, Security Customer Engagement.
                                                       Both of them are very active in the Salesforce community. They're very active at Salesforce events. You've probably seen them around security awareness booths. I know Laura was working in the admin zone at Dreamforce this year. They have so much wealth and experience to share with us as admins. It's a fun discussion. Don't turn it off. Listen to it all the way through, because I promise you, they're going to give you an article that you need to read. I'll call it homework. How's that sound? So with that, let's get Lynn and Laura on the podcast.
                                                       So Lynn and Laura, welcome back to the podcast.

Laura Pelkey:                                          Hey Mike.

Lynn Simons:                                           Hi Mike. So good to be on the podcast again.

Mike :                                                 It's been a while. We've had each of you on individually because we know that security is top of mind for admins, which is why we're starting off 2023 with a security minded episode. So Lynn, I'm going to start with you. What's it mean as an admin to be security minded?

Lynn Simons:                                           Love that question. It's really about how you are thinking over time as you're doing your other work as an administrator. And I think it's really smart to think about the broader principles because the thing is with security, it's always changing and the risks are always new. So really understanding key security principles like least privilege and using that as your guide, as you set permissions and access is really going to be a great start to being security minded. Also knowing what resources are out there for you as a Salesforce admin on the admin's website through other Salesforce resources that then by talking to fellow admins, that's another great way to find resources.
                                                       I think the job of security's never done, so just remembering that periodically. I always give the clue of, with each new release, think about what security impacts are in that release. And thinking about your job is never done with security, meaning it's not a one and done settings situation. This is something we have to look at all the time. And then last, also thinking of yourself as an advocate. You as a Salesforce admin have the ability to influence your IT department, your security team by bringing up what the security concerns are with Salesforce.

Mike :                                                 Laura, it's been a while and a few people have been out a couple days ago celebrating the new year, had too much bubbly and forgot what the principle of least privilege is. Can you help me understand that?

Laura Pelkey:                                          Well, I don't know how anyone could forget about the principle of least privilege-

Mike :                                                 You don't know how strong the champagne was on New Year's Eve.

Laura Pelkey:                                          ... I certainly think about it all the time. That's a good point. Yes. So the principle of least privilege, that is one of the fundamental tenants of cybersecurity. And really what it is making sure that your users don't have access to anything that they don't absolutely need access to. So it's really about restricting permissions and ability to act within your Salesforce org in your implementation to just what's absolutely necessary. And that helps to reduce risk across the organization.

Mike :                                                 I think of Dwight in the office letting me know that I'm security level three, but that's out of 300.

Laura Pelkey:                                          Yeah, exactly.

Mike :                                                 Got you.

Laura Pelkey:                                          And Beets Battlestar Galactica and Bears.

Mike :                                                 Beets. Beets Battlestar Galactica. Lynn, you mentioned reviewing security related changes with every release. What are some of the things that admins should look for in terms of changes in a release?

Lynn Simons:                                           That's a super important thing to do. I would really look for things that have to do with permissions and access first. Looking for words that have to do with how profiles are set around allow lists and block lists. Jump in Laura if you can think of anything. But really those profile and permission related things are the lowest hanging fruit, I think in releases.

Laura Pelkey:                                          And I know there've been some updates around guest user access and configuring that. And it's also something that is important for admins to pay attention to, that particular release update.

Mike :                                                 So we can obviously spend a whole lot of time talking about things they should be doing in the app, but we're thinking ahead, we're out there, we're maybe back in the office walking around seeing our users. What are some of the things that admins can pay attention to in terms of security habits outside of Salesforce that they could help bring a best practice for their users? And Laura, if you want to kick us off, you're usually out talking at user groups.

Laura Pelkey:                                          I love this question. So this is something, actually, Lynn and I talk about this a lot. Lynn actually runs our Security Awareness Program at Salesforce, and her and our team have to partner really closely with our IT team on something called phishing tests. And Lynn, obviously you can talk about this in more detail, but that's actually something that's really an interesting way for admins to create inroads with their IT teams or their IT leadership and partner outside of the whole world of Salesforce, but really in a way that uplifts the security of their company or their organization as a whole. Lynn, I don't know if you have any thoughts on how an admin might go about partnering with an IT director or someone on the IT team to do phishing tests.

Lynn Simons:                                           Sure. One of the things that security teams are always thinking about is what is the threat landscape look like? And they'll even do things called threat models to design how particular systems can be infiltrated by an actor. And it's really welcomed by a security team to be finding out from people in the company what kind of risks they're seeing. So as a person who runs a security awareness team, if I heard from our Salesforce administrator, of course we use Salesforce too, and I heard that they were thinking of some behaviors or risks that could be creating some type of potential attack, then I would really want to keep, I'd be all ears. So reaching out to that team and I think you can reach out to a security awareness professional or somebody who does user management and say, hey, the people I'm working with as a Salesforce administrator are using Salesforce.
                                                       I understand that Salesforce is a really big brand now, and is there potential that if an attack renew that we had a lot of Salesforce use it here, what might they be interested in? Maybe we can partner on a phishing test together. Because the most effective phishing tests that we do are ones that are really germane to the users in our environment. So for example, we might use a logo that looks familiar or we might use something that looks similar to a Salesforce related URL or email address in a phishing test. And I think kind of that partnership with the security team would be really, really appreciated. But what it would also do is provide that security team with some data that they can use to understand their user community. And I think that that would be an incredible basis of building a relationship with the security team.

Laura Pelkey:                                          And if you think about it, Salesforce user credentials are probably one of the more often targeted things that attackers might be after. And so you're not only helping to bolster the security of all of the employees at your company by educating around this passively, using phishing tests, but you're also bolstering the security of your Salesforce implementation by educating your user base on this. So it's a win-win really for everyone.

