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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Direct download: How_Do_I_Know_What_My_Learning_Style_Is_.mp3
Category: general
-- posted at: 1:00am PDT
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Thu, 14 March 2024
Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Evan Ponter, Salesforce Consultant and Certified Application Architect. Join us as we chat about all things reporting from his breakout session at TDX. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Evan Ponter. A deep dive into Salesforce reporting We last spoke to Evan back in 2019. Since then, he’s struck out on his own as a Salesforce Consultant, where he helps businesses get everything they need out of Salesforce and their reporting. He recently did a 75-minute breakout session at TDX about everything reporting, so I wanted to bring him on the pod to tell us all about it. The 75-minute deep dive breakout session is a new thing we tried this year at TDX, and it was everything we hoped for and more. Evan was able to not only cover the basic concepts around reporting but also get into some very advanced concepts. Or, as he puts it, how to crawl, walk, run, and fly with Salesforce reporting. Crawling, walking, and running with Salesforce reporting When he talks about learning to crawl, Evan means that you need to understand that every report you build is meant to answer a question. As he puts it, “Start with the end in mind.” If you know what question you’re trying to answer, you can make decisions about what information you need to see and how you might want to display it. Next, Evan gets into how to walk and run with reports. To do that, you need to understand what’s happening in a custom report type as far as which records are being visualized and what other opportunities that opens up for you. Several out-of-the-box Salesforce features can help here, like cross filters, with or without filtering, and pulling in fields from other objects. Flying towards the future of Salesforce reporting You probably have the same question I did for Evan: if that’s walking and running with reports, then what does it mean to fly? The answer is Cartesian product data sets, which let you bring together sibling records from two different objects that are both related to a common parent without changing your org’s architecture. Finally, we get into what the future looks like for reporting. AI is only getting smarter but, as Evan points out, while we might be able to automate some aspects of reporting we’ll still need to understand how everything works if we want to get the results we’re after. As you can probably tell, this is a very in-depth episode, so be sure to take a listen (or check the transcript) for more on cross filters, with or without filters, Cartesian data sets, and everything about reporting. Podcast swag Learn more Admin Trailblazers Group Social Full show transcript Mike:
So it's all things reporting this week on the Salesforce Admins podcast. That's right, we're fresh off of TrailblazerDX. I think I've got through my jet lag and the time change, and I'm ready to start reporting. Evan Ponter last week, gave an amazing breakout session at TrailblazerDX, and I had to have him on the pod to talk about what he was talking to all of our wonderful trailblazers about, crawl, walk, run, fly, with reporting. That's right.
And speaking of TDX, I want to give a shout-out to Scott, Katie, and Bill, you three are amazing. Thank you for coming up saying hello, sharing your stories with me. You're an inspiration to me, you're why I do the podcast, and thank you to all the listeners that listen in. I got to meet with many of you last week at TrailblazerDX, it's why I love coming to events. And thank you for sharing your stories, I hope to continue inspire you, I hope to continue to make a podcast that is exactly the length of your dog walks and your commutes, because those are what I listen to podcasts for. Of course, we're getting into summer, so I got to start mowing the yard, but let's not talk about grass, this is a Salesforce podcast, and we're going to talk about reporting with Evan Ponter.
But of course, before we get into that, just a quick reminder, it is super easy to follow the Salesforce Admins podcast on whatever platform you're listening to me on. So on iTunes, all you got to do is click follow, and then, iTunes takes care of all the hard work for you. Downloads the newest episode, then Thursday morning, you wake up, you're ready to go. Hey, let's knock an episode out on our drive to work, or maybe we're walking the dog that morning, and iTunes will have already downloaded it for you. It's just that easy. Almost all of the podcast apps will do that. So just a reminder, makes it easy, makes it one less thing to worry about. So wanted to get that out of the way, but let's get to our amazing conversation with Evan Ponter. Welcome back to the podcast. Evan:
Thanks for having me. Mike:
I happened to look, it was 2019, which feels like a decade ago. Evan:
Yeah, absolutely. Mike:
I'll definitely link to that episode, because we talked about the ultimate guide to report types, but you're still on the reporting train ... Evan:
I am. Mike:
... and you gave an amazing session at TDX, and since a lot of people probably weren't there, let's talk about that. But what have you been up to since 2019? Evan:
Oh, well, in the midst of the pandemic, I decided it would be a great time to go out on my own and become an independent Salesforce consultant, through a lot of turmoil, but it ended up being a really incredible journey for me, and the next step in my career, to start to facilitate working for a handful of clients, supporting them as an external Salesforce consultant, being the expert they can lean on. And I've been able to take a lot of this reporting content and apply it to any project that I'm working on. Mike:
Yeah. To be honest with you, it's actually kind of brilliant, if you think about it, with all of the shifts in employment and labor that are going on post-pandemic, being an outsourced admin, developer, architect, however you view yourself, would benefit the company and you. Evan:
Yeah, no, it's been great. Mike:
But you still report, you still literally are my one of two go-to sources for reporting. I go to Jennifer for flows, I go to Evan for reporting. Yes, I go to Trailhead, but I feel like the way you teach me is so much better. So let's talk a little bit about ... Because you gave, at least in admin [inaudible 00:03:57], one of two 75-minute deep dive sessions, which was a little bit of an experiment for us. I think it went well, there's probably some stuff we could do better. But 75-minute session, because we heard from a lot of the feedback, like, 40 minutes is great, but I've sat through a ton of dry runs, and it feels like the start of a really good book, when they're getting to something, and they're like, oh, and if you have any questions, you're like, no, I want another 30 minutes. [inaudible 00:04:31] we did, so you did one on reporting, and I'll let you explain kind of the theory from there. Evan:
Sure, yeah, so over the years, I've given some variation of a report session, and I've had, actually, a couple of different topics. So I can do a 40-minute session, I've done a 20-minute session, and then, I've done a couple more advanced topics as separate sessions. But getting the chance to do a 75-minute hands-on deep dive allowed me to pull a majority from a few of the main topics, but really kind of package it all up together as a full hour of everything you would ever need to know about reporting if you only had an hour to learn it. So it was really cool to tackle some of those basic concepts, but also, get into some of the more advanced stuff. And to have everybody following along and doing the hands-on exercises, you really get to see, feel, and live that experience in the hour of time that we have together. Mike:
Yeah, and I think what was nice ... I mean, it can be intimidating, because a little bit of what we did with this is, it's not really a hands-on workshop, there's not really tables and that traditional learning experience, but people had the option to be what I call, fingers on keyboards, and doing something, or just following along, and I think that's a fun balance. But what I loved about how you walked into it is, there was no real worry about, oh, I better know all of my stuff or I'm going to not know where things are at, because your concept of, was it crawl, walk, run, fly? Evan:
Yeah. Mike:
Really helped walk people through the complexities of understanding reporting. Evan:
Absolutely, yeah. We start with some basic crawl concepts that you can apply to anything. So we built a deluxe report type together, and we learned how using customer report types really opens up a ton of flexibility. But then, as we get into the walking and running portions, we start to look at some more advanced stuff, so really taking that base concept and expanding it so you can tackle different requirements and get a little more complex. And then, the fly piece was really just truly on the frontier of what you can do in a customer port type, so it was really cool to share that with everybody. Mike:
Now, what part of ... So let's go back to crawling. Crawling, to me, feels like, okay, we're just going to use maybe some standard objects stuff that's there, existing architecture. What part of moving from crawling to walking is really ... How much do I need to consider when I'm building an application about the reports? Because I feel like, too often, we build tons of these cool applications, and we forget about what the report is going to look like. Evan:
Yeah, so in any project I've been on, you kind of have to start with the end in mind, and really think about what questions are you going to need to answer with this data, this process, this automation, whatever it is you're doing, so that, you at least have a concept of what a report might look like, so that you can help answer that question. And a lot of what I talk about in the crawl portion is just being able to really make it concrete, what data you're visualizing in a report.
