Salesforce Admins Podcast (general)

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. 

 

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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.

 



Direct download: Explore_Advanced_Reporting_Techniques_with_Evan_Ponter.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 1:00am PDT

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.

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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.

 

Direct download: Introduction_to_Copilot_with_Gary_Brandeleer.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 1:00am PDT

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Ketan Karkhanis, EVP and GM of Sales Cloud at Salesforce. 

Join us for a replay of this episode about all of the new Sales Cloud features that have gone live recently and how you can use them to transform your organization.

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

New features in Sales Cloud

Over the last year, Sales Cloud has gotten a lot of new features and updates. That’s why I was so excited to run into Ketan at World Tour London and get him on the pod. Who better than the EVP and GM of Sales Cloud to tell us all about what’s new?

One thing that the Sales Cloud team noticed was how often businesses have been turning to third-party tools to get things done. So they’ve overhauled features like forecasting and pipe inspection to give you more customization options and flexibility without having to use a bunch of different point solutions.

Drive adoption with Sales Cloud Everywhere

Another problem that Ketan and his team have been working on is how to help drive adoption. As much as we’d like it to be the case, most people don’t do 100% of their job on Salesforce. And the added hassle of going into and out of the platform can create a lot of challenges for users trying to fit it into their workflow.

But what if Salesforce could follow you into other applications and be there when you need it? Sales Cloud Everywhere aims to do just that, with extensions for Outlook, Gmail, and more that will give your reps access to your full CRM no matter what they’re doing.

We need your help

If you only take one thing away from Ketan’s episode, it’s that there are so many new out-of-the-box features in Sales Cloud that it’s practically a new product. If you’re paying for third-party tools, you might be able to save your organization a lot of money just by turning something on.

Most importantly, Ketan and his team want you to know that they need your feedback to make Sales Cloud even better. Try Sales Planning, or Revenue Intelligence, or Einstein for Sales, or all of the above, and let us know how we can help you transform your organization with Salesforce.

Be sure to listen to the full episode to learn more about Sales Cloud, and what’s been added to Unlimited Edition.

Podcast swag

Resources

Social

Full show transcript

Gillian Bruce: Welcome to the Salesforce Admins Podcast, where we talk about product, community, and careers to help you be successful. I’m your host today, Gillian Bruce. Missed you. Nice to be back. I’m here with a very special interview that I wanted to be able to share with you from Ketan Karkhanis, who is our EVP and GM of Sales Cloud at Salesforce. Now, he is a senior executive in charge of all things Sales Cloud. And we had a chat, just running into each other at London World Tour of all places. And it really sparked my idea to have him join us on the podcast, because Sales Cloud has gone under a huge reboot over the last year. There’s a ton of new features that I don’t think many people are aware of. So, we wanted to dig into that a little bit. And then also, talk about why Sales Cloud and core are developing the things they are, prioritization, especially in the context of AI and GPT these days.

And I promise you, Ketan is going to show you that, hey, core is getting a lot of love despite all of the hype around GPT, which is also very exciting. But we really focus more on that conversation around core development. And he gets into the importance and the role of Salesforce admins. One quick note before we get into Ketan’s interview. At the time we were interviewing, the product we were developing was called SalesGPT. That has since changed. And now our AI products for sales is Einstein for Sales. And so, anytime you hear GPT, just think Einstein. So, without further ado, please welcome Ketan to the podcast. Ketan, welcome to the podcast.

Ketan Karkhanis: Hey, thank you for having me, Gillian. So good to be here.

Gillian Bruce: Oh, it’s wonderful to have you on. I can’t believe we haven’t had you on before. So, first time guest, long overdue. Ketan, can you introduce yourself a little bit to our audience?

Ketan Karkhanis: Oh, I sure can. First, a big hello to all of you. I mean this is exciting to be on this podcast with all of you. My name is Ketan Karkhanis. I’m the executive vice president and GM for Sales Cloud. For some of you, I’m a boomerang. So, I was in Salesforce from 2009 to 2019, then I left, did a startup and supply chain, and then I came back to do sales in my prior stint. I’ve done Einstein Analytics, Lightning Platform, Salesforce Mobile, all the things you probably want to talk to me about also.

Gillian Bruce: Some things we’re very familiar with in admin land, yes.

Ketan Karkhanis: Yeah, great to be here.

Gillian Bruce: Excellent. Well, we’re happy to have you on. And since you are now leading Sales Cloud, we’ve got some good questions for you. So, first of all, I would love to know, and I think a lot of our admins are curious, what are some of the top things in Sales Cloud that maybe you think aren’t being utilized enough?

Ketan Karkhanis: Oh, that’s a great question. Look, I’ll tell you, and this answer might be slightly long. So, Gillian, you should keep interrupting me, because a lot has changed in Sales Cloud in the last year. One of the fundamental things we have focused on is there are two things that happened. Number one was we realized that there was this hyper proliferation of point solutions around Sales Cloud. To work on one opportunity, customers were using seven, eight different other point solutions. These are not market categories. They are features of Sales Cloud. So, one of the great examples I’ll give you is forecasting. And amongst all us, our admin friends, we had not innovated much in that space earlier. And it’s okay to be honest and say that.

Gillian Bruce: We like transparency on the podcast, Ketan. Appreciate that.

Ketan Karkhanis: But we really doubled down on it. And if you now go look at forecasting, you will see that there’s still a long journey. I invite you to join me at Dreamforce. But things like customizability, things like bring your own columns, things like adding manager judgment, things like coverage ratio, things like a better user experience, which does not require a help dock. Things like pipe inspection. I don’t know how many of you have turned on pipe inspection. Maybe it may not have one or two things you don’t need, but it’s the new list view for opportunities. Why would you look at opportunities in a list view? Why wouldn’t you look at pipe inspection? And everything I said, it’s part of core. It’s not something new you need to buy. I have a lot of new things I can sell you to. You know me, I’ll keep building new things.

But the idea is, how do we get more intrinsic value out? So, you asked the question, so I’ll say, I invite you all to check out pipe inspection. I invite you all to check out forecasting. I invite all of you to check out… And I’m listing, Gillian, things which are not like, hey, you need to call an AE right now. These are things which are probably already there, you just need to go turn it on or something like that. The next thing I’ll tell you is, look, one of the largest problems I’ve seen a lot of customers espouse is adoption. Gillian, you hear that from admins, and I hear that. How do I drive adoption? What do I do, right?

Gillian Bruce: 100%.

Ketan Karkhanis: So, one of the capabilities, and it’s a very counterintuitive thought, maybe this will work, maybe this will not work, but is we are like we were saying, okay, why can’t Sales Cloud or CRM follow you wherever you go? So, let’s say you are in Outlook. Yes, I use the O word, Outlook. I can do that on a Salesforce podcast, because hey, a lot of people use Outlook and it’s a great email client. I mean, it’s fantastic. But what if Salesforce side panel was there right with you? What if your entire CRM was accessible to your end user as a sales rep, while they were in Outlook or they were in Gmail? And even coming one more further is, what if you could do that while you are on LinkedIn? So, this is the idea of Sales Cloud everywhere. It’s the Outlook extension, it’s the Gmail extension, it is the anywhere extension that’s coming out. And again, these are what we think core capabilities, and I invite you to try them. One last thing, because we’ve just innovated a lot, so Gillian, please interrupt me, okay?

Gillian Bruce: Give us all the goodies. I love it. This is great.

Ketan Karkhanis: Now, these were just examples, but you can make a long list of this theme. Now, if you’re on unlimited edition. So, some of you might be on UE, you have a special bonanza for you now, because everything I said before is available everywhere. Now I’m focusing only on unlimited edition. We added a ton of capability to unlimited edition, which was previously add-ons kind of stuff. So, for example, conversational AI. How many of you have heard of conversational AI? It’s a standard capability. ECI, Einstein Conversational Insights. Go turn it on, try it in UE. I’ll tell you, sales engagement, some of you probably remember HVS. And again, transparency, there was some work to be done on that, which we have gotten done last year.

I know there was a little bit of a pause on that, but we have rebooted everything in the past 12 months. It’s included in powerful cadence automation. Every inside sales teams needs it. It’s out of the box in Sales Cloud UE. Automated capture, Einstein Automated Capture. Do you know more than 20,000 customers have already used Einstein Automated Capture? Are you one of those 20,000? If you are, thank you very much. If you aren’t, why aren’t you on that list? Because why do you want sales reps to enter data manually? It should be automatically synced. But anyways, I can keep going on, Gillian. There’s just a lot. There’s just a lot.

Gillian Bruce: That is a lot. And you know what I really like is all of these features that you’re talking about are, like you said, your team’s been working on this in the last 12 months. But I mean really these are things that are going to help admins make their users happier. And so, especially when you were talking about basically the pipe inspection is a better list view that’s going to give you so much more information. So, why train your users on how to use a list view when you’ve got this? And they can get the insights just from looking at the list of their opportunities. And then in context, I mean when you’re talking about the extension, where you can bring Salesforce and your CRM in the context of which you’re already working. Because the last thing a sales rep wants to do is switch windows or have multiple tabs open, as all of us are guilty of having too many tabs open as it is.

But the idea of having that contextual as you’re looking at a LinkedIn, as you’re looking at your email, that’s fantastic. I mean, those are amazing features. And like you said, they’re already part of your core experience. So, I’m going to use a Mike Gerholdt analogy here. “If you paid for the Ferrari, don’t just use it to drive to the grocery store.” You’ve got all these bells and whistles, you should use them. And I think another thing that I hear often when I’m at community events or at user groups, is you hear people that are paying for all of these third party solutions that do a lot of the stuff they don’t realize core already does.

Ketan Karkhanis: Yeah, I mean they’re spending a lot of money. You could be a hero by taking all that out and showing your organization, “Hey, guys, I saved you a lot of money.”

Gillian Bruce: Exactly. Yeah. I mean it’s one of those maybe not so secret, should be more overt awesome admin skills, is that if you are really truly an awesome admin, you’re probably going to uncover so much money your organization can save when you open the hood and look at all of the third party things that maybe you are paying for, that you already have included in core. It’s akin to declarative first development. Use what’s out of the box before you go building a custom solution. And I think that is one of the things that we don’t talk about enough, having that admin eye to look at all the things that maybe we already have on core, but we don’t realize, or whoever was managing the org before you didn’t realize.

Ketan Karkhanis: Or maybe we at Salesforce didn’t talk about it too much. I think, so there’s some responsibility I need to take too, just because I can. And you’re going to see me and my team… As I said, look, it’s a new Sales Cloud. Simple as that. The last 12 months, it’s a new Sales Cloud. And I invite you, I encourage you, I will gently push you and nudge you to take a look. And more importantly, the two motivation I have behind saying these things is, if you take a look, you will give us great feedback. And that’s truly what we want is your feedback. But you can’t give me feedback if you have not tried something. It’s like a virtual cycle.

Gillian Bruce: This is taking me back to when we rolled out Lightning back in, what, 2015. And we were doing all those Lightning tours with our product managers. I was doing a ton of them. The feedback we got from people when we were actually getting them hands-on with the new platform and how it worked, I mean every single piece of feedback got incorporated in some way. And I think that’s one of the unique things and special things about Salesforce, is that our product is only what it is because of the feedback that we get from our customers. And we definitely take into account. So, Ketan, as leader of Sales Cloud, how important is it for people to give you feedback?

Ketan Karkhanis: I’ll just tell you all my best ideas are not mine. They’re yours. So, if you want me to do something good, give me feedback. I’m half joking. But you understand the spirit of that comment, I think. So, it’s really important we connect with each other in the true sense of the word connection. Look, you all have made Sales Cloud what Sales Cloud is. You are the reason Sales Cloud is here. And I really, really aspire for you to be part of the journey. The last year, we have rebooted it a lot. We have a lot of new capabilities across the board. And I ain’t even talking to you about new things like… Do you know last week, Gillian, we just launched a new product called Sales Planning? Now sales Planning can be done native on your CRM. Do you know we’ve got a brand new product around enablement to run sales programs in context and outcome-based? That’s brand new. We just launch a buyer assistant. That’s cool. And Gillian, I’m not even talking about GPT. We are going to need a whole podcast on SalesGPT.

Gillian Bruce: We can do that. That’ll be the follow-up episode, because I know a lot of people are curious about that. But I think speaking of that, we get a lot of feedback, especially now because everyone’s excited about AI. Everyone’s talking about it, GPT, all the things, great. But the majority of admins I talk to are way more concerned with core features, stuff that their organization’s already using. And so, you mentioned that the last 12 months, Sales Cloud has gotten a reboot. Can you give us a little insight into why there was a reboot? What is the priority with Sales Cloud and core features? And give us a little insider lens to why.

Ketan Karkhanis: No, no, it’s a very fair question. Look, the way I think about it is adoption fueled growth is a key strategy for me and my business. And I use the word adoption as the first word in that sentence, because it’s really the key word. To me, one of the thoughts I have after talking to countless customers, I went on the road and I met so many customers, and I’ll tell you, it was amazing. You sit down with the customer and one of my favorite questions is, how long have you been using Sales Cloud? That’s my first question I ask them. And you will be amazed. Some of them were saying 10 years. I met a customer who’s been using it for 18 years.

Gillian Bruce: That’s almost as long as Salesforce has been around, right?

Ketan Karkhanis: Incredible commitment, incredible partnership. And then as I look at their journey and we talk to them, they’re like, okay, here’s where we need help, here’s where we need help, here’s where we need help. And how do you build that bridge for them to create a modern selling environment, to create a data-driven selling environment, to create a selling environment where reps are spending less time doing entry, but more time driving deals. And to do all of this, it’s not just new capabilities or new products like Planning, like GPT, all those things I talked about, but it’s also the foundation capabilities of, okay, let’s ensure forecasting is amazing out of the box. Let’s ensure a lot of our features are turned on out of the box. Let’s ensure we are really funneling our energies into bringing more, I keep saying out of the box, out of the box, out of the box.

That’s my way of saying core, core, core, core. But it also implies I want to simplify setup and onboarding. We have some more work to do there. It’s not done. And I will be the first person to say, hey, need your help, but trust me, we are committed to doing it. I’m committed to doing it. So, there’s countless examples I can give you around all these things we are trying to do. But the strategy is adoption driven growth. Element of the strategy is I really don’t want our customers to use seven or 10 different products, because I think…

So, our customers are giving me feedback. They’re like, “Ketan, and this is becoming a bit…” I have seven to 10 different tools I have to use, and this happens in the industry, it’s cyclical. There’s a hyper proliferation of point solutions, and then we go into a tech consolidation phase. So, that is a very key part. That’s what we did with Sales Cloud Unlimited. We took all this. We are like, these are not add-on, we just get them. It’s like, okay, Gillian, when you buy a smartphone or you just buy… Nowadays, nobody calls it a smartphone.

Gillian Bruce: They’re all smart now, right?

Ketan Karkhanis: They’re all smart, right? Yeah, exactly. But there’s a point in that comment. Do you have to choose whether you get the maps functionality or not?

Gillian Bruce: No.

Ketan Karkhanis: It’s there. It’s a feature, it’s not a category. That’s what we think when we think about things like sales engagement, when we think things like revenue intelligence, when we think about enablement, when we think about planning, when our conversational AI. These are capabilities of the new CRM.

Gillian Bruce: I love that.

Ketan Karkhanis: These are not categories. So, anyways, it was a great question. Thank you for asking that.

Gillian Bruce: Yeah. No. And I appreciate the transparency. And I think what you described about the cyclical cycle, about how tack, the many, many points coming together into being one solution. And I think I feel though we’re in the consolidation moment right now, especially with Sales Cloud, which I think that’s pretty exciting. Now, in the last minute or two here, I would love to hear from you, Ketan. As someone who has been in the Salesforce ecosystem and at Salesforce for I think as long as I have, seems like forever at this point. Can you talk to me a little bit about how you view the role of the Salesforce admin in a successful-

Ketan Karkhanis: You’re the quarterback. You’re the quarterback. Or if the people from other regions, I can use a cricket analogy, I can use a soccer analogy, I can use any analogy you want me to use, but you get the spirit of what I’m trying to say is yes, it’s a critical role, it’s a pivotal role, it’s an important role. Because it’s also the role that drives, not just governance and compliance, which is one way to think about it, but also what I call agile innovation. You can show the organization a way to move fast. The person who understands the power of clicks, not core, is connected to the community to bring those best practices from the community into your organization, is connected to product at Salesforce to bring that feedback back to product. You are also now the face of Salesforce in front of your organization, and that’s why we love you so much.

It’s a tough job. Look, it can be stressful, because you’re juggling many balls. There’s like every day you’ve got 10 things you’re juggling. You are like, oh, I’ve got these five requests from this business unit, but I need to do this project, which is long-term. And I’ve still not gotten done with my data governance priorities, which I had. But it’s a critical role, and that’s why it’s my commitment to you that I want to be held accountable by you. And I would aspire to be more connected to you. So, I don’t know how we do-

Gillian Bruce: Well, this is a first step, Ketan, now everybody knows who you are. So, you’re going to start to get feedback as soon as this episode goes live, I promise you.

Ketan Karkhanis: I had to open my mouth.

Gillian Bruce: You asked for it. You asked for it. Well, Ketan, I so appreciate you coming on the podcast and giving us some context and insight to what’s going on with Sales Cloud, priorities within Sales Cloud, some of the features that maybe we don’t know about very much and that we should start be using. And then I also just really appreciate your insights and appreciation for Salesforce admins. I think it’s always really helpful to hear from someone who’s in the leadership position about how Salesforce really does view the role of the admin and prioritizes it and thinks it’s so important. So, I appreciate you.

Ketan Karkhanis:
Thank you so much.

Gillian Bruce: And we’re going to do an episode about SalesGPT coming up soon. Don’t you worry about that.

Ketan Karkhanis: Yeah, yeah, 100%.

Gillian Bruce: Thanks, Ketan. One quick note and reminder, SalesGPT has changed to Einstein for Sales. So, we’re Salesforce, product names change, especially as we come into Dreamforce. So, just wanted to remind you of that. Anytime you hear SalesGPT think of Einstein. Well, that was amazing to have Ketan on the podcast. Appreciate his time. And yes, we are going to do more with him. So, I am looking forward to getting him back on to talk a little bit more about SalesGPT, which I know everyone is clamoring to learn more about. But I did appreciate his honesty and transparency about how Sales Cloud needed a reboot, how they’re prioritizing reducing all of the different points of use of other products and other solutions, and trying to consolidate everything into one seamless Sales Cloud solution that helps you with adoption as you’re trying to get your users on board.

I love the couple of features he mentioned that I didn’t even really know about, was the extensions to bring CRM into your email or into LinkedIn, wherever you’re working. And then, I mean, gosh, who doesn’t love an improved list view, right? So, go ahead and check out the pipeline inspection list view. I mean, I guess it’s technically not called a list view, but what a better way to look at your opportunities. So, we’re going to do more with Ketan. I also thought it was great how critical he thought the admin role is, as we all know it is. But I hope that gave you a little insight into how our executive leadership views the role of Salesforce admin and how we are really prioritizing making the admin job easier and helping you make your users more successful. Enough from me. Thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today.

As always, if you like what you hear, please leave us a review. You can also get more information on my favorite website, admin.salesforce.com, for more great content of all kinds. And if you’d like to follow us at all, we are on all the social medias. You can find us on LinkedIn, or Twitter, or X or whatever it’s being called these days, at Salesforce Admns, no I, and all over LinkedIn as well. Thanks to the main host of this podcast, Mike Gerholdt, for giving me the chance to bring this interview to you. And I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day. I’ll catch you next time in the cloud.

 

 

Direct download: Replay__Sales_Cloud_Core_with_Ketan_Karkhanis.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 1:00am PDT

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Ella Marks, Senior Marketing Manager at Salesforce.

Join us as we chat about the keys to creating a great presentation, how to prep, and how to always nail your ending.

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

Presenting is a core skill for admins

Presentations are an important part of every admin’s life. And I’m not just talking about speaking in front of your local user group. Admins present every time they go in for a budgeting conversation, or demo a new process for their users.

That’s why I’m so excited to bring Ella Marks on the pod. She’s presented on some of Salesforce’s biggest stages, like Dreamforce and several World Tours. So I wanted to hear her tips for how to put together and prep for a great presentation.

The cool thing is that no matter the format or venue, Ella uses the same core principles to prep for every presentation.

Know your audience

Ella’s first step is to identify the audience that you’re presenting for. Who’s in the room? What do they already know, and what are you going to teach them? Your content is going to be very different if you’re presenting to a room full of admins versus a room full of new users.

There are several situations where you might not know exactly who’s going to be in the audience or what their level of expertise is. Ella’s trick for this is to just ask them, for example, “Raise your hand if this topic is new to you.”

Experienced presenters will be able to use the information they get about their audience to change things on the fly. If this sounds daunting to you, Ella recommends that you start small. Pick one slide or part of your presentation that you’ll adjust based on the answer to your question. That gives you a manageable way to practice thinking on your feet, and you’ll soon find yourself getting more comfortable with improvising.

Make an effective outline

The next step is to make an outline. For Ella, that’s listing out everything she could say about the presentation topic in a big list. This gives her the chance to move things around, pick out some themes, decide on a call to action, and then start editing it down.

When she’s ready to start creating her slide deck, Ella uses a technique called “blue boxing” to make a rough draft. Essentially, you use blue boxes to map out what you’re going to put on each slide. So a slide might have three blue boxes that say:

  • Title about why this is important right now

  • Text of the most important point I’m going to say

  • Image to illustrate the point

This allows you to visually sketch out what each slide looks like and how the presentation flows as a whole. Variation is what keeps your audience engaged, so we want to make sure that we have a balance of slides with more text and slides with more visuals. Blue boxing lets you make these decisions before you spend time hammering out the specifics of which image or which bullet point you’re going to use.

The trick to nailing your ending

Conclusions are always tricky. Ella recommends asking yourself three questions:

  • After my presentation, how do you want them to feel?

  • After my presentation, what do you want them to think?

  • After my presentation, what do you want them to do?

These are your three goals, and the secret to nailing your ending is to work toward them throughout the presentation. Every slide should be aimed at answering one of these questions so that, by the end, you’ve brought the audience with you and it feels inevitable.

This episode is chock-full of great tips for creating presentations, including how to prep with a group and the importance of a good pump-up song, so be sure to take a listen and subscribe so you’ll never miss out.

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Full show transcript

Mike Gerholdt:
This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we are talking with Ella Marks about building phenomenal presentations and the art of presenting how she gets ready. Now, if you don't know who Ella is, Ella's on our admin relations team and she's done Dreamforce keynotes. Maybe you've seen her in the Release Readiness Live and at Dreamforce, also on stage at Release Readiness Live. So she's presented to a few thousand people at a time and knows quite a thing or two about getting ready. Now, how is this relevant to you, admins? Well, you are going to be presenting at some point, either maybe to a board of directors or peers, or hopefully you're at a user group and you're getting ready to present a really cool idea.
But presentation is really part of what we do a lot because we're showing all kinds of stuff and always presenting new ideas. Now, before I get into this episode, I want to make sure you're following the Admins Podcast on iTunes or Spotify. That way whenever a new podcast drops, which is Thursday morning, it shows up right on your phone and you don't have to do anything. You can just press play and get on the bus and go to work or take your dog for a walk. So with that, let's get Ella on the podcast.
So Ella, welcome to the podcast.

Ella Marks:
Thanks so much, Mike. Thanks for having me.

Mike Gerholdt:
Well, it's been a while, but I think people have seen you elsewhere in the ecosystem. I mean, we're on the same team together, but for community members that haven't run into you or seen the plethora of work that you've put out, what are some of the things you do at Salesforce?

Ella Marks:
I've been at Salesforce for almost seven years now and I've done a lot of different things and I'm so grateful. A lot of the time that I've spent here has been working with the admin community. You may have seen my face before on Release Readiness Live or on the keynote stage at Dreamforce, but I have the privilege of focusing on creating and distributing content for admins like you on some of our new release features and really exciting new innovations like AI. It's really fun. I get to learn a lot about the platform and I'm always really excited to hear from admins and speak to admins and create presentations for admins. So really excited to be here today and talk to you a little bit more about that.

Mike Gerholdt:
Cool. I'm thinking ahead and for some of the admins we're getting ready. There's TDX coming up, but also user groups for those of us in the Midwest that aren't snowed in anymore, we can get to user groups and presentations are important there and there's all kinds of stuff that we present. Not to mention that it's probably almost budget season. I got to do some presentations for budget. I got to do a whole bunch of presentations if I'm an admin.

Ella Marks:
There's no limit I think to the type of presentations and the amount of presentations that you can do as an admin. Like you mentioned, there's events where you're speaking to your fellow admins and developers, there's internal presentations. And I think the most exciting thing or interesting thing to me about presentations is no matter what presentation you're giving or who you're giving it to, you can go about planning for it and preparing that presentation in kind of the same way. There's some fundamentals that go across every type of presentation that you may have or create in your role as an admin.

Mike Gerholdt:
And you've done quite a few because I remember seeing you on the Dreamforce keynote stage and Release Readiness. I feel like you've done a lot of different style presentations too.

Ella Marks:
I've honestly had the privilege to be on a bunch of different stages at Salesforce, whether it's a virtual presentation or a webinar on the Dreamforce stage or even at an event. This year, I got to present and connect with a lot of people at world tour events, and like I said, they're all very different. The people in the audience are very different, and so the way that I create content for them, while I might be covering the same things is always going to have a different output because I am trying to tailor it to the audience that I have, but I kind of use the same fundamental principles when approaching any presentation I give, whether it's online, in person, a hybrid. There's a few key things that I really go back to.

Mike Gerholdt:
Well, let's dive into those principles. Where do you start?

Ella Marks:
The first thing that I do when I'm putting together any presentation is identify the audience that I'm presenting for. Now, this can be super straightforward. Sometimes you're going to know exactly who's going to be in the room. You might be doing an internal presentation at work, the stakeholders, the names on a meeting invite, and you can take the guidance from there. In other times, you may not have the list of everybody exactly who's going to be in the room, but you have a sense of who they are. So a user group presentation, for example, you may know there's a mix of admins and developers and maybe architects in that room.
And you need to know who those people are in order to build a presentation that is really going to engage them and teach them or persuade them or whatever your goal is. You need to start with knowing who that audience is to understand where that goal fits in and how can I communicate this information best to them.

Mike Gerholdt:
But I'm going to play devil's advocate and say, so what if I'm presenting to a user group and maybe I've only been there once and I don't know all the people that are going to see my presentation. What do you do then?

Ella Marks:
One of my favorite things that presenters do, and I use this trick sometimes. And Mike, I've seen presentations where I know you've done this too, is you can ask the room. I think it's important for us to not make any assumptions about the audiences that we're speaking to. I think that can lead sometimes to a lack of clarity and confusion. And so if you're presenting to a user group about a topic that you know a lot about, I think it's a great tool. Sometimes even just engage the audience and bring them with you to say, "Before I get started, raise your hand if you're an admin or raise your hand if you have familiarity with the topic that I'm going to cover."
And that does two things. One, it tells you how you can tailor the rest of your content or your presentation to the people in the room, but it also kind of opens up almost a dialogue between you and the audience. So even if they don't speak for the rest of your presentation, you've created a real human moment of engagement with them that is going to be super important and key to holding their attention for the entire time that you're presenting.

Mike Gerholdt:
And much like that, and Ella, I've seen you do this, is if you're going to ask the question, make sure it's data that you're going to actually act upon. Because I feel if you're going to somehow tailor your presentation and make a couple versions, which I've done for user groups because I wasn't sure what the level of interest or the level of knowledge of the topic that I was talking about was, then you can kind of immediately pivot based on that. And I think everybody appreciates when they took the time to raise their hand that you're actually curating the content for that.

Ella Marks:
There absolutely needs to be a payoff. If you're someone that's not as comfortable giving presentations, starting with the question at the very beginning and trying to weave that throughout can feel intimidating. And what I would recommend instead is to pick a moment within your content where you can do exactly Mike, what you just said. Which is, you have a slide that hits on, maybe it's a new feature or a different topic. Instead of asking a super broad question that you then need to weave into your story for the rest of your presentation. You can tailor your question to exactly what you're talking about on the slide.
And that can help you build that muscle to incorporate who's in the room and that audience into your talk track without having to start with that big broad question at the beginning. We have to start somewhere. And I think a great place to learn that skill is really starting with something small, a specific slide or a specific product, and learning from there how to incorporate the questions that you're asking to a more broader scale to cover a whole presentation.

Mike Gerholdt:
So sticking on the theme of building content, there's a lot of mechanics to a presentation, but building the content. Depending on the topic you're choosing, it can feel like you're boiling the ocean. "I have all this to show, and I'm on slide 68 already. I can't possibly show "What are some of the techniques that you use to really boil down what you're presenting given sometimes the restricted timeline that you have?

Ella Marks:
First, before I go into tips, I just want to reiterate that phrase, don't boil the ocean. That is the number one thing that literally...

Mike Gerholdt:
Literally don't. If you have a big death ray, please don't boil the ocean.

Ella Marks:
Please don't boil the ocean. Global warming, we don't need that. But I think with presentations, it's super important because you usually have limited time to communicate whatever it is in your presentation you're going to communicate. That's not even considering the fact that people's attention spans are short. So you need to do that work to figure out what are your key points. And one of the things that I really like to do is I create a document and I will just start an outline. I'll start typing out what I think the points are in the story that I need to cover.
I'll include any important examples, include a CTA, kind of those key pieces of a presentation, but I'm not actually putting it together yet. I'm just making a huge list of everything I think might be included. And then from there, I go in and I kind of prioritize. So that list is usually way longer than what the presentation ends up being or has way more information, but it is a starting point. And that's the starting point that I kind of use to say, "Okay, I'm identifying that I'm seeing a couple common themes in what I've written out here. How can I communicate those most effectively?"
And what I like about the list is that if you're doing it... Whatever platform that you're using, a Google Doc, a Quip Doc, whatever, it's really easy to copy and paste and move around the order as well to think about not just, "What am I including, but how am I going to start creating this story?" And that gives you kind of a framework to use moving forward.

Mike Gerholdt:
I would agree. So you mentioned story, and I think a big part of storytelling is the visual element. How do you balance just not putting paragraphs of text up on the slides and that imagery?

Ella Marks:
It's a really good question, and it's something that I ask myself all the time. Because I'm not a designer, I do not consider myself to be good at graphic design. And so when I build a presentation, it can feel really intimidating to think about what are the visuals that I need to create? And there's a technique that I learned at Salesforce that I was taught called blue boxing, and that's really what I use. And the way that it works is once I've gotten to that state, I have my outline, I kind of know what I'm going to put on slides. Instead of jumping right to what is my final slide going to look like, here is the exact paragraphs, here's the exact talk track, here's the exact visual.
I kind of take a step back from that and use blue boxes, literal blue boxes on a slide to map out what I think it could look like and how I think the content on the slide can reinforce what it is that I'm going to say. So if I know that I'm going to put together a slide that has some tips, for example. I might put together a placement of where those tips might go and think, "Oh, there could be a supporting image for this." What I don't do is I don't dive in and find that image right away. I really take that step of thinking through, "Okay, what is a visual that can support what I'm saying?" And I go through the whole deck like that first and then come back to really hone in on what the message is on that particular slide and pull in those core visuals.
But taking that step to do that kind of blue boxing framework really helps you identify how the story is going to flow and how those visuals are going to support you. Because I will say there are times when you're going to want more text on a slide than others, and so you want to have a good balance of that. You don't want folks to also just only be reading the content on your slides while you're speaking to them. And so if you take that kind of step to build it out first, you'll have a better idea of what the mix of your presentation is going to look like, how you might use different slide formats to engage people, because we know people have short attention spans, so you want to make sure that we're kind of switching things up.
We're providing different visuals every few minutes, and I think using design is a very powerful tool to help you do that.

Mike Gerholdt:
I would agree. I would agree. Plus pacing, when you're thinking that through, you mentioned people have short attention spans, so keeping the slides moving also helps keep people's attention as well. I think often when I'm reviewing decks or I'm watching presentations at events, and these are outside of Salesforce too, sometimes people have a hard time closing their presentation. I feel like it's either one, they kind of fade off into the distance. It's like an eighties' movie where they just walk off into the beach into the sunset and we never hear from them again. Or it's like a steel door slamming shut where it's like, "Okay, so that's this. And if you have any questions, thanks." Bam.
And the presentation's done. What's your approach for the closure because I feel like the closure is the most important part?

Ella Marks:
I'd agree that if you don't have people with you at the end, I think you've really missed a big opportunity when it comes to creating presentations. The way that I would think about it is throughout your entire presentation, as you're putting together that outline. There are three things that you can think about that you want people to take away, how you want them to feel, what you want them to think and how you want them to act. And I would say that's not just your final slide or the thing that you leave the audience with. That should be at the core of why you're putting that presentation together.
I think the final slide in that CTA is incredibly important, but I also think that as someone in the audience who doesn't know anything about your presentation going into it, I think that they should know where you're going throughout the presentation. And that's really how you make whatever it is you share, whatever your CTA is super impactful. So I'll give you an example of that. If you're going to do an amazing presentation, let's say it's on new release features and you're going into great depth about... We have the spring 24 release right now, I know that's top of mind for a lot of admins.
If you go through great content throughout, at the end, to your point, if you don't leave folks with something to do next, they start to question what the purpose was of you sharing all that information. And as a speaker, that is the opposite of what you want. You want to be able to say, "I'm doing this presentation to help you prepare for the release, and I'm going to do that by showing you features and leaving you with either a resource or an approach or tips for you to take and go do this at your own companies or deliver your own presentation."
And I think where sometimes people fall flat is they think, "Great, I'll throw a CTA in my presentation at the end, and then everybody will go read my blog post or they'll all go follow me on various social media networks." And unfortunately, if you're not working in the purpose of what that CTA is throughout, it's not going to have that same impact. So you need it to close strong, but it shouldn't be an afterthought. Everything in your presentation should in essence be pointing towards your end goal, whatever you want to leave the audience with.

Mike Gerholdt:
I've many a times seen an entire slide devoted to resources and thought to myself, "I don't know where to start." There's a lot of resources, but a library is a resource too, and it's full of books, but I don't know where to start. [inaudible 00:16:32]

Ella Marks:
It's so common. Well, and that's the thing, it's kind of a double-edged sword, right? Because a lot of times there's so many resources because there are so many good resources out there, and that's awesome. But one thing to keep in mind when you're putting together a presentation is you're presenting because you have expertise or you have a message to share. And so really rely on that. Use that to say, "Okay, great. I know there are tons of resources." But actually share your recommendation. What is the number one thing that you would do. That's something that you as a presenter bring that no one else can that's unique to you, what that next step is.
We know that where most presentations, if you put 10 resources, people usually don't look at all 10. I hate to say it, but they probably won't look at more than one anyway, so focus on that one thing. And you really use your credibility that you've built with your audience to drive towards something more specific than a laundry list of things that people can do or read or engage with.

Mike Gerholdt:
A lot of this content creation focused around a solo presenter, but I think it carries over if you're presenting with someone else. And I see this a lot at our events, even user groups. It's a lot easier. And myself included, the first time I presented at Dreamforce, I had a co-presenter. It's a lot easier to feel like more people carrying the weight of a presentation. What advice or what best practices do you have when you're pairing up with somebody to present on how you divide up content and how the two of you interact during the presentation?

Ella Marks:
The first thing that I would do if I was presenting with someone else is have a meeting, get together with them, chat with them. I'm someone that prefers a meeting. I know some folks like to communicate on Slack or other formats, but I just love to chat with someone about this because you are going to be presenting and speaking. And to me, that's the best way to get a sense of that person's presentation style. And in that conversation, we might divide, if we're building content together, we might talk about our own expertise and where we feel like we can add the most value to the story and divide up the content that we work on and the slides and who's speaking based on what we think our strengths are.
And then making sure that we're having a really open conversation about that. And I think one thing that you can do that when you divide a presentation, a lot of times what you see is, "Okay, Mike and I are presenting together. I'll take one slide, Mike, you take the next one, then we'll go back and forth." And sometimes that doesn't feel super. It feels a little disjointed when you haven't had the chance to actually talk through your content and rehearse. Rehearsing is so important for any presentation, but if you have more than one person, it is absolutely critical because that's how you're going to feel out how that story is going to come together.
And what you may find is, "Yeah, I'm presenting with Mike, and Mike has a ton of expertise in this one area, but I have something to add there too." And actually switching up who's speaking on a particular slide that can reengage the audience. That's another tool that we have in our toolkits to make sure that people are staying with us throughout our presentation. And all that's going to come down to whether or not you've communicated all of these things with your co-presenter. Making sure that you guys are connected every step of the way is I think the best way to make a successful presentation with a partner or with the group, whoever it is.

Mike Gerholdt:
I would agree. And I feel to that point of, I've seen decks and presentations where it's every other slide. Change it up where it makes it most relevant because there is a little bit with the audience of context switching going on where they're trying to understand who's speaking and it should be relevant if the person's speaking and not just, "Oh, well, that means if we go every other one, I'm on this slide and I don't know anything about this." It can also help you regroup content that you're putting together.

Ella Marks:
Absolutely. And there's a lot of different ways that you can do this, but I really think that having that conversation with your co-presenter or co-presenters is going to be the best way to highlight how can you use your collective energy to get your message across in the best way possible?

Mike Gerholdt:
Right. Stage presence or stagecraft, even in small presentations where boardrooms I think are super important. How do you prepare for that? What are some of the things that you've gone through as you've kind of honed your ability as you were getting ready for a Dreamforce keynote to kind of make sure that your presence was there and it was adding to what the content you were presenting?

Ella Marks:
There are definitely a few things I do before every presentation, but I think a lot of it for me personally comes down to some important self-talk and pump up for a presentation. When you're chosen to present at an event or you've submitted something to a community conference, sometimes you need to remind yourself the day of, you get a little bit nervous, you might be scared to present. You were chosen for this, and you have knowledge and expertise to share. And going back for me and giving myself that confidence is probably the most important step that I take before I present anything. I always have to remind myself there's a reason I'm here.
I have valuable knowledge to share. I'll reset on whatever the topic or the goal is of the presentation. And then my hidden trick, I would say. I was like, "I don't know where I was going with that sneaky trick." I guess. Sneaky trick, my trick or treat tip, which is not uncommon at all, is I love a pump up song. I just love something to help, I don't know, make me feel energized and excited because I know that if I go into a presentation not pumped up, it's going to be really hard for people to listen. A lot of times we present... Internally, we present in a meeting and there's a lot of other people presenting or we're in a lot of meetings that day, or at Dreamforce, people attend a lot of sessions.
That's a lot of listening. And if you come out there with flat energy and aren't excited to be there and excited to get going, it shows and it makes it a lot harder for people to actually listen and absorb the content. And so going in pumping myself up is actually something that when I don't do it, I feel like I can tell in the presentation that my energy is not there, that I'm not communicating what I could in the best way possible.

Mike Gerholdt:
You know I have to ask what your pump up song is, right?

Ella Marks:
I know. It changes. A lot of my pump up songs are Lizzo though. I have to say Lizzo. I do love Taylor Swift as well, but I just... Lizzo, the number one song for me last year was Truth Hurts. There's some lyrics in there that I can't repeat on the podcast, but if you listen to the song, I think...

Mike Gerholdt:
My pump up song...

Ella Marks:
I think you'll know.

Mike Gerholdt:
A lot of lyrics I can't repeat on the podcast.

Ella Marks:
If you do listen, I think you'll know exactly what part of the song I'm referring to where I walk out and I'm like, "Aha, let's go. Let's get into it."

Mike Gerholdt:
So if you see people at community events or at Salesforce events, walk up to the stage with their AirPods in, it's probably a pump up song that they're listening to. I can't blame them. If you were to boil down and think of maybe, I don't know... Let's choose five because five's a good number to remember. What are five things that you always try to include that you really look for in like, "Wow, that presentation knocked it out of the park?"

Ella Marks:
That's a good question. As a reviewer of a lot of content, I'm just trying to think the things that have absolutely wowed me. Well definitely first, when it comes to presenting a good title to me, I'm immediately locked in. If there's a description associated with it like it would be for an event or maybe even a calendar invite. That to me is a sign of a good presentation. I know what I'm going to see. I'm excited for that content and I'm kind of hopeful to dive in. The second is probably... This is tough. There's just so many different ways to present, but I think looking for people that engage with the audience.
So either doing what we talked about before, getting that post-check of who's in the room or have some sort of engaging component to their presentation. That for me, because my attention span is very short, tends to be a very effective way to get my attention. And I enjoy presentations that have that. I think when people also set context by sharing their own expertise, we didn't talk about it in this conversation, but I think one important thing that you really need to do when you present is make sure that you highlight who you are. You need to have an introduction that is, "Here's who I am, here's why I'm here." And that builds credibility.
So when I hear something or see a presentation that I know the person is credible, that usually also is an indicator to me that it's a great presentation. Mike, I feel like you wanted five quick tips, and I'm giving you a lot longer than that.

Mike Gerholdt:
I don't know. I just picked five out of the air because it sounds good. It doesn't have to be five.

Ella Marks:
I also can't count, so I don't know what I'm on, but I'll say...

Mike Gerholdt:
Well, as a good host, you'd think I was paying attention and counting.

Ella Marks:
This is where I would use a visual to reinforce what I'm saying and remind me. If I was presenting this, I would put together a slide and I would have probably five horizontal bubbles on the slide and a few words about each, and that would help me stay on track. And at the end, I would have a super effective CTA, which I think would be one of the things that I look out for. If I know what... If I'm feeling inspired or motivated, or even just know the next steps I have to take after a presentation. That's how I know that it was good and it was effective.
And then I think my final thing would be, and this may seem counterintuitive, but if I have questions, a lot of times that's a sign to me that the content was really interesting. I think if I want to approach a speaker after their presentation and want to learn more and want to continue the conversation. I have follow-ups or things like that, that's a sign that they did a really good job in engaging me. It could sometimes be a sign that they didn't share the right information. So I think you have to be careful there, but wanting to connect with the presenter, wanting to learn a little bit more and asking a question, I think is engaging in itself. So that to me is a good sign that it was a good presentation as well.

Mike Gerholdt:
I go back and forth with questions, but I see your point. I think for me, I mean if I was to boil it to one thing. I don't have a word, but the comfort ability that the presenter has with the content. I really love it when somebody, it doesn't feel like their first time going through the content. And it so bugs me when I see somebody walk through and they click and goes to the slide and it surprises them. You're like, "Really? Okay." I really like it when somebody knows something and the slides are almost happening in the background and they're really paying attention to the audience. That to me, really gets me. And that comes with rehearsals, it comes with knowing the content, everything that you said previously.

Ella Marks:
Absolutely. I think a lot of us think, especially people who give presentations all the time, we're like, "Oh, we can win this. It'll be fine. I know the content." But the reality is people can tell when you have not done the preparation necessary for a particular presentation. And so I think it is a great sign of a good presentation and good content when someone isn't overly relying on their visuals or words on the slide to tell the story.
It's actually a story that they're telling where the visuals are supporting. It's not at the center of everything that they're doing. It's really more of a show that you're watching.

Mike Gerholdt:
I often compare presenting to athletes. Some of the greatest athletes that we've had in baseball or basketball or whatever sport you watch, they practice and there's a reason for that. They don't just show up and naturally wing it. Derek Jeter didn't naturally winged being good. It's repetition and it's doing and becoming comfortable with the moment. So it's great stuff. Thank you, Ella for coming on the pod and sharing. This is very relevant for where we are right now. Not only heading into TDX, but heading into world tour. And I feel like community group season, not to mention just budget presenting. I want more things in Salesforce season to my executives and all kinds of presentation times.

Ella Marks:
This is definitely super timely. So thanks so much, Mike, for having me.

Mike Gerholdt:
So it was a great discussion with Ella. I feel like we only scratched the surface. We talked about content creation and also stagecraft. I know there's so much more. I could probably do two or three more episodes with Ella. So if you enjoyed this episode and you've got some content ideas that you'd like to have her speak on, ping us, let us know. I'd love to have her back on to talk more about content and the art of presenting. Now, I need you to do one thing, the art of presenting, which is press share on this episode. So if you're listening to it on iTunes, it's super easy. You just tap the dots and click share episode and you can post it to social.
Maybe you got a friend that's getting ready for a big user group presentation or they're going to do a presentation to their company. This would help them 20, 30 minutes, they'd go out, walk the dog, "Hey, come back. I got a whole bunch of knowledge about how I'm going to get my presentation together." And of course, we have way more resources for admins at admin.salesforce.com, including a transcript of the show. Now, if you got more interesting things, questions, comments, concerns, you can go to the Admin Trailblazer group in the Trailblazer community. Of course, the link is in the show notes. And with that, until next week, I'll see you in the cloud.

 



Direct download: Create_Content_for_Impactful_Presentations_with_Ella_Marks.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 1:00am PDT

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Christina Nava, Director of Salesforce Strategy at Gaggle.

Join us as we chat about making flows more manageable with subflows.

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

Creating flows to save time on business processes

In the biz, Christina is what we call a long-time listener, first-time caller. She’s been listening to the podcast since 2014, back when I was known as the ButtonClick Admin. And while I’d love to toot my own horn, Christina has come a long way since learning Salesforce from a podcast. She’s an 8x Salesforce Certified Professional, an experienced software consultant, and she recently appeared on Automate This! to talk about how she uses subflows.

At Gaggle, Christina uses Salesforce to help her users match patients with mental healthcare providers. It’s a tricky process because both groups have different characteristics, like gender, specialty, and availability, that need to match up. She uses screen flows to make this process much quicker, but it’s her subflows that make all of this possible.

How to simplify flows with subflows

When she’s building a flow, Christina is always on the hunt for how she can simplify things for herself with subflows. One major tell is if she finds herself rebuilding a process she’s already written. That’s when she knows she might need to write a subflow. That gives her to option to call it in multiple flows, and simplifies things if she needs to make changes.

Christina gives the example of how she needs to update the same records in three different scenarios: if they get new information, at certain regular intervals, and if some other piece of information changes. To do this, she calls one subflow in three different ways. If it needs to happen immediately, there’s a screen flow. But there’s also a record trigger flow and a scheduled trigger flow to handle the other scenarios. All three are super simple, they just each call the same subflow a different way.

Using more subflows doesn’t make a difference to your users in terms of what they see, but it’s cleaner and easier for you. Think of it as a gift to yourself.

Christina’s process for gathering requirements

The key to structuring flows and subflows well is to be thorough when you’re gathering requirements. Christina’s process begins by sitting down with a user and asking them to show her what they do. Any time they do something, she asks them why they did it. Why did they set that filter? Why did that provider not work? Why did they pull up that provider instead?

The next step is to see if she can do the process herself. If she can’t do what they did, she wants to figure out why that is. The goal is to be able to write instructions for how to do the process as if they’re for someone who has never worked at her company before. That’s when you know you’ll be able to write a good flow.

There’s a bunch more that Christina shares in this episode about why she uses one master flow per object, how she debugs, and her tips for naming conventions, so be sure to take a listen. And if you haven’t caught up yet, check out her episode with Jennifer Lee on Automate This!

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Full show transcript

Mike Gerholdt:
This week on the Salesforce Admins podcast, we are talking with Christina Nava, who is an 8 time Salesforce certified professional, a ton of experience in software consulting, and hey, she started listening to the podcast back when I began the podcast in 2014. So talk about full circle from learning Salesforce by listening to the podcast to being on the podcast to teach us more about flows and sub flows. She was recently on an Automate This live with Jennifer Lee.
So if you're listening to this, be sure to check out the call notes and notice below the link to watch that on YouTube because that's super cool. Now, before we get into the episode, I just want you to do one thing and that's make sure you're following the Salesforce Admins Podcast wherever you get your podcasts, whether it's Spotify or iTunes or iHeartRadio. That way when a new episode drops like this one, which is amazing, it's downloaded right to your phone. So when you hop in your car or you jump in the transportation to get to work or you walk your dog, all you got to do is press play. So really cool there, but let's talk about flows and sub flows with Christina on the podcast.
So Christina, welcome to the podcast.

Christina Nava:
Thank you. I'm really happy to be on here.

Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, well, if everybody is diligently following all of the awesome admin stuff that we're putting out, they would've watched Automate This yesterday and saw some of the amazing flow stuff that you were doing there. But before we get into that, let's learn a little bit about you. So how did you get started with Salesforce?

Christina Nava:
So I'll say that I'm probably within the vast majority of people and I got started because I was an also admin or an accidental admin. Back in 2014, I became the director of tech support for a SaaS company and it's like, "Hey, what's this thing called Salesforce that we've been using for our support team?" And so I started looking into it and I'm like, "This is great." Of course, this was before Trailhead, so trying to learn was fun. And fun little tidbit is one way I started learning is I listened to all the different podcasts I could and one of them was the ButtonClick Admin. And so thank you for helping me learn Salesforce in the beginning. So I started listening and started learning the terminology, Googling and just playing. And so that's how I got into it. Then I did that on and off for about five years, and then in 2019 I made the leap and I made Salesforce my full-time career. And so I've been doing it full-time since then.

Mike Gerholdt:
Wow. Well you're more than welcome and I'm glad to have somebody full circle come on the podcast from listening all the way to now you're teaching.

Christina Nava:
It's exciting.

Mike Gerholdt:
Eventually in the next 20 minutes or so, no pressure.

Christina Nava:
No pressure.

Mike Gerholdt:
So I teased out with Automate This, which is really cool YouTube series that Jennifer Lee does and she live-streamed it yesterday. You can probably watch it on our YouTube channel. And you were on there and you were talking about flows and specifically the thing that I kind of want to dive into a little bit of sub flows. But if people haven't watched it, I don't want them to feel left out about what we're going to talk about. Can you summarize a little bit of what you talked about on Automate This yesterday?

Christina Nava:
Yeah, of course. So I built this flow for Gaggle. Here at Gaggle, one of the things we do is we help provide therapy and coaching for students. So the way we do that is when a student comes to us needing services, we match them with a provider. Well, the client has a lot of requirements including why they're being referred, what times of day they can meet, if they want to, male or female providers, lots of different criteria. And then on the other side of it, we have providers who have their own criteria. When they can provide services, their areas of specialty, obviously if they're male or female, what languages they speak, all of it.
So when we first started and we had a client come in, a student come in, we needed to match them. It could take five to 10 minutes to find the best match for them. And you can imagine we're getting 5, 10, 15 students a day. That was taking a lot of time. So I decided to create a screen flow that we can run from the student record that would give our internal team a list of providers that were the best match and then they can just click on the button, automatically assigns them, good to go. Ended up saving our internal team 5 to 10 hours a week.

Mike Gerholdt:
Wow. And the match was done based on criteria that you put in, right?

Christina Nava:
Yes, exactly.

Mike Gerholdt:
Okay. I mean, I asked because everything's AI now.

Christina Nava:
That's actually funny you asked because I was on Automate This previously and the flow I did for that one was how their providers actually add their criteria in.

Mike Gerholdt:
Oh, okay.

Christina Nava:
So had a flow for that as well.

Mike Gerholdt:
This flow is rockstar flow. But God, man, I'm thinking back to the days I was on the platform and I wish I so could have used this for about a million other things. One part that you talked about is creating a sub flow, and I'm not good at creating flows like Jennifer Lee is, which is hard to be on team with her because it's like being on, I don't know, the Olympic team and you're like, "Oh, well I just have to go against this gold world-class Olympian every time I build a flow."
But one thing that I am really trying to wrap my head around more is I don't have to create the entire flow every single time. I can reuse components of that and that being sub flows, and then when I do so then it's one place to update things as opposed to, "Oh, we changed this email template, now I got to go into these 20 different flows and update it with this new email template."

Christina Nava:
Exactly.

Mike Gerholdt:
Help me understand how you come about creating some of your sub flows.

Christina Nava:
So I would like to say that I'm the kind of person who listens to my users, sits down, draws it all out and knows exactly what they're going to build when they sit down a flow builder.

Mike Gerholdt:
You're not perfect? Come on.

Christina Nava:
I'm not, don't tell the people I work with.

Mike Gerholdt:
Don't listen. We'll cut that part out.

Christina Nava:
Exactly. So a lot of times I'm getting in and I'm building a flow and I'll find myself building the exact same loop and I'm like, "Wait, wait, wait. Why am I duplicating my effort here?" So for me, I build a sub flow in a couple of different instances. One is when again, as I just said, I'm in the same flow and I just rebuilt the same code. That's a waste. Let's take that out and make it a sub flow.
There are other times when I do sit down and I'm doing my design, I'm thinking in my head and I'm realizing, "I need to actually call this multiple ways." And so as you all know, we have screen flows, we have record triggered flows, we have scheduled triggered flows. I actually have one sub flow that I call three different ways. So for this one, what I'm doing is I'm populating the opportunity team members and I need to do it at specific times.
So I will have, well, if I need to do it immediately on the fly, obviously I have a screen flow, we click a button, good to go. There are other times when I need to do it on a record triggered flow when certain criteria happens. So because I don't want to have to reduplicate my effort, what I'm doing for both of those is with my record trigger flow, my entry criteria, I just start it, I immediately call a sub flow. That is all I'm doing in this flow is I'm calling a sub flow. With screen flow, exact same thing. I am, just click a button, call my sub flow. And then I'm doing the same thing with my scheduled triggered flow as well. So I have three different flows that all they do is call one sub flow and I loved that.

Mike Gerholdt:
So how much of that sub flow, I guess are you setting criteria way before that so that sub flow kind of knows what it's adding those team members to? How complex is that sub flow? Is it very simple, I'm guessing?

Christina Nava:
So on a scale of say one to five, it's probably at a one, maybe 1.5. It's a fairly simple flow. All I'm doing is I'm sending it the record ID of the opportunity and then it's doing all of the different decisions inside of it.

Mike Gerholdt:
No, I like that. I always feel like use cases that are easy to identify looking back. You probably were on what your third or fourth flow and you're like, "I need to rebuild this." Right?

Christina Nava:
About that. I think I was in probably my third or fourth iteration of the first one. And realized, "Wait, wait a minute. I need to give them the ability to actually do this manually as well. Hold on. I don't want to recreate this whole thing. I'll do it in the sub flow." It's kind of had that light bulb moment popped up.

Mike Gerholdt:
So then kind of walking people through this, I'm assuming at this point I would be thinking, "Oh, I could really go through and kind of do a flow audit and look at some of the stuff that I've built and see if there aren't parts that are replaceable." Have you done something like that? And what would be your process for looking at all of your flows and then finding sub flows that you could build?

Christina Nava:
Honestly, that's on my to-do list.

Mike Gerholdt:
Oh, is it? 2024, here we come.

Christina Nava:
With the new flow stuff that's come out, a couple of things with the whole new validation that's coming out, well tonight for me and some stuff that came out last year, which was when you send an email actually being able to attach it to a record. That's on my list of going through and updating all my flows, just haven't gotten down to it. So as of right now, the way I handle it is if I'm going into a flow and modifying it anyway, I'm making those updates at the same time.

Mike Gerholdt:
So it's kind of an as needed, but not house cleaning, shut everything down and redo all our flows kind of thing.

Christina Nava:
Exactly. Because your end users don't see these changes for the most part, especially with the sub flows. What you're doing is you're making things a little bit faster, but you're mainly making things cleaner and easier for you. So because we all live in the admin world and our users come first, what's easier for us gets pushed down on the bottom of the list.

Mike Gerholdt:
Get cobbler's shoes. Right.

Christina Nava:
Exactly.

Mike Gerholdt:
I hear you. Okay, so this was a thing that Jennifer has taught me, and I'm horrible at this, but do you have a naming convention or do you have a way that you always name your sub flows?

Christina Nava:
I do have a naming convention.

Mike Gerholdt:
Please share. Please share.

Christina Nava:
So it goes with the object name first. And by the way, I stole this from... See if I knew you were going to ask this question, I would have the name.

Mike Gerholdt:
I mean everybody steals stuff. So you copied it.

Christina Nava:
I'm sorry, I copied this because it was amazing. So the first word is the object name. Then it's dash and then either SF for screen flow, RTF for record trigger flow or STF for schedule triggered flow. Then dash. And then if it's for a record triggered flow, you'll have new or new and update and then after or before. And then if it is a master flow, because I am a big believer in having one flow for one object, if you can, I'll have the word master. If not, it'll be dash what it's for, for example, account RTF new and update after master. I can immediately look and know just from the name what this is going to be for and how it's called.

Mike Gerholdt:
I love all of that. That needs to be on T-shirt.

Christina Nava:
So when I have someone new I'm training, I'm like, "Can you rename your flow for me?"

Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, because it doesn't work.

Christina Nava:
Exactly.

Mike Gerholdt:
I'm going to only slightly deviate. We're going to take a quick exit off the highway. Because you brought up a subject that I have been asked a lot and you said, "I like to have one master flow per object." Can you explain that? Because I've been asked many times, "Should I have one that does everything? Should I have 20, should I have five, should I have three?" And I say yes to all of those answers because yes is correct, but I would love for you to take me into your world of how you manage that one master flow and if there's times that you've ever had to deviate from it.

Christina Nava:
Okay, so that is a really good question. I still personally Google that about once every two to three months. "Am I doing this the right way?" Because everybody does have their own opinion. So for me personally, I have a lot of flows. I'm a flow addict. I love flows. If I could sit and do flows eight hours a day, I think I'd be the happiest camper imaginable.
So that being said, I have a lot of flows in my orgs. And once you get up to 50, 100, 150 flows, it's hard to find what you're looking for. So that almost is, I don't know, maybe a third of the reason why I have one flow where I can just because one place to go to. And of course the old way when I started with process builder and people are thinking, "The old way? I did workflows."

Mike Gerholdt:
I know.

Christina Nava:
I can hear that.

Mike Gerholdt:
I did workflows.

Christina Nava:
I know. But with process builder, it was definitely one per object because that was the only way you could control the order of things. Well with flows, now you can actually control the order and how they're called, but I got in the habit of that one master, but it's so much easier for me to pull up this one flow and even if it's fairly large, which by the way another reason to use sub flows is to actually pull code out and make your master flow cleaner. So you're looking at less. So side note there, we took a deviation to the deviation.

Mike Gerholdt:
It's okay.

Christina Nava:
Thank you.

Mike Gerholdt:
Sometimes you have to pull around back of the truck stop.

Christina Nava:
Exactly. So I like being able to pull up this master flow and it's like reminding me, "Oh yeah, this is everything that happens when an account is updated." So that's another reason I like to use one master flow, but there are plenty of times when I have more than one flow, even more than one record trigger flow. So for example, for my cases, I have one that has to do with sending pending emails. So when a case is put in pending, I send an email after one day, three days, seven days and fourteen days. Well I'm obviously not going to have that in my master flow. So I have one flow that just handles kind of those scheduled things after a while just to kind of keep my flows cleaner and it's easier to look at and I have to change that flow a little more often than I have to change others. That was a long answer.

Mike Gerholdt:
No, it's okay. I was listening and digesting. I'm still just feeling the like here we go, one master flow per object situation. So I'm not saying it's wrong, because you can totally do it and you do. It's just a lot of testing, I feel.

Christina Nava:
It is. It's a lot of testing.

Mike Gerholdt:
One thing to get us back on the highway.

Christina Nava:
Darn it.

Mike Gerholdt:
Well, we stopped, we had some beef jerky, we looked at the map, we know where we're at and you're like, "Oh look, there's a campground off to the side."

Christina Nava:
I got some Doritos, I needed my Doritos.

Mike Gerholdt:
There's always a campground by rest stops. And you're like, "Whoever camps there, why would you want to?" I don't know. I would love to know. So taking requirements for screen flows and sitting and walking through and I'm looking at yours, which was the decision loop of helping pair those students up faster, right? That's the goal, right? Because 15 minutes to pair somebody up, you can obviously do the math and like, "Well here's how many people we need staffed 24 hours a day in order to handle this, right?"
What was the level of requirements gathering and how detailed did you have to be when you were building that flow? Because I've worked through decisioning elements before with people and there's in their head they expect how it should work and then there's actually how it works and actually what they told you. I'm curious, what was your requirements gathering like?

Christina Nava:
I do want to say another really quick side note on this flow. What I showed in the demo and what you see in the blog post is maybe about a quarter of the size of my real flow. If I had the whole thing, it would've been way too big. And so just keeping that in mind, there were a lot of, not necessarily requirements I needed to get for my end user, but a lot of fields that we needed to match up. So going back to the requirements gathering, obviously you have this business process review, you sit down with your end users and you're like, "First thing is show me what you do." And so you watch them pull up this student and pull up all their providers and you start watching them match.
And that's when it's like, "Okay, why did you set that filter? Why did you set that filter? Why did that provider not work? Why did you pull this one in?" It's a whole lot of why questions. And so once you get to that, what I kind of like to do afterwards, it's like, "All right, let me reproduce what you did." And so I am now pulling up the student and using what they showed me trying to find a matching provider and I can't find one. Well, how come I couldn't find one? "Oh, we forgot to tell you this." Or I pulled up five instead of, and these four wouldn't match. Well, how come they wouldn't work? "Oh, we forgot."
So one of the things I love to tell people is if you can write instructions for someone who has never worked at your company before and it is step one, go here and pull up this record. Step two, click this, and if you can literally give me step-by-step instructions, and if step five is not use your gut, then I can create a flow for you. But you have to be able to give me those steps. Either you give them to me or I develop them working with you, but we have to be able to know exactly what to do at every step in the flow.

Mike Gerholdt:
That makes sense. I also think it's funny just, "I just go with my gut."

Christina Nava:
You'd be surprised at how many times I hear that from people.

Mike Gerholdt:
No, I know. I had a contract routing process that I had to do once that was just kind of like, and then I get it down to four or five and I go with this one and why? Well, it was Wednesday? And that one looked good. Awesome. Let me work that into criteria.
So I guess thinking through this with screen flows and with this kind of decisioning element, did you ever create, for lack of a better term, like a backdoor of a, "I can't find anything" and run so that if somebody, because I mean you deployed this to, I don't know how many users and if they run into an issue, they can't just raise their hand and you come running and then that way it would also give you a chance to look at the decisioning criteria that led there to be, "Oh, well it looks like we need to append this flow." Do you have something like that?

Christina Nava:
No, actually I don't. That'd be a good idea. I'm going to steal that. What it is just if it finds no matches, it pops up a screen saying we couldn't find any. And it's usually because they're just truly isn't a provider that matches those exact requirements and that is when they go use their gut. But what do you mean I can't just come running when they snap their fingers? Is that actually something I cannot do?

Mike Gerholdt:
Well, just saying there's probably an occasion where maybe you're sitting recording a podcast and then a user can't-

Christina Nava:
Good point.

Mike Gerholdt:
Get your attention right away. No, I just happened to think through it as I was looking at what you were building and also thinking through some of the processes I had built where it's, "No, we actually, it's not that I didn't gather all of the requirements, it's that we actually just found a new outlier to a process." And you try to hit the 98 percentile of stuff. But I happen to think because then you'd want to capture stuff like that, especially in a screen flow.

Christina Nava:
Yeah, that's a good point. I probably do need to make more of a process as to why could we not find a match with this? Maybe these providers got to 98%, but there was that one that we couldn't find a match on.

Mike Gerholdt:
You mentioned emails in a few of the flows that you've created, and I'm sure there's quite a few emails your flows send out. How do you manage that? I bring this up because I feel like it's always a requirement that admins take and then the four days after you deploy something, you immediately get, ironically an email or a knock at your door and be like, "My inbox is full." Well, criteria that you said for emailing you. Are there red flags or questions you bring up or alternatives to email that you offer?

Christina Nava:
Absolutely. So we use four different kinds of notifications here. Obviously email is one of them. Another one is the bell notification, just popping that up. The third one would be Chatter, do a Chatter post, which also kind of does the bell notification and email at the same time, but that gives us a record on the record. You know what I'm trying to say.

Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, a receipt.

Christina Nava:
Yeah, there we go. We can actually say that, "Hey, we did notify you." We can look back a year later and actually see all of that happening. So that's one I use quite a bit. And then the fourth one that we don't use a lot of, but we do somewhat is Slack notifications because we are a Slack shop as well.

Mike Gerholdt:
Oh. How do you decide between those?

Christina Nava:
I let the user decide. I basically say, "Hey, here are the fourth things we can do." There have been times I've pushed back on, "You're getting a lot of emails, are you sure this is what you want?" And I get told, "Yep, absolutely." Like, okay.

Mike Gerholdt:
Me too. And I've been told that before. I just like, sometimes you sit down and you do that worst case scenario with people and you're like, "You know, there's 50 contracts that could come through and times two steps. That's a hundred emails I might send you in a day."

Christina Nava:
And half the time I'll get, "Yep, because my inbox is my to-do list." I'm like, "Really"?

Mike Gerholdt:
I know. Yeah. But to your point, when you or they get promoted, then that inbox now becomes a grave because now there's no to-do list and we got to pull that from somewhere. So I like the posting to Chatter or something as kind of a receipt for what needs to get done. I'll end on this one question, which is fairly simple. If a user is feeling intimidated with flow, where would you suggest they get started?

Christina Nava:
So if they've never ever seen flows before, first place is obviously going to be Trailhead. Go through the trails, build your own. But if you have a little bit of experience, you've done that and you're in your own org and you need to build something, the first thing I'm going to say is write out the steps I talked about. Actually write down, "Go to the account record, then click on this field, edit" step by step exactly what you need to do and then go to flow and try to build it that way, and then build the bare minimum first. Pull up, do your GI account, do your debug, did it work? Then do your next step. Update your account. Do your debug, did it work?
Do step-by-step, debug it because if you try to build out 20 steps and then you debug it and then it fails, you're going to get very confused and you're going to get very frustrated and you might want to quit. If you do it piece by piece, not only can you debug smaller bits, but you're going to feel the satisfaction of the win each time it works and it's going to build your confidence.

Mike Gerholdt:
No, I like that. That completely makes sense. I've certainly gotten not too deep into flows, but far enough that I wish I would've done the little bites at a time kind of situation and just testing to make sure it works. It also feels good. I mean, you don't have to sit for weeks building a flow and then pressing the button and being like, "huh." It feels good if you spend 10, 15 minutes and then you click something, it populates the field. You're like, "Yes."

Christina Nava:
Exactly. Never forget the power of debugging. If this is a record triggered flow and you can't figure out what's going on because you can't put up a debug screen, write a debug to your description field. Create a temporary text field that you can write information to. Don't forget those little tricks when you're debugging.

Mike Gerholdt:
Right? Oh, there's always a ton. Christina, thanks for coming by the podcast to help me understand sub flows and flows and decisioning.

Christina Nava:
Absolutely. Very happy to be here.

Mike Gerholdt:
I appreciate that. And we will link to the Automate This in the blog post below.

Christina Nava:
Sounds great.

Mike Gerholdt:
It was a great conversation with Christina. I had a lot of questions because I've been building some flows like you and I've been wanting to reuse things, and I really just need to know how people's heads work sometime, and she's really dialed in with some of the stuff that she's doing with flows and decisioning stuff. I think it's really cool.
So I hope you enjoyed this episode, and if you did, could you do me a favor? Real simple, could you share it with somebody? Now, if you're listening on iTunes, all you have to do is click on the three dots and click share episode. Then you can post it social, or you can text it to a friend. Maybe you've got a friend that's building a flow and you'd be like, "Hey, listen to Christina. She's got it going on. She can help you build things."
And of course, if you're looking for more great resources, your one stop for everything admin is admin.salesforce.com, including a transcript of the show. And be sure to join the Conversation Admin Trailblazer Group that is in the Trailblazer community. Link is over in the show notes. I know there's some flow questions in there. So until next week, we'll see you in the cloud.

 



Direct download: Optimize_Subflows_for_Efficiency_with_Christina_Nava.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 1:00am PDT

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Marissa Scalercio, VP of Sales Operations at Carnegie Learning.

Join us as we chat about Prompt Builder, why it will be a game changer, and how her Salesforce Admin skills help her be a better sales leader.

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

A Sales VP and a Salesforce Admin

Marissa is the VP of Sales Operations at Carnegie Learning, an ed-tech company that was founded 26 years ago with a product created on AI. “That’s why I’m really excited to start including AI in our sales processes,” she says.

Marissa is also a Salesforce Admin, which is why I was so excited to bring her on the pod. She’s not afraid to crack open her org and help build things for her team so she knows how it will actually work. She’s also involved in a pilot program for the new Prompt Builder feature and, of course, I wanted to hear all about it.

What’s coming with Prompt Builder

The pilot only gave access to a couple of features, but they demonstrated the power and potential of Prompt Builder in a big way. The first was the ability to create sales emails. It can instantly generate a sales email to your specifications, incorporating web pages for products and events, and personalizing it with CRM information. Even better, anyone else on your team can use that prompt to scale your work and generate as many emails as needed.

The other thing Marissa and her team got to play with were field summaries. This feature can take all of the information on an object and summarize it. This is great for getting a new hire up to speed with their accounts, or to prep before a meeting with a client and check up on past action items or key bullet points.

“Once I really got to learn and understand how to create a prompt, I just started thinking about how I’m going to implement this everywhere,” Marissa says. Prompting AI is a skill that everyone needs to practice, so take advantage of the free tools out there to learn the ins and outs. Prompt Builder is coming soon™, but you want to be ready to hit the ground running.

How to talk to executives about new tools

As a VP herself, Marissa has some practical advice for any admin who needs to persuade executives to add new tools. She urges you to make your case in terms of ROI. Have numbers ready for how much time you’ll save, for how many people, and how that translates into total dollars saved.

There’s so much more in this episode about Marissa’s career path, what the future holds for AI in Salesforce, and what you can do to get ready, so be sure to take a listen.

 

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Mike:
Prompt Builder is the first low-code, prompt management tool that allows you, Salesforce admins, to build, test, and fine tune trusted AI prompts within the Einstein Trust Layer, ground AI prompts with dynamic CRM data via merge fields and flow, and enable prompted actions across the Salesforce customer 360.
And today on The Salesforce Admins Podcast, we are talking with Marissa Scalercio, VP Sales Operations at Carnegie Learning, and she was part of the Prompt Builder pilot for customers, and she's a VP admin. She was in configuring prompts, testing out the pilot in her sandbox, doing all kinds of stuff that us Salesforce admins can't wait to get our hands on.
So we're going to talk to her about her experience in the Prompt Builder pilot, some of the stuff that she worked on. And I'm also going to dig into how she went from being in sales, sales operations, to VP to having an admin license like the admins at Carnegie Learning let her in, set up menu. She's configuring shoulder to shoulder with them, which I think is awesome.
Now before we get into that episode, I want to make sure you're following The Salesforce Admins Podcast on iTunes, Spotify, wherever you get your podcast. That way when an awesome new episode like this one drops on a Thursday, it's immediately on your phone. So all you got to do is press play when you wake up to go walk the dog or hit the gym or get on the bus to go to work. So with that, let's get to our fun conversation with Marissa. So Marissa, welcome to the podcast.

Marissa Scalercio:
Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to be here.

Mike:
Well, I'm excited to talk about our newest Coming Soon product that you've actually got your hands on, which is Prompt Builder. So before we get into that, because the tease to get everybody to listen, tell me a little bit about what you do and where you're at.

Marissa Scalercio:
Of course. So I am the Vice President of Sales Operations at Carnegie Learning, and we are an EdTech company that actually was founded about 26 years ago with a product created on AI. So I'm really excited to be including AI in our sales processes and was really excited to be able to pilot Prompt Builder.

Mike:
Yeah, and you are a VP that does admin work.

Marissa Scalercio:
I am an accidental admin. As my colleagues will call me. I am very involved in how the sales team specifically, but really how everybody in our company works, how we can make things more efficient, and I really like to test things out and build them so I can see how it's actually going to work. So yeah, I'm an accidental admin.

Mike:
Yeah, we need more of you, but we'll get into that in the second part because Prompt Builder... So Carnegie Learning built on AI, now you're excited to use some AI. What was some of the things that you were trying out with Prompt Builder? What were you doing?

Marissa Scalercio:
Yeah, so the best part of Prompt Builder was that once I really got to learn and understand how to create a prompt, I just started thinking about how I'm going to implement this everywhere. But the two pieces of Prompt Builder that you could do in the pilot, the first one was create emails, sales emails specifically. You could tell it to include a webpage or include an event page, and it would include an email that is specific and grabs CRM information along with whatever information you provide it and builds this great email that would take me 10, 15 minutes at least to create and it probably wouldn't be as good. And it is that easy just to create that, have it ready to go, and it already takes in the information about the account and the person that you're delivering it to.

Mike:
Now you created that prompt and then anybody could use it. So it was 10 or 15 minutes for you to write it.

Marissa Scalercio:
Yes.

Mike:
But if you have a hundred salespeople, that's 1,500 minutes of email writing time.

Marissa Scalercio:
It's lot of time savings. Yes.

Mike:
And that's if you're good at writing emails, which I'm not.

Marissa Scalercio:
Exactly, and I mean these emails that came out were better than I can write them. Absolutely. And I started as a salesperson and just being able to click a button and it create an email that was better than I used to create was amazing. It is so exciting to actually come out... what comes out next month or a couple days.

Mike:
A while. A forward-looking statement. Soon-ish or now. Maybe. That's what I always say. But so help me walk through this because what level of approval and kind of demos did you do? Because as an admin, I love to sit down, I configure stuff all day long and then I'm like boom, click, boom, it works, and then I run the flow twice. But then you unleash it on the users and they find, how did you make it do that? How would you turn your screen pink? I've had users do all kinds of stuff. What kind of process did you go through when you were starting to create some of these to be like, "No, no, no, people, this will generate stuff consistently and it's something we need to use." What was that rollout like?

Marissa Scalercio:
So we haven't rolled it out to the teams yet. We had Prompt Builder in our sandbox, but I did experiment with several of our account executives where I would ask them for emails that they're typically writing. I would create a prompt for it and send them back what came out and they were thrilled. So they are really excited to implement this.

Mike:
Okay. How do you feel... So I think prompt building, you go back five years ago for the rest of us, maybe not you guys. Prompt building's a new word, right?

Marissa Scalercio:
Yeah.

Mike:
Something we're just getting. I remember, this is a funny story. When we rolled out Chatter, I rolled it out internally at an organization and I had to explain hashtags as like it's the pound sign and my user base was super... It was up there in years and they go, "Well, it's the pound sign from the phone." And I was like, "Right." So if you were selling something to a sand and gravel company, you could put hashtag sand, which is like pound sand, and I thought it was really funny.

Marissa Scalercio:
I remember having to use that.

Mike:
Yeah. But Prompt Builder, this is a new term for us, too. How do you feel configuring working in Prompt Builder has made you a better prompt builder? Do you feel you use AI better now?

Marissa Scalercio:
Yes. I think it made me a prompt builder. I did not know what I was doing prior to this pilot. I kind of just played around with several of the ChatGPT, but I really feel like you can add tone and you can kind of ask it to change the email. So if it's too long, it's too short. If you want to add something specific, I mean, it really helped me understand what... Well, start to understand what all it can do and the power behind it, which is just phenomenal. I mean, everything around being able to edit and change on the fly, it did take me a while to create my first prompt to get it right because I was testing all of those things. But then once you have it, you really can build the prompts themselves fast.

Mike:
So knowing what you know now, when Prompt Builder rolls out for other admins, if you were to have a time machine, which I'm sure is just in the near future to be created at this point and go back and tell yourself, what would be some things that you're like, "Oh, I wish I'd gone back and done these three things first."

Marissa Scalercio:
So how far are we going back? Are we going back to just the sandbox?

Mike:
Yeah. I mean pre Prompt Builder days. Like, "I wish I would've got ready for Prompt Builder by..."

Marissa Scalercio:
Yeah, honestly, I wish in general, I had used AI more to feel more comfortable with using it in a daily basis. I started using it last year, which already was behind the bandwagon, and I am already behind, and I can see how other people, even in my organization and other people outside of the organization are using it on a daily basis. I would tell myself to start learning and using AI every single day years ago. It is just so much of an efficiency boosting tool that is going to change the way we all work.

Mike:
Yeah, I mean, there are times when I watch a TikTok from somebody and it's like, wow, they have three paragraphs of a prompt that they're putting in the ChatGPT, and I'm like, "Draw an apple with a kitten next to it."

Marissa Scalercio:
Exactly. So building the prompting out was hard.

Mike:
I feel like I'm in kindergarten sometimes. Yeah. How did that... So in your pilot, I think it was pilot, right, of Prompt Builder, how much did you experiment with different templates or different prompts? You said you used it for sales emails, right?

Marissa Scalercio:
Yep. So we did sales emails and we also did field summaries, which also was really exciting.

Mike:
Oh, tell me about those.

Marissa Scalercio:
The field summaries allow you to take all of the information on an object, an account, a case, a opportunity, and summarize it, which I'm just seeing a world of possibilities with that as an efficiency piece to our new hires, especially, whenever they come on and have to inherit territory and understand accounts. Whenever you're going into a meeting and understanding meeting notes that have taken place, any action items that were supposed to be accomplished, and even after a meeting or a phone call, understanding what can be grabbed out of there. So those field summaries are really going to be important along with all of the other AI tools that are coming out from Salesforce to really help with every salesperson and it's really going to be a true assistant to them.

Mike:
Yeah. You think about it, how many times, I don't know if you reassigned territories, but that seemed to be like a quarterly thing for me. As an admin I get new sales territories that I got to put into Salesforce, and how much do you have to spend for those salespeople getting those different accounts up to speed?

Marissa Scalercio:
Exactly. I mean, it is really hard to take over a territory or even just one customer and understand what has happened prior to you coming on board.

Mike:
Yeah, a hundred percent. When you were building the prompts, you said you were pulling in data, which I think is what we expect from when we look at other AIs, but Prompt Builder in specific, when you're building those sales templates where actually you tell it what data to look for, is that correct? Or help give a sneak peek to some admins?

Marissa Scalercio:
Yeah, you can add some grounding data into all of your prompts, which really I was experimenting with of course names, accounts, titles, states, and then adding in, of course outside information into that as well. But I imagine whenever it comes out, and I wasn't able to pilot this part of it, but I imagine that you can grab pretty much anything in Salesforce. You can throw it into a flow, so it can actually ask different questions based on what type of customer it is, and you really can get down to a specific email based on everything that's in your CRM plus any outside information you push into it. So is the world of possibilities are endless with it.

Mike:
Yeah, no, that's good. That also speaks to data cleanliness because-

Marissa Scalercio:
It does.

Mike:
If the contact's first name spelled wrong and it's grabbing that field, it probably spelled it wrong because doing what it's told.

Marissa Scalercio:
Exactly. So definitely data cleanliness is going to be a big issue. If it isn't clean, but hopefully we will figure it out as we go and hopefully our data's clean enough that it'll work.

Mike:
Right. Well, if not, it will be. You start off by saying VP of sales operations. You're also an admin and you called yourself an accidental admin. So I would love, first of all, to have more VP admins on, but how did you kind of get into that role, but yet still stay so connected with the setup menu?

Marissa Scalercio:
Oh, that's a good question. So we started with Salesforce, I want to say 2016 I believe. And honestly, I really like to learn new things and build new things. So I was asked... actually, I might have volunteered myself to be part of the sales side of implementing Salesforce. So for two years I just kind of embedded myself into those meetings and made sure that I was part of the conversation, part of the implementation. We then rolled out CPQ was the next one, and I was really part of that piece, but at the same time, I was still a salesperson actually at Carnegie Learning. So really trying to do my full-time job, which was a salesperson and this side job, which was really helping with the flow of how sales was going to be more efficient. So I started doing it kind of half-and-half until I really had to make the decision in 2018 and no questions asked. I was all on board with sales operations. So you can kind of say that Salesforce has kind of crafted where my career path went.

Mike:
It's done that for a lot of people.

Marissa Scalercio:
Mm-hmm. And since then, I mean, it's just been so exciting to learn, and I wasn't an admin at that point, but as I kept trying to learn new pieces of Salesforce and how it could be more efficient, they gave me an admin sandbox license so that I was able to really start building and using Trailhead to learn everything I could learn, and now they gave me a production license so I can now build within our production instance. So accidental admin.

Mike:
Yeah, but also good because I mean, to be honest with you, I was an admin for eight years. I've been at Salesforce for a long time. There seems to be a point at which a lot of executives, rightfully so, there's just so much on their plate that they can't get into that backend part of it, and sometimes adoption and usage really hurts because of it, because they're connected to the process, but they're not connected to the technology or vice versa. When it's both.

Marissa Scalercio:
Yes, it can absolutely be a struggle when I want to build something, but I also have those responsibilities of strategy or just sales operations as a whole. So I do still struggle with that, but building in Salesforce and understanding what it can do helps me be a VP of sales operations. So it really does impact everything that we are doing as a sales team, and my entire goal in sales operations is to improve the efficiency and productivity of them. How can you do that if you don't know the tool that they're using 80% of the time?

Mike:
Couldn't agree more. I couldn't agree more. If you don't know how to run the report on the tool that you're holding people accountable for, then that's kind of also on you.
So being in both roles, as advice for other admins maybe looking to grow their career and get more into a C-suite role like that, but also as somebody that's pitching ideas, like admins are going to have to go out and talk about Prompt Builder and they're going to have to do it to other VPs or probably Ps or maybe a whole board. There was a time when I had a governance board. What would your advice be? Because I feel like you're in such a unique position to help admins both craft that executive message, but also understand the backend part. As Prompt Builder goes GA, and as some of these AI tools go GA, how are you pushing that messaging through that isn't overwhelming to other executives?

Marissa Scalercio:
I think the first thing to understand about a new tool is how will this help the business? What are the use cases? What is the ROI? What's the business value? If you can start answering those questions as you are an admin or as you are a builder, those are the questions that you're going to be asked by the board, the CEO. They're going to want to know why and what impact this is going to have. So really being able to understand the product, really understanding what values it brings and what... Especially ROI, and being able to show and prove that, that is the number one way to talk to an executive board. I mean, bringing them where they can save money is what they're looking for. Either save money or really innovate and improve the lives of their employees.

Mike:
Yeah, no, I couldn't agree. Was there anything, and this is kind of specific to Prompt Builder, in your case with emails, how did you get some of that data on? Was it just like a simple poll of your salespeople like, "Hey, how long do you on average spend writing emails?" And did you collect a handful of emails to get a before and after example? Because I guess in my head, what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to gather that case for the ROI specific around your Prompt Builder.

Marissa Scalercio:
So we didn't grab that information then. But being a salesperson and knowing this has been kind of our job since 2018, our team's job, is knowing how long things take to do in the sales department. Writing an email, scouring the account to understand what's going on with the account. So we already kind of had a baseline of how long that takes. And then being able to write that prompt and have it come out with a similar or better outcome in seconds is really a huge value add. Being able to increase the amount of time that a salesperson actually is selling and decrease that administrative burden, that's where I am seeing the best ROI. If I can prove that I can give time back to the sales team because of these processes, you can then extrapolate that into what their salaries are and add in all of the costs that you have for that sales team into, well, 10% more selling time would equal X amount.

Mike:
Right. Yeah, no, I mean it's always how much time can you save a salesperson so they can sell more?

Marissa Scalercio:
Exactly.

Mike:
I used to sell things and I used to be like, "Great, Matt, thank you for the 10% more quota. I appreciate that."

Marissa Scalercio:
Also that.

Mike:
Because you also modulate your time as a salesperson, too. None of us do that. None of them. They all, foot on the gas all the time, I promise you. So as you look forward to this year, I also think rate of change. There are... and I went through this where I had to merge a couple orgs together and bring two companies together, and there was also a lot of organizational change going on. We're at the beginning of the year. I know you've got your plans. There's new products and features and services from Salesforce coming. As a VP, as an admin, how do you think through the amount of change that you push on your users throughout the year? What does your planning cycle feel like?

Marissa Scalercio:
We are usually very thoughtful about large changes within the organization and making sure we're rolling them out slowly where we get some of our best or worst people to really get on board with what we're doing first and then roll it out in that process where we have a smaller group rollout and then a larger group.
So we really are thoughtful about having those people that have already tested and like the tools that we're rolling out. This year is going to be a lot of change, though. I am really excited by it, but the tools that are coming out are game changers for our organization. I'm really lucky that we are embracing change and the AI era. We even have a department that is called CL Next that their sole mission is innovation, and they have developed a project drive where they are asking every single department to bring artificial intelligence into their area and show that it can be used on a daily basis.
So I'm very lucky that I am in an organization that really is embracing it, so it is easier for me to implement these AI products and tools, but rolling them out, the best thing you can do is get people on board with it that will talk to their peers about how useful it's been or how useful it's going to be.

Mike:
Yeah. That made me think of something. I don't know if you did this, and maybe you can answer, but when you were piloting this, did you set up a Chatter group or anything to kind of gather that information? Or when it goes GA, do you plan to do something like that or do you do that for other features?

Marissa Scalercio:
I plan to do it for pretty much any feature that we roll out. We always bring in somebody. It is so much easier to have a better adoption if you have people, their peers that they look up to, on board with it. So I always try to roll it out or at least show what's coming, have them test it, really play around with new tools, because that is the best way to get adoption throughout the entire sales org.

Mike:
Yeah, nothing like a group of people asking questions to see what everyone else is asking. I'm telling you.

Marissa Scalercio:
Exactly.

Mike:
It sounds scary, but that's the best part of rolling out a new feature because to some degree kind of helps everybody feel like, "Oh, I had that question too. I'm not alone." And like, yep, we're all in this together kind of situation.
As you're using AI and different tools for admins, you mentioned you wish you would've gotten up to speed. Are there things that you are doing or trying, trying to incorporate more? For instance, I am trying to use different AI tools and just write different prompts to try to almost... We did this in third grade. It was really weird. My teacher who apparently was kind of ahead of the game, she's like, "I need you to pretend that you're an alien and you have to tell another human how to pick up the phone." And we played this game called telephone. And it sounds crazy because you're like in third grade, you're like, "Well, I know how to pick up the phone." And you pick up the phone. She goes, "No, that's wrong because you're picking up the receiver." And she's like, "Pick up the phone."
And I find there's a huge correlation between that and what you tell AI because when you tell AI, "Pick up the phone," it doesn't understand a receiver or just the headset part of a phone. It would pick up the entire phone. That's just a funny story, only to make this question longer, but are there things that you are doing personally in using AI that you feel are making you understand it or build better prompts?

Marissa Scalercio:
Yeah. I mean, I'm using it in my personal life. I'm using it with my personal email. I'm trying my best to use it every single day, whether that is new products that I'm seeing that are coming out, the new tools that Salesforce is rolling out, the new tools that... Outlook's rolling out some stuff. Google's rolling out a lot of different AI tools. So really being able to test those throughout your personal and professional life. That's really what I've been trying to do. I also am asking a lot of questions of my peers as to how they're using it, and even my friends, just to make sure that if they have something really cool that they are using on a daily basis and it's making them more efficient, I want it. So I want to make sure that I am trying to find what is going to help me personally be more efficient and then help what is going to help our entire organization or sales organization.