Mike :                                                 Yeah, I could see that. And I think I've seen a few come through that, I don't know Lynn, if you've been the mastermind behind, but they've been awfully legit. They look really good.

Lynn Simons:                                           Definitely my wonderful team is doing that. And we really work with the various departments in the company to identify what's going to be germane to our audiences so that we can understand the difficulty level that they're able to respond to. And also part of that is that reporting behavior. As a security awareness person on a podcast, I have to say that it's really not just all about clicking on these emails, it's really about what happens after that when people like Laura said, might enter their credentials. And then also that activity of seeing something weird, seeing something suspicious and reporting it to your security team. And you can be a great friend of the security team by helping your user population understand that there's a way to report suspicious activity, not just ignore it, not sweep it under the rug, but let the security team know as soon as possible.

Mike :                                                 I'd love to know when you sit down with new clients or even existing customers, what are some of the questions that I think genuinely they ask? Not knowing it could be a security risk. I think of, we all know the sharing credentials stuff is not something that people should do, but are there questions out there that people perceive as well, this isn't creating a security risk, but it actually is?

Laura Pelkey:                                          I'll jump in if you don't mind to answer this. So just when I'm on the floor at Dreamforce or on the floor at a world tour or TDX, actually one of the most common topics that come up that people don't naturally associate with security is actually how permissions are configured. How user permissions are configured. So the whole concept of access within a Salesforce org is often not thought of as security, but really this all ties in back to that principle of least privilege that you asked about earlier, Mike. And just because someone is a registered user or is in your org is supposed to be in your org, that doesn't mean that there's no risk associated with them having access to certain objects or fields that they shouldn't have access to.
                                                       That's called an insider threat, is a term that sometimes can be used if somebody does something, a user does something that they're not actually supposed to do. And so really reviewing permission sets, we actually now are guiding people and advising people to use minimum access profiles and then layer permissions on top of that if they can. I know that's a shift from how people are typically used to setting up profiles and permissions, but really that's the best way to ensure that you are following the principle of least privilege when you're managing access within your Salesforce org.

Lynn Simons:                                           That's really interesting Laura, because it's related to the example I was going to give with customers I've talked to at Dreamforce. In particular with non-profit customers where they have a volunteer base that might have access to Salesforce, that can be a very transient group of people. And there's also this feeling of goodwill in that industry that assumes the best intent. Of course, we want to assume best intent of people in general, but in terms of protecting data, we generally think more in terms of, okay, let's start with no access and then let's build on that. And particularly with nonprofits, there's this risk because of the donor data and credit card data that's really at the heart of how nonprofits are operating.
                                                       That's one example. Another one I think is that clean up around releases that I was mentioning and the reality that we have to deactivate accounts. That if the accounts do not need to be active that are not used. So it's certainly advisable to be thinking about if a user account hasn't been used in X number of months, then perhaps that's access that's not needed. Are you hearing a theme? The theme is access.

Mike :                                                 Yeah. Removing unused, especially when an employee leaves. I think that's always something that I know as an admin I had to work diligently with my HR team to try and get on lists. And it's not me being nosy, I don't need to know who's leaving the company. I need to know so that I can ensure the day after they leave, can't still log into Salesforce.

Lynn Simons:                                           Exactly.

Mike :                                                 So let me tangent off that. What are some departments that you commonly tell admins to go reach out and have best practice discussions with or build relationships with? I know you mentioned IT, I'm guessing HR is another one.

Lynn Simons:                                           Absolutely. And I think it's important to understand who is the business owner and purchaser of Salesforce at your company, because there can be a scenario where IT isn't deeply involved and there are business people who own the implementation. And particularly in that case, you're going to want to know who those individuals are because the buyer may have received information that's valuable to you. So let's say it's the head of sales, they might be getting emails from Salesforce that are really, really valuable to you as administrator around changes that are upcoming around big announcements and that kind of thing. So I think being in lockstep with that team would be really critical.

Laura Pelkey:                                          And it actually all really goes back to thinking like a security advocate. And so when you have that mindset of, okay, my priority is to really advocate for cybersecurity, not just in terms of to my user base, but to the company and to the leaders in my company, that's a great mindset to have. And the first thing you want to do when you're doing that kind of work is identifying who the stakeholders are, who cares about security. And so that can be IT. If you have a cybersecurity team that's often larger companies may have a cybersecurity team and smaller companies may not, but that's not always a given.
                                                       HR, like Lynn was saying, your sales leadership is probably very invested in the security of Salesforce and of the company and also actually who is in charge of assigning budgets to Salesforce to people who are the decision makers for these kinds of things. So even if it's not a purely technical role or a purely people oversight role, there are a lot of different roles within your company or your organization that can touch on security. And so it's really helpful to do an analysis of your individual company and find out who those folks are and who those teams are.

Lynn Simons:                                           And just one other one that can actually be part of HR depending on the company, is your employee communications team. Because those are the individuals who you could influence in terms of company newsletters or other types of all hands where reminders around security best practices in Salesforce if you have a really broad audience of employees using the tool, I think knowing those comms people is going to give you a voice that's perhaps a more powerful and louder voice than your own at a large company.

Mike :                                                 Yeah, that makes sense. One thing I thought of, and it's because I watched way too much Weather Channel, which I forgot to get a tour of their offices when I was down in Atlanta, but it's all my to-do list. So anybody that works at the Weather Channel listens to this podcast, because I'm sure there's all of you, I want a tour. One thing they talk about, because it's storm season, we're in the Midwest, you guys are out West, you don't get anything. But in the Midwest and especially the East Coast, it's like prepare for snow and bad weather. And even in the South they're starting to get some tornadoes. One thing I think we often talk about a lot in security is how do we keep the doors locked?
                                                       How do we make sure everything's safe? And what we fail to do? And what they pointed out is, so let's just assume the tornado's going to go through what is your next steps? What is your plan for when the smoke detector goes off, when the tornado sirens go off? And I think I would love to know as you think through, what could you tell an admin for, let's plan for, I run a report and I suddenly see that I've got a user that looks like they logged in from three different locations within a minute of themselves? What's that plan look like? Or how does an admin put together a plan for stuff like that?

