Thu, 10 October 2024
Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Jim Ray, Director of Developer Relations and Advocacy at Slack. Join us as we chat about Workflow Builder, Slack integrations, and what happens when you put them together. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Jim Ray. Slack as a multi-purpose tool Jim is here to tell us that Slack is much more than a chat tool. Automations and integrations can open a whole new world of utility for your organization. And while Slack integrations have always been a thing, you used to need some technical knowledge in order to build your own. All that’s changed with the launch of Workflow Builder. This tool allows you to build automations in Slack without ever having to code or host an app. Once you get started with making your own Slack integrations, you’ll never know how you got by without them. Empowering admins with Workflow Builder You can do a lot of cool things in Workflow Builder, like create a new channel or automatically post a formatted message at a certain time each week. But Slack integrations are where it really gets interesting. For example, let’s say you have a weekly status report meeting. You can create a scheduled workflow that automatically drops the relevant Salesforce info into a Slack channel so everyone can refer to it for the meeting. Slack integrations go both ways, so you can also use a Slack automation to execute a flow in Salesforce. With Workflow Builder, you can bring your Salesforce data directly into Slack and vice versa, and the possibilities are endless. Enhancing Productivity with Slack AI Finally, Jim had a lot to say about Slack AI, which gives you the ability to search Slack with natural language queries and summarize or format the results. When he came back to work after his paternity leave, he needed to prep for a first meeting with a new skip-level manager. So he asked Slack AI, “What does this person think about the Slack platform?” It gave him a summary of everything they ever posted on the subject, complete with footnotes so he could look at specific comments. Most importantly, Jim points out that the automations you create in Workflow Builder are exactly the kind of structured data that Slack AI loves to work with. This opens up a whole new world of possibilities for how you can share information across your organization without the need to put everyone on Salesforce. This episode is full of use cases and tips for how to get started with Slack integrations, so be sure to take a listen. And don’t forget to subscribe for more from the Salesforce Admins Podcast. Podcast swag Learn more Admin Trailblazers Group Social Full show transcript Mike Gerholdt: Okay, this week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we are going to have a lot of fun because we are talking about Slack automations with the director of developer relations and advocacy, Jim Ray of Slack. Now, you're probably a Salesforce Admin, you're like, "Oh, but we don't use Slack. I'm not going to listen to this." No! This is a fun episode and it's going to give you a ton of ideas for, hey, maybe we should think about using Slack. I'm not here to sell you anything. I don't get any commissions. I just love when I can give you ideas and creative answers to challenges that you're facing. And Jim talks us through a whole bunch of fun stuff that you can do in Slack and gave me a ton of ideas. We talked about canvases. I don't know if you use canvases, but it's a ton of fun. Now, before we get into that, I want to tell you about, hey, what we got coming up in April, because this is last episode of March. I have architect evangelist Tom Leddy coming on to talk about decisioning. I reconnected with Lizz Hellinga at TrailblazerDX. Remember, she was on a previous episode talking about the importance of clean data and why that's important for AI. She's coming back. I'm working on getting Skip Sauls with the Data Cloud update, so Data Cloud. And then I'm going to introduce a new episode at the end of April where I'm bringing my co-worker, Josh Burke, on, and he's going to do a deep dive episode with a product manager. We're working on getting somebody really cool to help you change the way you do some of your thinking. That's all I'm going to tease out for right now. But of course, if you're not already subscribed to the podcast, make sure you're doing that, make sure you're following it. It's a different word on every podcast platform. But if you do that, new episodes automatically get downloaded to your phone. That way when you wake up in the morning, you put the leash on the dog, you go out, boom! You press play, podcast is going, and you can get some great information. You don't have to think about it, or maybe you're riding the bus to work or bicycling. It's starting to become summer now. So anyway, that's a whole long way. This is fun. You're going to enjoy this podcast. Let's get Jim on the pod. So Jim, welcome to the podcast. Jim Ray: Thanks so much. It's great to be here, Mike. Mike Gerholdt: I always have fun talking Slack. I feel like the last time we talked Slack was with Amber Boaz and she was telling us how to replace meetings with Slack. And then you did a presentation in the admin track at TDX about automating in Slack, and I just feel like that's the next level for people that use Slack is getting it to do stuff automagically. So that's what I'd love to talk about, but let's start with how did Jim get all the way to Slack? Jim Ray: That's a great question. I'm also glad you mentioned Amber Boaz. I had the opportunity to meet her at TDX. Mike Gerholdt: Oh, she's wonderful. Jim Ray: She's from my neck of the woods, so I'm going to try to drive down to Durham in a month or so and hang out with the user group that she's got. Mike Gerholdt: That's pretty country down there too. Jim Ray: It is. It's nice. I went to school down there too, so it's pretty great. So if we're talking background here, my background is actually in journalism. I have a journalism degree from the University of North Carolina. That's what I did. Mike Gerholdt: So it's obvious that you would work in tech. Jim Ray: Obvious that I would be working in developer relations at Slack. It's maybe not as much of a leap as people might think. I was always kind of the techie guy that was looking for... My degree is in this multimedia storytelling. This was the late '90s. We were trying to figure out how to do interesting new ways of telling stories on the web, and that's what I was into. So I always had a tech mindset inside of the newsrooms that I worked in. And then when I switched over to tech, I still brought that media background with me. And interestingly enough, DevRel has merged those two things. It wasn't something that I'd set out to do, but I was really interested in what was going on at Slack. I started working at Slack in the middle of 2016, so just as the company was really rocketing off. It was a really incredible first year. The user growth was happening a lot. The company itself was growing tremendously. It was a different place every year for the first couple of years that I was there. And so I've been working on the DevRel side for most of that time. And then recently, about a year and a half ago, I took over our developer advocacy team. And so on developer advocacy in Slack, what we do is we work primarily with our customers who are building on the Slack platform. The platform is multifaceted in some ways. We have our Slack App Directory where you go and you install apps that are built by our partners, or they're built by companies that are building their business on top of Slack. But the bulk of the work that happens on the platform is custom apps and integrations that are built by our customers to solve their own needs. We're always looking for ways to engage with that audience and help them understand how to do automation in Slack. Mike Gerholdt: I mean, I think too often people just look at Slack as like, oh, it's just another communication tool. But just as we were chatting before we even got started, the number of features that it has and the way you can configure things to, lack of a better term, almost communicate back with you and make life easier, which is what the point of automation. I remember the first time I built an automation, which I believe was just for a simple Slack group where it was like, I really want questions in the Slack group formatted in a certain way, and so I just stuck up that form and they just auto created that post. But the cool thing was somebody on my team pointed out, you know it could also put all of that text into a Google Doc so that you have this running FAQ? I was done at that point. I was like, oh God, no idea, right? Because for so long, you mentioned you started in 2016, but you got a degree in multimedia storytelling, who would've thought like, VHS, what are we going to do? DVD now for a certain period. Now, so many of these communication apps are not just like remember the days of MSN Messenger. It's not just text back and forth. It's actually managing of information and context. Jim Ray: I think that's such a good point, and I really love your example of formatting your questions. I think one of the things, and this is something that I learned from working more closely with my friends on the sales side of the house, is that if you're just using Slack for communication, you're overpaying for a chat tool, as they like to say. And there's a lot more that you can do to broaden your usage of Slack, and we're increasingly trying to be a surface area for getting work done. Obviously, Slack doesn't have any desire to be the only place where you come and do your work. It would pretty well constrain the work that I think people could do. But it's definitely a place, particularly those quick interactions, and that's where some of the automation comes in. But things like approvals, things like questions, even quick bug reports where you're already interacting with your colleagues, automation allows you to bring in your other tools, and that's where the power of that lies. And the platform has really expanded a lot in the early days. Slack came with some built-in integration. So if you wanted to do things like get an alert whenever somebody uploaded a file to Dropbox, then we had that automatically configured. But if you wanted to do something outside of the bounds of that automatic configuration, then that wasn't really possible. Then we launched the API and along with that we launched the app directory. And so we were approaching it from a couple of different ways. You could build custom integrations, or you could install apps and integrations that other people had built from the directory. And then that's where we saw that usage explode, where people were really building custom use cases. The problem was for those early days of the API was that it really did require a fair bit of technical knowledge. You had to know how to program against our APIs, which means you had to know how APIs work. You also had to host the app yourself. And so in those early days of the APIs, you had to build out an application. And it worked very similarly to how you might build a Twitter app or something like that, but you were responsible for hosting that. And then we built a lot of tooling around that to help improve that. We built some frameworks to make it easier to build with some of our most popular programming languages. And then we acquired a company called Missions, and this is where Workflow Builder really... Where its origins lie. We acquired this company called Missions, and the team that built Missions, they were a team that was actually inside of a consulting company called Robots & Pencils, and they were like, "We've got this idea for our product that can interact with Slack." Mike Gerholdt: That's a great name. Jim Ray: It's a cool name, right? And so the Missions app was all about making it easier to build automations without having to write any code. So we acquired that team, fantastic team, really love working with them. A number of them are still at Slack, thankfully, and they're doing fantastic work. And that became the first version of Workflow Builder, and Workflow Builder was our no code automation product. And that was a way to use the platform without having to know how to program, without having to host an app. And so that was the first big expansion beyond just writing applications. Mike Gerholdt: Jumping ahead to your TDX presentation, because we talked about automation, because the example I gave was just literally Slack just automating within itself, what were some of the examples you gave in that breakout presentation? Jim Ray: The evolution of Workflow Builder also mirrors the increased complexity of things that you can build. The initial version of Workflow Builder allows you to do exactly what you were just talking about, allows you to automate work within Slack. So if you wanted to do something like create a new channel or post a message that was formatted in a certain way, then you could do that with Workflow Builder. The second version of Workflow Builder that we released, and this is the current contemporary version, allowed hooks into other applications. And so apps could build custom steps that could then be inserted into workflows. And so you could install an app, and then that app would bring custom steps along with it. And what we've done now is continue to expand on that surface area. So now anyone can write a custom step and you can actually deploy that up to Slack and we'll run that custom step inside of Workflow Builder. We've also built out a number of what we call connectors. These are connections to other third-party tools. So Salesforce is a great example. So if you want to create a new record in Salesforce, then we have that connector built in. And what's nice about the way that we've built it is we handle things like authentication. We handle all of the API communications so that you don't have to worry about that, and then all you have to do is off with your credentials. And then when you run the workflow, then it will just essentially act on your behalf. And so we've got about 70 of these connectors into a whole bunch of apps. So Salesforce is obviously one. The Google suite, so if you need to create a new Google Doc or if you need to insert a row into a spreadsheet, if you want to upload files into various file providers. So we've got a number of steps that do things like that. And then one of the Salesforce steps that we've also got is to kick off a flow. So if your organization is dependent or you've built out a lot of custom flows or things like that, then you can insert a step into Workflow Builder and then we'll kick off that flow. So it'll actually execute a more complex workflow instead of just creating a new record or updating a record or something like that. Mike Gerholdt: I think the really cool automation stuff, at least cool to me, was giving Salesforce admins the ability to, lack of a better term, expand the footprint of Salesforce within an organization, but without having to add per se more platform licenses. And we did an example where like a warehouse manager really deals with the data, but a lot of people also needed to just know about things. And with automation, they could follow records and channels and get updates, but they never needed to update any of the physical data on the Salesforce record. Jim Ray: That's such a good example, and it's something that we see from our sales and customer success friends all the time as well is... So at Slack, the way that our channels are organized is that every account that we're attached to gets its own channel. They all have their own prefix and stuff like that. So it might be Account-Salesforce and Account-Acme. And then you can actually build automations that will do things like one of the ways that you can trigger your automation is you can have your automation set to go at a certain time once a week. So maybe you've got a Monday morning meeting and you want to get the entire sales team around that, but you want to pull some data from Salesforce. So you can go grab some information from Salesforce. You want to get the latest updated figures that have come in over the past week, and then you can just drop that information into channel, and then now everybody's got the context. And so you're not just blindly talking about, "Hey, what's going on with the customer this week," you actually have some information, and then you can start a conversation around that. It's actually a great way that teams have eliminated those regular meetings that we have so that everybody stays in sync. There's often good reasons why we have them, but maybe not good reasons why we keep them, especially now that everybody's working in a more distributed way these days. This works across all kinds of teams, not just sales team, but you might have a marketing team and maybe you want to pull some data from Google Analytics or any of your social analytics platforms or anything like that. You can drop that information in there and then the team can have a conversation around that. Maybe you notice something's right, or maybe everything's great and then you just don't need to have a meeting. It's just like, "Looking good and all systems go," and then you've just saved your entire team half an hour. Translate that over a quarter or a year, and that's some actual real-time savings. Mike Gerholdt: Am I understanding you right by also saying it could pull from reports or dashboards in Salesforce? Jim Ray: Absolutely. Because everyone's Salesforce instance is special, we operate on the record level, and so we'd be able to look at how those records are set up. And one thing that we're interested in getting a little bit closer to is things like Tableau and MuleSoft where there might be some complex records that run in the background, and then how do we pull that information into Slack? So we haven't quite fully figured out that level of automation yet, but it's absolutely something that folks on both sides are working on. Mike Gerholdt: On top of it just being cool, the part that really appeals to me is the lack of having the context switch. So this concept came to me, oh, I want to say four or five years ago when we were trying to work through a ticketing system for what my team does. We really tried to narrow down, what is the hardest part of your job? Well, the hardest part of your job is regardless of where your mind is at at say 12:30, you have to join this meeting. And for me, oftentimes I'll sit down at my desk, I don't know what the priority is that morning. I could get working on something. And then to your point, oh, it's 10:00. I got to join this team meeting. Boy, if I didn't have to and I could just stay in my mindset and do another 45 minutes, I could finish this project. But now I have to context switch. Join this meeting, look at 20 people on a call, waste an hour, and then spend another 20 minutes getting my brain back to where it was. I could have been done with this project and maybe my update was five minutes. And I bring that up because I think like, wow, just the ability to, hey, we're still going to have that Monday team call at 10 AM, except it's going to be a scheduled Slack post. And then I just expect you, the directs, to respond to as needed throughout the day. Because if you're a sales guy, you probably have a 10 AM with a customer, and that's bringing money in as opposed to, well, my update was only five minutes anyway, I'm going to add this update at 11:05 after I'm done with my customer call. I'm not going to prevent anybody. I bring that up because I think the value of not having to context switch by just putting in simple automation is so important when you think of it's not just automating and putting a dashboard in a Slack channel. Jim Ray: I think it's a hugely important point, and I think it really emphasizes how we work today. So the instance that you were just talking about about the meeting interrupting your day, so if you can eliminate that standing meeting, obviously we're not going to eliminate all of our meetings, I still have one-on-ones with all my reports and all that, but eliminate those kinds of meetings where the sharing of information is important, but having to sit together in a room is less important. So that's one great way that we can eliminate context switching. I think it's really important. One another way is to eliminate what I think of as alt tabbing. So every time you alt tab between applications, that actually... Even if you are actually working on the same project, we know, and I've studied this a little bit because it has to do with the customers that I work with and the kinds of applications that they're interested in building, but every time you alt tab between apps, it actually does a little mini version of that context switch. It's almost like going into a new meeting, especially if you haven't offed in, or you can't remember where you're supposed to go, or you have to pull some information from one system of record and put it into another. So those are the kinds of things that we know are real drains on people's productivity and actually their ability to get into that meaningful deep work state, that flow state that we know is really important for knowledge work. I mean, we're all really lucky we get to sit in front of computers all day for the most part. I'm not worried about getting black lung or anything like that, but the work actually does have a drain on our brains, the thing that we're using to do the work. And we know that by eliminating some of that context switching, we can actually help people get back and do some important work. There's some really great examples about how bringing some of that automation, and again, not bringing all of your work, but bringing some of that automation into Slack can be really helpful. So a couple of ways that we've been using it for a long time is, again, at Slack, we will set up channels for specific projects or features that we're working on. So we're working on a new feature, and that feature gets its own channel. And the team that's working on that feature will start working on it. And then when we release it internally, we create a feedback channel. And the feedback channel is where everybody who is starting to use that new feature, they'll come and they'll offer up obviously their feedback or give bug reports or maybe just things that they think could be tweaked. And so oftentimes we'll set up a workflow, and we've got some examples of it that teams across the organization can use, we'll set that workflow up in that channel. And then what it'll do is it'll post a message in the channel and we can have some conversation about that feedback. And then you can take that conversation and you can submit a bug report. So if somebody says, "Hey, this doesn't look right," then it doesn't automatically submit the bug report, but then the PM or the engineer or the designer can come in and say, "Oh, you know what? I can reproduce that. Let me file a bug." And then what they can do is they can kick off another workflow that will log that entire conversation in JIRA and create the new bug. And then once the bug has been created in JIRA, attach the URL for the bug into the thread. So then you've got the context in both directions. So the person who submitted the bug, they don't have to go through and figure out how JIRA works or whatever. The PM or the engineer, they don't have to context switch out to another application. And then if you want to come back and get some context about it, maybe I reported this a week ago and I want to see what the update is, I can go back to that original conversation. I can search for my name or whatever, and then I can click on the link and go in JIRA. And then JIRA remains the system of record. We're not trying to replicate all of JIRA. I wouldn't wish that on anyone, but JIRA remains the system of record, but the actual filing of that bug report didn't require switching between lots of different systems. Mike Gerholdt: That's along the lines with the automation that I saw where Salesforce remains a system of record. Slack just hosts the conversation, right? Jim Ray: Yeah, exactly. Mike Gerholdt: Back and forth and keeping people up to date. And also it reduces training, right? If I've got somebody like I think the example we used was a retail manager, if all the retail manager knows Slack, they don't need to know the back ends of everything. That's the best part about the apps and stuff. I was singing the praises of canvases before we started this call because I've started to use canvases a little bit more. I'd love for you to help me understand what are some examples that admins could use of automating with canvases or creating canvases as a result of automation? Is that even possible? Jim Ray: Totally, and it's a great question. So if listeners aren't familiar, canvases are kind of our document project or product inside of Slack. It's built into every Slack. You can create as many canvases as you want to. And think of a canvas just as kind of a lightweight doc. If you remember Dropbox Paper from back in the day, it works very similarly. It's not all the formatting that you get from something like Microsoft Word or Google Doc or something like that, but it's just enough formatting so that you can lay things out in a pretty consistent way. And the nice thing about canvases is they can exist anywhere inside of Slack and you can attach them in different places. So you can create a canvas that is attached permanently to a channel. If you want to provide some context, maybe again, it's one of those feedback channels, so you want to provide some information about how a person gives feedback, what to expect, is there an SLA, things like that, you can write all of that up inside of a canvas. And the cool thing is canvases can be automated. They can be automated with workflows. So one of the options for steps that you have inside of Workflow Builder is to create a new canvas. But the other thing that you can do is you can insert variables inside of canvases, and then the information that you collect from a previous step in a workflow can be inserted into that canvas where those variables are. We nerds, we call that variable interpolation. So basically you create a canvas that acts as a template. So maybe you want to create across your organization, you want to say, every time we spin up a new feature, we're also going to spin up a corresponding feedback channel. And every one of those feedback channels should have a canvas attached to it that provides some information about the channel. Maybe it's going to be who is the DRI for this feature? Maybe it's a PM or maybe it's an engineering lead and that person is the DRI for this. And so you should expect to hear feedback from them. And then maybe we also want to point you to a workflow that says, hey, this is the workflow to use if you want to give us information or if you want to give us feedback about this. And so you can create that workflow and then you can attach the workflow into canvas and we'll create a nice little widget for you. And then we'll put all of the information about the person, about the people who are responsible for that feedback channel into the canvas as well. And so you can create a setup feedback channel workflow, and maybe you gather some information, maybe you say, "Who's the DRI for this? Point me to the tech spec," and then any further information. Well, you can fill all that in in your workflow and then we'll automatically create a new canvas from that template, fill that information in, and attach it directly to the channel that gets created. And the workflow can also create the channel too. Mike Gerholdt: I don't want to get into different channels because right now I feel I need a workflow to manage my channels, but that's probably... I mean, well, let me ask about that. That's probably where the AI is going to go, right? So I see AI now in Slack in the search, but I got to envision that it's going to start heading into channels and other things, right? Jim Ray: Absolutely. And that's kind of where we're starting to think about some of this. And so back in February, I think it was actually Valentine's Day, we dropped a little Valentine's Day gift for everybody, which was Slack AI. The initial version of Slack AI was really all about improving your ability to search and find and summarize. And so now if you have the Slack AI, and it is an additional product because it's pretty expensive computationally and just in terms of resources to run. So if you have Slack AI enabled on your workspace, then search will be able to do things like take natural language queries. I was on paternity leave for about half of last year, and I came back and we still had a pre-release version of Slack AI running on our instance. And it was really great for me because I could do things like... I had a new skip level manager. And so I was like, what does this person think about the Slack platform? And it was just a very open-ended query. I was testing to see how the system worked, but it was also some information that I really needed to do my job. And it came back, and not only did it come back with a standard search result that we give you now with just here are some bits, but it uses the generative AI piece to say it actually found all of the relevant posts, composed a response for me as if a human had written it, but then it also has footnotes to the relevant posts. And so I was just like, oh, what is this person? That's fantastic. So I was ready for my one-on-one with them coming up. And then you can also do things like summarize. So if I wanted to be able to summarize a channel, again, that was super helpful for me coming back from a pretty extended leave, I was able to summarize some of the channels that maybe they were new or maybe it was the kinds of things that I keep an eye on, but I hadn't been there in a few months. So I was able to get those summaries. And so right now, Slack AI works on all of the data that gets put into your Slack instance. Most of that data is unstructured data, and so it's conversations that you're having. We know that generative AI, large language models are really good with that kind of unstructured data. But we also know that search and AI and just computers in general do really, really well when we give them a little bit of structured data. And that's where automations in the platform come back in. And that's where we're really going to be able to enhance some of these AI capabilities. So if you are adding context to all of these unstructured conversations with information back to your systems of record, that's the kind of thing that the AI is going to be able to ingest and get more information about. So if you need to know, hey, what's the latest with this customer, then we'll be able to grab that information. It will be inside of Slack. And then you can imagine, we're working on some ideas about this, we don't have any products or anything like that, but a whole bunch of... Even our customers are building custom versions of this where they're using these large language models, they're accessing their various systems of record, and then they're pushing it all into Slack. So you might ask a custom AI bot that you build or someone else builds for you some information and then it goes out and spiders the various systems of record and then brings back a comprehensive result. Mike Gerholdt: I will tell you that we use the summarize this. I tried it on a few Slack channels, and then I put the summaries into a canvas as a way to summarize a big channel internally for my team. It was interesting to see how it came back. It's also fun because it talked about me in the third person, and I just let it continue doing that because it's an ongoing Seinfeld joke. But last question for you. I mean, I got a million. We could go for hours, I think. If a Salesforce admin has... Obviously they've got Salesforce. They probably have Slack, that's why they're still listening. What is some automation that they should think about to get started with? Jim Ray: I think the easiest thing would probably be the ability to create or update a record. And this is for the low friction entry points. So obviously we're not trying to be the only interface to Salesforce, but Slack has a great mobile client. I know Salesforce does as well. But maybe you're out on the field and you just want to make it easy for folks that are out in the field to quickly update or create a new record and have that send the information. And you still want Salesforce to continue to be the system of record. So an example, and this is an example that I showed during one of my demonstrations, I'd built out a Salesforce instance and I'd put a bunch of data in from a real estate management company. It's just one of the data back-ends that we have with a lot of sample data in it. And the idea was that you might be out on the road and you might want to quickly add a new property that you had gone to see or inspect or something like that. And so you could pull that up in Slack. You could pull that up. The form is automatically formatted using our what we call Block Kit, which is really just our UI Kit, and you can create all of the fields that you need. So maybe there's half a dozen fields that you need just to get started on a new property. And then maybe when you get back to the office, you're going to fill it in. But maybe you're out there, you snap a quick pic and you want to add the address and a couple of quick information about it. That's something that you can do very quickly inside of Slack, quickly generate that, throw it in there, but then also have it update the rest of your team. So it's not just storing the information in your system of record, but you're also posting that inside of a channel. So now your team knows like, "Oh, okay, Jim was out in the field. He added this quick record in here." And then maybe somebody else who's already in the office, they can add some more contextual information about it, or it can kick off a chat and people can start conversing about what we want to do with that and where to go from there. So anytime that you have an instance where you want to keep the system of record, Salesforce in this case, you want to keep that updated, up to date, add new information, but then you also want to have a place where people are discussing that, and that could be a Slack channel, those two things are happening simultaneously, well, that's a great use case for a workflow. Mike Gerholdt: I would agree. You mentioned my favorite thing, which is Block Kit Builder. So I'm going to put you on the spot. Promise me you'll come back on and we'll do an episode on Block Kit Builder. Jim Ray: I would love to. Block Kit Builder is fantastic. Mike Gerholdt: Oh my God, I have so much fun with Block Kit Builder. You have no idea. Jim Ray: Fantastic. Mike Gerholdt: I have a million questions too. Jim Ray: Excellent. Mike Gerholdt: When you said that, I lit up and thought, oh, I have to do a whole episode on Block Kit Builder. Jim Ray: Well, schedule me up. I'd love to talk about it. Mike Gerholdt: l will. Thanks so much for coming on the pod, Jim. This was great. I've always been excited for Slack and just the cool stuff we can do, especially when it doesn't require code. The Block Kit Builder episode is going to be fun because it's both code and not code. Jim Ray: Absolutely. Mike Gerholdt: So we'll tease that out. Jim Ray: Thanks so much, Mike. I really appreciate it. It was great getting to talk to the audience. Mike Gerholdt: Am I right? How much fun is automations with Slack? Also, I might've gotten a little too giddy about Block Kit Builder, and I promise you that I'm already working on my schedule to get Jim back to talk about Block Kit Builder for Slack. But he gave me a ton of ideas for automations, including creating canvases and just the management of information. This was such a fun episode. I hope you enjoyed listening to it. And if you did, can you do me a favor? Maybe you're heading to a community user group with other Salesforce admins, or you're going to dinner, or you've got a large social following, just click the dots there in the podcast app and choose share episode. And when you do, you can text it to a friend or you can post the social. And then that way you help spread the word and spread all this really cool stuff that we're learning how to do without code. Now, if you're looking for more great resources, of course, everything that you need is at admin.salesforce.com, including the transcript of the show. And of course, you can join the conversation in the Trailblazer Community. There's a lot of great questions being asked there. A lot of admins helping other admins with stuff. And that's in the Trailblazer Community, in the Admin Trailblazer Group. So I'll include all the links to those in the show notes, which is on admin.salesforce.com. And until then, I'll see you in the cloud.
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Thu, 3 October 2024
Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Warren Walters, Salesforce MVP and host of the Salesforce Mentor YouTube channel and website. Join us as we chat about how we’re all becoming adminelopers and why you should learn to code. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Warren Walters. What is an admineloper? Salesforce Admins and Developers are increasingly overlapping in their roles, leading to the rise of the “admineloper.” AI has made it easier than ever to get things done with Apex, even if it needs some tweaking to get everything working right. A little coding knowledge can go a long way. For developers, declarative tools in Salesforce are becoming incredibly powerful. Using flows and formulas can often be a simpler way to solve a problem than creating something custom in Apex. In short, if you know a little about both admin and developer tools you can truly get the best of both worlds. Learning to code as a Salesforce Admin There’s a common misconception that only geniuses can understand code. However, Warren says, some of the best developers he knows didn’t go to school for computer science and are entirely self-taught. A little can go a long way. Basic coding skills can significantly enhance an admin’s ability to implement more complex solutions and collaborate effectively with developers. Combining a working knowledge of how programming works with the declarative tools we all know and love can get you far. Soft Skills and Career Advancement Beyond technical skills, Warren emphasizes that soft skills are just as important for career growth in the Salesforce ecosystem. While he identifies as an introvert, he’s made a focused effort to become a better communicator, and that’s helped him grow into new roles and bigger opportunities. Warren also urges you to spend some time thinking about your personal branding. His YouTube channel has opened a surprising number of doors for him, but even a simple portfolio can do a lot to help you stand out. There’s more from Warren about what he’s learned as a consultant and as a mentor, so be sure to listen to the full episode. And don’t forget to subscribe to hear more from the Salesforce Admins Podcast. Podcast swag Learn more Admin Trailblazers Group Social Love our podcasts? Full show transcript Mike Gerholdt: This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we are talking about mentorship and learning how to code. Surprisingly, not surprisingly, because admins and developers need to know the best practices for creating our apps and deploying the best technology for our organizations. So I'm going to bring on Warren Walters who is a Salesforce consultant. He's an admin, he's a developer, he's a mentor and a self-described general geek. Now, Warren's on because he runs a really cool YouTube channel, and I came across his TikToks where he does Salesforce tutorials to help you understand and master the concept of different things in Salesforce. He has this really cool site, salesforcementor.com, and just a really fun guy to talk about in terms of the world of mentorship, what a lot of skills are that he's seeing, and things that people should be paying attention to. Now, before we get Warren on the podcast, I just want to make sure that whatever you're using to listen to the Salesforce Admins podcast, make sure you hit that follow or subscribe button because then new episodes will show up on your phone or on your computer right away. So with that, let's get to our conversation with Warren. So Warren, welcome to the podcast. Warren Walters: Well, hey Mike, I'm happy to be here. Super excited because I've been listening to the podcast for such a long time and I'm finally on it, which is, I don't know if it's a dream come true or an honor, but I'm just happy to be here. Mike Gerholdt: It's destiny. Warren Walters: I'll take that. Mike Gerholdt: That's what I'll call it, it's destiny. Well, I ran across your TikToks when I was posting stuff about the podcast and really loved some of the videos that you're doing and the topics you're talking about. So let's just start off with what you do in the Salesforce ecosystem and how you got started. Warren Walters: Sure. So my name is Warren Walters. I am a Salesforce engineer. I do lots and lots of development. I probably talk too much about development. Some of you may or may not have seen my face on YouTube, and that's where I primarily host a lot of my content. And just from my side, I've been in development for about 10 years now. Various different companies, various types of companies to consulting ISVs in-House. And more recently, I've been focusing on a lot of mentorship and training in the Salesforce development space. So that's a little bit about me. I can dive deeper depending on where you want to go. Mike Gerholdt: Well, I think the mentorship part is intriguing. You said development a lot in this is admin podcast, but we kind of all live in the same space now. I think what's interesting is when I started doing Salesforce things back in 2006, there was a clear line between here's things I can do with the UI. Drag-and-drop GUI was a thing. Oh my God, it's WYSIWYG now, that was the new acronym back in '06. But then there was also really hard things that you had to learn. I remember going across to another part of my organization and talking to a developer who had to learn Python, how to deploy stuff. So there was code and there was the hard way of doing things, and there was the unhard way of doing things as people looked at it. Now those lines seem to be blurred. I mean, I'm looking at some of the data cloud stuff that we're coming out with, and you can very seamlessly connect things through a UI. So let's start with that is sometimes you hear terms where people mash together names of personas of admin and developer, and they think just because it's declarative, it must be developer or it must be admin. And because it's code, it must be developer. Warren Walters: Yeah. So it's funny you bring up those personas in the mashing admin and developer together, because as far as I know, it's called or it's rising to be called admineloper. I've heard that a couple of times [inaudible 00:04:25]- Mike Gerholdt: It makes me think of Jackalope. Have you ever heard of a Jackalope? It's a rabbit with weird horns. Warren Walters: Yeah, maybe that'll be their mask on it in a couple of weeks. Dream Forces around the corner. Mike Gerholdt: It is. Warren Walters: But yeah, so from my side, especially with the mentorship and what I like to do or a lot of what I do is to help people understand that there's not just one type of person anymore. Maybe years ago it was like that, but now it is very fruitful for you to understand all sides of the Salesforce. And this could be the configuration. So knowing how to set things up and the fields and the whizzy wigs like you mentioned, but also the benefits of knowing some development things. Now, maybe you don't need to jump all the way in where you're writing custom integrations yourself, but to just understand those core fundamental concepts of development can really help you build out more complex solutions and communicate better with your teams. And through mentorship, especially with a lot of admins, it's all about encouraging them and showing them different resources they can use to really understand some of the concepts that were traditionally a bit foreign to them or locked away in a separate area that's only for developers, which is not true anymore. Mike Gerholdt: They'll be developers, let's put that on the map. It's interesting because I think maybe, I'll go back 18 months ago before I had a really cognizant working awareness of AI. Learning code meant copy the snippet of code, find a developer friend and be like, what does this do? Now, I put a validation rule into ChatGPT just to have it double check what I was doing. And it can tell you back, you can copy snippets of code into AI and have it tell you what it's doing. So I have to believe that some of that acceleration for admins, just basic understanding of code is a little bit greater now that we have some tools like that, right? Warren Walters: Yeah, it's really been an explosion of what tools we have at our availability to help us understand it a lot better. In the past, we had maybe things like Stack Overflow and different websites you could go to, or if you were taking it back, you have to buy a book or something and try to read it. And that barrier to entry- Mike Gerholdt: The library. Warren Walters: That barrier to entry really stopped a lot of people from diving in and understanding certain things that were going on in Salesforce development and in code. But now with those other types of tools and even the tools that Salesforce is releasing, we're able to more easily understand different code and formula fields. Even our flows now, we're starting to be able to just reduce all of the headache and all of the additional knowledge that you needed to have to be able to work with those particular items. Now, there are some benefits of going, getting that deeper understanding, really learning the fundamentals and branching out further into programming concepts. But at least to get you started, get your feet wet, these AI tools have been really great for helping people get some encouragement and seeing if they're on the right path and getting more, down to complex questions where you're saying, all right, you needed to go to a developer friend to get that looked up. You might come with a more refined question now that you're using AI instead of just, here's the code, help me out. It's, I have this particular piece of code, it should do this. How does this look to you? Is it best practice? So the conversations are shifting a little bit more. Mike Gerholdt: Plus also just disseminating some of the code that admins would look at, it's not foreign into, I don't know what this does, pages and pages of stuff. I can at least copy it and maybe have AI give me an idea of where to start. Warren Walters: Yeah, that's funny too where the starting piece, just because it's really about what it gives you. So in certain aspects you have to be a little bit careful of AI because of it could produce code in a different language other than Apex, you get Python code. And if you don't know those fundamentals, it can really set you down maybe a rabbit hole or not be as helpful as you think. So it's a word of caution to a lot of my mentees. I definitely want them to use it, but make sure that you're still doing that due diligence to understand some of the basics of it. Mike Gerholdt: If you're having it generate code for you, I think I'm in the translation part of the world. So let's start there though with mentorship, what comes up most in the mentorship and in mentees that you work with? Warren Walters: Certifications is always a big topic. What search should they get and what should they focus on? What's next? So I think that one is really fun. And another big one is a lot of encouragement, especially for administrators that want to start to look in and dabble with code. A lot of people here, they have this perception that, oh, it's for the geniuses or only people that go to university, which is not true at all. I've met many, many developers that could code me into a box that have never gone to school, have just learned by themselves, and they're very passionate problem solvers and they really stick with that craft. So a lot of what I do is encouragement and then giving people resources for, if you're trying to learn integrations, start with either this Trailhead module or this specific article and bring it back to me and let's see if we can figure it out together. Mike Gerholdt: Do you find when individuals are coming into the ecosystem maybe with a coding background, that it's less obvious for them to pay attention to some of the declarative tools that are already built in Salesforce? Or is it intuitive to have them under... Is it natural to just look at everything first and then only go to code as a solution, or do they see everything's a nail and they've got a hammer and I'm going to code them into a box, as you said? Warren Walters: Yeah, it definitely starts out as everything is a nail and code is the hammer. It's funny because if you're in a lot of different orgs, especially when I was doing consulting, I got into a few orgs that had code written for very simple things that you can do in configuration, like creating a validation rule or sending an email, that kind of stuff. Just tons and tons and lines of code that were not necessary. But whoever got in there first, their mindset was, okay, I know how to code, let me just stick with that. So a lot of people that I talk with and mentor, especially if they have a coding background there, that's their first idea and that's one of the things that I have to educate them on, is Salesforce has so many different tools at your disposal. It's better to at least be familiar with everything that's available, like flows and the formula fields, and even just simple things like knowing how a lookup field works, especially if you're not coming from this sort of space, it can be a little confusing to understand what it is and how it works. So I generally recommend going on that journey of starting at the beginning, especially hitting a lot of those beginner admin trails where you can learn the fundamentals and work your way up into a good spot of understanding all the tools that are available and then you can jump into code. The code wall, always be there. There's plenty of reasons to use it, but you want to use the right tool for the right situation. Mike Gerholdt: And it's also, I have to think of just best use of your time. You could code escalation rules, you could code a workflow, but flow leaves you with an artifact that's easily upgradable and reproducible as opposed to something custom that, who knows, maybe something 10 releases down the line, Salesforce is going to change and now you might have to rebuild that Apex code. Warren Walters: Yeah, that's a big point, especially in consulting that you have to think about because a lot of times you may not be there one year later, two years later just because the contract or the project is ending. So designing for the team that is going to be there is very important. If you're going to leave a ton of code only with a team of admins, and that may not be the best solution for you. Or there might be a little bit of in-between where you can build out the complex pieces inside of code, but also leave the administrative side or leave the ability for the administrative side to have configuration or custom settings that can manipulate the code. All things like that are things that you need to start to think about when you look at the longevity of your code and the maintainability. Mike Gerholdt: Do people that you work with and start to work with, when they come into the ecosystem, do they know their path? Are they looking at consulting or being a developer first? Or is it just eyes wide open, help me figure something out, Warren? Warren Walters: A lot of it is eyes wide open. Lots of existing admins know that the developer path is out there, but people just starting out often they hear about development from other tech stacks and they know that it's out there, but it's hard to understand where should I be going? What should I be looking at? So there's a lot of education that goes on and there are so many different opportunities in Salesforce. So you need to try to find... Or I recommend trying out a bunch of things, but especially if maybe you have a background in project management or system management like databases and things like that. Take a look at how that translates directly over into a Salesforce career. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, no, that makes sense. Often you start off with an idea, and I've had a lot of friends too that were admins for a while and then they see that consulting dollar sign and they start chasing the money and obviously you can do that in any career. So that's interesting. You mentioned something that I wanted to think a little bit about, which is the topics that admins and developers should think about. So I started a little bit dumped into the deep end with AI, but we have declarative side, we have the code side. What is some of the stuff that admins and developers that you're mentoring aren't paying attention to and you're like, folks, the streetlight, the spotlight is on, you totally missed the sign on the side of the road. How did you blow past this exit kind of scenario? Warren Walters: That is really cool topic to bring up. I think a lot of it stems to one, everybody they know about AI, they probably are at least dabbling in it. If you're not dabbling in it, I would recommend at least looking at it. So that's one big piece. But the other part is probably more, I want to say on the soft skills or it's really around communication, especially for a lot of introverted people. It may not seem like it, but I'm pretty introverted. But it's around how you can communicate effectively either with your boss or your teams or anybody that you're working with. And that can be a huge valuable asset to you as an individual because it can help propel you into different types of roles that maybe somebody else that's lacking those skills or still working on those skills, they're not able to jump into what goes hand in hand with that is more personal branding as well. So this is how you present yourself on LinkedIn, doing things like YouTube channels, having a blog and that can also propel you above the rest, especially in a competitive market. Having that awareness of where you're at and how you want to be presented to the outside world can be very important for a hiring manager to make a decision on. So I recommend everybody working on a portfolio or having some sort of additional thing above the defaults of your resume and having a basic LinkedIn portfolio and that kind of stuff. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, I'm so on board with everything you just said because I feel like for a lot of my career when I was an admin, not only was it just understanding the configuration, but for lack of a better phrase, I'll say it was selling the configuration, really communicating to the organization, no, no, no, no. I know how to do this and this is what's best for right now based on what you told me and confidently communicating that. And then to your second point, showing up, I love it when people look like their profile pictures. It's so much because you look at, you think of how much you're online and when you see, especially with a coworker, your slack avatar all the time, and then you see them in person and they look the same, you're like, oh, I know I have the right person. Because I've always joked that I'm an introvert, but I play an extrovert for work. I can summon up a solid eight or nine hours of extrovertness, but 5:30 at Dreamforce, the bell tolls, Mike is running down the stairs, glass slippers falling off, he's turning into a pumpkin. He really wants to get back to his hotel room and just have some quiet stare at the wall time. But being able to show up and look familiar and then interact with people and that's how you network and that's how you get different ideas shared with everybody too. Warren Walters: I'm on board with that a hundred percent because at least for me, a lot of what you see online, a hundred percent of what you see online, I'm going to be the same exact way at a conference. As soon as you see me after I say hello, what is your name? I'm going to start spewing development and Salesforce right at you. So I think that that is important though to be authentic wherever you're presenting yourself because it's going to take that toll on you, especially over time, especially if you're at working at a place where either you have to change yourself to do that. It's important to be at home as much as you can in where you work and how you're presenting yourself. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, I mean for the longest time I wore a red shirt everywhere and it was very easy to spot Mike in the red shirt. So I had this question down, but in hearing you answer it, and I've done a million of these podcasts, I'm going to ask it to you different. So one of the questions, and you probably get this too, is like, all right, so what is good places to start learning? I'm going to ask you that, but I'm going to give you the caveat of you can't say the word Trailhead. And the reason I'm going to say that is, look, I work at Salesforce, Trailhead's table stakes. We all know to go there. Everybody in the community knows to go there. If you don't know to go there, you should go there. You're going to hear it at user groups. What are other places that you should go that are good places to learn in addition to Trailhead? Warren Walters: How much can I plug websites? How much is allowed? There are a few sites that I really love for either practicing Salesforce development or even Salesforce administration. I'm a big YouTube person. If you've looked me up at all, I love video, that kind of stuff. So there are some really major channels on there that I definitely follow. So some of them are Apex hours on YouTube. There's Matt Gary's channel, which is also very focused on Salesforce development, so also look at those. And then especially thinking more either when I'm studying for a certification or being more well-rounded, a lot of us know about Focus on Force, which is great. But what I like to do whenever I'm either taking exam or studying is, okay, maybe I'm doing some practice items, but I'm also actually building out the practice scenarios, maybe the exam question or something like that inside a Salesforce org so that I'm Retaining the knowledge a little bit better than just clicking through a few different examples. So this works really well for both administration and development. Just recreate the scenario the best you can when you're working through those. On top of that, there are some really great, if you're looking to dive and learn development, really great sites for that. So there's free code camp org, which is more of HTML JavaScript, it's like web languages. But like I've been mentioning, once you learn the fundamentals of development, you can transfer it around to any language and it will really help out in your configuration inside of Salesforce. So if you know how to do flows, either on the basic levels, if statement is an if statement, iterator, a loop is a loop in every different language. So you're able to translate some of those a little bit easier once you know how they work under the hood. I'm trying to think of some other ones. I know there are a ton and maybe I can link some down in the show notes and stuff like that. Mike Gerholdt: I didn't mean to put you on the spot but to be honest with you, every time I ask a question I'm like, oh, go to Trailhead. It's like, where do you start? Well, what are you looking for? Trailhead's been around I think almost 10 years to me now, it's to the point where it's like the help and FAQ part of a website. The first time that you saw a help or an FAQ on a website, you're like, oh, I wish every website had this. And to me, that feels table stakes. You should be able to do that. But then to your point, there are things that you should learn like communication skills and presenting skills and personal branding skills, and some of that's on there, but there's also good sites and good places to go to learn stuff like that. Last question, a little bit of a curve ball, but as a mentor, you've worked with a lot of people. What is one quality that is consistent across all of your mentees that seems to really drive their success? Warren Walters: I think one of the big ones is around persistence. Especially in the Salesforce space, configuration and development. I prescribed to a notion of, let me give you just enough so that you know where to look, you can be very dangerous. But not giving you everything to complete or solve challenges or whatever wacky idea that I've come up with at that point. So knowing that there is a light at the end of the tunnel, there is a solution for every problem, especially in coding. We're not inventing anything new and if statement is an if statement, some of these things that we are creating have been studied and perfected over a long period of time. So all you need to do is really find it and then use that solution and make that existing solution work for whatever your problem is. So understanding that idea of, okay, as long as I keep working at it, keep pushing, something will come from this that will put me in a better situation than I am currently, is really what I start to stress in a lot of the mentees that I work with. I think it can get overwhelming to learn development and maybe you don't feel like you're making progress, but a lot of times it's about looking back and reflecting on how far you've come to see some of the progress that you've actually been doing, which is really cool. So I think that's a big one, right? Persistence and then knowing when to ask questions may have come up before. But you're working on your own, you've found a lot of resources and you're going through and you end up getting stuck on one particular piece. I think it's important once you are completely stuck and you've done as much research as you can, of course to reach out. And it's humbling because maybe years ago, I didn't like to ask for questions read. I was like, oh, I should know everything, or I should be able to figure this out on my own. And I started progressing so much faster once I was able to say, all right, I've done enough research, I've looked at it, I'm going to ask a very educated question to somebody that has done this before, somebody who has been through whatever experience. It could be as small as making a formula field or as big as writing an integration to a third party system. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, you're spot on. Persistence is right there. You said that answer educated question, and this actually came up I want to say about a month ago or so. I interviewed David who does Wordle and Sudoku on YouTube and TikTok, he rather he also does coding, which is interesting. I feel like maybe a lot of software engineers and developers do Wordle and Sudoku. But I would rather, he said in working with team members would rather have a team member spend 10 minutes working through what they know to try and solve the problem and then come to me with a question as opposed to just immediately hitting a problem going, how do I do this? Throw your hands up. And I think when I've worked with people too well, how would you work through this? Because you need to start putting those connections together because every time something like this happens, there isn't going to be a Warren behind you that you can just turn around and be like, now what do I do? So educated question. That was really good. Warren, thanks for taking time out of your day and being persistent and mentoring people and being a part of the great Salesforce community. Warren Walters: Yeah, Mike, it's been a pleasure and an honor and I guess destiny to finally end up on the Salesforce Admin podcast. Super happy that I was able to make it out and spread the word about development. If you're scared about it, if you don't think it's for you, do not worry. I don't think it's for me, right? Everybody thinks that just try to take it one step at a time or reach out to me. A lot of developers are very, very helpful in the Salesforce Ohana. So yeah, so happy that we finally made this happen. Mike Gerholdt: Thanks, Warren. So that was a fun discussion with Warren. I love the term educated question. Going back and really thinking through it makes me think of that podcast that I did with David or ranks on Sudoku and Wordle solving, which is thinking through what are all the possible ways I can solve this, exercising those, and then turning to my community and seeing how they can help me based on what I've done. Because you might find a creative way of doing something, but I couldn't agree more, persistence, persistence, persistence. There is a light at the end of every tunnel, and I think his sight is very inspiring. I just pulled it up and the first thing it says, remember, I believe in you. So, thank you Warren for being on the podcast. Now, if you enjoyed the episode, be sure to click that follow or subscribe button so that new episodes are downloaded. And of course, if you're looking for resources, folks write down below in the show notes. I'm going to link to anything that Warren mentioned, including his social profile. But you can always find resources at admin.salesforce.com. That is your one stop for everything admin. Release information, more podcasts and a transcript of the show. Now be sure to join our conversation in the admin Trailblazer group. That is, of course, on the Trailblazer community, and you know where to find the link for that. That's right. It's in the show notes on admin.salesforce.com. So with that, I hope you enjoyed this episode. I enjoyed it a lot. And until next week, I'll see you in the cloud.
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Thu, 26 September 2024
Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Ben Sklar, Director of Product Management at Salesforce. Join us as we chat about how he’s making setup into a better, more consistent experience. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Ben Sklar. The problems with Salesforce setup If there’s one thing Salesforce Admins know a lot about, it’s setup. It’s time-consuming, complicated, and varies wildly depending on what you’re looking at. Answering a simple question like what objects does this user have access to and why turns into an arduous process. That’s why I was so excited to bring Ben Sklar on the pod to talk about how his team is fixing setup in Salesforce. We’ll find out how they’re laying the groundwork for faster updates and creating a more consistent user experience. Gradual improvements to setup A big question I had for Ben was how the changes he’s making to setup will show up for those of us who use it every day. “All these amazing enhancements we’re making to the setup platform are really behind the scenes,” he says, “if we do this right way you don’t really even need to know that it’s there.” However, you might notice a few improvements here or there. For example, there are new user summaries that allow you to see all the permission sets that a user has, all in one place. They’re also working with the Sales Cloud Go team to make sure that you can turn on features, discover new ones, and assign permissions, all in one place. Creating a consistent experience At the end of the day, the goal is to make things easier for the people who use it the most (that’s you!). “We’ve heard our admins often complain about inconsistent experiences,” Ben says, “and by being able to reuse components across setup you’ll be able to see more consistency.” As Ben says, setup was turning into the “Wild West” and it would feel different across experiences. His team has done a lot of work behind the scenes to make sure that setup always has a consistent look and feel, and they’ve established a setup design council to create guidelines that make sense. The future of Salesforce Setup is bright, and a whole lot easier. You should listen to the full episode for more from Ben, including what’s next for setup and why he loves ultimate frisbee. And subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you never miss an episode. Podcast swag Admin Trailblazers Group Social Full show transcript Mike:
This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we're talking about Setup, and I joked before I pressed record with Ben Sklar, Admins live in Setup. We probably could pay a mortgage based on the amount of time that we spend in Setup. And the reason I talk about Setup and Ben Sklar is Ben is one of the product managers who's tackling Setup and fixing Setup, and he's working very close with another product major that you may have heard of, Cheryl Feldman. And so that's how Ben came to the podcast. He was a suggestion from Cheryl. Hey, you got to talk about all the cool stuff that Ben's working on with Setup on the podcast. And so we cover that and I'm sure many of you probably have seen some of the very cool stuff that Ben and his team are working on in Setup, but at Dreamforce last week, and so we're going to talk about that.
But of course, before we get into it with Ben, just a quick reminder, wherever you're listening to the Salesforce podcast, if it's in app, go ahead and hit that subscribe or follow button. That allows you to get new downloads anytime a podcast drops, and every time a new podcast drops, you what time that is? It's Thursday mornings, so that way new pod right on your phone. If you're listening on the website, you don't have to worry about it. You should sign up for our Admin newsletter though, because we highlight podcasts in the newsletter. But enough about that, let's talk about the exciting world of Setup. It's really where all of us Admins live, and all of the cool stuff that Ben and his team are doing. So let's get Ben on the podcast. So Ben, welcome to the podcast. Ben Sklar:
Hey, Mike. Thank you. I'm excited to be here. Mike:
Yeah, well, when Cheryl comes knocking at the proverbial podcast door and recommends a guest, I can't turn her down, because every time Cheryl Feldman gets on stage to talk about the future of something in Salesforce, Admins flock to those sessions. So she recommended that we have a discussion. I'm very excited for this, but before we get into that, why don't we learn a little bit about you? So tell us briefly how you got the journey to becoming a PM at Salesforce. Ben Sklar:
Yeah, absolutely. So I started at Salesforce a few years ago. I joined as a product manager in our backend data services area. I became the product manager for our UI API, or user interface API, and I also launched our GraphQL API. And the reason I mention these things, I've been working on improving Setup, and it all starts at improving the way that we can pull in the right data and metadata inside of Setup. And so I'm really excited to talk more about how we're going to be fixing Setup. Mike:
You said the magical words, Setup. Now we're all excited. I've been in Setup, I think Admins live most of their work days in Setup. What are some of the challenges that we have with Setup right now? Ben Sklar:
Absolutely. We've heard a lot from our Admins and our customers. We've heard it can feel like when you're inside of Setup, it's really like being stuck on a deserted island. Mike:
Oh. Ben Sklar:
You're using these primitive tools and you really need a survivalist guide just to use it. So there's a lot of challenges we've heard. We've heard that it's very time-consuming and it takes forever to find out, what does a user have access to? Why do they have access to this object but not this other object? So we've heard a lot of challenges so far inside of Setup. Mike:
So to be clear, are you working on all of Setup or just Setup around users? Ben Sklar:
That's a great question. So we are working on all of Setup, but we needed to start somewhere. Where we started was around user access and user management, and as we've started building up, what we're calling, the Setup platform, and by the way, the Setup platform really allows us and will allow us to build features in Setup much faster than we ever have before. It's also allowing us to move experiences that are broken in Classic into Lightning. Mike:
Gotcha. Fun thing we should try out is naming this platform, because I can't envision Salesforce is going to go with the Setup Platform. That doesn't feel like us. Ben Sklar:
That's right. Mike:
We have Hyperforce and we have a lot of things, something force, we should... Is this like Benforce, Cherylforce, the Ben and Cherylforce? I don't know, Ben and- Ben Sklar:
Setupforce. Mike:
Setupforce. Yeah, people should share their ideas for the name of it. Setup1, there's a cadence of things. We got to have a one, and then that won't work for a while, and then we got to have a Thingforce, right? Ben Sklar:
That's right. What I will say is, all of these amazing enhancements we're making that we're calling the Setup platform, it's really behind the scenes. It's really just to let you all know that we're making amazing foundational changes to Setup, but if we do this the right way, you don't really even need to know that it's there. Mike:
So does this mean that as releases come out, the Setup menu's going to change for me? Or is this going to be a gradual thing that maybe I might not even notice because it's so seamless in the background? Ben Sklar:
That's a great question. This is more of a gradual change that you shouldn't notice at all, really, if we do our job the right way. What you will see are new features. You'll start seeing more consistency inside of Setup, where it looks like features are being developed by the same Salesforce and not disjointed experiences. And there's a lot of cool new things that are going to come every release because we can finally start moving, like I said before, these broken Classic experiences into Lightning? Mike:
What's one example that you think, well, that's top of your list to move, that you know Admins are running into? Ben Sklar:
Yeah, so if you were able to catch Dreamforce last week, you probably saw that the user list view, which was for some of our customers, a completely broken experience, we have finally moved that over into Lightning. And we're going to be expanding the functionality in that new Lightning Experience, release over release. Mike:
Wow, and you mentioned, so you called it the Setup platform. Platform implies a lot. Allowing Setup to become a platform, what is that going to give us in terms of an advantage in the future? Ben Sklar:
Absolutely. I think it really goes back to time to market for new features. As we build new features inside of Setup, like I said before, we can really build these features faster than we ever have before. Just to give you a little bit more context and information, when we're building features inside of Setup, in order to really populate that page with the components and all of the data that you see, we need to get it somewhere. And so we've really enhanced the way that we retrieve this data and put it on the page. And all of this is allowing us to really build the features much faster. And we've heard our Admins often complain about inconsistent experiences, and by being able to reuse components across Setup, that's when you're going to start seeing that consistency, and that similar look and feel for all these new features that are to come inside of Setup. Mike:
Can you share with me an example of that? Because I know when we went to Lightning Page Builder, I think we just call it Page Builder now, but I also noticed that as we launched some of the Agentforce Prompt Builder and Copilot stuff, that the configuration looks very similar. Is that what you're referring to in Setup? Ben Sklar:
Yeah, there's a few things to call out here. So the first is, I'm not sure if you've already seen the new summaries that we've built inside of Setup. So a good example would be if you go inside for a particular user, and you're trying to understand, okay, what permissions does this user have? What permission sets are they a part of? We can now see a summary of all that information in one place. We built one component, one summary component, but we're reusing that, not just for user but also now for objects, and for permission sets, and permission set groups.
So this Setup platform really allows us to build once and use all over the place. And so the next thing that we are focusing on are list views, and so you will now see that new user list view. You're going to see list views being built across Setup, us moving from Classic to Lightning. And one last example, the Sales Cloud team has developed a framework inside of Setup, called Sales Cloud Go. And this allows Admins really to turn new features on, faster. It puts it all in one place. And we've been partnering with that team, and in that same experience that you go to turn on your features and discover new features, you'll also be able to assign permissions in that same place. Mike:
So I've seen the release notes on Sales Cloud Go, there was some stuff that came out in our most recent release about that. Is that an example where now we have a standard template and framework for all of the other teams to use? Was that one of the reasons that Setup had so many different experiences, is when somebody would put an item into the Setup menu, they really controlled the experience and there was no real, I guess, you're a UI guy, there was no real UI dictation for what it had to look like or act like? Ben Sklar:
That's right. Exactly. So in the past, it often felt like Setup was starting to turn into the Wild West, where teams who were building inside of Setup could really do so many different things, and make it look and feel so different across experiences. What we're trying to do now is really templatize this so that we have a similar look and feel for all new features, and we've even established a Setup design council, which helps teams. Mike:
Ooh. Ben Sklar:
Yeah, it helps teams who are building in Setup, understand how should this look and feel? How do I get started using these new features and templates that have been created? It's really exciting, all the things that are coming out for Setup. Mike:
To think of the amount of time that I've spent presenting and talking about even deployment best practices, and user acceptance testing, and feedback, you're always thinking of the frontend of the app, where the user will use the app. And it's just neat to think of, wow, we actually have a design council for the people that, when they click Setup, they click the gear, there's people that that's their world to think about, because for a lot of us, that's the world we live in. You think of, too often, there's so much emphasis put on the outside design of a car, but you know somewhere, at one of the manufacturing plants, somebody's job has to be, yeah, but what happens when you pop the hood? How much of a mess does that engine have to be and what's that like for the mechanic to work on it? And I feel like that's what you're telling me. No, we're actually thinking about it. What happens when you have to live under the hood of the car all day in Setup, what that experience looks like? So that's really neat to hear. Ben Sklar:
Absolutely. Mike:
So you mentioned platform. I'd be remiss for some of our very experienced Admins, when I hear platform, I think, "Well, maybe there's an API that I can tap into." Is there going to be any kind of developer experience for this new Setup platform? Ben Sklar:
That's a great question. We often are asked by our Admins and ISPs, "All of these amazing new enhancements that you're making to Setup and changes to existing APIs, or may be new APIs that are being created, can we have access to these?" And what I would say is, we are really enhancing the same APIs that some of you already use, know and love today, including our UI API or user interface API and our GraphQL API. We are enhancing these APIs to improve the experience and the ease of bringing data and metadata directly into Setup. And so for all of you ISPs and Admins out there, again, those are the same services that we already make available externally. We are just improving the ability for us to tap into these APIs directly from Setup. We're reducing the barrier that we had before in accessing these APIs, and we're making it a lot easier for us to develop inside of Setup. Mike:
Hmm, well, that's really cool. Can it envision how much farther we'll be, maybe a year from now when we've got all the user stuff tackled? Ben Sklar:
That's right, and that leads me to say, we really started with user access and user management, really is the first customer or consumer of these new Setup platform enhancements we're making. That was really just the start, and we're now really talking to and partnering across our clouds, Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Data Cloud, Industries, Commerce, you name it, so that they too can make sure to take advantage of all these new things we're doing inside of Setup, to build better features for all of you Admins. Mike:
Yeah. That way it feels more unified, like everybody's building from the same playbook, right? Ben Sklar:
That's right. Mike:
Yeah. So Ben, when you're not fixing Setup, which I feel like is a 24/7, 365 thing, is there anything fun you like to do on the side? I know I've talked to product managers and some of them have smelted metals, and some run marathons and play board games, and they have all kinds of fun hobbies. Do you have any fun, tangible hobby you'd care to share with us? Ben Sklar:
I do. During the summer, I'm a big Ultimate frisbee player. Mike:
Oh, what's Ultimate frisbee? Tell us. Ben Sklar:
It's like a combination between football and soccer, and maybe some other sports, it's- Mike:
But with frisbees. Ben Sklar:
But with frisbees. It's a non-contact sport. But once you catch the frisbee, you become the quarterback, like in football, and everyone on your team becomes a wide receiver that you can throw to. And when you're on defense, everyone, including you on your team, is like a cornerback in football. So you're trying to intercept the frisbee from the other team when you're on defense. And when you're on offense, you're trying to either throw the frisbee into the end zone for a touchdown like football, or catch it in the end zone like a touchdown in football. Mike:
Wow. Do you have flags on the side since it's no contact, or you got to get that frisbee, that's the only way to stop the... is be to play good D. Ben Sklar:
That's right. So once you catch the frisbee, you cannot move. So there's no flag that you're trying to- Mike:
Oh, oh, you didn't say that before. Ben Sklar:
Yeah. Yep. Mike:
See, I didn't know that. Ben Sklar:
So as soon as you catch it, you have to stop, and then the only way you can continue to move the frisbee forward is by throwing it to someone on your team. Mike:
Okay. Okay. All right. I was envisioning people running and throwing, and I've never played this frisbee before, clearly. This sounds awesome. I fell into a rabbit hole of frisbee golf on YouTube for a while, and I live by a big, there's a big recreational dam by me that's like a, 10 minutes away, and they have a huge frisbee golf course, and it's through woods, and streams, and stuff. I played it once and I was like, "Wow, this is really cool." And I totally banged my friend's frisbees against the trees a lot. Are they like the same frisbees used with frisbee golf? Are they harder? Some of them that I would use had the hole in the middle. Ben Sklar:
Interesting. So the weight is definitely different between a frisbee you use for Ultimate frisbee versus frisbee golf, and the shape can be a little bit different too. Like you mentioned, there's could be a hole in the middle for frisbee golf. Ultimate frisbee, it's a standard size and weight. There is no change to that, unlike frisbee golf where- Mike:
Right. Yeah. Ben Sklar:
... you can use different types of frisbees. Mike:
Yeah, I know there was a driver and he had a putting frisbee. Ben Sklar:
That's right, a driver frisbee, putter frisbee, et cetera. Mike:
Well, how many is on a team? Ben Sklar:
Typically, you go up to seven people out in the line. Depending on if you're on a serious team or not, you might have an O line of seven and then maybe you switch out for a D line of seven. But typically, for the most part, I really just play pickup. Mike:
[inaudible 00:19:55]. Ben Sklar:
And so just seven of us get together onto one team, seven of us onto another team. Mike:
Wow, that's a lot of people. Ben Sklar:
Yeah. Mike:
I don't know, for a pickup game. Ben Sklar:
Yeah, we often get maybe over 20 people who will show up, so we'll sub out and allow other people to come in and have fun too. Mike:
Sure. Wow, that sounds cool. I'm going to have to check that out. See, there's always stuff that people that work in technology do that's very tangible, because at the end of the day when you turn the monitor off, where did the Setup go? Well, it's off because there's no power, right? But extreme frisbee, and frisbee golf, and stuff, it still exists when you turn the monitor off because the frisbee's in the corner. So- Ben Sklar:
That's right. Mike:
That's awesome. Well, Ben, thanks so much for joining us on the podcast. I'm sure I will do my best if the recordings are up, post-Dreamforce, to link them in the show. Otherwise, I know our social team will share them out, and I look forward to seeing all of the updates and new things coming to the Setup menu for all of us. Ben Sklar:
Thanks, Mike. Again, thank you so much for having me. It's been a pleasure. Mike:
Okay. How much fun was that? Oh, by the way, Ben's into extreme frisbee playing golf tournament rugby. It sounds cool and it's a hundred percent not anything I could play, but I promise you this, I would sign up to watch that if some sports network put that on a television because that looks like fun to me. I don't know. Have you ever frisbee golfed? I frisbee golfed. Have you ever extreme frisbee'd? It sounds like fun. I can't throw very well, so maybe that's why I didn't do it. But anyway, how about all that stuff coming to Setup? I'm excited for it.
I know that jumping around in Setup has felt a little different, and there's a lot of things to work on, and it's just cool that somebody's tackling... Also, there's a whole group of people that sit around and think about what the Setup experience should be like in UI, that is just like a warm glass of cocoa next to a crackling fire on a snowy winter's day, for me. That's what that makes me feel like. And a teddy bear. Let's throw that in for fun because it's fall, so I'm sure you got to have something pumpkin spiced. Anyway, I appreciate Ben coming on the podcast. I appreciate you listening to the podcast and being this far into the episode. We've got a lot of really cool guests lined up, and working on getting even more. So with that, be sure to join us next week, and until then, I'll see you in the cloud.