Mike:
That's smart. I mean, much like the last few podcasts that I've done, it's practice, practice, practice and use, use, use. Right?

Marissa Scalercio:
Yes.

Mike:
I have a friend that told me, he's like, "Writer's write." Yep. They sure do. That's how you get better at it. So we'll end on a fun note. Is there anything funny you could share that you've asked AI to do that you just kind of thought was an interesting response?

Marissa Scalercio:
I mean, funny pictures. Putting me in some interesting pictures, like basketball photos, which I don't play basketball. I'm very short. So I mean, there are some really fun things that you can do with AI as well. So those are some of the fun things I've been doing.

Mike:
Yeah. I asked AI to make a Pixar version of myself, and that was a hilarious outcome.

Marissa Scalercio:
Yeah, exactly. It's just fun to play around with it.

Mike:
Yeah. Well, and it's fun for me, I think, to try and repeat different things and see what the different, especially with images, response was. I did have a coworker. I thought this was really interesting. She's like, "I didn't know what to make for dinner. So I plugged some of the stuff that I had in the fridge, in the cupboard, into AI and asked it for a recipe." I was like, oh, it's like Iron Chef Kitchen AI.

Marissa Scalercio:
How smart.

Mike:
I know, right?

Marissa Scalercio:
I love that. Oh, I'm absolutely going to use that.

Mike:
Yeah, you're going to end up with a tuna noodle, taco shell, Dorito, rice and beans. I don't know. Kind of...

Marissa Scalercio:
Sounds delicious.

Mike:
Yeah, well, AI said it was good. Yeah, well, AI is not eating it.
Marissa, thanks so much for being on the podcast. I can't wait to see everything else that you guys are working on. I'm sure we'll see you elsewhere. You're going to be at TrailblazerDx and Dreamforce and all those fun events.

Marissa Scalercio:
Absolutely.

Mike:
Yeah.

Marissa Scalercio:
Thank you so much for having me. It was so nice to meet you and I'm honored to be here.

Mike:
So it was a great conversation with Marissa. I learned a lot. I feel like I can't wait to see all of the stuff that we can configure with Prompt Builder. I know she was very specific in emails, but it's one thing that we're improving constantly over user's time and building better emails for salespeople. They always need a better email. And I also loved her insight into being a Salesforce admin as a VP, helping us understand going across to other VPs, communication and also up and down within organizations. It's very important that we pay attention to that, especially as some of these new features come out and we plan our roadmaps for this year.
Now, if you enjoyed this episode, which I bet you did because I did, and you're listening on iTunes, I want you to share it. All you got to do is tap the three dots and click Share Episode. Then you can post it socially, you can text it to a friend. And of course, if you're looking for more great resources, Everything Admin is at admin.salesforce.com, including links to learn about AI and Trailhead and a full transcript of the show.
And of course, you can join our conversation, The Admin Trailblazer Group in the Trailblazer community. The link is also in the show notes. So with that, until next week, I'll see you in the cloud.

Direct download: Get_to_Know_Prompt_Builder_with_Marissa_Scalercio.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 1:00am PDT

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Jennifer Lee, Lead Admin Evangelist at Salesforce.

Join us as we chat about what you need to do to be ready for the upcoming Spring ‘24 Release.

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

Video Content for the Spring ‘24 Release

If you’ve come across any admin Release Readiness content, then you’re probably familiar with Jennifer Lee and her army of GIFs. That’s why I was excited to sit down with her and talk about what’s coming in the Spring ‘24 Release and what content is coming out to help you get ready.

Jennifer’s comprehensive blog post about her top Spring ‘24 Release features is a good place to start, but she’s also putting together a truckload of video content that is not to be missed. There will be new episodes of “Automate This!” and “How I Solved It” on YouTube.

Meanwhile, on Salesforce+, mark your calendar for a special Admin Preview Live on Thursday, February 8th at 9 a.m. (PST). Join Jennifer and all the PMs for presentations, demos, and everything admins need to know for the Spring ‘24 Release. It’s all a part of Release Readiness Live, which will be on Salesforce+ next week on February 6th, 7th, and 8th.

Spring ‘24 Release highlights

For Jennifer, the release notes are like an onion—you always seem to find something new each time you go through them. Some features she’s particularly excited about include:

  • Enhanced security management, like error messages that appear if you try to delete a permission set that is still assigned to users or permission set groups.

  • Flow enhancements like text templates, repeaters (no more placeholders!), and debugging data cloud-triggered flows.

  • An email alert page in setup to see which flows are sending things to your users.

  • Better report ownership management.

Sandbox best practices for release management

Jennifer also fills us in on some best practices for sandboxes to get your production org ready for a new release. You want to have two sandboxes: one that matches your production release that you use for deployment, and one that’s on the upcoming release to try out new features. That way you have somewhere to prep for the future without accidentally breaking your current deployment.

Finally, Jennifer recommends that every admin should pull up “release updates” in the quickfind. That’s the easiest way to see what changes coming up and how long you have to get ready. Armed with your pre-release sandbox, you’ll be ready for all the new features before they’re auto-enabled.

This episode was a great supplement to all the other Spring ‘24 Release content we’re putting out there, so be sure to take a listen. And don’t miss Admin Preview Live next Thursday, February 8th at 9 a.m. (PST).

 

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Full show transcript

Mike:
Salesforce does three releases a year, and I don't know about you, but I could use some warm weather thinking. So this week on the Salesforce Admins podcast, we are going to get release ready with Jennifer Lee, who is lead admin evangelist here at Salesforce, she was an MVP. You know her for all of the flow stuff that she does. By the way, she's got a really cool thing she's going to talk about on this podcast that's not release ready, but I bet you're going to want to hear that. Then of course, we talk about some of the release features that she's not going to feature on Release Readiness Live, which is next week if you're listening to this. So this is a fun episode. We're going to help you get release ready. Let's get Jennifer on the podcast.
So, Jennifer, welcome to the podcast.

Jennifer Lee:
Hey, Mike, thanks for having me.

Mike:
Yeah, well, it is springtime, despite the fact that I think you and I have been indoors for the last, I don't know how many days, and it's freezing cold, but spring '24 release features are right around the corner. You had an awesome blog post about it and we were looking through the release notes and heck, it's about to drop for everybody, so why not do a podcast to talk about it, right?

Jennifer Lee:
Super excited.

Mike:
Before we get into that, what else you got going on? You've got some video series and stuff coming out this year. I want to make sure that people up front know about that before we start talking about all the fun release stuff.

Jennifer Lee:
All right, so if you haven't heard about Automate This, it's a livestream series that I do monthly on the Salesforce Admins YouTube channel, so check that out. We also do deep dive blogs on it as well from our trailblazers. We're going to be bringing back How I Solved It back to the YouTube channel, so very excited to continue to feature awesome admins doing amazing things on the Salesforce platform. So, that will start next, actually this month.

Mike:
This month, yeah. It's February already.

Jennifer Lee:
This month on the 21st.

Mike:
Clock's ticking down. Here we go. Yeah, I mean to sit and watch Jen Lee build flows live, we should charge tickets for that, but you can just watch it for free on YouTube.
Okay, so we've got some pilot, some beta, some GA features coming in the spring release. What are you excited for?

Jennifer Lee:
A few things. So when we're talking about security management, I'm going to geek out on security, of all things.

Mike:
Hey, it's the security stuff's cool. It keeps us doing our jobs. People overlook that.

Jennifer Lee:
Yeah, so when you go and try and delete a permission set, previously if it had people assigned to it or it's assigned to a permission set group, it allowed you to delete it, it didn't even tell you. Now we're going to throw up an error and let you know someone's assigned to it, so get rid of them first before you go ahead and delete it or just check first that you really want to delete that permission set. So thanks to Cheryl and team for putting that in. But a lot of the things that are going into this release, surprise surprise, are flow enhancements, being the Flownatic that I love, so.

Mike:
I'm just shocked you didn't start there. I'm going to throw a curve and talk about one security thing, talk about fly. That's like being a hamburger reviewer and being like, so they have chocolate shakes at this burger restaurant, but let's talk about burgers.

Jennifer Lee:
So threw you guys for a loop, huh?

Mike:
A little bit, yep.

Jennifer Lee:
So I love the reactivity that's been going on in screen flows and Adam White and team, Sam Raynard, have been doing amazing things. So continuing on with reactivity, being able to have one component behave a certain way and then another component react to that. So, they're adding text templates, display texts going GA. They're also adding as a beta feature, repeaters. Now when you think of a repeater component, think of like you're filling out an application and let's say you're adding beneficiaries. Instead of thinking ahead and thinking like, oh, this person's going to add five and I'm going to put five placeholders, what about just adding the one? Then you let the user decide, hey, I want to add another and add another. So you don't have to build out this UI that has 10 placeholders or something. It's letting the user take charge and they're adding and removing accordingly. So I think that's got to be super cool for screen flows as well.

Mike:
I'm watching your GIF on that right now on this blog. I'm thinking, how many times haven't we built flow, really cool flow components on a page? Then they had to go through it and like, okay, now I've got to do this again, because you've got to add somebody else. Now they can just bang, bang, bang, bang, add them all.

Jennifer Lee:
Or you thought they're going to add five and they needed 10.

Mike:
[inaudible 00:05:29].

Jennifer Lee:
Then they complain about your form.

Mike:
Well, I mean, this is always the question I would ask in doing requirements gathering. So what's the maximum insane crazy number you would think we could add? They'd be like, oh four, I don't ever see us adding more than four. You're like, the third use case they give you is like seven. You're like, awesome. We're just going to add 10.

Jennifer Lee:
Then a couple of other enhancements. So that data table component. So now when you search for other records, it doesn't clear out your previously selected records, which is good. Then when you have flows that use email alerts, you can go to the email alert page and setup and see what flows are using it.

Mike:
Oh, that's so cool.

Jennifer Lee:
No more guessing where it is.

Mike:
Or no more just guessing how many emails I'm sending with all of my flows.

Jennifer Lee:
Then the last piece on the data cloud front is now you could debug your data cloud triggered flows, rather than build them and fingers crossed, hope they work.

Mike:
Right? Oh wow, yeah. You start off with, I'm going to geek out on security stuff. I think it's the debug stuff that we need to see more of. Everybody always talks about all the building of flows and stuff, but nobody ever gets into the debug and everything that you read or you go to events is always how you troubleshoot stuff. I feel like it's not that people just don't love the debug, it's that people just don't spend time in the debug. That'd also be a really cool place. Just call your, have a tech bar that serves coffee and scones and has free internet, and you call it the debug. Nope, not with me? All right, let's talk about more release features because Mike's not got a good coffee shop name yet.

Jennifer Lee:
Don't make me laugh because I might go into a coffee thing.

Mike:
Yeah, the winter has been hard on us East Midwesterners, I got the Barry White going, so.

Jennifer Lee:
Jen Lee has a bronchitis going, so that's great. We don't talk for a living.

Mike:
No, no. I have a friend of mine that has a podcast and he texted me a couple days after Christmas, he's like, dude, I broke my ankle, I got to go into surgery. And I said, good thing you talk for a living. He didn't find that funny. I did, because I said, you could be a marathoner. Nope, all right, zero for two. What else you got, Jen? There's some cool stuff in here. I mean, I'm busy watching all the GIFs in your posts.

Jennifer Lee:
I love creating those GIFs because it brings the feature to life. It's not just a description of what the thing is, but you actually get to see it.

Mike:
Yep, and it also doesn't feel like a commitment like watching a video, like click here to watch this video. It's like, no, it just plays. But yeah, I mean the release notes should have more GIFs in it, add that to the idea exchange. I can feel somebody crying already over that.

Jennifer Lee:
So some of the other changes on the analytics side, the reports and dashboard side. Now when you have changes in report ownership, I guess before you needed to do a clone of it and start from the beginning, now you could just change owners, so that's big. Then they had widgets that were only available to, I think it was enterprise and unlimited. So now it's available across the board for all editions, which is like, you have a widget and you have a widget, doing the Oprah thing.

Mike:
Wow. No, that's good. I just saw your GIF on the email thing. I'm still stuck on that.

Jennifer Lee:
You're just distracted by my GIFs.

Mike:
No, just the fact, I mean, I think I remember still old school, building a workflow and thinking, how cool is this? But you never had the ability, you always had email templates and you're like, I have no idea how many workflows are using this, but to see this as a related list, like, oh, okay, so these two flows are using this workflow or using this email. I love it. It's the simple things sometimes. There's the data table one.

Jennifer Lee:
Yeah, or if you needed to make a change to it, now you know which things are impacted by that change that you're making.

Mike:
Yeah, yeah, because the number of times I've messed up emails before, that's always a constant. I think we're a little late in this coming out because by now a lot of admins have read the release notes. They probably have their idea, but thinking ahead for the summer release, because I'll be honest with you. The summer release was always super hard for me because vacation and I wanted to be on vacation and then there was stuff coming out and then you had users on vacation. But thinking ahead to the summer release, what are some sandbox strategies that Evan should think about?

Jennifer Lee:
So when we're in this pre-release cycle, that's when some of the sandboxes are in pre-lease, some aren't. So if you haven't heard the term pre-release, that means you get to have your sandbox be in the upcoming release as opposed to your current release, which is what your production org is in. So the strategy that I've used when I was an admin is, when you're in the cycle and you have a path to production. Let's say you have multiple sandboxes that you build in, and then you push it from a dev sandbox to a UAT sandbox to some other sandbox to production, that's your deployment path. You want to make sure that it's on the current release.
So sometimes your sandbox, we're going to say, CS15, let's say that that was slated for preview and that's a sandbox that you use in your production deployment. Well, you don't want it to be in preview, you actually want it to be in the current release because your production is in the current release. What you want to do is build things and test things before it goes into production, as in being in that same release. You don't want to deploy something going from a higher API version because the newer release goes up an API version. You want to deploy like to like, not from higher to lower. The reason is because that new release might have enhancements to the thing that you're building, and now you're building on this newer thing, production doesn't even know about it. You try to deploy it, chances are you're going to run into a deployment error and you can't contact Salesforce support to help you because you went from preview to a non-preview. So definitely keep that in mind.
There is a timeframe, a window, and I believe, well, we provide resources that tell you if you want to stay on that current release or you want to move off of preview and go back to your current release, here are the actions you need to take, and that requires a sandbox refresh, for example. But we have blog articles that talk about that, so go to our release ready page and you'll find blog posts on that, but make sure that your deployment path is on the current release.
But at the same time, you also want a sandbox that's on preview because you want to test your current features and things like that, the things that you've currently built, and make sure they continue to work as expected and that you don't get some weird behavior as a result of something new that's coming out. So you definitely want to refresh and test the things that you have.

Mike:
Yeah, and I mean, even for example, we were in something like this, this time last year when reactive components came out. I was working with you to build the demo for our world tour. I couldn't figure out why in one of my environments I couldn't make the reactive component work, and here we need to check a box and go to a different API version. Similar, but yes, I mean you just want, yeah, pressure test against everything. Make sure it works current, make sure it's going to work when the upgrade happens because you'll nine times out of 10 be asleep, not sitting around pining for new-

Jennifer Lee:
Yeah, you don't want to get that call.

Mike:
Right? Hey, I don't know why this component doesn't work, because it's always a component. It's never anything in the background. It's always like an email didn't fire or a component is just saying insufficient privileges. Well, did you unplug Salesforce and plug it back in?

Jennifer Lee:
Reboot.

Mike:
Reboot.

Jennifer Lee:
Control, alt, delete.

Mike:
Control, alt, delete, yeah. Is there anything else that we should think about during release time, either before or after?

Jennifer Lee:
Oh, yes. So release updates. So you can get to release updates in setup, just go into the quick find, go to release updates, and then you'll see a list of upcoming release updates or you see things that you're behind on. Hopefully you don't, but Salesforce gives you ample time and they announce, okay, we're going to put this release update out there. You have until X date before Salesforce enforces it, and they auto enable it. So when you go into release updates, it tells you all the information you need to know about whatever that update is, how to go about testing it. So definitely go in a sandbox, test it out. Sometimes there are things that might require you to make changes to something that you have in your org so that it doesn't break when we auto enable it in a future release. So definitely go through it periodically to see if there's anything upcoming, and then spend a time to allocate to actually testing it, making sure it doesn't break anything there. In some cases, you can enable it in your after you've tested it so everything's cool, but you definitely don't want to miss the deadline, we auto enable it and then it breaks something in your production org.

Mike:
Breaking things is bad. You didn't mention this, but I was scrolling along. Access fields from related objects on dynamic forums, forums enabled record pages. This feels like, oh wow, air. I bring this up because there's literally a question in the Trailblazer community, and I'm going to respond to her after we get done with this podcast, where she was trying to pull in, she's trying to write just a simple formula field to return a phone number. This would totally solve it, because why not just pull the field in? You can do that. Just wait for the release.

Jennifer Lee:
I just realized I forgot to mention all the features that I'm going to highlight on Admin Preview Live.

Mike:
Well, but that's why you do the podcast because see, now they got to listen to all the features that didn't make it on Admin Preview Live, but when is Admin Preview Live?

Jennifer Lee:
So you're going to go on Salesforce Plus on Thursday, February 8th at 9:00 A.M. Pacific Time. We're going to live stream the broadcast. So we're going to go in the studio, all of the PMs, I'm going to be there as well. We're going to be in-studio doing live presentations and live demos. So I'm going to be covering admin highlights. I'm going to cover four things, and cross object fields is one of the things that I will be covering.

Mike:
Oh, darn. Yay, teaser.

Jennifer Lee:
Then other things. The other things that you'll just have to wait to find out.

Mike:
No, but look at all you get to find out on listening to podcasts ahead of time. Are you doing anything special for release live? Like we do shoes, I guess there's no really footwear attire for release live-

Jennifer Lee:
No.

Mike:
... anymore. We used to do shirts for a while.

Jennifer Lee:
I'll have to figure out what my outfit is.

Mike:
Yeah, maybe sparkly. Sparkly seems to be a thing. Maybe that's out in 2024. Maybe it's got to be something else, I don't know. Cross out [inaudible 00:19:04].

Jennifer Lee:
Well, we'll have to figure it out.

Mike:
I'm excited for this, little stuff. Jen, thanks so much for coming on the podcast and giving us all the cool stuff that you also included in your blog. But I feel like with the releases, you got to hear this stuff two, three times. It's like peeling back an onion. Every time you look at the release notes, you find something else that you didn't see before.

Jennifer Lee:
Oh, when I was a customer, I would love... So I would read through the release notes. Plus, I would always watch Release Readiness Live because I always find things that I didn't catch while I was reading through the release notes. The release notes are pretty dry, so.

Mike:
I mean, they're not a novel. But also, I felt like sometimes even reading your blog posts and seeing the GIFs, like the GIFs and that stuff, you read the feature and you're like, meh, okay, but then you see a GIF or then you watch the Release Readiness Live of it and you're like, oh, that's so much cooler than it read in the release note. Well, I will be sure to include the links to all of these. As always, if you've got this far in the podcast and you have a suggestion for themed wear that Jennifer should bring to release. You should have an Easter egg, that something only somebody on the podcast would know about. Then we'll put that on the thing and then see if anybody comments on it. Probably not, but it's fun to think about.

Jennifer Lee:
Well, Diana Jaffe brought her lamp.

Mike:
I know, right? Who would've thought that a lamp would-

Jennifer Lee:
That was on the craze on X or Twitter or whatever.

Mike:
I know. Yeah, well, that's okay. We have a goat as a mascot, so I'll par for it. I'll put the link in the show notes and then we will, we've got a week to prepare to watch you live on Release Readiness, so thanks for coming by and sharing some of that.

Jennifer Lee:
Thanks for having me.

Mike:
You bet.
Of course, that was another great discussion with Jennifer. Hey, How I solved It's coming back, which is amazing. I love watching that video series. I also just, the fact that we can watch Jennifer do live flow solutions on YouTube is just the funnest part because that's what I enjoy doing. Also, learning about flow because there's still so much that I need to learn about flow, but there's some pretty cool stuff in the release. I would love to know what is one of your favorite features. Go ahead and shout out on Twitter or any of the social platforms. Let us know.
Now, of course, if you enjoyed this episode, I need you to do me a favor. Can you share it with somebody? I mean, you've probably got friends that are getting release ready, right? Do they know about this episode? Do they know about some of the cool features like the reporting and the email stuff that Jen was talking about? If they don't, all you got to do is tap the three dots, choose share episode, and then you can post it on social, you can text it to a friend. You take them to a coffee shop and say, let's listen to the podcast together. I don't know, throwing out ideas there.
Full of resources if you're looking for them, admin.salesforce.com. That is where you're going to find transcript of the show, the link to watch Jennifer do Release Readiness Live, which I'll be tuning in for, and a link to the blog post where she has all those fun GIFs. Of course, don't miss out on the conversation we have going on in the admin Trailblazer group that is in the Trailblazer community. The link is in the show notes. Hey, until next week, I'll see you in the cloud.

 



Direct download: Explore_Spring_24_Release_Updates_with_Jennifer_Lee.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 1:00am PDT

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Anna Szabo, ISV Platform Expert at Salesforce.

Join us as we chat about getting started with Trailhead, how to decide which certifications to go for, and why we all need to embrace failure.

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

Give yourself a chance

Anna wanted to be Salesforce certified for a long time before she actually jumped into Trailhead and got started. “To be honest with you, I didn’t believe I could,” she says. But in 2022, she decided: she’d get her certification by the end of the year.

She left notes for herself everywhere that she’d be a certified Salesforce Administrator, but still couldn’t seem to get started. On May 23, 2022, she wrote herself a poem:

 

"Give Yourself a Chance" by Anna Szabo

When feeling scared, just give yourself a chance!

By analyzing paralyzed, you can’t advance.

To make some progress, starting is a must!

While outcomes pursuing, please the process trust!

 

Just give yourself a chance so you can soar!

View learning as a blessing, not a chore!

For outcomes to happen, you must start the process! 

Engage in learning to ensure your progress! 

 

Yes, you can do it; give yourself a chance!

At future, not the past I recommend you glance.

A vision helps you through the journey to advance!

Get started please! Just give yourself a chance!

 

Within 30 days, Anna earned her Admin certification. She became 19x Salesforce certified in 1 year, and earned the All Star Ranger rank in only 477 days. Today, she works for Salesforce as an ISV Platform Expert and has helped over a thousand Trailblazers get their certifications, too.

Be the CEO of your career

One of the most common questions I get asked at events is some version of, “How do I decide which certifications to pursue on Trailhead?” Anna’s advice is to be the CEO of your career and, as CEO, you need to look at which certifications are demanded in the marketplace. What shows up on job listings? What about for your dream job?

When you’re going for these certifications, Anna encourages you to embrace failure. “Studying for these exams only exposes how much you don’t know,” she says. Even with all of her accomplishments, Anna had to retake several certification exams. Keep on giving yourself a chance and you’re bound to succeed.

More content from Anna to help with your certifications

In addition to her role at Salesforce, Anna creates a ton of content to help other Trailblazers follow their dreams. If you’re thinking about getting more certifications or going for your first, make sure to check out her YouTube channel or find her on LinkedIn.

This episode is jam-packed with inspiring words and motivation, so be sure to take a listen if you haven’t already. See you next week!

 

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Direct download: Never_Give_Up_on_Your_Dreams_with_Anna_Szabo.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 1:00am PDT

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we’re revisiting our episode with Emma Keeling, Salesforce Consultant and Nonprofit Community Group Leader.

Join us as we chat about the skill of project management and some best practices to help you keep things organized.

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

Why everyone needs Project Management skills

Emma is one of our guests on this month’s Skills for Success video series, which breaks down the skills Salesforce Admins need to succeed in today’s world. And even though we brought her on to talk about Project Management, she actually doesn’t call herself a project manager. But she uses those skills all the time as a Salesforce Consultant, which is kind of the point.

When we think of Project Management, we imagine an array of timetables and Kanban Boards, and, indeed, there are some project managers who use those things to do big jobs at large organizations. What Emma does, however is a little different. She keeps her team on task, on schedule, and working together effectively. And those are skills that every admin should have.

Start with the starting point

Often, your starting point is figuring out what you’re even starting with. Is this a new process or an old process? Has it been documented before or are you coming in to make those decisions? And what are the priorities for the organization? Sometimes someone is saying they need this feature or that feature but the problem you really need to be solving is something else entirely.

“One of the key things is people,” Emma says, “if you’re doing an implementation, you’re probably not the expert on everything.” If you’re adding a new feature for fundraising, for example, you probably need to talk to the people doing the fundraising to figure out the best way to do things.

Timelines for your organization and your people

Even if you’re not a Kanban Master, you need to be aware of what timelines are important for your organization. For the nonprofit world that Emma operates in, November 1st is an important date because it marks the start of the holiday giving season. That means you probably want to get anything related to donations squared away and tested before it sees heavy use.

You also want to be aware of how timelines affect your people. Is everyone busy at the same time, or are their schedules independent from each other? Who is going to make plans based on the timeline that you’re outlining? It’s crucial to communicate which dates are firm and which dates are flexible. And it’s important to build in flexibility in case the unexpected happens.

Be sure to listen to the full episode for Emma’s four key Project Management skills for admins.

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Direct download: Replay__Project_Management_with_Emma_Keeling.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 1:00am PDT

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Dorian Earl, Founder & CEO of Development Consulting Partners.

Join us as we chat about how to integrate Salesforce with your business processes by working backwards.

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

A lost rolodex and a new career in Salesforce

Dorian and I have been running into each other at event after event, and I finally got him to come on the pod. He does a lot of work with different companies on refreshing their Salesforce org to match their business processes, so I’m excited to share his insights with you.

20 years ago, Dorian was selling medical supplies and using an old-school planner to keep track of everything. One day, he was driving home from some client visits when he had the funny feeling he had forgotten something. “I saw about $80,000 in pipeline go flying on the interstate,” he says, and that’s when he knew he needed a better way.

Dorian started using Salesforce, initially as an org of one, keeping track of his own pipeline. He got hooked and ended up founding a string of businesses based around the platform. These days, he uses his experience in sales and his knowledge of the Salesforce platform to help companies map their business processes over their tech stack to get the most out of both.

Defining business processes for Salesforce

Time again, the biggest issue that Dorian sees is that his clients haven’t defined their processes in terms of Salesforce. “Every company defines an account a little differently,” he says, “so I push my clients to say what an account means to them, and what it means to them when somebody creates an account, or when we convert a lead into an account.”

No matter what internal terms you use, it’s important to be clear about how Salesforce is built to work. For example, you should only create an opportunity for a qualified lead. It means something specific on the platform, but you might need to do some work to help your users understand that. Otherwise, you end up with a request for a field to track whether or not a prospect is interested.

How to start a business process backwards

The most helpful thing you can do is start with the end goal in mind and work backward from there. What does the business want to look at to measure success? What report is that in Salesforce? From there, you can figure out what steps need to happen on the platform to run that report, and how those correlate to the business processes already in place.

Businesses that have had Salesforce for a while sometimes start to wonder if it’s still working for them. Usually, it’s a question of refreshing the business processes and bringing them into alignment with what needs to happen in the org. Dorian compares it to owning a home: if you want to have a workout space, you don’t go around looking for a new house, you make space in your garage.

Dorian has tons of experience helping all sorts of businesses helping them to get the most out of Salesforce, so be sure to listen to the full episode for more tips and insights, including why exception reports are the best place to start when you’re refreshing an org.

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Direct download: Keeping_Processes_Fresh_in_Salesforce_with_Dorian_Earl.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 1:00am PDT

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Joy Shutters-Helbing, Salesforce MVP, Chicago Admin Co-Leader, and Golden Hoodie recipient.

Join us as we chat about why frontline experience is so important to your Salesforce career and the importance of networking.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Joy Shutters-Helbing.

Getting experience as a Salesforce user

I recently ran into Joy at World Tour Chicago, where I was shocked to discover that we’ve never had her on the pod. One of the most common questions I get asked is how to get started in a Salesforce career, and I think she has some great advice on the subject.

Joy and I both got involved with Salesforce as users, first, before transitioning into an admin career. That meant we already understood how business processes were supposed to work and how Salesforce could help. And that’s what can be the missing step for someone armed with Salesforce credentials but not a lot of real-world experience.

Get frontline experience while you learn Salesforce

Joy’s biggest piece of advice for someone looking to get started in Salesforce is to get experience in an industry you’re passionate about. “Go and answer those phones as a call center rep,” she says, “be that first line of employees that are working with customers that are going to be using Salesforce with a high frequency.”

In the meantime, you should be working through Trailhead and enhancing your skills on the platform. In short, you’ll be able to learn the ins and outs of business processes while you’re building up your Salesforce knowledge. And be on the lookout for opportunities to make suggestions and get involved in how the platform is used in your organization.

Why networking is misunderstood

Joy also has a great perspective on networking and how it’s misunderstood. When she’s looking for a new role, she updates her resume and makes cold applications like everyone else. But she also isn’t afraid to let people know that she’s looking, which creates an invitation for people to send things her way.

The difference here is between asking someone for a favor and allowing them to help you. And people will want to help you if you’re active in the community and have helped them in the past. It’s all about looking for ways to get involved in your local user group and pay it forward.

Be sure to listen to the full episode for more insights from Joy, and more about what it’s like to don the coveted Golden Hoodie.

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Direct download: Unlocking_Salesforce_Efficiency_with_Joy_Shutters-Helbing.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 1:00am PDT

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we revisit our episode with Ko Forte, Salesforce Business Analyst at RGP.

Join us as we chat about business analysis, career transitions, and the BA mindset.

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

August was Business Analyst Month

For August, we took a deep dive into the Business Analyst skillset. We started by talking to Ko, a consultant who helps organizations as both a Business Analyst and a Salesforce Admin. She’s recently given a talk at some Salesforce events entitled “BA Where You Are,” so we thought we should bring her on the pod to hear all about it.

Ko’s talk is focused on developing the mindset and habits for a Salesforce Business Analyst role. It’s geared toward people who are admins and want to move into business analysis, as well as folks who might be new to the ecosystem and looking for a potential fit.

The Business Analyst mindset

For Ko, the key to being an effective Business Analyst begins with mindset. Before she starts work with a new client, she asks herself:

  • Who is this company?

  • How are they positioned in the industry?

  • Who are their customers?

  • What do they do to make money? And therefore, what’s important to them?

Thoroughly understanding these things grounds Ko with a clear understanding of what the company she’s working with needs their technology to do for them.

It’s also important to cultivate a mindset of compassion, both for why business processes are the way they are and for the people who will be affected if you make a change. People do things for a reason, and you need to understand those factors to find something that works.

Transitioning your career

The biggest thing Ko recommends for admins making the transition into business analysis is to not be afraid of asking questions. Someone else may be wondering the same thing and something that seems obvious to an expert might need to be better understood by everyone else on the team.

You should also start making a habit of turning the camera on for meetings. You want to create the impression that you’re reliable, you’re present, and you’re listening. Our brains have evolved to look at faces and, especially in remote work, it helps to show yours to the world. And, again, have compassion for everyone else attending a meeting by clearly communicating what you’re trying to do with an agenda and some goals.

Be sure to listen to the full episode for more about Ko, and why it’s important to take a look at your job description if you’re trying to advance your career. And we’ve included links to the other Business Analyst August episodes if you want to learn more.

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Full Transcript

Mike Gerholdt:

This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we are doing a replay episode from Business Analyst August, which was we featured a lot of business analysts back in August talking about being and doing the active business analysis as part of being a Salesforce Admin and the whole BA mindset.

So, I'll include a link at the bottom for all of those episodes, but this really focuses on Ko Forte and kind of the business analyst mindset. Now, before we get into Ko's episode, I just want to make sure that you're doing one thing, which is following the Salesforce Admins podcast on the iTunes, or wherever you get your podcasts. That way, a new episode like this one will just download to your phone every Thursday and you don't have to think about it. So with that, let's get to our conversation with Ko.

So, Ko, Welcome to the Salesforce Admins Podcast.

Ko Forte:

Thanks, Mike. Great to be here.

Mike Gerholdt:

Let's get started. It's August already. Hey. Glad to be out of July. Felt like it was never going to end.

Ko Forte:

Agreed.

Mike Gerholdt:

But we're talking business analysts. Actually, I have quite a few episodes this month, spoiler alert, that will be focused around the BA. I know you and I have talked while Atlanta World Tour was going on. Tell me how you got started in the Salesforce ecosystem.

Ko Forte:

Sure. My journey to the Salesforce ecosystem came as a really great surprise to me. I was actually a theater major. I graduated from the University of Georgia with an MFA and just needed a quote, unquote, "Real job," in the interim. Definitely, graduating during a housing bubble and things like that contributed to that decision. But a lot of my friends from there were going to work for a small upstart tech company here in Atlanta, and they needed some entry level folks to do some data entry.

And so, I applied for that job and I got it. No experience needed or anything like that. You're literally just typing in numbers. But this company used Salesforce as their tool to build cases and quotes and opportunities and things like that. I was just very curious about this tool that we were using.

I said, "I notice that when I do this, then that happens. I wonder why? What's behind this thing that's making all this stuff do what it does?" That was really my introduction to what is Salesforce as a tool. Why are we using it? Why does it do what it does? How can I learn more?

Mike Gerholdt:

Wow. I would love for us to do some survey on the number of degrees that admins have that aren't tech.

Ko Forte:

Right.

Mike Gerholdt:

Because I'm a communication studies degree. I also did theater in high school and I loved doing it. So I can totally talk theater, but we won't on this podcast. You went to into data entry, which is as fun as watching paint dry, but it pays the bills. What got you into business analysis?

Ko Forte:

Well, it took some years, to be honest. Being at the level that I was and at the type of company that I was in, it was just, "We've got to do the job." That's first and foremost. As long as there's nothing else in queue, you can do whatever you want.

The company being smaller, I was able to talk to different departments and bring my questions to other people who knew a lot more than I did. There were thankfully enough supportive people around me to say, "Hey. Well, this is Salesforce. There's some help articles out there. You can understand what it does and study up on how this thing works."

From there, I just went on a journey of self-study. This was before Trailhead, so it was a lot of help articles and Googling and asking people around me, "What does this mean?" Befriending admins, befriending those people who were working in the IT departments and things like that to say, "Hey. I'm studying this thing. If you have any advice or if you can give me any mentorship, I would really appreciate it." Just building upon my knowledge from there.

Mike Gerholdt:

What do you do now then?

Ko Forte:

Now, I am a Salesforce business analyst. I work for a consultant agency and I am sent on different projects to help both in admin capacity and business analyst capacity for different Salesforce implementations and projects.

Mike Gerholdt:

You're the person who has to go into the bowl of spaghetti and untangle all of the noodles.

Ko Forte:

Yes.

Mike Gerholdt:

It's always been the analogy. It's been in my head since ever I can remember of, "Here's our business processes and it looks like a bowl of noodles." You do a lot of speaking at community conferences. I know you talk about business analysis there. Can you try and tell me, what do you talk about there? How are you getting people into the BA role?

Ko Forte:

Absolutely. Recently, I spoke at both the Southeast Dreamin' in Atlanta and Dreamin' In Color, both two really great community conferences. My session is BA Where You Are. My session is geared towards developing the mindset and habits for a Salesforce business analyst role.

This is for people who are admins and want to expand their admin career into more of a BA role. Or for people who are not yet in an admin position. Maybe they're in customer service or sales or something like that, and they want to pursue a business analyst career. And I talk about the mindset and habits and competencies that can be developed in order to build a business analyst career.

Mike Gerholdt:

Let's dig into that. Help me understand. Because I feel ... You're very fortunate in that you get to do business analyst stuff all the time. I feel for a lot of admins, it's kind of, "Well, that's part of the project." That's part of the day-to-day is to jump into a department and figure out the challenge and then have to solve it.

Let's talk about that mindset. What is your mindset going into that first-time, say, meeting with a client or a department, knowing they've got a bowl of spaghetti that you have to untangle? What should admins ... How do they start being that BA where they are?

Ko Forte:

My mindset work happens even before the project begins. It's taking a step back to review, "Who is that company? How are they positioned in the industry? What do they do to make money? What's important to them?"

Look at their overall profile, so that as I walk into the project, I have more of a grounded understanding of, "This is who this company is and how they show up. This is how they make money and these are their customers." And so, I have their story of who they are, where they're going, and what they need their technology to do in order to support that mission.

Mike Gerholdt:

Wow. You start a long time before I thought, as any good professional should. As you're walking through some of these business processes, I feel like you are almost solving a mystery to some degree. Is it just the fact that so many processes are put together and then changed and are not well-documented? Where does it start? Where does the mess start?

Ko Forte:

I'll just offer that it feels less like I am solving a mystery and more that I am being content with being in the mystery that is happening. I am in the mystery as it is unfolding, and even I am an audience to it, but a compassionate audience to the process.

Because as a business analyst, you are both dealing with technical information, process information, but you're also navigating the human aspect. The emotions of making a transition from where you currently are to where you're trying to get, and the reactions to change that happen throughout all of that. Mystery is a good word, but we don't understand how many micro-mysteries there are within that process.

Because like many great teams, there's somebody on the team who is a rockstar, who everybody goes to them because they do the thing and they know the information. And if we ask them this one thing, they'll take it and they'll do it. That person is great and valuable and necessary, but that person usually is not writing down what they do, how they do it, so that when they're gone, it can be repeated by someone else. Or just to give transparency to what that process is and how they're solving it.

So as a business analyst, those are the things that I am looking for. That hidden knowledge and those people who are key players that make the magic happen and solve the mysteries for the business, but make those mysteries more transparent.

Mike Gerholdt:

I'm going to stitch a couple of things together. What part of your theater degree do you have to rely on most in those meetings?

Ko Forte:

I appreciate this question, because the parts of the creative mindset that are so valuable in this space has to do with having that capacity to sit and let things unfold, but also allow repetition to be comfortable. Coming to the table and setting up a meeting where you're giving people space to talk and share about what they do. That's kind of like a rehearsal. We're coming together. We're trying to get all the information out there.

But there's also a great deal of synthesizing that must happen. We talked about this piece of work that this team is going to do and this process over here, but what are the threads that link all those together to help us move this project forward? And that's something that you're doing with a text that's in front of you, that you're studying to put on as a performance.

You have to find the themes within. You have to find the patterns. You have to synthesize the information and bring it to that larger context of, "What is the overarching idea that we're trying to put forward when we do this play?" It's kind of the same thing. We're helping organizations navigate that change, and in the end, curtains up. We've got a great Salesforce implementation and all is well.

Mike Gerholdt:

I love the play theme because we can run with that. There's always a part of a play that I feel people struggle with. Or somebody has a hard time with their lines. What is the hardest part that you had to learn in being a business analyst that you feel maybe other admins are going to run into as well?

Ko Forte:

Absolutely. The hardest part for me personally has been the speaking up and showing up.

Mike Gerholdt:

Really? For a theater major?

Ko Forte:

Absolutely. It makes sense now as I look back on my journey, because I had that imposter syndrome. I'm here, but I really am not the smartest person in the room. I don't know if I'm supposed to be here. I don't know if I can measure up to all these people who are more technically inclined.

And that had to do with a lot of, "Let's just be quiet. Let's just hold that. I see this thing and I am curious about this and I have questions and concerns, but let me not rock the boat, because someone else over there is smarter than me." But I learned that level of insight and curiosity that I have and the ability to say, "This doesn't make sense. Can we go through that again," is actually appreciated in the end.

Because a lot of times in these IT settings, we're talking about things while somebody else is multitasking over there. Not everybody is fully at the table, and so things get missed. And if you're a person who's sitting in there and that is actually listening and attuned to what's going on and a question comes up ... That's a benefit, because someone else might have that question. Someone else might have that concern.

Shrinking back is really something that I encourage myself constantly to avoid doing. You want to bring relevant questions to the table. You don't want to just be taking meetings off the rails. You want to have the ability to say, "This could use some clarification." Not from a place of, "I know better and I am the smartest person in the room. You need to say that again." But from a real question of, "You said A and you said B, but I feel like that doesn't equal C." Or, "Tell me how that equals C."

Mike Gerholdt:

No. I can 100% understand that. The imposter syndrome part, I feel like you deal with every day. Because you're sitting there and all of these people know the process or pretend to know the process. And then, you're the expert and they almost look for you to, "Well, can you answer this?" You're like, "We are just in the learning about you phase. We are not into the solving about you phase at this point."

Ko Forte:

Right.

Mike Gerholdt:

What is one thing ... I feel like maybe you pick up on this a little bit more with your theater background, but dealing with personalities. I'm trying to dig into the mindset part of this, because I feel like a lot of it is understanding business process and what people are telling you. But I feel the other part of it too is dealing with personalities in a meeting.

Because you mentioned, and I could literally visualize as you were telling me, the person over there multitasking. The one person talking, who is super excited telling you about the process. And then, two or three other people that are like they have to be there. What would your advice be for admins who are going into this? Who are like, "Look, we're all in this room. We're trying to solve this." How do I manage personalities?

Ko Forte:

Managing personalities for me has a lot to do with helping people understand their value within the context of the meeting or the workshop that you're doing. So it's really appropriate what you said about feeling like I have to be here. That is definitely an energy that I've dealt with.

When you haven't communicated beforehand in your meeting agenda ... Or not having an agenda. That's a big one. Or in your meeting invite, "What is the purpose of this meeting? What are we going to do there? What are we going to talk about?" Those are big things that contribute to the feeling of, "I have to be here. I really don't want to. I have nothing to contribute." And that's not going to be the case.

So as much as I can, helping people have information upfront. Even if within that meeting we don't get through that whole agenda. Just having them understand, "This is a snapshot of what I hope to achieve here and what kind of feedback I'm hoping to get. Thank you so much for making the time. I'll see you there." That goes a long way to creating an environment of participation and shared value.

Mike Gerholdt:

I know every meeting is different. In every business analysis session, you've probably had 20 or 30 people and two or three. Is there a physical activity that you feel you do in most every meeting that really helps move it along? That may be a normal Salesforce ... Normal. That may be a Salesforce admin who is getting into the business analysis role and maybe doesn't know what to do.

Ko Forte:

Well, the one big one, since a lot of us are working remotely now and we are having Zoom meetings and video meetings and things like that. The biggest thing I would say is, "Turn your camera on." Even if you are not facilitating the meeting, you're not leading the meeting ... Even if you're not a BA. Especially, if you're not a BA and you're hoping to land a BA role. Turn your camera on. Let people see your face.

As human beings, we have evolved to enjoy seeing a person's face, seeing the eyes. That's going to be important to create an image of, "I'm a safe person. I'm a reliable person. I'm here. I'm present." That goes a long way. Having the ability to show up and be seen, and to be seen as someone who is actively participating and present goes a very long way.

Mike Gerholdt:

I 100% can tell you I react differently in a meeting when I see the organizer's face versus when I don't.

Ko Forte:

Absolutely.

Mike Gerholdt:

Because I'm like, "Are you even paying attention? Are you phoning this in literally? Phoning it in?" I want to dig into a little bit of ... We talked a lot about inputs and managing stuff. We're never going to cover all of the business analyst role in a podcast. And if we are, it's going to be a long podcast.

Ko Forte:

Right.

Mike Gerholdt:

What are some of the outputs that you feel are different that maybe admins should shift to as they're doing more business discovery and business analysis work?

Ko Forte:

Sure. Just some simple things that I like to keep track of, especially if I'm working with other teams in their processes, is a process document. How do people currently do their work? And I like to say it doesn't have to be anything fancy. A lot of times when it comes to process documents, no one has written this stuff down. Because it's just the process and it's been transferred verbally from one person to another. We just know to do it like this.

But as you are creating that document and you are working with the point person to approve and authorize, "Yes. This is the process. We're good to go." So much comes out of that. Because then, you get to discover, "Well, that's what they do. Why are they doing it like that?" Or, "That's actually not the process. We need to figure out who told them to do that and why."

"This is the actual process. We need to tweak this process over here and make it more clear that this is the way, and not that." There's so much value that comes from that. Just knowing what people are doing and how. And then, where even the gaps are and the idea of, "We just started doing that. That's just what we do now." And the manager is like, "Well, I didn't know you were doing it like that. Why are you doing it like that?"

Mike Gerholdt:

Well, we started doing it that way, because we heard the consultants coming in.

Ko Forte:

Right. Right.

Mike Gerholdt:

It's like the chef getting the cookbook out. "Well, we started using this recipe the other day."

Ko Forte:

Well, a lot of times too, it happens because, "Well, that broke, so we couldn't do it like that anymore. We started doing this." Well, let's talk about this part that quote, unquote, "Broke." We can address that as opposed to making a whole other process to get around that thing.

Mike Gerholdt:

You never start fixing something until it breaks. Boy, let me tell you. That is so relevant for me right now. You have no idea. No idea. Documentation always comes up. I've managed admin track at Dreamforce now for many years. Almost every year outside of the shiny object that Salesforce is releasing, whether it's Dynamic Pages or Flow or whatever the hot new product is, the sessions on documentation are always the biggest.

The ways to store documentation, I've talked about this on the podcast. What do you like to give departments or give organizations and advise them in terms of a leave-behind? In terms of, "Now, we've documented this. Here's what I suggest, where to keep it, how to update it, how often to update it."

Ko Forte:

I'm actually working through that right now, because I'm rolling off of a project.

Mike Gerholdt:

Good.

Ko Forte:

What I decided to do was work with their current knowledge base. This is important because I want to be very sensitive not to create yet another space that they have to go to and that they won't go to. What are they actually currently using? Some organizations, they are blessed with lots of different tools.

Mike Gerholdt:

Sometimes they're rich in tools, but poor in knowledge.

Ko Forte:

Correct. Correct.

Mike Gerholdt:

Or they've got so many tools they don't even know where to put them. "Well, we could put this documentation in seven different places."

Ko Forte:

Correct. So as a consultant, if that's not a process that I'm there to solve for, I'll just ask, "Where will you find this? Where do you want this?" And in a place that everyone can get to it. So that's generally my approach. I actually want what has been created to be something that they can reference again and again.

Doing the work to prepare the documentation in such a way that it's not just, "Me, in my mind, I know exactly what that means," but making it for a general population that can go and get value from it after I'm gone is something that I'm really sensitive to. I want to put it in a style that they can easily read and get value from. And I want to store it in a place that they say, "We will come back to here and we will utilize this again."

Mike Gerholdt:

That's smart. How often do you recommend they update their documentation?

Ko Forte:

I recommend that documentation is reviewed quarterly. At least, quarterly. Because within a quarter, companies are reviewing what their goals were, what work they've completed, where they need to go to in the next quarter. It's just a good place to stop and say, "Is this still accurate based on where we last were and where we need to be now?"

But along with documentation that I create, throughout the lifetime of the project, I am adopting that company's documented information. When was the last time you reviewed your organizational chart? Or a job description? These are very valuable documents that a company provides and we hope that they manage pretty regularly, so that I know who key stakeholders are, how teams interact with one another, where they connect, and who to go to for certain information and guidance. So I'm constantly as the BA looking to interact with that company's documentation as it's stated.

Mike Gerholdt:

I've got to imagine that org chart is probably the least updated. I don't know. That would be a fun poll to ask people. I feel many companies I have worked at ... They always hand it to you in training or something, "Here's the org chart," but it's from 1982.

Ko Forte:

Exactly.

Mike Gerholdt:

You're like, "Wow. That's great." "We fired the guy that took care of it." You're like, "Cool. I love that even more so."

Ko Forte:

Right.

Mike Gerholdt:

As we wrap up, the one thing ... If you've ever presented an admin track or any presentation I'm overseeing. I always like to think of the one thing that goes through my mind when I'm done hearing a presentation, which is, "Cool. You gave me a ton of knowledge and I'm super excited to go do it. When I stand up, what should I do next?"

That's my question to you. After listening to this now for however many minutes, admins are like, "I need to do business analysis work even better." What should they do next? What's their next step?

Ko Forte:

What I would suggest is to first go and review your job description and understand for yourself, "Am I currently meeting this description as stated? Am I doing, to the best of my ability, what they are expecting me to do?" And then, from there, if you are, good job. Now, you can understand the ways that you want to start building out in this BA capacity.

I feel like that's the most supportive way for you to begin that journey. Because I don't want to put you in a position where you're like, "Well, I created these process documents and I had this workshop and I took meeting notes. I got all this documentation together. Can I be a BA now?" And they're like, "Well, you stopped being a great admin. We can't promote you to a BA, because you're not meeting your job description currently."

Make sure you're meeting all the needs and requirements there first to protect yourself and allow yourself to have the best possible path to where you want to go next. And then, start building relationships. That thing of turning on your camera? That's a simple one that you can do immediately. Start building relationships both horizontally with people who are in a similar state as you in the job. And then, vertically. Who's above you? Who can become a sponsor for you at your company? Who can be a mentor?

Who can you mentor? That's a very valid question to ask, because as you teach, you learn more. Your network is going to hopefully be full of people who can support you, who can encourage you as you do things like look into certifications and things like that. Because that's going to take not only mental space, but it's an emotional process to some extent as well. You want to be well-fortified in all the ways, so that you can expand your career in the direction you want to go, but keep your mental health intact at the same time.

Mike Gerholdt:

That was 8,000 pounds of awesome advice. You started with someplace that no one has ever started before. I feel the need to call it out. Take a second to look at your job description and make sure you're doing that well. Wow. Wow. Because I think we forget that, and I got goosebumps when you said that. You're so right. If you're going to move up, make sure you're doing the foundational work right.

Ko Forte:

Right.

Mike Gerholdt:

That is huge knowledge. Right at the end of the podcast. This is an amazing discussion, Ko. I could talk to you for days, literally. Thanks for taking time out and sharing some of your information with us, really bringing that mindset to what you do, inspiring admins, and being out there at community conferences and talking about this. Because it is so important.

Ko Forte:

Thank you so much for having me. It's really important to me and valuable to me to support people to share my journey. It feels like an unlikely journey. And so, that's why I'm happy to share it with others to say, "Hey. If I did it, you can do it." You can do even more.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yep. Absolutely. Absolutely. Wow. Well, thank you for being amazing at this.

Ko Forte:

Thanks, Mike.

Mike Gerholdt:

Okay. Was I right or was I right about Ko's advice on what you should do next? Literally, that might be the best advice I've ever heard about what you do next. So I hope you enjoyed that. I enjoyed the podcast. I will give you a hint that there is more business analysis podcasts coming up in August, because that's how the hosts lined up. And I am totally into business analysis stuff right now.

I think this is a great episode. What I want you to do is, if you'd do me a favor, I need you to share the episode with one person. Help us build the listeners. There's a ton of Salesforce admins out there that need to hear this. It's so much fun. I think it's fun to listen to.

Now, if you're listening on the iTunes app, here's how you do it. You just tap the three dots and choose Share Episode. Then, you can share it to your social feeds. Or you can text it to a friend and be like, "Hey. I just listened to the Salesforce Admins Podcast. I know you wanted to get into business analysis. Listen to this episode with Ko." That's literally what you need to do. It's not that hard.

Of course, if you're looking for more great resources, everything Salesforce admin is at admin.salesforce.com, including a transcript of the show. And of course, be sure to join the conversation over in our Admin Trailblazer Group in the Trailblazer community. I know there's probably some BA questions going on over there. Don't worry. Links to all of those are in the show notes. And until next week, I'll see you in the cloud.

Direct download: Replay__Being_a_Business_Analyst_with_Ko_Forte.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 1:00am PDT

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Will Moeller, Salesforce Administrator.

Join us as we chat about why relationships are the key to building trust and engaging with stakeholders and end users alike.

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

Lessons from a clinical social worker

Will is my first guest with a degree in clinical social work, and I wanted to bring him on the pod to talk about how those skills have translated into his role as a Salesforce Admin. He first started working with databases and data via the Homeless Management Information System (HMIS).

When Will’s nonprofit got a significant grant, they decided to move their data into Salesforce. He quickly became a self-described fanboy. His career has taken him to other places, but there are some key lessons he’s learned from social work that can help you connect with stakeholders and end users alike.

Finding congruence

We focus a lot on the business problems we’re trying to solve and the technical solutions we’re going to implement. Will, however, urges you to attend to the relationships you’re building in your meetings with users and stakeholders.

A key part of building relationships is knowing your audience. High-level stakeholders are going to go into a meeting with very different goals and concerns than an end user will have. Will explains the concept of “congruence,” a term from clinical social work. It means taking the time, before a meeting with someone, to understand their perspective and how you need to frame things to get them to listen to you.

Navigating Diverse Audience Priorities

Different audiences are going to have different priorities. In a meeting with stakeholders, you need to frame things in terms of the bottom line. Convincing your boss to address technical debt will go a lot more smoothly if you frame it in terms of how it’ll save your business time and money as time goes on.

For end users, Will finds it helpful to focus on building trust. As he says, they’re going to come into a meeting with you thinking, “This is my job, I need to trust that you’re going to have my best interest at the front of your mind as you’re going through this.”

As Will says, the key here is taking time to understand the motivations of the people you’re meeting with before you sit down together. This episode is full of other great tips for managing your business relationships, so be sure to take a listen.

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Direct download: Building_Relationships_and_Breaking_Down_Silos_with_Will_Moeller.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 1:00am PDT

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to David Giller, CEO of Brainiate. Join us as we chat about project management and how to push back with positivity.

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

Why admins need project management skills

It takes a lot of energy to keep up with everything going on in the Salesforce ecosystem. What David sees, however, is that learning how to do something isn’t the biggest challenge facing most Salesforce Admins. “The things people are struggling with the most,” he says, “involve all of the interactions that they have with end users and business leaders at the companies they work with.” In other words, admins need help with project management.

As David points out, admins love to solve problems. We want to show off our skills, make changes quickly, and—let’s be honest—play with some new toys. But we’re often so eager to jump in and implement a request that we don’t take the time to look at the business problem behind it that needs to be solved. 

Project management is problem-solving

What David is pointing at is the difference between being an order taker and being a problem solver. And being the person who just does what they’re asked to do is limiting for your career. What happens when AI gets smart enough to troubleshoot user requests and generate custom reports?

Talking to David made me realize an important distinction: the difference between customization and personalization. When someone makes a request, is it a customization that will help with an entire business process, or is it a personalization that will help that user with their part of the process? How will it affect everything else? What I’m getting at here is that admins need to create customizations that will scale, rather than personalizations that will help only a few users and could create other issues in the org.

The power of pushback

Solving problems at scale means that sometimes it’s your job to push back. Your users might not understand why you’re asking so many questions about adding a simple checkbox, or even suspect that you don’t know how to fulfill the request at all. When he runs into this, David will explain that while the feature is easy to add, he needs to make sure that it actually solves the problem and doesn’t create other issues.

The key here is to push back in a way that positions you as an ally, not an adversary, who is coming together with stakeholders to fix a problem. You’re a coach, a business therapist, a problem solver—in short, you’re on their side. 

In all of his consulting work, the most useful question David can ask a client is, “What is the problem we are trying to solve?” Focus on that, and you can position yourself as a problem solver and grow your career.

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Direct download: Effective_Project_Management_with_David_Giller.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 1:00am PDT

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Lizz Hellinga, Consultant and Salesforce MVP.

Join us as we chat about why clean data is more important than ever if you want to leverage the potential of generative AI.

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

Generative AI needs clean data

I brought Lizz on the pod to bring you an important message: clean data is no longer optional. “If your data isn’t ready for generative AI, your business isn’t ready,” she says. This was the theme of her presentation at Florida Dreamin’, and I thought it was something every admin needed to hear.

Everyone is excited about the new generative AI tools coming to Salesforce and it’s potential to revolutionize how we use data. Something that Lizz feels gets lost in the conversation, however, is that these insights will only be as good as the data you use to generate them. That’s why clean data is more important than ever before.

What is bad data?

This naturally begs the question, what makes for bad data? Some common examples Lizz shares include:

  • Duplicate data

  • Inaccurate data

  • Incomplete data

  • Stale data

  • Hoarded data

Hoarded data sticks out to me as something that isn’t discussed as much. As Lizz explains, not too long ago we went through a phase of “more data = good.” This has led many organizations to blindly hold onto data they’ll never use but are too afraid to throw away.

For Lizz, the key here is to work with your stakeholders to create a data governance policy. That way you’re clear on what data quality means for your organization and what data you don’t need to retain. As Lizz points out, reporting is a good opportunity to highlight why this is important to everyone involved.

How to get started cleaning your data for generative AI

When you’re looking at what data is most important to clean up for generative AI, Lizz recommends that you start by documenting the process you’re going to be working with. What are the essential data points in that journey? How does the data come in, and how can you make that easier?

It’s hard to get people motivated to clean up their data. Whether it’s the end of the quarter or the beginning of the new one, it’s never the right time. For Lizz, you need to talk about the why. You need to sell your stakeholders on what generative AI can do to make their lives easier, and why you need high-quality data to do that.

We get into a lot of specifics with Lizz on the podcast, so be sure to take a listen to learn more. And remember, now’s the time to clean up your data!

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Direct download: Why_Clean_Data_Is_Non-Negotiable_in_the_AI_Era_with_Lizz_Hellinga.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 1:00am PDT

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Shannon Tran, Principal Architect Director at Salesforce.

Join us as we chat about career changes, career progression, and chasing a vision.

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

The admin skill set is broad

Shannon is just over a month into her new role as a Principal Architect Director at Salesforce, so I thought it would be the perfect time to have her on the pod to talk about careers and how admins can branch out.

It’s easy to get caught up in a particular career path and chase the next title up the ladder, but that’s not the only way to grow your career. “The admin skill set is so broad,” Shannon says, “it can open so many doors for you.” She points to things we practice every day, like active listening or explaining technical processes, as examples of skills that can help you in a wide variety of roles.

Get a swim buddy

We all have different strengths and weaknesses, and it can feel like that creates walls for what we can and can’t do with our careers. As Shannon explains, we can invest a lot of time and energy into climbing over those walls, or we can look around and see if someone might be willing to offer us a ladder.

In the Navy SEAL training program, every recruit is paired with a “swim buddy,” whose responsibility is to “support them unfailingly through the trials and tribulations of their rigorous training program.” Shannon recommends finding a swim buddy for your career, someone in the same place as you who can share the load as you both work towards your goals.

Fake it till you make it

When you’re looking at that next job, it’s easy to get caught up in what qualifications you don’t have. But Shannon reminds us to think about it from the job poster’s perspective. They don’t want to hire someone who can already do everything because they’ll pretty quickly get bored and move on. “Growing isn’t just growing your title, growing is growing in your role,” she says.

The most important thing you do for your career is to believe in yourself and what you can accomplish. We talk a lot in this episode about the idea of “fake it till you make it” and how that’s been misunderstood. If you want to be a consultant, you don’t go around telling everyone you’re a consultant, you start acting like one. How would a consultant approach this problem? How would they document this process?

Shannon has a lot of great stories and advice for how to take control of your Salesforce career, so be sure to listen to the full episode for more great tips and a free pep talk.

 

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Direct download: Pursuing_the_Right_Salesforce_Career_with_Shannon_Tran.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 1:00am PDT

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to LeeAnne Rimel, Senior Director of Admin and Developer Strategic Content at Salesforce.

Join us as we chat about the call for presentations for TrailblazerDX and why you should submit.

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

A focus on community at TDX

TrailblazerDX isn’t until March, but our team is already hard at work on all the great stuff we’re planning for you. TDX has always been a unique opportunity to learn directly from the product owners and engineers behind your friendly neighborhood platform and, this year, we’re excited to create even more opportunities to engage and connect. It’s almost like an in-person version of the podcast.

This year, we’re also programming all sorts of community-led content from Trailblazers like you. We want to dig into real-life use cases and implementations to see these products in action. That’s why LeeAnne asked me to come on the pod. She wants you (yes, you!) to submit a presentation and be a part of this year’s TDX.

TDX is not just for devs

TDX 2024 will be the AI developer conference of the year. We’ll be focused on how you can build the next generation of AI-powered apps for your business using Einstein 1. While Einstein AI is a big part of the picture, core platform technologies like user management, app building, dev ops, Apex, Flow, and APIs are all key ingredients in making these solutions work well.

As LeeAnne says, “not every session has to be an AI session.” And also, just because it’s TDX doesn’t mean you have to be a developer in order to present. We want to hear from admins, architects, and ISVs, too.

Different sessions in the CFP

There are all sorts of ways to get involved. There are theater sessions focused on a specific product with demos and slides, but there are also more intimate and conversational campfire sessions.

This year, we’re adding a new session type called the Deep Dive Panel. If you have a solution that you’ve built that could be interesting to look at in-depth, we’d love for you to share it at TDX. We’ll pair these real-world examples panel discussions with customer experts and Salesforce experts to break everything down.

The CFP is open now, but it closes on December 1st. So get started on your title and abstract soon and I’ll see you at TDX!

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Full Transcript

Mike:
Trailblazer DX is the AI developer conference of the year, where you can learn directly from product owners and engineers how to build the next generation of apps on the Einstein 1 Platform and take your career to the next level. So it only makes sense that we talk with LeeAnne Rimel, senior director of admin and developer strategic content, about the call for presentations for Trailblazer DX. Now before we get into that episode, I want you to get sure you're following the Salesforce Admins Podcast on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. That way, you get a new episode every Thursday right on your phone. So let's get to that conversation with LeeAnne. So LeeAnne, welcome to the podcast. 

LeeAnne Rimel:
Hi, Mike. Thanks so much for having me.

Mike:
It's November, but we're talking Trailblazer DX, which is in March.

LeeAnne Rimel:
It is, yes. We're talking about TDX. We never stop working on the next awesome event for our Trailblazer community. And we came off of Dreamforce and we dove right into TDX planning.

Mike:
I mean, it's nonstop. Right? All the time.

LeeAnne Rimel:
Nonstop. I love it.

Mike:
So let's talk about Trailblazer DX. What do we have so planned so far? And what do you want to talk about?

LeeAnne Rimel:
Yeah. So I'm incredibly excited for TDX this year. Actually, you and me both, Mike, have been around since the first TDX, which was in 2016. And to take us down memory lane a little bit, the origin story of TDX was very much around let's have a Salesforce developer conference and dive deep into product, connect with product owners, engineers, really make it about learning, about the technology, connection. And so we are really excited to have laser focus on those goals for this year's TDX. And really, I think TDX has always been about learning, but really dive in deeper to that deep learning, more technical content, more technical presenters, more technical opportunities to engage and connect and network, so we're super excited about this year's TDX.

Mike:
Yeah. I always feel like TDX is kind of an in-person version of the podcast because I get to sit down with product managers all the time and talk to them about what they built and how they built it, and some of the concepts behind why they built things, like dynamic forms and stuff like that. And TDX is almost like you get to do that in person. You get to see the person that actually built the thing that makes you successful every day on stage.

LeeAnne Rimel:
Absolutely. So some sessions and some of the content will be things that maybe if you did go to Dreamforce, or watched some of the Dreamforce content, there will be some similarities there. And then at TDX, that's what we're going to do wall to wall, is these roadmap sessions, deep dive technical product sessions, solution oriented sessions, community led, Trailblazer led sessions focused on real life solutions that they've built, so we're really excited to I think have that opportunity to have Q and A with PMs, have sessions that are really built around that model. So I think we're looking at some different session formats and different ways to really cultivate that opportunity for discussion and Q and A, and asking questions of people who are implementation experts and also experts in the products, experts in the roadmap, so that we're all walking away with some deep learning under our belt and really feel like we've gotten answers in key areas that we need to continue building. 

Mike:
Well, you mentioned, you teased out a little bit of the change in the format. I also saw there was for the first time, a public facing call for presentation, so that's new as well.

LeeAnne Rimel:
Yeah. So we're really looking at: How do we feature alongside all of this roadmap, technical deep dive content that we get from our engineers, from our PMs, from our solution architects, alongside that, how do we partner that type of content track with also community led content from our practitioners out in the field, if you will, our Trailblazers, who are hands on with these products every day and have built and learned a lot of lessons and built successful implementations with many of these different features and products, so that we can learn some of those real life stories and use cases? And so we're excited to see that. So yes, you mentioned the CFP. I'm going to do my little plug for the CFP.
We will have dedicated community space and track, and we're really excited to feature our Trailblazer speakers at TDX, so I encourage all of you, I know you're going to link it in the show notes, Mike, to go through and submit your session idea. So that could be a theater session, which might involve more of a product coverage, more demos, more slides, as well as a campfire is another session option, which might be more conversational, more of a panel, maybe more career focused, maybe no demos or slides usually in campfire, so more of a kind of intimate conversational vibe. And then we also have a new option on the CFP for a deep dive panel. So if you have a solution that you've built that is well-suited to do kind of a deep dive, technical walk through, and then are willing to participate in a panel discussion afterwards, we're going to be introducing that on the CFP as well. So really look forward to seeing all of your ideas and session ideas come through the CFP.

Mike:
And the deep dive is a longer session version. So the amount of work and prep that would go into that's a little bit more than a breakout. Right?

LeeAnne Rimel:
Yes. It would be a bigger commitment to be sure. If you were involved or attended TDX '18 or '19, we had a session type called the extracurricular. And this is not exactly the same, but it's similar in many ways. It's a longer session format. We would be working together to identify people who would be on the panel with you, maybe a Salesforce product manager could be on the panel with you as well. So we have this kind of combination of customer experts and Salesforce experts. And yes, it would be a longer form presentation, so definitely more of a commitment, but really meaningful sessions.

Mike:
I think when I've submitted for call for presentations for other events, I've always kind of wanted to know: What is the main theme, or what is the main vision that the organization has for this event? Can you kind of help summarize that up?

LeeAnne Rimel:
Yes. So TDX is the AI developer conference of the year. So really, a huge focus of TDX will be: How do you build the next generation of AI apps on our Einstein 1 Platform? So how do you build apps, AI enabled apps for your business? And a key part of that, it's of course our Einstein product coverage, all of our new Einstein AI products that are coming out, as well as that core platform technologies, so user management, app building, devops, apex, flow, working with APIs, all of these core elements are incredibly important to build performant AI apps. And so I would encourage, not every session has to be an AI session, but of course AI sessions, very popular. But then these core technologies, what are those foundational lessons that help people build great apps? I mean, really going not back to basics, because we want to have some deep dive lessons, but going back to those fundamental tenets of: What do admins, developers, and architects and ISEs need to know in order to build performant apps that can be performant AI apps? 

Mike:
I know you said admin, architects, ISVs, but it's a developer conference. So if I'm an admin or an architect, should I submit to the CFP? 

LeeAnne Rimel:
Absolutely. So we definitely will have great learning experiences for developers and admins and architects and RISVs, so please submit your session. I think there is absolutely a very important place for all of those audiences. So we do call it a developer conference, but it's a wider reaching word developer that we're using here for really all of our technical practitioners will be prioritized at this conference and learning first for sessions, whether that's no code, low code, or code building, whether you're thinking about architectural tenets of building, or you're thinking about building partner app.

Mike:
One of the things that I've seen as a track leader at Dreamforce, and somebody that's submitted for other events is, it's real easy and I think sometimes people view it as beneficial to submit kind of 101 content because events are always looking for that, as opposed to the 301 content, where it's a deeper dive and it's super advanced. And it's like, "Maybe the event organizer isn't going to take this because it's so advanced, and they're going to be worried about putting 200, 300 people in a room. And my session isn't going to do that, so maybe I just shouldn't submit 301 content." What would you say to that?

LeeAnne Rimel:
Submit it. We need it. Looking at, I've spent a lot of time, Mike, I've spent a lot of time looking at the numbers, if you will, for all of our events. And I spend a lot of time looking at who comes to Salesforce events, and to TDX, or to the Trailblazer Forest and tracks of Dreamforce. And there is a wide range of skill levels and a wide range of expertise levels with all of our products and features across all of our audiences. So there are absolutely admins and developers that are attending these events who have successfully built many flows, or know what they're doing, and they want to see these niche solutions that may be much more advanced, or maybe much more technical.
They want to go beyond maybe the learning tools that have already been available to them. And so I think definitely submit those. I think we're going to be looking for very much a breadth, so if you feel very well-versed to present an amazing flow 101 type session, please submit that. If you want to share some really edge cases of how you are pushing the limits with Salesforce technologies and building great solutions with them, and it is more advanced and it requires an existing skillset, submit that as well. We'll be looking for the whole breadth of level. 

Mike:
Yeah. I've always felt like if you've gone to an event and felt, I could be presenting all of this, then that's what you should be doing, so that the event gets to that next level, so that more people like yourself can get farther into the learning journey, as opposed to letting it sort of plateau. What, if people are sitting down and kind of looking at their first quarter of the year, what else? We have sessions planned for TDX, how is that whole experience kind of planned out? What are we doing more of?

LeeAnne Rimel:
Yeah, more learning. I mean, that's if there's a TL;DR, it's going to be more deep technical learning. That's going to be the experience this year. We'll of course have workshops. We're going to have hopefully more workshops, more breakouts, really deep diving into more learning, more sessions. We will still absolutely have wonderful opportunities to connect and to network. So having special programming for some of our attendees, and having Q and As, and having spaces and opportunities to connect with your peers and with other Trailblazers and with product owners. Of course, we're going to have fun. That's always one of our values.

Mike:
Do you know the band? Do we know the ... Is there a band? 

LeeAnne Rimel:
I do not know the band. 

Mike:
That's okay. It's fine.

LeeAnne Rimel:
But the really having fun, diving in, connecting with the community partners, activities, events, so we're really excited about that, and then of course, giving back. How can we always build giving back into our experience? So I think if you're coming to TDX, I think it'll feel different than last year. I think TDX has not been around as long as Dreamforce, and I think we've always kind of been open to really listening to our customers and our community, and fine-tuning and shifting and changing and growing TDX. And so I think this year, we've heard very much from our community that deep learning, connecting with experts, that's what I want at TDX. And so that's what we are working on right now to really prioritize and deliver. 

Mike:
Okay. So LeeAnne, it sounds like step one is really thinking about if you want to submit to the call for presentations. Can you give us just a quick overview of that and when it closes?

LeeAnne Rimel:
Yes. So the call for presentations, often called the CFP, so we use those interchangeably, the CFP is open right now. It opened at the beginning of November. It is closing on December 1st, and it is not a quick thing to write your title and abstract because you want to be thoughtful. We pick the sessions based on great titles and abstracts, and so you want to be thoughtful about it. So give yourself some time to sit down and really workshop and work on your title and abstract and make sure it represents the content you'd like to deliver. So the next step for all of you is to ... I recommend visit the CFP blog. It's got a great overview of the CFP and adds additional clarity and reiterates some of those points that I made around the session types and what type of content is the right fit for each session type. Read the blog, start working and start thinking about your session that you'd like to submit, and send us your submission. I think we really want to see your submissions and we really want to learn from our community and make sure that our attendees have the opportunity to learn from our community.
And so, Mike, I think you had an excellent point earlier when you said, "If you've ever been at an event and you said, 'We need more X content, or I could be delivering this content,'" please do it. We want fresh, new faces. We're very excited to open this opportunity up and to learn from our Trailblazers. So please consider submitting your CFP. Read the blog first, I do recommend. It just offers some helpful insight.

Mike:
Awesome. Well, thanks so much, LeeAnne, for coming on the podcast.

LeeAnne Rimel:
Thanks for having me, Mike.

Mike:
Trailblazer DX is an AI conference for admins, developers, and architects. I can't wait to see some of the things that are going to be presented there. Now please share this episode with somebody because I mean, seriously, sharing is caring. And I love the podcast. Do you have thoughts on this episode? Let me know in the Trailblazer community. I'll link it in the show notes. You want to learn more about everything that you heard today? Check out admin.salesforce.com for show notes and a transcript of the podcast. So that's it for today, but stay tuned because next week, we're joined by Shannon Tran, who gives us her take on career growth and not chasing titles. 

 

Direct download: Trailblazers_at_TDX_with_LeeAnne_Rimel.mp3
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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Cheryl Feldman, Director of Product Management at Salesforce covering all user access features.

 

Join us as we chat about best practices for configuring user access and what Cheryl is working on to help you out.

 

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

Everything user access

We’re so excited to have Cheryl back on the pod to talk permissions and more. As a product area lead, she’s in charge of all the features you use every day to define user access and user management. Think things like user records, profiles, permission sets, permission set groups, roles, org-wide default, etc.

 

As an admin and manager of admin for 18 years, Cheryl recognizes just how much work goes into configuring user access. That’s why her team is hard at work to make everything easier for you and, in the meantime, she’s here to share best practices that might help you out.

The right amount of access

Cheryl recommends thinking about user access from the eye of the principle of least privilege “You want to think about the least amount of access somebody needs to do their job, you don’t want to give them any less or any more,” she says.

Think about if you have a bunch of personas that need object access to the account object. If you do that via profiles, you’d need to go through every profile and modify them if something changes. It’s simpler, instead, to create one wide permission set for all of your account access and then use permission set groups to mute what you don’t want.

It’s definitely a lot of work to set up, but it’ll save you so much time in the long run because your permission sets can be reused.

What’s next for user access in Salesforce

If you’re looking to evaluate user access in your org, you should know that Cheryl and her team have put out several tools to help you. They’ve created an app, User Access and Permissions Assistant, that helps you understand what a user has access to and how they are getting that access. And there’s more coming in the Winter ‘24 release, including user access reporting on standard reports and dashboards.

Looking forward, they’re releasing a new feature (currently in beta) called User Access Policies. It allows you to describe the type of users you want added to a specific group, or permission set, or profile, and automatically assign them to it when a user is created or updated.

Cheryl is on a mission to, as she puts it, “summary all of the things.” It shouldn’t be so hard to figure out what a user has access to and why. That’s why she needs your help. Check out the links below to the IdeaExchange to see if you might be able to join Cheryl on her quest to simplify user access in Salesforce.

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Direct download: Master_User_Access_with_Cheryl_Feldman.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 1:00am PDT

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Ajaay Ravi, Senior Technical Product Manager at Salesforce.

 

Join us as we chat about AI, Einstein for Flow (which at the time of the recording was called Flow GPT), and why admins should pay close attention.

 

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

Do Androids Dream of Bohemian Furniture?

Ajaay learned a lot about AI when he led a team at Amazon tasked with building technology to recommend furniture. The only problem was that they were all engineers and didn’t know the first thing about interior design. They brought in some experts who could tell them what individual components made something a particular style, and used their knowledge to train the AI by giving it high-quality data in bite-sized pieces that it could understand.

 

What’s important to understand here is that any AI model requires training. And to do that, you need to break a concept like “furniture style” down into tags like “upholstery,” “seat,” “legs,” “paisley,” etc. Then you can give it a group of tagged images to try to teach it a broader concept, like “Bohemian.” Finally, you test it to see if it can identify new images that have Bohemian furniture in them, give the model feedback on how it did, and start the loop again.

Einstein for Flow

For Salesforce, Ajaay has been building Einstein for Flow. The goal is to create a tool where you can just describe the automation you need and it will build you a flow—automagically. They’re still in the testing and training phase but the possibilities are tantalizing.

 

Depending on what type of user you are, you might use Einstein for Flow in several different ways. For those that are already experienced with Flow, you can leverage it to eliminate some steps and work faster. And for people newer to the ecosystem, Ajaay hopes it can remove barriers to unlocking the full potential of the platform.

Learning to crawl

Just like with the interior design tool Ajaay built earlier in his career, Einstein for Flow needs some time to learn. For now, they’re focused on building simple flows of five steps or less with minimal decision elements and branches. But it’ll only get better as they keep working on it and getting feedback from test users.

 

Be sure to check out the full episode for more about what makes for a good prompt, what you can do to get ready for Einstein for Flow, and how AI can “hallucinate.”

 

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Full Transcript

Mike:
Hey, Salesforce Admins. I am bringing back an episode that you might've missed in July, where we talked about what was then called Flow GPT. It's now called Einstein for Flow. And now that we're past Dreamforce, we can kind of dive into it a little bit more.
This is a really cool product that Salesforce is working on. And way back in July, I had the privilege of speaking with Ajaay Ravi, who is an engineer with Salesforce and, really, the tip of the spear working on all of this. We talk about AI and GPT and what is now Einstein for Flow, and really just why you as a Salesforce Admin should pay attention to it. So I want to call that out. Also, because we recorded this back in July, we do say “Einstein GPT” a lot, or “Flow GPT.” Of course, that naming convention has been changed, so we couldn't really go back through and change that. But this is a good episode. Dig into it.
Before you get into it, though, I just want to be sure you're doing one thing and you're following the podcast. So if you're just listening to this for the first time and you're not subscribed on iTunes or Spotify, go ahead and click that follow or subscribe button. And then, that way, every time a new podcast drops, which is Thursday morning, it'll be automatically put on your phone. And so you don't have to worry about it. And then you can just get in your car and ride to work or the train or ride your bike or take your dog for a walk. But anyway, this is a really fun conversation about Einstein for Flow with Ajaay.
Ajaay Ravi:
Thank you, Mike. Happy to be here.
Mike:
We're talking about AI and GPT, and I feel like you are the right person to do that, so let's start off by just giving everybody a background on your history of AI and GPT and how you got to Salesforce.
Ajaay Ravi:
Yeah, absolutely. Primarily, I have an engineering background and I used to design hardware chips, primarily networking and storage chip sets, and then I moved into the management carrier after doing my MBA. My initial brush with AI was at my previous job at Amazon, so I was a product manager. I did create a product called Shop by Style, which is live on Amazon Home. Essentially, it deals with how do you sell furniture, heavy, bulky home furnishings to customers via the phone and online. Traditionally, those are things that customers would like to walk into a store, touch, see, feel, and then figure out if it passes the squish test or not, and then purchase it. But then our focus was on how do we actually get customers to imagine what a particular piece of furniture will look like inside their own house and how do we enable every single person to become an interior designer of sorts and give them the skillset to do that?
So that's where we put together a team of computer vision scientists and we said, "Let's go and let's teach an AI model how to recognize style and stylistically put furniture together," and we realized that none of us knew anything about style or interior design, given that all of us had engineering backgrounds, and we were like, "Oops, what do we do now?" And then, to be very honest with you, I did not know what Bohemian meant, and what is the difference between industrial and glam and California casual and...
Mike:
Farmhouse chic. Don't forget about that.
Ajaay Ravi:
Absolutely. Farmhouse chic.
Mike:
Yep.
Ajaay Ravi:
So one of my first design [inaudible 00:03:01] was to hire some interior designers, actually new college grads fresh out of school. And they had two things. One was they had to come and teach blokes like us what style was about, and educate us on design and design concepts. And then they helped go through every single product or home furnishings product that Amazon sold, and tagged every single image with what style it pertained to. And that's when I realized that a single piece of furniture could also pertain to multiple different styles, and you had to break it down into the components. You had to see what kind of arm it had, what kind of upholstery, what kind of leather, what kind of back, what kind of seat, what kind of cushioning. Oh my God, they did a wonderful job.
So that was one of our first inputs into our computer vision models, and then we started teaching the computer how to discern style. And then we put together this product called Shop by Style, where now the AI could automatically go in and if there was a product that a seller or anybody posted on Amazon, it would automatically look at the images that they post and determine what kind of style it pertained to. A particular piece of furniture could pertain to multiple styles too. And then the best piece was depending on what it is that you're browsing, it could also recommend stylistically appropriate complementary products to go with it. For example, if you were looking at a couch, it could help you complete the look by suggesting a coffee table and an end table and a lamp to go with it. So that was my first foray into everything AI-related. And essentially, we used things like AR and VR.
Then how do we show these pictures on a phone and get you to just take a picture of your room from your phone and then superpose these images at scale, on that picture, and then help you visualize if you purchased all these things and put it in your house and whatever places that you wanted to, how would it look like and complete the look for you? So yeah, that's where I started. And then, after my time at Amazon, I moved into Salesforce. Seattle was getting a little too...
Mike:
Rainy?
Ajaay Ravi:
... rainy and cold and snowy for my liking.
Mike:
Oh, no.
Ajaay Ravi:
So as I like to tell people, I've spent three years in Cincinnati in the Midwest and I've paid my dues to the Midwest, and given that Seattle was starting to get snowy, I wanted to get out of there. So yeah, that brought me back to my origins here in the Bay Area. And then, yeah, it's been a wonderful journey with Salesforce. I started off as a product owner on the Marketing Cloud Einstein team, where we were building AI-driven products to help marketers reach their customers at the right time, on the right channel, with the right frequency to help them be successful and help sell more products to their customers.
Mike:
Well, I can speak on behalf of maybe thousands of bachelors across the world that you've helped at Amazon design cool living rooms as a thank you, because that's generally how I shop when I'm on Amazon is I find one thing I like and then everything else that goes with it. Yes, I'll take all of that. I need basically that room. So thanks for inventing that and making us look good.
Ajaay Ravi:
Yeah. Well, you are very welcome. Like I said, I had an absolutely wonderful team that worked the magic behind the scenes, so I can't take all the credit for it.
Mike:
Yeah, so I feel like I should just upfront let you know, I'm going to ask a lot of stupid questions or questions that I feel are stupid, but are questions that I think everybody's trying to figure out. In your description, you talked about furniture and having these interior designers come in and tag the images with the style. And when Salesforce launched a lot of Salesforce Einstein and the Einstein product and Next Best Action, a lot of the discussion for admins was, "Okay, we need to make sure our data's good so that we can train the data model," and it sounds like that was something you were working on.
I bring that up because the juxtaposition now that I feel is, and I did this the other day, I went to ChatGPT. I didn't train it on a data model. I just asked it, write a one paragraph summary of X, Y, and Z, and it did that. So, long question short, can you help me understand the difference between when you were training that data model to show only Bohemian-style furniture versus what's happening when I just type in a text prompt with ChatGPT?
Ajaay Ravi:
Absolutely. Yeah, that is actually a fantastic question. So whether you're typing a text-based input on ChatGPT or it is something more sophisticated and targeted that you're looking for, any kind of AI model that runs behind the scenes requires training. Even these LLMs or large language models as we talk about, like OpenAI's ChatGPT, that is also pre-trained on multiple different kinds of inputs and the responses and texts, just that we don't go in and personally train those models. Those models are already pre-trained and they are hosted by ChatGPT, which we just access.
Mike:
Okay.
Ajaay Ravi:
So the way I like to talk about models are I have a two-year-old and a four-month-old at home. It's like trying to teach them anything about how to communicate or language or anything in general. If I go to my younger one, who's four months old, and I try to talk to him, sometimes I try to talk world politics or philosophy, he just blinks back at me and all he says is, "Baba."
Mike:
That's all sometimes I say too, when people talk world politics with me.
Ajaay Ravi:
Well, that is true. Unfortunately, I'm not good at talking baby language, I guess, when my wife drops me off with him. I need to find topics to talk to him about, so I just scroll the news and then I'm like, "Hey, do you want to hear about a new piece of news today?" Anyway, that's how my interactions go with him. It was the same with my two-year-old as well when he was an infant. But then you have to constantly keep, one, talking to them, and two, keep introducing them to these new simpler concepts because their mind is like a blank slate, and then they start forming these connections and maps as you keep trying to do things, as you keep trying to tell them things.
And you have to keep repeating. It's not only just once if you tell them, they just get it right out of the bat. Another example is my toddler recently, I told him he shouldn't be kicking the ball on the road when there's nobody present. And I thought he would understand that, hey, balls should not be kicked on the road. And what he understood was that particular ball, which was a soccer ball that he had, should not be kicked on the road. So he brings his basketball next and he is like, "Dad, can I kick this ball on the road?"
Mike:
I like your kids.
Ajaay Ravi:
Yeah. And then I realized my instruction to him was wrong because I did not specify the fact that any kind of ball should not be kicked on the road. I just said, "Don't kick that ball on the road." So that's how it comes in. That's how you think about when you're training models. You have a certain kind of inputs that you're training the models on. For example, let's go back for the training that model to recognize furniture style. So essentially, if you look at training, it consists of two pieces. One is you have a training data set and the other one is you have a testing data set. So you first train a model to recognize or do something, and then you test it against various other inputs to see how it responds to your test scenario. So the thing is, you can't train it for all the scenarios that include your test also, because then tomorrow, if there is a scenario that comes up that it doesn't know about or that it hasn't seen, then it will react in a way that you don't expect it to react.
So what I mean by that is, going back to this ball example, I needed to tell my son repeatedly that he cannot kick the soccer ball on the road without supervision, he cannot kick the basketball on the road, and he cannot kick his bouncy ball on the road. So I had to tell him one after the other, patiently answer his questions. And then what I did was I just brought a tennis ball and then I gave it to him and I said, "What do you want to do with this?" And then he finally was like, "No, I'm not going to kick it on the road because dad said no kicking any ball on the road." I was like, "Okay, you finally got it," so that's essentially the thing. So you try to train a model by giving it a few inputs. For example, what we did was we took 300 pictures of different furniture types that were Bohemian, and then we broke it down and you have to do what is called labeling or tagging.
And then we labeled each one of those parts. For example, what is the arm? What was the seat, the cushion, the upholstery, the legs, the back, the arch of the back? And all of that, and then we gave it to the model and we said, "Hey, if you see this tag and this image, and if you can understand that this tag pertains to this image, these are what constitute Bohemian." So it repeatedly looked through all those 300 sets of images and tags that we provided, and it formed a neural network where it was like, "Okay, I think I now understand what Bohemian looks like." And the next step, what we need to do is the testing after the training is now we give it 600 new images that it has not seen, and then we tell it, "Now go and find out if this is Bohemian or not." And then of course you expect it to get it right at least a fair few number of times.
And then every time it gets it wrong, you provide feedback. You tell it, "Hey, for this image, you got it wrong." And then it learns from that feedback. So over time, the accuracy improves. That is what training constitutes. It's the same thing for the large language model. If you look at OpenAI, whatever text you're typing in today, there are billions of users across the world who have been typing in everything that ranges from, "Write me a poem for Mother's Day," to what I recently did was I wanted an overnight oats recipe that did not use nuts, so different kinds of inputs from billions of people around the world. It's continually learning. And then the best part is that is also feedback that is captured. And every time you think that ChatGPT hasn't gotten something right, you hit that thumbs down button so ChatGPT knows the model which was trained on some training data is now being used against testing data, and then it learns as it keeps going and then it keeps getting better.
And there's the same thing with the internal models that we have in Salesforce as well. One of the coolest things that we're working on right now is called Einstein GPT for Flow, because, as we know, Flow is a very nuanced and sophisticated product that our admins use. So we were just thinking about, "Hey, there is this new GPT feature where you can just talk to it in natural language and it can do something really technical and cool and just give you an output. Why don't we take that and try to help our customers and just have them describe a flow that they want to create?" And then we just automatically create it for them. They don't have to go through the steps of opening Flow Builder, bringing in different elements, actually configuring them, connecting them, and going into the property editors and making sure that they have the right information because all of this is time-consuming.
What if we just had them describe in two sentences or three sentences what it is that they're trying to do and then voila, just go ahead and automatically create it for them? So that I think is a long-winded answer to your question.
Mike:
No, it's good. And you took us there because I did want to talk about why Salesforce is paying attention to GPT and what we're trying to do with Flow GPT, because I feel like at least my interaction so far with this new tech is, "Tell me how many pizzas to order for a birthday party," or like you did, "Help me find a recipe." And I'm thinking, so what are we trying to do here at Salesforce with that? But you tipped the answer of have the person describe essentially the automation that they need created in Salesforce, and then so what exactly are we trying to do with Flow GPT? Do we want it to create the entire flow? Do we want it to just get started or return a nice image of a pirate cat?
Ajaay Ravi:
That is a lovely way of putting it. I would like a pirate cat. So what we are trying to do is just, in very simple terms, make life easy for our customers. And that could mean different things for different people. For certain people, it might mean reducing the amount of time that they spent in trying to create these flows. For certain people, probably the barriers to entry or adoption is pretty high where they feel like they're new users and there are just a million options that are available for them. They don't know where to start. And there are some users who are like, "I manage multiple things during my day. I wear so many different hats, so I need some kind of personal assistant for me who can help do some mundane tasks if I just ask them to go do it without me doing it."
So there are these different kinds of use cases. So with Flow, what we are trying to solve is whatever it is for you that makes your life easy. Let's say you're an admin and let's say you are somebody who's an expert user of flow, how do we help save some time for you? So before I go there, there's one thing that I would like to mention. It is with anything that is AI and training-related, as they say, Rome wasn't built in a day, so you have to crawl, walk, and then run. Because it takes time initially for that training to happen, and then the testing is the slow crawling phase where the model starts learning. And then once the model slowly starts getting better, then you can start adding more complexity to the point where you can now start walking and then finally you can start running.
For example, with my two-year-old, I can only talk to him about balls in the road and kicking the ball right now. I still can't go and talk to him about algebra and trigonometry. He's not going to understand that. So my natural progression should be, I talk about this, and the next thing is I've taught him how to count from one to 10, and he can go up to 11 today, but that's all he can do. So he first has to figure out how to get to about a hundred, how to do some basic math additions and subtractions, and then once these initial few foundational years, you do it correctly, and then that running phase is very simple because at that point he would start grasping things much faster, and then algebra and trigonometry would become much easier.
Similarly, here, our crawl phase is we are going to start with simpler flows. Can we go ahead and reliably create flows that are four or five steps long, for example, that do not have multiple decision elements, multiple branches, just have simple formulas and things like that, or maybe even simple MuleSoft connectors and do something very simple? For example, as an admin, if there are let's say five different kinds of flows that you wanted to create, out of which two are simple, and we can help save some time for you by creating those simple flows ,if you just come in and say, "Hey, I want to send an email when a lead is converted to an opportunity and just send that email to this email address," done. We can go ahead and create it for you. We don't want you to go into Flow Builder, open it up, and spend all the time in doing it when you have other things to do with your time.
And like I said, there are some people who would want to come in and who are like, "Hey, Flow has a million options." Crawl here, which is basic flows. "I want to create some basic flows. I want to know how these flows are created, but what if I can just describe what I want and you can create a simple flow for me and then I can go and look it up, and maybe I understand how it actually works?" So that is essentially what we're trying to do here is make life easy and simple for our customers.
Mike:
Yeah. No, that makes sense. As I've heard you describe this, and the ball analogy with your children I think is perfect, one thing that I just want to bounce this idea off you and see if I'm correct, can you tell me how important it will be for admins to correctly articulate what they want Flow GPT to do?
Ajaay Ravi:
That is an excellent question. So with anything GPT-related, your output or whatever you get out of it at the end of the day is going only going to be as good as what your input was or what you told it that you wanted. And given that natural language is something that is very subjective and different people can understand things in different ways, it is very, very important that we get that input very correct. So we call that as an input prompt, because prompt is the term that is used for anything that's natural language-related. So there are two things here. One is as we are training, we are trying to train the model to look for certain keywords in that input prompt and make certain decisions. So for example, if it looks at, "Create an email when a lead is converted into an opportunity," so the model recognizes the word lead there and says, "Okay, fine," so it is going to be a record keyword flow on the object called lead, and it makes those assumptions as it looks at the prompt.
In this initial crawl phase, it is very important for us to make sure that our admins that we are working with help give us as much detail as possible in those prompts, because the more specific they are, the higher are the chances of getting a more reliable output. And then, like I said, the second piece that is more important is feedback. So we are trying to collect feedback from customers. We don't want to take up too much of their time. Something as simple as a thumbs up, thumbs down mechanism. If you think that we really got the flow correct and we got the output that you expected or you wanted, just give us a thumbs up so we know, or if you think we were off target, give us a thumbs down, so what we would do is we would go take your feedback and then look at the prompt that you had and see where we missed. Why did we misunderstand your prompt? How can we get better?
The other thing is, to get absolutely great, if you were also to go in and create the right flow that you expected for the input prompt that you created and you gave us permission to access that. Now, that would be absolutely wonderful because not only do we know that we got it wrong, but we also have the right one that you were expecting or you wanted, so we can train our models even better, but again, that's a long shot. I'm not even going to go all the way there. As long as you can give me feedback to say it was thumbs up or thumbs down, then I can start training the model to better understand what your intent is and have it stop what is called hallucinating in the GPT world. Hallucination is when the prompt can start just going into some kind of loops and then the output is not always technically correct and it doesn't get you what it is that you wanted.
Mike:
Wow.
Ajaay Ravi:
And then at the same time, there are two things here. As far as we're talking about Flow GPT or Einstein GPT for Flow, one is we should be able to reliably get you a flow that can be rendered on the Flow canvas. And then the second piece is how accurate was that? So right now in the first stage, what we are targeting is to be able to reliably get you a flow. So whatever input prompt that you type in, and of course this is subject to ethical and legal guidelines. So whatever input prompt you type in, we want to make sure that we can take it, translate it, create a flow, and then render the flow on the canvas.
That in itself is a very hard problem. And once we solve that, the next step is did we get that correctly? Did we understand your intent? Then how do we tune ourselves to make sure that every time there is a prompt, we actually understand it correctly? And actually, we can even take this one step further. There is something called prompt engineering that is being discussed these days, is when as a customer or as an admin, they type their prompt, how do we help? Think about it as fill in the blanks. Can we provide you with a template of sorts where you just come in and say what kind of inputs and what kind of outputs to use? You just fill in certain blanks. Or can we add certain deterministic descriptions to those prompts above and below what you write in order to make sure that we pass on the right information to the model? So the reason there is a lot of research and work that's going on around prompt engineering these days is people have come to realize that that input prompt is so important to get the correct outputs.
Mike:
Yeah, no, and I'll actually link to a podcast. We talked with Sarah Flamion at Salesforce about prompt engineering and the importance of it back in June, so you can see that podcast episode. I think as we wrap up, Ajaay, I'd love to know, I can't get my hands on Flow GPT. Admins can't. That's a thing that's coming. Absent of that, from your perspective, what advice would you give admins to get ready for Flow GPT?
Ajaay Ravi:
That is a great question. Yeah. Shortly, whenever you see that Flow GPT is available, please do go ahead and use Flow GPT as much as possible, because the more you use it and the more input prompts that you specify, the better it will become with the days and with the years. So eventually, there will come a point when you have a really complicated use case that could probably take days to set up, which Flow GPT can go and do it for you in seconds. But it takes all of us to come together with those simpler use cases at the offset or at the start and then provide that feedback. Even if it is as simple as just indicating thumbs up, thumbs down, please do do that. And yeah, we will make your life simpler and better as we go together.
Mike:
You make it sound so easy, so go out and don't learn to kick a ball down a street. That's what I heard.
Ajaay Ravi:
That's precisely what it is, if you're on the street.
Mike:
This has been fun. You are a fountain of knowledge. You probably have forgotten more about GPT than most of us know to date, so I appreciate you taking time to be on the podcast with us.
Ajaay Ravi:
Absolutely, Mike. It was lovely talking to you.
Mike:
So, that was fun. I learned a lot. I didn't know AI could hallucinate. This is a new thing. Learning together, folks. Now, if you enjoyed the episode, can you do me a favor? Just share it with one person. If you're listening on iTunes, all you need to do is tap the dots and choose, Share Episode. Then you can post it to social, you can text it to a friend. If you're looking for more great resources, your one stop for literally everything admin is admin.salesforce.com. We even include a transcript of the show. And be sure to join our conversation in the Admin Trailblazer group, which is on the Trailblazer community. Don't worry, there's a lot of links, a lot of things I mentioned. All of that is in the show notes for this episode. So until next week, we'll see you in the cloud.