Laura Pelkey:                                          That's such a good question.

Lynn Simons:                                           It's such a great question. And I always go back to the first step to that and actually learned it from an MVP, which is cool, which is that documentation is incredibly important when it comes to dealing with security issues. So if you have a documented plan for how to deal with those things, you're going to be setting yourself up to not panic and be able to have some of your own guide for what to do. And secondly, those relationships that we just talked about really come to the forefront. Because investing in those relationships, you can make the plans that you need. Number one, reporting. Number two, being able to communicate as we were talking about. And then Laura, if you want to take over from the orgs themselves what to do there, I'd love for your take on that.

Laura Pelkey:                                          Well I think so, not to use the B word, but what we're really talking about is a breach remediation plan.

Mike :                                                 Thank you for telling me what the B word was.

Laura Pelkey:                                          [inaudible].

Mike :                                                 I had no idea.

Lynn Simons:                                           I don't even say the word.

Laura Pelkey:                                          But it's okay. We should be prepared as admins. I say I was an admin a long time ago, but-

Mike :                                                 You're still an admin.

Laura Pelkey:                                          Think once an admin, always an admin. We do need to be prepared in the event of a breach. And every company that has a good security posture has instant response plans already in place and remediation plans already in place for many different scenarios. And so it really depends on your implementation and your company and the resources you have at your disposal. So I don't want to give one blanket answer because it just depends on a lot of different factors. But proactively sitting down with those security stakeholders like we were talking about, this would actually be an amazing first step at connecting with these people once you've identified the stakeholders and saying, hey, I would like to create some breach remediation plans for the following scenarios.
                                                       And maybe one of them is the scenario, Mike that you gave. Maybe another one is, you can just talk to people on your IT team or your security team and maybe get their thoughts on what some common scenarios are. Maybe one of them is one of my users' credentials got hacked. That's probably something that everybody should have as a scenario. And then you outline in very specific steps what the next steps are and who owns those steps. And you make sure that all of those people are aware and are bought into that plan. And that plan is circulated very broadly. So everybody's on the same page.

Lynn Simons:                                           Those incident response teams really live and die by their operating procedures. So I think by working together to create that documentation, they can actually integrate that plan into their own plan. So they know, okay, they hear from Jane admin that that means that this particular procedure kicks into play in that moment.

Mike :                                                 I think one of the key things I thought you said there, Laura was and who owns the step. I think a lot of documents are always drawn up with here's the steps and then everybody looks at themselves as to okay, who does number one?

Laura Pelkey:                                          Yeah, that's super important. And I think Lynn can probably feel the same way, if one of our Salesforce admins came to us and said, hi, I'm proposing this breach remediation plan, here are the scenarios. I'd love for you to be an owner of this, will you agree to do this? I would be like, oh my gosh, this person is so amazingly security conscious. I would be so excited.

Lynn Simons:                                           We'd be thrilled.

Laura Pelkey:                                          But we're just security dorks. But still it would be really great. And if you want to just purely from a career perspective as an admin, if you want to make a name for yourself and you start doing things like that at your company or organization, people are going to start knowing who you are and thinking, wow, this person is bringing a lot to the table.

Mike :                                                 I think for our next event that you are both at, you should have fancy buttons made or stickers, people like stickers, maybe put a Twitter pull out, see what people like more because I don't know, Mike doesn't always know and have them bring you their security plan for some sort of fancy hot rod sticker or plushy that's like, I've got a security plan.

Lynn Simons:                                           Ooh, I love that.

Mike :                                                 You could rock that badge. Because that's a badge you want people to have.

Lynn Simons:                                           And I also-

Laura Pelkey:                                          I know I'm getting ideas for content that while we're talking about this.

Mike :                                                 Yes, and you can write that content on admin.salesforce.com

Lynn Simons:                                           I just also want to just mention one thing, I'm sorry Mike, is that you also, in these kind of big B scenarios, you want to avoid communication paralysis, which is what happens. So keeping your list of users really clean is important, and knowing what your primary mechanism is for reaching them during these situations is really critical. So if you're using Slack, that's can be really easy to reach people on a special channel dedicated to, I don't know what you call the channel, but emergency Salesforce things or something like that. But-

Mike :                                                 The channel you don't want to get a notification from.

Lynn Simons:                                           I think that having a mechanism planned in advance for reaching people, because really in these kind of scenarios people just want updates. And even if the update is there is no update, I think that that can be enough.

Mike :                                                 So as we wrap a bow on our first episode of 2023, I'd love to know if you have one best practice or something you do that you think is unique to you that is a security thing that admin should be doing. And I ask that because I continue to go back to the example of how Lynn at a Salesforce office when I very, very, I was just a wee little Salesforce employee, I was only a few months old, showed me how to use Last Pass and it has forever changed my life. And I feel like I have been a Last Pass advocate to all of my friends ever since then. But it's kind of peering over the shoulder of a mechanic. You're like, oh wow, that's how you do that. Or watching a chef cut something, you're like, that's so much cooler than the way that I would love to do. Is there something from your security minds that you do that you feel could be passed on to other admins?

Laura Pelkey:                                          Oh, I love the Last Pass example.

Lynn Simons:                                           Yeah, that was-

Laura Pelkey:                                          I love Last Pass also.