Direct download: The_Future_of_Salesforce_Setup.mp3
Category: general
-- posted at: 1:00am PDT
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Thu, 19 September 2024
Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Douane James, Salesforce Application Product Manager. Join us as we chat about his Dreamforce presentation about how reducing profiles in your org can enable faster deployments. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Douane James. How permission sets can help you reduce Salesforce profiles in your org Douane’s giving a talk at Dreamforce this year so I was excited to get him on the pod and hear more. He recently went through the process of reducing the number of profiles in his org from 11 down to only 2, so his talk is centered around why you can and should do the same. I know I don’t need to tell you this, but Salesforce best practices change over time. Most Salesforce orgs are built to work right now, which is how you can wind up with technical debt. For example, permission sets have become a much more elegant solution to the problems we used to solve with profiles. Sounds like a big project, but Douane’s here to tell you that reducing the number of profiles in your org is not as hard as you might think. Profile footprint reduction speeds up deployment A few years ago, Douane’s organization started using a new dev ops process. And while this made it easier to identify what needed to be built and do it quickly, he couldn’t help but notice how long the deployments were taking. More often than not, the delays were related to configuring profiles. He realized they needed to do an overhaul and reduce the number of profiles in their org. The first step was to get buy in. For Douane, the key was to emphasize how much quicker his team would be able to respond to requests if they spent time on cleaning up profiles. It also helped that they were committed to gradual improvements over time. Profile footprint reduction isn’t something that happens overnight, but it takes less time than you might think if go step by step. How to move from profiles to permission set groups Douane and his team set out to move everything they could from profiles into permission set groups. They identified a representative for each user role they could interview to make sure everything was still working as intended throughout the process. When you’re looking at your existing profiles, you need to find out: -
What are the permissions in the profiles? -
What permissions are common to each job function? -
Are there any special cases? For users that need a lot of special access, Douane recommends creating a “heavy” permission set that allows you to give them exactly what they need. If Douane has one message for you, it’s that the hardest part of reducing their Salesforce profiles was getting started. And the impact was felt immediately in terms of much quicker deployments and better security. Make sure to catch Douane at Dreamforce and subscribe to the Salesforce Admisn Podcast so you never miss an episode. Podcast swag Learn more Admin Trailblazers Group Social Full show transcript
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Thu, 12 September 2024
Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Jason Atwood, CEO and Co-Founder of Arkus. Join us as we chat about how to land your first Salesforce Admin role, from where to find good opportunities to how to prep for the job interview and more. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Jason Atwood. How Salesforce Admins should split their learning time We’re talking with Jason because he spends a lot of time interviewing and hiring people for Salesforce roles. So if you want to be a Salesforce Admin, how should you split up your learning time? Jason recommends following the 20/30/50 rule. Spend 20% of your time on Trailhead, 30% on acquiring certifications, and 50% on finding some way to gain experience. This split corresponds to how important they are on your resume. Trailhead: Becoming a Ranger is priority one, followed by getting some Superbadges. Take the time to set up your profile with a photo, a description of yourself, and a custom URL so that you look like you’re an active member of the community. Certifications: When is the best time to take a Salesforce certification test? As soon as possible! If you don’t get it this time, you can use your results to help you prep for the next exam. And if you do pass, you can get the next cert sooner. Gain Experience: Volunteering isn’t the only way to get experience. You can enroll in a program where you build mock projects in Salesforce, or just build something on your own. The important thing is to have projects you’ve built in Salesforce that you can demo in your job interview. Interview preparation and skill assessments When you’re going for your first Salesforce job interview be ready for some sort of skill assessment. Time pressure is usually a factor in these tests, so Jason recommends doing a practice run. Talk to a friend, find out what kind of data they collect, and then give yourself a day to build them an app. It could track the books they’ve read or the distance they’ve run, the important thing is that you don’t know what it’s going to be before you talk to them. All admins are consultants It’s also important to realize that an interview isn’t just about showing your skills—it’s about showing who you are. It’s a chance to listen and empathize with the person on the other side of the table. It’s a chance to share something that stood out to you in your research about the company. And most importantly, to show who you are by asking questions. Why does Jason place such an emphasis on soft skills in a Salesforce Admin job interview? Because, at the end of the day, every admin is a Salesforce consultant for their organization. You talk to people about their problems to get requirements, come up with a solution, and then iterate on that solution. We touch on a lot more in this conversation about how to look for Salesforce jobs, developing listening skills, and what it’s like to be a Salesforce consultant, so be sure to listen to the full episode and subscribe so you don’t miss out. Podcast swag Learn more Admin Trailblazers Group Social Full show transcript Mike Gerholdt: I got an idea. How about we tackle the hardest question on the Salesforce Trailblazer community? That's right. This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we're going to look for advice on finding your first admin job and doing the interview, getting experience, and more. And we're going to do all that with CEO and co-founder of Arkus, Jason Atwood. Jason and I chatted at TrailblazerDX and really wanted to dive into this topic. Now, before we bring Jason on, I just want to make sure that you're following the Salesforce Admins Podcast on iTunes or Spotify. That way, when new episodes like this one come out, they're automatically downloaded to your phone. But enough about that. Let's talk about finding that first job or even finding your next job as a Salesforce administrator. Oh, I almost forgot to mention we tackle the myth of "but it's just an admin job." So with that, let's get Jason on the podcast. So, Jason, welcome to the podcast. Jason Atwood: Thank you for having me. It's been a long time since we've podcast together. Mike Gerholdt: I know. I was thinking back; well, we were just reminiscing of the days at the Marriott Marquis and the Arkus podcast. Jason Atwood: Yep. You were on an episode of CloudFocus Weekly. We had it as part of our trivia once there was only four or five guests ever on the podcast, and you were one of them. Mike Gerholdt: Snuck in, only proximity. I'm going to say. So catch people up. What have you been up to? Jason Atwood: Well, since then, whatever that was, 10 years ago. Yeah. So I am now the current CEO and co-founder of Arkus. We're a Salesforce consulting firm. We deal mostly in the nonprofit space, and we've grown from that little company back then. We're almost up to 75 people. And now I run around between putting out fires, talking on podcasts, and trying to educate myself on the whole changing landscape of technology. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, it does feel like in the last decade, it's gone from everything we know to a brand new world. Jason Atwood: It certainly is. And I just spent three hours at a Heroku dev meetup and could hang there mentally for a bit, but they lost me at a little point. So it's both fun, interesting, and challenging to stay up with all this stuff. Mike Gerholdt: So one of the things that everyone's trying to stay up with is the ever-changing job market and hiring. We see a lot of the questions in the Trailblazer community from new admins, people getting into the ecosystem that want to become Salesforce admins, people in the ecosystem that are looking for jobs, or maybe have kind of hit a career plateau. And you and I were chatting, and boy, I think it'd be fun to kind of delve into that topic with you. Jason Atwood: Let's do it. I have some experience in hiring people over the last 15 years, so I can certainly talk about it. Mike Gerholdt: A little bit more than me. More than me. Well, let's get started. So let's start fresh. There's a lot of new people. As we were talking about in the intro, there's a lot of new people coming into the ecosystem that maybe don't have tech advice. They are doing Trailhead modules, completing challenges, getting a lot of badges, trying to round out their resumes, and they don't know A, what to look for, or B, what to put on their resumes. So somebody that's hired a bunch of people and been around for a long time, let's start there with some of your advice and where they should go. Jason Atwood: Sure. This is a very common thing, and the first thing I would tell everybody is relax. It's going to be okay. I know it feels daunting, and you see these triple all-star rangers and you see all these, the hoodies, and you see the people with the 15 certifications and 10 years of experience, and you feel like, "How am I ever going to get there?" You will; you'll get there. So the first thing is just to take it easy and not to get too worked up on it. It does feel like a lot. It's a very big community and filled with lots of hungry people for jobs, a lot of recruiters, a lot of activity. When I talk to people about getting started in the ecosystem, and certainly on the admin track, and we can talk about other tracks if you want, but on the admin track, I kind of say all those things matter. So when it comes to certifications, when it comes to Trailhead, when it comes to experience, they all matter. And usually the question I get is, "But what should I focus on?" And so I came up with something, I maybe made it up years and years ago. I call it the 30, 20, 50 rule, or 20, 30, 50. It doesn't matter; you can break it up anyway. And if you're going to take your time, right, you're in the hunt for a job, and you need to do the education, you need to get enabled, you need to build your experience level. I break it down into those percentages. So 20% of the time, I'd focus on Trailhead. And the trick for Trailhead is A, you just have to be a ranger. We don't even look at people who aren't rangers. I had an intern apply the other day, and I said, "No, you're not even on Trailhead. Go get a ranger before I even talk to you." So that, to me, is just a minimum bar. Just go be a ranger, and then if you can go up from there, that's great. And then, if you're still in your Trailhead worlds, the thing that we then look for besides looking at their profile, is it filled out? Have they thought about it? Have they created it like LinkedIn? So second advice on the Trailhead side is treat your profile like LinkedIn: fill it out, put your picture, put your description, do all the things. It'll probably take you no more than a half an hour. Make your URL; you can make your customized URL so people can find you; do all the things so it looks like you're part of the community, right? Make sure that your profile is rich and full. And then the third thing on the Trailhead side of things is to go for super badges. So I can look at double ranger, triple ranger all day long, but if I don't see some super badges and I speak from someone who doesn't have any super badges. Mike Gerholdt: Oh, no. Jason Atwood: I know, I know, it's on my hit list for this year. I know, I know, I mean, I have 15 certs, and so I have some experience, but I'd say, get some super badges. We see that when we look at that as a higher level of dedication and of expertise, because, as you know and as I've been doing them, they're difficult. They show that you have really dug in, and they're more than just answering some questions or watching videos, or getting fun ones. I love badges, but the super badges really show that kind of a deeper level of education and sort of just being in the Trailhead world. So that's the 20%. Then the 30% is certifications. You need to have both. You can't have one without the other. I don't know what that commercial was, peanut butter and chocolate or something, but- Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, I think so, yeah. Jason Atwood: -You might be [inaudible 00:07:08]. Certifications are important; you should focus on them. What I tell people is you need to get them, but you can't stall. Most people, I think, when we talk to them and we'll find in the ecosystem, say, "Oh, I'm thinking about getting that, or I'm planning to get that one next year." And our advice is, "Nope, go get it. Go get it now. Go take it. Go take the test a couple of times." Do whatever it is you can do to start your certification journey; don't put it off; don't procrastinate on it. You don't have to be perfect; just go get some. And obviously there's a path of which ones you should get, blah, blah, blah. It depends on where you're going in your world, but having at least one or two certs is kind of a bare minimum. So if you're starting off and you're trying to get into the ecosystem, that's your 20 and your 30, and then the 50 is the hardest part. And it's just hard to tell people because it's the experience. The third thing we look for is experience. I want to see that you've done something obviously new to the ecosystem, harder to have the experience, but that's where I say spend 50% of your time trying to gain that experience. There's the old adage: try to go work with a non-profit. Although there's some pushback on that nowadays because of the complexity of the platform, you don't want to hurt a non-profit. There's definitely... Get in in a way, there's programs, there's tons of programs out there that will help you do mock projects and things where you can just get your hands dirty. And even if you have to build your own thing that you're going to demo, you got to get experience because I've not hired people with 22 certifications, and because it didn't add up to any experience, and I've seen people with tons and tons of experience with zero certs, and I would hire anyway, just from the experience. But for me, that's how I tell spend your time: 20% trailhead, 30% certifications, and 50% getting that experience. Mike Gerholdt: I think that 50%, that part that you're talking about is always the part that feels like the hardest to get into. Because if you're not in tech and you don't have any experience and you're trying to land that first job, that can feel like, "If I could get this job, then I could get the experience." And so, part of that lends to my next question is, so you're new, we've checked all the boxes on filling out our profiles and done that part. What should I get ready for when I interview? Jason Atwood: So every interview's going to be different, obviously, but a lot of places are using assessments now. So I would say be prepared for an assessment. That means functionally, they're going to ask you to do something; they're going to ask you to build something or take something they've done and turn it into something on the platform, using Salesforce as the platform. So I would just be ready for that, be prepared, be okay with it. Even do mock versions of it, go have a friend, and I have to given this advice to some people, but go have a friend, sit down with them, talk to them about what they do, and you'll uncover something that they're collecting data. And as soon as you can figure out what the data they're collecting, whether it's books or they collect comic books, or they're a skier or they're a runner, anything you do, you can just come up with, "Ooh, what if I built you an app to track that?" So be prepared to have an assessment of your skills and be able to show that in a short period of time. Meaning it might be a take-home. Sometimes it's a take-home. Like, "Hey, go do this over the weekend." Other times it's, "You have an hour; come back and show us what you did." Mike Gerholdt: Ooh! Jason Atwood: So I'd say... Ooh! Yeah, I know. I've been doing that for 15 years to people. Trust me. I've seen a lot of, oohs. Mike Gerholdt: I would imagine. Jason Atwood: Even had one person pass out in the... Mike Gerholdt: Oh, my. Oh, goodness. Jason Atwood: It happens. Mike Gerholdt: You get an extra hour now. Jason Atwood: Yeah. So I think that it's coming more and more in the ecosystem, because again, when you look at a resume, when you look at LinkedIn, a lot of it's just you can't tell whether they know what they're doing. If you actually do an assessment, you can then assess, "Okay, you know, you functionally know how to do things." So I'd be prepared for that. The other thing is, I think when you're really, especially in the new, just be honest about what you do and do not know. That's really, really key. Don't fluff up your resume; don't put things that you don't know; don't put clouds, don't throw in data cloud if you don't know what data cloud is and haven't used it or can't really explain it. Just because you took a Trailhead on something doesn't mean that platform or know that cloud. So I'd really say be honest with what you know and the clouds, and the products, because that's going to be super important in the interview process. Mike Gerholdt: Wow. How much... In prep work for resumes, there's a lot of AI tools out there, so I'd love to know your perspective on both sides of this one: how much do you, as somebody hiring, kind of look for, "Oh, they used AI to generate most of this resume?" And on the flip side, how much should somebody building their resume that could really benefit from an AI tool? How much should they lean into it? Jason Atwood: So I'm going to be the strange answer on this one, or... Mike Gerholdt: Oh, good. Jason Atwood: Yeah, because I'm going to say, resumes don't matter. Mike Gerholdt: Okay. Jason Atwood: They're just checking a box. When people get to me in the interview process, they're beyond the resume. So yes, you need to have a resume; you need it because that's the part. It's like you have to have the internet; you have to have a way to fill out the form. So you need to have a resume, and it should have your accomplishments and stuff on it. But I don't look at resumes because they're just lies. They're just you telling me all these things, and sometimes I don't know if any of that's really true or not true. So to me, it's like it's just a checking the box. "Yes, you have to have a resume. Yes, it should be okay." Honestly, your LinkedIn profile should be your resume, right? Because that's real; it's on the web. And if you're lying, someone might actually call you out for it. "Hey, you didn't work at that company for 10 years." So I would say focus more on the LinkedIn. Because I'll look at that. If you gave me 10 minutes, I'd look at your LinkedIn first. I would not look at your resume, what you've put on, rather than what your actual history has been. That being said, you want to throw all this stuff on there for this ecosystem. So I do think showing work that you've done and really pointing to problems you've solved, if you really think about any job, especially as an administrator, you're a Salesforce admin, you're basically solving problems all day all. And you're communicating. So two things that I tell people about the resume and the process is how do you show that you've solved problems in the past in your resume, and then how do you show that you are a great communicator? Because great communication, it doesn't matter what, I mean, well, not what job, but certainly in this world, you are basically talking to people, helping them out, doing stuff, re-communicating with them, getting what they need to do, building it, whatever. You might work with different groups or whatever. But that communication skill is something we deeply look at. So again, if you're going to focus on stuff, don't so much focus on your resume as focus on how to be a great communicator. Mike Gerholdt: That's really good advice because I have been at that level where people show up and the resume looked good, but they couldn't facilitate the conversation or articulate any kind of answer in the interview. Jason Atwood: It is a skill that not a lot of people have, but it's a skill, you can learn it. So a couple of things to put into that communication bucket. We'll go down a little rathole here. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, let's do. Jason Atwood: One is empathy. Mike Gerholdt: Okay. Jason Atwood: Have the ability to show empathy, and that means sort of having a conversation with somebody and throwing in stuff that's like listening to them, talking to them, obviously pulling out information about them, but having the empathy when they say something's not going to happen or whatever, they could say, "It's a rainy day." I look for it in every interview that I do. Now this is going to be on the podcast; everybody's going to know this, but I will actually throw things into my talk track or as just the warm-up when you're sort of, "How are you and what's going on?" I will always throw in something to test empathy. I'll say, "Oh, I'm okay, but I didn't sleep well last night. Or I had a bad egg sandwich this morning, or I've tripped over the dog when I came into the room." And I just listened to hear what they react. If they go, "Oh, that's terrible. Oh, yeah, I know dogs can be really difficult. Or you know what? I get my egg sandwiches from downstairs, whatever." But hearing that back of that empathy, super important. Second is actually listening, so I will listen to people, how they listen to me. Are they interrupting me? Are they talking over me? Are they going? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, as I speak, I listen for their real intent and true conversational skills. And so the ability to actually listen, pause, and then answer is a really big; it's a great skill to have. And so the people who can do that, I know that they can do almost any job better because they've intently done that listening skill and they've got it working. So those are two that I throw out to most people when they're trying to build their conversational habits. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, I'm listening to you answer that, and I'm playing devil's advocate in my head and saying, "Maybe people are hearing Jason say this because he's hiring consultants." So why do you think this also translates over to people that are embedded in different work groups, or teams, or have stakeholders within an organization and aren't consultants, like for your organization? Jason Atwood: Because basically, being an admin is being a consultant in one organization. You are a consultant. What are you doing? You're talking to people; they're coming to you with their problems; you are getting their requirements; you're satisfying their needs; you're working with them; you're iterating; you're changing it; you're updating things, and then you're presenting it back to them. The thing that changes when you become a consultant is you're paying for someone's time, which then becomes a whole other thing. But also, you might be working with other organizations, and the level of expectation of how you do that and your expertise goes way up. And this is something I tell, I warn people about moving into consulting is that when you're an admin, you have the ability to take some time. Someone says, "Hey, can you build me these three dashboards that I want to track my sales forecasting?" You go, "Sure," and you can go Google it, and you spend a week, and you come back, and you're like, "Here's your three dashboards." They're ecstatic; they're like, "Great, thank you." They don't care that it took you three weeks or whatever, and then you had to ask your friend and Google it or ask ChatGPT to do it for you. In the consulting space, it's different. They don't ask, "Could you build this for me?" They say, A, "What are the options to build it? How long is it going to take you, and can you get it to me by next Tuesday?" So the expectation level of what you're doing goes way up, and they expect you to be expert. They don't expect you to ever say, "I don't know, but I'll figure it out." As an admin, I said, "I don't know. I'll figure it out." "Oh, you want to build some tracker for your feedback form? Sure, let go figure it out." Go away for a week, and I'll come back and show you something. So I think that's part of it, but as an admin, you're still doing all this stuff. It's the same stuff inside the organization. You're just not working with external companies or people; you work with internal people. So you still have Mary from accounting coming over and wants to synchronize with the QuickBooks, and you still have the CEO come over and they want an update to some dashboard because they can't figure it out, and you're doing the same stuff; it's more internal, more ad hoc, generally. Mike Gerholdt: I mean, I couldn't agree more. Also, Mary from accounting, they always want to, for some reason, can't seem to get opportunities flowing through your sales org, but let's integrate finance. Jason Atwood: So true, so true. Mike Gerholdt: But you kind of led into that. So what are the different jobs, or different tasks, types of jobs that admins would tackle within an organization? Jason Atwood: Yeah, I mean, we kind of started in there. You do become an internal consultant, but I think you first off just think of what, especially when you're applying for it, and this goes back to sort of the applying and getting the jobs' thing. When you're looking at the organization, you obviously want to know what their Salesforce landscape is. So if I were in the interview process, what I would do is come loaded with a bunch of really good questions, and I would pepper that person with tons of questions about their Salesforce instance, or, as we call it in the biz, we call it their org. But I would come in with, "What kind of licenses? How old is it? What kind of integrations? What kind of applications do you have? When's the last time you did a health tech? Do you use permission sets or permission set groups? Or did you flip the lightning yet?" I mean, I would be peppering them showing my expertise to get that admin job. So that's just on the interview side; I just want to throw that in. But coming back to what you do, again, it really depends on the organization, and this is actually a myth that is out there in the ecosystem, is that admins get bored and admins don't get to play with lots of different clouds, and admins don't do a lot of diverse things. That's completely not true because it depends on what organization you're with. I was with a company who had 375,000 people. I had a team; I had five people, or five, including me; we were all admins; that's what we did. And we had 12 different production orgs, 12 orgs with production, and I think nine different applications running in them with thousands and thousands and thousands of users. We were not bored; we had plenty to do; we were playing with great, big, unlimited licensing and integrations and projects, but we were admins. At the end of the day, we were admins. Same thing: you go work for a small company that's four... I don't think anyone would hire a full-time admin with four people. But the smaller the organization who's just using Salesforce for one thing and has no chance of expanding it or doing it, or going anywhere. Yeah. You're going to get bored, right? You come in, you're going to help out Mary in accounting, you get that one project done, and then they're going to be like, "Can you reset passwords all day?" So I think as part of the interview process to pulling it back in to that, and when your job seeking, you should be really interested in what their, especially if you want to be a Salesforce admin and you really want to do it full time, what's their Salesforce roadmap? Are they just solid? They have it, and they have had it up and running for five years, and that's it? Or do they have things that they want to do? New stuff you can build? Do you want to do the integration with that? We want to bring in marketing cloud next year. We're looking at how to do predictive AI, whatever. So if I were bringing more questions as the trying to get the job, I would bring in that to the organization. I'd say, "What do you guys, where's your roadmap? Or do you not have one?" And I think that would show as a hiring person; I'd be like, "Oh, they're forward-looking." And it'll also give you the idea of: "Are you going to get bored in six months?" Because you don't want to get bored in six months. Mike Gerholdt: Right. Although maybe a smaller footprint would be really good if you're looking to get that first admin job. Jason Atwood: Exactly. Exactly right. But then you have the counter, right? You have a smaller footprint, but they have 40 users, and they only use it for service. So you get in, you do some work, you do all the stuff, and then you're like, "Now what?" Mike Gerholdt: Right. So you brought up myths of admins, and one is, well, "I don't get exposed to enough clouds," and I've heard that at various events. "Well, we only use data cloud, or I just don't get to see it." And I feel like, and this still exists, all of these articles on admin to something else, as though admin is just the front door; all you got to do is get in and do that for a few months. But the real money and the real challenge is elsewhere. What would you say to that myth of just an admin? Jason Atwood: I think it is a bit of a myth, and it makes admins and being an administrator, Salesforce administrators feel like this... It's like you're the fry person in the back at McDonald's. It's like, "Well, I don't ever go back and cook the hamburgers." I don't know. And it's not true. Mike Gerholdt: Although the fries are kind of the best part. Jason Atwood: That's true. I actually worked at McDonald's, and I was the fry person, so that's why I brought it up. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. Jason Atwood: But yes, at some organizations, you could be the one admin, and that could be your role for a long period of time. And you could get bored, and it could just be a starter. At other organizations, you could run an entire group of admins. You could have six or seven admins, you could be part of a team of people supporting a lot of different Salesforce instances, and it could go anywhere from just administrative down to sort of more the solution architect type of stuff, or more towards the BA towards so stuff or more towards the development. One of the things you and I have been in this ecosystem for a long time, what we were able to do 10 years ago on the platform with our clicks and what we're able to do with clicks now, we're programming. Let's be clear: when we're building flows, we're programming; we're just programming with a user interface. But that's programming, and the stuff you can do is stunning, that you just couldn't do with any of the tools unless you're writing Apex. So I think even the idea that admins who are getting that technical acumen and are going into the more programmatic type of world of admin that could go long, there's lots of paths you can go down for that. So that's where I think some of the myths should go away because you're not just the admin who's building a report, adding a field to a page way out, and assigning a permission set. There's many, many different pieces of that platform. And that's before you even talk about the clouds; before you'd say there's now, I don't know how many clouds. There's a lot of clouds. Mike Gerholdt: There is a lot. Jason Atwood: Yeah. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. I mean, you brought up flow. I think back to the days of, "Boy, if I could just stand up like a window pane that a screen that people could input the data into as opposed to just editing raw right on the record." And now we can do that, and you can do that just using the interface. You don't have to try a single line of code, which is... Jason Atwood: It is stunning what you can do with that tool. And it's one of the things that has left me a little bit behind because I'm old school admin. I'm a work-for-rule person. And for that, I would've gone wrote in a user story and had someone written up a Visualforce, and with Apex in the background, and now it's... The stuff that we can produce with flows, screen flows, and even the call-outs. I was watching the call-out today, a flow that made a call-out to a Heroku Dyno that did a hookup to a Postgres database that pulled in AI predictions. I was like, "What?" So yeah, the world of an admin is becoming very, very broad in some ways. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, no, I agree. And you can also now trigger flows through prompts and have it call AI. And I mean, in a year from now, this is all going to sound like super, "Wow, they were impressed they could do that. Now look at where we are." kind of stuff. One thing we didn't touch on is there's a lot of job places to look at and career stuff. Often, when looking for a developer architect, I think those are a little more defined also, especially with developer, they've got experience in writing developer job titles for other platforms. So it's very easy to translate that over to Salesforce. What are things that an admin should look for in job descriptions? That maybe if the title or description doesn't say Salesforce admin, that will be the role? Jason Atwood: Yeah, it's a tough one because, I mean, the easiest thing to say is look for the keyword Salesforce. Obviously, there's going to be some sort of piece of that. I think you'd have to go a little old-school and think of the platform and what it's doing. So I would start to look for things that were based on what Salesforce, the platform's doing? Is it sales, right? Is it marketing? Is it service? Is it nonprofit? Especially in the nonprofit space, which is for me. So we would look at grant writing, fundraising, and all that stuff, which could be keywords for, we're using Salesforce in the background, but we're using it to do all these things. So I guess the meta hint without giving you the keywords is: What is this organization doing? What is the output of their world? And then looking at what the tool set they're using. They might not be Salesforce, right? There are other ways of saying the word. They might say something like health cloud and a health cloud administrator, and you're like, "Well, that's Salesforce." Or they might say, "net-zero cloud." Or they might say, "nonprofit cloud." Again, not saying Salesforce, but that's what it's based on. So sometimes, as an administrator and as part of this ecosystem, you have to know that there are products that are sitting on top of the platform that don't necessarily say the word in it. Remember when they named everything Force? Everything was Force something Force, this Force, that Force. Mike Gerholdt: We had everything named Lightning for a while, too. Jason Atwood: That too. That was fun. Mike Gerholdt: We like to do that a lot. I think everything's named Einstein now. Jason Atwood: Pretty much. Mike Gerholdt: I'll probably get in trouble for saying that. Jason Atwood: Yes, you will. Mike Gerholdt: But you could do the bingo card of name everything, Einstein, Lightning, Force, and then you're covered. Jason Atwood: I'm going to win that Bingo. Mike Gerholdt: Einstein, Lightning, Force, and then the actual product. Then you're covered. Jason Atwood: Totally. Mike Gerholdt: I was looking through all my notes, roles and descriptions and interviewing and challenges, and certifications, and I feel we touched on a lot. What is something that you feel we missed, that you talk about, that you bring up that maybe people aren't thinking about when they're looking to interview or get an admin position? Jason Atwood: Sure. I think there's a couple of things. A couple more things I would, if I were giving advice, which I happen to do all the time. Mike Gerholdt: You're full of advice. Jason Atwood: I'm full of advice, maybe too much. So one thing, and this is just generic to not Salesforce, but as anybody looking for a job, cultural fit, I think, is becoming more and more of a need. And I think, as people applying for jobs, you should be looking at it both ways. Do I fit that culture, and does that culture fit me? And that's do my values and the company's values or the organization's values align together. And asking a lot of questions around culture is going to become more and more important, especially because we go do remote work and all that. So I think what we used to think of, like, "Oh, we had coffee breaks and pizza parties for every quarter," is now a much bigger discussion. So I would say bring culture into the conversation. Another tip that I hadn't given yet is just preparedness. It seems silly to say you have to be prepared for an interview, but I can tell you the amount of people who show up who are not prepared, they're just not prepared; they don't know their resume; they don't have good questions; they don't know how to talk to their experiences. And I'm stunned when it happens, but it happens a lot. And one of my little pet peeves, I'm giving away all my hints, boy, anybody interviewing is going to be able to nail the interview the next time they get to me. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, you say that, but I bet not. Jason Atwood: Probably not, right? No one's even going to pay attention. But having really good questions is something that I look for. Again, we work in an industry where being able to ask your users what they want and question them, and being insightful is a great skill. So if I get to the end of one of my diatribe speeches and I say, "Do you have any questions?" And they're like, "No, I'm good." I immediately go, "Okay." And then I'm not good because I... So have questions ready at the go; have them sitting in front of you on a piece of paper, on a sticky note in a NeverNote, wherever. It's super important, and don't be generic. Don't say, "Where do you see yourself?" Don't interview the interviewee. Ask really stuff that's based on homework you did. And that's sort of the prepared thing too. When people come in and they say, "Oh, I read your blog post last week about blah, blah, blah. I was really interested about this key point." Immediately, I'm like, "They did their homework; they know what they're talking about, and they're asking me something interesting." Don't say, "How do you guys do raises?" That's not going to be; you need to have the questions about the culture or the stuff. I mean, I've had some really good in the past, but I've had some really terrible questions. And then two more, I'll give you two more tips. This is like the hundred tips for interviewing the Salesforce Ecosystem Podcast. Mike Gerholdt: We'll call it 98. Jason Atwood: There you go. Mike Gerholdt: So there's two. Jason Atwood: Two more is you can never, if you want to get two skills. If I told someone to go get two skills before they get any job to be super useful on day one, two things they should be focusing on: data and documentation. Your ability to understand data is like you need to have it, you have to have it as a skill; you need to know data; you need to know how data interconnects with other data, you need to know how to report on it. It's getting more and more and more important. So I look for data skills, even data nerds, people who say, "I love data." So if you're not that type of person, I would say these jobs are going to be tough. Because I don't know anywhere in the ecosystem that we are not just really crazed about and or dealing with lots of data. It is sort of what Salesforce is, in the back of all of it. So understanding data, taking courses on it, go learn SQL, go learn regular databases, go learn third normal form, learn it, and understand it because any of your skill sets that you have that are based in data will make you better at any job in this ecosystem. So data. Second is documentation, because one of the things you can do very quickly in any role is document things. You need to be able to document; you need to be able to take what people say, summarize it, put it into something, and spit it back out for people to take in. If you're an admin, you've got to come up with a training plan or a training agenda. You are an admin; you have to come up with a user story; you hand it off to a developer or someone to build something. Documenting is, and it's, I know there's Trailheads on it, and you can go to those, but really learning how to document even so much prove that skill when you talk to somebody and you follow up with an email. Follow up with an email that proved that you listened and that you're following up with documentation skills, coming back with key points or things that you wanted or questions, all great ways to show. But I would say two things you could just learn to show up on day one to start working and doing things is know data very well and know how to document things. Mike Gerholdt: Well, that was a really good point. I would hammer on that cultural fit and question part a lot because I always feel like you and I are of a certain generation that we kind of almost interviewed in the hopes that they chose us, right? The best of the survivor, we get picked. But the part that really dawned on me as I moved through my career was I also need to interview that person to see, is this the type of person that I'm comfortable... Would I be excited to get on a call with them every day? Does this feel like the type of company that I'm going to be excited to go to work at? Or do I just want to get in to get in? And I've made the mistakes of going to work for companies and then realizing I didn't ask enough cultural questions. The way things operate here and my expectations for this job are very different than what I had in my head, and it's my fault because I didn't talk about it. Jason Atwood: Yeah. And again, I think it's different. Even again, culture was, I hate to say it, but it wasn't really that much. It wasn't that important. 20 years ago, I wasn't worried about culture; now I think it's above compensation. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. Jason Atwood: I think it really is. And I've seen people go to places for less compensation because of a better culture. I've seen people leave terrible cultures that were highly paid. So really bringing that in, and that means how do they work? How do people collaborate? And you can ask these questions in the interview. You can say, "What are the three things you're doing this year to help your culture be better or to improve your culture at your company?" If someone asked me that, I'd be like, "Ooh, wow. Okay." Mike Gerholdt: That's a good question. Jason Atwood: That's a great question, right? You're then learning A; are they doing anything to make it better. Mike Gerholdt: Right. Jason Atwood: Or ask about... One of the things that we take at Arkus as very important is when I was doing my key goals for the next five years, and I was doing some presentations and talking to the staff about it. I had culture as a fifth thing, and then after doing it, I thought, "Wait, no, that's wrong. It's got to be number one." So for me, you ask a company, you say, "What are the main things you're thinking about doing for the next five years? What are the five key things that you're doing? What are your pillars?" Or whatever. And if they don't say culture, then you'd be like, "Oh, why isn't culture there?" And then you'll probably catch someone off guard; maybe they won't hire you there, but they should be thinking that keeping the company culture and embracing it, and making sure that it is... Culture isn't something that you set up and then walk away from. It's not a database system. You don't just go, "Oh, it's set up, and it's running in the corner." It's something that needs to be cultivated; it's something that needs to be put into; it's something that needs to be fed and loved, and thought of, and changed as the ecosystem and the world changes. Our culture changed when COVID happened, right? We had to adapt; we adapted to that; it wasn't the same culture as before. When we were three people, now 75, but the culture's different, but we're adapting to that. So again, it is a really, really big point. It is something you can catch people on, you can ask, and everybody likes to talk about their culture. Everybody will tell you that they have a great culture, but that's how, as an interviewer or interviewee, you should be questioning it and really ask the deep questions. So when they say they have a great culture, "Say, can you give me three examples from last week where you prove that or that you know that it is a great culture?" Mike Gerholdt: That's a good question. Thanks for coming by, Jason, and sharing your wisdom with us. You said you present some of this. Are you going to be presenting any of this at upcoming Dreamin' events after? Jason Atwood: I am. Well, you're catching me on my road tour. I don't know if this podcast... Mike Gerholdt: Oh, there's a road tour. Jason Atwood: There's a road tour. Mike Gerholdt: Are you going to have shirts made up? Jason Atwood: I might. So yeah, I actually- Mike Gerholdt: Have dates on the back. Jason Atwood: -I go to a lot... A lot of things, I will be at World Tour this year. World Tour New York in two days, but I don't think this podcast will be out by then. But you can catch me at Texas Dreamin', I'm doing this year. You can catch me at WITness Success, you can catch me at Mile High Dreamin', you can catch me at Dreamforce, you can catch me at Northeast Dreamin'. And is that it? I think that's it. Mike Gerholdt: I mean, Northeast Dreamin' is kind of the tail end of the year for us. Jason Atwood: Yeah, it is. It's the last one. So I'll be at all those. I don't know if I'll always be presenting this, but you can at least find me if you wanted to. Mike Gerholdt: Right. I appreciate you coming by. Jason Atwood: Thank you. It's been great talking to you. Let's do it in another 10 years. Mike Gerholdt: Or sooner. Jason Atwood: Or a little sooner. Mike Gerholdt: Well, I thought that episode turned out phenomenal. I'm so glad I got to have Jason back, and he is going to be on a road tour presenting and helping admins at different Dreamin' events. So hopefully, you can get to some of those that he mentioned. I think that'd be really neat, and some really solid tips on interviewing, and even I couldn't agree more on building experience when you've never had a job in the tech industry. So thanks, Jason, for coming on and sharing everything. And speaking of sharing, if you love this episode and you've got friends, or maybe you're going to a user group and you'd love to say, "Hey, I've got a podcast for you to listen to on finding that first job or getting your next Salesforce admin's job," here's how you do it. You click the three dots in the corner; most of these apps, podcast apps, have this now. And you can click share episode and you can post it to social; you could send it as an email to somebody, and then they get a link and they can listen to the podcast right on their phone, maybe as they're walking their dog, and even more. Now, if you wanted to look for any links or any resources, everything, everything I'm telling you, start your day admin.salesforce.com; everything is there for you. And of course, we also include a link to the Admin Trailblazer community, which is the admin group in the Trailblazer community, which is a great place and also the place I went to get all of these questions. Now, we'll also include a transcript if there's something you need to go back and read through; that is all going to be in the show notes. So, of course, until next week, we'll see you in the cloud.
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Thu, 5 September 2024
Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Rangsk, a Wordle and Sudoku educational YouTuber. Join us as we chat about how solving puzzles every day can help you sharpen your critical thinking skills. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Rangsk. The role of puzzles in critical thinking development I’m addicted to word games. They give me a chance to practice my problem solving skills and, hopefully, get better. That’s why I was so excited for this week’s guest, Rangsk, because he makes some of the best educational content out there on how to get better at solving puzzles. For Rangsk, puzzles are a way to develop your critical thinking skills. They give you an opportunity to think about how you think. “Overthinking has a negative connotation,” he says, “all I’m doing is thinking, and there’s nothing wrong with thinking when you’re solving a puzzle.” Practicing your problem solving skills in a low-stakes environment like a puzzle gives you the experience to fall back on in high-pressure situations. The process over the result A key part of using puzzles to develop critical thinking skills is taking the time to reflect on your thought process. When you solve a problem, don’t just move on to the next one. Instead, Rangsk encourages you to do a postmortem so you can learn something about how you think. Look through each step of a solve and analyze your decision-making. Where did you get stuck or tricked and why? What could you have done differently? And where did you make good choices that got you closer to the solution? If you take the time to internalize what worked and what didn’t work you’ll improve your critical thinking skills over time. How to know when to ask for help When I’m solving puzzles, one thing I always struggle with is when to hit that hint button. Rangsk’s advice is to make an honest assessment of your mindset. Are you well and truly stuck? Or have you hit a snag but are still enjoying the process of working through it? In puzzles and the workplace, we might not be able to solve every problem we encounter on our own. Maybe there’s some trick that we don’t know about or some key piece of information we don’t have. Puzzles help you teach your brain how to learn, and that’s something Salesforce Admins need to do every day. Listen to the full episode for more from Rangsk on his approach to teaching and some other word puzzles you might like if you’re already hooked on Wordle. And don’t forget to subscribe to hear more from the Salesforce Admins Podcast. Podcast swag Learn more Other word puzzles Admin Trailblazers Group Social Full show transcript Mike Gerholdt: Wordle, Strands, Connections, not just random words, but word games. And I am addicted to them. So, this week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, I had to get arguably the best word and logic solver I can find from TikTok and YouTube on the podcast. He goes by Rangsk on TikTok, and I'll put a link below. But David and I are talking about critical thinking and problem-solving using word games. Also, just how that applies to life. This is a phenomenal conversation. Don't be scared about the time because this is such a fun discussion. Also, how looking for answers and the journey of problem solving really applies to just everything that we do, not only as Salesforce admins, but in our learning journeys and as we navigate life. So, this is fun. Let's get David on the podcast. So, David, welcome to the podcast. Rangsk: Well, thank you. Mike Gerholdt: I'm glad to have you on. I feel this is one of those times where I'm way more the super fanboy because I have seen a ton of your TikTok videos and your New York Times solves. But without tipping too much, how did you get into word gaming and solving word games online? Rangsk: Well, it's a long story, but I can give the short version. Basically, YouTube likes to give random recommendations, and one day it recommended me a Sudoku video by Cracking the Cryptic. And I was familiar with Sudoku because it was a huge craze in the early 2000s. Do you remember that? Mike Gerholdt: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Rangsk: Everyone was doing Sudoku. Mike Gerholdt: On the planes, there were books. Every airport had a Sudoku book. Rangsk: Yeah. And so, I got into that craze back then, but then I burned out of it. And now, I realize it's because of the way I was solving it. It's because of the way everyone was solving it, it burned out quickly. But I was like, "You know what? Sudoku, I'm familiar with that." I clicked the video and I just immediately got hooked because this was not the Sudoku that I used to do. And I just really got hooked on watching Cracking the Cryptic on YouTube and the various different kinds of logic puzzles that they solve. And then, I actually started creating my own Sudoku puzzles. I crafted them myself. And I would do things like... I would submit them to Cracking the Cryptic. They actually have solved a few of my puzzles in the past. Mike Gerholdt: Wow. Rangsk: Featured in front of tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people, which is great. And what I wanted to do is I wanted to document how I intended those puzzles to be solved and walk through the logic of them. Because I've always been... I had sort of an instructor mindset. I've always liked teaching. I've never been a teacher, but I've always liked teaching anyway. And so, I decided to make my own videos where I walked through how to solve my own puzzles and I just uploaded them to my YouTube channel, which had nothing otherwise. And one day, Cracking the Cryptic featured one of my puzzles, and I commented saying, "Hey, I've got a walkthrough solve of this on my channel if anyone's interested." And I instantly gained 200, 300 subscribers. Mike Gerholdt: Oh, wow. Rangsk: And at that point, I was like, "Well, I better start making content." So, I decided, "Hey, maybe I'll start solving Sudoku's on there, not just my own, and see if I can grow that audience." And I was really enjoying the feedback I was getting from that. Flash forward to Wordle becoming popular, I was very much entrenched at that point within the logic puzzle community. And Wordle, of course, really became popular within that community. And so, I decided, "Well, I'm already making Sudoku content. Why don't I make YouTube shorts where I solve Wordle?" And so, that's really where I get started on that. And then, I went from... it had taken me two years to reach a thousand subscribers where I could finally monetize on YouTube. And then, within two months, my Wordle shorts had brought me to 10,000 subscribers. Mike Gerholdt: Wow. Rangsk: And so, that was like, wow, Wordle's my thing, I guess. And so, I decided just to... in addition to my Sudoku content, I started making word game content as well. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, I definitely was on the sideline for the Wordle wave. I remember it kind of crashing through. And I feel like for me, it was, "Oh, everybody's playing it, so I'm not going to play it." I also was afraid that I would never get a word. "Oh, man." Because my Facebook feed was filled with all of the little Wordle squares that everybody would post. I'm like, "Oh, I know so-and-so." I know some book editors and I know some people that are in the education space, and they were struggling with Wordle. And I was like, "I have no shot. Maybe I just shouldn't play this." But now that I've played it, I confess, today is my 40th day playing Wordle. Rangsk: Okay. I hope you're enjoying it. Mike Gerholdt: I am. I also have come now to the realization that I will never get it in one word. So, I have purposely looked ahead to see what words haven't been used as solutions, and then picked my beginning word now pending, the solution hasn't happened. My beginning word now is spoil because it has two vowels in it and it hasn't been used as a solution. Rangsk: Got you. Yeah. So, for me, getting word in one, of course, it would be exciting, but I would also feel a bit cheated because I didn't get to play that day. Mike Gerholdt: Yes. Rangsk: And to me, Wordle... I'm very much a logic puzzle guy. I approach even word games as if they were logic puzzles. And I think that's why I like Wordle so much is because you can treat it like a logic puzzle, where you're given information and then you want to come up with the best possible guess to utilize that information and get as much information as you can more. And you think about patterns in the words, not just, "Here's all the words I know," but "Okay, E likes to be at the end. R likes to be second. These letters like to be near each other. These letters don't like to be near each other." And so, you can kind of think about the patterns that you notice within words. And of course, every once in a while, you get tripped up by a weird word that comes from French or something and doesn't follow any of the rules. But even then, you get there by logically eliminating, it's not a regular word. So, I now have to investigate, is it one of those weird esoteric ones that came from French, for example, or came from a different language? So, yeah, I like to approach it as a logic problem, and I think that's why people enjoy watching me solve it. I constantly get feedback, "I'm better at the game after watching you play it." That warms my heart. That's exactly what I want. I'm not out here trying to impress people. I'm not trying to be a magician. I'm trying to be an instructor, and I'm trying to get people to understand that these games can be approached from a logical perspective. You can learn to get better at it without just going and memorizing a bunch of words. Mike Gerholdt: Right. Perfect segue to exactly why I'm having you on the podcast, because I ran across one of your TikTok videos on Connections, and I'd never played Connections. And the tone and the manner, now that you say instructor, I joked with a colleague that I called you the Bob Ross of Connections. But your tone was very calming. "And let's work through this, and here's all the words. We have to come up with four groups of four. Let me walk you through the way I'm going to think through this," which your logic or your critical thinking. And it wasn't just, "Well, these four have to go together. Why don't those go together?" And it's like, "No, but let's think about every possible meaning of this one word." Or I love when you, especially on some of the Connections, "What is the, not weirdest, but what is the farthest outlying word? And let's pick that and see how it can connect to other things." Rangsk: Yeah, I'm glad you recognized both my logical approach, but also the demeanor that I try to give to my content. I've been called Bob Ross by more than just yourself, also Mr. Rogers. Just having that calming presence is really important to me because people have so much going on in their lives. They have stress coming from everywhere, and then they try to escape that with the free time that they have. They're scrolling TikTok or they're scrolling YouTube or whatever it is. And when you do that, you're just getting people yelling at you. You're getting people trying to make you afraid, trying to make you angry. And I want to counter that. I want to be a place where I come up on your feed and you feel like, "Okay, this is a setting where I can understand what's going on. I'm not being yelled at." "Things are calm, things are straightforward and I'm learning, but I don't feel like I'm being talked at." I don't know the best way to put that. Mike Gerholdt: Or chastise. I mean really, because I think that's one thing, how this kind of carries over to software is critical thinking, but also when you're building applications or you're building programs, it's change that you're going to introduce to somebody. And I've always told people, when you roll out something, nobody wants to show up to work and feel stupid. And the easiest way to feel stupid is by showing them something they don't understand. And you can walk into some of these games and be like, "I don't understand. It doesn't make sense." And then, it makes you feel stupid when actually if you just sit and look at it. To me, I use a few of these games in the morning when I have a cup of coffee to kind of warm my brain up, kind of get me thinking through the day and sitting there thinking, "Okay," so this word for example, and maybe Connections is coat. Okay. So, coat and I started, "Well, how would David describe this?" Well, coat could be a jacket. Coat could be a heavy coat. Coat could also, you coat something with paint. I try to use some of the stuff that you teach to like, how would I talk through this and not just take it as the first thing that comes to mind? Rangsk: Right. And I get a lot of feedback, which I honestly don't appreciate very much because it's counter to what I'm trying to put across, which means I'm not communicating that effectively enough. But a lot of feedback is like "You're overthinking it. If you'd just gone with your instinct, it would've been correct." And they're ignoring all the times, probably the majority of the times, where had I gone with my instinct, it would've been wrong. Because these puzzles are designed to trick you. They are logic puzzles. And it's not much of a puzzle if it's just find four things that go together and that will be right. And so, the game is all about... I just made a comment today where someone was like, "Overthinking the easy ones is detrimental, but overthinking the hard ones is actually useful." And my response to that was, "Well, overthinking has a negative connotation to it, by definition. All I'm doing is thinking. And there's nothing wrong with thinking when you're solving a puzzle." So, yeah, the game is trying to get you to think. And you can either let it get you to think and follow along with the human creator of this puzzle and what they were trying to achieve in getting you to think about, or you can bash your head against it and try to get lucky, which to me isn't fun. And sometimes I have to resort to that and I feel bad about it. But most of the time, I try to logically approach the problem and also try to see what did the creator of this puzzle intend me to think about? And that's going to be fun and that's going to give longevity to the gameplay. Mike Gerholdt: Overthinking also comes from a position of I know the answer and you don't. At one point, they didn't know the answer. So, how can I overthink something if I don't know the answer? In hindsight, yes, I can look back at a solution, "Oh, I way overthought that. But I only know that because I went down that path and then I came back." Much like thinking through different situations or different, we talked about software debugging before I pressed record. Can you overthink software debugging? Well, yeah, I suppose. But you only know that once you go down that entire path and then come back. Rangsk: And I will say there's kind of a corollary to that where you said in hindsight, and I think that's another aspect of my content that you don't see a lot, and I think it's a really important aspect, which is after I've solved it, go and do a post-mortem basically, to use the industry term. Go and look back and say, "What is it that I did right? What is it that I did wrong?" "How could I have thought about this differently to have succeeded when I failed? Or why did I succeed at this? What did I do that I liked that I should try to do more of?" And I think that's a really important aspect of after you've solved a puzzle, or if you're working on debugging software, if you're working on any problem that you're trying to solve, don't just say, "Oh, I solved it. Let me throw that out." You say, "I solved it. Let me now internalize what worked and didn't work so that when I have a problem again in the future, I can utilize that and gain wisdom and gain experience." Mike Gerholdt: I'll be honest, one of the coolest things, I'll get off Connections. One of the coolest things that you added to your Wordle solutions is you go into a website that somebody create a bot and you kind of, "Okay, so here's the word I put in and we got orange, yellow, and green here. What is the bot say is the next one? What did I guess? Here's what I guessed. Here's this, that. Here's what I guessed. Okay." And oftentimes you're either... it helps you do that post-mortem because with Connections, you have a little bit different, you can see your categories, but with Wordle, you're like, "Was this the next best thing for me to guess to try and get to the solution?" And I love that you kind of walk through that with that bot and the bot's like, "Oh, yeah, so you basically had two choices after this word and you went to this one, which no harm, no foul, it was the other word." I need that bot for everything. Rangsk: Yeah. And what's nice about Wordle is a bot like that can exist because it's pretty easy to write a perfect solver. I wouldn't say it's easy, but it's viable to write a perfect solver for Wordle. And there's not a perfect solver for every problem you're going to encounter, but you can at least go back and analyze that. And I think an aspect that I thought about while you were describing what I do with that Wordle bot that I'd like to touch on is the question is, did I get lucky? Because a lot of times in problem-solving, there is a luck factor. Did I look at the right thing first or did I look at the right thing after struggling for three days on this problem? And the Wordle bot will answer that question for you. It'll say, "Oh, yeah, you totally got lucky. There were 60 possible words and you picked out the right one." So, what I learned from that is maybe it was a lucky decision, but maybe it wasn't the optimal decision, even though the optimal decision would've had a worse outcome in this situation. And recognize because... I guess to put it this way, if you can't separate what was lucky from what was good, then you're going to depend on getting lucky more and more. You're going to internalize what you did that made you get lucky rather than internalizing what you did that actually set yourself up for success. Mike Gerholdt: Well, I think that's... some of that has to do with why people gamble. They just feel they're lucky as opposed to working through the, I go back to the... I love the movie Apollo 13. Let's work the problem and go through it. Kind of transitioning that because I obviously could talk Wordle. You also do that really good on the mini crossword, where if by chance you happen to get all the downs, all the downs also solve all the acrosses for the most part. And so, you'll go back through and be like, "Oh, well, let's look and see actually what these questions were that the answer just autofilled back in." I think there has to be something that it does to your brain because it also trains it. You're like, "Oh, now, I'm not just reading this word, I'm also reading the clue that the creator of the puzzle had in addition to what the word is, and it just happened to be filled in for me." Rangsk: Yeah. If we want to even just touch back on Connections for a little bit. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, please. Rangsk: Every day I get comments from people saying, "Oh, the first thing I do is shuffle because they put in these red herrings and I don't want to be tricked by them." And I feel like this is just intentionally throwing out information about the puzzle because we've been told that they think very, very hard actually. They put a lot of thought into the arrangement of the words that are presented to you, which means they've added information to the system. And by hitting shuffle immediately, without even attempting to interpret that information, you've thrown out part of the puzzle. And to me, I feel like I can go, "Okay, well, they decided to put these tiles next to each other. What does that mean? Are they trying to trick me? Are they trying to hint me towards the solution? What is the information that they are trying to give me by this placement?" And I would lose all that if I hit shuffle. And so, I feel like it's kind of a short-sighted strategy because you can't learn to overcome the tricks that they're trying to put into the puzzle if you just wipe them clean first thing without even appreciating them. Mike Gerholdt: Right. Absolutely. Actually, you're the one that taught me that. I was partway through at Connections the other day and I think that two words were iron and steel, and I was like, "Those started right next to each other. I bet those don't have anything to do with each other. I'm not going to fall for it." Rangsk: Yeah, sure enough, they didn't. Exactly. And had you hit shuffle, you wouldn't have known that. Mike Gerholdt: No idea. Rangsk: And you might've said, "Well, iron and steel, those are both metals. Maybe that's a thing." I think they're getting wise to me. I think the other day they actually put three of them all on top of each other that were in the same category. Mike Gerholdt: Oh, no. Rangsk: In general, they are adding information when they, instead of presenting the tiles in a random order, just having a piece of software randomize it and presenting it, they are laying it out and they're discussing how they want to lay it out. And I think that's part of the puzzle. You're removing some of the interest in the puzzle by hitting shuffle. And it's the same with mini crossword. Yeah, you can solve it with just the acrosses or just the downs, but you're losing something by not at least going back and looking what was the whole puzzle. Because these kinds of clues are going to come up over and over again and this is a perfect opportunity, while it's fresh in your mind and while you're in the context, to use it as a learning experience for future puzzles. Mike Gerholdt: I completely agree. So, I think one of the things that fascinates me and I love using, I'll call them word games and maybe they're logic games. You need to tell me the difference. But using these to keep my mind sharp is I feel like it helps me be a better thinker just in general, just at my job, just working through decisions in life. You've been solving games a lot longer than me. How have you seen that kind of help you in your professional career? Rangsk: It's really interesting that you asked that because an aspect of my day job is actually studying transference is what the psychology term is, which is if you are to play a game and get good at it or do a logic puzzle and get good at that puzzle, does that have transference? Does that transfer to other aspects of your life? Are you just getting better at that game? Or is there sort of a rippling effect to the rest of your life? Okay. If I play GeoGuessr where I'm trying to locate where I am in the world, does that make me a better driver on my commute? Or if I am playing logic puzzles a lot, does that make me better at debugging software? Whatever it is that you're trying to actually accomplish in your life, are these things just games and you get good at that one game, or are these things that are going to transfer to other areas of your life? And that's actually a pretty hot topic of study within psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience. And there's a lot of studies going on right now related to that with mixed results. Some of these things that they claim, "Hey, if you play this game every day, you're going to get smarter. You're going to get better in these other areas of your life." And it may not be true. For me personally, I find it beneficial to just keep using my brain. Think of the brain as a muscle and just keep using it. Make sure those connections are strong. And by practicing it in low-stakes scenarios, when you get hit with a high-stakes scenario, you have this sort of instinct to fall back on for how you're going to handle that. Yeah. Does that- Mike Gerholdt: No, I'm still processing all of that transference information you gave because I was just thinking about how that applies to other things like prepping for tests. Did you just get good at taking the test, or did you genuinely learn the information? We can also talk about tests, but nobody wants to do that anyway. Rangsk: I'll talk about it. Mike Gerholdt: Are you just good at taking the test too? That's the third thing to bring up. Rangsk: Yeah, exactly. And this is a big topic in education, has been for a long time, which is how much do we lean on standardized tests and how much do we teach to the test? And is the standardized test important because we just need metrics on how students are generally doing, or is the standardized test also something that can direct curriculum? That's a question that every teacher has. And I don't think there's a perfect answer to that, and I'm also not much of an expert on that at all. But in my opinion, I think that anything you learn is good. I've always hated the question, when am I going to use this? The answer is, you use your brain every day. And the more you can teach your brain how to learn and all these cool things, that expands your horizons. It expands your use of your brain. Yeah, sure, you might not use algebra if you're not an accountant or a scientist or a mathematician. Yeah, you might not use algebra, but one day you're going to have the question and you're going to have the curiosity that's going to relate to math in some way. And you either have the tools to think about it properly or you don't, and that's something that you could have internalized, but you decided you weren't going to use it, and so you didn't. But there's the expression, when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. I have always thought that the more tools you have in your toolbox, the more versatile you can be in problem-solving and just living your life properly. Properly is not the right word. I didn't mean to say it that way, but living your life to its fullest extent, being able to accomplish the goals that you want to accomplish, being successful. It's all about setting yourself up for success. And you don't know what problems are going to arise. And so, the more tools you give yourself, the less everything starts looking like a nail, and the more you can be exacting and fall back on previous experience. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, I often think of... it's funny you bring up that algebra example. I was also that kid that was really horrible at math, so I never played Sudoku. But the concept sometimes of how you solve the algebra problem, I think to me, was also more important than what the answer was. And that to me is almost like the first time you pull the cover off a toy and realize there's a whole bunch of gears inside that make the bear move and kind of understanding, "Oh, there's more to this that I need to understand as opposed to just what the outcome is." We had this discussion the other day, outputs versus outcomes. And if your outputs is solved puzzles, are you smarter than if your outcome is no, but I learned the process and I learned how to work through difficult situations. The outcome is very different than the outputs. Rangsk: I love the way you put that and that's something... I solve The New York Times hard Sudoku every day on my YouTube channel. And my goal is not to say, "Look, I solved the puzzle." My goal is to help the viewers be able to solve the puzzle, but not just that. To understand that it's the act of solving it that's the fun part, not having that completed grid with all the correct numbers in it. And it seems obvious when I say it that way, but I get so many people commenting saying, "Well, if I just go through and fill out all the candidates first, which by the way is super boring, then I can solve it in four minutes, and you took 12 minutes." I feel like I failed that person because now they're going to get bored of Sudoku very quickly. Because who wants the first thing they do when they first receive that piece of paper or the digitally, the Sudoku puzzle, is go cell by cell and do accounting work? The puzzle can tell you a story if you let it tell you the story. And there are ways that you can approach the problem solving such that you are following along. It's like you're reading a book. You're following along the story. And in a sense, it's almost like a "choose your own adventure book" where you can choose where you want to go next. What do I want to discover about this puzzle? And just put a smile on your face every day because you found this really cool piece of logic and you go, "Ooh, that's really neat. It just told me about this cool structure." And people who are like, "Oh, well, I solve it in two minutes and I can just plunk them down, and I don't understand why you're doing all of this." And a year later, they've moved on. They're not doing Sudoku anymore, and they think it's boring. And I'm still doing it and I'm still learning from it every day. Mike Gerholdt: Right. Because the outcome for you is a lot different. The euphemism is the journey versus the destination. Rangsk: Yes. I'm a big fan of Brandon Sanderson and that's a big thing in Stormlight Archive, which is there's... not to get too spoilery, I won't spoil Stormlight Archive for people. But there is a group of people who basically have a mantra and part of that is journey before destination. We all have the same destination. And when it comes to puzzles, the destination is the solved puzzle, but it's about how you got there. The journey is the important thing. And you can start talking about things, do the ends justify the means? It's much of a corollary to that when you start talking about how you live your life. And I feel like if you start approaching even a logic puzzle that you're doing for fun, if you approach that in a way where you're trying to take shortcuts, that's training yourself to take shortcuts in all areas of your life. And I feel like that's... you're cheating yourself. That's another thing. People are like, "Is it cheating if I do this? Is it cheating if I do that?" And it's like, it's a single-player game. There's no stakes to it. The only person you're cheating is yourself. Are you enjoying the way that you're solving this? And that's the important thing. Okay, if I'm doing a crossword or if I'm doing Connections and there's a word I don't know, is it cheating if I look it up? Well, that's up to you. Do you want this to be a trivia game where you need to be going into the puzzle with a certain set of knowledge, and you want to learn as you go, and you learn from your failures because you didn't know what that word meant? And now you've looked it up and now you're going to remember it? That's one way to approach it. And a perfectly other valid way to approach it is, "Oh, this puzzle has shown me this word that I don't know. This is a perfect opportunity to look it up and have some success because I looked it up." And I think both approaches are valid. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. There's so much to unpack there, but the first thing I wanted to say was the best and worst times of doing any of the logic puzzles or The New York Times stuff is when it's solved is the best because I was like, "Yes, I did it." And the worst is, "Ugh, it's over." Especially a few times with Wordle or with Connections or even the mini crossword, "Oh, I finally got it." And to that other point, there have been times when I was like, "Okay, I clearly..." I don't know some... I think one of the questions was something and it was super pop culture. I was like, "I just need to Google this. That's my mulligan. I'm going to take it, I'm going to Google it and that's going to give me the answer." Because I'm past the point of enjoyment for this game and I need a little boost to get me back and going for that, and it's my game, so I can do that. Rangsk: Yeah. And it's all about knowing yourself and knowing what you're going to be happy with later and what you might be sad about later. And I think you kind of hit the nail on the head. Are you still enjoying the puzzle? Because that's the important thing. We don't do these because it's our job. We're doing puzzles because it's fun and enriching. And so, it's all about sustainability. What's going to sustain your interest in this hobby? And are you going to be a flash in the pan where you deep dive into crosswords or Sudoku or whatever word game for a month and then you're done with it and you move on? That's one personality style. Another personality style is crosswords are something that I do every morning for 50 years. There are people like that too. There are a lot of people like that. And there's a big difference. Someone who's going to do that every morning for 50 years, they're enjoying it every day and they've found ways to sustain that enjoyment. Whereas there- Mike Gerholdt: Go ahead. Rangsk: Sorry, go ahead. Mike Gerholdt: No, I'm 100% with you. I was going to ask because we didn't touch on it and maybe it's for a reason because it's in beta, but Strands. I think you said it in one of your puzzles, I was like, "I just need you. Can you just tell me if any of the four letters I put together are close to one of the words you want as opposed to just nothing?" And I think that for me, we get some of that. Well, you can tell me more of the game logic. But with Wordle and with Connections, at least with Wordle, I get a yellow. I get a colored square. Regardless of what I put in, I'm getting a color back. And with Connections, oftentimes I'm like, "Please just say one away." But you get kind of that. Rangsk: But even if it's not one away, it's still information. Mike Gerholdt: It is, yes. Except with Strands. Rangsk: Yeah, Strands is missing that. And the reason Strands is missing that is because I really feel like they built the hint system because they knew this was an issue. But the hint system is terrible because people don't want to use it. Some people do use it, but I don't like using it. I think that, first of all, making it a choice. Wordle, you don't have the choice to see whether a tile was yellow or green. It's just going to tell you. It's part of the game. A hint system feels like it's external to the game as like a, "I'm not good enough, so I'm going to press the hint button." And I don't think that was their intent, but I think that's what's happened because they realized that most of these games have some kind of lockstep functionality where you make as you progress through the puzzle and you gain information as you go. Whereas with Strands, you can be sitting there for 15 minutes and know as much as you did on minute one, even though you have found 100 words because you didn't find any of the words that they're intending and you're not understanding what the theme is trying to hit you towards. And it's just frustrating. And so, they probably saw that in the playtest and went, "Well, if you get three words, we'll give you a word." But that doesn't feel good because, first of all, they gave the choice. I kind of wonder what would the game be like? Is it just you get three words and it just reveals one without pressing hint? And it was just part of the game. I feel like more people would accept that rather than opting into admitting that you're not good enough at the game. But also the hint system is just simultaneously not powerful enough and too powerful. And I could rant about this. I feel like it's a bit off-topic. Mike Gerholdt: No, this is 100% on topic. Rangsk: All right. Well, I'll rant about it then. Early on, it's too powerful because it gives you... for those not familiar with Strands, it's like a word search game, but they don't tell you what words you're looking for. Mike Gerholdt: Nope. Rangsk: Instead, they all follow a theme. Maybe the theme is names of football teams or the theme is pieces of time, so seconds, minutes, hours. And some of them are a bit more esoteric. They might be words that are slaying for money, but are also food was one of them. And so, it really varies in difficulty. And they give you a little kind of crossword style clue hint at the start of what the theme might be. But it's usually not. Usually, it's either, "Oh, I know exactly what the theme is from this clue," or, "I have no idea what the theme is from this clue." There's not much in between. But anyway, what the hint does is if you get three words that they didn't intend, if you find three words, you can press the hint button and it highlights all of the letters involved in one of the words. And then, it becomes an unscramble basically. And then, you find that word. And I think the ideal situation when using the hint is then, okay, now that I know what one of the words is, I've now gained information about what the theme might be and I can try to think of other words that match. And if that's not enough, I'll find three more and I'll press hint again and I'll get another word. But it's too powerful because people don't want to just be shown one of the words. That's literally taking away from the enjoyment of the game because the game is only finding the words. And so, you're literally pressing a button saying, "I want one last word to find please." But then, at the end, sometimes you're down to one word left, it tells you how many words you need to find, and you're down to one word left. And I've literally spent 10, 15 minutes trying to unscramble that word because I can't figure it out. When it was Broadway shows, and I couldn't unscramble Carousel for the life of me because I hadn't heard of that Broadway show, and it's a weird word. Carousel. And so, the hint wouldn't have helped me. If I'd pressed hint, it would've highlighted all the letters. So, the hint is simultaneously too powerful early on and not powerful enough at the end. And then, also on top of that, isn't giving you what you want from a hint. So, I feel like it's a failure in game design there. And what they should have done is built-in ratcheting game mechanics that aren't opt-in. Mike Gerholdt: What are ratcheting game mechanics? Please tell me. Rangsk: So, if you think about a ratchet wrench. When you go one way, it doesn't lose progress on tightening, and then you go the other way and it tightens more. That's what a ratchet is. And so, you can make progress without losing progress. So, as you put input into the system and as you find things towards the game mechanics, you have now ratcheted yourself, you've given yourself more information. It's a ratchet-style gameplay. So, like Wordle, you input a guess and you get those yellows and greens and grays, and now you have more information about what the answer might be. And you never lose that information. That information never becomes obsolete. You can always use it. So, in the same way, that's why some of my suggestions for Strands were, "Hey, you know what?" "If I get partial word, maybe it should tell me, 'Hey, you got a partial word. You're on the right track.'" It's ratcheted that information into the system. It's like getting a green or a yellow in Wordle. Or if they want to keep the hint system, maybe one option for the hint system would be show me the starting letter of one of the words. Not the whole word, just give me somewhere to start. Mike Gerholdt: Where do I start? Yeah. Rangsk: Yeah. This letter I know is the start of a word now and I can focus my search on that. And so, I wouldn't feel as bad pressing that. But what if that were just part of the game mechanics? It's like rewarding you for finding words. They aren't the right words, but you're still finding valid words that exist. So, why not have those, just add information to the system as you guess in certain creative ways. So, it feels like a failure of game design that there isn't that sort of ratchet other than the opt-in very heavy-handed hint system that they have right now. Mike Gerholdt: Right. I am so glad you brought up that Broadway Strands because I was about... I'm like, "I think I'm done. I think I'm done with Strands now." It took me so long to get... the first thing I found with Strands is you either get started and it starts to make sense, or you're sitting there and you're looking at these two words and the clue and you're like, "I have no idea what these three things have to do with each other. I don't know what another word to look for." But that Broadway with Carousel, I was stuck on Carousel. I got everything else. Those are the only letters left. I never hit the hint button. And I thought, "What happens if you hit the hint button when you're done?" Because at that point, I'll be honest, the game Joy, it was no joy in Mudville right now. I just wanted to be done. Just please tell me what the answer is. I think I went through... I watched your TikTok. I went through all the same words you did. I'm like, "I don't know what word this is. Just tell me." And when I hit hint, it just put the little things around. I was like, "I know it's those letters." Rangsk: Yeah, exactly. Mike Gerholdt: I know it's those letters. Get me out of here. Where is the escape room button? That's the only time I wanted the hint button to just be like, "Nope, we're just going to solve this because we feel bad for you." Rangsk: And people use my videos as hints. They'll be like, "Well, I'm done with this puzzle. I haven't solved it, but I'm not getting joy out of it. Let's see what Rangsk did." Rangsk being my handle. "Let's see what he did and maybe that'll give me a hint." And that's actually the entire premise of me doing The New York Times hard Sudoku every day in that instructive way is I know that there's always going to be someone who's stuck on that specific Sudoku puzzle because it's so widespread. It's published by The New York Times. They're going to search on YouTube or Google. They're going to search "New York Times Sudoku today walkthrough or hint." Mike Gerholdt: Solve or something. Rangsk: Yeah, solve. And they're going to find my video and that'll track them to my channel. And not only will they find my video, but this video is going to blow their mind if they don't know modern Sudoku-solving techniques. And they're going to be like, "Wow, I need to watch more of these because this is way more fun than how I've been solving Sudoku, and I don't get stuck as much." "And if I do get stuck, I watch him until he does something I didn't know, and then I can continue." So, almost using me as a hint button. And I feel like with Strands, there's no strategy. Strands feels like a trivia game to me almost. I've been trying so hard to make it a logic game, which you probably have noticed if you watched my Strand solves, where I'm like, "Okay, corner strategy, edge strategy." And it kind of works, but it's not perfect and there's not a whole lot of logic involved. I will say there are word search games that do feel a lot more like a logic puzzle. One of them that I play is called Cell Tower. And this is probably the coolest word search game I've played. Normally, I'm not a big fan of word search-style games. I'm not very good at them. But to briefly explain this game, it's a grid of letters just as you'd expect a word search to be. And the way that these letters form words is a little bit unique, and that's not that important to describe, except basically you're drawing shapes in the grid. So, you're connecting the letters together in kind of a different way that you'd normally expect. You're not drawing a line through the letters to make words in order. You're just sort of highlighting them, and they have to be connected in some way. And it's red left to right, top to bottom. And so, it's sort of limiting you on... you can't make a word bottom right to top left. You can't just draw a line that way, or you can't zigzag around. Instead, there's a specific logical order to how the letters are going to appear in a word. In addition to that, every letter is part of a word, similar to Strands in that way. So, every letter will be involved in a word, and there is only one solution. So, you can't just go, "Okay, I found this word. Let's lock that in. Okay, now I found this word." You're going to find a bunch of words, but you need to look at how that affects the rest of the grid around it and make sure you're not preventing the ability for the letters around it to also be part of words. And that's where the logic comes in, where you go, "Okay, I think this word might be part of it. Can I add an -ed ending, an -ing ending, an S at the end? Is there a prefix I can add to it to expand that word? But also, how does that affect the letters around it? Am I going to be able to make a word out of these other letters if this was one of the words I use?" And so, you end up with this really logical approach to how you solve it. And you're thinking about how letters go together, how they go next to each other, and how words are formed in general. And you're looking at corners like, "Okay, this letter is going to have to be related to the letters around it in some way because it's in a corner because it's been isolated in some way." And so, it's not that you're trying to just find words that match a theme and the computer tells you, "Oh, yep, you found one of them," or, "Nope, that wasn't what I was looking for, sorry," with no extra information. Instead, you're trying to solve this logically and the computer is not giving you any help at all there. It's just the grid, the full information of the grid being used. So, in a way, it's a lot like Sudoku, but also like Connections where you can't just pick any four words that happen to relate because that might disrupt the ability for the other words to relate to each other. So, that's what really makes a logic puzzle a logic puzzle is you have to take the puzzle as a whole and you have to take steps that are logical. It's not just a trivia game. Mike Gerholdt: That's so apropos to everything that we talked about. You have to look at the puzzle as a whole. Last question, because I happened to think of this when we were talking about Strands. As somebody that's online solving problems, word games and stuff, how hard, how many times do you just want to hit that hint button? Does that ever come up? Maybe you have the patience of a saint, but have you ever gotten to that point where I know you're creating this for the good of other people and you have to walk through that, but you're like, "Maybe I just hit the hint button because I'm at 35 minutes on this video?" Rangsk: Yeah, for sure. And there's different forms that that takes in my mind. There's the built-in hint buttons to the game, but then there's also like, "Do I just Google this word?" I did do that once. There was a Connections, and I knew I was about to lose. I was like, "Okay, I've got no mistakes left. And there are three words on the board that I have no idea what they mean. Literally never heard these words in my life. So, how am I supposed to... is it good content for me to just make a guess and lose? Or do I go on Google, look up what the words mean, and continue the puzzle?" And in that case, I decided to do that. And I got mostly feedback saying, "Yeah, I Googled it too. It was fine to Google it, looking it up. What's wrong with that?" But then, I got a lot of negative feedback too about "How's it feel to cheat? You're such a cheater, blah, blah, blah." Just so much negativity. And so, I have to weigh the decision on how much negativity do I want in my comment section here, because they aren't just insulting me when they're calling me a cheater. They're calling everyone else who Googled a cheater. So, people are seeing themselves in that comment when they're reading through the comment section. And that's something I need to figure... it's not something I've solved. I don't have an answer. But what I try to do is understand myself and go, "Okay, am I 35 minutes into this puzzle legitimately, or am I just done with it?" There's a game I play called Squaredle. There's actually two games I play. Mike Gerholdt: It sounds like all the puzzles put together. Rangsk: Yeah. There's two games I play called Squaredle. One of them has an extra E and one doesn't. The one with the extra E... so one of them removes the E in square and one of them keeps the E in square when they add the -dle ending. They're completely different games. One of them that I play with the E, it's another word search game. It's a grid of four by four or sometimes five by five letters. And you need to find every possible word other than esoteric ones. They have some list of words that... you know how there's words that aren't really words, if you know what I mean? The esoteric ones, the archaic ones, out of use, highly specialized words. You don't have to find those. They count as bonus words if you do find them. But there's a list of words that it's looking for you to get. And sometimes this list is 60 to 100 words. And this game can take me an hour and a half. Mike Gerholdt: Wow. Rangsk: I sit there and I record the whole solve. It's a special occasion usually. I'll do it once every week or every two weeks and then put it on my YouTube where I solve the hardest Squaredle of the week. Because just like The New York Times puzzles, it gets harder through the week. And so, I'm like, "I'm going to solve the hardest one today." And it's a lesson in patience because you have to find every word, and it can take an hour and a half. And that's the kind of game where it's like, "Okay, I'm 30 minutes in, but I'm still solving the puzzle. And that's okay." There's also Sudokus that can take an hour, an hour and a half just because they're that hard. But it feels like you're making progress. If you feel like you're making progress, that's just you're still in the journey. You're still solving it, and that's fine. It doesn't matter how long it's been, as long as you still feel like you're in the puzzle and you're making progress and you're enjoying it. But then, there's puzzles where... the puzzle usually takes two minutes, and you're 30 minutes into it, and you feel like you haven't made progress in the last 25 minutes or ever. And you just have to make the decision of like, "Is this worth my time anymore?" And I've definitely had puzzles where I hit the stop button on the recording and I delete the video, and I just go, "I'm not solving that one today." Or ones where I go, "Well, it's time to get a hint." Literally, I just say, "I have failed this puzzle, but I want to see the end of it, so I'm going to look stuff up." You have to make that decision in your head. And I think you brought up a really important point, which is... I think you brought this point up at least, it became this point in my head, which is you need to decide for yourself when that is and that it's okay. You gave it your best, time to seek help. And I think that's something that's really important in life is that it's okay to seek help when you need it. I think people appreciate when you've put in some effort yourself first, but at the same time, they don't want... let me put it this way. I've been lead of several different teams as a programmer for my day job. And as a lead programmer, I would rather a junior programmer come to me with a problem that I can solve in a minute than spend six hours banging their head against it. But at the same time, if it would've only taken them 10 minutes, I'd prefer them to learn that on their own. So, it's important to learn at what point have I stopped being productive? Have I stopped enjoying this? Am I not in the right mindset and I either need to take a break, do something else, or I need to seek help, or both? Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. No, I think you're right. The hint button and being called a cheater, you're only cheating yourself. It's what do you need to move on with? And your example is perfect. Is there something that can be gained by that person asking you? But I also think, what level of thinking did they put into solving this before they came to me? And I always look at it as I'm very appreciative of, they came to me because they hit that wall, but they also realized quickly that they hit that wall. Rangsk: Exactly. Mike Gerholdt: And now they need to move on so that that learning journey continues as opposed to being frustrated in themselves. Rangsk: Yeah. And that's a skill unto itself. And that really separates the people you enjoy working with from the people you don't enjoy working with, people who are team players and people who aren't. That really separates them because it's a matter of, "I don't want to be doing your job for you. I've got my own job to do, but also I don't want you sitting there suffering as if you were alone." And there's that balance. And recognizing in yourself when you've hit that state is really important. And I think that... going back to the conversation about transference. That's something that can transfer. If you're playing games, and you can learn in a low-stakes scenario, how do I... be in yourself, be in your body, be in your mind, and be like, "I now recognize what I'm like when I'm in this hopeless scenario where I've given up without giving up, where I'm frustrated, where I'm tired, where I'm hungry." It's something even like children need to learn. Am I sad or am I just hungry? Or do I need to take a nap? That's something children need to learn, but it's not something we stop learning as a child. It's something we need to always know ourselves, know how our mind works, know what our limitations are, and know what our limitations aren't. Is this something I can just continue on, or is this something that I need to use my coping mechanisms that I've learned throughout my life to deal with this situation? Part of the problem has now become my own mind. And that's something you can learn by putting yourself constantly in these difficult situations, like difficult logic puzzles or trivia puzzles, where you're not very familiar with that trivia or whatever it is for you that puts you out of your comfort zone in a safe, low-stakes environment. So, you can learn how you yourself react to that and what that's going to take. And part of my job, implementing things, software. I need to recognize... have you ever had that... I'm sure everyone's had that late night where you've been banging your head against this fog or a thing you're trying to implement is just not working. You go home dejected. You get some sleep. You come in in the morning and you fix it in two minutes. And had you just recognized that you were in that situation where you were not going to be productive anymore, and you'd just gone home and you'd gotten rest and you'd accepted that that's what's happening. And you actually had your relaxing night and you took the time that you needed for yourself, and you got the good amount of sleep, and then you came in the morning ready to go, and you just solved the problem. Those two scenarios look the same from a work perspective, but look very different from a personal hygiene, mental hygiene perspective. Mike Gerholdt: I couldn't agree more. I couldn't agree more. I think it's also a great way to end this discussion, David. Thanks for coming on the podcast. You gave me so much to think about and here I was just excited to talk about word games. But really a lot of it is how you look at everything in life and how you tackle situations. And really part of, I think, the word game or the game itself is also helping you understand yourself. So, this is a great discussion. I appreciate it. Thanks so much. Rangsk: Well, thanks for having me on. And if people want to watch my content, I'm just going to plug my stuff real quick. Mike Gerholdt: Absolutely. Rangsk: So, I am Rangsk on all platforms. R-A-N-G-S-K. I'm sure there'll be something in the description where you can find that. I'm on YouTube and also on TikTok. And I recently had to split my TikTok into multiple accounts. But if you find that Rangsk_YT account, that's the main one, and you'll be able to find the others through my videos. And so, if you enjoy Sudoku, logic puzzles, word games, that sort of thing in an instructive calm environment, then my channel is for you. Mike Gerholdt: So, as I write, this was a shot in the dark, I'll be honest with you. I reached out to David after being completely addicted to his TikTok videos on Connections and Wordle, and just thought, "This is really what critical thinking looks like to me." And the conversation, I probably could have gone for another hour easily. I had a hundred more questions in my head, but I hope you enjoy it. I do want you to do one thing. If you enjoyed this episode, go ahead and give David a follow. I promise you it's super rewarding to watch his critical thinking and the way that he solves problems and word problems and word games online. I honestly do think it will make you a better Salesforce admin and a better business analyst in general. So, go ahead and give a click on the links below. Also, if you're not already following the Salesforce Admins Podcast, please do so. We're available on all the platforms. Click follow. Then new episodes like this one, we'll download automatically every Thursday morning. So, with that, thanks for listening and of course, we'll see you in the cloud.
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Thu, 29 August 2024
Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Kate Lessard, Lead Admin Evangelist at Salesforce. Join us as we chat get to know the newest member of the Admin Evangelist team and her journey through the Salesforce ecosystem. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Kate Lessard. Giving back to the Salesforce community Kate actually got her master’s in museum studies, so how did she get involved in Salesforce? “I started at a nonprofit in Denver, Colorado, and my first day on the job they asked me if I had ever heard of Salesforce,” she says, “and I said no and they said, ‘that’s okay but you’re in charge of it now!” One thing that really helped Kate, back when she was an accidental admin, was finding a mentor in the Salesforce community. That’s why she’s been so focused on giving back through programs like Super Moms, WITness Success, and Forcelandia. And now, she’s the newest member of the Admin Evangelist team. Working behind the scenes Kate takes the stage at tons of events but she also does work behind the scenes. For Forcelandia, she’s the Communications Lead, where she coordinates with speakers and makes sure they have all the information they need to be successful. The two main lessons she’s learned from this work are that no question is a dumb question and that you balance how you communicate information. For the first one, you don’t want to be the person who shows up in the wrong place when people are depending on you. For the latter, it’s important to realize that some people want one big communication with all of the facts and others prefer it broken down into smaller snippets. Kate is great Kate is excited to join the Admin Evangelist team and share how awesome it is to be a Salesforce Admin. “I’m really drawn to this because you get to still be technical and know how to do all the things,” she says, “but you also get to share the excitement behind them.” We think Kate is great, and if you want to meet her she’ll be presenting two sessions at Dreamforce this year. The first will be on why admins should learn dev fundamentals, and the other will be a security breakout session. Make sure to stop by and say hello! Podcast swag Learn more Admin Trailblazers Group Social Love our podcasts? Full show transcript Josh Birk:
Welcome, Salesforce admins. I'm Josh Birk, your guest host for this week. This week we're going to sit down with our brand new Lead Admin Evangelist, Kate Lessard, and get to know her a little bit better. So let's go straight to the tape.
All right. Today on the show we welcome Kate Lessard to talk about, well, mostly Kate Lessard, and the things that you're doing and some of the conferences you're going to be going to. So Kate, welcome to the show. Kate Lessard:
Thank you. Excited to be here and to talk about myself. Josh Birk:
It's all of our favorite topics. All right, so going into your earlier years, the first thing that I see in your early years is that you studied abroad in France. How did that come about? Kate Lessard:
Oh, my gosh, I was so lucky to be able to do that, and my study abroad sister is still one of my very best friends. I just went back and saw her this year. She just had a baby, so that was really cool. Yeah, I studied French in high school and just really loved the language and learning about France. And had the opportunity to go with my high school for a really short spring break-style program, and then went back in college. Josh Birk:
I got it. I did like that underneath you listed some of your activities that included gastronomy. Isn't that just a fancy word for saying French food? Kate Lessard:
Oh, yeah. We had a whole class that I got credit for in college on gastronomy, which was wine tasting and learning how to cook desserts and cheese tasting. Josh Birk:
I had to take PE. Kate Lessard:
I know it was the best class. Josh Birk:
Not fair. Okay. And then you went on to study art and eventually a master's in museum studies. Where did that interest come from, and what's it like studying museum studies? Kate Lessard:
Yeah, I've always loved art, and that was my favorite subject in school growing up, and especially when I went to France and got to see all these incredible artworks at some of their wonderful museums, decided that I really loved art, loved art history, and wanted to find a career in that. And museum study seemed like a cool way to be able to do that, to just be able to experience some of the best artworks in the world and be able to share that with others. So that was where I went into that kind of study path. Josh Birk:
Nice, nice. Well, and to put a cap on that, giving you an overview for the, and I'm going to try to get this right, the Pre-Raphaelite female muse in Juliet Margaret Cameron's, Idols of the King photographs. Did I get any of that pronounced correctly? Kate Lessard:
That was pretty close. Josh Birk:
Okay. Kate Lessard:
That was pretty good, yes. My master's thesis, the longest paper I will ever write in my life, hopefully. It was really fun to dive into some Pre-Raphaelite photography. It was one of the first actual times that photography was used as artwork and not just capturing the world around us. So that was really cool. Josh Birk:
That's really cool. That's very, very cool. Now, how did you move from French and art and photography into software and computer? Kate Lessard:
Oh, gosh, what a journey. So, with that museum studies and art background, I was working for some arts and culture organizations, nonprofits, and I started at a nonprofit in Denver, Colorado. And my first day on the job, they asked me if I had ever heard of Salesforce, and I said, "No." And they said, "That's okay, but you're in charge of it now." So accidental admin is my entry point. Josh Birk:
Gotcha. Nice, nice. And I mean, I assume you can talk about it, but your first gig was something about counterterrorism? Kate Lessard:
Yes, it was the Counterterrorism Education Learning Lab. They had an exhibit space, so that's why I was drawn to it initially, because there was this museum space that still exists in Denver that you can go into and learn about counterterrorism. But the main thing that we did was programs in training up event staff and volunteers about how they could recognize signs of terrorism. And if you see something, say something. Josh Birk:
Interesting. So in the age of 9/11, because museums, public spaces, all of this kind of stuff... It's fascinating how our public safety protocol has gotten above flight learning CPR. Kate Lessard:
Absolutely. Yeah. Your volunteer job is more in-depth these days. Josh Birk:
Right. Now, before we get into your current job, let's talk a little bit about your vast experience in volunteering. We'll start with: How did you get involved with Trailblazer mentoring? Kate Lessard:
Oh, gosh. When I was an accidental admin, I was so lucky to find a mentor in the community, and as I got more advanced in my career and was able to be like, "Oh, my gosh, I have kind of crossed this threshold of needing someone to mentor me," which I guess we always need someone to mentor us, but I felt like I was in a space where I could actually start to give back to others, and that's when I joined the mentorship program. Josh Birk:
Nice. And we had Heather Black on the DevPod talking about Supermums. Tell me a little bit about that program. Kate Lessard:
Supermums is such a cool organization. They are based in the UK, and they actually have a Salesforce class that their students go through, and they have these modules that they work through. And the mentors are kind of like, I almost think of it as like a teaching assistant, because you're not just there to provide career guidance. You are also there to help them develop their Salesforce skills and help them through the training classes. Josh Birk:
Nice. Nice. And I know there are similar programs, and they find that it's amazing how much that increases the success of not only gaining the knowledge but knowing what to do when you walk into an office and you have to have an interview for it. Kate Lessard:
Absolutely. And being able to have a portfolio of work that you can show someone like, "Hey, I've actually done this; I've built this." You can see it live. Josh Birk:
Now you've had a lot of experiences, both on the stage but also behind the scenes for events. You've been a community group leader; you've worked with WITness Success; you've worked with one of my favorites, Forcelandia. First of all, what brought you into that side? Because that is very different from mentoring; it's very different from educational; it's very organizational program management, working with people. What attracted you to that kind of volunteering? Kate Lessard:
Yeah, very different, but also a lot of the same group of people. And so, when I was mentoring and becoming involved in the community, I met several people that were involved with the Denver Women in Technology group as well as the Denver Admin group when I was living out in Colorado. And they kind of folded me into WITness Success and were really welcoming and started off just volunteering with the registration table, really enjoying the conference itself, and wanted to just be part of making it happen. It was such a good experience for me, both networking wise and learning wise. Josh Birk:
Got it. And speaking of learning, what are some lessons you've learned from those experiences? Kate Lessard:
Oh, my goodness. Well, with Forcelandia, I am the communications lead, which means that I am in charge of basically tracking down speakers, communicating with them, making sure that they have all of the information that they need to be successful. And the things that I have learned that I use in just my life project management philosophy is that no question is a dumb question. If you have a question, you should always ask it because you don't want to be the one that doesn't have the answer and isn't where you're supposed to be, especially at a conference when people are depending on you. And also to balance communication, figuring out how people respond. Do they want one big communication with all the facts? Is it helpful to break it down into littler snippets? Just figuring out the way that different people work and how they absorb information has been something that's been really helpful. Josh Birk:
Love it. Now talking about your roles, moving on to the stage, and also the skills that you were just talking about. Now you're only about two weeks into the gig, but first of all, welcome to the team. Kate Lessard:
Thank you. Happy to be here. Josh Birk:
What is your new job, and what's the one sentence or when people ask you, "Wait, what does an evangelist do?" What do you tell them? Kate Lessard:
My new job is Lead Admin Evangelist at Salesforce, and evangelists get to be out in the community sharing how awesome it is to be a Salesforce admin and the very cool things that we get to do. So I'm really drawn to this because you get to still be technical and have to understand and know how to do the things, but you also get to share the excitement behind them and be able to share that with others and get them excited and doing all of the really awesome things that you can do as a Salesforce admin. Josh Birk:
Love it. Is there any early content that you're working on that you can share with us right now? Kate Lessard:
Oh, absolutely. I will be at Dreamforce this year presenting two sessions and also kind of helping some other speakers get ready for their sessions on the admin track. Josh Birk:
So if you're on the admin track, you might be hearing from Kate pretty soon. Now let's go ahead and dive into those two sessions. Now, let's start with the one I'm actually a little familiar with because you presented a version of it at Forcelandia and you talk about jumping into the shoes of a developer and then some of the lessons you learned from that. What enticed you to try to jump into the shoes as a developer? Kate Lessard:
A few years ago, I was at a point where I was feeling really good in my admin career and didn't know what the next step was. And I feel like at the time, you were an admin or you were a developer, there was not the amazing options that we have right now to take our career in. They just weren't as widely publicized. And so I was like, "Oh, I guess a developer is my next step." And so I went through RAD Women, which was an incredible training program. I learned probably more in those few weeks than I've learned in much of my life and got to the end of it and realized that the number one lesson I learned was that I didn't want to be a developer. And that there's no such thing as being just an admin, which I think was the big lesson, that you can take skills, and you can continue to learn from different subject areas, and they can just make you a better admin. And that was a really big lesson. Josh Birk:
Yeah, because that was my follow-up question. So how long did the developer's life stay for you? Kate Lessard:
Oh, yeah, that was shattered pretty quickly. Still very dev curious; I am very fascinated by the things that developers do, and now I have the language to be able to speak and understand, which was one of those really important things to learn. Josh Birk:
And I think it's something that's going to become more common because the era you're talking about is the one before we started using phrases like admineloper, which I have been on the record of saying is both my favorite word and also my least favorite word. It's my favorite word because it's like it proves the need. We wouldn't throw that part together if we didn't have to describe people who had to carry both roles, but also, as an English major, it just makes my ears ring a little bit every time I say it. But I also feel like admins are being confronted with... As flow expands into being more parity, have more feature parity with APEX. What I've heard a lot is it's not the exercises that programmers go to when it comes to streaming logic together, but understanding what a variable is and what are these nouns that we're working with. Gives a good framework for using a lot of the more advanced features in flow. Kate Lessard:
Absolutely. And it just kind of lifts up the curtain. One of my developer friends always likes to say, it drives her crazy when people say that "Dev work is magic," because it's not magic. Josh Birk:
It's not magic. Kate Lessard:
It's logic. Josh Birk:
Actually, one of my old school jokes was when people found out that I'd gone from English and psychology and I got into computers, and they're like, "Yeah, but you were never very good at math." And I'm like, "Of course I'm not good at math; that's why I have a computer. I'm good at logic; I've got a computer that can do all the math for me. I don't need that." Kate Lessard:
That is great. I love it. Josh Birk:
Now tell me a little bit about your second session. Kate Lessard:
Second session is going to be a breakout on security. Josh Birk:
Oh. Kate Lessard:
So we're still working out what exactly that's going to look like. So this is just a teaser, of course, but going to talk about building a security culture at your organization. Josh Birk:
Oh, I like that. I like that. Don't worry. You still have about 30 days, so plenty of time. Kate Lessard:
Thank goodness. Josh Birk:
To get some slides together. And then I will be seeing you at Mile High Dreamin'. Tell me a little bit about the talk that you're going to present there. Kate Lessard:
Yes, this is one of my favorite talks because it's something that I've used in my own life. I will be talking about five tips to ace your interview. So, whether you're talking to HR, a hiring manager, doing a technical assessment, five tips that are going to help you land that next step, dream job. Josh Birk:
Nice, nice. Now, in fact, I'm going to be completely honest here. I'm like, I knew I had Kate on the DevPod, and I'm like, "Wait, what did we talk about?" And so I went back, and it was your case study, like how to write a good case study that you had presented at Forcelandia. So you've presented a lot of different topics over the years, and this is always a kind of a mean podcast trick, because I'm asking you to pick the favorite of all your children. But out of all your presentations, do you have one that kind of stands out that's like that was super fun to do? Kate Lessard:
Oh, gosh. I think that changes year over year. Josh Birk:
Sure. Kate Lessard:
I get really connected to one each year, it feels like. Josh Birk:
Yeah. Kate Lessard:
So right now I would say the Why Admins Should Learn Dev Fundamentals or Why Admins Should Learn Dev Fundamentals is probably my favorite. I think that's the most relevant- Josh Birk:
Got it. Kate Lessard:
-To my life. And so, that's the current favorite, but ask me next year. Josh Birk:
And I will tell you, as the life of an evangelist, chasing after the next shiny object is actually a very good habit to have. So you're on the right track. All right, well, if people want to hear about the interview tips, they'll have to visit you in Denver for Mile High Dreamin'. For the other stuff, we'll see you at Dreamforce. Kate, I have one final question for you. As a yoga instructor, what is your response when people ask, "Why do yoga?" Kate Lessard:
Oh, my gosh, I actually don't know that anyone has ever asked me that. Josh Birk:
Really? Kate Lessard:
Which is funny. Why not do yoga? Josh Birk:
There you go. Kate Lessard:
I love to tell people that... People have this whole concept that yoga is this huge big thing, and I like to tell them to take it back a step. And if you're in class, if you're breathing, you're doing yoga. Josh Birk:
Nice. Kate Lessard:
And breathing is good for everybody. Josh Birk:
Right. Yes. I love that. I love that. All righty, Kate. Well, thank you so much for the time and information. It was a lot of fun. Kate Lessard:
Yeah, see you soon. See you in Denver. Josh Birk:
See you in Denver.
I want to thank Kate for the great conversation and information, and as always, I want to thank you for listening. If you want to learn more about this show and being an admin in general, go on over to admin.salesforce.com. Thanks again, everybody, and we'll talk to you next week.