And as we build our one deluxe custom report type for that object, you are tying together records from an object to results that you see in a report. And once that concept is tangible, and you can feel that and understand how that's working, then we can look at the walking and running concepts that really build on what's happening in a customer port type, as far as which records are being visualized, and what other opportunities that opens to use some of the other out-of-the-box features, like cross filters, and doing some more advanced filtering capabilities, and pulling in other fields from other objects. Mike:
So you mentioned exactly the thing I was going to talk to you about, which is cross filters, because when I start building reports, or even when I get back into reports, if I haven't done it for a while, it's like riding a bicycle. I feel like I start off and I need training wheels, and then it takes me two, three weeks to get to Tour de France-style bike skill. You just get on a bike, and you're down the road. Cross filters to me always trip me up. What is the most common thing you see when you talk to people, or when you work with companies, that trip people up with cross filters? Evan:
Yeah, so I mean, first of all, I do a whole 20-minute session on cross filters, so being able to incorporate that into this deep dive was really cool. It's one of those topics that I'm super passionate about because there are so many problems that can be solved with a cross filter, people just aren't quite aware of it, or exactly how to set them up. So the basic thing that it solves for is, you want a list of records, but you want to filter them based on the presence or absence of some child records. And what it allows you to do is, anytime you've had a situation where you're like, I have this report results, but I need to get rid of all the duplicates. I really just want to see a clean list of accounts that had opportunities closed last year. And you started with an accounts and opportunities report type, and you have all this opportunity data, but you really just care about seeing the account records.
What a cross filter allows you to do is run a report based on your report type that will show you account records, and then filter them based on those opportunities. So you get to filter based on objects and fields from that object that do not appear in your report results as columns. And it opens up a lot of possibilities, so for that example, you would say, show me all the accounts that have opportunities where the close date equals last year, and the stage is closed one, and you get a nice, clean, de-duplicated list of account records that meet that filter criteria.
Then, as far as what trips ... A lot of people can get that down once you sort of explain what's happening, what trips people up is when you start using the cross filter using the without operator. So it works 100% opposite of using the with operator. So when we said, show me accounts with opportunities that have a close date in the last year, that means each one of those account records in your results has at least one opportunity that meets that filter criteria. But when we switch that operator to without, it means every one of those accounts does not have any opportunities that meet that filter criteria. And that's where things get super interesting, as you add cross filter criteria that has the without operator, you're actually opening up your results. So you could say something along the lines of, show me accounts that don't have any open opportunities, and what you'll end up seeing is, there are accounts that have opportunities, but none of them are open, they're all closed one or closed loss status. Mike:
And that exactly is where it usually happens that I get tripped up, because ... Well, and I bet it's other admins, too. I think the frustration, you probably dealt with this, too, is, especially when you're helping build a report for somebody, there's an expectation in their head. They know there's usually one or two data points they're looking for that are kind of like a check. Like, is that report really working? And if they don't show up, then they question, well, what's wrong with Salesforce?
And well, it's not wrong, it's just, I think to your point, as you add without filter criteria, you're opening more things up. And the thing that always bugged me was, somebody would always pull up on the screen, well, I'm on this opportunity here, and it's got an opportunity, or I'm on this account here, and it's got this opportunity, and it fits all the criteria. And you're like, right, except you don't own that account, and we were doing my account. And you don't say that to be the IT guy, like, move, you say that to be like, no, we have to evaluate all of the criteria and figure out why something is or is not being omitted. Evan:
Exactly, and I think that's a key thing that I show in the presentation, is, if you are on the filters tab of a report, and you understand what the report type results are going to show you, you can read from top to bottom and understand exactly, every filter being applied to your data, which helps immensely when you're doing that troubleshooting of, oh, it doesn't show up because I have a my accounts filter right here. It's going to show you that. So I kind of walk people through that troubleshooting to make sure ... You have to be critical of every filter being applied to your data. Mike:
And not to mention permissions, whether or not they also have view permissions, because they could be looking at someone else's account, or ... Who knows, right? Evan:
Yeah. Yeah, security model definitely comes into play. Mike:
I feel like those are all the diagrams you kind of need to have handy when you're thinking about like, okay, I need to build this report. First, what's the architecture of my organization? Not necessarily the whole org, but pertaining to what I'm creating a report for. And then, two, what security is in place for the individual or individuals that I'm running this report for? Because I don't want to always be the run report as person. Evan:
Right, yeah, that would always show organization-wide data. So yeah, if you have a private model, thinking about that as you're building reports is really going to help you build one report that can support multiple people across different teams, and allow them to only see their own data, but it's also going to help to have an understanding of that as you're troubleshooting things. Because it's going to drive yourself crazy if you're helping two people that are on two different role hierarchy points, and they're running the same report, but they get different results, well, you must have some kind of private model in place, or some kind of my ownership filter on the records in that report. Mike:
Right. So I feel like that's walk, what are some of the things you cover in run? Evan:
Yeah, in the run portion, we're really looking at ... We do a little bit with cross filters, but we also take a look at those with or without style report types, and those can be tricky, as well. I kind of walked through, when you have the normal kind of [inaudible 00:16:13] report type words, every A record must have related B records. You're getting that inner join of the diagram that shows you all the child records that specified parents.