Lynn Simons:                                           I was just going to say eight years later. It was the one I was going to say. So that tells you how powerful of a security tool it is. It's just incredibly critical.

Laura Pelkey:                                          For me, just my friends, my family, I get made fun of constantly for how security minded I am. And I don't feel bad about it. I think it's great to be security minded, just the amount of information that I will share on social media, on the internet in any way. I'm very restrictive of the information that I'll put out there. Even my phone number, when you're online shopping and you have to enter your phone number. I really don't even like to do that. I like to do the 555-555-555, million fives, if I can. But just being really, really, really conscious when somebody's asking you for information. So if you get a call from your bank or if you get an email from your bank or someone pretending to be your bank asking you for any personal information or data, I'm the first person that will be like, no, I'm not going to give you that.
                                                       What's another way for you to either verify my identity or can I reach you if I call this main number on your website, if I call you back? So just being really aware that you don't have to give out any information about yourself 99.9% of the time, that is your social security number, your address, your credit card numbers, things like that. No one's ever going to approach you or call you, email you and ask you for things like that. And then even when you're interacting with people, be really restrictive with the information that you share. It sounds paranoid, but I get way less spam calls than all of my friends. So I will say there is that upside and just overall it's a good security mindset to have.

Mike :                                                 I like that. That's one thing that I think I've definitely picked up from you and the security team and a lot of the stuff that I've read too is if somebody calls you and how come you don't know this? You should know this, so let me just call you back because then I'm not giving that information out. But that's good to know. Because especially the phone number thing, I think we're so innocuous and Lynn, you can probably tell me what that is, but it's like when somebody tries to win over your confidence, because I feel like what Laura described was at our heart in nature, we want to be helpful, we want to help this person on the other line and just get back to our work. But that's actually a certain type of attack and I forget what it's called.

Lynn Simons:                                           Social engineering.

Mike :                                                 Social engineering. Darn it. I'll get that question wrong on our quiz.

Lynn Simons:                                           And I'll tell you one of the more recent ones that I think is particularly interesting and something that parents or just friends of friends or people who have parents, something to be thinking about is how much we use video and photos now in our online personas. And we even work with our own marketing and social teams at Salesforce as they use photography and videos, that whatever is in the background of your photo are all clues for some nefarious personal organization to learn more about you. I always try to remind our employees that attackers have all the time in the world and they will be very patient until they get all of the information they need in order to do that attack.
                                                       So by having your college diploma right behind you and the name of the local sports team near your house or pictures of your kids or your parents, there are a lot of things you can pick up off of that background. So I really try to be very conscious, particularly when I'm speaking on a webinar, to blur that out. Use a different background if you're going to post things online to really look at the contextual clues you're giving about yourself. It could have your address in the background or if you're leaving town on vacation, these are all clues around the, not only your online security, but your physical security of your home as you post that information online.

Mike :                                                 Both good tips. Leave on a positive note as a to-do item for our listeners, what would be an article or a piece of content you would suggest they read on admin.salesforce.com?

Laura Pelkey:                                          Well, we have one of our amazing colleagues, Tammy Ron has written a blog series covering MFA and really how to prepare your end users. Lots of amazing tips. I think it's a three-part series and I know they're all up on admin.salesforce.com, so I would definitely urge people to check those out.

Mike :                                                 Cool. And of course, Trailblazer DX is just around the corner, so.

Laura Pelkey:                                          Yes.

Mike :                                                 I'm sure we can see both of you there.

Laura Pelkey:                                          [inaudible].

Mike :                                                 And they can show up with your security plans and get a fancy security shield.

Laura Pelkey:                                          Where Lynn and I are hesitant to agree because we're like, are we going to get in trouble for advising our customers on cybersecurity?

Mike :                                                 I know we could just wear a button.

Laura Pelkey:                                          No, I love that idea though.

Lynn Simons:                                           Yeah. And I'll admit it, I still love the stickers. Still love the stickers.

Mike :                                                 People like stickers.

Laura Pelkey:                                          Yeah.

Mike :                                                 They're good. They're always good. And plushies, we learned that on a previous podcast. People-

Lynn Simons:                                           I like stickers more than Plushies, but that's me.

Mike :                                                 Stickers have mobility. It's hard to-

Laura Pelkey:                                          And variety.

Mike :                                                 ... A few hundred plushies with you and not look creepy.

Lynn Simons:                                           It's been done, I'm sure.

Mike :                                                 Sure it has.

Laura Pelkey:                                          The day after Dreamforce, all the people on all the airplanes.

Mike :                                                 Planes.

Laura Pelkey:                                          And with all their plushies.

Mike :                                                 [inaudible] Luggage just...

Laura Pelkey:                                          Must be a site.

Mike :                                                 Well, it was great having both of you on and I'll be sure to include the link to the piece of content that you mentioned. So thank you both for hopping on the podcast and kicking off this year, keeping us safe and secure.

Laura Pelkey:                                          Thank you, Mike.

Lynn Simons:                                           Thanks so much, Mike.

Mike :                                                 So it was fun to have Lynn and Laura back on the podcast. What a great way to kick off 2023. Let's be security minded. I go back to all of the tips that they've shared with me and a lot of stuff that we've thought about too. The one takeaway that I really happen to think of as we were recording this podcast was I never really sat down and thought about what I would do if a user showed as logging in two different locations. What are the steps and how do I follow that? And who are the people I need to reach out to in my security? But that's why we do the podcast because then we're thinking about this stuff in advance, right? It's like the weather channel. We're making a plan before the storm comes so that if the storm comes, we're already set and we're prepared and we know who needs to do what.
                                                       So fun discussion. I love having them on the pod. If you have security tips or things that you do best practices, you should share them on Twitter. And of course, if you want to learn more about all the things Salesforce admin, go to admin.salesforce.com to find more resources, including that article that we mentioned in the episode as well as a full transcript. You can stay up to date with us on social. We are at Salesforce Admins, no, I, on Twitter. Jillian is @Jillian K Bruce. And of course I am @Mike Geralt. So with that, stay safe, stay awesome. Happy 2023 and stay tuned for a ton of really great episodes. We'll see you in the cloud.