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Thu, 22 August 2024
Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Lisa Tulchin, Senior Curriculum Developer at Salesforce. Join us as we chat about user learning styles and how to use them to create better training sessions. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Lisa Tulchin. Choose the right learning style for you on Trailhead As a Senior Curriculum Developer for Salesforce, Lisa spends a lot of time thinking about user learning styles. That’s why there are two paths to learning new Salesforce skills. You can use Trailhead to go at your own pace or sign up for Trailhead Academy to work in an instructor-led group setting. The best way to choose between Trailhead and Trailhead Academy is to think about what’s worked for you in the past. When have you been able to learn something quickly, and when have you struggled? Remember that it doesn’t have to be an either/or decision. You can always see how far you get working through recommended badges and trails, but consider Trailhead Academy as an option if you get stuck. Breaking through fear in user training Fear can be a major barrier to learning, and it’s often what’s behind resistance to a new process. That’s why Lisa recommends starting your training sessions by “hugging the elephant.” Acknowledge that, yes, this new process is tricky while also explaining how it will make their lives easier. What makes sense to you may not work for other user learning styles—some people want to run down a checklist and others need more context. “Kids are a lot more comfortable making mistakes than we are as adults,” Lisa says, “saying, ‘I don’t know,’ is one of the scariest things for adults to admit.” In any user training, make sure give your users explicit permission to ask questions so no one gets left behind. Best practices for planning user trainings When she’s writing a new training, Lisa tries to separate what information her users need to know from what would be nice for them to know. She calls it the 80/20 rule. Generally, if you can get your users to 80% with a training, they have what they need to do their job. You can fill in the other 20% as you go. Another user training hack is to break complicated things down into manageable tasks to make them easier to learn. Lisa explains that our brains tend to remember 5-7 chunks of information at a time (for example, phone numbers or ZIP codes). So if you’re writing out a task and the individual steps get into the double digits, you might want to break it down differently so it’s easier to remember. Lisa has tons of great tips in this episode for how to keep up with your own learning and take advantage of the resources out there from Salesforce, so be sure to take a listen. And don’t forget to subscribe for more from the Salesforce Admins Podcast. Podcast swag Learn more Admin Trailblazers Group Social Full show transcript Mike Gerholdt:
This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we were talking to Lisa Tulchin about learning and how you can be a better learner, and also, as a Salesforce admin, how you can help teach and educate and drive user adoption with your user. I've known Lisa for over a decade now. She's a senior curriculum developer at Trailhead. She's done both in-person and self-paced learning. She's created both. Mike Gerholdt:
So I feel like she's a real expert on this, and we cover a lot because I had a lot of great conversations at TrailblazerDX about learning, and I know admins are always learning, so that's why I wanted to cover that. Now, before we get into the episode, I want to be sure that you're following the Salesforce Admins Podcast on iTunes or Spotify, wherever you get your podcasts. That way, when a new episode drops like this one, and it's amazing on learning on Thursday mornings, it's immediately on your phone. So be sure you're following that, and then a new episode will drop. So with that, let's get to, this is such a fun episode, let's get to Lisa Tulchin. So, Lisa, welcome to the podcast. Lisa Tulchin:
Thanks. It's such a privilege to be here. Mike Gerholdt:
Well, we've known each other for a while, but I am unleashing you to the Salesforce ecosystem because I feel like I've secretly held this decade of awesomeness of knowing you and talking about learning. That's what we're going to talk about today, in case you didn't listen in the intro. But Lisa, let's level set because I've had the privilege of working with you and seeing you teach, and create, and do, and that's why I wanted to have you on the podcast. But let's start with what you do at Salesforce and how you got here. Lisa Tulchin:
I am a senior curriculum developer, which means I help write content for the product education team. I have been focusing almost exclusively on instructor-led training. So when you sign up through Trailhead Academy or one of the bootcamps before an event to be in a live or virtual classroom with the person. So that's what I have been focusing on, but the group has expanded over the past year, and I will no longer be focusing just on that type of content. Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah. And so if you think about it, what's great about Salesforce is we have lots of different methods of learning. Lisa Tulchin:
Indeed. Mike Gerholdt:
And to hover around, I've seen you do instructor-led training and we have that. We also have Trailhead, or what'd you call it? Self-paced learning. Lisa Tulchin:
Yeah, so Trailhead is one example of self-paced, and I have in my past at Salesforce as a full-time employee, because I've been here three years, I have actually written a few trails. I may start writing them again. We are still figuring out exactly the roles, but that's just one example of what we'd like to say self-paced. And self-paced really means that you, as an individual, go to the resource and, I guess, take it in, read it, test it on your own timing. The difference with if you're in a classroom, you're following the agenda with the instructor, and you have to do things in a certain order, in a certain pace. But self-paced, and Trailhead is one example. Slack, and Tableau, or other resources that have their own training repositories that you can also take in at your own timing. So that's why we use the term self-paced. Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, no, it makes sense. Otherwise, I was just going to call it instructor-led and not instructor-led. Lisa Tulchin:
Exactly. Mike Gerholdt:
Like hot dog, not hot dog, right? Lisa Tulchin:
Exactly. Mike Gerholdt:
Okay, so I feel like here is the question everybody thinks I'm going to ask, and I'm not because everybody would ask, Okay, Lisa, well, then which is better, instructor-led or self-paced? And I'm not going to ask you that question because I think it's the wrong question to ask. I think what the right question to ask is how, as a Salesforce administrator getting into the ecosystem, do I figure out if in-person or self-paced learning is best for me? Lisa Tulchin:
I like that question a lot. Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, that's why I'm asking it. Lisa Tulchin:
Yeah, no, I really like that question a lot. The hardest thing with radio, of course, is that people can't see me thinking literally when I think, I always think my face shows the wheels turning, but I have to remind myself that you all can't see that. So I'm thinking through- Mike Gerholdt:
You're envisioning. Lisa Tulchin:
Visualize Lisa looking away, and the [inaudible 00:05:01] the hamster in her brain is running on that wheel. Mike Gerholdt:
It's smoking. Lisa Tulchin:
Yeah, exactly. I think you have to stop and have an honest talk with yourself. What have you found for yourself in the past? We're all adults going into this scenario for the most part, and I'd like to think that by the time we get to that stage, we understand a little bit about ourselves and how we take information in. So for example, if you're just starting out in the ecosystem, not even for example, I'd say the first thing you should do if you haven't already is actually go to trailhead.com and sign up for an account. Lisa Tulchin:
It's free to do that, and you automatically then have an enormous number of resources at your fingertip just through that site. There is Trailhead, the slightly gamified, self-paced learning that's available to you for Trailhead resources. There's also Trailhead Academy, which are the classes. But there also is the community, and so your peers. So I think that's one way that you can explore and test out waters. If you're thinking to yourself, I think I could do this on my own. Well, if you log in and you see how you feel after taking a couple of what they call modules, or trails, or badges, then that may be a sign that you're good to go. But if you're doing this and you're thinking I need a little structure, then you immediately do have resources because you can sign up for ILT, but you also have the community. Lisa Tulchin:
So you can go there, maybe find a local user group through that site, and ask questions of other people there. So I think that's the first thing is have an honest talk with yourself. See if you can figure out for yourself what your learning style is. I personally often need that instructor. I need that person in the room either live or virtually helping talk me through things, honestly, helping me keep focused on what I'm actually doing. There are other resources there. I sometimes need a map. Lisa Tulchin:
I like to have a map and being able to think. I also need to be goal-oriented. So for me, credentials were a natural way to think about things. And even if you're not going to study and earn a credential, there is a section on the site for credentials, and they have, for example, if you were just starting out in the ecosystem, the Salesforce Associate Certification might be a really good starting point, and they have recommended badges and trails to take. So that's what I mean there's some guidance, even if you don't think that cert is for you, you could look at the map to get that cert and follow that along, and take information in. Mike Gerholdt:
No, I think, I mean, you're so spot on. I often see a lot of people in the community ask a question assuming someone else has the answer, and I really think a lot of people forget they have the answer inside them. They know what way they learn best. They just sometimes are looking for validation in that. Listening to your answer, I was thinking back to when I had to tackle something big, I really needed that in class sitting next to somebody with an instructor so that I was focused. And it's not that I can't focus at home or at work, it's that I think you probably know this, people sometimes try to do a trailhead module and answer email and maybe watch a webinar, and it's like, stop. You can't get away with that in class. Lisa Tulchin:
You can't. Mike Gerholdt:
So that's what I find. That's what I find. Lisa Tulchin:
Yeah, and I mean, the other benefit is finding a local Salesforce user group can also be super helpful because I think typically they have regular meetings at a certain date and time, and so I find there's a lot of talk about what they call the beginner's mindset and how we all have to have the beginner's mindset, and I think it's really hard and it's easy for us to talk about, but truly being beginners, it's scary. You don't know something, you don't know what you don't know. For me, there's that fear of messing up, and that's definitely something I've learned like teaching adults, and I have also taught kids or, yeah, kids, they were actually kids, and kids are a lot more comfortable making mistakes than we are as adults. Mike Gerholdt:
Why do you think that is? Lisa Tulchin:
I think part of that is that feeling of, as adults, we're supposed to know everything. If we followed a traditional path, we've gone to college, we've maybe gone on to graduate school, and we're just supposed to know. You're supposed to be able to move and function in an environment. And saying I don't know, is one of the scariest things I think for adults to admit. Lisa Tulchin:
And that's one reason why I just encourage a community and peers because there typically are themes for meetings where people go and either someone's presenting or sharing what they know or everyone's there asking questions, and sometimes it's just being in a room and having somebody else ask a question that you've been worrying about. It almost makes you relax a little, feel somewhat more secure. And that's one reason why I would recommend that. Now, I say that as an ambivert, as someone who is very uncomfortable in situations where I don't know people. So it's actually quite challenging for me. It's easy for me to say, go join the local user group. Actually, showing up to that first meeting of a user group is really hard for me. Lisa Tulchin:
But once I settle in an environment and I can feel more comfortable, I am very outgoing, but that's what that ambivert talks to, but that first getting me out the door. So if you're sitting here and you're listening to me talk and saying, Lisa, you are crazy. There's no way I'm ever going to join a user group, that's talking to people I don't know. I get it. And that's why, in a way, there's a virtual user group, people can chat. I think every cloud, for the most part, has its own section of the community where people can ask questions and help each other. And as I said, we have all these self-paced environments where you can little by little take on information and take it in without having, if you're truly introverted, you don't need to interact with anybody else. Mike Gerholdt:
So flip the coin a little bit from us learning to admins teaching and maybe even user group leaders doing some of this birds of a feather or instructor walking people through stuff. What in your experience in both you've said you've taught children, you've taught adults, what in your experience really resonates when you're trying to walk some adults through new technology or new functionality and have them learn? Lisa Tulchin:
There are a lot of different words for this, but yeah, I was thinking about how I was going to answer you while you were asking the question. I came up with three or four different ways of saying the same thing. When we first worked together, it was WIIFM, what's in it for me? I think now they talk a lot about personas or jobs to be done, so I'm throwing these out there in case folks listening have heard any of these. The really important thing for adults is that when they go into training, or if you're trying to think of developing training for them, the training speaks very specifically to what they need to know to get the job done. Lisa Tulchin:
When you're teaching kids, you can teach them almost any topic, and they'll be much more trusting about, I don't see the why, but I understand you're telling me, and therefore I need to know. But with adults, it is so critical that they understand the why am I sitting here or why am I watching this video? Or why am I reading this Java? I think figure out the why, and everything should hopefully flow a lot easier from that why. For one thing, you'll have immediate buy-in from the people that you're working with, because if they don't understand the why, they tune you out. Lisa Tulchin:
If you have that why you have their attention. I'm not saying they're going to be eager, willing, and able when they're sitting in the room, but they're going to be more likely to be behind you or stay with you as you go through it. And it also will help them remember what you're training them. It can be overwhelming to sit down and learn a new technology. Now, Salesforce, as we both know, has evolved and is constantly, I think, improving what they call the user experience, the way that you as an end user take in the system, but it's still scary, and new, and challenging. So the more that you get what you need to know in the moment that you're needing to know it and not getting a lot of extra stuff, that's another thing that's really important in designing training. Another thing people may have heard or some folks throw around is the 80/20 approach, which is that training should focus on the 80% of what people need to know. Lisa Tulchin:
So dividing the focus of the training to be almost exclusively on what they need to know 80% of the time, and maybe if you have time, have an extra session or just provide an additional resource for what they need to know 20% of the time. Part of that is I've learned a lot about the science behind the way we take information in, the way we remember things, and that's another reason to emphasize what they need to know now as opposed to the nice to have for that couple times a year. I mean, think about it, right? If you're a salesperson and you're learning how to use Salesforce, what do you need to know? You need to know how to enter leads. Lisa Tulchin:
If you're doing sales cloud, you need to probably know how to do leads so that you can track potential sales. And then you need to know how to create probably an opportunity so you can track an actual sale and maybe how to add products to that opportunity, but that's the bulk of your time, right? Creating leads, creating opportunities, tracking activity around those two records. But you may not close, depending on the type of business you do, you may not close that many opportunities in a year. It may be a lot of nurturing. So focusing training on closing opportunities may not be as important. That's just one example. Mike Gerholdt:
No, that's a really good example. So here's why I was looking forward to this podcast. So can I take those two principles and turn them on their head and ask you, do those two apply, and I'll regurgitate those, when admins are trying to learn Salesforce through Trailhead? And those two principles I'm pointing at are they may or may not understand why, and they're trying to focus on the 20% versus the 80%. Lisa Tulchin:
So that's a really good question because having from the admin perspective, there's just so much to learn, and it can be overwhelming. I think, honestly, what I had to do, and I'm trying to remember when I was first starting it out, I broke things down. Instead of looking at the whole 100%. What I did was I looked at, now I admit, because I've never sat in the job, I've never sat in the chair as an admin. I was looking at the admin certification, and I was looking at the breakdown of the exam and looking at what the breakdown of the exam was and what had the most emphasis in the exam. And then I was thinking, well, that's probably either what's the hardest or, I mean, I probably was going about it the wrong way from that point of ignorance, but I felt like that's most of what admins have to do. And so for me, I would probably break it down and focus section by section of that. Mike Gerholdt:
I think that's good philosophy. I mean, I was kind of sneaking that question at you because I feel like it's one thing to give people advice on how to instruct, but then it's also on, does that also apply to us learning as well? So you tackled it well. How does some of this work? As we both, I mean, we focus on learning and being new, and that applies throughout the years, but is there anything you think of if you are going into perhaps training an older set of users, and so there's median age, obviously companies try to hire for diversity, but some companies have older users, and should you think about how to frame things differently or if you are in that set, is there a way to think through maybe because you teased, and I'd love to know more about the science of what you read on learning? Lisa Tulchin:
Oh, yeah. So there are a couple of things popping into my mind with that. One is that there has been a lot written, and I've only read a little bit about generationally differences in learning. So that Gen X, Y, and Z, millennials, I'm not sure exactly the lineup, they learn differently, and the younger employees are having grown up in a much more digital first age, take information in differently. So if you're training older employees, there are a couple of things that come to mind. One is my feeling, oh my goodness, I may be approaching older employee "as a group." But the other thing is that try to be sensitive to what you may encounter as resistance may actually be fear. Lisa Tulchin:
There can be a sense with new, technology in particular, a fear of I know how to do things really, really well in the previous system, method, whatever you want to call it. This is something new, and I don't know how to do my job well. And the reality is there is age discrimination and so you could be starting to spiral into a fear cycle. What if I can't catch on? What if I can't do my job? What if I can't "wrap my hands" around this new technology? Am I going to lose my job? So I think there's a level of that that could be behind what you might be perceiving as resistance with older employees that you wouldn't necessarily be receiving from younger employees. For one thing, they're closer to being in that true beginner's mindset where they don't know things and are taking things in all the time. They're less likely to be as insecure about their job and potentially a little more open to systems changing. Lisa Tulchin:
So that's one thing that pops into my head. And I have gone and I've trained people on how to use a CRM system when the previous one was paper, and there was a range of employees in the room; they did tend to be older, and there was a lot of resistance to that. So it could also depend on the shift that you're making. If you're going from one online system to another online system, it likely would have less resistance. I kept emphasizing, you're just carrying around an iPad, you're not carrying around stacks and stacks and files and files. Look how much easier this is. And a lot of them though still were like, but everything's in my head. Now you're making me write it down. So I think the reality is change is hard, no matter what. I think it's just as someone who might be in charge of training others, being open to the fact that what you may be seeing as intractable resistance could actually be a fear-based response. Yeah. Mike Gerholdt:
One thing you said, which is the biggest thing in all of learning, which is change is hard, right? Anytime you're learning something, you're learning something because something is changing. One, and I believe you were part of this project with me, I've always tried to really make it resonate with admins. Hey, when you're rolling out a new app, make sure you're paying attention to all the other changes that are going on in the organization. Because I know the project that we worked on together, we had a big change in the organization on top of a technical change. And you can be focused on, well, we're just rolling out Salesforce, right? Oh, but there's organizational structure, and there's a whole bunch of other changes going on. I think it's one thing, it can be a little hard maybe for an admin to wrap their head around organizational change, although they should. But looking at yourself individually. Is there something to be said for taking an inventory in the amount of change that's going on in your life while you're trying to learn something? Does that affect how you gain your knowledge? Lisa Tulchin:
Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And that's a really good point, which is that, and actually something popped into my head, sorry, when you were talking about how when we worked together, there was a big change, not just a technology, is that you may encounter resistance to training people on a new technology because the new technology could be the convenient scapegoat for a lot of the anxiety and fear around change that is happening. So sometimes it's good to just open things up or just acknowledge and be open to the fact. I was in a meeting with someone recently, who I loved the way they opened it. They just opened it with a phrase that they said they'd been taught, which is, "Let's start off by hugging the elephant," was what they said. Mike Gerholdt:
Oh, I've never heard that. Lisa Tulchin:
Isn't it wonderful? I loved that, and a picture of a baby elephant and people hugging it. But it was really, let's start out by hugging the elephant, which is to just acknowledge upfront that that elephant in the room. We're not going to tiptoe around a topic. So it could be as simple as opening up a training with, Hey, I know there's a lot going on, let's just acknowledge that right out and maybe give five minutes for people to just talk about it and get it off their chest. And then they'll feel better. They'll have cleansed the air a little bit, and you can move into, okay, let's focus on how the system works. But I've noticed myself personally, yeah, if a lot of things are happening and I'm under stress, I could have more trouble focusing, which means that as a learner being in a classroom, it's harder for me to take things in if things aren't paced appropriately, which is a great way for me to seg into the science of learning. Mike Gerholdt:
Nice segue. Lisa Tulchin:
I took that, and I brought it back where I wanted to go five minutes ago, whatever it was, that was so subtle. So from a science perspective, there's this feeling of, and as a curriculum developer, we talk about the need to what we call chunk things out. So it's break things down. And now, admittedly, my research is a little outdated on this, but when I was first learning it, they talked about no more than five or seven things in any given segment. And I know sometimes, especially with software training, it's really hard because, in order to do a task, you may actually have to do a certain number of steps maybe. But I really try to break training down by tasks. So if I have an exercise, I'll have broken the exercise down into tasks, and if I've written a task out and it's more than a certain number of steps within that task, that's usually assigned to me that this might be too big a chunk. And I go back, and I see, do I have to break this down further? Lisa Tulchin:
And every exercise, I should say, is pinned to a scenario. And so it all goes back to the scenario. Okay, in this exercise, it's usually a scenario. Either you are an admin or you're observing an admin who has something to do and they're trying to do A, B, C, and I'm like, oh, well, maybe A, B, and C is too much, too big a chunk right now, and it has to really be A, B, or maybe even just A, and that's the way I approach it because you need to only give so much information to a person, and then you need to shift gears and maybe you need to talk about something else for a while, let them process. It's another reason why a lot of training with systems is around watch me do it. Now you do it. We don't always have the time. I always wish we were given more time for training, but you may not always have the time. So it may be introduce a concept and then have people walk through, but just make sure you're not having them walk through too much at one given time. Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, training, unfortunately, is always like the landscaping when you're building a new house. It's the last thing and you have no money left, and it just ends up being here's a flower from the hardware store. Lisa Tulchin:
I know, I really wish- Mike Gerholdt:
Congratulations. Lisa Tulchin:
I really wish we'd be able to have the full landscape architect at all times. Mike Gerholdt:
The whole thing. The whole thing, the drawing. Everything. Lisa Tulchin:
Tear the yard out, rebuild it entirely. That's what I feel. I mean, that's one reason why it's nice that there is a resource such as Trailhead, and I haven't even talked about it, but when you onboard as a Salesforce customer, there are other resources that are available to you or to companies and to customers, especially if they're on a success plan. There are whole libraries and resources available to them. So I would say, as an admin, find out is your company, do they have a success plan? And if so, which plan and what resources are available to you? And if you have them, take advantage of them. Some of them are one-on-one coaching, I think for Premier. So you have all these resources, and I would say take advantage of all of the resources that are available to you to help you learn and then help you get everyone else working towards using the system effectively. Mike Gerholdt:
One thing I thought of as we bring this around to a close. One thing you do that is exactly what admins do, I mean, you do a lot, is approach a brand new feature and have to learn it because you have to write training for it. I mean, you have to write Trailhead modules and all kinds of stuff, and admins maybe don't necessarily have to train somebody else on that, but they have to learn it themselves. I would love to know, based on your experience, when a new feature comes down into your queue and you're like, I got to write a module on this and I got to learn this feature, what's your approach? Lisa Tulchin:
I personally might be more of a maximalist than a minimalist. Mike Gerholdt:
Please explain. Lisa Tulchin:
I want to get my hands on all the things and digest them to try to figure out what is the essence there. Now I admit, Mike, I am learning this not because I'm going to have to use it every day in my job. I'm learning this because I want to understand the full picture in order to be able to distill it down to its basic essence. And so my objective might be a little bit different. I would say that the task is easier if it's something that is new to me because there will be resources that are out there for me to take in. When it's net new, the challenge really can be trying to figure out how something works when there aren't as many resources, but I would definitely say being part of the ecosystem, stay plugged in, keep an ear out for the announcements that happen at the regular events such as the TDX, the conference that just happened. Lisa Tulchin:
Big announcements will be made at Dreamforce and at TDX. There are also what we call world tours, which are events that take place in different cities around the world. I know that it's not possible for everyone to attend these, but there is the Salesforce Plus website, and a lot of the keynotes and major presentations from all of these events are available for free streaming. And actually, I think Salesforce Plus has other admin-focused resources that could be amazing right there. And especially if you're a visual or an auditory learner, and by that I mean watching something or hearing something that could be a really good resource because you can listen to the announcements and then they have sessions that focus on different aspects of different clouds, and so you can listen in and hear announcements and sharing about resources. Lisa Tulchin:
The Salesforce blog is another good site because there'll be articles published there talking about new resources, and that's kind of how I get my information for net new content. And then they release webinars, and I know as an employee, I have access to all of them, but keep an ear out for resources such like that because they'll share all the changes that are coming and there'll be demos of how it works. Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, no, there's a ton out there. You very much are a maximalist. Lisa Tulchin:
I know, man. I know. I'm not saying do it all, I'm saying pick and choose, right? Mike Gerholdt:
Thank you, Lisa, for being on the podcast. I appreciate you coming by and sharing resources, and helping us understand the world of learning. Again, you know what's funny? Is if you've listened to this podcast for a while, you know how many times we keep mentioning know the why. And I've done podcasts with Kevin Richardson on the five whys. I've worked with the Trailhead team on understanding the why. It really always keeps coming back to the why. But I will tell you this, listening to this episode, I learned something, which was the whole point, but it really sunk into me. The fear could equal resistance when you're doing training. I run into that where people are super resistant, and it was out of fear, not out of the willingness to learn. So I think that's interesting. I really hope you got something out of this. I loved the way Lisa approached training and talking about five to seven steps. Mike Gerholdt:
I feel like that was super important. So I hope you enjoyed this episode, and if you did, can you do me a favor? Share it on social. Share it to one person, maybe send it to a friend that could be doing training. I promise you, you have to know somebody that's doing training. That, or at a user group, you could share it and be like, Hey, listen to this great podcast about training. And I learned about five to seven steps and the 80/20 rule, but you got to listen for the 80/20 rule. And of course, if you're looking for more great resources, just check out the show notes. Also, everything is at admin.salesforce.com, including in the show notes a transcript of this episode. And of course, we will post this to the Admin Trailblazer community, which is one of the plethora of places that you can go and ask questions and help other Salesforce admins learn. So, of course, until next time, I'll see you in the cloud.
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Thu, 15 August 2024
Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Ella Marks, Senior Marketing Manager at Salesforce. Join us as we chat about the keys to creating an effective presentation, how to prep, and how to create a strong ending. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Ella Marks. Core principles to prep any presentation We’re starting the last quarter of the year and that means it’s presentation season. Whether it’s presenting about the work we did last year or trying to get budget for next year, creating an effective presentation is a core skill for Salesforce Admins. That’s why I’m so excited to bring Ella Marks on the pod. She’s presented on some of Salesforce’s biggest stages, like Dreamforce and multiple World Tours. So I wanted to hear her tips for how to put together a great presentation. The cool thing is that no matter the format or venue, Ella uses the same core principles to prep for every presentation. 1. Who is your audience? Ella’s first step is to identify the audience that you’re presenting for. Who’s in the room? What do they already know, and what are you going to teach them? Your content is going to be very different if you’re presenting to a room full of admins versus a room full of new users. If you don’t know exactly who’s in the audience or what their level of expertise is, just ask them. For example, “Raise your hand if this topic is new to you.” In general, it makes your presentation more engaging if there’s a little bit of back-and-forth with the audience. 2. Make an outline and blue box your slides The next step is to make an outline. Ella recommends starting by making a big list of everything you could possibly say about the presentation topic. Then you can start moving things around, whittling it down, and picking some themes. All of this helps you decide on a call to action. When she’s ready to start creating her slide deck, Ella uses a technique called “blue boxing” to make a rough draft. Essentially, you use blue boxes to rough out what you’re going to put on each slide. So a slide might have three blue boxes that say: -
Title about why this is important right now -
Text of the most important point I’m going to say -
Image to illustrate the point We’re trying to sketch out just enough to see how the presentation flows as a whole. Look for a balance of slides with more text and slides with more visuals because that variation will keep your audience engaged. That way, we’re not spending time looking for the right image or writing the perfect title until we’re sure we need it. 3. Nail the ending Conclusions are always tricky. Ella recommends asking yourself three questions: -
After my presentation, how do you want them to feel? -
After my presentation, what do you want them to think? -
After my presentation, what do you want them to do? These are your three goals, and the secret to nailing your ending is to address them throughout the presentation. Every slide should be aimed at answering one of these questions so that, by the end, the conclusion feels inevitable. Ella has lots more great tips for creating effective presentations, including how to prep with a group and the importance of a good pump-up song, so be sure to take a listen. And be sure to subscribe so you’ll never miss an episode. Podcast swag Learn more Admin Trailblazers Group Social Full show transcript Mike Gerholdt: So we're halfway through August, and for many of us, that's the start or getting real close to the start of the last quarter of the year, which means we're doing a lot of presenting, either presenting to show our work, what we've got done for this year, presenting to get budget for next year as admins for what we'd like to do or, if you're like me and a few of my colleagues, going to world tours, going to events, going to community events, and presenting. Presenting, presenting, presenting is at the heart of a lot of what Salesforce admins do. Mike Gerholdt: So this week on the podcast, I pulled in Ella Marks to talk us through and give us some tips on building phenomenal presentations in the art of presenting. Now, if you're not familiar with Ella, she's on our admin relations team, and she has done quite a few Dreamforce keynotes. She's helped coordinate a lot of our release readiness lives at Dreamforce, both on stage and recorded. So she's presented to cameras, and she's presented live on stage, and she's also coached quite a few presenters. Mike Gerholdt: And I think this is really important for us to learn because no matter how great the app is that we build, and no matter how cool the functionality is, we need to be able to stand up and deliver. And being a solid presenter and really conveying those ideas is key. So that's why I wanted to have her on the podcast. Mike Gerholdt: Now, just a reminder, if you're listening to this and you really enjoyed this episode, be sure to hit that Follow button or subscribe, depending on what the app is that you're listening to. That way you'll get a new podcast episode every time a new one drops, which is on Thursday mornings. So with that, let's get Ella on the podcast. Mike Gerholdt: So Ella, welcome to the podcast. Ella Marks: Thanks so much, Mike. Thanks for having me. Mike Gerholdt: Well, it's been a while, but I think people have seen you elsewhere in the ecosystem. I mean, we're on the same team together, but for community members that haven't run into you or seen the plethora of work that you've put out, what are some of the things you do at Salesforce? Ella Marks: I've been at Salesforce for almost seven years now and I've done a lot of different things and I'm so grateful. A lot of the time that I've spent here has been working with the admin community. You may have seen my face before on Release Readiness Live or on the keynote stage at Dreamforce, but I have the privilege of focusing on creating and distributing content for admins like you on some of our new release features and really exciting new innovations like AI. It's really fun. I get to learn a lot about the platform and I'm always really excited to hear from admins and speak to admins and create presentations for admins. So really excited to be here today and talk to you a little bit more about that. Mike Gerholdt: Cool. I'm thinking ahead and for some of the admins we're getting ready. There's TDX coming up, but also user groups for those of us in the Midwest that aren't snowed in anymore, we can get to user groups and presentations are important there and there's all kinds of stuff that we present. Not to mention that it's probably almost budget season. I got to do some presentations for budget. I got to do a whole bunch of presentations if I'm an admin. Ella Marks: There's no limit I think to the type of presentations and the amount of presentations that you can do as an admin. Like you mentioned, there's events where you're speaking to your fellow admins and developers, there's internal presentations. And I think the most exciting thing or interesting thing to me about presentations is no matter what presentation you're giving or who you're giving it to, you can go about planning for it and preparing that presentation in kind of the same way. There's some fundamentals that go across every type of presentation that you may have or create in your role as an admin. Mike Gerholdt: And you've done quite a few because I remember seeing you on the Dreamforce keynote stage and Release Readiness. I feel like you've done a lot of different style presentations too. Ella Marks: I've honestly had the privilege to be on a bunch of different stages at Salesforce, whether it's a virtual presentation or a webinar on the Dreamforce stage or even at an event. This year, I got to present and connect with a lot of people at world tour events, and like I said, they're all very different. The people in the audience are very different, and so the way that I create content for them, while I might be covering the same things is always going to have a different output because I am trying to tailor it to the audience that I have, but I kind of use the same fundamental principles when approaching any presentation I give, whether it's online, in person, a hybrid. There's a few key things that I really go back to. Mike Gerholdt: Well, let's dive into those principles. Where do you start? Ella Marks: The first thing that I do when I'm putting together any presentation is identify the audience that I'm presenting for. Now, this can be super straightforward. Sometimes you're going to know exactly who's going to be in the room. You might be doing an internal presentation at work, the stakeholders, the names on a meeting invite, and you can take the guidance from there. In other times, you may not have the list of everybody exactly who's going to be in the room, but you have a sense of who they are. So a user group presentation, for example, you may know there's a mix of admins and developers and maybe architects in that room. Ella Marks: And you need to know who those people are in order to build a presentation that is really going to engage them and teach them or persuade them or whatever your goal is. You need to start with knowing who that audience is to understand where that goal fits in and how can I communicate this information best to them. Mike Gerholdt: But I'm going to play devil's advocate and say, so what if I'm presenting to a user group and maybe I've only been there once and I don't know all the people that are going to see my presentation. What do you do then? Ella Marks: One of my favorite things that presenters do, and I use this trick sometimes. And Mike, I've seen presentations where I know you've done this too, is you can ask the room. I think it's important for us to not make any assumptions about the audiences that we're speaking to. I think that can lead sometimes to a lack of clarity and confusion. And so if you're presenting to a user group about a topic that you know a lot about, I think it's a great tool. Sometimes even just engage the audience and bring them with you to say, "Before I get started, raise your hand if you're an admin or raise your hand if you have familiarity with the topic that I'm going to cover." Ella Marks: And that does two things. One, it tells you how you can tailor the rest of your content or your presentation to the people in the room, but it also kind of opens up almost a dialogue between you and the audience. So even if they don't speak for the rest of your presentation, you've created a real human moment of engagement with them that is going to be super important and key to holding their attention for the entire time that you're presenting. Mike Gerholdt: And much like that, and Ella, I've seen you do this, is if you're going to ask the question, make sure it's data that you're going to actually act upon. Because I feel if you're going to somehow tailor your presentation and make a couple versions, which I've done for user groups because I wasn't sure what the level of interest or the level of knowledge of the topic that I was talking about was, then you can kind of immediately pivot based on that. And I think everybody appreciates when they took the time to raise their hand that you're actually curating the content for that. Ella Marks: There absolutely needs to be a payoff. If you're someone that's not as comfortable giving presentations, starting with the question at the very beginning and trying to weave that throughout can feel intimidating. And what I would recommend instead is to pick a moment within your content where you can do exactly Mike, what you just said. Which is, you have a slide that hits on, maybe it's a new feature or a different topic. Instead of asking a super broad question that you then need to weave into your story for the rest of your presentation. You can tailor your question to exactly what you're talking about on the slide. Ella Marks: And that can help you build that muscle to incorporate who's in the room and that audience into your talk track without having to start with that big broad question at the beginning. We have to start somewhere. And I think a great place to learn that skill is really starting with something small, a specific slide or a specific product, and learning from there how to incorporate the questions that you're asking to a more broader scale to cover a whole presentation. Mike Gerholdt: So sticking on the theme of building content, there's a lot of mechanics to a presentation, but building the content. Depending on the topic you're choosing, it can feel like you're boiling the ocean. "I have all this to show, and I'm on slide 68 already. I can't possibly show "What are some of the techniques that you use to really boil down what you're presenting given sometimes the restricted timeline that you have? Ella Marks: First, before I go into tips, I just want to reiterate that phrase, don't boil the ocean. That is the number one thing that literally... Mike Gerholdt: Literally don't. If you have a big death ray, please don't boil the ocean. Ella Marks: Please don't boil the ocean. Global warming, we don't need that. But I think with presentations, it's super important because you usually have limited time to communicate whatever it is in your presentation you're going to communicate. That's not even considering the fact that people's attention spans are short. So you need to do that work to figure out what are your key points. And one of the things that I really like to do is I create a document and I will just start an outline. I'll start typing out what I think the points are in the story that I need to cover. Ella Marks: I'll include any important examples, include a CTA, kind of those key pieces of a presentation, but I'm not actually putting it together yet. I'm just making a huge list of everything I think might be included. And then from there, I go in and I kind of prioritize. So that list is usually way longer than what the presentation ends up being or has way more information, but it is a starting point. And that's the starting point that I kind of use to say, "Okay, I'm identifying that I'm seeing a couple common themes in what I've written out here. How can I communicate those most effectively?" Ella Marks: And what I like about the list is that if you're doing it... Whatever platform that you're using, a Google Doc, a Quip Doc, whatever, it's really easy to copy and paste and move around the order as well to think about not just, "What am I including, but how am I going to start creating this story?" And that gives you kind of a framework to use moving forward. Mike Gerholdt: I would agree. So you mentioned story, and I think a big part of storytelling is the visual element. How do you balance just not putting paragraphs of text up on the slides and that imagery? Ella Marks: It's a really good question, and it's something that I ask myself all the time. Because I'm not a designer, I do not consider myself to be good at graphic design. And so when I build a presentation, it can feel really intimidating to think about what are the visuals that I need to create? And there's a technique that I learned at Salesforce that I was taught called blue boxing, and that's really what I use. And the way that it works is once I've gotten to that state, I have my outline, I kind of know what I'm going to put on slides. Instead of jumping right to what is my final slide going to look like, here is the exact paragraphs, here's the exact talk track, here's the exact visual. Ella Marks: I kind of take a step back from that and use blue boxes, literal blue boxes on a slide to map out what I think it could look like and how I think the content on the slide can reinforce what it is that I'm going to say. So if I know that I'm going to put together a slide that has some tips, for example. I might put together a placement of where those tips might go and think, "Oh, there could be a supporting image for this." What I don't do is I don't dive in and find that image right away. I really take that step of thinking through, "Okay, what is a visual that can support what I'm saying?" And I go through the whole deck like that first and then come back to really hone in on what the message is on that particular slide and pull in those core visuals. Ella Marks: But taking that step to do that kind of blue boxing framework really helps you identify how the story is going to flow and how those visuals are going to support you. Because I will say there are times when you're going to want more text on a slide than others, and so you want to have a good balance of that. You don't want folks to also just only be reading the content on your slides while you're speaking to them. And so if you take that kind of step to build it out first, you'll have a better idea of what the mix of your presentation is going to look like, how you might use different slide formats to engage people, because we know people have short attention spans, so you want to make sure that we're kind of switching things up. Ella Marks: We're providing different visuals every few minutes, and I think using design is a very powerful tool to help you do that. Mike Gerholdt: I would agree. I would agree. Plus pacing, when you're thinking that through, you mentioned people have short attention spans, so keeping the slides moving also helps keep people's attention as well. I think often when I'm reviewing decks or I'm watching presentations at events, and these are outside of Salesforce too, sometimes people have a hard time closing their presentation. I feel like it's either one, they kind of fade off into the distance. It's like an eighties' movie where they just walk off into the beach into the sunset and we never hear from them again. Or it's like a steel door slamming shut where it's like, "Okay, so that's this. And if you have any questions, thanks." Bam. Mike Gerholdt: And the presentation's done. What's your approach for the closure because I feel like the closure is the most important part? Ella Marks: I'd agree that if you don't have people with you at the end, I think you've really missed a big opportunity when it comes to creating presentations. The way that I would think about it is throughout your entire presentation, as you're putting together that outline. There are three things that you can think about that you want people to take away, how you want them to feel, what you want them to think and how you want them to act. And I would say that's not just your final slide or the thing that you leave the audience with. That should be at the core of why you're putting that presentation together. Ella Marks: I think the final slide in that CTA is incredibly important, but I also think that as someone in the audience who doesn't know anything about your presentation going into it, I think that they should know where you're going throughout the presentation. And that's really how you make whatever it is you share, whatever your CTA is super impactful. So I'll give you an example of that. If you're going to do an amazing presentation, let's say it's on new release features and you're going into great depth about... We have the spring 24 release right now, I know that's top of mind for a lot of admins. Ella Marks: If you go through great content throughout, at the end, to your point, if you don't leave folks with something to do next, they start to question what the purpose was of you sharing all that information. And as a speaker, that is the opposite of what you want. You want to be able to say, "I'm doing this presentation to help you prepare for the release, and I'm going to do that by showing you features and leaving you with either a resource or an approach or tips for you to take and go do this at your own companies or deliver your own presentation." Ella Marks: And I think where sometimes people fall flat is they think, "Great, I'll throw a CTA in my presentation at the end, and then everybody will go read my blog post or they'll all go follow me on various social media networks." And unfortunately, if you're not working in the purpose of what that CTA is throughout, it's not going to have that same impact. So you need it to close strong, but it shouldn't be an afterthought. Everything in your presentation should in essence be pointing towards your end goal, whatever you want to leave the audience with. Mike Gerholdt: I've many a times seen an entire slide devoted to resources and thought to myself, "I don't know where to start." There's a lot of resources, but a library is a resource too, and it's full of books, but I don't know where to start. [inaudible 00:16:32] Ella Marks: It's so common. Well, and that's the thing, it's kind of a double-edged sword, right? Because a lot of times there's so many resources because there are so many good resources out there, and that's awesome. But one thing to keep in mind when you're putting together a presentation is you're presenting because you have expertise or you have a message to share. And so really rely on that. Use that to say, "Okay, great. I know there are tons of resources." But actually share your recommendation. What is the number one thing that you would do. That's something that you as a presenter bring that no one else can that's unique to you, what that next step is. Ella Marks: We know that where most presentations, if you put 10 resources, people usually don't look at all 10. I hate to say it, but they probably won't look at more than one anyway, so focus on that one thing. And you really use your credibility that you've built with your audience to drive towards something more specific than a laundry list of things that people can do or read or engage with. Mike Gerholdt: A lot of this content creation focused around a solo presenter, but I think it carries over if you're presenting with someone else. And I see this a lot at our events, even user groups. It's a lot easier. And myself included, the first time I presented at Dreamforce, I had a co-presenter. It's a lot easier to feel like more people carrying the weight of a presentation. What advice or what best practices do you have when you're pairing up with somebody to present on how you divide up content and how the two of you interact during the presentation? Ella Marks: The first thing that I would do if I was presenting with someone else is have a meeting, get together with them, chat with them. I'm someone that prefers a meeting. I know some folks like to communicate on Slack or other formats, but I just love to chat with someone about this because you are going to be presenting and speaking. And to me, that's the best way to get a sense of that person's presentation style. And in that conversation, we might divide, if we're building content together, we might talk about our own expertise and where we feel like we can add the most value to the story and divide up the content that we work on and the slides and who's speaking based on what we think our strengths are. Ella Marks: And then making sure that we're having a really open conversation about that. And I think one thing that you can do that when you divide a presentation, a lot of times what you see is, "Okay, Mike and I are presenting together. I'll take one slide, Mike, you take the next one, then we'll go back and forth." And sometimes that doesn't feel super. It feels a little disjointed when you haven't had the chance to actually talk through your content and rehearse. Rehearsing is so important for any presentation, but if you have more than one person, it is absolutely critical because that's how you're going to feel out how that story is going to come together. Ella Marks: And what you may find is, "Yeah, I'm presenting with Mike, and Mike has a ton of expertise in this one area, but I have something to add there too." And actually switching up who's speaking on a particular slide that can reengage the audience. That's another tool that we have in our toolkits to make sure that people are staying with us throughout our presentation. And all that's going to come down to whether or not you've communicated all of these things with your co-presenter. Making sure that you guys are connected every step of the way is I think the best way to make a successful presentation with a partner or with the group, whoever it is. Mike Gerholdt: I would agree. And I feel to that point of, I've seen decks and presentations where it's every other slide. Change it up where it makes it most relevant because there is a little bit with the audience of context switching going on where they're trying to understand who's speaking and it should be relevant if the person's speaking and not just, "Oh, well, that means if we go every other one, I'm on this slide and I don't know anything about this." It can also help you regroup content that you're putting together. Ella Marks: Absolutely. And there's a lot of different ways that you can do this, but I really think that having that conversation with your co-presenter or co-presenters is going to be the best way to highlight how can you use your collective energy to get your message across in the best way possible? Mike Gerholdt: Right. Stage presence or stagecraft, even in small presentations where boardrooms I think are super important. How do you prepare for that? What are some of the things that you've gone through as you've kind of honed your ability as you were getting ready for a Dreamforce keynote to kind of make sure that your presence was there and it was adding to what the content you were presenting? Ella Marks: There are definitely a few things I do before every presentation, but I think a lot of it for me personally comes down to some important self-talk and pump up for a presentation. When you're chosen to present at an event or you've submitted something to a community conference, sometimes you need to remind yourself the day of, you get a little bit nervous, you might be scared to present. You were chosen for this, and you have knowledge and expertise to share. And going back for me and giving myself that confidence is probably the most important step that I take before I present anything. I always have to remind myself there's a reason I'm here. Ella Marks: I have valuable knowledge to share. I'll reset on whatever the topic or the goal is of the presentation. And then my hidden trick, I would say. I was like, "I don't know where I was going with that sneaky trick." I guess. Sneaky trick, my trick or treat tip, which is not uncommon at all, is I love a pump up song. I just love something to help, I don't know, make me feel energized and excited because I know that if I go into a presentation not pumped up, it's going to be really hard for people to listen. A lot of times we present... Internally, we present in a meeting and there's a lot of other people presenting or we're in a lot of meetings that day, or at Dreamforce, people attend a lot of sessions. Ella Marks: That's a lot of listening. And if you come out there with flat energy and aren't excited to be there and excited to get going, it shows and it makes it a lot harder for people to actually listen and absorb the content. And so going in pumping myself up is actually something that when I don't do it, I feel like I can tell in the presentation that my energy is not there, that I'm not communicating what I could in the best way possible. Mike Gerholdt: You know I have to ask what your pump up song is, right? Ella Marks: I know. It changes. A lot of my pump up songs are Lizzo though. I have to say Lizzo. I do love Taylor Swift as well, but I just... Lizzo, the number one song for me last year was Truth Hurts. There's some lyrics in there that I can't repeat on the podcast, but if you listen to the song, I think... Mike Gerholdt: My pump up song... Ella Marks: I think you'll know. Mike Gerholdt: A lot of lyrics I can't repeat on the podcast. Ella Marks: If you do listen, I think you'll know exactly what part of the song I'm referring to where I walk out and I'm like, "Aha, let's go. Let's get into it." Mike Gerholdt: So if you see people at community events or at Salesforce events, walk up to the stage with their AirPods in, it's probably a pump up song that they're listening to. I can't blame them. If you were to boil down and think of maybe, I don't know... Let's choose five because five's a good number to remember. What are five things that you always try to include that you really look for in like, "Wow, that presentation knocked it out of the park?" Ella Marks: That's a good question. As a reviewer of a lot of content, I'm just trying to think the things that have absolutely wowed me. Well definitely first, when it comes to presenting a good title to me, I'm immediately locked in. If there's a description associated with it like it would be for an event or maybe even a calendar invite. That to me is a sign of a good presentation. I know what I'm going to see. I'm excited for that content and I'm kind of hopeful to dive in. The second is probably... This is tough. There's just so many different ways to present, but I think looking for people that engage with the audience. Ella Marks: So either doing what we talked about before, getting that post-check of who's in the room or have some sort of engaging component to their presentation. That for me, because my attention span is very short, tends to be a very effective way to get my attention. And I enjoy presentations that have that. I think when people also set context by sharing their own expertise, we didn't talk about it in this conversation, but I think one important thing that you really need to do when you present is make sure that you highlight who you are. You need to have an introduction that is, "Here's who I am, here's why I'm here." And that builds credibility. Ella Marks: So when I hear something or see a presentation that I know the person is credible, that usually also is an indicator to me that it's a great presentation. Mike, I feel like you wanted five quick tips, and I'm giving you a lot longer than that. Mike Gerholdt: I don't know. I just picked five out of the air because it sounds good. It doesn't have to be five. Ella Marks: I also can't count, so I don't know what I'm on, but I'll say... Mike Gerholdt: Well, as a good host, you'd think I was paying attention and counting. Ella Marks: This is where I would use a visual to reinforce what I'm saying and remind me. If I was presenting this, I would put together a slide and I would have probably five horizontal bubbles on the slide and a few words about each, and that would help me stay on track. And at the end, I would have a super effective CTA, which I think would be one of the things that I look out for. If I know what... If I'm feeling inspired or motivated, or even just know the next steps I have to take after a presentation. That's how I know that it was good and it was effective. Ella Marks: And then I think my final thing would be, and this may seem counterintuitive, but if I have questions, a lot of times that's a sign to me that the content was really interesting. I think if I want to approach a speaker after their presentation and want to learn more and want to continue the conversation. I have follow-ups or things like that, that's a sign that they did a really good job in engaging me. It could sometimes be a sign that they didn't share the right information. So I think you have to be careful there, but wanting to connect with the presenter, wanting to learn a little bit more and asking a question, I think is engaging in itself. So that to me is a good sign that it was a good presentation as well. Mike Gerholdt: I go back and forth with questions, but I see your point. I think for me, I mean if I was to boil it to one thing. I don't have a word, but the comfort ability that the presenter has with the content. I really love it when somebody, it doesn't feel like their first time going through the content. And it so bugs me when I see somebody walk through and they click and goes to the slide and it surprises them. You're like, "Really? Okay." I really like it when somebody knows something and the slides are almost happening in the background and they're really paying attention to the audience. That to me, really gets me. And that comes with rehearsals, it comes with knowing the content, everything that you said previously. Ella Marks: Absolutely. I think a lot of us think, especially people who give presentations all the time, we're like, "Oh, we can win this. It'll be fine. I know the content." But the reality is people can tell when you have not done the preparation necessary for a particular presentation. And so I think it is a great sign of a good presentation and good content when someone isn't overly relying on their visuals or words on the slide to tell the story. Ella Marks: It's actually a story that they're telling where the visuals are supporting. It's not at the center of everything that they're doing. It's really more of a show that you're watching. Mike Gerholdt: I often compare presenting to athletes. Some of the greatest athletes that we've had in baseball or basketball or whatever sport you watch, they practice and there's a reason for that. They don't just show up and naturally wing it. Derek Jeter didn't naturally winged being good. It's repetition and it's doing and becoming comfortable with the moment. So it's great stuff. Thank you, Ella for coming on the pod and sharing. This is very relevant for where we are right now. Not only heading into TDX, but heading into world tour. And I feel like community group season, not to mention just budget presenting. I want more things in Salesforce season to my executives and all kinds of presentation times. Ella Marks: This is definitely super timely. So thanks so much, Mike, for having me. Mike Gerholdt: So I love that discussion with Ella. That was a lot of fun. And as with anything, presenting, content creation, stagecraft, there's only so much we can cover, but I feel like we could do so much more. And we're heading into Dreamforce. So a lot of people are probably getting ready to present or even if you're not going as a presenter, you might have to do like I did, which was get back and have to present what you learned. So you're presenting one way or another. But I enjoyed this. Mike Gerholdt: I love coaching people on how to present and Ella's one of truly a few people that can do it super well. So again, if you enjoyed this podcast, make sure you give us a follow on the app that you're listening to, and then that way you get new episodes. And of course, any resources that we listed can be found at admin.salesforce.com, including a transcript of the show, so that way you can read it and follow along. And of course, participate in the Admin Trailblazer community that is in the Trailblazer Group. And of course the link to that is in the show notes. So with that, until next week, I'll see you in the cloud.
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Thu, 8 August 2024
Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Jennifer Cole, Director of Business Intelligence and Automation at 908 Devices. Join us as we chat about why understanding and documenting your business processes is critical for collecting quality data in your org. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Jennifer Cole. Admins connect the dots Jen recently co-presented at World Tour Boston about business processes and data strategy, and I wanted to get her on the pod to tell you all about it. “Data isn’t helpful if you don’t know your process,” she says, “it’s just interesting facts on a screen that maybe make pretty graphs but what does it tell you if you don’t know what questions you’re answering?” I think a common misconception is that it’s the people not doing the day-to-day work who don’t understand the business process. As Jen points out, it’s often the folks actually doing the process who don’t understand why they need to log data a certain way. As we’ll get into, that’s not necessarily their fault—there’s an information gap. So it’s up to us as Salesforce Admins to connect those dots and spell out why accurate data is so important. How inaccurate data gets in your org Jen often supports sales teams and it’s a great example of how inaccurate data can end up in your org. Now it might sound obvious, but sales teams want to sell things. They don’t understand why they need to log an email into Salesforce or create the next step on an opportunity because they don’t know how that information will be used. So you see a lot of rushing through fields or just filling in a random date because it doesn’t matter anyway, right? And that’s where the problems creep in. Inaccurate data creates inaccurate business decisions. AI tools like Einstein Copilot or Next Best Action turn into useless, expensive toys without accurate data. So the first step is to figure out what questions you need to answer with data. If you can get to the Why behind the business process, you can build bridges across your organization and bring people together. Business processes and getting to why The next step is to explain the Why to the people involved in the business process. For example, “If you log your follow-up calls accurately, we can look at all that data and tell you the best time to make those calls,” or, “Sue from marketing will use this to send a targeted drip campaign that we know makes them more likely to buy from you.” Suddenly, you’ve created a feedback loop that gets the people entering data invested in data quality. Training is the best time to get started with explaining why. When they fill in this field, who else will use that information and how will it help the business as a whole? You need to get them invested in the process and help them see the broader picture. There’s so much more great stuff from Jen about how to look at your business processes and data strategy, so be sure to listen to the full episode. And don’t forget to subscribe to hear more from the Salesforce Admins Podcast. Podcast swag Learn more Admin Trailblazers Group Social Full show transcript Mike:
This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we're talking with Jennifer Cole about data strategy and process. Well, yeah, a little something different because in the world of AI and a lot of tools just in general, not to mention automation tools, it's good to know what you're doing with your data and do you have a process in place to make sure you're collecting good data. Also, I ask her about bad data, so that's an interesting answer. But really understanding what data are you collecting, and does everybody know the process for data collection because as we know, it's going to be even more important to have great data so that AI can give us even better insights. But if we don't know the process, then I think we're in trouble. So Jennifer's going to help us with that.
But before we get into the episode, just a reminder that if you're listening on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts, be sure to click the follow button, that way this podcast can automatically be downloaded right to your device so that when you're out on your dog walk, you don't have to worry about downloading it because it'll already be there. And of course, I always appreciate a good review, so let me know how we're doing. With that, let's talk process and data quality and maybe data strategies. There's quite a few things in this podcast with Jennifer. And let's get Jennifer on the podcast. So, Jen, welcome back to the podcast. Jennifer Cole:
Thanks, Mike. I'm really excited to be back. Mike:
Well, last time, and I'll put a link in the show notes because you won't hear that a thousand more times today, but we were talking about documenting your process as an admin when you're solving things. Jennifer Cole:
Yes, good stuff. Mike:
I know. Well, I really enjoyed that. I could spend, again, probably another two hours doing that because, first of all, I constantly forget, "What was I doing here?" I should have wrote that down better. But we've since caught up a thousand other times and wanted to expand on that conversation because with AI, there's so many more shiny tools out there. Jennifer Cole:
There are. Mike:
I know, seriously. Jennifer Cole:
A lot. Mike:
I'm getting the cart in front of the horse. Let's refresh people about the amount of awesomeness stuff that you work on and what you do in the community. So let's start there. Jennifer Cole:
Sure. Yeah. I am Director of Business Intelligence and Automation at 908 Devices, which is a super cool title that basically says, "I am still an awesome admin." I'm building apps and supporting my team. I run a team of awesome admins and have recently been able to co-present with one of my awesome admins at the Boston World Tour last, what, two months ago? Wow, time flies. Mike:
I know. Yeah. Jennifer Cole:
Oh, so much. Talking about process and data strategy. So that is my sweet spot and what I'm still rocking out at 908. Mike:
I feel everybody now is paying attention to data with AI. Data, data, data. Pay attention to your data, clean your data, wash your data, put your data in a dishwasher. Jennifer Cole:
Give me your data. Mike:
Cascade is going to have special data tabs here pretty soon. Tide's going to have data pods, right? I'm kidding. Jennifer Cole:
I was going to ask if they were going to be Salesforce branded, that would've been fun. I would've bought those. Mike:
Oh, I know, right? But they only work in the cloud, so you'd have to stand outside in the rain. That wasn't a well-thought-through joke, so that's okay. You can't have a zinger every single time. But you bring up a good point. So what good is data if you don't know your process, right? Jennifer Cole:
Yeah. I don't know that it's helpful if you don't know your process. It's just interesting facts on a screen that maybe make pretty graphs, but what does it tell you if you don't know what questions you're answering? Mike:
Yeah. I guess in the scheme of things, if we're sitting down and we're looking at our data and we're cleaning our data, we should really take a step back and think about, "What are we doing with our process?" And maybe to your point, and you can expand on this, does everybody know the process? Do you run into a lot of organizations that don't know their process? Jennifer Cole:
Yes. Mike:
Or a process, I should say. The process, like there's one. Jennifer Cole:
Can I choose C, all of the above? Mike:
C, all of the above. Jennifer Cole:
Yeah, actually quite a few. And I would expect most people assume it's certain pockets of the organization or those who just aren't doing the day-to-day work, but I don't think that's true. I actually experience people that are doing the day-to-day work don't even fully understand the process or why they're doing what they're doing or what information downstream or upstream their process is being leveraged in. So it's everywhere, honestly. Mike:
Look, we all go to work. People are probably listening to this podcast going to work, like, "I'm going to go to work and send some emails and do work." And they do things. So when you say they don't know the process, what about that do you... Is it there's no organizational book or they don't know where the data comes and they don't know what they're shipping out or where it goes? Jennifer Cole:
I think a little bit of both, but if I think about the group of folks I support the largest amount of my time against is the sales organization. They have an objective to make sales, right? They're in sales. It's literally in their title. And for them, they just want to get the job done, right? They want to make a customer happy, they want to book that order, and they want to move on to the next one. And they don't always understand why they have to log an email into Salesforce or why they need to create this next step on their opportunity, and who is actually using the application field that they're tagging about their customer.
I think they get rightfully so focused on what they're trying to achieve, they don't see the broader picture of where their data's going and how that helps the company refine what they're doing or tweak the customer they want to focus on or tweak how we do things to make them more efficient. So I think in that particular very specific example, they're just so focused on their job, they don't understand why or how it matters. Mike:
You bring up a very good step in the sales process. If they don't understand why that step's required and the data they're gathering for that step, then they're less likely to do it, right? They'll just do it in a spreadsheet and then when the deal's closed, they'll just go in Salesforce and just bang through the opportunity as fast as they can, right? Jennifer Cole:
Right. There's nothing enriching in that. I can't look at a bigger scope of data to understand, "Geez, a lot of our opportunities close faster when they do a follow-up call 20 days after X event." And that would be juicy information to know because then it becomes a feedback loop in the process to say, "Hey, it looks like the odds of closing your deal faster if you do this particular step." But if all of that is being logged outside of the system and we don't know how many follow-up calls there are or face-to-face meetings or customer demos that are taking place, then we can't provide that intel back to help them achieve their goals faster and smarter. Mike:
So if they're logging, let's say, a required field, which is an arbitrary date because they're trying to get through to the closed one because they think they're following the process, but they really did the whole thing out of Salesforce, and then it's Friday night and the quarter closes and they're trying to get their opportunities in, by not understanding the process, are they then creating bad data? Jennifer Cole:
Oh, bad's a funny word. I would say inaccurate data. I would say data that's going to mislead you. Yes, there's technically bad data, but in that case, it's not intentionally bad. It's more just inaccurate to the true story. And I think that can make it very misleading for the business because they might adjust their workflow based upon the intel they have and it actually isn't improving anything because nobody was being honest about what they were entering. Mike:
So CEO goes to, we'll use your example, Boston World Tour and sees the new AI, Copilot and Einstein stuff, and maybe wants to use Einstein Next Best Action, but because they're just putting in arbitrary dates, the new shiny isn't really helping them. Jennifer Cole:
No, it just becomes a very expensive toy. Sorry, but it does. It doesn't help them move anything faster, right? Mike:
Yeah. And I think it's an interesting concept because we always go back to, "Well, this one thing will just help you do stuff better." But ultimately, before you even look at those things, it's, "But what is the process that you're trying to get to? Do you even understand the process?" Is that where you start with a lot of things? Jennifer Cole:
It's where I start everything. When a person comes for an enhancement or wants to report out on this particular metric or get data to understand what's happening with their business, the question always begins with, "What questions are you trying to answer? I understand you are asking for this data point, but why? Is it something you're doing today or you're not doing today and you want to understand how well you are or are not filling that information in or following that process?"
Because understanding the process for me and my experience and my team's experience helps us serve our customers better. And when I say customer, I mean internal employees in this case because we're an internal team. We help them achieve so much more when we can get underneath and get to the why. Understanding their why is what drives bigger change for us because it often is not just them who need the help or need the change, but actually other people in the organization have that same why. So process is almost like a keystone in the bridge for us. We have to get to it. We have to understand it before we start building across and bridging islands together. Mike:
Man, the number of times understanding the why has come up. I should get a shirt that says that. Jennifer Cole:
That'd be a great shirt. Mike:
Understand the why. So let me dial in specifically for an admin that's listening. Are there things that you build into your application when you create something, let's say for sales or customer service, that helps remind the end user about the why? Jennifer Cole:
Sometimes, yes. Actually, a recent deployment we did was to enable sales to capture who should get automated booking and shipping notifications. And we moved that into Salesforce so that when it replicates over to our ERP, it's auto-fed. It's just more accurate. The sales rep knows who should be getting those notices. And we have those fields there to fill in those addresses, but we did something super simple. We added a little text bubble, an actual text component on the lightning page that explained what field did what, and critical reminders about which field you should fill in and which field you should update this address only.
And the feedback we got was, "That was great. I need that. That always will remind me because I can never remember what I'm supposed to do or why it matters." And it was just a really simple little text component on the screen. So we try to do small things like that where we nudge them through the workflow with those gentle reminders, conditional visibility reminders, anything that helps them in that moment for that particular step in the process to remember the critical reason why it matters helps. Mike:
Yeah. That's really great because you think about the level of complexity that is getting added to everyone's job. I remember as an admin, I'd spent two, three months with maybe a department or a team working on what their process is and getting their app right in Salesforce. And by the end of it, man, you could have quizzed me Jeopardy-level on what was going on with that team and how the data flowed and I would have nailed it, but two months later- Jennifer Cole:
It's gone. Mike:
... no idea. It's gone. Jennifer Cole:
What's my name? Yes. Mike:
I'll take, nope, I don't know, hodgepodge for 500, Alex. Jennifer Cole:
Yes. Real admin life. Mike:
Exactly. But somehow you just expect to turn that app over to your users and like, "Oh, I'm sure they'll remember this." So when you're creating an app and have those epiphanies, "Let's add this box that reminds people," how important is it for you? Or how important do you feel it is that admins make sure that their users know where the data that they're working on comes from and where it goes? Jennifer Cole:
I think it's actually critical to adoption. Everyone loves to throw this word adoption around, and it's more than just logins. It's actually usability of the system and following the process. And we had a sales meeting, was it two years ago, a year ago? And we were asked to present as a Salesforce team to the sales team about critical fields they need to fill in. And everyone's done those trainings. They're painful for the salespeople. They're just sitting there, "Yeah, okay, I have to fill in the application. Yeah, okay, I have to update my close date. Yeah, okay." And they go through this monotony. But what we found was so successful and an incredible adoption to following the process was when we told them why.
We said, "Okay, when you fill this in, here are the people after you that are using this data. Here's your marketing team and how they're using it to refine the drip campaigns to send to your customers. So if you classify them right, they're going to get special content against their industry or application usage." And we found, Mike, it was the coolest thing, we found in our support channel, we use Slack for issues and questions by the business, people after that sales meeting we're just saying, "Now, what if I choose this and what happens if I choose this?" Because they knew who was using the data that they input and where it went, they started to care. And then we just saw greater adoption and questions around, "Well, what happens if I choose the wrong thing? Can I fix it?" And that's a win as an admin in my book when your business suddenly cares about the data they're putting in. Mike:
Yeah, especially for salespeople. I did an exercise like that where the salespeople went through the call center. And I remember sitting in the break room and the salespeople sitting down with call center agents and like, "Well, whenever we get this from sales, it says this." And them sitting there going, "Well, we fill it out because we think it's this." But those two people had never talked. And the second they talked, it was like, "Oh, well we could 100% get this." And then the customer service agent is like, "Oh, that would be so helpful because then when they call in and ask, we don't have to spend 20 minutes looking something up." Jennifer Cole:
It's amazing. It's powerful. Mike:
I'll take ownership of this too, it's the fact that when you sit down sometimes, you work at processes at a stage gate level and you forget, "Okay, well, I did sales and then sales ends here." Well, sales doesn't end there. There's that gray area, and I just didn't bring those groups together. I jumped over to service and obviously everything shipped and it was fine or then they'd call, except that gap in between there is the parts you got to work on. Jennifer Cole:
The bridging of the teams and how the data flows between them. Mike:
Yeah. Jennifer Cole:
I think that's where the secret sauce is. Mike:
A lot of it is. So let's touch on this. Automation has always been huge, and I know we've talked a lot with you about integrations and bringing data over. How does not knowing the process really impact automations? Jennifer Cole:
How much time do we have? No, I'm kidding. Mike:
As much time as you'd like. Jennifer Cole:
I think it can have a huge impact on the business in not a good way. I think it could accelerate inaccurate data faster. If you don't understand your process and why you're filling in what fields, you could be filling in fields that mean nothing to your business, that mean nothing to you learning how to change your process, adapt your process to better suit your business and your customers. I think it can actually be an unfortunate waste of energy for your admins and money for the organization if you just don't understand what you want to do and who's doing what and why. Remember the TV show Lost, which is very controversial, no one likes the ending of Lost. But remember- Mike:
I remember it. I'm one of the few people that never got into it. Jennifer Cole:
Okay, consider yourself lucky. Mike:
So I've been told. Jennifer Cole:
You've saved so many hours of your life that you've done better things with. Mike:
Oh no, I've wasted them with other TV shows. Jennifer Cole:
Well, I will quickly say, for the audience that does know the show, there's this scene or episode where this guy just keeps pressing a red button and he has no idea why. And then he leaves and someone else has to take over pressing this red button. And ultimately, it ends up being not as critical as anyone might think, but they're just doing it because they were told to do it and they have to do it, but nobody knows why.
And I think businesses, if they don't understand their process, are doing the same thing. They're demanding fields to be populated by their users that are never used, that are never actually aggregated to understand if there's value or something to modify an existing workflow or change the direction of how you advertise to customers. They're just pressing red buttons. So I think it can be dangerous if you don't understand. Mike:
Yeah. So is that perpetuated by the fact that a lot of products and services are sold with, "Here's the easy way to fix your X"? Jennifer Cole:
Short answer? Yes. And I understand why that's done. They want to show the ease of use of the tool. But I think the piece that's really hard is we can't get underneath to see how it's built to know if it's going to work for our challenging business problems that we're trying to solve. And what isn't really discussed either is why understanding your data strategy is so important and how that tool fits in. I think that's missed.
And I don't think that's always understood by the C-suite or the folks that are paying for these tools. They just see this really cool tool like, "Hey, AI is going to do this for you. I want to be able to do that too. Let's just buy it." But somebody has to understand how it works, and somebody has to understand the process so that it actually becomes valuable. It's missed. It's truly, truly missed. And it's hard for admins. Mike:
Well, I think you said something that's even bigger than process that I'm realizing now, which is process exists in a world where there is a data strategy. Jennifer Cole:
It's a piece. Mike:
We've probably not sat down, I've never sat down, have you ever sat down and written a data strategy with an organization? Jennifer Cole:
Written it down? No. It's desperately needed, but conversations are a good place to start, for sure. Mike:
Yeah, but it's something that we as a Salesforce admin should think about because then we can create a world in which process can exist because data strategy tells me, "We know where the data is going to originate from, how we're going to use it, and what our end goals are." And end goals could be many endpoints. And then within that data strategy world is where we start to build different processes that take that data and transform it into useful things that the business can then use to make decisions on. So we just haven't sat down and wrote data strategies. Jennifer Cole:
I think so. And I think that's hard day one. My own experience has been the process that was just built over time because somebody needed this field or somebody wanted to do this. There wasn't a broader conversation of, "Well, who else wants to use this field?" And it's something I need, do you need it too, Mike? Those conversations, I don't think they happen at the beginning because businesses are just trying to get off the ground and they're just trying to get customers engaged.
So we're a little bit backwards in the whole process, but it is critical, I think, for businesses to start and stop... Well, how do I want to say this? They need to stop and think about, "We've got all these processes, do they still make sense? Are they where we want to go and do they fit into our larger strategy for what data we want to use to navigate the ship of our business truly?" So I think unfortunately, the data strategy doesn't come until after processes are baked in, but hopefully not too solidified that they can't rip them up and start something from scratch if it doesn't fit the strategy they want to achieve. Mike:
Right. Yeah, because I'm thinking early day one, which who knows where people are at, but early day one of a sales process is, "How do you get the widget to the customer as fast as possible?" Right? Jennifer Cole:
Yeah. Mike:
Later stage day one, as the company matures, "How do we efficiently get the widget to the customer and understand our operational challenges?" Jennifer Cole:
It's an evolution, yeah. Mike:
We're still shipping widgets, it's just why does the widget sit for six days at this stage? Is that six days lost or is that six days... I don't know. And that's where data strategy figures that out because are we even capturing that data to make that decision to figure that stuff out? And if not, then we need to start doing that. Jennifer Cole:
Yes. And it makes me think about how I'm hearing more in the community, which very much excites me, of reverse thinking, "Well, what do you want to measure? Okay, let's go backwards and figure out do you even have the fields to start measuring it. And are you measuring it because you're curious or are you measuring it because it's something you want to bake into your workflow and your process there?" So I'm excited to hear more in the community of folks starting to think about this reverse modeling of, "Well, we want to understand what our customers are doing with our widgets. Now that they're using them, we're super excited we've got this customer base, but should we start to target certain types of customers? Well, what are they doing with our widgets?"
"Okay, great question. Are you set up to even track that? And what do you need in order to start tracking it? And then who's going to fill it in and do they know why they're filling it in?" That whole reverse model. So that's an exciting shift that I'm hearing more of in the industry and fellow admins to support that data strategy. But I think you're right, that next step is really sitting down to define on paper what that strategy is and then communicating it to everyone in the organization at every level of the organization because that just goes back to the why. When folks understand the why, they get excited, they want to help. Mike:
I'll flip back and forth. So then you sit down, you look at process, you think of data strategy. When looking at tools, what are some things that admins shouldn't be afraid to ask or should really get behind and get their hands dirty looking at? Jennifer Cole:
Oh, thank you for the question. I think it's setup. As a customer of Salesforce, your poor sales reps, I'm tough because I always want to see what's underneath. Don't give me the shiny YouTube video, let me play with it, let me get in there. So I would love for fellow admins to be just as precocious and go into setup. Let me physically see my options. And that's super cool what you just showed me, but how did you set it up? Let me in your demo org. And Salesforce demo orgs are incredible, like what your solution engineers build and play with and what's in there. Ask admins, ask for a sneak peek because you, as an admin, not only need to understand how your business would apply the tool, but you need to understand how it works and how it can scale to solve all the crazy problems that you'll come across because in a way, you've got to sell it to your business. Admins are diverse. They're builders, and they're also internal salespeople to their own executive suite. So I would encourage them to say, "Show me how it's made." Mike:
Yeah. I also, as an admin, liked showing my users if they wanted to see how I made the app or parts of it that, say sales, for example, if they asked, "Well, what happens if we add a step here?" Well, then I can just go click, click, boom, and now that new step shows up in path and shows up in the opportunity. And it lets them know two things. One, I understand the value of being agile and changing because if we're working on a new process, we've got to be ready to, "Hey, this really isn't working despite what we thought it would do on paper." And also two, when we get to that point, you need to know I have the skill to change the application at the speed of business so that we can make that adjustment and keep moving forward. Jennifer Cole:
Yes, I fully agree. And it's interesting too because even my user population loves to see under the hood, even though they're never- Mike:
Oh, really? Jennifer Cole:
... going to use it. Oh, they love it. When they like to see those changes on the fly that you were just speaking to, like, "Yeah, I do know how to manage this application. I do know how to customize it. I can improve it for you." When we do on-demand changes for them in a meeting when we're getting app feedback or process feedback that we've implemented in Salesforce, they just think it's so much fun.
Number one, they gain a lot more confidence in the team because they're seeing something happen in real-time. But number two, they themselves love to see it and enjoy how quickly we can support the business. And also, it allows them to understand when sometimes it takes us more time because it's more complicated, there's a better understanding. So totally diverging topics on you, but yeah, users love it too. Mike:
It's getting behind the scenes, which is digging into process and digging into data strategies. So a follow-up to that, do you regularly share that, and would you recommend admins regularly do that as well? Jennifer Cole:
Yes, I would actually. And it's funny, as an admin, we're often tagged as being a tiny bit controlling in our orgs and love everything to be precise and buttoned up. But I think it actually gains business trust when we crack open the org in setup for them and they can see how we click around because there's no risk. If someone wants to join the admin team and they're that curious and inspired by what they see in setup, oh my gosh, come on over. But at the same breath, admins can gain so much trust, I feel, from their business when they expose what they're doing.
Because if you think about it, admins are going into the business every day and saying, "Show me your process. How are you doing it? Let me see what you're doing." We're putting our business under the microscope to improve it. I don't think there's any harm in the reverse. It just helps build that mutual trust and relationship of sharing how to build something and what the possibilities are or are not. And I encourage it. I think it would be great. Actually, I encourage my team to do it. They do it in front of our users all the time, and it's been a positive experience. Mike:
Well, I can't think of a better way to wrap up the conversation than having brought it completely back around on us where we're being as transparent with our processes, we're asking the business to be with us while we create the technology to support it. Thanks for coming back on the pod and sharing your thoughts on this and giving us data strategies to work on. Jennifer Cole:
Thanks, Mike. It was really great. Mike:
I'm excited. Jennifer Cole:
Me too. I'm excited [inaudible 00:32:28] admins do, have fun out there. Mike:
Well, I don't know about you, but I was thinking of a thousand different times that I needed to have a conversation between different departments so that they understood the importance of putting fields in. And really, it was interesting, after the call, Jennifer and I talked a little bit because so much of what we do when we sit down with our users is, "Well, how are we going to document this? What are we going to put in Salesforce?" And we get wrapped up with what we're going to put in Salesforce, which we should, but we forget to talk of why.
And that came up in this conversation is why are we putting this down? Why is this a critical stage? Why is it critical that we capture this data at this point? And then who's going to do something with it to make us a better organization? When talking sales, it's not just shipping out the widget as fast as we can, but maybe as efficiently as we can and understanding different parts of our organization so that we can capture data. And I got to agree with Jennifer, boy, it was such a good point, having all of your users understand where the data is coming from and where the data that they create goes, where in the process they sit, and having those individuals meet with each other. I think that was such a great insight that Jennifer brought to this episode.
I hope you enjoyed listening to it. And of course, if you did, you can share it with your friends. Just go ahead and click on those three dots. There's usually three dots in just about every application now, and you can share it on social. I would so appreciate that. And if you're looking for resources or anything that we mentioned in the episode itself, show notes are right there. They're also on our website, admin.salesforce.com, which has got everything you need to read, blog posts, other podcasts you can listen to, and a transcript of this show. And of course, you can join the conversation in the Admin Trailblazer group, which is in the Trailblazer Community, that is also a link in the show notes. A lot of people talk in data quality and process there too. All right, so until next week, we'll see you in the cloud.
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Thu, 1 August 2024
Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Elizabeth Awad, Associate Product Manager for Prompt Builder at Salesforce. Join us as we chat about how you can use Prompt Builder to simplify users’ daily tasks by integrating generative AI moments powered by prompt templates into their workflows. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Elizabeth Awad. What’s the difference between Einstein Copilot and Prompt Builder? There’s been a lot of buzz around Prompt Builder these days, so I was excited to get Liz Awad on the pod to pick her brain about it. She’s a product manager on the Prompt Builder team, so you could say she knows some things. The first question I had for her is one I hear frequently from the community: What’s the difference between Einstein Copilot and Prompt Builder? “They go hand in hand,” Liz says, “the prompts that you create in Prompt Builder can be connected to custom actions in Copilot.” In other words, Prompt Builder is where you as the admin create custom prompts to write a sales email or summarize a case, and Einstein Copilot is what allows your end users to invoke those prompts. Practice your prompts We’ve had more than a few guests suggest that you jump on an LLM to practice prompting but I wanted to know from Liz, specifically, what she’s found helpful. She had a really interesting answer, which was to try to get ChatGPT to write a birthday text to her mom. If you think about it, that’s a perfect use case for practicing writing better prompts. It’s pretty simple in terms of information but it’s tricky to get the right tone. More importantly, you probably have a good sense of what sounds right and what doesn’t. And so when you give adjustments, you instantly know how well they worked. Liz points out that this process is what people mean when they talk about “grounding” a prompt. It’s the extra bits of information you give an AI to adjust the response, like “That sounds too formal” or, “Here are three other texts I’ve sent my mom.” Prompt templates you can use in Salesforce right now As a reminder, there are four prompt template types that you can use in Salesforce right now. They are: -
Sales email -
Field generation -
Record summary -
Flex templates Josh Birk and Raveesh Raina went over all of this in detail in their episode last month, so I’ll link below. However, Liz wanted to draw special attention to a new addition to the flex prompt template, which is the ability to use free text as an input. That means you can use something like a chat transcript or a case summary to ground your prompt. It’s super flexible, and the sky’s the limit. There’s so much more great stuff from Liz about what you can do with Prompt Builder and how she approaches her role as a PM, so be sure to listen to the full episode. And don’t forget to subscribe to hear more from the Salesforce Admins Podcast. Podcast swag Learn more Admin Trailblazers Group Social Full show transcript Mike:
Earlier this year, we talked with Melissa Scalercio about Prompt Builder, because she was on the customer side and she had some pretty neat things to say about how they were using Prompt Builder. You can go back into the Salesforce archives there to listen to that episode.
In case you're not familiar, Prompt Builder allows you to simplify users' daily tasks by integrating generative AI moments powered by prompt templates into their workflow. It's really cool. You get to bind a field and put sparkles on it. That's what it's called literally, sparkles. I wanted to talk to one of the product managers that is working on Prompt Builder. That is Liz Awad, who is based in New York. She is helping build the future of Prompt Builder. She not only gives us some really useful insights into Prompt Builder and how she's seeing other customers use it, but also into what's coming with Prompt Builder, and you may have already seen it. Then, fun fact, we get to learn a hobby. I bet it's one maybe that most of you do. I've seen it on a ton of TV shows. But I'm not going to tell you because you have to listen to the episode. With that, let's get Liz on the podcast.
Liz, welcome to the podcast. Liz Awad:
Thank you. I'm excited to be here. Mike:
Well, I'm excited to talk about Prompt Builder. We've talked about Prompt Builder in the past, with Melissa, earlier. I wanted to hear from somebody that's actually working on the product and doing some really fun stuff, because not only is Prompt Builder a really cool tool for admins to use. We're seeing that in all of our AI Now tours. But also, there's a lot of really cool features coming as well.
Look, I'm getting the cart in front of the horse, like I always do. Let's start off with you. Liz, how did you get to Salesforce and start owning Prompt Builder? Liz Awad:
Sure. I've been at Salesforce a little over a year now. I'm actually part of a rotational product management program here at Salesforce. Previously, I was on Sales Cloud, and I was working on adoption. Which is actually admin relevant, as a new feature on Sales Cloud is launching soon called Sales Cloud Go. I was part of that development. Then I knew my manager, Avantika. She's the one that pulled me into Prompt Builder, where I am now. Mike:
Wow. Liz Awad:
I've been working here for around five months now. I'm very excited. It's been a great journey. Things have changed really fast, as you know, in the large language model space. There's new models all of the time. We are, like you said, launching some amazing new features. Mike:
Yeah. Just trying to keep up with ... I remember when Einstein came out and we suddenly had to learn large language models as part of our nomenclature. Then now, we're having to learn generative AI, and prompts, and grounding. My most fun word to say is hallucinations. Because you know, hallucinations, what could go wrong there? But that's a different podcast that you can listen about.
Prompt Builder, what are exciting things that you can dug into and are happy to work on out of the gate? We'll preface that by saying tell me how Prompt Builder is different than Copilot. Liz Awad:
Yes, great question. Prompt Builder is a low code prompt management tool. This basically allows you to create reusable prompts that are being sent to these large language models. Prompts are just instructions that you send so that the model outputs the correct text.
The way that it's different than Copilot, the way that we view it actually is they go hand-in-hand. The prompts that you create using Prompt Builder can actually be connected to custom actions in Copilot. Then within Copilot, when you ask Copilot a question, it can invoke the prompt that you have created. They're different in that Prompt Builder is this tool that allows you to create the custom prompts. Copilot is maybe one area when your end users actually invoke the prompts. Mike:
Yeah. Copilot's a little more conversational. Liz Awad:
Exactly. Mike:
Yeah. That's also one of the things that, as a former Salesforce administrator, I love about Prompt Builder is it's just a little sparkle button that my users have to press and they get magic. Liz Awad:
Exactly. Mike:
It doesn't depend on their ability to write a good prompt. Liz Awad:
No. It's the admins, now you all become prompt engineers. I will say you do need to spend some time reworking your prompts, testing your prompts. In Prompt Builder, you can even change the models. Certain models are better at writing sales emails than others. Depending on your use case, that Prompt Builder workspace is really where you can test. Just so, like you said, your end users just get to see magic. Mike:
Yeah. Let me ask. What do you do to get better at writing prompts? Liz Awad:
I was introduced to the concept of prompt engineering, like the rest of the world, when ChatGPT came out in November 2022. The first thing I did was just go to the website and start asking it questions that I knew the answers to already. Or I would be able to tell that's a good response, and that's a bad response. It was as simple as, "Write a text to my mom, wishing her a happy birthday." When the LLM responds, it used maybe a formal tone, or something that I personally would never send to my mom. Then I'm like, "Make it sound more casual. I'm very close to my mom, so make sure you include that." That idea of editing a prompt, and trying to have it fit your tone and your style can be used in an enterprise context as well.
The other thing to think about is, when you're telling ChatGPT or your LLM more information, that's called grounding. That's giving more data to the LLM about the type of response that you want back. All of those things are really important in prompt engineering. Mike:
Yeah. Well, I'll be honest with you. The first time I ever heard the term grounding was when I was doing the Data Now workshop. We talked about building a prompt in Prompt Builder. I think the very first line was, "Acting as," and then you could fill in $user.organization, however that worked. It was literally meant to pull the running user, which is you. I thought, "Oh, that totally makes sense." Then you could pull in, "Here's different information." Because I think back to the way you brought in writing prompts, the rest of the world was just like, "Oh, neat. With ChatGPT I just ask it questions." But here, we can actually pull in and say, "No, I want you to go into my Salesforce org and really pull that data out," as opposed to just asking it for a text for your mom. Liz Awad:
Exactly. That's what really makes it powerful, is that it's dynamic. What you said here is you can think of it as a variable, or a field, that's user.name. When that prompt is invoked at runtime, that is replaced with the actual end user's running the name in Salesforce. That prevents you from having to create multiple iterations of prompts.
When we say grounding, all we're really saying is data. It's just a fancy way of saying injecting more data into your prompts. Mike:
Right. Liz Awad:
With Prompt Builder, that data can come from a wide variety of places, not just your CRM. It can come from Data Cloud. You could use a flow to inject data. It can get really powerful, which is really exciting. Mike:
If you think about it, if you really wanted to go back in time, this is where a time machine would help to tell our parents, "If I'm grounded, it just means I've got the data. Thanks." Liz Awad:
Yeah, exactly. Mike:
"You're grounded for a month." No, I'm grounded for life because I've got data. That's how you get more grounded. Just realized it, that dawned on me.
One thing that I did for the longest time. I love using the little sticky notes feature on my Mac. When I would write a good prompt for ChatGPT and it would turn something out, it was like, "Oh, awesome." I would copy that and I'd hang onto it. Then I remember sharing stuff with my team early on. They're like, "Oh, how did you do that?" I would share the prompt with them, the text. Liz Awad:
Yes. Mike:
Then they would plug that in, and they would get something different. I realized early on, with AI, the learning curve for AI is everybody's different, as opposed to when we were trying to learn Flow Builder. When Flow came out, the admin created the flow, and then the record, or whatever the action was, worked the same for everybody. Then as I started looking at AI I was like, "Boy, this is going to be tough for users," because it really depended more on what is that end user's ability to write a good prompt. Or how do I disseminate good prompts to my users?
That all changed for me when I saw Prompt Builder because we can put all that in there, which means the end user gets a solid experience every single time without having to be good at writing prompts. Right? Liz Awad:
Exactly. The end user doesn't need to be the prompt engineer because, as an admin, you are created those instructions every time and it's following that template.
Now I will say you can have different outputs because it's generative. Even if you're invoking the same instructions, the response might be a little different every time you call the large language model. But it should be somewhat the same every time you call. Mike:
Right. Obviously, if it was the same, then it'd just be like email templates. Liz Awad:
Exactly. I do want to say, now that you've brought up email templates, just a small use case or a small story. Mike:
Yeah. Liz Awad:
One of our customers was telling us that they used to use the email templates. Now they're using the sales email template in Prompt Builder. Because it's generative, they're delivery rate was much higher. As in Gmail, Outlook, and these email clients wouldn't mark it as scam. It would actually deliver in whoever they were contacting, that inbox.
That was really interesting for us to hear. That was the first time we had thought about that metric of tracking delivery rate. And how, when you're using generative AI, it's not a pattern, it's not a template. Those words can change every time you're calling the large language model, with the same theme throughout. Mike:
Right. Liz Awad:
That was really interesting for us to hear on the product management team. Mike:
No, I like that. That actually leads into the next question I had. Which was where are you seeing admins deploy Prompt Builder the most? Liz Awad:
It's a great question. It really depends on industry and use case. But we've seen a lot of field generation templates, which is what you described, where your end users see that magic button. You use a prompt template to fill in a field on a record. Mike:
Okay. Liz Awad:
We've also seen a lot of sales emails use cases. Case summarization use cases. It's really across the board. The best part is, you as an admin get to be creative with it. Because you can really think of 100 plus use cases, that's why we have flex template to allow you to customize and put in as many objects, or even now strings or free text, as input to a prompt. Mike:
Tell me more about the templates. I forget, there's four types of templates? Liz Awad:
Yes, there are four types of templates. Sales email. Mike:
Okay. Liz Awad:
Field generation. Record summary. And flex templates. Mike:
Flex sounds the coolest. Liz Awad:
Yes. Flex, it's in the namesake. It's allowing you to create those custom templates where you can call an invokable action, you can use flows.
One feature that we just released is actually called string inputs or free text. Where, using a flex template, you can have text as your only input. Previously, we required templates to be associated with objects. But we heard from customers, "Hey, what if I have a transcript of a chat and I only want to use that as my grounding data?" Well, that's why we just released this, actually this month. It's very exciting. Mike:
That's interesting. Tell me more about that. Because I think I saw that in one of the release readiness' that you did. Liz Awad:
Yes. The use case here is that, if you want to invoke a template from a flow, or maybe using Apex, and all you want as the input is just text itself ... Another example could be an agent gathers a question from a user in a chat, and you want to use that question as input into the prompt. Previously, you would still have to associate that template with a record, which would just be wasted time. You're not actually using that record as grounding data. But now, you can just have that template with the input as a user question, for example. Mike:
Interesting. Yeah. No, I like that. I think, in the earlier podcast we talked to Melissa, she was using the sales email stuff a lot. I'm curious, do you have any insight ... Maybe this is just me, and I've worked in these overly micromanaged organizations where marketing needs to see every period, and comma, and I that's dotted, which is why they loved email templates so much. You mentioned sales templates. Sales email templates. How are marketers adjusting to AI, where it's not word-for-word every single time? Liz Awad:
That's a really good question. I just want to point out that we still recommend that a human's eyes are on the responses from the large language models before they're sent out. We don't recommend automated generation and sending just yet. Primarily for that reason, just to make sure that either a marketer or a sales rep understands exactly what is being sent to their customers. It's really just used as a tool to help, like an assistant, as opposed to replacing that job of writing the email. It gives you a baseline for you to go in and potentially edit or add certain things that you want, depending on the customer.
Now, like you said, some organizations are stricter than others. Maybe they'll, in their company, have a process which is you still use the sales email template to start, but then someone either needs to check it before it's sent. Or the admin can actually go into the audit trail and see all the generated emails, and someone can review those and make sure that that pass is their standard of quality. Mike:
Sure, sure. Yeah. No, I like that. Plus, you could probably include some stylistic cues in the prompt when you're building that as an admin as well. Liz Awad:
Definitely. That is recommended. Mike:
Write in your voice and tone. Liz Awad:
Yes, voice and tone is definitely recommended. You really want to be as specific as possible. You can even give an example of a great email in your instructions. Mike:
Oh! Well, that works out nice. Liz Awad:
"This is an example of a great email we would want to send to a customer." Mike:
Interesting. I like that. There's so many areas now, I think of Salesforce, to talk about with stakeholders as an admin. Not just features that are coming out, but it's also ... I know working with sales teams, thinking of I've always had that sales manager that would come up to me and say, "So-and-so writes great emails. How do we make everybody a great email writer?" Prompt Builder now has that ability. You can work with that great salesperson to get some of their great email ideas, and use those as some initial early prompts, that you can then disseminate to all of your sales team. Which, to me, I'm sure that salesperson doesn't like that. Salespeople are a little competitive that way. Liz Awad:
Yes, that's interesting. That's true, I never thought about that. Mike:
As a product manager, I guess, admins do a lot of product managing. Is there any advice that you would give that you've learned in your year or so at Salesforce that would help them manage the onslaught of new features or how you balance priorities? Liz Awad:
Definitely. I think the biggest skill that's important in being a great PM is just communication, and over communication. And ensuring that everyone is aligned on not only what the priorities are, but why they are prioritized how they are. Because when you explain, "This is the use case, this is the problem, and this is the solution, and this is why it's important," then you really get that alignment.