And that is still true for that with or without style report type, where it's, each A record may or may not have related B records. It's really two different data sets that get put together and dumped onto your screen. And they can be really useful for solving certain types of problems, but the key thing to think about with those is, those two data sets that are being put together for you, can be filtered independently, so it allows you to do things like, I want to summarize the total amount of opportunities for all the accounts that I own, and I want to just get a summary of the close dates in the last year.
So you'll have your opportunity records, and you'll have your account records, and because you can filter them independently, you could say, all right, show me all of my accounts, and then, only show me the opportunities that had a close date in the last year, and I want to summarize the amount from those records. What you'll end up getting is, all of your accounts are going to show up, and if they don't have opportunities that meet that criteria, the account still displays as a row, it just has a zero for that amount summary. And it really helps people keep tabs on things, like, they care about seeing all 50 their accounts, or whatever it is, but they just want a summary from a specific timeframe. And those with or without style custom report types are really the only reporting tool that allow to do something like that. Mike:
Those always trip me up, because it would or would not exclude the entire object. Evan:
Yeah, right, so if you filter an account out of your data, it's also going to take out all of its related records, so all of its related opportunities would also be excluded. But if you just filter based on an opportunity field, it doesn't exclude the account from showing up. Mike:
So the other thing that I've really wanted to always get into, I've never had the use case for, is report formulas, where you're building the formula to also be inside the report. Do you include that in your crawl, walk, run, fly? And if so, where do you stick that? Evan:
No, I mean, we don't get into that. I mean, there's so many different possibilities with setting up row level formulas- Mike:
Yeah, like, it's not going to the same with formulas for just everything, right? Evan:
... Yeah, right. But yeah, I mean, there's a whole bunch of interesting things you can do. One place where I really like using the row level formulas is when I'm reporting on objects that I cannot customize. So you weren't able to put a formula field on the object, but now that you can do a row level formula in a report, you kind of can at this point. So that's helpful for ... I mean, there's a ton of standard objects where you can't set up a formula field, so having that ability really opens up some possibilities for data points that were never possible before. Mike:
Yeah. [inaudible 00:19:42], let's tackle a little bit ... I know everybody's [inaudible 00:19:45], what is fly? What's fly? Evan:
Fly? Yes. Mike:
So the fun backstory behind this, when I saw your submission, I read it, I was like, okay, cool, Evan's man with the report stuff. Got it, he's going to be great. And then, you showed up to the dry run, and you're like, hey, I kind of added a whole other section, and I'm calling it fly. And I was like, oh, well, tell me more. Evan:
So for as long as I've been reporting in Salesforce, somebody always comes up and asks me a question. I have records in two sibling objects, can I bring them together in a single report without using a joint report? And I've always had to tell them, no, you can't do that. There's no way for me to relate these sibling records together because there's no direct relationship. They have a common parent, but there's no way to say that record one from this object matches up with record two from this other object.
So this fly portion of the presentation is what I call Cartesian product data sets. It's on the bleeding edge of what's possible in a custom report type. I've done some experiments, and I think people have been using this style of custom report type and not even realizing what's happening, but there's a handful of scenarios involving Salesforce standard objects that allow you to essentially cross multiply records from one object against records from another object. And it allows you to bring together those sibling records from two different objects that are both related to a common parent.
And it's really cool to create one of those data sets. So the example I always give is, if you have three records in one object, and three records in another object, your report results, without any other filters supplied, are going to show you nine results. It would be like, record 1A, record 1B, record 1C, record 2A, 2B, 2C, 3A, 3B, 3C. And it just puts together every possible combination of matching up those records from those two different objects. And if you take that, and then filter it for your needs, you can do things like, the example I give is, you have a bunch of customers, and they have contact roles on opportunities, and you're selling them a bunch of products, and you want to answer the question, which products are associated with which contacts?
Those are sibling records, they're both related to a single opportunity, but there's no direct relationship. And I walked through how you can build one of these Cartesian product data sets to cross multiply those records, then, you can put a visualization on a contact record page that shows you the products and the quantities that are associated with that contact, without having to change your architecture, without having to do any custom automation. You can just take advantage of this Cartesian product data set. Mike:
I think the key thing I heard there is, without changing your architecture. We're not building anything new that has to be constantly dealt with forever in time, because it's part of the report. So I didn't prompt you for this question, but I'm going to look ahead, because there's a lot of AI stuff out there, and I'm sure you hear about it, you see it. There's all kinds of plugins and stuff where you can throw spreadsheets at AI, and it'll analyze things, and it'll create pretty charts that, to be honest with you, aren't that hard in Google Docs or whatever, Microsoft, or whatever tool you use. Devil's advocate, five years from now, I don't know, 10 years from now, maybe, at some point, you're just going to be able to say, hey, Salesforce, run this report and make this output. How important is it now to learn this stuff, knowing that AI is going to take care of it? Evan:
I still think people are going to be troubleshooting their reports and their report results, the same, if not more than they do now, once AI is generating this stuff. Because especially at first, we're going to want to verify that we're getting the results we think we're getting, so that we don't cause ourselves to go into hallucinations with [inaudible 00:24:24] business. If the AI is not- Mike:
That's a good point. Evan:
... Yeah, if the AI is not giving us what we need, then we're not able to make a good business decision. So a lot of the skills I'm teaching are about troubleshooting, and they're about taking the actual root question that needs to be answered, and making sure we're answering that question. And it's less about order taking and just throwing together a bunch of columns on a report and creating a chart out of it. Sure, it might look nice, but what is it we're trying to get at there? And I think that level of scrutiny, if you can start to have those skills now, while you're building the reports manually, those will carry over into the AI world, but we'll be able to scrutinize and make sure that those AI-generated results are giving us the answers that we truly need. Mike:
Yeah. I think about it sometimes, when I have it do whatever kind of calculations, I'll double check it on a different spreadsheet. I always think back to, was it like, fourth or fifth grade, I think, we finally got to use calculators in math class. I am of that age that they used to make you suffer in math and write everything out. And the teacher's saying, well, yeah, but you can't just plug it in, you have to know what to expect the output to be, because the calculator will only do what you tell it to do. It doesn't know what the intent of the answer should be.