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Kat Aquino, the Salesforce Admin for LA28, otherwise known as the organizing committee for the Los Angeles 2028 Olympic & Paralympic Games.

 

Join us as we talk about how she’s setting up LA28’s Salesforce infrastructure to power a massive, international event and what she’s learned so far.

 

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

Work together better.

The Olympic (and Paralympic) Games are coming to LA in 2028, and Kat is the Salesforce Admin for the organizing committee, LA28. Obviously, they’re in the planning stages right now, but that’s the perfect time to build a foundation in Salesforce.

 

Kat spends a lot of time talking with users to figure out what tools to build, but she’s also keeping an eye on the bigger picture. “As we onboard all of these different departments which all have different processes,” she says, “we need to think about how we can work together better.” That means a thorough understanding of how things are done and, more importantly, how they could fit together.

Prioritization when you’re starting from the ground up

So Kat has this massive list of things that need to be built in Salesforce, but how does she make decisions about what to prioritize? There’s a triage element of who needs what and when, but she also factors in how much time a task will take to accomplish. If she has the chance to score a quick win she’ll take it in a heartbeat.

 

Rolling out new tools lets Kat show the organization how Salesforce can enable them to collaborate like never before. Dashboards have been a game-changer for Sales, for example, because everyone can see what’s going on and collaborate on new approaches. Automations are mind-blowing if you’ve been stuck with the same repetitive process for years. This helps with adoption and generates momentum for the future.

Athlete Data: custom objects or contact records?

One thing Kat has to solve for that might not be a problem in your Salesforce org is how to deal with data for athletes—it is, after all, the Olympics and Paralympics. “Athletes are quite different from the regular business contacts you’d normally associate with an account,” she says. They need more specific fields (like sport, discipline, or what year they participated), but it’s really important to control who has access to that information with tight security and access.

 

Kat initially built a custom object and related lists solution, which worked great for reports but not for users. She went back to the drawing board and created a new record type for the contact of an athlete. They can still use the related lists and custom objects they previously created and the user experience is much improved. It requires a lot more management of page layouts and deciding who can see what, but it’s well worth it.

 

There’s so much more about how Kat is weening a department off of spreadsheets and what she’s looking forward to in the future, so be sure to listen to the full episode for more. We’ll be sure to check back in with Kat as we get closer to LA28.

 

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Full show transcript

Gillian Bruce:

Welcome to the Salesforce Admins podcast, where we talk about product, community, and careers to help you be an awesome admin. I am your host today, Gillian Bruce, and we got a fun one for you. We are going to be talking with Kat Aquino, who is working as a Salesforce administrator for the LA28 Olympic and Paralympic Games. She is actually building Salesforce to help support this huge event that's happening in just a few short years, and they're starting at ground zero, so I wanted to get Kat on to talk about some of the amazing processes, unique processes, that are special to running an Olympic and Paralympic games using Salesforce, which kind of processes she's bringing in, how she's thinking about the strategy. She's going to be growing the use of Salesforce massively over the next few years, leading right up to the LA28 games, and so I think it's really fascinating to hear from her.

And we are going to check back in with her in a few years to follow along her story, but I wanted to get her on to talk about some of these unique use cases and really explore some of the ways that maybe will help you expand your ideas of how you can use Salesforce to help support your business, as well.

All right, without further ado, let's please welcome Kat to the podcast.

Kat, welcome to the podcast.

 

Kat Aquino:

Thanks so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.

 

Gillian Bruce:

Oh, well, I am very happy to have you here. It's so fun. Now, I have had the opportunity to chat with you a little bit, but we got to share all of your goodness with everybody else who's out there listening, because Kat, you are doing something pretty special. Can you just give us a little overview of what your role is at the organization that you're at?

 

Kat Aquino:

Yeah, so I work at LA28, and we are the organizing committee for the Olympic and Paralympic Games, which are coming to Los Angeles in 2028. And my role is the Salesforce admin, essentially, of our organization.

 

Gillian Bruce:

Okay, so kind of a big deal.

 

Kat Aquino:

No pressure or anything.

 

Gillian Bruce:

I know. The Olympics are kind of a big deal, and they're coming back to LA. I think they've got, they haven't been in LA since forever, I feel like, maybe even in my lifetime. Maybe they're in LA in the eighties or something. Do you know when the last time they were there?

 

Kat Aquino:

Yeah, I believe it was '84.

 

Gillian Bruce:

84. There you go. I was two years old. So yeah, pretty much the first time in my lifetime, the Olympics are coming to my home state, not my home city, but very exciting. And I mean, it's a very unique way that the LA '28 is kind of set up. I mean, as a Salesforce admin, you've got a lot going on in the next few years. Can you tell me a little bit of the overview of how the organization is growing or plans to grow to prepare for this huge undertaking?

 

Kat Aquino:

Oh, yeah. So at our organization right now, we are kind of just setting up foundations for how we can plan the games. And we are currently planning the games. We have multiple departments that support that mission. And with being in the technology department, we're tied in with working with other departments to help them succeed and give them the tools that they need to be able to do their jobs. And so right now, as the admin, I've been going through talking with different departments and understanding what their needs are and how we can better collaborate with each other. And I think I'm in a really unique position to be able to help do that through the use of Salesforce. And the different departments, they really do need to work together. Right now, there's a lot of silos. And when they collaborate, they're not really leveraging technology in the best way that they can to be able to do that.

