Jenny McNamara on Growing Your Career From TDX

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Jenny McNamara, Salesforce Admin at CINC.

Join us as we chat about how she became obsessed with Flow Builder, the importance of mastering the basics, and why you need to get yourself to a Salesforce live event.

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

Be the translator

Jenny started as a business analyst, serving as the scrum master for multiple teams in her organization. When the Salesforce team needed more help, she jumped at the chance to specialize and become an admin. In both roles, you need to be able to translate what people are saying into the why behind it.

“Technical people and client-facing people don’t always speak the same language even though they’re all trying to accomplish the same thing,” Jenny says. A stakeholder may ask for a new data field when what they really want is a way for that information to show up on a dashboard. And tech person may not want to do that because it makes the org a mess. You need someone with an understanding of both sides of the organization to step in and translate.

Flow all night

When Jenny first started focusing on Salesforce, the thing that got her hooked on the platform was learning Flow Builder. She was still a business analyst at that point, but the Salesforce Admin on her team was having trouble building something and asked her if she could look into Flow a little bit so he could bounce ideas off of her.

Jenny sat down for a quick glance at what Flow was all about, just enough to help out. Before she knew it, she had learned enough to solve the problem in a single night. Some people binge Netflix, Jenny binged Flow Builder.

The magic of Salesforce live events

We met Jenny at TrailheaDX, where she was really excited to dive into the fundamentals. “The better your basics are, the more of the foundational things that you really master, the better you’re going to be at everything,” she says.

Getting to live Salesforce events has been so important to Jenny’s career in Salesforce, and she recommends it for people at all experience levels. You never know who you’ll meet, and you already have something in common to talk about. You can learn about something you didn’t know existed, which could take your career in a new direction. You might even find yourself staying up all night to learn more.

Podcast swag

• Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Learn more

• Salesforce Events

• Trailhead: Get Started as a Salesforce Business Analyst

• Essential Habits for a Salesforce Admin

Social

• Connect with Jenny on the Trailblazer Community

• Salesforce Admins: @SalesforceAdmns 

• Gillian: @GillianKBruce

• Mike: @MikeGerholdt