As far as how to understand what's being released at Salesforce and all the new features, that is a beast within itself. But that's why we have release notes. That's why we have all of the help docs. I would encourage you to even engage with your AEs and your SEs to learn more and inquire. As product managers on Prompt Builder and Copilot, we are actually aiming to talk to our customers as much as we can, because we learn from you all. Because you all are the ones that are engaging with the tool every day. That's also what helps us prioritize, is engaging with customers. Mike:
Yeah, absolutely. Too often, as an admin, I couldn't communicate enough with all the features that were coming out.
Thanks for coming on the podcast, Liz. I will end by saying it's always fun to know, outside of managing Prompt Builder, which is what admins love, if there's anything fun you do as a hobby? Liz Awad:
I've recently picked up, not recently, but in the past year or two, pickleball. Mike:
Okay. Liz Awad:
But I'm based in New York, so that requires me to fight over pickleball courts as there's limited space. It's actually turned into quite an expensive hobby recently, because they charge per hour and per court. But I love it. I grew up playing competitive tennis. So this has just been my outlet as I can play tennis and racket sports, but not be too harsh on myself.
Now my brother thinks that pickleball is an abomination. There's really two groups of thought on that coming from tennis players. But I love it and it's been really fun. Mike:
It's about the size of a tennis court, right? From what I know. Liz Awad:
No, it's actually much smaller. Mike:
Okay. But about? Liz Awad:
About, about, about. Mike:
But much smaller. Okay. Okay. Liz Awad:
Small enough that- Mike:
My neighbors set up pickleball in their driveway. Liz Awad:
Yeah. If anyone wants to challenge me to a pickleball game, I'm ready. Mike:
You should set that up. Do a pickleball tournament in New York. That's what we should have is a pickleball court at Dreamforce. Liz Awad:
That would be amazing. Maybe I should go talk to the event team. Mike:
That would be low impact sort of thing. But there's shoes, right? There's pickleball shoes. I know that you have to have a special paddle. Is it called a paddle? Liz Awad:
Yes. Mike:
Or is it called a racket? Liz Awad:
I believe it's called a paddle. Mike:
Okay. Liz Awad:
I'm actually not sure. Yeah. Mike:
It kind of looks like a ping-pong paddle, just a little bit bigger. Liz Awad:
Exactly. It is called a paddle. Mike:
Okay. Liz Awad:
You can get fancy with it. But you can go out in sneakers and be totally fine. You just have to watch your ankles. Mike:
Sure. Yeah. Boy, I don't know. Well, good luck with that because unfortunately, in New York, it's probably also hard to have an apartment any kind of size at which you could practice pickleball. You should take up ping-pong. It's New York size friendly. Liz Awad:
Yes, exactly. Well, thank you so much for having me on. Mike:
Absolutely. Thanks for being on, Liz.
Okay, I feel like I've been on a lot of television shows lately that have featured pickleball. Am I right or am I wrong? It's just everywhere. I think there was even some sort of deal on pickleball equipment on one of the morning shows I was watching. Good for people playing pickleball. I don't know, do you play pickleball? I don't. But my mom wants to play pickleball. We'll see how that goes. I do think it would be fun to have a pickleball court at Dreamforce. Don't you? We should ask for that.
Anyway, I thought that was a great, fun discussion with Liz. I think it's pretty cool, the stuff that admins can do without writing a single line of code in Prompt Builder. I wish I had this when I was a Salesforce admin. Boy, it'd be really cool. Anyway, if you enjoyed this discussion, I did, I'd love if you could just share it with one person. If you're listening in iTunes, or if you're listening in Apple Podcasts, or any of the podcast apps, usually all you have to do is click the three buttons. There's three buttons somewhere, you get a little arrow. You could share it on social, you could share it with your friends. You could text it, post it to Facebook, LinkedIn. I would appreciate any of those to help spread the word of the podcast. Of course, you can always give me feedback on the podcast if you go to iTunes. I'd love to hear what you think.
Now if you're looking for any of the resources, links to anything that we mentioned, or just great blog post reading and podcast listening in general, that is on admin.salesforce.com. Including a transcript of this show. You can join with other admins in our Admin Trailblazer community. That, of course, is in the Admin Trailblazer group. I'll include the link to that in the show notes. Until next week, we'll see you in the cloud.
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Thu, 25 July 2024
Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, it’s another deep dive with Josh Birk as he talks to Bobby Brill, Senior Director of Product for Einstein Discovery. Join us as we chat about how you can use Model Builder to harness the power of AI with clicks, not code. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Bobby Brill. What is Model Builder? Bobby started his career at Salesforce in Customer Success before working on Wave Analytics. These days, he’s the Senior Director of Product for Einstein Discovery, and he’s here to talk about what Model Builder can do for your business. If you have Data Cloud, then you already have access to Model Builder via the Einstein Studio Tab. With it, you can create predictive models with clicks, not code, using AI to look through your data and generate actionable insights. As Bobby says, the AI isn’t really the interesting part—it’s how you can use it as a tool to solve your business problems. BYOM - Build Your Own Model In traditional machine learning, models are trained on data to identify successful and unsuccessful trends, which is fundamental for making accurate predictions. For example, if you want to create an opportunity scoring model, you need to point it to the data you have on which leads converted and which leads didn’t pan out. Model Builder lets you do just that, building your own model based on the data in your org. What’s more, it fits seamlessly into the structures admins already understand. We can put our opportunity scoring model into a flow to sort high-scoring leads into a priority queue. And we can do all of this with clicks, not code. Building a predictive model that’s good enough Einstein’s LLM capabilities offer even more possibilities when it comes to using your data with Model Builder. You can process unstructured texts like chats or emails to do something like measure if a customer is becoming unhappy. And you can plug that into a flow to do something to fix it. One thing that Bobby points out is that building a model is an iterative process. If you have 100% accuracy, you haven’t really created a predictive model so much as a business rule. As long as the impact of a wrong decision is manageable, it’s OK to build something that’s good enough and know that it will improve over time. There’s a lot more great stuff from Bobby about how to build predictive models and what’s coming next, so be sure to listen to the full episode. And don’t forget to subscribe to hear more from the Salesforce Admins Podcast. Podcast swag Learn more Admin Trailblazers Group Social Full show transcript Josh:
Hello, everybody. Your guest host Josh Birk here. Today we are going to talk to Bobby Brill about Model Builder, which is going to allow you to create your own predictive and generative models to use within Salesforce. So without further delay, let's head on over to Bobby.
All right, today on the show we welcome Bobby Brill to talk about Model Builder. Do you prefer Robert, Bob, Bobby? What do you like to go by? Bobby:
It's an excellent question. So I'm a junior. My dad is Robert Howard Brill Sr. I have the same first middle and last name. He goes by Robert, Rob, or Bob, so I've always been Bobby my whole life. Josh:
Yeah, I feel you. My brother is Peter. My father was a Carl Peter and my grandfather was a Carl Peter. Bobby:
Wow. Josh:
Got very confusing sometimes. Yeah, yeah. So introduce yourself a little bit to the crowd. What do you do at Salesforce? Bobby:
That's a great question. I've been at Salesforce almost 13 years. I was a customer of Salesforce for about three and a half years prior to joining, so I've been in the ecosystem for quite some time. Josh:
Got it. Bobby:
I started off in actually customer success group, actually it was called Customers for Life. So I worked with customers getting on boarded onto Salesforce. I joined the product team back in 2015 in analytics, so we had this thing called Wave Analytics. So even well before AI I've been working with data. The last year I've actually been part of the data cloud team, so I do AI for data cloud, so it's called Model Builder. Josh:
Got it. Got it. Were you interested in AI before it blew up, before it got all big? Bobby:
Am I interested in AI? I think it's interesting. I think it's really cool technology, but what I really like is how the technology can help our customers solve their business problems. I was a customer, I understood what it was like to just have this tool available and put my data in and what can I do with that data. What I like is showing customers how AI can help them achieve their business goals. I really focus on how the AI helps business goals versus really caring about all the new technology and all the new models that are out. I've got other people that do that. I focus in on how are these models going to be used. Josh:
Chasing solutions and not trends. Bobby:
Correct. Josh:
Like it. Now, before we get into the product, one other question, I just like to ask people this because in technology I find the answers are so varied, was software something you always wanted to get into? Bobby:
Yes. I actually had a computer science degree, so I was writing software. What I realized is, while writing software is fun, I actually really like to debug software still, what I really enjoy is coming up with the ideas of what software should do or how it can help solve problems. Product management has really been the thing for me. When I started Salesforce, I just wanted to get into the company any way I could, so I didn't try for a product manager position- Josh:
Got it. Bobby:
... but the second I got in, I had to figure out how to get to this position. Josh:
I like it. From a very high level, what is your elevator pitch for Model Builder? Bobby:
Okay, elevator pitch for Model Builder is build predictive models with clicks, not code. It started with actually predictive models. Now that GenAI is available, it's utilize custom, predictive, or generative models with clicks, not code. Josh:
Okay. Now, when we say model, how do you describe that within the input and output of how we interact with an AI? Bobby:
That's a great question, I don't think anyone's really asked me this specifically. But I think the way I would best describe it is a model is just a function. You first want to know what do you want that function to do. You have to understand what that function is capable of doing. AI is only as good as what the model is capable of doing. So in traditional machine learning, you would have a model that perhaps could tell you what is the likelihood of this lead to convert. And how did it understand that? Well, it had to get some examples of what did conversion look like, give me some leads that successfully converted, give me some lead that didn't, so the model can understand what are the trends for a successful outcome or a non-successful outcome.
That was traditional machine learning. You'd have to train your model. Now, large language models are really good at putting sentences together. It understood text, it's read so much text, it's trained on that, and it knows when it sees certain words, here's the potential. It can predict the next word and the next sets of words to come out. And so if you think of models as just it's a function and you're going to give it some input and it's going to give you an output, what that function can do is totally dependent and there's so many different use cases. But that's I think how I would best describe a model, is it's a function. Josh:
Gotcha. Now let's talk a little bit about building models with clicks, not code. I'm trying to think of the right way to ask this. Let's start with what's your basic user scenario of something that they're going to try to build? Bobby:
So thankfully when we're talking about models, it's all around business data. We are a company that sells to businesses. They put their data in our systems, and while a model can do lots of things, we try to focus on what are the things that our customers are likely doing. The easiest one, Salesforce has had Sales Cloud the longest, so you would build an opportunity scoring model. And that is nothing more than a predictive model that understands what are the traits that go towards an opportunity that's going to close, or win I guess, versus an opportunity that's going to lose. That's probably the simplest thing, and this is what machine learning has really done over the past probably 20 years. People have been solving this problem forever. But every single customer wants this, and they want to make sure that it's trained on their data. They use Salesforce because they can fully customize how they want that data to be stored, what object. They're going to have relationships across other objects. It's not going to be everything in an opportunity object. It's going to be across multiple things.
And they want to make sure it's their data. So why they don't want to use an out-of-the-box model is they don't know what goes into that. Some people like that, but our large enterprises, they like to understand what goes in that. So by giving our customers control and just saying, "Tell us where this data is," we will then go train that model, and we can predict the likelihood of an opportunity closing or take Service Cloud, predict the likelihood of a case escalating or processes, business processes are really important, predict the time it's going to take for an opportunity to close or go from stage one to stage two or service case from the time it was created till when we think it's going to be predicted resolution. These are all things that I think are bread and butter to Salesforce and things that they can predict. And then again, that's your traditional machine learning, that's where you're going to need to use your data to train that model. Josh:
I think it's very interesting because as you say, this isn't a brand new problem, these are questions people have had and have tried to answer,. Right now I'm imagining the world's worst formula field that's trying to connect 17 different data points and make a guess about the probability of an opportunity closing. Bobby:
Exactly, yes. Josh:
How would you describe the level of precision that you're seeing from Model Builder these days? Bobby:
The level precision depends on the data. Some models can be really accurate, but if you have a predictive model that's 100% accurate, then it's not a predictive model, it's some business rule. You've basically told the model, "Look at this field. When you see this value, 100% of the time it's going to be a converted opportunity or... " Sorry, I guess a closed one opportunity. "And when you see this variable, it's always going to be a loss." So there's a lot of times this is data leakage. This is very common in machine learning where you introduce something that basically the model just looks at that and it's like, "I know what I'm going to do." So you never want it to be perfectly accurate. And then there's other levels of accuracy. You could say that, "60% accurate, is that good enough?" Well, it's better than a coin flip, so you are already getting some uplift. Josh:
Right. Bobby:
So then really it's up to the business to figure out what is the impact of a wrong prediction. And a lot of times the businesses, they know the impact of that wrong prediction. If it helps you prioritize the things faster, great. Then start with something that's, let's say, 60% accurate and then work towards something that is a little bit more accurate. It's an iterative process, so try to not be afraid of doing those iterations because you can get some uplift. Josh:
Yeah. I'm going to ask you the world's most leading question, but it's something that we keep trying to get people to think about, because when it comes to the data that the model is going to leverage, there's size, but there's also quality. How important is the concept of clean data to getting that prediction model? Bobby:
Clean data is very important to getting a good model. However, I don't think there's any company that thinks they have clean data. They all think their data's terrible. I think if you were to look at Salesforce, I mean, we know the data really well here, and I wouldn't say that it's clean. But I think you could argue that you have enough clean data to train these models. So it really depends on the use case. Josh:
Got it. Bobby:
If we're talking about sales data, you probably have a lot. Service data, that's probably the cleanest data out there. Service processes are very much you got to get the data in, you work on SLAs, there's very much these touch points. That data is really good. So if you ever want to try something like, "Where is my data the cleanest?" I guarantee you it's service. Sale is people don't enter things in right. Josh:
Okay, so I really love that messaging because it's not that cleanliness isn't important, but you don't need perfection to start using these tools. Bobby:
Right. And then I will say that with generative AI and the ability to process a lot of, I'm going to call it, unstructured text, let's say chats or email, and getting information out of that is perfect for actually cleaning up your data or even putting it into a predictive model. Then the next thing is layer these two things together. There's going to be a data cleanup. You're going to be training a model, but then when you're actually delivering the predictions, you don't want to have to worry about cleaning up that data. That's where the LLMs can be used. Something comes in, you get a signal that says, "Hey, this customer, let's say, their sentiment is dropping." Well, how do you know their sentiment is dropping? Because an LLM is figuring it out and saying, "The customer's not happy," and the models are really good at understanding that, which is pretty cool. Josh:
That's a really interesting point. I've actually not tried to really consider that before, because to an LLM, let's take one of the most common data quality problems, if you have, say, redundant fields or you have duplicate data, the LLM isn't actually as worried about that as, say, a standard reporting tool would be. Bobby:
That's correct. Yep. Josh:
So I think we've been touching on it as we've been talking about this, but where do you see the role of an admin being when it comes to constructing and maintaining these models? Bobby:
The best part about Model Builder, which I haven't even talked about, is how it integrates back with Salesforce. What we've tried to do is we give you this tool where you can build this really, really good function. It's got an input, it's got an output. As long as admins understand that there's going to be some inputs needing to go into this and it's going to have an output, you can actually put the models wherever you want. The same way that you're building, let's say, a flow, and within the flow there's a decision tree, admins know how that works really well, or even the admins that can write a little bit of Apex code. So as long as you know how to do that, as long as you know how these different Salesforce functions are coming together, models are going to be just another input to that.
So take a flow with a decision. Perhaps it's a case escalation... Or no, let's not even take case escalation, let's talk about leads and lead prioritization. You built a flow, you want to put leads in the right queue. Well, what if before you even put a lead into a queue you can predict the likelihood that this lead is going to be converted. You can say, "Hey, everything that has a score between, let's say, 80 and 100, 100 being the highest score, maybe you want to route that to a special queue. You understand queues, you understand decision trees in a flow. So now all you need to know is, hey, I have this score. How do I get the score? Maybe there's another team that figured that out or maybe you were comfortable enough because you know the data to actually train that model. Now you can just use this as a decision. You don't have to actually show the prediction to anyone. Who cares if that prediction is written anywhere. You don't need that for anything, you just need it at that point.
So admins should start thinking about this just says another function. I think flow is a great way to look at it because a process. Something goes through step one, you do this, step two, you do that, and so on. And that model might be just part of that process. Josh:
When you're saying that's interacting with flow, are you saying that it's like I have a custom object, I have a custom field, I can make a decision tree based on that? Is it that same level of implementation? Bobby:
It could be. You don't have to write that prediction out anywhere. We can actually generate it live within that flow. So let's say a lead comes in, you kick off a flow, so you have a lead form, the lead comes in, it goes through a flow. You're not sure where that lead is going to go. You technically I guess created the record, and then you want to figure out where does this lead go.
Well, you don't need to score it and write that score back to the lead. You can actually within the flow call our model endpoint so we can get an on-demand prediction. We're going to give you that on-demand prediction and we can route it somewhere. What's really cool within a flow, you can also call LLM models. So perhaps the lead comes in, you have some unstructured text, maybe you care about sentiment, maybe you want to understand what's the intent from some texts, an LLM theoretically can go do that. And then you get the output of that LLM and you pass that into the model. Now we know more about this lead or this person and then make a prediction, then file the lead away in a queue. That prediction becomes sort of, I'm going to call it, throwaway. You don't need to use it anywhere. Josh:
Got it. It's a fun rule [inaudible 00:15:42]. You get the data- Bobby:
Correct. Josh:
... on demand and then... Yes, gotcha. Now I think we just touched on sort of two different forms of Model Builder. We have the clicks, declarative generate your own model, and then we have bringing in an LLM, and I think this is what we keep referring to as bring your own model. What does bring your own model look like and what kind of models are we supporting there? Bobby:
That's a good question. When I talked about what's the value of Model Builder, my elevator pitch, it was all about building stuff with clicks. And that's because we're really allowing all of our customers to have access to this stuff. But the reality is there's only so much you can do with clicks and then the rest you're going to do with code. We have this idea of bring your own model, whether it's a predictive model or an LLM. You're just connecting these models that live in your infrastructure, customer's infrastructure, whether it's SageMaker, Vertex, Databricks, or maybe it's your Azure OpenAI model, or maybe it's your Google Gemini model. We're giving you the ability to just connect these models directly to Salesforce so you can operationalize them the same way that you would as if it was built on the platform. So you'd have full platform functionality, but the models themselves, they're not hosted in Salesforce.
So there's all kinds of things you can do with that. Your data science team can make sure that they have full control. Let's say they fine tune the LLM so it talks specifically in your brand language, for instance. That's a use case. Josh:
Gotcha. Bobby:
We want to give customers the ability to do this on the platform as well. So the same clicks, not code, we want to bring that to LLMs. That's a future thing. We want to give that capability. Josh:
I'm going to make a comparison here, and I'm going to be a little controversial to my artist friends who I've had these arguments with, but I know artists who have actually built their own LLM model based on their own art, and then they're treating these models as their little AI buddy to try different things very quickly and then kind of motivates them in a very specific direction. Is that a quality comparison to what you're seeing people are doing when building their own models? Bobby:
It's a good question. I don't know that that's... Well, I don't know. I think what we are seeing, so brand voice for sure is something that people want an LLM to do. They put sentences together really well, but if you are distributing anything to your customers, you want to make sure that the sentences that are generated are on point to how you would speak as if it was a regular person. So fine-tuning that with specific words and phrases, that's what we're starting to see some customers do with their own LLM. But we're also seeing that there's other techniques, retrieval augmented generation, or RAG. People call it RAG, which I feel like is a... I can't just say RAG without saying retrieval augmented generation to customers because I don't want to be looked at like I'm a crazy. But then also- Josh:
It is a sort of unfortunate acronym. You're correct, yeah. Bobby:
It is. But I guess it's getting common, so I'm correcting it... Or not correcting, I'm not saying the full thing as often. But we're finding that that is another approach to not having to train those models. I think research is still out on which is the most effective mechanism because you can say at the time that you want that LLM to process something, say, here's some examples. So you don't have to train because training an LLM is pretty expensive right now. Josh:
Yeah. Both from a quantity and processing point of view, right? Bobby:
That's correct. Josh:
Yeah. Take that one step further for me. How does RAG change the game a little bit? Bobby:
With the ability to quickly find some examples of things that you're looking for... Okay, let's say you are replying back to a customer for customer service, you want to automate it. So customer asks a question, and the LLM obviously can't really answer the question unless you provide it some information. So you could give it some knowledge right away. So first, find some similar cases, find the resolution of these cases, and summarize that and go back to the customer. So simply by searching for certain resolutions and responding back or summarizing those resolutions, you already have brand voice because those resolutions themselves we're assuming that was all typed in by someone who understands how you're supposed to respond back. And then, let's say the LLM responds back, it's already similar, and that gets recorded as the resolution. Now the next you're responding back it already sort of knew how to respond and the next time if you're searching for similar things, you'll probably get the same kind of response back. Did that make sense? Josh:
It did. It did actually. Yeah. It's like, as a fishing analogy, you're fishing in the sea that you already have. You're bringing in examples that have already been contextualized within your data and you're just like, "Go ahead and just start there." Does that sound accurate? Bobby:
Exactly. Yeah, that's exactly it. And then the other thing is, as you're responding back you could... Because when you're talking to an LLM, you have to generate this prompt. I know this isn't part of the subject here, but Prompt Builder is another great tool that's on top of Model Builder where you basically tell the LLM what you want do. You program that LLM, and you can insert the retrieval augmented generation wherever you want. It's like you're building an email template and you're just saying, "Hey, here's some similar cases." And then around that within the Prompt Builder you can say, "Here are some examples summarized like this." Josh:
Got it. Bobby:
So you're using this LLM as if it's an assistant that can go do something for you and you give it a bunch of instructions and you put that all in one place. It's pretty cool. Josh:
Yeah, no, it's okay. I still get another nickel if we say Prompt Builder, so it's a good advertisement. Bobby:
Perfect. Josh:
And on that note, so I'm thinking of the Prompt Builder interface and where you build out the prompt and then over on the right we've got like, "Here are the models you can use." So are we going to make that portion transparent to Model Builder and be like, "Oh, hey, my data science team created this specialized model based on our marketing, our brand, our voice. Please use that instead of, say, OpenAPI... or OpenAI 3.0 or something like that." Bobby:
Yep. So that's actually in there today. So if you're using Prompt Builder, when you look at the models, there's a drop-down. The default is going to be the standard model. There's a drop-down there, you can change that to custom models. Once you change that to custom models, it's any other thing that shows up in Model Builder.
So this could just be, let's say, OpenAI 3.5 turbo and you've configured it slightly, you've changed the temperature, one of those parameters. We have a model playground that allows you to do that. Or it's a LLM that you brought in. So whether it's the ones that we have, GA today or the ones that are coming, it's a model that's your own and you have full control. So then that just shows up in Prompt Builder and you build the prompt. In the future, we're looking at how to, I don't know, give you more controls over which LLM should show up in Prompt Builder versus the ones that you don't want to have show up. So while today it's everything, we know that our customers want that finer granularity, so we're thinking about that. Josh:
Got it. Well, let's touch on those two points. What is availability for Model Builder looking like today? Bobby:
Model Builder, it's actually packaged with Data Cloud. So if you have Data Cloud... I didn't say buy Data Cloud because Data Cloud is now being packaged with many different things. It's a consumption-based pricing model, so this is new to a lot of our customers. But what's cool about doing a consumption-based model for pricing is this tool can just be there. We want Data Cloud to be an extension of the platform, just like you're building custom objects and things like that, we want Data Cloud to be as easy as that. It's just there for everyone. It's a tab called Einstein Studio within Data Cloud. That name may or may not change in the future, so just bear with me if it does. I know we're talking about Model Builder and we have a tab called Einstein Studio, and we like to say Einstein 1 Copilot Studio.
I love marketing at Salesforce. It's fun because it changes and I'm like, "I got to just go with it." So Einstein Studio, it's packaged with Data Cloud. So you get Data Cloud, you go into the Data Cloud app, you find Einstein Studio. But it's just a tab. So just like you can find the Reports tab and any app that you want, you can put Einstein Studio in whatever app you want. So if you're an admin, it's just a tab, you'll find it. It's only there if you have Data Cloud turned on in your org, but that is currently how it's packaged. If that's the future, whether it changes, who knows? Josh:
Who knows? I do feel like if there's one thing our audience has learned if they've been in the Salesforce ecosystem for even half a second, is that all things might change. They might change their name, they might change their location, they might change their pricing. So if you're listening to this and you're interested, please check out your health documents or talk to your account executive. Speaking of things that might change, anything on the roadmap you want to give a shout-out to? Bobby:
Model Builder itself, I mean, there's lots of things we're doing with Model Builder just in this release. Actually here, this is really important, for all you admins out there, we are working as fast as we can to get features out. We are no longer on the Salesforce three-release cycle. We are going to be coming out with stuff on some monthly cycle. You're going to see that across all AI. You're going to see that across Data Cloud. We're coming out with things just on a different cycle, so please bear with us. I know how difficult it is even to keep up with our three releases, so just bear with us.
We, in fact, have a release coming up very soon with Model Builder for some of the predictive AI stuff. We're making it easier so that you can build models with clicks even easier than you could before. I would say there's nothing earth-shattering there, but we're making it easier. You're going to see a lot more LLMs that you can bring. You're also going to see a lot more default LLMs, ones that are just shipped. We have a handful of models today from OpenAI and Azure OpenAI. You're going to start to see ones from other vendors as well. So they're just going to show up, everyone just has access to it. Josh:
Got it. Bobby:
And configuring those models within flows and prompts and all these things, it's just going to get a lot easier. So please bear with us. Keep up with the release notes because release notes are only three times a year. We're just updating release notes mid-release, which is weird. Josh:
Got it. Bobby:
Trust me, I know this is weird because I've been around a long time and I keep asking myself, "Should we be doing this?" And you know what? We're doing it, so here we are. Josh:
Not to panic anybody, it feels like a fundamental change that Salesforce might be evolving to in the long run. So everybody obviously can keep your eyes on admin.salesforce.com, and we will try to keep you in the loop as those changes make. And Bobby, do we have Trailhead content on this? Bobby:
Yes. In fact, we just came out with a Trailhead for Model Builder, just the predictive model piece. I think there's some coming for LLMs in the future, but just the predictive model piece that just shipped, so take a look. Josh:
Sounds great. Bobby, thank you so much for the great conversation and information. That was a lot of fun. Bobby:
Absolutely. Thanks for having me. Josh:
Once again, I want to thank Bobby for joining us and telling us all the great things about Model Builder. Now, if you want to learn more about Model Builder and of course Salesforce in general, head on over to admin.salesforce.com, where you can hear more of this show, and also, of course, our friend Trailhead for learning about the Salesforce platform. Once again, everybody, thank you for listening, and we'll talk to you next week.
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Thu, 18 July 2024
Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Mehmet Orun, GM and Data Strategist at PeerNova. Join us as we chat about why data health is easier than you think and what you can do to get started. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Mehmet Orun. Healthy data drives business outcomes We talk a lot about getting your data ready for AI, but there’s a simpler question you need to ask yourself: is your data driving business outcomes? After all, AI insights are only as good as the data they’re based on. That’s why I’ve been looking forward to this episode with Mehmet Orun. He recently gave a presentation about all this and more, entitled “Harnessing AI: Strategic Planning & Data Best Practices for Salesforce Success,” and I was able to grab him for a quick conversation how you can improve data health in your org. Questions for a foundational data health check If you’re cooking, you want to make sure that you have the basic ingredients and enough space on your countertop. And the same is true with your org. You need to have your data health squared away before you can cook up something tasty. For Mehmet, a foundational data health check starts with asking three questions: -
Do you have any objects that are close to or past their limits? -
Are you retaining too much data in your CRM that you don’t use? -
Do you have unintentional duplicates in your solution and do you know where they come from? You want to zero in on which data matters for which specific business need. You don’t need it to be perfect, you just need a solution that is good enough to do what you want it to do. How to get started with data cleanup Every org is going to have some duplicates, and Mehmet recommends thinking through a few things about how data works in your business before you merge everything. Is there a business reason to have duplicate records? Do you have other information in objects or fields that can help you decide whether to match or merge? Above all, Mehmet wants you to know that obtaining good data health in your org isn’t as difficult or time consuming as it sounds. There are free data profiling tools on AppExchange that can help you get most of the way there. So what are you waiting for? There’s a lot more great stuff from Mehmet about what to look for when you’re doing a data health checkup, so be sure to listen to the full episode. And don’t forget to subscribe to hear more from the Salesforce Admins Podcast. Podcast swag Learn more Admin Trailblazers Group Social Full show transcript Mike:
We talk a lot about data readiness and getting ready for AI, but let's take a step back. Is your data really driving business outcomes? So that's what we're going to talk about today on the podcast, and I am bringing in Mehmet Orun, who is the GM and Data Strategist at PeerNova. I mean, just looking through his LinkedIn profile, he has a ton of publications and a ton of patents. I actually don't think I've ever had anybody on the podcast that has had patents. And I should have asked him about that. So spoiler, I don't ask him about patents. But we're going to talk about getting your data ready to drive business outcomes. You know what? Even if you're not ready to use AI, this is still a good podcast for it. So with that, let's get Mehmet on the podcast. So Mehmet, welcome to the podcast. Mehmet:
Thank you, Mike. It's a true pleasure to be here. Mike:
Yeah, well, you ran into colleague of mine at World Tour London. And well, I mean everybody's talking to AI and you're talking to AI and data. But before we get into that, why don't you give me a little bit of a brief history of how you got into the Salesforce ecosystem? Mehmet:
So before I was a partner, I was a Salesforce employee. Before I was an employee, I was a customer. I worked for Genentech, which is a biotech company, for a period of time. And what was interesting about Genentech was our CEO was a scientist. We looked at problems like they were clinical trials. You formed a hypothesis. In a safe way, you chose to assess if that hypothesis was going to be true or not. And then we would look at how can we solve it at greater scale. What that meant was when we were getting ready to launch a new set of products, and the enterprise architecture was going to be shifting from 150 or so disconnected applications, this is 20 years ago by the way, and the story today may sound much the same for many customers and companies, we wanted to bet on a new CRM solution, rather than the homegrown or the older technology ones.
And Genentech became the first life sciences company to chose Salesforce. Because the idea of not needing to spend time just working on an upgrade, rather than solving business problems, made a lot of sense to us. There were a few challenges, like a contact model didn't really work for life sciences, because we are really engaging with a doctor or a prescriber who may teach at a university hospital, they may see patients at a different facility, they may have their own practice. By the way, this is why person account was born. If you're curious about the trivia, happy to dive into the details. Mike:
You need one of those shirts. "I'm the reason person accounts exist." Mehmet:
Yeah, I'm not sure how popular it may be, but maybe I'll submit to shirt force. Mike:
Yeah, you never know. Might try. So I've had Liz Helengo on the podcast, we've talked about data quality. And you have a great presentation out there, Best Practices for AI Ready Salesforce Data. Do you think people's Salesforce data is AI ready? Mehmet:
From what I have seen, and I do engage with many organizations still, neither the data nor metadata is AI ready, vast majority of the time. Now the question of readiness is interesting because it depends on how far you want to go. What is it that you're trying to solve or accomplish? If you just want to see if you can get recommendations, it's a proof of technology, great. You can definitely use it. If you're trying to get consistent answers based on reliable data, and make sure it is behind the trust layer, at a minimum, organizations need to do an assessment of the current state of their data and metadata, and make sure that their architecture is going to meet their needs, not just today, but on an ongoing basis. Mike:
One of the questions that you ask, and I think this is pretty paramount, because anytime we talk about data and data cleanliness, is oh, I've got to look at everything. And there could be some objects that have two 300 fields on it. Lord knows why, but there's a lot of fields, right? Because we're capturing everything. One of the things that you point out, is how do I know if it's good enough data to drive business outcomes? And I think that's second part, that clarifying part, is really important. Because when we're looking at data, yes we need to look at everything. But what is the data that we really need to have perfected to drive a business outcome? So what should admins be looking at? Mehmet:
Before diving into data that matters to business outcomes, one of the things I suggest is what is the foundational data health of your org in general? And I use cooking or dance analogies. Usually I'm [inaudible 00:05:27]. Mike:
I use cooking analogies too. Mehmet:
Great. So if I'm getting ready to cook a big meal, I want to make sure I have the right ingredients, and the ingredients I have are also fresh. They haven't passed their expired date. I want to make sure that I have enough space on my countertop. Not everything has to be cleaned, not everything has to be put away. I don't need to have every single ingredient up there, but I need to have just enough. So when I mean a foundational data health check, we should always know, do we have new objects that are close to or past their limits. You mentioned two or 300 fields. I have seen 900 custom fields, which is the upper limit. Mike:
I was trying to be nice. Mehmet:
Salesforce platform is incredibly flexible. We can add packages from AppExchange, which we install [inaudible 00:06:21] custom fields at times. And then after a while processes change, people change, new people come in, we stop using fields that we used to. Or perhaps fields were added, but we weren't quite sure what they were going to be. User adoption head gaps. I think you can find many parts of this, but if your org is more than five years old, your foundational objects, account contact case opportunity probably have 25% of custom fields or more that haven't been used in the current last one or two years. So one aspects of foundational data health is about understand if any of your objects are nearing or at their limits. Number two is are you retaining too much data in your CRM org, because that is going to be part of what data you want to act on.
If you have rubbish data or if you have data that has outlived its usefulness, archiving solutions are great. And the third piece to be mindful of is do you have unintentional versus intentional duplicates in your solution. Just looking at those three areas is going to give you a sense of data consistency, data completeness, data relevance risks. Once we look at that, then it is a matter of looking at what is the fields that matter, What is the data that matters to add specific business need at a point in time. I'm happy to dive into more details, but do you have any questions on the foundational data health outline I just gave? Mike:
Well, I think you mentioned duplicates. So I'm an admin, I'm looking at my data, and I find duplicates. Where should I start talking to understand are these intentional and good, are these intentional and bad, do I need to deduplicate? What are the types of questions, who are the stakeholders that I should be looking at to understand if we should have duplicates in our system, let alone not even talking about looking at other systems? Mehmet:
Yeah. When I talk to people, let's say that you're an admin for... You can make up a scenario. Mike:
Sure. Mehmet:
So how did you find out about the duplicate problem, and can you describe to me what is the problem these records are causing on your end users? The reason I start with that question is I am listening for the answer that is telling me whether stakeholder impact is well understood, and what is the nature of that impact that can really help drive the type of solution we could put in place. Time to value is something that's going to be quite important, as well as seeking to avoid nonreversible fixes. Because many solutions are not going to be 100% right. Especially when it comes to match [inaudible 00:09:23] type scenarios.
A common challenge is let's say that it's a call center operation and we have a lot of context, but the data is distributed, which means it may be out of state, information may be incomplete, I would often ask the question, "So what if regardless of how many duplicates you have, every single record you click on shows the exact same transactional history? Would that solve your business need?" Or if it's a marketing challenge and they are concerned about consent and compliance, and they are unsure about which of these values should we pick, I would ask a question, "That's great. Do you have the policies in place on how would you approach these different related records?" And the question that I get incomplete answers most often, is, "Do you know why you have these duplicates, and if you are supposed to have some of these duplicates by design?" Mike:
I can only imagine the look on people's faces when you ask that. Mehmet:
Well, their examples help. I've written a few articles on that and I sent people pictures, and asked them how this could relate to their line of business. One of the things I love about how Salesforce talks about solutions is they put a person in the middle surround by the icons of the era. Every industry can use that mindset and think about their interaction with an individual or with an organization. The reality is, whether you're a nonprofit, whether you're a consumer company, you are a B2B company, you are likely to encounter the same individual or same organization in more than one business context. Mike:
Yeah, Very true. Mehmet:
There's a high risk in being overzealous in approaching duplicates, that I worked for Salesforce in the past, I worked for Genentech in the past, I work for PeerNova now, I'm involved in the trailblazer community. I Mehmet as a single human being, have at least four different business contexts in my engagement and relationship. So if you try to combine and merge all four of the records into one, first off, which email address do you take or keep, given the nature of the CRM data model? But what is some of the interactions were contact specific, account specific? Are we going to introduce more risks or would we be better off recognizing all of these records are associated with one person, and then use the contact record when it makes sense, use the individual record when that makes sense? Is the example helpful? Mike:
No, it is, because I think that's what a lot of people run into, is you run reports and you look at the data very, I don't want to say abstractly, but you try to look at it very black and white, and say, "Well, there is four Mehmets, so we should merge them. There shouldn't be four." But you bring up a very important point, is the associated, let's say account for this person, really brings context to what you were discussing with that person at the time. Which is lost when you merge it all. Because to your point, all of those activities would just merge together, and it's like it wouldn't make sense. It's like, so we talked to them one minute about partnering and the next minute about this, and it's like, wait, why was this happening? And you're losing the context of where this individual contact was employed at. So I think that's important. Those are the questions that people have to have, is yes, that is one person four times, but the context of what was our relationship with them is very important. Mehmet:
One of the other aspects is when we're looking at the records. I think people jump into, "Oh, I know they are duplicates because they have the same name and email, or they have the same name and address, or they have the same name and LinkedIn profile. Whatever it may be." It is incredibly important to look at the object as a whole, to look at the fields as a whole, for three reasons. There may be fields, record types, types, some other custom field for classification, that actually indicate this person, this organization is playing a different role. That may be the basis of what else to include in a match role. So if the context is different, you may want to match them, but you may not want to merge them. Or you still want to match them, but you want to create a unified profile in data cloud.
Number two, there may be other fields that you can use, that increases matchability of that particular record. When I talk about account matching, I often say account matching is not a string matching problem. You are not trying to match Salesforce to salesforce.com or Salesforce Inc. What you are trying to do is understand Salesforce in San Francisco at 1 Market Street, which is the old address, is the same location as the new headquarters. Salesforce in Bishopsgate, London is part of Salesforce corporate hierarchy, but it's a distinct entity and subsidiary. By the way, Slack in San Francisco, completely different name, is also a legitimate distinct but related account record.
If you don't have the depths of the B2B domain, let's say that you're a new admin, but you profile your account object, you may discover there are other fields that are not standard fields. They were brought in by a managed package, let's say D&B connect or BVD Connect, but then you see fields like dance number, global ultimate dance number, that have a high population rate, but low distinct rate. Maybe you can use these fields as part of your match rules also, and discover that you have a lot more attributes at your disposal than just name and contact points. Mike:
Right. Yeah, it's really diving deeper. Mehmet:
Absolutely. And the third and final reason, and I ask this question to everyone, "Mike, what is your favorite fake email address or phone number?" Mike:
I can't tell you. Mehmet:
Without exception, every single org I've analyzed, either had invalid or fake contact points in it. What is invalid? Maybe it is sales@companyname.com, or supportedcompanyname.com. They didn't have an email address, it was a required field. They just put a group email, or perhaps they put their own. Na@na.com. Noemail@noemail.com. If we do not discover the data content that may also throw off our match result, not only we may over merge where the contacts needed to be separate, we may actually incorrectly match and merge accounts and contacts the way they should never be. So we started this from duplicate management. I know the session is for data reliability and not just for AI. At the end of the day, we want to discover what is knowable with statistical techniques with data profiling, as much as we can. And once we determine that we want to define what an experiment would look like, how would we know for certain is this the outcome we're looking for, and then drive it forward? Mike:
Yeah. No, you're right. One thing you bring up, and I'm going to ask, maybe it's a bit of a facetious question, but I'd be curious what your answer is. Do most organizations have someone responsible for data quality? Mehmet:
I think most organizations have someone that cares about data quality, but that doesn't mean they're necessarily responsible or empowered. Mike:
What's the difference? Mehmet:
I have been in orgs where let's say there's a data quality manager, it's an independent role, it reports to the business, sounds great, but it is outside of the org hierarchy where the CRM administrator is reporting into. Even if they get long, if the CRM administrator cannot act on requests, unless it is associated with a specific project task, there tends to be delays or friction. Because I don't see a lot of organizations saying we need to launch a data quality initiative. Most of the initiatives are business initiatives where data quality assessments, verification, and as needed improvement should be a part of it. But if your job is to ensure data quality is good, if you are not authorized to be able to initiate projects that can then be prioritized, you may not even be able to get an AppExchange package installed in a quick and timely manner.
Now on the flip side, you may be an admin and you have the rights and you are close to the system. You may not know that there are tools and techniques out there that helps you discover whether that field that was so urgent that you just edit and rolled out, is being used at all. Tracking user adoption of fields be rolled out, pick list values be rolled out, is something admins ideally would and should do if they're informed by effective techniques, and if their [inaudible 00:19:26] allow them to not just add a field but put in place the processes to monitor the usage of that field.
Honestly, one of the reasons I'm most excited to be on this podcast is to be able to talk about these things being not only possible. But fairly easy and not time-consuming. So we can broaden the conversation on how do we make sure the good work admins put in is actually being impactful. And admins can even be more empowered to monitor what is being used, what is not being used, what is being used poorly. To be able to raise these to their stakeholders and drive that level of awareness, so they're being more impactful on any line of business. Mike:
No, I understand. Okay, so if I'm hearing this, depends on how big my backlog is and my requests are for new features, in your opinion, how much time should admins be spending ensuring data quality is happening in their org? Mehmet:
I don't know that I can answer that with number of days or percentage of time, as opposed to when should they look at their quality and act accordingly. Because each work is going to be a little bit different. One of the things I believe in, is if I'm a new admin, and you mentioned this earlier, she has a great LinkedIn post she did on what is the first thing you look at as a admin in a new org, and the answer is very broadly, "I like looking at for the foundational objects, what can I tell about the usage in current plus one year versus the life of the object?" That's a starting point data profiling scenario for me. And the reason is when I look at accounts, contacts, opportunities, and cases alone, or let's throw in leads for good measure, it's going to give me a sense of how well adapted is this org.
It's a really good baseline. I want to know what fields are not used or no longer used, what fields appear to be used but not really used, because they only have the default value. The number of times I see 100% populated fields with one and only one value, is pretty significant. And to me that means it either is driving code somehow, or someone has set up a field with a default value and never looked at it again. I then look at what is my foundational health, and with the right tools on AppExchange, you can get much of these insights in a single business day. Then you have the ability to have a conversation with your manager, with your stakeholder, that is about starting the job and having an understanding of the foundational health. The other piece I look at, is if I'm starting on a new project, and my role as an admin is supporting the needs of that project, I'm going to focus on a scenario that is specifically for that.
Maybe we have HR cases, customer cases, and partner cases in our org, but this project is just about customer cases. I'm going to want to look at what can I tell about the cases that are coming in that have caused successfully or unsuccessfully, whatever is the definition for my business. And I want to look at the fields that are being consistently populated with high fidelity, and then compare the difference between successful and unsuccessful outcomes. The way admins can minimize the amount of time they are spending analyzing data, is reports are great, but creating reports just on field rates are incredibly time-consuming and not scalable. There are great free data profiling tools that are 100% native on AppExchange. Start with one and start running different scenarios to see what you can tell about the state of your data. And then the best way to make sure that you don't have to keep checking is, set up and monitoring scenario.
Salesforce CFJ has been talking about the importance of profiling, cleanup, and monitoring for a long time. When I go to roundtables, I see almost no one monitoring their data reliability. And with flow, with the right profiling tools, it is something you can very easily configure, and detect deviations whether your sale rates are going down, or you used to capture an active pick list value, it's no longer being picked up. Send a targeted alert based on understanding the fields that matter to a particular outcome. And I think three to six months, from the beginning of this journey, people are going to start noticing a higher level of either user or admin engagement. Mike:
Yeah. I also like you point out the idea of a data owner. I think that's important. That's something that admins when they're meeting with stakeholders, can sit down and really kind of empower one or two, maybe multiple people, within a team, along with the stakeholder to really kind of be the overseer of that data. And these can be that next level admin, maybe people that are looking to move up into the organize, and take ownership of that. I think that's a powerful idea. Mehmet:
And the nice thing about what you mentioned, is it could be an admin who wants to increase their scope and impact. It could be somebody in a line of business. At Salesforce, for example, the owner for account and opportunity fits within sales operations. Mike:
Makes sense. Mehmet:
Yeah, because that is where you're going to be closer to it. And if I recall, the ownership for contact and lead, set in the marketing organization. Because that is where you're wanting to make sure you have a holistic understanding from lead to contact, and you're also being consistent and compliant. For shared entities or when you are starting new, an admin would make sense, especially admins that are close to their business, and know what data matters or not. It is about increasing impact. And for anyone that doesn't know, you can capture data owner along with data sensitivity as part of your object manager and CRM metadata. A lot of people do not seem these attributes exist. Mike:
Yeah. As we kind of wrap things up, we talked a lot about the doing. And sometimes ironically we get caught up on the doing, and we forget to actually look at what the goal is. And so how do you define success when you're doing data cleanup? I mean, I'm sure there's multiple ways to define it, but what are things that admin should look at in terms of creating that definition of success so that they can show progress to the stakeholders that they're making their way towards AI ready data? Mehmet:
I was lucky to have a mentor that would say, "Unless you can define how you're going to demonstrate success at the end of your project, you're not going to start working on it." Now, we don't always have that luxury, but part of it is to be able to say what do we need to demonstrate differently. We started the conversation with duplicate management. And if people are seeing too many duplicates, and the concern is inconsistent data when they look at one record versus the other, perhaps the definition of success is they see consistent, complete, correct data. Which makes it not about merging anymore, by the way. It's about data consistency and correctness, which is what is impacting the end users. And if you think about it that way, we can now start taking about hiding records over time. Because everyone is already looking at information the same way, rather than taking the riskier task of merging records and then worry about, "Can I on unmerge?"
If it's about an AI outcome, how would we know and users are going to be able to rely on the information? AI is not just one flavor of technology. We have deterministic solutions, we have probabilistic solutions, right? We have Einstein Discovery as well as Einstein Copilot. So at the end of the day, can we define a process that is human repeatable, to then demonstrate how this is being automated at scale? This is one of the things that AI is very good at. If it is going to be about judgment calls, an AI may or may not be as good at it, so we need to look at what is that feedback loop that can also be provided back to an admin. And sometimes data readiness is about having just the right data and just the right metadata you need for completeness sake. Einstein Copilot leverages the field description metadata in finding what fields to look at for information. Sensitivity classifications are also important.
And sometimes you need to add a few additional fields in order to inform what AI could do for you. Just last week, gave a brief presentation on what if we can leverage copilot to inform end users that while their opportunity cost probability is at 75%, because as you move it along the stage, it updates the probability percentage, AI could tell you when that opportunity was actually at risk. It says, actually your risk of closing on time was 50%, 75%, whatever it may be. The idea of adding formula fields that most admins know about, to assess record level data quality, is something you can actually define, and then feed into your prompts, so you can look at information completeness at the record level, and then use that to inform your end users. The key message here is sometimes data completeness is about knowing what to remove, and sometimes it's about knowing what to add. And it all has to be about specific business use cases and specific business outcomes at the point of customer engagement. Mike:
Yeah. Oh, there's never a simple answer, is there? Mehmet:
Rarely, and I think this is what makes this a fulfilling journey. None of us have all the answers, but there are positive patterns and anti-patterns out there. I love reading the admin blog and listening to this podcast, I love reading articles on Salesforce Ben, going to Trailblazer community events, and in person get togethers. Because we shared stories, we complain, but then we make suggestions on, "Have you considered this way of approaching it?" And this is how we keep learning and how we keep being better. Mike:
Yeah, I would agree. I think it's much like when earlier this year I talked to David about puzzle solving, and sometimes it's like you literally just have to sit down, put the puzzle down, give your brain a break, and then come back to it refreshed, and with a different perspective, and that changes everything. So I would agree. Mehmet, thanks for coming on the podcast and talking about a different perspective to AI readiness, than what I've already covered. Because I feel there's a lot to cover, so I appreciate you sharing your insights, and getting us hopefully AI ready. Mehmet:
As you said, it is a journey. I hope this conversation helps all the listeners on what are some of the things to consider, right? It is not visual, we are not pointing to a roadmap. Much of this is really a mindset. And if anyone is curious about furthering the conversation, I am happy to be a part of that conversation. Feel free to reach out to me. Mike:
So that was a fun conversation with Mehmet. I love the idea of a data owner. I don't know why I haven't thought of that. Somebody that works with the stakeholders in every department, and kind of owns the data, right? It's like when you get a puppy, making sure that somebody is always going to keep their bowl of kibble full.
I guess the kibble is the data in this scenario. That's the best I can come up with, but I really like that idea. I think that's something that we and Salesforce administrators are doing our quarterly check-ins with our stakeholders, and talking about business objectives. I think that's something we should start bringing up, and really having that conversation even with the larger organization, as we branch out and maybe bring in data cloud, and have the conversations with IT. Data owners. That's the next thing we need to be talking about. But anyway, if you love this episode, and I did, I thought it was great. Because it's more than just really reducing duplicates and figuring out good data and bad data, as you heard. But let's go ahead and just share this episode. You do me a favor, just share it. Just click share in whatever podcasting app you're listening to, and then that way you can send it to your friends who are maybe thinking about doing some data stuff.
I promise you everybody's doing data cleanup. Now, Mehmet mentioned some things and some links. I'll be sure to put those in the show notes as always. And of course, if you enjoyed this episode, there's tons more episodes. Everything can be found admin.salesforce.com, which is just your one stop for everything Salesforce admin, including a transcript of the show. Now, if you want to join the conversation, there is the Admin Trailblazer group, and that of course is in the Trailblazer community. Of course, the link is in the show notes there. So with that, until next week, all of you data fans, I will see you in the cloud.
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Thu, 11 July 2024
Why Mentorship is Crucial in the Salesforce Ecosystem Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Warren Walters, Salesforce MVP and host of the Salesforce Mentor YouTube channel and website. Join us as we chat about what admins and devs can learn from each other and why everyone can learn to code. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Warren Walter. The rise of the Admin-eloper If you’ve ever taken a peek at Warren’s content, you may have noticed that a lot of it is about learning how to code in Apex. So why have him on a podcast for admins? That’s dev stuff, right? Warren has noted that there's an increasing convergence between these two roles. Personally, I've gained confidence in implementing code because AI assists in clarifying the processes involved. Similarly, for developers, using declarative tools such as flows and formulas can be much simpler than crafting solutions in Apex. In short, we’re all becoming admin-elopers. Why Salesforce Admins should learn to code One of the biggest misconceptions that Warren wants to dispel is that only geniuses can understand coding. The truth is that some of the best developers he knows are people who never went to school for it and taught themselves everything they know. As an admin, you don’t necessarily need to know how to build complex Apex customizations. A basic working knowledge of how programming works can get you far, especially when combined with all the declarative tools at your disposal. Soft skills can help you build your career Finally, Warren emphasizes the importance of honing your soft skills. A self-described introvert, he’s found that focusing on becoming a better communicator has helped him find his way into new roles and bigger opportunities. He also urges you to think about your personal branding or, as he puts it, “how you want to present yourself to the outside world.” His YouTube channel has opened doors for him, but even something as simple as a portfolio can really help you stand out from the crowd. There’s a lot more great stuff from Warren about his experience as a consultant and as a mentor, so be sure to listen to the full episode. And don’t forget to subscribe to hear more from the Salesforce Admins Podcast. Podcast swag Learn more Admin Trailblazers Group Social Full show transcript Mike Gerholdt:
This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we are talking about mentorship and learning how to code. Surprisingly, not surprisingly, because admins and developers need to know the best practices for creating our apps and deploying the best technology for our organizations.
So I'm going to bring on Warren Walters who is a Salesforce consultant. He's an admin, he's a developer, he's a mentor and a self-described general geek. Now, Warren's on because he runs a really cool YouTube channel, and I came across his TikToks where he does Salesforce tutorials to help you understand and master the concept of different things in Salesforce.
He has this really cool site, salesforcementor.com, and just a really fun guy to talk about in terms of the world of mentorship, what a lot of skills are that he's seeing, and things that people should be paying attention to.
Now, before we get Warren on the podcast, I just want to make sure that whatever you're using to listen to the Salesforce Admins podcast, make sure you hit that follow or subscribe button because then new episodes will show up on your phone or on your computer right away. So with that, let's get to our conversation with Warren.
So Warren, welcome to the podcast. Warren Walters:
Well, hey Mike, I'm happy to be here. Super excited because I've been listening to the podcast for such a long time and I'm finally on it, which is, I don't know if it's a dream come true or an honor, but I'm just happy to be here. Mike Gerholdt:
It's destiny. Warren Walters:
I'll take that. Mike Gerholdt:
That's what I'll call it, it's destiny. Well, I ran across your TikToks when I was posting stuff about the podcast and really loved some of the videos that you're doing and the topics you're talking about. So let's just start off with what you do in the Salesforce ecosystem and how you got started. Warren Walters:
Sure. So my name is Warren Walters. I am a Salesforce engineer. I do lots and lots of development. I probably talk too much about development. Some of you may or may not have seen my face on YouTube, and that's where I primarily host a lot of my content.
And just from my side, I've been in development for about 10 years now. Various different companies, various types of companies to consulting ISVs in-House. And more recently, I've been focusing on a lot of mentorship and training in the Salesforce development space. So that's a little bit about me. I can dive deeper depending on where you want to go. Mike Gerholdt:
Well, I think the mentorship part is intriguing. You said development a lot in this is admin podcast, but we kind of all live in the same space now. I think what's interesting is when I started doing Salesforce things back in 2006, there was a clear line between here's things I can do with the UI.
Drag-and-drop GUI was a thing. Oh my God, it's WYSIWYG now, that was the new acronym back in '06. But then there was also really hard things that you had to learn. I remember going across to another part of my organization and talking to a developer who had to learn Python, how to deploy stuff.
So there was code and there was the hard way of doing things, and there was the unhard way of doing things as people looked at it. Now those lines seem to be blurred. I mean, I'm looking at some of the data cloud stuff that we're coming out with, and you can very seamlessly connect things through a UI.
So let's start with that is sometimes you hear terms where people mash together names of personas of admin and developer, and they think just because it's declarative, it must be developer or it must be admin. And because it's code, it must be developer. Warren Walters:
Yeah. So it's funny you bring up those personas in the mashing admin and developer together, because as far as I know, it's called or it's rising to be called admineloper. I've heard that a couple of times [inaudible 00:04:25]- Mike Gerholdt:
It makes me think of Jackalope. Have you ever heard of a Jackalope? It's a rabbit with weird horns. Warren Walters:
Yeah, maybe that'll be their mask on it in a couple of weeks. Dream Forces around the corner. Mike Gerholdt:
It is. Warren Walters:
But yeah, so from my side, especially with the mentorship and what I like to do or a lot of what I do is to help people understand that there's not just one type of person anymore. Maybe years ago it was like that, but now it is very fruitful for you to understand all sides of the Salesforce. And this could be the configuration.
So knowing how to set things up and the fields and the whizzy wigs like you mentioned, but also the benefits of knowing some development things. Now, maybe you don't need to jump all the way in where you're writing custom integrations yourself, but to just understand those core fundamental concepts of development can really help you build out more complex solutions and communicate better with your teams.
And through mentorship, especially with a lot of admins, it's all about encouraging them and showing them different resources they can use to really understand some of the concepts that were traditionally a bit foreign to them or locked away in a separate area that's only for developers, which is not true anymore. Mike Gerholdt:
They'll be developers, let's put that on the map. It's interesting because I think maybe, I'll go back 18 months ago before I had a really cognizant working awareness of AI. Learning code meant copy the snippet of code, find a developer friend and be like, what does this do?
Now, I put a validation rule into ChatGPT just to have it double check what I was doing. And it can tell you back, you can copy snippets of code into AI and have it tell you what it's doing. So I have to believe that some of that acceleration for admins, just basic understanding of code is a little bit greater now that we have some tools like that, right? Warren Walters:
Yeah, it's really been an explosion of what tools we have at our availability to help us understand it a lot better. In the past, we had maybe things like Stack Overflow and different websites you could go to, or if you were taking it back, you have to buy a book or something and try to read it. And that barrier to entry- Mike Gerholdt:
The library. Warren Walters:
That barrier to entry really stopped a lot of people from diving in and understanding certain things that were going on in Salesforce development and in code. But now with those other types of tools and even the tools that Salesforce is releasing, we're able to more easily understand different code and formula fields.
Even our flows now, we're starting to be able to just reduce all of the headache and all of the additional knowledge that you needed to have to be able to work with those particular items. Now, there are some benefits of going, getting that deeper understanding, really learning the fundamentals and branching out further into programming concepts.
But at least to get you started, get your feet wet, these AI tools have been really great for helping people get some encouragement and seeing if they're on the right path and getting more, down to complex questions where you're saying, all right, you needed to go to a developer friend to get that looked up.
You might come with a more refined question now that you're using AI instead of just, here's the code, help me out. It's, I have this particular piece of code, it should do this. How does this look to you? Is it best practice? So the conversations are shifting a little bit more. Mike Gerholdt:
Plus also just disseminating some of the code that admins would look at, it's not foreign into, I don't know what this does, pages and pages of stuff. I can at least copy it and maybe have AI give me an idea of where to start. Warren Walters:
Yeah, that's funny too where the starting piece, just because it's really about what it gives you. So in certain aspects you have to be a little bit careful of AI because of it could produce code in a different language other than Apex, you get Python code.
And if you don't know those fundamentals, it can really set you down maybe a rabbit hole or not be as helpful as you think. So it's a word of caution to a lot of my mentees. I definitely want them to use it, but make sure that you're still doing that due diligence to understand some of the basics of it. Mike Gerholdt:
If you're having it generate code for you, I think I'm in the translation part of the world. So let's start there though with mentorship, what comes up most in the mentorship and in mentees that you work with? Warren Walters:
Certifications is always a big topic. What search should they get and what should they focus on? What's next? So I think that one is really fun. And another big one is a lot of encouragement, especially for administrators that want to start to look in and dabble with code.
A lot of people here, they have this perception that, oh, it's for the geniuses or only people that go to university, which is not true at all. I've met many, many developers that could code me into a box that have never gone to school, have just learned by themselves, and they're very passionate problem solvers and they really stick with that craft.
So a lot of what I do is encouragement and then giving people resources for, if you're trying to learn integrations, start with either this Trailhead module or this specific article and bring it back to me and let's see if we can figure it out together. Mike Gerholdt:
Do you find when individuals are coming into the ecosystem maybe with a coding background, that it's less obvious for them to pay attention to some of the declarative tools that are already built in Salesforce?
Or is it intuitive to have them under... Is it natural to just look at everything first and then only go to code as a solution, or do they see everything's a nail and they've got a hammer and I'm going to code them into a box, as you said? Warren Walters:
Yeah, it definitely starts out as everything is a nail and code is the hammer. It's funny because if you're in a lot of different orgs, especially when I was doing consulting, I got into a few orgs that had code written for very simple things that you can do in configuration, like creating a validation rule or sending an email, that kind of stuff. Just tons and tons and lines of code that were not necessary.
But whoever got in there first, their mindset was, okay, I know how to code, let me just stick with that. So a lot of people that I talk with and mentor, especially if they have a coding background there, that's their first idea and that's one of the things that I have to educate them on, is Salesforce has so many different tools at your disposal.
It's better to at least be familiar with everything that's available, like flows and the formula fields, and even just simple things like knowing how a lookup field works, especially if you're not coming from this sort of space, it can be a little confusing to understand what it is and how it works.
So I generally recommend going on that journey of starting at the beginning, especially hitting a lot of those beginner admin trails where you can learn the fundamentals and work your way up into a good spot of understanding all the tools that are available and then you can jump into code. The code wall, always be there. There's plenty of reasons to use it, but you want to use the right tool for the right situation. Mike Gerholdt:
And it's also, I have to think of just best use of your time. You could code escalation rules, you could code a workflow, but flow leaves you with an artifact that's easily upgradable and reproducible as opposed to something custom that, who knows, maybe something 10 releases down the line, Salesforce is going to change and now you might have to rebuild that Apex code. Warren Walters:
Yeah, that's a big point, especially in consulting that you have to think about because a lot of times you may not be there one year later, two years later just because the contract or the project is ending.
So designing for the team that is going to be there is very important. If you're going to leave a ton of code only with a team of admins, and that may not be the best solution for you.
Or there might be a little bit of in-between where you can build out the complex pieces inside of code, but also leave the administrative side or leave the ability for the administrative side to have configuration or custom settings that can manipulate the code.
All things like that are things that you need to start to think about when you look at the longevity of your code and the maintainability. Mike Gerholdt:
Do people that you work with and start to work with, when they come into the ecosystem, do they know their path? Are they looking at consulting or being a developer first? Or is it just eyes wide open, help me figure something out, Warren? Warren Walters:
A lot of it is eyes wide open. Lots of existing admins know that the developer path is out there, but people just starting out often they hear about development from other tech stacks and they know that it's out there, but it's hard to understand where should I be going? What should I be looking at?
So there's a lot of education that goes on and there are so many different opportunities in Salesforce. So you need to try to find... Or I recommend trying out a bunch of things, but especially if maybe you have a background in project management or system management like databases and things like that. Take a look at how that translates directly over into a Salesforce career. Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, no, that makes sense. Often you start off with an idea, and I've had a lot of friends too that were admins for a while and then they see that consulting dollar sign and they start chasing the money and obviously you can do that in any career. So that's interesting.
You mentioned something that I wanted to think a little bit about, which is the topics that admins and developers should think about. So I started a little bit dumped into the deep end with AI, but we have declarative side, we have the code side.
What is some of the stuff that admins and developers that you're mentoring aren't paying attention to and you're like, folks, the streetlight, the spotlight is on, you totally missed the sign on the side of the road. How did you blow past this exit kind of scenario? Warren Walters:
That is really cool topic to bring up. I think a lot of it stems to one, everybody they know about AI, they probably are at least dabbling in it. If you're not dabbling in it, I would recommend at least looking at it. So that's one big piece.
But the other part is probably more, I want to say on the soft skills or it's really around communication, especially for a lot of introverted people. It may not seem like it, but I'm pretty introverted. But it's around how you can communicate effectively either with your boss or your teams or anybody that you're working with.
And that can be a huge valuable asset to you as an individual because it can help propel you into different types of roles that maybe somebody else that's lacking those skills or still working on those skills, they're not able to jump into what goes hand in hand with that is more personal branding as well.
So this is how you present yourself on LinkedIn, doing things like YouTube channels, having a blog and that can also propel you above the rest, especially in a competitive market. Having that awareness of where you're at and how you want to be presented to the outside world can be very important for a hiring manager to make a decision on.
So I recommend everybody working on a portfolio or having some sort of additional thing above the defaults of your resume and having a basic LinkedIn portfolio and that kind of stuff. Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, I'm so on board with everything you just said because I feel like for a lot of my career when I was an admin, not only was it just understanding the configuration, but for lack of a better phrase, I'll say it was selling the configuration, really communicating to the organization, no, no, no, no. I know how to do this and this is what's best for right now based on what you told me and confidently communicating that.
And then to your second point, showing up, I love it when people look like their profile pictures. It's so much because you look at, you think of how much you're online and when you see, especially with a coworker, your slack avatar all the time, and then you see them in person and they look the same, you're like, oh, I know I have the right person.
Because I've always joked that I'm an introvert, but I play an extrovert for work. I can summon up a solid eight or nine hours of extrovertness, but 5:30 at Dreamforce, the bell tolls, Mike is running down the stairs, glass slippers falling off, he's turning into a pumpkin. He really wants to get back to his hotel room and just have some quiet stare at the wall time.
But being able to show up and look familiar and then interact with people and that's how you network and that's how you get different ideas shared with everybody too. Warren Walters:
I'm on board with that a hundred percent because at least for me, a lot of what you see online, a hundred percent of what you see online, I'm going to be the same exact way at a conference. As soon as you see me after I say hello, what is your name? I'm going to start spewing development and Salesforce right at you.
So I think that that is important though to be authentic wherever you're presenting yourself because it's going to take that toll on you, especially over time, especially if you're at working at a place where either you have to change yourself to do that. It's important to be at home as much as you can in where you work and how you're presenting yourself. Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, I mean for the longest time I wore a red shirt everywhere and it was very easy to spot Mike in the red shirt. So I had this question down, but in hearing you answer it, and I've done a million of these podcasts, I'm going to ask it to you different.
So one of the questions, and you probably get this too, is like, all right, so what is good places to start learning? I'm going to ask you that, but I'm going to give you the caveat of you can't say the word Trailhead.
And the reason I'm going to say that is, look, I work at Salesforce, Trailhead's table stakes. We all know to go there. Everybody in the community knows to go there. If you don't know to go there, you should go there. You're going to hear it at user groups. What are other places that you should go that are good places to learn in addition to Trailhead? Warren Walters:
How much can I plug websites? How much is allowed? There are a few sites that I really love for either practicing Salesforce development or even Salesforce administration.
I'm a big YouTube person. If you've looked me up at all, I love video, that kind of stuff. So there are some really major channels on there that I definitely follow. So some of them are Apex hours on YouTube. There's Matt Gary's channel, which is also very focused on Salesforce development, so also look at those.
And then especially thinking more either when I'm studying for a certification or being more well-rounded, a lot of us know about Focus on Force, which is great. But what I like to do whenever I'm either taking exam or studying is, okay, maybe I'm doing some practice items, but I'm also actually building out the practice scenarios, maybe the exam question or something like that inside a Salesforce org so that I'm Retaining the knowledge a little bit better than just clicking through a few different examples. So this works really well for both administration and development.
Just recreate the scenario the best you can when you're working through those. On top of that, there are some really great, if you're looking to dive and learn development, really great sites for that. So there's free code camp org, which is more of HTML JavaScript, it's like web languages.
But like I've been mentioning, once you learn the fundamentals of development, you can transfer it around to any language and it will really help out in your configuration inside of Salesforce. So if you know how to do flows, either on the basic levels, if statement is an if statement, iterator, a loop is a loop in every different language.
So you're able to translate some of those a little bit easier once you know how they work under the hood. I'm trying to think of some other ones. I know there are a ton and maybe I can link some down in the show notes and stuff like that. Mike Gerholdt:
I didn't mean to put you on the spot but to be honest with you, every time I ask a question I'm like, oh, go to Trailhead. It's like, where do you start? Well, what are you looking for?
Trailhead's been around I think almost 10 years to me now, it's to the point where it's like the help and FAQ part of a website. The first time that you saw a help or an FAQ on a website, you're like, oh, I wish every website had this. And to me, that feels table stakes. You should be able to do that.
But then to your point, there are things that you should learn like communication skills and presenting skills and personal branding skills, and some of that's on there, but there's also good sites and good places to go to learn stuff like that.
Last question, a little bit of a curve ball, but as a mentor, you've worked with a lot of people. What is one quality that is consistent across all of your mentees that seems to really drive their success? Warren Walters:
I think one of the big ones is around persistence. Especially in the Salesforce space, configuration and development. I prescribed to a notion of, let me give you just enough so that you know where to look, you can be very dangerous. But not giving you everything to complete or solve challenges or whatever wacky idea that I've come up with at that point.
So knowing that there is a light at the end of the tunnel, there is a solution for every problem, especially in coding. We're not inventing anything new and if statement is an if statement, some of these things that we are creating have been studied and perfected over a long period of time.
So all you need to do is really find it and then use that solution and make that existing solution work for whatever your problem is. So understanding that idea of, okay, as long as I keep working at it, keep pushing, something will come from this that will put me in a better situation than I am currently, is really what I start to stress in a lot of the mentees that I work with.
I think it can get overwhelming to learn development and maybe you don't feel like you're making progress, but a lot of times it's about looking back and reflecting on how far you've come to see some of the progress that you've actually been doing, which is really cool. So I think that's a big one, right?
Persistence and then knowing when to ask questions may have come up before. But you're working on your own, you've found a lot of resources and you're going through and you end up getting stuck on one particular piece.
I think it's important once you are completely stuck and you've done as much research as you can, of course to reach out. And it's humbling because maybe years ago, I didn't like to ask for questions read. I was like, oh, I should know everything, or I should be able to figure this out on my own.
And I started progressing so much faster once I was able to say, all right, I've done enough research, I've looked at it, I'm going to ask a very educated question to somebody that has done this before, somebody who has been through whatever experience. It could be as small as making a formula field or as big as writing an integration to a third party system. Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, you're spot on. Persistence is right there. You said that answer educated question, and this actually came up I want to say about a month ago or so. I interviewed David who does Wordle and Sudoku on YouTube and TikTok, he rather he also does coding, which is interesting. I feel like maybe a lot of software engineers and developers do Wordle and Sudoku.
But I would rather, he said in working with team members would rather have a team member spend 10 minutes working through what they know to try and solve the problem and then come to me with a question as opposed to just immediately hitting a problem going, how do I do this? Throw your hands up.
And I think when I've worked with people too well, how would you work through this? Because you need to start putting those connections together because every time something like this happens, there isn't going to be a Warren behind you that you can just turn around and be like, now what do I do? So educated question. That was really good.
Warren, thanks for taking time out of your day and being persistent and mentoring people and being a part of the great Salesforce community. Warren Walters:
Yeah, Mike, it's been a pleasure and an honor and I guess destiny to finally end up on the Salesforce Admin podcast. Super happy that I was able to make it out and spread the word about development. If you're scared about it, if you don't think it's for you, do not worry. I don't think it's for me, right?
Everybody thinks that just try to take it one step at a time or reach out to me. A lot of developers are very, very helpful in the Salesforce Ohana. So yeah, so happy that we finally made this happen. Mike Gerholdt:
Thanks, Warren. So that was a fun discussion with Warren. I love the term educated question. Going back and really thinking through it makes me think of that podcast that I did with David or ranks on Sudoku and Wordle solving, which is thinking through what are all the possible ways I can solve this, exercising those, and then turning to my community and seeing how they can help me based on what I've done.
Because you might find a creative way of doing something, but I couldn't agree more, persistence, persistence, persistence. There is a light at the end of every tunnel, and I think his sight is very inspiring. I just pulled it up and the first thing it says, remember, I believe in you. So, thank you Warren for being on the podcast.
Now, if you enjoyed the episode, be sure to click that follow or subscribe button so that new episodes are downloaded. And of course, if you're looking for resources, folks write down below in the show notes. I'm going to link to anything that Warren mentioned, including his social profile.
But you can always find resources at admin.salesforce.com. That is your one stop for everything admin. Release information, more podcasts and a transcript of the show. Now be sure to join our conversation in the admin Trailblazer group.
That is, of course, on the Trailblazer community, and you know where to find the link for that. That's right. It's in the show notes on admin.salesforce.com. So with that, I hope you enjoyed this episode. I enjoyed it a lot. And until next week, I'll see you in the cloud.
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Thu, 27 June 2024
Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, it’s time for a deep dive with Josh Birk, who talks to Raveesh Raina, Principal Solutions Engineer at Salesforce. Join us as we chat about what Prompt Builder can do and how to write effective prompts. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Raveesh Raina. Intro to Prompt Builder Raveesh is the perfect person to talk to about Prompt Builder and all the cool stuff you can do with it. As a Solutions Engineer, he works with customers to implement the latest and greatest Salesforce innovations and right now, that’s Prompt Builder. Prompt Builder takes all the power of LLMs and combines it with your Salesforce data. You can use it to help you write personalized emails to customers, build out records with more information, and much, much more. The four prompt template types and what they do Right now, there are four prompt template types in Salesforce: -
The sales email template drafts an email you need to send to your customer. Some examples include introducing them to a new product, or reminding them about an appointment. -
With the field generation template, you can quickly and easily populate or complete a specific field on a record page with a summary or description created by an LLM. -
The record summary template does exactly what it says it does: summarizes a record. This one is really easy to use via Einstein Copilot, and his clients love it for meeting prep. -
Finally, there’s the flex prompt template. This can be used anywhere and everywhere on the platform to create a customized prompt template that incorporates records from multiple objects simultaneously. An example would be to create a personalized product recommendation for a customer based on an Einstein Next Best Action. With all of these prompt templates, you can dynamically ground them with data from Salesforce or Data Cloud. That gives the LLM the power to pull data from records or, with flows, from pretty much any object—standard or custom—in your Salesforce org. How admins can write effective prompts So how do you write effective prompts that do what you want them to do? Raveesh has four tips to share with us: -
Be explicit about your expectations and goals. What are you hoping to get out of the response? The AI needs a clearly defined goal in order to generate a good response. -
Contextualize the information. State if you want to add related records to contextualize the response. -
Specify your role. What is the persona for which this prompt template is built? -
Add limitations and set boundaries. For example, “do not exceed 500 characters.” The AI needs to be told, and sometimes told again, what not to do. This is especially important to think about as you test and refine your prompt in order to get consistent results. There’s a lot more great stuff from Raveesh about building better prompts and how Salesforce protects your data, so be sure to listen to the full episode. And don’t forget to subscribe to hear more from the Salesforce Admins Podcast. Podcast swag Learn more Admin Trailblazers Group Social Full show transcript Josh Birk: Greetings everybody. Guest host, Josh Birk here, to take another deep dive into a topic. And this week, the topic is going to be Prompt Builder and Building on Prompts. I am joined by my good old colleague, Raveesh Raina, who is one of the people who wrote, for instance, our Ultimate Guide to Prompt Builder. Now, with no other hesitation, let's get over and talk to Raveesh. All right, today on the show, we welcome Raveesh Raina to tell us about all things Prompt Builder. Raveesh, welcome to the show. Raveesh Raina : Thank you very much, Josh. It's an honor to be here and thank you for having me. Josh Birk: Excellent. Well, let's start off with a little bit about you. Tell me, what is your current role at Salesforce? Raveesh Raina : So I am a Principal Solutions Engineer. I work predominantly with our account executives and account directors to helping customers get inspired with our latest and greatest innovations that we are publishing and that we are releasing into the market. So I have a specific focus towards financial services. I'm based out of Toronto, Canada, so I work with all of our major enterprise banks with a lot of the different innovations and as far as financial services cloud is concerned, which is our flagship industries product. So helping them get inspired and sharing ideas on how we can help them better meet their goals. Josh Birk: And was computer something you always wanted to get into? Raveesh Raina : No, it's definitely an area that I personally have tried to get better at. Josh Birk: Okay. Raveesh Raina : And it's definitely an amazing opportunity and an amazing space to be. Josh Birk: What did you go to college for? Raveesh Raina : So funnily enough, even though I am based out of Canada, I actually went to the United States for my undergrad and I did mechanical engineering. Josh Birk: Ah. Raveesh Raina : So I graduated from New Jersey Institute of Technology, NJIT, with a mechanical engineering degree. But life had a different set of actions for me and somehow, I ended up aligned to the Salesforce ecosystem a long time ago. Josh Birk: Nice. Okay. Now, today we're going to talk about Prompt Builder. And when customers ask you about Prompt Builder, they're not familiar with it, what's the early elevator pitch you give them? Raveesh Raina : I essentially tell customers that Prompt Builder is an easy to use tool, which allows them to send a predefined set of instructions to an AI model, with the expectation of getting a response that has both value and meaning to them. And by value and meaning, I'm specifically referring to within the context of the data that they are providing via their CRM for Salesforce. Josh Birk: Okay. And walk us through the four templates we have right now that frame that data and that value add? Raveesh Raina : Yeah, absolutely. So right now, as of today, we have four prompt template types, sales email prompt templates, that's the first one. The second one is going to be field generation. The third one is what we call flex prompt templates. And the fourth one is record summary prompt templates. Josh Birk: Yeah. Now, I think the first two there are pretty straightforward. We're generating an email to send out to somebody, and if we're summarizing or we're generating a field, it means instead of a human putting in things manually, the GenAI is going to create it. Tell me a little bit more about the second two because I feel they're off to the corners and they're also very different from each other. Right? What's the purpose of a flex template and what's the purpose of the record summary template? Raveesh Raina : Yeah, so what I'll do is let me tackle record summary template first. Josh Birk: Okay. Raveesh Raina : Just as its name suggests, a record summary template is used by an admin to summarize a record or to get a succinct overview of a particular record. It is best served, best delivered in the UI via Copilot. So that is what we've seen greatest success in, in that record summary prompt templates can be surfaced up via Copilot, but it allows the admin to summarize a record based on whatever data model that they have already implemented. Josh Birk: Got it. Raveesh Raina : So that's a record summary template. Now, flex prompt templates, they are really powerful and versatile because what they allow an admin to do is to connect up to five objects together in a prompt template for the purposes of grounding. Those five objects could be standard objects or custom objects. They don't have to be related to each other in any way, shape or form, but through the power of the UI that the admin is surfacing, they can ground the flex prompt templates with each of those different objects with the expectation of getting a response from the LLM. Josh Birk: And for listeners at home, if you have somehow missed all of the wonderful Salesforce marketing about Einstein Copilot, it is a conversational AI for your platform and we will discuss that in another episode. Now, when it comes to these kind of templates, let's focus on the sales email, as I think it's the most straightforward. Some people listening might be like, "Well, I already know how to generate an email. Why do I need generative AI to do this?" What do you think the value add specifically that these are being pulled in through an AI model and having a generative response as opposed to a human created one? Where do you think the power lies there? Raveesh Raina : So the way I like to think of it where generative AI sales email templates provide value is the fact that it provides an easy mechanism for a user to craft an email in a conversational style that includes human and natural language text into it. If I were to use a standard email template as an example, that is static text, but replaced with either merge fields or even sometimes even with related records. But it removes that humanality sort of, from crafting an email. And the recipient may recognize that this is static text, but with generative AI, it adds more humanity towards that email template type. So that's where I feel is some of that value added. Josh Birk: And I think to some people, they might be scratching their eyebrows there because they're like, "But Raveesh, I'm using a computer to generate this email." But I think that's exactly spot on because we've all gotten that email that's like, "Hello, first name at company name. Congratulations on your date." And it's like you know instantly, this isn't from a human, but what these GenAI models are really good at is mimicking a human-like response, this human-like writing. And so it's like you get something that's acting like it's somebody to draft an email every single time you're sending this out to somebody. Raveesh Raina : Absolutely. Absolutely. It adds a little bit more personalization to a piece of communication that was missing with your static email templates in the past. Josh Birk: And also, I think it's hard to do it on a podcast, right? It's hard to show it on the podcast, the power of being able to ground this in Salesforce data. Tell me a little bit about... For each one of these templates we're talking about, what kind of data can we bring into the AI model to let it represent whatever it is that we're trying to generate? Raveesh Raina : Absolutely. So the real power of our generative AI tools with Salesforce, in my personal opinion, is the fact that we allow admins and customers the option to dynamically ground these prompt templates. What we mean by dynamically grounding is adding placeholders in these prompt templates that will be automatically replaced with either merge fields directly from a record or related lists that trace back to the origin of that record, or even through the power of flows. Once again, get a subset of related records associated to that original parent record as well. So dynamically grounding can be done using merge fields, related lists, flows to get subset of records. And you can take it two steps further by grounding with Apex classes or even through the power of Data Cloud data model objects as well. Josh Birk: And what I think is also going back to the old way of doing things and doing things with this way, using flow, but also just because it's a conversational model, you can instruct the AI to do things based on the data. So it's not just, "Say something about this person's description." It could also be like, "Based on the fact that this person has no survey scores, change your response based on that." And what are some things that people who have flow skills can do to apply that extra layer of logic? Give me a good example of something that would change the course of the outcome based on a flow? Raveesh Raina : Yeah, absolutely. So I did mention that the power of flows is the fact that you can get subsets of records. So for example, if I want to surface up using a generative AI response, a summary of all open cases associated to a client or an account. If I were to use the standard related list component or resource picker, then it would give me a summary of all the cases associated to an account, whether it's open, closed, escalated, high priority, so on and so forth. But with flows, if I just want to surface up open cases only, that is what I can do through the power of dynamic grounding as well. Josh Birk: And what I love about it, if anybody's here, maybe for some reason, you haven't dipped your toe into the flow pool, the flows we're talking about can be very... I can do these flows, and I'm not Jen Lee. Flows are her job. She's the one who goes like, "Oh yeah, flow can do that crazy, impossible thing. Wait a minute, I'm going to show you how." Going on the other side of the spectrum, tell me a little bit about how data cloud can help complete this picture? Raveesh Raina : Yeah, absolutely. So as we all know, Data Cloud is an amazing tool that unlocks an organization's ability to tap into their enterprise data. So what that means is that for an organization that is using Salesforce, they may have a good portion of their data sitting in CRM, sitting in Salesforce, but a lot of it could also be sitting off platform in, for example, a lot of organizations, they have a separate dedicated app for their orders or their accounting, or even if they have a public website or mobile app, then some of that web traffic is logged in those third party systems. Josh Birk: Yep. Raveesh Raina : So through the power of Data Cloud, if they want to bring those insights and have a summarization or generative AI information associated to that data, customers are able to take all of that third party data that is sitting in those systems and have that surfaced up in Data Cloud. And the power of Prompt Builder allows for grounding with those Data Cloud objects or data model objects, I should say, and then surface up that information directly within the flow of work in Salesforce. Josh Birk: Yeah. Now, let's take a couple steps back because we've been talking a lot about data and grounding the data, taking the data from sources like Data Cloud, and I think that a lot of people have cautionary tales about AI. Describe the Einstein Trust Layer to me and how does it keep all of this stuff safe? Raveesh Raina : So one of the biggest messages that we have is the fact that we have zero retention policies with all of the public AI model providers that we have partnerships with. Whether those are, as an example OpenAI. So what that means is that I think we have to also take a step back and appreciate the fact that Salesforce's number one value is trust. And what we mean by that is the fact that we value our customers, we value that they are trusting us to securing their data. And we also take it one step further in ensuring that we are not sharing their data in any way, shape or form with any of these third party AI model providers. So a big part of the Einstein Trust Layer is the fact that we are not sharing customer data directly or indirectly with AI model providers there. And also at the same time, those AI models are not learning from Salesforce's and customers' data as well. Josh Birk: And to be clear there, it's not like some generally handshake between us and Sam Altman. We filter that stuff out. OpenAI does not have the chance to train their models based on our data because they never see it. Raveesh Raina : Correct. Absolutely. Josh Birk: Okay. And then just to bring this to another level, because we think about things like in P-term, P2 and privacy and stuff like that, that's also stuff that's not being shared with entities that don't need to see it. Raveesh Raina: That is correct. Yeah, absolutely. We as a company have gone the extra mile to ensure that PII, personally identifiable information, or PHI, that is not shared, and it is actively masked and obfuscated before it is even sent to an AI model for processing as well. Josh Birk: Got it. Now, you've written a blog post, Ultimate Prompt Builder Guide, thank you for that, it's very extensive, and in it you include some very good tips on how to effectively write a prompt. Give me the high level like what are some really good tips to let me be more effective with that? Raveesh Raina: Absolutely. So a couple of pointers that I will suggest as admins and customers are looking to design prompts are that there are a few different areas that you should try to focus on. First is be explicit in your instructions in terms of the expectations and goals as far as what is it that you're hoping to get out of the response. So making sure that you are setting those expectations. Second is contextualizing information, meaning that state if you are adding in some related records to further contextualize the set of instructions. Third would be to specify your role. What is the persona for which the prompt template was built out for, whether it was a customer support manager or an account executive? An important aspect of the prompt template that I would suggest is also ensuring that you add limitations and setting boundaries, so by being explicit with instructions such as, "Do not exceed past 500 characters," as an example. That is an explicit instruction and a guardrail, ensuring that the prompt template is not going to give a response longer than 500 characters. So those are some areas that I would suggest that folks go in on as far as designing prompt templates. Josh Birk: Yeah, one of the earliest things I realized in working with AI was, and this is in general, AI has this sort of default setting, shall we say, like a default tone, a default style. It thinks its response should be two paragraphs long, paragraphs should be three to four sentences. It's almost exactly what we'd learned back in high school for what a good writing style was kind of thing. Raveesh Raina: Right. Josh Birk: And it will default to that all the time unless you tell it not to. My favorite thing what you just said is explicit. Raveesh Raina: Correct. Josh Birk: I would actually add to that explicit and occasionally repetitive. Raveesh Raina: Yes. Yes, absolutely. It doesn't hurt being repetitive with your instructions because it's about ensuring that the AI model is going to meet your expectations of a response that has both value and trust. Josh Birk: Right. Because this is dynamically generated, which means even if you see the thing that you wanted to do once, run it three more times. Raveesh Raina: Correct. Exactly. Josh Birk: Because it might break one of your rules at one of those points. And then one of favorite anecdotes I give people is, if you saw the Dreamforce '23 keynote, we use Prompt Builder to do a sales email, and to have some fun, we added emojis to the sales email, which worked about three times out of five. Raveesh Raina: Yes. Josh Birk: Right? The team kept on coming out, they're like, "How do you fix this?" I'm like, "I have no idea. I'm going to go talk to the AI and figure it out." What it turned out was I had to beat the AI over the head and be like, "Not just use an emoji with this email, make heavy use of emojis all through this email." Be very, very explicit. Raveesh Raina: Absolutely, [inaudible 00:03:52]. Josh Birk: Now, unlike myself, you have actually had the advantage of working directly with customers on some of these issues, and feel free to nerd out on fintech and banks in general, but what are some specific problems that you've seen from customers? Obviously, if you need to not name names, that's great, but what are some specific problems that you're seeing Prompt Builder help solve? Raveesh Raina: Yeah, absolutely. I think one of the reasons why I have been able to talk to a lot of customers is just because I've been also listening to a lot of customers as well. I think one of the most glaring areas where generative AI and Prompt Builder can provide most value is the use case for meeting prep. So I'm a rep, or I'm a customer support manager, and I need to prepare for an upcoming engagement with a client for a meeting. Using generative AI, I can quickly get a succinct overview on a particular client with all of the different data points that has both value and meaning to me, which I can use as part of my conversation in that meeting with that client as well. So meeting prep or account summarization is of immense value where we are seeing a lot of success with sharing this value with customers, and they are absolutely head over heels signing up for using Prompt Builder to address this need. Josh Birk: Got it. Well, to learn more, everybody, we're going to point to Raveesh wonderful blog post. We'll point you to a couple of Trailhead resources, some help documents. Raveesh, thank you so much. I do have one final question for you. What is your favorite hobby? Raveesh Raina: My favorite hobby at the moment right now is cycling. I use that as an opportunity to bond and to spend time with my kids. I have a seven-year-old and four-year-old, so any chance we get, especially with the weather that we're having this summer, we go outside, we go for cycling around the trails and around our neighborhood. So yeah, right now it's cycling for me. Josh Birk: Wonderful. Raveesh, thank you so much for the great conversation and information. That was a lot of fun. Raveesh Raina: Thank you very much, Josh. Josh Birk: I want to thank Raveesh for sitting down with us this week. And as always, I want to thank you for listening. Now, if you want to learn more about this show and stories about being a Salesforce admin in general, go down over to admin.salesforce.com. Thanks again, everybody, and we will talk to you next week.