 

Gillian Bruce:

I mean, you're at the center of a really, really big effort. So, I mean, you talked about different departments and different silos and talking to all of your stakeholders. What are some of the questions that you go in with? Because a lot of admins, maybe they're not working to support the Olympic games, but they might be coming into an organization where, again, there's a lot of different stakeholders, a lot of different departments. How do you go about engaging with them and understanding their needs and identifying how Salesforce might be able to play a role in their business processes?

 

Kat Aquino:

Yeah, that's a really good question. I would say that one of the most important questions to ask is processes. What are they currently doing? And really understanding, not just from a broad perspective of how that ties in with the organization as a whole, but really getting down into the nitty gritty details of understanding what exactly it is that they are doing on a day to day basis, because that's where we can really take a look and examine that process and understand how we can take it apart and tinker it together and put that process into Salesforce.

 

Gillian Bruce:

Okay. So, let's talk about that, because, I mean, the LA28 organization does a lot of different things. What are some of the first things that you've been able to set up in Salesforce to help manage their processes a little bit better?

 

Kat Aquino:

Yeah, so earlier I mentioned that I had interviewed a number of departments to really understand what they needed and what they were trying to do. I came up with a huge list. And in order to understand and prioritize what needed to be done, put together the urgency, a list of departments requests that needed a solution quicker. And then I also divided that up into figuring out which of those solutions don't require that big of a lift, so which of those solutions could be set up a little bit more easily than others. So, after doing that, the first department that we set up was our commercial sales department. And that was of simple solutions, seeing that the bread and butter of Salesforce was to help the sales teams do their jobs. And so we set up opportunities, we set up accounts, we set up contacts and allowed them to be able to track their conversations using the activity timeline. And we added the Outlook integration so that they can add their emails into the opportunities. And being able to see all of that in one space for them has really changed the game.

 

Gillian Bruce:

Yeah, I would love to hear... What was the reaction once you were able to set that up? Were the sales people happy with you and super excited to now have this all into one place, or how did that go?

 

Kat Aquino:

I would say, yeah, there was excitement, absolutely. And they loved seeing it because I would show examples of how they can do the work that they've previously done in this new platform. And I would say that there were some challenges that came along with it as well. It was adoption, just making sure that some of the users knew how to use the system, because a lot of them never used Salesforce before. So, that was a challenge that we took on and helped them to increase their confidence and knowledge about how they can leverage this platform to sell, essentially. And I would say the other side of that is... Their leadership was super excited about the dashboard that we were able to set up for them and the reports that were available on that dashboard. It really gave them that one stop shop to be able to see what the progress was looking like on a daily basis, weekly, monthly, how are we tracking towards our goals, things like that. It helps them to just really level set with each other because they were all looking at the same data.

 

Gillian Bruce:

Well, yeah. And then it's automated. Once you put it in Salesforce, right? It just pops up right there, and nobody has to compile different spreadsheets and talk to different sales groups and understand who's done what.

 

Kat Aquino:

Exactly. And it allowed them to work together better. Previously, their leadership and the people who were actually having the conversations and keeping tabs on what was going on, they were very much separate. But now that they have them all available on these dashboards, they're working together much more closely.

 

Gillian Bruce:

Well, that's good. Congratulations. Okay, so you set up sales and Salesforce, but I know you had a few other things on your list. So, what other things have you been able to set up in? And let's also be clear, how long have you been in this role?

 

Kat Aquino:

It has been a little over a year now.

 

Gillian Bruce:

So, forever, such a long time. So in just a little over a year, so you set up a sales process. What other things have you been able to build out in Salesforce?

 

Kat Aquino:

Yeah. Well, specific to the Olympics, we, of course, have to work with athletes. And one of the other projects we are working on was how do we actually set up athletes in our system, because athletes are quite different from the regular business contacts that you'd normally associate with an account. And so thinking about that was a little bit challenging. We initially landed on looking at creating a custom object to hold athlete information. And the reason for that is so that we could create as many fields as we needed to that were really specific to athletes and attributes about an athlete. And being able to control the security and access to that information was also important.

 

Gillian Bruce:

Oh, no, I bet. I mean, it's such a unique set of data to track because you've got all these different things that the athletes do with you and the community and whatnot. So, I could imagine that that took quite a high level of customization.

 

Kat Aquino:

Yeah, there was a lot of customization. And we thought about, okay, we needed to create additional related lists/custom objects to be able to associate them with games that they had participated in and the sport that they participate in, and the discipline that they participate in. So, a lot of that was designed so that we could be able to easily report off of that information to be able to create reports and search for athletes in a more aggregated way. But we realized that the setup of that athlete record, separate from a contact and separate from an account, was not providing the greatest user experience for our athlete department. And so we've had to come back to the drawing board and kind of rework what that should look like and how we should store athlete information in the system.

 

Gillian Bruce:

Interesting. I love that you rolled out something, and then we're like, "Hmm, it's not quite right. We need to come back to the drawing board." Can you talk a little bit more about that process? Because I know, even the limited admin work that I have done, it's not always great the first time around, and so sometimes you have to come back and revisit it.

 

Kat Aquino:

Yeah.

 

Gillian Bruce:

Tell me a little bit about that process and how you approach it, because it can be a little humbling, it can be a little difficult. What have you learned that might be able to help some other admins in the similar position?