 

Direct download: Replay__Building_Einstein_for_Flow_with_Ajaay_Ravi.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 1:00am PDT

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Johnjoe Mena, a self-taught admin and Systems Associate Analyst at Salesforce.

 

Join us as we chat about how to get started teaching yourself Salesforce and what to do when you feel overwhelmed.

 

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

Working his way up

Johnjoe worked his way up at Salesforce from the mailroom—literally. “I still didn’t know what Salesforce was when I started working there,” he says, “but in my first and second years I learned so much.”

 

Johnjoe soon found himself at Dreamforce, working the trading post. As he was handing out prizes to customers, he came to a realization. “Every time I would hand a gift out, I would tell myself this could be me one day,” he says. The next day, he logged into Trailhead for the first time.

Getting started on Trailhead

One thing we hear from people all the time is how overwhelming it can feel to get started in Trailhead. With so many options, there can be a bit of decision paralysis in deciding what to do next. For Johnjoe, it was knowing when to step back and look at the big picture. He took a break and asked himself, “Why am I doing this in the first place?”

 

Johnjoe shortly came across the Credentials page, and that’s when everything started to fall into place. Looking through the overview of all of the different roles in the ecosystem, he found himself drawn to the admin page and got some guidance on what to do next. “Once I found the Admin Trailmix, the overwhelm went away,” he says, “everything started working for me after that.”

What to do when Trailhead feels overwhelming

One of the most amazing parts about Johnjoe’s story is that he managed to skill up into an admin role while working a full-time job. He leaned on Trailhead GO to get through reading material when he had time to fit it in, like on his commute. And he also points out that once you get started, Trailhead has a way of snowballing as you work towards your goals.

 

Finally, Johnjoe advises you to go at your own pace and not compare yourself to other people. Sure, there are people out there with a ridiculous number of badges but it’s not a race. We’re all still learning—what’s important is to find a path that works for you.

 

Be sure to listen to the full episode to learn more about how Johnjoe got started at Salesforce in the first place, and why nothing beats hands-on experience.

 

Podcast swag

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Social

Full Transcript

Mike Gerholdt:
This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we're talking to Johnjoe Mena, or JJ, about learning Salesforce literally from scratch, from the very beginning. JJ is an actual Salesforce admin here at Salesforce, which I find super cool. I mean, you're the admin at Salesforce. And he just got a promotion to systems associate analyst, and we cover a lot. Boy, let me tell you, this is a great episode.
Now, before we get into it, I want to make sure you're doing something, and that is following the Salesforce Admins Podcast on iTunes or Spotify, wherever you're listening to us, because if you're doing that, then you're automatically going to get new episodes every Thursday right on your phone. They come out in the morning. We try to hit that early morning so that you've got it right away. If you're on East Coast drive time, Midwest, Mountain, especially West Coast, you're going to have them before you even wake up. So be sure to do that, because then, your phone is just going to grab the newest one, like this one, and you're not going to miss out on some amazing stuff that JJ has to give us. With that, let's get into our conversation with JJ.
JJ, welcome to the podcast.

Johnjoe Mena:
Hey, Mike, how's it going?

Mike Gerholdt:
Good. Why don't we get started, because you and I chatted before this and you have an amazing story. You also did a lot of work and helped the admin relations team out at Dreamforce this year in the Admin Meadow, because I got an email from one of my team members about having you on the podcast. But to introduce you, I'd love for you to get everybody up to speed to where you're at now, but if you could go back to the days of salad and give us a brief overview of how we got to the podcast today, but starting with the days of salad, I would appreciate that.

Johnjoe Mena:
Yeah, of course. As in the beginning, I started as a salad maker at Mixed Greens, located in San Francisco, California, which was about a two, three minute walk to the Salesforce building. I worked there for about a year and a half, and in that year and a half, I've met a recruiter. And he would always come in, come get his lunch, we'd always just chat, just talk about life. And the more and more he came, we just started getting closer and closer, building a connection. And out of nowhere without even asking anything about where he worked or anything, he just asked, "Hey, are you looking for a job?" I said, "Yeah, I'm looking for something. I don't have much on my resume." And he said, "Don't worry about it. Just send me what you have, and then, I'll connect you."
That same day, after he gave me his card, I went home home and my wife helped me write my resume because I didn't have anything on it other than working at the salad place, send it to him. Two days later, he called me saying that he got me a job in the Salesforce mail room at HQ. And then, from there, when I started at Salesforce is when ... I still didn't know what Salesforce was when I started Salesforce, which is funny, but as my first and second year I was at Salesforce, I learned so much about what Salesforce was and what they did.
And I just would poke my nose around where I shouldn't have and just looking through content, things that Salesforce provided for free. And I was also able to work with Vanessa Ng, who was on the Trailhead team, and she asked me to help at Dreamforce, at the booth. I think a lot of people know the trading posts where you hand out the gifts for going to demos, trails, you get prizes.
That's really where it really motivated me, when customers would come and they would come pick up their prize and they would say, "I'm here for my prize. I'm an admin, I'm a developer," and me handing them a prize motivated me to start this career as a Salesforce admin because every time I would hand a gift out, I would just tell myself, "This could be me one day, me being on the other side, as an admin." And I think going and working at Dreamforce and being in that environment just really motivated me. And then, right after that, I really got into Trailhead, I started doing, figuring out how to work Trailhead, I took classes. And then, once I got my admin cert, I started doing nonprofit work for Salesforce. And then, I would just say my career just took off, really. And then, now, where I'm at now, if we fast forward now, I'm a Salesforce admin for the real estate department, but I got promoted to a systems associate analyst now, but I still do the same work, admin slash developer work.

Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah. No, that's cool, and I think there's a lot of relatable parts to your story. Also, by the way, I really like Mixed Greens. I've been there. That steak salad is wonderful. I also feel like it's the joke on some Midwestern commercials where the guy goes to pay, and it's like 1975. It's like, "No, I'm just paying for my salad."
It's funny if you live in the Midwest, because we don't expect salads to be that much, but it's interesting because you got a job here at Salesforce, so you're very immersed in our culture, which obviously, not everybody is, or not everybody listening to the podcast is, but the way that you learned Salesforce, the platform, was the same way that anybody can learn it, which was through Trailhead.
And then, you also, I think, got a very unique perspective when you worked our training post booth, I think it was at TDX or Dreamforce too, to see the joy of people getting plushies and T-shirts and stuff. I'm curious, we'll go back to those days. You got a job here at Salesforce, but then, it's also, hey, I want to learn the platform. As somebody, and this is a lot of people, as somebody that's getting started in Trailhead, where did you start? What was the thing you sat down and said, "Oh, I'm going to do these modules first?"

Johnjoe Mena:
For me, when I first started Trailhead, it's a lot of stuff on Trailhead so you can get lost, but something that stood out to me when, even just on the homepage, really, was credentials. When you see credentials ... It just stood out to me. And when I saw it, I was like ... I would browse the modules that were there, the today ones, the ones that you can do off the bat just when you get on the homepage. But once I got into credentials and I started looking at the roles and I saw it said Salesforce admin, and then, as you look at what they offer, they have trail mix that you can just click and they have all of the modules for you in line and it's like a school, kind of. They give you all these courses in order for you to do so that you can learn what the product is, how the product works, and then, how to use it.
For me, those credentials, doing the certified admin trail mix is what really helped me just learn really what Salesforce was, and then, what an admin does. And I think having that trail mix ... I think trail mixes are awesome, awesome things, because they're just a bunch of trails put together for you, but you don't have to go looking for, what trail should I do next? Or if you do a trail and then you click on the next one, sometimes, it can take you to different parts of Salesforce. You start learning one thing, and then, you learn another thing, another product.
But the trail mixes, I feel like they're very focused on that one product, that one learning, and that's what really helped me because, like I said before, I didn't know anything about Salesforce. And then, doing the admin one, it teaches you about what Salesforce is as a company, and then, it goes into the product of what the product is, what the features are, and then, how to use the features. Trail mixes is the best thing, I think, that could be created for me, personally, because even for school, it's when the teacher gives you an assignment, you do it. The trail mixes, you see them like, "Okay, I got to do this one. And then, next, I got to do this one." And then, that momentum starts building. You know?

Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah. No, I completely ... Many in the afternoons I start and think, I'm just going to do these one or two trails, and then, it's almost like potato chips. Then, you're half a bag in, didn't even know you went that far. How did you get past that feeling of scrolling around and seeing how much content there was and just being completely overwhelmed?

Johnjoe Mena:
I would have to say that I took a break from Trailhead for a moment when I did get overwhelmed, when I started looking into Trailhead and I started doing trails and ... I really didn't know what I was doing because there's no ... You get badges and you get points, but it doesn't say, "Oh, you're building up to get a certification or any kind of certificate or anything." In the beginning, when I did get overwhelmed, I took a little bit of a break and I stopped doing Trailhead for a little bit. And then, when I got back on is when I just thought, what is the purpose of Trailhead? What is it going to benefit me? Why am I doing this? And I think, once I figured that, I was like, "Okay, I want to be an admin. Okay, how do I learn to become an admin?" And then, that's when the credentials, the roles started showing ... I started clicking where I should be clicking to find admin, the role, the trail mix.
And then, once I got found the admin trail mix is when the overwhelm went away because it just looked like, "Here's all the trails you need to do. Here's the order." And then, it just started just working perfectly for me after that because the way I was doing it, I was looking for ... I would type "Salesforce admin," and then a bunch of trails would just show up and I would start doing one. And I remember I would do ... I did intermediate trails, and then, all of a sudden, I was doing advanced admin trails, and I felt like I was just going everywhere. There was no trail, no path that I was going down. And then, once I found the trail mix, I felt, I was like, "This is perfect. This is telling me what to do, the steps, how to learn everything."

Mike Gerholdt:
Did you ever find yourself going back over different modules or different challenges? I know, on a couple occasions this spring, I had to build a demo on Flow. And mind you, Jennifer Lee's on our team and she's probably forgotten more about Flow than I've learned, but it was a point of pride for me. I really wanted to get into it and understand this new version of Flow.
And I was working through some Trailhead modules and, at a certain point, I found myself just going through it and being like, "Cool, got it done. Wait, I don't remember if I learned anything." And it's not that I didn't learn anything, it was that I was so focused on completing it and moving on that I'd forgot like, "No, I need to take a breath and actually soak this stuff in and go back to a couple different modules."
These are also modules that Mark Ross had wrote. Mark Ross is a Trailhead writer. He's been on the podcast before, and he had suggested to me, and he wrote them for Flow. And I remember going back and thinking, yeah, I remember doing that and getting this one thing, and then, just going back over the module, and it was almost like re-watching a film. I saw so much more. Did you ever go back and kind of redo some of those early Trailhead modules?

Johnjoe Mena:
Yes, I did, in the beginning. In the beginning, yes, I did. I started-

Mike Gerholdt:
So it's not just me. That's good.

Johnjoe Mena:
No. I think it's a lot of people, because when you start doing it, sometimes, you can get in that rhythm of just reading everything, getting to the questions, answering and just next, and you really didn't learn anything because you're going so fast just to complete it. So then, for me, that was, in the beginning, yeah, I would read really fast, read the questions, and then answer, and then move on.
And then, what happens is, when you're doing certain trails, then, you have to do the project once. And then, that's when you're like, "Oh," it's telling you to the next step, but you didn't do any of the steps before because you just read through everything, and then, you answered and you skipped what the project was leading up to. When that happened to me, that's when I started to realize, I need to slow down. Even the question ones, you just got to just read it at your own pace and just, how you said it, observe all the information or all the key information they're trying to explain to you and not really think of it as a race.
I feel like, sometimes, people can think Trailhead is a race, trying to get as many badges as you can. Also, you never want to compare yourself to another person's badges or points. Trailhead, it's your own trail. And I think, as long as you're learning and you're progressing the way you want to progress and you feel that this is benefiting you, I think that's fine, instead of comparing how many badges you have to your friend or to other people. For me, I have 400 badges compared to a lot of people who may have more, but I feel like I have learned a lot in those 400 badges that I've gotten.

Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah. That's a lot, dude, seriously. Are you a four star ranger?

Johnjoe Mena:
Yeah, I'm a four star ranger.

Mike Gerholdt:
Okay. I'm a three star ranger.

Johnjoe Mena:
[inaudible 00:14:11] two weeks ago.

Mike Gerholdt:
Oh, congrats. Oh, my God. That's awesome.

Johnjoe Mena:
Thank you.

Mike Gerholdt:
I want to reiterate what you said. You never want to compare yourself to someone else's badges or points. That's huge. Trailhead is built to be so gamified, but it's a competition that you're having with yourself, and the winner is knowledge. The winner isn't the points. And I think you saying that, man, that was just like, that hit me. That was serious.
You're working in Salesforce, you're doing Trailhead. It's no different than a lot of admins working their day job at an organization, or maybe even not working at an organization as a Salesforce admin. How did you balance ... I'm sure you've got a home life, there's stuff going on there, you got stuff going on at work and you're trying to do Trailhead. How did you fit all that stuff in?

Johnjoe Mena:
I would have to say it's a little of a mix. I know, for me, once I started getting a rhythm with Trailhead, I almost didn't want to stop doing Trailhead. When you start learning and getting into it, you don't want to stop. But then, I knew I had to take a break at times, but I would always try to find time when I had downtime at work, even five minutes, 10 minutes. If I could knock out a trail in 10 minutes, I would do that. I would try to pick that.
Or also just, they have Trailhead Mobile and I would do, on my way home when I would commute, I would do Trailhead on mobile and just learn there, because a lot of trails that were just reading and answering questions. My commute was about 30 minutes, so I would just sit there and just do my Trailhead on my way home from work and on the way to work. It's really ... I try to balance it as good as I could.

Mike Gerholdt:
No, your answer's good. I think you're reaching to be like, "Is there a better answer in my head?" No. I think it's that balance, right? It's also something new, and I would akin to, when you add something to your life, you're like, "Oh, how am I going to fit this in? My day is super busy already." Have you looked at the screen time on your phone to see how many hours you spend on TikTok? Just spend two less hours on TikTok. I'm guilty. And think about all the badges you could do.
But I think you were very poignant in thinking through rationally, "Hey, I've got this commute time, there's Trailhead Mobile. Now, I can't do everything on mobile, but that's okay. I can do challenges that are just questions that give me something to chew on my 30-minute train ride." And that's perfect, because it is a balance. And I think, sometimes, people race too hard because they're comparing themselves to other people's badges and points.
I did that for a long time. I'd say, "Oh, man, someone's got so many badges." And it's like, "Okay, cool," but that's the journey that they're on. You can equate it to something else like, I don't know, bank accounts. Cool. You know how many more people in the world got more money than me? A lot. But that's the journey they're on. And there's a lot of people that don't have as much money as me, and that's the journey they're on. But you can't compare yourself to that. Also, what's the point? I think thinking of badges and points for yourself as a celebration of you. You've done 400, cool. I've done 300. Awesome. That's great for both of us, not you're farther ahead and I'm farther behind kind of feeling. I really like that.
You mentioned briefly, at the end of your explanation, that you worked for nonprofit, and I know nonprofit stuff comes up a lot. I feel like there's both sides of the opinion on it. For new beginning admins, working at a nonprofit, not really a place to hone your skill because it is very high stakes. But also, I've been doing this now since 2006 and I'm still learning. I don't think, at any one point, we stopped learning. We're just very experienced. What did you learn from working at that nonprofit that maybe you weren't getting at Trailhead?

Johnjoe Mena:
I would say it was the real use case scenarios that I was exposed to. They had a use case, they wanted ... The nonprofit I worked for, they wanted to track their volunteers and track where the volunteer was going to be going to, what pet they were going to take, how many hours. I was experiencing the real hands-on scenarios, I think, and it was different from Trailhead because Trailhead, there's use cases, but this was, I getting the real experience of what an Salesforce admin really was doing on a day-to-day basis.
What I learned from there was just, they traded me as their admin and they would come up with a request, we would meet, go through the request, then, I would come up with the solution and we would build it, and then, we would present it and show them. And then, if they liked it, then, we would deploy it to their production org. I got to learn a lot of just hands-on, really, just working as an admin in an org.

Mike Gerholdt:
Well, I feel you're spot on with a lot of the nonprofit stuff and bringing it up because working with nonprofits, it's a little more high stakes, right? It's blue sky, green field of some of the solutions that you're trying to work through as opposed to a Trailhead module where you know where the solution is. I think that's very cool. I appreciate you taking time out and sharing your story with us. I really feel like you've given me some insight and just a little bit of a reset on what it can be like to be overwhelmed and prioritizing things, so I appreciate you coming on the pod.

Johnjoe Mena:
Yeah, thank you for having me, Mike. This was very exciting and fun to be able to share.

Mike Gerholdt:
Well, and congrats on the promotion as well. Look at this, you're learning and ...

Johnjoe Mena:
Thank you.

Mike Gerholdt:
And moving up. You're already ahead of me in badges, but that's okay because I feel like I've got a lot to learn too. Thanks so much for coming on the podcast.

Johnjoe Mena:
Thank you for having me.

Mike Gerholdt:
It was a fun discussion. I don't know if you can tell, but I totally got hung up on that. You never want to compare yourself to someone else's badges or points. It's about learning and feeling confident in yourself and moving forward. And boy, if you just didn't get that tidal wave of that feeling in this episode, go back and listen to it again because JJ really, very rightfully so, gives us a lot of lessons. And it's real useful stuff that I feel I see in here in the community, I see in here in the Trailblazer community a lot, overwhelmed and not sure where to go. I really enjoyed this call. I'm glad I had a chance to run into him at Dreamforce. I'm sure you will at some upcoming events.
Now, if you could do one thing, if you enjoyed this episode as much as I did, share it with somebody. If you're listening on iTunes, I'm going to tell you how to do that. You tap the dots, there's three dots, look for them. It's right in the interface, and you click "share episode." And then, a little share box will come up and you can post it social, you can text it to a friend, you can send it to wherever you would like.
Also, if you're looking for more great resources, everything Salesforce admin is at admin.salesforce.com, including a transcript of the show. If you miss something, you want to go back and maybe reread it because you can't listen to it, I don't know why, there's transcript there.
Now, be sure to join our conversation Admin Trailblazer Group, literally the Admin Trailblazer Group. I saw this question come up so much that I booked JJ on the pod to help us answer this. This is where I get my inspiration as well. You can too. It's in the Trailblazer community. Don't worry, links are in the show notes. Like I say every week, until next time, we'll see you in the Cloud.

Direct download: Transition_to_a_Salesforce_Career_with_Johnjoe_Mena.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 1:00am PDT

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we sit down for another cup of coffee with Gillian, Josh Birk, Jennifer Lee, and me, Mike Gerholdt.

Join us as we chat about how to get help learning Salesforce when you’re new to the community and where to get guidance for Trailhead.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with the Admin Evangelist Team.

"I’m new to the community and I need help learning Salesforce, but I get lost in the different trails. Can someone guide me?”

Every month, Gillian, Developer Evangelist Josh Birk, and I sit down with a cup of coffee and a topic. This time, we’re also joined by the one and only Jennifer Lee. For October, we’re tackling one of our most frequently asked questions: how do I get started learning Salesforce?

 

Join us as we discuss:

  • Why it’s important to “learn the nouns” by reading Salesforce blog content to guide your work in Trailhead.

  • How learning to do a specific thing can give you the context you need to choose Trailhead topics.

  • Why you should pay special attention to hands-on Trailhead modules and community stories.

  • Why learning Salesforce starts with understanding why companies use it in the first place.

  • The importance of getting involved with the Trailblazer community, even if you’re just listening in.

  • Why everyone in the Salesforce community wants to pay it forward.

  • How to find your local Trailblazer community group.

  • What you can learn from working with your own personal dev org.

  • How Gillian made a Salesforce app to help organize her wedding.

 

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Full Transcript

Mike Gerholdt:
So this month on Coffee With Evangelists, we're going to the Trailblazer Community for inspiration and discussion. Not that you aren't a daily inspiration for us, but this category of question really seems to pop up a lot. And that question is, I'm new to the community and I need help learning Salesforce, but I get lost in all of the different trails. Can somebody guide me?
So joining us this month, in October, maybe with pumpkin spice in their latte, is my co-host, Gillian Bruce, host of the Automate This and Everything Flow, Jennifer Lee and, of course, the godfather of Trailhead, Josh Birk. Welcome all.

Josh Birk:
Hello Mike.

Jennifer Lee:
Hello.

Gillian Bruce:
Hello. Hello.

Mike Gerholdt:
Did you put pumpkin spice in anything? Do you pumpkin spice things now?

Josh Birk:
I don't avoid it, but I don't seek it out, either. I honestly don't see the appeal, to be frank.

Jennifer Lee:
Same. Outside of pumpkin seeds, I'm not really a pumpkin person.

Josh Birk:
The pumpkin seeds, that's a good ...

Mike Gerholdt:
I forgot about that. Like, roasting them? If you roast them in the oven?

Gillian Bruce:
Jen, do you do that after you carve your pumpkins? Or do you get pumpkin seeds from the store and roast them?

Jennifer Lee:
Pumpkin seeds from the store. I've not really carved pumpkins myself.

Mike Gerholdt:
Really? Oh wow. Heard it here first. Breaking news.

Josh Birk:
It's a task. It's a lot of work.

Mike Gerholdt:
It is, and it's not fun.

Gillian Bruce:
I disagree.

Josh Birk:
A lot of it's not fun. I love the carving part, but I kind of wish somebody would do all the prep for me and then just going to be fun.

Gillian Bruce:
You know like the gooey emptying out part of all the pumpkin guts? That's the best part.

Mike Gerholdt:
That is the worst part. I'm with Josh, I'm with you on the carving. With the reaching in for the guts and the stringiness?

Josh Birk:
It's not a texture thing for me. I get bored with that step so quickly and yet, I'm so I want to be methodic and make it the cleanest pumpkin inside as possible that I just get, I just get annoyed by it by the time I get to that stuff.

Gillian Bruce:
Just get a nice sharp spoon, and go for it.

Mike Gerholdt:
I carved a pumpkin, just on the inside.

Gillian Bruce:
I have a girlfriend who was so obsessed with pumpkin seeds that for the many years that we were both single and not carving pumpkins with families, she would literally come over, we would scoop out the insides of the pumpkin and stop there because all she wanted to do was roast the seeds. They're like, cool. So we have a hollow pumpkin.

Jennifer Lee:
Now, I don't know if you all have something like this, but we have a zoo that we go to in Rhode Island and during Halloween they have all these pumpkins that people carve and then they parve some really complex designs in them. There were like Martha Luther King, Michael Jackson. It's pretty cool.

Gillian Bruce:
That's next level.

Josh Birk:
I think they do that at the Lincoln Park Zoo here. I know they do Festival of Lights and stuff like that, which is usually pretty cool.

Mike Gerholdt:
I do have an empty field in my development and I would love to do, if you watch on, I think it's on, it used be on ...

Gillian Bruce:
Pumpkin chuckin'?

Mike Gerholdt:
Yes. Pumpkin chucking.

Gillian Bruce:
They do it in Delaware. It's amazing. I got to go there when I was in DC.

Mike Gerholdt:
Those things are Legit.

Mike Gerholdt:
People spend the whole year building those things.

Gillian Bruce:
They're basically these homemade catapults that people launch pumpkins off of and see how far they can launch the pumpkins. It is so fun. They do it this big huge field in Delaware. The limited amount of time I spent in DC I got to go view this in person one time. It was so amazing.

Mike Gerholdt:
I mean, they have trebuchets, as well.

Gillian Bruce:
Yeah, yeah.

Mike Gerholdt:
But the air cannons, the air cannons are the ones that send it football fields.

Gillian Bruce:
Wow. So fun. So fun.

Mike Gerholdt:
Oh, I just like the splat part.

Gillian Bruce:
And that's exactly how you start learning about Salesforce.

Josh Birk:
Take a pumpkin.

Mike Gerholdt:
Okay, so I pulled this question out. I mean, Gillian, Josh, Jennifer, we've all been around the community for, I told somebody I was like, "Oh, like a decade and a half." And they're like, "Oh wow." And I was like, "Oh God, that doesn't make me feel old."

Gillian Bruce:
It's okay, Mike, you started when you were 15. It's fine.

Mike Gerholdt:
I did, totally, yes. But I think we've had different onboarding experiences and I wanted us to put that fresh hat on of like, okay, so what if we were brand new Salesforce admins today, knowing what we know that Trailhead exists and there's help documentation, how would we tackle it? Because I feel like the beauty of hindsight is, oh, we know all this stuff now here's how I'd go back and do it, having known that, but not, right? So, that's what I'm throwing out. And of course, it's great that we have Josh on because you built Trailhead.

Josh Birk:
And it's interesting to me because how you phrased this, right, was like, I know I need to learn Salesforce, I know about Trailhead. It's not a lack of discoverability of Trailhead, the product itself. It's that Trailhead itself has gotten so complicated that it's hard to just jump in and take the right trails and just get to exactly where you want to go. Why that's interesting to me is that was partially the problem we were trying to fix in the first place. Trailhead used to be so simple. It was like, you're a beginner admin, go here, boom, you're done. Because there wasn't, I don't know how many badges we're up to at this point. Jen probably knows. I think you have them all, right?

Mike Gerholdt:
Right. I was going to say, "How many badges does Jen have?" That's how many we're up to.

Josh Birk:
That's how many we're up to. So it's interesting that we have developed ourselves into this problem, and I think that's really where it comes down to is, it's like I do this joke. Nobody ever asked me about the zebra that I have in my room. Well, why not? Because who would think I have a zebra in my room. Unless you know the noun, it's hard to go after the information itself.
So I think in this day and age where we don't have a lot of workshop tours, we don't have the beginning webinars, I think learning the nouns might be first step. Just start reading the blogs and start reading what is it like to develop and administer on this platform and then dive into the Trailhead, tracking those downs down. Because one thing about Trailhead is that it was intended to be atomic, which means that if you want to just go learn about flow, you can just go learn about flow. Or if you just want to learn about one thing, you can do that. So you can choose your own adventure, so to speak, when it comes to learning a trail.

Mike Gerholdt:
Josh, I can't help but think of your answer in the same way that college is difficult to navigate, too. You go back a hundred years, I'm sure colleges had what, 10 majors and now there's canoeing. I'm sure you could get a degree in canoe. You could probably get a PhD in ...

Josh Birk:
You probably could get a PhD.

Mike Gerholdt:
... water, hydration, floating. It would be something fancy. But the catalogs are super difficult, but people still manage to get through it. It's because, I think, there's one destination in college and I think we imply, or do we imply, that because other things, there's one way to learn Salesforce and people just can't figure out that one way.

Josh Birk:
And also people don't, not everybody learns the same way, right? Developers are, frequently people who like to go in and take existing pieces of code and then pull them apart and put them back together again, which is an exercise we have in places in Trailhead, I think, but not consistently. So, I'd be curious to know how many people rely more on say, stack exchange than ever before because of the level of complexity of the platform these times.

Gillian Bruce:
Well, and you said it's the way people learn. For me, I remember the one thing I took, God, I think I took ADM 201 three times before it finally stuck with me, and I still got out of that course at the last time I took it. I was like, "What did I just do? I have no idea." 'Cos I didn't have the context for how to use this. Now this is pre-Trailhead, but for me it was, "Oh, I should build an app to do this thing," and then going through and doing that, now also, this was right when we were transitioning to Lightning, so there was a lot of push to test and do things, but for me it was putting context behind, I'm trying to accomplish a thing and I'm going to go build the thing.
And the parts of Trailhead that really work for me are the projects, right? Because you're working towards completing a specific goal or task versus, here go play around and build a formula or this is how Omnichannel works. Like, okay, "But I need context. How is this fitting into the bigger picture of things?" So I'm a learn by doing person, which Trailhead has a fair amount of that, but I'm more project oriented in Trailhead than I am straight up modules.

Jennifer Lee:
Yeah, I agree with you, Gillian. I learn best by doing. And so back in the day when I was learning Salesforce, I became a master Googler, right? You go in there, because there wasn't a lot of content provided by Salesforce at that time. So you become a master Googler, you might be able to pull stuff up by ChatGPT, I don't know, but you Google whatever the topic is, Salesforce and then boom. Then you start going through the content and I found the community content was really great, just learning from the practitioners themselves and following along or on Trailhead doing the projects or anything that had the hands-on training. 'Cos then you're learning the concept, but then you're exercising the muscles and actually going through the step-by-step. And that's how I retain information better than if I just read it.

Mike Gerholdt:
Gillian, you brought up a good point, the context. I actually had a friend a while back lose their job in that big retail layoff and showed them Trailhead, and that was the biggest problem that they ran into. Mind you, they're a college graduate in philosophy, which I mean, again, degree in canoeing. But really smart guy, didn't understand why things existed in the platform because they didn't have the context. And so I'm wondering if people that are asking this question, are trying to learn the platform agnostic of having any context to either maybe having the role or how organizations would use Salesforce.

Gillian Bruce:
I will say in the dozens, I don't know, probably more than that, hundreds of presentations I've done as an evangelist in the last however many years. 'Cos again, I started Salesforce when I was nine years old, it keeps getting younger. It's weird. As the years go on, I started Salesforce as a younger person.

Josh Birk:
Sooner later, child labor laws are going to be ...

Gillian Bruce:
You're right. But the one thing that I have found that helps me explain what Salesforce is to people who don't know what Salesforce is, but know that maybe this is a career trajectory they might be interested in, they're like, "Okay, so how do I get certified? Okay, how do I do that?" I'm like, "Okay, but do you understand why people use this platform? Why do people build things in Salesforce? Why are there jobs for people who are Salesforce practitioners? Let's talk about big picture. Salesforce helps companies do X, Y, and Z." And you can pull out a handful of very general examples. And then doing that next level.
Salesforce helps companies organize their customers data because then they're able to do better marketing to sell their widgets better. And it's that kind of trajectory of that context and that bigger picture I find really helps. And so if you are net new, you're like, "Great, I need a new job, or I want to get into the Salesforce ecosystem," don't just do it to be part of the Salesforce ecosystem. Understand what the technology does for companies, why do companies buy it? And I think a lot of times we bypass that and go straight to Trailhead. And I feel like that maybe is a piece for me. At least, that was very important to understand before I started learning the technology on top of it.

Mike Gerholdt:
It's understanding why people would buy a car before you start working on the car to fix it.

Josh Birk:
Well, and even the presence of the car, because as evangelists we all know part of our problem is convincing people we actually have a platform. It's not just CRM, and it can be extended through all sorts of custom data and processes and stuff like that. So there's people running around in a car, but they don't even realize there's multiple gears. I don't know. I'm losing the analogy here, Mike.

Mike Gerholdt:
I know I boxed you in with that. Also, I could hear Gillian be like, damn, another Mike analogy about a car. Totally heard that.

Gillian Bruce:
No. I'm so used to them. I'm be like, well, I mean, Josh, to add for the metaphor, I think what you were saying is like, "Well, sometimes you need a truck to do it and sometimes you need a fast car and sometimes you need a rider mower." And it all depends on what you're trying to accomplish. But Salesforce can do all of those things.

Josh Birk:
I mean, I remember doing just a basic 101, here's how you build out a custom object type thing at a world tour. And somebody came up to me afterwards and they're like, "That was mind-blowing." And I'm like, "No."

Mike Gerholdt:
No, there's so much more.

Josh Birk:
You haven't seen the mind-blowing stuff. That was watching me put the rabbit in the hat and then being like, "I'm going to pull a rabbit out of my hat. That's how mind blowing that was."

Mike Gerholdt:
Well, object permanency sometimes.

Josh Birk:
Right.

Mike Gerholdt:
I mean, but I think to that end, it's so, understanding the why, maybe that's where they get lost. Because Trailhead shows you the how and absent of being able to connect it to the why, to me, it sounds like understanding just how to do things on the platform is maybe where they're getting lost because Gillian, to your point, I would learn Omnichannel, but I wouldn't understand why I would do Omnichannel. So I could understand how to customize it. I just wouldn't understand how to talk about it or why I should care.

Josh Birk:
And I think that's also speaks to, because our platform has gotten so broad. So we're talking about Salesforce Core for the most part, but I think you can ask those exact same questions about things like MuleSoft and even some of our clouds and things like that. It's like it's hard to know why you care until you've actually gotten into it, but it's also hard to learn it until why you care.

Mike Gerholdt:
Absent of Trailhead, what role would help documentation, which I feel is its own group of things. And then just turning to the community play for each of you.

Jennifer Lee:
I know when I first started, I was a data consumer of the Trailblazer Community. I was absorbing every single post that was posted, and then I was like, "Oh, well, this person has this problem. How did other people solve it?" And I'm like, "Oh, that's really cool." But I also recommend going to user groups, finding that local user group, going there and listening to what other people are facing, learning from their solutions as well, and networking.

Gillian Bruce:
Jen, I think there's something to that as just being around it to understand how people talk about it and what types of problems they're solving. I mean, I remember still to this day, one of the first recommendations I say to people who are like, "Okay, I'm net new. What do I do?" It's like, "Okay, yes, learn what Salesforce does, learn the technology, but honestly, go be like a creeper in the Trailblazer Community." Maybe not creeper, creeper is the wrong word, but hover.
Just listen. Just see what people are posting, see what answers are getting posted, see what questions are getting posted, see what's happening in their local Trailblazer group, even if you're like, "I don't want to go to a meeting yet." But just being around it and reading and consuming that I think is such a great way to get oriented in terms of, A. What are people doing as practitioners with Salesforce and B. What kind of problems are they solving and how? And I think that's, and even just the language, right? The jargon, what things are called, how we describe certain parts of the platform, I think that's one of the easiest things you can do to get yourself going in the Salesforce space.

Josh Birk:
I mean it's part of our special sauce. It's part of the thing that makes Salesforce the communities distinct. I've had so many people in interviews who talked about learning the platform, and it's hard for us, I think, to say it without it sounding like hype. But we have a community that believes firmly in giving back to the community, and they learn from the community. And so they want to teach you the community. And there's no way of saying that without it making it sound like, I'm just trying to hype it, but it's like we've got rad women, we've got Salesforce Saturdays, we have people who spend time helping other people for free on this platform. And not every tech community out there is like that. And I totally agree with you, Jen. It's like that, don't miss that because it's a special thing out there. And especially now post pandemic, I feel like it's even easier than ever because I think there's still a virtual Salesforce Saturdays that's going on. Wherever you are, there's something that should be accessible to you.

Gillian Bruce:
Well, and Jen and Mike, I mean, this is how you started your careers, right? I mean, you were members of the community, you were giving back, helping other people solve problems, being very active and participatory. I mean, you were evangelists outside of Salesforce before Salesforce hired you, right? I think that's what's so unique and special is because your authentic, there's an authenticity there to how vibrant the community is. 'Cos it's not just Salesforce pushing stuff out. It's what actual people are doing and saying and using,

Jennifer Lee:
Sorry. Go ahead, Mike.

Mike Gerholdt:
Look at these two evangelists, talk over each other. Go ahead, Jennifer.

Jennifer Lee:
So when I joined the community, I was like, "Oh my goodness, these people are just going out of the way to help one another. Don't they have day jobs? What's going on here?" And then when I attended my first in-person event, I think it was Dreamforce, and I was telling my family, I'm like, "Oh, I'm getting to meet these people in person. They're my friends, but I've never seen them before." And they're like, "What? How's that possible?" So, as I mentioned, I was a data consumer, and then eventually I had enough knowledge where I'm like, "Oh, I know the answer to this, so I'm going to start typing." And it was, okay, well, these people before me who knew Salesforce were sharing their knowledge, their time. Now that I get, I'm building up my knowledge, well, I want to give back, too, because someone before me helped me and I'm going to help the people after me. And it's just this natural thing of wanting to give.

Mike Gerholdt:
I think, so a lot of what you said, Jennifer, I was trying to think back as you were all talking, what was the catalyst that got me in?

Josh Birk:
Because I feel like that's the next hurdle, right?

Mike Gerholdt:
You kind of look at Salesforce, oh, there's a lot to learn. There's a lot of things on Trailhead and there's community, but it feels like a lot of work. And I often joke is being so passionate about vacuums that you would join a vacuum community.

Gillian Bruce:
It sounds like it would suck.

Mike Gerholdt:
I remember, so this was back when I was just turned 18 and it was 2006, because I'm following Gillian's Benjamin Button style of aging. But I was just fresh on Twitter, and I remember TweetDeck was a thing, and I started to call them like, "Oh, there's people I tweet about Salesforce." And up to that point, I had just tried to do it all myself. I'll just try to figure it out. And I remember I asked a question and I'm sure I can go back and try and find that tweet. It'd be cool.
But I asked a question and I got 20 responses. And one of the responses, somebody was like, "Hey, send me a DM and I'll give you my email because I think we can solve this. I just need more than ..." it was 120 characters or whatever. Remember when Twitter had that limit? And I remember that. So I did that and it was probably a Thursday or a Friday, and then over the weekend I made a remark to somebody. I said, "This guy from Canada is going to email me this solution, and they're totally going to do it on their own time." And I remember thinking to myself like, wow, that's pretty neat. Maybe there's more to this.
But it felt like, I don't know. And I think a lot of people approach that. They hear community and they hear all this stuff. I should be a part of it. And it's like, yeah, I don't, but it's until you just go out there and ask one question and then you see five different responses that are probably four different ways of solving a solution that you're like, oh, maybe there's something to this. And that was, for me, which then turned me into like, well, if I can get these answers and build this stuff, then why isn't, because Gillian, to your point, Salesforce wasn't putting that stuff out there. That was the gap, that was the void that Jennifer filled as well, too. Salesforce wasn't putting this stuff out there.

Gillian Bruce:
I mean, it's special. It is something unique and it's something really special. It's one of the magical things about our community. Our community. Magical things about the Salesforce, just ecosystem in general, is the community. And until you're in it, it's very hard to describe it. It's very hard to explain it. And I love the stories that you both shared about, yes, so my family didn't quite get it, and I thought this was really special. It's something you don't find in other technologies, other platforms. And I think if you're trying to orient yourself and figure out where do I start? What do I do? I mean, yes, of course you need to learn the technology and go to Trailhead. There's a lot of great things there. I would start with the admin basics trail, if you're going on an admin path, or beginner admin trail, I think is what it's called. But honestly, get in the community. I mean, if nothing that you've heard between Mike and Jen and Josh, just dip in and let it wash over you.

Mike Gerholdt:
I would add to that, simply ask yourself why you are trying to learn this and if it's interesting and fun for you. And I go back to that because I can still remember, Gillian, as you were talking, I was thinking back to the very first time, and this will date me to when I was 19 years old, in 2007, and I built my first workflow and it worked. And I remember sending an email to the sales team, and it was a simple workflow that literally just updated a field that was locked on a contact, based on a pick list value. And it was such a huge thing. And it gave me this sense of accomplishment that I feel probably was lacking that I wasn't getting in my current job. And that was that reason why. But unlocking that was, I was like, oh, I think I found something I'm passionate about.
And I've always heard this quote that was, if you find your passion, you never have to look for your drive, because it will always be there, right? And I think for Jen, I always look at how innate her skill is to build stuff in flow, but it's because she found her passion in flow. And I don't share that passion. I would love to. Mine exists in other parts of the platform. But once you have that, then it feels like the wind is at your back.

Josh Birk:
Well, I think the rise of flow is also interesting because it used to be developers would learn most of, they wouldn't get as expert in admin skills, but we were expected to know what a workflow was. We were expected to know what a validation rule was. We were expected to know what a formula was, et cetera. But flow is so much of its own skillset that it's, but also so powerful. If you want that thing in your resume that's going to help you get that next job, it's really an important one.
But I think it also just speaks to not just the number of products and companies that Mark has bought over the last 10 years, but just to the power and the complexity of the platform itself.

Mike Gerholdt:
Jen, Gillian, final thoughts?

Jennifer Lee:
I think what's also important is as you're learning Salesforce, whatever that thing is, whether it's writing a validation rule or what have you, spin up a personal dev org and you can sign up for that and that will be yours forever. And what I do is I play around with things, right? If I'm trying to learn something new rather than mess up my company's org? I go and play out in my own sandbox, play around with it and get familiar with it. Build apps.
Also use Salesforce for your personal lives. That's something that you're creating your own use cases, right? And then you're just using Salesforce as a solution, but then you're practicing using things in Salesforce.

Gillian Bruce:
Well, and Jen, that's basically exactly what I was going to say. But not only are you practicing using Salesforce and building out the app, but you're practicing all the other things that come along with being an admin. If you are building out an app for your own personal use case, right? You're figuring out what are the requirements? How am I going to test this to make sure it works? I am the user of this, right? I remember I built an app to help manage my wedding as an excuse to tinker around with things. And I was like, "Oh my gosh, how would I do a guest list? How would I do all the event pieces of this?" And it was such a huge learning curve for me, and it helped lock in so many of these concepts of not only how do I build the thing, but why do I build the thing and how do I make sure the thing does what I want it to do?
And I think there's no better way to learn than to build something for yourself. It also, if you make it nice, it's a good thing to demo if you're trying to get a job. Make a screencast, include it in the process of how you're looking for jobs. Shoot, post it on the Trailblazer community. Maybe somebody sees it is like, "Ooh, that person's got talent. I like what they're doing. Maybe they could be my next Salesforce admin." So it serves a lot of purposes, and so great recommendation done. And that is my number one thing to recommend to folks. Get your dev org, spin it up, build out your own use case. Use it as a demo going forward.

Mike Gerholdt:
I couldn't agree more. And that gives you even more things to showcase to somebody to show your skill. Well, this is a great discussion. Thank you all.

Gillian Bruce:
Thank you, Mike.

Mike Gerholdt:
Thank you.

Jennifer Lee:
Thanks for having me.

Mike Gerholdt:
If you enjoyed this episode, I need you, the listener, to do one thing, and that is share it with somebody that you think would enjoy it as well. If you're listening on iTunes, all you got to do is tap the three dots and choose Share episode, then you can post it to social, you can text it to a friend, put it on any of the socials. And if you're looking for more great resources, like some of the links that probably Jennifer and Gillian and myself mentioned, you can always go to Everything Admin, which is admin.salesforce.com. And, of course, there will be a transcript and links in the show notes below. And, of course, I know we mentioned the Admin Trailblazer group, so you can join the conversation there in the Trailblazer community. Don't worry, link is also in those show notes. So, until then, we'll see you next week in the cloud.

 

Direct download: Salesforce_Learning_Strategies_for_Newbies_with_Admin_Evangelists.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 1:00am PDT

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Kalpana Chauhan, Lead Salesforce Consultant at Mar Dat. Join us as we chat about Einstein lead scoring and the importance of high-quality data.

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

From math teacher to Salesforce Admin

Kalpana started out as a math teacher but, as her kids got older and she found herself with time on her hands, she discovered she had an affinity for Salesforce. That foundation has been incredibly helpful in her career as a Salesforce Consultant when she has to untangle something like validation rules. “Coding is easy once you understand the logic and flowchart of how it actually works,” she says.

Flows and automation have always held a special place in Kalpana’s heart. There is so much manual work that you can make unnecessary if you’re willing to sit down and thoughtfully analyze a business process. And new tools like Einstein are making that easier than ever before.

Scoring leads with Einstein

One of Kalpana’s clients needed help resolving issues related to proper lead qualification and marketing engagement. “The marketing team was eager to enhance their engagement with leads, while the sales team was seeking better clarity regarding which leads were sales-qualified so they could focus their efforts on conversion,” she says. 

That’s when Einstein came to the rescue. They worked through the AI Wizard and came up with three scores:

  1. Behavior, to evaluate how warm a lead is based on engagement.

  2. Engagement frequency, to figure out what marketing cadence is best for each lead.

  3. Send time optimization, to automate marketing emails to go out at the best time for each lead based on their engagement history.

Together, these scores helped marketing engage prospects at the right cadence while sales could pursue an optimal nurturing and conversion strategy for each lead.

Getting started with Einstein

If you want to start using Einstein in your org, Kalpana recommends starting by taking a close look at your data quality. “Data is the key,” she says, “the more data you feed in, the more accurate your results will be.” That means Implementing solid data validation rules and using screen flows to remove duplicate records. 

Getting up-to-speed on Einstein was easy with all of the resources out there from Salesforce. In addition to Trailhead, Kalpana found Bootcamps to be especially useful. “I love anything with visuals,” she says. She also recommends going to your local Trailblazer Community Group meeting to connect with other admins facing similar challenges.

Be sure to listen to the full episode to learn more about Einstein, email marketing, and data cleanup.

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Direct download: Einstein_Lead_Scoring_with_Kalpana_Chauhan.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 1:00am PDT

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Ketan Karkhanis, EVP and GM of Sales Cloud at Salesforce. 

Join us as we chat about all of the new Sales Cloud features that have gone live recently and how you can use them to transform your organization.

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

New features in Sales Cloud

Over the last year, Sales Cloud has gotten a lot of new features and updates. That’s why I was so excited to run into Ketan at World Tour London and get him on the pod. Who better than the EVP and GM of Sales Cloud to tell us all about what’s new?

One thing that the Sales Cloud team noticed was how often businesses have been turning to third-party tools to get things done. So they’ve overhauled features like forecasting and pipe inspection to give you more customization options and flexibility without having to use a bunch of different point solutions.

Drive adoption with Sales Cloud Everywhere

Another problem that Ketan and his team have been working on is how to help drive adoption. As much as we’d like it to be the case, most people don’t do 100% of their job on Salesforce. And the added hassle of going into and out of the platform can create a lot of challenges for users trying to fit it into their workflow.

But what if Salesforce could follow you into other applications and be there when you need it? Sales Cloud Everywhere aims to do just that, with extensions for Outlook, Gmail, and more that will give your reps access to your full CRM no matter what they’re doing.

We need your help

If you only take one thing away from Ketan’s episode, it’s that there are so many new out-of-the-box features in Sales Cloud that it’s practically a new product. If you’re paying for third-party tools, you might be able to save your organization a lot of money just by turning something on.

Most importantly, Ketan and his team want you to know that they need your feedback to make Sales Cloud even better. Try Sales Planning, or Revenue Intelligence, or Einstein for Sales, or all of the above, and let us know how we can help you transform your organization with Salesforce.

Be sure to listen to the full episode to learn more about Sales Cloud, and what’s been added to Unlimited Edition.

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Gillian Bruce:
Welcome to the Salesforce Admins Podcast, where we talk about product, community, and careers to help you be successful. I'm your host today, Gillian Bruce. Missed you. Nice to be back. I'm here with a very special interview that I wanted to be able to share with you from Ketan Karkhanis, who is our EVP and GM of Sales Cloud at Salesforce. Now, he is a senior executive in charge of all things Sales Cloud. And we had a chat, just running into each other at London World Tour of all places. And it really sparked my idea to have him join us on the podcast, because Sales Cloud has gone under a huge reboot over the last year. There's a ton of new features that I don't think many people are aware of. So, we wanted to dig into that a little bit. And then also, talk about why Sales Cloud and core are developing the things they are, prioritization, especially in the context of AI and GPT these days.
And I promise you, Ketan is going to show you that, hey, core is getting a lot of love despite all of the hype around GPT, which is also very exciting. But we really focus more on that conversation around core development. And he gets into the importance and the role of Salesforce admins. One quick note before we get into Ketan's interview. At the time we were interviewing, the product we were developing was called SalesGPT. That has since changed. And now our AI products for sales is Einstein for Sales. And so, anytime you hear GPT, just think Einstein. So, without further ado, please welcome Ketan to the podcast. Ketan, welcome to the podcast.

Ketan Karkhanis:
Hey, thank you for having me, Gillian. So good to be here.

Gillian Bruce:
Oh, it's wonderful to have you on. I can't believe we haven't had you on before. So, first time guest, long overdue. Ketan, can you introduce yourself a little bit to our audience?

Ketan Karkhanis:
Oh, I sure can. First, a big hello to all of you. I mean this is exciting to be on this podcast with all of you. My name is Ketan Karkhanis. I'm the executive vice president and GM for Sales Cloud. For some of you, I'm a boomerang. So, I was in Salesforce from 2009 to 2019, then I left, did a startup and supply chain, and then I came back to do sales in my prior stint. I've done Einstein Analytics, Lightning Platform, Salesforce Mobile, all the things you probably want to talk to me about also.

Gillian Bruce:
Some things we're very familiar with in admin land, yes.

Ketan Karkhanis:
Yeah, great to be here.

Gillian Bruce:
Excellent. Well, we're happy to have you on. And since you are now leading Sales Cloud, we've got some good questions for you. So, first of all, I would love to know, and I think a lot of our admins are curious, what are some of the top things in Sales Cloud that maybe you think aren't being utilized enough?

Ketan Karkhanis:
Oh, that's a great question. Look, I'll tell you, and this answer might be slightly long. So, Gillian, you should keep interrupting me, because a lot has changed in Sales Cloud in the last year. One of the fundamental things we have focused on is there are two things that happened. Number one was we realized that there was this hyper proliferation of point solutions around Sales Cloud. To work on one opportunity, customers were using seven, eight different other point solutions. These are not market categories. They are features of Sales Cloud. So, one of the great examples I'll give you is forecasting. And amongst all us, our admin friends, we had not innovated much in that space earlier. And it's okay to be honest and say that.

Gillian Bruce:
We like transparency on the podcast, Ketan. Appreciate that.

Ketan Karkhanis:
But we really doubled down on it. And if you now go look at forecasting, you will see that there's still a long journey. I invite you to join me at Dreamforce. But things like customizability, things like bring your own columns, things like adding manager judgment, things like coverage ratio, things like a better user experience, which does not require a help dock. Things like pipe inspection. I don't know how many of you have turned on pipe inspection. Maybe it may not have one or two things you don't need, but it's the new list view for opportunities. Why would you look at opportunities in a list view? Why wouldn't you look at pipe inspection? And everything I said, it's part of core. It's not something new you need to buy. I have a lot of new things I can sell you to. You know me, I'll keep building new things.
But the idea is, how do we get more intrinsic value out? So, you asked the question, so I'll say, I invite you all to check out pipe inspection. I invite you all to check out forecasting. I invite all of you to check out... And I'm listing, Gillian, things which are not like, hey, you need to call an AE right now. These are things which are probably already there, you just need to go turn it on or something like that. The next thing I'll tell you is, look, one of the largest problems I've seen a lot of customers espouse is adoption. Gillian, you hear that from admins, and I hear that. How do I drive adoption? What do I do, right?

Gillian Bruce:
100%.

Ketan Karkhanis:
So, one of the capabilities, and it's a very counterintuitive thought, maybe this will work, maybe this will not work, but is we are like we were saying, okay, why can't Sales Cloud or CRM follow you wherever you go? So, let's say you are in Outlook. Yes, I use the O word, Outlook. I can do that on a Salesforce podcast, because hey, a lot of people use Outlook and it's a great email client. I mean, it's fantastic. But what if Salesforce side panel was there right with you? What if your entire CRM was accessible to your end user as a sales rep, while they were in Outlook or they were in Gmail? And even coming one more further is, what if you could do that while you are on LinkedIn? So, this is the idea of Sales Cloud everywhere. It's the Outlook extension, it's the Gmail extension, it is the anywhere extension that's coming out. And again, these are what we think core capabilities, and I invite you to try them. One last thing, because we've just innovated a lot, so Gillian, please interrupt me, okay?

Gillian Bruce:
Give us all the goodies. I love it. This is great.

Ketan Karkhanis:
Now, these were just examples, but you can make a long list of this theme. Now, if you're on unlimited edition. So, some of you might be on UE, you have a special bonanza for you now, because everything I said before is available everywhere. Now I'm focusing only on unlimited edition. We added a ton of capability to unlimited edition, which was previously add-ons kind of stuff. So, for example, conversational AI. How many of you have heard of conversational AI? It's a standard capability. ECI, Einstein Conversational Insights. Go turn it on, try it in UE. I'll tell you, sales engagement, some of you probably remember HVS. And again, transparency, there was some work to be done on that, which we have gotten done last year.
I know there was a little bit of a pause on that, but we have rebooted everything in the past 12 months. It's included in powerful cadence automation. Every inside sales teams needs it. It's out of the box in Sales Cloud UE. Automated capture, Einstein Automated Capture. Do you know more than 20,000 customers have already used Einstein Automated Capture? Are you one of those 20,000? If you are, thank you very much. If you aren't, why aren't you on that list? Because why do you want sales reps to enter data manually? It should be automatically synced. But anyways, I can keep going on, Gillian. There's just a lot. There's just a lot.

Gillian Bruce:
That is a lot. And you know what I really like is all of these features that you're talking about are, like you said, your team's been working on this in the last 12 months. But I mean really these are things that are going to help admins make their users happier. And so, especially when you were talking about basically the pipe inspection is a better list view that's going to give you so much more information. So, why train your users on how to use a list view when you've got this? And they can get the insights just from looking at the list of their opportunities. And then in context, I mean when you're talking about the extension, where you can bring Salesforce and your CRM in the context of which you're already working. Because the last thing a sales rep wants to do is switch windows or have multiple tabs open, as all of us are guilty of having too many tabs open as it is.
But the idea of having that contextual as you're looking at a LinkedIn, as you're looking at your email, that's fantastic. I mean, those are amazing features. And like you said, they're already part of your core experience. So, I'm going to use a Mike Gerholdt analogy here. "If you paid for the Ferrari, don't just use it to drive to the grocery store." You've got all these bells and whistles, you should use them. And I think another thing that I hear often when I'm at community events or at user groups, is you hear people that are paying for all of these third party solutions that do a lot of the stuff they don't realize core already does.

Ketan Karkhanis:
Yeah, I mean they're spending a lot of money. You could be a hero by taking all that out and showing your organization, "Hey, guys, I saved you a lot of money."

Gillian Bruce:
Exactly. Yeah. I mean it's one of those maybe not so secret, should be more overt awesome admin skills, is that if you are really truly an awesome admin, you're probably going to uncover so much money your organization can save when you open the hood and look at all of the third party things that maybe you are paying for, that you already have included in core. It's akin to declarative first development. Use what's out of the box before you go building a custom solution. And I think that is one of the things that we don't talk about enough, having that admin eye to look at all the things that maybe we already have on core, but we don't realize, or whoever was managing the org before you didn't realize.

Ketan Karkhanis:
Or maybe we at Salesforce didn't talk about it too much. I think, so there's some responsibility I need to take too, just because I can. And you're going to see me and my team... As I said, look, it's a new Sales Cloud. Simple as that. The last 12 months, it's a new Sales Cloud. And I invite you, I encourage you, I will gently push you and nudge you to take a look. And more importantly, the two motivation I have behind saying these things is, if you take a look, you will give us great feedback. And that's truly what we want is your feedback. But you can't give me feedback if you have not tried something. It's like a virtual cycle.

Gillian Bruce:
This is taking me back to when we rolled out Lightning back in, what, 2015. And we were doing all those Lightning tours with our product managers. I was doing a ton of them. The feedback we got from people when we were actually getting them hands-on with the new platform and how it worked, I mean every single piece of feedback got incorporated in some way. And I think that's one of the unique things and special things about Salesforce, is that our product is only what it is because of the feedback that we get from our customers. And we definitely take into account. So, Ketan, as leader of Sales Cloud, how important is it for people to give you feedback?

Ketan Karkhanis:
I'll just tell you all my best ideas are not mine. They're yours. So, if you want me to do something good, give me feedback. I'm half joking. But you understand the spirit of that comment, I think. So, it's really important we connect with each other in the true sense of the word connection. Look, you all have made Sales Cloud what Sales Cloud is. You are the reason Sales Cloud is here. And I really, really aspire for you to be part of the journey. The last year, we have rebooted it a lot. We have a lot of new capabilities across the board. And I ain't even talking to you about new things like... Do you know last week, Gillian, we just launched a new product called Sales Planning? Now sales Planning can be done native on your CRM. Do you know we've got a brand new product around enablement to run sales programs in context and outcome-based? That's brand new. We just launch a buyer assistant. That's cool. And Gillian, I'm not even talking about GPT. We are going to need a whole podcast on SalesGPT.

Gillian Bruce:
We can do that. That'll be the follow-up episode, because I know a lot of people are curious about that. But I think speaking of that, we get a lot of feedback, especially now because everyone's excited about AI. Everyone's talking about it, GPT, all the things, great. But the majority of admins I talk to are way more concerned with core features, stuff that their organization's already using. And so, you mentioned that the last 12 months, Sales Cloud has gotten a reboot. Can you give us a little insight into why there was a reboot? What is the priority with Sales Cloud and core features? And give us a little insider lens to why.

Ketan Karkhanis:
No, no, it's a very fair question. Look, the way I think about it is adoption fueled growth is a key strategy for me and my business. And I use the word adoption as the first word in that sentence, because it's really the key word. To me, one of the thoughts I have after talking to countless customers, I went on the road and I met so many customers, and I'll tell you, it was amazing. You sit down with the customer and one of my favorite questions is, how long have you been using Sales Cloud? That's my first question I ask them. And you will be amazed. Some of them were saying 10 years. I met a customer who's been using it for 18 years.

Gillian Bruce:
That's almost as long as Salesforce has been around, right?

Ketan Karkhanis:
Incredible commitment, incredible partnership. And then as I look at their journey and we talk to them, they're like, okay, here's where we need help, here's where we need help, here's where we need help. And how do you build that bridge for them to create a modern selling environment, to create a data-driven selling environment, to create a selling environment where reps are spending less time doing entry, but more time driving deals. And to do all of this, it's not just new capabilities or new products like Planning, like GPT, all those things I talked about, but it's also the foundation capabilities of, okay, let's ensure forecasting is amazing out of the box. Let's ensure a lot of our features are turned on out of the box. Let's ensure we are really funneling our energies into bringing more, I keep saying out of the box, out of the box, out of the box.
That's my way of saying core, core, core, core. But it also implies I want to simplify setup and onboarding. We have some more work to do there. It's not done. And I will be the first person to say, hey, need your help, but trust me, we are committed to doing it. I'm committed to doing it. So, there's countless examples I can give you around all these things we are trying to do. But the strategy is adoption driven growth. Element of the strategy is I really don't want our customers to use seven or 10 different products, because I think...
So, our customers are giving me feedback. They're like, "Ketan, and this is becoming a bit..." I have seven to 10 different tools I have to use, and this happens in the industry, it's cyclical. There's a hyper proliferation of point solutions, and then we go into a tech consolidation phase. So, that is a very key part. That's what we did with Sales Cloud Unlimited. We took all this. We are like, these are not add-on, we just get them. It's like, okay, Gillian, when you buy a smartphone or you just buy... Nowadays, nobody calls it a smartphone.

Gillian Bruce:
They're all smart now, right?

Ketan Karkhanis:
They're all smart, right? Yeah, exactly. But there's a point in that comment. Do you have to choose whether you get the maps functionality or not?

Gillian Bruce:
No.

Ketan Karkhanis:
It's there. It's a feature, it's not a category. That's what we think when we think about things like sales engagement, when we think things like revenue intelligence, when we think about enablement, when we think about planning, when our conversational AI. These are capabilities of the new CRM.

Gillian Bruce:
I love that.

Ketan Karkhanis:
These are not categories. So, anyways, it was a great question. Thank you for asking that.

Gillian Bruce:
Yeah. No. And I appreciate the transparency. And I think what you described about the cyclical cycle, about how tack, the many, many points coming together into being one solution. And I think I feel though we're in the consolidation moment right now, especially with Sales Cloud, which I think that's pretty exciting. Now, in the last minute or two here, I would love to hear from you, Ketan. As someone who has been in the Salesforce ecosystem and at Salesforce for I think as long as I have, seems like forever at this point. Can you talk to me a little bit about how you view the role of the Salesforce admin in a successful-

Ketan Karkhanis:
You're the quarterback. You're the quarterback. Or if the people from other regions, I can use a cricket analogy, I can use a soccer analogy, I can use any analogy you want me to use, but you get the spirit of what I'm trying to say is yes, it's a critical role, it's a pivotal role, it's an important role. Because it's also the role that drives, not just governance and compliance, which is one way to think about it, but also what I call agile innovation. You can show the organization a way to move fast. The person who understands the power of clicks, not core, is connected to the community to bring those best practices from the community into your organization, is connected to product at Salesforce to bring that feedback back to product. You are also now the face of Salesforce in front of your organization, and that's why we love you so much.
It's a tough job. Look, it can be stressful, because you're juggling many balls. There's like every day you've got 10 things you're juggling. You are like, oh, I've got these five requests from this business unit, but I need to do this project, which is long-term. And I've still not gotten done with my data governance priorities, which I had. But it's a critical role, and that's why it's my commitment to you that I want to be held accountable by you. And I would aspire to be more connected to you. So, I don't know how we do-

Gillian Bruce:
Well, this is a first step, Ketan, now everybody knows who you are. So, you're going to start to get feedback as soon as this episode goes live, I promise you.

Ketan Karkhanis:
I had to open my mouth.

Gillian Bruce:
You asked for it. You asked for it. Well, Ketan, I so appreciate you coming on the podcast and giving us some context and insight to what's going on with Sales Cloud, priorities within Sales Cloud, some of the features that maybe we don't know about very much and that we should start be using. And then I also just really appreciate your insights and appreciation for Salesforce admins. I think it's always really helpful to hear from someone who's in the leadership position about how Salesforce really does view the role of the admin and prioritizes it and thinks it's so important. So, I appreciate you.

Ketan Karkhanis:
Thank you so much.

Gillian Bruce:
And we're going to do an episode about SalesGPT coming up soon. Don't you worry about that.

Ketan Karkhanis:
Yeah, yeah, 100%.

Gillian Bruce:
Thanks, Ketan. One quick note and reminder, SalesGPT has changed to Einstein for Sales. So, we're Salesforce, product names change, especially as we come into Dreamforce. So, just wanted to remind you of that. Anytime you hear SalesGPT think of Einstein. Well, that was amazing to have Ketan on the podcast. Appreciate his time. And yes, we are going to do more with him. So, I am looking forward to getting him back on to talk a little bit more about SalesGPT, which I know everyone is clamoring to learn more about. But I did appreciate his honesty and transparency about how Sales Cloud needed a reboot, how they're prioritizing reducing all of the different points of use of other products and other solutions, and trying to consolidate everything into one seamless Sales Cloud solution that helps you with adoption as you're trying to get your users on board.
I love the couple of features he mentioned that I didn't even really know about, was the extensions to bring CRM into your email or into LinkedIn, wherever you're working. And then, I mean, gosh, who doesn't love an improved list view, right? So, go ahead and check out the pipeline inspection list view. I mean, I guess it's technically not called a list view, but what a better way to look at your opportunities. So, we're going to do more with Ketan. I also thought it was great how critical he thought the admin role is, as we all know it is. But I hope that gave you a little insight into how our executive leadership views the role of Salesforce admin and how we are really prioritizing making the admin job easier and helping you make your users more successful. Enough from me. Thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today.
As always, if you like what you hear, please leave us a review. You can also get more information on my favorite website, admin.salesforce.com, for more great content of all kinds. And if you'd like to follow us at all, we are on all the social medias. You can find us on LinkedIn, or Twitter, or X or whatever it's being called these days, at Salesforce Admns, no I, and all over LinkedIn as well. Thanks to the main host of this podcast, Mike Gerholdt, for giving me the chance to bring this interview to you. And I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day. I'll catch you next time in the cloud.

 

 

Direct download: Sales_Cloud_Core_with_Ketan_Karkhanis.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 1:00am PDT

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Garry Polmateer, CEO of Red Argyle, a Salesforce Consulting agency and a member of the Salesforce MVP Hall of Fame.

Join us as we chat about why admins need to be involved with cybersecurity at their organization and how to start planning.

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

Admins and cybersecurity

Garry and I go way back—we were both in the first class of Salesforce MVPs back in 2010. We recently caught up at Midwest Dreamin’, where Garry gave a great talk about why Salesforce Admins need to be involved in cybersecurity, so I asked him to come on the pod and tell us all about it.

It can often feel like cybersecurity is a secondary consideration for Salesforce Admins, that it’s too complicated to get involved with. While Garry isn’t here to scare you, he wants to remind you that there’s a lot you can do as an admin to protect your organization.

Running away from a bear

When it comes to reducing your risk of a cyberattack, it’s a little like running away from a bear. You don’t have to be faster than the bear, you just have to be faster than the people next to you. Hackers are generally looking for low-hanging fruit, and doing some simple things like enforcing MFA and password best practices is often enough to get them to move on.

However, Garry points out that good cybersecurity is a lot more nuanced than simply not getting hacked. A good security plan protects your organization from itself, whether that’s an accident that leads to a data breach or ensuring that you meet regulatory requirements. And if something does happen, you need to know what to do about it.

A framework for security

Garry lays out a simple framework for looking at security in your organization:

  1. Understand your risks

  2. Respond

  3. Recover

What Garry has found in his consulting work is that while most businesses have spent time on #1, they don’t have a clear understanding of what to do if something goes wrong. That comes down to three simple questions: What will you do? Who will you talk to? And what will you do next?

“Any admin can do this,” Garry says, “and having a communications plan that’s nailed down with some specificity is like an insurance policy for your peace of mind.” And if something turns out to be serious, you have an action plan in place for what to do next so you can act quickly.

Be sure to listen to the full episode to learn more about security considerations you might not be thinking about and everything you need to know about backing up data.

 

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Direct download: Make_a_Cybersecurity_Plan_with_Garry_Polmateer.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 1:00am PDT

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Christine Stevens, Senior Salesforce Consultant at Turnberry Solutions.

Join us as we chat about the keys to user management and why documentation is so important.

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

Start with documentation

Christine is another guest we’re bringing on from Gillian’s Skills for Success video series, where she shares her tips for user management. We couldn’t pass up the chance to bring her on the pod to hear more and ask some questions.

User management starts with a solid onboarding process and, for Christine, that comes down to good documentation. New users have a lot to learn and having clear process flows can help them make sure they’re doing the right thing.

Christine recommends showing the same process multiple ways, like a flow chart for more visual people and a step-by-step list for folks who just want the instructions. The same goes for In-App Guidance—some users love it but other users would rather have a printed reference next to them for help as they go.

Good documentation tells a story

When it comes to documentation, it’s important to remember that different industries have different terminologies that might overlap with Salesforce terms. Christine points out that an “account” might mean one thing to an accountant, a different thing to a lawyer, and yet another thing to a Salesforce Admin.

“Write the training like you’re telling a story,” Christine says. Whenever possible, put documentation in terms that make sense for the industry your users are working in. This makes it easier to follow and easier to update. What your users need to do probably won’t change that much, even if how they do it in Salesforce does.

Empathy and patience

Whenever possible, Christine recommends taking a close look at your company’s existing technical documentation. You can save yourself a lot of time by adapting it to fit with Salesforce, and it’s likely that there has already been a lot of thought put into how to document key business processes in a way that makes sense for your users.

Finally, Christine reminds us that the keys to user adoption are empathy and patience. Change is hard for anyone, so it’s especially important to take the time to listen to people and hear their concerns. If you can get to the root of the problem there’s often a simple fix.

Be sure to listen to the full episode to learn more about managing permissions, some new things coming in Winter ‘24, and how Christine reverse-engineered an abandoned Salesforce instance.

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Mike:
User management is one of the four core habits of a Salesforce Admin and big responsibility that we all take on every day. So it really only makes sense that I talk with Christine Stevens about user management, documentation and user adoption. Now, Christine is featured in our Skills for Success YouTube series that Gillian launched just right before Dreamforce. And if you've been following along with us on the podcast this month, I've called it Skills for Success September. And so we're going to round out September by talking about user adoption and user management. But before we get into the episode, be sure you're following the Salesforce Admins Podcast on iTunes or wherever you get your podcast. That way you get a new episode every Thursday right on your phone. It's like magic and I promise they all don't sound like this one because Dreamforce kind of wrecked my voice. So with that, let's get Christine on the podcast. So Christine, welcome to the podcast.

Christine Stevens:
Thank you so much for having me, Mike.

Mike:
Well, I'm glad we are able to connect and round out September our Skills for Success September and talk about user management, which I mean that to me is the basis of success for admins within an org, for users, for really everybody. I mean, if users are using the system, then everybody's going to be successful. So let's dive into that. But first let's find out a little bit about you, Christine. How did you get started in the Salesforce ecosystem?

Christine Stevens:
Yeah. Sure. So I got my start in Salesforce back in 2014. I actually joined a small ISV partner called Accounting Seed. So they originally hired me as their bookkeeper. And I want to say about three months into the job, I had no idea what Salesforce was, one of my managers approached me and they're like, "You're going to be working on our support team. You're going to be helping our users get onboarded with Accounting Seed and Salesforce." And I'm just like, "Oh gosh, I know what Accounting Seed is because I've been doing the bookkeeping, but I have no idea how to use Salesforce." So they're like, "We'll send you to Salesforce training and all the shebang." So I went to Salesforce training over the summer of 2014. I really liked the class, I really liked the material. So I spent maybe about a month after that class studying for the Salesforce Admin Certification, and then I eventually took the test and actually passed the first time. And since 2018, I've actually been working as a consultant for various consulting firms.

Mike:
Wow. Passed the first time. You're in a minority there. That's really cool. Because I know a lot of people don't pass the first time. Ironically enough, your story mirrors a lot of admins. "Hey, I'm working for this company now and I'm in charge of Salesforce." "Oh, cool. I know what that other thing is. I don't know what Salesforce is, but let me figure that out." I know in the Skills for Success series with Gillian on the YouTube channel, which we'll link to in the show notes, you talk about user management. So let's dive into some of the user management stuff because I know there's a lot around with profiles and permission sets and being a consultant, I'm sure you run into all kinds of nightmarish scenarios where there's lots of things set up. But at the core, as admins get orgs set up or dive into orgs, where should they get started?

Christine Stevens:
I would say the most underrated skills that I find that is not done on a lot of projects is documentation and training. I feel like those two things are when you're cutting the project budget, those are the first two things to go. But also I find those things important because when you're training, you want to give your end users documentation. They're going into a new system, they don't know how to use the system. And the first thing I've always noticed a lot of users ask is like, "Okay, you're showing me this cool system, I see this and that, but I feel really overwhelmed and I can't really absorb this knowledge right now. Where can I go after this training session to review what we just had? Or can I have a documentation on hand? So as I'm learning and navigating the system, I have a reference guide to refer to."
So what I like to do on a lot of projects that I work on is I do documentation. So I usually like to do process flows because we have some users who are very visual and if they see the process flow of how to do everything, they're able to follow that. And then I have users who just like to read a book of documentation. I also write documentation guides along with little screenshots. And I think that is really important so that they can see where they go and they just have that hands-on guide next to them as they're clicking around in the system and it gets them more comfortable and confident in using the system.

Mike:
Yeah. Having done some implementation projects, I always know documentation is, it's like when you're building a house, they go, "Oh, we can paint the walls for you." "Nope, that's fine. I'll do it myself. It's totally going to save me money." And then you're a couple of hours into painting the first wall and you're like, "Should've paid for this, should've had somebody else do it." What's interesting, I thought you went a different route with documentation, so I'm going to go down your road with you and then come back. Do you find when you're building documentation for users that they enjoy having something that is outside the system? And I ask this because we have in-app prompts and we spend a lot of time on that versus having stuff help guide them through the system.

Christine Stevens:
So I've seen it go both ways in my experience. So I have some end users who like to have that outside documentation. They just like to have a printed copy of that document sitting next to them as they're on their computer, they have the document sitting next to them and they're clicking around in Salesforce using that guide. But then also I have users who like to use the in-app prompts such as the screen flows, the help text, the little pop-up icon when you're clicking on a field and you have the pop-up icon to see the additional information.
And then one thing I liked really doing in the past for UAT is when we built our test scripts, I worked for a company at one point where we designed a training app and we would load it into each of our client's sandboxes and we would load our test scripts, which contained the steps to test each process. So that information was in Salesforce. And what I've noticed what quite a few customers have done over time with that app is they would take our instructions if they were well written and turn that into their training documentation. So they would show users where to go in Salesforce and then they would just go into Salesforce, maybe have it up on another screen and just be able to navigate those test scripts as they're entering their real life information into Salesforce.

Mike:
Yeah, that makes sense. How do you advise as an admin sitting here thinking, oh man, documentation. It always works out nice to start fresh when you have a new project. But for admins that are like, "Okay, I've got to go back and document some stuff." How would you recommend somebody tackle that?

Christine Stevens:
Yeah. So I've been involved in quite a few projects where I was thrown into the middle of the project as an admin. So there was a project I worked on last year and they had a Salesforce org that was about 12 to 15 years old and nobody on staff knew how to use the org. So what I did to figure out how things worked is I just dove into the backend of the system. I started looking at the Schema Builder to really understand the object data model, and then I just dove into the objects to see what kind of fields there were. I dived into the flows.
I started really looking into the flows and writing on a scratch sheet of paper what the flow did, what objects it was touching and then I ended up taking that. And the good thing about the company I worked for when I was doing this is they had templates of technical documentations that you could write. So I just took all that information that I documented onto that scratch sheet of paper and put it into that document, and I actually presented it to my clients and they were like, "Wow, in the 15 years we have this org, this is the first time we've had completed documentation." And they asked me, "Who showed you how to use the system?" And I was like, "Nobody. I actually took it upon myself to really dive into the backend myself to really understand how things worked."

Mike:
Wow, that's cool. I love that tip of look for existing technical documentation because you know most companies have that.

Christine Stevens:
Yes.

Mike:
You're not starting from scratch. Okay, so I love where you went with the documentation question, you threw me a curveball because I wasn't even thinking about users and wanting to look at the process to understand what they're inputting in terms of the technology in front of them. I was thinking documenting user profiles and user management, and I thought that's where you're going to go. So I'm going to throw that at you, so here's your curveball. Which is, as a Salesforce Admin, I think it's always very important that we make sure that for security reasons, our profiles and permission sets and permission set groups are always up-to-date. How best do you recommend for admins or some of your clients to document that?

Christine Stevens:
Yeah, so there is an app that I've used in the past, and the name of it does not come to the top of mind. Because I know the issue with documenting profiles and permissions, it's not really easy to abstract that information out of Salesforce. At least that's how it's been in my experience. You do have to do some clicking around. So there was an app that I've used in the past that allowed for you to export your profile and permission information just so that you had up on, I think it put it into an Excel spreadsheet so that you had an Excel Doc and it had the different profiles listed along with the different permission sets.
I think the profiles were rows and then the different permissions for columns. Maybe I have that flipped. And you could see right on screen, okay, what does this user have access to? And when I showed that app to some of my clients, they were actually surprised at what they saw. They saw there were times that they had users who had too much access to the system because a lot of clients, their default is to give everybody admin access just so they don't have to go through that strategy of thinking of limiting access.
But as a consultant, I advise against that. And then another thing I advise against is always updating your profiles is you have these permissions, and I know you have, I think they're called permission groups now, where you can group the different permission sets together. So when I'm working with a brand new client with a net new Salesforce org, I encourage them to go down that route and use that app, and then we just go through it, clean up the permission sets. And I think with that app, you are able to directly load back into Salesforce those updated changes so that they could take effect immediately. Because I know with the user interface of Salesforce right now, you have to go through one by one on the objects and update the permissions, and I know that's a nightmare for a lot of people.

Mike:
Yeah. Well, the good news, and I'll link to this in the show notes, I saw at Dreamforce, because we're coming off Dreamforce from not that long ago, in Winter '24 at the release readiness live that we did, Cheryl Feldman demoed that you can, A, now select all on permission sets. So that's in that video. And B, you can also see all of those permissions-

Christine Stevens:
Oh, wow.

Mike:
... on a page. So there's some improvements coming. Everybody cheered, so I know I am underselling it by 1,000% right now. But everything you mentioned was stuff that's coming now in Winter '24 because, yes, I mean it can be a little bit of a who sees what, who saw what, and just set them up as an admin, I just need them... And it's like, "Right, but we need to do this with the right security in mind so that people aren't seeing things." To your point on documentation when doing training, what is your best advice for tackling and making sure that your documentation doesn't get out of date?

Christine Stevens:
I would say the biggest thing I've been focusing on in most recent years, especially as I do training and write documentation, is I find that my customers can consume the training better is if you write the training like you're telling a story or you're telling a day in a life story. So right now I work with a lot of clients that are law firms, so they like to hear the law firm terminology as you're going through stuff. So I try to relate it to the industry that they're in and the role that they're in. And as long as I write it as a story, it makes the updates easier. I noticed with a lot of training documentation that I read sometimes, it's very technical versus user-friendly. And I find when you write it in more of a technical nature, you have to update it more versus if you write it in a story mode, sometimes I find that I'm going through and maybe updating the screenshots and maybe the text here and there.

Mike:
Yeah. Right. But the story sometimes doesn't change a whole lot because it's the same.

Christine Stevens:
Yes.

Mike:
Yeah, that's a really good tip. Plus, I mean, if you think about it, how has humans throughout the span of history moved knowledge and data before the internet or before, I don't know, chiseling in stone? We told stories. There were storytellers, they would go from village to village and knoll to knoll. I don't know, people lived in knolls I guess. Or maybe under bridges.
Let's dive into user adoption and I'm going to ask you a question. Yeah, here we go. First day at Dreamforce, we did these one-on-one consults in the Admin Meadow. I love doing them, they're super fun. They're a little challenging, I won't lie, there's a lot of people that came up that had some very challenging things. A couple individuals sat down and said, "So we've spent five years trying to solve this and we can't fix it yet." And I said, "Good, we're going to do it in 20 minutes." Tongue in cheek. One question though, this is the first person I had as a consult, they sat down, they said, "What's the secret to user adoption?" And that was their question. And I said, "Oh, well, let's talk about that." I'm going to ask you, Christine, what's the secret to user adoption?