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Thu, 20 June 2024
Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we sit down for an Admin Evangelist roundtable discussion with Josh Birk, Jennifer Lee, and yours truly. Join us as we chat about how AI can help you be a better Salesforce Admin and what you can do to improve your prompts. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Josh Birk and Jen Lee. Practice your AI prompts With everything going on with Einstein Copilot and Prompt Builder, I wanted to bring the Admin Evangelists together to find out how they’re thinking about AI and what you should do to get ready. The number one thing that everyone agreed on is to start practicing your AI prompts. Josh recommends seeing if you can get your LLM of choice to tell you a dad joke. Then try and get it to tell you a better one. Just like how we had to learn how to write a good Google query, you’ll quickly find out that some prompts are more effective than others. Jennifer shares the story of how her husband used ChatGPT to help with their itinerary on their trip to Italy. They still had to double-check that the restaurants it recommended were still open and that the timing of everything made sense, but it was a great starting point for planning their vacation. How Salesforce Admins can get help from AI Both Josh and Jennifer also use AI to help with work. Jennifer’s found ChatGPT to be really helpful for writing formulas. She used to spend hours on Google trying to find an example that matched the exact scenario she needed. These days, she can just write a prompt with her specific parameters and get back something useful in seconds. If Salesforce gives her an error, she can tell ChatGPT about it and it’ll try to fix the code. Josh, meanwhile, has been using AI to help generate Apex code from scratch when he’s spinning up a demo org. As he’s quick to point out, it’s not necessarily helpful for the maintenance and debugging tasks that most developers do on a daily basis, but it’s perfect for his particular use case. The human in the loop One last thing we talked about that I want to highlight is the importance of the human in the loop. We used the example of someone calling a power company to find out why their electricity bill is higher. If a human has realized that the weather has a major effect on usage rates and created a screen flow to call the right API, then an AI might be able to give the customer the right answer. But you need a human in the loop to do that second-order thinking. We’ll have even more about how Salesforce Admins can use AI next week in Josh’s deep dive episode, so be sure to subscribe to hear more from the Salesforce Admins Podcast. Podcast swag Learn more Admin Trailblazers Group Social Love our podcasts? Full show transcript Mike Gerholdt:
So in the world of AI and GPTs, and I think one's called Hugging Face, maybe it's Hugging Chat, I don't know. There is a lot to learn and people maybe you're afraid of it or you haven't tried something out. I don't know. We've heard a lot as evangelists on the admin relations team. And so this week I wanted to dive in with all of the rockstar evangelists that I have. Josh Birk, our Senior Admin Evangelist, and Jen, our Lead Admin Evangelist. Also, everything flow about let's dive into prompts and let's start learning about prompts and what should we be afraid of or what shouldn't we be afraid of, or what should we start doing? So that was a really long, highly caffeinated intro, but welcome to the show, Jennifer and Josh. Joshua Birk:
Thanks for having us. Jennifer:
Hey. Mike Gerholdt:
So I won't name names, but I have been around in the community, and I have heard people like, "Cool, oh, you've done something with ChatGPT." And to be frank, if you follow me on Instagram, you'll realize that my feed, sometime in March, quickly took over crazy images generated by Dall-E. Because I find it fascinating that I can give it words to a 1970s music classic rock and say, "Make a picture." And it will produce something that would take me years to put together. And sometimes it's crazy, and I have to share that with the world because I think that's just so cool. But I guess I'm not afraid to try things out. So that's where I was with the world of AI. Where do you guys fall? Joshua Birk:
Well, first of all, I want to go back to something you just said about what's dangerous about talking to something like let's just call it ChatGPT. Just use that as the generic one since it's the most famous and most popular. But I go back to- Mike Gerholdt:
It's like the Kleenex of AI. Joshua Birk:
Yeah, exactly. Mike Gerholdt:
Everybody knows about it. Joshua Birk:
Exactly. And I'm going to say this and I'm going to add a huge caveat to it. But when it comes to going to especially a free one, and just tinkering around with it, it's the same thing that one of the best pieces of advice I ever got before I started programming on a pretty basic on an Apple II. And my teacher at the time, I don't even remember what the class was called, it wasn't computer science or anything like that. But basically he was like, "Do whatever you want. You're not going to break the computer." There's nothing you're going to do that's going to... Nothing's going to blow up. Nothing's going to go in smoke.
The dangers of using AI right now is not the conversation you're having with the AI, it's what you do with the result. So Mike, you're posting things to Facebook. What's the nefarious outcome to that? There's not, right? Now, if I use the generation of AI to submit my legal brief without checking it, you might run into some troubles. But what I always tell people is just jump in and just try talking to it, because until you do... I usually start with have it tell you a dad joke, have it tell you five dad jokes.
My favorite, actually, one of my favorites is go in and play 20 questions with it. Because having an AI guess the object that you're thinking in your brain is actually, it's an interesting way to prove how a conversational model works. But basically to go back to my teacher's advice, don't be scared. Go in an experiment. Jennifer:
Yeah, I have to say that when it first came out, I wasn't one of the people who went running to play with it. But when we were planning our trip to Italy last year, my now husband went and used it to come up with the itinerary. He said, "Okay, we're going to start here. Here are the sites we're going to, recommend some restaurants for me." So then it came back and it said, "Okay, you should go here and here." He, of course, human in the loop, had to go verify that these restaurants still existed. Mike Gerholdt:
Yup. Joshua Birk:
Sure. Jennifer:
But it helped put together our agenda. And then nowadays I've been using it to help me with formula creation, because I am the worst when it comes to the parens, commas, nested if statements, they drive me nuts. I used to spend hours Googling to find the exact scenario I needed that someone else posted, and then tweaked it. But now I can go and say, "ChatGPT, I need a if statement for three things. Give me the structure," and then I would put it in there. So it's been really helpful to me in that regard. Joshua Birk:
And not to throw down Jen, but being the worst, I might have to, I'm not sure. I think I might be worse than you are, because I've done the same thing. And the nice thing is, so ChatGPT is what's called a chained conversational AI. Which means when you create that formula, if you get... Like you put it in and you get an error from Salesforce, you can give that error back to ChatGPT and be like, "You got this wrong," and it already has the context of the formula it gave you, and it'd be like, "Oh, you're right. Let me fix that for you." Jennifer:
Right. Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah. And then just to clarify, in the context of what we're talking about, a prompt, because we spelled this out in our workshops, but a prompt is a starting line for an AI conversation or task where you tell the large language model what you're looking for using natural language, right? Joshua Birk:
Yeah. Mike Gerholdt:
So tell me this, because sometimes I struggle with this. How do you write your prompts differently, than say, putting in a search for Google? Joshua Birk:
Yeah. So first of all, I think that's one of the reasons we call it... People are like, why prompt? It's a weird word. And I think the reason why we refer to it as prompt, because it's a more generic thing than saying query or question or request, or anything like that. Because the thing that you need to provide in a prompt... So let's compare those two directly. When you do a search in Google, it's basically going to a database of a whole bunch of really fancy stuff Google's done, and then you're always going to get the same answer.
If you do the same prompt in ChatGPT you might get slightly different answers because that answer is being generated on the fly. And so in order to be successful with... The nice thing with ChatGPT, once again, because it's a chain conversation AI, so you can start slow and then just keep adding context to it. But in a non-chained one like Prompt Builder, it's adding in all the instruction and the explicit instruction, and the repeated instruction, and the context of, "No, that's sort of the response I wanted, but that's not exactly. Here's how to correct it," kind of thing.
So to compare it to a Google search, it would kind of be like, no, give me the Google searches that are actually relevant to the problem I have at hand. Which Google can't do because it doesn't understand context. Mike Gerholdt:
Right. That makes sense. Jen, you said human in the loop, and I feel like we've naturally in just comparing Google searches to prompting a GPT to return a result, naturally put the human in the loop. But what did your husband do in terms of planning to put the human in the loop for other things? Jennifer:
Yeah, I mean, he had to go, even though it would return an itinerary for us of sites to see in Italy, he still had to go and check and say, "Okay, is this the right path that it should take?" Confirm the hours that... Even though it suggested here's the order, well, is it even open at that time, right? Can you imagine just showing up there and like, oh, nope, it's not open until noon, but you have me going there the first thing in the morning. Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah. Or it figures your itinerary is you just drive there, spend one second there, back out of the driveway. Joshua Birk:
Right. Mike Gerholdt:
Like, no, I'm going there for a reason. Joshua Birk:
Yeah, it doesn't always get the context of time correctly the first time. The last time I tried to do an itinerary, it gave me so many things to do in three hours that no human being could possibly do it. Mike Gerholdt:
Oh my goodness. Yeah. I will say I have tried... So one of the first things I experimented with was, I think it's called Gemini Now, because it was Google and it plugged into their Google Maps. And I think planning road trips and stuff, when you're looking for specific stops, not touristy stops, but okay, a couple hours into the drive, I'm going to want to stop and get some diesel. I want to take a break from driving for 10 or 15 minutes.
I don't want to just sit there and figure out on the map and scroll mile by mile on the map. Does that look like a gas station? Does that look like a gas station? And have it go through that. But oftentimes I also have to go back through the map and validate like, oh, is that still open? Joshua Birk:
Right. Yeah. So I think they've gotten better because these large models at one point were impossible to pre-train on small amounts of data. They basically had to re-consume the entire internet over and over again. And that's why when they first became popular, they warned you it doesn't understand anything. Basically pre-pandemic, if I remember right. And that was a problem here in Chicago because a lot of very famous places had shut down.
So to your point, Jen, about itinerary, making sure they're still there, it would've been spot on recommendations in 2019, but now not so much. And again, I think they've learned how to train them with smaller bits of data. So I think this is better. But yeah, it's whatever moment in time it's looking at when it was grounded in that data. Jennifer:
Well, when I was looking at free GPT products, I used Perplexity AI, and that was using the internet and not data up until a certain timeframe. Joshua Birk:
Nice. Jennifer:
And it came back and said, here's my answer, but then here's my sources. Joshua Birk:
Nice. Jennifer:
So then if I wanted, I could go click on that to get more information Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, as an article from 2007. Like, "Oh, cool, five star Michelin restaurant." What do you feel, in terms of using AI just for your everyday life, is helping you understand AI better as we work to understand the capabilities of prompt builder and copilot? Joshua Birk:
So for work, I'm going to confess, because I've been using AI to generate a lot of APEX. And it's not that I can't write that APEX. And I'm going to say this because I think this is a very unique situation because I'm writing a lot of APEX that's from scratch. I'm not an enterprise developer who has to go in and maintain large bits of code and large project related code and things like that. And there's this huge question out there for the everyday developer, is AI something that's really useful? Because a lot of everyday development is maintenance and it's bug fixes and it's very detailed work.
And there's probably a role for AI when it comes to code reviews and things like that. But for what I'm using it for, it's like I know how to write this and I know I've written something like this, but AI will do it 90% correctly in about three seconds. I can't type that fast, especially these days. I cannot type that fast. And so if I just kind of go back in and I'll reiterate it and stuff like that, and because of that in very short period of time, for instance, the demo works we're spinning up. I have APEX that can recreate all the data for me in these styles.
And that's, I think, the important thing is it's in the style that I want the data to look like. It's in the level of realism that I want the data to look like. Which actually would've been... That's the part that would've been very difficult me to do because to sit back and be like, I want 30 companies that sound like they would work with Northern Trail Outfitters. Mike Gerholdt:
Oh yeah. Joshua Birk:
Right? I'd have to sit back and actually ideate about that and spit out ideas and all of this kind of stuff. And ChatGPT is just like- Mike Gerholdt:
I'd come up with a whole bunch of Southern Trail Outfitters and Western Trail Outfitters and Eastern Trail Outfitters. Joshua Birk:
Exactly, exactly. It's not shy. It will just try to give you that kind of slightly creative information shoved inside of an APEX class. And it's definitely, I mean, I can't even calculate how much time it saved me. Jennifer:
I think for me, outside of the formula piece, which it has definitely helped me build formulas faster, but I use it to shorten things that I've written. Here's this thing, I need to narrow it down into this many characters. So that's been helpful in shortening that up. I have a problem of condensing things. Mike Gerholdt:
No, I think that's great. I mean, that's actually to look back at admin track at Dreamforce a few years ago, the biggest session that was always attended was documenting your org. And I think it's because you always would have to start from scratch as opposed to, Jen, I use AI for a lot of that as well. I will write a description in X number of characters following this style of writing and then give me three versions of it. Because Josh, to your point, I don't have three versions in my head, or I need a fourth version, but I need you to give me three to kind of push the cart down the hill a little bit. Joshua Birk:
Yeah. And it's like, why do we keep going back to summarization as such a classic AI use case? Part of it is because it can read it and then write that summarization faster than you could read it by a 100th percent. It can do it. So it's not just the speed of generation, it's the speed of consumption as well. Mike Gerholdt:
So working with, looking ahead, because Prompt Builders GA, we're doing workshops. What are some of the things that we should think about as admins for what organizations may be looking for in terms of prompts, so that... Because I literally think the amount of creativity that we have in our heads is the limitations we all have for delivering on super useful prompts. Joshua Birk:
Well, Mike, I don't know if you know this yet, but we have an upcoming episode with my friend Ravish [inaudible 00:14:47], where we talk about this a little- Mike Gerholdt:
Next week. Joshua Birk:
Right. So one of the things I asked him, because Ravish actually is working with customers and working with billing out some of these solutions. And I think the answer to that question is start looking at... Let's focus very specifically on this field generation prompt builder template. Look at your page layout and ask yourself, is there something here, or can I add a field to this that would be useful? Because going back to our friend summarization, that we could summarize not just the object that we're looking at on the record, but summarize it in its related data. And it's a data next to it and data that Flow can find to it and data that's in Data Cloud and all of these points of data.
And what Ravish said, not to spoil my own content, but he's like, "One of the most useful things is either meeting prep or call prep." Like if you have a call with a customer coming up, you want to pull up the account and you want to get a one paragraph overview of all the activity of that account so that you are enlightened almost right away as to what to do with this. So I think it's going to be hard until you see the fields actually being generated, because it's a very different kind of data that we're used to.
But the question is going to be, I'm trying to think of if, and maybe one of you two have a good example, because Salesforce has evolved so much over the years, right? I always joke with people, you don't know how good you have it because you can do GO selection and SOQL queries. I had to write an entire APEX class in order to make that work, and I couldn't even do it with Radius. I had to select zip codes by a square because we didn't have the capacity to do sign and co-sign back then. The things that we've added that make the platform so much more intelligent, and this is another step in that evolution. And so it's time to start asking yourself, what layer of generative data can I add to my object model that's going to make my users more successful? Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, I would agree. I think along those lines, looking at what's available, looking at what GPT, even if you can't get your hands on anything Einstein and all you do is Trailhead modules and you listen to some podcasts like this. I think the one thing, not that worries me, but the one thing that I would have a serious conversation sit down with stakeholders is I would look at what's all the anecdotal data that we store in Salesforce and where is it at?
And so I bring that up because Josh, your example of zip codes, phone numbers, hard data, super hard data, a zip code, a phone number, even a street address anymore, you can write a call out and verify that. The number of websites I go to now, and I literally type the three numbers of my house in, and it's already narrowed it down to the five possible addresses this could be, I think is amazing, it didn't exist before. But what I think the power of what people are wanting is, so give me a summarization of the last five calls and what their pain points were.
And if you're not running some sort of reports or like Jen, if you don't have, I'm thinking screen flows with really good fields to prompt people on, you need to fill this stuff out and we need to prepare for it. I don't care how good the AI is, it's not going to weed through bad call notes if the salespeople didn't put that stuff in. Joshua Birk:
Yeah. And I want to call out one of the demos I saw here internally, because I think it touches on that a lot. And the demo was case support, and I think this was Copilot. And the ticket was, "Why is my power bill so high?" And the AI doesn't know how to answer that question properly. And this is like when we keep the human in the loop, the human in the middle, we have to remember that's in the whole... It's from beginning to end, because a human had to realize, oh, we charge people for electricity.
And what is one of the things that determines how much electricity you use? Oh, it's the weather. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to build a Flow that calls out to the weather API that brings me back the weather for the last whatever period of time this ticket was for. And then the AI is like, oh, well, your power bill was high because it was super cold, or it was super hot, or whatever. But the case support person can basically just ask, analyze the support ticket and with the power of Flow that a human created, then the AI can add into it and be like, oh, this is why we think this is wrong. Jennifer:
Yeah. I think back to the demo that we created for Dreamforce, for the admin keynote, we were using NTO, right? They did expeditions and we were able to say, okay, take the customer's expeditions that they've already been on and take the customer state, and then now go and based on what they've done in the past, recommend something similar. And looking at all the expeditions that were available. So that would've taken some time for the rep to then go research that and see what expeditions they've been to, what they might like, based on those things, to recommend other things. But with Prompt Builder and field generation, click a button, AI does it all for you. Mike Gerholdt:
I would agree. Well, thanks for sitting around and jawing about prompts and GPTs, because I feel like it's June, we've been talking about this... Has it been for over a year or has it just been a few months? Or has it just been a year- Joshua Birk:
It feels like over a year. Mike Gerholdt:
Right. Right. But it's a little more advanced. It's interesting because I wonder in a year from now if we listen to this episode, if it'll sound super dated or not. Joshua Birk:
Yeah, I think that's an interesting question. And it's hard to answer because you have OpenAI saying the AI you're talking to right now are, oh gosh, I think I'm trying to remember their exact quote and realizing it might not be something we want to record on a podcast. So let's just say not nearly as evolved as the models that they are trying to bring into the near future. And the near future ones are supposed to be much more intelligent, much more capable of reading your contacts, much more behaving like a human, kind of thing. And so I think that poses the question of when I say how much context and how much repetition you have to put in your prompt to make it do what you want.
That statement might sound dated in about six months to a year. Because the person listening to it at that time might be like, "What are you talking about? The AI just knows who I am and they just talk to me like a travel agent. It's just normal." But I think in general, what we're going to get is better results, and prompt building in general is going to remain relatively the same. We might get to the end faster. We might get more better concise data. It's going to realize that that great pizza shop is actually closed in Chicago, and it won't recommend it, and things like that. But I think the actual concepts of prompt building, I think they're here to stay for a while. Mike Gerholdt:
Wow. Well, that's good to know. It doesn't feel like fly-by-night anymore. Well, I'll stick a bow on this episode for now, and thankfully none of our AI's hallucinated.
If you enjoyed this episode, do me a favor and share it with one person, just one. It's not that hard. If you're listening in the Apple Podcast app, you can just tap the three dots up in the right-hand corner, click the share episode, and then you can post it to social. You can text it to a friend and be like, "Let's listen to the prompt building episode together."
If you're looking for more great resources, of course, admin.salesforce.com. The number of people I know that don't know about admin.salesforce.com is hopefully dwindling in the world because I keep bringing it up. But the good news is the reason you can go there, all the resources, if we mentioned any in the show, will be there, a transcript of the show, and links to our Admin Trailblazer group on the Trailblazer Community will be there as well. So with that, until next week when Josh talks to Ravish, and you already had a preview of that episode, we'll see you in the cloud.
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Thu, 13 June 2024
Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Chris Zullo, Global Practice Director of Customer 360 and Marketing at AllCloud. Join us as we chat about integrating Marketing Cloud and Data Cloud and how you can do more with your data. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Chris Zullo. Bring all your customer data together in Salesforce Chris is kind of my go-to Marketing Cloud guy, so I wanted to bring him on the pod to talk through how Data Cloud and Marketing Cloud go hand-in-hand. In his role as Global Practice Director of both Customer 360 and Marketing at AllCloud, he’s seen firsthand just how much of an impact Data Cloud can have by allowing both departments to work in tandem. There are so many applications businesses use in today’s environment that each store data about your customers. But there’s a problem. As Chris puts it, “The likelihood of all of those systems talking to each other in any cohesive fashion is slim to none.” That’s where Data Cloud comes in. It allows you to bring all of that data into one place in Salesforce, and that’s where the magic happens. Data Cloud creates a consistent customer experience When a customer interacts with your business, they don’t care who they’re talking to—they just want to be treated consistently and as if they’re the same person. If they had a conversation with a sales rep about a certain product or feature, they expect the customer service rep they call to know what they’re talking about. With Data Cloud, your customer service rep can look at all the communications a customer might have had with sales so they’re on the same page. And if they notice that there’s an email sequence scheduled next week to remind them about their warranty, maybe they can cancel it ahead of time and head things off at the pass. That’s why it’s so important to give everyone a seat at the table when you’re establishing Data Cloud at your organization: marketing, sales, service, eCommerce, IT, and your data team. You want everyone working together to create a unified experience for your customers. Data Cloud makes your data actionable Some business units get really attached to their data. Sure, they’ll build you an API to provide a one-way glass view of their data, but why do you need them to integrate it with Data Cloud? “It’s all about making it actionable,” Chris says, “it’s a verb, it’s an action. Just because I have a view doesn’t mean I can do something with it.” Data Cloud lets you do segmentation and targeting at scale without having to copy-paste into a bunch of pivot tables. And with AI features like lookalike segments, the possibilities are endless. There’s a lot more great stuff from Chris about how Data Cloud can transform your organization so be sure to listen to the full episode. And don’t forget to subscribe to hear more from the Salesforce Admins Podcast. Podcast swag Learn more Admin Trailblazers Group Social Full show transcript Mike:
With Data Cloud, you can organize and unify data across Salesforce and other external data sources. After data has been ingested into Data Cloud, it can be used to drive personalization and engagement through the creation of audience segments. So that's what our help documents say. And I wanted to find out from Chris Zullo, who is a business puzzle solver, Salesforce MVP and Global C360 and marketing practice director at AllCloud. What he's seeing when he's helped other admins integrate Marketing Cloud and Data Cloud and all of the benefits across the organization from having visibility into that. Also, what are some of the questions that admins should be asking in order to get that integration going?
Now, before we get into the podcast, I want to be sure you're doing one thing and that's following the Salesforce Admins Podcast. And the reason I ask is if you're doing that on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or iHeartRadio, then the newest episode will automatically be downloaded right to your phone so you can listen to it on your bike ride or your dog walk, or maybe you just walk around the neighborhood to clear your head. But let's talk about integrating data with Chris and get Chris on the podcast. So Chris, welcome back to the podcast. Chris Zullo:
Thanks for having me. Mike:
It's probably been a while, but you're my go-to Marketing Cloud guy, and I feel a lot of people have seen you present in the ecosystem and talking Marketing Cloud. But catch us up. What have you been up to? What do you do? What's your exciting passion in the Salesforce ecosystem? Chris Zullo:
Sure. So I mean, right now, I am doing a lot of things around Marketing Cloud and Data Cloud as a global practice director for Customer 360 and marketing for a company called AllCloud and just really trying to figure out how best to utilize the data that we have. Mike:
I love it when you get titles based on marketing and you go, "Had that for a while." Chris Zullo:
It's a long one. Mike:
I used to be a director of social enterprise. I was like, "Ooh, that sounds neat." And then Salesforce dropped Social enterprise and I was like, "Oh, now I'm stuck with this." So I'm going to play devil's advocate because Marketing Cloud and Salesforce, I've done stuff, isn't campaigns enough? I mean, as an admin, I signed up my marketing people and they can create campaigns and they can put contacts in as campaign members. Chris Zullo:
I mean unofficially the campaign object is the first part of the Marketing Cloud going back in time. But no, it is not in fact enough by itself as that is merely just a folder, if you will, a job folder that you can manage any engagement and activities that you plan to execute and engage with your customer base. So yeah, you need to do more. Mike:
So what do we get when we sit down and have the grownup discussion of let's pull in Data Cloud? Chris Zullo:
So when you think about pulling in Data cloud or why you would need Data Cloud, you got to think about how many systems and applications store customer data and it's never just one. The likelihood of all of those systems talking to each other in any cohesive fashion is slim to none. So with Data Cloud, you have the ability to connect and create a number of bridges, if you will, to allow all of these systems and applications to feed into one centralized location where we can harmonize, centralize, standardize all of that data to create a unified view of any one individual to better engage with them, to better service them, whatever the topic may be, and not have to swivel chair across multiple systems and try and remove a lot of the manual labor that goes into historically accessing customer data in a lot of different locations. Mike:
So what are some of the things that you are finding when you work with marketers that they're excited to get data on with Data Cloud? Chris Zullo:
Well, some of the bigger things are some of the more advanced segmentation capabilities that you're able to do. If you think about from retail businesses that are selling goods or products and they're wanting to figure out what's the customer lifetime value of an individual or how much are they spending with us? Recency frequency and monetary models where you can get into these more robust modeling above and beyond your typical segments of, okay, give me all the people who like the color red. You can get more just deeper into the weeds to create these more robust groupings of individuals that you can then break down into smaller parts as you need. And so, that's one of the bigger things is just really being able to look at that and isolate at scale what people are doing, how are they interacting with us and how much do they really like us? Mike:
Yeah, how much do they really like us? Dear Marketing Cloud, how much do... Please, no, don't do that. So if I'm listening to this and I'm an admin, I'm putting myself back in those days of sitting in the chair and it's usually an executive or a stakeholder sees something at an event is like Data Cloud. We should talk about that. Where are you finding when you're helping admins or doing some of this work yourself? The admin should start this conversation. Does it start with the marketing team because the marketing team needs to pull that in and then they're going to service? Where are some of these conversations originating? Chris Zullo:
Marketing certainly has a seat at the table since the concept that Data Cloud is built upon originated within the marketing realm over 10 years ago, the concept of a customer data platform, which really was to make their jobs easier. That being said, they're not the only ones that can benefit from data. So I think if you're going to do it right, you have the right heads of each of the major business units or teams or departments, however you organize your company at the discussion around what do we want to do? Who is our customer? Even before you get to the technology, it's really around alignment across sales, marketing, service, e-comm, maybe IT is involved or if you have a dedicated data team, these are some of the main voices that should have input into creating that centralized model because you may have different uses in each of those teams. The customer doesn't changed and they don't care who they're talking to. They expect to be treated consistently as if they're the same person regardless of the context of what their conversation is on. Mike:
Yeah, sitting back as an admin where the data's at and that your customer doesn't know where their data's at, they don't get, like when you go check into a hotel, why don't you have all my information? I don't know where you keep all my information. I don't know where my name is stored versus my hotel room preferences and I don't care, I shouldn't because I'm talking to the front desk person. They should have all that. That's a thing that I always seem to forget. So what are some of the conversations like because I have to feel like a few of these databases or wherever this information stored have owners and they own the database. I've worked with orgs before where, yeah, well, IT owns the invoice server or whatever. Boy, they don't want to give that data up. What is the benefit in that? Or they'll come back and say, "Well, I can just write you an API that gives you a view into the order table." What is the benefit of going Data cloud versus a one-way, maybe pane of glass view? Chris Zullo:
It's really making it actionable. I don't recall the specific quote, but you were in the room with me- Mike:
Oh, boy. Chris Zullo:
... back in the day. And it was a difference between a noun and a verb. If you recall the particular event we were at, it was it's all about making it actionable. It's a verb, it's an action. And so, just because you have a view doesn't mean I can actually do something with it. I mean, that's still swivel chair because if I've got to copy and paste or manually key something in that's not making it frictionless, and not only is that making my job harder, that is making the customer experience less enjoyable because that prolongs the conversation that slows down the resolution of whatever activity that individual's trying to carry out. And so, Data Cloud makes it actionable so that once we have that data in, and something that I don't think a lot of people realize is Data Cloud is not overriding those source systems.
It's not a survivorship model. So the systems of record are still the systems of record. The system owners are still in charge of what goes on in their domain. Data cloud is just making it so that we can combine the data from these various systems and make it more usable for business users. And if you want, you can activate or push data back to those systems if you see fit. Otherwise, you're going to activate it into the channels where you can do something with it that's going to benefit the customer and hopefully make your day job a little bit easier. Mike:
So what I'm hearing is, as a marketer because that's where we started, I can query contacts and with Data Cloud also look at maybe contacts with invoices greater than a $1,000 and not have to do a pivot table with contacts I pulled out at Salesforce and then invoices that I got out of this other system because the data is actionable within Salesforce. Chris Zullo:
That's absolutely correct. Mike:
Just letting that moment of silence kind of fall upon people as you hear 10,000 pivot tables in the background screaming, because I feel like that. It's a different scenario, but I remember just Salesforce a long time ago used to be able to do web tabs or whatever. And so, I set up a web tab, which was our travel portal, and I remember the salesperson being like, "Oh my god, Mike, this is amazing. So this means that when I booked the travel, it's going to put it on my calendar." And I was like, "No, it's just a pane of glass to our travel portal. It is just that there is no integration."
And too often I think people get caught up in what the visual looks like. You asked for order information, so here it is on another tab when you click this and now you have access to it. Except as a marketer, I still have to go to this other system, to the invoice domain on this other server and pull customer numbers and pull contact records and then pivot table the two as opposed to using a report in Salesforce or something in Tableau to create that campaign. Chris Zullo:
That can be a brutal way to go about things. And frankly, a lot of us have been used to that for so long because that's just the way it was done. But now there's a better way to utilize that data and like I said, make it more actionable to speed up the process and the time to value both for the business as well as the individual that you're supporting or trying to provide great customer experience to. So another example of that is you mentioned orders, but think about from a case perspective, and this is going to touch across multiple teams. If somebody calls in with an issue or have questions about a product or service that they've bought, so you have the customer service rep on the phone, there was an order placed and fulfilled at some point in the recent memory.
And you may have active marketing communications going out to this individual on a regular basis. And so, that's just three teams that could be involved in that one call. And so, in that moment, does the customer service rep know what you have bought recently without having to ask and make you repeat 15 times after they've done that to validate that you are who you say you are? But then can I see your order history? Can I see that there's some marketing communications scheduled very soon that might be touching upon this very same topic or related topic, which maybe we let go? Maybe we want to hit pause for a second and say maybe we don't want to hit them up with this marketing communication because they've called in, they have a question, we haven't resolved it.
It may or may not be negative, it may just be a neutral situation, but we don't want to potentially turn this into something bigger than it is. And so, you've got those three different teams that can be influenced by that one call, but how many systems does that rep have to go to see what this person has, what they have bought, what email communications are coming up, or SMS if it's a different channel? All of that can be in one view if you are able to unify everything through Data Cloud. Mike:
Yeah, I always feel like the conversation with marketing is sales oriented, but the real increase in fidelity is when as an admin, marketing and service talk to each other, because that's normally where the joy can be maintained of the sale. After the salesperson not walks away, but closes the deal, to your point, if they have say, a warranty issue, the last thing they want is two days later after a customer service call to get a marketing email reminding them to sign up for a three-year extended warranty. Like, "Hi, welcome to Tone Deaf Marketing." But it happens, right? And I always feel like when you sit down with marketing people, their initial inclination is sales oriented. But I feel like what I'm definitely hearing is a big value comes to the customer service rep who is, "Hey, I hear you. Let's work through this issue. I see you're on a couple of warranty reminder emails. I'm going to go ahead and uncheck you from those." And you can correct me on this, the marketing team, empowering the service team to do something like that, right? Chris Zullo:
Yes, exactly. Work smarter, not harder. Mike:
What are other examples that you're finding of, I won't say it's unintended, but unintended collaboration like that unlocked because of Data Cloud? Chris Zullo:
Sure. So I think other ones is to your point, from a sales perspective, sometimes people lump marketing and sales into the same team oftentimes and stereotypically and very humorously, it's like Westside story and they're on rival factions where we agree on nothing. Mike:
I would love to think that every sales and marketing meeting begins with teams snapping at each other. Chris Zullo:
Oh, I feel like there's a nice skit in the future with that one. Mike:
There is. Chris Zullo:
But so think about how those two can be working more collaboratively whether they want to or not, they should be. But thinking about you have people selling on an interactive basis, and if you are, say it's multithreaded in its account-based marketing, and you have different sellers talking to different people in the same organization, do they know that? Mike:
Oh, yeah. Chris Zullo:
Do we know if the left hand is doing while the right hand's over here shaking a new hand? How are we connecting the dots not only internally, but also looking at the target organization? Who is getting what communications? How are we bombarding them with all these different communications? Or potentially, do we want to empower the sales team to drop somebody into a nurture campaign? It would be a lot more effective if A, we can bubble up the fact that, okay, we have one organization, we have got two sellers talking to five different people and they're on all these different communications. One's not.
And then we can look at a broader picture from an account level at the individual level and internally who's doing what, when, where, and why. All of that rolls into how can we provide a better service from a sales perspective, and how can we empower bidirectionally marketing and sales to help each other to put them into the right communication? Or maybe again, similar to the previous example, maybe dial it back. Maybe we don't want to hit them as much because they're talking to a human being. We don't need to prompt them to schedule their next appointment. Mike:
Right. Yeah, that's always fun when you're getting the email. So moving ahead, AI is a thing, it's been a thing for a while. We have Prompt Builder, we have Einstein Copilot. What are some of the cool things that you're hearing marketers are really looking forward to with some of the AI stuff that's out there? Chris Zullo:
I think some of the predictive capabilities, I think really being able to leverage the AI from an ideation perspective, creating content or I don't know about you, but I do enjoy writing, but I don't always hit the ground running and wanting to be able to throw an idea out there, get something back and go, okay, that's not exactly what I wanted, but I can work with this. And so, then I can tweak it. And so, I might have a great idea, but I don't have the words to get it going. And so, that's one example from a marketing perspective. The other is from a data perspective, thinking about, again, the data has a story to tell and the better your data, the better the story can become.
And with AI in particular leveraging good data, we can then identify trends or identify opportunities that maybe we're not looking at as closely as we could or should, but also would take us a lot more time to effectively do if we were doing it manually and allowing that to create a lookalike audience, a lookalike segment to say, "Hey, here's your best audience based on these parameters. You've got this whole group of untapped potential that would potentially be really interested in this same product or this same service, but you've never bothered to ask." Mike:
Yeah, I mean, you put a lot on the salesperson to make those connections in their head, and sometimes it's just not going to happen depending on the salesperson, right? Chris Zullo:
Exactly. Mike:
This is more of a Mike question because Mike's curious. So where are marketers falling with a lot of the advancements in AI writing emails to customers? Because you and I, we're from the days when marketing had to go over every single letter word, consonant vowel period in an email, and we built email templates and we would build workflows with email templates. And somewhere a marketer would lay his head down or her head down at night and be like, "I know exactly word for word what the customer got when we closed the deal." But now with AI we can kind of say, "Hey, tone and voice..." And maybe be softer or maybe be happier or funnier. And I suppose it's no different than just letting people write emails, but I'd be curious kind of what you're hearing because I feel you're a little more plugged into marketers than I'm. Chris Zullo:
Yeah, I think there's a relative split. I think you've got a number of folks who are embracing it and leveraging it for the benefits that it offers. I do feel that there's still a bit of skepticism and fear. And to be honest, two years ago I was very much skeptical on what AI was going to do for me as a marketer. So I decided to investigate a little bit further and learn more about it and saw that there really is a lot of potential with AI. And I think the way I would explain it is AI is not going to replace you. I think people who understand and learn how to harness the power of AI are going to have an inherent advantage over others because it is a productivity play, in my opinion. And so, the way I have been explaining it to people is it's not so much artificial intelligence, but it's supplemental intelligence. You don't replace the human. The human still needs to be involved. You're still the chaperone. You still going to be a hand on the wheel, but it's almost like having Jarvis from a very popular. Mike:
[inaudible 00:25:27]. Chris Zullo:
Yes, our boy, he is a helper, but he can't do all the things without your guidance. Jarvis was a product of Tony. And so, the AI that we're using in our organization, it's really going to be a product of how you utilize it to increase your time to [inaudible 00:25:54], your speed to market, or reduce the friction to process data. It's really about taking that and leveraging that in a way to be more efficient with the time that you have and still have the final say. I'm not asking Einstein to create an email and just send it blindly. No, I'm doing it to jumpstart the process and then I can refine it and revise it with a trained human hand that knows, you know what? That might not work the way that the output provided it. And you can either train it to get better, which it can do, but at the end of the day, it still requires you or me to be involved in the process. It doesn't work asynchronously. It just doesn't. Mike:
Yeah. I was talking with a friend this weekend, and of course, this'll date me in 10 or 15 years, he's a professor at university. He said, "AI's not going to take your job. What's going to take your job is the people that know how to use AI." Chris Zullo:
Exactly. Mike:
And I was like, "Oh, you're so spot on." We diverged a little bit. Last question, anyone who's looking to get interested in Data Cloud, what would your suggestion be? Chris Zullo:
I would jump on Trailhead for one. That is a great place to start because you can get hands-on exposure and experience. And honestly, whether you realize it or not, admins, you have such an important role in your organization and Data Cloud can have such a significant impact on how your data is managed, that it really is in your best interest to understand how it works, how it can impact your environment and how you can influence it. And so, number one, go to Trailhead and get started there. There's a number of resources out there. I'm trying to think of the name. There is a great YouTube series that Danielle Larregui oversees, the specific Data Cloud series and has a number of different guests from Salesforce on there about how Data Cloud works and how to use some of the various features within that, and it's a really good resource. Mike:
I like it. Thanks for coming on the podcast, Chris. It's always good to hear from you and I'm sure we'll hear some crazy visionary insights from you at Dreamforce this year, right? Chris Zullo:
I will certainly be there. I've been around for a while, so I don't know if anybody really wants to hear from me anymore, but I'm always happy to share. Mike:
I don't know, I got to believe so, right. Chris Zullo:
Hey, I'm willing and ready. If the invite's there, I'll be there. Mike:
I appreciate it. So it was a great discussion with Chris I, You always think of what's the immediate benefit of doing something with another cloud? So what will Data Cloud get sales? Or immediately, as you heard in the conversation, my head goes right into marketing and sales, but there's also a lot of other benefits that other departments are seeing and we had that discussion about service, how you can actually talk and service your customers better. Having that integration, that information, it just kind of makes sense. So I hope you enjoyed the episode. I thought it was a lot of fun.
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Thu, 6 June 2024
Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Joe Sterne, a Solutions Architect and Salesforce contractor. Join us as we chat about his tips for job interviews, what to look for in a job description, and how you can use AI to help you prep. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Joe Sterne. Contract work in the Salesforce ecosystem Last month, we talked to Jason Atwood about how to prepare for a Salesforce job interview. That episode was fantastic because Jason interviews job candidates all the time, but I wanted to hear from someone who’s had experience sitting on the other side of the table. That’s why I was so excited to hear from Joe Sterne about his experience as a contractor. Contracting is becoming more common in the Salesforce ecosystem, and it can be a great way to get experience to land that next-level position. “At the end of the day, certifications are great,” Joe says, “but certifications aren’t the be-all, end-all—it’s also experience.” Of course, being a contractor means that you’re constantly looking for that next gig, so Joe has a lot of great tips to share from going out on so many interviews. What to look for in a Salesforce job description Looking for a new position usually starts with reading through a bunch of job descriptions. Joe recommends taking a close look at what responsibilities are actually listed because it doesn’t always match the job title. It can happen for any number of reasons, but it’s important information to know going into the interview process because it can affect the salary band. Joe also suggests investing the time to make sure you have something to talk about once you land that big interview, especially if you’re bound by an NDA. It could be Superbadges, or work you’ve done for a nonprofit, or, as Joe says, “maybe it’s something you did for fun just so you could talk about it in an interview.” No matter what, you need a way to demonstrate your skills and knowledge and how they’re a fit for your new role. How to prep for a Salesforce job interview When you’re prepping for an interview, Joe recommends taking some time to learn about the business and the industry they’re in. Who are their clients? What problems are they trying to solve? And, most importantly, why are you a good candidate for them to help them address those problems? At the end of the day, that’s what you’re selling. As Joe says, you want to be able to walk into the interview and say, “Here are your problems, I understand them, I’m going to be able to fix them, here are some ways I should be able to fix them, and here are other ideas I have that I could work on with other people as I learn more to evolve those solutions.” There’s a lot more great stuff from Joe in this episode about how to deal with weird interview questions and how he uses ChatGPT to help him prep, so be sure to listen to the full episode. And don’t forget to subscribe to hear more from the Salesforce Admins Podcast. Podcast swag Learn more Admin Trailblazers Group Social Full show transcript Mike:
So let's say you're out there as a Salesforce admin and you're interviewing and you get a crazy question like, "If you could be any animal, what animal would you be?" Well, I won't tell you the answer that Joe Sterne gave but Joe Sterne is on the podcast today and he's going to help us flip on the other side of the coin. That's right. So it's June. If you remember back in May, I had Jason Atwood on the podcast. He's from Arkus and he was talking about what he does to interview Salesforce admins. My hope was to get you in the mindset of what a hiring manager is looking for.
Today, I got Joe Sterne, who is out there in the job market and he's interviewing as a Salesforce admin, at least he was at the time that we reported this. And gave some tips to help you get ready for your interview, some things that he's doing. Also, you know what? We talk about contract work because I think that's a very viable solution as a new admin. Now, of course, before we get into the episode, I want to make sure you're following the Salesforce Admins Podcast wherever you listen to podcasts, whether it be Apple Podcasts or Spotify or iHeartRadio. Go ahead and click that follow button and the reason is then a new episode will be put on your phone right away when you wake up Thursday morning. So with that, let's get to our conversation with Joe.
So Joe, welcome back to the podcast. Joe Sterne:
Hello. Mike:
Good to have you on again. It's been a while. But let's talk about, so back in May for the people that follow along with the podcast, because I know everybody does. I published an episode How to Prepare for a Salesforce Job Interview in 2024 and Jason Atwood was my guest. And I think he did a really good job of prepping us on the employer side. You, I know, are currently now on the admin side. So I wanted to get the... Does it show my age if I say the peanut butter cup scenario, like the chocolate and the peanut butter version? Joe Sterne:
I mean, I don't think so. I'm still a big fan of Reese's Peanut Butter Cup. Wait. Can I name drop brands on this? Mike:
Yeah. You can. Joe Sterne:
So- Mike:
I mean, if they want to want to send me a care package of peanut butter and chocolate, I'm all for that. Joe Sterne:
There you go. Yes. I mean, to me, that does not date you. If you were saying something more along the lines of... I'm trying to think of... Not Milk Duds. There's some candy that's coated in chocolate that has powder in the middle of it that's from the 1940s. Mike:
That's Milk Duds. That's Milk Duds. Every time I've had Milk Duds- Joe Sterne:
Oh, okay. Mike:
Oh. No, no. Malto- Joe Sterne:
Malt... yes. Malted Stuff. Yeah. Mike:
Malted Dots or something they're called. Joe Sterne:
Yes. Yeah. Those- Mike:
Yeah. Those things- Joe Sterne:
Are old. Mike:
You bite into it, you're like, "Oh, chocolate," and then it's like a puff of dry dust. Joe Sterne:
Exactly. Yes. That, I feel like, would date you. Mike:
Wow. All right. So Joe, since we've last spoke, what have you been up to? Joe Sterne:
Oh man. So was I still at Salesforce when we last spoke? I think I might have been. Mike:
You were still? Joe Sterne:
So yeah, I was wrapped up in part of the layoffs in the beginning of 2023 and landed a couple different solution architecture specific roles at companies over the course of 2023 that also had layoffs sadly. The market has been quite chaotic over the last year and a half in the Salesforce space. I am currently right now doing contract work for another company, still doing solution architecture, but doing it under my own LLC. Mike:
Ah. So what have you found interviewing... And I guess being an LLC and pitching consulting services, you're interviewing, right? Joe Sterne:
Right. Oh, yeah. Yeah. You're still interviewing. It's just, to me... Well, I'll take one step back here. I'm still interviewing for full-time or W2 positions as they like to call it when I've been talking about positions but I'm also open to 10-99 or corp to corp. Corp to corp is one of the main reasons that I decided to do an LLC. Besides the tax reasons, it's the ability just for somebody to come back to me and be like, "Hey, we can do contract but it needs to be corp to corp." It's like, "Cool. We can do that. I have one." Mike:
Gotcha. Joe Sterne:
And not have that be a limitation where it's like, "Hey, we can't do 10-99 or W2 on this engagement," that knocks you out of the rutting. It's like, "Well, okay, that doesn't really help me and I would love to be able to deduct stuff from a business standpoint. Since I'm going to be using my own hardware in most of these contract situations, I'd rather just wrap that up from a business perspective." So I know that's not necessarily totally viable for a lot of people, especially just starting out in the industry. But I would say, it's something to be aware of because I have seen a pretty big shift within the last 18 months in the industry. Well, big for me. I've been in the industry since 2013 and I fell into it. That there's been a dramatic increase in contract roles of any sort and a pretty pronounced pullback in full-time W2 roles. Mike:
Okay. But let's tackle that first part. Let's say you are, for your opinion, a newer admin. What is the level of experience you feel people should be at before they would go and do what you did which is start an LLC and do, we'll just call it contract admin work, as opposed to being hired on as a position within the company? Joe Sterne:
Yeah. I would recommend probably being at some sort of a senior level, so a few years of hands-on experience ideally. That you can then use to translate some of the value of why you would be a good candidate for them from a hiring role in general, whether it's contract or not. But here's some of the stuff that I've done, here's some of the things that I'm a part of, here's some of the knowledge that I have, that I've encountered on the job, some stuff that I may have not necessarily encountered on the job but dabbled in.
Because at the end of the day, certifications are great. I am a certification ambassador for Salesforce so I will not say anything different. But obviously, certifications aren't the be all end all either. It's also experience. Experience both helps you get a certification as well as certifications help you get experience. So it's this chicken and the egg scenario sometimes when you're first starting out where it's like, "How do I get that experience if no one's willing to take a chance on me?"
That is obviously a much larger conversation than what we're having today. But having some of that experience, I think, is helpful if you're trying to go that contract admin route or a fractional admin. Which I feel like as the rise of some of these C-suites, I think that some of that "fractional work" may start coming up where you may be working for two or three companies at once. That you're all doing admin things, but they just don't have the level of requests or tickets or change that would require somebody to be on full-time with benefits but they still need some help. Mike:
Right. That may be the case, right? In your area or depending on where a person is, maybe they're not hiring for a full-time admin. So you're newer, you need the experience, would you take on a contract role? Let's say a company's like, "Look, we're not going to hire for this position full-time but we will do a 6-month contract with you." As an individual, to me, that sounds like a great way to at least get some experience. Joe Sterne:
Absolutely. Mike:
And then you're also working towards, "Well, they could renew the contract. It also gives me a few months to get in with an organization," and maybe you may like it. And then, you could... Well, if you made this full-time, look at all that you would get. Joe Sterne:
Right. The one thing I've seen over the past few months as I've navigated the new contract world. Because historically, I've only looked for W2, but with this market I've had to open myself up to contract roles, is that there definitely is the concept of contract to hire.
Where essentially instead of testing out an employee for 60 or 90 days, you're essentially testing them out for six months, a year, or so. Some of those offers might just be dangling in front of you to get you to be willing to do a contract. But I feel like others actually do convert and drawing some parallels to outside the Salesforce ecosystem when it comes to community management or marketing, having a bunch of contract roles before you land a full-time one is not unusual.
It used to be unusual in the Salesforce realm and I feel like that is also starting to change just with the way that the current market is and the pullback on head counts. That is forcing companies to arguably prioritize their bottomline over their employees. But again, slightly separate conversation. But making sure that from a cost standpoint, that they're not necessarily wasting money on separate groups that they don't "need" too.
So I think that having the ability to grab a contact role for six months is great. It's just that one of the things that you will need to be aware of is that from a interviewing perspective, you don't... Sometimes when you get a full-time job, especially if it's one that you've been pining for, for a while, you take a step back from the LinkedIn and the job application market for a period of time.
When it comes to contracting like sales, you don't really have that luxury. So yes, I am currently contracting for one company but I've never stopped looking for additional work. Just because I don't necessarily have an exclusivity with my current company and I'm also... I'm trying to get to 40 hours a week billable right now which they can't offer and that's okay. It was only pitched as part-time anyway. But for me, it's always trying to find more work and more potential pipeline.
So it's very similar. It's from a consulting standpoint of trying to build a book of business and trying to build a pipeline and trying to line that up. Because ideally, if I stayed in this world of contracting work and whatnot, I would be trying to make sure that I'm fully booked out for a year or so in advance and turn away work or refer work to other people rather than trying to scramble for it. It's the typical feast or famine concept. Mike:
What were... I guess I started in the past tense. But what are some of the things that you do when getting ready for a job interview, either as a W2 or a 10-99, that you feel is applicable to a lot of admins? Joe Sterne:
Oh, man. So I would say, one of the things that I've really started to leverage. And I know that the whole AI, AI, AI thing has been beat over- Mike:
Really? You don't get that anywhere? I haven't- Joe Sterne:
Yeah. No, I- Mike:
I haven't seen AI anywhere. That's the first I've heard of it. Joe Sterne:
Yeah. Exactly. Over the last year, I've definitely started to leverage at least ChatGDP more and more to a point where I'm actually paying for it. I tried to actually set up my own custom GDP around Salesforce architecture that got kicked off the store because it used the term Salesforce. But that is something that I've found to be helpful when I have been, A, researching the company and the industries that company is in. Because asking questions about that, diving deep, granted for most of the stuff that people think of AI today, arguably it's just spicy autocorrect.
But there are some areas where it can definitely start doing things for you that are either tedious or just time-consuming. So I just saw an article that Shannon Tran posted around a Salesforce Ben posting where they were trying to implement different types of AI in an org and they were just trying to figure out what made sense. It turns out, a lot of it, they had to go off platform for and that brings up a ton of complexity. As an admin, you're not necessarily required to know all of that. But you would want to know at least on the Salesforce side, what they're planning on doing and what tools that they are implementing. And what different areas or different features that may have not been available in the past are now available. Is the company going to be paying for those extra licenses? How are those going to be implemented? Are you implementing them? Is a third party implementing them?
So there's a lot of different questions that would probably come up in an interview if you start diving down into that. I have found that tools like ChatGDP are very helpful to navigate those flows beforehand and potentially, give you a talk track before you actually even talk to them. So I mean, you can use ChatGDP as a pseudo interviewer and have it just drill you for questions. You can use it as a certification prep tool and have it ask you questions.
Now, granted, especially in the latter example, I would want to verify that those answers are correct because they do have the chance to hallucinate every now and then. Obviously, I always joke that because it's on the internet, everything is true. But I do feel that when people see things that are typed out, they usually default to thinking that is true rather than potentially critically thinking that it may not be. So just a word of caution that you may not have 100% accuracy in truthfulness. But, to me, that's been a great way to prep for interviews just because I can almost have a conversation rather than me just doing a few Google searches and having to potentially connect the dots here and there which is also very useful. Mike:
You said something that... Well, right at the beginning of your answer, it's been just echoing in my head that I want to know in the current landscape... You said, "When I'm looking at a company and how I would work with them..." How much does that come up in the interview? How important is it in the age of the internet that you actually do the prep work on the about page and the history page and the about us page or if they have a corporate values page? How much do you do that when you're prepping as an individual or as a consultant? Joe Sterne:
So I would say that you don't necessarily need to know their entire executive suite by the back of your hand and be able to recite off what they've done like you're talking about a sports player. Unless you want to, by all means, go for it. I've found that knowing a initial amount about what the industry that they're in, some of the customers that they deal with, whether that's other businesses, whether that's end consumers, whether that's both, it helps you figure out some of the problems that they're searching for.
Because eventually, that's what you're trying to help them solve. That's what you're selling to them as a solution is, "Here. Here are your problems. I understand them. I'm going to be able to fix them. Here are some certain ways that I should be able to fix them. And there are other ideas that I have that I could work with other people as I learn more to evolve those solutions." I mean, that's true if you're a consultant, that's true if you're in-house. You're there to solve problems and make the company money or make the company money by making other people more efficient, stuff like that.
So having a baseline knowledge of what they're doing helps you because from an initial interview standpoint, you may not necessarily have a lot of the... The best way to describe this is like a contact situation where it's, "Hey, given this certain issue that we're having, we're going to give you a quick brief background, tell us how you might approach it or tell us how you might solve it." I see that all the time. Those, if you don't know what the business does, you don't know how they necessarily act with their clients or partners or anything in their ecosystem, it's going to be a struggle for you to answer those. Because you won't know that off the top of your head and then you might have to fumble your way through it.
As opposed to doing a little bit of research, not a ton. Because granted like right now in this market, I've found that there is a lot of quantity that you may have to go after initially before you can start focusing on quality as those amounts of interviews narrow as you go through the process. So it does take a lot of time to fully memorize a company. I'm not recommending that you do that. But not knowing anything about them and going in "cold" is not going to help you either because you won't be able to answer those hypothetical situations. Mike:
Right. Yeah. It's funny just having been in the world and seeing that change, just the difference that the internet brought interviewing people. God. Before times? So what are things that you... Always, we get asked, and a lot of people get asked like job description. What should I look for in a job description? How do I know if this is... Is this a Salesforce admin job? Some companies call it that. They call a duck a duck, you're a Salesforce admin. Some don't. The business technology specialist or corporations sometimes have different naming conventions. What are things that you look for in job descriptions? Joe Sterne:
Okay. So- Mike:
Buckle up. I feel like this is an answer. Joe Sterne:
Yeah. So it's funny that you bring this up because from the one thing that I have definitely noticed as being a solution architect, for the last half a decade or so, is that a solution architect these days isn't always a solution architect. You have to actually read the job description. Because a lot of times, I've encountered where you have a "solution architect", like that's what they call you. But you're asked to do Apex coding and debugging and all these other things that a technical architect would be responsible for.
I don't know if it's just people don't understand that there is a fairly clear delineation between technical architects and solution architects when it comes to the amount of code that they should be required to do or if they're just trying to get a technical architect for cheap. Because arguably, the pay band for a technical architect, like any other dev, is a little bit higher than a solution architect which is generally not responsible for stuff like that.
So I have seen a lot of that confusion in the marketplace when it comes to the position that I'm currently in. And I think that definitely also cascades down into even the difference between a "junior admin" where they're asking you to do everything an admin would do, but they're only trying to have you at the junior level to save cost or that they may not know better.
It definitely depends on, if you can tease out, how long they've been using Salesforce. Because obviously, the newer they are to Salesforce, I think, the more struggle of understanding titles and how they reference to typical other titles in the ecosystem. It's a little bit more of a struggle if you've just started Salesforce as opposed to, "Hey, we've been on Salesforce for a decade. HR is caught up to this. We're well aware of pay bands. So that's not something that we're going to necessarily be able to," I don't want to say con, but, "argue with the level of talent that we want."
Because that's something where if you're applying for a job that says junior and all of the stuff that they're asking and all the things that you talk about in the interview says, "This is actually a typical admin or a senior admin level," that's something to call out. Because that's probably going to show up, maybe not necessarily on the title side, but it's probably going to show up on the pay band side.
So being aware of what a typical admin is responsible for is generally pretty helpful when you're reading these job descriptions. Because then, you can get a gut check of like, "Hey, are they really asking for an admin or are they asking for a senior admin? They just happen to have it marketed as something different."? Mike:
Yeah. Well, and a lot of times, a lot of what we find and this is true for a... I don't want to pick on just admins because I know I've talked to the developer relations side. It's that way, too, with a lot of roles that people write. Especially if it's a new role within the organization, they just blanket, "Here's everything you should do," and it's like... I remember reading job descriptions in... Was it 2017? And they said, "You need five years of Lightning experience." It's like, "Well, it's only been out for two." And it's no fault to the company, they just... I don't think they somehow know to categorize stuff like that. So yeah, job descriptions can be all over the place. Joe Sterne:
But as long as you're comfortable with what they're asking you to do, at least on the ten, that is usually a good start. Because the other thing to note about the job descriptions is it's generally, not always, but it's generally a starting place to some of the questions that you're going to start getting from the interviewers. One of the things that I get all the time when I am pitching companies or just interviewing generally is they're like, "Hey, you gave me an example about X, Y, Z. Can you go into more detail?" It's like, "No, I can't. I'm under NDA, so you can go talk to this company and have them sign a waiver if you want but I can't tell you exactly what I did. I can tell you that I worked on it."
That happens more often than people think because they're trying to not necessarily see what the competition is doing but they're trying to gauge your skills. So being able to have ways that you can talk about your skills that aren't necessarily bound by an NDA can be really helpful. Maybe, that's some stuff that you've done with Superbadges, maybe that's something that you've done with a nonprofit that isn't necessarily bound by NDA, or maybe that's just something that you did for fun, literally, so you could speak about it in an interview. There's nothing wrong with that. But those questions generally do come up. It may not be first round. It might be second or third. And God, hopefully not fourth or fifth. But those- Mike:
You never know. Joe Sterne:
Yeah. You never know. Those examples usually directly relate back to that job description. Because there are people that you may be talking to that aren't necessarily very close to Salesforce. But they're brought into the interview process because they are a department that you're working with or a division that you're going to be embedded in. They may not know everything about Salesforce, so they may just go down the job description part and ask you questions.
They may go down your resume and just drill you on, "Hey, why do you have this on here? Can you tell me a little bit more about it?" So being able to say, "Oh, cool. Thanks for asking me about that here. And I'm going to go into a 2-minute monologue of the question that you just asked." That's definitely very helpful because it shows that, A, you understand what they want and you also understand what you've done and you're able to talk about it at arguably a snap of your fingers. And not necessarily have to be like, "Oh, well, hold on a second. Let me look that up," and, "What did I write here?", kind of thing Mike:
As we wrap things up, I... It sounds like a fun question. Fun is a word that means a lot of things in my head so we won't use- Joe Sterne:
Are we using air quotes right now? Mike:
No. I'm trying not to. Nobody can see them. Let's use the word interesting. Joe Sterne:
Okay. Mike:
What is the most interesting question you feel comfortable sharing that you got in a job interview? Joe Sterne:
Oh, man. Mike:
See how fun could also work? Joe Sterne:
Yeah. Yeah. Fun could also work. I feel like that is... I've gotten a lot. I've had a... So I would say within the last year and a half across the last few jobs that I've gotten ever since I left Salesforce, I've probably put in well over a thousand applications. Mike:
Wow. Joe Sterne:
I've had not a very good conversion rate to interviews but I have had some interviews. I think that the more bizarre questions that I get are usually something that has absolutely nothing to relate to Salesforce. I think it's the ones that they're trying to figure you out from a psychological perspective but they haven't really thought it through. So it's the ones where it's like, "Hey, if you could be any animal, what animal would you be?" "I don't know. An elephant? So I can't forget all this stuff." Like, "How does this relate to what we're doing?" That was- Mike:
Joe, how are you going to type with elephant feet? Joe Sterne:
Right. Exactly. I'm like, "I'll have to use-" Mike:
[inaudible 00:29:30]. Joe Sterne:
Right. I'm like, "Do I need to ask for accommodations here?" So it's questions like that, that I've gotten, where it's just been completely oddball. Like, "This has nothing to do with the job at all. How..." I even struggle to how connect the dot back to the interview process itself where it's like, "Hey, what are you trying to ask me?" Because it's not something simple of like, "Hey, I'm having this issue. How would you tackle it?" It's like, "Well, I'd try to do it in configuration and this is the way that I think I would tackle it based on this information. If that changes, then maybe I'd look at the App Exchange and see if I could find anything there. If that didn't necessarily work, then I'd have to start talking about custom code and understanding..." That's a whole train of thought that you can have with a question that is semi-technical related. But if you have somebody asking, "Hey, what brand of soda would you be and why?" Where do I go with that? Mike:
Yeah. First of all, you've got the big two. And then, what if you go a regional flavor that nobody understands with limited distribution? Joe Sterne:
Right. Or what if you go something retro like, "Hey, I'd like to be Tab or Crystal Clear Pepsi," like- Mike:
I was going to say Crystal Pepsi, yes. Joe Sterne:
Yeah. Mike:
That's the second or third time it's come up on this podcast. It's awesome. Joe Sterne:
Yeah. I mean, bringing it back full circle, talking about something that will date you, Gen Z has no idea what Crystal Clear Pepsi is. But it is definitely one of the, I would say, the rare failures of soda, up there with new Coke which is also- Mike:
It still doesn't... Coke still doesn't taste right. I remember what Coke tastes like as a kid and the whole new Coke, new Coke tasted like Pepsi. Joe Sterne:
Yeah. Exactly. They were trying to go after the sweeter market. I only remember this because Stranger Things did a Coke tie-in, I think, for Season 2 or 3 where you could buy redone new Coke in the can. And so, I bought it just to taste it and I remember sipping it and I was like, "This is horrible. This is knockoff Pepsi, store brand Pepsi." And I was like, "Yeah. I can see why this didn't go anywhere." Mike:
Right. Joe Sterne:
So yeah, so I would say that I don't know if you could necessarily prepare for those questions of, "If you were a soda, what soda would you be and why?" But those are usually ones that I would found there, it's like, "All right. Maybe I should reconsider wanting to work for this company in general if you're going to be asking me questions like this. Because I don't know if this is going to be a reflection of the type of company that it is too."
Because I mean... I feel like one thing that a lot of people forget, and it's easy to especially when you're desperate for a job, is that you're also interviewing the company. You're trying to figure out if you want to work there too. So there are times where the interviewers are trying to sell you on working there and there are times where they may not be. But that's something that, ideally, is on you to figure out, "Hey, I need to be able to ask questions that would determine if I want to work there," and those can vary from people.
So I can't say there's a list of questions that you should ask every company, period. But a very good one to start teasing out how they were is what is their stance on return to office? Because that's usually a really good indicator of, "Do we listen to our employees actually or do we say we listen to our employees and ignore them?" So it's questions like that... Obviously, if you want to be in the office full-time, you can ask that question. It doesn't necessarily matter what they say. But if you don't want to be in the office full-time or if this was marketed as a remote job and they're actually saying it's hybrid, that's something to think about like, "Hey, if they can't get this right in the job application, what else are they going to potentially be getting wrong or not necessarily telling you the truth when you're working there?"
So make sure that you don't forget that you're also interviewing them to see if they're a place that you want to work for too. Not necessarily just... It's not one-sided. It's always two sides of a conversation. It's a conversation. It's not a monologue. It's something where you need to have back and forth and it's for the... Ideally, it's for both sides to make sure that, "Hey, we're both in agreement of what's expected." Mike:
Yep. I completely agree. I wasn't trying to teach admins anything out of this other than just sometimes getting funny questions is a fun way to end things. Joe, I want to thank- Joe Sterne:
Oh, yeah. Yeah. Sorry. I probably went on a serious tangent there. Mike:
No, you're fine. We know you want to be an elephant. Joe Sterne:
Yeah. I mean, sometimes that's also to keep with a funny thing like, "Do you have any questions?" That's also something that you can just throw back at them too. "Hey, if you were a soda, what soda would you be and why?" Because I guarantee that 99 point something percent of people aren't expecting that question. So it's a... Depending on the banter that you have with your interviewer, it might be a fun way to end it out. Mike:
Right. Good. Joe, thanks for stopping by and- Joe Sterne:
Of course. Mike:
Keeping us up to date on what's going on out there. If people wanted to follow you on anything social, I'll go ahead and link it down in our show notes. Joe Sterne:
Yes, that would be great. Yeah. You can find me on Twitter, I refuse to call it X. You can find me on LinkedIn and I mean, heck, you couldn't find me at my new company. You can shoot me an email. Feel free to reach out to me. I still have people reaching out to me from our past conversation I've had on this podcast periodically so I always love to get those notes. Yeah. I love to get those notes because I mean, I'm here to help other people. So if I haven't helped you, I'm sorry. That was definitely my goal of today. And if I have helped you, I'd love to hear that I have because it's always a nice ego boost. Mike:
Absolutely. Thanks so much, Joe. Joe Sterne:
Thank you. Mike:
It was a great discussion with Joe. I'd love to know, so what answer would you be for an animal? The whole time that he was asking that question, for some reason, the tiger came to mind. But I'd be curious, I'd love to know what animal you could be if you were a Salesforce admin at a job interview. But I did think that Joe gave us some really good tips and from an experience standpoint, oftentimes, it's brought up, "Go help a nonprofit." But sometimes looking for a full-time FTE job versus a contract job, a contract job might be a good path for getting some experience. If it's a trend that a lot of organizations are going to, it's a great way to get into the front door of that organization. So thanks, Joe, for being on here and sharing some of those wisdom.
Now, if you're doing one thing and you enjoyed this, I want you to help share and spread the word. So if you're listening on Apple Podcasts, just go ahead and tap the three dots in the upper right and click Share Episode. What you can do there is you can post at social or you can text it to a friend, maybe you have somebody else that's out there looking for a job. Of course, I mentioned resources, links to Joe's social stuff, all of that will be in the show notes for the episode. All of the Salesforce Admin episodes can be found at admin.salesforce.com. That is your one-stop for everything admin, including a transcript of this episode. Be sure to join our conversation in the Admin Trailblazer Group that is in the Trailblazer Community. Again, link is in the show notes. So until next week, we'll see you in the cloud.
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Thu, 30 May 2024
Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we have another deep dive with Josh Birk, who talks to Shoby Abdi, Principle Architecture Evangelist at Salesforce. Join us as we chat about the Well-Architected framework, why you should start using Data Cloud, and what you need to do to get ready. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Shoby Abdi. The Well-Architected framework Shoby is the Principle Architecture Evangelist at Salesforce, and he’s come on the pod to tell us about the Salesforce Well-Architected framework. And he’s here to tell you that the framework is not just for Salesforce Architects—everyone should take a look at it. As Shoby puts it, if your customers or users open Salesforce and it scares them, that’s how you know you need to use the framework. It can help you identify anti-patterns in your org and fix them by building solutions that are trusted, easy, and adaptable. Those are the essential ingredients for a healthy org, and that’s what puts you in the best position to take advantage of everything Data Cloud has to offer. If Data Cloud was a parking lot We’ve talked a little about Data Cloud on this podcast in the past, and that’s linked below, but Shoby helped explain why it’s such a big deal. The main point he makes is that by bringing all of your data together in one place, it can start to tell a story. As he puts it, “What is your customer doing? Where are they? And then how do you interact with them next?” When we talk about Data Cloud, it can often sound like it’s some sort of parking lot for all of the information you have about your customers. But as Shoby points out, it’s so much more than that. It’s more like if your parking lot had a valet that could tell you everything about who’s parked there, what kind of car they drive, how long they’re staying there, and exactly when they plan to leave. Einstein and Data Cloud If you’re a Salesforce Admin looking to enable Data Cloud, Shoby recommends working through the Well-Architected framework to make sure that your org is healthy. After all, these tools are only as good as the data you give them. If you’ve done all that, there’s a lot to get exited about. Data Cloud brings everything into Salesforce as standard objects, which means you can build all sorts of interesting things with flows and everything else you’re already using. And with Einstein Copilot and other AI tools, the possibilities are endless. There’s a lot more great stuff from Shoby in this episode about how Data Cloud works, so be sure to take a listen. And don’t forget to subscribe to hear more from the Salesforce Admins Podcast. Podcast swag Learn more Admin Trailblazers Group Social Full show transcript Josh Birk:
Greetings, Salesforce admins. It's Josh Birk here, your guest host for this week. This week on a deep dive, we're going to dig into data cloud and then talk about data cloud. I brought one of my good friends and old colleagues, Shoby Abdi.
All right. Today on the show we're going to welcome back Shoby Abdi to talk about data cloud. Shoby, how you doing? Shoby Abdi:
Not too bad. Just doing well. Connections is right around the corner. Just to timestamp this for everybody. Josh Birk:
It's a Connections week. It's a DevOps streaming week. Everybody here is in Chicago and I'm still at home talking to you. So that's my social calendar. Shoby Abdi:
Exactly. That sounds very similar. I am also in Chicago. Josh Birk:
Nice. Okay. So introduce yourself a little bit. Tell me a little bit about your current role. Shoby Abdi:
Sure. So my name is Shoby Abdi. I am a principal architecture evangelist on the Salesforce's Architects and Well-Architected team or the other way around. Essentially, if anybody has ever gone to or if you're a Salesforce architect or if you've ever gone to architect.salesforce.com or if you've ever heard of the Well-Architected framework, my role, along with a few others is that we are evangelists. So it's very similar to the work that Josh does or on the admin side or developer advantage to the developer size, except our audience is firmly architects. Architects of all kinds, whether that be our internal ones, customers, partners, architects all over the place. Josh Birk:
There's a nice overlap between admins and architects. So actually let's give you that this is the Tonight Show portion where you get to do your own plug. Tell me a little bit about the Well-Architected framework. Shoby Abdi:
Sure, absolutely. So the Well-Architected framework in a very simple manner is prescriptive guidance for solution health. When we put it that way... Now remember, it's a Well-Architected framework. Now, Well-Architected frameworks exist not just with Salesforce, but Amazon, Microsoft, all kinds of other cloud providers have created their own Well-Architected frameworks. What's really important about the Well-Architected framework is that it's not simply for architects, right? While it's Well-Architected, it's not a well-built framework for architects. It's a Well-Architected framework.
So the idea is that regardless of your role, your function, if you're just a customer, if you're an implementer, everybody should be looking at it. And when we talk about solution health, really what it boils down to is a lot of times when anybody is implementing for the first time, or they're implementing in an existing org, or even at as an administrator, you inherit an org. You start a job and you inherit some eight, nine-year-old org with all kinds of technical debt happening and you're like, "Okay, I don't know what's good and what's bad, what to keep and what to deprecate."
What the Well-Architected framework does, and when you look at it from a baseline perspective, is that it was really developed and designed by architects and other individuals in the ecosystem like yourselves, like the folks listening. It was also firmly designed by our individuals within our product and engineering team. And that's important is that the prescriptive guidance within it is really firmly built on top of not just base level knowledge, but it's firm recommendations, firm practices, and we even take the tack of actually dictating specific patterns and anti-patterns. Josh Birk:
Got it. Shoby Abdi:
Related to how it goes. And the way that Well-Architected framework is structured is around solutions should be trusted, easy and adaptable. And we firmly believe they should be in that order. One of the first elements of trusted is secure, but then easy, it's about being intentional and then adaptable. One of my favorite, one of the last ones is composable. And obviously as Salesforce, trust is our number one value. So obviously we're going to feel trust should be the first thing you focus on.
So really the framework itself is really a... The simplest way I can put it is that if you want to build a healthy solution, if you want to maintain a healthy solution, you can utilize a prescriptive guidance within the framework and you can find it at architect.salesforce.com. It's available today. It's not hidden anywhere. You can find it today and utilize it as you need it. Josh Birk:
Love it. So if you're an admin and you open up your org and it scares you, this is a good trail guide to get out of it. Shoby Abdi:
It's not even if you're an admin, it often scares you, it's more of like if you're a customer or if a business user open up the org and it scares them. Josh Birk:
Right. Shoby Abdi:
It's like, "I'd love to use Salesforce, but I really can't use it because of the following SB issue. My report-" Josh Birk:
Because of all the anxiety it gives me, whatever. Shoby Abdi:
"I really want to use this report. I don't know where it is, but I really want to use this report, Meredith, but it takes five minutes to run. I can't use it." Okay, well, it may be full of anti-patterns. So that's where utilizing some of the guidance within our performance, topics, around throughput and latency could come in handy to really understand, are these reports I need to modify? Do I need to do skinny tables? Do I need to optimize any queries if it's custom? That's what that guidance really is.
It's not simply an admin even or an architect or developer or anybody looking at it themselves. It could also be based on actual customer and end user feedback of what they're seeing and what they're telling you that needs to be fixed. Josh Birk:
Because that's the commonality between these three roles is that the users are always in the middle. Shoby Abdi:
And Salesforce. Josh Birk:
And Salesforce, yeah. Shoby Abdi:
There you go. Josh Birk:
Okay. So we're talking data cloud today, and let's take the very, very high level. If you have to introduce data cloud as a product to somebody, how do you describe it? Shoby Abdi:
The way that I describe data cloud is that when it's so much like you hear a lot of different capabilities around it. You'll hear data lake, data warehouse. Really what data cloud is, is it provides the ability for any organization, regardless of the amount of data sources that your organization has to make those data sources and all of that data, that disparate data that can be everywhere doing many things. It makes it useful in the context of your customer.
If you're a B2C organization that has end customers out there in the world buying things, then it could be useful as far as a unified profile for that person goes. As you're a B2B organization where you're more business oriented and account oriented, it could be useful for you as well. I was actually describing this to someone yesterday where when you look at data cloud and its capabilities, and a lot of people will always think of different data sources, data lakes, data warehouses where it's different and important is that data cloud is not simply a place where you park your data, hope it works, and hope you can find it. It's not a parking lot for your data. Right? Josh Birk:
Right. Shoby Abdi:
What it is when you bring it into data cloud, you can automate it. You can get a view of your customer. Right? Josh Birk:
Yeah. Shoby Abdi:
When we talk about that single view of the customer. And really what drives that view is the customer's interactions and activity. Whether you're a consumer based organization or a business to business based organization, your customer is going to interact with you in some way that involves data. They're going to be creating data, whether they're clicking on websites, they're paying invoices, they're paying credit cards, they're creating cases, they're telling you that they want to buy 500,000 of these and you're closing a deal and they're paying off an invoice and agreeing to an order over email.
All of these actions, all of these functions, all this data as it comes into data cloud starts to tell you what are the behaviors? What is your customer doing? What is your customer doing today? Where is your customer? And then how do you interact with them next? So that's the power of data cloud is, it's not simply a, "Okay, I've got all my data in. That's great." No, that's literally step zero.
That's what we tell everybody. Get your data into data cloud. Just get it in. Because once you get it in, then it's the power of automation, analytics, unification, segmenting, activations. That's where it starts to matter. So that's really when we talk about the data cloud, that's what we look at. Josh Birk:
Yeah. I love the parking lot analogy because first of all, it's so easy to think of it like that. I've got my data in Salesforce, but then blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. There's something over here. I'll use data cloud to connect it. But to kind of extend that analogy, it's not just a parking lot. It's a parking lot with a valet and a security officer and a scheduling system. It's got all the moving parts you need in order to efficiently move cars in and out of that parking lot. Shoby Abdi:
Yeah, absolutely. It's not just lot covered. So really what it is, it's similar to everything that Salesforce does. Like I said before, trust is our number one value. Similar to the Well-Architected framework as well, it's built with trust in mind. It's built with security in mind. So because we have that trust first. Now, when it comes to data cloud, you can be secure that when your data comes in, we handle that. We can take care of that part. Then what starts to matter is what you do with it like automation. Josh Birk:
Yeah. What are some specific use cases that you see? What's an example of somebody who just clicked and they're like, "Oh, this is actually the problem that I need data cloud to be the solution"? Shoby Abdi:
So a lot of it really comes in terms of, okay, data cloud obviously started from its CDP days and it's evolved significantly. A lot of use cases that we'll see are simply around, "Okay, I need to understand how do I interact with my end customer next?" So principally you'll see some of that around unified profile. If you've ever seen a demo of data cloud, you'll see first use case of, "Okay, who is this human being? What websites are they going to? And then finally, what is it that we need to really work them with?"
And then people often ask like, "Okay, I've got that element of data cloud and I've got all this data in. I see this person, but who's going to help me next?" That's where our friend Einstein comes in handy, right? Because you can create an email within Einstein utilizing different prompts, different capabilities, but once you include data cloud data into that prompt, now all of a sudden you've enriched it significantly. Where now because CRM data, while powerful is often limited.