And I come back to that, I never thought I'd think about that again, and then, here, 100 years later, I'm out of school, and it's kind of like it's coming full circle of, yeah, you can ask this thing to do whatever, but if you don't know how to double check it, or you don't know what the expected answer should be, even for, I'm thinking through a lot of your examples, just running a report that returns a handful of rows, just so that you can check all of your filters, as opposed to creating a report that returns tens of thousands or whatever records, and you're like, oh, it's too much to check, is knowing what you're going to double check for. Evan:
Yeah. Yeah, having that sanity check, I mean, that's crucial, just to make sure that we're getting something valid. And I think trying to do that at the reporting stage is tough if that's the only place where you're doing the sanity check. And I think it's part of the process all the way through, you have to be making sure that your data architecture lines up with what you're trying to capture in the real world, and that the data you're putting into that structure actually aligns and is kept up to date, and has all the right validation rules in place, you're using automation to fill in the gaps, and auto calculate anything that you can.
And I think it's important to take advantage of what computers are good at, putting in sound calculations that you can guarantee the arithmetic is going to be correct. But then, we still need to rely on humans to be sanity checking all of this stuff, making sure that we're asking the right questions, and that the answers that we're trying to get out of the system are actually addressing that question. Mike:
Yep, I couldn't have said it any better. Evan, I appreciate you coming back on the podcast and towing the straight and narrow line for us on reporting, and helping us get all of the good data out that we hope our users are putting in. Evan:
Yeah, thanks so much for having me. This is always a blast, I'll come back anytime. Mike:
You bet. Thanks, sir. I bet you never thought you'd hear Cartesian report types on this podcast. I know I didn't. If I had to go back 10 years ago and say words that are going to be said on this podcast, Cartesian report types probably wouldn't be on my list of things. But that's the beauty of the incredible intelligence that everybody has in the community, and some of the really fun stuff that you're doing, like Evan, on report types, and just tapping into all of the features and functionality. I hope you can get a chance to dive into some of the stuff that he's doing, I think it's really cool.
Now, if you're doing something like listening to this on iTunes, do me a favor. Click the three dots in the upper right-hand corner. Okay, see, it says share episode? You can now text or post social, like, hey, I just listened to this episode with Evan about reporting, I think it's really cool. And you can share it with your community, share it with your friends, share it with fellow Salesforce admins. Maybe you have some people in your organization that are looking to up their reporting skills. Great idea to share the podcast with them.
And of course, if you're looking for more great resources, you can always find everything admin at admin.salesforce.com, including a transcript of the show, so that you can read through, follow along. Of course, be sure to join the conversation, the Admin Trailblazer group, that is in the Trailblazer community. Of course, the link for that, where is it? Show notes, absolutely, you know where it's at. All right, so until next week, I'll see you in the cloud.
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Thu, 7 March 2024
Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Gary Brandeleer, Senior Director of Product Management, Emerging Tech and Products at Salesforce. Join us for a roundtable discussion of everything Copilot: what it can do, how you can customize it, and what you need to do to get your org ready to get the most out of it. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Gary Brandeleer and Josh Birk. What is Einstein Copilot? So there’s a big announcement at TDX today about a cool new AI tool for Salesforce called Copliot. We thought it might be nice to hear all about it from the PM in charge, so we brought Gary Brandeleer on the pod to find out all about it. We’re also joined by Josh Birk, who has spent a lot of working with Copilot. Simply put, Copilot is an AI assistant that will help you get things done in Salesforce with natural language prompts. So you might ask it to give you a list of all your opportunities in the last month, or to summarize your most recent opportunity, and it will give you an answer in natural language. But we’re only scratching the surface of what it can do, and Gary was excited to tell us more about it. Customizing Copilot to get more done Salesforce has been working with AI for a long time, and you’ve probably seen it integrated into things like lead scoring and analytics. So what’s so special about Copilot? For one thing, natural language processing makes everything much more user-friendly. You can chain multiple actions into one request. For example, “summarize the most recent case and write an email about it.” If you think about how many clicks that would take to do on your own, it’s easy to see the potential of Copilot for your users. As for what you sort of actions you can request Copilot to do, there will be several options available out of the box. But because Gary knows how important Flows, Apex, and other customizations are to admins everywhere, you’ll be able leverage those skills to create your own custom actions, too. The possibilities are truly limitless. How to get your org ready for Copilot We’ve talked a fair amount on the pod about what you need to do to get ready for the AI tools coming to Salesforce. Data cleanup is more important than ever before. For custom actions to work well, you need to make sure that you’ve updated the descriptions on all of your flows so that Copilot knows what it’s looking at. In general, you need to take a look at your labeling and organization practices for all of your data. Finally, it’s important to remember that prompting AI is a skill that you need to practice. Both Josh and Gary recommend spending some time with a tool like ChatGPT seeing what kind of prompts work best. Try to get it to give you a recipe, or tell you a dad joke, and then see what kinds of questions get the results you’re looking for. There’s a lot more in this episode about how Copilot works, so be sure to take a listen and subscribe so you’ll never miss out. Podcast swag Learn more Admin Trailblazers Group Social Full Transcript Mike Gerholdt:
This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we are talking with Gary Brandeleer about Einstein Copilot. Now, it's March 7th if you're listening to this, the day this podcast drops, which I'm sure you are, you could be at TDX. Or not. So this is why I'm bringing this to you because we're talking about Copilot at Trailblazer DX and wanted to bring you a little bit of a conversation that myself and my fellow evangelist, Josh Birk had with Gary Brandeleer on some of the challenges and features of Copilot, the direction that they're going to go in terms of building it, some of the really cool capabilities of it. It's just a really fun discussion. I appreciate Josh jumping in, helping me out with this podcast. He really had an opportunity to get hands-on with Copilot at this point, so he really helped steer the conversation. I hope you find it intriguing. I did.