Christine Stevens:
I would say in my opinion, the secret to user adoption is it's always evolving. There is no one unique way of doing user adoption. At least that's how it's been in my experience. It's really understanding, sitting down with your users and really getting to know them on a personal level and how they work. I find when I do those two things, I do find myself adjusting as I engage in user adoption with a lot of my users. I don't have the same training style for each of my clients, it shifts a tiny bit. And I would say the biggest personality trait to have successful user adoption is to be empathetic because sometimes I work with a lot of clients who are in the accounting industry and accountants, they love their QuickBooks. So when they're moving to Salesforce, they're either moving to an Accounting Seed or a FinancialForce. I think they've changed their name to something else that I forget off the top of my head.
But most of the time when those users are moving the Salesforce, they're pretty upset because they don't want to leave QuickBooks because QuickBooks is pretty easy to use and now they have this massive Salesforce system and they're just like, "Oh God, I just don't want to do it." And it's just the key that I get to get users to use the system is just to be empathetic and also be patient. Because sometimes I find with clients, we are going over some stuff over and over again, which helps me to adopt my user training. Sometimes the training might not be efficient or maybe I'm not using the language.
One thing I try to do is just really adopt in terms of speak the client's language versus the Salesforce language. Because if I use account, not everybody thinks account is an account. Some people think accounts are like client accounts. I know in the legal industry, accounts are parties. So really adopting that language because I find when I adopt the client's language, they are more likely to adopt this system faster because they know what account translates to in their language.

Mike:
Right. Yes. I could not agree more. And in fact, sometimes I've stumbled in training and used a technical term, "Wait, I mean this instead." Everybody comes back and does that. So you mentioned training and I want to touch on that because I think there's a fair group of admins, I'll group myself in there, that actually really enjoys doing training. Training is a form of public speaking, so I'm not very scared of that. But there's also a fair group of admins that, if I can just send somebody a manual, maybe a link to a video, I'm good. What's your advice for admins that have to tackle that? Because there's definitely admins that are very outgoing that maybe only have 10 users and can be around all the time. And then there's definitely admins that aren't very outgoing and they might have 100 or 200 users, but they still need to train them.

Christine Stevens:
Yes. I would say on a personal level, myself, I'm actually not a very outgoing person, I'm very introverted. So that's something I've struggled with throughout my career also. What's helped me is I've actually invested time into public speaking. So I've gone to things like Toastmasters and really found things to talk about that I'm passionate about. And once I found things that I'm passionate about speaking about, that translated very well into speaking about stuff related to training and user adoption. So I think of it as a game. So when I'm doing those training sessions, I think of it like, "Okay, this is something that I'm passionate about." And just remind myself, what is the end goal. I try to set goals for myself when I'm doing these kinds of trainings. And I feel like when I have the goal and the passion, it feels like it's so much easier for me to get through those sessions.
And then I'll also say, what I try to do prior to those training sessions is I try to meditate or I try to take some quiet time because training, it can be exhausting. And when I take that quiet time and also time to rehearse before the call, I usually have a successful training call. I mean, sometimes there are people I speak to who can be quite difficult and usually when I encounter somebody who's difficult, I try to follow up with additional questions to ask them. Because sometimes when you follow up their question with a question or their frustration with a question, it causes them to pause and think about what are they trying to say or what's the point they're trying to get out there. And either they dial it back or they try to figure out a better way to phrase their question.

Mike:
Yeah, the number of times you have to grit your teeth sometimes at that difficult person in training and you think, "Why are you doing this? This is making it harder." And then you sit back and it's that layer of empathy that I've always had to be like, "Oh, they just need this information in order to move on. They're not trying to make things harder on you. This is a gap that they need filled as well." I think this would be something that a lot of admins are very curious about. User management always falls under the house cleaning stuff, that we always have to maintain, got to make sure everybody's got, what I call, the right key to the right door, permission sets and profile groups and stuff like that. When you talk to admins, what do you advise them on in terms of reporting around user management that shows their ROI?

Christine Stevens:
So I usually ask them what are their key performance indicators? What are we trying to measure here? Are we trying to measure the amount of times user login? Are we measuring based on the amount of records that are being created in Salesforce? And I always find that as a consultant, this always varies. So the client I worked with last year, they measured success just based on the number of intake records. So they were a financial services company and their key performance indicator was just the number of clients they onboarded each month. So when I first joined the project, they noticed their client onboarding was on a decline and we started the investigation of the reason why. So I did a couple of interviews with some of the admins on the team and I also talked to some of the end users and the end users had a lot of complaints about the system.
So I was working as a business analyst on this project. So I just went through, documented all their concerns and then I went to the admin team and I'm like, "Okay, here's what I'm finding why they're not adopting the system." So one reason was they had to create accounts and at that point their account creation process was manual. And they also had a lot of fields on the account page layoff that they weren't using. So I worked with their admin team, so we ended up building a screen flow to do the intake and just having the specific fields that their agents cared about filling out when they were onboarding a client. So when we presented that to them in a demo session, there was a lot of cheering and clapping, they were like, "This process is so much more automated." And the first month we implemented that, their client onboarding was significantly higher than the beginning of the year. And that was just really cool to see. And we wouldn't have known that if I had not sat down and had the conversations with the end users.

Mike:
Yeah. Man, I am right with you. I remember for the longest time, I had the hardest time getting salespeople to create contacts. And there was just a whole bunch of superfluous fields there that other teams needed. This was the days before Dynamic Forms, by the way. And the biggest thing that always stuck with me, and a trainer like yourself told me this, was nobody wants to show up to their job and feel stupid. And leaving a field blank on a page when they're creating a record, unintentionally made my users feel stupid because they're like, "Should I know this? Why don't I know this? Maybe I shouldn't be creating this contact." And it was that little bit that was just enough to stop them from hitting that new button. Which was a measure of their success as well, but we didn't uncover it until we got into some later project phases and I had a boss that asked for that and somebody finally stood up and says, "Half these fields, I don't even know when I create the contact."
And I was like, "Oh, well..." Workflows and record types at the time was how I solved it. But yeah, screen flows. I love that answer. That's great. Christine, thanks so much for coming on and sharing some user management. I love the documentation aspect of it. I feel like there's just never enough that we can do to really drive people through and help them understand and drive that user adoption. So I appreciate you taking the time out and being on the Skills for Success video series and then sharing some extra insight with us here on the podcast.

Christine Stevens:
Yes, thank you so much for having me on, Mike. It's been fun.

Mike:
So that was a great discussion with Christine. I really enjoy the tip that she had about look for existing technical documentation within your organization and then copy off of that. I think sometimes when we're thinking we've got to write user manuals or we've got to write process documentation, we're starting from scratch and we don't know what's out there. Hey, I bet your organization has something out there. This is also a good opportunity for you to make friends over in your IT org, maybe they can help you with that documentation as well.
Now, if you enjoyed this episode, can you do me a favor? I just need you to share it with at least one person. And here's how you do it. If you're listening on iTunes, you just tap the dots and choose share episode. Then you can post it social, you can even text it to a friend, maybe a friend that's looking to build some user management adoption documentation. And of course, if you're looking for more great resources, your one-stop for everything admin is Admin.salesforce.com, including the transcript of this show and links to that YouTube series. Be sure to join the conversation over in the Admin Trailblazer Group in the Trailblazer Community. Again, links are in the show notes. And with that, until next week, we'll see you in the cloud.

Direct download: Christine_Stevens_on_User_Management.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 1:00am PDT

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we’re replaying our episode with Sarah Flamion, Research Architect on Salesforce’s Research & Insights Team.

Join us as we chat about what recent advances in generative AI mean for admins and the Salesforce platform.

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

What is generative AI?

Generative AI is a blanket term for algorithms that can generate new content: text, images, code, voice, video, and more. It does that based on what it has learned from the existing data you give it.

Sounds complicated, but one of the coolest things about generative AI is that the interface for it is natural language processing (NLP). You can describe what you want it to make in plain English and it will spit something out at you.

The human in the loop

One thing that’s important to understand about generative AI is that it’s not an encyclopedia, it’s a completion system. Fundamentally, the way it works is to identify patterns and then predict the next thing in the sequence.

A new field is emerging called prompt engineering, which is focused on how to talk to these models to get better results. You can adapt the model to specific knowledge by “grounding” it with data that isn’t public, for example, your brand voice or information about your industry. You can also give it feedback on its responses, which gives it a chance to learn and improve thanks to “the human in the loop.”

The main takeaway from all of this is that generative AI “supercharges the things that the humans can do,” Sarah says. You can make an image and then have the model give you three variations on it, or get a quick first draft for the opening of a piece of content you need to write.

Jobs to Be Done and Salesforce

For Salesforce, there is a lot of potential to make users’ lives easier. You might be able to automatically log calls based on an AI-generated transcript of the conversation, or clean up old data that was perhaps sloppily entered.

Sarah and her team often look at their research in terms of Jobs to Be Done. Businesses generally have a list of jobs they’re trying to accomplish and then use tools, like Salesforce, to help them do those jobs. The thing is, the tools might change but most businesses will have the same Jobs to Be Done, even over decades. Generative AI stands to shake that up, both in terms of what businesses need to get done and who can do those jobs.

Be sure to listen to the full episode for our in-depth conversation with Sarah and why change management just might be the most important skill for admins in the future.

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Full Transcript

Mike:

Hey, Salesforce Admins. Boy, last week was busy with Dreamforce. And even if you didn't get to go, I'm sure you saw a lot of the news around AI and generative AI and GPT, and boy, just a lot of things going on. So in the spirit of making sure that you're staying up-to-date, I'm going to rebroadcast an episode that I did not that long ago, literally just a month or so ago, with one of the generative AI specialists that we have here at Salesforce. So listen in. This is a fantastic conversation that I have with Sarah.

 

So Sarah, welcome to the podcast.

Sarah Flamion:

Thanks. I'm happy to be here.

Mike:

Yeah. Before we get started, just give us a brief history of Sarah's journey to Salesforce.

Sarah Flamion:

Sure. So I have worked at a couple different large enterprise organizations. I worked at General Electric back when they had a Capital Services division. And then, I worked at a company called MedPlus, which is part of Quest Diagnostics, a big lab on their electronic medical record. So I like big software.

And I interviewed with Salesforce. I was interested in switching to a more established research team. And I interviewed on the day that ExactTarget got acquired by Salesforce.

Mike:

Oh, wow.

Sarah Flamion:

I tell people I've been with Salesforce exactly as long as ExactTarget has.

Mike:

Exactly.

Sarah Flamion:

Exactly. That's right.

Mike:

Perfect. Well, I appreciate you sharing that with us, but we really want to... I really, really, really, really, really want to dig into generative AI because I feel like I can't shake a stick or go to any social post without people talking about it or my friends talking about it in tech. So I'll just start off with the obvious question. What is generative AI?

Sarah Flamion:

Well, it's a great question. I think a lot of people are still on the learning curve about it. When we talk about generative AI, we are generally referring to algorithms that can create or generate, that's where the name comes from, new content. And that can be text. It could be pictures. It could be code. It could be voice. It could be video, and it does all that based on what it's learning from existing data.

And the newer cooler thing about generative AI is that it's creating that content in a way that's controlled by natural language. So people can just conversationally describe what output they want, and they don't have to have special expertise to get that out.

Mike:

Okay. That makes sense. So hearing that from you, I'm wondering why is everybody freaking out about this?

Sarah Flamion:

Sure. So it might be worth explaining a few more things about generative AI to help it make sense. If you think about AI, we use this word called a model. It's basically like a computer program or an algorithm that can be trained on large amounts of data, and it can learn patterns and relationships between those, and then use that to do things.

Generative AI has these large language models. They sometimes call them foundation models, but they're different in that they're huge. So all these models have little parameters that can be configured to tweak how it behaves and functions.

And the foundation models behind generative AI have billions of parameters. And they've been modified so they can ingest just massive quantities of data. So you'll hear a lot like the term GPT. That is a famous model. The G is for generative.

The P means pre-trained, and that is kind of the secret here, where it's trained on this huge broad set of data, not unique to any particular task. And it can learn in a, they call it, self-supervised way, but it can learn without a human having to control all the learning. And then, the T is for transformer. That's a capability that allows the model to understand relationships.

But people are freaking out about it. I think right now, we have an AI research team that published a blog post called, If You Say It, You Can Do It, the Age of Conversational AI. But in it, they talk about how the world is primed for this type of advancement.

I think all of us have had the experience of information overload where there's just more to consume than time. So there's more emails and Slack messages and texts and podcasts, articles that look interesting than any human could really ingest.

And we're all also working a lot. There's increasing workloads and this pressure to do more with less. And the article, they refer to trapped potential, but you've probably worked with people who have ideas, but maybe not the skills to execute them. So they have an idea for an app but can't maybe make it happen, or something they want to do at work, but they lack some sort of skill that's required. So we're sort of ready for this new kind of fundamental way to interact with our tools. And then, you get this fundamentally new tool. So the timing was right.

Generative AI is different from previous ones in that it can generate new content. So it's not something that previously existed. It can make net new things, and it can make them in unstructured ways, so long texts or images or videos. So I'm sure you've seen examples in the past of AI being able to identify photos.

So you can classify a photo as a dog or a landscape. And now, it can make a new dog or a new landscape based on what it's seen. So if you ask it, it can generate this new thing. And it also can be used for a wide range of tasks.

So I commented on the broad data that it's trained on, but AI in the past was pretty narrow. So it was designed to do a thing like language translation or image recognition. And shifting from that narrow to this really wide possibility is a pretty fundamental change. So the same tool can be used to do just this incredible array of things, and that's pretty transformative.

You'll also hear people talk about it being multimodal. So that's just a fancy way of saying it can process and generate output that isn't text, which makes it a lot easier to interact with as a human person. We're much more multimodal in the way we talk. We use words, but also we make sounds, and we're using visuals and gestures. And so, the more conversationally we can interact with the technology, the more natural it is.

And I think as part of that conversational thing, you'll see that if you've played with any of the tools, you can ask it to do something for you. You can ask it to produce output. And then, you can interact with it, and you can say like, "Well, actually, that's not what I wanted. I thought it would be, can you make it less formal or, I want this image to be more in the style of this other thing," and it'll adjust it. So it's adapting based on what you're telling it, which again makes it feel more conversational.

Mike:

On our previous podcast at the end of May, talked with Josh Burke, who is big into Midjourney and generating images from that. And I said, "Can you just do a demo for me?" And I was so fascinated that he was able to just put in... I think he put in cat on a pirate ship.

Sarah Flamion:

Right.

Mike:

And it came back with that. And then, he's like, "No, but change this and make it in the style of Van Gogh." And I thought to myself, "Oh, well, this is going to be interesting what comes back with." And it understood that.

Sarah Flamion:

Yeah. And you'll see... So OpenAI introduced ChatGPT in late 2022. And the public-facing person hit 100 million users in two months, which is the fastest growing app of all time. And I think the conversational nature of it is really what is behind that. It's so easy to do.

My sister was talking about her daughter is a kindergartner and has been writing stories and wants pictures for them, but they're very specific pictures. And she's been using Midjourney to create a purple cat in high tops skateboarding in the neighborhood.

Mike:

Totally [inaudible 00:08:39].

Sarah Flamion:

Yeah. So it's such a low lift that you can really play around with it. Yeah. So it's been pretty fascinating thing to be a part of.

Mike:

So without getting too technical, just thinking ahead here, what are some other concepts that myself or Salesforce admin should understand about generative AI?

Sarah Flamion:

Sure. I think, fundamentally, one thing that is worth understanding is that it's not a big knowledge repository. It's not just like a giant encyclopedia where you go and find the answer. It's really more of a completion system. So the tool is predicting the next element of a sequence based on the information that's been trained on.

So if you give it a sentence like today is a rainy, it can predict the next plausible text like day. It doesn't just always pick the highest probability word, that makes it sound really flat and kind of weird. Those parameters that we talked about kind of changed that. But it's probably important to understand that what it's really doing is going out and completing sequences rather than acting as a repository.

There's also some language that you'll hear. So if you're looking around at generative AI, you'll hear it talk about prompts. And those are just as natural language descriptions of the task could be accomplished. So the example I was giving earlier, give me a picture of a cat who's purple and is wearing high tops and is skateboarding.

You'll probably hear the term prompt engineering a lot. That's kind of a new field that is out there now, which is where you design and formulate these really effective instructions, which we're calling prompts to guide the output or the behavior of the model that you're using.

Mike:

And when you say-

Sarah Flamion:

Oh, go ahead.

Mike:

Oh, sorry.

Sarah Flamion:

No, go ahead.

Mike:

I just wanted to make sure I understood that. When you say the prompts to guide the behavior, you mean the behavior of the AI, not the behavior of the person putting in or giving a text?

Sarah Flamion:

That's right. The behavior of the AI. So you are telling the generative AI model what you want from it, and there are techniques that are increasingly being learned about how to do that in really effective ways. And the instructions that you're giving it are called prompts, and the technique of getting those prompts to be better and more effective is called prompt engineering.

Mike:

Gotcha. Okay. Wanted to make sure, because-

Sarah Flamion:

Sure.

Mike:

... old-school Mike of the technology of the 21st century prompts are like, "How do you get the right input from the person on the keyboard?"

Sarah Flamion:

Yeah. It's also worth knowing that generative AI models are adaptable. They can constantly be tweaked. So there's lots of parameters that can be adjusted. But you can also take specific knowledge. So knowledge from a domain, like finance or healthcare or an organization or a particular task, you can inject it right into the prompts. That's called grounding them, or you can also adapt the model to specific knowledge.

So you can train it. You can take a model that's been pre-trained. And then, you can do some additional training basically on an industry or a specific subject matter. And that lets you use the generative AI in ways that aren't... on information that isn't public. So you can say like, "I want you to generate an email that uses my brand voice," or you want to use a huge amount of data to perform a task without entering it all into the prompt.

So that adaptability is really interesting and is super powerful. It's also kind of continuously getting better. So they can be fine-tuned these models where you can teach it basically what a good prompt is and what a good output for that prompt is. So when you see this type of prompt, this is good output, that's kind of called demonstration data.

You can also train it on big sets of data, or you can get human feedback on it. So you can have people enter a prompt and get back maybe four different outputs and say, "This is the best one. This is the second best one." And it will teach the models how to improve, so that real human feedback can also be taken in as input by the model and then used to make it better.

So we're in the early stages really, but these models are just continuously learning and getting better. And so, it's going to be a really exciting space as we watch what's possible as they learn.

Mike:

As I try and learn. This might be a dumb question. Actually, it feels dumb, but it might not be. Is it possible that the generative AI is also building its own prompts as it's learning because you gave that example of it comes back with four and you're like, "Ooh, I like two the best?" Does that then create its own prompt or am I using that term-

Sarah Flamion:

I'm actually not sure.

Mike:

Okay.

Sarah Flamion:

I think typically, when we talk about training, it's more in terms of understanding the right sequences of things to put together and reaction to a particular instruction.

Mike:

Yeah. Okay. So just trying to put two and two together. Man, that's so cool. Well, we talked about pictures a lot. But what are some other things that generative AI is kind of really good at?

Sarah Flamion:

So a lot of the capabilities are around jump-starting things. So you've probably experienced that if you've messed around with it on your own. You can create a first version of something, a quick draft. You can use it to create content at scale. So like, "I want a bunch of product descriptions for this product catalog."

It can be used to transform content. That's pretty interesting. You can take content and then transform it into something really different, like a real remix. So I want this image, but I want these three different variations of it, or, personally, I was reading a blog recently where it was asking for product recommendations. And people in the comments were posting products that they loved.

And then, somebody use generative AI to go through all the comments and take out all the recommendations and put them in a categorized spreadsheet. So you can really transform things in different ways. It does an amazing job of summarizing data. So in a business context, maybe you're in a really long meeting. Then, you want to summarize it, or there's a huge set of texts and you want it to summarize and tell you, "What are three things I need to know from this big set of information."

Mike:

So in the realm of why does this matter to me, I'm hearing it's really good at expanding or synthesizing information.

Sarah Flamion:

It is, yes. And it can just do these things at a speed and a scale that humans really can't, which just supercharges the things that the humans can do. If you're hitting writer's block, you can quickly get a starter for a paragraph to help you get going again or if you make an amazing image, you can quickly make it into three variations.

So there's lots of work that is just really manual for us to do, where now, we have this super powerful tool that really anybody can harness to do these things. So before, you have to have this really specialized capability in order to write code or generate these variations or summarize data. Somebody has to go through it and pick all that out. And so, having these tools at your disposal to do that is just really powerful.

Mike:

Yeah. No. I can't help but think back to... So the early to mid-90s, my mom was in a call center. And she used to get these call scripts of, "Okay, so if a customer says this, then do this." Right?

Sarah Flamion:

Yeah.

Mike:

And the good call center people like my mom was could memorize those, and she didn't even have to flip through. She knew when somebody said something, exactly what to go to next.

And I remember early versions of working in a call center where we would try to write prompts for people. I guess I'm thinking of that as you're telling me this because we're talking prompts, but probably in a different way of asking generative AI to do something, make a cat on a pirate ship, and then come back with stuff. I guess outside of that, what are the ways that this feels kind of new and different?

Sarah Flamion:

So we've talked about it a lot. But I think the conversational nature of it feels very new. It can democratize a lot of what can be done because you just have to be able to speak regular language to invoke it. I think that introduces some weirdness also. And you see that play out in the media a lot, that as we're building this, typically, when we're having a conversation, we're conversing with a sentient being on the other side.

Mike:

Sure.

Sarah Flamion:

And it's hard to remember that, in this case, we are having a conversation, what feels like a conversation. But the thing that we're conversing with is not a human. So there's a lot of work that's going into thinking about how we push back against that natural human tendency to think of the thing we're conversing with as a person. It's interesting too in that it has variable output.

So if you give the same prompt a couple times, you can get different outputs. And that feels really different than a lot of technology today where we sort of lean on consistency and are used to the idea that if you do A and B, you get C. So that's kind of a different thing.

And then, I think we talked about the adaptability earlier, but you'll hear this concept sometimes called human in the loop. But it's the idea that feedback from humans can continuously improve the model, and that's kind of a fun new aspect of this. So it can be explicit like maybe you thumbs up or thumbs down some output that you got to let it know if it was good, or it can be implicit.

So we can track how users interact with generated content. Are they just immediately accepting it? Are they making edits? Are they ignoring it? How are they interacting with it? And you can make some inferences and do some research around that too.

So I think those are all things about generative AI that feel different and that, like I said, it's all pretty new. So there's a lot of fun research to be done about how to help people interact with these things and what those patterns should be.

Mike:

Yeah. I mean, the first point that you hit on for me is you can give it the same prompt and get something different back is really like, "Whoa." That to me feels like, "Okay, there's something going on. Who's the wizard behind the curtain there?" So shifting a little bit towards Salesforce and some of the stuff that you do on the team, what do we already know about our customers and AI that could apply here?

Sarah Flamion:

So our research team has invested a lot of time in understanding something we call jobs to be done. The idea behind the jobs to be done theory is based on this belief that people buy or hire products and services to get a specific job done. They're trying to do a thing in order to achieve a particular outcome or set of outcomes.

And we do research in that way because it helps give us a framework for discovering and defining the jobs and needs and then understanding how our customers think about the success of those.

So as we're thinking about generative AI, there's a couple ways that those jobs to be done factor in. The first one is kind of obvious. We're going to help people achieve the existing jobs to be done, but in better ways, so they can get to the success metrics that they're looking for, just more effectively or more easily.

So sometimes you'll hear people call that augmenting. You're helping someone achieve their desired outcomes with more satisfaction and more efficiency, reducing manual workarounds, that kind of thing. When we talk to customers just generally about the value they expect to realize based on AI and generative AI, that comes up a lot.

Mike:

Yeah. I can understand that. I mean, that also sounds a little broad, right?

Sarah Flamion:

Right.

Mike:

We're going to help do things more effectively and efficiently. Do you have an example or a few examples you could give us?

Sarah Flamion:

Oh yeah. There's lots of them. So some of the things that kind of immediately jump to mind, most systems like the Salesforce work best when they have really good data being entered into them. But if you've entered data into them, it can be time-consuming and manual. So using a tool like this to make that data entry easier would be a good example of augmentation.

Another example is we talked about summarization. So maybe you want to summarize a conversation that you had with a customer or a meeting, or you want to summarize a really good resolution to a support issue. So your mom is handling a case, and she has a great resolution, and you want to summarize that so you can share it broadly. We have a lot of developers in our ecosystem. Developers can use tools like these to help write code or generate test cases.

It can be great for inspiration. So you can get a first draft of an email that you want to send, or an image that you want to use in a marketing campaign, or maybe a presentation or a proposal. You can get past that writer's block or you can brainstorm a bunch of ideas.

So the other day, I had an idea for something I wanted to do inside the company, and I needed a name for it. So I was brainstorming using ChatGPT, what are some good names for this? And then, you can take that, and you can polish it or kind of adjust it.

And the nice thing is, because it is a tool, you can just scrap ideas that are bad. It gave me a whole bunch of ideas that weren't great. And it took me two seconds. So I can just say, "No, not like that. Here's what I was thinking, something like this." And then, I got a bunch of better ideas. You don't have to feel badly about taking or leaving the content.

Also, we talked about generating content at scale. It can also help people look at huge amounts of data and ask questions of it, interrogate the data with more natural language or spot patterns. So without writing queries or code, you're just speaking what you're looking for and being able to find it.

And then, it can enhance conversations. So you gave the example earlier of having the service call or support call. You can harness these huge bodies of information and information about the brand or the customer, and you can put that and inject that into the context of the conversation itself to make suggestions.

Mike:

Well, I don't know about that whole developer and test cases stuff, because everything I know of developers, they love writing test cases.

Sarah Flamion:

Yes.

Mike:

Tried to say that with a normal face just to see.

Sarah Flamion:

So it just really can amplify what you're able to do.

Mike:

Yeah.

Sarah Flamion:

And then, I think if we go back to the jobs to be done, everybody has things that they do that are more fulfilling to them than others. So you're looking at your workday, and you're recognizing and pieces of it are more fun, or more interesting or more engaging to you.

And so, personally, I'm really optimistic that generative AI is going to help people free up time to spend on those more fulfilling jobs to be done. So if the data entry piece is a necessary task that you have to do but isn't your favorite part, we can help expedite that so that you have more time to think about interesting ways to connect with your customers or build proposals for new projects, just more interesting and rewarding ways.

So that to me is what is most exciting about all of this. I am obviously a big proponent of Salesforce. So we have seen the incredible things that our trailblazers can do with the tools they have today. And if we can make it easier for them to complete the kind of rote, mundane, time-consuming tasks and surface information to them that might have been hard for them to get before, it just feels like the creativity that, that could unlock is going to be amazing.

Mike:

I mean, you're saying the exact same words I've been saying for years about all of what we call declarative tools that we build on the platform. What do you want your developer spending time doing? Do you want them writing mundane validation rules or just using our validation rules? Do you want them writing these insane business processes, or would you rather they go write some really cool stuff, and not to put this on the admin, but the admins building the flows that are the meat and potatoes, getting everything done.

Sarah Flamion:

Exactly. I also think it's interesting to think about, we know the jobs to be done that people are trying to do today. And typically, if you read about jobs to be done, they're typically pretty evergreen. So they don't change a lot. The ways that you accomplish them might. But the job you're trying to do might be the same for 50 years.

But with generative AI, it feels like there's a possibility to start to see really new jobs to be done. So things that just weren't even in the realm of possibility before are now something that you might think about being part of your role. So just as a personal example, I have three kids, and they really enjoy laughing at how old I am and talking about all the things that we have every day now that weren't possible when I was growing up. So the fact that we didn't have cell phones or navigation systems just kind of blows their mind.

Mike:

They'll never know. They'll never know the excitement of seeing the blinking red light on the answering machine.

Sarah Flamion:

Exactly, or how cool I thought I was when I could print out MapQuest directions and fold them up and put them in my dashboard.

Mike:

That was the thing.

Sarah Flamion:

That was the thing, right? But if I think about when I used to write school reports, I would look stuff up in an encyclopedia or go to the library-

Mike:

For hours.

Sarah Flamion:

... and I would have a limited amount of sources.

Mike:

Hours.

Sarah Flamion:

It would take forever. And now, if I look at what they're doing, my daughter did a report last year about paleo artistry, which she learned about by asking questions of the internet about how we know what dinosaurs look like. And she found all these interactive, really interesting resources, but she also was able to find a paleo artist through social media that she could interview.

And just the amount of expansion and what is possible for them versus what was possible when I was growing up really is pretty breathtaking. And it bends my mind a little bit to think about what is going to be possible for my grandkids because of what is emerging now.

Mike:

Is paleo artistry the art of drawing dinosaurs as to what we thought they looked like, or-

Sarah Flamion:

It is. Yes. They're artists and they kind of combine that artistry with science to take the scientific information that we have and then render what that would look like.

Mike:

Okay.

Sarah Flamion:

And there's a lot that goes into all the plants in the background have to be-

Mike:

Right. Certain kind-

Sarah Flamion:

... contextually appropriate. It was a pretty fascinating little report.

Mike:

I've never heard that word. This is so cool. Okay. Come on, do a podcast about generative AI, learn about paleo artistry.

Sarah Flamion:

Paleo artistry. Yeah. But I think about just the stuff that they're going to be able to understand and learn about and know because you can just so easily access this information kind of... It's pretty amazing.

Mike:

I mean, I-

Sarah Flamion:

I also think it's going to be interesting.

Mike:

You and I wouldn't have run across it unless the word was in the encyclopedia.

Sarah Flamion:

That's exactly right. And then, you only get one perspective, whoever wrote that article.

Mike:

Sure. Hopefully, they liked paleo artists.

Sarah Flamion:

Yeah. We're at a pivotal point, I think. You talked about it earlier, but the people who do the jobs today have to have particular skills to do the jobs. And I think with generative AI, we're going to see some of the job performers changing, so new roles. People who had ideas but couldn't tackle that job before might be able to now, or new groups within an organization working together in different ways. I think that kind of organizational shaping is going to be a really interesting aspect of research as well.

Mike:

I mean, you look at how organizations are structured now versus 50 years ago when things are very different based on just the jobs that we're doing. Yeah. It's also crazy to think that most likely the kids born now will have a job that doesn't exist maybe for another 20 years.

Sarah Flamion:

Right.

Mike:

Who knows? So as you're going through this and you're reading about the research, what kind of concerns do customers have around some of these capabilities?

Sarah Flamion:

So I think anyone who's thinking responsibly about these technologies is also thinking about the risks and the concerns and how we best handle those.

Salesforce has been in the AI space a long time. So we pioneered AI for enterprise in 2013 with Einstein. And I think our latest count, we have over 60 AI features. So we've had lots of opportunities as researchers to talk to customers about AI. Our customers understand the importance of accuracy and quality.

And so, I think there's some worry that generative technologies are going to churn out content that isn't great, so low quality code or wrong answers to questions or mediocre marketing content. And I think they've seen stories on the news about generative AI making toxic or really strange kind of weird content. I think there's concerns about security and privacy of data and the data of their customers. And customers talk to about they want to have agency and what's going on. So they don't want to just totally lose control of their craft and their domain or see a decline in their skillset.

At Salesforce, we talk a lot about how trust is such an important value for us. And I think we're going to have to really lean into that as we bring this generative AI tech to market. I know we're not deep diving today into Salesforce, but it's worth the admins who are listening, knowing that there's lots of smart people really invested in how we build this in the most responsible and thoughtful way possible.

And that includes not just how the technology is being built. So we are building some of our own models, but also how it's being leveraged by our systems, how those interfaces work, how we're training it, how we're going to use data cloud technology to ensure that we're basing these capabilities on really good clean data. And then, especially from a researcher perspective, how we make sure that the people, the humans who are using it are informed and engaged in the right way.

Mike:

Yeah. All very valid. So as we kind of wrap up, a couple questions. I think I see admins being on the frontline of helping organizations understand AI and probably GPT inside of Salesforce. What suggestions do you have for them?

Sarah Flamion:

I think our knowledge and understanding of change management is going to be more important than ever. So just because we can augment all these jobs and have all these amazing new capabilities, people won't just adopt it because we have, as humans, a preference for doing things the way we do them now, what we call that status quo bias.

And, sometimes, we also talk about this psychological inertia, which is the idea that it's difficult to get people truly invested in change once they've kind of solidified the way that they're doing it now, their ideas and their habits.

So if you're trying to combat those tendencies and drive adoption, I think, first, admins need to think about the culture of their organization. Every organization has kind of different feelings about things, and you need to use that to frame how you're talking about enrolling out these capabilities.

So an example of that might be if you have a team with a lot of high trust in data, they might respond really well to sort of data-oriented framing metrics about the productivity improvements for particular roles, for example. If you have a team who's maybe less data oriented but much more relationship driven, maybe, you're highlighting how AI might free up some of their time by taking care of some day-to-day tasks so they have more time for relationship building. So I think some of it is around framing.

I think the second thing is really focusing on value. So the more obvious the value and the clearer it is, the more you can push back against that status quo bias. So highlighting the solutions that are available, benchmarking before and after changes, so you get that social proof of what is possible.

I think prioritizing really role-relevant information to help people super clearly understand what's in it for me. So rather than kind of blanket statements about success, really identifying this is what's in it for you as a service agent. So this is what's in it for you as a marketing specialist.

I think being clear about how we bridge from output of the models to action and then making sure there's lots of feedback mechanisms. I probably lean toward that because I'm a researcher, but you want your teams to be able to share input and talk about what they're loving and what they're nervous about and ideas that they see for how to use it so that you can kind of meet them where they are.

And then, the last recommendation we'd have is you share success stories and be really honest about the time commitment required to adopt these changes. There's a little bit of a learning curve with any new thing. And I think the more honest you can be about the payoff and also what it takes to get there, the better. And then, we generally suggest rather than focusing on one major long-term goal, look for kind of smaller targets where you can quickly see success, and iterate as you go.

Mike:

Your second point was huge because it was exactly the bailiwick that I feel I've done a lot as an admin, which was focusing on here are the tasks that this takes off your plate so you can do this part of your job better because you're already great at it. Maybe that was the salesperson in me, but that was completely how I sold some workflow rules and validation rules to salespeople.

Sarah Flamion:

Exactly.

Mike:

You don't have to worry about doing this. It's going to take care of it for you, so you can spend more time on the phone because that's what you're good at.

Sarah Flamion:

And our admins have such a pulse on where the folks in their organization are struggling and where they really shine. So they're the perfect people to help craft that narrative. They can really point to specific examples and say it in ways that their teams can hear.

Mike:

Yeah. No. 100%. Sarah, you taught me, and I think everybody listening, more about generative AI than I knew heading into it. So this has been a very productive time. One last question I love to ask, and it's totally fun. It has nothing to do with everything we talked about.

Sarah Flamion:

All right.

Mike:

This is why I put it at the end, but I think it's always fun to find out the hobbies that people have when they work at Salesforce, because a lot of times, working in technology, there's nothing physical or tangible. I often the met the builder of the house that I live in. He said, "It was a very proud moment when I finished your house because I got to drive by and show my son that I had finished this house."

And I often think admins, I can't drive by and show their son, "Look, son, here's the flow I built today." And as a product manager, it can be the same way. So I was wondering if you would be so kind as to share with us any fun hobby that you may have.

Sarah Flamion:

Yeah. I spend a lot of time cooking. I really enjoy probably for the same reason you just pointed out. I like the tactical like tactile output of it. It brings me joy. There's like a creative element to it. You can start with a recipe and add your own ideas and come out with something really new.

And then, I'm a mom. So there's also-

Mike:

There's a-

Sarah Flamion:

... a productive aspect to it. Yeah. It feeds my family. So I really enjoy that. I've also got some kiddos who are pretty artistic. And so, we've been spending a lot of time doing art. So I've been learning a lot of new techniques and tools from them, but that's been a pretty fun side gig as well.

Mike:

Okay. I love it. I also enjoy cooking. I can follow a recipe, but don't send me to the store with those shows on the Food Network where they sent... Here's $50 and you got to make a dinner. I just come back with a pre-made dinner. I need a recipe. I'm a good [inaudible 00:37:43].

Sarah Flamion:

Really, I'm not a great baker. I think the precision is not what I'm looking for. I like a little of this and a little of that and maybe [inaudible 00:37:49]

Mike:

Exactly. I have learned that there's a difference between cooking and baking. I am not a chef, but I like to cook because I can add a little extra, and it doesn't mess everything up. But baking, everything, it's a leveled cup. I forgot to level it. Well, it's ruined. Awesome. I'll still eat the brownies anyway. Not a fan. Sarah, thanks so much for coming on the pod today and giving us a lot of generative AI knowledge.

Sarah Flamion:

It was great. It was my pleasure. Thank you so much for inviting me. And I certainly encourage anyone who's listening to share their feedback with us. It's a space where there's lots of research to be done and still to do. So if you are at Dreamforce or Connections or you're part of our research program, we really do want to hear from you because there's a lot that we're all collectively figuring out, and I think there's a lot of possibilities. So I'm looking forward to the creative input from your audience.

Mike:

We'll see what the next year is like.

Okay. So I don't know about you, but I know a ton more about GPT and generative AI than when this podcast started. So I also feel like I could finally get the Jeopardy question right as to what GPT stands for. So if you enjoyed this episode, can you do me a favor and just share it with one person? If you're listening on iTunes, just tap the dots and choose share episode. Then, you can post it on social. You can text it to a friend. I have a feeling you're really going to want to do that with this episode. Just saying.

Now, if you're looking for more great resources, your one stop for everything admin is admin.salesforce.com, including a transcript of this show. And be sure to join our conversation in the Admin Trailblazer Group in the Trailblazer Community. Don't worry, link is in the show notes. And, of course, until next week, we'll see you in the cloud.

Direct download: Replay__Sarah_Flamion_on_Generative_AI.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 12:00am PDT

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Anthony Cala, Senior Salesforce Consultant at eVerge Group and a US Army Veteran.

Join us as we chat about how he tackles problem-solving and all the volunteer work he does with nonprofits that support veterans.

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

From veteran to Salesforce consultant

Anthony is another guest on the Skills for Success video series, and we wanted to bring him on to hear more about how he gets started solving business problems with Salesforce.

As a US Army Veteran, Anthony got his first experience with Salesforce working with the Wounded Warrior Project. He got hooked on creating reports and dashboards, and very quickly transitioned into a career on the platform. Today, he works as a consultant helping all sorts of organizations solve business problems with Salesforce, and also mentors veterans and organizes events in his spare time.

Start with user interviews

Whenever Anthony is asked to come into an organization and overhaul a business process, the first thing he does is figure out what he’s starting with. He interviews everyone involved and documents how things are getting done right now. That groundwork is a crucial step on the way to using Salesforce to improve and scale that process.

Another touchstone for Anthony is creating thorough user stories and personas. When it comes to conducting user interviews, empathy is key. “Turn on your webcam,” he says, “smile!” Always remember that there are people behind any business process, and you need to understand where they’re coming from to create a business process that works for them.

Getting experience with nonprofits

A common piece of advice for new people is to gain experience working with nonprofits, but how do you find an organization that needs help? Anthony, who works with three organizations on the weekends, tells us that he started by volunteering for things he was interested in. The Salesforce came later, once he got to know people and mentioned what he does for a living.

Because of the discount Salesforce offers, nonprofits will often have a bunch of cool features and tools. So you can get experience with things like Community, Tableau CRM, and ServiceCloud that you might not have access to at a for-profit organization. “It’s a win-win for both parties involved,” Anthony says.

Be sure to listen to the full episode to learn more about all the work Anthony does with these organizations, and why it’s so important to him to be there to pick up the phone.

 

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Full Transcript

Mike:     Problem-solving, as we define it on the Admin Skills page, is solving business problems using the Salesforce platform. So you know what? It makes sense that I would talk to Anthony Cala, who is a veteran and consultant, who is on the Skills for Success video series, which is launching this month, September, about how he tackles problem-solving.
       Now, before we get into that episode, be sure you're following the Salesforce Admins podcast on iTunes or Spotify, wherever you get your podcasts. That way, you get a new episode, boom, right on your phone every Thursday, in the morning, all set to go. So with that, let's problem-solve with Anthony Cala.
       So Anthony, welcome to the podcast.

Anthony Cala:  Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Mike:     Great. Well, we're following along with the Skills for Success series, which also launched on YouTube that Gillian put out, and there's quite a lot of episodes, but you're in the problem-solving episode. So let's kick off and talk about problem-solving today. But before we do that, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got started in the Salesforce ecosystem?

Anthony Cala:  Wow, that's a story in itself. I started my Salesforce journey first in the military. I was in the military for over 16 years, 10 years active, six years in the Guard. And my second job out of the military, I was working at Wounded Warrior Project. And their CRM system was Salesforce. And had to learn it, loved it, was a super user, power user, making reports and dashboards. My job at the time was to create events to empower Wounded Warriors and family support members for post 9/11.
       And over the year that I worked at Wounded Warrior Project, traveled 148,000 miles, created 75 events. It was my dream job, traveled a lot. After I left Wounded Warrior Project, got lucky, got an opportunity to work at a great company called Tableau Software. And before I went to Tableau Software, I took my Salesforce Admin class in 2013, and didn't pass the admin exam, but still stayed and stayed focused. And continued learning and stayed, and did Salesforce admin work at Tableau. Primary job I created all the registration platforms for Tableau Conference '14, '15, '16, '17, and '18. And enjoyed it. It was a lot of fun. But I wanted to advance my career, and became a consultant.
       I've been a Salesforce consultant for almost five years now, and really enjoy it. I think for me, every client is different. I have over nine certifications, and I think they're mostly, in my opinion, just mostly declarative. I'm hoping to get Dev One. I want to get more coding. I'll be taking a CPQ with Americus, a veteran nonprofit that helps veterans and military spouses with Salesforce classes. So I learn very well with other people I could bounce ideas off of. So I'll be taking CPQ with Americus in October.
       But just in my career, just really enjoy giving back to Salesforce community. When I'm not actively implementing projects, on the weekends, I have a Better Call Anthony Cala, just do it for fun where I can help veterans, military spouses, and first responders where they're either looking to get into Salesforce or looking to get into IT. They have some questions about the Salesforce Fellowship program, or they need some help bouncing ideas off their resume. So some things that I do.
       And then I also volunteer with an organization called Higher Ground USA, where I'm helping them build a customer community where veterans and first responders can sign up for events that are happening in their local community through the Community Resilience Unit Ambassador program that Higher Ground's has launched.
       And then also I create adaptive events in Florida. We'll be conducting two adaptive water-skiing events in October, and then also a stand-down event, Topgolf. And the idea is to help veterans and first responders that just want to go out and meet other people in the community that need some mental health support. There will be some other programs that are supporting veterans and first responders that will be there, and hopefully those can help empower them as well.

Mike:     Wow, that's fantastic. And thank you for your service. We really appreciate that. And I really appreciate all that you're doing outside of just your day job to help veterans and those that served, our first responders, because we wouldn't be in the place we are without their help and their support, so that's very cool.
       I have to think of, as we kind of talk about that in problem-solving, it seems almost so logical to have you on because I believe a lot of what you would do in the military is immediate and long-term problem-solving. So what is the first kind of hurdle that you find most people, most Salesforce admins face when working in problem-solving?

Anthony Cala:  Wow, that's a great question. Just last weekend, I was volunteering and lady asked me some recommendations for in her career, what to do next. And one of the biggest things when I'm meeting new people coming into the ecosystem is I really think people need to get a business analyst acumen. And that also is just a basic problem-solving understanding.
       And the question I get asked a lot is is where do we start? And sometimes as consultants, we don't know where we start. We start with understanding what a customer is currently using because somebody was using something differently before Salesforce. So I think that there has to be some type of empathy as well. I always try to get clients or customers to give artifacts of examples of their current process or an existing process so that we can start with something because we're trying to build something here.
       And really, a lot of that really has nothing to do with Salesforce. It has to do with what they're doing outside, what's their process. And sometimes veterans and military spouses when they come out, they're like, "Well, I don't know how to ask those questions." I was like, "Well, just ask it." And they're like, "Well, what do you mean?" I said, "No, just ask the question. What is your current process? How do you take a lead for your business? Can someone go to your website and sign up and say I would like to know more about your business? Is an email accessible on a website?" And what I find is when just having that conversation with the military spouse and veteran, they're like, "Oh, I know that."
       So what I try to empower them is just put yourself as a customer. It's always easiest to think as a customer when you're trying to problem-solve. I think also with just getting started is being able to articulate and be able to take notes and take those notes and transfer them into usable tasks and usable stories that you can build something with and hopefully the project that you're on, if it's in consulting or if you're at a brick-and-mortar using Salesforce, you're using agile methodologies to really release your features.

Mike:     Yeah. So what I heard in part of that answer, and I think this is something I'd like for you to expand on, is putting yourself in that person's role. As a consultant and as an admin, often you sit across from people that do very different jobs from you and you're trying to iron out what the process is, where the problems, where the gaps are. I think you mentioned the word empathy quite a few times. What are some things that you do and that maybe you've learned in your experience are good ways to understand that person's point of view or gain a sense of empathy for the person that you're working through the process with?

Anthony Cala:  Yeah, there's a couple things to unpack there, but I think the biggest thing is is that we are in a climate now where all of us work remote and all of us sometimes forget to turn on that webcam. And so one of the biggest things that I try to instill in people is turn on your webcams, smile, because that might be the only person you'll see for the day. But try to put yourself in their position by getting to see them and just explaining to them that everything will be okay, everything will be fine. You're here to help them. You're a new Salesforce admin, but that's okay. You're here to document their process to hopefully improve their process, to scale it, to make it better.

Mike:     No, I think that's a really good point is you can forget that sometimes there's somebody else on the other side of that little logo when it's moving and they need to see them.
       One thing that I think is easy to kind of jump to when you're problem-solving, and especially you've probably run into this when you're learning new features or when you've just kind of seen some new products or done a different or a similar implementation, is to hear somebody's problem and go, "Oh, I know the solution for that and I know how to fix that." And I'd like to call it solutioning on the fly because as the person's feeding you the problem, you're already solutioning it as opposed to hearing the entire problem and the entire process. What are some things that you do to kind of combat maybe that solutioning on the fly?

Anthony Cala:  Wow, that's a good one, because as a consultant, we get that a lot actually.

Mike:     Yeah.

Anthony Cala:  But I think it's just timing. I think that when it comes time solution, it's when you've clearly outlined that, "Hey, this is the time that we're going to be doing some discovery in a call, and this is where we're going to take some time solution."
       Solutioning is not a good time when you're on a standup, a 15-minute standup, when you're checking in with your developers and you're checking in with your admins and saying, "Hey, what are you working on today?" I think you just have to just set a dedicated time for people to have enough time to go through a few user stories. I think that it's best to write a solution first and a user story to kind of understand what the persona is. And even if we can go back a little bit, I think that any project or any feature, I think it's best to define what the personas are.
       So in Salesforce, it's going to be is this for backend? Is this going to be for a service agent? Is this going to be for a sales agent. Or for the front end, it can be is a customer going to be able to file a case? Is a customer going to be able to see his cases? Is this customer going to have access to a portal where they can follow their case?
       And so just in my overall experience, I think it's just easiest just to work in a user story, persona-based, "Hey, this is what the persona's for. This is the feature." And then I think it's good to have an acceptance criteria to validate that the feature was done successful.

Mike:     Yeah, no, that's really good. You mentioned you do a lot of work outside of your day job consulting. I'd love to jump into that.

Anthony Cala:  One of my new volunteer projects that I'm working on is with Higher Ground USA. They are an organization that was founded in Ketchum Valley, Idaho. They do a veteran and first responder and couples retreats, week-long retreats. They do events like learn how to ski, learn how to scuba, learn how to surf, and they have these events spread throughout the United States, California, Idaho, and some in the West Coast, as well East Coast.
       And now they are branching out into a new program called CRUA, Community Resilience Unit Ambassador programs. And so I am one of 27 ambassadors that are spread out the United States. We have a small budget that we are able to do events for veterans and first responders. Some of the events that some of our ambassadors have done are, they've done some scuba classes, scuba diving, they've done fishing, and they've done some backpacking and hiking trips. I will be doing a Topgolf event on September 17th in Tampa, and that's going to be for first responders and veterans. So that's police, fire, and EMS.
       And then also I'm partnering with a adaptive water-skiing organization called Ann's Angels. We'll be doing a adaptive water-skiing in Sarasota and Lakeland in October. And they'll be on my Linktree. You can sign up if you meet those qualifications.
       But the mission is to help empower veterans that are seeking mental health support, and hopefully this will help stop veteran suicide because there are 22 veterans a day that are committing suicide. And so one of the things that I just want to do is to make sure that no one after me has to figure out what resources are out there.
       So this Topgolf event was really stemmed by me. Four months ago, I was that veteran in crisis. I've been traditionally giving back to the veteran community, but I myself needed to call the Veteran Crisis Line. And I did. And through my journey of my mental health fitness, I navigated some different mental health support that I needed and I used them. And they will actually be there at the Topgolf event.
       So I'm hoping that the next veteran looking for a resource that maybe they might see an event that I have, or there might be a veteran that might be at an event and they say, "Hey, talk to Anthony." That's really where the name came from. I saw Better Call Saul, one of the famous shows. So I was like, "You know what? Better call Anthony Cala." It's just a slogan. It's a marketing slogan. And it's actually worked. I think in the last five months I've helped 40 veterans and military spouses on Better Call Anthony Cala. And it's just fun to do on the weekends, to help somebody that just needs a little bit of help just to get that little push for either some interview prep or the resume.

Mike:     Yeah. Of course, the difference being you're not selling burner cell phones out of a circus tent in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Anthony Cala:  Yes. Yeah, no I'm not.

Mike:     So you do a lot of volunteering and thank you for doing that. I think one of the things that admins definitely we always talk about is how to elevate your company and your career and your community. When you're looking to reach out or help an organization, what would be some advice you would give fellow Salesforce admins for finding a nonprofit or finding an organization to work with?

Anthony Cala:  Wow, that's a great question. I met a local nonprofit called Quantum Leap Farms, and they're my farm now. They provide equine therapy to veterans and first responders. And I found them by just Googling them on Google. And as luck would have it, they were having a retreat, a four-day retreat, and I signed up for it. And I was participating in the event. They were doing AART and equine therapy and yoga. And it was just what I needed in that time. And somebody asked me what I did on my day job and I said, "Salesforce." And then they said, "Oh, we use Salesforce."
       And so I think as a veteran or first responder, as you start to participate in events or programs, you'll find that most of everybody uses Salesforce. And most veteran nonprofits, the ones that I know, are mostly volunteer ran. Higher Ground's right now has 25 employees, but they have over 600 volunteers that help them in their everyday operations. So there is always a nonprofit that is looking for someone that understands Salesforce admin or just Salesforce speak.
       So just by me just sharing what I did on my every day, I help Quantum Leap Farms. And so one of the things that we'll be doing over the next month is building a horse app and a goat app. And part of that is to track their health, when they're fed, when they clean out the barn. And I always wanted to do that on Salesforce. And to me, it's fun.
       So when I am interviewing for new jobs, [inaudible 00:18:33] says, "What do you do on the weekend?" I say, "Well, I still do Salesforce stuff because it's a lot of fun to me." And what you'll find is when you start going and doing volunteer work with nonprofits, because Salesforce does offer them a considerable discount, they have the bells and whistles, they have what I call the cool kid toys. They have stuff like Tableau CRM. They're using stuff like Community. They're using Service Cloud. So you really get experience on clouds that you might not every day get experience on.
       So it's a win-win for both parties involved because you're learning, but then they also need help themselves. So it's really cool once you just start telling people about Salesforce.

Mike:     Yeah. No, that's neat and I appreciate that. Anthony, I want to thank you for hanging out with us today and talking problem-solving and volunteering and some of the work that you're doing. I think it's really cool and it's a really good complement to the video that you helped Gillian produce in the Skills for Success series.

Anthony Cala:  Thank you so much for having me. Thank you so much for Salesforce putting on the Military Trailhead program because people like me use it, and we hopefully send the elevator back down and help more people. So thank you.

Mike:     Absolutely.
       So it was a great discussion with Anthony, and again, I'd like to reiterate a big shout-out and thank you in appreciation for your time served in the military. I personally appreciate that. I also really appreciate all the work that you're doing for veterans with PTSD and suicide prevention, as well as canines for Veterans. Those are all very near and dear causes to what I support as well. And of course, in case you missed it or you didn't, the links to everything Anthony's doing will be in the show notes. There's a Linktree there because he's got so many amazing things that he's working on.
       Now, if you enjoyed this episode, I need you to do me a favor, and I really think this is going to be pretty easy. I'd like you to share it with one person. If you know somebody, just while you're listening in iTunes, all you got to do is tap the dots and it'll give you an option to share the episode. Then you can post it on social, you can text it to a friend. And of course, if you're looking for more great resources, your one stop for everything admin is admin.salesforce.com, including a transcript of the show.
       Now, be sure to join our conversation in the Admin Trailblazer Group. That's in the Trailblazer Community. Don't worry, just like everything I mentioned before, the link is in the show notes. So with that, until next week, we'll see you in the cloud.

Direct download: Anthony_Cala_on_Solving_Business_Problems.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 12:00am PDT

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Emma Keeling, Salesforce Consultant and Nonprofit Community Group Leader.

Join us as we chat about the skill of project management and some best practices to help you keep things organized.

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

Why everyone needs Project Management skills

Emma is one of our guests on this month’s Skills for Success video series, which breaks down the skills Salesforce Admins need to succeed in today’s world. And even though we brought her on to talk about Project Management, she actually doesn’t call herself a project manager. But she uses those skills all the time as a Salesforce Consultant, which is kind of the point.

When we think of Project Management, we imagine an array of timetables and Kanban Boards, and, indeed, there are some project managers who use those things to do big jobs at large organizations. What Emma does, however is a little different. She keeps her team on task, on schedule, and working together effectively. And those are skills that every admin should have.

Start with the starting point

Often, your starting point is figuring out what you’re even starting with. Is this a new process or an old process? Has it been documented before or are you coming in to make those decisions? And what are the priorities for the organization? Sometimes someone is saying they need this feature or that feature but the problem you really need to be solving is something else entirely.

“One of the key things is people,” Emma says, “if you’re doing an implementation, you’re probably not the expert on everything.” If you’re adding a new feature for fundraising, for example, you probably need to talk to the people doing the fundraising to figure out the best way to do things.

Timelines for your organization and your people

Even if you’re not a Kanban Master, you need to be aware of what timelines are important for your organization. For the nonprofit world that Emma operates in, November 1st is an important date because it marks the start of the holiday giving season. That means you probably want to get anything related to donations squared away and tested before it sees heavy use.

You also want to be aware of how timelines affect your people. Is everyone busy at the same time, or are their schedules independent from each other? Who is going to make plans based on the timeline that you’re outlining? It’s crucial to communicate which dates are firm and which dates are flexible. And it’s important to build in flexibility in case the unexpected happens.

Be sure to listen to the full episode for Emma’s four key Project Management skills for admins.

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Full Transcript

Mike:  This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we're talking with Emma Keeling about the skill of project management and some best practices that Emma uses to keep things organized. Emma is a Salesforce consultant and nonprofit community group leader. Now, before we get into this episode, which I know you're going to want to check out, I want you to be sure you're doing the following. So if you're listening to Salesforce Admins Podcasts on iTunes or just wherever you get your podcast, make sure that you are subscribed or following the podcast. That way every Thursday you will get a brand new episode dropped right on your phone automatically, so then you don't have to think about it. Boom, new episode. Yay. All right, so with that, let's get to our conversation with Emma. Emma, welcome to the podcast.

Emma Keeling:  Thanks for having me, Mike.

Mike:  Well, I'm glad we had a chance to connect as part of the Skills for Success series. Jillian's having you on, and I also wanted to talk too, because you are in the project management video I'll say, but as you told me before I pressed record, you're not a project manager. So let's start there. What do you do in the Salesforce ecosystem?

Emma Keeling:  So in the Salesforce ecosystem, I am effectively a Salesforce consultant. I started my life back in corporate hospitality where I was the expert of a product that wasn't Salesforce, that then got migrated to being built on force.com, and I was the admin for that and suddenly had to become the Salesforce expert and basically an accidental admin. And then after about three years, I kind of got to the point where I was the global product manager and they were starting to talk about moving me to onto other products that weren't Salesforce related. And at that point I was like, no, because I want to do Salesforce and I also want to stay hands-on. I don't just want to do product management as such. So that's what I did.
   I went freelance, started doing hospitality stuff and then Covid hit, and that gave me a real good opportunity to diversify and I jumped in full feet into the nonprofit world. And we're now more than three years on and that's going really well. And yeah, so I'm Salesforce consultant, but with that role comes a lot of project management, right?

Mike:  Yeah.

Emma Keeling:  So I am currently spend about half of my time working with one client where I am the project manager for their Salesforce implementation. And I'm actually working with another partner, which is really interesting. So there's another partner on the other side actually doing the implementation. And when I was asked to do that role, they were like, "We've been recommended you for this and we are looking for a project manager." And I was like, awesome. I was like, I have project manager experience, but not your typical project manager.
   I remember project managers when I was in the big corporate hospitality world, and they were drawing their massive diagrams and they were timetabling it out to almost the minute. And I had more than one project manager telling me, "Well, you can't now change your mind about that." I'm like, what? That decision that you made three months ago and you didn't really know what the product could do, but at that point you said you were going to do X and you now want to do Y. Well, you can't do that because it's not in the plan. And I was like, okay. So I'm like, I'm not one of them. It's like I'm more, what I would say is a taskmaster, don't get me wrong. I can run to a timetable. We can sit and look at timings and work out. Do they make sense? I can juggle diaries and that sort of thing.
   I can work with vendors and help timetable that in. But to me that's a slightly different form. I almost feel like I'm more of what I would call an internal project manager. I'm not that external project manager you bring in who all they've ever done is big projects that are really needed in some of those, say Fortune 500 companies. I'm sort of a slightly smaller scale project manager. I was told very clearly by somebody that there's no way you'll manage to project manage this project in two days a week. And I was like, well, I'm like, let's see how it goes. And actually it's gone very well and we're actually going to deliver on time and on budget. So it's working.

Mike:  So you're a good project manager. And I think that's the reality of it. There's different levels of project management. There's the full on people that are dedicated. They come in, everything's a Kanban chart, a swim lane, they've got Gantt charts, everything. That's their world. Then there's kind of everything in between, all the way down to admins that just have to manage a lot of tasks. And I think project management is, that's why we include it in the Skills for Success series, one of those things where exactly as you put it, how do we manage all of these tasks so that we're not overwhelmed and we get stuff done on time and hopefully like you on budget.

Emma Keeling:  Absolutely. And that's I think the real key. Like you say, there are people who do this as a full-time job at that high level. And interestingly, the partner I'm working with on this particular project, they have one of those people, but actually she's also not full-time, she is working multiple projects, but she's the person who's already managing a Smartsheet where she's got all of those dates, but then we just kind of dovetail in together because what I'm managing is those priorities. I'm managing a lot of organizational priorities and a lot of, you talk about tasks. So when I'm working with any of my clients on any of the work I'm working on, whether that is just supporting an admin with some of their questions and almost being there kind of, what's the word? Their person to just go to just bounce ideas off almost... it's a little bit like that.
   It's like consultant, but it's like it's literally consulting as in I'm not necessarily building stuff. I'm just helping them with their conversations. I'm helping them with their, is this the best way for me to do this? I'm an admin, I'm a solo admin, is this the best way to do this? And then so through that I'm managing tasks there and I'm very much, you need somewhere to keep your tasks that you're never going to manage to keep everything in your brain or just on a notepad. So I use ClickUp, that's kind of my product of choice. And in there I put all my tasks in there and they're all by client and they're there, ready for me to go through, add notes on, copy and paste emails in. There's loads more it can do, but I kind of really just manage that.
   And then I also have to being a consultant, manage my time, so I attach time to them. And I choose to use ClickUp just to be clear, rather than Salesforce, just simply from a potential growth perspective, Salesforce licensing, as we know, can get a little bit pricey, and I do get an org as a partner, but I kind of went, you know what, ClickUp works. Somebody suggested it to me, I'd seen it in action with somebody else, and I was like, do you know what? I'm going to try that. But you could easily do it in Salesforce, particularly if you're a solo admin.

Mike:  I was going to say, let's start there at the basement level, as a solo admin or an admin that's maybe just spun up an org or doing all the implementation themselves, what were some of the things as a project manager that when they put that hat on that they need to think about? Because there's a lot to do, right? There's new features, there's existing features that they need to roll out and maybe bugs. When Emma jumps in and has to sort all that out, do you start by prioritizing things or where does your project management start?

Emma Keeling:  So I guess it depends where you are and what you are handling. Because I would say no project ever looks the same, but one of the key things is people, right? Figuring out what people you've got. Because if you are doing, say, an implementation, you are probably not the expert on everything. Even if you are implementing a new feature as the Salesforce admin, you may or may not be the expert on that feature. So if you are implementing something for fundraising, you're probably going to need to talk to the people in fundraising to find out what they really want.
   Also, are you starting from totally new? As in no one's ever documented any of this before to actually there's a load of stuff here that somebody's written down and given me. So really that starting point is almost figuring out where you're starting. So like, I have all the stuff, let me take that away. Let me process it, let me validate it. Or you're starting with conversations with people. And you're really trying to understand the lay of the land, particularly even just with an organization, right?

Mike:  Right.

Emma Keeling:  You are going to have far more success with Salesforce, with exec buy-in. Exec buy-in, I used to, I'll be honest, I used to scoff and be like, huh, yeah, really no, you really do. Having that exec, and I would say almost that probably level below, depends how big the organization is, but probably that level below, you want your exec to be on board, your top CEO. You want them to be well and truly on board, but you need a good foundation of people around that and you need to know who your players are. You need to know whether they're pro Salesforce, anti Salesforce, whether they've got good technology knowledge or whether they maybe struggle a bit more with technology adoption.
   You want to be trying to get all of that sorts of information and really understand your people. And then you want to start understanding what's key here and you want to understand what's key right at the top of that organization or as I say at that second level to really understand it's not the person who came to you first who wants something most importantly, it's not the person who shouts the loudest. This is where it all kind of dovetails almost into that product management role that I historically did. Because you're really then kind of going, okay, so I've got somebody here in grants who says, all these things are really important, but actually when I talk to the person at the top, they're saying, "No, no, no, our focus at the moment isn't our outbound grants, it's our fundraising and getting our funds in." And that's where you've got to manage your people.
   So you've got to manage your people and be like, grants person, you are amazing. I love your energy, I love all your ideas. Let's take all of that. And then you start almost building out things like roadmaps and you go from there. Now this is where the world of let's say project management, product management, just being an admin all collides because whose role is that? Is that one person's role? Is it lots of people's roles? At least I would say if you are a small organization or maybe you're not, but there's just an admin and you kind of think, oh my God, we really could do with more people. You still need to do a little bit of each of those. Because you've got to have somewhere where you are documenting what's important, where you are kind of reviewing what's important, and then where you are almost getting down those almost business as usual type tasks.
   And also then looking at things like timelines and dates. If you are being told that fundraising needs something for the holiday season, and if your holiday season, if it starts 1st of November, let's say that's a common date that's battered around in the UK, it's like 1st of November is when all this has to be in. Now, if you are in September and you are being asked for a massive piece of functionality, that's where you kind of have to do the pause and the so what did you do last year? Oh, okay, so you do have a solution in place. Do we want to do this? I have recently witnessed somebody try and roll out brand new donation pages in the middle of their biggest campaign period, and they came to me and said, "Oh, this seems to be a problem." I'll be honest, I didn't project manage this one. I was just on the kind of sideline.
   And they came to me and they said, "We're having problems with these and we're really worried, it's impacting our campaign period." And my first question was, well, my first point, I guess it wasn't even a question, was why would you do that now? And I think that is kind of also where your project management comes in. It's sitting down and saying what else is happening in the organization? The organization I'm working with at the moment is going through, we have three really busy periods a year in programs, so you know you've got to work around them, but do you have to totally work around them? I actually found out that the key person I needed in that team does a lot of work at other times of the year. Her work is not tied to those programs times. And it was really key that I figured that out because I initially was trying to block out time, kind of going, oh no, we're not going to be able to use this person during this time.
   And actually when I started talking to her, she was like, "No, no, no, I can do that, as long as I know in advance." So I think that's a huge amount about project management. It's getting all those people, knowing your people and getting them in the right place and knowing building relationships, being able to go to somebody and say, I need you to do this, and I know you don't really have time, but is there any chance you can do this because maybe something's moved forward in a project, maybe something was delayed, maybe something has just come up. The people are really, really key.

Mike:  Yeah, I think that's an important aspect to bring up is too often I think we forget when we're doing a new rollout or even adding a new feature, what other things are going on in the organization at the same time and how will this adversely or not adversely affect somebody? Is it our slow period or is it our busy period? Because if it's your busy time, everything's got to work. Everybody's stressed out anyway. And then if you're rolling something else out on top of that, boy, what is the reception going to be like? I think that's a really great point to bring up.

Emma Keeling:  Yeah, absolutely. And only last week I was chatting with a guy called Tim who does the human stack, really interesting concept of not focusing on the digital but focusing on the humans over the innovation and how that works and really interesting. He's on LinkedIn and people should go check him out. But what I saw, I was reading some articles and one of them was, it was basically a coffee cup where with an implementation or anything, like you say, it could just be a new feature. You are basically pouring more into that person's coffee cup and actually what they need is a bigger cup. They can't just keep taking on more and more. But I think sometimes as a project manager, it's really key for you to ask that question. So ask the question of who is going to do this? Do we have time to do this? Do you have time to test this?
   Those things that even though in a meeting, one of the things I will try and do is bring groups of people together so that I don't have to repeat the same conversation over and over again. And you also know that everybody then heard the same narrative. So the project I'm currently working on, we're about 10 months in. It's going to have been about a 12 month project when it goes live. And we've probably had big meetings I would say about every two months where we've really, I've brought up a timeline and I've looked at the next couple of sprints and just called out what is happening, who is responsible for what, and that might be as simple as it's our responsibility as the client versus it's the implementation partner's responsibility, allowing people then to call up and go, actually all my team's on holiday that week, for example. And you actually have that.
   But the other thing I've also cautious of doing is giving them a whole project plan and people going away and making full plans based on that when you're like, actually some of those dates further down the line could be fluid. So being a little bit cautious and making sure that things are caveated. And as much as people say, don't write everything on a presentation slide, still writing stuff on a presentation slide that says (TBC), next to certain dates. Just so that when somebody says, but you said the date for that training was going to be on that day, I can say, I did say it was to be confirmed and allowing you that space to breathe because actually a lot of what happens in a project isn't necessarily down to the project manager, even if you are the solo admin.
   So you could be the solo admin who's working on a new piece of functionality, who then gets pulled into another piece of work that really is an organizational priority. So I know somebody who works in a charity to do with children affected by war. Now, you can imagine when the war in the Ukraine started, they got very much, their organizational priorities changed. So that isn't the project manager's fault or the admin's fault when actually that piece of functionality doesn't happen. That's something outside of their control. We all face this with Covid, but that can happen on a lower level. People are sick. So you also need to bake in time. You need bake in time for what if somebody's sick? What if somebody isn't available to test? Is there a backup person? Can that backup person test and is there output valid? Because I've worked on many projects where one person will say, "Yes, that's absolutely fine," and they may be aren't the main decision maker.
   Main decision maker comes back and says, "Ooh, sorry, but I'm not happy with that decision." And you kind of go, okay, well we asked and you said the other person could make the decision, but okay, this is real life and you have to be willing to pivot and you can't be responsible for everything. When somebody's son is sick and they can't make it into the office that day, there's nothing you can do about it. And I'm always very clear with whoever I'm working with, whoever I'm reporting into, let's say whether that's my client, whether that when I was internal, if that was my manager, I would almost make that quite clear of I can only be fully responsible for this to a point.
   So especially when I work with clients, I have to kind of highlight, I can't force your team to do this. I can give them all the tools to fish, teach them to fish. I can get on a call with them and sit with them while they do testing, say, but if they didn't want to come to the call, I can't. So there's kind of a level where you have to say, there's only so much I can do and also how much do you want me to do? Because when you look at a client, they might not want to pay you for all that time. And even internally, if you're an internal admin, they might not want you to spend hours just sitting with users while they're going through testing. So that's kind of where you need that exec. You need that next level up. You need that next level where we say, hey, team, this needs testing. You've been sent all the information. You've been sent a deadline. Please work towards that deadline. Please let us know if there are any problems. You almost need that backstop, right?

Mike:  Right.

Emma Keeling:  And that backstop can't always just be you. I talk a little bit about playing good cop, bad cop. I also find I kind of need to be good cop as much as I can be. Don't get me wrong. Sometimes I have to play bad cop and I have to be like, no, sorry, that doesn't work. And in some roles that's more of a requirement than others, but sometimes you have to figure out who you need to keep on the side. And if you know that you need to have a team be really happy and you have to, maybe they're under a lot of pressure. Maybe they've got people off sick, maybe they're down a team member because somebody moved on to another role, you sometimes don't want to be the person who has to say the final no.
   And I don't always think that that's a bad thing that you need to bring somebody else in who maybe says, "Hey guys, I don't think we can do it like that or hey team, let's think about moving that back. Can we move it back a month?" You need people to help you with those conversations.

Mike:  Yeah. When you think through the skill of project management, because you do this for as a consulting and admins manage projects a lot too, what would you say are the three most important things that you've learned that help you successfully manage a project?

Emma Keeling:  Now, that's an interesting question because I obviously did the video with Jillian that kind of goes with this, and I can guarantee that whatever I said in that video is going to be completely different to what I say now. And there's a reason for this, right? Because there are that many skills that I had to pick out what skills I was going to talk about in that video. So I would say our top skills, at least how I feel today, let's say, are I think people skills. And you can intertwine that with things like leadership.
   I think strong people skills, being able to talk to people, being able to understand people, being able to understand what motivates people, even down to things like are the people in your team, people who are there early in the morning and that's when they have great time? Or are they the sort of person who you're better getting on a call? Or are they the sort of people you can just send a slack message to and they'll just be like, "Yep, send over some more information in text form. I'm fine with that." Really being able to understand people is important.
   I think it is very important that you can understand time and budget. So being able to understand how long do I have for this piece of work? How much money do we have? And then be able to also convert that into what does that look like at the end? Because if I have a low budget, but we really need this sort of functionality, in what ways can we achieve that? Is there a lower cost way to achieve it? Can we build an MVP, that minimum viable product? Can we do that instead?
   And actually if that isn't going to meet our use case, do we build anything at all? Do we actually go back to the drawing board and we go back to the leadership and we either A, ask for more money or if you've already got to the point where there isn't the more money, do you go back and say, Hey, do you know what, maybe we're better to start with something else. Maybe we're better not to do priority one on the list because maybe we need a round of funding for that. Or maybe we need to wait until our budget comes in for next year. Or maybe we've got another in-house resource who can work on that, but they're working on another project. Try and figure out where are we best placed to use that money and use that time.
   And then I think the last thing is probably, and I'm toying here between is it important to be able to use tools and software and that sort of thing, or is it important to have industry knowledge? I would say if I have to put it in a top three, I mean to both equally, it's important, so I'm going to push it to four. So I would say you've got to be able to manage your time as a project manager. If you can't keep track of your tasks and what you are doing. If you don't remember to send out the email, if you don't remember to chase somebody, if you don't manage to collaborate effectively in JIRA or Google Sheets or whatever that is, you can't really expect to be able to bring everybody else along for the ride. So you've got to be able to do that.
   And then I think the last thing really is that industry knowledge. Now, don't get me wrong, I've worked with some very, very good project managers who actually, their industry knowledge was much lower. But you end up caveating that with a lot of time spent with them, learning from subject matter experts to be able to have those questions, to be able to talk about a product or a solution or an industry, and particularly the industry, don't get me wrong, it can work. And as I said, I've been in the nonprofit space now for about three and a half to four years. So I'm not going to say I know everything about nonprofits. I don't. And I try and ask a lot of questions to learn more, but you really have to up that knowledge. And I think to be successful, you need to learn about that industry or at least be willing to learn. I find it very difficult with project managers who suggest they don't need to know anything about the industry to be successful in it, because I just don't think that's the case.

Mike:  Yeah, I would find that hard. I had some great discussions in community groups too about I want to be a Salesforce admin, what industry should I be in? I'm like, well, an industry that you're aware of and are familiar with, because otherwise you're really setting yourself up for a steep learning curve, thinking that through of having to learn the industry as well.

Emma Keeling:  Yeah, totally. And I think if you are going into maybe a role where you are in a team and you maybe don't know that, you maybe get a faster ramp up because people around you can help bring up that knowledge. And I think if you apply for a role and you don't have that, and I think you then just have to be very clear with people. Like "I don't have the knowledge about this, but I want to learn, so please tell me more or please tell me where I can find out about this." I've even found things like over the lunch table discussions helpful. When I've been on site with a client and you sit and have lunch and you can be like, Hey, tell me a bit more about legacy donations and legacy donors and where that comes from and how does that work and how do you find legacy donors, for example?
   That was a really interesting discussion. And at the end of it, I was like, wow, I've actually learned loads and I can then share that knowledge. But I think if you don't have industry knowledge, you really need to make sure that people you are working with do or that it's quite accepted that you don't, and you need time for that. So you need to factor that in, right? I once went and did a piece of work in a financial services company. It was only a short piece of maternity cover. I'd never wanted to work in that sector, and I was right. I didn't enjoy working in that sector, if I'm honest. But what I did find was I was able to ask the right questions because I've done stuff historically where maybe I haven't known the answer. So I've had to ask lots of questions, but it was challenging. It was challenging.
   And the people who knew I didn't have the knowledge that was okay because they made sure that they started discussions with explanations of why we're doing this, why is it important? And you have to ask all those whys. Where I was put into conversations with people who didn't know I didn't have the industry knowledge, that was really difficult. Because people immediately assume that you do have that knowledge and they aren't always receptive to the fact that you don't. So I would say definitely steep learning curve. Try and start somewhere where you've got knowledge or at least be clear with people that you don't have the answers.

Mike:  Yeah, absolutely. Emma, you've done a really great job of exposing us to some of the things that you do and don't do as a project manager and thinking about project management as a skill. So I feel this was a very good compliment to the video that you put out with Jillian. So appreciate you taking time out to be on the podcast.

Emma Keeling:  Thanks so much for having me, Mike. It's been fun.

Mike:  Yeah, thanks so much.
   That was a great conversation with Emma. I think she really brought out a lot of things. Boy, one part that you always have to think about is how much other change is going on in the organization as well. So, now if you enjoyed this episode, be sure to share it with one person. If you're listening on iTunes, just tap those dots and choose share episode. Then you can post it to social, you can text it to a friend. I'd really appreciate it. And of course, if you're looking for more great resources, your one stop for everything admin is admin.salesforce.com, including a transcript of the show in case you missed anything. So be sure to check that out and join our conversation in the Admin Trailblazer group in the Trailblazer community. Don't worry, the link is in the show notes. And with that, until next week, we'll see you in the cloud.

Direct download: Emma_Keeling_on_Project_Management.mp3
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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we sit down for another cup of coffee with Mike, Gillian, and Josh Birk.

 

Join us as we chat about the ever-changing nature of work and preview Skills for Success September.

 

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with the Admin Evangelist Team.

How we work, then and now

Every month, Gillian, Mike, and Developer Evangelist Josh Birk sit down with a cup of coffee and a topic. For August’s Coffee Talk, we’re reflecting on the ever-changing nature of work. How things have changed in our work lives, technology that has changed the way we work, and a look ahead to our Skills for Success series.

 

Join us as we discuss:

  • How email has gone from something you’d check every so often to something that’s in your pocket.

  • How Slack has helped with email overload.

  • Camera on or camera off in videoconferences?

  • How perceptions of work-from-home have changed.

  • Why changes in our work lives are opportunities and what that has to do with business analysis.

  • The Skills for Success series coming to YouTube this September.

  • How that’s going to tie in with upcoming episodes on the podcast.

 

Podcast swag

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Business Analyst August episodes

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FULL TRANSCRIPT

Mike:  To wrap up Business Analyst August, we're chatting about the ever-changing nature of work, so how things have changed in our work lives, maybe notable changes in technology that have changed the way we work, and maybe even discuss some crazy processes that we've had to unwind as admins or being in the tech world. I don't know.
   We'll see where this conversation goes. But I also have Jillian on to give us a preview of the Skills for Success September, which is next month's theme, because we're also launching that as a YouTube series. To help me do all of these fun, conversational things, joining me is fellow podcast host Gillian Bruce and host of the Dev Podcast and evangelist Josh Birk. Hi, everybody.

Josh Birk:   Hey, everybody.

Gillian Bruce: Hello.

Mike:  Let's start with the ever-changing nature of work, which is what business analysts deal with all the time. I'll just throw out there, I was thinking this is probably the lowest of low-hanging fruit, but how email has changed. Because I remember a time, I don't know, many, many years ago, when I used to go to the public library to check out a computer to check my email. I didn't do that every day, and now it's, what, I mean, how many times have you checked your email this hour?

Josh Birk:   I feel like it checks me at this point. It's just watching me. I think it's a bidirectional route now.

Gillian Bruce: Well, I think it's been quite an evolution, right? Because it went from like, oh, there's this new thing called email that you check when you can, to being like, this is the thing that runs your work life. I literally would spend all day just in email answering things, to now I check it once, twice a day maybe, because everything I do now is Slack.

Josh Birk:   That's right. If we're centering an email, we've definitely drifted away there. I remember my first days in the cubicle, the company had a proprietary... It was a proto email kind of thing.

Mike:  Oh, they built their own thing.

Josh Birk:   They built their own thing, and then they got Outlook, but the proto email thing had the ability to cancel an email. If your recipient hadn't opened the email, you could cancel it and they'd never see it. They never knew you wrote it. The entire company went up in arms because they suddenly lost the ability to send their bosses angry email at midnight and delete it at 6:00 AM.

Gillian Bruce: Wow. Because with the unsend now is you have to do it within the first five seconds after you hit the send button or something. Interesting.

Mike:  Ridiculous. I remember pre cubicle land when I was in retail and part of your morning startup besides counting your drawer was checking the company email. You had to sign in. I mean, you never responded because it was basically just one way, like here's the thing from corporate, or here's the stuff that's on sale.

Josh Birk:   Right.

Gillian Bruce: Well, and I also remember, I mean, you used to have to physically be at a computer to read your email. I remember my first few office jobs, I had to wait until I got into the... Commute into the office, fire up the computer, and then log into the email. Whereas I mean, gosh, now it's like I just roll over and look at my phone and I can see the email, to the point where I now have to have a really good boundary about, no, we're not checking work email until it's a very normal hour to do so, because then I'll just start doing things. It's also interesting how that has changed.

Josh Birk:   I will always recommend people to have two phones, which is not a phrase I thought I would say five years ago, but it's like have a work phone, have a life phone. And that way if you want to go walk the dog, just leave the work phone at home, just turn it off for a good couple of hours.

Gillian Bruce: I've had Slack creep in that way.

Mike:  I've always been a two work phone kind of guy. Always two. That way, you go on vacation, my phone can just do whatever.

Gillian Bruce: I used to be very good about turning off the apps or even uninstalling the work apps because I've been a one phone person for the last 14 years. I'm starting to realize, okay, maybe it's getting too complicated to untangle the unification of both personal and work on one device, and maybe I do need to go to two devices at this point.

Josh Birk:   Speaking of that, because I was just realizing my work phone is not really a phone. If you look at the call history, it's all spam and lies and misinformation. Nobody from work calls me on that phone, which is fine because almost nobody from work ever actually calls me anymore. And yet, I remember once again going back to my cubicle days, I remember being told the strategy of when to call somebody when you had to talk to them.
   You don't call at 9:00 because everybody just got in the office. They haven't had their coffee yet. You don't call around noon because they're probably out to lunch. Strategize how you're going to have a phone conversation with people, and now it's just like I don't talk to people. I think there might be a mental emergency if somebody calls you on the phone.

Gillian Bruce: Well, now your phone doesn't even work if you try to call. Half the time I try to make an outgoing call and it fails.

Josh Birk:   Oh, I mean, I just don't even answer. I got a call the other day. I was like, oh, neat. They can leave me a voicemail.

Gillian Bruce: Thank goodness for transcription of voicemails. You don't even have to listen to it. You can just see what's written in the... Gosh, Josh, you're bringing back so many vivid memories of like remember all of the learning how to use the complex phones in the office.

Josh Birk:   Conference calling. Conference calling.

Gillian Bruce: All the headsets everybody would wear and everything was a GoTo Meeting or Cisco. It was a whole other culture and things that we did. I still have a technical landline at Salesforce that I don't know how you would even access. Occasionally I get an email with a voicemail from that line that I never check. That was a whole thing. How do you record the right greeting and how do you know how to dial the extensions?
   I mean, that's a whole nother thing that, I mean, people these days probably have no idea what that even means. If you're starting in your professional first ever office job at this point, the concept of a physical intercom, one of those big phones with all the buttons on it, would just be like, "What is this?"

Mike:  I mean, you remember those UFO looking phones that they had in conference tables with speakers and all the... I remember every Monday we would have a sales call and people from the field, that's what we called it, called in, and we're all sitting around a table and it's like, Bing. John Smith has joined the call." And then it's either they're in their house or they're driving, and that was cellphones mid '90s, which is like a wind turbine. Can you hear me? Can you hear me? Go on mute, John.

Josh Birk:   I will confess, one thing I miss about those days is when I was working in a consulting firm, we would have conference calls. If the client was, shall we say, particularly rowdy sometimes, somebody would just put a plastic cup over the speakerphone and all of a sudden they sounded like they're just like [inaudible] Then we just all laugh at them without them knowing. Harder to do that...

Mike:  You do that now, everybody's on camera. It's all Zoom and Google Meets. It's super easy to join. You actually have to say why you're not on camera.

Gillian Bruce: That's the thing. How quickly has that culture shifted? I remember, this was probably three years ago, this was before the pandemic, which I think also drastically changed a lot of culture around this, but I was with a couple of friends and we were together, but we were still working our respective jobs for a few hours until we were doing whatever we were doing.
   I don't know if it was weird. It was like we're doing a wine country thing or something, but we're all in our respective corners doing work and I'm on video calls. One of the people is just on an actual phone call most of the time, and all of us looking, "What are you doing? The expectation is not to have your camera on?" They're like, "No. Nobody does that." We're like, wow, that's different.

Josh Birk:   I mean, I've been remote since well before the pandemic. It used to be you were expected not to be. You were distracting people if you were on camera. And then the pandemic hits and it's like, "How dare you not show your face? You're not being social."

Mike:  That changed. It was also kind of weird too, because when you were... I've been remote, let's see, 10 years now. There was a period of time too where you had to have your camera on because it's like, are you really at your desk slaving away over a keyboard? Because the perception of work was, well, you work from home, you're just out lollygagging, walking around and enjoying the weather, while the rest of us are stuck in cubicles, slaving away over hot keyboards answering emails.

Gillian Bruce: Before those of us who were office based, we're all forced during the pandemic to be home-based. That was absolutely the perception from those of us who had to go to the office every day. Oh, cool. You just woke up and turned your computer on. Congratulations. Yeah, that's working. And now I'm like, actually, I prefer to go office because I don't have to work as hard in the office. I chat with people, and I'm late to meetings, and I have an excuse not to go to a meeting. It's so fascinating how that has shifted for me.

Mike:  Sorry, the elevator, I'm stuck. I can't make it.

Gillian Bruce: Meanwhile, those of you who are back to back meetings at home are like, come on, people. You office slackers.

Mike:  Click, click. Why are you so late? Why are you 10 seconds late?

Gillian Bruce: I was getting coffee and having a chat in the hallway with so-and-so.

Josh Birk:   I had to change rooms, which feels so weird.

Gillian Bruce: I couldn't find a room.

Mike:  When you work from home and people are like, "Well, I had to change rooms," you're like, "Oh, yeah, that's weird."

Josh Birk:   Like what, to the living room? I don't understand.

Mike:  I know. Why? Why did you have to change rooms? I never get kicked out of my house. Well, August was great. Gillian, you said you listened to Amber's podcast. It rounded out the whole Business Analyst stuff.

Gillian Bruce: It did, yeah, because it connected like, hey... I mean, it connected to what we just talked about. Mike's very thematic. There's different moments in time where work cultures shift and how you interact and get work done shifts. Being a good business analyst is all about identifying those opportunities and figuring out how you can make that happen, well, in the Salesforce world with Salesforce technology.
   But I think what I really liked about Amber's podcast is it kind of tied it together because it's like, oh, it's not specifically tied to one specific platform, but the advent of something like Slack really gives you an opportunity to reexamine how your team works together, what is productive, what are the outcomes, how do you maybe take a step back and look at this strategically to find ways to make people more productive and happier. It was good. Good job, Mike. I enjoyed Business Analyst Month.

Mike:  Well, good, because next month is actually a pairing or a cousin to what you're launching on the YouTube channel. Let's talk about the Skills for Success series.

Gillian Bruce: Yes. Well, Mike, you are also a part of this.

Mike:  Very small. Real small.

Gillian Bruce: You know what, small but mighty.

Mike:  Like 30 seconds.

Gillian Bruce: It was a great 30 seconds, I'll tell you. We are launching a five part video series on YouTube all about skills for success. We go through all of the 14 skills that are in the Salesforce Admin Skills Kit. It's not just me talking about them, it's actually experts and industry leaders within the field. We have real life awesome admins, some of whom, Mike, I know you're going to have on the podcast, and we have industry leaders. Mike, I'm sorry, I'm calling you an industry leader because that's what happens when you do this stuff for a long time.

Mike:  Because I answer a lot of emails.

Gillian Bruce: Yeah. Well, yeah, probably more Slack messages now. We have some industry leaders. We also have some people who have expertise in hiring Salesforce administrators to get that employer perspective on why these skills are important, how you develop them, how you represent them to potential employers, what employers are looking for. It's a fun series.
   We had some fun, as we do with our YouTube series, injecting some fun in it, but it's a really great way to hear from different faces and different people and perspectives and hopefully really help you get a more in depth view into how these specific skills can help you be a successful Salesforce administrator.

Mike:  Yeah, it's really cool. As of this recording, I've already spoke with one of the guests, which was Emma Keeling, to talk about project management. I'm trying to delve into some of the people that you had on that video series. What was the things that you wanted to talk about but maybe ran out of time, or what was other things that maybe are left on the cutting room floor but are still really good?
   Emma and I had that chat and I've got a few other guests coming up that will be part of the series. Of course, we can't feature all of them. You have so many people on the videos. Thankfully, there's not that many Thursdays in September.

Gillian Bruce: We got lots of awesome admins out there and lots of experts in these arenas. It was really fun to work with all of them and put this together. I'm happy that you're going to have some of them on the pod to dig a little deeper and get that full picture, that longer soundbite from the 45 seconds or whatever they are. I mean, Mike, you talked about change management, I believe.