 

Kat Aquino:

Yeah, totally. I would say that this process was... It was tough. We're early in our stage of using Salesforce. So in that sense, I'm kind of lucky that we're going to establish a better foundation, but it was difficult to look at it and say, "Oh, we didn't do that the best way that we could have." And having to go back to the drawing board and re-architecting the data that currently existed was important to determine what connections can we make that don't disrupt the requirements that we initially had heard of from that department. So, pulled up a lucid chart, looked at how everything was connected there, and decided, okay, maybe we could keep all of these requirements just by using a new record type on contact records. So, we decided to try that out and create a different kind of record type for the contact of an athlete to be able to hold all of their athletes specific details and still be able to use the previous related lists, custom objects that we had created that were initially tied to the athlete and tie them into the contact object.

So, that serves the purpose of eliminating the matrioshka and clicks that the athlete department would have to go through to get to the athlete's information. It was really just opening up their account, and then opening up that contact record, rather than going to account, contact, then athlete.

 

Gillian Bruce:

Yeah.

 

Kat Aquino:

Does that make sense?

 

Gillian Bruce:

Totally. Yeah. Well, and I think it kind of goes to this classic debate of custom object versus using a record type, right? I know that's something that-

 

Kat Aquino:

Yeah.

 

Gillian Bruce:

It's kind of hard to figure out sometimes what the right answer is there, so I really appreciate you breaking down kind of decision points that you used to evaluate, okay, we went in with the custom object, but we learned that there were some things that weren't ideal for the end user. So, then you use the record type. I think that's always a good thing for our admins especially to remember, because record types could be really, really useful, especially if there's enough similarities there to where you can add some more customizations and plug into the existing relationships and schema that are already built in Salesforce.

 

Kat Aquino:

Yeah, exactly. And I think early on, I was scared of record types just due to some stories that I had heard, and also the amount of care that it required, considering you're having to adjust page layouts now and making certain things visible depending on a profile, things like that. It was just a lot more management. But with the user experience, that greatly improves. And I think that in itself makes it worth it.

 

Gillian Bruce:

I love that. That's great. Okay, so you built a sales process, you built a process to manage athlete, athlete data. What else are you working on? I mean, I know you've been busy so far, so I would imagine-

 

Kat Aquino:

Yeah.

 

Gillian Bruce:

... there's not that much time for you to do a whole bunch else, but what else are you working on in terms of bringing different processes into Salesforce for LA28?

 

Kat Aquino:

Yeah, so we are also bringing on more and more departments. Right now, we have about four departments that are presently using the platform, and we're coming up on bringing on two more. And one of these new departments, this is our communications department, it is probably our biggest build yet. We've had to create a number of new custom objects to be able to support the processes and workflows that they have. And it's been really interesting to see how we can take their work and translate it into Salesforce processes. So, example is that the communications team handles all of the internal requests to participate in certain events within the local organization. Maybe there's an award ceremony or maybe there's an interview that a media outlet would like to have. All of that is managed through our communications department. And they do have a lot of spreadsheets, presently,

 

Gillian Bruce:

Boo.

 

Kat Aquino:

... how they have run their systems. And all of these spreadsheets are kind of... They have multiple tabs within them. And so it's been very interesting to see how they've worked through switching through different spreadsheets, different tabs within a spreadsheet to be able to do their work. We had to take a lot of time understanding what they were doing so that we could translate it into Salesforce. And at the end of the day, what we've been able to do is organize their sheets, so that in Salesforce, you're looking at one object. And that one object, we've created additional record types so they can adjust the kind of media engagement, per se, that they are looking at. So, different fields might show up, different values might show up, depending on a status or a stage for that particular engagement. And that is a much more organized way of viewing things than their three different Excel sheets where only a couple of tabs really related to that whole piece.

So, having that tied back to accounts, so accounts being their media outlets, and then the contacts in which there are journalists and reporters, having all of that tie back together and being able to see that bigger picture of, okay, these are the engagements that we've got going on under this particular category, these are the people that are involved in it, this is the reporter, this is our LA28 representative that's going to be in it, this is the comms team person who's going to be staffing this and supporting this project. These are the topics that are involved, we've been able to create a number of custom objects to be able to support all of their needs.

 

Gillian Bruce:

That's awesome. I mean, I can very easily envision that nasty spreadsheet with all the tabs, because I feel like we've all encountered those.

 

Kat Aquino:

It was rough, and I think they would agree.

 

Gillian Bruce:

Well, that's awesome. I mean, that's a very complex and unique process to bring into Salesforce, so I think that's really interesting that you were able to do that. I mean, I would imagine there's probably some other processes that you may be working on in the future. What else are you working on? What is in the vision for the next steps of Salesforce with LA28?

 

Kat Aquino:

Yeah. And right now, I think we're heavily focused on foundations and making sure that we are doing what we need to do without too much fuss and too much frill. But as we onboard all of these different departments, which all have different processes, and some processes really overlap with other departments, we start to think about how we can work together better. Maybe, is there a way that we could optimize certain processes? Can we use flows to automate certain things? And can we adjust a field so that it serves a greater purpose? Can we serve a greater purpose by adjusting a custom object? And all of that, I think, is something that has been coming out of what I'm calling as... We have a steering committee and the steering committee that we have meets on a monthly basis, and it has representatives from each department so that it provides a space for our users to have a voice and really be involved in the planning and what features that we're going to be prioritizing, what features are needed, and really help shape what our Salesforce instance is going to look like.

So, I'm really excited to continue meeting with our steering committee to be able to shape how we can create a better collaborative environment.

 

Gillian Bruce:

What I love about that, Kat, is that, I mean, knowing that basically you've got a very collaborative building environment kind of across the whole organization, because I think, I mean, you're all gearing up for this huge event in a few years, and it's a massive undertaking, and it's really unique to hear your perspective as the admin who's building all of the Salesforce infrastructure to help run this whole organization. I mean, it's really, really fascinating, and especially at this stage where everything is kind of... You are, you're laying the groundwork, you're setting up the infrastructure that is going to run this massive, massive event. It's really fascinating to hear how you think about what to set up and the steerco with all of the different departments, making sure stakeholders are involved from the get-go. This makes me really excited.