Now, of course, if you love what you are listening to, can you do me a favor and just make sure you're following the Salesforce Admins Podcast? So if you're listening to this episode and you like what you hear, listen to a couple more. Hit that follow button on iTunes or in Spotify or iHeartRadio. Because then every time a new episode comes out, it will drop right on your phone. But enough of me, let's get to the conversation we had with Gary and Josh about Copilot.
So Josh and Gary, welcome to the podcast. Gary Brandeleer:
Thank you. Josh Birk:
Thanks for having us, man. Mike Gerholdt:
Good. Well, wanted to have a little bit of a round table discussion because Copilot is such a very cool product that we're launching actually today because today is the first day of TDX if you're listening to this when the podcast comes out. And I know you are because you downloaded it on your phone right away, just like I said in the intro to do. But we've got Gary on, and I brought Josh on, a familiar voice from those that listen to the Admin Podcast because Josh has actually been a little bit more hands on with Copilot than I have. So Gary, let's kick off with you. How did you get started at Salesforce and what do you do? Gary Brandeleer:
So amazingly enough, I started on the Salesforce field service product as a solution engineer, and then I moved to the US. So obviously I'm from Belgium. I cannot get rid of this accent. Mike Gerholdt:
I thought it was a southern accent. It sounds like Tennessee to me. Gary Brandeleer:
Exactly. It's directly from there. Mike Gerholdt:
Is it? Okay, the mountains. Gary Brandeleer:
And so yeah, in San Francisco now it's been six years or a bit more. And so I worked as a product manager on Salesforce Field Service. Then I moved to the emerging tech team where we worked on blockchain and Web3 related aspects. And then of course when GPT happened, we got asked to work very fast on that technology. And so that's what I've been doing now for a couple of months, if not already a year. Mike Gerholdt:
Great. And Josh, we know your history. You created Trailhead, you've done a lot of stuff. You've been hands-on with Copilot. So I'll let you kick off the discussion with Gary. Josh Birk:
Yeah. Now, first of all, I'm shy about the whole created Trailhead thing. Mike Gerholdt:
I'm not. Josh Birk:
I know. A lot of people aren't. I had a lot to do with the prototype and getting involved in the first year. But Trailhead took a village for sure. But anyway, moving on from that. Gary, it's good to talk to you again. Gary Brandeleer:
Good to talk to you. Josh Birk:
Well, let's start at the very basics, and I'm going to ask you a very basic question, but I want to get an answer that's pointed to those nouns you just used like blockchain. Pretend I don't know anything about that. So slow walk me through what exactly is Copilot? Gary Brandeleer:
So Copilot is really an AI assistant that's going to help you to do your tasks inside Salesforce. And I think that the easiest way to understand this is simply to tell you what you can ask it essentially. And so something you could ask to your Copilot is, "Can you give me list of the opportunities I have and what's the total amount?" And you use natural language and suddenly you have a Copilot AI assistant that is helping you at getting the answer. It's giving you the answer in the form of text or other forms. And that's pretty much it. It's really helping you to be more proactive using Salesforce data. And of course it can use also external data through data cloud and so on. Josh Birk:
Right. I want to follow up a little bit on that conversational model, but kind of a historical question because as you mentioned, GPT happened, when did Salesforce first started working with technologies like this? And then what has the last six to eight months been like for you? Gary Brandeleer:
I think it's a little bit tricky to answer because we started to work on AI very long ago. So GPT are just one of the many, many technologies out there that we can use under the banner of artificial intelligence. So I would say Salesforce started long ago on artificial intelligence in general. And you can see that, for example, from in Sales Cloud, you have lead scoring, we have also analytics that can use different algorithm and so on. So we had a lot of already of AI intelligence, I would say, in our product.
But then what happened really is that when we saw the power of what LLM could do, especially around analyzing texts, giving you answers in the natural language or using natural language, we were thinking of, okay, now how can we use that on Salesforce? And I think really we started a bit earlier than when it became very public that LLM we are going to change everything. If you look at our Salesforce AI research team, they have been working on LLMs for quite a while and they had already a lot of patents and white paper about it.
But I think it's accelerated once the public have seen how much value could LLM provide. And so that accelerated, I would say, starting January of last year. And since then it's been very intense, I would say. And the reason why is first of all, shipping a product very fast is not easy. Shipping an AI product very fast is even harder. And the story is even getting harder, as you look at the AI space right now, it's evolving like crazy. Every week I have something that is blowing my mind. I'm reading an article and I'm like, "Wow. That is feasible now? That's mind blowing." So keeping the rhythm, keeping yourself informed about what's feasible and then making sure that we can deliver as much value as possible to our customers using the latest and greatest is really, really a big challenge. But it has been super fun so far. Josh Birk:
Yeah, it is. And I can sympathize with you because I have made statements to the public about AI, which were then disproven about three weeks later. It can be so hard to say, "This is exactly what the feature set it's going to be like." It has been a fascinating journey kind of interacting with them. Pretend I'm somebody who has heard about ChatGPT, is kind of familiar with the idea of a bot, but probably kind of in a more traditional sense of a bot. And when I hear we can do things like ask Copilot for the last three leads that I worked on or something like that, I might also think, well, that sounds like a dashboard or a report or a list view or aspects of the UI we're already familiar with. What novelty, what innovation is Copilot bringing to the user interface that's giving this power? What is the LLM and IN adding to it? Gary Brandeleer:
I think there is two answers to that topic. One is if you look at LLMs, generally speaking, they're very good at managing text, summarizing, generating content, and so on. The second part, and that's more Copilot related, is that Copilot is able to chain what we call Copilot actions, which is really basically stuff it can do. I would say another way to position this is to say that Copilot will have a brain, and we call that the planner. That's the technical term so far.