Mike:  Yes. I talked about a lot of things.

Gillian Bruce: And Josh, I also know that you were part of the series. I think you had a product management section you talked about?

Josh Birk:   Something along those lines. I think I pretended to be a product management expert. I just talked about a feature for 15 minutes straight I think was the right thing to do, right?

Mike:  Wow, 15 minutes.

Gillian Bruce: Oh, you'll have to tune in to find out how it all turns out.

Mike:  I'll link to those in September too, so that the podcast can share the love with the YouTube series and back and forth.

Gillian Bruce: It's like they're connected or something.

Mike:  Look, let's be honest, as you're listening to this, we're like, what, 10 or 12 days out from Dreamforce too.

Josh Birk:   Don't say that.

Mike:  Because that's going to happen in September, but that doesn't happen to everybody. Now, you have this whole series of videos and podcasts to listen to in September as the leaves fall. I don't know, September is that weird fall month where it's like, is it summer? Is it fall?

Gillian Bruce: Well, in San Francisco it's summer.

Mike:  Heat advises already at the coffee shops.

Josh Birk:   Are you getting any of those heat advisory stuff over in Iowa?

Mike:  Oh yes. It's going to be melt your face hot today. Not going outside. But who knows what winter will be? I don't know. Pick one.

Gillian Bruce: I mean, I'm looking forward to... San Francisco summer is literally beginning right now. It goes from late August until mid-November, and this is the second day in a row where it's gotten above 70 degrees and it's glorious.

Mike:  Wow.

Gillian Bruce: I mean, it's been foggy basically from May until a week ago consistently. It's really nice to see the sun and get some warmth, and I'm soaking it all up.

Josh Birk:   Well, as I look over at my dashboard, it's going to hit 102 here tomorrow.

Gillian Bruce: Oh!

Mike:  Yeah, we're in the same boat, Josh, because it's just really in the heat advisory, because our dew point, I don't know what your dew point is, but they always say in the Midwest, it's not the heat, it's the humidity. Oh, it's both right now.

Josh Birk:   Oh, it's both. Yeah, it's both. I think the weather report today is something like 85, but feels like death.

Gillian Bruce: Wow. Well, you will be here in San Francisco with me soon, and you'll enjoy this beautiful 71 degree weather with a, let's see, I'm looking it up, a 72% humidity or the dew point is 61.

Mike:  Oh, well, that's not too bad.

Gillian Bruce: No. I mean, it's humid for us. It's abnormally humid, but it's beautiful.

Mike:  But Gillian, I bet Josh's dew point is probably the same as mine. We're in the 80s, 80 degrees. I woke up this morning literally all the windows in my house were wet because the dew point and the temperature were like one or two degrees apart.

Josh Birk:   This is the time of year we're reminded that Chicago was built on a swamp for sure.

Mike:  Full of concrete.

Gillian Bruce: Come on out to the dunes of San Francisco. It's glorious.

Mike:  And then when you're not in Chicago, and this is a real thing, you can look it up, I don't know if I'm going to say it right, but it's not evaporation, but it's evapostoration or something. It's literally the fact that Iowa and some neighboring states, but really Iowa has so much corn with so much moisture that it raises the humidity level. Because as it heats up, the corn evaporate. It's all over The Weather Channel, and you can smell it too. When you walk outside, it smells like corn.

Gillian Bruce: In like a good way?

Mike:  Oh, very good way. Very good.

Josh Birk:   I can see that one falling either way.

Mike:  Right. Right. No, this is a very good corn on the cob on the grill. You're like, ooh, let's go get some corn from the farmer's market.

Gillian Bruce: Speaking tangent, because we like talking about food, I made the most epic elote salad a week ago. Elote is that Mexican street corn basically. They grill it and they put a bunch of aioli on it. Deliciousness.

Mike:  I've wanted to do that.

Gillian Bruce: And cotija cheese. I made a grilled corn elote salad that I still think about. I think I might have to make it again tonight. It's basically you grill the corn, you put a bunch of tomatoes and avocado and cheese and deliciousness. You mix it together. Holy moly! I mean, Damon and I ate the entire bowl in one sitting.

Josh Birk:   Nice. Nice.

Mike:  You kind of live like a Mid-Westerner because I will confess that it is sweet corn season right now. It's almost at tail end. I really need to go to the farmer's market. But we've had sweet corn for dinner, same as the elote salad, just on the cob with butter on your cheeks. Look at that. Well, there we go. That's how we're going to end it, butter on our cheeks or mine at least anyway.

Gillian Bruce: Butter makes everything better, right?

Josh Birk:   Yep. Secret ingredient.

Mike:  Real good butter. If by chance, by chance you enjoyed this episode, maybe pick a different one and then share that with one person, because that would be awesome. Here's how you do it. If you're listening on iTunes, all you got to do is just tap the dots. There's three little dots. You choose share episode, and then you can post it to social. You can text it to a friend. Maybe you text an elote corn salad recipe. We'd love that too. There's more recipes.
   There's more resources on our website, which is literally everything admin, admin.salesforce.com, including a transcript of the show. I will bug and see if we can get Gillian's recipe just because that would be fun and it'd be great if it showed up in the show notes. Be sure to join the conversation in the Admin Trailblazer Group in the Trailblazer Community. Don't worry, the link is in the show notes. Because remember, everything is on admin.salesforce.com. With that, I will see you in the cloud.

Direct download: August_Coffee_Talk_with_Admin_Evangelists.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 12:00am PDT

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Pei Mun Lim, Consulting Coach and Trainer at Zenhao and the author of Salesforce Discovery 101.

Join us as we chat about two critical skills for Business Analysts, emotional intelligence and active listening.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Pei Mun Lim.

Two Business Analyst skills every admin should have

Pei has spent her entire career in consulting, with over a decade of experience in the Salesforce ecosystem in a variety of roles. She helps people use technology to solve real-world problems, and business analysis skills are crucial to help make sure they’re actually addressing the core issues. We brought her on the pod to talk about two skills that are foundational for doing that well: active listening and emotional intelligence.

Pei discovered the power of active listening and emotional intelligence quite accidentally when she started volunteering for a crisis lifeline where she talked to callers in distress. “I noticed that my projects started getting a lot easier,” she says, “and that was because I was listening a lot better and I was able to navigate human communication and relationships in a much better way.”

Emotional intelligence

When someone is asking for a particular functionality, it’s important to realize that human emotions are always at play. Emotional intelligence helps you gently peel back the biases, assumptions, and preconceptions behind a request to get at the real business problem and what you can do about it.

Pei points out that people communicate in several ways beyond the words that they’re saying. Her advice is to be observant of all of the nonverbal cues someone is sending. If that doesn’t match up with the content of what they’re talking about, you need to ask some more questions.

Active listening

The biggest driver behind resistance to change is fear. As Pei puts it, people are concerned with questions like, “What does this mean for my job security?” or, “What does this mean for me as a person?” Showing empathy and that you care about those concerns can go a long way toward helping people to open up. That means having the emotional intelligence to acknowledge their fears and then using active listening to show that you understand.

“Active listening is not a passive action, it is an active posture,” Pei explains, “you’re trying to see the world from the other person’s point of view.” Beyond simply showing that you’re paying attention, you’re actively trying to listen without judgment. And, she notes, that includes showing that you want to understand them better by asking follow-up questions. That’s how you get to the real underlying issues at hand.

Be sure to listen to the full episode for more about how you can practice emotional intelligence and active listening in your day-to-day life, and so much more.

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Direct download: Pei_Mun_Lim_on_the_Skills_of_a_Business_Analyst.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 12:00am PDT

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Amber Boaz, Slack Community Group Leader, Salesforce MVP, and Principal Salesforce Consultant at Cloud Giants.

 

Join us as we chat about how you can eliminate ineffective meetings using Slack best practices.

 

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

Meetings, all the way down

Amber is a self-described “serial user group and community group starter,” including the local Slack community group in Durham, NC. She recently presented at Southeast Dreamin’ on how Slack can help you eliminate ineffective meetings, so we wanted to bring her on the pod to hear all about it.

 

The life of project-involved people—admins, consultants, etc.—is filled with meetings. But meetings are expensive! You need to get everyone in the same room when they could be doing other things, not to mention the time it takes to schedule them in the first place. Luckily, Slack can be an incredibly helpful tool for cutting down on unnecessary meetings while still making sure that everyone is aligned and informed.

Using Slack tools

Amber points out a few different ways Slack can help you. If you have meetings that are just updates about a customer or project, you can probably share all of the information you need in a channel on that topic. Delaying messages can help with folks in different timezones, and Slack Connect can help you make bring external stakeholders into the loop.

 

Amber also wants to point you to Workflows as a way to save on meeting time. You can set it to give someone a message with the five things they need to know about the project whenever they join a channel, for example, so you don’t have to spend as much time onboarding.

 

When you do need to come together to troubleshoot or talk something out, you can often bring people together with the huddle feature without having to go through the rigamarole of scheduling a full-blown meeting. Using short video clips can help you do that asynchronously, or just keep senior leaders in the loop and share your successes.

Not all meetings are ineffective

So even if you know all this, how do you have that hard conversation about whether or not a regularly scheduled meeting is actually productive? One thing that Amber suggests is modeling good behavior by canceling a meeting and giving a status update instead. It’s likely you’re not the only one thinking about it.

 

It’s also important to remember that you can’t and shouldn’t replace every meeting with Slack—building relationships is important! “The purpose, fundamentally, of a meeting is getting together with your colleagues,” Amber points out, “and that, ideally, should be enjoyable.” Slack is for the boring stuff, so your meetings can be about solving a puzzle or making a hard decision together.

 

Be sure to listen to the full episode for more about how to identify unproductive meetings, channel naming conventions, and so much more.

 

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Full Transcript

Mike:
Slack stands for Searchable Log of All Communications and Knowledge. Let's hear from the Slack Community group leader, Amber Boaz, about how we can replace ineffective meetings with Slack and get some best practices for some Slack change management. Now, before we get into the episode, can you be sure you're following the Salesforce Admins Podcast on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts? I'm telling you this because that way you get a new episode every Thursday, boop, right on your phone, it's like magic. So speaking of magic, let's get Amber on the podcast. So Amber, welcome to the podcast.

Amber Boaz:
Thanks, Mike, it's great to be back.

Mike:
I know it's been a while. We should do this every ... Less than five, six years at a time.

Amber Boaz:
That sounds like a great idea. I'll pencil you in for 2028.

Mike:
Right, right. It sounds like run for president, Amber Boaz 2028.

Amber Boaz:
I like it.

Mike:
Amber, since it's been a while, and I feel like you and I are old hats in the community, what have you been up to? What do you do in the Salesforce world?

Amber Boaz:
What have I been up to? So I am back at consulting. For those of you who are not stalking my LinkedIn profile, I moved. I've been vacillating back and forth between being a customer and being a consultant. So I'm back to consulting and loving it. Working for a company called Cloud Giants. Also, for those of you who know me, I'm a serial user group, community group starter, and so I have started the local Slack Community group here in Durham, North Carolina.

Mike:
Nice.

Amber Boaz:
Good stuff.

Mike:
You did a lot with Salesforce Saturday too, right?

Amber Boaz:
I did. I started the local Salesforce Saturday. In fact, last week was our seven-year birthday. We would-

Mike:
Oh wow.

Amber Boaz:
I know. It's amazing, isn't it?

Mike:
Yeah.

Amber Boaz:
I handed that off at the first of the year, I had some personal stuff I needed to handle. The folks who are leading that are amazing and awesome, and I adore them and miss them terribly. That group still meets every single week.

Mike:
Wow. And serial because you handed it off. Also, serial because ... I feel like you were on stage with me way back 100 years ago when they started the MVP thing.

Amber Boaz:
Not the very first class, I was second class.

Mike:
Oh.

Amber Boaz:
I know, I know.

Mike:
Okay.

Amber Boaz:
I'm not quite as cool as you are.

Mike:
Sure. Boarding group two.

Amber Boaz:
Yes, yes. Boarding group two. I'm not part of the first class I'm business class.

Mike:
Business class.

Amber Boaz:
I have extra legroom and bulkhead.

Mike:
Right. I mean, I think it's the same it's just the seats are different but it's okay. Amber, you sent me this really cool deck, that you'd been presenting, of replacing meetings with Slack. I scrolled through it. Can you give us an overview of what that is? Because you presented it what at Southeast Dreamin'?

Amber Boaz:
I did. The gist of the meeting is, here are 10 ways to replace ineffective meetings with Slack. In the deck I talked some about the metrics around effectiveness of getting everybody in a room, having a meeting. I don't know about you, but I have a lot of meetings. My Tuesdays I average 11 meetings every Tuesday. And that's my busy day. Today I only have seven, to give you an idea. That's the life of a consultant, but that's also the life of an admin, and a manager, and a folks ... Project involved people. So talking about ways to replace some of those meetings with asynchronous communication via Slack. So, for example, using channels to replace your meetings. If you're meeting about a customer or about a project, having a channel for that customer or that project so that you can communicate with stakeholders about it in that channel rather than having everybody get together at 3:00 on Wednesdays.
Using something like delaying sending your message. That I use a lot with my colleagues who are in other time zones. I work pretty heavily with folks in Europe and so they aren't on the same time I am. Writing my thoughts out, giving my status, and then delaying the sending of that so that I don't interrupt them and their family time. And then using Slack Connect to include external stakeholders. For example, we have several clients who we are in Slack channels with coordinating on meetings, coordinating on decisions, just coordinating in the Slack channel about the work we're doing together, consultant and client so that's really cool.
Another great way to just get rid of those super ineffective, bringing people on board meetings ... I don't mean hiring because that's a bigger thing. But bringing newcomers up to speed quickly on a project using something like a workflow in Slack where you can ... Whenever somebody joins the channel it gives them, here are the five things you need to know about this project, or here are the 10 things, or here are the seven things, however many things you have to tell them so that they can get up to speed quickly. You can set up a workflow to do that. You set it up once and then anytime anybody joins they get that message immediately. You don't have to remember to do it, you don't have to send it at a given time it just is automatic.

Mike:
And I was just thinking through wow, 11 meetings on a Tuesday that's-

Amber Boaz:
I know.

Mike:
Of course, at Salesforce we're heavy Slack users as well.

Amber Boaz:
Oh, I'm sure.

Mike:
I have used ... The delayed send thing I think is probably the most underutilized feature. And I love using it, especially when our team is in London World Tour because then I can be all snarky and ha-ha send it at 1:30 AM which is right before they're walking in to think, oh wow, Mike's up. No. I'm just-

Amber Boaz:
No, no, he's definitely not.

Mike:
I just know how to schedule a thing, that's all.

Amber Boaz:
I've used it to congratulate folks. I was getting ready to go on vacation, and one of my team members was coming up on their two-year anniversary with the company, and I scheduled it to send while I was on vacation so that it happened on the day of. But then I put a little disclaimer of, I'm sending this from the past to the future so that it didn't look like that I was working on vacation.

Mike:
Right. But then you didn't have to-

Amber Boaz:
Exactly, exactly.

Mike:
I mean, because you didn't have to oh, I got to log ... Oh, I'm two hours late.

Amber Boaz:
Right. Or 10 days late. Because I was going to be gone for a big chunk of time and I didn't want this employee to feel like they were forgotten just because their anniversary landed on my vacation.

Mike:
Right.

Amber Boaz:
Right?

Mike:
Yeah. I've had stuff like that happen too. I love all of the ideas of this. And I think they're all relevant because ... Especially for me. I've done this before where I've canceled meetings and just said, "Just post your updates in a Slack group."

Amber Boaz:
Absolutely.

Mike:
Because then I can read them when I need to. A lot of what you get at in the deck, an underlying theme that you don't really call out, is context switching, right?

Amber Boaz:
Right.

Mike:
So you're able to just focus your time and then oh, okay, so I have 20 minutes in between meetings now, let me catch up on something in Slack in a way that makes sense for me as opposed to dropping everything to have a meeting and then pick back up something. You can have that unbroken mental time to really focus on something.

Amber Boaz:
Right, right.

Mike:
One part I want to dig into ... Any admin or business user that goes through your deck or here's your talk is like, I'm on board. How do we do this? How do we start doing this? You point out the video thing. I think the video, the recording, a two, three minute video thing ... We did that last year for a large part of the team leading up to Dreamforce because we were in different time zones, we were traveling. And me being on central time I was generally ahead of everybody so I could-

Amber Boaz:
You're always ahead of everybody.

Mike:
Get up ... Right. Not East Coast, you guys are up too early. I could get up, record a video, and then boop schedule send that, and then be moving on with my day. I think the part that I want to dive into and help admins ... Where do we have this conversation of talking with people who haven't seen the deck, stakeholders, and saying, "Let's talk about this incredibly wasteful meeting that we have every Tuesday where 20 people sit on a Zoom call and 15 of them clearly aren't paying attention and they're sending emails while two people talk and report something to you?

Amber Boaz:
So I think some of it is just modeling good behavior, right? I can't make the meeting today here's my update. Don't tell the internet this, but I have used the, I'm at a dentist appointment here's my update. And then-

Mike:
You're not at the dentist that often?

Amber Boaz:
I'm not at the dentist that often. My dental hygiene is spectacular, thanks for mentioning it. But modeling that behavior of, hey, we can do this asynchronously, here's a quick update. One of the things that we do in ... For one of our bigger projects is we literally use a Slack workflow to remind everybody to fill in their daily standup. What did you work on today? What did you work on yesterday? What are you working on today? Where are you stuck? It's got emojis in it, and it's animated, and all the things to get people excited about it. Because it's asynchronous, I can go back and go, "What did we do three weeks ago?" I can go search. When was it that Grant said he was working on that ticket? Find that information in the past.
To not answer your question. The value in it is the searchability but also in the asynchronous and synchronicity of it. Getting your stakeholders to understand ... You mentioned the meeting of 15 people where of those 12 are paying attention. I call those book report meetings, right, because it's-

Mike:
Show and tell.

Amber Boaz:
Right, exactly. You give your status and then I give mine. And if, even once, you can turn it into a hey, here's a clip of my status update, and then you don't have to do a meeting. I'm sure there are exceptions to this. In general, folks don't want to be in that meeting. They don't want to have to show up and pretend like they're paying attention, in general. There are some weirdos who sometimes do. So giving people that out of hey, it's the middle of August, folks are on vacation, school's get ready to start, folks are doing their last hurrah to the beach, let's do this. Let's try this. Let's just experiment. Let's try this meeting asynchronously and see how people like it, and then talk about what worked and what didn't. Fundamentally, it's about iterating. Not every single meeting can be replaced with Slack, let's not pretend that's real, but a lot of them can. A lot of them can. You don't want to overclock, if you will, onto replacing ... This is about replacing ineffective meetings with Slack.

Mike:
And good call out because I did skip over that work area effective. Just go for the whole thing.

Amber Boaz:
All meetings. Never have a meeting again.

Mike:
All the meetings, everything. Clear your calendars, folks. You've been a manager. I didn't ask if you're currently a manager-

Amber Boaz:
I am.

Mike:
But I've been a manager. What is something that when you made this transition you had to work through that you weren't used to, right? I come from ... We're of that generation where we've probably worked for a lot of bosses that required us to be at our desk by 8:30 or you weren't working.

Amber Boaz:
Right, right.

Mike:
I know those norms are shifting, but there's still a lot of people, a lot of stakeholders, a lot of executive management that are of that generation that they need to see the people in the room. I've worked in sales where oh, Bob's not on the call. Well, Bob must be running late he's slacking again. And it's like no, Bob's not, maybe Bob has a flat tire on his way to the office.

Amber Boaz:
Maybe Bob's on the phone with a client closing a big deal.

Mike:
Right, right. Yes. But what was something that ... Even with the shift to working from home more, managers have to just be ... Not resigned to the fact but accepting of the fact that okay, so people are going to get their work done and they may not start at 8:31.

Amber Boaz:
Right.

Mike:
Right? And so if we're going to have this meeting, and it's normally a Tuesday at 10:00 AM, as a manager do ... What were things you changed?

Amber Boaz:
So I think there were a couple things. The flexibility of ... Well, let me say this. Because a lot of my colleagues are in Europe, a lot of that you had ... That's the only time they're available to meet. So if you truly do need a meeting it's a morning meeting. If I ran the world I would be able to sleep until 9:00 AM every single day. I don't run the world.

Mike:
Yet.

Amber Boaz:
I mean, the day's young. That presence for those meetings is important to build the relationships. Let me differentiate a little bit between meetings where you're literally just reporting a status and meetings where you're having a discussion or building relationships. And those are two different things. If it's just about the status, I closed eight deals, I created a permission set group, I ... If it's that, you can do that asynchronously with something like Slack. Getting in a room and having that conversation is dumb. If, however, it's "Hey, did you go see that hot new movie this weekend? Did you" ... "How are your kids? Which beach did you go to?" That relationship building I believe still needs to happen. I prefer it via Zoom because I like working from home on my treadmill rather than in the office, but if in the office so be it. Not every meeting has to be boring, and painful, and awful. Because the purpose, fundamentally of a meeting, is getting together with your colleagues. And that ideally should be enjoyable or at least not painful.

Mike:
Right. Right. I think you've given the example ... It seems like a pretty low-hanging fruit example of the book report or the readout for an ineffective meeting. If it's not that apparent, what are some things that you look for, or that admins in working with their business units can say, "Here's five meetings that I think could be Slack channels or hosted there as opposed to time on the calendar?" Is it characteristics?

Amber Boaz:
I think anything where you are just giving a status. Where it's just a status. How are things? Those often are weekly. Sometimes if you're lucky they're monthly or quarterly. Those are low-hanging fruit, right? You can give me the status of the thing in a Slack channel. Where decisions need to be made. We need to get all of the stakeholders together in a room to thunderdome it out on a big new feature. That isn't where you ... You wouldn't do that via Slack. The boring stuff should happen via Slack. And the engaging, interesting, puzzle solving, whiteboarding, those aren't the right place. Slack isn't the right place for that discussion.
You're looking for meetings where it's ... Somebody prepared slides, and they're going to go through the slides with you, and it's the same order of slides that you saw last week and the week before. Or you're the one preparing the slides and it's the same slides it was last week. It's just painful. That's, in my opinion, wasted time and energy where you could just do a quick clip. Here's what we did, and here's what's happening, and here's how it's going. Red, yellow, green trend line up to the right, screenshots if you want because that's easy enough to do, and close it off with an animated GIF. And Bob's your uncle, there's your status meeting.

Mike:
No, I like that, I like that. So if we were to rework this presentation, what are some things that you can add to an effective meeting with Slack?

Amber Boaz:
Add to an effective meeting? Sorry.

Mike:
Because I think we're trying to replace okay, ineffective meetings.

Amber Boaz:
Oh, I see.

Mike:
Let's say we've got good meetings going. Is there also a way that we can carry that into Slack so that we don't lose that momentum between meetings?

Amber Boaz:
Absolutely. I mean, I think sharing anything that was shared in the meeting. Any links, any slides, anything that was created as a function of the meeting. Any documentation. Oh, in this meeting we created eight Jira tickets, and four Asana tasks, and five cases for the various teams in our company, here's the links to all of those. For the record ... I'm using air quotes, you can't see those.

Mike:
I can totally see it on an audio podcast in my head.

Amber Boaz:
In your head you're seeing the air quotes. Good, good, good. Those assets from the meeting, and sharing those so that there's a record of what happened. You asked me about decision criteria for what ... How to look at a meeting. Let's say you go on two weeks vacation, and I hope you do, the meetings that you miss where you literally aren't able to attend, where when you come back, you don't wonder what was covered, those could be replaced with Slack, right? If you're coming back and going, "Oh, darn, I missed that meeting where Amber and I were going to discuss the thing, and she probably made a decision." That's different from Fred and Sally did their slide deck dance again, and Oh darn, I missed that one. Ha ha ha. Maybe that's the decision criteria. If you truly weren't able to be present because you were off gallivanting on a beach someplace, as you do, and would not have missed it, then that is a meeting that is a good candidate for replacing with Slack.

Mike:
What do you give as a suggestion for people who manage channels to ensure that people don't feel overwhelmed or feel, I just can't even keep up with the Slack thread anymore?

Amber Boaz:
Some of that comes down to folks self-identifying that they're overwhelmed. I can't help you if you don't tell me you're overwhelmed which is fair. Talking through how to update your sidebar, how to group things, how to mute channels. Lord knows I'm in plenty of channels that are muted that I check when I have the brain space or the time to check them. And that's okay. That's the whole point of having those features in Slack. And it's okay to leave channels. There are sometimes when you don't need to be there anymore. You're not on that project anymore, you're not working with that team anymore, you can leave that channel no harm no foul. Part of it is owning your own destiny, right? I don't need to be here, this isn't useful information for me anymore. I'm going to mute it, and if I don't miss it for two weeks, two months, whatever I'm going to leave the channel.

Mike:
I couldn't agree more. I feel like the only thing missing is I would just love to see a channels that I own. That would be great. Just let me filter on that somehow.

Amber Boaz:
You could put them in the sidebar in a group.

Mike:
Sometimes you create a lot of channels very quickly. As we tidy things up. Do you enforce or do you have any naming conventions? Because I feel like I've been at companies that had various different ways of messaging each other. With Slack, you can name things anyway. Do you enforce ... Enforce, I'm using air quotes you can totally see them.

Amber Boaz:
I can.

Mike:
Naming conventions or that? Or do you suggest admins do that?

Amber Boaz:
There are suggested ... Slack has, in their training materials, pretty strong opinions about how you should name channels. The way I tend to think about it is ... In the beginning of the Slack name ... And you do want to standardize, right? Let's just agree that they need to be standardized. What your standard is, however, I think is way more up for debate. The way I have seen it done successfully is you start with either ... You start with some sort of prefix. In our company, we start with our company initials. If, however, it includes a client it starts with EXT as an external, then it's the client name, then it's the project name because we also have multiple projects with the same client. So, for example, EXT Acme, as an example. PRM project. EXT Acme service contract. EXT Acme, right? You have those multiple channels ... So you have the context. Because we also have different teams working on those different projects with those different clients. So it just depends on what your business does, and how you're structured, and who is using Slack.
You may have sales and there's one big sales channel, an all sales, and then you may have sales by region, and then by district or whatever your breakdowns are so that you can ... Managers can communicate to their team, or VPs can communicate to their bigger team. It just depends on how you're structured. I think standardization is a hill I'm willing to die on, you should be standardized. But what that standard is is what works for your organization.

Mike:
No, I agree. I believe it was a validation rule that I built in a few Salesforce instances to enforce naming conventions on opportunities.

Amber Boaz:
I love it, I love it.

Mike:
Got to have that stuff.

Amber Boaz:
Absolutely.

Mike:
I do love the ... Especially that you call out when it's an external channel. Important because people can get clicking around in a hurry and you don't want to make a mistake.

Amber Boaz:
Right. Exactly. In the consulting space, the last thing you want to do is ... You have your client channel by name and then external client channel by name, and putting, "Hey, I need help with stakeholder X who's being particularly prickly."

Mike:
And stakeholder X is in that channel.

Amber Boaz:
Exactly. Whoops.

Mike:
Awesome. No, it's good to know I'm being prickly. Completely understand. Fabulous. Well, it was good catching up with you.

Amber Boaz:
Always a pleasure.

Mike:
It's been a while. I didn't know you were a Slack Community group owner. No surprise there because serial community.

Amber Boaz:
My name is Amber and I have a community group starting problem.

Mike:
And I'm sure you use Slack for that.

Amber Boaz:
Oh, absolutely. I absolutely do. I'm not being facetious, I absolutely use Slack for that.

Mike:
No, I feel you have to. That's one of those things I've always said, the CEOs of Holiday Inn have to stay at a Holiday Inn because otherwise, it would just be weird, right?

Amber Boaz:
One would think but I'm quite sure that there's plenty of cross-pollination.

Mike:
I'm sure. Well, that's on them. So it was a fun chat catching up with Amber. In case you don't know I have known her boy, for almost over a decade now. She's been in the community as a serial community group leader and creator as you could say. I want you to do one thing. I need you to share this episode with somebody. I bet you've got somebody that's listening, and friends with, and really wants to know more about Slack or saving them time. And here's how you do it. If you're in iTunes, all you have to do is tap the dots and choose share episode, and you can post it social, you can text your friend, and then they can listen to it right on their phone. I super, super appreciate it. Now, if you're looking for more great resources, don't worry. Everything admin is at admin.salesforce.com including a transcript of the show. Now, be sure to join our conversation, the Admin Trailblazer group, that is over in the Trailblazer Community. Don't worry, all the links are in the show notes to this episode. So until next week, we'll see you in the cloud.

 

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Category:general -- posted at: 12:00am PDT

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Toni V. Martin, VP of Salesforce Marketing and Communications at Bitwise, Salesforce MVP, and founder of Systems to Success.

Join us as we chat about why you might already be a Business Analyst, the flavors of business analysis, and how to get the experience to take that next step in your career.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Toni V. Martin.

Why you might already be a BA

Toni got her start on marketing automation platforms and then sales enablement on Salesforce. “I was on the admin path, the way everyone starts out,” she says, “but it wasn’t a good fit for me, I was really more interested in improving business processes.” She asked for some advice from Stephanie Foerst, a Salesforce MVP based in Atlanta, who suggested going into business analysis.

But could Toni really just become a Business Analyst? Didn’t she need a bevy of certifications or years of experience? “According to the International Institute for Business Analysis, anyone who performs business analysis tasks is a Business Analyst,” she says, “and that’s probably everyone listening right now.” Today, she trains other people in business analysis and produces events like the Salesforce Business Analysis Virtual Summit through her organization, Systems to Success.

The flavors of business analysis

One thing Toni realized, as she gained more experience in business analysis, is that there are actually many different types of BAs. Toni likes to call them the “flavors” of business analysts, and it helps to understand what makes sense for you.

At SMBs, you’re probably doing business analysis as part of some other responsibilities, like being a Salesforce Admin. At larger organizations, the roles will be split and more specialized so you may only get your hands dirty when you’re prototyping or testing. When you’re looking at BA paths, you need to ask yourself: do you want to be more functional or do you want to be more system agnostic? “You need to know, going in, what flavor you’re looking for,” Toni explains.

Whatever your flavor, Toni reminds us that one of the most useful skills for any Business Analyst is knowing when to say “I don’t know, let me look into it.” Salesforce is a powerful platform that can do just about anything, but sometimes that comes with a ton of added costs or a significant time investment. Give yourself permission to get more information before you commit to something.

The BA fairy

If you want to get into the world of business analysis, you can get started by studying for the Business Analyst Certification. Toni was part of the team that put it together, and she’s been thrilled to hear from everyone using it to take their careers in a new direction.

And while a certification can certainly help you get that next role, Toni reminds us that experience is crucial. “There’s no BA fairy that waves her magic wand and pronounces you a BA,” she says. But if you’re an admin, you’re already doing tasks that require business analysis and you probably just need to find a way to highlight those skills.

Be sure to listen to the full episode for more about getting Business Analyst experience in your current role, how to get started with Trailhead, and the advice Toni got from Mike that transformed her career.

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Category:general -- posted at: 12:00am PDT

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Ko Forte, Salesforce Business Analyst at RGP. Join us as we chat about business analysis, career transitions, and the BA mindset.

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

August is Business Analyst Month

For August, we’re taking a deep dive into the business analyst skillset. We get started by talking to Ko, a consultant who helps organizations as both a Business Analyst and a Salesforce Admin. She’s recently given a talk at some Salesforce events entitled “BA Where You Are,” so we thought we should bring her on the pod to hear all about it.

Ko’s talk is focused on developing the mindset and habits for a Salesforce Business Analyst role. It’s geared toward people who are admins and want to move into business analysis, as well as folks who might be new to the ecosystem and looking for a potential fit.

The business analyst mindset

For Ko, the key to being an effective business analyst begins with mindset. Before she starts work with a new client, she asks herself:

  • Who is this company?

  • How are they positioned in the industry?

  • Who are their customers?

  • What do they do to make money? And therefore, what’s important to them?

Thoroughly understanding these things grounds Ko with a clear understanding of what the company she’s working with needs their technology to do for them.

It’s also important to cultivate a mindset of compassion, both for why business processes are the way they are and for the people who will be affected if you make a change. People do things for a reason, and you need to understand those factors to find something that works.

Transitioning your career

The biggest thing Ko recommends for admins making the transition into business analysis is to not be afraid of asking questions. Someone else may be wondering the same thing and something that seems obvious to an expert might need to be better understood by everyone else on the team.

You should also start making a habit of turning the camera on for meetings. You want to create the impression that you’re reliable, you’re present, and you’re listening. Our brains have evolved to look at faces and, especially in remote work, it helps to show yours to the world. And, again, have compassion for everyone else attending a meeting by clearly communicating what you’re trying to do with an agenda and some goals.

Be sure to listen to the full episode for more about Ko, and why it’s important to take a look at your job description if you’re trying to advance your career.

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Category:general -- posted at: 12:00am PDT

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we sit down for coffee with Mike, Gillian, and Josh Birk.

Join us as we chat about community conferences and tips to get started speaking at events.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with the Admin Evangelist Team.

Community conferences

Every month, Gillian, Mike, and Developer Evangelist Josh Birk sit down with a cup of coffee and a topic. For July’s Coffee Talk, we’re sharing our love for community conferences and explaining why they’re such a good opportunity to get into speaking at events.

Join us as we discuss:

  • Fun things to do with your off day from our conference veterans.

  • Why bad weather is the key to Midwestern niceness.

  • How to use community conferences to dip your toes into public speaking.

  • What makes for a good speaking topic.

  • Why it’s so important to know your conference.

  • What you can learn by attending conferences before you try speaking at one.

  • Our favorite places to eat when we’re at conferences.

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Category:general -- posted at: 12:00am PDT

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Laura Pelkey, Senior Manager of Customer Security Awareness & Engagement at Salesforce.

Join us as we chat about how to be a security-minded advocate within your organization and what it could do for your career.

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

What security means for admins

Even though Summer is the time for vacations and fun in the sun, Laura wants to remind us that security threats don’t take time off. That’s why it’s so important for every organization to have security advocates: people who are consistently vocal about security.

You might already be doing all the good stuff we’ve talked about in past episodes, like password enforcement and TFA, but this is about taking it a step further. It’s thinking like a security leader and looking into the future by requesting budget to address security debt or get more help on your team. “As a business professional, as an admin, as someone who’s in charge of aspects of data security, you’re leveling up by acting this way,” Laura says.

Having security conversations

Things have changed since 2020. More people are working remotely, and more and more business operations have gone digital. Hand in hand with that, the responsibilities of an admin have increased.

Security is a big job that touches on all areas of your business. So if you encounter a problem that you can’t address with the security tools in Salesforce, how can you be proactive and partner with security allies across your organization? For example, if you notice phishing emails targeting your users, you could work with IT to create some training around what to look out for.

Where security advocacy is going

Being a security advocate has a lot of benefits for you, too. Being proactive instead of reactive will save you a lot of time and headaches. In our phishing example, your users receiving that training could mean you get a suspicious email forwarded to you instead of having to do damage control after your Salesforce org has been compromised.

Security advocacy could even take your career in a new direction. Laura points out that her own job in security awareness didn’t exist ten years ago. “This is a huge value add to your career,” she says. As a Salesforce Admin, you are the expert on what needs to be protected in your org, so make sure you get a seat at the table.

Be sure to check out the full episode for info on the Trailhead Security Superbadge, and what Laura has to say about imposter syndrome.

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Category:general -- posted at: 12:00am PDT

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to David Carnes, Chairman & Chief Evangelist at OpFocus and the author of Mastering Salesforce Reports and Dashboards: Drive Business Decisions with Your CRM Data.

 

Join us as we chat about writing a book, tips you can apply for your own content, and, of course, reports.

 

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

Content opportunities

David was contacted by one of his favorite publishers, O’Reilly Media, to put together a book about Salesforce analytics. “They asked me to put together a proposal,” he said, “and I really didn’t have to think too much about the topics because I had a lot of them in my head from hosting the Dashboard Dojo.”

 

The entire journey started with blog writing and speaking at events. David got his start with a 20-minute theater presentation at the Boston World Tour. “There’s just so many great events to speak at,” he says, “so there’s a really nice way to leverage the content that you develop and your thoughts around a particular topic.”

Why reports and dashboards are crucial reporting tools

One thing he’s seen time and time again in his consulting work is that most companies wait too long to invest in a proper Business Intelligence tool. “The reality is that for the majority of users in the world, the only reporting tool they may get is reports and dashboards,” he says.

 

The Dashboard Dojo is driven by that need, creating a place for people who want to improve their Salesforce reporting skills to meet and learn together on a regular basis. It’s a webinar format where anyone can ask questions. Those recordings are then published to a broader audience through their podcast and on YouTube.

Reporting tips and tricks

One major topic for the book is what you can do when you combine reporting with other Salesforce features. “If you ever get stuck in reporting, keep in mind that formulas solve all kinds of problems,” David says. Trending can also be a powerful tool you can use to show how things are going. “It’s something that your executive leadership needs but doesn’t always ask for,” David says. These features are available out of the box but you need to know about them to use them.

 

Whenever you create a dashboard, David recommends that you ask to sit in the meeting where they use it to make business decisions. It’ll instantly give you ideas for how to make your reporting even better and you’re there to answer any questions that may come up.

 

Be sure to check out the full episode for settings you might not know about, how to keep reporting in mind when you’re building apps, and the difference between writing and editing. And, obviously, read the book!

 

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Full Transcript

Mike:David Carnes wrote a new Salesforce book called Mastering Salesforce Reports and Dashboards, and it's out on bookstores now. And I know many of you won't likely be writing a book, but many people in the community create content. So I wanted to talk to David about content creation, because he wrote a book, and how he sustained writing things that he learned about himself while creating content, and also just where his passion for reports and dashboards came from. So let's get David on the podcast.
So David, welcome to the podcast.

David Carnes:  Thank you so much. Really excited to be on with you today.

Mike:Well, we've chatted a lot and I feel like we run into each other annually at a New York World Tour event or some sort of Salesforce event, but it's really cool. So you wrote a book called Mastering Salesforce Reports and Dashboards, tell me about that.

David Carnes:  It was really quite an experience. My favorite, favorite tech book publisher, O'Reilly Media, reached out, it was about just a little less than two years ago saying, "Would you consider writing a book on Salesforce Analytics?" And they asked me to put together a proposal and I really didn't have to think too much about the topics because I had a lot of them in my head from hosting the Dashboard Dojo. I submitted the proposal and off we went. So they told me it would take 15 months, it took me almost 18 months. But I was paired with a wonderful editor at O'Reilly and we literally just finished up the process today. So it's up on Amazon and the print versions will ship, I think three weeks from now.

Mike:Wow. I mean, I've never written a book, I've thought about doing it. I've done the math on it, the number of words that an average content creator writes in a blog post times the number of blog posts I've written and I think I've written two or three books.

David Carnes:  I bet.

Mike:It's just, they're incohesive, they don't go together very well. But now I know most people probably won't write a book. I mean, you're in the kind of next level air. But I think that content creation is something that everybody does, from creating presentations to go to Salesforce events or community events or even internally people are creating content where. What are some of the things that you learned writing a book that you think could parallel very well for admins creating content?

David Carnes:  I think for me it started right with writing blog articles, and I heard a really great tip at tech event probably 15 years ago, which the suggestion was something along the lines of answer every question with a blog article. And a lot of people will start writing a blog article and sort of inadvertently write a chapter of a book and blog articles really don't need to be a chapter of a book, they could be something a bit shorter. And the answer to a question is something that's really valuable. And a lot of times people are searching on the web for specific questions and they find an answer in the form of a nice cohesive blog post.
For me, it started with blog writing and then submitting to speak at different events. And I think one of the entry points for me was speaking at the Boston World Tour, and you gave me a shot for a 20 minute theater presentation, and I was talking about report and dashboard features in lightning that I thought were pretty exciting. This must have been five plus years ago at the Boston World Tour, but from there, there's just so many great events to speak at. I was given an opportunity to speak at Dreamforce and started with a 20 minute theater session, and then the next year put in for a longer session at Dreamforce. And then they're all the Dream events, but there's a really nice way to leverage content that you develop and your thoughts around a particular topic.
In my case, I felt like there wasn't a lot of content related to reports and dashboards, and I knew that for most organizations the leadership needs to make decisions on what's going on within the organization, and the way to do that is leveraging reporting tools. So there was sort of a need in the marketplace and something I was willing and able to go deep on. I also started the Dashboard Dojo, now almost three years ago, and that's been really fun to pick a topic and just go deep on the topic, whether it's formulas or joined reports or whatever the topic.

Mike:What is Dashboard Dojo?

David Carnes:  So Dashboard Dojo is a group that I started three years ago, we meet once or twice a month and we just dig into reporting topics. So we had a dojo session earlier today. So anyone is welcome, anyone that wants to learn about or discuss reports and dashboards, we do it in a webinar format. We allow people to ask questions, we allow people to come off mute. We do it in a webinar format mainly because we know that the majority of the listening will be on the recordings. So we've had some of the recordings. In fact, the number one recording was a hands-on session on custom report types. And that one topic more than any, it's probably 10 times the viewership on YouTube.

Mike:Yeah. Now one thing that struck me, because when I think books I think permanency. I've got books on a shelf behind me that I go back and reference. I write content for the admin blog, you talked about that and doing your webinars. How did you tackle writing a book? I mean, you said they contacted you two years ago and the book's coming out now. How did you tackle staying relevant given the tech industry? I don't even know we knew AI or some of the features that we're talking about now two years ago.

David Carnes:  Yeah, it's very exciting. There was one additional chapter that I added to the book that wasn't in the original set of chapters, which is the Analytics Tab, and that's just coming out, it's generally available in the summer '23 release. So very, very exciting. Lots of new functionality available. And that was sort of a nice example of something that it was more than halfway through the writing that I realized that the feature was introduced in beta a year ago, and I got started with it. The Salesforce engineering team has been wonderful to me to answer questions and sort of dig into things because some of the documentation isn't fully there yet because it's new beta functionality. I did have to rewrite one chapter, which was on the mobile reporting. So earlier this year, Salesforce released the newer version of reporting on mobile devices, and it's so fantastically different that I needed to get back in there and rewrite the chapter.

Mike:Wow. You mentioned, well, the mobile reporting, which wait, because I'm sure more things will change too. If you had to sit down and write a book and I polled 100 admins, I don't know that reports and dashboards would come up as one of the things to write about. And every presentation that I have seen you give has always been around reports and dashboards. What got you hooked on reports and dashboards?

David Carnes:  My company, OpFocus, we're a consulting shop. We've been working in the Salesforce space for 17 years, we're coming up on our 17th anniversary within weeks. And since day one we've seen companies struggle without proper reporting tools. Most companies wait too long to invest in a proper BI tool like a Tableau or CRM Analytics. And the reality is that the majority of users in the world, the only reporting tool they may get is reports and dashboards. So that's one reason I felt like the audience was there for the book.
I think with any content generation, finding something that you're passionate about is sort of important because you're going to have some long nights, whether it's writing or preparing a speech or setting up a demo. The number one class that I took, it was a summer course at Harvard many years ago, it was on database management. And it opened my eyes to how important the structure of data is and then how important data is for driving decisions within organizations.

Mike:So one question I have for you, this is just me kind of needling, do you think we organizations have too much data? Is it just too much to report on, to get together to try and use for decision making?

David Carnes:  Oh, I think there is a lot of data. I think it's very important that we be able to zero in and maybe zoom out on the data as well. And I think part of speaking at events and hosting the Dojo and writing the book on reporting is to help people really zoom in and try to drive good decision making. But certainly companies are awash with data and some of these new announcements that Salesforce has made relative to AI or with some of the Einstein functionality and just getting in this whole realm of predictive analytics, it's very, very exciting.

Mike:Well, so let me needle you on that because we'll see a bunch of stuff, I mean, Salesforce back in June had an AI day and there's going to be announcements at Dreamforce, forward-looking statement, I don't know what they are. But in the world of AI and GPT tools... Just the other day somebody sent me a blog article and they're like, "Oh, you need to read this." And I took two seconds. I opened up the URL and scrolled, and it was this huge blog post, huge. I was going to run out of battery power if I kept scrolling to the end. I thought to myself, you know what? I bet ChatGPT can just summarize this. So I just put in the text from the article and said, "Give me 200 word summary on this." And I guess I did a pretty good job. I mean, I read it. I was like, oh, okay. Maybe that's what the article's about. I need to go back and read the article.
One of the things that I wonder with reporting and the amount of data now that we're creating is will we use these AI tools to just tell me... I don't need to read the whole book report. This is me playing Biff in Back to the Future. Marty, just write the book report for me so that I can re-transcribe it. Do you see AI heading in that way for reports and dashboards? Just tell me what I need to know. Tell me what decision I should make.

David Carnes:  Yeah, I think there're probably a couple of steps in the middle. One would be getting toward more natural language requests for specific information. How many net new logos did we have in Q1 versus Q2? Something like that. So stepping toward natural language is one area and having a response from something that's intelligent enough to figure out what it is that I'm asking for. Then you get toward the generation of reporting output. I mean, it's amazing to see all these demos, whether it's at TDX or at the World Tours, the New York World Tour most recently for me, but see all this generative output and thinking what that could mean for reports and dashboards. I think it's very exciting.

Mike:You mentioned, well, you've been in the ecosystem for a long time. Looking back, what do you think your book would look like had you written it when you first started back in 2006?

David Carnes:  Oh, interesting. It's amazing how many features have been there for years and years. Whether it's cross filters or historical trending or even things we could do with custom formula fields. So I think there would be less explanation of features and more explanations on how to do things because you probably needed to combine more things to achieve an outcome. And that's really one of the goals in writing a book like this. It's like, okay, here are all the tools that Salesforce provides, and it's through the effective combination of these tools that you can do really interesting things.
One of the things I talk about in the Dojo a lot and at presentation at Dream events is, if you ever get stuck in reporting keep in the back of your mind that formulas solve all kinds of problems. Whether it's converting a data type, whether it's concatenating text, whether it's getting a ratio to appear a certain way, there's all kinds of things we can solve with formulas. And what I'm getting at is that through the effective combination of features, you really get some powerful outcomes. So writing the book on here are all the features, that's one thing. But then here's some ways to consider combining them to really achieve powerful outcomes.

Mike:Yeah, no, that's a good point. You've been in Boston as a user group leader for a while now. What is something that you definitely had to include in this book because it always comes up when you start talking about mastering reports and dashboards from user group experience?

David Carnes:  I'll give you two answers.

Mike:Oh, bonus.

David Carnes:  One is formulas, and so chapter five's all about formulas. And the reality is we could do a whole book on solving problems with formulas because they're just so useful. And with the ability to have a role level formula on a report or have cross object formulas on joined reports, which are super powerful, that's really exciting.
Another area that I want more admins and report writers to take advantage of is trending, and we have a number of ways to achieve trending. One of the later chapters in the book is all on trending. And it's something that your executive leadership needs, but they don't always ask for. And some of the features require a checkbox to turn them on or require you to know about a special report type that's available that offers a monthly snapshot. Just out of the box it's there, but if you don't know about it you don't know about it. But I want people to take advantage of trending because it is so powerful and helping people make good decisions through reporting.

Mike:So along that trending line, this is the next level question that I'm going to ask, what are things that admins should listen for in meetings or when gathering requirements to be like, "Oh, they're looking for a trending report?"

David Carnes:  I'm really glad you asked this because I feel very passionate about this. One thing. For anybody who's creating a great report or creating a great dashboard, ask to sit in the meeting, just sit in the corner and just listen, but the next time that leadership team takes a look at that report or uses that dashboard because you'll hear things and there'll be in a couple of categories. One will be that they don't understand something. Another will be that you'll hear them say, "If this could only" dot, dot, dot. So that's one category answering your question.
I think another with regard to trending, you get a lot of questions, especially from sales leadership was like what fell out of the pipeline since last week? And we have an amazing feature, I think it's called historical trending, it's been in Salesforce for more than a decade. It's a checkbox to turn it on the opportunity object. And you literally can compare what was in existence in the pipeline last week versus what's in the pipeline this week. And it's great, and you can see pluses and minuses and change dates and things. But I've had that request probably the most over the years from head of ahead of sales or a director of revenue operations who's running a meeting just trying to figure out and explain what changed since last week. And it's such a powerful feature, it's not a complicated feature, but it does require a checkbox to turn it on.

Mike:Yeah, often there's always a setting.

David Carnes:  There's always a setting for something.

Mike:I think one thing that I always think about is reporting always feels like last. And I think you mentioned that early on, reporting's always last. I know because of history and because I've heard you speak, reporting's actually first. What are some considerations that admins should think about when building apps so that they can actually report on the things they need to report on?

David Carnes:  Do you know, Aaron Krier has done some really nice work in the area of architecting for reporting, and it's such a great topic. That class that I mentioned that I took, that summer course on database management all those years ago, sort of learned about how joins work, how data is structured, and the concept of normalized and non normalized databases. So that was really good foundational information for me. But I think understanding the data model is one, and there are a couple of ways that you can learn the data model. So there's a tool that we can see in setup called Schema Builder. And it's not a new tool, but it's a nice way to visualize how the tables are organized. I was asked to report on a much older CRM system many, many years ago, and I asked that software company and had to beg them for the data model. They sent it to me, it had 400 tables, and I printed them all out lovingly. I taped them to the wall because it was my only way of understanding how the data was structured so that I could report on it.
I feel like in your Salesforce works you have to do the same. Whether you're using CPQ or whether you've built out custom functionality or you're taking advantage of the nonprofit template. There's specific data model that's unique to your org and it's important to get to know that to be able to write reports effectively.

Mike:Yeah, no. Geez, it had to have been a big wall. Thinking of, you watch all of those movies where people, the ropes and they get the strings tied together.

David Carnes:  Oh yeah. [inaudible]-

Mike:Tracking bigfoot.
As we wrap things up here, I'd love to know what is something you learned about yourself that you didn't know before you started this book?

David Carnes:  Oh, that writing is different than editing. That's one thing. I was paired with an amazing editor, and it was actually the same editor that Phil Weinmeister had for his two books. And Phil was someone who kindly spoke to me before I said, "Phil, I'm thinking about writing a book, could I talk to you?" And we'd only met once briefly, and he was so gracious. So he gave me some advice. For me, it was establishing a rhythm of writing, like figuring that out. Although for me, it was kind of all over the place. Sometimes in the middle of the night, sometimes in the morning. But probably the bigger thing that I learned was around editing that it's amazing how many passes. And then this idea of working with an editor who gives you feedback and then you need to triangulate their recommendations back into the book. It actually took me longer often to edit a chapter than it did to write the chapter, which sounds nuts. But yeah, so lots of learning all around. I appreciate you asking.

Mike:Yeah, no, I mean I think that's all part of content creation. Whether you're writing a book or a script for a video or something, oftentimes getting the idea out there can feel daunting, but it's refining the idea. And that can be challenging too. Editors have a lot of patience, I've worked with editors before and, boy, they should be up for sainthood.

David Carnes:  Yes. I was thinking similar words, religious [inaudible]-

Mike:You hand them something here, please read this and just look away. In there somewhere is my idea, I promise you, please tease it out.
David, it was great chatting with you. I'm, I'm glad we had a chance to connect and I look forward to seeing the book and catching up with you some more.

David Carnes:  We'll see you at Dreamforce. Thank you so much. And for anyone that's listening, if you're interested in the Dashboard Dojo and learning, we try to meet every month at least once or twice. So it's just dashboarddojo.com.

Mike:Perfect. Thanks David.
So it was a great discussion with David. I am always amazed by how much he knows about reporting. And let's do trending reports a little bit more, let's get into that. Now, if you enjoyed this episode and I just need you to do me a favor, here's what it is. If you're listening on iTunes I want you to tap the dots and choose share episode, and just share it with one person. Just share with them, "Here's an amazing podcast. I want you to subscribe to it and start listening to it." You could also post it to social, I'd love that, or you can text it to a friend. If you're looking for more great resources, be sure to visit your one stop for everything admin, which is admin.salesforce.com. And we also include a transcript of the show so in case you missed something. Now, be sure to join in our conversation in the Admin Trailblazer Group in the Trailblazer community. Don't worry, link to that is all in the show notes. So with that, until next week, we'll see you in the cloud.

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Category:general -- posted at: 12:00am PDT

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Ajaay Ravi, Senior Technical Product Manager at Salesforce.

Join us as we chat about AI, Flow GPT, and why admins should pay close attention.

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

Do Androids Dream of Bohemian Furniture?

Ajaay learned a lot about AI when he led a team at Amazon tasked with building technology to recommend furniture. The only problem was that they were all engineers and didn’t know the first thing about interior design. They brought in some experts who could tell them what individual components made something a particular style, and used their knowledge to train the AI by giving it high-quality data in bite-sized pieces that it could understand.

What’s important to understand here is that any AI model requires training. And to do that, you need to break a concept like “furniture style” down into tags like “upholstery,” “seat,” “legs,” “paisley,” etc. Then you can give it a group of tagged images to try to teach it a broader concept, like “Bohemian.” Finally, you test it to see if it can identify new images that have Bohemian furniture in them, give the model feedback on how it did, and start the loop again.

Flow GPT

For Salesforce, Ajaay has been building Flow GPT. The goal is to create a tool where you can just describe the automation you need and it will build you a flow—automagically. They’re still in the testing and training phase but the possibilities are tantalizing.

Depending on what type of user you are, you might use Flow GPT in several different ways. For those that are already experienced with Flow, you can leverage it to eliminate some steps and work faster. And for people newer to the ecosystem, Ajaay hopes it can remove barriers to unlocking the full potential of the platform.

Learning to crawl

Just like with the interior design tool Ajaay built earlier in his career, Flow GPT needs some time to learn. For now, they’re focused on building simple flows of five steps or less with minimal decision elements and branches. But it’ll only get better as they keep working on it and getting feedback from test users.

Be sure to check out the full episode for more about what makes for a good prompt, what you can do to get ready for Flow GPT, and how AI can “hallucinate.”

 

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Direct download: Ajaay_Ravi_on_Flow_GPT.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:00am PDT

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we sit down for coffee with Mike, Gillian, and Josh Birk.

Join us as we chat about what ChatGPT has to do with New Coke and ponder the mystery of the McRib.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with the Admin Evangelist Team.

Opinionated launches (and lunches)

Every month, Gillian, Mike, and Developer Evangelist Josh Birk sit down for a cup of coffee and hit the “record” button. For June, we’re talking about opinionated launches: launches in the tech world—or elsewhere—that drew attention and, most importantly, a whole lot of opinions.

 

Join us as we tackle the big questions:

  • McRib: Hero or villain?

  • Apple Vision Pro: Next big thing or next Crystal Pepsi?

  • The problem with EV charging ports

  • Self-driving cars: questionable tech or questionable roads?

  • Josh Birk’s Tales From the Photo Booth

 

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

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Deon Louw, Financial Planning and Analysis Manager at City and Provincial Properties, triple-star Ranger, MuleSoft mentor, and avid Composer enthusiast.

Join us as we chat about MuleSoft Composer, why the community is such a good resource, and how integrations can lead to a digital transformation snowball.

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

From accounting audits to Salesforce

Deon started his career in accounting, specializing in external audits. “While that’s a great profession and really interesting, I realized that I just loved technology more,” he says, so he started trying to figure out how to change careers.

When, through a series of coincidences, Deon ended up looking after a Salesforce org for one of his clients, he felt like he had finally found his calling. He was immediately struck by how powerful the platform could be as a business tool and the potential it had for automation. He could apply his skills in a new way, and that only became more apparent as he added MuleSoft to his toolkit.

Becoming a MuleSoft Mentor

Deon’s company originally handled a lot of business processes manually, so moving to Salesforce was a game-changer. But that meant the rest of their business needed to keep up. Deon started looking into ERP platforms and how he could use MuleSoft Composer to unlock even more automations. “It allows us to scale without having to increase headcount at every single step,” he says.

The community helped Deon immensely on his journey and he’s been giving back by becoming a MuleSoft Mentor. He helps people work through issues they face on the platform and connects people who face similar challenges with the resources to solve them.

A digital transformation snowball

One thing that Deon has found as he’s brought more automations to his organization is that digital transformation starts to snowball. Once people see how getting rid of manual processes can help them get more done, they start looking for other areas where technology can help them and they bring their own ideas to the table.

At the same time, Deon’s organization is relatively small, and so one major challenge he faces is figuring out how to add layers of automation and integration without bringing on more people to manage everything. Luckily, MuleSoft Composer strikes the perfect balance of keeping everything manageable for a small team while still enabling the powerful integrations Deon is looking for.

Be sure to check out the full episode for more about MuleSoft mentors, how Deon thinks about integrations, and why the MuleSoft Composer community is so amazing.

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Full Transcript

Mike:  MuleSoft Composer makes it easy to build process automation for data using clicks instead of code. Dion Lowe is a triple star ranger MuleSoft Mentor and avid composer fan. So in this episode, we're going to find out from him what he was able to accomplish using MuleSoft Composer. Now, before we get into that episode, be sure you're following the Salesforce admins podcast on iTunes or wherever you get your podcast, that way you get a new episode every Thursday right on your phone. So let's get Dion on the podcast. So Dion, welcome to the podcast.

Deon:Mike, thank you so much.

Mike:  Why don't we get started, just introduce everybody to where you are and how you got to being a Salesforce admin and also I'll tip the cards, I know you're an admin of another platform too.

Deon:Yes, so I've had quite an interesting journey. I started off my world as a chartered accountant and in external audit, and I realized that while that's a great profession and really, really interesting, I realized that I just love technology more. So I went down a route of changing careers and then through a number of interesting occurrences I ended up looking after one of my employer's Salesforce platform and I realized how incredibly powerful this is as a business tool, not only for the collection of information, but actually for building out processes and for efficiencies and ultimately automation.
 And I've been doing that now for a while, and I've loved every moment of it because I've been able to take a set of skills and I've been able to replay those skills and reuse those skills at different companies in different industries. And to your point, recently, I've been very fortunate to be able to take everything that we've learned in Salesforce and apply it to a new system, to a new ERP system, which has allowed us to further the depth of what we are able to do within the business.

Mike:  Yeah. So I think that's interesting because that also leads us to a MuleSoft Composer discussion. But before we get to that, when I was introduced to you, I was told that you are a MuleSoft Mentor, so I would love to know what a MuleSoft Mentor does.

Deon:So MuleSoft Mentor was a thing I came across as I joined the MuleSoft greater community and MuleSoft Mentors are these people that have not only just a passion for the product, so they know the product, they've worked with the product, but they're also end users. So these aren't people... No one's a Salesforce employee, no ones a MuleSoft employee. These are people that live and breathe these real world challenges. But MuleSoft's come along and said, but hold on a second, I really like what you're doing or I like your engagement with the community. Can I please get effectively more of that? So MuleSoft Mentors are these groups of people that work with the product, but they're there, they're active people, they're active participants in the community, and they really do champion it from not a sales perspective because hey, I'm just here solving a problem and this is how I do it.
 And because they're not sitting on a sales side, they're not sitting on a Salesforce side, they're normally not even sitting on a consultancy side, they're able to talk to people about what they've done with the platform. They run into the real world challenges. I was doing X, Y, Z, I couldn't do this. And they're able to take that knowledge and proactively feed it back into the community, which is just what's great about the overall ecosystem is that you have these communities that identify these opportunities for people and engage so wonderfully with that.

Mike:  Well, I think that's a great, great description. I teased a little bit in the intro, but you're Salesforce admin, so you got that platform. You have an ERP system. What's it like owning multiple platforms at an organization?

Deon:It's really daunting, but quite exciting because all of a sudden these businesses, so take our business as an example, we really are saying, well, we understand that digital is the future. We understand that we need to do more online, we need to do more automation and all these buzzwords, but we're a small business, so all of a sudden the pressures just keep growing. But with that, because we're a small business, because we're agile, the opportunities grow with them. So while I'm fortunate that I could at least get Salesforce buttoned down and operating effectively before the ERP system came around, it is challenging because there are big responsibilities that the business is becoming more and more reliant on.

Mike:  Right. I think... Well, first of all, I've never been in your chair before, but one of the things that I have done that I'd be interested to dive into is that discussion that a business has with, okay, we have Salesforce. Boy, it would be great, and I'm sure in your case it was, it would be great to get this ERP data in, or a reverse of that was wouldn't it be great if Salesforce could push this over to our ERP system. I'm figuring one of those two had to been mentioned in a room somewhere for you to move forward. So I would love to know what were some of the topics or issues that came up as you were considering, we need Salesforce and our ERP system to be integrated so that I can automate things with Composer.

Deon:So our journey really does start with Salesforce, and we deployed late 2020 and we deployed because we had to. This business is incredible and I'm really proud of what the business does, but it was all done on paper. Our billing was incredibly manual and time consuming and just not scalable. And I think I speak for any businesses that you want to be able to scale, you want to be able to grow, but you want to be able to do so effectively. So Salesforce started off as a way of being able to do, to start building out that scale. And then due to Salesforce and actually what we were accomplishing with Salesforce, we were really starting to push against the limitations of what our existing, and I can't even call it an ERP system, but what our existing accounting system was capable of.
 And that's how the new ERP system discussion came up. But from the get go, we recognize that it can't be manual because the value of looking at a new gen ERP system and having next gen software like Salesforce in the business is absolutely not more processes. It's absolutely not, well, now I've got to go and download files and upload, or I've got to manually integrate. So from the day that we started mentioning ERP, it was, well, how are these going to talk? Because that's where the value for us comes in. That's where knowing that from an operational perspective, my business can operate, and from a data accounting finance perspective the business can seamlessly follow. That's how we know that not only do we drive much better client engagement, but better holistic understanding of where we are as a business and just allows us to scale without having to increase headcount at every single step.
 And all the discussions that I always have about scale, but this isn't that important. Then you start asking, "Okay, well how many people are you willing to employ just to import data?" And then people are like, "Oh, hold on. That's not what I meant." Then you start saying, "Okay, well this is the solutions." And then you start trying to sketch out to people that it's not just to say, oh, we can just do, we're just pushing invoices from Salesforce or payments statuses or customer information, it's well, yes, we're going to start there, but integrations go both ways. And the more you integrate means, the more data you can aggregate and the more meaningful decisions you can make off the back of that data. So for us it was, well, you can't do the one without the other because you lose so much value by not doing it.

Mike:  That's a very good point. And you said something huge, integrations go both ways. So what were those early considerations that you were talking about in your organization that you think other admins should write down as like, oh, these are the things you need to start asking right away when we talk integration.

Deon:So I guess there's two parts of it is, especially in smaller businesses, it's about building up that use case to say, okay, well, it's great having the information, but what does that mean? And that's absolutely what needs to be done, but unfortunately due to how complex the overall, call it SaaS landscape or tech stack or whatever buzzword you want to use because of how complex that's becoming, when you start looking at integrations, integrations are a beast on their own. And you really need to start thinking, okay, but what does this mean for my organization? So similar to the point that I made earlier of saying, well, how many people are you willing to employ to run to import data? The same type of questions need to be made about your systems and your integration layer to say, well, are we willing to deploy an integration layer that then needs to be serviced by someone?
 Is that an employee? Is that a consultant or is there ways that we can do that differently? And that's being very blunt and probably jumping ahead, but that's how we landed up on MuleSoft Composer is to say, well, you start going through all the purchasing, the consideration to say, well, okay, I want something that's reputable? I want something that I know is out there that's got a community that I can turn to and get support on. I want something that's easy or something. But actually what you need is you need something that slots into your business and you need something that's manageable, that's not going to increase the workload of the team that you have or require you to go and hire an additional person just to look after something that's really supposed to solve problems and not create them.

Mike:  Yeah, oftentimes you're adding, because you're adding another layer there and you can create, now we have to have somebody that almost needs to monitor the telephone lines.

Deon:Yes.

Mike:  And you took my next question, but did you even look at anything besides Composer?

Deon:Oh, absolutely. We had to do our due diligence and that's the right thing to do. And we looked at, I very excitedly looked at the Anypoint platform because it is just so impressive and so powerful, but unfortunately it just, it's just that little bit too complex for us considering that we're such a small team. And we looked at other tools either be it no-code tools or other call it low-code tools. And some of them were impressive, some of them were dismal from the get go. But really what it came down to for us is how reputable is the product? Do we have relationships that support that product? And again, we're a existing Salesforce customer, so it wasn't that we needed to build that relationship. So we had existing relationships. Everything that we were looking at integrating in our, I say MVP, but it was our core processes.
 Everything that we looked at integrating already had connectors. So it was out of the box. And the big thing that I was pushed on very, very hard by the leadership team is saying, okay, this is great. You understand all these words, you understand how this works, but what happens if I need to move you into another part of the business? Or what happens if I for whatever reason lose you so I move on or something else happens? What's going to happen to this platform then? And for them, that was a really, really big part of the buying considerations because if it's not easily maintainable, then I don't want it because yes, while it might work now, I can't afford to take on that headache and that uncertainty that it's not going to work easily in the future.

Mike:  Yeah, I think you had a unique perspective in that you owned both platforms you were integrating. To take a step back, if you didn't own one of those platforms, let's say your ERP system, what as a Salesforce admin should you ask for in terms of, I need to push data to you? What should that data look like and what data are you giving me? I think sometimes we start talking integration and you can feel like you're a little bit over your skis as a Salesforce admin because you're not quite sure what that means on the other side. So what were some of the things that were very beneficial for you to be able to look at your ERP system and map that to Salesforce?

Deon:So what's interesting about that is our ERP system was a new purchase for us. So it wasn't that these two systems had been running side by side for any period of time. And just to be clear, our integrations ran from day one, which is something that I'm immensely proud of, but it's testament to how easy this was to set up. But what that meant for us is that actually, while I own both systems, I had to learn a lot about the data model, especially within the ERP landscape. And effectively we had to understand, well, initially I started stressing over how does this data fit together and how am I going to map it and what am I going to do? But again, another great thing about MuleSoft Composer is that it does a lot of that back end translation for you.
 So it starts to translate field names and data types to common language or to platform specific language so that when I talk to our ERP implementation guys, they see something and they're like, oh, okay, well I know what that is, even though I might not know what an object is in Salesforce or what this field record was in Salesforce, I do know what that same field is in the ERP system. And that translation, I cannot overemphasize how valuable that was for us because again, everyone was talking in a language that they were comfortable with.

Mike:  That's a good point. Your post integration, I guess you were post integration on day one, which is unlike anybody, but-

Deon:Really proud of that.

Mike:  Yeah, exactly. Right. I mean, hey, we've been integrated since day one. You know, like okay. You win. What does the roadmap look like now after that initial integration? What are the conversations that you're having with the organization?

Deon:So the overall roadmap's been really, and this is probably not the right word, but it's been really fun. Because we've had the basics buttoned down from day one we've been able to leverage all the new functionality that MuleSoft is bringing out and there's quite a lot of it, which again is why this is such an exciting product. But the conversations with the businesses has been really, really fascinating. So I've always been tech first. This is my bread and butter and I love it, but the business isn't. But giving people exposure to integrations has really allowed them to see the art of the possible. So now my conversations have gone from stress over the basics, and we're talking this in a couple of months to conversations of saying, "But hold on a second. I do this process. Can we not do something here?"
 Or, "Hold on a second, when this happens I know you've got this tool, can't you make something else happen?" And from my perspective, from a digital transformation perspective, I can't tell you how exciting that's been because we've now been able to focus on the business efficiencies and the automations and the improvements and not, oh, but now I've got to spend three weeks trying to build a code or deploy a solution to, well, while we're having this meeting, let's quickly spin something up. Let's quickly run a test on it. And that's been incredibly empowering and transformative as how this business looks and thinks about technology.

Mike:  That's really great. As we wrap up, I want to go back to that mentor piece that I asked you about earlier, because I always try to end on, I don't know, something great for people to work for. As a MuleSoft Mentor what is one question that you feel you answer quite often?

Deon:It's really about I'm struggling to do X, Y, Z in this specific use case, can someone help me? And it might sound silly saying this, but it just goes back to how strong the community. Is the MuleSoft Composer community feels so active that you've got people that'll jump on that answer, typically mentors because of the role that they play in their community, but they jump on those answers. And within the matter of a day, couple of hours, but maximum a day, you've got these people with unique perspectives, guys working all over the place with all this different experiences supporting either the incoming cohort of MuleSoft users or the guys that are just struggling with a problem. And I really can't think of any other community that I've at least been part of that is as proactive as solution orientated in a constructive manner as what the MuleSoft community is and I think that is largely thanks to the MuleSoft Mentor program.

Mike:  Yeah, this as well. So often when I go to Salesforce events or user groups or community events as an admin you can feel like, oh, no one else has this problem. There's no way anybody else has this problem. And then you bring it up at a birds of a feather table and you ask the question, six other people nod their heads because they were-

Deon:Everyone turns and they're excited.

Mike:  "And you have that problem too." "Yep." You really all, there's like 10 business problems in the world. We're all trying to solve them. They just, they have different names, different process names.

Deon:No, absolutely. And it's about, and that's what I've always just loved about the overall community is that there's no right or wrong way. There's perspectives or there's experiences and people are so open, or most people should I say, are so open about talking about that. And the more that people talk about it, the less closed off people are. And without a doubt, that's been life-changing for me as an admin in this community coming from technically a non-technology background because I know that there's no question too silly or too small or too complex that won't be engaged with, and I can't think of a better tech stack to place my bets on.

Mike:  Yeah, no. Well, Dion, I think you summed it up perfectly there with the more that we talk about challenges that we're confronting, the more we learn from each other. And I just can't think of a better place to end this conversation. So thanks so much for coming by and telling us about what you've done with MuleSoft Composer and good work on owning two platforms.

Deon:No, thank you. And thank you so much for having me, and thank you for championing the admin journey. It's really appreciated.

Mike:  Well, it was a great discussion with Dion. And of course, if you enjoyed this episode, can you do me a favor and just share it with at least one person? If you're listening on iTunes, all you need to do is just tap the dots and choose share episode. Then you can post that show to your social feed. You can text it to a friend. If you're looking for more great resources, your one stop for everything admin is admin.salesforce.com, including a transcript of the show. And be sure to join in our conversation, the Admin Trailblazer Group in the Trailblazer Community. Of course, don't worry about it. Mentioned a lot of things. All those links are below in the show notes. So until next week, we'll see you in the cloud.

Direct download: Deon_Louw_on_using_MuleSoft_Composer_to_Integrate_Systems.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:00am PDT

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Sarah Flamion, Research Architect on Salesforce’s Research & Insights Team.

Join us as we chat about what recent advances in generative AI mean for admins and the Salesforce platform.

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

What is generative AI?

Generative AI is a blanket term for algorithms that can generate new content: text, images, code, voice, video, and more. It does that based on what it has learned from the existing data you give it.

Sounds complicated, but one of the coolest things about generative AI is that the interface for it is natural language processing (NLP). You can describe what you want it to make in plain English and it will spit something out at you.

The human in the loop

One thing that’s important to understand about generative AI is that it’s not an encyclopedia, it’s a completion system. Fundamentally, the way it works is to identify patterns and then predict the next thing in the sequence.A new field is emerging called prompt engineering, which is focused on how to talk to these models to get better results. You can adapt the model to specific knowledge by “grounding” it with data that isn’t public, for example, your brand voice or information about your industry. You can also give it feedback on its responses, which gives it a chance to learn and improve thanks to “the human in the loop.”

The main takeaway from all of this is that generative AI “supercharges the things that the humans can do,” Sarah says. You can make an image and then have the model give you three variations on it, or get a quick first draft for the opening of a piece of content you need to write.

Jobs to be done and Salesforce

For Salesforce, there is a lot of potential to make users’ lives easier. You might be able to automatically log calls based on an AI-generated transcript of the conversation, or clean up old data that was perhaps sloppily entered.

Sarah and her team often look at their research in terms of “jobs to be done.” Businesses generally have a list of jobs they’re trying to accomplish and then use tools, like Salesforce, to help them do those jobs. The thing is, the tools might change but most businesses will have the same jobs to be done, even over decades. Generative AI stands to shake that up, both in terms of what businesses need to get done and who can do those jobs.

Be sure to listen to the full episode for our in-depth conversation with Sarah and why change management just might be the most important skill for admins in the future.

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

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Andrew Mangano, Director of Product Management for Mobile at Salesforce.

Join us as we chat about the new features coming to Salesforce Mobile in the Summer ‘23 release.

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

Why Salesforce is about interactions

Andrew comes to product management from a background in data science, which is why he was originally brought into Salesforce. This gives him a unique perspective on how to make data-driven decisions to build what customers need the most.

Before all of that, Andrew started in retail, which really informs how he thinks about Salesforce. For him, it’s all about interactions. While the rise of mobile is often framed in terms of how it’s caused people to disconnect from each other, Andrew sees an opportunity to reconnect. He wants Salesforce Mobile to help make your interactions with your customers more one-to-one and face-to-face.

The power of mobile

“The power of mobile is being able to get out there and do things more efficiently that you really couldn’t do before,” Andrew says. You can have all of the information you need, immediately accessible from the field. And you can share that information instantly throughout your organization so everyone is up to date.

Andrew’s team been trying to make data easier to navigate so your users can put away the phone and focus on the interaction. They’re releasing Dynamic Forms for Mobile in Summer ‘23 you can help your users spend less time thumbing through lists and more time getting things done.

Offline access to your data

A common misconception about Salesforce Mobile is that it’s meant to be somehow replace or stand in for the desktop experience. However, Andrew points out that it’s more about adoption and engagement. It’s about putting Salesforce in the hands of employees that wouldn’t otherwise be on the platform and giving them access to new tools and information they haven’t been able to use before.

Bringing Salesforce to new places with mobile also introduces new challenges, namely, what if you need access to your information in a place with spotty internet? They’ve engineered an offline solution for that, coming in this release, which will let you still access the data you need even if you’re not connected to the cloud.

There’s even more coming soon, so be sure to enable all objects for Dynamic Forms and stay posted.

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

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

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

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

Be the translator

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

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

Flow all night

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

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

The magic of Salesforce live events

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

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

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

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we sit down for coffee with Mike, Gillian, and Josh Birk.

 

Join us as we chat about the Summer ‘23 Release, Einstein GPT, and what makes a Dreamforce speaker submission stand out.

 

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with the Admin Evangelist Team.

Summer ‘23 Release

May is coming to an end, which means the Summer Release is just around the corner. The team has been hard at work on content to help you get up to speed on everything you should know. Be on the lookout for even more content, with on-demand Release Readiness Live videos for Admins and Devs, and the Learn MOAR blog post series both coming out soon.

 

We talk through some features we’re looking forward to, both large and small, from horizontal alignment on dynamic fields to custom property editors. There’s a lot to look forward to!

Einstein GPT

There’s been some buzz about Salesforce and AI lately, specifically the announcement of Einstein GPT. We already have some content out there about what admins can do with it right now, but there’s a whole lot more info coming soon.

As more and more AI is incorporated into Salesforce, what we do as admins is naturally going to shift and change. Some things will definitely become easier to accomplish, but the value we bring in understanding business processes and translating them into a solution that works will be even more critical.

Submit to present in Dreamforce 2023

We’re currently looking for presenters for the Admin track for Dreamforce 2023. As someone who reviews submissions, Mike recommends focusing on a few quality abstracts that you’re really excited about instead of trying to apply with every idea you can possibly think of. “It’s not about the number of cupcakes you show up with, it’s about the quality of the cupcake,” he says.

If you’re looking for ideas, a good place to start is in the Trailblazer community. If people are talking a lot about something over there, it’s probably going to be a topic we want to cover. And be sure to listen to the full episode for more about the Build a Blog series, and the theory that the Flintstones actually takes place after the Jetsons.

 

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

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Skip Sauls, Senior Director of Product Management at Salesforce. Join us as we chat about why data is so important to reporting, what some big-data terms are, and some fun hobbies that Skip enjoys outside of building awesome products for Salesforce admins.

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

The data lakehouse

Skip is the product manager in charge of the ecosystem for Data Cloud, which unifies data from Salesforce and other sources to give you a single source of truth for everything your organization knows about your customers. This will make it easier to do everything from generating reports and dashboards to implementing new apps across the organization using the data you have, no matter where it’s coming from.

For admins, Data Cloud will remove the need to move data around every time you want to use it somewhere else. This reduces the risk of using old data or accidentally opening up a security vulnerability. Instead, you’ll keep your data in a centralized “Data Lakehouse” (both a data lake and a data warehouse) and pull it from there when you need to use it for something.

What you get from centralizing data

Centralizing your data management in one place has a number of other benefits. For one thing, it gives you a framework for making important decisions about which source is the most authoritative so you can resolve any conflicts that may come up when there’s a disagreement. What’s more, it’ll minimize situations where reports and dashboards don’t match up because they were created from different sources or pulled at different times.

Today, when new data comes in from somewhere, you can’t necessarily be sure how long it will take to update in your other orgs. With Data Cloud it’s all in one place, which means any changes will be reflected everywhere simultaneously. And if you need to figure out why a report is telling you something different today than it did yesterday, you can go back and look at a snapshot without having to dig through multiple orgs.

The future of Salesforce

Going forward, the hope is to build more and more Salesforce features that are used in multiple orgs on top of Data Cloud, separate from individual platforms. This gives every platform you use access to the same powerful tools like advanced analytics. It’ll also make it possible for third party platforms to work directly with Salesforce capabilities, offering more flexibility for your org. 

This all gets even more exciting when Skip starts talking about the possibility for building apps that can be reused throughout an org, or even users creating things with generative AI. The streamlining provided by Data Cloud will make all of that possible.

Be sure to listen to the full episode for more of Skip’s thoughts on the future, and what Evel Knieval’s stunt bike can tell us about where technology is headed.

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

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Elizabeth Bochanski, a newly-certified Salesforce Admin and MidAtlantic Dreamin’ Volunteer Committee Member.

Join us as we chat about prepping for your first Salesforce certification and why in-person networking is so important.

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

Taking the leap and becoming a Salesforce Admin

Elizabeth was working in sales for a mortgage company when they announced they were switching over to a new platform: Salesforce. While many of her coworkers were grumbling about having to change their routine, Elizabeth was excited about all the ways this new technology could make their lives easier. She started making suggestions and, without knowing it, became a power end user at her organization.

During the pandemic, when everyone was stuck at home, Elizabeth happened to be hanging out with her cousin who happened to be an accidental admin. Togther, they sorted out an issue she was having in her org. That’s when Elizabeth realized that maybe she should pursue this admin thing more seriously.

How to make studying a hands-on experience

At TrailblazerDX this year, Elizabeth dove into the Camp Quick Start area. It was exactly what she was looking for because, as she was studying for her certification, she had realized that hands-on learning was key for her. “Going into learning Salesforce, you need to have an idea of what way you learn,” she says.

For Elizabeth, one thing that really helped was to get into an org and do things while learning about them. “When I was taking a practice test and got a question wrong, I would go and find the answer within the org,” she says. She also highly recommends finding a study group for the shared motivation and support.

The importance of in-person networking

Going forward, Elizabeth has her sights set on getting better with Flow, understanding security, and diving into Object relationships. She’s also thinking about what comes next, like getting the Platform App Builder and Business Analyst certifications. She already has experience working with admins on business processes from her time as a power end user, so it’s a logical next step.

The other thing that Elizabeth emphasizes is the importance of networking. And not just virtual networking, but in-person events. It’s how she met her mentor, and how she ended up being a guest on the pod. You never know who you’re going to run into at a live event, and where a chance meeting might take you, so put yourself out there.

 

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

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Gorav Seth, Salesforce Platform Manager at Ashoka, and Eric Smith, Technical Architect at RafterOne.

Join us as we talk about the flow solutions they came up with to improve their processes in their orgs, and how you can get started building your own flows.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Gorav Seth and Eric Smith.

25+ years of Salesforce experience in one episode

We brought Gorav and Eric on the show to talk about their upcoming appearances on Jennifer Lee’s Automate This! YouTube show. If you don’t already tune in, now’s the time to start. They’ll go over the cool Flow solutions they came up with to improve things at their orgs. But first, a little bit more about our guests.

Gorav has a background in plant biology but got involved in the ecosystem when he migrated his nonprofit to Salesforce and fell in love with the technology. Eric’s been in technology for over 45 years, and his path took him through a telecommunications company that was using Salesforce essentially as a Rolodex. He quickly realized that they were barely scratching the surface of what they could do with the platform, and started building things to help his team of product managers do their jobs better.

Collectively, they have over 25 years of experience in Salesforce.

Why automate?

One thing we wanted to ask our guests is how they think about automations and why you should build one. For Gorav, it’s about the massive improvements you can make to usability on both the front end and the back end. For Eric, it’s also about improving data quality and data security. “A well-designed automation will reduce steps for somebody that has to interact with it and improve the quality of the data that comes out of it,” he says.

On Automate This!, they’ll each share a pretty nifty Flow solution they found to replace a clunkier process. Gorav consolidated multiple notifications into one rich text email that gave his users all of the information they needed in one place. They ended up replacing something like 10 workflow rules with one streamlined flow.

Eric’s users needed to constantly refer to the case number they were working with but were spending a lot of time trying to find it. He created a utility to highlight field data on a Lightning record page using a screen flow and saving a ton of time.

Starting with Flow

Flow offers a lot of possibilities for simplifying and improving things but it can still be intimidating when you’re starting out. Eric recommends breaking your process down into the smaller steps that need to happen in order to get from point A to point B.

And, Gorav adds, it’s an iterative process. You can and should use the debugger to understand what’s happening and why. Take it one step at a time and focus on improvements to your process. “We’re not trying to rebuild this stuff,” Gorav says, “we’re trying to say, ‘How can we do this better?’”

There are a lot of great tips in this podcast about the importance of learning in your career, when to use subflows, and more, so be sure to listen to the full episode and don’t miss their appearance on Automate This!

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

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Brandon Van Galder, Technical Consultant at Arkus, Inc.

 

Join us as we talk about his tips for getting started with Flow, how omni-channel automation solved a big problem for him, and his tips for breaking into a Salesforce career.

 

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Brandon Van Galder.

Tips for your first Salesforce interview

Before Brandon had ever heard about Salesforce, he was an elementary school PE teacher. When he was feeling burnt out and looking for new opportunities, he happened to hear about Trailhead and the Salesforce Admin role and pretty soon, he was off to the races. He spent about a year as an admin and is now currently a technical consultant with Arkus, Inc.

 

Going from doing a bunch of online training to sitting in an interview and proving that you have the skills to actually be an admin is a big step, and one that many people struggle with. “I would recommend building a custom app in Salesforce,” Brandon says, “find something in your personal life that you can potentially track in Salesforce and build some automations, and then you can talk about that in your interview.” For example, Brandon built a mileage tracker to help him with training for a 5K race.

Mastering the learning curve for flows

Brandon will be appearing on Jennifer Lee’s Automate This! YouTube channel soon to talk about omni-channel automation. “When I first was learning, I was deathly afraid of flows,” he says, “but now I can’t look back, I can barely even use Process Builder after being a Flownatic for the last year or so.”

 

One important thing to keep in mind as you get into flows is that you’re going to get better at it as you go. When Brandon first started, he was trying to send email notifications with flows and it took him about eight hours to get everything working correctly. These days, he can build the same sort of thing and fully test it in a single hour.

Why you should always read the release notes

Brandon had chats coming in from three different sources and a lot of them were getting missed, especially around shift changes. They really needed to know who was online and when. And it just so happened that Salesforce had recently added custom components that could get the availability of agents. It just goes to show that it’s worth it to keep up-to-date on the release notes!

 

You can learn more about how Brandon solved his problem with automation on Automate This!. And make sure to listen to the full episode to hear his tips for getting started with flows, what to look out for when you’re implementing automation, and more.

 

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Mike Gerholdt:  Welcome to the Salesforce Admins podcast. We talk about product, community, and career to help you become an awesome admin. And this week we are talking to Brandon Van Galder, who is a technical consultant at Arkus, but previously a Salesforce Admin and staying on that theme of automation, little bit of omnichannel, little bit of career switching in this. So it's like a chopped salad. There's a lot of little bit of everything in it. That's what I'm going to call this. With that, let's get Brandon on the podcast. So Brandon, welcome to the podcast.

Brandon Van Gal...:Hey Mike. Thanks for having me.

Mike Gerholdt:  Let's get started. For those that don't know who Brandon is, tell me a little bit about Brandon and how Brandon got into the Salesforce ecosystem.

Brandon Van Gal...:Well, that's a good story. I'll start. Before I even knew what Salesforce was, I was a teacher and I actually taught elementary PE for most of my career. And then just got burnt out and I heard a podcast where they talked about becoming a Salesforce Admin and how you can make pretty good money, and the training for that was pretty simple, and they had this thing called Trailhead and just signed up for Trailhead after listening to that and fell in love with it immediately because I love badges and points. Fast forward two years later, still teaching. I landed my first role as a Salesforce Admin at a company called Scale Computing, and I worked there for a little over a year, and now I am currently a technical consultant with Arkus, Inc.

Mike Gerholdt:  Wow. Okay. Was it my podcast? You could say it's my podcast. If not, that's okay.

Brandon Van Gal...:It was not. It was the ChooseFI Podcast.

Mike Gerholdt:  Darn it. Okay, that's fine. I'm going to listen to that now. So that PE, we're going to have to talk about that at the end of the show. You realize that because I think Foursquares should make a comeback because that was a huge PE game for me, but spending that time starting off as a career change before we jump into all the flow stuff, because I know that's what people want too. What was the learning for you moving from being an educator to getting that first Salesforce job? Was this nights and weekends you were just one or two modules or here or there, or was this very deliberate? You set a goal of within two years, I'm going to be out of education. What was that time period for you?

Brandon Van Gal...:It was semi deliberate. I did have a two year plan where I did use nights and weekends and more during spring break, fall break, Christmas break, and especially summer break. I would get a lot of my learning done then, and then transitioning into the business world quite different than the education world. I had to learn that at my first role as well. Just the nuances of business and how it differed from education and that first role was a great learning experience. I landed with a great team. Shout outs to Kelly and Rebecca, if you're hearing this, thanks for all the healthy [inaudible].

Mike Gerholdt:  Of course they are.

Brandon Van Gal...:They really took me under their wings and showed me how to do things.

Mike Gerholdt:  So I get a lot of questions and I'm spending a lot of time on this. I get a lot of questions like, man, that had to have been a hard interview because you're sitting across the table from somebody and you're like, look, I've just done a whole bunch of stuff online. What was the contributing factor or what was one piece of advice you'd give new admins that are looking to make that career change and going through that path into landing that first job?