It's limited based on what your business does and how your business updates still that CRM data, whether it's case data or opportunity data. But data cloud data is your customer's data. Right? Josh Birk:
Mm-hmm. Shoby Abdi:
They're the ones who are constantly making it happen. So now all of a sudden if your email or if the campaign is a part of, is a reflection of actual real life activity they're doing and they didn't need to tell you, "Put me here next," that makes a big difference in that process. So that's fundamentally a use case that we see. It's like while it's very general, it could apply to marketing, it could apply to sales, in the end, the reason I articulate this specific use case is that it starts to really combine the power of the data cloud with the power of what you probably already have if you're looking at data cloud, which is your Salesforce CRM. Josh Birk:
Yeah. Well, and I like... Every now and then in tech, we get the handiness of a phrase that just makes sense. Unified profile, I feel like honestly gives you the solution, but also defines the problem in the first place, right? Shoby Abdi:
Yeah, absolutely. Josh Birk:
If I'm trying to communicate with you, Shoby Abdi, but you as a digital identity is actually strewn about 15 different data sources, then when I go to Salesforce, I have to cobble that together before I have an accurate representation of you. Shoby Abdi:
No, absolutely. A lot of the challenge is, someone even asked me this... Yesterday was apparently a busy day, but someone asked me this yesterday as well, was just around, "Well, can you use data cloud for de-duping?" Josh Birk:
Right. Shoby Abdi:
And then I said, "One of the things you have to think about is de-duping is a you problem. It's not a customer problem. The customer's problem is you don't know who they are. So if you've got eight different versions of that human being's name and you don't know which one is the which one that actually has bought anything, or maybe they've changed their name, they've changed their address, they've changed their phone number, but then all of a sudden when you bring in the data cloud, you bring in all those unified data sources and one of those John Smiths is clicking on a lot of your websites, ordering a lot of your product.
And the John Smith you thought that was in your CRM was the one that was actually doing it, is not that one. Then you really don't have to de-dupe anything. Then you know which one is the actual human being, John Smith, like the ones you should actually start having that enriched discussion with, that enriched engagement with, whether it's through sales, service, marketing support, however. That's where you can start. Josh Birk:
So data cloud's not there to try to fix your bad data management, but it can help focus the lens, so to speak, so that you're looking at the right part of the data. Shoby Abdi:
No, absolutely. Right? Because by bringing all those data sources in, now all of a sudden your customer is almost in the data driver's seat because as they interact with your online properties, as they interact with your organizational properties and data created, now all of a sudden their activities start to reflect within those profiles and you start to see and understand what it is they do. Josh Birk:
To extend to that, how would you compare, because you and I are old school technologists and we grew up in the days where what we are talking about now would mostly be in the realm of extract, transform, and load, right? Like an ETL process. How does data cloud compare or how is it similar or different from those old school solutions? Shoby Abdi:
Yeah. And I think that comes up quite a bit of like, "Well, how do I do ETL with data cloud? Do I go with this ETL tool or do I go with data cloud? Do I do this or do I do that?" And invariably the power... One of the things that often comes up is it becomes a... When you look at what data lakes we're looking to solve and data warehouses were looking to solve was like, "Okay, we've got all of our data all over the place. We need and to be one specific place."
And then it's like, "Okay, we've put it now in one specific place." And it's like, "All right, now what? Now, are we all of a sudden... Once again, it's the parking lot." Are we all of a sudden like, "Okay. Well, this person's claiming they need to leave the building at 9:00 PM. This person is leaving at 10:00. So why don't we park their car up here and then with there and then go over there." Right? Josh Birk:
Right. Shoby Abdi:
So now all of a sudden as a customer because of something I really didn't do, I may have gotten there really early. But because I got there early, I'm getting penalized for leaving early because a lot of people came after me. So the way that I compare it with ETL, it goes back to the ability to create that unified profile, activate on that unified profile, create some [inaudible 00:15:45] unified profile, is that you start to worry less about how to get clean amazing data.
I don't even compare it to MDM. I'm sorry ETL, but it's MDM. How do you do data cloud with MDM? And it's like, well, once again, who is it for? Is it for your internal organization to have its perfect golden record situation when in fact the golden record should be the customer? It should be that customer. It should be the individual account record or that individual record inside of Salesforce. And then what's really driving it being meaningful golden are the interactions and activities that are happening.
And that's where that power of data cloud comes in with you bring in from data sources through batch elements or through streaming elements, whether you bring it through our Insights API or any other API or an SDK. As you bring that data in, now all of a sudden you're simply enriching that profile more and more and you're able to automate on that more and more as it goes along.
So that's why it's hard for me to compare it to base level ETL or anything because the power of it is that just bring the data in. Bring the data in. Where with ETL it's all about, "Well, before you bring the data in, let's talk about at least 50 things." Where now it's like, "No, just bring the data in. And then utilizing the power of the data cloud itself, the power of automation built within our platform like Flows, and Apex, and Orchestration, others, you can do a lot more with it. But the first step, I'm going to go back to what the first episode will be on, it's just got to bring it in. Josh Birk:
You just got to bring it in. Right. Well, and let's use that as a launching point because you just said automation a lot and you said Flow. So an admin who knows Flow, what are some things that they can use Flow to interact with data cloud? Shoby Abdi:
Yeah, absolutely. And what's interesting is a couple of weeks ago we actually put out a blog. So if anybody's ever read our blog, medium.com/salesforcearchitects actually blog post about this very thing. It's essentially, if you want to look, it's called Making Data Cloud Work With Your Existing Salesforce CRM data. And while I'm not good at titles, the end goal of it was really to talk about when we talk about data cloud and Salesforce and our entire platform, our Einstein 1 platform, it's really all about... One of the things that you'll see is that shared metadata framework.
And that's one thing if anybody takes anything away from whatever it is I'm saying, it's really that all of this is a shared metadata framework. What that shared metadata framework means is that now as we just keep saying, "You bring that data in, bring that data in." It's not simply, "Okay, now that I've brought that data in, I don't know what to do with it. Can I actually access it? Can I use the tools that I have in place in platform to actually do anything with it?"
Or it's like a marketing cloud thing. I need to learn marketing cloud automation. So one of the drivers behind creating that blog post was to say, "No. Data cloud was built with the power of the platform in mind." It's the marrying of data cloud capabilities with Salesforce CRM. So when data cloud comes in, it comes in as different kinds of objects. It's objects. So it starts usually from data streams as DSOs. And DSOs is essentially that data from all these different third-party sources. And this is where data starts to reflect within your data cloud environment, whether it's zero copy or it's registered.
It's essentially there. It's available to you to actually start to proceed with. That's when you start to create essentially data lake objects as well as DLOs. And those DLOs is when you start to look at, "All right, what are those specific data use cases I want?" It could be sales-related, it could be service-related, it could be marketing-related, it could be telemetry-related, it could be anything. But then beyond those DLOs, once again, we're still talking about objects. That's when we're going to create other kinds of objects.
So the first kind of object is usually what's called a DMO. Now, if you're an administrator or developer architect, when you're working with data cloud, you're probably going to be working with DMOs quite a bit because DMOs are more often than not, where a lot of the automation is happening. So a DMO is essentially to harmonized group in those DLO. So you could have those data lake objects. Let's just say, one of the things about I always miss is those fun old school MarTech diagrams where they're like, "Oh, let's show all the hundreds of billions of kinds of applications that exist out there for marketing." Josh Birk:
Right. Shoby Abdi:
It's true. Right? You may have 55 Google Sheets and ADRPs and etc, etc. As you start to go down the source object, DSO, data lake object, DLO, DMO object in a DMO process, you start to essentially build out, parse out what the object model needs to look like, what that harmonized elements of data needs to look like for your specific use case. And I'll go over a Sales Cloud, use case that'll be relevant.
So for DMO, and then you'll have another kind of object, which is actually a calculated insight object, calculated insights, which is a CIO, now that you can create basically based on essentially an insight based on a query, based on specific analytics like certain... Old school calculated insight or [inaudible 00:21:33] review. There's a lot of different ways you can call it, but it is essentially based on a calculation that occurs where someone hits this website these many times, or they've made these many orders or that kind of thing. Josh Birk:
Gotcha. Shoby Abdi:
But those are the kinds of objects. So now all of a sudden, okay. You've got all these kinds of objects within data cloud, these data cloud objects. What happens then? So that is where the power of our fliend, friend. Not fliend, but friend. Josh Birk:
Fliend. Shoby Abdi:
Friend Flow comes in. So when we look at flow, it's really the one thing we need to realize about data cloud is that a data cloud instance can exist in one environment. It could exist as a single data cloud instance across multiple environments. Josh Birk:
Gotcha. Shoby Abdi:
So if you're an administrator who's like, "Well, it's not as easy for me Josh, because I've got 55 environments in this one data cloud instance, catering to all of them." You could still use Flow. The way that it changes the way that you design it slightly differs. And this is obviously evolving, but for now, this is the way it is at the time of this recording where if your data cloud and your Salesforce CRM are in a single environment, the same environment, that's where you're going to create a data cloud triggered flow. And the data cloud triggered flow, if anybody has an activated data cloud org, or if you've gotten a data cloud environment from Trailhead, you'll see the ability to create a data cloud triggered flow, and that's launched when a DMO or CIO have a change of data. So now all of a sudden it's like, "Okay. How do I then associate that triggered flow with my Salesforce data?" Well, you do it the way you do it. Josh Birk:
You would do it normally. Shoby Abdi:
You create a record or you essentially update a record or you do something, right? Because now all of a sudden that customer activity within that Flow can then drive whatever updates you want within that CRM object. Josh Birk:
Gotcha. Shoby Abdi:
So that's one of the first ways you can correlate, or you can actually directly link your data cloud, data model data that's being generated to your Salesforce CRM data model data. Josh Birk:
Got it. Shoby Abdi:
The second way to use Flow is that if it's in different environments. Now you may say, "Okay, well it's in different environments. Am I in trouble now? Now the answer is no. Once again, data cloud is designed for this in mind. Now, there are many ways to actually utilize a data action and data cloud, and what a data action does is very similar to the trigger flow. It looks for any data changes in the DMO or CIO, right? One of the specific ones, you could do web hooks and other means that work with all of our clouds, but the one that people probably most know is a platform event, because a platform event is basically another kind of object.
And that now all of a sudden you can create a platform event and then that can hit a flow within another org, a platform event, and then all of a sudden it becomes, "Well, now how do I associate that data cloud platform event, data to my CRM data in my other org?" Well, you do it the way that you would do it today, right? Josh Birk:
Right. Shoby Abdi:
You essentially do it the way that it would work with the platform event today if it came from data cloud, if it came from grandma's Microsoft Access table, whichever one. So that's where you can operationally use it, where in those situations, whether it's the same or different environment, how you can use Flow if you want to create read, update or delete any and all Salesforce data. Josh Birk:
Gotcha. Shoby Abdi:
The other path that you can do is you can also... You have the ability to actually view some data cloud data associated with CRM data, and that's relatively new, what are called data cloud related lists and data cloud copy fields. A related list is essentially the way it sounds where it's just specific DMO like data model object data associated to a lead contact or person account or a field, or a field data that can be updated from data cloud.
So that once again, the lead contact and person account. The only distinction on that one is that it's view only at the moment, and it's really restricted to lead contact person account at the moment. Whereas through our Flow process, any implementer, administrator, anybody can use the existing skills they have from a clicks or a code perspective to make it work Flow.
I keep using Flow. People are like, "Well, what about Apex?" Same rules. Same principle rules. You can create a trigger on platform events. You can create a trigger off of... And utilize the triggered Flow and data cloud in the same environment to kick off Apex. You have a lot of those options as well. So in the blog, I have an example of like, "All right, I talked about it in very ethereal terms." How do I talk about that in terms of an actual use case, like a useful one?
So the way that it's described is that essentially we have data like a Sales Cloud one because Sales Cloud is our number one biggest cloud, and we have Sales Cloud data coming in from order management systems and ERPs. And it used to be, "Well, if I'm bringing in from order management and ERPs, that's all ETL talk. Do I need to do that?" No, no, no, no. You can absolutely bring that data in into Salesforce using data cloud. And once it's in data cloud, you can create those data lake objects, you can create those DMO objects and even calculated insights.
The example that I gave was if you have all these order management systems and all these ERPs, you can create DMO records that combine all of the order data across all these different sources into a single object model. Josh Birk:
Gotcha. Shoby Abdi:
You can combine all of them if they're, let's say, direct. In fact you're selling through like grandmas... I'm really harping on grandma today. Grandma's like a local convenience store. You can get their data as well. And then you could also create this calculated insight record and you could say you want to group all the order data by an individual across all of them, whether they went into grandma store or they went on your online e-commerce website. E-commerce, That's a good way to put it. You're online. E-commerce, I'm going to really age myself.
Then regardless of which direction you go, you can get that data from all those disparate data sources, Salesforce, and that can create an order record and associated to a lead and opportunity or quote that can update data within your CRM. It could do all of those things. You can actually show those copy field data, those related list data associated to that lead contact or person account because it's probably you making that order regardless of where you go.
So now all of a sudden, that order, whether you went to the store, whether you did it online, showing up under you. It's coming in from data cloud. So that's a very base level one example that's described in more visual diagram detail inside of the blog post. But the reason that we went with the route of a Sales Cloud, one, is that right now, obviously data cloud is activated in everybody's environment. You could turn it on today. Josh Birk:
Gotcha. Shoby Abdi:
The first thing that people turn on, they've got Sales Cloud. It's like, "Oh, let's see what this looks like with my Sales Cloud. Can I use it with Sales Cloud?" The answer is yes. Josh Birk:
The answer is yes. Shoby Abdi:
Absolutely you can and you should. So that's really the goal of that. Josh Birk:
Nice. Now, if somebody is listening to this and they're like, "Oh, this might be me. I use Sales Cloud. I have other clouds, I have other data sources, et cetera," are there considerations? I mean, other than the obvious stuff, don't go blow up your production just because you listened to Shoby and Josh on a podcast. But are there considerations an admin should take before flipping that switch and turning on data cloud? Shoby Abdi:
Yeah, absolutely. A lot of those considerations are obviously looking at the state of your existing environment. If all of a sudden you're going to open up all the sources of data, the source of very powerful automation, I think people should absolutely not underestimate how powerful is because in many respects is that it's going to be meaningful. It's going to be meaningful is because when we talk about bringing those data sources in, it's your data. It's your organization's data. But the end, you want to look at your org and essentially understand, okay, is it in the best place it can be to do that? Right? Josh Birk:
Yeah. Shoby Abdi:
And bar another word because I'm setting myself here, up here, am I healthy? Josh Birk:
Exactly. Shoby Abdi:
Is the organization healthy? So now all of a sudden it's like, "All right, well if I got to get healthy, where do I find that?" You could look at the prescriptive guidance that exists within the well architected framework, because while you'll find a lot of items there that maybe specific data cloud, one of the things over the next few months, our product managers associated with the framework and with data cloud, they're adding more as it goes along.
But one of the things to keep in mind is that if you're going to bring that data into Salesforce, CRM, anyway, the guidance within what Well-Architected framework is all about that. Josh Birk:
Gotcha. Shoby Abdi:
So I wouldn't even say it's more of a, well, before you blow up your org... Remember, data clouds are really designed for such a significant amount of data. You may be listening to everything right now, I was like, "Well, Shoby, I got way too much data. I got way too much data." I can't handle this. Once again, that data cloud was designed so that problem doesn't exist. Because you may say, "Well, I've got too much data in Salesforce. How do I solve that?" Well, that's where data cloud has these amazing CRM connectors. Sales and service. And you can actually ingest your own data and utilize the analytics and automation capability at scale to make it work where if all of a sudden an account is 20 years old, you don't want to lose out on all the amazingness of the last 19 and a half years.
Only the last six months matter from an automation perspective. It used to be used be, "Well, you just got to archive that data and then hope for the best." Now, you could still right, but in the end, bring it back in data cloud. Josh Birk:
Get the insights. Shoby Abdi:
Get the insights, absolutely. Get that historical insight. All of a sudden you're... And if you start to inject Einstein into this, because it's the Einstein 1 platform, you start to inject Einstein into it. That is where all of a sudden you may be using the latest and greatest in technology, but your customers aren't losing out on the historical context that you are providing them. They will gain. They will absolutely gain from what you're providing. Josh Birk:
And since we get paid every time, we can say AI on the air, it also completes that picture. When we talk things about like grounding prompts and putting your data into what the model is going to understand, if you haven't fixed that lens problem, if I haven't figured out who Shoby Abdi is or who John Smith is, then AI won't either. Shoby Abdi:
No, absolutely not. Josh Birk:
Data collect can help you point in that direction for the AI. Shoby Abdi:
And really that's where all of a sudden, even when we talk about principally AI, we talk about that human at the helm. Josh Birk:
Right. Shoby Abdi:
Right? For a long time we obviously called it human at the loop, but now we're talking human at the helm. And really the whole end goal of the human at the helm is that you in many respects need to co-pilot this. It's almost like we have this product called like Copilot. Josh Birk:
It's like, "We've thought about that name first." Shoby Abdi:
It's like, "Oh my God." And really the end goal of being a co-pilot... And the way that I'd like to think about it principally, especially with co-pilot and how it relates to data cloud, is that when you're a co-pilot and you're flying a plane, some large 747, what you're not having to do is go outside on the plane and the flaps, raise them up, go down to the fuselage, put the wheels down, and then when the plane is in the air, "Boy, now I got to get it for cruising. So now you got to go back outside when you're 10,000 feet in the air. Josh Birk:
In the air, yeah. Shoby Abdi:
But the flap is back down. Raise the wheels up. Our aviation technology has evolved beyond that. So when you look at the power of Einstein, look at data cloud, really what it is, is that you truly become the co-pilot where all of this automation, everything is there to help you as the human being to just do your job. But what it's not doing right is it's not adding more complexity to it, right? Aviation technology has gotten to that point where it's like... There's been jokes of like, "Well, if I fall asleep, who's going to flip the switch to land? When we have to land." It's like, "Okay." It's almost to that stage.
It's like, once again, but would you ever fly a plane? Would you ever fly in a plane that didn't have a pilot? I don't think anybody is ready for that yet, right? So having a human at the helm providing all of this, so increasing the ability for that just makes things more trustworthy. It makes things a lot safer for you and your customer. So that's why I like to... Once again, I don't think it's an AI, but now I just did. But in the end, when I think about AI in terms of all this, it's really, it relates to me. The data cloud story is a huge part of it, right? The Salesforce CRM story is a huge part of it. You can't talk AI. You can't talk Einstein without data cloud and without CRM. Josh Birk:
Yep. All righty. Well, thank you very much, sir. We will give references and resources in the show notes, including to the Architect site and Shoby's blog post on this topic. Shoby, thanks for being on the show. Shoby Abdi:
Thank you. Josh Birk:
I want to thank Shoby for the great conversation and information. As always, I want to thank you for listening. Now if you want to learn more about this show, head on over to admin.salesforce.com where you can hear old episodes, see the show notes, and also read other resources on the topic. Once again, everybody thank you for listening and I'll talk to you soon.
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Thu, 23 May 2024
Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Brandon Walton, President, Owner, and Principal Consultant at Cypress Learning Solutions. Join us as we chat about discovery, building trust, and why building with core Salesforce features is the best option for small organizations. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Brandon Walton. Creating a puppy pipeline in Salesforce Brandon started his career as a car salesman and support tech in the Redmond, Washington area when a fateful call with a tech executive who liked how he explained things led to a job offer. That company used Pardot and, when it was acquired by Salesforce, he had the opportunity to become the implementation partner. The rest is history. Today, Brandon’s a Salesforce Consultant for small businesses. One of his clients is Family Bred Puppies, which works to maximize the quality of life for dogs by matching families with small breeders. I wanted to bring him on the pod to share how he created a Salesforce implementation for them that’s scalable and easy to maintain. After all, who doesn’t love talking about puppies? Creating a low-maintenance, scalable Salesforce implementation As Brandon explains, when you’re working with a small team they want Salesforce to help them do what they do best. They often don’t have the resources to hire a full-time admin or developer. However, as he was doing discovery, Brandon realized that there was a way to map their already-existing business process onto basic Salesforce architecture. Family Bred Puppies needs to go through an application and interview process to qualify families looking to adopt, which are handled with the standard Salesforce lead and lead status objects. If they’ve found a suitable candidate, they can upgrade that lead to a contact and use the stages of an opportunity to track the adoption process. There is, however, a custom puppy object for puppy-specific information like vaccinations and genealogy. Because almost everything is built with standard Salesforce objects, the implementation is extremely low maintenance. It’s also easy to upgrade and expand. In fact, Brandon just came from a meeting to talk about adding case management and Marketing Cloud, and AI features like Einstein Next Best Action just work because it’s all standard. How to build trust with clients While all of this is good in theory, I really wanted to know how Brandon was so successful at getting his client to follow his advice. That’s the real challenge, isn’t it? You can explain all day why an opportunity would work better than building a custom adoption object, but how do you get them to believe you? For Brandon, it comes down to building trust. “When someone believes that you’re listening to them and have their best interests as your top priority, that’s the foundation of trust,” he says. Keep asking questions instead of jumping to a solution right away, and get them involved in the process of creating a Salesforce implementation that works for them. There’s a lot more great stuff from Brandon in this episode about scalability, user training, and puppies, so be sure to listen to the full episode. And don’t forget to subscribe to hear more from the Salesforce Admins Podcast. Podcast swag Learn more Admin Trailblazers Group Social Full show transcript Mike Gerholdt:
I got a plan. How about this week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk about the Puppy 360 instead of the customer 360. That's right. So this week we're doing a follow-up. You might've seen Brandon Walton on How I Solved This with Jennifer Lee. If not, I'll include that link in the show notes. But Brandon helped a small family business that helps place puppies with the right people to use Salesforce. And so I'm having him on the podcast to talk about discovery, and building trust, and really building applications with native Salesforce features that require some, let's call it minimal maintenance, because I think there's parts of organizations that you build high maintenance or applications for because their business is constantly changing and ones that will require minimal maintenance. We also talk about the art of building trust, which is fascinating, but also puppies. So I'll warn you, there's a few puppy talks in there.
But before we get into the episode, I want to be sure that you're following the Salesforce Admins Podcast on iTunes or wherever you get your podcast. It's super easy. Just click on the follow or subscribe button inside the app. And the reason I tell you to do that is then the app will automatically download new episodes. So you can wake up, say it's Thursday morning, because that's when new episodes drop, and you're like, "I'm going to go for a walk this morning. It's a beautiful May day, and I want to immediately listen to this fantastic episode about puppies." The Apple have taken care of it for you while you were sleeping, so all you got to do is subscribe and do that right on your phone. But with that, let's get into the conversation with Brandon.
So Brandon, welcome to the podcast. Brandon Walton:
Thanks, Mike. Thanks for having me. Mike Gerholdt:
You bet. Well, I'm excited after watching Jennifer's How I solved It on her YouTube channel, see all the amazing things you do. Plus, when she recorded the episode, there was puppies all over our Slack feed. So I'm a dog lover. Got to have people on the podcast that help people out with dogs.
But let's get started with you Brandon. How did you get started in the Salesforce ecosystem and what do you do? Brandon Walton:
Yeah, Mike, thanks. And before I get started, love puppies too. I love working with the Family Bred Puppies team. They're just a great group of folks, and puppies barking, yapping. Just add a little of excitement that you don't get to enjoy all the time.
So rewind a long, long time ago, my first jobs out of college were sales jobs. And I was the young just out of college guy who became that impromptu help fix someone's computer here, help fix a printer there. This is back in the mid 2000s when we were still sending faxes back and forth. So I became- Mike Gerholdt:
VGA ports. Don't forget those. Never forget. Brandon Walton:
Yes, you get it. You've been there. Mike Gerholdt:
Oh, yeah. Brandon Walton:
So I worked at a car dealership actually, I was selling cars in Bellevue, Washington. And a big demographic that we serviced were Microsoft folks. So I was the dealership sales/tech support specialist guy, if you will, just by function, not by job title. And I was working with an executive and he said, "Brandon, I like the way you talk and explain things. [inaudible 00:03:49]. Do you want to sell cars the rest of your life? And do you want to come work for me, work with me?". And I didn't look back.
And so from there I did technical sales, business analysts work, a lot of it related to Microsoft, that being from Bellevue Redmond at the time, that was the big employer there. And the team I was on started using a tool called Pardot for communications, an email automation platform. Pardot eventually became acquired by Salesforce, and there was this opportunity to be an implementation partner. So I jumped at that opportunity, started working in the Salesforce ecosystem, and I've been a consultant in the ecosystem since 2014 now. So gosh, that's 10 years in doing Salesforce work specifically.
2018, started my own Salesforce partner consulting firm, and get to work with small teams like Family Bred Puppies every day. And I love the challenges. I love solving things for different businesses. It's kind of like you get to solve a new puzzle all the time. Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah. Well, you lasted in consulting 10x more than I did, so congrats. You mentioned Family Bred Puppies quite a bit. Let's talk about them and a little bit of the solution that you built. Brandon Walton:
Sure. So Family Bred Puppies is a client of mine. They work with small family-owned breeders. So their whole thing is they believe in quality of life for puppies, for dogs, especially the ones that they work with. And also making sure that families are getting a good experience through the adoption process. So when they came to Salesforce, looking at exploring Salesforce to facilitate not only relationships with the different breeders that they work with, but also the families that are adopting these puppies, they were looking for that all-in-one solution of being able to qualify applicants, also work with breeders, but manage the life cycle of a family that's adopting a puppy, and also managing the relationships with the small family breeders that they're working with on a regular basis.
So one of the things that we do as consultants, and where we start out with is, okay, let's understand what this business is looking to do, and let's understand how we can map what the business is looking to do with Salesforce's core platform. Because that's the other thing. Working with small teams like this is, they're not necessarily developers. The Family Bred Puppy team, they love working with dogs. They don't have a computer science background. So what's good about that is they're very open to our suggestions and recommendations. They really needed something that was easy to use, that didn't require a solution that was so advanced that they would need to hire a full-time admin or a full-time developer.
So we start taking a look at all the parts of their business that they need to manage in order for them to deliver on their mission of providing a good adoption experience for families, providing a good relationship with the small family breeders that they're working with, and having something that they can manage very easily. So we started taking a look at just that core Salesforce architecture. You've got your lead, a lead can be converted into an account and a contact, and you're managing opportunities.And then down the road you look at cases and stuff like that.
So they have an application process. You can go to their website, familybredpuppies.com, submit an application. They're asking questions that are important for the application process. So they want to make sure that families that they're working with, they're not looking to start their own puppy mills and things like that. All those things are very important for the team. So we took a look at all of the questions that they needed to have to qualify a family looking to adopt a puppy. We mapped that to a web-to-lead form. Again, keeping it very simple out of the box. We set up that web-to-lead form on their website. And so now when someone goes to Family Bred Puppies and submits an application to adopt, that gets added to their Salesforce account as a lead. And all of those fields are being mapped in so they can see it all inside of Salesforce.
The team uses lead status as they're qualifying the family, so there's an interview process. The first part of that interview, if some of those questions aren't answered correctly, maybe they're looking for a breed of puppy that Family Bred Puppies doesn't have or doesn't work with, or maybe they're looking to adopt a puppy for a reason that the team doesn't want folks adopting puppies for, like they want to be very careful about people wanting to adopt a puppy and then go create a puppy mill from the puppies. They disqualify. So you have this using lead statuses, disqualify, [inaudible 00:09:34], disqualify.
When someone goes through that application process and they are someone that would be a good fit, that's when we convert them from a lead to a contact. A contact gets associated with an account, a household, it's a specific record type that we're using. And then we have the opportunity. And what we did on the opportunity is we mapped the sales stages of the opportunity to the steps of their adoption process. So first step is let's match the family with a puppy. Let's have the family out to meet. Let's make sure that the puppy's gone through all their vaccinations and all these things. And then throughout the process, the final step is the puppy's been taken home.
And so what we did with Family Bred Puppies is let's map your business process as close to the Salesforce process as we possibly can. And what was good about working with the team is sometimes you work with small businesses that say, "ell, this isn't an opportunity. This isn't a product, this is an adoption. So rather than using opportunity, we should create something totally custom and call it adoption." And then you end up recreating a lot of these out of the box features.
And so what was really important for, I think the success of this project was the fact that they were so open to listening to our advice and leveraging that standard Salesforce architecture. So now they have a solution where we were having a discussion earlier today about adding cases so they can actually do case management. And because it's all built off of accounts and contacts in the core architecture, looking to add these things is just easier and easier and easier.
We're early on in the conversations about looking at things like Marketing Cloud so they can send follow-ups a year in, two years in, three years in, when they're working with these families. Or if someone refers a friend, being able to manage all of those kinds of relationships. And because it's built on that core architecture, adding these new features and looking other things that we can do on the platform is just way more attainable because they're designed for scale. Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, no, I think you said something key at the beginning there, which is... And I get you're a consultant and people listening to the, oh, why is he talking to a consultant? Well, essentially where admins are consultants are internal, right? We're just paid differently.
But you'll go into an organization, and I've gone into different parts when I've worked in organizations, and this client for you needed an app that didn't need to be highly maintained because it was pretty sturdy. We're not going with a lot of crazy out of the box stuff. And I've had different departments that use Salesforce the same way. And I think it's kind of figuring out what does this department need, and how custom do they want to go, and how much can I support it? Because you were clearly wanting to set them up with something solid that they didn't really need to pay. It is essentially like buying a new car. I just need to be able to put gas in it and manage everything.
You said something at the beginning before we pressed record that I thought was really interesting, because a lot of getting an organization or getting a department to use standard objects, and getting past the, "Well, but we adopt things and we don't sell things," is trust. And I wrote it down, you said, 'There's an art to getting them to trust you," and I think that's for the admin as well. What is that art for you? What does that mean for you? Brandon Walton:
Yeah, I think trust in my world starts with the client, or the team, or the department, understanding that you're listening and you understand. And I think for so many people, and sometimes by accident, that it's a skill that you learn over time, is to listen and to listen to understand. And I think when someone believes you, that's part of trusting, is believing. When someone believes that you're A, listening to them, and two, have their best interests as your top priority, that's the foundation of trust.
How many times are we in a conversation, a conference maybe where we're meeting someone, or just whatever it is, meeting someone for the first time, and you're talking to them, and you can't get a word in because they're just talking, talking, talking, talking, talking? But when you are engaging with someone who's listening, and listening to understand, and asking questions, like we use the example, "Okay, Mike, you're not really selling, but it's more of this adoption process. But let's talk about this adoption process and what goes into that?". Just by asking questions rather than jumping to what that conclusion might be, it helps, not only it helps me really understand what you're looking to do, but my goal is that you understand that I'm here to try to understand as well.
And then you can dig dig dig dig into a topic, and then at the tail end of that session, it might be a couple of days or a couple of hours depending on the complexity of the project, the goal for trust is to come out with we understand each other. And if we're talking from a place of understanding, then I can make a suggestion to you and you trust that my suggestion comes from a place of, "All right, Brandon understands what I'm looking to do, and now we can have a conversation."
But when you rush that, it's kind of like if we were just going out for dinner, if we were going out on a date for the first time and I asked you to marry me after an hour, "Well, hold on, hold on. I don't know if we're ready for that." So I think trust comes from listening and from a place of mutually understanding each other, and then believing that the person who you're talking to really has your best interest in mind and can get you there because that person understands what you're looking to do. Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, I do feel like there's a TV show of One Hour Date And Marriage.
But one thing you mentioned that I think is huge is you started with all of the core functionality web to lead. You mentioned lead object, you mentioned opportunity. And then you also, well, they're looking to expand. It's so easy to sit down and say, "Well, I was just at World Tour," or, "I was just at this fancy user group and I'm all juiced up. I'm going to build a custom object. And I can create an adoption object. And maybe I call it adoption process object."
For you, what was the benefit for them being able to expand, having used that core just opportunity object, just the core lead object? Brandon Walton:
Well, in my world, I work with a lot of, whether it's an app exchange package that a customer wants to install down the road, or even just expanding with more Salesforce products, I've seen it happen so many times where, "Oh, you know what? We're ready to try CPQ," or, "We're ready to try Account Engagement or a Marketing Cloud."
And you go in there and you realize, "Okay, well you can't use that right now because instead of using a lead or a contact, we've got something totally custom that's been rebuilt." So there's two things that come from that is one, just having gone through the pain of, "Oh yeah, you want to add on this DocuSign thing here," or something like that, and not being able to do it because you have to map all the custom stuff back into standard objects anyways.
But also getting so familiar with all of those pre-built dependencies, and I think that's one of the mistakes that is easy to make early on, whether you are an admin that's just getting started, or a small business that's just purchased Salesforce and you're going to be your own admin, in my shoes, is understanding over time all of the relationships, like with opportunities, you get so much great stuff out of the box. You've got your opportunity line items, products and price books, and quotes, and just knowing all of these things and all of these relationships that exist out of the box without having to reconstruct them is a huge benefit.
And I remember early days of being an admin, you don't necessarily know all of those things, and that's where you make those mistakes. "Oh, we need one other thing, so let's build it all custom." But I think a big part of it for me in my journey is getting to the point where you just understand all of the connections that are made available for you when you use that standard architecture, and you understand how an account relates to an opportunity, and all the great stuff you can do with that, and how a contact and account are related, and how all of the other, there's all this great new AI stuff that's coming out that supports some of the custom stuff that's out there, but when you're using the standard architecture, it understands what you're looking to do already. And that's so important. And sometimes you learn it the hard way, but we do our best to explain those things, and teach others and newer users about the benefit. Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, no, absolutely. In fact, well, and so I'll use it as a jumping off point, thanks for setting me up, to teach the other users. Trust is also when you roll it out. I mean the trust factor, they get you in the door and you're listening to them, and I'm going to build a puppy pipeline report, which has to sound fun. The amount of paw prints and puppy knows things that must exist in this app. I can only envision your Google search results right now are up there.
But the second part is also rolling it out. I mean, I've sat in weeks and weeks of discovery, and apps, and building, and then user testing. And then you go to roll it out. And this is a small company that has to sit and say, "Okay, so then how are we going to support this?". How did you build trust when you also rolled it out? Brandon Walton:
Yeah, so we meet regularly. In fact, we met earlier today and had a working session together. So we do these working sessions where we talk about what the business objectives are, "Okay, what do we need to do? How are we going to make this experience better for," maybe it's a family breeder that they're working with or an applicant that they might be working with, because now we have all this great data in Salesforce, we can take a look at these kinds of things.
And I'll tell you what is the most exciting thing for me, is when we are talking about making an update to part one in the puppy pipeline, which is a puppy application. And Sydney, who started out on this thing, never using Salesforce before is like, "Oh, that sounds like a checkbox. I understand how check boxes work on a lead. And yeah, I can map that over to it." So for me, that's always the yes, the slam dunk home run moment, if you will, when we're talking about these concepts that when we first got started, it was still intimidating for them, but under understanding, "Oh yeah, that's going to be a pick list. And not only that, once we make the pick list here on the lead, let me go and add this to the lead mapping, so it's going to just move over to the contact when I hit that convert button."
And so the first question, how we get there is just regular working sessions. Let's go through, let's talk about the business objectives here. Let's talk about what's been created and how it's all going to work. That's probably the most instrumental piece. So it's not Brandon going and locking myself in a room for three weeks, and now there's all these new fields and buttons, and let's teach you how it's done. It really has been collaborative the whole way through. And the discussion really is led by the business. So it's not necessarily Salesforce feature driven. We don't go in here with an objective of, "Oh, you know what? There's a lot of great new AI stuff, so let's just add all this AI stuff, whether we know what we're going to do with it or not." It has to be driven by the business first. And when the business users are able to say, "Yes, this makes sense, because when I check this box, I understand what that means versus when I'm checking this pick list or this, dare I say it, multi-select pick list, which some"- Mike Gerholdt:
Oh, I was just going to ask. They clearly aren't to reporting yet, or they'd understand the fallacy of multi-select pick lists. Brandon Walton:
Well, going back, that's one of the things that I am able to bring to the table, and why they want to avoid it.
But the fun part in it for me is when those users are in the platform and they understand what the platform is doing, so more than just, "Oh, I have to go in and enter my data." I'm here to work with puppies, not enter data. But when Sydney and Peter understand why they're adding that, and it's not a burden for them, but they see the benefit because I think it really starts with them being involved in that process, so they feel like they were heard, they feel like their input was heard.
And with larger organizations that might not be an entire puppy management portal or puppy pipeline, or some of the fun things that we're doing. Some larger organizations, it's a lot more work just to get small changes made. Just like with trust, when people feel heard, and people feel like they're part of something, and part of the creation of something, there's that bit of ownership. I found that those are the folks that are going to adopt it a lot more. "If my say was included when we were coming up with the sales process, because yes, it's important. On this step we need to make sure that we understand how they're going to pick up their puppy. And Brandon knows that I contributed to step five. Well, now Brandon's pumped up and excited because I was part of this thing, and so now I'm more excited to adopt the technology," versus something that was set up and it's a burden. It's maybe an extra step. I think that's a big differentiator I see in working with, especially small teams. Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, I've always said when I'm doing training, is this is how you do your job, not another thing to do your job. And it sounds like a small word change, but it's part of the job to get it complete. Ensuring in this case that the puppy has a great home, putting good data in and keeping track of that is part of that journey. It's not another thing to do. And when people look at data input, or data collection, or data reporting as another thing to do, then it feels superfluous to their mission and they get off track. So yeah, I can completely understand that.
You've seen a lot, not only with this company, but in general. You brought up the AI thing, so I'll kind of wrap on that. If you were to start brainstorming, we're obviously not going to ask Einstein to draw us a puppy. I think I spend my countless hours making poor ChatGPT draw different versions of dogs. But how would you see, based on what you've built, that AI layer starting to come into what this organization uses Salesforce for? Brandon Walton:
Yeah. And we've already started having those conversations as well, starting out with some of those Einstein features that have been around for a while. We're looking at things like Einstein recommended next actions, things like that.
And what's great about those is it's data driven. So going back to users adopting the importance of entering information, understanding how family breeder A, how Mike's pups is working compared to Brandon's pups, and being able to understand, okay, when I am entering the data on vaccines, and health of these puppies, and all of these other details, that's going to allow us to leverage this platform to assist our team in making better decisions, then data entry isn't a burden, it's a necessity. And we're very, very clear on the benefit.
If we know that puppies from this family breeder are getting a certain type of worm, we know that we can work with that breeder. And that's the beauty of what Family Bred Puppies do, because they're working family to family, it's not a situation where their breeders aren't working with them. So they've got these great relationships already. And using the technology to improve the relationships and be better partners to their breeders, match families, whether that's getting through the adoption process quicker, what have you. It's, how can we drive business outcomes through this platform? Not, well, we have to put it in there because my boss says we're using this tool and we have to put it in there. Mike Gerholdt:
The number of times I've heard that.
I'll end on a fun question. Oftentimes when you sit down, even in organizations that I've worked for, but as a consultant, you get to learn the business and fun facts. Was there something fun or interesting that you learned about puppies during all of this that you didn't know heading in? Brandon Walton:
Oh, there's so much. What's one thing I can summarize? I think, well, this might tell a little bit more about the kinds of things that I find fun and interesting. But you assume it, or I assume it, you assume that there's a lot of production that goes into raising breeding puppies. But the amount of planning that goes in... So where we did do some custom objects is we have a custom puppies object with litters. And so we are able to track the genealogy of the puppies through some custom objects. It was more than what opportunity products could do. We'll say that. So we started, can we do it from the... But- Mike Gerholdt:
I don't think opportunity products were ever envisioned to be used that way. Brandon Walton:
Yeah. So that was one place where we did go a bit custom, but it's just a couple of objects that have relationships to each other.
And again, I didn't come in there as the puppy breeding expert, but being able to understand what those timelines are, what's happening at one week, what's happening at two weeks. And I think all the orchestration that goes into that is what was just really fascinating. And it's more than just shots, but it's, are the puppies, how much time are they spending with their mom? And then when you move them from indoor to outdoor facility, all these details that go in.
And what's been really cool is, of course, we track those details on the platform. And so now it exists as part of the PMP, the Puppy Management Portal. But I think that was one of the takeaways that I thought was really interesting, is just how calculated that process is, just to make sure that, again, the mission is that the puppies are raised in a nurturing environment, that they're healthy when a family receives them. I would say that orchestration and seeing all of that come together was one of the coolest things for me. Mike Gerholdt:
Wow. Yeah. No, very cool.
Brandon, thanks for coming on the podcast, oh let's talk puppies. This had to have been easily one of the most fun projects to work on. Brandon Walton:
Oh, for sure. Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah. Well, thanks for sharing it with us, and keep on keeping on with helping puppies in the world. Brandon Walton:
Will do, Mike, will do, Mike, I'll keep doing my part. Mike Gerholdt:
See, again, I told you that was a fun discussion. Also, tell me how quickly you wouldn't sign up to build a puppy pipeline report. If I saw that in my list of requests for things that needed to be built in Salesforce, a puppy pipeline report would definitely top the list. Also, I might take a little bit too long doing that. But I enjoyed that conversation. That was fun talking with Brandon.
Now, if you enjoyed this episode and you're listening on iTunes or another app, go ahead and click the three dots in the upper right-hand corner or see if there's an arrow. You can share the episode, and you can post it on social, you can text it to a friend, you can DM it. And of course, if you're looking for more great resources, the entire transcript, all the links are in the show notes, and everything can be found at admin.salesforce.com. And until next week, we'll see you in the cloud.
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Thu, 16 May 2024
How Can Solving Sudoku and Wordle Enhance Your Critical Thinking Skills? Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Rangsk, a Wordle and Sudoku YouTuber. Join us as we chat about critical thinking, problem solving, and why puzzles are a great way to practice and improve your thinking. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Rangsk. Who is Rangsk? I’m a big word puzzle fan. Sudoku, Wordle, Connections, I love ‘em all! I think they’re a great way to warm up your brain and stay sharp. That’s why I was so excited to sit down with this week’s guest, Rangsk. His YouTube and TikTok videos have helped me become a better puzzle solver, and I wanted to bring him on the pod to talk through his unique approach. Rangsk first got into puzzle solving via a recommended video on YouTube for Cracking the Cryptic. He fell down the rabbit hole and became obsessed with the logic game that happens behind the numbers. He created his own sudokus and started posting walkthrough videos of how he made them and how to solve them. Rangsk’s channel has grown exponentially since then. The thing that sticks out to me about his content is the tone: he’s positive, gentle, and clear. He really helps you become a better critical thinker, and have some fun along the way. Word games are logic puzzles “I approach word games as if they were logic puzzles,” Rangsk says, “you’re given information and you want to come up with the best possible guess to utilize that information and get as much information as you can.” Some feedback Rangsk often gets about his solves is that he’s “overthinking it.” For him, that misses the point of doing these sorts of puzzles in the first place. Yes, you can brute force a sudoku or get a lucky guess on a Wordle. But what do you learn from that? As Rangsk puts it, “It’s a single player game, there are no stakes to it. The only person you’re cheating is yourself.” Practice your critical thinking skills Instead, Rangsk recommends using puzzles as a low-stakes opportunity to practice thinking through things logically. It’s an opportunity to build up your critical thinking skills for when there’s more on the line than beating your high score. At the end of the day, it’s all about learning. Whether you solve a puzzle or get stuck halfway through, Rangsk encourages you take a close look at your thought process and learn from it. Why did you solve it? Why did you get stuck? It’s the chance to learn about yourself and how you think through things that makes these puzzles worthwhile. Listen to the full episode for more from Rangsk on when it’s OK to hit the hint button, and some other word puzzles you might like if you’re already hooked on Wordle. And don’t forget to subscribe to hear more from the Salesforce Admins Podcast. Podcast swag Learn more Other word puzzles Admin Trailblazers Group Social Full show transcript Mike Gerholdt:
Wordle, Strands, Connections, not just random words, but word games. And I am addicted to them. So, this week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, I had to get arguably the best word and logic solver I can find from TikTok and YouTube on the podcast. He goes by Rangsk on TikTok, and I'll put a link below.
But David and I are talking about critical thinking and problem-solving using word games. Also, just how that applies to life. This is a phenomenal conversation. Don't be scared about the time because this is such a fun discussion. Also, how looking for answers and the journey of problem solving really applies to just everything that we do, not only as Salesforce admins, but in our learning journeys and as we navigate life.
So, this is fun. Let's get David on the podcast. So, David, welcome to the podcast. Rangsk:
Well, thank you. Mike Gerholdt:
I'm glad to have you on. I feel this is one of those times where I'm way more the super fanboy because I have seen a ton of your TikTok videos and your New York Times solves. But without tipping too much, how did you get into word gaming and solving word games online? Rangsk:
Well, it's a long story, but I can give the short version. Basically, YouTube likes to give random recommendations, and one day it recommended me a Sudoku video by Cracking the Cryptic. And I was familiar with Sudoku because it was a huge craze in the early 2000s. Do you remember that? Mike Gerholdt:
Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Rangsk:
Everyone was doing Sudoku. Mike Gerholdt:
On the planes, there were books. Every airport had a Sudoku book. Rangsk:
Yeah. And so, I got into that craze back then, but then I burned out of it. And now, I realize it's because of the way I was solving it. It's because of the way everyone was solving it, it burned out quickly. But I was like, "You know what? Sudoku, I'm familiar with that." I clicked the video and I just immediately got hooked because this was not the Sudoku that I used to do.
And I just really got hooked on watching Cracking the Cryptic on YouTube and the various different kinds of logic puzzles that they solve. And then, I actually started creating my own Sudoku puzzles. I crafted them myself. And I would do things like... I would submit them to Cracking the Cryptic. They actually have solved a few of my puzzles in the past. Mike Gerholdt:
Wow. Rangsk:
Featured in front of tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people, which is great. And what I wanted to do is I wanted to document how I intended those puzzles to be solved and walk through the logic of them. Because I've always been... I had sort of an instructor mindset. I've always liked teaching. I've never been a teacher, but I've always liked teaching anyway.
And so, I decided to make my own videos where I walked through how to solve my own puzzles and I just uploaded them to my YouTube channel, which had nothing otherwise. And one day, Cracking the Cryptic featured one of my puzzles, and I commented saying, "Hey, I've got a walkthrough solve of this on my channel if anyone's interested." And I instantly gained 200, 300 subscribers. Mike Gerholdt:
Oh, wow. Rangsk:
And at that point, I was like, "Well, I better start making content." So, I decided, "Hey, maybe I'll start solving Sudoku's on there, not just my own, and see if I can grow that audience." And I was really enjoying the feedback I was getting from that. Flash forward to Wordle becoming popular, I was very much entrenched at that point within the logic puzzle community.
And Wordle, of course, really became popular within that community. And so, I decided, "Well, I'm already making Sudoku content. Why don't I make YouTube shorts where I solve Wordle?" And so, that's really where I get started on that. And then, I went from... it had taken me two years to reach a thousand subscribers where I could finally monetize on YouTube. And then, within two months, my Wordle shorts had brought me to 10,000 subscribers. Mike Gerholdt:
Wow. Rangsk:
And so, that was like, wow, Wordle's my thing, I guess. And so, I decided just to... in addition to my Sudoku content, I started making word game content as well. Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, I definitely was on the sideline for the Wordle wave. I remember it kind of crashing through. And I feel like for me, it was, "Oh, everybody's playing it, so I'm not going to play it." I also was afraid that I would never get a word. "Oh, man." Because my Facebook feed was filled with all of the little Wordle squares that everybody would post. I'm like, "Oh, I know so-and-so."
I know some book editors and I know some people that are in the education space, and they were struggling with Wordle. And I was like, "I have no shot. Maybe I just shouldn't play this." But now that I've played it, I confess, today is my 40th day playing Wordle. Rangsk:
Okay. I hope you're enjoying it. Mike Gerholdt:
I am. I also have come now to the realization that I will never get it in one word. So, I have purposely looked ahead to see what words haven't been used as solutions, and then picked my beginning word now pending, the solution hasn't happened. My beginning word now is spoil because it has two vowels in it and it hasn't been used as a solution. Rangsk:
Got you. Yeah. So, for me, getting word in one, of course, it would be exciting, but I would also feel a bit cheated because I didn't get to play that day. Mike Gerholdt:
Yes. Rangsk:
And to me, Wordle... I'm very much a logic puzzle guy. I approach even word games as if they were logic puzzles. And I think that's why I like Wordle so much is because you can treat it like a logic puzzle, where you're given information and then you want to come up with the best possible guess to utilize that information and get as much information as you can more.
And you think about patterns in the words, not just, "Here's all the words I know," but "Okay, E likes to be at the end. R likes to be second. These letters like to be near each other. These letters don't like to be near each other." And so, you can kind of think about the patterns that you notice within words. And of course, every once in a while, you get tripped up by a weird word that comes from French or something and doesn't follow any of the rules.
But even then, you get there by logically eliminating, it's not a regular word. So, I now have to investigate, is it one of those weird esoteric ones that came from French, for example, or came from a different language? So, yeah, I like to approach it as a logic problem, and I think that's why people enjoy watching me solve it. I constantly get feedback, "I'm better at the game after watching you play it."
That warms my heart. That's exactly what I want. I'm not out here trying to impress people. I'm not trying to be a magician. I'm trying to be an instructor, and I'm trying to get people to understand that these games can be approached from a logical perspective. You can learn to get better at it without just going and memorizing a bunch of words. Mike Gerholdt:
Right. Perfect segue to exactly why I'm having you on the podcast, because I ran across one of your TikTok videos on Connections, and I'd never played Connections. And the tone and the manner, now that you say instructor, I joked with a colleague that I called you the Bob Ross of Connections. But your tone was very calming.
"And let's work through this, and here's all the words. We have to come up with four groups of four. Let me walk you through the way I'm going to think through this," which your logic or your critical thinking. And it wasn't just, "Well, these four have to go together. Why don't those go together?" And it's like, "No, but let's think about every possible meaning of this one word."
Or I love when you, especially on some of the Connections, "What is the, not weirdest, but what is the farthest outlying word? And let's pick that and see how it can connect to other things." Rangsk:
Yeah, I'm glad you recognized both my logical approach, but also the demeanor that I try to give to my content. I've been called Bob Ross by more than just yourself, also Mr. Rogers. Just having that calming presence is really important to me because people have so much going on in their lives. They have stress coming from everywhere, and then they try to escape that with the free time that they have.
They're scrolling TikTok or they're scrolling YouTube or whatever it is. And when you do that, you're just getting people yelling at you. You're getting people trying to make you afraid, trying to make you angry. And I want to counter that. I want to be a place where I come up on your feed and you feel like, "Okay, this is a setting where I can understand what's going on. I'm not being yelled at."
"Things are calm, things are straightforward and I'm learning, but I don't feel like I'm being talked at." I don't know the best way to put that. Mike Gerholdt:
Or chastise. I mean really, because I think that's one thing, how this kind of carries over to software is critical thinking, but also when you're building applications or you're building programs, it's change that you're going to introduce to somebody. And I've always told people, when you roll out something, nobody wants to show up to work and feel stupid.
And the easiest way to feel stupid is by showing them something they don't understand. And you can walk into some of these games and be like, "I don't understand. It doesn't make sense." And then, it makes you feel stupid when actually if you just sit and look at it.
To me, I use a few of these games in the morning when I have a cup of coffee to kind of warm my brain up, kind of get me thinking through the day and sitting there thinking, "Okay," so this word for example, and maybe Connections is coat. Okay. So, coat and I started, "Well, how would David describe this?" Well, coat could be a jacket. Coat could be a heavy coat.
Coat could also, you coat something with paint. I try to use some of the stuff that you teach to like, how would I talk through this and not just take it as the first thing that comes to mind? Rangsk:
Right. And I get a lot of feedback, which I honestly don't appreciate very much because it's counter to what I'm trying to put across, which means I'm not communicating that effectively enough. But a lot of feedback is like "You're overthinking it. If you'd just gone with your instinct, it would've been correct." And they're ignoring all the times, probably the majority of the times, where had I gone with my instinct, it would've been wrong.
Because these puzzles are designed to trick you. They are logic puzzles. And it's not much of a puzzle if it's just find four things that go together and that will be right. And so, the game is all about... I just made a comment today where someone was like, "Overthinking the easy ones is detrimental, but overthinking the hard ones is actually useful."
And my response to that was, "Well, overthinking has a negative connotation to it, by definition. All I'm doing is thinking. And there's nothing wrong with thinking when you're solving a puzzle." So, yeah, the game is trying to get you to think. And you can either let it get you to think and follow along with the human creator of this puzzle and what they were trying to achieve in getting you to think about, or you can bash your head against it and try to get lucky, which to me isn't fun.
And sometimes I have to resort to that and I feel bad about it. But most of the time, I try to logically approach the problem and also try to see what did the creator of this puzzle intend me to think about? And that's going to be fun and that's going to give longevity to the gameplay. Mike Gerholdt:
Overthinking also comes from a position of I know the answer and you don't. At one point, they didn't know the answer. So, how can I overthink something if I don't know the answer? In hindsight, yes, I can look back at a solution, "Oh, I way overthought that. But I only know that because I went down that path and then I came back."
Much like thinking through different situations or different, we talked about software debugging before I pressed record. Can you overthink software debugging? Well, yeah, I suppose. But you only know that once you go down that entire path and then come back. Rangsk:
And I will say there's kind of a corollary to that where you said in hindsight, and I think that's another aspect of my content that you don't see a lot, and I think it's a really important aspect, which is after I've solved it, go and do a post-mortem basically, to use the industry term. Go and look back and say, "What is it that I did right? What is it that I did wrong?"
"How could I have thought about this differently to have succeeded when I failed? Or why did I succeed at this? What did I do that I liked that I should try to do more of?" And I think that's a really important aspect of after you've solved a puzzle, or if you're working on debugging software, if you're working on any problem that you're trying to solve, don't just say, "Oh, I solved it. Let me throw that out."
You say, "I solved it. Let me now internalize what worked and didn't work so that when I have a problem again in the future, I can utilize that and gain wisdom and gain experience." Mike Gerholdt:
I'll be honest, one of the coolest things, I'll get off Connections. One of the coolest things that you added to your Wordle solutions is you go into a website that somebody create a bot and you kind of, "Okay, so here's the word I put in and we got orange, yellow, and green here. What is the bot say is the next one? What did I guess? Here's what I guessed. Here's this, that. Here's what I guessed. Okay."
And oftentimes you're either... it helps you do that post-mortem because with Connections, you have a little bit different, you can see your categories, but with Wordle, you're like, "Was this the next best thing for me to guess to try and get to the solution?" And I love that you kind of walk through that with that bot and the bot's like, "Oh, yeah, so you basically had two choices after this word and you went to this one, which no harm, no foul, it was the other word." I need that bot for everything. Rangsk:
Yeah. And what's nice about Wordle is a bot like that can exist because it's pretty easy to write a perfect solver. I wouldn't say it's easy, but it's viable to write a perfect solver for Wordle. And there's not a perfect solver for every problem you're going to encounter, but you can at least go back and analyze that.
And I think an aspect that I thought about while you were describing what I do with that Wordle bot that I'd like to touch on is the question is, did I get lucky? Because a lot of times in problem-solving, there is a luck factor. Did I look at the right thing first or did I look at the right thing after struggling for three days on this problem? And the Wordle bot will answer that question for you.
It'll say, "Oh, yeah, you totally got lucky. There were 60 possible words and you picked out the right one." So, what I learned from that is maybe it was a lucky decision, but maybe it wasn't the optimal decision, even though the optimal decision would've had a worse outcome in this situation. And recognize because... I guess to put it this way, if you can't separate what was lucky from what was good, then you're going to depend on getting lucky more and more.
You're going to internalize what you did that made you get lucky rather than internalizing what you did that actually set yourself up for success. Mike Gerholdt:
Well, I think that's... some of that has to do with why people gamble. They just feel they're lucky as opposed to working through the, I go back to the... I love the movie Apollo 13. Let's work the problem and go through it. Kind of transitioning that because I obviously could talk Wordle. You also do that really good on the mini crossword, where if by chance you happen to get all the downs, all the downs also solve all the acrosses for the most part.
And so, you'll go back through and be like, "Oh, well, let's look and see actually what these questions were that the answer just autofilled back in." I think there has to be something that it does to your brain because it also trains it. You're like, "Oh, now, I'm not just reading this word, I'm also reading the clue that the creator of the puzzle had in addition to what the word is, and it just happened to be filled in for me." Rangsk:
Yeah. If we want to even just touch back on Connections for a little bit. Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, please. Rangsk:
Every day I get comments from people saying, "Oh, the first thing I do is shuffle because they put in these red herrings and I don't want to be tricked by them." And I feel like this is just intentionally throwing out information about the puzzle because we've been told that they think very, very hard actually. They put a lot of thought into the arrangement of the words that are presented to you, which means they've added information to the system.
And by hitting shuffle immediately, without even attempting to interpret that information, you've thrown out part of the puzzle. And to me, I feel like I can go, "Okay, well, they decided to put these tiles next to each other. What does that mean? Are they trying to trick me? Are they trying to hint me towards the solution? What is the information that they are trying to give me by this placement?"
And I would lose all that if I hit shuffle. And so, I feel like it's kind of a short-sighted strategy because you can't learn to overcome the tricks that they're trying to put into the puzzle if you just wipe them clean first thing without even appreciating them. Mike Gerholdt:
Right. Absolutely. Actually, you're the one that taught me that. I was partway through at Connections the other day and I think that two words were iron and steel, and I was like, "Those started right next to each other. I bet those don't have anything to do with each other. I'm not going to fall for it." Rangsk:
Yeah, sure enough, they didn't. Exactly. And had you hit shuffle, you wouldn't have known that. Mike Gerholdt:
No idea. Rangsk:
And you might've said, "Well, iron and steel, those are both metals. Maybe that's a thing." I think they're getting wise to me. I think the other day they actually put three of them all on top of each other that were in the same category. Mike Gerholdt:
Oh, no. Rangsk:
In general, they are adding information when they, instead of presenting the tiles in a random order, just having a piece of software randomize it and presenting it, they are laying it out and they're discussing how they want to lay it out. And I think that's part of the puzzle. You're removing some of the interest in the puzzle by hitting shuffle. And it's the same with mini crossword.
Yeah, you can solve it with just the acrosses or just the downs, but you're losing something by not at least going back and looking what was the whole puzzle. Because these kinds of clues are going to come up over and over again and this is a perfect opportunity, while it's fresh in your mind and while you're in the context, to use it as a learning experience for future puzzles. Mike Gerholdt:
I completely agree. So, I think one of the things that fascinates me and I love using, I'll call them word games and maybe they're logic games. You need to tell me the difference. But using these to keep my mind sharp is I feel like it helps me be a better thinker just in general, just at my job, just working through decisions in life. You've been solving games a lot longer than me. How have you seen that kind of help you in your professional career? Rangsk:
It's really interesting that you asked that because an aspect of my day job is actually studying transference is what the psychology term is, which is if you are to play a game and get good at it or do a logic puzzle and get good at that puzzle, does that have transference? Does that transfer to other aspects of your life? Are you just getting better at that game? Or is there sort of a rippling effect to the rest of your life?
Okay. If I play GeoGuessr where I'm trying to locate where I am in the world, does that make me a better driver on my commute? Or if I am playing logic puzzles a lot, does that make me better at debugging software? Whatever it is that you're trying to actually accomplish in your life, are these things just games and you get good at that one game, or are these things that are going to transfer to other areas of your life?
And that's actually a pretty hot topic of study within psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience. And there's a lot of studies going on right now related to that with mixed results. Some of these things that they claim, "Hey, if you play this game every day, you're going to get smarter. You're going to get better in these other areas of your life." And it may not be true.
For me personally, I find it beneficial to just keep using my brain. Think of the brain as a muscle and just keep using it. Make sure those connections are strong. And by practicing it in low-stakes scenarios, when you get hit with a high-stakes scenario, you have this sort of instinct to fall back on for how you're going to handle that. Yeah. Does that- Mike Gerholdt:
No, I'm still processing all of that transference information you gave because I was just thinking about how that applies to other things like prepping for tests. Did you just get good at taking the test, or did you genuinely learn the information? We can also talk about tests, but nobody wants to do that anyway. Rangsk:
I'll talk about it. Mike Gerholdt:
Are you just good at taking the test too? That's the third thing to bring up. Rangsk:
Yeah, exactly. And this is a big topic in education, has been for a long time, which is how much do we lean on standardized tests and how much do we teach to the test? And is the standardized test important because we just need metrics on how students are generally doing, or is the standardized test also something that can direct curriculum? That's a question that every teacher has.
And I don't think there's a perfect answer to that, and I'm also not much of an expert on that at all. But in my opinion, I think that anything you learn is good. I've always hated the question, when am I going to use this? The answer is, you use your brain every day. And the more you can teach your brain how to learn and all these cool things, that expands your horizons.
It expands your use of your brain. Yeah, sure, you might not use algebra if you're not an accountant or a scientist or a mathematician. Yeah, you might not use algebra, but one day you're going to have the question and you're going to have the curiosity that's going to relate to math in some way. And you either have the tools to think about it properly or you don't, and that's something that you could have internalized, but you decided you weren't going to use it, and so you didn't.
But there's the expression, when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. I have always thought that the more tools you have in your toolbox, the more versatile you can be in problem-solving and just living your life properly. Properly is not the right word. I didn't mean to say it that way, but living your life to its fullest extent, being able to accomplish the goals that you want to accomplish, being successful.
It's all about setting yourself up for success. And you don't know what problems are going to arise. And so, the more tools you give yourself, the less everything starts looking like a nail, and the more you can be exacting and fall back on previous experience. Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, I often think of... it's funny you bring up that algebra example. I was also that kid that was really horrible at math, so I never played Sudoku. But the concept sometimes of how you solve the algebra problem, I think to me, was also more important than what the answer was.
And that to me is almost like the first time you pull the cover off a toy and realize there's a whole bunch of gears inside that make the bear move and kind of understanding, "Oh, there's more to this that I need to understand as opposed to just what the outcome is." We had this discussion the other day, outputs versus outcomes.
And if your outputs is solved puzzles, are you smarter than if your outcome is no, but I learned the process and I learned how to work through difficult situations. The outcome is very different than the outputs. Rangsk:
I love the way you put that and that's something... I solve The New York Times hard Sudoku every day on my YouTube channel. And my goal is not to say, "Look, I solved the puzzle." My goal is to help the viewers be able to solve the puzzle, but not just that. To understand that it's the act of solving it that's the fun part, not having that completed grid with all the correct numbers in it.
And it seems obvious when I say it that way, but I get so many people commenting saying, "Well, if I just go through and fill out all the candidates first, which by the way is super boring, then I can solve it in four minutes, and you took 12 minutes." I feel like I failed that person because now they're going to get bored of Sudoku very quickly.
Because who wants the first thing they do when they first receive that piece of paper or the digitally, the Sudoku puzzle, is go cell by cell and do accounting work? The puzzle can tell you a story if you let it tell you the story. And there are ways that you can approach the problem solving such that you are following along. It's like you're reading a book.
You're following along the story. And in a sense, it's almost like a "choose your own adventure book" where you can choose where you want to go next. What do I want to discover about this puzzle? And just put a smile on your face every day because you found this really cool piece of logic and you go, "Ooh, that's really neat. It just told me about this cool structure."
And people who are like, "Oh, well, I solve it in two minutes and I can just plunk them down, and I don't understand why you're doing all of this." And a year later, they've moved on. They're not doing Sudoku anymore, and they think it's boring. And I'm still doing it and I'm still learning from it every day. Mike Gerholdt:
Right. Because the outcome for you is a lot different. The euphemism is the journey versus the destination. Rangsk:
Yes. I'm a big fan of Brandon Sanderson and that's a big thing in Stormlight Archive, which is there's... not to get too spoilery, I won't spoil Stormlight Archive for people. But there is a group of people who basically have a mantra and part of that is journey before destination. We all have the same destination. And when it comes to puzzles, the destination is the solved puzzle, but it's about how you got there.
The journey is the important thing. And you can start talking about things, do the ends justify the means? It's much of a corollary to that when you start talking about how you live your life. And I feel like if you start approaching even a logic puzzle that you're doing for fun, if you approach that in a way where you're trying to take shortcuts, that's training yourself to take shortcuts in all areas of your life.
And I feel like that's... you're cheating yourself. That's another thing. People are like, "Is it cheating if I do this? Is it cheating if I do that?" And it's like, it's a single-player game. There's no stakes to it. The only person you're cheating is yourself. Are you enjoying the way that you're solving this? And that's the important thing. Okay, if I'm doing a crossword or if I'm doing Connections and there's a word I don't know, is it cheating if I look it up?
Well, that's up to you. Do you want this to be a trivia game where you need to be going into the puzzle with a certain set of knowledge, and you want to learn as you go, and you learn from your failures because you didn't know what that word meant? And now you've looked it up and now you're going to remember it? That's one way to approach it.
And a perfectly other valid way to approach it is, "Oh, this puzzle has shown me this word that I don't know. This is a perfect opportunity to look it up and have some success because I looked it up." And I think both approaches are valid. Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah. There's so much to unpack there, but the first thing I wanted to say was the best and worst times of doing any of the logic puzzles or The New York Times stuff is when it's solved is the best because I was like, "Yes, I did it." And the worst is, "Ugh, it's over." Especially a few times with Wordle or with Connections or even the mini crossword, "Oh, I finally got it."
And to that other point, there have been times when I was like, "Okay, I clearly..." I don't know some... I think one of the questions was something and it was super pop culture. I was like, "I just need to Google this. That's my mulligan. I'm going to take it, I'm going to Google it and that's going to give me the answer." Because I'm past the point of enjoyment for this game and I need a little boost to get me back and going for that, and it's my game, so I can do that. Rangsk:
Yeah. And it's all about knowing yourself and knowing what you're going to be happy with later and what you might be sad about later. And I think you kind of hit the nail on the head. Are you still enjoying the puzzle? Because that's the important thing. We don't do these because it's our job. We're doing puzzles because it's fun and enriching.
And so, it's all about sustainability. What's going to sustain your interest in this hobby? And are you going to be a flash in the pan where you deep dive into crosswords or Sudoku or whatever word game for a month and then you're done with it and you move on? That's one personality style. Another personality style is crosswords are something that I do every morning for 50 years.
There are people like that too. There are a lot of people like that. And there's a big difference. Someone who's going to do that every morning for 50 years, they're enjoying it every day and they've found ways to sustain that enjoyment. Whereas there- Mike Gerholdt:
Go ahead. Rangsk:
Sorry, go ahead. Mike Gerholdt:
No, I'm 100% with you. I was going to ask because we didn't touch on it and maybe it's for a reason because it's in beta, but Strands. I think you said it in one of your puzzles, I was like, "I just need you. Can you just tell me if any of the four letters I put together are close to one of the words you want as opposed to just nothing?" And I think that for me, we get some of that.
Well, you can tell me more of the game logic. But with Wordle and with Connections, at least with Wordle, I get a yellow. I get a colored square. Regardless of what I put in, I'm getting a color back. And with Connections, oftentimes I'm like, "Please just say one away." But you get kind of that. Rangsk:
But even if it's not one away, it's still information. Mike Gerholdt:
It is, yes. Except with Strands. Rangsk:
Yeah, Strands is missing that. And the reason Strands is missing that is because I really feel like they built the hint system because they knew this was an issue. But the hint system is terrible because people don't want to use it. Some people do use it, but I don't like using it. I think that, first of all, making it a choice. Wordle, you don't have the choice to see whether a tile was yellow or green.
It's just going to tell you. It's part of the game. A hint system feels like it's external to the game as like a, "I'm not good enough, so I'm going to press the hint button." And I don't think that was their intent, but I think that's what's happened because they realized that most of these games have some kind of lockstep functionality where you make as you progress through the puzzle and you gain information as you go.
Whereas with Strands, you can be sitting there for 15 minutes and know as much as you did on minute one, even though you have found 100 words because you didn't find any of the words that they're intending and you're not understanding what the theme is trying to hit you towards. And it's just frustrating. And so, they probably saw that in the playtest and went, "Well, if you get three words, we'll give you a word."
But that doesn't feel good because, first of all, they gave the choice. I kind of wonder what would the game be like? Is it just you get three words and it just reveals one without pressing hint? And it was just part of the game. I feel like more people would accept that rather than opting into admitting that you're not good enough at the game.
But also the hint system is just simultaneously not powerful enough and too powerful. And I could rant about this. I feel like it's a bit off-topic. Mike Gerholdt:
No, this is 100% on topic. Rangsk:
All right. Well, I'll rant about it then. Early on, it's too powerful because it gives you... for those not familiar with Strands, it's like a word search game, but they don't tell you what words you're looking for. Mike Gerholdt:
Nope. Rangsk:
Instead, they all follow a theme. Maybe the theme is names of football teams or the theme is pieces of time, so seconds, minutes, hours. And some of them are a bit more esoteric. They might be words that are slaying for money, but are also food was one of them. And so, it really varies in difficulty. And they give you a little kind of crossword style clue hint at the start of what the theme might be.
But it's usually not. Usually, it's either, "Oh, I know exactly what the theme is from this clue," or, "I have no idea what the theme is from this clue." There's not much in between. But anyway, what the hint does is if you get three words that they didn't intend, if you find three words, you can press the hint button and it highlights all of the letters involved in one of the words.
And then, it becomes an unscramble basically. And then, you find that word. And I think the ideal situation when using the hint is then, okay, now that I know what one of the words is, I've now gained information about what the theme might be and I can try to think of other words that match. And if that's not enough, I'll find three more and I'll press hint again and I'll get another word.
But it's too powerful because people don't want to just be shown one of the words. That's literally taking away from the enjoyment of the game because the game is only finding the words. And so, you're literally pressing a button saying, "I want one last word to find please." But then, at the end, sometimes you're down to one word left, it tells you how many words you need to find, and you're down to one word left.
And I've literally spent 10, 15 minutes trying to unscramble that word because I can't figure it out. When it was Broadway shows, and I couldn't unscramble Carousel for the life of me because I hadn't heard of that Broadway show, and it's a weird word. Carousel. And so, the hint wouldn't have helped me. If I'd pressed hint, it would've highlighted all the letters.
So, the hint is simultaneously too powerful early on and not powerful enough at the end. And then, also on top of that, isn't giving you what you want from a hint. So, I feel like it's a failure in game design there. And what they should have done is built-in ratcheting game mechanics that aren't opt-in. Mike Gerholdt:
What are ratcheting game mechanics? Please tell me. Rangsk:
So, if you think about a ratchet wrench. When you go one way, it doesn't lose progress on tightening, and then you go the other way and it tightens more. That's what a ratchet is. And so, you can make progress without losing progress. So, as you put input into the system and as you find things towards the game mechanics, you have now ratcheted yourself, you've given yourself more information.
It's a ratchet-style gameplay. So, like Wordle, you input a guess and you get those yellows and greens and grays, and now you have more information about what the answer might be. And you never lose that information. That information never becomes obsolete. You can always use it. So, in the same way, that's why some of my suggestions for Strands were, "Hey, you know what?"
"If I get partial word, maybe it should tell me, 'Hey, you got a partial word. You're on the right track.'" It's ratcheted that information into the system. It's like getting a green or a yellow in Wordle. Or if they want to keep the hint system, maybe one option for the hint system would be show me the starting letter of one of the words. Not the whole word, just give me somewhere to start. Mike Gerholdt:
Where do I start? Yeah. Rangsk:
Yeah. This letter I know is the start of a word now and I can focus my search on that. And so, I wouldn't feel as bad pressing that. But what if that were just part of the game mechanics? It's like rewarding you for finding words. They aren't the right words, but you're still finding valid words that exist. So, why not have those, just add information to the system as you guess in certain creative ways.
So, it feels like a failure of game design that there isn't that sort of ratchet other than the opt-in very heavy-handed hint system that they have right now. Mike Gerholdt:
Right. I am so glad you brought up that Broadway Strands because I was about... I'm like, "I think I'm done. I think I'm done with Strands now." It took me so long to get... the first thing I found with Strands is you either get started and it starts to make sense, or you're sitting there and you're looking at these two words and the clue and you're like, "I have no idea what these three things have to do with each other. I don't know what another word to look for."
But that Broadway with Carousel, I was stuck on Carousel. I got everything else. Those are the only letters left. I never hit the hint button. And I thought, "What happens if you hit the hint button when you're done?" Because at that point, I'll be honest, the game Joy, it was no joy in Mudville right now. I just wanted to be done. Just please tell me what the answer is. I think I went through... I watched your TikTok.
I went through all the same words you did. I'm like, "I don't know what word this is. Just tell me." And when I hit hint, it just put the little things around. I was like, "I know it's those letters." Rangsk:
Yeah, exactly. Mike Gerholdt:
I know it's those letters. Get me out of here. Where is the escape room button? That's the only time I wanted the hint button to just be like, "Nope, we're just going to solve this because we feel bad for you." Rangsk:
And people use my videos as hints. They'll be like, "Well, I'm done with this puzzle. I haven't solved it, but I'm not getting joy out of it. Let's see what Rangsk did." Rangsk being my handle. "Let's see what he did and maybe that'll give me a hint." And that's actually the entire premise of me doing The New York Times hard Sudoku every day in that instructive way is I know that there's always going to be someone who's stuck on that specific Sudoku puzzle because it's so widespread.
It's published by The New York Times. They're going to search on YouTube or Google. They're going to search "New York Times Sudoku today walkthrough or hint." Mike Gerholdt:
Solve or something. Rangsk:
Yeah, solve. And they're going to find my video and that'll track them to my channel. And not only will they find my video, but this video is going to blow their mind if they don't know modern Sudoku-solving techniques. And they're going to be like, "Wow, I need to watch more of these because this is way more fun than how I've been solving Sudoku, and I don't get stuck as much."
"And if I do get stuck, I watch him until he does something I didn't know, and then I can continue." So, almost using me as a hint button. And I feel like with Strands, there's no strategy. Strands feels like a trivia game to me almost. I've been trying so hard to make it a logic game, which you probably have noticed if you watched my Strand solves, where I'm like, "Okay, corner strategy, edge strategy."
And it kind of works, but it's not perfect and there's not a whole lot of logic involved. I will say there are word search games that do feel a lot more like a logic puzzle. One of them that I play is called Cell Tower. And this is probably the coolest word search game I've played. Normally, I'm not a big fan of word search-style games. I'm not very good at them.
But to briefly explain this game, it's a grid of letters just as you'd expect a word search to be. And the way that these letters form words is a little bit unique, and that's not that important to describe, except basically you're drawing shapes in the grid. So, you're connecting the letters together in kind of a different way that you'd normally expect.
You're not drawing a line through the letters to make words in order. You're just sort of highlighting them, and they have to be connected in some way. And it's red left to right, top to bottom. And so, it's sort of limiting you on... you can't make a word bottom right to top left. You can't just draw a line that way, or you can't zigzag around. Instead, there's a specific logical order to how the letters are going to appear in a word.
In addition to that, every letter is part of a word, similar to Strands in that way. So, every letter will be involved in a word, and there is only one solution. So, you can't just go, "Okay, I found this word. Let's lock that in. Okay, now I found this word." You're going to find a bunch of words, but you need to look at how that affects the rest of the grid around it and make sure you're not preventing the ability for the letters around it to also be part of words.
And that's where the logic comes in, where you go, "Okay, I think this word might be part of it. Can I add an -ed ending, an -ing ending, an S at the end? Is there a prefix I can add to it to expand that word? But also, how does that affect the letters around it? Am I going to be able to make a word out of these other letters if this was one of the words I use?"
And so, you end up with this really logical approach to how you solve it. And you're thinking about how letters go together, how they go next to each other, and how words are formed in general. And you're looking at corners like, "Okay, this letter is going to have to be related to the letters around it in some way because it's in a corner because it's been isolated in some way."
And so, it's not that you're trying to just find words that match a theme and the computer tells you, "Oh, yep, you found one of them," or, "Nope, that wasn't what I was looking for, sorry," with no extra information. Instead, you're trying to solve this logically and the computer is not giving you any help at all there. It's just the grid, the full information of the grid being used.
So, in a way, it's a lot like Sudoku, but also like Connections where you can't just pick any four words that happen to relate because that might disrupt the ability for the other words to relate to each other. So, that's what really makes a logic puzzle a logic puzzle is you have to take the puzzle as a whole and you have to take steps that are logical. It's not just a trivia game. Mike Gerholdt:
That's so apropos to everything that we talked about. You have to look at the puzzle as a whole. Last question, because I happened to think of this when we were talking about Strands. As somebody that's online solving problems, word games and stuff, how hard, how many times do you just want to hit that hint button? Does that ever come up?
Maybe you have the patience of a saint, but have you ever gotten to that point where I know you're creating this for the good of other people and you have to walk through that, but you're like, "Maybe I just hit the hint button because I'm at 35 minutes on this video?" Rangsk:
Yeah, for sure. And there's different forms that that takes in my mind. There's the built-in hint buttons to the game, but then there's also like, "Do I just Google this word?" I did do that once. There was a Connections, and I knew I was about to lose. I was like, "Okay, I've got no mistakes left. And there are three words on the board that I have no idea what they mean.
Literally never heard these words in my life. So, how am I supposed to... is it good content for me to just make a guess and lose? Or do I go on Google, look up what the words mean, and continue the puzzle?" And in that case, I decided to do that. And I got mostly feedback saying, "Yeah, I Googled it too. It was fine to Google it, looking it up. What's wrong with that?"
But then, I got a lot of negative feedback too about "How's it feel to cheat? You're such a cheater, blah, blah, blah." Just so much negativity. And so, I have to weigh the decision on how much negativity do I want in my comment section here, because they aren't just insulting me when they're calling me a cheater. They're calling everyone else who Googled a cheater.
So, people are seeing themselves in that comment when they're reading through the comment section. And that's something I need to figure... it's not something I've solved. I don't have an answer. But what I try to do is understand myself and go, "Okay, am I 35 minutes into this puzzle legitimately, or am I just done with it?" There's a game I play called Squaredle. There's actually two games I play. Mike Gerholdt:
It sounds like all the puzzles put together. Rangsk:
Yeah. There's two games I play called Squaredle. One of them has an extra E and one doesn't. The one with the extra E... so one of them removes the E in square and one of them keeps the E in square when they add the -dle ending. They're completely different games. One of them that I play with the E, it's another word search game.
It's a grid of four by four or sometimes five by five letters. And you need to find every possible word other than esoteric ones. They have some list of words that... you know how there's words that aren't really words, if you know what I mean? The esoteric ones, the archaic ones, out of use, highly specialized words. You don't have to find those.
They count as bonus words if you do find them. But there's a list of words that it's looking for you to get. And sometimes this list is 60 to 100 words. And this game can take me an hour and a half. Mike Gerholdt:
Wow. Rangsk:
I sit there and I record the whole solve. It's a special occasion usually. I'll do it once every week or every two weeks and then put it on my YouTube where I solve the hardest Squaredle of the week. Because just like The New York Times puzzles, it gets harder through the week. And so, I'm like, "I'm going to solve the hardest one today."
And it's a lesson in patience because you have to find every word, and it can take an hour and a half. And that's the kind of game where it's like, "Okay, I'm 30 minutes in, but I'm still solving the puzzle. And that's okay." There's also Sudokus that can take an hour, an hour and a half just because they're that hard. But it feels like you're making progress.
If you feel like you're making progress, that's just you're still in the journey. You're still solving it, and that's fine. It doesn't matter how long it's been, as long as you still feel like you're in the puzzle and you're making progress and you're enjoying it. But then, there's puzzles where... the puzzle usually takes two minutes, and you're 30 minutes into it, and you feel like you haven't made progress in the last 25 minutes or ever.
And you just have to make the decision of like, "Is this worth my time anymore?" And I've definitely had puzzles where I hit the stop button on the recording and I delete the video, and I just go, "I'm not solving that one today." Or ones where I go, "Well, it's time to get a hint." Literally, I just say, "I have failed this puzzle, but I want to see the end of it, so I'm going to look stuff up."
You have to make that decision in your head. And I think you brought up a really important point, which is... I think you brought this point up at least, it became this point in my head, which is you need to decide for yourself when that is and that it's okay. You gave it your best, time to seek help. And I think that's something that's really important in life is that it's okay to seek help when you need it.
I think people appreciate when you've put in some effort yourself first, but at the same time, they don't want... let me put it this way. I've been lead of several different teams as a programmer for my day job. And as a lead programmer, I would rather a junior programmer come to me with a problem that I can solve in a minute than spend six hours banging their head against it.
But at the same time, if it would've only taken them 10 minutes, I'd prefer them to learn that on their own. So, it's important to learn at what point have I stopped being productive? Have I stopped enjoying this? Am I not in the right mindset and I either need to take a break, do something else, or I need to seek help, or both? Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah. No, I think you're right. The hint button and being called a cheater, you're only cheating yourself. It's what do you need to move on with? And your example is perfect. Is there something that can be gained by that person asking you? But I also think, what level of thinking did they put into solving this before they came to me?
And I always look at it as I'm very appreciative of, they came to me because they hit that wall, but they also realized quickly that they hit that wall. Rangsk:
Exactly. Mike Gerholdt:
And now they need to move on so that that learning journey continues as opposed to being frustrated in themselves. Rangsk:
Yeah. And that's a skill unto itself. And that really separates the people you enjoy working with from the people you don't enjoy working with, people who are team players and people who aren't. That really separates them because it's a matter of, "I don't want to be doing your job for you. I've got my own job to do, but also I don't want you sitting there suffering as if you were alone."
And there's that balance. And recognizing in yourself when you've hit that state is really important. And I think that... going back to the conversation about transference. That's something that can transfer. If you're playing games, and you can learn in a low-stakes scenario, how do I... be in yourself, be in your body, be in your mind, and be like, "I now recognize what I'm like when I'm in this hopeless scenario where I've given up without giving up, where I'm frustrated, where I'm tired, where I'm hungry."
It's something even like children need to learn. Am I sad or am I just hungry? Or do I need to take a nap? That's something children need to learn, but it's not something we stop learning as a child. It's something we need to always know ourselves, know how our mind works, know what our limitations are, and know what our limitations aren't.
Is this something I can just continue on, or is this something that I need to use my coping mechanisms that I've learned throughout my life to deal with this situation? Part of the problem has now become my own mind. And that's something you can learn by putting yourself constantly in these difficult situations, like difficult logic puzzles or trivia puzzles, where you're not very familiar with that trivia or whatever it is for you that puts you out of your comfort zone in a safe, low-stakes environment.