But basically that brain will select different actions based on what you are asking the Copilot. And so what would happen is that you could say, yeah, if I want to find the latest scales, I can do that by going on a list view, for example, so on and indeed you could ask Copilot, "Hey, find the latest case," it will find it for you. And then you could ask this follow-up question of, "Hey, summarize it." And so it's going to summarize it for you.
What's much better is to say, "Hey, summarize the latest case." And in that scenario, the Copilot will combine different actions. It'll find dynamically which actions it need to combine to answer the requests. And so then you unlock a lot of value and a lot of different use cases simply because now the Copilot is able to chain the different actions together and give you an output that will be relevant for your request. And so I think more and more as it evolved and as we get user feedback, you will see that people will say, "Oh, wait a minute, I can do that with clicks, but now I could have done this with 10 clicks or I can just ask one single sentence to Copilot and the 10 clicks [inaudible 00:09:52] for me." Josh Birk:
Right. Yeah. And I want to dig into actions a little bit more, but let me give you a theoretical based on what you just said. With Copilot, I could ask one question, which is, "Provide the three most recent open case leads I have." And then I could say, "Summarize those based on the amount of active cases that they have." And then I could say, "Okay. For that lead that has the most active cases, could you give me an email version of the summary that I could send to my manager?" And that's three prompts and I would get that actionable piece of content, right? Gary Brandeleer:
That's exactly correct. And so you could even go as far as, I would simplify a little bit, but I would say you could go as far as saying, "Hey, summarize this lead or summarize this case and write an email about it." And at that stage you will not see the summary first. You'll basically get as an output directly the email, even though the Copilot has executed two or three actions to get to that output. Josh Birk:
Got it. Now, first of all, I absolutely love the definition of an action as stuff that it can do because I feel like that boils it down so wonderfully. But let's bring that up another level. What is powering an action? What's the technology behind it and what is Salesforce providing out of the box with that? Gary Brandeleer:
That's extremely important to flag it. And there is differences of course between what we ship. So as Salesforce, we will ship standard Copilot action or Copilot standard actions. And an example of that would be query CRM, draft and revise emails, summarize records. And these are really standard actions that are coming with Copilot. But then what we know is that many, many of our customers still love to configure, customize Salesforce. We also know that a lot of Salesforce admin tailor flows, apex and so on. So we are like, "Okay, wait a minute, because we need to be sure that the Copilot can be configurable, so how can we do that?"
And so we introduced the concept of Copilot custom action, and you can then create these custom actions and select either invocable actions, either auto launch through so far, either prompt template. And that's unlocking a lot of value because you can then cover a lot of use cases. On top of this, I would say, it's introducing one aspect that people will have to learn, which is you might already have an auto launch tool, or you might have already an invocable action that you are thinking of, "Hey, wait a minute, if I set up that in Copilot, this is going to be a super cool use case that Copilot will be able to do for my user."
But what is very important is to describe very well what the action is doing. And that's, I think, a new pattern that is popping up is that we are not very good at describing. Every time I'm creating a flow, I'm like, "Hey, I'm creating the flow. I'm naming it." And then the description, I'm just skipping it because I was like, "Nobody's going to read the description of the flow anyway." And that's just the way I'm doing it. Maybe some people out there are more disciplined than me.
But now it's extremely important because there is actually something that's going to read that description and it's going to be the LLM. So the LLM will only know if it needs to pick up this action or not based on the description you have for that custom action. And so to put that a bit more in context, it would be, I have a flow that is allowing me to, let's say, create a case. Then I would've to create the custom action, select that flow, and then I would've to describe, okay, this action is allowing you to create a case which is a Salesforce object used in the context of call center. And now the LLM will be, "Okay, if there is a call center agent asking me about creating a case, I will use this action. That's something I can do that has been well described to me." Josh Birk:
Yeah. First of all, I love that acknowledgement of human behavior. My father is a surgeon and he got flagged by an administrator because none of his notes had his signature on it. And his response was, "They're my notes. They're for me." I know I wrote them, they're my notes. Why are you bugging me about my signature? And I think a lot of people think, well, if I put the label in and it's human friendly enough and most of the people are going to be seeing it are the people who are using it, the description is just sort of an add-on. But first of all, I want to hang a lantern on something. We've said LLM as an abbreviation a few times. It's large language model. Gary Brandeleer:
That's correct. Josh Birk:
Which is basically... I've heard it described, I mean, I kind of have it in my head as it's the very specific kind of data that the AI is looking at, right? Gary Brandeleer:
I would put it another way, I like to simplify stuff a lot. And this is an oversimplification. Josh Birk:
Okay. Gary Brandeleer:
And it's probably a very, very, very simplified version. But for me it's more like what the LLM can do, at least in our context right now. And for math, I was going to use a calculator and I'm going to do one plus one equals two, which I can prove now that I'm very good at math. But the second thing here was for text, I could not really use anything. And now I have these LLMs that are able to ingest a lot of texts, generate a lot of content and so on. And that's what I think is important. How it's built, we can go very technical. But basically neural network and so on and so on. So I mean, we could create a full podcast just on that if you want, but it's more important to know what the use of it and the use of it is. Now everything you are doing with text can be much more automated or I would say much more augmented in some ways. Josh Birk:
It's very good that this is a podcast format because it means we don't even have the idea of adding in the formulas that make this thing work that made my eyes bleed the first time I saw them. So I think that's an excellent description. And I think it also, thinking as terms of a calculator of AI and hallucination, some of the ways we phrase these things kind of makes it sound like they're almost a thinking sort of thing, but they're really more of a calculating kind of thing. And I wanted to say that to kind of emphasize your importance on, well, why do you need a really well fleshed out description? Because you're talking to a calculator that needs as much, it needs all of the numbers you would put into the calculator in the first place. Gary Brandeleer:
That's correct. And on top of that, I would say the basics behind is that basically when you ask a request to a large language model or LLM, each word is basically a statistic. Meaning it's going to think of, "Hey, I'm going to speak about the cat, and the two words are going to come based on statistics." So it looks to us like it's complete magic and you have nearly someone speaking to you. At the end of the day, it's just statistic behind the scene that are popping up the right word and that's important to keep in mind, essentially. Josh Birk:
Got it. So I can leverage my existing flow skills. I can even, to a certain extent... When we talk about invocable flows and headless flows, are you seeing flows that are kind of like, if I make my descriptions really good, they can pretty much serve as actions or what's your recommendation there that I kind of take an existing flow tailored for Copilot and then make sure the descriptions are a nice hefty paragraph? Gary Brandeleer:
My recommendation there would be think really about the different strengths of Copilot and of LLMs in general. So if you have an existing flow that is already working and you would think of this would be worked for the Copilot to be able to call it whenever a user is requesting. Then, indeed, the only thing you need to do really is to create your custom action, describe it very well, describe the input, describe the output, and that's pretty much it.