Brandon Van Gal...:I would recommend building a custom app in Salesforce. I built out a mileage tracker app for running. I did it during COVID and I started training for a 5K, so it aligned with what I was doing in my personal life. So you can just find something in your personal life that you could potentially track in Salesforce and build it. Built out some automations and then you have that you can demonstrate during your interview and talk about and share your experiences of what you did on the platform.

Mike Gerholdt:  I like that. I've done that quite a bit actually in some of the stuff. So you mentioned automation. Let's get into that because I know on Jennifer's automate this episode, you are going to talk about omnichannel, which is very specific. I will say very specific because we've had a lot of her guests on the podcast, but what got you into automating with omnichannel and doing some of that?

Brandon Van Gal...:Yeah. Well, when I first was learning, I was deathly afraid of flows. I was like process builder all the way. I'm going to ride this till it dies, and now Salesforce is basically not supporting it as much anymore. So had to learn pretty quick how to do flows and now I can't look back. I can barely even use Process Builder and look at it and debug it anymore. Trying to figure it out. It just doesn't make sense to me after being flown addict for the past year or so, and then specifically omnichannel at my role in scale computing, we had chats coming in from three different places and a lot of them were getting missed. Hence, the deep dive into omnichannel flows.

Mike Gerholdt:  What was the hook? What made things click? And I asked this because I know I've done a previous podcast with Eric Smith and Gworth and they said, "Start with screen flows," and screen flows are a great way to get your teeth into flow. Was the screen flows that got you or was it something else?

Brandon Van Gal...:For me, it was more sending email notifications using flows just because that's what I was doing in the business and I know you can do it just with email alerts, with workflows and things like that, but we had some unique use cases where we couldn't use flows for that. I mean the first time I built it probably took me eight hours to do one, and then as I got better, I could whip one out in less than an hour, completely tested. And just seeing that learning curve speed up is really helpful and encouraging to myself to use it more.

Mike Gerholdt:  Yeah. What is one area when you're sitting down with a business, and this can be in your previous job as an admin or your current job as a consultant. What are some of the key words that you feel other admins should listen for when determining how much or where to add automation?

Brandon Van Gal...:When someone says, 'We do this all the time and manually," that's a good spot to look for. In some cases you can't automate it, but in a lot of cases you can just with the power of Salesforce. So that's what I look out for when asking questions to clients and business units.

Mike Gerholdt:  So then conversely, because we love to automate all the things, what are red flags that you listen for as well when you're like, I could do this, but it means you're going to get 500 emails

Brandon Van Gal...:When they say, I want to email every time, If you hear the word every time or on every status update or something like that, that is definitely a red flag where you can say, "Hey, let's pump the brakes here." Maybe having a report that shows these and then it gets emailed out once a day or once a week would be a little bit better than getting 500 email alerts in one day.

Mike Gerholdt:  Yeah, no, that makes sense. Are there, because I'm always noodling around in an org, creating stuff. As you look at flows and flows that you've created in the past, are you now seeing just having done this for a while, ways to combine flows together or ways to minimize the number of flows that you're creating?

Brandon Van Gal...:Yeah, absolutely. Early on, I'd never used the invocable flows, but recently I've been using that more where I create at least one section of that flow and can reuse it in multiple different flows, being triggered by different actions. That's been huge. And then I've also used the save as a new flow where instead of having to rebuild it from scratch, you can save a previous flow as a new one and then make whatever minor changes you need off of that, where maybe the decisions might be a little different or the loops might be a little different. Yeah. So I've used those two things.

Mike Gerholdt:  Yeah, no, that makes sense. I know because I'm just looking through at different flows that I've created and sometimes it's so easy and tempting to click that, create new button and you forget all the other stuff that you've added into an org. A little bit back on omnichannel, I think before we pressed record, you were talking about how that got started. Where was some of the omnichannel work that you did and how did that inspire you for automation?

Brandon Van Gal...:At scale computing, we had chat capabilities come in from three different websites, one being like the company's main website, one being the community user portal, and then one being the partner portal. And what was happening is usually during the tier one support agent meeting, they would all log off and then any of the chats that were routed to the tier one agents were being missed. And it just happened to be during that 30 minute window that helped us figure out what to do from there.

Mike Gerholdt:  Yeah. It never fails. It's always right during the shift change or something when everybody presses the little chat button on your site. So thinking through just, you are a school teacher, you moved into the ecosystem, what now do you do to just outside of the daily work to keep up to date with skills, with new features of flow? How do you plan that out?

Brandon Van Gal...:I read the release notes specifically towards flow automation. That's one of the loves. I skip over some of the other stuff I don't necessarily work with every day, but I like to see that. And that came in handy when we were building out this omnichannel flow. We were manually trying to get the availability of the agents and then all of a sudden in the next release, Salesforce had these custom components where you could get the availability of all the agents in a specific queue. And that was really helpful. And knowing that's coming down the pipeline really helps you sustain on top of those. Looking at Trailhead when they update those or make new trails is a good way to stay on top of it too, because it includes that new functionality and then watching some YouTube videos that come out every once in a while via it, Jen's automate this or how I solved it, you see how other people solve issues instead of being just stuck in your own mind, you can see how other people think about flows and use them to solve problems.

Mike Gerholdt:  Yeah, no, that's great. As you build and possibly rebuild flows, what advice would you give on some best practices that you do for user adoption or people really understanding, here's the implication of clicking this button or what this means.

Brandon Van Gal...:Documentation is huge and screen recordings of the steps that are triggering the flow or what happens when you click the button are huge. In my current work now, we record videos and then share them with the clients at times so they can see, hey, when I update this status, something's happening in the background, but this is what it looks like on the front end so they can see the changes that were made.

Mike Gerholdt:  No, that makes sense. Especially with stuff when it's going to just trigger because the record was saved. I think behind the scenes maybe sometimes a user doesn't always know everything else that cascades out as a result of that. So that's good to know. What part of flow and automation is a little bit, lack of a better term here be dragons for you. It's a little unknown. You need to learn it, but it's still off in the distance.

Brandon Van Gal...:I'd say some of those newer components that I just haven't touched yet because I haven't had the business use case to use. And then when you open your mind to everything on the app exchange, what's available out there, be it from unofficial Salesforce, they have some great flow components that I just haven't used, but I've seen in other people's flows. Just trying to wrap my head around what is possible. I think I'm 25% level right now of knowing what flow can do. I feel there's so much more out there that I just don't even understand or comprehend at this point.

Mike Gerholdt:  I don't know if anybody's at 100%.

Brandon Van Gal...:Yeah. There's a lot of things with outbound messages or platform events, things like that that I just haven't touched that I still need to learn about because those are pretty powerful as well.

Mike Gerholdt:  So I asked this on previous pod because I know we'd done a blog post that was probably, Jennifer did a blog post on this, but how often do you find yourself using subflows?

Brandon Van Gal...:I do it on rare occasions. There's one client I'm currently working with where I did use it where it ranks records based on their score. So if a record is created or updated, I can call it, if a record is deleted, I could call a subflow. That ranks everything. So a couple of different use cases personally that I've done. It's just not something I've had to use that often.

Mike Gerholdt:  Yeah, absolutely. Moving into the world of teaching, did you have a favorite PE activity?

Brandon Van Gal...:Absolutely. I was a dodge-ball fan.

Mike Gerholdt:  You call that dodge-ball in schools?

Brandon Van Gal...:You just call it throwing and catching skills and then it's okay. And I'm not big on having the kids sit out for a long time.

Mike Gerholdt:  They would have to catch your way back in.

Brandon Van Gal...:Do some exercise or whatever to come back in the game and keep it like a nonstop because if you keep it nonstop, then they're having fun.

Mike Gerholdt:  Do you ever do the dodge-ball with... We used to put these boxes in the back of the gym and so in addition to getting all the people out, you also had to knock the boxes down.

Brandon Van Gal...:Yeah. We had you use cones or bowling pins on the back. We'd call it pinball bombardment, but same thing, dodge-ball rules, but the real objective for the game was knock down the pins. If you do that type of thing.

Mike Gerholdt:  You win. You get the whole thing. Yeah. Even if nobody's out, you can knock both pit. We did that. Yeah. Of course, immediately when somebody says dodge-ball, I go right to the movie Dodge Ball.

Brandon Van Gal...:It's classic.

Mike Gerholdt:  Yeah. Well, this is great. I feel like we delved into some automation and even touched on little career stuff as well. For people looking to make that switch to go from A to B, whatever A is to either getting into consulting or looking at an admin or consulting job, what was one thing that kept you going?

Brandon Van Gal...:I just really fell in love with Salesforce. Once I started digging in. I didn't know what it was when I heard the podcast, I'd listened to the podcast twice, Google what it was, look at what Trailhead was I had, I didn't know what a CRM was when I first started, but I'd say, "Yeah, just give it a try." Jump on Trailhead, do a couple of modules, and then if you feel that itch and you like it, just keep going because there's a position out there for you.

Mike Gerholdt:  Yeah. No, that's great. And then ball house fails, we can always get a game of dodge-ball together.

Brandon Van Gal...:That's right.

Mike Gerholdt:  Awesome. Brandon, thank you so much for being on the podcast.

Brandon Van Gal...:Yeah, thanks for having me, Mike.

Mike Gerholdt:  So it's fun to have Brandon on the podcast and talk about automation and the way he approaches things. And also it was learning journey. I couldn't help but dive into that. And it wouldn't be the Salesforce admins podcast if we didn't talk about something fun like dodge-ball or Foursquare. Did you have a favorite game while you were in school? I like foursquare. But I'd love to hear it. So send me a tweet, let me know. Also, if you still play that game, good for you because I would love to mark out some chalk on my driveway and get a Foursquare game going. But anyway, I digress.
 If you want to learn more about all things Salesforce Admin, go to admin.salesforce.com to find more resources, including any of the links that we mentioned in this episode as well as a full transcript. You can stay up to date with us on social. We are @Salesforce.Admns on Twitter. Gillian, my co-host is on Twitter. She is @GillianKBruce. And of course I am at Mike Gerholdt. So with that stay safe, stay awesome, and stay tuned for the next episode. We'll see you in the cloud.

Direct download: Brandon_Van_Galder_on_Automated_Omni-Channel_Routing.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:00am PDT

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Melissa Shepard, Salesforce CTA and CEO of Lizztech Consulting.

 

Join us as we talk about how to approach automations in your org and why asynchronous processes are so powerful.

 

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

Simple questions for automations

Melissa started as a Salesforce Developer, working on integrating Salesforce with some of the other systems they were using. “I like to think of integration as a backbone for the bigger, more robust automations that you can build,” she says. And if you think about it, bringing in data to Salesforce and sending it out to other platforms is at the core of what you’re trying to do with automations.

 

In the first phase of a project, Melissa recommends getting a firm grasp on what you’re trying to accomplish. Those simple questions are so important: what is the process? What is the end goal? “It’s not even thinking about the technology but understanding what’s the problem you’re trying to solve, first,” she says, “and then you decide how you’re going to solve that problem with the technology.”

When to rebuild

When you’re coming into an org that’s been around for a while, Melissa recommends getting a good lay of the land. Understand how everything was built and why it was built that way. If you’re missing documentation, make sure to do that as you go to make things easier later.

 

You should especially be on the hunt for processes that are similar but with slight variations. Sometimes you can really simplify things by turning that into one flow with multiple paths. And if you come across something that’s being used multiple times, it could be a good candidate to break out into a subflow.

Asynchronous automation

“You can do so much in Flow nowadays that you could do with Apex,” Melissa says, with looping, updating records, and doing things in batches. And there are some great tools like Orchestrator and MuleSoft Composer that make integrations easier than ever before.

 

Melissa feels that asynchronous automation is one of the most overlooked features in Flow. You can get a lot of benefits from running a process outside of normal operating hours, including more processing power and better performance for your users. She actually has a presentation coming up on this very topic, so if you’re interested in learning more you should catch her talk.

 

Melissa will be appearing on Automate This with Jennifer Lee later in April, so be sure to tune in for more about how your automations can be well-architected.

 

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 Mike: Welcome to the Salesforce Admins podcast. We talk about product, community, and career to help you become an awesome admin. And this week we're talking with Melissa Shepherd, who is a Salesforce CTA and CEO of Liz Tech Consulting. Well, you know about Well Architected automation. If you haven't picked up, we've got a little bit of a theme going. These last few episodes, we've talked last week with Tom Letty about Well Architected automation, talked about some new Trailhead classes around Flow and hyperflow. And coming up, boy, there is some really good stuff coming later in April and early May around cool Flow solutions and some omnichannel stuff. So I'll just tease that out. But of course, Melissa is also going to be on the Automate this series, which is Jennifer Lee's YouTube series, so be sure to check that out. I'll also post a link to it. We get her on the podcast first, so by the time you get to watch her on the video, you've already seen a podcast star, but enough of me talking, let's talk automation and some really cool stuff with Melissa. So let's get Melissa on the podcast.
 So Melissa, welcome to the podcast.

Melissa:Thank you.

 Mike: We're talking a lot about automation and I think it's appropriate to have you on. But before we head into that, give us a little bit of a backstory. How did Melissa come to Salesforce and join the Trailblazer ecosystem?

Melissa:Well, thank you for asking. That's an interesting story. I actually just wrote a really long blog post about all that because a lot of people don't know my journey or where I came from. It actually started back in 2006. So I was a developer and I was brought into the IT department of a small but kind of startup company to help build some customer and partner portals in .net to interface with Salesforce and also do some other customizations written in .net. And one of the systems I had to work with was Salesforce, so I had to build these portals and also I saw an opportunity to integrate Salesforce with our other systems to help the users not have to do double entry to help alleviate errors with information they were entering into the system.
 So this is actually a form of automation. I like to think of integration as a backbone for some bigger, more robust automations that you can build. So that was how I was introduced to Salesforce. And I really loved working with it and decided to keep working in that space and ended up at an integration middleware company working on the Salesforce adapter and the core software. It was written in multiple languages, so I was still in that development role, but still touching Salesforce. And then when I left there, I just went off and did Salesforce consulting around 2009, 2010. And that's what I've been doing ever since.

 Mike: Wow. I think you're the first person I've had on the podcast that has been doing Salesforce since '06, like me.

Melissa:Oh wow.

 Mike: Yeah, you said '06. I was like, oh, do you remember those days of page builder where you used to have to select and then select where the component went and it wasn't wizzy wick and it took you hours to do the simplest thing?

Melissa:Yeah. And I also remember not having sandboxes, and then when we finally did have sandboxes, we had to build things in the sandboxes and then rebuild them all in production.

 Mike: Yeah, I get a lot of grief for that when I talk to people and tell them. Early days, I would build things two or three times. Why? I mean, I remember chain sets coming out and thinking, oh cool, I'm so used to just building and rebuilding things now that I think I might be faster.

Melissa:Yep.

 Mike: Oh, interesting. So I think you're so spot on that integration is really a form of automation. A lot of the podcast that I've had recently where I've spoken with people, we've always talked about automation just within Salesforce and broadening that even bigger to automation outside of Salesforce, just bringing in data from another system as a way to do that, yeah, I'm on board with that.

Melissa:Or pushing it out to another system. So instead of user having to enter something in Salesforce and then going and enter that in the other system, your backend integration's going to push it from Salesforce to that other system. And that's an automation,

 Mike: Right. A 100%. I mean a lot of it is, how do we get things just done in Salesforce, but it's also what are the other systems that people live in? So yeah.

Melissa:Someone that's in an architect role, a CTA role like me, we care about that. We care about the other systems that interact with Salesforce and how all these automations within Salesforce are affecting these other systems or the data that's coming into Salesforce are going out and not just on platform.

 Mike: So tell me and help everyone think, when you sit down with somebody, where does your mind go for automation in terms of planning, even just your first app or the first phase of a project?

Melissa:So I always like to understand what it is they're trying to accomplish. So it always starts with the user. The user usually needs to do something. So having an understanding of what it is they're trying to accomplish, what is the process, what is it that they need to get to? What's that end goal? Or sometimes it isn't user, usually it is, but sometimes it isn't. Like I said, sometimes it could be that backend process that's performing some sort of automation behind the scenes and that could be done with things like Flow or code. So it's not even thinking about the technology, but understanding what's the problem you're trying to solve first and then you then decide how you're going to solve that problem with the technology.

 Mike: Yeah. So step two, and one of the things that I asked Tom was I think it's very easy once you have apps built and you kind of have things going to jump into Flow and create these little one-off Flows. You mentioned as an architect, I'll dive deeper into that. As an architect, how do you resist that urge to keep adding rooms or keep adding closets to a house and really thinking methodically about how you build that automation solution?

Melissa:So understanding what you already have built is a huge part of that and where you need to maybe add on or modify. So instead of just adding something new, you have to understand the house that's already built and maybe there's something you can already use and just modify it a little bit or take advantage of something that's already existing. So sometimes you're not always the architect that built that house, so you have to gain an understanding of how it was built. I actually just went through this before talking to you how I like to sit down and understand current state. So what's the process? What are the processes like now? What do they look like and what supports those processes? And is it in flow, is it in Apex? Are there triggers? What is going on behind the scenes and what was built to understand what's there? And sometimes there's documentation, sometimes there isn't. If there isn't, then it's a good idea to document all that because then you have that to refer back to when you do need to go and add in new functionality or make changes. And that's the best practice.

 Mike: Oh man, I would love to see documentation everywhere and unfortunately it's kind of like when you go on a road trip, you forget how you got there 'cause you were in such a hurry to get somewhere.

Melissa:Exactly.

 Mike: You mentioned processes and kind of getting an idea of current state. I think a lot of people right now are trying to get an idea of current state because they really want to migrate off of process builder and into Flow. As an admin or developer architect looking at current state, what are places that you look at that maybe are the first stop because they're over automated or they have overly too many things that could really be migrated into a simple Flow?

Melissa:Yeah, that's a good question. So it is those areas of process builder and current flows where you want to look at how you can maybe combine things together. So looking at things that are similar processes, but maybe some slight variations. I've actually had to do this exercise before in an org merged scenario. So multiple orgs getting merged into one, lots of automation built in each org that was very similar. So there was an exercise of going through everything and understanding the logic. So this was actually workflow and process builder that I was analyzing, understanding what each one was doing, the processes that were happening and then seeing where everything could be combined, but where there was just some slight variations, then you would have different paths to take within your Flow.

 Mike: Yeah, I think oftentimes there's so many paths that cover over, I'd be curious. I mean anecdotally, I'm sure you run into this a lot where you find processes that update processes that have other processes that re-update them.

Melissa:Yeah. You have to be careful with that too, right? Because you're in an infinite loop of updates. So yeah, definitely. You've got to be careful there and I always like to look at things that are very similar and then where it makes sense to break something out into a subflow, something that's maybe being used over and over multiple times, that is a good candidate to go into a subflow.

 Mike: I was just about to ask you, how often do you use subflows?

Melissa:Yeah, where it makes sense.

 Mike: Where it makes sense.

Melissa:It's actually the same concept as development in Apex. So you have things like functions that get called for different purposes and you put them in maybe helper classes. So they get called by all kinds of different code. So when you see something that is getting reused, you want to push that out into your helper class that can then support your other code. So that's the same idea as a subflow.

 Mike: Oh, I like that. Subflow is like a helper class.

Melissa:Right? Exactly.

 Mike: I had a lot of fun discussions at TDX and I'm sure you've had a lot of fun discussions maybe even just today. How often should somebody go back and revisit Flows or processes that they built in order to make sure that they actually reflect the way that the business does business?

Melissa:That's actually a good question. That's going to depend on how often the processes within the business change. So if a business has processes that stay pretty much the same, I couldn't see that as being something that's really critical. But if it's a business that's growing and changing and their processes are changing or they're acquiring other businesses, you absolutely need to go in and look at those processes. So mergers and acquisitions, that's something that at a more higher level, global level that someone like a CTA is caring about. We care about how these mergers and acquisitions are affecting current business process and how it's affecting the current technology within Salesforce and also in the entire enterprise. So those are the scenarios where you're going to really need to go back and evaluate current processes against newer processes that are coming in. I've had to do that to support organizations that were merging together, their processes were different, had to really go in and look at everything, what can be merged together, what needs to be separate, and just understand how that all can live within the same system.
 So yeah, I guess it's going to depend on the business. The business is going to drive that.

 Mike: Yeah, understandably. And hopefully the business keeps you up to date.

Melissa:Right.

 Mike: So I've had that as an admin too where three months later you're looking at something like, we don't do things that way anymore. Since when? Since you have told me?

Melissa:Right, exactly. Yeah, and that's interesting. So I think that's where the admin still has to play that role of advisor as well. When the business is not telling you things, you get to be more liaison with the business, have a point of contact that you can go to, maybe sit down or review things with. As companies grow and get bigger, they create these centers of excellence that are overseeing these types of things. But when you're just in a lonely admin at a company, you don't have that kind of structure in place, you kind of get to play that role yourself.

 Mike: Yeah. You have to be a thorn in their side. That's the way I always looked at it

Melissa:Yeah. And play that role of advisor. So maybe instead of waiting for them to come to you, maybe trying to find out what's going on or things changing, how are things going and how are the processes working for you and just check-ins.

 Mike: Okay, so in looking at Flows and a business process changes, at what point do you think I need to modify and add on and build a more complex Flow or should I build a new Flow?

Melissa:I would say if the process is very different. So you look at the current process you're building for and the existing processes that are covered in your existing Flows, and a way that I like to do that is having process diagrams. So there are tools out there that can help you create those process diagrams so that you can understand your current business process that you don't have to go through and understand every single detail of the flow. And really understand what they're all doing so that you can decide if one of them is similar enough to what you're building for. If there's enough, and it's hard to really pinpoint that point where it's enough. So I always like to say if you see at least a few similarities in something, then maybe that's a good candidate to build off of. If there's not enough, it also depends on how big it is too. So that's a hard question.

 Mike: Well, and a lot of times there's no right answer, right? I mean, for sure I've looked at Flows and thought we could add on to this, but at what point is it going to be so incredibly hard to troubleshoot and to debug?

Melissa:Yeah, exactly. And got to look at, am I going to make this one Flow too complicated? Does it make sense to just put this new process into its own Flow? Is it small enough to where it's just a slight variation and it's similar enough that it's not going to overcomplicate. So I'll just add on and modify the current one. So that really does take some analysis. Like you said, there's no right or wrong answer there.

 Mike: Yeah, because if you've been working in Salesforce since '06, you remember workflows and how little we could do with those, but it still felt like a lot.

Melissa:Right.

 Mike: And then we went to Process Builder, which was like an animated process diagram and now we're in the new Flow builder. What about Flow now for you is the most exciting?

Melissa:I would say the fact that you can do so much in Flow that you can do with Apex nowadays, that's exciting.

 Mike: Such as?

Melissa:Just some of the logic that you can build in and then you can even call invocable actions in Apex. So if there is something that some complex logic that you need to run that you just can't build and flow, you can then just call your Apex there. But just a lot of the things you can do like looping and getting records and updating records and doing stuff in batch. And there's just so much power in the Flow now as opposed to what you could do with Workflow or Process Builder that you don't need to just go to Apex to do some of these more complex business processes and error handling and things like that. You can even build tests for your flows, which is great. So it's a little bit more like building tests for your code.

 Mike: Because we started talking about integration and then we got off that a little bit. What is some of the biggest stuff that you are excited about looking at? We now have Orchestrator as an option.

Melissa:So yeah, there are some great tools like Orchestrator, MuleSoft Composer that are helping to build an integration. So a couple of the things that are exciting with Flow is there's HTTP callouts, so you can make direct callouts to endpoints from within Flow. There's external services, that's another way you can integrate. There's also platform events. So you can create platform events with Flow or not create them, but write records into your platform event, which can then be subscribed to you by something like MuleSoft. There's so much integration capability out of the box now within Salesforce. And because there is a lot, you want to understand which one you would want to use for each of the different types of use cases. What's a fire and forget versus what's a request and reply? And those are patterns that architects really care about. So you have certain use cases for certain patterns and then you have the technology that you want to use that's the best solution for each of those patterns.

 Mike: Two questions as we wrap up both ends of the spectrum. I think the first one, it's very fortunate for people, the longer they're around the technology, the more they see it evolve, the easier it is to kind of grasp the concept. But for you in understanding Flow, what was the one hook that made everything click?

Melissa:So I really got into it when I had to build a custom process off of opportunities to interface with Field Service Lightning. And I can say really got hooked because I had to build this custom process and it just made it so easy to build it and get it done, didn't have to go to code. It made it so fast to get it done and delivered the functionality that was expected and needed.

 Mike: So conversely, thing that got you hooked, what do you find or what do you think is the most overlooked feature in Flow?

Melissa:Now? You can do things synchronously and asynchronously within the same flow and maybe the asynchronous stuff is probably the stuff that's most overlooked. And I actually speak on asynchronous automation specifically, and I actually have a presentation that I'm going to do specifically on all the ways you can automate asynchronously with Flow. Because that's even something that's not well understood and there's different ways to do it. And being able to understand when you'd want to use one versus the other I think is very powerful. So that probably is an area that is overlooked and not well understood as to when and why you would want to use it.

 Mike: Yeah, I mean, without seeing your presentation completely understand, I mean I think with Flow we think of how do we make something happen right now? When this either record happens or field changes or something, how does it happen right now as opposed to not right now? I guess is the easiest way to put it.

Melissa:That doesn't have to always be instant gratification in something that you learn as you grow as an architect is you really like to take advantage of asynchronous processing. There's reasons for it. You get more power out of the platform, you can allow more for your users so you're not tying up resources for them to get their jobs done. So where I was going with this is now we're talking about Salesforce Well Architected and Well Architected is telling you that you really want to try to use asynchronous processing as much as possible.
 Synchronous when you absolutely have to, and there's certain times when you have to use synchronous, but there's also certain times when you have to go asynchronous and there's ways you can do that with Flow. So that's an exciting area and that's where I like to start talking about what are these well-architected concepts, how can we start applying them? What are the different ways we can build them into our automations? And that that's actually one of my presentations I actually did at Dreamforce, asynchronous automations presentation. I do that at some community events and like I said, I'm also going to be doing one specifically on how to go asynchronous with Flow.

 Mike: And we talked a lot last week with Tom Letty about Well Architected. So I'll be sure to put a link to the previous week's podcast, keep people listening in the show notes so they can listen to that.

Melissa:I think admins should get to know Well Architected as much as they can because it's just going to help them become better admins and grow into architect level if they so wish.

 Mike: Absolutely. In fact, we've had calls with that team because the goal is to build the best possible application, right? And fun fact, in May I have Gorav, Seth and Eric Smith on about their Flow solutions. And Gorav has a very similar one where it was actually a reporting thing that we talk about because we don't need that constant... I'm sure you've heard or been across the table from some sales manager that had to get an email every time an opportunity closes. And it's like you don't want 600 emails. That doesn't help. You really want one email that's summarized of the hundred top opportunities and you don't get that by firing off an email every single day or every single time. Exactly.

Melissa:Yeah, that becomes more noise. And then you can even take advantage of things like notifications as well within the platform if you don't want to get too many emails.

 Mike: Right, yes, exactly.

Melissa:Which can then have your records.

 Mike: So I'll end on this question for you, Melissa. If an admin or anybody listening is ready to get into automation, and this is similar to a question I ask Gorav and Eric, what should be the first thing they should look at?

Melissa:As far as to how to automate?

 Mike: I leave that very open for a reason because I think it's important to understand businesses definitely need to automate processes and there's automation in Salesforce and as we've talked, integration is also automation. But it's one thing to build an app, I think it's the next thing and take that app to the next level and start adding automation to it. Where did you start?

Melissa:Usually you look at where pain points are for your users, where maybe they're doing things multiple times or there's repetitive tasks. If you can bring value to your users and your business, that's where you want to look and that's where you want to start trying to build an automation. So you really want to understand those processes, look at where you can alleviate some issues in the process and then figure out the right technology to bring in, whether it's Flow or something else that's going to be developed like Batch Apex or something because you can automate with Apex as well. It's not always just Flow. Sometimes there's better use cases for going to something like that, but Flow is such a powerful tool like we've talked about that you just really need to understand the process to know which tool to use, if that makes sense.

 Mike: It absolutely makes sense. And thank you so much Melissa for spending time with us today. I appreciate you coming on the podcast.

Melissa:Yeah, no problem. Thank you for having me. Really enjoyed our discussion.

 Mike: And of course we appreciate Melissa taking time out of her day to talk through Well Architected Automation. Only took me an entire episode to get that out verbatim, but boy, it has been a trip. Talk and flow these last few episodes and automation. I hope you enjoy it. It's more to come. And of course, if you want to learn more about all things Salesforce admin, go to admin.salesforce.com to find more resources, including any of the links that we mentioned in this episode, as well as a full transcript. Now you can stay up to date with us on social, we are at Salesforceadmins no I on Twitter, my co-host Gillian is on Twitter. She is at GillianKBruce. And of course I'm on Twitter as well. I am at MikeGerholdt. So with that, stay safe, stay awesome, and stay tuned for the next episode. We'll see you in the cloud.

Direct download: Melissa_Shepard_on_Well_Architected_Automation.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:00am PDT

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Tom Leddy, Principal Evangelist, Architect Relations at Salesforce.

 

Join us as we talk about how admins can build well-architected automation solutions.

 

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

Salesforce Well-Architected

Tom is here to tell us about a new program the Architect team created, Salesforce Well-Architected. It’s a framework organized around the principles you need to understand what healthy solutions look like in Salesforce. “There’s a lot of great information there regardless of what your role is,” Tom says, “I think the lines between what admins do and what architects do are blurred these days.”

 

The Well-Architected Framework will help you get a handle on how to think about the big picture when it comes to making decisions in your Salesforce org. For example, how to put together a security model that is strong, scalable, and meets everyone’s needs over the long haul.

What makes something well-architected?

One of the things they cover in-depth is how to create well-architected automations. How do you make something that will scale and will actually add value to your business? Because, as powerful as automations are, if you’re automating a process that doesn’t make sense in the first place then you might be hurting your business more than you realize.

 

What needs to happen first is business process optimization, asking questions like: Why do we need to do things this way? What other business processes does this affect? Is this process repeated elsewhere in your org? Only when you’ve gotten all that straightened out do you start to build.

Why you need to remediate technical debt

This is especially important as everything is moving over to flows. We have the opportunity to look at things that might’ve been over-built in Process Builder and rethink them moving forward. There’s an architecting term for that: technical debt.

 

Every org will accrue technical debt over time. Maybe you’ve acquired new skills and that you didn’t have 6 months ago. Maybe Salesforce has added a new feature that makes everything easier. Whatever the reason, you need to make business stakeholders aware of the long-term benefits of remediating technical debt—building a foundation for better solutions in the future. And, like any debt, you need to pay it off little by little or it’ll just grow even bigger in the future.

 

Tom will be appearing on Automate This with Jennifer Lee later in April, so be sure to tune in for more how your automations can be well-architected.

 

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Full Transcript

Mike Gerholdt: Welcome to the Salesforce Admins Podcast where we talk about product, community, and career to help you become an awesome admin. And this week we're talking with Tom Leddy, principal evangelist, architect relations at Salesforce about how admins can build well architected automation solutions. And we did get into a few other things like documentation best practices, and really some tips that architects can give admins. It's a super fun conversation. Tom and I had a chance to catch up after TrailblazerDX, and of course Tom will also be on the Automate this series with Jennifer Lee later in April. So if you're listening to this early in April, hang on for later in April because he's also going to be on Automate this. And if you're listening later, obviously go check our YouTube page. But fun conversation. There is a question I asked Tom at the end about some fun stuff that he does, and I promise you you don't know the answer. So with that, let's get Tom on the podcast. So Tom, welcome to the podcast.

Tom Leddy:Thank you. It's great to be here.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. Well, we had a chance to catch up at TrailblazerDX, which feels like not that long ago, but for anybody listening that doesn't know you or ran into at a big event, tell me what you do at Salesforce and how you came here.

Tom Leddy:Sure. So I am an architect evangelist. I'm part of the architect relations team. And what I do at Salesforce is my team is responsible for creating tools and resources to help architects be successful at their jobs. And I help to make sure that our ecosystem is aware of those tools and knows how to use them and where to find them.

Mike Gerholdt: Very succinct. So what'd you do before Salesforce?

Tom Leddy:Before Salesforce, I worked at a variety of different customers and partners and I've been working in the ecosystem for a little over 10 years and used to lead digital transformations. I had big Fortune 500 companies and worked for a partner for a little while and then got the call from Salesforce.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. That's how it works. Boy, I think back to the last, I don't know, 10 years. You said 10 years. And digital transformations to me feel like we were going from steam powered engines to electric cars overnight to some degree.

Tom Leddy:When I think about tech as a whole, but specifically the Salesforce platform and what it looks like now compared to what it looked like when I first started working with it, it's night and day for sure.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. I remember page builder having to double click because it wasn't even wizzywig. You just double clicked and move stuff. Yeah. Anyway. So we chatted at TrailblazerDX and stuff. I saw a lot of people at TrailblazerDX and probably in the community have heard about this, but I want to get up to speed. Tell me about what well architected is.

Tom Leddy:Sure. So Salesforce, well architected is a framework that we created. Then it's available on the Salesforce architect's website, which we can share the link in the show notes. And it is a framework that is organized around the principles that you need to see what healthy solutions look like in Salesforce and where to spend your time and what to focus on as an architect.

Mike Gerholdt: What if I'm an admin?

Tom Leddy:You know what? Actually, there's a lot of great information there, regardless of what your role is. And I think there's honestly the lines between what admins do and what architects do are blurred a lot really now compared to, again, when we go back to what it was like to work on the platform 10 years ago compared to today. It's hard to put people into specific roles I think now compared to maybe early on. So there's a lot of great information for everybody on the site.

Mike Gerholdt: So help me understand that because I feel like I can't speak for everybody, but I've lived in the admin world my whole life and I've always seen what architect's done, and I feel like, wow, that's super way more detailed than where my brain is at. But you said there's a blur there. What do you see in that blur?

Tom Leddy:Well, I'll take security for an example. So that's one of the topics we cover in, well architected, how do I physically configure a sharing rule, which is obviously good to know, but then how should I even be thinking about putting together a security model so that it's going to be stronger long term for my organization? It's going to scale, it's going to meet everybody's needs. And that's the guidance that we really put in well architected, which is how should I even be approaching this and what should I look for to know if something is set up the right way or if it's bad and there's something maybe I need to refactor. We have some of that prescriptive guidance and then some tables that have what we call patterns and anti-patterns where a pattern is something you can physically see in an org of if you see your security model set up like this and it has these characteristics, good job, keep going, you're doing great.
 And then an anti-pattern would be okay if you see these things, hold on, stop what you're doing and let's maybe rethink this. And you may have to even have a conversation with your business stakeholders where you're going back and saying, you know what, before we keep building something on top of this that's going to cause more issues down the road. Yes, it might delay this next project, or it might be a little bit more expensive, but it's going to pay off a lot more in the long run.

Mike Gerholdt: Then you're not building something on a house of cards?

Tom Leddy:Exactly.

Mike Gerholdt: So let's take that one step further because I know later in April you are going to be on Jennifer's Automate this YouTube series. So plug there.

Tom Leddy:Looking forward to it.

Mike Gerholdt: Which would be fun. But let's talk about what is well architected automation.

Tom Leddy:Sure. So automation, that's one of the other topics we cover and we talk about how to design good automations that, number one, will scale and we'll also, we'll actually create value for a business because I'm sure everybody has seen this at one time or another where somebody will come and maybe they'll ask you to build a flow or whatever it is. And they'll describe a process and you'll be thinking in your head, "Okay. Why are you even doing this way in the first place?" And then you push back and maybe ask a few questions, and really it comes out, well, nobody really knows why we're doing it this way, but we always have and now we want to build it in Salesforce. And then you want to be thinking, "Well, do you really want to automate something that you're not even really clear on why you're doing it in the first place?"
 So that's the first topic that we actually cover in well architected, is that business process optimization piece. And then we go in a little bit deeper into, okay, now you've figured out it's okay to build this automation, it makes sense from a business perspective. Now how do we actually build it in a way that is going to be scalable and sustainable over the long term? And that's where we start talking about things like data integrity and transaction handling and asynchronous versus synchronous patterns and those types of topics.

Mike Gerholdt: I hear you, because the crazy thing is, I'm thinking about some of the conversations I had at TrailblazerDX with customers that are looking at their automations, and of course, we're moving everything to flow now, which right fits really well with this well architected thing because I feel like we're architecting things even better now. We being the royal we of admins. But in terms of this is a good opportunity for us to look at, hey, what is some of the stuff that we might have overbuilt and process builder and move it over into flow?
 What is your approach for when stuff, I don't want to call it end of life, but the features degrade and something new comes in? Because often, especially when I was starting as an admin, the joke was you talk with a developer and they'd a few years later, six months later, look at the code they wrote now having skilled themselves even more and been like, "How could I have written this bad code?" Do you often find that you look at automations or work with people in automations? It's like, "How could I have automated this? Why did I build six pages of process builder?"

Tom Leddy:Yeah. All the time. And I can say I work people with people that would say something like that, but I would also say something like that myself. Because if I think about some of the automations I built maybe early on in my career, I'm even looking at myself going, "Did I really build that? What was I thinking?" And you're right. And we call that, we have a term for that actually. We call it technical debt, which is something that could be created for a variety of different reasons. One is I built something that now that I know a little bit more, I maybe I could have done it better and there was a more efficient way to do this. Another reason it can be created is because Salesforce comes out with a feature that maybe you don't need that automation anymore because it's available in as the standard part of the platform now.
 And there's a variety of reasons that you would do that. And the recommendation that we give is that to involve business stakeholders in any technical debt remediation, because if you make that just IT's problem, then what ends up happening is the admins are going, "We really need to fix this. This is not the best way to be doing this," and all you really have to go back to your business stakeholders with this. So if we fix it's pretty much going to work the same way that it works today from your perspective, but it's just going to be better "technically." And a lot of business stakeholders will say, "Well, we don't want to pay for that."
 So what we recommend is making sure that business stakeholders are aware of the long-term benefits of remediating technical debt, which is that it's building a stronger foundation that you can build even better things on in the future, and that they're willing to make that part of projects and things that they're willing to pay for throughout the course of the year, and that they're aware that it's necessary to do that, to keep your system healthy.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. I feel like that's the hard conversation to have is why aren't you building new as opposed to how come all you're doing is maintenance stuff? That was always a discussion that I had to have with my stakeholders was, here's the three features I can deliver because I also need to maintain the other stuff. What is your advice on conversations like that? How from an architect standpoint would you advise an admin to balance that?

Tom Leddy:Would be working to make sure that you've got a governance structure or is use the term COE, that includes both business and IT stakeholders. And when anybody is estimating how much is a project going to cost, how much is this implementation going to cost? Like you said, everybody wants to build new, but if you factor in the, okay, we're going to build this and here's how much it's going to cost to build it. Also, we're going to be maintaining it for the next X number of years realistically, how much is it going to cost per year to maintain and how much time are we going to need? And making sure that, that information is gathered and communicated upfront so that it's not a surprise down the road is probably the best way to handle that.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. No, that makes sense. I feel like the best intentions, whatever that saying is slips my mind, but I feel like when you sit down, one thing that I've always admired about architects is I feel like they have this very holistic view. And sometimes as we operate in a world that doesn't give us everything, I sat down with a couple admins at TrailblazerDX, and they didn't have the full business view yet, but they wanted to build for that scale. How do you work through that? What is an architect's mindset knowing... I always envision a house... knowing I have to build a house, but possibly five more additions to it.

Tom Leddy:That involves a lot of communications. Usually at the executive level too. And I think one of the unfortunate things that happens a lot to admins is you get put into a position where people expect to just give you a set of specs and say, "Okay. Go ahead and build this." And by the time that gets to you, the discussions about what are we going to be building in the future have maybe already been had. And then you don't have the opportunity to come back in and say, "Okay. This looks like it's going to meet maybe a short term need, but are you sure this is really what you want to do?" And I think the biggest thing to do there is don't be afraid to push back when you see scenarios like that where you're curious about it.
 And I think one of the things that you had mentioned a minute ago when you were asking the question is, well, what if we don't even know? And some of that comes with experience too, is knowing the right questions to ask. And I feel like that sounds like a consulting type answer, but the truth is, the more you work, more start to think about things and I feel like your mind goes there naturally. Because when I think about earlier in my career, when I started out, I was in that role where it was people would give me a spec and I would be like, "All right. Okay, whatever. I'll build whatever you tell me to build."
 And as time went on and I started to see what was happening as a result of some of the things that people had asked me to build 18 months ago that are now coming back to bite us as an organization, because what we built was really shortsighted over time, you get and you get that experience where you start to realize, "Okay. I need to be asking these questions first." And then it really comes down to when those questions start to pop up and you're not getting good answers, don't be afraid to hold off on something and keep pushing back until you feel comfortable.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. And unfortunately, that can be the hard part to do. What can happen often is admins come into a role and previous admins vacated it. And I want to talk a little bit about documentation here because as an architect, I always feel like you're in this room of blueprints and every wire and diagram and everything's methodically planned out and the admin's in a little bit of a messy cave, but maybe that's just the world I live in. What are some of the things that you would advise, especially around automation? And I bring this up because not too long ago it was process builder, all the things. Now it's flow, and we have Orchestrator. Plus we also have MuleSoft. We have a lot of other ways to integrate. What are some of the best practices that you feel architects could give to admins around documentation, especially around automation?

Tom Leddy:Actually, I'm glad you asked. So we have in our various well architected chapters, there are some links at the bottom to additional resources. And one of the chapters is called Simple and Simple, the way that we tell it, the overarching pillar is easy. And then Simple, talks about not over-engineering, and I like to tell people, easy doesn't mean that it's easy for you as an architect. It means that as an architect, you've made all of the hard decisions to make it easy for your business to get value out of your solutions. But underneath the easy/simple chapter, we've got a list of tools and resources, and there are some templates for documentation.
 So we've got a template that you can download for things like design standards, so naming conventions and specific processes that you might want to follow. And then we've also got one to download just simply for documentation and what fields do I need to be filling out and what information do I need to be providing to make sure that if I walk away from this project and hand it off to somebody else, they're going to have all of the information that they need. And I'm not going to be getting phone calls every five minutes to try and explain things that I don't necessarily even want to talk about anymore because I've move on to something else.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Or you're somewhere else.

Tom Leddy:Yeah. Or you've physically gone to a different company and they can't call you.

Mike Gerholdt: I've seen that actually a few times at user groups where they'll walk up and, "Hey, used to work at... Can you tell me what this thing meant?" I didn't explicitly write that down enough. Sorry about that. Tom, outside of drawing diagrams and writing incredible documentation and building templates for admins, what are some of the things that you enjoy maybe outside of Salesforce, hobbies, VTO, stuff like that?

Tom Leddy:So let's see. So I have run at least a half-marathon in all 50 US states and on all seven continents.

Mike Gerholdt: What?

Tom Leddy:Yeah.

Mike Gerholdt: First of all, I didn't even know that all 50 states had a half-marathon. I feel like first the Rhode Island ones basically just run across the state.

Tom Leddy:Yeah, it's pretty close. Yeah.

Mike Gerholdt: Wow. Okay. All 50. I haven't even been to all 50 states.

Tom Leddy:Actually worked out nicely. It was a good way to see the country and then the rest of the world as well.

Mike Gerholdt: Okay. That's really cool. And is those number things that come from it, or, I'm sure you have pictures too?

Tom Leddy:Yeah. I've got a bunch of pictures and yeah, I've saved my race numbers and medals and everything that I've gotten over the years.

Mike Gerholdt: Wow, okay. That's a trivia question answer, I would've got wrong. For sure. And all seven continents too.

Tom Leddy:Yeah. Actually, it was about a year ago now, but went to Antarctica and did continent number seven.

Mike Gerholdt: What?

Tom Leddy:Yeah.

Mike Gerholdt: Okay. Very cool.

Tom Leddy:Thanks.

Mike Gerholdt: Wow. You might win of all the answers for the rest of the year now.

Tom Leddy:Thank you.

Mike Gerholdt: I don't know how to top that. Yeah, okay.

Tom Leddy:It was a really cool experience too. And Antarctica in particular was number one because it's Antarctica, but number two, because I was actually supposed to go back in 2020 and the trip got delayed and then delayed again and delayed multiple times because of COVID. It ended up, when I finally got to go, it was the grand finale for this big long-running journey that I had started. It took me about 15 years total to do.

Mike Gerholdt: I mean, maybe there was nothing but it was there something that kicked off this like, "Hey, I'm going to do this in all 50 states and all seven continents?"

Tom Leddy:It was funny. So I had done some local races and then I had some friends that lived in other states, and I would go to visit them and just look to see if there was an interesting race to do during the weekend that I was going to be there. And after a while I got to a point where I realized, "Wow. I've run in 10 different states. That would be cool to do all 50." And then from there, I started actually making plans specifically to go to states around the races that I wanted to do in those states.

Mike Gerholdt: Okay. So do you have a favorite that stood out?

Tom Leddy:In the States, it would be Alaska, I think.

Mike Gerholdt: And why is that?

Tom Leddy:So it's during summer solstice.

Mike Gerholdt: Okay. So the sun never sets.

Tom Leddy:Exactly. And the way that it works is you do the race at around 8:00 AM, which is around the same time most races are, and the race is awesome too because it goes through downtown Anchorage and then out into the wilderness for the second half. So I got to see a moose standing alongside the course and it was pretty cool. But then when you come back, the idea is because it's light out all night, you go back to your hotel, take a shower, get something to eat, sleep for a few hours, and then starting in the evening, there is an all night festival in downtown Anchorage where they close off pretty much all of the streets in the city, and there's dancing and food and everything. And it's summer solstice fest that goes all night. And you don't even realize it's like two o'clock in the morning because the sun is still out. And it was a fun weekend.

Mike Gerholdt: Wow. I was going to ask, I mean, I wonder if you're sleep equilibrium or whatever they call that, it was way wacky?

Tom Leddy:It when I got home. I definitely noticed it because then I had to go back to my normal schedule of sleeping in the evenings. But when you're there, surprisingly, I don't know what the specific word is for the effect that it has on your brain, but because it's sunny out and it looks like it's two o'clock in the afternoon when it's really two o'clock in the morning, for some reason, your brain doesn't think that you're supposed to be tired right now.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. It's I think back to some of the shows when they're in space for so long. Can I just see gravity? Yeah. You get back home, you're like, "Darkness."

Tom Leddy:Yes.

Mike Gerholdt: Wow. That's really cool. Well, Tom, thanks for being on the pod and enlightening us on being well architected. I think some of this is so cool. I can't wait to see what you're going to talk to Jennifer about.

Tom Leddy:Thanks. Yeah. I'm looking forward to that for sure. And we'll actually some of the topics we talked about earlier with automated, and then we'll do a little bit of a deeper dive into actually building some automations too, so it's-

Mike Gerholdt: Because, I mean visual.

Tom Leddy:Yeah, exactly.

Mike Gerholdt: Great. Well, thanks so much, Tom. This is fun.

Tom Leddy:Thank you. This has been great.

Mike Gerholdt: So Tom wins half-marathon in all 50 states and seven continents. That's pretty cool. I mean, that's one of the fun takeaways I had from our conversation. There was so much in there, and it was really interesting to get that architect's perspective around thinking through business process and how we automate solutions and how we architect solutions and really that planning process. Some of that can be super exciting to get into. At least I find it exciting.
 Now, if you want to learn more about all things Salesforce Admin, go to admin.salesforce.com to find more resources, including all the links that we mentioned in this episode, as well as a full transcript. You can stay up to date with us on social. We are @SalesforceAdmns. No I, on Twitter. My co-host Gillian, is on Twitter. She is @GillianKBruce, and of course you can give me a follow. I am @MikeGerholdt. So with that stay safe, stay awesome, and stay tuned for the next episode. We'll see you in the cloud.

Direct download: Well-Architected_Automation_with_Tom_Leddy.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:00am PDT

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

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

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

Enroll in Trailhead Academy

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

ADX301: Automate No-Code Solutions Using Flow

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

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

ADX350: Build Salesforce Hyperautomation Solutions with MuleSoft

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

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

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

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

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Direct download: New_Admin_Classes_from_Trailhead_Academy_with_Stuart_and_Feroz.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:00am PDT

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

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

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

What’s the biggest mistake new admins make?

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

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

Measure twice and cut once

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

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

Your time to shine

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

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

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Full Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LeeAnne Rimel: Absolutely.

Gillian Bruce: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LeeAnne Rimel: Thank you, Gillian.

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

Direct download: Biggest_Mistakes_Admins_Make_with_LeeAnne_Rimel.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:00am PDT

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

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

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

The birth of Automation Champion

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

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

Why you should start blogging

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

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

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

How Rakesh writes a new post

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

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

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

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

Rakesh Gupta: Thank you for inviting me, Mike.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mike:  I know.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rakesh Gupta:30 minutes.

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

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

Mike:  Wow.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Direct download: Automation_Champion_with_Rakesh_Gupta.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:00am PDT

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

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

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

What is Data Cloud?

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

 

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

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

How Data Cloud empowers admins

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

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

  1. Bring data in

  2. Transform the data

  3. Harmonize the data

  4. Generate insights on that data

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

How to get ready for Data Cloud

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

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

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

  3. Decide which users will need to access what.

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

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

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

MK: Thank you, Gillian. How are you?

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

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

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

Mike:  It's always a data party.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gillian Bruce:  Wow.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Direct download: Data_Cloud_for_Admins_with_Muralidhar_Krishnaprasad.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:00am PDT

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

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

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

Scheduling on-call hours for a telehealth organization

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

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

Why research should always be the first step

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

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

How Lynn skilled up quickly in Flow

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

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

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

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Direct download: Solve_Problems_by_Experimenting_with_Lynn_Guyer.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:00am PDT

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

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

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

Doing more with less

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

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

The formula Erick uses to measure efficiency

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

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

How to build trust

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

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

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

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Full Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

Erick Mahle:Exactly right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Erick Mahle:February 22nd is the next one.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Erick Mahle:Likewise.

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

Direct download: 2023_Outlook_for_Salesforce_Admins_with_Erick_Mahle.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:00am PDT

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

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

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

Turn new knowledge into a new job

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

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

Why mentorship is so important

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

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

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

Other programs to help you grow your career

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

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

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

 

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Direct download: Workforce_Development_with_Shirlene_Chow.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:00am PDT

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

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

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

Blog highlights from January

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

Video highlights from January

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

Podcast highlights from January

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

Just for fun

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

 

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Direct download: January_Monthly_Retro_with_Mike_and_Gillian.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:00am PDT

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

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

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

Why you should speak at a Salesforce event

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

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

Overcoming imposter syndrome

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

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

Tips for talks

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

Build good security habits

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

Engage with other teams in your organization

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

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

Planning for the worst-case scenario

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

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

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Full Transcript

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

Laura Pelkey:                                          Hey Mike.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Laura Pelkey:                                          Yeah, exactly.

Mike :                                                 Got you.

Laura Pelkey:                                          And Beets Battlestar Galactica and Bears.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lynn Simons:                                           Exactly.

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

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

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

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

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

Laura Pelkey:                                          That's such a good question.

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

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

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

Laura Pelkey:                                          [inaudible].

Mike :                                                 I had no idea.

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

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

Mike :                                                 You're still an admin.

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

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

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

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

Lynn Simons:                                           We'd be thrilled.

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

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

Lynn Simons:                                           Ooh, I love that.

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

Lynn Simons:                                           And I also-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lynn Simons:                                           Yeah, that was-

Laura Pelkey:                                          I love Last Pass also.

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

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

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

Lynn Simons:                                           Social engineering.

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

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

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

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

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

Laura Pelkey:                                          Yes.

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

Laura Pelkey:                                          [inaudible].

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

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

Mike :                                                 I know we could just wear a button.

Laura Pelkey:                                          No, I love that idea though.

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

Mike :                                                 People like stickers.

Laura Pelkey:                                          Yeah.

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

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

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

Laura Pelkey:                                          And variety.

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

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

Mike :                                                 Sure it has.

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

Mike :                                                 Planes.

Laura Pelkey:                                          And with all their plushies.

Mike :                                                 [inaudible] Luggage just...

Laura Pelkey:                                          Must be a site.

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

Laura Pelkey:                                          Thank you, Mike.

Lynn Simons:                                           Thanks so much, Mike.

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


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

 

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

 

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

Work together better.

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

 

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

Prioritization when you’re starting from the ground up

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

 

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

Athlete Data: custom objects or contact records?

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

 

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

 

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

 

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Full show transcript

Gillian Bruce:

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

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

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

Kat, welcome to the podcast.

 

Kat Aquino:

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

 

Gillian Bruce:

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

 

Kat Aquino:

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

 

Gillian Bruce:

Okay, so kind of a big deal.

 

Kat Aquino:

No pressure or anything.

 

Gillian Bruce:

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

 

Kat Aquino:

Yeah, I believe it was '84.

 

Gillian Bruce:

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

 

Kat Aquino:

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

 

Gillian Bruce:

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

 

Kat Aquino:

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

 

Gillian Bruce:

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

 

Kat Aquino:

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

 

Gillian Bruce:

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

 

Kat Aquino:

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

 

Gillian Bruce:

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

 

Kat Aquino:

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

 

Gillian Bruce:

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

 

Kat Aquino:

It has been a little over a year now.

 

Gillian Bruce:

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

 

Kat Aquino:

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

 

Gillian Bruce:

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

 

Kat Aquino:

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

 

Gillian Bruce:

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

 

Kat Aquino:

Yeah.

 

Gillian Bruce:

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

 

Kat Aquino:

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

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

 

Gillian Bruce:

Yeah.

 

Kat Aquino:

Does that make sense?

 

Gillian Bruce:

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

 

Kat Aquino:

Yeah.

 

Gillian Bruce:

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

 

Kat Aquino:

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

 

Gillian Bruce:

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

 

Kat Aquino:

Yeah.

 

Gillian Bruce:

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

 

Kat Aquino:

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

 

Gillian Bruce:

Boo.

 

Kat Aquino:

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

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

 

Gillian Bruce:

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

 

Kat Aquino:

It was rough, and I think they would agree.

 

Gillian Bruce:

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

 

Kat Aquino:

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

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

 

Gillian Bruce:

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

 

Kat Aquino:

It makes me excited too.

 

Gillian Bruce:

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

 

Kat Aquino:

Yeah, of course.

 

Gillian Bruce:

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

 

Kat Aquino:

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

 

Gillian Bruce:

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

 

Kat Aquino:

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

 

Gillian Bruce:

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

 

Kat Aquino:

It totally is.

 

Gillian Bruce:

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

 

Kat Aquino:

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

 

Gillian Bruce:

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

 

Kat Aquino:

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

 

Gillian Bruce:

Excellent. Thank you so much.

 

Kat Aquino:

Thank you so much.

 

Gillian Bruce:

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

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





Direct download: Supporting_the_LA28_Games_with_Salesforce_with_Kat_Aquino.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:00am PDT

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we’ve got the Monthly Retro for December. Join us as we review the top product, community, and careers content for December, and hear about Gillian’s visit to French Touch Dreamin.

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

Go to an event!

Gillian just got back from delivering the keynote address at French Touch Dreamin. If you’ve never been to a Dreamin event, there’s probably one near you or even remote options available. They’re organized by the community and have a very different feel from the official Salesforce events like World Tour, though you should also give those a try.

Blog highlights from December

The weather outside is frightful, the fire’s so delightful, and you know what that means: it’s time to get ready for the Spring ‘23 Release. Ella Marks put together a great blog post laying out the major milestones you need to have on your calendar to get ready.

Video highlights from December

If you haven’t checked out the official Salesforce Admins YouTube channel, you’re missing out. Jennifer Lee is rocking some great live streams—Automate This! is must-see TV. You get to watch Jennifer and some amazing Trailblazers solve problems, live, right in front of your eyes, and if you miss anything you can always go back and watch the replay.

Podcast highlights from December

We really think you should take a listen to Brenda Glasser’s episode if you missed it the first time. She’s currently a Salesforce Architect, but the story of her career goes hand-in-hand with how she was able to champion the Salesforce platform at her organization, and she has a lot to say about how to do that effectively.

Just for fun

Mike and Gillian check in on their feelings about candy canes and ask the hard questions, like why are there fruit-flavored candy canes and who actually enjoys them?

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Full show transcript

Mike: Welcome to the Salesforce Admins podcast in the December Monthly Retro. Oh, the last one for 2022. I'm your host and in this episode, we will review the top product community careers for December plus anything else we can think of that's top of mind. I don't know. You never know what's going to come to our minds, but also joining me is Gillian Bruce. Hey, Gillian.

Gillian: Hi, Mike Gerholdt. How you doing?

Mike: Good so far.

Gillian: Happy December.

Mike: I know. Can you believe it's already? It happened just like boop. Oh, 2022 is over.

Gillian: Yeah. It felt like this year went a lot quicker than the two years prior.

Mike: Right. Yes. Well, maybe we're catching back up.

Gillian: It's a good thing.

Mike: You fast forward the VHS tape. Because everything is digital now, you don't fast forward. We did some things. You did a thing. You went over to France and did French Touch Dreamin.

Gillian: I did.

Mike: Let's kick off there because that was fun.

Gillian: I got on an airplane. I got to go to Paris. I got to hang out with our amazing EMEA Trailblazer community. Let me tell you, this event, so French Touch Dreamin, it's got to be the biggest, or if not, along with maybe London's Calling, one of the biggest community events outside of the US. Jean Michelle has been running this for a while. It is such a cool event. They had an overwhelming response this year, so they had a lot more people attend than they had planned. But it was wonderful. It was just really a great opportunity again to see folks I have not seen in many years, to meet a bunch of new trailblazers in the EMEA community. It was also pretty sweet because the Salesforce office, for those of you don't know, is literally right next to the Eiffel Tower.
   It was just a wonderful time to be away from the family for a little bit, but also to really get connected with the French Touch Dreamin community. I was honored to be able to keynote the event, so I got to close out the event with a keynote all about how to really find ways to amplify the impact of the work that you do and focusing on values and all that. It was really fun. I had a lot of tremendous metaphors, analogies in there. It was great. There was so many amazing sessions I got to sit in on and it's really fun. I love Dreamin events. I've talked about it before. I know you've talked about it before, Mike, but the chance to really participate versus being a host at an official Salesforce event where we're running around like crazy people trying to manage all the things.
   To just sit and take in the content and really connect with people and have really deep conversations, get feedback, get ideas. It was an invaluable, so huge shout out to the whole team that put together French Touch Dreamin. If you, listener, are at all interested in attending French Touch Dreamin in the future, I highly encourage you to do so. They will be hosting it again next year. I think it's always in early December, so good time to maybe go to Paris and do a little holiday shopping. That's a fun place to do that. You can get in some big trouble. Not that I did at all.

Mike: Well, it is the holidays. Or I would add, Gillian, really any community event, because there's a lot of community events across the US. You don't have to fly all the way to France.

Gillian: Yeah, there's community events everywhere. There was a community event in Morocco, North Africa Dreamin just a month ago. No matter where you are, really, hey, if you have not attended a Dreamin event, I guarantee you there's one within a reasonable distance of where you live, so check it out. There's also a lot of virtual ones, too, which is pretty fun. Definitely a lot more of a program than a typical user group meeting. It's very different from going to a Salesforce sponsored event because these are all put on by the community. Salesforce has nothing to do with the programming and sometimes they invite people who work at Salesforce like myself to participate, which is really cool.

Mike: Speaking of Salesforce sponsored.

Gillian: Good segue.

Mike: We also did World Tour New York early part of December, it was December 8th. I want to say. For some reason that sticks in my head.

Gillian: I think you're right. Yeah.

Mike: That looked like a packed event. We had Lisa there and Jennifer and Ella from our team. That was a really cool event and a ton of community people. Holy cow.

Gillian: The Twitter thread was unending of all of the selfies and the photos. Michelle Hansen, our golden hoodie winner from our keynote at Dreamforce was there giving a session. Michael [inaudible] won the golden hoodie in the main keynote. It was very, very cool. Just from what I heard, what Lisa and Ella and Jen said is it was packed. There was so many people.

Mike: It looked packed. Did you see that? The pictures, it looked packed. It reminded me of London World Tour that one year that was just like...

Gillian: That's right. It was like 10,000 people.

Mike: Let me just wiggle through people.

Gillian: Yeah. Javits Center was going off with a lot of Salesforce content and some fun. If you missed it, you could actually, I think watch the broadcast that happened during the event. Check that out. I know they definitely got a version of Mark's keynote on there, which is interesting to always check out and see what's top of mind for him. Definitely had even a new framework that he's playing with about playing on the seven habits of highly effective people, the seven habits of highly effective companies. Check it out. An interesting approach.

Mike: Yeah. Wonder if we've done that. Anyway, let's talk about the cool content we had for December, at least the three things we think you should pay attention to. I'll kick off. Wouldn't be December if it wasn't talking about spring, because the second, a little flurry flies, we immediately start thinking about the next season. I'd be remiss if I didn't point out the spring '23 release dates countdown blog that we put up, because you probably already have those dates on your calendar as an admin. If not, you will.

Gillian: Yeah. Get them, because guess what? It's right around the corner. It's a season of giving gifts and we're giving you the gift of another release coming very soon.

Mike: Yeah, it feels like. Okay, you do the holiday stuff. Yay. New Year's. Okay, now it's the release time.

Gillian: Yeah, it's release time this year. Trailblazer DX time, too.

Mike: Oh yeah, we have that coming up. We'll save that for our next Retro.

Gillian: Okay. I thought it'd be more of a January topic anyway.

Mike: Right. One thing at a time.

Gillian: I know, I know. I think [inaudible], what are we working on all the time every day right now? Oh, right. That's not actually for everyone else for a few months.

Mike: Right. Yeah. It's 90 days out. That's a long time in the real world.

Gillian: Yeah. In the real world. Well, in Salesforce timeline, that's was yesterday.

Mike: Right. Gillian, you did a great podcast with Brenda on propelling your career.

Gillian: Yeah. Brenda Glasser, she's actually an architect, but she came in as an awesome admin and has really worked in her career to build her skillset and grow into now, she manages a team of Salesforce professionals. She's working at a really cool innovative startup company, but she has been around on the ecosystem almost as long as I have. I think we've both been in around like 12, 13 years, which sounds crazy to say that, but she has really found that the way that she's been able to propel her career is by being an internal advocate for Salesforce. By being the person who keeps pushing the idea that, hey, could do this with Salesforce, we can build this out with Salesforce has really enabled her to grow her career and help her make the moves that she's been able to make to now be a really seasoned professional leading a team.
   I thought it was interesting to get her on the podcast and she talks through what it means to be an advocate for Salesforce within your organization, how to do it, how to speak to executives, how to build that momentum. Good, good. It was a fun podcast. Brenda is great.

Mike: I enjoyed it. And then of course, we always point out video and I'm wanting to point out something a little different in not a specific video, but kind of a specific video, in that we do what I think is super cool, the royal we, Jennifer does live streams on our YouTube channel. I'll include the link in the show notes, but Automate This, it's just this really cool live thing that she does that I feel is, man, it's up there in terms of fun stuff to watch that you can just chime into and if you miss it, you can go back and watch it, but you also know when the next one is coming. I don't know, I find stuff like that really neat.

Gillian: Well, it's really innovative. Really, nobody else is doing what Jennifer is doing. It's highlighting trailblazers who are doing really interesting things and really going through it live. You are a part of it. This is not pre-recorded. It's a really fun way to really get involved, to feel connected, to learn. If you missed anything, you can then go back and watch the replay. But she does these quite often, so if you've never tuned into one, please go investigate.

Mike: Seriously. I feel like I'm constantly looking over at my Twitter feed and being like, oh, Jennifer is live on YouTube again.

Gillian: Yeah. And then everyone is like, oh my gosh, did you see this? Did you see this? I didn't know you could do this. Yeah. Very fun. Check it out.

Mike: Cool. Well, last Retro of 2022. I'll pull from an internal question that we asked the team. Gillian, do you have a preference on candy canes? Do you like the peppermint or do you like the fruit?

Gillian: Fruit candy canes are what? Why?

Mike: I know, right?

Gillian: I like the pretty colors, the rainbow colors are...

Mike: I think they're sweet.

Gillian: I see what you did there.

Mike: I try.

Gillian: I like a good peppermint candy cane in my hot cocoa. Mm-hmm. Just a little minty.

Mike: Oh, yeah. This is that time of year when everything becomes candy cane flavored.

Gillian: I will say my three-year-old son Jack just had his first candy cane the other day and it blew his mind. He also didn't understand the thing that you're just supposed to leave it in your mouth. He kept taking it out and touching it and getting all sticky and getting everything else all sticky. At some point, I just made it disappear. Candy canes. Mike, what about you? Fruit candy cane?

Mike: No, I'm team peppermint. There's one reason it should be striped like that. I also would buy candy canes if they were peppermint flavored, but had the beauty of the fruit candy cane. If I want a piece of fruit, I'm going to get a Jolly Rancher or something. That to me doesn't say holidays. This is the one time a year you can walk around with a candy cane in your mouth and not look like a weirdo.

Gillian: I guess that's a good point.

Mike: Why waste it on a fruit candy cane?

Gillian: You know what else I really like to do with candy canes? I like to make peppermint bark.

Mike: Oh, I just like the regular bark, the almond bark. Do you like chocolate bark or almond bark? I like almond.

Gillian: I don't really discriminate, but a good peppermint bark is really hard to beat. The William Sonoma Peppermint bark, that's the bar to meet. But making your own peppermint bark, I like milk chocolate with the candy canes.

Mike: Oh. I think I pepperminted myself out too much one year. They had a peppermint coffee and I drank too much of it and now I'm just a little, it's like pumpkin spice.

Gillian: Well, I wonder if we're going to start another feud here because we're both big peppermint proponents, but what are the other holiday flavors? There's eggnog, hot cocoa.

Mike: In a candy cane? Here's an eggnog candy cane. Oh, that sounds horrible.

Gillian: Eggnog is just not my thing anyway.

Mike: No, no.

Gillian: Well, mulled wine is a thing that people get into at the holidays, which is quite delicious and so boozy. It's so dangerous.

Mike: I thought we were talking about candy canes.

Gillian: Yeah, sorry. I just took it another direction. I apologize. I don't know of candy cane things.

Mike: Would you like a mulled wine candy cane, an eggnog candy cane, or a no thank you, we're good candy cane?

Gillian: Yeah. Other than the fruit version. I don't know of any other non-peppermint candy cane.

Mike: Right, because it's a waste of time.

Gillian: Yeah. Well, now everyone is going to want to eat a candy cane.

Mike: I know. Well, 'tis the season. All right, well, if you want to learn more about all things admin and anything that we just talked about in this episode, minus fruit flavored candy canes, please go to admin.salesforce.com to find those links and resources. You can stay up to date with us for all things social. We are @SalesforceAdmns, no I, on Twitter. I'm of course @MikeGerholdt on Twitter and Gillian is @gilliankbruce. With that, stay safe, stay awesome, have a great holiday season, and we will see you in the cloud.

Direct download: December_Monthly_Retro_with_Mike_and_Gillian.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:00am PDT

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Rohit Mehta, Senior Product Manager for Sandboxes and Scratch Orgs at Salesforce.

Join us as we talk about how to think about sandboxes and scratch orgs and some tips for how to use them better.

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

Diving into sandboxes

We’ve talked a lot about why sandboxes are so important for admins over the years, but we’ve never really gotten into the nitty-gritty of it. That’s why for this episode, we thought we’d bring on the sandbox PM, Rohit, to talk through everything.

Rohit has been at Salesforce for a long time, first as a computer engineer and then later on the product side of things. In fact, he says, “a lot of the product that I manage nowadays I actually built, years ago.” Since he took over the team, there have been a lot of improvements to what sandboxes have to offer, including upgrades to speed and reliability, data masking, and partial sandboxes, and the future is looking even more exciting.

Hyperforce and the need for speed

One big thing coming up is sandboxes for Hyperforce. If you’re not familiar, Hyperforce is a Salesforce deployment on public cloud infrastructure (like AWS). “One of the most common complaints that we get from customers is that their sandbox takes too long to create,” Rohit says, “but now with Hyperforce, we can produce sandboxes much much faster due to a newly-rearchitected design.”

They’re starting with Quick Clone for Dev and Dev Pro sandboxes coming up in Winter ‘23, with an eye towards a GA release in Spring ‘23 (forward-looking statement!). The Create operation will be coming along shortly after, so lots to look forward to. “People don’t often think about speed as a feature,” Rohit says, “but we make speed improvements on every release.” And the goal with Hyperforce is to be able to create sandboxes an order of magnitude faster than before. That’s 10x, for those of you playing along from home.

Check out scratch orgs

Rohit is also the product manager for scratch orgs, so we figured he’s perhaps the best person in the world to ask this question: what’s the difference between sandboxes and scratch orgs? scratch org is a source-driven and disposable deployment of Salesforce code and metadata. A scratch org is fully configurable, allowing developers to emulate different Salesforce editions with different features and preferences, and they only last 30 days. Sandboxes are copies of your Salesforce org that you can use for development, testing, and training, without compromising the data and applications in your production org.

Source-based development can really improve the speed that you’re able to deliver complex projects, so Rohit encourages every admin to give scratch orgs a closer look. While creating one through the CLI may seem complicated, there are a lot resources out there to help you make it happen, and new declarative options are on the way.

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Direct download: Sandboxes_and_Scratch_Orgs_with_Rohit_Mehta.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:00am PDT

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Eddie Cliff, Senior Director of Product Management for Salesforce Easy.

 

Join us as we talk about what Salesforce Easy is and what it means for Admins.

 

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

What is Salesforce Easy?

Eddie has had a varied career that has taken him all over the world. He’s lived and worked everywhere form NYC to Singapore to Sydney. Nowadays, he’s based in New Orleans, which means he can say he’s from the Big Easy and works on Salesforce Easy. Eddie leads the team of product managers working on it and that’s exactly why we brought him on the pod.

 

If you haven’t heard of it yet, Salesforce Easy aims to help companies of all sizes get started on Salesforce faster and, yes, easier than ever before. As Eddie says, they’ve adopted a mantra of “Easy by default, and advanced by choice.” In practice, it means you can get set up on the critical aspects of a deployment first, and then expand your functionality as you go. You can think of it as a new front door for Salesforce.

An Innovation Center for everyone

On the top floor of the Salesforce Tower in San Francisco, there’s something called the SIC: the Salesforce Innovation Center. Here, we bring together Salesforce customers with leaders from the Salesforce team to share best practices, case studies, and more, with a focus on digital transformation.

 

“The unfortunate thing about the SIC is there’s only one top floor of the Salesforce Tower,” Eddie says, “so they don’t scale very well.” Salesforce Easy aims to bring all of those learnings and best practices to everyone, with an onboarding process that helps every company implement them right away, without the commute to San Francisco.

 

Salesforce Easy asks you questions as you’re setting up in order to recommend out-of-the-box sales processes that are tried and true, and start closing more deals — fast. This includes declarative defaults across Sales and Service processes, reports and dashboards that work from jump, consistent record page layouts with best-practice information architecture, a simplified import experience, and so much more. 

Elevating the admin

So what does this all mean for admins? The benefit of a streamlined setup that implements so many best practices is that the more technical, repetitive, and support tasks are already taken care of for you. That frees up admins to be more strategic and focus on integrating Salesforce with their organization to improve business processes and support business objectives.

 

Most importantly, Salesforce Easy expands on existing platform capabilities and solutions that admins can leverage to help their users. You can take advantage of features like in-app guidance and in-app learning that make it, well, easy to onboard users who are new to Salesforce or changing roles.

 

Eddie also shares some exciting ideas they’re working on rolling out soon, including smart guidance and spotlighting to help users do their jobs better every time they log in. Go ahead and sign up now—it’s free and takes three clicks—and Eddie would love to hear your feedback.

 

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Direct download: Salesforce_Easy_with_Eddie_Cliff.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:00am PDT

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Brenda Glasser, Salesforce Architect at Ripple and co-leader of the Atlanta Salesforce Architect Community Group.

Join us as we talk about how evangelizing Salesforce and being an advocate for expanding the use of Salesforce within your company can help propel your career.

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

Why Salesforce can do more

Brenda has built out Salesforce implementations at several different organizations over her long career in the ecosystem so we brought her on the pod to share some lessons she’s learned along the way. “Salesforce, as a platform, can do so much within an organization,” she says, but it can be hard to think big when you’re only using one or two clouds and you’re a solo admin.

If your data is in a bunch of different places, or if you are seeing people lose time to tedious manual processes in email or spreadsheets, it can be really powerful to step forward and point out how Salesforce can make things work more smoothly. But how do you take the first steps?

Show your work

Advocating for big changes takes time: you need to build trust and credibility. Brenda recommends trying to find some low-hanging fruit where you can make a big impact quickly. It’s also important to realize that the people in your organization who are struggling the most with Salesforce can be your biggest opportunities. “If they don’t like it, find out why,” she says. After all, it’s your job to help them do their job better, and if you do that you can turn your worst critics into your biggest fans.

The other thing that works really well with stakeholders is building a proof of concept. Gathering some quick requirements and making something can show them that what you’re suggesting is really possible. As the saying goes: you have to see it to believe it. Your Salesforce account team and the Trailblazer community can help you figure things out—you don’t have to go it alone.

How your career can grow with your org

For Brenda, being an effective champion for Salesforce starts with listening. Always be on the lookout for problems you can solve. Being eager to jump in and start building can put a lot of work on your plate, but it also makes you visible to leadership as somebody they can count on.

“If you work for a company that is supportive and committed,” Brenda says, “then that will mean you’ll get additional resources.” You can soon find yourself leading a team, or learning more about the platform and moving into a different role as your org grows. But it’s all about stepping forward and saying, “Hey, Salesforce can do this and I can show you how.”

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Full show transcript

Gillian  Bruce: Welcome to the Salesforce Admins Podcast, where we talk about product, community, and careers to help you be an awesome admin. I'm your host today, Gillian Bruce, and we are going to talk about how you can be a Salesforce evangelist within your own organization. Today we are going to be speaking with Brenda Glasser, who is a community leader. She has been in the Salesforce ecosystem for, I mean, longer than I've been in, maybe around the same time, about 12, 13 years. So a while.
                                                       She's got some amazing experience. She has built out Salesforce implementations at many different organizations. She's at a pretty cool organization right now, but I wanted to get her on the podcast to talk about how evangelizing Salesforce and being an advocate for expanding the use of Salesforce within your own company can help propel your own career. And it's a good topic too, as we round out the year, go into the new year, helping you set a vision for what Salesforce could be in your organization. We had a little bit of an issue with Brenda's audio, so apologies in advance. We did the best we could to make it sound a little bit better, but I promise you the conversation is worth it. So stick with it and enjoy the episode.
                                                       Brenda, welcome to the podcast.

Brenda Glasser:                                        Thank you so much. I'm excited to be here.

Gillian  Bruce:                                        Well, I am very glad to have you on. We've got a really fun discussion in store. But before we get into that, why don't you take a moment and just kind of introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about who you are, what you do, how long you've been in the ecosystem?

Brenda Glasser:                                        Sure. So I'm Brenda Glasser. I live in the Atlanta area. I am currently a Salesforce Architect for a company called Ripple, which is in the cryptocurrency space, which has been an interesting journey for me. Yeah, I've been in the ecosystem, I think about 13 or 14 years. I don't actually know, but I've been around for a while. I got started sort of pre-Trailhead and all that good stuff. And I also help co-lead the brand new Salesforce architect Trailblazer Community Group here in Atlanta.

Gillian  Bruce:                                        That's awesome. So just a few years in Salesforce, still learning the ropes, right?

Brenda Glasser:                                        I am though. That's the thing, is you never stop learning. So I am still learning the ropes.

Gillian  Bruce:                                        I love that. I love that. Well, congrats on leading the new architect group there in Atlanta. Very exciting. Brenda, I wanted to get you on the podcast because with all of the experience that you've had in Salesforce over the years, you had a lot of experience kind of working with organizations and getting them on board with Salesforce and kind of making a case for why they should use more Salesforce. I wanted to get a talk about how admins can really think about setting a vision for Salesforce. And so can you talk to us a little bit about how setting a vision for Salesforce has helped you in your career?

Brenda Glasser:                                        Yeah, absolutely. So I think the first thing is just to know that Salesforce as a platform can do so much within an organization. But I know I have, especially when I was first starting out, where you're in roles, your company is using it maybe for only certain use cases, or maybe they just have Sales Cloud or they just have one or two Clouds, especially if you are a solo admin or working in a smaller org with a very small team, it can be easy to sort of think of Salesforce as smaller than it really is. But as a platform and with everything, all the different Clouds and different offerings, there is really just so much that Salesforce can do for any organization. And so I think as I have been on my Salesforce journey, I've had the opportunity to get experience and learn about a lot of the different Clouds.
                                                       So I really started out in Sales Cloud and then Service cloud, Experience Cloud, marketing, Tableau, all the different stuff. And you sort realize just how powerful it can be and the different business problems that it can solve. So for example, if you are noticing, and this happens in every company, right, that your customer data is disjointed or it's in a lot of different systems. And if you can't easily figure out who are our customers, what did they buy, what's their status? Are they even an active customer or no longer an active customer? If you are seeing manual processes, so things that are being handled by email or in Excel or random other tools, anything like that, if you sort of can start to tune in to some of those things that might be a little bit outside of your day-to-day scope, but you talk to your coworkers, you learn about how the business is operating, it can be really powerful to start to tune in to, Hey, Salesforce can help with this and here's how.

Gillian  Bruce:                                        So I mean, I think, you hit the nail on the head a lot of ways about understanding, hey, Salesforce can do so much, right, even if you're only working on Sales Cloud. It's really good to know, oh, it can do all of these other things as well, especially now with Tableau and Slack and MuleSoft in the house.

Brenda Glasser:                                        Mm-hmm.

Gillian  Bruce:                                        In order to kind of get buy-in from stakeholders to maybe expand the business a bit and expand the use of Salesforce across the business. What are some things that have helped you in the past? Maybe pushed for that? Because I can imagine especially, I mean, a lot of times Salesforce admins we're the only ones in the company who even knows anything about Salesforce, right?

Brenda Glasser:                                        Mm-hmm. Yep.

Gillian  Bruce:                                        So what are some things that have helped you in the past kind of sell the business in terms of getting them to expand the use of Salesforce? Maybe think about bringing more processes within the Salesforce platform.

Brenda Glasser:                                        Yeah, I mean, I think the most important thing really is to kind of build trust and credibility amongst your team and amongst your stakeholders. So if your stakeholders don't know you or they don't trust you, or maybe don't fully buy in to Salesforce, that could definitely make it harder to get their buy-in. So I think trying to proactively find and help support maybe some low hanging fruit and spending the time to understand, hey, if they maybe are not the number one fans of Salesforce within their organization, if they find it clunky or it's not easy to use or they don't like it, I think find out why, right? So really go in with an attitude of, Hey, I'm not here to be defensive. This is a platform and it's my job to help you do your job better. So I think it really does start with building that trust and credibility.
                                                       And then I would say once you have that or you've started to build that, one thing that I like to do is try to whip up a proof of concept, right? So a lot of times it's easy to say, Hey, Salesforce can do this. But if they can't visualize it, they've never seen it in action, it sounds maybe too good to be true, spending a little bit of time to gather some quick requirements, right? It's not going to be the full requirements that you would need for a larger project or if you're implementing another Cloud or something like that. But spend the time to understand a few use cases and then in either a sandbox or developer edition org, build out a proof of concept so that they can see, okay, this actually does work the way that the Salesforce admin team is telling me that it could work.
                                                       And I would say another thing you can do is leverage your Salesforce account team. I am a huge fan of my Salesforce account team, because probably your company is not the only company that has tried to solve these problems, and they can help arm you with collateral and experts to help sell the vision as well. So you don't have to do it yourself. It's not something that you're on your own. There are resources within the Trailblazer community, of course, and within Salesforce itself that can help you put together that story. But again, I think the proof of concept is a really great way to get people to understand, here's how the solution could work.

Gillian  Bruce:                                        Yeah. You got to see it to believe it, right? I mean, that's kind of the idea. And I really like how you broke it down into the two steps, right? First, really establish that trust. Establish yourself as the subject matter expert, as the trusted advisor when it comes to Salesforce, that you can deliver results, you can have an impact. And then when you want to expand, be like, oh look, look what I can do. Look what I can build for you. I think that's a really, really good kind of two step vision setting process there.
                                                       So one of the things too, Brenda, that I know that you've kind of self-described yourself as is an in-house Salesforce evangelist. So can you talk a little bit, I mean, as an evangelist myself, I evangelize, but to a slightly different type of audience in a slightly different situation. So can you talk to us a little bit about what it means to really kind of evangelize and be the Salesforce advocate within your company and kind of be that person? How do you become that? And then how does that help you both in your own career and then you're building solutions?

Brenda Glasser:                                        Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So I think the first part, I just really love building stuff on Salesforce. So for me, it's fairly natural because I really like solving problems. And that's the reason that I fell in love with Salesforce to begin with was something so simple of I can create a field for you, look at that and receiving that feedback selfishly. I love almost nothing more when I can solve an issue for somebody, even if to me it's something really simple, it can really kind of make somebody's day. So for me, definitely I am just super passionate about the platform and what it can do. And so I am always looking for opportunities to raise my hand or poke my head in to say, actually Salesforce can help with that. Do you want to learn more? Do you want to see how? So I think it really starts with, again, listening, looking for problems, looking for opportunities.
                                                       And that can sometimes be challenging because that does put extra work on your plate, because you find yourself in the position where you are signing up for more work. So that is a thing that you do have to balance. And I know that's something I can be guilty of taking on too much just because I'm a little bit too excited about what it can do. But where that really starts to help me personally in my career is I am able to be seen amongst stakeholders, leadership as somebody that they can kind of count on and that somebody who really, truly has the business' best interest in mind. So that means that where if you work for a company that is supportive and is committed, then what that will mean is that you do get additional resources, right? So if you are in a position where you can maybe expand your team, then that can also enable you the opportunity to move into a kind of leadership or management type position.
                                                       So that is a really great way. It also gives you the ability to invest in the platform more, which means you get more cool stuff that you can play with, but that also adds to your resume, that gives you more opportunities to get hands on with different aspects of the platform, gives you opportunities to go and get certifications or trainings or all that sort of thing. So I think by really looking for those opportunities to raise your hand and say, Hey, Salesforce can help with this, that benefits your business, your company, but the benefits to yourself are just, the sky's the limit.

Gillian  Bruce:                                        I love that. It's an investment in yourself, which also turns out to be an investment in the company and in Salesforce too, because the more people like you that are out there, the better the product gets because you give us feedback. But I think one of the things that I heard in that is, hey, it can be a little scary because you're the eager person and you create all this more work for yourself and you create all these opportunities, which means there's just endless things that you can work on.
                                                       How do you find a balance for that? How do you figure out, I maybe have taken on too much, or maybe this is the right time to take on a little more. I mean, I know there's no right answer, but just looking, I think that might be one of the most intimidating pieces of this for folks is being like, yeah, I would be happy to say Salesforce can do that. And yes, I can do that, but oh wait, now I just said I can do all of these things and I only have time to do three things and now I have 10 things that I want to do.

Brenda Glasser:                                        Yeah. So I think one is, and this is something that you kind of develop a muscle for over time I think is setting expectations. So just because you're saying yes, Salesforce can do this is not the same thing as saying Salesforce can do this and I'll have it done by next week. You are constantly having to evaluate and also prioritize with your leadership, with the company's priorities. Just because you as an individual or you as an admin team have identified a problem that you can go solve doesn't mean it's the top priority. So you have to constantly check in with yourself, check in with your team, check in with your manager, your leadership to make sure that you're focusing on the right things at the right time. But also providing that feedback and expectations to your stakeholders to give them realistic timelines, understanding scope, and having them understand they're going to have to participate in the process.
                                                       It is not magic that if you do take on, especially if it is a larger project, it's not just you doing all the work. Your teams and your stakeholders will have to participate in that as well, and do your best to set expectations in terms of when and how a project is going to go down. But it is hard. It's something you have to constantly check in. And I know for me it's not just at work, right? 'Cause I have kids, so I obviously have responsibilities with my kids, I have responsibilities within the home. I try to do as much as I can to give back to the Trailblazer community. But again, I can't go to every event, I can't volunteer with all of the wonderful organizations. So I do have to always kind of reassess, all right, where is my time going? Am I spending my time in a way that I'm not burning out? Which I can't say I'm always successful at that, but I try.

Gillian  Bruce:                                        I mean, I think we all struggle with that, all these competing priorities, all these things that want a piece of us in our lives and figuring out how to divvy that up in the right way. So well said, well said. And I think this discussion ties pretty well with another episode that was recently on the podcast kind of dealing with talking about burnout that was on the developer podcast. So I think it's a really good conversation to say, Hey, yes, you can go be an evangelist for Salesforce and you can help grow your abilities and grow the capabilities of Salesforce within your organization, but also you need to make sure that you're taking care of what needs to be taken care of, which is number one yourself, right?

Brenda Glasser:                                        Yep.

Gillian  Bruce:                                        And making sure that by investing both in yourself by growing your expertise within Salesforce and growing your responsibilities at your role at your company, but that you're not doing it at the compromise of something else.
                                                       So yeah, very good discussion. Things to keep in mind, especially as we're rounding out the year starting the new year. I think this is a good chance to kind of evaluate those things and take them into account. So Brenda, before we totally wrap up, I would love to know, do you have some tips or advice since you're a very tenured person in the Salesforce ecosystem, maybe for some folks that are a little bit newer, first couple years in the role of being a Salesforce admin, what are some tips or advice you have for them?

Brenda Glasser:                                        Yeah, I mean, I think just sort of getting to know even at a really high level what all is available from Salesforce. So again, when we were first starting out, we focus a lot on really kind of the core platform and getting admins search and kind of starting down our certification journey. But I would really recommend spending time on Trailhead or getting involved within the Trailblazer community on some of the other offerings. So there's wonderful Trailblazer groups and conferences and trails on things like Experience Cloud, on Marketing Cloud, on Tableau, on what else is out there. You certainly don't need to be an expert, but I think just knowing what those offerings are can really make a big difference to help you put on your creative problem-solving hat and looking for where there can be opportunities to expand your utilization of the platform.

Gillian  Bruce:                                        I love that. Expand your horizons a little bit. I think that's great, especially your note about you don't have to be an expert to go to a Marketing Cloud user group meeting.

Brenda Glasser:                                        Nope, nope.

Gillian  Bruce:                                        Show up, take it in. Learn something.

Brenda Glasser:                                        Exactly. Exactly.