 

Kat Aquino:

It makes me excited too.

 

Gillian Bruce:

Yeah. And I think it's a really great example too, for maybe even admins who are maybe at some more established Salesforce instances and companies and organizations. But the idea of having that fresh look and really looking at how people are getting their work done and doing those evaluations that you've done, and not being afraid to come back to the drawing table and reevaluate stuff, I think those are some really, really great learnings that you've been able to share with us, and I so appreciate that.

 

Kat Aquino:

Yeah, of course.

 

Gillian Bruce:

I mean, what has it been... I mean, I can imagine being an admin for the LA28 games is probably... It might seem a little daunting at times, but where do you see a couple years from now, or even maybe as you head into the last year or two before the games, what's your vision for maybe what you have built out by then or what it's going to be like to be the Salesforce admin or running the Salesforce instance for such a huge undertaking?

 

Kat Aquino:

Yeah, that's such an interesting point that you brought up about what the vision should look like, because I think earlier when I was interviewing all these different departments and understanding their functions and what they do, that started to help formulate the vision of what Salesforce could be for our organization. And I think what it really could be is this glue that brings together these different departments to be able to provide transparency across all of the different work streams that we have. Because as an organization that's developing and planning the Olympics, there's a lot of entities and organizations that we need to communicate with, and ensuring that everyone uses the platform so that they can understand, this is what I talked about with this department in this company. Another department at LA28 might see that and say, "Okay, I know that that happened. Let me readjust the way that I'm going to speak to that company about this topic." And I think the real vision for Salesforce is just being able to bring all of those departments together to better collaborate with each other.

 

Gillian Bruce:

I love that. That makes me... I'm really looking forward to, hopefully, Kat, if you'll let me, continue to talk to you over the next few years because I'm so fascinated to hear what else you build and all your different learnings and experiences. This is kind of like a startup in some senses, right? You're starting from ground zero.

 

Kat Aquino:

Absolutely. We absolutely are. And I think one of the key that we're excited about is Salesforce is going to help us create a more holistic understanding of the different stakeholders and accounts and companies and organizations that we work with. We'll be able to open up an account and see all the different facets that involve that account, like whether or not that account has a stake in venues. Are they a manager of a venue? Do they operate a venue? Are they a concession provider for that venue? Have they been engaged with our communications team before? What have they been involved in? What are they involved in as far as our sales department? Have they been in touch with them at all in any capacity? So, it's really going to allow all of us to be able to look at what we're working with and share that information across our organization.

 

Gillian Bruce:

You are building the customer 360 for LA28. Good job, Kat.

 

Kat Aquino:

It totally is.

 

Gillian Bruce:

Well, Kat, I really appreciate you taking the time to chat with me and share some of the things that you've already built and what you're going to look at building next. And I do also really appreciate that grander vision. because I think every Salesforce admin, no matter what organization you're in, you should have a vision of what you want Salesforce to do in the long run. And I think your very clear vision about it being the glue. I literally just wrote that down because I'm like, that is great. It's very clear and concise, and so it's helpful to have that as a direction that you're going, that vision. So, any little tips or advice do you want to leave the listeners before we wrap up today?

 

Kat Aquino:

I would say keep things open-minded. Stay open-minded about what is possible and what's available. I know that at a certain point, when you've encountered numerous problems and understand, "Oh, I've encountered that before, this is how we do it," there might be alternative solutions that maybe work better nowadays relative to the previous ways that you've been implementing a solution. So, staying open-minded.

 

Gillian Bruce:

That's a great note to end on. Thank you so much, Kat, for spending time with us today. I look forward to seeing what else you're going to build. And get ready. Now, all Salesforce admins are going to hit you up for advice and interesting stories about working for LA28.

 

Kat Aquino:

Happy to hear, and happy to learn from them as well.

 

Gillian Bruce:

Excellent. Thank you so much.

 

Kat Aquino:

Thank you so much.

 

Gillian Bruce:

Well, thank you. Thank you, Kat, so much for taking the time to join us on the podcast. I hope that all of you listeners got some great insight from Kat about how you can build the infrastructure and the foundation for a very successful Salesforce implementation to run a huge, huge amounts of project or program. And hey, especially if you're an admin at a small business or a startup, there are some great learnings here and here from Kat to help you set up for success. I love how Kat said she's got a vision for Salesforce. It is clear. It is going to be the glue that brings all of these very separate departments all together. And having that vision for what you want Salesforce to be in the overall, it's just so important. At Salesforce, we talk about our V2mom all the time, which is how we set our vision and values and metrics and methods for the year.

Kat does the same thing. So, really having a clear vision for how you want Salesforce to function within your organization is so, so helpful. If you want to learn more about being an awesome admin, you can find all kinds of great content on admin.salesforce.com, blogs, videos, podcasts, all kinds of great things, even the Salesforce admin skill kit. Check it out if you haven't already. You can follow all of the awesome admin fun on Twitter using hashtag #AwesomeAdmin or @SalesforceAdmns, no I. You can find our guest today, Kat Aquino on LinkedIn. I'll put her LinkedIn link in the show notes. Please give her some love. Follow her. She's going to be building some very cool things in the next few years. And you can find my co-host, Mike Gerholdt, @mikegerholdt on Twitter, and you can find myself @gilliankbruce on Twitter. You can also find us on LinkedIn. We exist there too. We're on all the platforms. With that, I hope you had a great day or having a great day, will have a great day, and I'll catch you next time in the cloud.