Now that I think is a little bit too much of a dream, it'll not work as easy as that. What I mean by this is that now you might have, let's say 10, 15 actions that you have assigned to your Copilot. It might be that you add one more action and now your description was pretty bad. So this time for some reason, it was late on a Friday, you wanted to close your computer fast and you created very bad description.
If your description is very bad, it might be that suddenly, even though your first actions were all working fine, that now when you ask some requests to the Copilot, the Copilot will always select that action with the bad description simply because it's a description that is so bad that it's kind of overrule all the others. So I think what's important really is that testing of utterances, which is another word for simply a request from users. And so every time you create a new action is think about the value. Is there a real value to add that in a Copilot, yes or no? Is that using the power of LLMs? So content generation, summarization. In some ways text analysis or I would go for data analysis even though it's not exactly right. But think about that, the strength of the LLMs themselves, and then think about, wait, is that going to be overlapping with other actions I have already?
And the last piece is that going to be used and chained with other actions? And that I think is a very important point is back to that question of, if you ask it to summarize the data scales, will it use different actions, chain them? And the answer is yes. If you create a new custom action, is there something super cool you could do by thinking of, hey, wait a minute now I could create this flow. It's going to retrieve some data, for example, and then it's going to use the existing summarize action to summarize something, a customer record or something like this. So really that chaining of action can be also a good reason for why or why not taking an existing flow and creating that as a custom action or using that as a custom action. Josh Birk:
Got it. Now Copilot's going to arrive out of the box. It's going to have some standard actions. We've talked about actions. What else does an admin need to know day one if Copilot's enabled? What other kind of setup tips and steps should they know they should be working towards to get it up and running in an org? Gary Brandeleer:
A couple of things. One, there is one Copilot for your employee in that Salesforce org. So generally speaking, you will have one single Copilot so far for all your employees in your Salesforce org. Second, you can, of course, control the access and the access to the Copilot is done via permission sets. The data access, you don't have to change much. It will respect, of course, the system we have for years now. Which basically if you have a profile and you don't have CRED access on some objects or whatever else, we will not of course certainly overrule that because you are asking to Copilot to update an opportunity where you don't have access, for example. Josh Birk:
Gotcha. Gary Brandeleer:
So the beauty there is really activate the Copilot, give the perm sets to the right users so that they can use Copilot. And that's pretty much it. And that's using the out of the box standard actions. After that, once you see and get feedback from your users, I think then think about what kind of custom actions you could add, what other use case you could cover, but don't go too fast. Like, little by little. New technology, people need to get used to it. I think there is a big, big part of expectation as well. People expect a lot from AI. The reality is that at first it'll do a few things pretty good for you and your users will tell you, "Well, I keep asking to the Copilot, 'What is the weather in San Francisco?' And it doesn't reply." And I'm like, "Okay, that might be a custom action. I'm not sure you should really do that in Salesforce." But that, I think, is important is look at what kind of requests your users are requesting, and from there you will find cool use case that you can customize and configure. Josh Birk:
Now- Mike Gerholdt:
Josh, I have a little bit of a specific follow-up question before you go. Josh Birk:
Oh, go go. Yeah. Mike Gerholdt:
Because Gary, a lot of the podcasts that we've been doing and a lot of articles around getting ready for AI have really focused on data cleanup, and we actually had quite a few customers at Dreamforce talk about data cleanup in terms of prepping for AI, which is a best practice for a Salesforce admin anyway. It should be in their essential habits. What I'm also hearing, and this makes my heart sing, is that you now have a reason to have a systematic plan to go through and either describe or clean up your descriptions on key things like flows, custom objects. I'm hearing this is a priority, right? Gary Brandeleer:
I think it is, at least for the flows you want the Copilot to use once you set up your custom action. But yeah, it's becoming much more important. And data quality has always been super important. I think what's new is, I would nearly say metadata quality is also super important now. So not only if you look at an opportunity is the opportunity description well described is the amount at the right level and things like this. So the data quality itself, but then did you describe really well what that flow on the opportunity object was doing? Keeping in mind that if you, for example, go in one of your existing flow and you add descriptions there or edit the descriptions there, once you will select that flow as a Copilot custom action, we will of course copy over all the description from your flow. So I would say best practices would be, hey, get the source cleaned up so that whenever you are using it in Copilot, you don't even have to change the description. You just take the one that were set in your flow essentially. Mike Gerholdt:
Gotcha. Josh Birk:
How does things like duplicate fields and records and other aspects of unclean data, can that impact how well... Is it on the same level as what we usually see with that kind of turn? Or can Copilot be even more affected by that kind of thing? Gary Brandeleer:
I would take the example of summarization. If you try to summarize an opportunity where many of the fields are completely blank, nothing has been really changed and there is not even a good naming convention of your opportunity or whatever else. You can do whatever you want, but there will be no magic. The summary will be looking pretty bad simply because it's trying to summarize data that is pretty bad. So that's one. When it comes to identifying records, I would think more about it as a search mechanism where, generally speaking, if you have opportunity names that are a bit weird, as long as you search for the right name, the Copilot will be able to find them the same way you would be able to search them.