So, you can learn how you yourself react to that and what that's going to take. And part of my job, implementing things, software. I need to recognize... have you ever had that... I'm sure everyone's had that late night where you've been banging your head against this fog or a thing you're trying to implement is just not working. You go home dejected. You get some sleep. You come in in the morning and you fix it in two minutes.
And had you just recognized that you were in that situation where you were not going to be productive anymore, and you'd just gone home and you'd gotten rest and you'd accepted that that's what's happening. And you actually had your relaxing night and you took the time that you needed for yourself, and you got the good amount of sleep, and then you came in the morning ready to go, and you just solved the problem.
Those two scenarios look the same from a work perspective, but look very different from a personal hygiene, mental hygiene perspective. Mike Gerholdt:
I couldn't agree more. I couldn't agree more. I think it's also a great way to end this discussion, David. Thanks for coming on the podcast. You gave me so much to think about and here I was just excited to talk about word games. But really a lot of it is how you look at everything in life and how you tackle situations.
And really part of, I think, the word game or the game itself is also helping you understand yourself. So, this is a great discussion. I appreciate it. Thanks so much. Rangsk:
Well, thanks for having me on. And if people want to watch my content, I'm just going to plug my stuff real quick. Mike Gerholdt:
Absolutely. Rangsk:
So, I am Rangsk on all platforms. R-A-N-G-S-K. I'm sure there'll be something in the description where you can find that. I'm on YouTube and also on TikTok. And I recently had to split my TikTok into multiple accounts. But if you find that Rangsk_YT account, that's the main one, and you'll be able to find the others through my videos.
And so, if you enjoy Sudoku, logic puzzles, word games, that sort of thing in an instructive calm environment, then my channel is for you. Mike Gerholdt:
So, as I write, this was a shot in the dark, I'll be honest with you. I reached out to David after being completely addicted to his TikTok videos on Connections and Wordle, and just thought, "This is really what critical thinking looks like to me." And the conversation, I probably could have gone for another hour easily. I had a hundred more questions in my head, but I hope you enjoy it.
I do want you to do one thing. If you enjoyed this episode, go ahead and give David a follow. I promise you it's super rewarding to watch his critical thinking and the way that he solves problems and word problems and word games online. I honestly do think it will make you a better Salesforce admin and a better business analyst in general.
So, go ahead and give a click on the links below. Also, if you're not already following the Salesforce Admins Podcast, please do so. We're available on all the platforms. Click follow. Then new episodes like this one, we'll download automatically every Thursday morning. Thanks for listening and of course, we'll see you in the cloud.
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Thu, 9 May 2024
Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Michelle Blair, Community Manager at Salesforce. Join us as we chat about Salesforce Community Events, her work with local event organizers, and why you should attend one near you. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Michelle Blair. By Trailblazers, for Trailblazers Michelle is a part of the Trailblazer Community team, which helps millions of Salesforce users around the world come together and learn. I brought her on the pod to tell us about community conferences and how you can find an event near you. Salesforce community conferences are created by Trailblazers, for Trailblazers. As Michelle shares, over 40 events are happening this year around the world, and they offer a great opportunity to connect with other people in the community and learn more about Salesforce. Get personal at a Salesforce community event near you When you think of Salesforce events, you probably think of Dreamforce or TrailheaDX. These events are huge and offer so much. But all of those choices can get a little overwhelming. The cost can also be a challenge. I remember exactly how much budget I had for attending conferences when I was a solo admin—it was $0. If you’ve ever felt that way, Michelle recommends that you give community events a try. Because they’re volunteer-organized, they have a more intimate, personal, inclusive feel. It’s easier to talk to speakers and make those connections. You can also find one within driving distance so you don’t have to take a flight or book a hotel. Most importantly, the quality of content and professional networking opportunities at community conferences is top-notch. Michelle and her team have put together a handy-dandy calendar so you can easily find a community event near you. Get involved in the Salesforce community Michelle’s team is hard at work making Salesforce community events even better. They offer sponsorships to help with affordability and are connecting organizers with keynote speakers and Salesforce engineers. This year, they’re bringing several hands-on workshops to community events to take your learning to the next level. Be sure to listen to the full episode for more on the Salesforce community events happening around the world and how you can get involved. And make sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode. Podcast swag Learn more Admin Trailblazers Group Social Love our podcasts? Full show transcript Mike:
Salesforce community events are a great way to connect with Salesforce people in your area, consume some amazing content, dare I say Dreamforce level content, and get connected with your local user group. So this week on the Salesforce Admins podcast I'm talking with Michelle Blair, who's the community major at Salesforce. And she helps all of these community event organizers really propel their event into the next level. We talk about what a community event is, how it's different than an actual Salesforce event, some of the stuff that Salesforce is involved and not involved in when it comes to that. And I'll be honest, why you should go. Now, before we get into that episode, just want to make sure that you're following the Salesforce Admins podcast on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. That way when new episodes like this come out every Thursday morning, it's going to be right on your phone. So with that, let's get to our conversation with Michelle. So Michelle, welcome to the podcast. Michelle:
Well, thank you, Mike. It's great to be here. Mike:
Yeah. Well, I'm excited to talk about there's a lot of events that Salesforce does, but then the passion that runs through our community also exudes into them running their own events, which we'll talk about. But let's get started with you, how did you get started at Salesforce and what do you do? Michelle:
Yeah, so it's been about three years that I've been at Salesforce now. And I actually was a customer prior to joining Salesforce and was implementing our marketing cloud and our social, using a lot of the social platform at the customer company. And came to Dreamforce back in 2018 and was able to lead a session at Dreamforce, and talking about our journey and working with a Salesforce expert within the company. And from there I really experienced the Trailblazer community and was so inspired and just like, okay, got to get in here somehow. And I was already working with our community at the customer. So kind of just got in there eventually and made my way in about three years ago now, and it's been quite a ride. Mike:
And so at Salesforce you manage all kinds of stuff? Michelle:
Yes, lots of community things. Mike:
I feel like the over/under at one time I was a customer, it used to be very unique as an answer. Now it's very common. But our community events, so we do TrailblazerDX, and have Dreamforce and we have World Tours which are smattered across the US and EMEA. But we also have events that our Trailblazer community puts on, so tell me about those. Michelle:
Yeah. So a little overview of the team that I'm on. So the Trailblazer community team we support that global network of millions of Salesforce users across the world now. And we really help them to learn, succeed, and enable them with the tools to be able to put on their own events, their own communities, bringing people together to talk all about Salesforce and share that knowledge. And we manage a number of different programs like the online community, our community groups, as well as our community experts like Salesforce MVPs, and of course these community conferences which I'm so excited to dive into a lot deeper on this podcast. Mike:
Yeah. No, and I've been to quite a few of them, not all of them because I feel like there's more all the time. So what are we... First of all, they're not put on by Salesforce so you don't have anything in the planning of it, right? Michelle:
That is correct. Mike:
Okay. Michelle:
We do not plan these. So these are a collection of learning conferences and they're created, organized, managed by the community for the community. So they are around Salesforce content, but just not a Salesforce led event. And they really do offer such a unique opportunity to learn network, get inspired and give back to your community. And like you said, they're entirely led by our incredible Trailblazers around the world. And they really just volunteer their time and pour their hearts into these community led events. And there are about 40 plus and counting this year and more to come. So these are just popping up all over, which is really exciting. Mike:
And various sizes too, right? Michelle:
Correct. Mike:
With 40 plus, what are we looking at? Michelle:
Yeah, so community conferences typically it'll be about 200 minimum and then can go to 1000s now. I think in certain places it goes, we've seen 1000s up to 2000, in the States about a 1000. And so they really are just quite a range of options as well. And each of them are so unique to their local culture, to their city, their region. And some are single day, some are multi-day, but all of them have tons of content and a lot of robust speaker lineups that really include a range of sessions, workshops, demos, and all of that networking that we know our Trailblazers love. Mike:
Yeah. You were a customer and you said you went to Dreamforce, which that was your first event. That's like, ooh, I'm going to go on vacation for the first time and I'm going to go to Vegas or something. But I feel like when I was a customer I had a budget of zero, which made it very easy for me to know my budget every year. And I found community conferences as a super easy way to get connected with content that was, I would say Dreamforce quality but at a different price. What do you see... And you can see this from both angles, what do you see as the advantages of community conferences and some of our customers going? Michelle:
Oh, absolutely. And kind of to touch on the Dreamforce part of my experience, it was extremely overwhelming. I remember just walking around and just not really knowing where exactly I should go. There was just so many options and it kind of is easy to feel a bit lost. And I think that is such a benefit of these community conferences. They really do feel like these intimate conferences that if maybe you are newer to the ecosystem, or maybe you're making a career change and you're just breaking in that way, or maybe you're a seasoned Trailblazer and you just enjoy more of these more intimate settings. And I think these community conferences really offer that. They also offer more of affordability in that way too, where they're just more accessible and budget friendly. So I think there's a lot of opportunity to be more inclusive through these than your typical industry event. And make it possible for folks who may not be able to attend those big events like Dreamforce and TDX. So I think that's really important to definitely note. Mike:
Yeah, I know for a few of them I didn't even have to spend a night in a hotel. It was great because it was one day, but also the drive, the Midwest, everybody, we drive everywhere. We only fly if we have to go to the coasts. But you could drive, attend the event and drive home. And that also was a huge kind of budget saver. Not to focus on that, but money talks a lot. Michelle:
100%, yes. And I think that is something that we absolutely love about these events, is we have to keep in mind that they're 100% community-led so these are people who are just volunteering to put these events on. So they create these events through sponsors, like ourselves, the Trailblazer community team we do offer a sponsorship. And just to help out with some of those costs, but it really it's a lot of people just have to get creative to put these events on. And I think they do such a wonderful job and really hone in on the community. And that's really the whole point of these is to bring the community together. Mike:
Yeah, absolutely. And then for some of the events, I guess, what are you seeing as a trend in, you mentioned 2018 and I often think back to even the Dreamforce and some of the events that we've done pre 2020 and post 2020. What are some of the trends that you're seeing in the style of community event or the length of community event now versus say a few years ago? Michelle:
That's a great question, Mike. And I wish as a customer, I had attended a community conference to be able to share that perspective of like this is as a customer back in 2018 versus now working at Salesforce and actually helping to support these events internally. But I will say, I think with the pandemic we definitely saw that these particular events, there was a pause on a lot of them. Many of them had to skip a year or two years or just coming back maybe this year, which is really exciting. And I will say last year in particular, that's when I really helped to bring our focus back to community conferences and really find ways to support internally through our team and build out this sponsorship. And I think there was so much excitement this past year and that continues on through this year. And I think internally, something we have been really honing in on is that internal awareness and making sure that employees know that these are happening.
We get out account executives, we get out those engineers who can really get this feedback in person. We also are delivering some hands-on workshops that have been really impactful at some of these pilots that we've had this year. And we have a goal of piloting 10 hands-on workshops at community conferences by the end of this year, which is really exciting. Mike:
Yeah, I think that's always the part for me that felt very, I don't know, lack of a better term, real, was you went to the event and it was very local to you unless you flew across the country or something, or you went outside of the United States. But it felt very local. So there's a lot of people that you would know or you could connect with. If you go to an event in the Midwest, you're going to talk about the weather 100%. And then we're going to avoid bumping into you and say, "Oh, [inaudible 00:12:10]." But I think you get a mix of community members presenting, but then you also have Salesforce shows up. It just shows up in a very different way. It's not a heavy-handed message, but in a supportive manner like you said, where we can do a workshop. And so you still get kind of that local flavor, but also some of the big production of a hands-on workshop that you feel like, oh, well, this poor customer didn't have to spend 10 weeks toiling away to create this workshop. Michelle:
Right. Yes, I think that is a really important note because we 100% want to respect the community and give them the credit that they all deserve for organizing these events. And one way we can do that is within our sponsorship package, we actually do offer whether it's keynote assistance, where we can make an ask on behalf of the conference organizers if they have a keynote or an internal speaker that they would really like as their keynote speaker or as a session topic. So that is one way we support logistically. And I think it is wherever we can help out, we will try to find a way. And I think it is just that trust piece where the community trusts us to have their back to know that we will support where we can. And then we trust in them to put on these incredible conferences that really just are the heart of this community. Mike:
Yeah. Speaking of local, are there... And there's so many, are there unique events that some of these community events do outside of the conference? Michelle:
Yes. So I know that... Well, and to give a little history but just on that local piece, Mike- Mike:
Oh, please do. Michelle:
So the history of these events really came from, I think it was back in 2012, and it's a customer who actually wasn't able to attend Dreamforce. They wanted to offer something similar to their local Salesforce network. So they basically decided to bring this mini Dreamforce to their hometown, and that's been duplicated all over the world now. We're seeing all of these pop up globally, but it really is the overall vision. And the goal here really is to connect local Trailblazer community groups. So those are those regional groups that get together, very product and industry specific groups, so architects, admins, developers. And then those local Salesforce customers who just want to get together and get to know each other as well as share that knowledge and then anyone interested in learning.
And that's really the goal here is to spark those connections and ideas for all. And yeah, I think the local piece is just so important because these conferences are a celebration in a sense of that region, that local culture that people really love about their city, about their state. So we do see a lot of very specific, especially in the States, very specific regions that these Dream and events are named after. And then we're seeing a ton come up in EMEA as well as APAC. Yeah, there's so much local flavor that we're seeing and it's amazing. Mike:
It sounds like... Well, I'll flip to the other side of the coin because I feel like going to these is paramount. We've talked about that a lot. What if you're on the other side of the coin you're thinking, boy, I think I could do something like this in my area. From your perspective, what does it take to put on a community event? How big are some of these teams that plan these? And I think you said the turnout's kind of all over the place, but if somebody wanted to get started what are they looking at? Michelle:
Great question. So typically with our conference planning teams, we see at least three to four members. I would say that's a minimum because you got to think about all the different components that go into these conferences and up to it could be 10 planning team members. So really is just depending on the scope of your conference and what you're trying to bring together. And we really recommend even forming an additional volunteer team to help handle this day of responsibilities as well. So those are additional folks who can jump in if there's any fires, anything going on that need to be addressed as soon as possible. Something we also do recommend is having at least one community group leader that currently is leading one of those regional community groups, just so that they kind of have that full understanding of the Trailblazer community and the importance of bringing the community together.
And then typically we also recommend that the planning team is individuals not employed but just by one company. It's really spread out through a company and different organizations coming together. And that could include customers, partners, and making sure that they are active members of the Salesforce ecosystem, the Trailblazer community. And that they really create that open and inclusive environment that these community conferences are known for. Mike:
Yeah. No, sometimes it takes an army or what's it? No, it takes a village. Michelle:
Takes a village. Mike:
It takes a village, yes. May feel like an army sometime, but yeah, I've been to quite a few and I think it's always interesting. I also, just to speak to kind of the vibe, I don't know how best to say that but the vibe, the vibes at a community conference are so different. On top of just the speakers being super approachable, they'll get up and literally there'll be times... There was one time I was sitting in a session, he's like, "I wonder who the speaker is." And he just got up because they're not in this bougie suit like you see at Dreamforce. But also when you're there talking with the partners, the SIs and stuff, they're a little more laid back. It's a little more casual. I really enjoy that you can have what I'll call a human conversation, as opposed to at some of these more formal corporate events where the people at the booth or whatever are just trying to hard sell you the whole time.
There you can be like, now, you sit down and it's nothing to walk past a table and see people sketching stuff on a piece of paper. And then really working through the challenge as opposed to like, "Buy my product." I don't know how best to say that. Michelle:
I totally agree, Mike. I think that is really the magic is that relaxed environment where you can show up authentically. You don't have to play a certain role or act a certain way. You just show up as yourself, whether you've been in the ecosystem for years and years or you're coming in new, I think it's somewhere that is so welcoming and inclusive of all. And that is something I just absolutely love. And you see that across every single community conference. It really is that's just the vibe of our Dream and events. So it really is incredible. And I think touching on the opportunities that when you can show up authentically, it really does offer or allows you to grow personally and professionally on such a different level because you can be yourself and then you make those really special connections that will allow you to become a better admin, become a better community member, become a better community leader. And then that kind of just flows into your personal everything. So I think that's really such a beautiful thing about these conferences. Mike:
If somebody was listening and we'll put the link in the show notes, and wanted to find, do we list all these or is there a listing somewhere that they could find of these events? Michelle:
We sure do, yes. Great question. It's exciting because we're actually going to be updating this landing page very soon. So you can find community conferences at Trailblazercommunitygroups.com. And then on that top area you can just click onto community conferences from there. And you will see a calendar of all of the amazing events that are happening throughout this year, and then all of the past events that have happened as well. Mike:
So you can find out all the stuff you missed out on. Michelle:
Yes, exactly. Mike:
I feel like it's that way with me all the time. Like, oh. Every time I hear a band or a comic is going on tour, like, oh. And like, "You didn't know they were going on tour." You're like, "No, I didn't." And then you pull up the event and you're like, "Cool, [inaudible 00:22:19]." Michelle:
It was last weekend, yeah. Mike:
So conversely, if somebody's listening to this, what would be the bar? Is there a requirement that they should have stuff together before they contact you if they were looking to get into creating a community event? Michelle:
Yeah, I think it really is there's quite a range in that too. When a team will come to us and say, "I have interest in this. I really don't know what to do. Can you help guide me?" And then we also see the other side where it's like, we have the date, we have the venue, we have everything already set. All we need from you is really the sponsorship and a point of contact on your team to help support in that planning and execution. So we show up wherever the conference planning team really is. And yeah, once they kind of go through our intake process and we say, "All right, you're approved. Here's the sponsorship, here's your point of contact." We then the point of contact on our team will be able to support them with all the additional items like that internal awareness piece. We do a demo jam trophy, that keynote speaker sourcing, some marketing support as well, as well as some little giveaway items that we provide.
And something new that we're piloting at domestic conferences is an onsite community booth where our team, yes, for those who our team is able to travel to some of these conferences. And when we do we kind of bring this community booth kit where we have pop-up banner, we have all of the things that help to identify the Trailblazer community. And we spread some of that awareness of what makes the Trailblazer community unique, and how we support these conferences as well as our community groups and our community experts. So lots of fun things. Mike:
I would say, that's quite the welcome wagon. My God. Michelle:
Yes. Mike:
Well, Michelle, thanks for coming on the pod and talking about our community events. I know that I've been to quite a few and I've got quite a few listeners that go to them and plan them and talk about them. And it's just kind of a neat extra layer of participation that we have as part of this ecosystem. Michelle:
Yes, I couldn't agree more, Mike. And thank you so much for supporting these incredible community led events. They really are just exactly what the community is all about. And we couldn't do any of this without the people who are organizing these events, so big shout out to them. Mike:
Yeah, absolutely. Michelle:
They're the real heroes here. Mike:
Yep, absolutely. Well, it was great to have Michelle on the podcast. I'm glad she could join us. I really love going to community events. I think they're a lot of fun, and I wasn't kidding about the vibe. I think it's so much more enjoyable when you can sit down with a lot of the vendors. And also to be honest with you, a lot of the speakers are also a little less rushed too. So if you're working on a budget like I am all the time, community events are a great way to get connected with some great content. Also, a great way for you as a Salesforce admin to try out your presentation skills. If you've been presenting at a local user group and kind of want to go that next level, community event is a great way to get in front of a larger group of people and really try out your speaking abilities.
So if you enjoyed this episode, can you do me a favor and just tap on the three dots in Apple Podcasts and click the share episode. That way you can text it to a friend or you can most importantly share it on social. And of course, we mentioned resources, Michelle had a couple of URLs. I want to make sure you know how to get to those. All those resources are in the show notes, and those show notes and along with everything else is at Admin.salesforce.com, including a transcript of the show. Now, be sure to join us in the Admin Trailblazer group in the Trailblazer community if you're not there already. And of course, until next week, we'll see you in the cloud.
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Wed, 1 May 2024
Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Jason Atwood, CEO and Co-Founder of Arkus. Join us as we chat about landing your first Salesforce Admin role, from finding good opportunities to nailing the interview and more. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Jason Atwood. The 20/30/50 rule Jason has interviewed a lot of people for Salesforce roles in his 15 years in the ecosystem. His biggest piece of advice when looking for your first role is pretty simple: “Relax. It’s going to be OK.” But you still need to acquire skills and there’s a lot to do, so Jason recommends following his 20/30/50 rule. Spend 20% of your time on Trailhead, 30% on certifications, and 50% finding some way to gain experience. This split loosely follows what he looks for on a resume when he’s making a new hire. He also shared some advice about each step of your journey. Trailhead: Becoming a Ranger is your number one priority, followed by Superbadges. He also recommends taking the time to set up your profile with a photo, description of yourself, and custom URL. Certifications: Don’t put off taking your certifications. Give it a go as soon as you’re ready. If you don’t get it this time, you can use your results to help you prep better the next time. And if you do pass, you can move on to the next one sooner. Gaining Experience: Volunteering isn’t the only way to do this. You can enroll in a program where you build mock projects, or simply build something on your own that you’re willing to demo in an interview. Preparing for a Salesforce Admin interview Jason interviews a lot of people so I asked him, how should you prepare for your first interview for a Salesforce role? The first thing is to be ready for some sort of assessment. Since there’s often time pressure, Jason recommends doing a practice run. Talk to a friend, find out what kind of data they collect, and build them an app to track the books they’ve read or the distance they’ve run, anything will do. When you sit down in the room, Jason emphasizes the importance of listening and showing empathy. One way to do that is to ask good questions. What’s their Salesforce roadmap and what can you build for them? What’s their organization’s approach to culture? You can also do your homework and bring up a blog post they wrote, or something specific their company has done. Admins are consultants Listening and empathy are so important to Jason because he sees that as the biggest part of the job. “Being an admin is being a consultant for one organization. What are you doing? You’re talking to people, they're coming to you with their problems, you’re getting their requirements, you’re satisfying their needs, you’re working with them, you’re iterating, you’re updating things, and then you’re presenting it back to them.” We touch on a lot more in this conversation about looking for Salesforce jobs, listening, and what it’s like to be a Salesforce consultant, so be sure to listen to the full episode and subscribe so you don’t miss out. Podcast swag Learn more Admin Trailblazers Group Social Full show transcript Mike:
I got an idea. How about we tackle the hardest question on the Salesforce Trailblazer community? That's right. This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we're going to look for advice on finding your first admin job and doing the interview, getting experience, and more. And we're going to do all that with CEO and co-founder of Arkus, Jason Atwood. Jason and I chatted at TrailblazerDX and really wanted to dive into this topic. Now, before we bring Jason on, I just want to make sure that you're following the Salesforce Admins Podcast on iTunes or Spotify. That way, when new episodes like this one come out, they're automatically downloaded to your phone. But enough about that. Let's talk about finding that first job or even finding your next job as a Salesforce administrator. Oh, I almost forgot to mention we tackle the myth of "but it's just an admin job." So with that, let's get Jason on the podcast. So, Jason, welcome to the podcast. Jason Atwood:
Thank you for having me. It's been a long time since we've podcast together. Mike:
I know. I was thinking back; well, we were just reminiscing of the days at the Marriott Marquis and the Arkus podcast. Jason Atwood:
Yep. You were on an episode of CloudFocus Weekly. We had it as part of our trivia once there was only four or five guests ever on the podcast, and you were one of them. Mike:
Snuck in, only proximity. I'm going to say. So catch people up. What have you been up to? Jason Atwood:
Well, since then, whatever that was, 10 years ago. Yeah. So I am now the current CEO and co-founder of Arkus. We're a Salesforce consulting firm. We deal mostly in the nonprofit space, and we've grown from that little company back then. We're almost up to 75 people. And now I run around between putting out fires, talking on podcasts, and trying to educate myself on the whole changing landscape of technology. Mike:
Yeah, it does feel like in the last decade, it's gone from everything we know to a brand new world. Jason Atwood:
It certainly is. And I just spent three hours at a Heroku dev meetup and could hang there mentally for a bit, but they lost me at a little point. So it's both fun, interesting, and challenging to stay up with all this stuff. Mike:
So one of the things that everyone's trying to stay up with is the ever-changing job market and hiring. We see a lot of the questions in the Trailblazer community from new admins, people getting into the ecosystem that want to become Salesforce admins, people in the ecosystem that are looking for jobs, or maybe have kind of hit a career plateau. And you and I were chatting, and boy, I think it'd be fun to kind of delve into that topic with you. Jason Atwood:
Let's do it. I have some experience in hiring people over the last 15 years, so I can certainly talk about it. Mike:
A little bit more than me. More than me.
Well, let's get started. So let's start fresh. There's a lot of new people. As we were talking about in the intro, there's a lot of new people coming into the ecosystem that maybe don't have tech advice. They are doing Trailhead modules, completing challenges, getting a lot of badges, trying to round out their resumes, and they don't know A, what to look for, or B, what to put on their resumes. So somebody that's hired a bunch of people and been around for a long time, let's start there with some of your advice and where they should go. Jason Atwood:
Sure. This is a very common thing, and the first thing I would tell everybody is relax. It's going to be okay. I know it feels daunting, and you see these triple all-star rangers and you see all these, the hoodies, and you see the people with the 15 certifications and 10 years of experience, and you feel like, "How am I ever going to get there?" You will; you'll get there. So the first thing is just to take it easy and not to get too worked up on it. It does feel like a lot. It's a very big community and filled with lots of hungry people for jobs, a lot of recruiters, a lot of activity. When I talk to people about getting started in the ecosystem, and certainly on the admin track, and we can talk about other tracks if you want, but on the admin track, I kind of say all those things matter.
So when it comes to certifications, when it comes to Trailhead, when it comes to experience, they all matter. And usually the question I get is, "But what should I focus on?" And so I came up with something, I maybe made it up years and years ago. I call it the 30, 20, 50 rule, or 20, 30, 50. It doesn't matter; you can break it up anyway. And if you're going to take your time, right, you're in the hunt for a job, and you need to do the education, you need to get enabled, you need to build your experience level. I break it down into those percentages. So 20% of the time, I'd focus on Trailhead. And the trick for Trailhead is A, you just have to be a ranger. We don't even look at people who aren't rangers. I had an intern apply the other day, and I said, "No, you're not even on Trailhead. Go get a ranger before I even talk to you."
So that, to me, is just a minimum bar. Just go be a ranger, and then if you can go up from there, that's great. And then, if you're still in your Trailhead worlds, the thing that we then look for besides looking at their profile, is it filled out? Have they thought about it? Have they created it like LinkedIn? So second advice on the Trailhead side is treat your profile like LinkedIn: fill it out, put your picture, put your description, do all the things. It'll probably take you no more than a half an hour. Make your URL; you can make your customized URL so people can find you; do all the things so it looks like you're part of the community, right? Make sure that your profile is rich and full. And then the third thing on the Trailhead side of things is to go for super badges.
So I can look at double ranger, triple ranger all day long, but if I don't see some super badges and I speak from someone who doesn't have any super badges. Mike:
Oh, no. Jason Atwood:
I know, I know, it's on my hit list for this year. I know, I know, I mean, I have 15 certs, and so I have some experience, but I'd say, get some super badges. We see that when we look at that as a higher level of dedication and of expertise, because, as you know and as I've been doing them, they're difficult. They show that you have really dug in, and they're more than just answering some questions or watching videos, or getting fun ones. I love badges, but the super badges really show that kind of a deeper level of education and sort of just being in the Trailhead world. So that's the 20%. Then the 30% is certifications.
You need to have both. You can't have one without the other. I don't know what that commercial was, peanut butter and chocolate or something, but- Mike:
Yeah, I think so, yeah. Jason Atwood:
-You might be [inaudible 00:07:08]. Certifications are important; you should focus on them. What I tell people is you need to get them, but you can't stall. Most people, I think, when we talk to them and we'll find in the ecosystem, say, "Oh, I'm thinking about getting that, or I'm planning to get that one next year." And our advice is, "Nope, go get it. Go get it now. Go take it. Go take the test a couple of times." Do whatever it is you can do to start your certification journey; don't put it off; don't procrastinate on it. You don't have to be perfect; just go get some. And obviously there's a path of which ones you should get, blah, blah, blah.
It depends on where you're going in your world, but having at least one or two certs is kind of a bare minimum. So if you're starting off and you're trying to get into the ecosystem, that's your 20 and your 30, and then the 50 is the hardest part. And it's just hard to tell people because it's the experience. The third thing we look for is experience. I want to see that you've done something obviously new to the ecosystem, harder to have the experience, but that's where I say spend 50% of your time trying to gain that experience. There's the old adage: try to go work with a non-profit. Although there's some pushback on that nowadays because of the complexity of the platform, you don't want to hurt a non-profit.
There's definitely... Get in in a way, there's programs, there's tons of programs out there that will help you do mock projects and things where you can just get your hands dirty. And even if you have to build your own thing that you're going to demo, you got to get experience because I've not hired people with 22 certifications, and because it didn't add up to any experience, and I've seen people with tons and tons of experience with zero certs, and I would hire anyway, just from the experience. But for me, that's how I tell spend your time: 20% trailhead, 30% certifications, and 50% getting that experience. Mike:
I think that 50%, that part that you're talking about is always the part that feels like the hardest to get into. Because if you're not in tech and you don't have any experience and you're trying to land that first job, that can feel like, "If I could get this job, then I could get the experience." And so, part of that lends to my next question is, so you're new, we've checked all the boxes on filling out our profiles and done that part. What should I get ready for when I interview? Jason Atwood:
So every interview's going to be different, obviously, but a lot of places are using assessments now. So I would say be prepared for an assessment. That means functionally, they're going to ask you to do something; they're going to ask you to build something or take something they've done and turn it into something on the platform, using Salesforce as the platform. So I would just be ready for that, be prepared, be okay with it. Even do mock versions of it, go have a friend, and I have to given this advice to some people, but go have a friend, sit down with them, talk to them about what they do, and you'll uncover something that they're collecting data.
And as soon as you can figure out what the data they're collecting, whether it's books or they collect comic books, or they're a skier or they're a runner, anything you do, you can just come up with, "Ooh, what if I built you an app to track that?" So be prepared to have an assessment of your skills and be able to show that in a short period of time. Meaning it might be a take-home. Sometimes it's a take-home. Like, "Hey, go do this over the weekend." Other times it's, "You have an hour; come back and show us what you did." Mike:
Ooh! Jason Atwood:
So I'd say... Ooh! Yeah, I know. I've been doing that for 15 years to people. Trust me. I've seen a lot of, oohs. Mike:
I would imagine. Jason Atwood:
Even had one person pass out in the... Mike:
Oh, my. Oh, goodness. Jason Atwood:
It happens. Mike:
You get an extra hour now. Jason Atwood:
Yeah. So I think that it's coming more and more in the ecosystem, because again, when you look at a resume, when you look at LinkedIn, a lot of it's just you can't tell whether they know what they're doing. If you actually do an assessment, you can then assess, "Okay, you know, you functionally know how to do things." So I'd be prepared for that. The other thing is, I think when you're really, especially in the new, just be honest about what you do and do not know. That's really, really key. Don't fluff up your resume; don't put things that you don't know; don't put clouds, don't throw in data cloud if you don't know what data cloud is and haven't used it or can't really explain it. Just because you took a Trailhead on something doesn't mean that platform or know that cloud. So I'd really say be honest with what you know and the clouds, and the products, because that's going to be super important in the interview process. Mike:
Wow. How much... In prep work for resumes, there's a lot of AI tools out there, so I'd love to know your perspective on both sides of this one: how much do you, as somebody hiring, kind of look for, "Oh, they used AI to generate most of this resume?" And on the flip side, how much should somebody building their resume that could really benefit from an AI tool? How much should they lean into it? Jason Atwood:
So I'm going to be the strange answer on this one, or... Mike:
Oh, good. Jason Atwood:
Yeah, because I'm going to say, resumes don't matter. Mike:
Okay. Jason Atwood:
They're just checking a box. When people get to me in the interview process, they're beyond the resume. So yes, you need to have a resume; you need it because that's the part. It's like you have to have the internet; you have to have a way to fill out the form. So you need to have a resume, and it should have your accomplishments and stuff on it. But I don't look at resumes because they're just lies. They're just you telling me all these things, and sometimes I don't know if any of that's really true or not true. So to me, it's like it's just a checking the box. "Yes, you have to have a resume. Yes, it should be okay." Honestly, your LinkedIn profile should be your resume, right? Because that's real; it's on the web. And if you're lying, someone might actually call you out for it.
"Hey, you didn't work at that company for 10 years." So I would say focus more on the LinkedIn. Because I'll look at that. If you gave me 10 minutes, I'd look at your LinkedIn first. I would not look at your resume, what you've put on, rather than what your actual history has been. That being said, you want to throw all this stuff on there for this ecosystem. So I do think showing work that you've done and really pointing to problems you've solved, if you really think about any job, especially as an administrator, you're a Salesforce admin, you're basically solving problems all day all.
And you're communicating. So two things that I tell people about the resume and the process is how do you show that you've solved problems in the past in your resume, and then how do you show that you are a great communicator? Because great communication, it doesn't matter what, I mean, well, not what job, but certainly in this world, you are basically talking to people, helping them out, doing stuff, re-communicating with them, getting what they need to do, building it, whatever. You might work with different groups or whatever. But that communication skill is something we deeply look at. So again, if you're going to focus on stuff, don't so much focus on your resume as focus on how to be a great communicator. Mike:
That's really good advice because I have been at that level where people show up and the resume looked good, but they couldn't facilitate the conversation or articulate any kind of answer in the interview. Jason Atwood:
It is a skill that not a lot of people have, but it's a skill, you can learn it. So a couple of things to put into that communication bucket. We'll go down a little rathole here. Mike:
Yeah, let's do. Jason Atwood:
One is empathy. Mike:
Okay. Jason Atwood:
Have the ability to show empathy, and that means sort of having a conversation with somebody and throwing in stuff that's like listening to them, talking to them, obviously pulling out information about them, but having the empathy when they say something's not going to happen or whatever, they could say, "It's a rainy day." I look for it in every interview that I do. Now this is going to be on the podcast; everybody's going to know this, but I will actually throw things into my talk track or as just the warm-up when you're sort of, "How are you and what's going on?" I will always throw in something to test empathy.
I'll say, "Oh, I'm okay, but I didn't sleep well last night. Or I had a bad egg sandwich this morning, or I've tripped over the dog when I came into the room." And I just listened to hear what they react. If they go, "Oh, that's terrible. Oh, yeah, I know dogs can be really difficult. Or you know what? I get my egg sandwiches from downstairs, whatever." But hearing that back of that empathy, super important. Second is actually listening, so I will listen to people, how they listen to me. Are they interrupting me? Are they talking over me? Are they going? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, as I speak, I listen for their real intent and true conversational skills. And so the ability to actually listen, pause, and then answer is a really big; it's a great skill to have. And so the people who can do that, I know that they can do almost any job better because they've intently done that listening skill and they've got it working. So those are two that I throw out to most people when they're trying to build their conversational habits. Mike:
Yeah, I'm listening to you answer that, and I'm playing devil's advocate in my head and saying, "Maybe people are hearing Jason say this because he's hiring consultants." So why do you think this also translates over to people that are embedded in different work groups, or teams, or have stakeholders within an organization and aren't consultants, like for your organization? Jason Atwood:
Because basically, being an admin is being a consultant in one organization. You are a consultant. What are you doing? You're talking to people; they're coming to you with their problems; you are getting their requirements; you're satisfying their needs; you're working with them; you're iterating; you're changing it; you're updating things, and then you're presenting it back to them. The thing that changes when you become a consultant is you're paying for someone's time, which then becomes a whole other thing. But also, you might be working with other organizations, and the level of expectation of how you do that and your expertise goes way up. And this is something I tell, I warn people about moving into consulting is that when you're an admin, you have the ability to take some time. Someone says, "Hey, can you build me these three dashboards that I want to track my sales forecasting?"
You go, "Sure," and you can go Google it, and you spend a week, and you come back, and you're like, "Here's your three dashboards." They're ecstatic; they're like, "Great, thank you." They don't care that it took you three weeks or whatever, and then you had to ask your friend and Google it or ask ChatGPT to do it for you. In the consulting space, it's different. They don't ask, "Could you build this for me?" They say, A, "What are the options to build it? How long is it going to take you, and can you get it to me by next Tuesday?" So the expectation level of what you're doing goes way up, and they expect you to be expert. They don't expect you to ever say, "I don't know, but I'll figure it out." As an admin, I said, "I don't know. I'll figure it out."
"Oh, you want to build some tracker for your feedback form? Sure, let go figure it out." Go away for a week, and I'll come back and show you something. So I think that's part of it, but as an admin, you're still doing all this stuff. It's the same stuff inside the organization. You're just not working with external companies or people; you work with internal people. So you still have Mary from accounting coming over and wants to synchronize with the QuickBooks, and you still have the CEO come over and they want an update to some dashboard because they can't figure it out, and you're doing the same stuff; it's more internal, more ad hoc, generally. Mike:
I mean, I couldn't agree more. Also, Mary from accounting, they always want to, for some reason, can't seem to get opportunities flowing through your sales org, but let's integrate finance. Jason Atwood:
So true, so true. Mike:
But you kind of led into that. So what are the different jobs, or different tasks, types of jobs that admins would tackle within an organization? Jason Atwood:
Yeah, I mean, we kind of started in there. You do become an internal consultant, but I think you first off just think of what, especially when you're applying for it, and this goes back to sort of the applying and getting the jobs' thing. When you're looking at the organization, you obviously want to know what their Salesforce landscape is. So if I were in the interview process, what I would do is come loaded with a bunch of really good questions, and I would pepper that person with tons of questions about their Salesforce instance, or, as we call it in the biz, we call it their org.
But I would come in with, "What kind of licenses? How old is it? What kind of integrations? What kind of applications do you have? When's the last time you did a health tech? Do you use permission sets or permission set groups? Or did you flip the lightning yet?" I mean, I would be peppering them showing my expertise to get that admin job. So that's just on the interview side; I just want to throw that in. But coming back to what you do, again, it really depends on the organization, and this is actually a myth that is out there in the ecosystem, is that admins get bored and admins don't get to play with lots of different clouds, and admins don't do a lot of diverse things. That's completely not true because it depends on what organization you're with. I was with a company who had 375,000 people.
I had a team; I had five people, or five, including me; we were all admins; that's what we did. And we had 12 different production orgs, 12 orgs with production, and I think nine different applications running in them with thousands and thousands and thousands of users. We were not bored; we had plenty to do; we were playing with great, big, unlimited licensing and integrations and projects, but we were admins. At the end of the day, we were admins. Same thing: you go work for a small company that's four... I don't think anyone would hire a full-time admin with four people. But the smaller the organization who's just using Salesforce for one thing and has no chance of expanding it or doing it, or going anywhere.
Yeah. You're going to get bored, right? You come in, you're going to help out Mary in accounting, you get that one project done, and then they're going to be like, "Can you reset passwords all day?" So I think as part of the interview process to pulling it back in to that, and when your job seeking, you should be really interested in what their, especially if you want to be a Salesforce admin and you really want to do it full time, what's their Salesforce roadmap? Are they just solid? They have it, and they have had it up and running for five years, and that's it? Or do they have things that they want to do? New stuff you can build? Do you want to do the integration with that? We want to bring in marketing cloud next year. We're looking at how to do predictive AI, whatever.
So if I were bringing more questions as the trying to get the job, I would bring in that to the organization. I'd say, "What do you guys, where's your roadmap? Or do you not have one?" And I think that would show as a hiring person; I'd be like, "Oh, they're forward-looking." And it'll also give you the idea of: "Are you going to get bored in six months?" Because you don't want to get bored in six months. Mike:
Right. Although maybe a smaller footprint would be really good if you're looking to get that first admin job. Jason Atwood:
Exactly. Exactly right. But then you have the counter, right? You have a smaller footprint, but they have 40 users, and they only use it for service. So you get in, you do some work, you do all the stuff, and then you're like, "Now what?" Mike:
Right. So you brought up myths of admins, and one is, well, "I don't get exposed to enough clouds," and I've heard that at various events. "Well, we only use data cloud, or I just don't get to see it." And I feel like, and this still exists, all of these articles on admin to something else, as though admin is just the front door; all you got to do is get in and do that for a few months. But the real money and the real challenge is elsewhere. What would you say to that myth of just an admin? Jason Atwood:
I think it is a bit of a myth, and it makes admins and being an administrator, Salesforce administrators feel like this... It's like you're the fry person in the back at McDonald's. It's like, "Well, I don't ever go back and cook the hamburgers." I don't know. And it's not true. Mike:
Although the fries are kind of the best part. Jason Atwood:
That's true. I actually worked at McDonald's, and I was the fry person, so that's why I brought it up. Mike:
Yeah. Jason Atwood:
But yes, at some organizations, you could be the one admin, and that could be your role for a long period of time. And you could get bored, and it could just be a starter. At other organizations, you could run an entire group of admins. You could have six or seven admins, you could be part of a team of people supporting a lot of different Salesforce instances, and it could go anywhere from just administrative down to sort of more the solution architect type of stuff, or more towards the BA towards so stuff or more towards the development.
One of the things you and I have been in this ecosystem for a long time, what we were able to do 10 years ago on the platform with our clicks and what we're able to do with clicks now, we're programming. Let's be clear: when we're building flows, we're programming; we're just programming with a user interface. But that's programming, and the stuff you can do is stunning, that you just couldn't do with any of the tools unless you're writing Apex. So I think even the idea that admins who are getting that technical acumen and are going into the more programmatic type of world of admin that could go long, there's lots of paths you can go down for that. So that's where I think some of the myths should go away because you're not just the admin who's building a report, adding a field to a page way out, and assigning a permission set. There's many, many different pieces of that platform. And that's before you even talk about the clouds; before you'd say there's now, I don't know how many clouds. There's a lot of clouds. Mike:
There is a lot. Jason Atwood:
Yeah. Mike:
Yeah. I mean, you brought up flow. I think back to the days of, "Boy, if I could just stand up like a window pane that a screen that people could input the data into as opposed to just editing raw right on the record." And now we can do that, and you can do that just using the interface. You don't have to try a single line of code, which is... Jason Atwood:
It is stunning what you can do with that tool. And it's one of the things that has left me a little bit behind because I'm old school admin. I'm a work-for-rule person. And for that, I would've gone wrote in a user story and had someone written up a Visualforce, and with Apex in the background, and now it's... The stuff that we can produce with flows, screen flows, and even the call-outs. I was watching the call-out today, a flow that made a call-out to a Heroku Dyno that did a hookup to a Postgres database that pulled in AI predictions. I was like, "What?" So yeah, the world of an admin is becoming very, very broad in some ways. Mike:
Yeah, no, I agree. And you can also now trigger flows through prompts and have it call AI. And I mean, in a year from now, this is all going to sound like super, "Wow, they were impressed they could do that. Now look at where we are." kind of stuff. One thing we didn't touch on is there's a lot of job places to look at and career stuff. Often, when looking for a developer architect, I think those are a little more defined also, especially with developer, they've got experience in writing developer job titles for other platforms. So it's very easy to translate that over to Salesforce. What are things that an admin should look for in job descriptions? That maybe if the title or description doesn't say Salesforce admin, that will be the role? Jason Atwood:
Yeah, it's a tough one because, I mean, the easiest thing to say is look for the keyword Salesforce. Obviously, there's going to be some sort of piece of that. I think you'd have to go a little old-school and think of the platform and what it's doing. So I would start to look for things that were based on what Salesforce, the platform's doing? Is it sales, right? Is it marketing? Is it service? Is it nonprofit? Especially in the nonprofit space, which is for me. So we would look at grant writing, fundraising, and all that stuff, which could be keywords for, we're using Salesforce in the background, but we're using it to do all these things. So I guess the meta hint without giving you the keywords is: What is this organization doing? What is the output of their world? And then looking at what the tool set they're using.
They might not be Salesforce, right? There are other ways of saying the word. They might say something like health cloud and a health cloud administrator, and you're like, "Well, that's Salesforce." Or they might say, "net-zero cloud." Or they might say, "nonprofit cloud." Again, not saying Salesforce, but that's what it's based on. So sometimes, as an administrator and as part of this ecosystem, you have to know that there are products that are sitting on top of the platform that don't necessarily say the word in it. Remember when they named everything Force? Everything was Force something Force, this Force, that Force. Mike:
We had everything named Lightning for a while, too. Jason Atwood:
That too. That was fun. Mike:
We like to do that a lot. I think everything's named Einstein now. Jason Atwood:
Pretty much. Mike:
I'll probably get in trouble for saying that. Jason Atwood:
Yes, you will. Mike:
But you could do the bingo card of name everything, Einstein, Lightning, Force, and then you're covered. Jason Atwood:
I'm going to win that Bingo. Mike:
Einstein, Lightning, Force, and then the actual product. Then you're covered. Jason Atwood:
Totally. Mike:
I was looking through all my notes, roles and descriptions and interviewing and challenges, and certifications, and I feel we touched on a lot. What is something that you feel we missed, that you talk about, that you bring up that maybe people aren't thinking about when they're looking to interview or get an admin position? Jason Atwood:
Sure. I think there's a couple of things. A couple more things I would, if I were giving advice, which I happen to do all the time. Mike:
You're full of advice. Jason Atwood:
I'm full of advice, maybe too much. So one thing, and this is just generic to not Salesforce, but as anybody looking for a job, cultural fit, I think, is becoming more and more of a need. And I think, as people applying for jobs, you should be looking at it both ways. Do I fit that culture, and does that culture fit me? And that's do my values and the company's values or the organization's values align together. And asking a lot of questions around culture is going to become more and more important, especially because we go do remote work and all that. So I think what we used to think of, like, "Oh, we had coffee breaks and pizza parties for every quarter," is now a much bigger discussion. So I would say bring culture into the conversation. Another tip that I hadn't given yet is just preparedness.
It seems silly to say you have to be prepared for an interview, but I can tell you the amount of people who show up who are not prepared, they're just not prepared; they don't know their resume; they don't have good questions; they don't know how to talk to their experiences. And I'm stunned when it happens, but it happens a lot. And one of my little pet peeves, I'm giving away all my hints, boy, anybody interviewing is going to be able to nail the interview the next time they get to me. Mike:
Yeah, you say that, but I bet not. Jason Atwood:
Probably not, right? No one's even going to pay attention. But having really good questions is something that I look for. Again, we work in an industry where being able to ask your users what they want and question them, and being insightful is a great skill. So if I get to the end of one of my diatribe speeches and I say, "Do you have any questions?" And they're like, "No, I'm good." I immediately go, "Okay." And then I'm not good because I... So have questions ready at the go; have them sitting in front of you on a piece of paper, on a sticky note in a NeverNote, wherever. It's super important, and don't be generic. Don't say, "Where do you see yourself?" Don't interview the interviewee.
Ask really stuff that's based on homework you did. And that's sort of the prepared thing too. When people come in and they say, "Oh, I read your blog post last week about blah, blah, blah. I was really interested about this key point." Immediately, I'm like, "They did their homework; they know what they're talking about, and they're asking me something interesting." Don't say, "How do you guys do raises?" That's not going to be; you need to have the questions about the culture or the stuff. I mean, I've had some really good in the past, but I've had some really terrible questions. And then two more, I'll give you two more tips. This is like the hundred tips for interviewing the Salesforce Ecosystem Podcast. Mike:
We'll call it 98. Jason Atwood:
There you go. Mike:
So there's two. Jason Atwood:
Two more is you can never, if you want to get two skills. If I told someone to go get two skills before they get any job to be super useful on day one, two things they should be focusing on: data and documentation. Your ability to understand data is like you need to have it, you have to have it as a skill; you need to know data; you need to know how data interconnects with other data, you need to know how to report on it. It's getting more and more and more important. So I look for data skills, even data nerds, people who say, "I love data." So if you're not that type of person, I would say these jobs are going to be tough. Because I don't know anywhere in the ecosystem that we are not just really crazed about and or dealing with lots of data.
It is sort of what Salesforce is, in the back of all of it. So understanding data, taking courses on it, go learn SQL, go learn regular databases, go learn third normal form, learn it, and understand it because any of your skill sets that you have that are based in data will make you better at any job in this ecosystem. So data. Second is documentation, because one of the things you can do very quickly in any role is document things. You need to be able to document; you need to be able to take what people say, summarize it, put it into something, and spit it back out for people to take in. If you're an admin, you've got to come up with a training plan or a training agenda. You are an admin; you have to come up with a user story; you hand it off to a developer or someone to build something.
Documenting is, and it's, I know there's Trailheads on it, and you can go to those, but really learning how to document even so much prove that skill when you talk to somebody and you follow up with an email. Follow up with an email that proved that you listened and that you're following up with documentation skills, coming back with key points or things that you wanted or questions, all great ways to show. But I would say two things you could just learn to show up on day one to start working and doing things is know data very well and know how to document things. Mike:
Well, that was a really good point. I would hammer on that cultural fit and question part a lot because I always feel like you and I are of a certain generation that we kind of almost interviewed in the hopes that they chose us, right? The best of the survivor, we get picked. But the part that really dawned on me as I moved through my career was I also need to interview that person to see, is this the type of person that I'm comfortable... Would I be excited to get on a call with them every day? Does this feel like the type of company that I'm going to be excited to go to work at? Or do I just want to get in to get in? And I've made the mistakes of going to work for companies and then realizing I didn't ask enough cultural questions. The way things operate here and my expectations for this job are very different than what I had in my head, and it's my fault because I didn't talk about it. Jason Atwood:
Yeah. And again, I think it's different. Even again, culture was, I hate to say it, but it wasn't really that much. It wasn't that important. 20 years ago, I wasn't worried about culture; now I think it's above compensation. Mike:
Yeah. Jason Atwood:
I think it really is. And I've seen people go to places for less compensation because of a better culture. I've seen people leave terrible cultures that were highly paid. So really bringing that in, and that means how do they work? How do people collaborate? And you can ask these questions in the interview. You can say, "What are the three things you're doing this year to help your culture be better or to improve your culture at your company?" If someone asked me that, I'd be like, "Ooh, wow. Okay." Mike:
That's a good question. Jason Atwood:
That's a great question, right? You're then learning A; are they doing anything to make it better. Mike:
Right. Jason Atwood:
Or ask about... One of the things that we take at Arkus as very important is when I was doing my key goals for the next five years, and I was doing some presentations and talking to the staff about it. I had culture as a fifth thing, and then after doing it, I thought, "Wait, no, that's wrong. It's got to be number one." So for me, you ask a company, you say, "What are the main things you're thinking about doing for the next five years? What are the five key things that you're doing? What are your pillars?" Or whatever. And if they don't say culture, then you'd be like, "Oh, why isn't culture there?" And then you'll probably catch someone off guard; maybe they won't hire you there, but they should be thinking that keeping the company culture and embracing it, and making sure that it is... Culture isn't something that you set up and then walk away from.
It's not a database system. You don't just go, "Oh, it's set up, and it's running in the corner." It's something that needs to be cultivated; it's something that needs to be put into; it's something that needs to be fed and loved, and thought of, and changed as the ecosystem and the world changes. Our culture changed when COVID happened, right? We had to adapt; we adapted to that; it wasn't the same culture as before. When we were three people, now 75, but the culture's different, but we're adapting to that. So again, it is a really, really big point. It is something you can catch people on, you can ask, and everybody likes to talk about their culture. Everybody will tell you that they have a great culture, but that's how, as an interviewer or interviewee, you should be questioning it and really ask the deep questions. So when they say they have a great culture, "Say, can you give me three examples from last week where you prove that or that you know that it is a great culture?" Mike:
That's a good question. Thanks for coming by, Jason, and sharing your wisdom with us. You said you present some of this. Are you going to be presenting any of this at upcoming Dreamin' events after? Jason Atwood:
I am. Well, you're catching me on my road tour. I don't know if this podcast... Mike:
Oh, there's a road tour. Jason Atwood:
There's a road tour. Mike:
Are you going to have shirts made up? Jason Atwood:
I might. So yeah, I actually- Mike:
Have dates on the back. Jason Atwood:
-I go to a lot... A lot of things, I will be at World Tour this year. World Tour New York in two days, but I don't think this podcast will be out by then. But you can catch me at Texas Dreamin', I'm doing this year. You can catch me at WITness Success, you can catch me at Mile High Dreamin', you can catch me at Dreamforce, you can catch me at Northeast Dreamin'. And is that it? I think that's it. Mike:
I mean, Northeast Dreamin' is kind of the tail end of the year for us. Jason Atwood:
Yeah, it is. It's the last one. So I'll be at all those. I don't know if I'll always be presenting this, but you can at least find me if you wanted to. Mike:
Right. I appreciate you coming by. Jason Atwood:
Thank you. It's been great talking to you. Let's do it in another 10 years. Mike:
Or sooner. Jason Atwood:
Or a little sooner. Mike:
Well, I thought that episode turned out phenomenal. I'm so glad I got to have Jason back, and he is going to be on a road tour presenting and helping admins at different Dreamin' events. So hopefully, you can get to some of those that he mentioned. I think that'd be really neat, and some really solid tips on interviewing, and even I couldn't agree more on building experience when you've never had a job in the tech industry. So thanks, Jason, for coming on and sharing everything. And speaking of sharing, if you love this episode and you've got friends, or maybe you're going to a user group and you'd love to say, "Hey, I've got a podcast for you to listen to on finding that first job or getting your next Salesforce admin's job," here's how you do it. You click the three dots in the corner; most of these apps, podcast apps, have this now.
And you can click share episode and you can post it to social; you could send it as an email to somebody, and then they get a link and they can listen to the podcast right on their phone, maybe as they're walking their dog, and even more. Now, if you wanted to look for any links or any resources, everything, everything I'm telling you, start your day admin.salesforce.com; everything is there for you. And of course, we also include a link to the Admin Trailblazer community, which is the admin group in the Trailblazer community, which is a great place and also the place I went to get all of these questions. Now, we'll also include a transcript if there's something you need to go back and read through; that is all going to be in the show notes. So, of course, until next week, we'll see you in the cloud.
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Thu, 25 April 2024
Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, Admin Evangelist Josh Birk sits down with Kat Holmes, Chief Design Officer and EVP at Salesforce. Join us as we chat about diversity, accessibility, and her book, Mismatch: How Inclusion Shapes Design. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Kat Holmes. What is a mismatch? I brought Josh on the podcast to host this special deep dive episode of the Salesforce Admins Podcast, and we couldn’t think of a better guest than Kat Holmes. At Salesforce, she’s in charge of User Experience. But she’s also the author of the amazing book, Mismatch: How Inclusion Shapes Design. The title of the book comes from the World Health Organization. In 2011, they redefined disability as “a mismatched interaction between the features of a person’s body and the features of the environment in which they live.” As Kat explains, thinking of design as a way to solve mismatches leads to innovative solutions you wouldn’t otherwise find. The problem with designing for the “average user” For decades, designers have tried to make things for the “average user.” Kat takes us through the fascinating history of the bell curve, which goes back to a 19th-century Belgian astronomer who set out to apply the principles of statistics and probability to sociology. The problem, as she points out, is all of the different types of users that this approach leaves out. Kat’s favorite example is the keyboard. It’s an interface that’s incredibly efficient and enables pretty much everything we do with computers. But it was actually invented to help a blind Italian countess write letters without the need to dictate everything. And there are tons of other examples, like bendy straws and curb cuts. These designs solved one person’s specific mismatch problem but ended up benefiting all sorts of other people, too. Designing with inclusion and the potential of AI When you’re building something, Kat recommends recognizing the abilities on your team and thinking about who might be excluded. As she puts it, “What abilities are missing that are important to the design we’re making?” Then, find a way to include someone with those different abilities in your process. We also get into AI and what the future holds. As it becomes easier and easier for admins to build things, it’s more important than ever to factor in things like accessibility and inclusion into the equation. And there’s a lot of potential to adapt to the interface to the user to give each person a different experience. There’s so much more in this deep dive episode, so be sure to take a listen for . Be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss out. Podcast swag Learn more Admin Trailblazers Group Social Full Transcript Mike Gerholdt:
This week on the Salesforce Admins podcast, well, it's our Deep Dive episode. I said we're launching something new for April, and with a deep dive comes a guest host. Hey Josh, how are you? Josh:
Hi, Mike. I'm doing pretty good. How are you? Mike Gerholdt:
I'm excited because I listened in on this episode and I can't wait to see if this is the pilot episode of where the Deep Dive series is going. Buckle up, folks because it's going to be awesome. Josh:
Right? I honestly think maybe we should just, I don't know if we're going to do better than this. This was a... And I hate saying things like when people are like, "Oh, who was your favorite guest?" I'm like, "I don't like picking the favorite of my children." Kat's going to get into the top five right away. I never thought I would talk about diversity when it comes to everything from the iPhone to bendy straws. Just almost [inaudible 00:00:58]. Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, it's fascinating. Let's get into the episode with Kat. Josh:
Today on the Salesforce Admin podcast, we are going to talk to Kat Holmes about things, diversity, inclusivity, and AI. Kat, welcome to the show. Kat Holmes:
Thanks for having me. Josh:
So let's talk about your early years. In one of your talks, you speak about growing up in Oakland, and that led you thinking and eventually promoting inclusion. Can you expand on that a little bit? What about Oakland fermented this for you? Kat Holmes:
Yeah, in the way back machine. So growing up in a city that os incredibly diverse, all the way through my schooling, all of my community engagements, we really learned a lot about many different ways that people live. But the thing that was really interesting for me, all the way through college, so I went to college in the Bay Area as well. I never learned about the fundamentals of accessibility as part of my training as an engineer. I also studied pre-med. We just didn't learn about ways that people experience disability in the world. So it's kind of ironic, you'd come up in this environment where you have all these kind of movements that had happened, right? Free Speech Movement, there was the Black Panthers, and at the same time, we never learned about the Disability Rights Movement, which also started in Berkeley in the 19... I'm going to say '50s and '60s by students, Ed Roberts, students that really, they created some of the first accessible sidewalks in the United States- Josh:
Oh, wow. Kat Holmes:
... right here in Berkeley. And I just never knew it even though I was going to school right there on campus. Josh:
Gotcha. Now, you've talked about how when you were 16 you encountered racism, and I believe even neo-Nazism for the first time. And that left you, and I believe I'm quoting you here, "Activated and angry." And I have to say, as somebody who has used the written word to try to exact revenge on his enemies, I can appreciate it. But when you say active and angry, what actions were you taking? What led you closer to activism? Kat Holmes:
The encounter I had, this was when I was a junior in high school. It was right off of the school campus, and I was physically and verbally assaulted by a group of neo-Nazis. I'm going for lunch. And it was a pretty shocking... I had also just moved from Oakland to a suburb, and this is where this encounter happened. So it was really shocking to my system. But the thing that really got to me is, that I told the administrators of the school, the principal, and their response was that there was nothing they could do about it because it was off of school grounds, so therefore it was perfectly legal, and that's the part that angered me the most.
Because that sense of responsibility, here's the adults in the environment that are, I thought, there to provide my safety. And what I was really hearing is I only do that within a certain boundary. And the way I got activated was writing. New student in the school, and took the time to write a intense feeling-filled, sixteen-year-old article that was published in the newspaper about my experience. And so when I think about, for me, and it means many different things for different folks, but for me it was about saying what was true and saying what my experience was and what was true about that. And so finding ways to activate people through our experiences, really, to share those experiences. And that's what I really have taken through my entire life. Josh:
Did it feel like you were taking the power back? Kat Holmes:
I felt like I could make myself visible is the way to say it. Josh:
Got it. Kat Holmes:
In the moment where I felt very much like people were trying to keep me invisible. Josh:
Got it. Moving on a few years, what exactly did you study at UC Berkeley? Kat Holmes:
I studied orthopedic biomechanics and material science engineering. So my goal was to design prosthetic limbs for people and tried to find a way to eke that out of a combination of majors. Josh:
I got to ask, and I am going to throw in an anecdote here, because my father-in-law actually is blind and has no hands. So prosthetic limbs is something we... I think we have a few in the house here, actually. Why prosthetic limbs? Where were you going with that? Kat Holmes:
I had been really interested in materials and mechanics for a lot of my young adult life. One of the things that struck me was prosthetics. We often try to replicate a human [inaudible 00:06:13] to try to make some material look like skin or some material shaped like bone or nail. And I thought there were so many other kinds of materials that were more expressive or unique that actually when you pair them up with somebody, you ask them what their preference is, they may choose a really amazing leather over a polymer. So quite honestly, it was just curiosity, following curiosity, connecting with people that I knew in my life who used prosthetics, but also just there had to be a better way to do this. Josh:
Gotcha. Gotcha. Now at Microsoft, you were, I believe, if I'm correct, you were involved in designing their first-ever smartphone. Which I have to say, I think might've been my first-ever smartphone, might've been exactly that smartphone, and I remember it pretty clearly because it had this wonderful keyboard that was this very nice, tactile keyboard. And I know that a lot of people out there probably think this sounds weird because we live in... This is before the age of the iPhone where touch screen basically started ruling the world. What was that like at that time? Because smartphones were really just basically being invented. And so what kind of challenges were you facing when it came to designing a product for something that didn't exist before? Kat Holmes:
Just to clarify, I did not work on Windows Mobile, and Windows Mobile was a really relatively successful platform for Microsoft. I came in right about the time that the iPhone came out, so 2007. And it was this existential moment for Microsoft because like you said, there's this physical world, BlackBerrys, and Nokia phones, and some of those great tactile keyboards that you're talking about. And then the emergence of the iPhone was the pinch and zoom on a map.
Being able to still take a phone call, even though you're taking photos, amazing. And the first phone that I worked on for Microsoft actually ended up being a spectacular failure, it was called Kin. I don't know if anybody knows it, but we had a blast building this phone, and it was about tactility. It was really a phone for teenagers, and it's because Facebook was one of the first apps on the iPhone. It was just emerging as well. And so we thought, wouldn't it be cool if you could create a full on social media app just for teenagers all built into the phone?
So learning a lot about that time, what I'll say is the top lesson for me is we poured money, our hearts and souls. We developed beautiful hardware with a company [inaudible 00:08:57] Sharp. But we missed what the success of the iPhone was going to be. And that was the developer ecosystem, the App Store. So you can build the best phone in the world, but the game had changed and we hadn't realized it. The game was all about activating a tremendous ecosystem of applications and developers that could build on this platform. And so we were still thinking of it as a device-centered world when really it was a platform game. Josh:
Yeah. Well, and to your credit, I think Apple itself, because for the first year, I want to say of the iPhone, they're just like, "Oh, no, if you want to do anything custom to this, you have to do it through a website. We're not going to let you past our Ivory Palace into the App Store." And then somebody course corrected and here we are now in the middle of history. Kat Holmes:
Well, that's where I did then transition into Windows Phone. And so I did help build that product and that platform. And that was a really fun experience, a really interesting experience. I think we pushed the boundaries and the design of user interfaces for mobile, and that did change the game for a lot of companies and how they thought about mobile design. Josh:
Nice. Can you give me a couple of specifics there? What were some corners that you turned that you feel we might be still seeing today? Kat Holmes:
If you remember the iPhone in 2007 when it came out, I think we used the term lickable for the advertisements, it looked like pieces of candy. They were shiny, they looked like they had [inaudible 00:10:36] in the phone. And it's those kind of, we use the term in design of affordances. The shape of the button says, "Push here," because it's so clearly indicating that it wants to be touched.
One of the first things that we did with Windows Phone was flat UI is what we called it. And we took all of those affordances out, but it's because we wanted the content itself to come through, people's photos. An application's top metrics, maybe it's biometrics from your health app. We want that content to come through on the icon or, we now think of them as widgets, but at the time it was very revolutionary to say, "What if the icon was the photo? What if the icon was the biometric data?" And so on a home screen for a user, they'd look at this unique, only looks like their phone, doesn't look like anybody else's, flat window into all of their content. And that was pretty revolutionary at the time. Josh:
To actually surface that detail right up to the phone so that you can just glance at it and be like, "Oh, it's Tuesday." Kat Holmes:
It's right there. And we still see that. I think the iPhone and its widgets in particular, but many developers have tried to bring, what's the most important thing a user wants to know both so they can glance and go, but also to maybe entice them to come into the app. Josh:
Right. One of my favorite T-shirts is from Apple's WWDC where they announced the App Store, and they must have still, the icons are literally the location and date and time of the WWDC announcement. Kat Holmes:
Oh, that's cool. Josh:
Yeah, they lifted that for sure. Kat Holmes:
I want a cool T-shirt like that. I have so many cool T-shirts from my 25, 30 years in tech. That's maybe the best part of working in tech is you get cool T-shirts. Josh:
You get cool T-shirts. I have found that every now and then I have to double check myself and make sure I don't have more than three Salesforce logos at a time. And then I just feel like that guy at that concert. So, yeah. Speaking of Salesforce, how would you describe your current job? Kat Holmes:
I am the Chief Design Officer and Executive VP for our user experience team. So I lead product experience, which means anything that at the end of the day ends up in front of an end user, whether it's through our amazing admin community, architects, developers, we're thinking about the platform that you use to build that, but also the end experience that people are going to interact with. Josh:
Got it. Now in your book Mismatch: How Inclusion Shapes Design, you talk about design leaning to the average person. How are you defining a mismatch here, and what are some examples of design that intentionally are not being inclusive because they're designing for the average person? Kat Holmes:
Yeah, the first thing I'll say is that in all my training as an engineer, in addition to not learning about accessibility, I also was taught the myth of there being an average person. So I'll get to that in a moment. When I think of... So the term mismatch, I borrowed from the World Health Organization's definition of disability, and they dramatically redefined it in 2010, they defined it as a mismatched interaction between the features of a person's body and the features of the environment in which they live. And I loved that as an engineer, as a designer, because it meant that it was my responsibility, in the choices that I make for the product, to make sure that I was considering different types of abilities that somebody might have when they come to use that product. The responsibility sits with me, as a product maker. Josh:
Got it. Kat Holmes:
And so some examples of mismatches might be stairs at the front of a library. It's a public library, but somebody who uses a wheelchair, who has limited mobility, would not be able to access that front entry. So another great example is the keyboard. This is a mismatch for anybody who has limited use of their hands, or doesn't have hands, completely unworkable for interacting with a computer. And what I love about these examples of mismatches, it means that we can identify who might be experiencing the greatest mismatch when they come to interact with our program or application. We need to make sure that it works for voice as well as keyboards, or it needs to be for different types of audio in addition to tactility. But, what I love about this also is that it's not about trying to create one solution for all people. You often hear the term universal design. That really means creating one environment that works for everybody. What I love about the keyboard is it was actually invented by a blind countess from Italy, and an inventor named Pellegrino Turri. And the two of them worked together to create a device that she could use to type letters on her own, rather than dictating to somebody else who'd write it for her. So they invented this device originally for someone who is blind, but it went on to benefit so many more people. We've used this device multiple times today, all of us. And in that, they've created an inclusive design. It started first with somebody who's highly excluded from some sort of activity. And that solution that they created benefited many more people. And so when I think about coming back to your point on the average person the misinformation that I was certainly taught in engineering is that there's a bell curve of human abilities, or any kind of human dimension.
And if you think about that bell curve, that the middle of that bell curve is the average human. This is a concept that was created by Adolphe Quetelet, he was a Belgian astronomer in the mid-1800s. And he was actually super jealous, is the way I read it. Super jealous of Isaac Newton, right? Isaac Newton had created these laws governing, deciphering what was happening in the heavens like why does the moon move this way? And Quetelet, who was also an astronomer, he had a pretty curious bombing of his observatory and could not practice astronomy during the Belgian Revolution. Josh:
Oh my gosh. Kat Holmes:
So he turned all of his ambitions to be as famous as Newton towards human society, and he started measuring human bodily dimensions. He created the body mass index that we still use today. It actually used to be called the Quetelet Index, to determine is a person healthy based on weight and height, which is a pretty crude measurement. He also developed the foundation of IQ tests, and he also developed really dangerous frameworks that underlie eugenics.
And the challenge with what Quetelet did is he gathered data for as many people as he could, but in the mid-1800s, really hard to believe that he had a true global sample of human [inaudible 00:18:36]. He had a nice Belgian, maybe a couple of countries over sample. So he took all of his data and he was astonished to find his data fit to a curve, a normal curve, which is in mathematics we know of normal curve is there's a point where the tangent reaches a perpendicular. So he was astonished that it fit this normal curve. And he took the middle of that line and he said, "Well, that curve right in the middle must be the perfect person." [inaudible 00:19:07] perfect person. Josh:
Oh, God. Kat Holmes:
And that became the foundation for saying any deviation from the center of that curve was some kind of abnormality or error. So taking mathematics and applying it to humans can be very powerful in some ways and can be very dangerous in others. But it's why we refer to people as normal, is actually from a mathematical background. And what I was taught as an engineer is if you design something for the average, you're going to hit 80% of the population. And then there's edge cases. I like to talk about edge cases.
There's 20%. That's an edge case. All you have to do is really look around at humanity, or do some research of your own, to know that that is just not true. That's not actually how the world is. But it's so deeply entrenched. It happens maybe at large sets of data, like large public health issues, and you find anomalies, and that's good indicators. But when it comes down to one person's experience sitting in front of whatever technology you're configuring or building or designing, it actually just isn't true. So that's where inclusive design becomes a much more interesting paradigm. Josh:
It's fascinating to me that when we say the word average, and we apply that to a person, that we are probably describing a 20- to 30-something-year-old white male in Belgium. Kat Holmes:
Yes. Josh:
It's slightly terrifying, too to be kind of honest. And speaking this. And I honestly, I just want to bring this up because when I was reading about it, it shocked me that this even exists. You talk about Robert Moses, who apparently had, I'm actually struggling to say this to be honest, that he utilized a racist lens in some of his urban planning, which, I'm like, that's supervillain-level stuff right there. What's an example of this? I think a lot of what we're talking about is sort of designed through intention and it's good intention. We don't think about the average person being a 30-year-old white male in Belgium, so people don't intend to exclude people. But here we have an example of somebody who did. What's the story there? Kat Holmes:
It's a really fascinating study, and you always have to remember the context of the time and place. But Robert Moses was the... the term they gave him was the master builder of New York City. He was a city planner, but he had wide-ranging control and power over the design of New York City. And the practices that he employed, and some of these are documented in a book called The Power Broker, is thinking about the types of transit that people had access to or didn't have access to. And so he'd say, "Hey, the tunnels leading out of Manhattan, heading out to the beaches," Long Beach, let's say. So the height of an average public bus, let's say is X, and the height of an average car is Y. So he would design the tunnels coming out of the city to be low enough that a public bus couldn't pass underneath it.
In effect, it created limited access to those public spaces outside of the city. But the inherent, nefarious part is, people who predominantly relied on public transportation, or exclusively relied on public transportation, tended to be Black or African-American families or families of low income. And so it's that it can happen intentionally, and it can happen unintentionally when you think about, oh, I have a car, so I'm going to just make this tunnel to fit my car. And not really think about somebody who maybe doesn't and somebody who maybe uses other modes of transportation that you're in fact creating this physical barrier in participating in public spaces outside of the city.
So that's a great example of sometimes it is nefarious, and sometimes it is accidental or unintentional. I think as people who are problem solvers, we come to this discipline or our jobs because we like solving interesting problems, or we think about how we can solve these and make the world a better place. And it's that kind of intentionality that fascinates me because when we bring attention to it, you can't unlearn it. [inaudible 00:23:48] oh, I didn't realize I created something that made it uncomfortable for somebody else. Just [inaudible 00:23:53]. How can I be a better problem solver? Josh:
And to flip that script completely to the other end, give me a little bit of backstory. Once again, it was fascinating to learn, why do we have bendy straws? Kat Holmes:
The story behind the bendy straw is super fascinating. The first design actually came from a man who was watching his four-year-old niece try to drink a milkshake at a counter. And this is the old soda fountain days, and they had straight paper straws in those days, and she kept tipping the glass and spilling the milkshake while she was trying to drink out of this straight straw. So he went home and he put a nail inside of one of these paper straws and he wrapped a wire around the outside and created a flexible joint in the straw and then ended up patenting it. And that's how we have bendy straws. Josh:
That's awesome. That is awesome. Okay, so let's talk specifics about if I am a designer, how can I identify and address these kind of potential exclusions while I'm working? Kat Holmes:
The best way to identify this is really first looking at our own abilities, like what abilities... Often the products that we make, there's teams that are working together. So looking across that group and saying what abilities are represented? And it might be, oh, okay, we all have 20/20 vision, we all are right-handed. We all speak a particular language. These are the abilities that we represent. Now, what abilities are missing that would be really important to the design that we're creating?
And that might be, okay, somebody who has low vision, or somebody who speaks a different language. And it doesn't mean you have to solve every scenario, every potential language, every potential ability. But what are you making? And who's going to need to use it? Are you designing something that's going to be in healthcare? Do you potentially need to think about somebody who is not well? Somebody who maybe has a different cognitive state, maybe they're in an emergency situation? If that's the case, then how can we think about including people in your team who have either experienced that or are experiencing that difference in ability and bring them in as experts to advise and learn from, or even co-design that product with you. So that's really the starting point is recognizing exclusion and then asking yourself who's missing? Really seeking out their expertise. Josh:
And what's the importance in collaborating directly with people who either have experience or are possibly experts in different forms of disabilities? Kat Holmes:
There's a couple of lenses I think are really important. One is, we often do research in design and we think of it more as user or usability research, or we're putting something in front of a person and asking, how do you think this works? Or does this work for you? We're treating people a little bit more like a subject, a research subject, which is different than starting before we've designed anything, and going to someone who has a different set of abilities than we do, and asking them, how would you solve this problem? Or have you already solved this problem in some way, in your home or in your work? And learning from the workarounds that people already have, or the considerations before you even create any solution is incredibly insightful to the process. And so it gives us a way of A, thinking differently about expertise. I'm not the expert as the designer. The expert is the person who's experienced exclusion, but still somehow is making a living using the product that I created. Josh:
Got it. Kat Holmes:
And then I think the other part's just, quite candidly ego, just to check my ego as a designer, that there's collaboration has a way of opening up the creative process. And I think that keeping our egos in check is a really important factor, and bringing other people to the process and letting them be the experts to lead the way is a really great way to do that. Josh:
So to paraphrase, don't design a solution and then take it to somebody and be like, "How bad is this for you?" But bring them into the process so that by the time you get to the point where we're trying the solution, you've already brought their feedback in. Kat Holmes:
Well said. Yeah. Josh:
Thanks. Now let's move that kind of conversation to AI because that's how the world's revolving these days. So when we talk about AI in collaboration, how do you think people should think about AI itself? Kat Holmes:
That's a ginormous question. There's two lenses I'll put on for this conversation. I think AI as a tool that can help us think about and the things that we're not recognizing ourselves. What are other considerations I'm not considering? How do I think more broadly than my own experience? I think AI is a great tool to help us expand the starting points. I do this often just with our own tools, with Einstein or some of the other tools in the world that are AI-related. But it's just, "Hey, I'm thinking about getting started on this. Where are different considerations that I might have?" So it could be a way of expanding beyond our own biases.
I think the other lens is thinking of AI as a user of what we're designing. So there's a whole bunch of behaviors, AI or different types of machine learning, different types of generative and predictive, even machine learning, are going to bring to our applications or businesses that we're building. So if we think of AI as a user that itself is trying to solve some set of problems. It's going to encounter certain kinds of errors, it's going to need to make certain kind of adjustments on the fly. The more we can understand what kind of goals and what kind of barriers AI is going to encounter when they work with the data that we are providing, or working with the applications we're providing, the more we're going to be able to design this positive cycle of access and also safe parameters around what AI can access, what it can and can't do. And so it might be a nuance, but thinking about AI as a tool, versus thinking about AI as a user, I think gives us really two interesting places to design from. Josh:
Gotcha. Because I think one of the things, it's very hard, and this is one of the reasons in my own AI talks, I always tell people, just go try it because it's really hard to describe why it's a new style of interface, simply because it's conversational and it's interactive. What sort of design challenges come up with something that's having more of a conversation with you than just pressing a submit button? Kat Holmes:
The interesting thing about AI is that we're kind of in love with this conversational moment of AI, ChatGPT welcomed us to a really broad and accessible kind of AI through conversation. But most of machine learning and AI applications that I've worked with, and I've worked with different types of interactions since about 2010, a lot of them aren't conversational. Josh:
Got it. Kat Holmes:
And even in our devices, our smartphones, we may have different types of machine learning or AI that is vision-based, object recognition, or audio-based or tactile. So there's many different kinds of interaction models that come along with processing information through AI. And the unique design challenges, I think one of the biggest ones comes back to the mismatches we were talking about earlier.
AI could give us a tool to be much more adaptive, to meet people where they are, whether that is, we were talking a lot about physical abilities earlier, whether the person can see or hear, but what about cognitive differences? And that's a whole frontier that I think is fascinating. There's so many different ways that people learn or process information or want information presented to them. Can AI help us adapt a design or an interface or an application to meet people where they are? If they're a novice versus an expert, wouldn't it be interesting to think about the differences in experience that AI could create to meet people where they are? So that's one design challenge.
And then another prominent one that there's many leaders in this field is thinking about the biases in AI itself. And there's a lot more, I think, visibility and awareness of this now than there was, say, five years ago, certainly 10 years ago. But the training sets of data, or when I go into Midjourney and I say, "Create an image of a doctor treating patients." [inaudible 00:33:58]. What's the doctor look like and what does the patient look like? And has this algorithm been trained predominantly on sets of data that favor certain races or for certain experiences, genders. So that kind of bias is a very small example, but a lot of companies have learned early lessons in this. I think Tay at Microsoft being trained overnight, within hours by the Twitter community, formerly known as the Twitter community. And it just went sideways within hours. And so that risk of what we're teaching and how that shapes the design at the end of the day is a huge challenge as well. Josh:
I kind of feel like the world should actually kind of thank Tay for being such a horrible, awful example of how things can go wrong. Kat Holmes:
That's true. It happened in a relatively safe sandbox. Josh:
Right. No doubt here, it's basically speaking Hitler. We all can agree, let's not do that. Kat Holmes:
[inaudible 00:35:11]. Thank you, Tay. Josh:
Thank you, Tay. And I really appreciate it because I've talked to women of color who they're kind of in a generation where they grew up with the concept of what an engineer looks like, and it's that crew cut guy with glasses and a shirt and a pocket protector in an IBM [inaudible 00:35:31]. And they didn't think they would be an engineer because they never saw anybody who looked like them be an engineer. And I feel like we just have that history that AI has. I don't know how AI is even going to try to catch up to it. Kat Holmes:
The opportunity is there. The opportunity to create a different reflection of reality is there. And it really comes down to the choices that we make in the design of our AI. And who is designing that AI at the end of the day. Can we really broaden... One of the things I love is I think the skillset to become an AI designer will dramatically change because the things that I learned in engineering school, I learned FORTRAN, so that's not super helpful anymore. But if we don't need to learn some of these technologies that are going to turn over anyways, what is the important thing to learn about the design of AI and then what skills are needed? And that could open up the field dramatically to a wider range of people. Josh:
Yeah. And it's one of the things I'm really excited about with Salesforce because the idea that an admin could use their preexisting skills as a flow builder to then also be an AI builder is very exciting to me. Do you have any tips for some... I think our community's really in the shallow end of this. They're slowly getting into the waters of it. When it comes to thinking of solutions for their users, do you have any suggestions or tips for lining up what we can do with AI with a user's skills or job or role? Kat Holmes:
Being in the shallow end is I think where everybody is. There's maybe a very small population that really, really is deep in these waters. Most of the population hasn't even put their toe in yet. So if you're in the shallow end, welcome. Josh:
You're in good company. Kat Holmes:
... [inaudible 00:37:29]. And please keep learning and keep walking a little bit further in because this is the first wave of us who, coming into those shallow waters, are going to say, "This is how we apply it to life." This is where it makes a difference. And I think our admin community understands the work that people are trying to get done on a daily basis. They understand the challenges people encounter. And when we designed Prompt Builder, for example, we were really thinking about the community that understands what an end user is trying to do. We're thinking about the admin community who can say, "These are the most important mundane tasks that need to be repeated and automated or supported by AI."
And so I think the most important advice is lean into that understanding who's using your products or who's using Salesforce at the end of the day. And help us understand what more will serve the people, and the use cases that they have, in better ways. And going back to inclusive design, think about folks beyond, think about the edge cases or think about the folks who maybe are experiencing challenges without using Salesforce today, and how can we really make this a turning point using AI tools to make sure that we're doing a better job going forward. Josh:
Yeah. Okay. I'm going to throw a hypothetical to you and we're going to pretend you have infinite time and money. Where do you think... One of the things I think is very interesting is that the hardware curve, I feel is still advancing. We're just now getting things like AR goggles that are associated with AI. Where are some edge cases that you think could AI really help with inclusivity? For instance, I was having a conversation with a friend and I was like, "Well, I have a nephew who is autistic, and he might benefit from glasses that could actually identify social cues that maybe his brain isn't wired for." Where do you think we might be going with this? Kat Holmes:
There's this interesting debate, I think, between computing power, infinite times and resources to make trillions on infinite computing power. Versus reaching as many people as possible with something that's beneficial. Josh:
Got it. Kat Holmes:
I would lean towards reaching as many people as possible with something beneficial. We may be in a place with what we have today to transform a lot of lives if we can really connect the potential of the technology to what people are trying to achieve. So with infinite time and money, I think there's tremendous diversity in human... This is such an obvious statement, but it's one that we haven't really taken to heart as technologists. There's infinite diversity in human lives. And understanding unique medical needs, diagnosing those, giving people the power to diagnose them for themselves, or to at least understand some of what's happening in their lives.