Gillian  Bruce:                                        Oh, that's great. Well, Brenda, I really appreciate you taking the time to chat with us today, and it's wonderful to hear about how you've learned to be an advocate for Salesforce within your organizations and then how it's really helped you propel your career, and then maybe give some insight to some others for some opportunities. So thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it.

Brenda Glasser:                                        Oh, well, thank you. Thank you so much for having me on. I really enjoyed it.

Gillian  Bruce:                                        Well, huge thanks for Brenda for taking the time to chat with us. I really enjoyed our discussion and I hope you enjoyed it too. I love talking about being an advocate, wanting to do more work, but also being very cautious about the work that you're taking on and trying to balance that with all of the other things you have and prioritizing. It can be hard sometimes, but I mean, I am very naturally an eager, let's go do all the things person, and I struggle with taking on too much myself. So really good discussion with Brenda about that. I wanted to remind you that as you go into your end of year/beginning of year planning and you're trying to figure out what you might want to learn, we have some really great content on admin.salesforce.com and if you haven't spent time there lately, please go check it out.
                                                       We've got some amazing blog content, especially this last year. We've done an amazing job of really putting together quality content from experts on there. And we've got a lot coming up as well about the upcoming release. So all the Spring '23, is it Spring '23? Yeah. Wow. Spring '23 Release goodies will be on admin.salesforce.com very soon. So stay tuned for that. And as always, if you want to learn anything else about what it takes to be an awesome admin, check all the content out.
                                                       We also have great videos on YouTube like Automate This and Expert Corner and some fun Salesforce Plus content about How I Solved It. And so yeah, just check us out, admin.salesforce.com. Make it a priority to hit us up there. You can follow our guest today, Brenda Glasser on Twitter. She is (@BrendaGlasser). She's also very active on the Trailblazer community, so find her there. You can find my co-host Mike Gerholdt (@MikeGerholdt) on Twitter and myself (@GillianKBruce). You can find All Things Awesome Admin using (#awesomeadmin) on Twitter or (@SalesforceadminsknowI). Hope you have a wonderful rest of your day or evening or morning, and I'll catch you next time in the Cloud.



Direct download: Propel_Your_Career_by_Being_a_Salesforce_Advocate_with_Brenda_Glasser.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:00am PDT

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we have a guest episode from the Salesforce Developers Podcast. Host Josh Birk talks to Drew Tauber, a Salesforce Engineer at Clear.

Join us as we talk about how to identify signs of burnout and the steps you can take to prevent it from happening.

You should subscribe for the full episode (and subscribe to the Salesforce Developers Podcast), but here are a few takeaways from Josh’s conversation with Drew Tauber.

Proto-Architect

When Drew was trying to change jobs, he went to an interview where the company had mislabeled the job title as “Systems Administrator” instead of Information Systems Specialist. He still got the role and it led him to transition to working entirely in Salesforce and taking on more of a Developer role. Today, he describes his job as somewhere between an Admin, a Developer, and a “proto-Architect.”

Signs of burnout

If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed, stressed, or like the amount of work you have to do is insurmountable, you may be headed toward burnout. Drew gave a presentation about this very topic at World Tour New York, and he’s had many conversations about it in his role as co-leader of the New York City User Group.

When the pandemic hit, “everyone’s work-life balance went out the window,” Drew says, and the same goes for traditional structure and support networks. Salesforce professionals were hit especially hard because as everything went remote, there was increased pressure to expand functionality to account for the “new normal.” At Drew’s company, for example, the Salesforce footprint doubled but his team remained the same size. 

Why it’s OK to ask for help

The first step Drew recommends to help with burnout is to ask for help. It took a while to add more people to his team, “but even just seeing that there was a light at the end of the tunnel was hugely helpful,” he says. It’s in your company’s best interest for you to not burn out, so don’t be afraid to start a tough but necessary conversation.

Asking for help can extend to things beyond just asking for more people or resources. You can ask for help carving out some time away from the job, or help yourself by establishing clear communication boundaries so you don’t feel like you’re “always on.” There’s a lot of value in managing expectations by saying, “I can’t get to that right now but I will when I have a minute.” The research also shows that exercise is also crucial. “Stress is a physical reaction in the body,” Drew says, “and it definitely helps to get the endorphins going.”

There’s so much more in this episode so be sure to listen in and, if you like what you’re hearing, be sure to subscribe to the Salesforce Developers Podcast.

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Full show transcript

Mike Gerholdt: Welcome to the Salesforce Admins Podcast. We talk about product, community, and career to help you become an awesome admin. Now, this week we're going to try a little something different. So as you know, at Salesforce, we have quite a few podcasts, and one of those we're good friends with the Salesforce Developer Podcast hosted by Josh Burke. You've heard him here on the pod before. He's been on, talk about some developer stuff and Trailhead. And you know what? We wanted to try one do a little something different and we wanted to swap out some episodes. So recently Josh had a guest on who was Drew Talber, who talked about burnout and stress. And you know what? Admins get burned out and stressed too. So do podcasters.

So what we're going to do is we're going to rebroadcast that episode so that you have a chance to listen to it. I think it's a really great episode. I've listened to it myself. And then you know what? Give it a listen. And if you love the podcast, go ahead and jump on over the Developer Podcast and give them a subscribe and check out what Josh is doing. So with that, I'm going to turn it over to Josh, take it away.

Drew Tauber: When I was in college, I went to college for information technology, and I was adamant that the last thing I wanted to do was be a coder.

Josh Birk: That is Drew Tauber, a senior Salesforce engineer over at CLEAR. I’m Josh Birk, your host for the Salesforce Developer Podcast. Here on the podcast, you’ll hear stories and insights from developers for developers. Today we sit down and talk with Drew about something people are really starting to talk more about, and I think it’s great. We’re going to talk about stress. We’re going to talk about burnout.

Josh Birk: We’re going to talk about anxiety and we’re going to talk about how it can affect you in the workplace and what you can do about it. Before we get into that, we’re going to start right after that cold quote and get into how Drew really did become a coder. Why?

Drew Tauber: For me, at the time, coders were just down in the basement, typing it out and I wanted to be upstairs with the people, so I went into desktop support, service support out there, working with end users. I think that’s why Salesforce wound up jibing with me as a developer role because I’m not hidden in the corner. I’m out there with my stakeholders, building stuff for them.

Josh Birk: Gotcha. You always had that people skills layer that you wanted to be able to dive into?

Drew Tauber: Mm-hmm.

Josh Birk: What’s your earliest memory of the computer?

Drew Tauber: Fourth grade Apple IIes, we were using some word processor, Magic Writer or something like that.

Josh Birk: Yes. The one that taught you by… Was the one that had the letters that would pop up so that you know you were hitting it right?

Drew Tauber: I think so. There was some key command you could put in to change the font face from bold to outlined or something like that.

Josh Birk: Nice.

Drew Tauber: I remember learning that and I remember going around the room in the computer lab with all the other fourth graders showing them this key command you could hit that would change your font.

Josh Birk: Nice. Very, very nice. A hacker from way back then.

Drew Tauber: Yes. I also remember the same time Logo Writer, which I didn’t even realize until college that that was teaching me coding.

Josh Birk: Oh, right, because that’s in the Turtle Graphics family of things, right?

Drew Tauber: Yeah. It’s all Turtle Graphics. Step forward, turn right, step back. Then we learned how to make pinwheels. I’m like, “Oh, that’s a forward loop.”

Josh Birk: Yep. Exactly. I can’t remember which interview it was that came up. I don’t think it’s been published yet. Logo came up again. Logo was weirdly my first computer science programming class. It was supposed to be just the basics of programming and so they used Logo as the starter kit. I remember I had homework that was converting Arabic numerals to Roman and then back again, and it would work five times and then it would just stop doing anything.

Josh Birk: To this date, I have no idea if it was because I was a bad programmer or because Logo sucks. 50/50 chance probably. When did you first get involved with Salesforce itself?

Drew Tauber: I first got involved with Salesforce… I actually just recently checked my dev org. I think it’s 12 years old.

Josh Birk: Oh, wow.

Drew Tauber: I was working at a payroll company in New Jersey. It’s a classic accidental admin story. My CTO, I was basically the IT guy there. Desktop servers, networks, AV equipment. Anything that turned on was my job. I’ve been one of the guys. My boss came to me one day, said, “Hey, our sales team’s been using Salesforce. It’s getting big, we’re taking it over in IT. You’re in charge of it.”

Drew Tauber: Then this was pre-Trailhead but we had Premier support so I’m doing the training webinars and everything. As I’m learning, I was like, “This is pretty good. I could do it. There’s a lot of stuff I could do here.” Now, I had been doing web development in my spare time and PHP so I had a idea for like, “Oh, yeah, there’s a lot of stuff that could be done here. I want to believe in that job for other reasons.”

Drew Tauber: But when I was looking for a new job, I completely… Completely by accident, so one of those sliding doors, serendipity moments. This job I was looking for… or I got called for, had mislabeled their job title as systems administrator.

Josh Birk: What was the title supposed to be?

Drew Tauber: Information system specialist. This recruiter was like, “Hey, I’ve got this job. It uses Salesforce. It’s a system administrator. I’m looking for system administrator roles. Do you want to go to this interview?” I was like, “Yeah, sure. Let’s do the interview.” I go in there and I quickly find out it’s a all-Salesforce job, which was not something I had been… I hadn’t thought about it yet I had been thinking like, “Oh, CRM would be a cool thing to do.”

Drew Tauber: I knew I had to pivot at some point because there wasn’t really going to be much of a use for on-prem server admins for much longer with AWS and everything happening. I was like, “Sure, I’ll go do this Salesforce role.” That was my first full-time Salesforce job and where I actually started developing.

Josh Birk: Interesting. Well, and so that was going to be my next question. You got launched into the you have to be the jack-of-all-trades person. How did you find learning development on Salesforce?

Drew Tauber: Good. I’m a learn by doer kind of thing. I love Trailhead, but I’m really much better at… The first thing I built on Salesforce was one of the call center agents… Because I worked in the office for my company where our customer support team was located and this was back in Classic. They said, “Hey, it’d be great if there was a way that we could see when someone sends a screenshot, if we could just see it on the page without having to click into the attachment, download the attachment and then open it up on our computer.”

Drew Tauber: I was like, “There’s got to be a way to do…” I basically started figuring out in Apex, how do I get the attachments? In Visualforce, how do I display the attachments? How do I make it so when you click on it opens up in a little modal window and shows you the actual screenshot of it?”

Josh Birk: Nice.

Drew Tauber: How do I make it show an icon if it’s a PDF kind of… And it just went from step one through step N as I just keep going.

Josh Birk: Yeah. I think it’s interesting how so many early use cases it’s just attachments were another interesting data point. Once you figure out how Apex can manipulate them, there were actually some kind of cool tricks you could do with it.

Drew Tauber: I spent two years at that company. They were really great. I mean, their whole idea is that we hire people who don’t know a ton of Salesforce have them learn on the fly. Then I spent two years there, got all my certifications from admin to dev one. Then after two years there, I moved to my current job.

Josh Birk: Gotcha. How would you describe your current role?

Drew Tauber: Officially my title is senior Salesforce engineer. I am basically the guy that all of our Salesforce customizations runs through to some degree. I started as the guy, I was the Salesforce guy. Now we have a team and it’s kind of an architect role, but not officially an architect role.

Josh Birk: Gotcha. The proto architect, but you’re still sort of the jack of all trades. You’re just the jack of all trades who can also help other people get their job done?

Drew Tauber: Mm-hmm.

Josh Birk: Nice. Nice.

Drew Tauber: We don’t have any admins. We just have four developers so we’re all kind of everything.

Josh Birk: Gotcha. I think if there’s an admin listening right now we might have just sent a little shiver down their spine.

Drew Tauber: Oh yeah. No. I could definitely use an admin, but we don’t have one.

Josh Birk: Gotcha. Before we get into the topic at hand, what’s your current role in Salesforce community?Drew Tauber: I’m a co-leader of the New York City user group and then just fan and everything else.

Josh Birk: How long have you been in the developer?

Drew Tauber: I’ve been a user group leader since March of 2020 which I don’t know if you remember, a lot of stuff happened in March of 2020.

Josh Birk: Oh, the timing.

Drew Tauber: It was literally… So there were three co-leaders of the user group. One of them got a job at Salesforce and I had already been doing presentations and helping out, so I always joke around the one thing that we’re great about as a Salesforce ecosystem is identifying people who will say yes to anything.

Josh Birk: Gotcha. Nice.

Drew Tauber: They asked me, “Do you want to be a co-leader?” This was literally my last day in the office before our one week test quarantine happened.

Josh Birk: My God.

Drew Tauber: I said, “Yeah, sure. I’ll do it. I’ll talk to you guys in a couple of weeks when this whole COVID thing’s over.”

Josh Birk: Wow.

Drew Tauber: Fast-forward to two years, I’m now doing in-person meetings again it’s weird for me because I’m like, “I’m just so used to it. I just throw up a Zoom link and people join. Now I got to find food for people? This is weird.”

Josh Birk: Weird. They actually need to eat and stuff.

Drew Tauber: I need to feed people and find space?

Josh Birk: Nice. Nice. Okay. Today we’re going to talk about burnout, which I believe you presented at World Tour New York, correct?

Drew Tauber: Yes.

Josh Birk: Nice. Let’s start at the beginning. What were some early signs that were making you question just how stressed are you?

Drew Tauber: A lot of it is just feeling overwhelmed. You have trouble not necessarily getting up in the morning, although that’s definitely part of it sometimes, but just seeing the list of work you have to do, and just seeing it as being insurmountable to the point where you don’t even know how you can start because you don’t see how you can finish and just gets debilitating in that respect.

Josh Birk: Yeah. Were you falling prey… And I am blanking on the term because there’s actually a cognitive term for it, where you look at a task and your instant reaction is that task clearly is going to take three/four hours, which is not true but your brain is convinced that it is true.

Drew Tauber: Yeah. That would definitely happen. I think there’s some… I don’t know what the official term of it, but there’s a phobia of an empty notebook and that same kind of situation where in my head I know in intellectually like yeah, once you just get started on a project, it just snowballs and then you finish it eventually. But it’s like seeing how many things have to be done, just the idea of starting it would feel so daunting.

Josh Birk: Yeah. I think it was somebody on the ADHD side of things that told me about the fork theory. The fork theory goes that a normal person, if they think about their day, they think about it in terms of five straws. It’s the five straws, those are the big five things that they’re going to have to accomplish through the day. The problem is some people get that detail-oriented way of… that hyper-vigilance way of thinking about it.

Josh Birk: It’s like they actually see five forks and of course each fork also has five tips to it. They’re not thinking in terms of five things they got to get done through the day. They’re thinking in terms of 25 things that they got to get done through the day.

Drew Tauber: Yeah. I like that analogy.

Josh Birk: Were you running into other things like sleeping, eating, that kind of stuff?

Drew Tauber: Oh yeah. I mean, a big part of it is… Especially in the last couple of years, everyone’s work-life balance went out the window. All of a sudden, I’m not commuting to work anymore, at the very beginning started off like, “Oh, I can sleep until 15 minutes before I’m supposed to be working and then roll out of bed and walk down the hallway to my home office and start working? Great.” That slowly turned into… I’m a late person normally.

Drew Tauber: On weekends, I’m up pretty late and this started turning to be like, “Oh, I’m going to be up to like 2:00, 3:00 in the morning, go to sleep, wake up at 8:30 in the morning, roll out, get my work done.” Sleep, it all… Part of it was stress but part of it was also just my pattern was already off. I was already halfway there.

Josh Birk: Yeah. I mean, think there was a collective groan around the world in March of 2020 because people who had very structured lives are suddenly trying to figure out which couch is going to be the most comfortable for them to sit down with their laptop. There’s just nothing healthy about any of that.

Drew Tauber: Yeah. All the gyms were closed. Thankfully I have a dog so he forced me to get outside of the house once or twice a day to take him for a walk.

Josh Birk: Yeah. That’s one of the things I really miss about having… I always joke cats are great if you want to stay in bed. Dogs are great if you want to get out and take a walk.

Drew Tauber: Yeah. Especially because at the beginning we thought, “Okay. Everybody is going to be a recluse for a month and come back, so why not live it up a little bit? I’m not going out and getting the healthy food options. I’m getting DoorDash. I’m getting whatever junk food I want to get sent to my house.” It gave me a head start towards a lot of these issues that turned into burnout.

Josh Birk: Well, and it’s like, it gives you a head start. You’re not socializing, you’re not eating, you’re not sleeping right. These are all core things that start the patterns that get worse, and everybody else is in the pandemic so you have this… At least I found it as you blanket it as normal. Like, who am I to complain about these things because the whole world is effectively going through it? Somewhere in my emotional brain, it was like, “Suck it up buttercup.” Which is not a great mental health response to anybody including yourself.

Drew Tauber: Yeah. Yeah. Part of it’s… Yeah. It’s definitely like, what right do I have to be more put out than… I’m in relatively good shape. I’ve got space. I’m not in a tiny little closet of an apartment somewhere trying to make it. I’ve got space. I’ve got people. But at the same time, I couldn’t go see my family. I couldn’t go see my friends. I used to go out to the movies most weekends with my friends. That went out the window immediately, still hasn’t quite come back.

Drew Tauber: I’ve found… Because I’ve been talking to a lot of people about burnout around my sessions and the commonality I found is a combination of, one, everyone’s support structure went out the window. Everyone’s coping mechanisms went out the window, and also… I think this is not unique to Salesforce, but definitely common among Salesforce people I’ve talked to, is that as every company went remote, everyone had to fall onto their remote collaboration tools a lot more.

Drew Tauber: Salesforce is obviously front and center in a lot of people’s workflows. That just put a lot of extra pressure like, “Oh, Salesforce is good for this, but we need to make it do X so we can better support our remote workforce.”

Josh Birk: That makes a lot of sense now that everything is a remote workforce. Yeah. Yeah. One of the symptoms you had on one of your slides, which I thought was interesting because it’s one I hit really hard and wasn’t thinking about it, it’s a lack of satisfaction. You’re not getting joy either out of your work and it might even be hard to get joy out of the things that are supposed to relax you. Did that hit you?

Drew Tauber: Yeah, definitely. I think that a lot of that goes back to seeing the list as so insurmountable. Achievements that I would normally be like, “Oh, I pulled this off. This is great.” Turns into “Oh, well, okay, I’ve done step one of 27.” It’s hard to be thrilled that you made it to base camp when you need to get to Everest kind of thing.

Josh Birk: Right. Exactly. Yeah. I think people get into this where they think it’s like “Well, it’s my job. It’s a pandemic.” Once again, it’s an excuse, right? Like, why… Of course, I’m not happy right now, but the problem is it’s almost the second tier, you’re going to get more anxious and stressed and depressed if you can’t counter that with fun and joy like you’re saying, giving yourself that pat on the back for an achievement.

Drew Tauber: Right. Definitely.

Josh Birk: Now, what factors do you think led to your burnout that we haven’t… We’ve talked about pandemic, we’ve talked about quick shifts in Salesforce, in your work, lack of a social structure is gone. Anything else that you think was leading you towards this path?

Drew Tauber: I think the biggest thing just is like I’ve said before to people I work with, between the pandemic and the unique ways that our business changed in the pandemic, our Salesforce usage essentially doubled. Our Salesforce footprint. We added a new org. We added whole new people who hadn’t been using Salesforce before. Our Salesforce usage footprint at the company had essentially doubled and my team had not.

Josh Birk: Which now of course you have proof that you’re right, it’s an insurmountable amount of stuff because everything just doubled, even if there’s a irrational layer to it, there’s still a rational amount of data for you to enforce it. When you first started realizing this is a problem, what did you do?

Drew Tauber: Probably when I noticed was a problem I started asking for help. One of the great things about my manager and my company in general is that they were very supportive. It took a little bit for them to get to the point where they were like, “Okay, let’s hire some people.” But they got there. Then obviously the job market being what it was, it took us a while to get somebody who was able to come in and help, but even just seeing that there was a light at the end of the tunnel was hugely helpful.

Josh Birk: Nice.

Drew Tauber: The thing I always tell people is it’s in your company’s best interest for you to not burn out. Obviously from a people perspective, your manager doesn’t want you as a human being to burn out and be in a bad place. But even just the corporate ones and zeros straight numerical perspective, it is cheaper to keep you happy and productive than it is to hire somebody new because you flamed out and had to leave.

Josh Birk: Yeah. I mean, I think if you look at some of the other symptoms we haven’t talked about that are purely cognitive, in the sense of you get more forgetful, you’re more anxious. You’re more likely to snap at a coworker, all of these kind of things, not leading to what one would call an efficient job environment.

Drew Tauber: No, definitely not. There’s definitely been times when, and still happens to a degree, where I found myself apologizing for my tone way more than I should. I would be in a meeting and I could tell that I was being real snotty about my answers. I was being really snide. I was being really short. I was sarcastic. I’m like, “This is not the way I want to be sounding, but I just can’t pull myself out of it. I’m too into it right now.”

Drew Tauber: Immediately after the meeting would end, I would go on Slack to the person I was talking to, “Hey, I’m sorry. I know that came out the wrong way. I’m sorry that came out…” I wouldn’t necessarily apologize for the points I was making because the points I was making were valid, but there was definitely a better way I could have come out and said it.

Josh Birk: Yeah. You heard yourself in your head and you’re like, “I didn’t have to be that sharp about it.”

Drew Tauber: Yeah. It’s like an out-of-body experience. Like, “Why are you being such a mean person?”

Josh Birk: Well, and that’s an interesting cycle I think, because when you’re being the mean person, it’s because you’re getting that cortisol spike, you’re getting that little fight or flight instinct to it. But part of that situation is you don’t really know you’re in it. The brain’s just poking you and poking you. Then you get out of the room, be relaxed and then it’s like you said, out-of-body experience like, “Oh, wow. Was I the jerk? No, I might have been the jerk.”

Josh Birk: Yeah. Outside of getting more help and more resources, did you take time off for yourself? Did you try to counter any of the workload with going out and having more fun or doing more walks with a dog or anything like that?

Drew Tauber: Yeah. There’s definitely time, I definitely took some time off. I think my boss at one point insisted.

Josh Birk: Good. Good.

Drew Tauber: Good boss. Good boss.

Josh Birk: Good boss. Good boss.

Drew Tauber: Insisted I take some time away, which at the time it was hard. Being such a small team and like okay I can step away, but here’s all the stuff that’s not going to get done while I’m gone and just be like, “Okay, it’ll get done when you get back.” The other things I would do, yeah, people I work with have gotten pretty accustomed to the idea that if it’s between 10:30 and noon, and I have a meeting where I am not going to be needed to be on my keyboard, I’ll take that Zoom from the park when I’m walking my dog.

Josh Birk: Awesome point.

Drew Tauber: I’ll turn the camera on him and I’ll point the camera at him on my Zoom and people will appreciate that more than seeing my face.

Josh Birk: I love that. I love that so much. Now I have to repeat Mike Gerholdt’s… I think he tweets this every three weeks or something like that, just a friendly reminder, not only is it okay to have your kids, your cats and your dogs on your Zoom call, we want to see them. It’s actually a plus because we’re still a little trapped inside. Yes, I love that. I love puppy Zoom.

Josh Birk: Also, just really, I think that’s part of the Zoom fatigue, is that feeling like you have to be there in person. As somebody who’s worked remotely for a little over a decade now, I found it weird that I was actually finding every now and then I’ll do the same thing. I’ll take the call outside or I’ll take the call on my couch and I just turned the camera off. It’s like if I’m not necessary, then I can listen and be present without having to necessarily feel like I’m also on camera.

Drew Tauber: I think I saw something a while back about how psychologically what Zoom does to people because you can be in a meeting room and obviously people can see you, but you know when people are looking at you. But when you’re on Zoom, you don’t know what square… Even if everyone’s got their camera on, you don’t know what square on the Zoom Brady Bunch panel they’re looking at.

Drew Tauber: You have to be like, “All right. I’m being seen by everybody on this meeting simultaneously,” is where your head goes. I think one of the best things I did for Zoom in general is I just have everything set to default off.

Josh Birk: Nice.

Drew Tauber: I join a meeting, my camera’s off. My microphone is muted and I have to go in and push the buttons like, “I’m ready to talk. I’m ready to be seen.” I’ll turn the camera on. If not, I just won’t. Sometimes I’ll say, “Oh, I’m not turning my camera on. I’m eating lunch and I don’t want you all to watch me eat a sandwich.” Sometimes people just… Thankfully as a company, we generally don’t have the expectation that you have your camera on at all times.

Drew Tauber: If it’s a standup meeting, if it’s my morning meeting with my team then I’ll have my camera on because I know these people. But if it’s a group, a lot of times I won’t. Sometimes if I know that I’m not going to be able to keep my eye rolls to myself, I’ll keep my camera off.

Josh Birk: I love it. There’s wisdom in that. It’s self-knowledge. I like that. It does occur to me that prior to the pandemic and when everybody going into Zoom calls that this design of 12 huge faces and perfect squares in front of you, that’s the kind of stuff they used to put in supervillain movies.

Drew Tauber: Oh, yeah.

Josh Birk: It’s like this weird awe of power kind of thing in front of you. Now, I’m trying to figure out, did you manage to… Because socialization is such a huge role in maintaining stress and lowering stress. It’s considered to be one of the great ways of trying to help people through things like drug addiction. Did you manage to find a way to add any of that stuff back to your life?

Drew Tauber: Yeah. I mean, I feel like everyone had their friend Zooms at the very beginning before we all realized that this is not a great way to hang out with people.

Josh Birk: I know.

Drew Tauber: But we’d play video games with each other and if we’re playing a game, we would fire up a Discord chat or something so we could talk to each other while we’re playing. That way we’re not staring at each other, but we’re playing a game. We’re just talking. There’s actually a really cool game that I found called Starship Horizons where it’s a group game where one computer is the host and everyone else logs in on a web browser and everybody is a different station on your Starship.

Drew Tauber: It’s like one person logs in and they pick the tactical console and they’ve got the tactical station. One person’s the helmsman and one person’s communications. Then one person’s the captain and all they really do is they just tell other people to do… The captain has nothing. The captain just has… You rely on just like if you’re in Star Trek, let’s say you’re relying on your tactical person telling you information.

Drew Tauber: You’re relying on your op station giving information. You’re giving orders and they’re all executing, but it’s just finding ways to hang out without just staring at each other on a Zoom screen and be like, “So what are you guys up to?” “Nothing. I’m all at stuck at home. What are you up to?” “Nothing. I’m stuck at home.” It was all very important.

Josh Birk: Nice. I like it. I like it a lot. Now, on the flip side of video games, another thing I’ve had to accept because I was never much of an exercise fan, shall we say? But the science is undeniable as to the effect it can have. Even walking, running, whatever, it reduces your stress, it reduces anxiety, et cetera. Was walking the dog your exercise or did you tack on more stuff?

Drew Tauber: For a while it was my exercise. It definitely wasn’t enough exercise as far as staying healthy. I wound up starting to go do a more regular exercise regimen again. That’s the thing I always mention, is stress is a physical reaction in the body and I’m not going to say the best way to deal with your depression is to go out and exercise necessarily, but it definitely helps to get the endorphins going.

Josh Birk: Yeah. No. Totally. I’m a big fan of mental health is physical health. It’s all wrapped into one thing. Even if stuff’s just occurring in your brain, your brain’s on a brain stem and brain stem’s controlling the rest of your body. The proof is there that it’s just like this stuff can really hurt you physically over time, which is another reason why if there’s managers listening to this, it’s like at some point… When I was going through some stuff, I had a family member who was just not getting it, not realizing what was happening.

Josh Birk: My therapist was like, “Well, if they’re not going to appreciate your mental health, would you tell them that you would prefer not to have a heart attack?” Yeah. I will try that then. What else have you done to make sure you’re not going to get back there?

Drew Tauber: Yeah. I mean, a lot of stuff I’ve done from a work perspective is I don’t do quick things anymore if I can avoid it. It’s a trap that I find I used to fall into a lot all the time and I find a lot of people do the same thing where someone comes up to you and say, “Hey, can we add a field that does something?” You’re like, “Yeah, sure.” Click, click and is done. You get the immediate endorphin rush, you get the immediate satisfaction.

Drew Tauber: It’s like, “Oh my God. That’s so amazing. Thank you so much. That’s great. I can’t believe you were able do it so fast.” Then you fast-forward to a week later when they need three more fields. They’re like, “Well, you were able to do it in two seconds last time.” It’s like, “Yeah. Well, I’m busy now.” You set the expectation that you can do it quickly. I’m going to keep throwing out the Star Trek analogies.

Josh Birk: Please do. Yeah.

Drew Tauber: Scotty would always say like, “Oh, yeah, I multiply all my time estimates by four. That way you would believe I’m a miracle worker.”

Josh Birk: Right. Exactly.

Drew Tauber: I’m not saying lie about how long your timeframe’s going to be, but even if it’s something quick like that, it’s very much like, “Okay. Put it in a Jira ticket so none of us forget. We’ll plan it out. If it’s quick, we’ll do it.” I can’t just be like, “Oh, yeah, sure. I’m going to stop what I’m doing and go do your thing.” I always find people are very understanding of that. You always worry it’s like when you say like, “Oh, I can’t do it right now, but I’ll get to it when I have a minute.” Unless it’s super urgent I’m like, “Oh, well I actually need it right now, and-

Josh Birk: Right now. Right.

Drew Tauber: … the CEO’s demanding this field in the next five minutes or I’m fired.” Obviously stuff like that doesn’t happen in my company. Yeah, just managing expectations in a lot of ways. I’ve heard a lot of times a saying, if it’s not in Salesforce, it doesn’t exist when referring to sales opportunities and leads. I have the same thing with Jira. If it’s not in Jira, it doesn’t exist to me. If you want something done, especially if it’s a change that we need to be able to have good tracking on you need to make a Jira ticket.

Drew Tauber: I mean, I’ll do… You can come to me and say, “Hey, can you tell me why this thing happened to this person?” I’ll go and I’ll do some investigation, but if it takes me more than a few minutes, it’s like, “Okay, we need to plan this time out because I’ve got my sprint that I’ve committed to doing and if I don’t get that done, because I spent all my time doing all this troubleshooting stuff that was not on my list of things to do I have to answer to people for that.”

Drew Tauber: Also, going back to being able to justify hiring more people. If you’re doing all your work off the books-

Josh Birk: You can’t. Right.

Drew Tauber: … my boss might know that but when he goes to his boss, say, “Hey, we need to hire more people to help Drew?” Like, why? He’s getting-

Josh Birk: Why?

Drew Tauber: There’s nothing in his backlog and he’s getting all of his stuff done.

Josh Birk: Yeah. Yeah. Back when I was a dev lead, I told our business partners, it’s like everything’s an hour. Just assume it’s an hour. I know you think it’s simple. I know you think it’s straightforward, but assume that the developer has to actually research something to make sure they’re doing it right. They actually have to implement it and they actually have to test it. It’s just nothing is less than an hour.

Josh Birk: For a while I had a rule back when I was a people manager for tenure, if it’s not in GUS… And GUS was our internal sprint manager type thing. I’m like, “If it’s not in GUS, it won’t happen and if it’s not on Chatter, it didn’t happen.” Because you should do is go do good work and then brag about it on Chatter. Totally with you there.

Josh Birk: A big one that comes up a lot is notifications and having your phone on and stuff like that. Have you reinforced rules to get that stuff out of your cognition from time to time?

Drew Tauber: Yeah. I mean, I spend a lot of time on Slack boundaries. Part of it is just the idea of… I think I moved up by an hour, at least, the default times in Slack when they say, “Okay. This is your I’m not working anymore no-notifications time, unless it’s an emergency.” The bedtime rules or whatever. They recently released, I think in the last six months, the ability to set different times for weekends.

Drew Tauber: Basically extend your do-not-disturb time to the weekend and even sometimes during the day. If I’m focused on working on something, I’ll just set my notification. I’ll set do not to disturb because I’m really focused right now. That’s definitely important to me.

Josh Birk: Yeah. Back when I worked in an office, we would refer to it as heads-down coding because you could see the developer hunch. We trained everybody who wasn’t on the development floor like, “If you see them like that, if you have to talk to them, approach slowly. Make sure you realize you are probably bringing them out of a flow state and that’s not what they need.”

Drew Tauber: Well, it’s like yeah, back in the office, everyone would have headphones. If you see someone with their big cans on you don’t bother them.

Josh Birk: You don’t bother them.

Drew Tauber: But we don’t have that same thing anymore on Slack. The other thing I always say with Slack is Slack is great and I prefer it over email, but Slack has this implied immediacy to it that email doesn’t have. You get a message at like 10 o’clock at night it’s like, “Oh, I just got a Slack message. I need to reply.” I’ve tried to get into a habit of if this Slack message were sent to me via email, would I feel like I need to reply to it right now?

Josh Birk: Yeah. Exactly.

Drew Tauber: If I don’t feel that way, then I won’t.

Josh Birk: Then don’t. Yeah. Another big tip I always tell people, especially on that front is if your work phone is your personal phone, definitely fix that especially in the Slack world, it’s like if you can just walk away from your laptop and your work phone and just have no capacity to see any of these notifications, it’s so much easier than trying to figure out when is it my phone and when is it my work phone?

Drew Tauber: Yeah. I haven’t had that luxury since way back when I worked for a small company called Lehman Brothers, when everyone was issued a Blackberry and that was your only work device and people would say, “Oh, why don’t you get your regular stuff on your Blackberry?” I was like, “Because I want to be able to put my Blackberry in a drawer at the end of the day.

Josh Birk: Yeah. Exactly.

Drew Tauber: Now I do a pretty good job of like say managing notifications for off hours. Going in and if I’m going to be away snoozing my notifications, if I’m going to be really away, just turning off Slack, turning off do not sync my Gmail into my phone. If I’m on vacation, I don’t want to see it. If I’ve got time and I want to go check something or check on work, I’ll go in and I’ll pull the refresh and I’ll make it pull down but do not automatically background refresh this app.

Josh Birk: Nice. Nice. Now, when did you say, “I want to do this as a presentation? I want to get up in front of other people I want to talk about this.”

Drew Tauber: Probably late last year is when I started really bumping around. It was one of those things like I think I had the slide deck in Google Slides. I was just popping in like, “Oh, this is a good thing. I should say this kind of thing.” I say one of the parts of doing this is being able to go out there and talk about it and destigmatize it. Every time I do this presentation, I’ll do like, “Show of hands, how many people have felt this way?” Then most people put their hands up.

Drew Tauber: My favorite is I was doing the presentation in Chicago and I see a whole bunch of people on their laptops and on their phones while I’m presenting. I said, “Show of hands, how many of you are working right now?”

Josh Birk: Now.

Drew Tauber: They put their hands up. How many of you do you… I’m at a conference. How many of you do your managers know where you are right now and they’re still asking you for stuff? Most of them keep their hands up.

Josh Birk: Yeah. Well, yeah, and I thank you because it’s like I completely agree. I think awareness and transparency, that’s the front line that I think the community can embrace. It does help to know if you’re in a room there’s probably… John Oliver just did his episode of mental health and he’s like… It went back in the 2010s. It was one in 10 adults suffered from anxiety and depression. Now it’s up to like four in 10. I guarantee you in the tech industry, it’s more like six in 10 or seven in 10, if we’re lucky.

Drew Tauber: I think a lot of that is just, don’t think a lot of it… There’s definitely a part of it where people are getting more anxious but I think a lot of it is people are recognizing it more.

Josh Birk: Yeah. Agreed.

Drew Tauber: It used to be like, “Oh, I’m just in a funk or I had a bad day.”

Josh Birk: Right. Or of course it’s been a long work week. That’s what work weeks look like.

Drew Tauber: Then you realize like, “Oh, no, my bad days are outnumbering my good days.” Then you finally realize like, “Oh, no, this is actually something real.”

Josh Birk: That’s our show. Now, before we go I did ask after Drew’s favorite non-technical hobby and it’s honestly one that he shares with a lot of people in the community.

Drew Tauber: I’m not sure if this is non-technical or not. It’s definitely more analog, but I enjoy woodworking.

Josh Birk: Oh, yeah. That’s definitely… If Kevin Portman’s listening right now, he’d be like, “No, Josh, it’s a technical thing.” I get you because it’s-

Drew Tauber: Yeah. There’s a lot of math involved. There’s a lot of… Because if you’re off by a little bit and it just cascades through your entire project… So it’s definitely I’m away from my computer. I’m working with my hands, I’m outside, and at the end of the day, I can point to a table that I made, it’s like, “I made that.”

Josh Birk: I want to thank Drew for the great conversation and information, and as always, I want to thank you for listening. Now, on a personal front, I just want to say, we’re talking about very serious issues out there. I do want to call out and just say, if you are feeling symptoms of anxiety and depression, you’re making it something that’s hard for you to get through work, please, please seek help. There’s a lot of great telehealth services out there, but first of all, you’re not alone and with help, you can get through it.

Josh Birk: Once again, thank you everybody. If you want to learn more about this show, head on over to developer.salesforce.com/podcast, where you can hear old episodes, see the show notes and have links to your favorite podcast service. Once again, thank you and I’ll talk to you next week.

Mike Gerholdt: So I really enjoyed that podcast and I will echo where Josh left that podcast off. If you're listening to this episode or any other episode and you're feeling stressed out, you're feeling burned out, reach out to someone. Don't be afraid to talk that that can be incredibly helpful. There's a lot of help lines, there's a lot of people I promise around you that are there to care for you. So I took a lot out of that podcast. I hope you do too. I really identified with how Drew brought up feeling overwhelmed. I thought it was interesting, the empty notebook syndrome that he talked about, which is looking at something and thinking of all the things that need to be done and the Zoom fatigue.
                                                       So this is a really, really cool episode. I'm glad the developer team let us kind of swap episodes out. I'd be curious to know what you think. Did you enjoy a trading spaces podcast where we rebroadcast somebody else's stuff? So let me know what you think. Hit us up on Twitter. Of course, if you want to learn more about all things Salesforce admin, go to admin.salesforce.com to find more resources, including any of the links that Josh and Drew mentioned in this episode. And of course, there's a full transcript down below. And of course, you can stay up to date with us on social. We are @SalesforceAdmns on Twitter. Gillian, who's my co-host, she is on Twitter @gilliankbruce. And of course you can find me. I am @MikeGerholdt.
                                                       So with that, stay safe, stay awesome, and stay tuned for the next episode. We'll see you in the cloud.

Direct download: Guest_Show__Burnout_and_Stress_with_Drew_Tauber.mp3
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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we’ve got the Monthly Retro for November.

Join us as we review the top product, community, and career content for November, and celebrate National French Toast Day.

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

Learn MOAR

The Learn MOAR Trailmix is still going. If you complete it before Nov 30, 2022, you’ll unlock a special community badge and be entered to win 1 of 5 Cert Vouchers—see the link and Learn MOAR page for all the details. Get up to speed with the upcoming release!

Blog highlights from November

MFA auto-enablement is coming on February 1st, 2023. You’ve still got a couple of months to prepare, so read this blog post and learn why it’s not as scary as you thought.

Video highlights from November

Jennifer Lee continues to crush it with the How I Solved It series. This month, she joins forces with CeCe Adams to tackle how admins can design a better user experience. Dynamic forms can do a lot of the heavy lifting—a significant improvement from the days of wading through page layouts just to add a field.

Podcast highlights from November

Gillian hopped on the pod with LeeAnne Rimel to talk about making your “Brag Book.” Having a place to record all your wins can be incredibly helpful, not just to grow your career but also to help those around you. We also had a fascinating conversation with Kathy Baxter and Rob Katz about data and AI ethics that you shouldn’t miss.

Just for fun

Mike and Gillian chat about a few things French to close out this episode. November 25th is National Parfait Day. A parfait, French for “perfect,” is a frozen dessert that has been around since 1894. November 28th is National French Toast day, so we thought we’d include a recipe to celebrate. Finally, in December, Gillian will be keynoting at French Touch Dreamin’.

Apple-Cinnamon French Toast

Apple Topping:

  • 2 medium apples, peeled and sliced
  • 3/4 cup brown sugar
  • 4 tablespoons butter
  • 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
  • 1/4 teaspoon vanilla

French Toast:

  • 1/2 cup milk
  • 2 eggs, lightly beaten
  • 1/4 cup all-purpose flour
  • 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
  • 1/4 teaspoon vanilla
  • 6 slices bread
  • butter
  • powdered sugar

Make the topping by melting the butter and brown sugar in a pan, stirring frequently. Add apples and cinnamon. Stir to coat, then reduce heat and cook until apples are slightly tender, about 6 minutes. Remove from heat and stir in vanilla. Allow to cool. Meanwhile, whisk together milk, eggs, flour, cinnamon, and vanilla until smooth. Pour into a casserole dish. Soak bread in mix for 1 minute, turn and soak for 1 minute more. Melt butter in a skillet over medium heat. Add battered bread to pan. Add bread and cook until golden brown, 1-2 minutes. Flip over and cook that side until golden brown. To serve, place bread on platter, cover with apples and sauce and sprinkle with powdered sugar.

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Full show transcript

Mike Gerholdt:                                         Welcome to the Salesforce Admins podcast in the November monthly retro for 2022. I'm your host, Mike Gerholdt, and in this episode we're going to review some of the top product, community, and careers content for November, plus anything else we find interesting. To help me do that, I'm joined by the very familiar voice of Gillian Bruce. Hey, Gillian.

Gillian Bruce:                                         Hi Mike. Hi Mike. Good to be back with you on the pod. I like our little monthly tradition we've got.

Mike Gerholdt:                                         We check in on each other.

Gillian Bruce:                                         It's good.

Mike Gerholdt:                                         It's a fun time.

Gillian Bruce:                                         Good. November was a fun month.

Mike Gerholdt:                                         It was. It was hot and it was cold. It was like a Katy Perry song, depending on where you lived in the US.

Gillian Bruce:                                         Yes. Chaos. There was 70-degree weather in New York, and I've been quote-unquote "freezing" here in San Francisco at 50. Yeah.

Mike Gerholdt:                                         Literally, today when we're recording, the high at noon is 70. Tonight, 12 hours later at midnight, the low is going to be 31 in Iowa.

Gillian Bruce:                                         Ouf!

Mike Gerholdt:                                         How do you dress for that? Come on.

Gillian Bruce:                                         You just stay inside.

Mike Gerholdt:                                         That's my plan, and record podcasts. The other thing you could do, depending on when you're listening to this, if it's before November 30th, is you could go to our Learn More campaign and unlock the community badge for a chance to win one of five cert vouchers.

Gillian Bruce:                                         It's so cool. It's cool to be able to win, possibly win a cert voucher, but the community badge is pretty awesome. Those are one-time deals.

Mike Gerholdt:                                         Like the Trick or Trailhead badge.

Gillian Bruce:                                         Mm-hmm.

Mike Gerholdt:                                         Oh shoot, I forgot to get mine. Well, anyway, link is in the show notes. You have until November 30th, so hop on it.

Gillian Bruce:                                         Hop on it, and then you'll be totally prepared to make the most out of the winter release.

Mike Gerholdt:                                         Yep.

Gillian Bruce:                                         There you go. We also had a bunch of content.

Mike Gerholdt:                                         We did. We did, a little bit of content. You know what? I'll start us off because I helped review this post from Tammy. So, want to put out, Tammy wrote a great post for admins on Get Ready for Multi-Factor Authentication and Plan for Auto-Enablement. Auto-enablement is coming February 1st.

Gillian Bruce:                                         Still got a couple of months there to prepare.

Mike Gerholdt:                                         Yep, but I think, I come back to this. You should read this post. It's not scary, and I say that, but I've gone through MFA at organizations. I also went through it in my personal life, like during the pandemic, one of my fondest memories was binge-watching all of Tiger King-

Gillian Bruce:                                         Yes.

Mike Gerholdt:                                         And setting up MFA on all my accounts. I kid you not, I spent a Saturday doing that.

Gillian Bruce:                                         That's amazing, Mike. I love that combination. Now, the biggest question is, did you wear any Tiger-King-appropriate apparel while you were setting up all of your MFA, and watching Tiger King?

Mike Gerholdt:                                         No. I'll tell you why. I was too busy getting alerts from Instagram that somebody in Russia was trying to log in to my Instagram account.

Gillian Bruce:                                         Well, hey, who doesn't want to be Mike Gerholdt?

Mike Gerholdt:                                         Seriously, honestly, parody accounts. I need a verified check mark.

Gillian Bruce:                                         Well, apparently anyone can buy one now.

Mike Gerholdt:                                         Right. Yep.

Gillian Bruce:                                         That's great. But yeah, MFA is super-important. That's a good reminder. I've done it a little bit for some of my personal stuff. I need to do it for the rest, so it's a good reminder. But yeah, MFA, it's coming. It's a real thing.

Mike Gerholdt:                                         Yeah.

Gillian Bruce:                                         Get ready, everybody.

Mike Gerholdt:                                         Yeah. Yeah, this is a good thing, seriously. You know what, Gillian? You and I both did a podcast-

Gillian Bruce:                                         [inaudible].

Mike Gerholdt:                                         So, let's start off with the podcast you did, because that was just most recently released.

Gillian Bruce:                                         Yeah. I got our amazing teammate, LeeAnne Rimel, on the pod because we've been having a lot of discussions. It's the end of the year, and it's figuring out how to capture the work that you have done, and figuring out what work you're going to do in the next year. We actually talked about a concept that, Mike, you introduced to both of us, the brag book. So, the idea of how do you capture your work and your feedback throughout the year in one place, so that you can really explain and demonstrate the impact and the value that you added to the organization in your role.
                                                       It's something that I think is really important, especially for every admin. LeeAnne and I go into that, about the why, about the how, and really talk about how you can start small and accumulate that, build that muscle over time. Then, especially, I think and remember, LeeAnne had such a hard time with this in the beginning, I did not. I was like, "Yeah, look how great I am, look at all the cool stuff I'm doing." LeeAnne was like, "No, I just want to do the good work."

Mike Gerholdt:                                         Right.

Gillian Bruce:                                         So, talking about that mind shift of a) it's not all about you, it's about the impact you have. Then b) understanding that capturing your feedback and sharing your accomplishments is not really the traditional brag. It's not like, "Hey, look how great I am!" No, it's look at the impact you're having and the value that you're adding.

Mike Gerholdt:                                         Yeah.

Gillian Bruce:                                         That's what helped LeeAnne get over the hump. It's been a shift for me too. So, it was a fun discussion.

Mike Gerholdt:                                         Yeah. I will say... so, teaser... we have a cool podcast coming up in December. I'm not sure when it's going to come out. Where we talk about stress and anxiety. When I listened to this episode, it made me think of when you put this together and you accomplish something. I always kept that brag book deck open in a browser tab, because then it felt like I got to cross a finish line and cheer a little bit before I moved on. That was the thing that I always explain to LeeAnne, is, "I know you want to do the work, but like stop and celebrate what you're getting done."

Gillian Bruce:                                         Yeah.

Mike Gerholdt:                                         I don't think we do that enough.

Gillian Bruce:                                         Well, it's hard. I think everyone works in a pretty fast-paced environment, and so it's really hard to take a pause and be like, "Wait, no, that was really cool. Like, that's something special." So, yeah, I think to your point, having this as a way to, "No, no, like stop and think about how cool that was, that you just did that," is important.

Mike Gerholdt:                                         I know. Listen to Gillian. The other episode we did, and this sounds very pedantic, but I am going to encourage people to listen to it because I enjoy talking with Kathy Baxter and Rob Katz, Data Ethics and AI for Admins. Sounds like a mouthful, but it really was eye-opening for me when we were recording the podcast, to look at just the shift of where things have come and where things are going.
                                                       I bring up one point that I really think is relevant for admins. Gillian, you remember this, you've been around in Salesforce world for a long time. For the longest time and early in my admin years, it was, "How can we get data out of LinkedIn?" Right? "How do we get leads?" It was like Glengarry Glen Ross. Now... and Rob points this out, this is why you should listen to this... now, that's not a problem.
                                                       Getting data isn't a problem. It's the opposite right now. There is a data glut. We have so much data, and you have access to so much data that it's, what do you want to be responsible for, and how are you making those decisions? I was on the floor just reading through the show notes as we were prepping for the call. I thought, "This is so much stuff that, as an admin with a seat at the table, you need to sit down and ask these questions."

Gillian Bruce:                                         Yeah. God, Kathy, I remember having Kathy on the podcast a while ago, and just my whole mindset being shifted about how to think about data and what it means. What it really means, other than what the data set actually is. Yeah, Mike, it was a great discussion. I really enjoyed listening to the pod too. Yeah, it makes you think about things a little differently. Just because you can get the data doesn't mean you should. Right?

Mike Gerholdt:                                         Yep. Well, and what's it mean to be responsible for that data too.

Gillian Bruce:                                         Yeah.

Mike Gerholdt:                                         Yeah, and it's a good podcast to sit down and take notes on a rainy day.

Gillian Bruce:                                         Yeah.

Mike Gerholdt:                                         Probably not one you want to walk the dog with.

Gillian Bruce:                                         You can't really multitask very well and pay attention-

Mike Gerholdt:                                         No.

Gillian Bruce:                                         ...to what's going on. There's a lot of really good diving deep.

Mike Gerholdt:                                         Yeah, just to be honest.

Gillian Bruce:                                         But yeah, it was a great pod, Mike. Good job with that one.

Mike Gerholdt:                                         Yeah, it was good. Jen, of course, leads the way in video. She is a face and a personality for video.

Gillian Bruce:                                         She has got it down.

Mike Gerholdt:                                         Yep. Another How I Solved It with Designing User Experience, A Better User Experience. I think this is always the thing that it's interesting for me, comes up every now and then, when new automation tools or new things come into the ecosystem. I think immediately as admins, we think, "How can we apply this to a business problem?" We forget that sometimes creating a new user is the most thing-involved task-listy job that we fail to automate.

Gillian Bruce:                                         Yeah. Yeah. Well, and Cece, our amazing trailblazer that Jen features, is really good at... You know what? Hey, guess what, Mike? It ties into that Salesforce Admin Skills Kit, believe it or not. It's all about the designer's mindset skill.

Mike Gerholdt:                                         Yep.

Gillian Bruce:                                         So, really thinking about that experience, and Cece really epitomizes that. So, it's a great video. Everyone should definitely check it out.

Mike Gerholdt:                                         Yep, and Dynamic Forms, which is-

Gillian Bruce:                                         Yes.

Mike Gerholdt:                                         ... something I've waited a long time for.

Gillian Bruce:                                         I was going to say, Mike, do you remember the days, the before times, when we had no dynamic forms?

Mike Gerholdt:                                         I remember the days when I used workflows-

Gillian Bruce:                                         Yeah.

Mike Gerholdt:                                         Record types, and page layouts, to mimic dynamic forms.

Gillian Bruce:                                         How many page layouts did you have to create?

Mike Gerholdt:                                         Billions. Billions. Billions. It was a full-ti... Oh my. You need to add a field? Hang on. That's a week. Why does it take you a week? I got so many page layouts I got to add it to.

Gillian Bruce:                                         Exactly.

Mike Gerholdt:                                         Yep.

Gillian Bruce:                                         Oh, man.

Mike Gerholdt:                                         Yep. Yeah.

Gillian Bruce:                                         Thank you, dynamic forms. Thank you. Thank you.

Mike Gerholdt:                                         No kidding. Last month, I hope everybody enjoyed our discussion about apple cider and pumpkin spice. The tweet on that was fun.

Gillian Bruce:                                         Oh, I think it was the most viral tweet we've had in a long time.

Mike Gerholdt:                                         I know, and I was surprised how people were dialed up about pumpkin spice losing. I'm fine with it. Anyway.

Gillian Bruce:                                         You're going to get them all activated again, Mike.

Mike Gerholdt:                                         I know. All riled up.

Gillian Bruce:                                         The pumpkin spice lovers are going to come after us.

Mike Gerholdt:                                         I know. Yeah. Well, I won't reemerge until after fall when pumpkin spice goes away. That'll be my plan. Housekeeping note... and so fun discussion... we're going to take November 24th off, so there's no podcast that's going to come out, because the US holiday of Thanksgiving. We've done episodes on Thanksgiving that have been released, but I'll be honest, just nobody listens to them. So, we're going to give you the week off, but we will return the following week. Which is, I think, December 1st.
                                                       I alluded to it previously. We have a lot of really cool stuff lined up for December, and it's starting to bleed into January. One thing I wanted to do is close up our November episode with, ironically, a few things French, because I found things in Google that interest me. So, Gillian, November 25th is National Parfait Day. I did not know that parfait is French for perfect, which is a frozen dessert that's been around since 1894. So, that's November 25th.
                                                       November 28th is National French Toast Day, which has 'French' in it. I'll include the link, because I also found an apple cinnamon French toast recipe, and because you know I like apple cider. Apple cinnamon French toast sounds amazing. Gillian, you're also keynoting that French Touch Dreamin. I feel like I just ended the pod with a Seven Ways to Relate to Kevin Bacon thing on [inaudible] parfait, French toast, and French Touch Dreamin, and loop all together.

Gillian Bruce:                                         I love a parfait day that leads into French Touch Dreamin. I think that was parfait, sir.

Mike Gerholdt:                                         It was parfait, yeah.

Gillian Bruce:                                         Yeah. No, I'm really looking forward to it. I got invited to keynote at French Touch Dreamin, which is happening on December 1st in Paris. It's going to be really amazing to connect with the EMEA community. I haven't had a chance to do that since before the pandemic, honestly. So, it's going to be great to meet some new faces and reconnect with folks I haven't seen in so long. Hey, if you are inclined to go to Paris from December 1st, please come join us.

Mike Gerholdt:                                         [inaudible].

Gillian Bruce:                                         The registration is still open, yeah. Yeah, it should be really good times, and it's going to be a really fun keynote. It's going to be a little different than stuff that I've done in the past. So, just teaser, just teaser hanging out there. Come play with us in Paris.

Mike Gerholdt:                                         I expect to find out things that you ate while you're there, because I promise they probably don't have French toast. They have something better.

Gillian Bruce:                                         No, but they probably have parfaits. I don't know.

Mike Gerholdt:                                         Well, parfaits are good. I like parfaits, to be honest.

Gillian Bruce:                                         I definitely plan on consuming quite a bit of crepes.

Mike Gerholdt:                                         Oh, crepes are really good. Oh, man.

Gillian Bruce:                                         Yeah, crepes. Definitely a fair amount of wine, because that's just, you have to.

Mike Gerholdt:                                         [inaudible] French. It's in France.

Gillian Bruce:                                         Yeah. Good pastry.

Mike Gerholdt:                                         Savory crepe or sweet crepe?

Gillian Bruce:                                         I am a sweet crepe person. I like maybe a little Nutella or just a little powdered sugar. Nothing too complicated.

Mike Gerholdt:                                         All right.

Gillian Bruce:                                         Yeah. How about you?

Mike Gerholdt:                                         Same. Strawberries.

Gillian Bruce:                                         Oh yeah.

Mike Gerholdt:                                         Yeah. Strawberries and powdered sugar. That's it.

Gillian Bruce:                                         Yeah.

Mike Gerholdt:                                         Go all day. I also like funnel cakes that way. Oh!

Gillian Bruce:                                         I was going to say, it sounds very funnel-cake-like. Yeah.

Mike Gerholdt:                                         It does. Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Gillian Bruce:                                         I love Mike on our retro pods. We always talk about food. It's great.

Mike Gerholdt:                                         Imagine that, but also French Touch Dreamin and French toast.

Gillian Bruce:                                         Yes. Oui, oui. Oui, oui.

Mike Gerholdt:                                         Yeah. Yep.

Gillian Bruce:                                         Yeah, if anybody has fun French sayings that I need to know, please tell me, because I clearly do not speak French.

Mike Gerholdt:                                         Or not know, Gillian, because I will say I'm really good at figuring out things you shouldn't say in Europe too.

Gillian Bruce:                                         Right. Especially when you're up in front of a packed room-

Mike Gerholdt:                                         A whole bunch of people.

Gillian Bruce:                                         Delivering a presentation.

Mike Gerholdt:                                         You learn.

Gillian Bruce:                                         And you say something you think is going to play and be really funny, and people look at you like, "What did you just say?"

Mike Gerholdt:                                         Yeah. Yep. The London admin user group knows that.

Gillian Bruce:                                         Mm-hmm.

Mike Gerholdt:                                         Anyway. Well, I'll include the apple cinnamon French toast recipe in the show notes, because it sounds amazing. Just flip over and cook that side until golden brown. To serve, place on a platter with apples and sauce. Mmm!

Gillian Bruce:                                         I'm going to have to make that over the holidays. Just, it looks too good.

Mike Gerholdt:                                         The main ingredients are sugar, butter, cinnamon, vanilla.

Gillian Bruce:                                         Come on!

Mike Gerholdt:                                         And apples. All of those taste good on apples, so we're good there.

Gillian Bruce:                                         See, and this is a theme from the last pod, or was that two pods ago, when we talked about apples? Right?

Mike Gerholdt:                                         We did, last one. I tried to stitch together... It's for you that I do this. The time spent creating a through-line, it's all consuming. [inaudible].

Gillian Bruce:                                         I appreciate it, Mike.

Mike Gerholdt:                                         And sometimes completely accidental, to be clear. If you want to learn about all things admin that we talked about in this episode, including the links to the blog, and the podcast, and the video, we will include those links in the show notes, and you can find them on admin.salesforce.com. You can also stay up to date with us on all things social for admins, including pumpkin spice or apple cider.
                                                       We'll have to figure out, maybe we do a parfait and French toast tweet. You can follow us on Twitter @SalesforceAdmns, no 'i'. Of course, Gillian is on Twitter. She's at @gilliankbruce. So, be sure to tweet at her, not only when she's in France, but other times too. Then, of course, I am at @MikeGerholdt. With that, stay safe, stay awesome, and stay tuned for the next episode. We'll see you in the cloud.



Direct download: November_Monthly_Retro_with_Mike_and_Gillian.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:00am PDT

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we bring on LeeAnne Rimel, Senior Director of Admin Evangelism at Salesforce, to share how you can build a “Brag Book” to capture your wins and successes.

Join us as we talk about why it’s so important to put all your successes in one place, how to get started, and how to feel comfortable talking about your accomplishments.

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

What is a Brag Book?

“Imagine you’re getting ready for your end-of-year or end-of-quarter review with your boss,” LeeAnne says. It can be hard to remember what you were doing last month, let alone the last six months or last year.

“That’s where the Brag Book comes in,” LeeAnne says, “it’s a place to collect your wins, your accomplishments, your project completions, your accolades, or awards, or feedback, throughout the year.” By putting everything together as it happens to you, you’ll be ready whenever you need to talk about your career. “It’s one of those chances to do future you a favor.”

Building your bragging muscle

You need to get in the habit of saving positive feedback whenever you come across it, like building a muscle. When she first started her Brag Book, LeeAnne used a private slide deck with a slide for each project. Then she could simply drop in whatever she came across that was worth keeping, whether qualitative (like an appreciative YouTube comment) or quantitative (like attendance or adoption numbers).

These days, LeeAnne uses a private Slack channel with herself, with threads to organize everything into individual projects. “It doesn’t really matter where your bucket is,” she says, “pick your place, make it easy to get to, and then practice building it into your muscle memory.”

Shine a light on your collaborators

It can be hard to get into the mindset of bragging about your accomplishments. If you’re used to working behind the scenes, it might feel weird to step into the spotlight. “It’s really not about you, it’s about the work and the impact that it’s having,” LeeAnne says, “and it’s helpful for the people around you to know if that work is impactful or not, if that’s something they might be able to learn from for their own work, and if that information might influence decisions that are coming up for them.”

Nobody works in a silo. Even if you’re a solo admin, you have partners who help you succeed. Capturing the story of a successful project gives you a chance to not only talk about your work but also to shine a light on other people who deserve credit. Getting the opportunity to give those well-deserved kudos can make anyone feel like bragging.

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Full show transcript

Gillian Bruce:                                         Welcome to the Salesforce Admins Podcast where we talk about product, community, and careers to help you be an awesome admin. I'm your host today, Gillian Bruce, and I am joined by the wonderful LeeAnne Rimel. Hi LeeAnne.

LeeAnne Rimel:                                         Hi Gillian.

Gillian Bruce:                                         Thank you for joining me. We are going to be talking about something that you posted on Twitter not too long ago as a thread and just took off and got a bunch of attention. And we're going to talk about this idea of creating a personal brag book. But before we get into all that, I want to set the context for our listeners. So admins, you're listening to this, it's getting towards the end of the year. You did a lot of great things this year, whether it was for your organization or for your personal career, and it's a really good time to think about all those contributions you made, all the work you did. And I know it's really hard sometimes to capture that work and then share that. It's one of the reasons we built the Salesforce admin skills kit to help try and give you some language around that. But I really wanted to get LeeAnne on the podcast today to talk really about how you can build this idea of a brag book to help you capture what you're doing, capture your wins and successes. So LeeAnne, can you give us an overview of what a brag book is?

LeeAnne Rimel:                                         I sure can. So imagine you are getting ready for your end of year or end of quarter review with your boss or with your manager, or you are wrapping up a project, maybe a three month or six month project, and you're getting ready for your postmortem report to your team or your leadership. Or imagine your thinking about leveling up your career, whether that's applying for a job internally at your company, looking for jobs elsewhere, looking to go into that next role. Sometimes it can be really hard to sit there and say, "Okay, what did I do the last 12 months? What are all the things I did in the last three months?" A lot of us, especially Salesforce admins, are often moving really fast. We move really quickly through project, through work. People are working a lot.
                                                       A lot of people have very busy personal lives. There's a lot on our plates. And I don't know about you, but I definitely have sat down and drawn a blank and I'm like, "Okay, what's my year review look like? I knew I did a lot this year, I was really busy this year. What did I do?" And so that's where the brag book comes in. It is a place, a way to collect your wins, your accomplishments, your project completions, your accolades or awards or feedback throughout the year or throughout the project or throughout the quarter so that when those times come where you have the opportunity to amplify your work, you're 90% of the way there.
                                                       You've got your brag book ready to go, and you can take the pieces out of that that are relevant for the thing that you're preparing. So if you're preparing for a quarterly review or something like a job review or something like that, you can go through and take the pieces out of your brag book that I always joke, Gillian knows this. I'll be like, "Oh, 2022 LeeAnne is doing 2023 LeeAnne a favor. And it's one of those chances that you can do future you a favor and be like, "Oh man, I'm so glad that 2021 LeeAnne documented all of these things so it was easier for me to collect them now."

Gillian Bruce:                                         So one of the things that I think you hit on is that you're doing this throughout the year because like you said, I do the same thing. I'm like, "Cool, so what did I just spend the last nine months working on? I don't know, I think I did that." But your concept is capturing that in the moment. And so how do you capture it? What are you saving? Where does it live? Talk to me a little bit about how you approach that.

LeeAnne Rimel:                                         So it's definitely a muscle that you build. It's this muscle that you build of constantly being aware of inputs in your environment, whether that's a feedback note, whether that's a great survey result, whether that's user adoption training that you had really high participation on, and all of your sales leaders were so happy about it because everyone used Salesforce after. So whatever it is, creating that muscle of, okay, I'm going to collect this somewhere. So, where you collect it is totally up to. So when Gillian and I both started doing this many years ago because our team leader Mike Gerholdt said, "You guys need to create brag books." And so we created brag books, and at the time we started them in, I think Google Slides, and this was not a beautiful automated solution. This was a place to put things.
                                                       So I would have a running slide deck called my brag book that was just private to me and it was just the place that I dropped items. So for example, I'd create a slide if I worked on a project like keynote or if I worked on a project like a webinar or whatever it was, I would create a slide for that. And then I would drop things into that slide as they came up. So if someone left a comment on YouTube that it was really meaningful to them, I would put in both qualitative and quantitative pieces. So if someone left a comment, that piece of content was really meaningful to them, or if we had someone from one of our internal partners or a leadership team member give a lot of positive feedback about something, I would literally do a snag it. I'd take a picture of that, drop it into the slide or that series of slides.
                                                       But I also would use it as a place to store quantitative feedback as well. So if there was survey results, if there was any sort of numbers like attendance, everyone tracks different, if there's adoption numbers, whatever those numbers and metrics were that were related to this, I'd put the link to the Salesforce dashboard in there that I was using to track that project, whatever it was. And so truly for many years it was a Google Slide deck. Now I use a private Slack channel. So I have a private channel just with myself and I organize things with threads. So if I'll have my overall Dreamforce thread and I'll paste things into that thread, or I'll have different threads for different projects that I've worked on and I use that to organize. But it doesn't really matter where your bucket is it, I would say it probably should be digital because I'm a big fan of pen and paper journaling. However, I would recommend making it a digital one because likely there will be some copy and pasting, some links, some screenshots an pictures. I'm a big advocate of always collecting photos when possible.
                                                       If you do a lunch and learn. Like if you're an admin, you roll out something, you're doing some sort of virtual webinar, a lunch and learn, a user adoption training, some user testing with your super users, do a quick picture of that, capture a picture because that really does tell a thousand words to you and it'll help you revisit that moment when you're trying to amplify that work later on. So pick your place. Again, it doesn't matter what it is, Evernote, your Mac notes like OneNote, it doesn't matter. Just pick a place. Pick a place you're going to document things. Make it easy to get to, bookmark it, add an extension whatever tool you're using and then practice building that into your muscle memory. So when you see a note, like a great feedback note, when you see a survey result that you're proud of, when you see an adoption training result you're proud of, when you see some numbers about an automation you built, practice putting that muscle in of this is awesome. I'm going to log this.

Gillian Bruce:                                         I think the idea of putting it somewhere that's really easy because I think for me, especially when we use the Google Slides, I've always felt this pressure to make it look pretty when I put it in, but the idea now... The private Slack channel's brilliant. I think now I need to start doing that because I literally just have a Quip doc where I just paste stuff and paste feedback, which has worked fine, but the Slack thing I think makes it even more accessible and easy. I love that. So that's a great tip and I think everybody uses Slack so it's super easy.

LeeAnne Rimel:                                         I love private Slack channels. I also have a private Slack channel just for call notes, which I highly recommend as well. But yeah, private Slack channels are great, especially if you get comfortable with Slack Search and how to use Slack Search quickly because then you'll surface stuff just really fast when you're looking for things if you are trying to create a specific preso on here's what we learned with this project or this presentation.

Gillian Bruce:                                         And one thing that I also want to address is some people might feel weird about the idea of bragging, right? Because it's not comfortable sometimes to talk about how great you are and all the great things that you do. But here's the thing, if you don't do it, no one is going to do it for you. And I know it might be uncomfortable, I think for some of us, myself included, this is not hard. This is a natural muscle that I have had since I was, I don't even know, able to walk and talk. But often when I talk about this or just in general sharing your accomplishments, I usually get people being like, "I don't know, that feels uncomfortable and weird," but you got to do it. And it's not all about you, you, you, how great you are. I think the biggest thing is focusing on the impact.
                                                       So when you're gathering that feedback, like for example, if I have somebody who comes up to me at an event is like, "Gillian , I listened to that one podcast, it motivated me to do X, Y, and Z, and now it's enabled me to do this." That's to me, the stuff that I like to capture, because it shows the work you're doing is actually making a difference. And so if you're an admin, it's like, oh, will this flow that I implemented, this person just told me it saves six hours of their monthly reporting or whatever. That's the stuff that you want to include because then when you share it or when you have a reason to share, it's clear why you're sharing it. You're not just like, "Look at me, I'm so great." It's like, look at the impact that my work has had on the people that I'm working with or the customers that I serve.
                                                       I think that's a really important distinction, because LeeAnne, I think working with you for what, eight years now? Almost nine years. I've actually seen you go through this shift too where it's like, no, it's not just about talking about how great you are, which I have no problem doing, but it was not necessarily in your wheelhouse and naturally something that you did.

LeeAnne Rimel:                                         I was really uncomfortable with it. I was super uncomfortable. I was like, "No, I do my work." My background is I've always had pretty technical roles and the mindset I had was very much, I do my work, I did my project, the work speaks for itself. And that's that. It was a mindset shift for me to think about... It's almost remove yourself from the equation like you're saying. Because I was like, "Oh, it feels weird to just sit and talk about a project I worked on, and the information's available. People could have watched the webinar if they were interested. So why do I need to talk about why it was great?" And I suffered from being just incredibly illogical. And there's a few things that helped me overcome that hurdle.
                                                       One, it's really not about you, it isn't. It's about the work and like you're saying, it's about the work and the impact the work is having. And so it's helpful for people around you to know if that work is impactful or not, if that's something that they might be able to learn from for their own work, if that information might influence decisions that are coming up for those people. Also, it's a little bit of an act of empathy for your management team because if you think about how difficult it can be for you to sit down and think about every one of your accomplishments or the projects you've finished and the successes you've had over the last 12 months, imagine your people manager who might be managing four to 12 people on average. And so do you think that they just know off the top of their head the nuances of every single project? And even really great managers, they might not know those details, they're not on the receiving end of those feedback notes, or maybe they're not drilling into those results in the same level of detail.
                                                       So also you're making it easier for people in decision making positions in your group to understand here's why this was valuable and here's some of the buttons that this pushed. Like if we're looking at user adoption or we're looking at automation, whatever those goals are, it's really very helpful to have that information supplied to you in a tangible way. And so it's not about you, it's nice to your management, they'll be happy for it usually to have this summarized, and then it can help your peers. So I think that was a big thing. That was a mindset shift for me as well where I was like, "Oh, if we learned lessons along the way on this project and then we made these decisions to handle a project a certain way and it turned out well, we got positive feedback from it, I want to share that with my peers because they might be facing similar challenges or similar decisions and maybe that will help them determine what path to take and maybe I can save them a little bit of time or they can make more informed decisions.
                                                       For example, if you're on a team with multiple admins and you're getting all this really positive feedback and positive results from automating a particular part of your business or your business process, that's really important to share because there might be other groups, like you might have peer groups that are doing their work prioritization and they might say, "Oh, well we're getting so much positive feedback from automating stage five of this business process, maybe we should automate stage two as well because we see that there's a lot of momentum here." So I think there's a lot of reasons, but I think if you're sharing things in a way that are useful and genuine, I don't think people will look at you as, oh, you're bragging too much.
                                                       We call it a brag book a little bit jokingly. I think that that's really the tone of most workplaces now is you have to amplify your accomplishments. I think particularly if it's uncomfortable to do so, because probably if it's uncomfortable, it means you really need to do it. Because it probably means you don't naturally organically do it in the course of your work as much as maybe someone who is really, really comfortable amplifying themselves. And so if I could draw a little chart for you, there's probably an inverse relationship there of the more uncomfortable you are with it, means probably the more pressing this is for your career growth.

Gillian Bruce:                                         100%. And one thing that you said about helping, getting the feedback and sharing it with your peer groups to help them work better, it's also a way to shine light on others too, right? Because it's empathetic for your manager, it helps them understand all the great work you're doing, the impact you're having, but it's also a way to propel the work that other people you're working with are doing. Nobody works in a silo, so even if you're the only admin in your organization, you guarantee have partners. Maybe you got a super user who's just fantastic at helping you QA stuff. Maybe you've got an IT partner who is just always helping you figure out new ways to take advantage of different technologies or whatever. I mean, you've got partners that you work with, and so when you capture the story of a success, clearly it's work you did, but it's work that you did as a team.
                                                       And so it shines light on other people that maybe aren't used to capturing their work in that way either or aren't used to getting that light. So it's a really important thing to do. And I think, God, even as we're talking about this, I'm like, "Shoot, there are four things that I have not put in my own bag that are really important stories that I need to share," because to me it's always been about the impact. That's the biggest value that I've always had no matter what job I've done. Thankfully, my role here at Salesforce, I've been able to really feel like I am making an impact.
                                                       But when I tell the stories of the work that we've been doing and stuff that we've done together, LeeAnne, or the stuff that we've done as a broader team, focusing on the impact is really important, and that shining the light on others. And I think especially in a role as an admin, you have to demonstrate your impact. That is how you're going to get more resources, that's how you're going to get more support. That's how you're going to get more people bought into the solution that you're selling, because I guess you're selling it, right? You're selling it internally, but it's a really important thing to do. And I want people to share little pieces of their brag books. I want little tweets to-

LeeAnne Rimel:                                         I want everyone to brag online about what they're doing. No, I think that's such an important part is it's not just about you and it's about amplifying others too. I'll say as someone who wasn't initially comfortable and had to learn to do this, definitely one of the on ramps. And one of, to this day, my very favorite Slack posts are the ones where I get to go through and itemize all the great contributions that happened on a project and all of the people who were involved with it and what their contributions were. And so I think definitely building that bragging habit, it's not just about you, it's also being able to, like you said, shine a light on others and also be good to work with. I think there's a piece too. A lot of people aren't amplified enough at work and maybe don't get as much visibility for projects that they're working on.
                                                       I recently had a really wonderful opportunity to work with a team in the process of building the admin keynote that isn't normally involved with events and isn't normally involved with some of these projects that are on the event keynote visibility space where there is a lot of sharing and talking about those projects. And they really stepped up and they were just integral partners for a key component of that keynote. And they turned something around in a really amazing way in three days or something bananas. And it really warmed my heart to be able to do a special call out and special amplification of that team and the work that they had done when we were doing our wrap up thank yous and talking about the work different teams had contributed to Dreamforce. And I think that that's so important, and it's honestly the best part of working with peer groups, with internal partners.
                                                       It's, I think, one of my favorite parts is when you get to work with people on something that's maybe a new collaboration or a new project and really thank them for their work. When I was an admin, one of the things I would do is host a lot of lunch and learns and user adoption. I was trying to get everybody to use Salesforce, and so I was like, "Okay, we got to use Salesforce," This is 14 years ago. I'm like, "How can I get you to use Salesforce?" And we would do these lunch and learns and I started doing special little awards for the people who asked the most questions or would show how they were using it and just participate a lot. And I think I had a lunch gift card, my budget was $30. I had no budget for anything, but I would give them a little lunch thing, they'd win a lunch.
                                                       And I don't think they really cared about winning the lunch, it was the amplification of the project or the amplification of their participation. And it made other people want to participate. And I would highlight people when I would talk to our senior leadership and share with them the status of our Salesforce adoption programming that we had been working on. And it also made it better to work with us. It made more people want to participate in that. And I think you can't overstate how much recognition can do to help just build a positive workplace environment and make people want to participate with your projects.

Gillian Bruce:                                         100%, that's the other piece of this, is what are the results of building the brag book and sharing it is that people are going to want to work with you. People are going to trust you, people are going to want to be associated with stuff that you're working on because you are projecting that you are successful and that you are collaborative. And I think that's a really, really important element as well. So all in all, create a brag book.

LeeAnne Rimel:                                         And I know we're coming off on time, but I want to share one last piece because you mentioned something really important about that confidence and that mindset. And I think it's about how building a brag book and building this habit and this muscle of how do I amplify my work and how do I document and then amplify my work? is so important for our career growth. It's important for how our peers work with us and view us and view working with us, but it's also really important for how we view ourselves. So I'm a big proponent, I very much believe in some of these science based tools for how you can influence your mindset. And one of the ways positive thinking truly does make a difference, I think it does impact how you show up every day. And there's many, many blogs and many, many podcasts and books on this topic.
                                                       But one of the areas that I think a brag book factors into it is really focusing on positive things like focusing on wins and areas that you've been successful, focusing on things that you feel like you did well. And I think building that muscle of not only logging them, like putting them into your slack channel, putting them into your document, but also having that to revisit. So I think if you are in a space where you have been creating this muscle of, okay, I'm going to track my wins, my accomplishments for myself, you don't have to keep it closed until it's time to do a performance review or project review. You can open that. Maybe you're looking down the runway at a project that's a little intimidating, or maybe you're going to try something that's really brand new to you. Maybe you're going to try a new project or start a new job or start taking on more responsibility, there is actual science that supports that if you sit down and you take time to reflect on those wins and on those times where you were in maybe a difficult project, a new project, a thing that was scary or new different, and you had these positive outcomes from it.
                                                       And there's always going to be things, there's always going to be lessons we learn. Of course, nothing is 100% perfect. We all should walk away from every project with our accomplishments and also the things that we learned for next time. But if you can take that time to sit and really focus on and reflect on those wins, those accomplishments, it really does help you build that positive mindset, which is very, very powerful. So, that positive self-talk, which many people, there's always that struggle between negative self-talk and positive self talk, so it's looking at, here's tangible evidence that I'm good at what I do. I did this thing that was scary and new and I did a good job and it impacted people positively and look at all this evidence.

Gillian Bruce:                                         Yeah, you got to be your own hype person sometimes, right? It's a good natural way to get that little boost of confidence and that yes, you can do this, you can do this. And I know we have talked on the podcast and in the admin community for many years about the idea of imposter syndrome and really owning your skills and your abilities and going for things that you typically wouldn't. Building a brag book, to your point, LeeAnne is a great way, it's an asset in that it helps you overcome some of that and deal with those feelings a little bit better.

LeeAnne Rimel:                                         It is evidence that you're good at your job. It is documentation and evidence and quantitative and qualitative real feedback that you did a thing that was... Many of us are often doing new things at work. So maybe it was a new thing, maybe it was a thing you've been working on for a while. You did a thing and there was positive outcomes from it and you did a good job.

Gillian Bruce:                                         Yeah. I love that. Well, I'm sure we could actually probably keep talking about this for hours, I think we have actually talked about this for hours in the past, you and I LeeAnne, but I think we shared some really good stuff today. The idea's a brag book and then what were your three elements that help you overcome, get used to building the brag book muscle? It was what? Pop quiz, end of the podcast.

LeeAnne Rimel:                                         I came up with it in the moment. I think one is, it's not about you. So de-center yourself from thinking about what it means to document accomplishments of the work you've been doing, which sounds weird, but it works.

Gillian Bruce:                                         Yeah. Focus on the impact.

LeeAnne Rimel:                                         Focus on the impact, yeah. And then the second is it's very helpful to your leadership team. It's something that your leadership probably needs you to do and wants you to do, whether or not they know to have asked you. Oh, and if there's any people leaders listening, tell your people to make a brag book. And then three is it's a chance to help your peers, your colleagues, because you're sharing things that worked and you're sharing maybe things that you all figured out on a project or things that had a significant positive impact. So it can maybe help people that you work without if they're trying to make a decision.

Gillian Bruce:                                         And then people are going to want to play with you. They're going to want to work on stuff with you, so it's all good. Awesome. Well, leeAnne, thank you so much for joining us today on the podcast. I really appreciate you sharing, you bragging about your brag book skills.

LeeAnne Rimel:                                         [inaudible].

Gillian Bruce:                                         Awesome. Well, thank you so much.

LeeAnne Rimel:                                         Thanks for having me.

Gillian Bruce:                                         All thanks as always to LeeAnne for joining us on the podcast. I could talk to her forever. In fact, I do on a daily basis, if you couldn't tell. Really great discussion about how to create your own brag book. Hopefully you heard some things that help inspire you to capture your successes and the impact that you're having in the work that you do. And if you need any help with that, feel free to reach out to myself or LeeAnne, we will gladly help coach you on how to do that better. But I wanted to take a moment and make a shout out. Thank you to Mark Jones on Twitter who actually commented on LeeAnne's original thread about this saying, "Hey, this sounds like it'd make a good podcast. What do you think?" Well, thank you, Mark. We just made a podcast. I hope you like it.
                                                       As always, if you want to learn anything else about being an awesome admin, you can visit my favorite website, admin.salesforce.com, where you can find blogs, you can find product pages, you can find more videos, and of course, other podcasts. You can join the fun on Twitter using #awesomeadmin and follow us @SalesforceAdmns. You can find LeeAnne on Twitter @leeanndroid. You can find myself @gilliankbruce, and you can find my co-host, Mike Gerholdt @MikeGerholdt. Hope you have a fantastic rest of your day, rest of your evening, rest of your morning, whenever you're listening to this, and I will catch you next time in the Cloud.



Direct download: Build_Your_Brag_Book_with_LeeAnne_Rimel.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:00am PDT

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Kathy Baxter, Principal Architect, and Rob Katz, VP of Product Management, both in the Office of Ethical and Humane Use of Technology at Salesforce.

 

Join us as we talk about data ethics, AI ethics, what it all means for admins, and why responsible AI and data management protect the bottom line.

 

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Rob Katz and Kathy Baxter.

With great power comes great responsibility

We brought Rob and Kathy on the pod because they work in the Office of Ethical and Humane Use of Technology at Salesforce. They’re there to work on questions around data ethics and AI ethics. In practice, they set up systems and processes that make it as easy as possible to do the right thing and as difficult as possible to do the wrong thing.

 

While these issues are important to us here at Salesforce in terms of thinking about the platform we create, they’re also fundamental to everything you do as an admin. We become capable of more and more with each new release, but we have to make sure we use that power responsibly in a way that builds trust with customers. 

Thinking through data ethics

So, what are data ethics? “They’re guideposts about the gathering, protection, and use of personally identifiable information,” Rob says. Many services these days use your data to deliver personalized experiences. It makes sense, however, that users should have some measure of control over how much information they’re sharing and transparency on how it’s being used. Data ethics is putting those principals into action. As Rob explains, it’s “applied privacy by design.”

 

This is important because, over the past few years, we’ve moved from a world of data scarcity to a world of data surplus. It’s become less about how we can get more data, and more about how we can get the right data. It’s all about decreasing the signal-to-noise ratio.

 

For example, if someone signs up for your birthday promotion, you may also end up with their birth year when all you needed was the month and day to send them a “happy birthday” email. And while that might not seem like such a big deal, it could inadvertently lead to some creepy behavior from your organization when you start segmenting your list by age, target them based on that information, and the customer doesn’t know how you know that about them. An understanding of data ethics helps you focus on only collecting the information you need, and make a decision about keeping it, restricting it, or discarding it when you’re finished.

How AI ethics enters the picture

You also have to think through how your automations and algorithms work within that framework, which is where AI ethics comes in. This comes down to asking questions to determine if you’re using data responsibly: Are you collecting data that is representative of everyone your AI system is going to impact? Did you get consent for collecting this information in the first place? If your AI makes money off of other people’s data, how do you pay them back fairly? “All of those things are necessary to create responsible AI that works for everyone,” Kathy says.

 

Even if regulations like the EU AI Act don’t apply to your industry, there is a good chance that you could lose revenue, customers, and employees if you aren’t thinking about data ethics and how to create AI responsibly. A recent DataRobot survey, in collaboration with the World Economic Forum, found that 36% of companies had suffered losses due to AI bias in one or several algorithms. “Good, responsible AI is good business,” Kathy says.

 

Our guests also pointed us to some great resources you can go through right after listening to the podcast, including a Trailmix. This episode is absolutely jam-packed with smart people talking about important topics, so make sure to listen to the full episode.

 

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Full show transcript

Mike Gerholdt:                                         Welcome to the Salesforce Admins Podcast, where we talk about product, community, and career to help you become an awesome admin. And this week we are taking the awesome level up a few notches, let me tell you. So we are at two guests on the pod and I'm excited for both of these. These people are so incredibly intelligent and thoughtful and I'm so glad they're in the world. Kathy Baxter, you may remember, she's a returning guest. She is the principal architect in the office of Ethical and Humane Use of Technology here at Salesforce. And also joining us is Rob Katz, who is the VP of Product Management of the Office of Ethical and Humane Use of Technology.
                                                       Folks, we're talking data ethics. We're talking AI ethics. Don't turn this off. This is stuff that falls in our bailiwick's admins. This is stuff that we need to pay attention to. This is stuff that we will clearly have an impact on as we build more and more apps that collect more and more data. Wait until you hear how much data will be collected from Rob and the amount of information and things we need to think through that Kathy brings to light.
                                                       It's a fun conversation and I did close it by having them give you one thing you should do next. I'm going to do these things right now. I think they're so incredibly helpful. I hope you enjoy this episode. I really had a great time. I love to have Kathy back on and teaser, you will find out about a podcast episode that will come out in February. So I'm just going to leave that hangout there because let's get Kathy and Rob on the podcast. So Kathy and Rob, welcome to the podcast.

Kathy Baxter:                                          Thank you for having me.

Rob Katz:                                              Thanks for having us.

Mike Gerholdt:                                         It's great. Kathy, we've had you back. Rob, first time guest, longtime listener. I'll just say because that's like always the first thing people want to get out of the way when they're on a podcast. But that being said, I'm actually going to start off with you, Rob, because we're talking a whole lot about data ethics and data and ethical AI. But let's lay that first foundation and talk about data ethics. So can you start by telling us what you mean by that term data ethics?

Rob Katz:                                              Sure. Thanks Mike, and thanks for having me. So I get this question a lot. What is data ethics? They're guideposts about the gathering, protection and use of personally identifiable information. So that's practically speaking about transparency and control over data that consumers that we share with companies and organizations about ourselves in return for personalized experiences. And when it comes to data ethics, more and more the onus is on an organization to handle data that they have about their stakeholders, whether those are consumers or other folks that they need to handle that data ethically, because we as users are overwhelmed with all these opt outs and privacy and preference centers and cookie consents. So data ethics in a nutshell is applied privacy by design.

Mike Gerholdt:                                         Got you. Okay. Now before we jump into how that applies to Salesforce, Kathy, can you help us understand this in the context of AI?

Kathy Baxter:                                          Absolutely. You can't have AI ethics without data ethics. Data ethics is the foundation. And in terms of AI, that includes making sure that you are collecting data that are representative of everyone that your AI system is going to impact. It also means getting consent. We've seen too many different AI models that are built on data that was simply scraped off the web. And whether it's an artist or a writer, that their content that may be protected under copyright or simply wasn't intended to be scraped and fueling an AI is indeed doing just that. And by scraping the data off the web, you're probably also capturing a whole lot of toxicity and bias.
                                                       So how we treat data, how we collect it, how we get consent and pay people back for the data that they have paid to power the AI, that now companies are making lots of money off of how we label it. All of those things really matter. So first and foremost, we need to ensure that we have good data, that it's representative, that it was ethically collected, and that it is identified for systemic bias, toxicity, and quality. All of those things are necessary to create responsible AI that works for everyone.

Mike Gerholdt:                                         So I started there because I think this is so fundamental. So for even people like me that have been in the ecosystem, we think of all of those different bots and ways that we used to, as you said, Kathy. I remember thinking and being in sales meetings with the sales managers like, "Well, how do we just scrape LinkedIn for a whole bunch of lead information?" So that leads me a little bit to talking in the context of Salesforce, but before we talk of the context of Salesforce, help me and everyone understand the office of ethical and humane use of technology, because that's where both of you sit. And to me it feels, wow, this is such an important part of what Salesforce is devoting it's time to. So help me understand that office's purpose. And that'll set the tone maybe for where we're headed today.