But of course, if you have, for example, let's go a bit more to a practical example. If you say, okay, I have a deal called Acme, but now you have three deals actually called Acme. If you search for it, you'll find three records. If you ask a Copilot to update Acme and you have three opportunities named exactly the same way, then at that stage, Copilot will try to ask you more information to find the right record. So it'll probably ask you, "Which record are you talking about? Because now there is three of them that have exactly the same name, so which one do you really want me to update?" So that's what you can expect. So I think a search mechanism would be more like we show you the result and then you figure it out. With the Copilot, it's more like, hey, we get some results, and then we ask you more questions to know that we are acting on the right record. Josh Birk:
Which speaks right back to the power of that conversational model. Which is really hard, I feel, to know until you experience it. One final question for me, where can people learn more both at TDX since the magic of time travel we'll be talking to people sharing TDX when this launches. But also beyond TDX, what are some of the best resources? Gary Brandeleer:
So we are working on a couple of trails that will be published by TDX. We are also, of course, updating our websites with a lot of data there. And then I would say release notes are still your best friends. We will make sure that they're as clear as possible. But I think these are a couple of places where to find this. And then we have, I think, multiple communities as well that are set up for AI and we should reuse just these to have our discussions about Copilot. So that's what we'll have by that time. Josh Birk:
Nice. Mike Gerholdt:
I have a feeling this is going to be on everybody's lips when they're at TDX and all of these groups thereafter. Gary Brandeleer:
I have a feeling as well that this will be very much discussed. Josh Birk:
Yeah. And the hand things right back off to you, Mike, I have a feelings will probably not be your last AI centric episode. Mike Gerholdt:
No, there is no such thing. We're just getting started. I am excited to do an entire presentation on best practices for updating your description fields, though. Gary Brandeleer:
Yep. Mike Gerholdt:
I know it sounds insanely boring talking about how white rice is, but man, let me tell you, it sounds like that is going to be key. Gary Brandeleer:
It's going to be key. I can tell you [inaudible 00:29:20]. Mike Gerholdt:
It's all the little thousand paper cuts. Gary Brandeleer:
Yes, yes. And we even ourself, we struggle with it honestly by building this product. We are like, every time we build a standard action, we also need to describe it correctly. And there was a lot of back and forth on how to name it, how to describe it, and so on. So that has been quite a challenge, I would say. Mike Gerholdt:
Well, to echo back to an episode that I published in February with Marissa Scalercio, who is a customer that was on the podcast talking about her pilot use of Prompt Builder. One thing I asked her, and I think it reigns true for this episode, regardless of what we're talking about in terms of AI for Salesforce, her advice was, "I can't tell you how much I wish my past self would tell my future self to start using AI now. Just any AI. Because asking it questions, doing things."
Josh, you probably follow me on Instagram. I'm spitting out a whole bunch of AI generated images just because I find it's interesting what you ask AI and what it comes back and then getting better at learning how to ask questions and learning how to, not train the model, but think through, oh, this is literally what I asked for, but in my head it was something different. And I will echo back to her advice because I think it reigns true. Even getting ready for Copilot, you're going to have to get better at asking questions and get better at cleaning your data up. Gary Brandeleer:
That's correct. Josh Birk:
And there's no reason this magic of a conversational UI, which is so hard to describe in any way other than just saying, "Do it." There's no reason to wait. You don't have to wait for Copilot access or anything like that. Go to Bard and ask it to give you dad jokes. Jump in and just get that conversation flowing just to feel the fact that, oh, like Gary was saying, I thought it'd be three prompts. It actually could be two if you know how to ask the right questions. Gary Brandeleer:
That's very involved, I would say- Mike Gerholdt:
Gary, thanks so much for coming on the podcast, and I'm sure people... I have a feeling you're going to be a little bit popular at Trailblazer DX. Gary Brandeleer:
It might be. I will be there hopefully being able to answer as many questions as possible from the customers. And if not, we'll try to find a way to get maybe a Copilot answering the questions. So we'll see. Mike Gerholdt:
There you go. Oh, look at that. Gary Brandeleer:
We will see. Mike Gerholdt:
Very meta answer of you. Josh Birk:
One final question, Gary. Are you a coffee person? Gary Brandeleer:
Actually, so amazingly enough, yes, but I stopped because I was not sleeping well because I was drinking too much coffee. So now I'm a tea person, which is much more boring. Mike Gerholdt:
That's the best part of coffee. Gary Brandeleer:
Yeah, kind of. Mike Gerholdt:
You quit because of the best part. Gary Brandeleer:
Kind of in the morning, yes. But in the evening when you're in your bed and trying to get asleep and you're still thinking about all the stuff you could do and so on, and you can't just go to sleep, it's just a little annoying. So after a while I was like, "Okay, let's switch to tea." But I must say I'm really missing a good coffee cup, especially a bold espresso. That would be the best. But for now, this month is coffee free for me. Mike Gerholdt:
So it was a fun conversation. Boy, there's a lot to pick up. A lot of really cool features coming, I feel, in the next few years with all of the AI possibilities and some of the stuff that's going on with the ability to automate things and ask conversations, and talk with our data. Isn't that something we've been talking about for a while?
So if you enjoyed this episode at the beginning, I asked you to hit follow. Hey, maybe share it with somebody. You got a fellow person on your team that's looking to expand their admin skills or learn more about Einstein Copilot or the plethora of information that we cover on this podcast. All you got to do is just really tap the three dots and click share episode. You can post it social, you can text it to a friend. I appreciate you doing that. And of course, if you've got more great resources, your one stop for everything is admin.salesforce.com, including a transcript of the show. So that way, if there's a part of it that doesn't make sense, you can go through, read the transcript and get some information that way.
But be sure to join in the Trailblazer Group community discussion. A lot of great questions there and people sharing the podcast, which I appreciate. Also, if you have feedback, hey, I'm on Twitter and Threads and TikTok, and I think I'm on everything at this point. But send me your feedback. I'd love to hear it. I'd love to know what you think. I do enjoy reading all of the comments and hearing about the podcast because it's something I enjoy creating for you. So until next week, we'll see you in the cloud.
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