I think about medical, I think about cognitive learning styles, education around the world, just thinking about how I learned versus I have an 11-year-old, it's my youngest kid who's learning on YouTube, so fast, guitar virtuoso overnight. And I'm like, "Oh, how'd you do that?" Well, they've been watching YouTube videos and [inaudible 00:41:26]. So the learning, the medical applications, and then I think, one of the things I'm really interested in is how language models are going to become local to devices. How are we going to get really personal, device-driven AI that can be a close companion, or just the applications of being able to embed that in different environments? And that's where I think about climate science. And could we combine sensor technology with local AI device technology and think about climate science differently on a global pattern.
And so we put all our money into computing power for one great AI. Or do we think about the diversification of many different kinds? And I'd say the past 20 years has taught us that this tremendous power in diversification of applications, like we said in the beginning through the iPhone, that whole ecosystem, many, many small things can sometimes solve a problem equally or better than one ginormous thing. And that's how, I'd apply my money towards the small and the mighty. Josh:
I love it. Kat, thank you so much for the great time and conversation. This was a lot of fun. Kat Holmes:
Thank you. It was really good to dive into these topics. I appreciate it. Josh:
Thank you very much.
I want to thank Kat for the great conversation and information. And as always. Thank you all for listening. Mike, how you think we did? Mike Gerholdt:
I think it was amazing. I also got into some of the discussions that you were talking about, especially around architecture. I think a lot of times we, as admins, think of, "Oh, well, how does this apply to tech?" Well, how does it apply everywhere? We're design thinkers everywhere. And some of this is really opening up. I mean, you've exposed to me the whole making ChatGPT do illustrations, and now I'm asking it stuff. Like, that's fascinating. That's not what I was thinking in my head, but that's clearly what other people, or a machine, was thinking. Josh:
Yeah. And I'm really glad that we got Kat to really describe how admins are going to really be in a driver's seat. They have a really important role based on what they're already doing. Based on the solutions that they're already building and their relationship with current users. Mike Gerholdt:
Yep, absolutely. And of course, any of the resources that Kat or Josh mentioned we'll include in the show notes, which can be found on admin.salesforce.com, including a transcript of the entire show. And be sure to join our Trailblazer community because we'll post there to discuss about it.
So with that, we'll see you in the cloud.
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Thu, 18 April 2024
Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Skip Sauls, Senior Director of Product Management at Salesforce. Join us as we chat about how Data Cloud can make it easier than ever to roll out enhancements to your org. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Skip Sauls. The challenges of working with external data sources Pulling data from external sources is always a challenge. For one thing, it usually requires a bunch of work on the backend to get things looking the way you want them to. What’s more, it opens the door to all sorts of potential problems when things don’t match up, not to mention the extra security challenges. That’s why I was excited to sit down with Skip Sauls. He’s the PM for Data Cloud, and he’s here to tell us how his team has made working with external data sources easier than ever before. How Data Cloud simplifies data management Data Cloud allows you to combine your external data sources with what’s in Salesforce without hacking together a series of customizations. Connectors allow you to import data from external sources as direct objects, or transform it into something more useful. You can run reports with it, use it in flows, embed it in Lightning pages, and much more, without needing to write specialized code. Skip’s goal is to minimize the customizations you need to make and seamlessly combine your external data with what’s in Salesforce. Using Data Cloud means that you’ll be able to deploy enhancements to your org without worrying that everything’s going to break, or rebuilding it from the ground up. As Skip says, “we don’t want people to feel like they have to radically change everything in their day-to-day lives just to access something new.” Get hands-on experience with Data Cloud Looking forward, Skip and his team are trying to further simplify how Salesforce works with external data sources. They’re rolling out tools to minimize imports, so your data lives in one place but works the same as what you have in Salesforce. They’re also working on Remote Data Cloud, which will help you consolidate data that’s spread out across multiple orgs. If you want to learn more about Data Cloud, I have good news for you. Skip and his team are releasing dozens of new hands-on challenges to Trailhead over the next few months. There’s never been a better time to get up to speed with everything that’s possible with Data Cloud. Podcast swag Learn more Admin Trailblazers Group Social Full show transcript Mike Gerholdt:
This week on the Admins Podcast, we're talking lakes, well, not lake lakes, but I mean we do talk about lake-making kits, and I do think that would be a hilarious swag at Dreamforce. But Skip Sauls is back because data lakes and Data Cloud are on our mind, and he's got a bunch of new features that he's talking about. Not to mention, he also tells us how we can get hands-on with Data Cloud, which I'm a fan of getting hands-on anything because that really helps me understand it. That's what we're going to talk about.
Before we get to the episode, just want to make sure you're following the podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, iHeartRadio. We're on all the podcast platforms. You don't have to follow them everywhere. Just one, your favorite one, and then the new episodes download automatically right to your phone. Every Thursday morning, you can get up head to work or walk the dog or go for a run and get your new episode just by pressing play. With that, let's get to our conversation with Skip.
Skip, welcome back to the podcast. Skip Sauls:
Thanks, Mike. I'm glad to be back, and as always, glad to talk to you and to the admin community. Mike Gerholdt:
I was looking at my notes from the last time we talked, and the last real podcast that we did was about a year ago. To me, a lot of Data Cloud stuff was brand new, and also a lot of the concepts around data lakes and data silos was a new thing. It still may be new to many people in the audience, but I think we're starting to become even more exposed to it by just the sheer volume of amount of Data Cloud information that's coming out, and also the number of features that now Salesforce can support. Let's start with, what's some of the new stuff that you've been rolling out in Data Cloud since we last talked? Skip Sauls:
One of the most exciting things for the admin community is how you can now leverage data from Data Cloud in your standard Salesforce org, in your lightning pages, in your reports, in your flows. That's been a big theme for the past year, which is, we've got this great technology for unifying the data, manipulating it, doing all kinds of great stuff to the data, but we now need to make it available to our customers, to our respective users. A lot of that focus is what I think is very exciting because now you can actually make use of it, and you're not trying to write specialized code or you're not trying to export things somewhere else. You can use it in the standard Salesforce fashions. It's inside of fields on a form, it's in inside of a record with related lists, it's in a report, so it's in all the places you would expect it to be. Mike Gerholdt:
That's good. A lot of the times when we hear stuff like that, when we're not bringing the in, but we're surfacing it, I've heard the term like a pane of glass? Skip Sauls:
Mm-hmm. Mike Gerholdt:
Okay. Just want to make sure that- Skip Sauls:
That's a great way to visualize it. The trick for a lot of our customers, as you know, is that you bring things in and enhance their working environments. You make them more productive, giving them better results, better KPIs, whatever that might be. We don't want people to feel like they have to radically change everything in their day-to-day lives just to access something new. Salesforce has done a pretty good job of that over the years, of bringing things in to lighten the experience, into mobile, making things that are in a low-code, no-code fashion, and really listening to what our customers want, which is, "Make my users more productive. Give them something useful here." They're always interested in technology, but really, the reason people want Salesforce is because it makes them more productive. It's a useful application architecture. That's what, to me, is very exciting. I look forward to Data Cloud just being assumed as being part of all Salesforce, not as being an add-on or something that's on the side, so to speak, that it's actually just it is Salesforce, for that matter. Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, well, it is. Skip Sauls:
Exactly. Mike Gerholdt:
One of the things that's interesting is I learned more about Data Cloud, I go back to... This was a requirement that I got way, way back when I was an admin, 2008. I remember an executive saying, "Well, this is nice and all, Mike, but how come I can't see X?" And I remember having to explain to them, "X data is on a different server that we have on location that Salesforce doesn't have access to." The fear, for me, was them wanting to integrate, essentially, a data silo into Salesforce. Because back then, data integrations were just crazy. But I think there's often, this is how I look at Data Cloud is, but how hard is it to really set up? Skip Sauls:
That's one thing we've focused on is making it so that you can bring data from pretty much any source into Data Cloud. I'll tell you more about something else that's even more exciting down the road, but first off, talk about the notions of connectors. You have them in various flavors where you can connect to an external source and you can pull the data in. You can do it in batch, you can do it in streaming, it can be fully scheduled, and you bring that data in either as the direct objects from the remote source or you can transform them into something more useful. You may say, "I need to do something to IT to get it in the standardized formats." Things like dates and times, all sorts of things that you may want to... Salesforce admins are familiar with this. How do you make the data get into the shape you want?
Data Cloud has a lot of really great functionality for that. We've leveraged tooling from the likes of MuleSoft, Tableau, CRMA, plus the traditional Salesforce loaders and that sort of thing, and unified that in Data Cloud. We made that part of it as simple as possible, and we're adding more and more connectors to external sites. We'll have a very rich array. In theory, an admin can say, "I need to pull data in from..." Even something relatively obscure. There'll be a way to do that, and in the future, even custom connectors will be possible. You'll be able to do one that isn't sold by Salesforce or by a partner. That all is very exciting, and that fits into the traditional model where you're importing things in, but you're now doing it into one place i.e. in the data cloud, as opposed into multiple places, or directly into Salesforce itself, which is the part that's nerve wracking, as I think you were saying.
You don't want to necessarily modify all of your existing records, so with Data Cloud, you'd bring those external sources in. You can have as many as you want to. It's highly scalable to work with almost anything. Then you'll bring in your data from Salesforce, you'll have that mapped in effectively, and then you can have that unified into a single object. You look at it as being the same person, account, contact, et cetera, across all the different data sources. And you're not having to go and manually map everything in and do all sorts of things with unique IDs and keys and that sort of thing. It's doing a lot of the heavy lifting, and it fits very much into the standard Salesforce model of making those things easy. You're now dealing with it at an app level, not at a lower level, in most cases. You're not having to do that every day, trying to figure out how to get the data in. Mike Gerholdt:
One of the things that came up in the discussion that we had of getting the data out of the silo... To be clear, it's not that we wanted it out, it was more of we just need to reference it. I think one thing you mentioned to me that was very intriguing is because back, this is '07, we were going to copy the data and then Salesforce could see it. But with Data Cloud, we actually don't need to worry necessarily about that, right? It's a feature we can set up where, if we want to keep that single source of truth and reference that glass pane, we can do that. Right? Skip Sauls:
Exactly. The terminology you might hear is bring your own lake, bring your own code, and that sort of thing. There's a whole class of things there. I don't know how much I can say, because there's some pretty cool announcements coming around this, but there's a lot of work on making it so that you can leave the data in the external store. It could be a lake, lake house, data warehouse, traditional database, S3 buckets, wherever. You can leave a lot of those things in place, and you reference them from Data Cloud as opposed to importing them. This gets into the zero copy, no ELT mantra that you'll hear. The basic idea is that you're not having to actually make those copies, like you were saying. You're not going to move it back into it. It stays in place. It stays resident in the external system. But to your apps and to your users, it looks like it's natively in Data Cloud, and therefore natively in Salesforce.
That's pretty exciting. There's still the case where you might want to transform something to make it fit into the shape you want, but importantly, you don't have to do that to this data. You don't have to do it every time you want to try to use it. That's what we've seen traditionally with Salesforce is we were always importing, whether it was into Core or into Tableau or CRMA, etc. You are always importing the data, doing stuff to it, making copies of it, and that sort of thing. As powerful as those tools were, they still required that copy, which is the part you were saying we're trying to get away from. Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, copy, sync, then you had to figure out last modified, who wins, conflict resolution... That was a whole day of meetings for me. Skip Sauls:
Exactly. Mike Gerholdt:
It was not good. As you mentioned all this, I'm thinking just offhand, because this is how my brain works. A really fun swag item for Dreamforce would be a lake-making kit, like from the Progressive commercials. That would be hilarious. Skip Sauls:
Yeah. Mike Gerholdt:
I'm the only one that thinks that's funny, I think. Skip Sauls:
Maybe you can do that for a Dreamforce or TDX next year. Mike Gerholdt:
Yep. "Here you go, sign up to win a lake-making kit." One of the important things I think about not having to sync data and worry about that as a potential is also, depending on the organization and how they use the data, if they're in a contract and there's PII involved, then they can confidently say, "This is only stored here." As opposed to... I remember we had to go through that with a government contract and outline all of the places that this data could appear. When we were syncing data, then it became another page and a half of documentation of how people had access to Salesforce. I think that's really cool. You mentioned ease of use, and with ease of use, to me, that is also just how do we get the word out? How do we get people hands-on with that? What are some of the things that your team's working on around that? Skip Sauls:
One of the things we're really excited about is providing hands-on challenges where you get to actually use Data Cloud directly. There's some technology behind it, but in effect, you're getting an org that is Data Cloud-ready, and then you can go do a trail, do a hands-on challenge at TDX or Dreamforce, maybe you're in a course somewhere. Using that org, and in the Trailhead model, you're running a check, have you done the work and that kind of thing. That all works perfectly. Now we've got that working very well. You can use this in the same way you would your standard Salesforce org. You get a DE org or something, and you start working against that. That's very exciting. And the cool part about that is that also will power all of these modules that come from Einstein, things like Prompt Builder and so forth.
Almost everything that you'll see for these new technologies is actually powered by Data Cloud. Even though you're not maybe explicitly using Data Cloud for the trail or the hands-on challenge, it's under the covers, Data Cloud being used for all the data, objects, services, and so forth. The reason that's exciting is it's harder than it may sound, because Data Cloud instances are not as lightweight and inexpensive as say, a Salesforce DE org. There's a cost associated to it. They're consumption-based. So we had to do a lot of work to figure out how to get that into a manageable state so we can offer that experience to our users and not be too much of a cost burden for us. There's still a cost there, but it's worth it for us to invest in our users, our customers, so they can get up to speed on Data Cloud, they're enabled on it, and they're also enabled on, again, I mentioned Einstein and that sort of thing. That's very exciting.
We were hearing from people, "I like Data Cloud, I want to learn more about it, but these trails don't let me use it." "I don't have Data Cloud. How can I learn more directly?" As I've heard you and others say, a lot of people can learn the theory from a standard trail or from docs and that kind of thing. Maybe they can pass a test, but in practice, it's that hands-on experience that really resonates. It's like, "I actually know what I'm doing here. I know how this behaves when I click on it. I know where to go." And that sort of thing. That's a really cool thing, which you're going to see a lot of.
Our plans are to have dozens of these out over the next few months, and we have a goal of getting tens of thousands of users enabled with these hands-on challenges. That tells you the scale we're talking about. I would encourage everybody who's listening, go try out the hands-on challenges that are on Trailhead right now. There's at least a few of them there for Data Cloud, some for Einstein, etc. You can get nice, shiny new badges and get your real world hands-on experience, and you'll see more and more of these in the coming months. Mike Gerholdt:
It's one thing to do a module where it ends in quiz questions and then you read some stuff, and then it's another to do one and then get the error message be like, "Oh, really? I got to go back and read some of this. I really thought I knew what I was doing here." Skip Sauls:
Exactly, exactly. Mike Gerholdt:
One thing we didn't touch on, and this is maybe blinders that I have, but what about people with multiple orgs? Skip Sauls:
A really cool feature, which is... I have to go look at my schedule and see when it's going to be out, but it's soon. Is the notion of a remote Data Cloud. I'm waving my hands here as I'm talking to you, but I'll try to describe it for the listeners. What you'll do in the future is when you have multiple orgs that you're managing, for example. A lot of people will have more than one. You'll designate one to be the home org. I don't know if that's the official terminology, but that's what we're calling it right now. That is where the Data Cloud instance will live. It'll be tied to that org. You won't have multiple Data Clouds, you'll have one, in most cases. Then the other orgs you have will be remote orgs that are leveraging that org.
There's some technology there. You can look up something called data spaces. You'll be able to say this part of this data in this data space can be mapped to these remote orgs, and in your remote org, you'll be able to access that as if it's natively inside of your org. In all cases, Data Cloud doesn't live inside of Salesforce Core, it's actually running externally. It's not as big of a hop, if you will, to have these remote orgs. It's not like they're really going around the globe trying to connect to each other. The home org is just where you're going to manage the core data, the way to do everything. But you could then have orgs that are primarily for sales or for service, or maybe you've got some that are by industry or by region. However you decide to organize yourself, no pun intended, you can still use the same Data Cloud instance.
The cool part there is because we're unifying all this data, you could have the same customer represented in multiple places across all these orgs, but they look like the same customer inside of Data Cloud. You can use this for how do you rationalize the data instead of trying to do it manually with all sorts of mappings and code and that sort of thing. You can say, "This is going to be Mike on all these different orgs." And also, importantly, it's Mike coming in from external data sources. It could be IoT, it could be social media, pretty much wherever you'd like to. But you can know this is Mike across all those, and it's a lot more straightforward than in the past, where we had to manually do a lot of work to say, "This is actually the same user across all these things." Mike Gerholdt:
I like that. Yeah. Boy, 2007 Mike really needed Data Cloud, let me tell you. One of the things I was thinking about as you were talking through all this and unifying the data is really looking at Einstein and some of the stuff that's coming down now, and admins are seeing that. We saw it at TDX with Prompt Builder and Copilot. If you're a Salesforce admin and you're sitting there and you listen to this Data Cloud, what are some of the questions that we're hearing from customers that are really good questions to ask on what should I be looking for in an organization that should prompt me to start having these conversations about getting Data Cloud? Skip Sauls:
There's a really good blog, and I'm going to try to find this for you. I'm going to tell you there's some great quotes in here if you're not familiar with SalesforceBlogger.com, that's actually run by some Salesforce employees. It's mostly employees posting it, but it's not our official blog. It's like some of the other semi-official blogs that has some really great content. In there, there's a whole section of what people will ask for. The reason I bring this up is a lot of times, you won't hear people saying, "We need Data Cloud." They're going to actually say, "We need to make better sense of our sales data." "My sales guy needs to be able to know which customers to target." In that example, you might have your current notion of your accounts and contacts and leads and that sort of thing. Then you've got some external data which talks about very similar things, but it's from a public source. It's not Salesforce data.
But it's information about accounts and it could be customer data, it could be company data and that kind of thing. But it tells you something interesting about them and what they're interested in, and you can actually import that data and unify it and then run some calculated insights and other about it. You might find out you're not really targeting the right people. You might say, "We actually need to branch out and target other customers." Or you're enriching the same data for your current customers, it's just data you didn't have before. It's like, "We didn't know this. We didn't know they were interested in these things, and we can have other selling opportunities." It's that kind of thing that I think is very important is that you're using it as a tool to make better sense of your data, make better sense of your respective target objects, whether they be customers or things, than you could before. You can do so in a way that doesn't require that you're manually trying to build all this inside of Salesforce Core. Mike Gerholdt:
For the longest time, the joke was how long is your account page or your contact page, because you are having to reduplicate all these fields just to accommodate all of this extra data. Skip Sauls:
Exactly. We see lots of interesting naming conventions for that kind of thing Mike Gerholdt:
Probably horrible ones, too. Skip Sauls:
Yeah, exactly. Mike Gerholdt:
I'm guilty of that, too. Contact, last name, four, because that's how it's going to work. Skip Sauls:
If you inherit orgs from others, sometimes that's multi-generational. You can certainly see that with like, "There's three or four different naming conventions and duplicates of objects." Because they oftentimes came in and said, "We can't really change this. We can't really make sense of it. We almost have to start over again in order to enhance something." The idea with Data Cloud is don't do that. Keep your existing data, move the source of truth into Data Cloud and operate it on it there, and you don't have to go back and rewrite everything in Core or importantly, everything off Core, every single time. Mike Gerholdt:
You bring up a point, so let me... Silly question, because I'm still learning this too, but with Data Cloud... This is going to sound weird, correct me if I'm wrong, but you can have multiple sources of truths. We would have a finance system that was a source of truth for address, but we had a certification system that was a source of truth for what certifications that organization held. We didn't want them all in Salesforce. We wanted each... It's a data silo, but that's its job, and it's secure that way. With Data Cloud, we can connect them, we can get that view in Salesforce, but we also don't have to pull all that data in. Am I right in saying that? Skip Sauls:
Exactly. You're mapping the data from Salesforce into Data Cloud, and if you have the same names and same values across different objects in different fields and external sources, you can resolve those inside of Data Cloud and say which one is the one you want to use, which one is that source of truth. You can create your ideal, I think people call it the golden record, is one notion I've heard of. This is the agreed upon... I heard it called the single version of the truth, which sounds political, but it's basically you as an organization say, "This is what we all agree is the correct source of truth for these things." Instead of it being in multiple orgs or across multiple objects, you now have the single unified object and you agree that this is the address, this is the account value, this is whatever the dates might be.
That's the beauty of it is it gives you one place to do that work, instead of trying to do it across things. It's always been possible to do this kind of thing. You didn't need Data Cloud to do that kind of thing, it's just harder to do those things. People found it frustrating, and the thing we didn't want to hear, what we heard people say, "I had to pretty much export everything outside of Salesforce and do work on it in some other cloud to get the results that I wanted." So we're saying, "Let's not let require people to do that. We don't want them to leave Salesforce. We want this inner gravity to still be on Salesforce. Let's give them the tools they need to be inside of our platform instead of externally." Mike Gerholdt:
I remember having real conversations about how this X server could do a CSV and put it on... I think it was an Outlook or SharePoint, and then how do I set up, at the time, Data Loader via the CLI to do batch imports? That was a conversation that now feels so dated. Feels like watching a early '90s sitcom where they have a bag phone in a car. Skip Sauls:
But people still do that today. We saw that with analytics. We still see it with people exporting, and they go into Excel, and they do their work there. We have had lots of great tools for this, and Data Cloud has the best suite of these things now, and you can actually do it really well in place. There's no reason for you to export anything, unless you want to make it available to somebody to play with in Excel, but there's no reason you should be doing your work there. Importantly, you've got tools like Tableau, which are really good at this, much better than Excel would ever be. Do your work in Data Cloud, use some of these great tools we have, and not do this external manual copying, uploading type of thing. That stuff works fine in the small, but it's terrible when you have large numbers of people working on it, and really bad when you have different people coming in at different times that may not realize what was happening. Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, let alone the second you pull something out of a system, now you've lost all control over that data. Skip Sauls:
Exactly. Mike Gerholdt:
In terms of security, confidentiality, especially if it's a spreadsheet, could be emailed to somebody. That's the part that always worried me. I always had the sales manager whose second question was, "Who can export this data?" Nobody, thankfully. That's a checkbox I never check. Skip, thanks for coming on. I know last time, we talked about the Evel Knievel motorcycle, but that was just because I was fresh off of going through a world tour DC and some museums out there. Skip Sauls:
Oh, yeah. I'm a big motor sports fan, just like you. A gear head, whatever you want to call it. If it has a motor, I'm interested in it. Getting a little too old for some of it, but I still enjoy it. Mike Gerholdt:
Well, that's the beauty is you can always watch it. There's always somebody younger than us that'll want to do something fun. Skip Sauls:
Exactly. Mike Gerholdt:
Thanks for catching us up as the new Trailhead... I'll link to the Trailhead modules that we've got available on that. Then of course, knowing that there's more coming out. To me, the most exciting part with everything is the second I can get my hands on a DE org or something, that's when I can actually start to understand it. I remember that was so fundamental when I first started as an admin, the ability to get my hands on a DE org and try stuff out that wasn't a production org. The same holds true for all of our products, so I'm glad that we've overcome that barrier. Skip Sauls:
I encourage everybody to try that out and give us your feedback. What else do you want to know? What doesn't work well? What did you enjoy? Reach out to us. You guys will see me, the community, on Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. I'm always looking for more feedback, and ping me if you need anything. Let me know how we can help. Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah. I appreciate it, Skip. Thanks for coming back. Skip Sauls:
Yep, thanks a lot. Mike Gerholdt:
I'm glad we could have Skip back. Always appreciate him coming back and helping admins understand how we can break down all of the data silos that we have within an organization and make our lives easier. I wasn't kidding when I asked a few of the questions about syncing data and back and forth. I've got to believe that's some of your life, too, because I feel like everybody just one view of the customer. But everybody's got to own different parts of data, and that's fine. This really helps knock things out. I think it really makes things interesting and accessible for Salesforce admins.
Now, if you're listening, I want you to do me a favor. Click on the Share Episode button, and you can post it to any of your social media. You can text it to a friend, maybe there's a friend. You guys can both do a Data Cloud Trailhead module together, and let him know that you got hands-on with Data Cloud, which was something that the last time we were on the Salesforce podcast that Skip was on, he couldn't tell us to do.
Thanks for listening, and until next week, we'll see you in the cloud.
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Thu, 11 April 2024
Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Lizz Hellinga, Consultant and Salesforce MVP. Join us as we chat about why product management principles Salesforce are crucial if you want to take advantage of new AI tools. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Lizz Hellinga. AI enhancements and what they mean for admins The last time I had Lizz on the pod, we talked about why clean data is crucial for AI tools. But with everything that Einstein Copilot and Prompt Builder make possible, I wanted to bring her back to help us understand how to approach AI enhancements. The big thing to get your head around is that these tools make it easier than ever to implement changes to your org. However, as Lizz points out, that means it’s even more important to think through how Salesforce fits with your business processes. How you gather requirements and communicate with your stakeholders is more important than ever before. Apply project management principles to your Salesforce org To get the most out of everything that’s possible with AI enhancements, Salesforce Admins need to brush up on product management. “It’s kind of like the operations around your operations of Salesforce,” Lizz says. She wants everyone to think through three questions: -
How are you taking in change requests? -
How are you working with your stakeholders to determine if those requests are aligned? -
And, finally, how do you go through the process of enabling that change and then extending it for adoption? As Lizz points out, what you need to do hasn’t changed. You might be able to do things faster with AI tools, but big-picture thinking is even more essential so you can deliver the right solutions at the right time. Communication with stakeholders is a two-way street So how do you get started? For one thing, you need to figure who you’re trying to talk to. As Lizz puts it, “it’s never too late to run a report and do a stakeholder analysis.” You can look at profiles or roles to determine who the main people are in your organization and what they need from Salesforce. You need to build trust with your stakeholders, and that means establishing two-way communication about requests and what you’re working on. Lizz recommends creating a transparent system for tracking requests, whether that’s using case objects or custom objects in Salesforce, or even (gasp!) creating a shared spreadsheet. It can often feel like there’s a lot of heat on you to get everything done as quickly as possible, but that’s why bringing stakeholders into the conversation around enhancements is so important. If people understand why bumping something up on the roadmap will push other changes back, it can really turn the temperature down. It’s all about creating a feedback loop that turns stakeholders into collaborators. Be sure to listen to the full episode for more from Lizz, and don’t forget to subscribe for more from the Salesforce Admins Podcast. Podcast swag Learn more Admin Trailblazers Group Social Full show transcript Mike:
So we're talking about product management this week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast with returning guest Liz Hellinga. You may remember she was on in December and really focused us on getting data cleaned up to get ready for AI. Well, now it's, how do we manage Salesforce as a product manager and also take into consideration all of the things that we've got going on with AI? And really all of the tools that AI can provide us, like Einstein Copilot, Prompt Builder. What can we do?
Before we get into that episode, I just want to point out if you're getting ready for all of the content that we've got lined up this month... So last week we had Tom Leddy on the podcast, check out that episode. Next week is Skip Solves. We're going to talk about Data Cloud updates. Skip was on last year. And then at the end of the month on the 25th, we're launching a new style of episode. It's going to happen at the end of every month, and it's... We called it Deep Dive and it's with a fellow evangelist, Josh Burke. He's going to deep dive into a topic a little bit more than I do. We're going to kick it off with our Katie Holmes, who is on our design team and talk about design and AI. It's going to be a really cool conversation.
But for now, let's talk about product management and AI and helping Salesforce admins be good stewards of the platform. So let's get Liz on the podcast.
So Liz, welcome back to the podcast. Liz:
Thank you, Mike. I'm happy to be here. Mike:
Last time you were here, we talked about how clean data is non-negotiable in the era of AI, and I still think it is. So let's pick up our discussion from there. What have you learned about cleaning data in the last four months? Liz:
That it's still essential and it's ongoing. And that I really do love a good data dictionary that helps you define data and make sure that you're using it correctly aligned to your processes. But in this age of AI, it's even more crucial as we talked about before, because people are going to be making decisions on that. And we're all able to make more decisions based on AI, whether it's around our data or whether it's around how we build in our Salesforce org. Mike:
Yeah, I think that's the thing that's changed since I started doing podcasts around AI last year is, last year we really focused a lot of the episodes on, well, how does this affect data? What can it do? Now... And I ran into you at Trailblazer DX. Now we've seen things around Einstein Copilot, Einstein Prompt Builder, which yes can do things around the data. But also a lot of the promise that we're seeing with Copilot is this will be a tool to help admins not only generate information or help users generate information, but also potentially configure organizations as well. Liz:
Yes. And it increases the rate that we're able to make change because- Mike:
Very true. Liz:
... you're shortening some of that cycle to produce for those outputs. You still... Just like data, you still need to have some of these core foundations in place to make sure that you're making the best decisions for your Salesforce instance based on the output. But the scale of change is going to continue to increase, and it's going to be back to the basics for some of those things like around product management, the Salesforce, product management. Mike:
Yeah. Well, and that's really one of the key things that admins work on because I remember way back in the days... I want to just outdate myself. I believe it was Shell Black, for those of you that are as old as me. Remember, he coined a phrase, "Order taker admin." And I think that's kind of relevant to what we're talking about because we've always talked about, "Wow, with every new innovation that Salesforce comes out with, it's easier and easier to make change."
Now, we're also have the ability to ask AI to start making change for us or to show us various flows, right? Liz:
Right. Mike:
And that affects our ability to manage the product because essentially the way that we're perceived potentially from our users is, "Well, it's just a field. Why can't you add it?" Or, "It's just a flow, why can't you add it?" Liz:
Yes. And they're not always familiar with all the behind the scenes stuff that it takes. But ultimately, with your Salesforce instance, you always need to be enabling change based on what you're gathering from your end users and your stakeholders and aligning it to business objectives. And so that still hasn't changed. You may be able to do it a little bit faster with the help of some of these things like Copilot. But you still need to understand and have a lens for that decision making. Because just because you can add a flow or just because you can do something, doesn't mean that you always should. You still need to think through it from a process lens, from a stakeholder lens. Mike:
So maybe we jumped in too quick, but to level set, I'd love to hear from you. What is your definition of product management that a Salesforce admin would do for the platform? Liz:
Yes. Gosh, I have such a strong opinion on this, Mike. Mike:
I know that's why I'm having to move on. Liz:
Well, with... Product management is really sort of like the operations that you wrap around your Salesforce instance. How are you taking in change requests? How are you working with your stakeholders to determine if those requests are aligned? And then how do you go through that process of enabling that change and then extending it for adoption? So it's kind of like the operations around your operations of Salesforce a little bit. But it's just a way to bring structure and I would say consistency and continuity around how you iterate on your Salesforce org. Mike:
So product management is not just a ticketing system and doing what the users ask. Liz:
Correct. There needs to be thought around it. And I've been in orgs, right, where... We've been in those shoes where there's pressure to do something and you do it because you're just like, "Well, I don't know. I don't have enough to stop this." Or, "We're under a time crunch. We've got to get it done." But that's why it's not easy. But admins have to spend time building relationships with their stakeholders and being thoughtful about how they take in change requests.
And it could be something as simple as even just... Not that I want people to use spreadsheets and things like that, but sometimes just at least capturing that information even in a typical requirements document or building that out within Salesforce. I've seen a lot of people, and I've done this myself too, use the case object to help manage that and then review it with key stakeholders, determine what changes do we need to implement and how? What is the best method for it? 'Cause that's the beauty of Salesforce, there is usually more than one way to do something. Mike:
Yeah, no and beauty and part where you have to really contemplate. What I'm hearing, and I'd love to know your thought on this 'cause this is something that even I struggled with as an admin. I think everybody does. The short-term change versus the long-term. And I mean that in respect of... I almost think of you know when you get a scratch on your car? Well, the long-term change is, I'm going to get it in the body shop. But the short-term is I'm just going to shoot it with a can of spray paint really quick to prevent it from rusting out. How do you balance that?
I mean, what can we do to think through product management to say like, "Okay, cool. I totally hear you need this and it's on my six month roadmap." As opposed to maybe I just invest time now and build a little bit of it to turn the heat down knowing we're going to invest in it later. What's the balance there? Liz:
Yeah, the balance comes from understanding your stakeholders and the processes that you're using, that you're building out in your Salesforce system. So for example, if you know on the roadmap that something's coming in six months, but there's heat to get that taken care of sooner. I mean, being able to have conversations around, "Well, this is what's on the roadmap. If we pull this forward, something else is going to have to be pushed. How might we make that decision so that we can meet this business need sooner rather than later?" And it's not always an easy conversation for admins to have because it takes relationship building initially and trust building. Mike:
What are some of the most important things that you feel should be communicated to stakeholders in order to keep that constant level of trust high? Liz:
Yep. Great question. So there's a couple things that you can do. So initially... And it's never too late to do this, so you could be in an org for three days, or you could be in an org for three years. It's never too late to just start to do a stakeholder analysis. You can just run a report, group people by either their profile, their roles and determine who are the main people. You may be in an org where you can't talk to all 1000 users, but you may be able to get to a subset for relationship building.
And that is crucial, especially with the pace of change that we're encountering now because of generative AI. And then I tried to get a system down for gathering enhancements. Some of those enhancements may honestly never get built, but at least you're documenting them and those as request and keeping a... Excuse me, keeping a log or a history of that. Sometimes you just build it in the case object. Some people do custom objects. You can do integrations for those or a spreadsheet depending on how big your org is. Just giving a place for that and then creating some transparency around that list is helpful.
And then including those stakeholders in discussions around how do you prioritize those things? And I would start small, especially if your org is larger. If you're dealing with a lot of stakeholders, you want to start small maybe with one group. But as you can expand that, then I would probably start to do... And this is what I do in one of my orgs currently is, I do a bi-weekly update. And we don't work on a regular sprint cycle per se. We're not as hardcore with the Agile methodology, but we share every two weeks what we've accomplished, if it has a significant impact on the end users.
And then we also share in that notification projects that are in flight and their status. So if we're working on maybe implementing something from the app exchange that maybe take us a month or two to implement, we include that and we provide status. So it's creating that visibility because sometimes people... You'll be surprised that people will respond and say, "Hey, I'm interested in this," or "I have an idea, or I have a thought on this." It creates that two-way communication that is required for admins and their end users. Mike:
Yeah, I think a lot of... And I experienced this too. A lot of the requests, I was able to dial the heat down and dial the request down when I started sharing very transparently the roadmap on what was coming and features that were coming. Because, to be frank, a ton of users, over 500, and they don't know. And when an absence of knowledge happens, they feel, well, maybe nobody's thinking of this, so I better raise my hand and put in a request when in fact it is on the roadmap. Liz:
And then sometimes too, just getting that visibility into the roadmap, end users will kind of do a groundswell like, "Hey, we actually need this sooner." And it helps when you've got a list of 10 people, individuals, that are asking for something and you're like, you can then go to leadership and say, "Hey, this is becoming a real need. How can we prioritize this? What can we put further down the backlog so that we can push this forward and get this really great feature out that could help make the team more productive?"
So creating that path for feedback is essential. And I know sometimes there's this... People think, "Oh, we're going to just get inundated with complaints or things like that." But I'm like, "Bring it," 'cause I want to know. I'd rather have people log a case with me around something that they is annoying them so that I can analyze it and determine, can I fix this? Is this a part of something else that we're working on so that we can keep iterating? Mike:
Yeah, I agree. I would rather them be publicly vocal than privately angry. Liz:
Yes. Plus, when things come in the written format, it allows me to use the written format back to them versus sometimes when you're maybe on a group call, a meeting and it's hard to be eloquent. So I will say one other area that the LLMs have helped me significantly is crafting more clear and concise messages back to my end users and stakeholders. Mike:
Yeah, I was just going to ask you about that. Because I think that's one of the things where for a long time, creating training and stuff, people can look at, "Well, I'm just not a good writer," or "I'm just not a good communicator." And I was going to ask you what specifically maybe some of the tips that you have for admins to get out there and experiment with AI and absent of some of the products that Salesforce has, because AI seems to be everywhere now. I feel like pretty soon my toothbrush is going to have AI, it's going to start talking to me while I'm brushing my teeth. Liz:
Well, hopefully it'll tell you if it has a cavity. Mike:
Yeah, I don't... But do you want to know that? You got a cavity here. I just might throw you away now. Liz:
I know, right? Mike:
No, you're lying at me. But I feel like that could be one avenue that could help admins both understand how to write good prompts and understand AI while benefiting us back. Liz:
So for example, I can be quite verbose and long-winded, and so I will sometimes ask something like ChatGPT or Gemini to make... I'll just draft something. This is the one thing. It's like you can draft something and your tone could be maybe terse or it could just be long-winded or filled with jargon. And I can pop it into ChatGPT and sometimes I'll use it like explain this like you're explaining it to an eighteen-year-old. Oddly, the eighteen-year-old or sixteen-year-old sort of prompt kind of helps me because it takes out some of that technical jargon, but also softens the tone a little bit for me. That's been quite helpful. I have ideas in how I want to communicate. ChatGPT helps me kind of put a little bit of structure around it so that it's not so all over the place. Mike:
Yeah. I also really like it. I'll ask it for different tones. Liz:
Yes. Mike:
That was always a... A friend of mine told me this trick, which now it feels like trying to teach somebody how to use a rotary phone. But if you need to write a difficult email, pay attention to your tongue because you're probably nervous and your tongue's on the roof of your mouth, so you need to lower that. That'll also help lower your stress, but also pay attention to your eyebrows. And it was always referred to me as eyebrows up, because it's really hard to write something angry if you have your eyebrows up. Liz:
Oh, I never knew that. Mike:
Yeah, I mean, you can of course, but if you're trying to not write something terse per se, eyebrows up because it kind of pulls your whole face into that happy smiley. And it's very non-verbal and it's telling your brain, "No, we're happy. Let's write this in a non-confrontational way." But the AI can do that. Liz:
Where was that advice pre-ChatGPT, Mike- Mike:
Sorry. Liz:
... when my brow is furrowed and I'm thinking I've reset your password 10 times in the last week. Mike:
Yeah. Well, there are some things you can write with your eyebrows up that still come off terse, but that was always the trick that I was told. Liz:
Well, it helps too, 'cause sometimes you can play around with formatting using ChatGPT. It's like how would you format this for a Slack message versus an email? And it is helpful. It even adds an emoji sometimes, which to me, it could be a little bit of overkill. And sometimes when I ask it to write in a friendly tone, it's a little too much. So I like balance between professional and friendly.
And then obviously, I'm going to still make changes to it, but it just gets me closer to... It saves me a significant amount of time. It gets me closer to communicating effectively, and it allows me to continue the positive relationships that I do care about and that I want with my stakeholders. But sometimes in the moment, emotions can get the best of you. Mike:
Well, and you bring up a good point, and I can always edit it. And I think that's very relevant to a discussion we had last week with Tom Leddy on decision-making and throwing things at Copilot and Prompt Builder and then just taking what it gives you. One of the ways you can always think about that as a product manager is, "Okay, so is this thinking of ideas that maybe I didn't come up with?" And I think for me, a lot of times Copilot if it can build me a flow that I didn't think about or in a way I didn't think about, that gives me another option as a product manager for how best to manage all of the platform. Liz:
Yes. Well, and if it's giving you an option that you didn't think about, you still need to spend time thinking about it before you select that as your option, right, to solve that problem or to solve that request. What's nice about is it shortens your learning time. You're not having to build and fail, build and fail as much, but you can't take the human assessment out of it. Mike:
Right, right. There's no one right way to product manage. And I say that and then oof, somebody's going to be like, "No, there is," because the internet. But I think from your perspective, having worked with a lot of admins and seen orgs and seeing various different ways of product managing, rather than asking you, "What's your preface for product management?" What are attributes that admins should think about when creating a system like a ticketing system, regardless of what it looks like, that would be a good attribute to help them manage Salesforce as a product in their organization? Liz:
Yeah. So I mean, you think fields that you would ask? Mike:
Happy with fields or outcomes or... I've definitely... We've discussed using, you said, service cloud and cases. That's one way. Liz:
I mean, I love a good Kanban view, right? Mike:
Sure. I mean, we can have that. Liz:
That is one of my favorites, and it's a great screenshot for a slide if you have to. Mike:
Not that you've done that before. Liz:
But for me, it's the level of detail that you're willing to ask your end users to put in. I mean, I would say for about every couple of tickets, most of the time I still need to have an additional conversation to understand. And this is purely around enhancements. I mean, definitely if there's fixes that need to happen, there's conversations automatically. But I love that it creates this opportunity for me to reach out to people and continue to build that rapport. So it's never just like, "Oh, I get this request in from a case for an enhancement." And, "Okay, I am just going to do this." It's never that. I always want to understand a little bit more context.
So I try not to create too many field requests on that enhancement request, but I do want to understand what process is this supporting? What is this hindering you from doing? How will this help you? Things like that. I try to get a little bit of what I would say, just contextual information if I can. But sometimes people just put stuff in. It's like, "I want this field so that I can do this reporting." And that's their enhancement request. Mike:
Yes. I need six check boxes, one for every color of the product that we sell. Liz:
Yes. Or they want five multi-selects. Mike:
Oh. Liz:
But it's also too... The one other thing that I like about creating the space for people to submit enhancements, it allows me to create groupings. And that's one of the key things that I look for when I'm building the system is, can I group... Well, for lack of a better term, tickets or requests together to form a mini project? Because then you're really thinking through the process and how it relates to Salesforce beyond just a field.
And so typically when things are going on at the company and people are all of a sudden you're getting all these kind of related asks, that means there's like, is there an initiative that I haven't been informed upon? Do I need to know more than I know? Because maybe I can build a better solution if I get more looped into these internal initiatives or objectives. Mike:
Yeah, I really like that idea. I mean, I think that's something that I would love to see in a future roadmap for some of the Einstein products is helping if you set up a ticketing system, using cases, helping you kind of clump, for lack of a better term, those cases together into these kind of... It's almost like, do you play connections in the New York Times? Liz:
I do. Mike:
Okay. So don't get started on that. But it would be like, what are these all have to do together with each other kind of a thing? Liz:
Oh, that would be awesome. Mike:
I know, right? Liz:
It'll be here before- Mike:
And then purple would be like- Liz:
...we know it. Mike:
... here's the craziest cases that we've found a through thread. I can't figure out what the through thread is. Liz:
That would be incredible. I'm sure that will be here before we know it. I Mike:
I mean, next year maybe we'll be on the podcast together. I'll be like, "Liz, hey, remember we had that podcast we talked about? Now it works." Liz:
Yes, that would be a dream because I think I do spend a bit of time grouping things together and trying to figure out like, "Okay, is this related to something? And maybe I need to look more." But that's the beauty of it 'cause sometimes you get the cases in and then you're like, "Oh my gosh, we may have something that we may need to fix or we may need to re-engineer," and that's okay. You want that. And again, the more you can get that and iterate on it, the more your stakeholders and your end users are going to trust what you're building and doing in the system. Mike:
So one thing I want to touch on, and unfortunately we're doing it at the end, but a lot of this we talked about product management in terms of what users want and what's being requested of you, absent of the release schedule that Salesforce has. What is your philosophy or how do you think about adding that as... Because that's an additional layer that we have to consider, right? Three times a year there's a brand new release, there's new features, and they may or may not be on any roadmap. Liz:
Well, if you're in your org and you know what's going on with it, you're usually waiting for those features. I usually get pretty excited about some of the things that come out. So usually I feel that I'm always eager. And I love all the stuff that the, admins blog and the Salesforce plus sessions that you all do for release readiness. That's so incredibly helpful because I sometimes listen to and have an 'aha' moment like, "Oh wait, we were just talking about this and this could help me solve it."
And it's just being aware. I think having that rigor around your enhancement list and then reviewing it on a regular basis helps you when you're starting to review the release notes or attend release readiness live, you'll get those light bulb moments. And you'll just be like, "Okay, well this is coming, but it's going to have to now wait until the summer release." Or should I say fall? Just joking. Mike:
Yeah, right. That's always a quiz question to get wrong is what's the season that's not a release? Liz:
Right. Mike:
Or I guess I always think of it, here's a feature that's coming that I don't have to build. Liz:
Yes, yes. It saves time. Mike:
Which used to be the case a lot. So thanks for coming on and refreshing us on product management because I feel this is a core responsibility that admins focus on, and especially given the speed of innovation now that we're thrust into with AI. Liz:
Yes. And it's even more important for them to flex these types of skills around product management. Mike:
Oh, absolutely. I mean, product management skills as an admin will translate to other skills across the organization and within technology. Liz:
Yes, exactly. And it's a great way for them to build their career and trust. Mike:
Absolutely. Thanks for being on. Liz:
Thanks so much. It's always a pleasure to be here. Mike:
Of course, that was a great discussion with Liz. I love having her back. I'll also link to that previous episode down in the show notes so you can check it out because clean data with AI is super important. But love some of the points that she had to bring up, especially around thinking through different features and really managing all of the requests and roadmap. I hope that's something that you're thinking about, too.
Now, if you enjoyed this episode... I hope you did. I had a lot of fun recording it. I would love for you to share the episode. And if you're listening on iTunes or really any platform, it's usually super easy. You hit like an up arrow or in iTunes, you hit three dots and you can click share episode, and that'll allow you to post it to social or text to a friend. Maybe you got a friend that's getting started as a Salesforce admin and they want to learn how to manage the product.
And of course, as always, I appreciate you listening. So until next week, we'll see you in the cloud.
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Thu, 4 April 2024
Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Tom Leddy, the Product Director of Well-Architected and Decision Guides at Salesforce. Join us as we chat about decision-making in the age of AI and why cleaning up your data is more important than ever. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Tom Leddy. Decision Guides and the Well-Architected Framework Almost exactly a year ago, we had Tom on the pod to talk about the Well-Architected Framework. I’ll link the episode below but Tom gives us a quick summary: “It tells you how to build healthy solutions with Salesforce and what a healthy solution should look like,” he says. Making your org healthy comes down to looking for patterns and anti-patterns. Essentially, you want to do things in a way that sets you up for long-term success. Tom and his team are hard at work rolling Decision Guides into the Well-Architected Framework. These walkthroughs are designed to help you decide which Salesforce tool is right for you when they have overlapping functionality. The answer is going to depend on your specific use case, so looking at a Decision Guide can help you understand the full picture and make the best choice for your business. Understanding AI as a tool Looking forward, Tom sees a lot of potential in combining AI tools like Einstein Copilot with the information in Well-Architected and Decision Guides. There’s a lot of potential to make things more interactive or quicker to digest, but you’ll still need to do some critical thinking and make your own decisions. In terms of incorporating AI tools into your org, Tom is working on decision guides for that, too. “A lot of the cool AI features are not going to work very well unless you have a good underlying data strategy,” he says. Working through the Well-Architected Framework will help you create a solid foundation to get the most out of these new tools now and in the future. Why AI needs clean data If you’re a frequent listener, you’ll know that we can’t have an episode about AI without mentioning just how important it is to have clean data. As Tom points out, this extends to patterns and anti-patterns as well. It’ll be easier than ever to roll out code to your org and create new customizations, but you need to be sure you’re doing it the right way and not crippling yourself with technical debt. Luckily, Tom and his team are working on tools to help you make sure your org is, well, Well-Architected. Stay on the lookout for a Data Strategy Decision Guide, coming soon™, and new ways to assess the health of your org with Einstein Copilot. The future is bright, and hopefully a little more organized. Be sure to listen to the full episode for more tips from Tom, and don’t forget to subscribe for more from the Salesforce Admins Podcast. Podcast swag Learn more Admin Trailblazers Group Social
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Thu, 28 March 2024
Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Jim Ray, Director of Developer Relations and Advocacy at Slack. Join us as we chat about automating in Slack and what’s coming with Slack AI. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Jim Ray. Slack is more than just a chat tool Jim gave a great breakout session at TDX on automating in Slack, so I wanted to bring him on the pod to tell us all about it. “If you’re just using Slack for communication, you’re overpaying for a chat tool,” he says, “there’s a lot more you can do to broaden your usage of Slack.” Slack integrations have been around for forever, but it used to be that you needed a fair bit of technical knowledge in order to make your own customizations. With the launch of Workflow Builder, however, you can build automations in Slack without having to code or host an app yourself. This unlocks a whole new level for how Slack can improve your business processes and make everything easier. Build custom automations with Slack Workflow Builder If you’ve played around with Workflow Builder in the past, you may be familiar with how you can use it to create a new channel or automatically post a formatted message at a certain time each week. But recently, they’ve added the ability to use custom steps from apps and 3rd-party tools, like Salesforce, and now the possibilities are endless. Jim gives a few examples that help spell out how big this actually is. For example, imagine you have a weekly status report meeting. You can create a scheduled Slack workflow that automatically drops the relevant Salesforce info into a Slack channel so everyone can refer to it. That can save you a bunch of time you’d spend bringing the room up to speed, or even eliminate the meeting entirely. We get into a ton of other examples, including adding info to the channel’s Canvas document and even using a Slack automation to execute a flow in Salesforce. There’s just a ton of great use cases here when you’re able to bring your Salesforce data directly into Slack and vice versa. Summarize and search with Slack AI Lastly, we talked about Slack AI and that’s where things get really interesting. It gives you the ability to search Slack with natural language queries, and summarize or format the results. Jim gives the example of when he returned to work after some time off for paternity leave. He had a first meeting with a new skip-level manager and needed to do some prep. So he asked Slack AI, “what does this person think about the Slack platform?” It not only found everything they ever posted on the subject and summarized the results, but it also gave him footnotes with links to the actual comments so he could do more digging. AI does even better with structured data, and that’s where Workflow Builder comes back into the picture. The automations you build create exactly the kind of data that Slack AI loves. It opens up a whole new world of possibilities for how you can share information across your organization without the need to put everyone on Salesforce. Jim shares a bunch more use cases and tips for how to get started building automations in Slack, so be sure to take a listen. And don’t forget to subscribe for more from the Salesforce Admins Podcast. Podcast swag Learn more Admin Trailblazers Group Social Full Transcript Mike:
Okay, this week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we are going to have a lot of fun because we are talking about Slack automations with the director of developer relations and advocacy, Jim Ray of Slack. Now, you're probably a Salesforce Admin, you're like, "Oh, but we don't use Slack. I'm not going to listen to this." No! This is a fun episode and it's going to give you a ton of ideas for, hey, maybe we should think about using Slack. I'm not here to sell you anything. I don't get any commissions.
I just love when I can give you ideas and creative answers to challenges that you're facing. And Jim talks us through a whole bunch of fun stuff that you can do in Slack and gave me a ton of ideas. We talked about canvases. I don't know if you use canvases, but it's a ton of fun. Now, before we get into that, I want to tell you about, hey, what we got coming up in April, because this is last episode of March. I have architect evangelist Tom Leddy coming on to talk about decisioning. I reconnected with Lizz Hellinga at TrailblazerDX.
Remember, she was on a previous episode talking about the importance of clean data and why that's important for AI. She's coming back. I'm working on getting Skip Sauls with the Data Cloud update, so Data Cloud. And then I'm going to introduce a new episode at the end of April where I'm bringing my co-worker, Josh Burke, on, and he's going to do a deep dive episode with a product manager. We're working on getting somebody really cool to help you change the way you do some of your thinking.
That's all I'm going to tease out for right now. But of course, if you're not already subscribed to the podcast, make sure you're doing that, make sure you're following it. It's a different word on every podcast platform. But if you do that, new episodes automatically get downloaded to your phone. That way when you wake up in the morning, you put the leash on the dog, you go out, boom! You press play, podcast is going, and you can get some great information. You don't have to think about it, or maybe you're riding the bus to work or bicycling.
It's starting to become summer now. So anyway, that's a whole long way. This is fun. You're going to enjoy this podcast. Let's get Jim on the pod. So Jim, welcome to the podcast. Jim Ray:
Thanks so much. It's great to be here, Mike. Mike:
I always have fun talking Slack. I feel like the last time we talked Slack was with Amber Boaz and she was telling us how to replace meetings with Slack. And then you did a presentation in the admin track at TDX about automating in Slack, and I just feel like that's the next level for people that use Slack is getting it to do stuff automagically. So that's what I'd love to talk about, but let's start with how did Jim get all the way to Slack? Jim Ray:
That's a great question. I'm also glad you mentioned Amber Boaz. I had the opportunity to meet her at TDX. Mike:
Oh, she's wonderful. Jim Ray:
She's from my neck of the woods, so I'm going to try to drive down to Durham in a month or so and hang out with the user group that she's got. Mike:
That's pretty country down there too. Jim Ray:
It is. It's nice. I went to school down there too, so it's pretty great. So if we're talking background here, my background is actually in journalism. I have a journalism degree from the University of North Carolina. That's what I did. Mike:
So it's obvious that you would work in tech. Jim Ray:
Obvious that I would be working in developer relations at Slack. It's maybe not as much of a leap as people might think. I was always kind of the techie guy that was looking for... My degree is in this multimedia storytelling. This was the late '90s. We were trying to figure out how to do interesting new ways of telling stories on the web, and that's what I was into. So I always had a tech mindset inside of the newsrooms that I worked in. And then when I switched over to tech, I still brought that media background with me.
And interestingly enough, DevRel has merged those two things. It wasn't something that I'd set out to do, but I was really interested in what was going on at Slack. I started working at Slack in the middle of 2016, so just as the company was really rocketing off. It was a really incredible first year. The user growth was happening a lot. The company itself was growing tremendously. It was a different place every year for the first couple of years that I was there. And so I've been working on the DevRel side for most of that time.
And then recently, about a year and a half ago, I took over our developer advocacy team. And so on developer advocacy in Slack, what we do is we work primarily with our customers who are building on the Slack platform. The platform is multifaceted in some ways. We have our Slack App Directory where you go and you install apps that are built by our partners, or they're built by companies that are building their business on top of Slack.
But the bulk of the work that happens on the platform is custom apps and integrations that are built by our customers to solve their own needs. We're always looking for ways to engage with that audience and help them understand how to do automation in Slack. Mike:
I mean, I think too often people just look at Slack as like, oh, it's just another communication tool. But just as we were chatting before we even got started, the number of features that it has and the way you can configure things to, lack of a better term, almost communicate back with you and make life easier, which is what the point of automation.
I remember the first time I built an automation, which I believe was just for a simple Slack group where it was like, I really want questions in the Slack group formatted in a certain way, and so I just stuck up that form and they just auto created that post. But the cool thing was somebody on my team pointed out, you know it could also put all of that text into a Google Doc so that you have this running FAQ?
I was done at that point. I was like, oh God, no idea, right? Because for so long, you mentioned you started in 2016, but you got a degree in multimedia storytelling, who would've thought like, VHS, what are we going to do? DVD now for a certain period. Now, so many of these communication apps are not just like remember the days of MSN Messenger. It's not just text back and forth. It's actually managing of information and context. Jim Ray:
I think that's such a good point, and I really love your example of formatting your questions. I think one of the things, and this is something that I learned from working more closely with my friends on the sales side of the house, is that if you're just using Slack for communication, you're overpaying for a chat tool, as they like to say. And there's a lot more that you can do to broaden your usage of Slack, and we're increasingly trying to be a surface area for getting work done. Obviously, Slack doesn't have any desire to be the only place where you come and do your work.
It would pretty well constrain the work that I think people could do. But it's definitely a place, particularly those quick interactions, and that's where some of the automation comes in. But things like approvals, things like questions, even quick bug reports where you're already interacting with your colleagues, automation allows you to bring in your other tools, and that's where the power of that lies. And the platform has really expanded a lot in the early days. Slack came with some built-in integration.
So if you wanted to do things like get an alert whenever somebody uploaded a file to Dropbox, then we had that automatically configured. But if you wanted to do something outside of the bounds of that automatic configuration, then that wasn't really possible. Then we launched the API and along with that we launched the app directory. And so we were approaching it from a couple of different ways. You could build custom integrations, or you could install apps and integrations that other people had built from the directory.
And then that's where we saw that usage explode, where people were really building custom use cases. The problem was for those early days of the API was that it really did require a fair bit of technical knowledge. You had to know how to program against our APIs, which means you had to know how APIs work. You also had to host the app yourself. And so in those early days of the APIs, you had to build out an application. And it worked very similarly to how you might build a Twitter app or something like that, but you were responsible for hosting that.
And then we built a lot of tooling around that to help improve that. We built some frameworks to make it easier to build with some of our most popular programming languages. And then we acquired a company called Missions, and this is where Workflow Builder really... Where its origins lie. We acquired this company called Missions, and the team that built Missions, they were a team that was actually inside of a consulting company called Robots & Pencils, and they were like, "We've got this idea for our product that can interact with Slack." Mike:
That's a great name. Jim Ray:
It's a cool name, right? And so the Missions app was all about making it easier to build automations without having to write any code. So we acquired that team, fantastic team, really love working with them. A number of them are still at Slack, thankfully, and they're doing fantastic work. And that became the first version of Workflow Builder, and Workflow Builder was our no code automation product. And that was a way to use the platform without having to know how to program, without having to host an app. And so that was the first big expansion beyond just writing applications. Mike:
Jumping ahead to your TDX presentation, because we talked about automation, because the example I gave was just literally Slack just automating within itself, what were some of the examples you gave in that breakout presentation? Jim Ray:
The evolution of Workflow Builder also mirrors the increased complexity of things that you can build. The initial version of Workflow Builder allows you to do exactly what you were just talking about, allows you to automate work within Slack. So if you wanted to do something like create a new channel or post a message that was formatted in a certain way, then you could do that with Workflow Builder.
The second version of Workflow Builder that we released, and this is the current contemporary version, allowed hooks into other applications. And so apps could build custom steps that could then be inserted into workflows. And so you could install an app, and then that app would bring custom steps along with it. And what we've done now is continue to expand on that surface area.
So now anyone can write a custom step and you can actually deploy that up to Slack and we'll run that custom step inside of Workflow Builder. We've also built out a number of what we call connectors. These are connections to other third-party tools. So Salesforce is a great example. So if you want to create a new record in Salesforce, then we have that connector built in.
And what's nice about the way that we've built it is we handle things like authentication. We handle all of the API communications so that you don't have to worry about that, and then all you have to do is off with your credentials. And then when you run the workflow, then it will just essentially act on your behalf. And so we've got about 70 of these connectors into a whole bunch of apps.
So Salesforce is obviously one. The Google suite, so if you need to create a new Google Doc or if you need to insert a row into a spreadsheet, if you want to upload files into various file providers. So we've got a number of steps that do things like that. And then one of the Salesforce steps that we've also got is to kick off a flow.
So if your organization is dependent or you've built out a lot of custom flows or things like that, then you can insert a step into Workflow Builder and then we'll kick off that flow. So it'll actually execute a more complex workflow instead of just creating a new record or updating a record or something like that. Mike:
I think the really cool automation stuff, at least cool to me, was giving Salesforce admins the ability to, lack of a better term, expand the footprint of Salesforce within an organization, but without having to add per se more platform licenses. And we did an example where like a warehouse manager really deals with the data, but a lot of people also needed to just know about things. And with automation, they could follow records and channels and get updates, but they never needed to update any of the physical data on the Salesforce record. Jim Ray:
That's such a good example, and it's something that we see from our sales and customer success friends all the time as well is... So at Slack, the way that our channels are organized is that every account that we're attached to gets its own channel. They all have their own prefix and stuff like that. So it might be Account-Salesforce and Account-Acme. And then you can actually build automations that will do things like one of the ways that you can trigger your automation is you can have your automation set to go at a certain time once a week.
So maybe you've got a Monday morning meeting and you want to get the entire sales team around that, but you want to pull some data from Salesforce. So you can go grab some information from Salesforce. You want to get the latest updated figures that have come in over the past week, and then you can just drop that information into channel, and then now everybody's got the context. And so you're not just blindly talking about, "Hey, what's going on with the customer this week," you actually have some information, and then you can start a conversation around that.
It's actually a great way that teams have eliminated those regular meetings that we have so that everybody stays in sync. There's often good reasons why we have them, but maybe not good reasons why we keep them, especially now that everybody's working in a more distributed way these days. This works across all kinds of teams, not just sales team, but you might have a marketing team and maybe you want to pull some data from Google Analytics or any of your social analytics platforms or anything like that.
You can drop that information in there and then the team can have a conversation around that. Maybe you notice something's right, or maybe everything's great and then you just don't need to have a meeting. It's just like, "Looking good and all systems go," and then you've just saved your entire team half an hour. Translate that over a quarter or a year, and that's some actual real-time savings. Mike:
Am I understanding you right by also saying it could pull from reports or dashboards in Salesforce? Jim Ray:
Absolutely. Because everyone's Salesforce instance is special, we operate on the record level, and so we'd be able to look at how those records are set up. And one thing that we're interested in getting a little bit closer to is things like Tableau and MuleSoft where there might be some complex records that run in the background, and then how do we pull that information into Slack? So we haven't quite fully figured out that level of automation yet, but it's absolutely something that folks on both sides are working on. Mike:
On top of it just being cool, the part that really appeals to me is the lack of having the context switch. So this concept came to me, oh, I want to say four or five years ago when we were trying to work through a ticketing system for what my team does. We really tried to narrow down, what is the hardest part of your job? Well, the hardest part of your job is regardless of where your mind is at at say 12:30, you have to join this meeting. And for me, oftentimes I'll sit down at my desk, I don't know what the priority is that morning.
I could get working on something. And then to your point, oh, it's 10:00. I got to join this team meeting. Boy, if I didn't have to and I could just stay in my mindset and do another 45 minutes, I could finish this project. But now I have to context switch. Join this meeting, look at 20 people on a call, waste an hour, and then spend another 20 minutes getting my brain back to where it was. I could have been done with this project and maybe my update was five minutes.
And I bring that up because I think like, wow, just the ability to, hey, we're still going to have that Monday team call at 10 AM, except it's going to be a scheduled Slack post. And then I just expect you, the directs, to respond to as needed throughout the day. Because if you're a sales guy, you probably have a 10 AM with a customer, and that's bringing money in as opposed to, well, my update was only five minutes anyway, I'm going to add this update at 11:05 after I'm done with my customer call.
I'm not going to prevent anybody. I bring that up because I think the value of not having to context switch by just putting in simple automation is so important when you think of it's not just automating and putting a dashboard in a Slack channel. Jim Ray:
I think it's a hugely important point, and I think it really emphasizes how we work today. So the instance that you were just talking about about the meeting interrupting your day, so if you can eliminate that standing meeting, obviously we're not going to eliminate all of our meetings, I still have one-on-ones with all my reports and all that, but eliminate those kinds of meetings where the sharing of information is important, but having to sit together in a room is less important. So that's one great way that we can eliminate context switching.
I think it's really important. One another way is to eliminate what I think of as alt tabbing. So every time you alt tab between applications, that actually... Even if you are actually working on the same project, we know, and I've studied this a little bit because it has to do with the customers that I work with and the kinds of applications that they're interested in building, but every time you alt tab between apps, it actually does a little mini version of that context switch.
It's almost like going into a new meeting, especially if you haven't offed in, or you can't remember where you're supposed to go, or you have to pull some information from one system of record and put it into another. So those are the kinds of things that we know are real drains on people's productivity and actually their ability to get into that meaningful deep work state, that flow state that we know is really important for knowledge work. I mean, we're all really lucky we get to sit in front of computers all day for the most part.
I'm not worried about getting black lung or anything like that, but the work actually does have a drain on our brains, the thing that we're using to do the work. And we know that by eliminating some of that context switching, we can actually help people get back and do some important work. There's some really great examples about how bringing some of that automation, and again, not bringing all of your work, but bringing some of that automation into Slack can be really helpful.
So a couple of ways that we've been using it for a long time is, again, at Slack, we will set up channels for specific projects or features that we're working on. So we're working on a new feature, and that feature gets its own channel. And the team that's working on that feature will start working on it. And then when we release it internally, we create a feedback channel. And the feedback channel is where everybody who is starting to use that new feature, they'll come and they'll offer up obviously their feedback or give bug reports or maybe just things that they think could be tweaked.
And so oftentimes we'll set up a workflow, and we've got some examples of it that teams across the organization can use, we'll set that workflow up in that channel. And then what it'll do is it'll post a message in the channel and we can have some conversation about that feedback. And then you can take that conversation and you can submit a bug report. So if somebody says, "Hey, this doesn't look right," then it doesn't automatically submit the bug report, but then the PM or the engineer or the designer can come in and say, "Oh, you know what? I can reproduce that. Let me file a bug."
And then what they can do is they can kick off another workflow that will log that entire conversation in JIRA and create the new bug. And then once the bug has been created in JIRA, attach the URL for the bug into the thread. So then you've got the context in both directions. So the person who submitted the bug, they don't have to go through and figure out how JIRA works or whatever. The PM or the engineer, they don't have to context switch out to another application.
And then if you want to come back and get some context about it, maybe I reported this a week ago and I want to see what the update is, I can go back to that original conversation. I can search for my name or whatever, and then I can click on the link and go in JIRA. And then JIRA remains the system of record. We're not trying to replicate all of JIRA. I wouldn't wish that on anyone, but JIRA remains the system of record, but the actual filing of that bug report didn't require switching between lots of different systems. Mike:
That's along the lines with the automation that I saw where Salesforce remains a system of record. Slack just hosts the conversation, right? Jim Ray:
Yeah, exactly. Mike:
Back and forth and keeping people up to date. And also it reduces training, right? If I've got somebody like I think the example we used was a retail manager, if all the retail manager knows Slack, they don't need to know the back ends of everything. That's the best part about the apps and stuff.
I was singing the praises of canvases before we started this call because I've started to use canvases a little bit more. I'd love for you to help me understand what are some examples that admins could use of automating with canvases or creating canvases as a result of automation? Is that even possible? Jim Ray:
Totally, and it's a great question. So if listeners aren't familiar, canvases are kind of our document project or product inside of Slack. It's built into every Slack. You can create as many canvases as you want to. And think of a canvas just as kind of a lightweight doc. If you remember Dropbox Paper from back in the day, it works very similarly. It's not all the formatting that you get from something like Microsoft Word or Google Doc or something like that, but it's just enough formatting so that you can lay things out in a pretty consistent way.
And the nice thing about canvases is they can exist anywhere inside of Slack and you can attach them in different places. So you can create a canvas that is attached permanently to a channel. If you want to provide some context, maybe again, it's one of those feedback channels, so you want to provide some information about how a person gives feedback, what to expect, is there an SLA, things like that, you can write all of that up inside of a canvas. And the cool thing is canvases can be automated.
They can be automated with workflows. So one of the options for steps that you have inside of Workflow Builder is to create a new canvas. But the other thing that you can do is you can insert variables inside of canvases, and then the information that you collect from a previous step in a workflow can be inserted into that canvas where those variables are. We nerds, we call that variable interpolation. So basically you create a canvas that acts as a template.
So maybe you want to create across your organization, you want to say, every time we spin up a new feature, we're also going to spin up a corresponding feedback channel. And every one of those feedback channels should have a canvas attached to it that provides some information about the channel. Maybe it's going to be who is the DRI for this feature? Maybe it's a PM or maybe it's an engineering lead and that person is the DRI for this. And so you should expect to hear feedback from them.
And then maybe we also want to point you to a workflow that says, hey, this is the workflow to use if you want to give us information or if you want to give us feedback about this. And so you can create that workflow and then you can attach the workflow into canvas and we'll create a nice little widget for you. And then we'll put all of the information about the person, about the people who are responsible for that feedback channel into the canvas as well.
And so you can create a setup feedback channel workflow, and maybe you gather some information, maybe you say, "Who's the DRI for this? Point me to the tech spec," and then any further information. Well, you can fill all that in in your workflow and then we'll automatically create a new canvas from that template, fill that information in, and attach it directly to the channel that gets created. And the workflow can also create the channel too. Mike:
I don't want to get into different channels because right now I feel I need a workflow to manage my channels, but that's probably... I mean, well, let me ask about that. That's probably where the AI is going to go, right? So I see AI now in Slack in the search, but I got to envision that it's going to start heading into channels and other things, right? Jim Ray:
Absolutely. And that's kind of where we're starting to think about some of this. And so back in February, I think it was actually Valentine's Day, we dropped a little Valentine's Day gift for everybody, which was Slack AI. The initial version of Slack AI was really all about improving your ability to search and find and summarize. And so now if you have the Slack AI, and it is an additional product because it's pretty expensive computationally and just in terms of resources to run.
So if you have Slack AI enabled on your workspace, then search will be able to do things like take natural language queries. I was on paternity leave for about half of last year, and I came back and we still had a pre-release version of Slack AI running on our instance. And it was really great for me because I could do things like... I had a new skip level manager. And so I was like, what does this person think about the Slack platform? And it was just a very open-ended query.
I was testing to see how the system worked, but it was also some information that I really needed to do my job. And it came back, and not only did it come back with a standard search result that we give you now with just here are some bits, but it uses the generative AI piece to say it actually found all of the relevant posts, composed a response for me as if a human had written it, but then it also has footnotes to the relevant posts. And so I was just like, oh, what is this person? That's fantastic.
So I was ready for my one-on-one with them coming up. And then you can also do things like summarize. So if I wanted to be able to summarize a channel, again, that was super helpful for me coming back from a pretty extended leave, I was able to summarize some of the channels that maybe they were new or maybe it was the kinds of things that I keep an eye on, but I hadn't been there in a few months. So I was able to get those summaries. And so right now, Slack AI works on all of the data that gets put into your Slack instance.
Most of that data is unstructured data, and so it's conversations that you're having. We know that generative AI, large language models are really good with that kind of unstructured data. But we also know that search and AI and just computers in general do really, really well when we give them a little bit of structured data. And that's where automations in the platform come back in. And that's where we're really going to be able to enhance some of these AI capabilities.
So if you are adding context to all of these unstructured conversations with information back to your systems of record, that's the kind of thing that the AI is going to be able to ingest and get more information about. So if you need to know, hey, what's the latest with this customer, then we'll be able to grab that information. It will be inside of Slack. And then you can imagine, we're working on some ideas about this, we don't have any products or anything like that, but a whole bunch of...
Even our customers are building custom versions of this where they're using these large language models, they're accessing their various systems of record, and then they're pushing it all into Slack. So you might ask a custom AI bot that you build or someone else builds for you some information and then it goes out and spiders the various systems of record and then brings back a comprehensive result. Mike:
I will tell you that we use the summarize this. I tried it on a few Slack channels, and then I put the summaries into a canvas as a way to summarize a big channel internally for my team. It was interesting to see how it came back. It's also fun because it talked about me in the third person, and I just let it continue doing that because it's an ongoing Seinfeld joke.
But last question for you. I mean, I got a million. We could go for hours, I think. If a Salesforce admin has... Obviously they've got Salesforce. They probably have Slack, that's why they're still listening. What is some automation that they should think about to get started with? Jim Ray:
I think the easiest thing would probably be the ability to create or update a record. And this is for the low friction entry points. So obviously we're not trying to be the only interface to Salesforce, but Slack has a great mobile client. I know Salesforce does as well. But maybe you're out on the field and you just want to make it easy for folks that are out in the field to quickly update or create a new record and have that send the information. And you still want Salesforce to continue to be the system of record.
So an example, and this is an example that I showed during one of my demonstrations, I'd built out a Salesforce instance and I'd put a bunch of data in from a real estate management company. It's just one of the data back-ends that we have with a lot of sample data in it. And the idea was that you might be out on the road and you might want to quickly add a new property that you had gone to see or inspect or something like that. And so you could pull that up in Slack. You could pull that up.
The form is automatically formatted using our what we call Block Kit, which is really just our UI Kit, and you can create all of the fields that you need. So maybe there's half a dozen fields that you need just to get started on a new property. And then maybe when you get back to the office, you're going to fill it in. But maybe you're out there, you snap a quick pic and you want to add the address and a couple of quick information about it. That's something that you can do very quickly inside of Slack, quickly generate that, throw it in there, but then also have it update the rest of your team.
So it's not just storing the information in your system of record, but you're also posting that inside of a channel. So now your team knows like, "Oh, okay, Jim was out in the field. He added this quick record in here." And then maybe somebody else who's already in the office, they can add some more contextual information about it, or it can kick off a chat and people can start conversing about what we want to do with that and where to go from there.
So anytime that you have an instance where you want to keep the system of record, Salesforce in this case, you want to keep that updated, up to date, add new information, but then you also want to have a place where people are discussing that, and that could be a Slack channel, those two things are happening simultaneously, well, that's a great use case for a workflow. Mike:
I would agree. You mentioned my favorite thing, which is Block Kit Builder. So I'm going to put you on the spot. Promise me you'll come back on and we'll do an episode on Block Kit Builder. Jim Ray:
I would love to. Block Kit Builder is fantastic. Mike:
Oh my God, I have so much fun with Block Kit Builder. You have no idea. Jim Ray:
Fantastic. Mike:
I have a million questions too. Jim Ray:
Excellent. Mike:
When you said that, I lit up and thought, oh, I have to do a whole episode on Block Kit Builder. Jim Ray:
Well, schedule me up. I'd love to talk about it. Mike:
l will. Thanks so much for coming on the pod, Jim. This was great. I've always been excited for Slack and just the cool stuff we can do, especially when it doesn't require code. The Block Kit Builder episode is going to be fun because it's both code and not code. Jim Ray:
Absolutely. Mike:
So we'll tease that out. Jim Ray:
Thanks so much, Mike. I really appreciate it. It was great getting to talk to the audience. Mike:
Am I right? How much fun is automations with Slack? Also, I might've gotten a little too giddy about Block Kit Builder, and I promise you that I'm already working on my schedule to get Jim back to talk about Block Kit Builder for Slack. But he gave me a ton of ideas for automations, including creating canvases and just the management of information. This was such a fun episode. I hope you enjoyed listening to it. And if you did, can you do me a favor?
Maybe you're heading to a community user group with other Salesforce admins, or you're going to dinner, or you've got a large social following, just click the dots there in the podcast app and choose share episode. And when you do, you can text it to a friend or you can post the social. And then that way you help spread the word and spread all this really cool stuff that we're learning how to do without code.
Now, if you're looking for more great resources, of course, everything that you need is at admin.salesforce.com, including the transcript of the show. And of course, you can join the conversation in the Trailblazer Community. There's a lot of great questions being asked there. A lot of admins helping other admins with stuff. And that's in the Trailblazer Community, in the Admin Trailblazer Group.
So I'll include all the links to those in the show notes, which is on admin.salesforce.com. And until then, I'll see you in the cloud.
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Thu, 21 March 2024
Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Lisa Tulchin, Senior Curriculum Developer at Salesforce. Join us as we chat about choosing the learning path that fits your learning style and strategies from training your users. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Lisa Tulchin. Choose a learning path that matches your learning style Lisa works on the Trailhead Academy Team, and I wanted to hear her take on a common question I get asked: “Should I work through Trailhead on my own or do I need to sign up for a class with Trailhead Academy?” For Lisa, deciding between self-paced or instructor-led learning is going to depend on knowing yourself and what you need. What’s worked for you in the past? And when have you struggled to learn something? “You have to stop and have an honest talk with yourself,” she says. Some people like to work through a checklist of goals, and other folks need a bit more guidance. It’s important to remember that it doesn’t have to be a binary choice. You can go for credentials, but you can also look at the recommended badges and trails for them to give yourself some guidance. And Trailhead Academy is always an option for when you get stuck. Learning is a process, and most people are going to succeed by trying different approaches and seeing what works. Facing fear and finding community makes learning easier When you’re struggling to learn something new, you should be aware that fear might be holding you back. “Kids are a lot more comfortable making mistakes than we are as adults,” Lisa says, “saying, ‘I don’t know,’ is one of the scariest things for adults to admit.” That’s why she encourages tapping into the Salesforce community, whether that’s online or through your local user group. You might hear someone else ask the same questions that are on your mind and, suddenly, you’re not alone. Or you might even find yourself able to answer someone else’s question. Finding peers makes the whole learning process easier. Best practices for training your users As an experienced instructor, Lisa has some great tips for how to overcome resistance and train your users. Change is hard and, again, fear might be a factor. She recommends starting off by “hugging the elephant” and explaining that, yes, this new process is tricky but it will make your life easier. Lisa also shares some best practices for how to write an effective training. For starters, there’s the 80/20 Rule. In other words, your training should focus on the 80% of knowledge they need to do their job, not the 20% that would be nice for them to know. Additionally, you can make something easier to learn by breaking it down into manageable tasks. Our brains remember things in 5-7 chunks at a time (for example, phone numbers or ZIP codes). If you’re writing out a task and the individual steps are getting into the double digits, you might want to break it down differently to make it easier to remember. This episode has a bunch more great tips for how to keep up with your own learning and take advantage of the resources out there from Salesforce, so be sure to take a listen. And don’t forget to subscribe for more from the Salesforce Admins Podcast. Podcast swag Learn more Admin Trailblazers Group Social Full show transcript Mike Gerholdt:
This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we were talking to Lisa Tulchin about learning and how you can be a better learner, and also, as a Salesforce admin, how you can help teach and educate and drive user adoption with your user. I've known Lisa for over a decade now. She's a senior curriculum developer at Trailhead. She's done both in-person and self-paced learning. She's created both.
So I feel like she's a real expert on this, and we cover a lot because I had a lot of great conversations at TrailblazerDX about learning, and I know admins are always learning, so that's why I wanted to cover that. Now, before we get into the episode, I want to be sure that you're following the Salesforce Admins Podcast on iTunes or Spotify, wherever you get your podcasts. That way, when a new episode drops like this one, and it's amazing on learning on Thursday mornings, it's immediately on your phone. So be sure you're following that, and then a new episode will drop. So with that, let's get to, this is such a fun episode, let's get to Lisa Tulchin. So, Lisa, welcome to the podcast. Lisa Tulchin:
Thanks. It's such a privilege to be here. Mike Gerholdt:
Well, we've known each other for a while, but I am unleashing you to the Salesforce ecosystem because I feel like I've secretly held this decade of awesomeness of knowing you and talking about learning. That's what we're going to talk about today, in case you didn't listen in the intro. But Lisa, let's level set because I've had the privilege of working with you and seeing you teach, and create, and do, and that's why I wanted to have you on the podcast. But let's start with what you do at Salesforce and how you got here. Lisa Tulchin:
I am a senior curriculum developer, which means I help write content for the product education team. I have been focusing almost exclusively on instructor-led training. So when you sign up through Trailhead Academy or one of the bootcamps before an event to be in a live or virtual classroom with the person. So that's what I have been focusing on, but the group has expanded over the past year, and I will no longer be focusing just on that type of content. Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah. And so if you think about it, what's great about Salesforce is we have lots of different methods of learning. Lisa Tulchin:
Indeed. Mike Gerholdt:
And to hover around, I've seen you do instructor-led training and we have that. We also have Trailhead, or what'd you call it? Self-paced learning. Lisa Tulchin:
Yeah, so Trailhead is one example of self-paced, and I have in my past at Salesforce as a full-time employee, because I've been here three years, I have actually written a few trails. I may start writing them again. We are still figuring out exactly the roles, but that's just one example of what we'd like to say self-paced. And self-paced really means that you, as an individual, go to the resource and, I guess, take it in, read it, test it on your own timing. The difference with if you're in a classroom, you're following the agenda with the instructor, and you have to do things in a certain order, in a certain pace. But self-paced, and Trailhead is one example. Slack, and Tableau, or other resources that have their own training repositories that you can also take in at your own timing. So that's why we use the term self-paced. Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, no, it makes sense. Otherwise, I was just going to call it instructor-led and not instructor-led. Lisa Tulchin:
Exactly. Mike Gerholdt:
Like hot dog, not hot dog, right? Lisa Tulchin:
Exactly. Mike Gerholdt:
Okay, so I feel like here is the question everybody thinks I'm going to ask, and I'm not because everybody would ask, Okay, Lisa, well, then which is better, instructor-led or self-paced? And I'm not going to ask you that question because I think it's the wrong question to ask. I think what the right question to ask is how, as a Salesforce administrator getting into the ecosystem, do I figure out if in-person or self-paced learning is best for me? Lisa Tulchin:
I like that question a lot. Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, that's why I'm asking it. Lisa Tulchin:
Yeah, no, I really like that question a lot. The hardest thing with radio, of course, is that people can't see me thinking literally when I think, I always think my face shows the wheels turning, but I have to remind myself that you all can't see that. So I'm thinking through- Mike Gerholdt:
You're envisioning. Lisa Tulchin:
Visualize Lisa looking away, and the [inaudible 00:05:01] the hamster in her brain is running on that wheel. Mike Gerholdt:
It's smoking. Lisa Tulchin:
Yeah, exactly. I think you have to stop and have an honest talk with yourself. What have you found for yourself in the past? We're all adults going into this scenario for the most part, and I'd like to think that by the time we get to that stage, we understand a little bit about ourselves and how we take information in. So for example, if you're just starting out in the ecosystem, not even for example, I'd say the first thing you should do if you haven't already is actually go to trailhead.com and sign up for an account.
It's free to do that, and you automatically then have an enormous number of resources at your fingertip just through that site. There is Trailhead, the slightly gamified, self-paced learning that's available to you for Trailhead resources. There's also Trailhead Academy, which are the classes. But there also is the community, and so your peers. So I think that's one way that you can explore and test out waters. If you're thinking to yourself, I think I could do this on my own. Well, if you log in and you see how you feel after taking a couple of what they call modules, or trails, or badges, then that may be a sign that you're good to go. But if you're doing this and you're thinking I need a little structure, then you immediately do have resources because you can sign up for ILT, but you also have the community.
So you can go there, maybe find a local user group through that site, and ask questions of other people there. So I think that's the first thing is have an honest talk with yourself. See if you can figure out for yourself what your learning style is. I personally often need that instructor. I need that person in the room either live or virtually helping talk me through things, honestly, helping me keep focused on what I'm actually doing. There are other resources there. I sometimes need a map.
I like to have a map and being able to think. I also need to be goal-oriented. So for me, credentials were |