Rob Katz:                                              Kathy, do you want to take that one? It's your Salesforce anniversary after all today.

Mike Gerholdt:                                         Oh, it is. Congrats on your Salesforce anniversary or Salesforce anniversary as we call it.

Kathy Baxter:                                          Yeah. Today is seven years. It's fantastic. One of the things that really attracted me to Salesforce in the first place was the company's stance on issues of social justice and pay equity and a recognition that we are part of the broader community and society. And what we create in the world isn't just about giving value back to shareholders, but it's what are we putting out in the world and our values of trust and customer success and equality and now sustainability. All of that has created a culture that when Marc announced that we would be an AI first company in 2016, and I started asking questions about ethics and how do we make sure that we are building our chat bots responsibly, that we don't create a chat bot that spews hate and disinformation. How do we make sure that we are giving our customers the tools they need to use our AI responsibly.
                                                       In 2016, there was a lot of head nodding, like, "Yeah, those are good questions." And then in 2016, I had pitched this as a role to our then chief scientist, Richard Socher, and he pitched it to Marc Benioff and they were both like, "Yeah, this is what we totally need." And at the same time, Marc said, "We also need an office. We need a chief ethical use officer." And the hunt began, and Paula Goldman was hired to become our chief ethical and humane use officer. So this is really about creating not just a culture, because I think the culture has been here, but creating the practice and the awareness and putting the processes in place that enable our teams to make it as easy as possible to do the right thing and as difficult as possible to do the wrong thing.

Mike Gerholdt:                                         That's really good. So Rob, can you help us put that a little bit more into context? I think Kathy set you up there, but Salesforce as a company, we need to pay attention to this. There's also Salesforce as a platform.

Rob Katz:                                              Absolutely. So as a platform, how are we building the platform and shipping it? And then how are we helping our ecosystem configure it in a way that it's easy to do the right thing and hard to do the wrong thing? And that is what Kathy and I do on a day-to-day basis with our technical teams and our product teams, our design teams, and increasingly with our systems integrators and ISV partners and folks on the app exchange and yes admins and data specialists and users. Because how the product and how the Salesforce platform is used as you know, is highly configurable. So let's work together to ensure that we're using it in line with these best practices and principles.

Mike Gerholdt:                                         Totally makes sense. And I think for a lot of us, it's a big platform. Well, it's easy to think marketing and I think you actually use that. These opt out forms gathers a lot of data. So as we continue the fall from 30,000 feet, we know that data ethics is a good foundation. Let's set that tone for, I'm an admin sitting here listening to this, and I want to start good data ethics in my organization. Kathy, I'm going to get to you because then this is going to help me lead to building AI that's being ethical. What are some of the questions or some of the areas that the admin should start thinking about in terms of asking questions or red flags they should as they're building apps?

Rob Katz:                                              So when it comes to data ethics, it's important to remember that Salesforce will build a single source of truth to help you connect with your customers. And you were talking about how the world has evolved and now the current state of the world in terms of data, I would argue has shifted. And we see that in statistics as we heard from Bret on the Dreamforce main stage in the keynote, Bret Taylor, the average company has 976 IT systems and their data are going to double again by 2026. So we have moved from a world of data scarcity where every single data point to go and scrape LinkedIn to get sales leads was a good idea in the past, because we were in a data scarcity world. We're now in a data surplus world and in a data surplus world, we as admins need to think a little differently.
                                                       We need to think less about how can I go get more data and then cross my fingers and hope that I can make sense of it? And rather, how can I get the right data? How can I get the right signal to noise ratio? Because when you have too much data and you have a bad signal to noise ratio, you can have unintended consequences or unexpected creepy outcomes. So I'll give you an example. When you are trying to run a birthday promotion, let's say, and you want to connect with your consumers whose birthday it is or even whose birth month it is and say, "Hey, happy birthday. We'd like to send you a free..." I'm going to say free coffee because I'm in Seattle and there's a little local coffee shop here that likes to give me a free drink on my birthday.

Mike Gerholdt:                                         I mean, free coffee, can't turn that down.

Rob Katz:                                              Never. So I'm opting in, I'm saying, "Yeah. Love my free coffee, here's my email address, here's my birthday." Now the form, admin, we're setting up the form. What do you need there? You need month, you might need day if you want to do it specifically on that person's birthday. And the way you set it up typically would be.

Mike Gerholdt:                                         Wait, hang on.

Rob Katz:                                              Go ahead.

Mike Gerholdt:                                         I'm an aggressive admin, why don't I put month a year?

Rob Katz:                                              Well, so there you go. Well, now you know exactly how old I am and I'm not too particular about that. But when you bring in year, you don't need it for that birthday promotion. You just need month and day. When you bring year in, you've now captured data about somebody that can indicate how old they are. And as a result, when those data are later used for other things like segmentation of an ad audience or in a machine learning model, it can lead to potential age discrimination creeping in to the predictions that are made or to the segmentation that's created. And that is an application of data ethics. Take what you need, not what you can. Take what you need and you get a better signal to noise ratio and you can still deliver a great birthday promotion without needing to get their year.

Mike Gerholdt:                                         It's just so ingrained that when you say, "Give me a date," it's month, day, year, or was it day, month, year in Europe because it's has how we're trained. Even the little calendar field, when you create a date field in Salesforce, it includes year, I think. So wow. Things to think about.

Kathy Baxter:                                          And now the challenge with this, the corollary on AI ethics, if we want to do an analysis to see is there the potential of bias in my model on a protected group. Am I making bias decisions based on age? Because you might not have collected year, but maybe there's another proxy in there. For example, maybe the year you graduated college or the year you first started working, or how many years of industry experience you have. It's difficult to do fairness assessments if you don't have that data.
                                                       So in some cases, companies may decide that they do want to collect that data because they explicitly want to do fairness and bias assessments on those fields. But they put it behind ales and only the say, fairness and ethics data scientist can actually see those fields and can actually use them when modeling. And they're only used to be able to do fairness assessments. They're not used to make predictions. So to just underline what Rob was saying about take what you need, be mindful. There may be cases where there's a sensitive variable that you want to collect, but handle it with extreme care and know exactly what you're going to do with it and put barriers around it so that it's not going to be used in unfair and unsafe ways.

Mike Gerholdt:                                         It's like we were meant to podcast together, Kathy, because I was literally turning to you to think of, so we're collecting this data and we're trying to do right, but now I want to turn some of our AI onto it. Marketing's asking me, "Well, help me understand if targeting these promotions on to maybe to Rob's point the day of their birthday versus just any day in that month is helping me. But one thing maybe I didn't pick up was that I'm picking up on year." So when we're building our ai, what are some things that we need to think about if maybe we're walking in and this data is already being collected?

Kathy Baxter:                                          I think there are so many customers or companies that they really don't know, again, going back to Rob's point, there's so much data that they have. They don't even necessarily know all of the data that they have going back years, decades. And if they just are turning the bucket upside down and dumping all of this data into a model and telling AI, "Hey, find something for me." AI will find something for you. It could be spur correlations, it could be very biased patterns in your data. You don't know what you might get from it. So being exceedingly mindful about what are those variables that you are using.
                                                       And you mentioned about marketing campaigns, we recommend actually that you don't make marketing or targeted advertising decisions simply based on demographics. That's the tendency you market makeup towards women and dresses towards women but we have increasing numbers of people who identify as male who really like makeup. And we also have people that are not on the binary gender spectrum. So how do you target your ads at the people who would really like to see those makeup ads? You don't waste your dollars on the individuals that have no interest in it. Just because they identify as female, it's not a guarantee that they're going to want makeup.
                                                       So by creating trust with your customers and not relying on third party cookies that at some point are going to disappear, you're not going to be able to depend on those massive data brokers that have been hoovering up data and making predictions about you. You're going to have to build trust with your customers to give you that first party data. What are you clicking on? What are you searching on? But also zero party data. Can you get trust to give a form to your customers and have them indicate, "I like makeup. Here are my skincare woes. These are the types of things that I'm looking for in my skincare regime." If you can build that trust and demonstrate value and give people control over their data, you're going to be able to make much more accurate targeting decisions. So not only does it give you value, but you're going to give value back to your customers.

Mike Gerholdt:                                         So far, you've done a really good job of giving me examples that I feel aren't inside of a heavily regulated industry because I do feel like the awareness in regulated industries is there for things. But not every executive that an admin works for or takes requirements from is in a regulated industry. So how do we help them understand red flags, especially around building an ethical AI, Kathy?

Kathy Baxter:                                          Yeah. I have heard unfortunately more than once from executives or admins at other companies say, "I'm not in a regulated industry or I'm not creating high risk AI that would fall under the definition that the proposed EU AI ACT has said will be regulated or has these additional requirements. So why should I care?" No one wants to make bias decisions but if an exec isn't convinced that they need to invest in responsible AI, especially in these difficult financial times where cutting costs and making sure that you make as much money as possible becomes really, really critical. It's going to be difficult for an admin to try to convince them that they should invest in this.
                                                       So what I would say to an admin, if they really wanted to convince their executives after listening to this podcast that this is something they should be investing in, I would say that good responsible AI is good business. And just to give you a couple of stats for our listeners, I would recommend they take a look at a survey that was published at the beginning of this year. It was done by DataRobot in collaboration with the World Economic Forum.
                                                       They found out of 350 companies they surveyed in the US and UK executives and IT decision makers, they found that 36% of those companies had suffered losses due to AI bias in one or several algorithms. And of those 62% had lost revenue, 61% had lost customers, 43% had lost employees, and 35% had incurred legal fees from litigation. So even if there isn't a particular regulation that applies to your AI, if you aren't thinking about data ethics and how to create AI responsibly, there is a good chance that you could lose revenue, customers and employees.

Mike Gerholdt:                                         Well, my ears perked up and I think we've done... I feel bad because sometimes the podcast train runs over marketers a lot because we love to point fingers at the cookies, which by the way, kudos, whoever came up with that idea of calling it a cookie. But Rob, I would love because when we were talking about this podcast, you mentioned something that made me abrupt face and it's around some of our other industries like sales and service. Can you help me understand data ethics that maybe haven't peaked our interest? Because we're not thinking, well, marketers are collecting all this stuff with their forms and AI, but you brought up a few use cases around sales and service that I hadn't thought of.

Rob Katz:                                              Well, thanks. So let's talk about field service technicians as an example. So someone's using Salesforce field service to manage their fleet of folks who are out there in the flesh doing field service appointments for customers, maybe servicing cable boxes, HVAC units, handling updates on security systems, installing new dishwashers, you name it. Well, what do you know about how those folks use data in order to do their jobs? Well, one thing they might have in the system is their next appointments gate code or key code for the building or something like that so that they can get in and do the work.
                                                       Well, how about we set a deletion period so that those gate codes or key codes, especially for one time appointments like you're getting a new dishwasher installed, are automatically deleted because we don't need my gate code, my lockbox code stored in a Salesforce system for anyone to see forever because that is a breach of my private information potentially and it's a risk. On the other hand, you may want to keep that information handy if you're doing a recurring service appointment like landscaping.
                                                       So it's about how you think about data and whether it should be retained or deleted and who should have access to it. And these are all things that you can do inside of the system using things like field level security and audits. And you can handle time to live and automatic deletion as well.

Mike Gerholdt:                                         Wow. You're right. I hadn't actually thought of that. That does make me think about all those companies now that... I mean, my garage door has a code to it and there's been a few times I've had service people come by, "Well, just give me your code. Yeah, no, not going to do that because I mostly forget how to change the code and then you forget the code. But also I don't need it lingering around in your system."

Rob Katz:                                              Exactly.

Mike Gerholdt:                                         Exactly. Good point. Rob and Kathy, as we wrap up, we've literally scratched the surface on this. I think I've talked to both of you for a long time and I find all of this so compelling to understand because it's something that admins work with every single day and it's also expands the level of responsibility that we have. It's one more question to ask, but it's one more question in the right direction. And Kathy, as you pointed out of keeping customers and keeping employees, the one thing that I would ask for each of you, and I always bring this up to a lot of the people that I coach for presentations. So you're done listening to this podcast. Kathy, what is the next thing you would love for a Salesforce admin to do?

Kathy Baxter:                                          I think there are a couple of really easy things that they can do. We have a white paper on ethical AI maturity model. This walks through how we actually stood up our ethical AI practice at Salesforce and I validated it with my peers at a number of other companies who have had similar ethical AI, responsible AI responsible innovation, insert your favorite name here practice. And they validated, yes. This also looks similar to how we stood up our practice. So that's something that a Salesforce admin or others at the company could take a look at and see how might we apply this to our company? We have a number of Trailheads and Trailmixes that we can put onto the episode description for them to check out.
                                                       But I would also encourage them to, if they are trying to convince an executive this is something that we need to do, equal AI has a responsible governance of AI badge program that is specifically targeted to executives. It's not how to build AI, it's not how to do bias assessments and mitigation. This is for executives of what should you look for to be on a lookout of, is your company building or implementing AI responsibly? In full transparency, I'm a board member for equal AI and I'm one of the instructors for the program. So I'm biased in that recommendation but nevertheless, I wouldn't be involved if I didn't think that this was a good use of executives time to help stand up responsible AI practices at their company.

Mike Gerholdt:                                         Yeah. Rob, same question. So I'm an admin, I just finished this. I'm excited, I want to go dive in. What would be the first thing you would want me to do tomorrow?

Rob Katz:                                              Ask yourself whether you can but whether you should when it comes to that field, when it comes to that new object, when it comes to how you're configuring those requirements that you got. And if you want to learn a little bit more practically and tactically about it from an ethical personalization and trusted marketing perspective, we will link to a Trailmix in the show notes that can give you some very specific do's and don'ts and suggestions. But for anyone, regardless of whether you're working on marketing or not, it's just because you can, doesn't mean you should. And in a world of data surplus, actually now less is more. And that is a new way to think about it that I hope is helpful.

Mike Gerholdt:                                         Very helpful and I appreciate that. Kathy, it was great to have you back again as a guest. I hope we make this a little more frequent than every few years.

Kathy Baxter:                                          Yes, I would like that very much.

Mike Gerholdt:                                         And Rob, it was great to have you on. The virtual podcast door is always open, if you'd like to come back and help admins become better at data ethics, we would appreciate that.

Rob Katz:                                              It was great to be here. And as a preview, we have a new feature coming out in the February release and I would love to talk about it with you on the podcast as we're getting closer.

Mike Gerholdt:                                         I love that. When a guest puts you on the spot, that I got to book. So I guess we're going to book you now. Look for that episode coming out in February. It's going to be awesome. Don't know what it's going to be called but Rob will be the guest.

Rob Katz:                                              Awesome. Thanks Mike.

Mike Gerholdt:                                         Thank you both.
                                                       So it was great having Kathy back. See, I told you it was a fun discussion and I promise you, I bet you weren't thinking along the same lines about sales and service having data ethics in the same way that some of the marketing stuff was, because that example caught me off guard too. Totally makes sense though, and I'm glad they were on to help us be better humans. There is a ton of resources in the show notes. So when you're back and you're not driving or you're not walking your dog, or you're not running, I know that's what a lot of you do. Click on this when you're back in your house and you're in front of your computer or you're on your phone, and go through some of those resources. Boy, that Trailmix is super helpful in understanding.
                                                       And of course we have a ton of resources for everything Salesforce admin, if you just go to admin.salesforce.com, you can find those there. Of course, I linked all the resources that Rob and Kathy talked about in the show notes. And of course there's a full transcript there as well. You can stay up to date with us on social. We are @SalesforceAdmns on Twitter. And of course my co-host Gillian Bruce is on Twitter. You can give her a follow, @GillianKBruce. And while you're over there, you can send me a tweet, give me a follow. I am at @MikeGerholdt. So with that, stay safe, stay awesome, and stay tuned for the next episode. We'll see you in the cloud.



Direct download: Data_Ethics_and_AI_for_Admins_with_Rob_Katz_and_Kathy_Baxter.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:00am PDT

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

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

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

Learn MOAR

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

Dreamforce highlights

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

Blog highlights from October

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

Video highlights from October

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

Podcast highlights from October

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

Just for fun

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

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

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

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

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

Admins are problem solvers

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

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

When roadblocks aren’t actually roadblocks

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

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

Why understanding the problem makes solving it easy

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

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

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

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

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

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

A new galaxy of Salesforce characters

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

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

When a brand is like a hug

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

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

Crouching Astro, hidden SaaSy

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

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

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

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

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

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

When two become one.

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

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

Working around NDAs

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

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

No code, no problem

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

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

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

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

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Louise Lockie, Salesforce Consultant, and Trainer and 6x Salesforce MVP.

Join us as we talk about her amazing presentation from Dreamforce about how to embrace a permission-set-led security model in your org.

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

Everything you need to know about Permission Sets

We last heard from Louise back in 2016, after she gave a presentation for Dreamforce ‘16. And sure enough, we’ve brought her back on the pod to give us an overview of her killer presentation this year: “Embracing a Permission Set Led Security Model.” 

As Louise points out, Salesforce recently made a very important announcement: that they are going to be sunsetting permissions on profiles sometime in the near future. “Whenever a change like that comes out, we know we need to help the community and the community needs to help each other to get through this change,” she says. Louise is a big fan of permissions for heping to manage security in her org, so she put together her talk to share how she’s approaching the upcoming changes.

An easier approach to permissions

In her talk, Louise will cover what at the moment has to stay on a profile, what she thinks will definitely stay on a profile even after the change, and what she recommends for a baseline standard profile in terms of managing security.

When you’ve got it properly deployed, permissions will make it so much easier to standardize things like your password policies, login hours, IP ranges, and more. From there, it’s simple to take advantage of permission set groups to build out what you need for each persona at your org.

Why it’s worth it to overhaul your permissions

Louise has been a big advocate for permission set groups since 2019 purely to save time and clicks, but it had always been something that was nice to have and not necessarily something that was absolutely essential. This new approach affords you more flexibility than building out one big permission set, allowing you to more easily share capabilities across roles and also adjust things quickly when the need arises.

If you have hundreds of profiles on your org, you now have the opportunity to really look at where the commonalities are and simplify things a great deal. “Map it all out, capture what permissions you’re giving out, and then see how you want to break those out,” Louise says, “with permission set groups being where you want to commonly give out those permissions together, knowing you can still give them out separately.”

Listen to the whole episode to learn more and, if you lead a User Group and want to bring this content to your people, Louise would be happy to get in touch about sharing her deck of even doing a virtual presentation, so don’t hesitate to reach out!

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Full show transcript

Gillian Bruce:
Welcome to the Salesforce Admins Podcast, where we talk about product, community, and careers to help you be an awesome admin. I'm your host today, Gillian Bruce, and we are coming at you with a Best of Dreamforce episode. I know that many listeners may not have been able to make it to Dreamforce, or even if you did, you didn't get to go to all the sessions that you wanted. So we've pulled some of the best sessions, in my opinion, to share with you on the podcast. So today joining us is Louise Lockie, who has put together an amazing presentation about how to embrace a permission set led security model. Now, Louise is a longtime rockstar in the Salesforce community. She was last on the podcast I think in 2016 as we were preparing for that Dreamforce, because she had another great presentation that she had put together for that. So Louise is joining us from across the pond. And so without further ado, let's welcome Louis back to the podcast.

Gillian Bruce:
Louise, welcome back to the podcast.

Louise Lockie:
Thanks, Gillian. It has been a long time, so I'm thrilled to be back.

Gillian Bruce:
Every six years we'll just keep having you back on the podcast. How about that?

Louise Lockie:
I'll hold you to that one. It's a date.

Gillian Bruce:
There we go. Well, I wanted to have you on the podcast today, Louise, because you have put together a great session for Dreamforce this year and I wanted to bring that to our listeners. So can you talk to us a little bit about an overview of your session?

Louise Lockie:
Sure, yeah, absolutely. And I'm really pleased to got selected for Dreamforce. It is called Embrace a Permission Set Led Security Model. How's that for a nice, long name? But it's actually one that I delivered at Midwest Streaming and it went down so well and I got so much great interaction with the audience there and the questions, and I know it's such a hot topic, so I am really pleased to be presenting it at Dreamforce this year in a breakout, which gives me lots of time to get into the detail.

Gillian Bruce:
So many details to get into, right? We're talking about security model and hey, permission sets are the future. So talk to us a little bit about some of the top things that you're going to be getting into in the session.

Louise Lockie:
Yeah, well I am going to be a reminding people that if they don't know, that Salesforce is going to be sun setting permissions on profiles. And that's a bit of a big announcement. Whenever a change that comes out, we know we need to help the community and the community need to help each other to get through this change. And I really did shout from the rooftops when this one was officially best practice, because I've been a massive fan of using permission sets instead of profiles. Let me correct that because we can't lose profiles, we can't get away from them completely, but I use them as the principle driving and the principle means of granting access in my org.

Louise Lockie:
So with that announcement coming from Salesforce that this is somewhere in the future, we don't know exactly when yet, I wanted to talk to fellow admins about how I approach making this change and preparing for this change so that they can do the same. So I talk about what, at the moment, has to stay on a profile because there are some things that aren't yet available on permission sets. What I envisage will stay on a profile, and as I'm a community member, I don't work for Salesforce, I can make those statements because I'm just saying, "This is what I think." Rather than, "This is what I know." And of course, it's a Dreamforce presentation. There'll be forward looking statements, safe harbors mentioned there.

Louise Lockie:
And what I then will talk about is that, once you've got your baseline profiles, and I talk about my recommendation of having, of course, the system admin profile because we need those keys to our org, we need to have all that access, and then having a standard profile for our users. And that is just to give those permissions, things like the password policies, like the maybe login hours that are going to stay on profiles, IP ranges.

Louise Lockie:
So that super, super basic level on a profile that all of your users get. And then you really utilize the permission sets and permission set groups to build out the persona-based access. And I talk about doing that sort of role persona-based for permission set and permission set groups. And then additionally features, because we all know that you can be almost the same persona, you can have two colleagues in one team, but one of them needs slightly different access because they've been given a special task or they are also managing an extra area, or maybe they wear more than one hat, like admins do, in that they need to actually have the permissions of both sets of personas or roles. So I work it through and talk about what I put on a profile and then some examples of how permission sets and permission set groups could be grouped together.

Gillian Bruce:
Wow. Okay. So this is great. I love... What I really like, Louise, about this, your approach, is that you're like, "Oh, I went through this and this is how I thought about it, so I'm going to share it with everyone." And you mentioned permission set groups, so can you just take a second and kind of break down when you would use a permission set group versus just a permission set?

Louise Lockie:
Well, when permission set groups first came out, of course I didn't have the knowledge at that time that this is what we were working to, basically profiles essentially being sidelined to almost go away. And so I used to say permission set groups have been saving admins clicks since 2019. Because at that time I was like, "Yeah, that saves us some time. But really?" It's a bit like the confetti. We all thought it was a bit fun, but was it the best use of time to create this feature? But now I've totally rethought it, because what you can do with your permission set groups is something like a persona. So a role based permission set group. But instead of building out one big permission set, which of course could end up looking almost like a profile, which feels like it defeats the object of this change, you can break it down into the different permission sets and use those for different parts of that role, that persona, that department, if you will.

Louise Lockie:
But of course the joy of that means each of those individual permission sets can be in multiple permission set groups. We can have A, B, and C together, and D, E and A together and so forth. Which is again, something I show in my presentation, use some real case examples of different departments and how different roles and how they can be added together. And knowing that the permission sets can be in more than one permission set group, users can have a permission set group and permissions. So you can still assign them individually. And I think that building block approach means that you've got complete flexibility, which is important because with that flexibility, you can actually give that granular access and you're not tempted to just give, "Oh, I'll give the whole department that access because that'll be easier." Which I do think happens with profiles.

Gillian Bruce:
Oh, absolutely. I remember, gosh, in my early days of learning our security model back 10, 12 years ago, I was always like, "Oh, so then why wouldn't you just give everybody this profile? Then you're covered?" And then it's like, "Oh no, no, wait, hold on. You're going to make a mess for yourself if you do that because then you're not going to be able to understand and kind of troubleshoot when you need to that easily." And from a Salesforce perspective, the product team has been talking about this kind of different change and different approach for a while. And I know that there's so many exciting announcements coming kind of in the roadmap about user access and permissions and how that's all modeling. Big shout out to Cheryl Feldman, who's now a product manager who manages a lot of these. She came in from the other side, right?

Louise Lockie:
Absolutely. She has done wonders, and I've been on a few sessions and calls with her about this and she knows I'm a massive fan of what she's doing, her and her team are doing. So she definitely will be getting shout outs at Dreamforce as well from me. And I'll be attending her sessions as well.

Gillian Bruce:
She's going to be a popular person again. So Louise, I would also like to know, what are some of the things that helped you understand these concepts as you were... You mentioned like, "Oh, I wasn't so sure about permission set groups when they first came out." You've been working in the ecosystem for a while, at least six years, right?

Louise Lockie:
True. And that's it.

Gillian Bruce:
So talk to us a little bit about what helped you understand these concepts. Because I would imagine for some new admins, it's not the most intuitive thing to grasp. So help us understand what helped you really get these concepts and put them to work for you in a really good ease... A way that helps.

Louise Lockie:
Yeah, no, you're absolutely right. They aren't the easiest. And I think the overall security model and data access model of Salesforce takes some understanding. And one of the hats I wear is actually, I teach the admin course, the five day admin course for Salesforce. And as you'd imagine, there's a big focus on this because it's a toughie, but once you know it, once you know the rules then it's so important. You've got the fundamentals of Salesforce down. And so you have to look at what's on a profile, what's on a permission set, have some examples. So what I've done in the presentation, and I do similar things when I'm teaching this as well because it helped me, is map it out. Do an audit of what permissions you are granting which users now, and then think about, well, where are the commonalities? What are the permissions or the org settings or the field level security that you need to give everyone?

Louise Lockie:
And then work for it in a granular way that way, because it is... The combinations can be almost endless. So the businesses that have got hundreds of profiles at the moment, now have got that opportunity to really compare them all and use some of the tools that are out there to compare the different profiles and work out, well, am I giving the right level of access? And use that as an opportunity to audit, use this process as an opportunity to audit what you're doing at the moment. And I think once you see the differences that you've got in your org, in your permissioning model, you can then work out, well, where do they sit? And where you've got the permission sets, go ahead, create those at a really granular level, because what that means is, it's so much more transparent because the name of the permission set is what it's doing.

Louise Lockie:
The description filled on profiles and permission sets is tiny. And I think that breaking it down like this, if though you may have to set it up, it will take a little bit of time working through the permissions, grouping them together and deciding that they're going on these permission sets, and then grouping those permission sets together into the groups. And for me, I'm a real data person. So that's what I would recommend because what would work for me is map it all out, capture what permissions you're giving out, and then see how you want to break those out. Thinking about permission sets being a small subset of permissions, permission set groups being where you want to commonly give out those permissions together, knowing you can still give them out separately. And I do mention muting permissions in the session. And again, it's one of those things that when it came out, I was like, "Oh, blimey, Salesforce. All the time we've been... Permissions is always granted."

Louise Lockie:
So I do a bit of work in Marketing Cloud as well, and they actually have it that has a deny permission, normal, core Salesforce doesn't. It's all about granting permissions. And then muting came along and I was like, "Oh, there we go. That's just set the cat amongst the pigeons, that's something different." But with permission set groups, again, it's one of those features, once you see it as part of the bigger picture, you can understand, okay, now that really adds value. That really adds value to my setup because I can create a permission set group, maybe have five different permissions, permission sets in it, and then just clone it and add a mute for a new version. And that can really give you that flexibility that is going to encourage you to use the principle of least privilege rather than the, I'll just give them all the same access, which is obviously... Well, every good admin should avoid at all costs.

Gillian Bruce:
Well, yeah, and it saves you time. Because, to your point, you don't have to recreate a perm set group every single time, if you got one that you know works and you just want to mute that one little part of it. So that's really helpful to think about that as part of the strategy. So Louise, do you have any idea how many Dreamforces this is going to be for you?

Louise Lockie:
I need to work... Remember this. So I think this... And do I count virtual or not? Because I went every year since 2015, and then obviously missed the hybrid one last year. So let's do the math, shall we? '15, '16, '17, '18, '19. So this will be my sixth in person, but obviously I did attend the virtual versions the last two years. So six or eight, depending on which [inaudible 00:14:32].

Gillian Bruce:
We'll count it as eight, we'll count it as eight. But that's awesome. Yeah. Okay. So as a veteran Dreamforce attendee, if anyone listening to the podcast has... Well, when they listen to this, they would've already been to Dreamforce. What are some of your tips for Dreamforce recovery?

Louise Lockie:
Oh, stay hydrated, for sure. So I'm hearing we're not getting a water bottle this year, so make sure you bring your own. I obviously travel across the Atlantic, so I definitely have at least a one water bottle, if not several.

Louise Lockie:
And I would say there's going to be lots of standing around, there's going to be some queuing, so use those opportunities to talk to the people in line. Make some new friends because you immediately have got something in common with them because you're going to the same session, you've got that interest. So when I go to Dreamforce, I don't tend to know a huge amount of people because it's mostly people more local. There's not that many of us Europeans that come over, so it's a great opportunity for me to meet new people. So I bet there'll be people out there that don't know everyone in the queue. It'll definitely be people that don't know anyone in the queue. So use that as an opportunity to make some new friends.

Gillian Bruce:
All right. So for listeners who maybe just attended Dreamforce, what are your tips for carrying the learnings and everything they got from Dreamforce? The connections forward.

Louise Lockie:
Oh yeah, because every day is a school day. We work in this space where there's so much to learn and we are encouraged to learn and we are all in that mindset, I believe. So there'll be some sessions that are available afterwards. It's not going to be all of them, I understand it. So that you have sometimes that cloning machine, you're going to be regretting not having it. So catch up on that content. There'll be new Trailhead modules coming out. Speakers will make their presentations available, I know that's a thing. And reach out to them. So if you are hearing this and you didn't go to my session at Dreamforce, get in touch with me on LinkedIn, Twitter, the Trailblazer community, and I'll send you my deck. If you lead a user group, I could always come and virtually deliver to you, deliver to your users as well. So I'd say do that for me, but do that for other presenters as well.

Gillian Bruce:
That's a great tip because I think a lot of folks be like, "Oh, I wasn't at Dreamforce," or "I missed that session and it's gone." No, I love that, Louise. It's great. Yeah, reach out to the speakers because you're right, you already did all this work to prepare this great presentation.

Louise Lockie:
Happy to share it with a wider audience, always. Everyone will be.

Gillian Bruce:
Exactly. Might as well amplify it. Well, Louise, thank you for all your hard work in preparing for this year's Dreamforce and sharing your knowledge with the community. It's amazing. It's one of the best things about the Salesforce community at large, is just the generosity and people like you who want to take what you learn and give back and help enable others. So thank you for all you do. And I look... Well, we're recording this before Dreamforce, so I look forward to seeing you at Dreamforce.

Louise Lockie:
Yes.

Gillian Bruce:
And we'll have you back on in another six years. How about that?

Louise Lockie:
As I say, it's a date. Get it in the diary.

Gillian Bruce:
Thank you so much, Louise.

Louise Lockie:
Thank you. Cheerio.

Gillian Bruce:
Well, always lovely to chat with Louise. Great to hear about how she thinks about that permission set model and how to use permission set groups, lots of good strategies and best practices there.

Gillian Bruce:
Now, if you want her session or any of her content, or you want her to come present at your user group, reach out to her. You can find her on Twitter, @louiselockie. You can also find her on the Trailblazer community on LinkedIn, put all those links in the show notes. And as always, if you want any information on how you can be an awesome admin, check out my favorite website, admin.salesforce.com. That's where you can find more blog, content, videos. You can find the admin skills kit, which I'm super passionate about. And stay tuned because we probably are going to turn some of these great Dreamforce sessions into content for our site as well.

Gillian Bruce:
So if you want to follow all of the awesome admin goodness on Twitter, as always, you can find us @salesforceadmns, no 'I'. Or #awesomeadmin. You can find myself @gilliankbruce. And you can find Mike Gerholt, my co-host with the most, @mikegerholt. I hope you have a great rest of your day. Thank you for listening, and I'll catch you next time in the cloud.

Gillian Bruce:
(Silence).

 




Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, Mike and Gillian are on to celebrate Admin Day at Dreamforce with a story about the origins of the Awesome Admin movement.

Join us as we talk about the teamup of the century, how “good stuff no fluff” and “for admins by admins” became mottos the Admin Relations Team lives by to this day, and why the community has been key from day 1.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Mike and Gillian.

Getting the team together

Our story begins with a certain handsome, intrepid Salesforce MVP—our hero, Mike Gerholdt didn’t know it, but he had a date with destiny. The year is 2013 and Macklemore’s “Thrift Shop” is number one on the charts. Meanwhile, our other hero, Gillian Bruce, is working Technical Communications and taking meetings with people at Salesforce trying to figure out which direction to take her career. There are rumblings of doing something for “declarative developers” and Gillian is thinking to herself that the term sounds a lot like what the admins she communicates with do.

You see, our mild-mannered admin had an alter-ego. By day, a Salesforce MVP, but by night, he was known as the ButtonClick Admin, with a podcast and blog devoted to all the amazing things you could do in Salesforce without code. Back at Salesforce, Gillian was in a fateful meeting where an idea was floated: “What if we hire the ButtonClick Admin?”

The Admin team’s first Dreamforce

The team’s first Dreamforce together was an important part of the Awesome Admin mythos. With no overarching theme, they decided to go with superheroes for the admin area. There was Super De-Duper, the Mobile Avenger, and Doc Developer. And they had so much help from the community staffing the very first Admin area. They were a small-but-mighty team of three, so they really relied on the community to live up to the phrase, “for admins, by admins.”

They even had to do their own advertising for the first Admin Keynote, which wasn’t even supposed to be an official keynote. LeeAnne Rimel was at that time a standout member of the community who created all the demos for this DIY keynote. Today, she’s running the Admin Keynote at Dreamforce ‘22.

Listen to whole episode for behind-the-scenes stories on the demo that rocked the world, why they started working more closely with product teams, and why they always show setup. And whether you’re at Dreamforce or tuning in from home, happy Admin Day!

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Full show transcript

Gillian Bruce: Welcome to the Salesforce Admins Podcast, where we talk about product, community, and careers to help you be an awesome admin. I'm Gillian Bruce and I am joined today by Mike Gerholdt. Hi, Mike.

Mike Gerholdt: Hey.

Gillian Bruce: And Mike, I have you on the podcast today because I wanted to do something a little bit fun given that today is the official Admin Day at Dreamforce. And so if you're at Dreamforce and you're listening to this, wow, nice multitasking. I'm impressed. If you are not physically at Dreamforce, my-oh-my. There's a lot for you to join in with us digitally. And I wanted to use this as a fun excuse to take a little trip down memory lane and tell the real story about the advent of the awesome admin movement, so to speak. So Mike, you really were the inspiration for a lot of this. And so I wanted to go way back. That's the way back machine and take us all the way back to actually 2013, which is when the kernel of this all began at Salesforce. Now, Mike, you were an MVP, not working at Salesforce. And how long had you been an MVP at that point?

Mike Gerholdt: I think I got awarded in the winter release. It was the Dreamforce that happened, I want to say in between Thanksgiving and Christmas one year. So, it was a super late Dreamforce.

Gillian Bruce: Yeah. That's right. Sometimes, they're in November.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. Because MVPs used to be awarded on releases. And so, I think it was the winter release that year. So, 2011 something. Yeah.

Gillian Bruce: Okay. Well, 2011. Okay.

Mike Gerholdt: Sometime.

Gillian Bruce: So 2011. So, you'd been an MVP for a couple of years. 2013 for me, I was doing a little internal career exploration at Salesforce, doing coffees to meet people, understand what their jobs were. And I happened to be connected to this woman named Sarah Franklin at the time who had just left Salesforce and come back to Salesforce. And I remember her talking to me and being excited about doing something for the declarative developers, the way that we do for traditional developers. And I was like, "Those sound like Salesforce admins to me because those are the people I communicate with all the time about technology changes in my role as a tech comms person. When we're notifying everyone about a release or a performance issue, those are the people I email all the time." And from there it was like, "Okay. Here we go. I know how to talk to admins. You want to do something for admins?" And in a few months, Mike, I remember Sarah telling me, "Yeah, I was in a conversation with Alexander Dayon," who at the time I think was I forget what exactly. He was a C-level-

Mike Gerholdt: He ran Service Cloud. Didn't he?

Gillian Bruce: That's right. Yeah. Service Cloud. And I think in a meeting, Sarah said that Mr. Alexander Dayon was like, "Let's hire the Button Click Admin." And that was you Mike because you, at that time, you would what? You had the blog, you had the podcast.

Mike Gerholdt: So, I started all of that. It was a kernel of an idea in 2009 where I started writing something called the Monday... I really meant it to be the Monday Morning Admin, like the Monday Morning Quarterback because of blog titles and Technorati and Google, that I ended up calling it the Monday AM Admin. And I started that on my personal blog and it got a little bit of traction. And then I was talking with a friend and he's like, "I think there's something bigger here. There's a bigger brand I should build."
And he said, "Well, what do you do?" And I was like, "I don't know. It's like mouse clicks. I'm just clicking buttons." And he's like, "Oh." And he pulls up his phone and he checks and buttonclickadmin.com was available. And that's where that started. 2010, I launched the blog. I had a Monday morning post, every morning, 10:00 AM Central. And it was basically a recap of all of the things I did wrong the previous week. And if I could redo the week over, what I would do, but none of it included code. Because there was so much stuff you could do in Salesforce without code. Like, page layouts. And at the time workflows and validation rules that I didn't need to write code. And I felt there was other people that probably were doing that too. So, Monday AM Admin is where that started.

Gillian Bruce: Well, and clearly you were right. Other people were doing the same thing because it took off.

Mike Gerholdt: Yep. So, I grew that for a while and then started a podcast because I dabbled in video, but YouTube wasn't YouTube yet. And I realized the biggest thing was going to Dreamforce and hearing stories and hearing people talk about their stories and listening to them and hearing their passion. And I thought, "Oh. Well, that's what a podcast could do," because when you distill it down into black and white, into written words, the blog post just wasn't getting it across as much. And so 2012, with Jared Miller who was also a fellow Salesforce MVP, I launched what was called the Button Click Admin Podcast. And that was every Thursday because I didn't want to take traction away from my Monday morning posts. So, twice a week. And then that gets you through 2013-ish.

Gillian Bruce: Yeah. So then Alexander Dayon says, "Let's hire the Button Click Admin, Sarah." And then you got a call, I believe Mike.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah.

Gillian Bruce: At some point.

Mike Gerholdt: So, as part of this was a unique time just in branding and in, I would call it the internet. Because at that time, and I'll preference that time as 2006 to 2015, you could 100% make a brand for yourself. You could have a blog, you could have a podcast, you could monetize those and you could do a lot of public speaking. And so, that's the evolution of where I took the blog to. It was essential hub for me to advertise my knowledge, do the podcast, distribute information and then also sell advertisements and then get speaking gigs. And that was a big thing in that, I would say nine years on the internet.
And part of doing that was being present at a conference called South by Southwest. And so, I was at South by Southwest in 2014 and hanging out at the blogger lounge, which is a thing you do just bunch of people, clicking keyboards, writing blogs, feeling self-important. And my phone rang. Mind you, the friend I was with had been ribbing me constantly like, "Oh. When's Salesforce going to hire you. They're never going to hire you, blah, blah, blah." And my phone rings and I looked down, it was San Francisco. And I think to myself, "Oh. He hired a friend to call, to play a prank."

Gillian Bruce: You're about to get punked.

Mike Gerholdt: I was literally about to get punked, yes. And so, it was super loud in the blogger lounge. I answer the call and it was in a broom closet across the hallway from the blogger lounge because there's no place to [inaudible]. And it was Sarah Franklin. She introduced herself and I 100% thought she was playing a joke on me because she told me she was starting this admin marketing team and was really interested in talking with me, but didn't know if I was looking for a job and I hung up on her.

Gillian Bruce: That's the best.

Mike Gerholdt: Yep.

Gillian Bruce: So, you hung up on Sarah?

Mike Gerholdt: That's the first crazy career thing I have done. She called back. Fast-forward to today. Thank God, I didn't hang up the second time.

Gillian Bruce: Yeah. Thank God you didn't hang up the second time because then you officially became part of the team and I think you were... What, it was Sarah and myself? And I think you were the next person to join because I don't think Leanne was-

Mike Gerholdt: Was, I was three.

Gillian Bruce: Developer of evangelism.

Mike Gerholdt: We were just a scrappy little team for, I mean, all the way through Dreamforce 2014.

Gillian Bruce: Yeah. Well, and I remember too, it was one of those funny... We did. We felt like a little scrappy startup because I remember Sarah being like, "Hey. Gillian, we should start a newsletter." I'm like, "Yeah, cool. So maybe we could just email the same list that I used to email about tech comms. Let me see if I can make that happen." I was like, "Thank goodness. I got a good relationship with the email team because they're going to let us send a newsletter out." And I remember it was originally going to be the Admin Roundup and we had a whole cowboy motif, I think-

Mike Gerholdt: Because why not?

Gillian Bruce: Yeah. Well, thank goodness that didn't really hash out. But yeah. It was like, "Oh. Well, let's feature some community posts." And I think what was really special about that and was special about having you really help us create this is, it's always been by admins for admins. It's never been us creating that new content that we're trying to push out to the admin community. What we really started was, "Hey. We recognize that there's an admin community out there. We recognize that there are people doing this work. And as a company at Salesforce, we need to let them know that we see them and that we want to highlight the work that they're doing and elevate it, so the rest of the community can get something from it too." And that's something that I always just feel so fortunate to be a part of because it's really unique when you think about enablement or just marketing in general because it is really good stuff, no fluff. And that's the heart of what we do in the admin relations team, which I think is really special.

Mike Gerholdt: Well, I think it also aligns to really the culture of Salesforce admins. We find ways to scale. So, if you're at an organization... And I was at an organization, I was a solo admin for, I don't know how many users. It was in the hundreds, a lot. The way you scale is online, on social, in the trailblazer community, which was called something else at that time. And you asked questions. And so, it was very natural for our team to just follow that mantra. We couldn't scale. There was three of us and there was how many million admins. Obviously, we can't write enough content.

Gillian Bruce: No. But we rebranded Button Click Admin and it became admin.salesforce.com. So we had all your content.

Mike Gerholdt: Wisely so.

Gillian Bruce: And we relaunched the podcast and you invited me to be a co-host, which was terrifying, but it was so fun. And I can't believe it was that many years ago, Mike.

Mike Gerholdt: It was a long time ago. I remember that first podcast. Because there was the discussion of, "Okay. So I come over, obviously my cohost isn't a Salesforce employee. Do we do that? Is that a thing? Is that weird?" And then I remember Sarah was like, "Well, have you talked to Gillian about being co-host?" I was like, "No, does she want to co-host?" "I don't know." And I remember, "Well, so what do you do?" "Well, I don't know. You just talk when I don't talk."

Gillian Bruce: Yeah. I remember feeling totally out of my element, but totally down and excited to try it. And I remember those first few episodes of recording and hearing my... I was terrified every episode. And you can tell when you hear them because you can hear me going...

Mike Gerholdt: Right. Well, I think, not to go down the podcast path. The hardest thing is people don't know how to necessarily carry a conversation. And the one thing that I learned starting the podcast is interesting podcasts are ones where the host has an idea of where things are going, but isn't committed to the outcome and is happy to let the guest guide the journey. And I remember reading about Larry King and CNN and The Art Of The Interview and the art of the interview is that it's not about you, the host. But it's about you asking the questions and being present in the moment to continue that conversation, to bring out the best in what your guest is talking about. I mean, those early episodes of the podcast, we probably didn't talk enough and then you talk too much, but you find that intermedium.

Gillian Bruce: Yeah. And one of the things I've also always heard about podcasts or really about anything, it's all about the reps. It's about the practice and doing it. The more you do it, the better you get. And I mean, we've been doing this for a long time now, Mike. So, hopefully people still think it's good.

Mike Gerholdt: I know. You would think. But let's talk about the first Dreamforce because that was fun because we threw everything at the wall.

Gillian Bruce: And from the wall and hanging from the wall.

Mike Gerholdt: Yep.

Gillian Bruce: Yeah. This was pre-Trailhead. So Trailhead was just a glimmer-

Mike Gerholdt: Trailhead actually launched at that Dreamforce, I think.

Gillian Bruce: Yeah. And I think there was one-

Mike Gerholdt: Two.

Gillian Bruce: Three trails or something. It was-

Mike Gerholdt: I mean, it was huge. Massive back then.

Gillian Bruce: So, we had no overarching special Trailhead theme. So we decided, "Hey. Admins are superheroes. Let's make our whole area all about the different types of admin superheroes." Oh, man. We had so much fun coming up with all of those different superheroes, like Super D Duper, because that was the year that they finally introduced the de-duping feature from the IdeaExchange-

Mike Gerholdt: Duplicate management, yep.

Gillian Bruce: I just always call it de-duper.

Mike Gerholdt: I know because it's fun.

Gillian Bruce: And we had what? The Mobile Avenger and Doc Developer and-

Mike Gerholdt: Just all kinds.

Gillian Bruce: And we had them printed on huge banners and we hung them in the little atrium area on the second floor of Mosconea's as you come up the escalators and it was amazing. It was just-

Mike Gerholdt: It was so cool.

Gillian Bruce: Oh. It was so cool.

Mike Gerholdt: We also quickly learned why that atrium area was available for us to use.

Gillian Bruce: It was so hot.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. On the first day at 2:00, we're all standing there. "You're hot." "But this is really... I need to go." And you would just walk 10 feet out of that area. And it would be 20 degrees cooler.

Gillian Bruce: It was a whole greenhouse effect going on there.

Mike Gerholdt: It was.

Gillian Bruce: Yeah. Well, especially, when I was moving hundreds of boxes of T-shirts and swag around because that's what we did.

Mike Gerholdt: That's what we had budget for.

Gillian Bruce: And we had the first ever admin theater and we had our first ever admin zone. And again for admin by admin-

Mike Gerholdt: We had a little podcast booth. Don't forget we had that little podcast booth.

Gillian Bruce: We sure did. And that looked amazing, the whole on-air sign. Which you have in your house, I believe.

Mike Gerholdt: No. That's the following year. The big on air sign. I have some of those letters, yes. But thank God I don't have that whole booth because that would be massive.

Gillian Bruce: Yeah. But again, back to for admins by admins, the only way that we were able to have an admin zone and provide that first ever home for admins at Dreamforce, is because the three of us could not staff at all. We had the entire community staffing those booths and it was all this ask the expert format. Which is now the heart of what we do and how we do any experience that we have. Whether it's at World Tour or at Dreamforce or a TDox. I mean, that is literally at the heart of how we treat all of these demo stations and experiences is that we have experts actually talking about how you can solve your problems and helping you troubleshoot.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, and people showed up. I think that's the biggest thing. We were all looking at each other like, "People are going to show up, right? And they're going to be excited for this?" And that in addition to the community stepping in, is really what drove success because everybody else at Salesforce looked at this team of three, four people, I think Leanne probably pitched in that year.

Gillian Bruce: I think Leanne was our first ever, "keynote."

Mike Gerholdt: She helped with the keynote. Oh, we should talk about that. But people showed up and when they showed up, they appreciated what we had and was willing to contribute more. And other areas caught wind of that vibe and they're like, "We need to package this stuff up." You're like, "Nope, it's ours."

Gillian Bruce: Yep. Well, we had superhero capes. We had bright blue awesome admin-pow T-shirts. I mean, it was pretty magical. And I remember we had to do a lot of advertising to get everyone to come to what we were calling a keynote, but wasn't officially recognized as a keynote with the first ever admin keynote. It was the basement of the Marriott.

Mike Gerholdt: Hilton Union Square.

Gillian Bruce: It was the Hilton, that's right.

Mike Gerholdt: Hilton Union Square.

Gillian Bruce: Yeah. So that keynote is actually really amazing because talk about Leanne. Leanne was instrumental in creating all the demos for that keynote. And she's running the admin keynote today at Dreamforce '22 today as well. So that's an incredible journey, but yeah, we showed... I remember, that keynote was so fun. Sarah had just had a baby and Amelia was brand new and Sarah's like, "Yeah, no, I'm going to get on stage and we're going to rock this keynote."

Mike Gerholdt: Uh-huh. Like, two weeks rehearsal she had and just nothing. Just rocked it.

Gillian Bruce: And we'd never created a keynote like this before. This was all new to all of us. And then we featured a bunch of customers who we were going to recognize as awesome admins and give them capes. So I remember it was... Oh, god, Nick Lindberg and Dale Zigler-

Mike Gerholdt: Cheryl Feldman.

Gillian Bruce: Cheryl Feldman. Oh, gosh. There were a handful of them. They were amazing. And Cheryl Feldman won the first ever Awesome Admin Award that was presented to her by her VP at her current job. And it was our way of like, "Hey. This is a recognition of the amazing impact that an admin can have on the organization. And Salesforce is giving you the platform and trying to elevate that." And for those of you who don't know, that eventually evolved into what is now the Golden Hoodie.

Mike Gerholdt: And Gillian, I think one part that's always fun to talk about with that keynote is the mistake that actually changed the way a lot of teams demo Salesforce. And so, Dreamforce 2014 Process Builders, the brand new shiny thing. It's built on the Flow engine, but it makes sense. And everything you could do was totally declarative when you build a flow. Except, there was one random checkbox buried in set up that you had to check. And we rehearsed this to the nth degree. Off stage, was going to be one person sitting that would check the box so that everything just worked seamlessly in our demo. And then that didn't happen.
And it really caused all of us to pause and we probably could have moved forward. Now, thinking through the skill level of this team we would've just adjusted on the fly, walked people through. We probably would've had a backup. By the way, we didn't have a backup then, and moved on. But what happened? Leanne was like, "You know what? No, I'm going to show you what we've missed and we're actually going to do it. And then I'm going to show you." And I think it was really a little bit of Leanne wanted to prove the things she had built was legit.

Gillian Bruce: Yes. That we weren't showing stuff that was built fake. We wanted show the real deal. This is something you can do today.

Mike Gerholdt: So we went off-script. We showed setup and thunderous applause. There were executives in the back of the room that were like, "Oh, man. What are they doing?" And everybody reacted. And from there on, our mantra was we show set up. We show you the real-real. We'll show you how to set this thing up because there should be no mystery to how you configure some of this stuff. And that moment in time, had that not happened, that was a huge cultural moment for our team. And I think for the whole admin community.

Gillian Bruce: 100%, I mean, that sets the tone. It's the good stuff, no fluff. We're really going to show you how you can do this. Not just the theory of, "Look at what's possible." It's like, "Cool. We know what's possible. We're going to show you how you can actually make that happen." And that moment was amazing. That did, that really set the tone for a lot of how we presented technical content until today. So, hopefully we keep true to that.

Mike Gerholdt: We do.

Gillian Bruce: We do. And then from there, Mike, I mean, we were launched, I mean, Awesome Admin became a thing. Trailhead started developing... The first Trailhead content was developer and admin. We were in the core DNA of what Trailhead ended up becoming. And it went from just recognizing admins to then really celebrating and elevating what admins are and what they do. And as a team, we got to dig a little deeper into really getting in with the product teams and being advocates for admin and connecting product with the admin community. And true to the core has been a really important element of the admin community from the start. And that messaging continues to go through everything that we have done as well. IdeaExchange, really making sure that the product is thinking about the admin use case. And honestly, if you look today at Dreamforce, a lot of the new product innovations, they're mostly adminy.

Mike Gerholdt: Well, it's that, and I think that the really unique thing that this team and admins in the community and everyone listening gets to do is, you get to participate in the growth of this identity within the technology ecosystem. So, a developer in the early '70s, you could argue when Apple came out, is really what started to define that. It was probably, you could argue even earlier, but the stereotype and the persona for the most part had been molded throughout the '80s. And for sure, the '90s, by the time that the internet and technology computers and classrooms happened. This is our 1960s, 1970s moment. You go back in time through that 2012 period, we're defining this identity now as in real-time. So it's more than just us showcasing it at Dreamforce. I mean, Gillian, we fast-forward to 2022 now, we're actually saying, "Okay, as part of this identity, here are the core skills that you need to have."

Gillian Bruce: Yep. I mean, it's gone way beyond just focusing on the product, but we've learned a lot. We've gotten feedback from the community and the ecosystem at large about, "Hey. It takes more than just being able to know how to do the technology piece of it. It's that magic of... The admin is at the core of the business, connecting the technology and the business and the processes. And so, how do you do that? You can learn a lot of tech. We have Trailhead to help you learn all that, but there's more to it. And that's where the admin skills kit came out of the research that we were doing, and really honing in on, "What are those skills that help you be a super successful admin?" When you pair those with the technology skills, man, the sky's the limit.

Mike Gerholdt: I agree.

Gillian Bruce: Yeah. What I love about rehashing the story and going back is understanding how core these values of good stuff, no fluff, for admins by admins, are to everything that we do today. Things that were important at the outset, we show set up. We use and tap into the knowledge of the community to help each other. I mean, that really has actually affected the rest of Salesforce too. If you start thinking about how things have shifted between Trailhead and focusing more on the individual trailblazers, a lot of what we've done as a team and what the community has done is now being really reflected in a huge way. And so, admins keep being awesome because you're what makes Salesforce special and it's really an honor to be a part of this community.

Mike Gerholdt: Absolutely.

Gillian Bruce: So then Mike, what's next? What are we going to do more for admins? What's the future look like?

Mike Gerholdt: Well, they should watch the Salesforce Admins Keynote at Dreamforce and find out.

Gillian Bruce: It's a great tip.

Mike Gerholdt: Which is also available on Salesforce Plus in case you weren't there in-person.

Gillian Bruce: Absolutely. And there will be lots available on Salesforce Plus, including our Release Readiness Live session. So if actually you're listening to this in the morning of Thursday, you can actually tune in live to the Release Readiness Live, the admin preview later today, which we are doing at Dreamforce with product managers. So, we're going to have an in-person experience and the regular virtual experience for Release Readiness live. And there's going to be some really amazing Admin sessions that are going to be available on Salesforce Plus on demand after Dreamforce.
And then also, stay tuned to the podcasts because we've got great Dreamforce presenters joining us on the podcast, doing a best of Dreamforce series. So stay tuned and keep contributing to the growth and the amazingness of the awesome admin movement. And as always, it's only what it is because of the work that you all are doing. And as always, if you want to learn more about anything else, everything will be on admin.salesforce.com or you can find more information about everything that we did at Dreamforce. You can find videos, you can find more podcasts and of course, great blogs. You can find myself on Twitter at GillianKBruce. You can find Mike on Twitter at MikeGerholdt. And we'll catch you next time in the cloud.



Direct download: The_Awesome_Admin_Story.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:00am PDT

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we’re bringing on the Admin Relations Team to talk through the Admin Track at Dreamforce ‘22.

Join us as we talk about the Admin Meadow, the Admin Track, and what you can expect at Dreamforce!

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with the Admin Relations Team.

The Admin Meadow is your home away from home

First up, we have Lisa Dick, Director of Admin Marketing at Salesforce and the newest member on the Admin Relations Team. It’s her first Dreamforce, and she’s excited for everything they’ve planned for you. “The one thing I want everyone to feel when they walk into the space is feel like the Admin Meadow and the Admin Zone is really the home for admins,” she says.

Even better, sessions will be mapped to the tools in the Admin Skills Kit so you can focus in on the things you want to learn most. She especially wants to see you at the Admin Theater on Tuesday for Admin Karaoke, so pick out your best power ballad and don’t miss out. Finally, you can sign up on the Admin Meadow for a 1-on-1 consult to talk through the challenges you face with someone who has a ton of expertise.

What you can’t miss on the Admin Track

Next up, we brought on Jennifer Lee, this year’s Admin Track Leader, to talk about everything we have planned for you. “We’re going to be able to nerd out on all things Security, User Permissions, Flow Builder, Dev Ops, and even more,” she says. Be sure to take a listen to this part of the pod, as she highlights some of the standout events you won’t want to miss.

We also brought on LeeAnne Rimel to give us a sneak peek at the Admin Keynote. It’s a time we can all come together on the biggest stage to just talk about admins and best practices and changes that are coming for tools you use every day: Flow Builder, App Builder, Permissions, Deployment, and more. And, because it’s LeeAnne, you better believe there will be killer demos.

Release Readiness Live, IRL

Finally, we talked to Ella Marks to find out what she has planned for Release Readiness Live. We pick out the top highlights for the Winter ‘23 Release for Admins, and then open it up to questions from the audience for our product managers. And this year, it’s going to be in-person—the can’t-miss party that ends Dreamforce and sends you off with a ton of new information to take home to your org.

Don’t think you’ll have to miss everything if you can’t make it to Dreamforce in person. There’s tons of stuff to see and do on Salesforce+, so block off your schedule and tune in live. After the Admin Keynote, there will be a special after-show hosted by Gillian and a panel of admin experts to recap the highlights and give some post-game analysis. You’ll even be able to ask our product managers questions for Release Readiness Live later in the day.

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Full show transcript

Gillian Bruce: Welcome to the Salesforce Admins podcast, where we talk about product, community, and careers to help you be an awesome admin. I'm your host today, Gillian Bruce. Listeners, we are less than one week away from Dreamforce 2022. If you can believe it, this is the 20th Dreamforce. I know. It's crazy. I wanted to take today's episode to spend some time hearing from the incredible people on the Admin Relations team about what the admin experience at Dreamforce 2022 is going to be.
If you're joining us on site in San Francisco in just a few days, welcome. We're excited to host you. We will see you very soon. This is a great preparation episodes that you know exactly what to expect when you get here. If you're not able to physically join us on site here in San Francisco for Dreamforce this year, don't worry. A lot of the content that we're going to be covering is also about how you can participate with us digitally. This is truly going to be a hybrid event. We have two streaming channels, the entirety of Dreamforce on Salesforce, plus we also have some other special things happening live. You can definitely participate, even if you're not going to be here with us in San Francisco.
What I have lined up for today is a sequence of the incredible people on our team who are owning and designing and running really important pieces of the admin experience at Dreamforce. We're going to talk about the physical experience in Moscone West on that first floor, the Admin Meadow and Admin Theater with Lisa Dick, who is one of our amazing marketers on the team. Then we're going to talk to the one and only, Jennifer Lee, who is owning and running the Admin track this year. That's all the breakout and theater sessions that are mostly presented by you, the community. Then we're going to get into talking about the big shining star of every event, the Admin Keynote. Leanne Remmel, who has been the mastermind behind this year's Admin Keynote joins us to talk a little bit about what to expect for that.
Then we close it out with the bang, folks, because we have the one and only Ella Marks. I like to call her Stellar Marks, who is going to talk to us about how she is bringing release readiness live, our traditional online virtual experience of how to prepare you for the release. We're bringing that as into Dreamforce this year as an in person and virtual experience. It's going to be the closing party, the closing ceremony of all of Dreamforce. In fact, the Admin Keynote and the Admin Release Readiness preview are all happening exactly a week from the day that this podcast comes out, because it's all on Thursday. Thursday of Dreamforce is admin day.
Stay tuned. You're going to hear from each of these incredible people about what is happening with the admin experience at Dreamforce and how you can participate either in person or online. Let's kick it off by talking to Lisa about the Admin Meadow.
Lisa, welcome to the podcast.

Lisa Dick: Thank you. I'm glad to be here.

Gillian Bruce: I was going to say, first time on the podcast, right?

Lisa Dick: Very, very first time on the podcast.

Gillian Bruce: Oh, well welcome. It's about time we get you on the podcast because we need to introduce you to the listeners. Lisa, can you please introduce yourself and tell a little bit about what you do at Salesforce?

Lisa Dick: I would love to. Thank you. I joined Salesforce this year. I'm a little bit newer to the team, but I'm the director of Admin marketing on the Admin Relations team. This is my first Dreamforce ever. I am very excited for what we have planned.

Gillian Bruce: Okay. Then let's get into it because people are really pumped to know. I know a lot of people listening are going to be able to physically come to Dreamforce next week, which is really exciting. A lot of people are not, so we're going to cover both, but can you tell those who are coming to Dreamforce, what are they going to be able to expect once they arrive on site as an admin?

Lisa Dick: I am so glad you asked. I would describe the admin experience this year in one word, which is magical. I think we have so many fun things planned. We have so many little surprises planned here and there, but the one thing that I want everyone to really feel when they walk into this space is feel like the Admin Meadow and the admin zone is really the home for admin. We're going to have activations and sessions and things for people to keep coming back to, so that over the course of three days, there's going to be so many things that people can interact with and visit, and sign up for, that it really will, I think, feel like a true home and a place that our admins want to keep coming back to.

Gillian Bruce: They're going to want to hang out with us all the time in the Meadow and at the theater. Wait, I said theater. Tell us about the theater.

Lisa Dick: I would love to tell you about the theater. There's a couple of different pieces of the admin zone. One of them, as you mentioned, is the theater. We will have both 20 minute sessions in the theater and also 40 minute breakout sessions with a ton of different learning tracks. There are so many sessions. I would like to call out that all of our theater sessions have been mapped to the 14 skills from our admin skills kit so that when someone comes to a theater session, they'll have a better understanding of what session maps to all of those different skills to find the right sessions in the theater for the things that matter most to them and the things that they want to learn.

Gillian Bruce: Oh, I love that. I am very passionate about the Salesforce Admin Skills Kit. I love that we're pulling that in through all of our, both breakout and theater sessions, but I know that there's some special theater sessions that you've got lined up. Is there anything you're going to share with us?

Lisa Dick: I would love to share them with you. We have some really fun sessions. As most of our admins know, we always try to have some fun sessions mixed in with all of the amazing learning sessions. We're having what we are calling, the How I Solved It showdown, which will be at 1:30 every day. It'll feature participants coming up with real actual business challenges that they have come up with an automation to solve. I also want to add that one of our most fun theater sessions will be on Tuesday, which is admin karaoke. I hope that everybody comes out and either sings. If you're not okay singing, that's okay, but cheering on all of your fellow admins. We think it'll be a really great time.

Gillian Bruce: I will be in the cheering section, for sure. No one needs to hear me sing anything.

Lisa Dick: I do. I need to hear you sing everything.

Gillian Bruce: No, no, no, no, no. Okay. But there's more than just the theater. You mentioned that there's also the Admin Meadow. What are folks going to be able to experience in the Meadow?

Lisa Dick: That's right. There's a couple of different components to the Meadow. There's a ton of action happening. When I talk about coming back to the Meadow and it feeling like home, there will be enough things happening in the Meadow to bring everybody back over the three days. When you first walk into the Meadow, you'll of course be greeted at a welcome desk. There's a couple of things you can do there. You can obviously get some help, but there will also be folks that are signing admins up for a one-on-one consult. We will have those consult stations in the Meadow. Admins can sign up for a 20 minute consultation with a Salesforce expert to really get their own individual questions answered.
We know that our admins face a lot of challenges or unique situations, or things that they just want to talk through with someone who has a ton of expertise. Having those consultations will allow folks to do that. They can sign up for those at the welcome desk when they get on site. We will also have four different demo stations, which I'm really excited about. Our demo stations will be staffed by Salesforce experts. We are really, really excited this year to focus on four specific topics, which are user management, app building and automation, the Admin Skills Kit, which I also love, and then also a session for admin best practices. There's a lot of things happening at the demo booths. Those are, as folks know who have attended Dreamforce in the past, the demo booths, you can just walk up to. It's not something that you have to schedule.
The last thing that's really exciting happening in the Admin Meadow is our activation. Again, talking about the skills kit, we have heard so many wonderful stories about how admins are using the skills kit to really help explain what they do and define what they do and really tell their own story through the skills in the skills kit.
The great part about Dreamforce this year is we have turned the Admin Skills Kit into a digital activation. It's really bringing to life the skills and creating your own unique admin story. In the Meadow, we will have a way for our admins to walk up to an activation station and really use those 14 skills to tell their own story of who they are and then it'll be shareable. You can add it to your resume. You can share it across social. We're really excited for admins to really take the 14 skills and make it feel more unique to them.

Gillian Bruce: I love it. I have gotten some sneak peaks of this activation. I cannot wait to see it in action. It is really amazing way to, like you said, pull together the skills and make your own custom story. I think this is a great takeaway that everyone is going to love. Hey, especially if you're joining virtually, you're going to see people post these. You can create your own when you're at home. This is going to be a really cool thing that I'm sure we're going to carry beyond Dreamforce, as well, in some capacity, but there's a lot going on, Lisa. I love it.

Lisa Dick: It's a lot.

Gillian Bruce: Do you have any tips, maybe for folks who this is their first Dreamforce? This is your first Dreamforce, so you're in the same boat. What is your strategy when you're coming on site? What are you going to do first? How are you going to try and manage doing all of the things?

Lisa Dick: Yeah, it's a great question because there is a lot going on. I also recognize there's a lot happening outside of the Admin Meadow, but one of the cool things that our team creates, it's called the Admin Workbook. We will be sending that out and publishing it on Twitter the week before Dreamforce and really helping attendees plan those things out and figuring out the things that they really have to make sure they do before they leave the Dreamforce grounds. But I haven't planned mine out yet because I've been so deep in figuring out what the Meadow looks like, but I think my big piece of advice that I have heard from everybody on the team and some folks that have been at Salesforce for a while is to just walk around and take it all in. It's a large amount of space. There's a lot of people, but there's also so much to be able to just take it in and just really enjoy the experience of it because it's been so long since we've been together in such a large setting. Just take a moment to just recognize how exciting it is that we're all back. We're all together. We get this really unique space and opportunity to celebrate that.

Gillian Bruce: I love that. That's a great tip. Now, for those of people who maybe are not able to join us in person, what do you recommend for them to get a little taste, a little feeling of this admin magic?

Lisa Dick: Yeah, a couple of things. One, definitely log on to Salesforce plus and see some of the top hits for admins. The second is to follow us on social. In addition to having magic in the Meadow, we will, obviously, of course, our admin Twitter account is amazing. We'll have a couple of details of some fun things happening during the week, but also there's going to be a sweepstakes for folks on site and who follow our Twitter account. Yeah, I think that'll be a really helpful way to figure out what's happening both onsite and for the folks at home.

Gillian Bruce: I love that. I love that. Well, Lisa, I am excited for you to experience your first Dreamforce. I'm really, really looking forward to connecting you with a bunch of admins who are going to be onsite, which is going to be really fun. Everyone, come meet Lisa. She's going to be in the Admin Meadow pretty much the entire time, but we'll let you walk around a little bit, I promise.

Lisa Dick: I hope. Thank you.

Gillian Bruce: Lisa, thank you for all your hard work. We are so looking forward to seeing everything come to life next week. Yeah. Hey, let's get ready to Dreamforce, huh?

Lisa Dick: Let's get ready to Dreamforce. Absolutely.

Gillian Bruce: I cannot wait to see your faces as you walk into the Admin Meadow on Moscone West in just a few short days here. Lisa has been working hard. So fun to hear about some of the special surprises and magical moments that you are going to experience. Now we're going to keep it moving because we got a lot of great admin experience to talk about. Admin experienceness, I think that's a thing. Next, we're going to go to Jennifer Lee, who is the mastermind, and organizer, and proud owner of the admin track this year at Dreamforce to talk about all of the great theater and breakout sessions you can expect this year.
Jenn Lee, welcome back to the podcast.

Jennifer Lee: Thanks for having me Gillian.

Gillian Bruce: Well, I needed to get you on because we're getting ready for a little something called Dreamforce in just one week here, actually, if you're listening to this podcast. I wanted to get you on because you are managing the entire admin track at Dreamforce this year. Hands to you. That's an amazing feat. I wanted to get you on the podcast to talk a little bit about some of the amazing things happening in the admin track. Give us an overview as folks get ready to head to Dreamforce.

Jennifer Lee: All right. How much time do you have because I can go on and on about how amazing the line up is?

Gillian Bruce: Well, I know you can go on and on. Let's keep in sound bite for the podcast.

Jennifer Lee: All right. I am really super excited to be this year's track lead for the 20th Dreamforce admin track and to curate such a great lineup of breakout and theater sessions. We have a little bit for every admin out there, whether you're just starting out, you're intermediate, an advanced admin, and a wide variety of topics that can help you build on those 14 skills that you helped us identify in our skills kit. In fact, Brittany Gibson, if you've seen that awesome, great Quip doc that she put out there, the admin sessions by skills that list out all our sessions categorized by the related skills, that is something that you definitely need to get your hands on if you haven't seen it. Gillian, would we be able to include that as a link in the pod notes?

Gillian Bruce: Absolutely. It's going to be in the notes.

Jennifer Lee: Awesome. All right. In regards to speakers, we have Salesforce MVPs. We have community members. We also have Salesforce PMs, like Shell Feldman, Diana Jaffy, Antoine Kubot, just to name a few. They're going to share their latest and greatest with their respective products. We're going to be able to nerd out on all things, security, user permissions, flow builder, DevOps, and even more.

Gillian Bruce: I love nerding out. This is making me excited. Come to Dreamforce to nerd out.

Jennifer Lee: All right. I'm going to give you a teaser into some of their sessions. Okay, folks, bookmark these now. True to the core from feedback to features. Also, getting started with low code application building. The feature of user management for admins, and also rating effective and maintainable validation roles.

Gillian Bruce: It's quite a line, Jenn. There's a lot going on there.

Jennifer Lee: I know when I was a customer and I attended Dreamforce, I like to learn from the practitioners, the people who are out there doing the thing. I'm just going to highlight just a few sessions that, again, you want to bookmark. We're going to go through the fundamentals of formals, approach reporting like never before, deluxe report types. We're going to throw in some Salesforce automation with Slack. Then if you're looking to get into public speaking and speaking at events, we have a session called find your voice, tips for becoming a Salesforce speaker. There's also a session on the art of a Salesforce demo because we, as admins, need to present and share what we've built to our users. Learning that would be great. We also have dynamic forms, driving data, and user experience. Lastly, we have the London user group leaders presenting a theater session on how to become a skilled admin specialist. They'll go through various skills and what's involved in doing that and then tying that back to the skills kit.

Gillian Bruce: I love it. I love how you cover really a whole breadth between nerding out on products. You kind of career developmental, great content, and then just best practices as well. That's really awesome.

Jennifer Lee: And I'm excited for new faces. While we love our returning Dreamforce presenter veterans, we do have some new faces as well. There's app exchange strategies for Salesforce business analysts with Shira Tyson Griffin. I hope I said their name right. There's also step by step guide for transitioning all processes to flow with Chrissy Andrews and Kristen Blazer, and catch the release, how to manage major releases year round with [inaudible] Burke, who is our awesome release person, but also a former coworker of mine. She works at Manual Life Candy Weeks.

Gillian Bruce: I love that. That's great. Yeah, actually [inaudible] was on the podcast earlier sharing some of her great presentation that she put together about app exchange strategies for business analysts. Yeah, a whole bunch of first time Dreamforce presenters, which is always fun to get some new voices out there and amazing content. I've been able to jump on a couple of the dry runs for these sessions and wow. It is a rockstar lineup. It is going to be an amazing track.
Now, for those who maybe aren't able to attend in person, Jenm, how can they enjoy some of these great topics and great presentations?

Jennifer Lee: We have the opportunity to record three of our sessions from the admin track. Those will be available on Salesforce plus for a future viewing. They're the automate your business processes with Flow Builder. Ready, Click, Automate, Salesforce to the max with RPA. Lastly, Make the Move From Chain Sets to DevOps Center.

Gillian Bruce: Okay, those are three, obviously, very popular and very exciting sessions about really great product and innovations that everybody needs to know about. Again, Salesforce plus on demand after Dreamforce. You can get it all right there, as well as some other great stuff like our Admin Keynote, which we talked about on the podcast already. Of course, release readiness live will be available after Dreamforce, as well.
Jenn, this is your first time running an in-person Dreamforce as not a customer, as part of Salesforce. Tell me a little bit about how that change has gone for you. Not only are you now part of Salesforce running an in person Dreamforce, but you're owning all of admin track. Just tell me. How has that been?

Jennifer Lee: I just say it's been truly your honor to even be given this opportunity. I want to give props to [inaudible], you, and everyone on the team for being so supportive. It truly takes a village to do this. I'm just the conductor, but it truly takes the whole orchestra to get this thing together. It's been great going through and being on the other side, because I was a presenter and now I'm on the other side organizing it and going through the process of selection. That was really hard. We had so many great submissions and I only had so many slots. It was really hard going through that process. But then now, working through and doing the dry runs, I'm really getting excited by seeing the sessions. I really can't wait to get those in front of all our admins.

Gillian Bruce: Yeah, absolutely. It's been really fun to see you bring that perspective to this process that Mike and I have done for gosh knows how many years at this point. It's great. You've done an amazing job. It's really fun to see it all come to life. Hey, I'm looking forward to seeing your face next week after the Dreamforce is going on and the sessions are happening and you're like, "Oh my gosh, this is the track that I put together. It's coming off amazing. All these people are getting such great value out of it."
Congratulations. Hey, everybody get ready to enjoy a amazing admin track next week. Jenn, we also didn't talk about the fact there are breakouts and there are theater sessions. Can you talk to us a little bit about that?

Jennifer Lee: Yes. Our breakouts will be 40 minutes in an enclosed room. Our theater sessions will be on the... The breakouts will be on the second floor of Moscone West. The theater sessions will be on the first floor of Moscone in the Admin Meadow. It will seat about 125 people in an open area. We're really excited to get the excitements of the crowd, the people walking around the Admin Meadow. Yeah, I'm really looking forward to all this.

Gillian Bruce: It's going to be vibrant. It's going to be fun. It's going to be an awesome admin party all around. Congratulations. Thank you for leading admin track this year. Folks, we're getting ready to see you at Dreamforce.

Jennifer Lee: Yay.

Gillian Bruce: Wow. So many amazing sessions, lots of brand new presenters, lots of veteran presenters. Thank you, Jennifer Lee, for shepherding this incredible admin track to come to life at Dreamforce. I hope you've bookmarked the sessions she mentioned and you're exploring on your own. Make sure you pop open that Salesforce plus window so that you don't miss out.
Now, we're moving on to the Admin Keynote. Leanne Remmel, who is the original Admin Keynote designer. If you all don't remember back in 2014 when we first had our first ever Admin Keynote, which we called it a keynote, even though it wasn't really deemed a keynote. Leanne designed all the demos for that, and in fact, created the whole entire brand of how we do admin demos by showing you how we use setup. Without further ado, let's get Leanne on the pod to talk about what you can expect in this year's amazing keynote. Leanne, welcome to the podcast.

Leanne Remmel: Hi Gillian. Thanks for having me.

Gillian Bruce: Well, I had to have you on, because we need to talk about something really important and really exciting happening at Dreamforce next week, the Admin Keynote. Can you tell us a little bit about what is going on for admins in the Keynote?

Leanne Remmel: I sure can. If you haven't been a dream first before, or if this is your first time tuning in, the Admin Keynote is really this time that we gather all together as admins. We share with you the latest and greatest in announcements, in tools for admins. We try to share and reinforce things we've learned from you over the previous year about the role of admins and how it's growing, and things you are all doing in your careers and at your companies. It's really... I'll be honest. It's one of my favorite Dreamforce events. It is really a time for us all to gather together in the big room. We're in the Moscone hall F in the big keynote room. We gather together and we just talk about admins for the entire time.
We spend time with you talking about what are those products and features coming that we want to make sure your hands on with? What are those business areas you should be building out? We'll be, first off, diving into the latest and greatest with your favorite products. We'll be including Flow Builder, Ad Builder, permissions, deployment. Those things that you're using every day as an admin, we're going to be talking about some of the right ways and best practices on how to use those tools. We're going to be hearing from product leadership. We're going to be talking about roadmap and exciting things that are coming or just released for those tools. I'm really excited for that. I love building out our product overviews and demos. It's a really fun part.

Gillian Bruce: Yeah, and you've been... Leanne, you have also had a hand in helping with product demos for quite a while at Salesforce, and especially for the admin audience, which makes it extra special because these demos are really, as you said, tailored towards the admin experience. Along with what you just listed, what else is going on in the Admin Keynote?

Leanne Remmel: I love that question. I do love demos. I just still do. A quick aside, we really do build these demos. Every step of the way we're thinking, what is it that we want admins to see? What are those features, those best practices, those tools that are just, we really want admins to know about. We really want admins to see. You'll notice we really dive a lot deeper often into setup, into the builder experience. That's because these are truly tailored for you, both the products that we're covering and then how we show them in demos.
Gillian, I just love demos. I used to build demos all the time when I was a Salesforce admin. I built them in order to get budget and things like that for my projects and drive user adoption. My entire career, whether I was a customer, or at Salesforce, or tech support, I think demos are so important. They're so fun.

Gillian Bruce: Demo all the things.

Leanne Remmel: Demo all of the things. Gillian, you asked what else we're doing in Admin Keynote. There's two other areas I want to share that I'm really, really excited about. I told you how demos are so important and we're doing demos. Something that's really exciting that we're doing in the Admin Keynote this year for the first time is it's not just going to be Salesforce employees up their demoing. We're going to have our customers up on stage leading demos. We're going to have some of our admin trailblazers who have used some of these products, used some of these tools to build solutions for their companies. They're going to be on stage showing their build to you in a demo in the keynote. I am just so excited about that because, of course I love demoing. I love showing things. There is nothing better than seeing someone who has the same role as you, the same job as you, is maybe solving the same business problems as you, up there saying, "Here, let me show you how I solved this."
I think that's going to be such a fun and important element of the keynote. I'm so honored. We've got our admin trailblazers that are joining us, are just awesome members of the community, awesome admins through and through. I'm so thrilled that they're taking the time to share their solutions with us and with you, our admin audience. Those customer led demos are going to be really, really fun.

Gillian Bruce: That is really special. That is unique. I think that's the only time that any keynote has really done that. This is going to be a first time innovation that we're bringing to the Admin Keynote this year.

Leanne Remmel: I think I would say we're trailblazing.

Gillian Bruce: What? Boom! Mic drop. Love it, Leanne. Okay. You said there's three things. We talked about too. What is the third part of the Admin Keynote that you want to share today?

Leanne Remmel: Okay. The third thing that I'm really excited to talk about today, that will be so impactful for you, Salesforce admins, who are attending and viewing our Admin Keynote, Gillian and our team worked really hard over the last few years to learn more about the skills that make admin successful. It's called the Admin Skills Kit. It's on our site. It'll be in the show notes.
That skills kit that they worked hard to identify, what are those skills that help admins be successful in their roles? We launched the skills kit at TDX 22. That was in... What month was that? April 22, but we're not done. We launched it. We gave you that first iteration of an overview of all the tools and skills that you need to be successful as admin, that you should focus on building on. We had a wonderful blog series by our admin trailblazers sharing how they use those skills in their jobs and their careers, but we're not done yet.
At the Admin Keynote, we're going to have some really exciting announcements about this next phase of Admin Skills Kit, and new tools and new ways, building on the skills kit, that we are working to enable you as Salesforce admins to be successful in your roles. I'm really excited about... It's a culmination of a lot of hard work from the team and a lot of contributions and sharing and knowledge, sharing from admins, that we're working to combine into this product, this tool, for you, called the Admin Skills Kit that'll help you just crush it and be an awesome admin.

Gillian Bruce: Yeah. It's like our own product roadmap. We're sharing everybody.

Leanne Remmel: It is. We get a do a roadmap. Yeah, we get to do a roadmap conversation. We're going to have some exciting roadmap announcements about Admin Skills Kit.

Gillian Bruce: I love it. I love it. Leanne, you did mention that the Admin Keynote is going to be in the big room this year, the same room that the mark main keynote is in. We need everybody who's coming to Dreamforce to join us. When is the keynote happening Leanne?

Leanne Remmel: Oh, that's a great question. It is in the big room. It's on Thursday at 9:00 AM. It's probably going to be your first session of the day. Maybe you can meet up with your admin buddies, go to Starbucks, go to your coffee shop, make your coffee at your hotel, whatever. Everyone can get their coffee, get their nice little morning walk in, make their way over to Dreamforce and come bright and shiny and early to the Admin Keynote and really start your day with us. I'll be honest. I love being on Thursday morning, because I think then we've had a couple of days to attend sessions, to attend other keynotes, to learn more about different areas that we're interested in. With Admin Keynote, we try to help you put a lot of that into context and set you up for successes.
You go back to your day job after Dreamforce and want to take all these learnings from Dreamforce and make your plan, your roadmap for what you do with those learnings. I love being on Thursday. I love being on Thursday morning, Thursday morning, hall F, 9:00 AM. Even if you're not a morning person, even if you're tired, I promise we will wake you up. It'll be a fun show. We will be bright and shiny. There'll be a very big element of fun. You're going to see some really faces and love and haven't seen in a while. It'll be a wonderful way to kick off Thursday.

Gillian Bruce: Well, Thursday is, Leanne, it's admin day at Dreamforce because not only do we start the day with the Admin Keynote, but we end the day with admin release readiness live, which is really exciting. The whole day is really focused on admins. It's a great way to end Dreamforce with the bang with a whole day dedicated truly to Salesforce admins. Yeah, we're looking forward to it. Leanne, as you mentioned, if you're in person, come to Hall F, but if you're not in person, people can watch it online, right?

Leanne Remmel: Yes. It will be on Salesforce plus at 9:00 AM Pacific on Thursday. Definitely tune in. And there'll be a little something special for people who are tuning in online. There's going to be an after show. There's going to be the Admin Keynote, and then we're going to be diving into our after show as well. Also, really starting this live will be on later in the day, as well, for everyone who's not attending in person. I love that really starting this live is happening later in the day, because I think also, we're going to be talking about some new products and some new features and some new tools in the keynote. At really starting this live, you have Q and A with the product managers. If you come up with questions during keynote or during other sessions the week, you can ask those questions during really starting this live. I'm really excited for admin day and for Dreamforce. I hope to see you all there.

Gillian Bruce: Excellent. Well, we'll be there.
All right folks. We are done. The keynote is incredible. You are going to want to tune in. It's exactly one week from today. You'll be able to view that live on Salesforce plus. Starting at 9:00 AM Pacific time on Salesforce plus. You are not going to want to miss it.
We have a brief after show that's going to happen right after the keynote that, yours truly, is hosting along with some incredible admin analysts. We've got Carmel James, familiar voice on the pod, and Cheryl Feldman, one of our amazing product leaders who are going to join me as the post game analysts for what happened in the Admin Keynote. You're only going to find that live on Salesforce plus, so make sure you tune in there. We've got some fun surprises in that little segment too.
All right. Now, to wrap out the admin experience at Dreamforce, we are going to talk to Ella Marks, who is innovating... Oh my gosh. This is such a cool innovation that she's bringing to life this year at Dreamforce. It is the first time that we're ever going to be doing release readiness live with an in-person audience. You heard it. We do release readiness live every release. It is one of the best ways to get up to speed with all of the features that you should know about as an admin hearing directly from product managers. Well, we're bringing that experience to the attendees at Dreamforce. We're doing it in a big keynote room. We're going to have the product managers there, live, answering questions. If you are tuning in virtually, nothing's going to change for you. It's the same way that you can tune into release readiness live. We're just going to have a live studio audience who's also going to be able to participate. Check that out. That's going to be at 3:00 PM Pacific time. You'll be able to stream that the way that you normally stream release readiness live. Get your questions ready. Ella, welcome back to the podcast.

Ella Marks: Hi Gillian. Thanks for having me.

Gillian Bruce: Oh, well I am having you because I want something very specific from you. First of all, before we get into it, can you remind the listeners who you are and what you do?

Ella Marks: Yeah, I'd love to. I am a senior marketing manager on the admin relations team. I have my hands in a lot of different things, but I'd say the biggest things that I focus on are admin website and our campaigns. Our release campaigns like Learn More, and some other campaigns that you may see across our social or our website.

Gillian Bruce: Yes, you do all of the very fun activating the community things, which is great. Speaking of which, we are giving everyone who's listening a little precursor to what they can expect at Dreamforce next week for both those attending in person and those attending online. Ella, you are owning a very exciting piece of this. Can you talk to us a little bit about release readiness live at Dreamforce?

Ella Marks: Yes. I would love to. Nothing gets me more excited for this year's Dreamforce than talking about the first ever, in person release readiness live. That's right. In person release readiness live.

Gillian Bruce: And the crowd goes wild!

Ella Marks: Insert cheering noises! It is so exciting because if you've seen release readiness live before, you know that every release we go through all those release highlights. There's tons of innovation out there with every single release. We pick out the top highlights for admins. Then we bring them to you in this release readiness live broadcast. We get to go through our demos and show you all these new innovations. Then the product managers take your questions about these new features during that broadcast. We're having all of that, but this time, there's also going to be this live in person component. Don't worry. If you're not joining us live in person, you will still be able to watch release readiness live the same way that you've watched it previously. You'll still be able to ask your questions, but it's just so exciting that we're going to have this new way to engage with the product managers and really be in that room. We're hoping to bring all of the awesome admin fun release energy to the session. I'm just so excited, if you can't tell.

Gillian Bruce: Well, it is something to get pretty pumped up about because not only is it the first in person release readiness live. This is kind of almost true to the core, but focused on the release, because we're going to have all those product managers there. Release readiness live is amazing because you get the PMs to join you on the broadcast and answer those questions live, but we're going to have all the PMs there. We're going to have rows of PMs to answer questions. If you've got a specific question that you've never really gotten an answer to feel free to bring it because we are going to be able to ask them... We. You will be able to ask them there in person. It's also the official closing party of all of Dreamforce and admin day. Ella, talk to us about how this party's going to go down.

Ella Marks: It's so exciting to be able to be that closing party because what it means is all week, you will have learned all of these new, amazing features. You may learn about Admin Skills. You'll learn about products. You'll have all of this learning. At the very end, you'll be able to keep those questions in the back of your mind that entire time, bring them to this session and go out learning all about the top new features. When you get home, they're right fresh in your mind, so you can immediately go start implementing these new features or playing around with them in a sandbox. This is just so exciting because you have that experience where you can have that closing party with us. We're going to make it fun. Don't worry. More to come on that.

Gillian Bruce: There'll be lots of fun.

Ella Marks: Lots of fun, but it'll be the last thing that you see at Dreamforce. You can take that, write your notes down, go home, and then immediately take action and start learning about some of these new features. I'm so excited. It's going to be the closing party, the can't miss last thing that you do at Dreamforce.

Gillian Bruce: Yes. Release readiness live to take it all home. To your point, what's great is that this is a good forcing function to get everybody ready for the winter 23 release. You'll be able to go right back to your work when you get back home on Monday or Tuesday, or if you're taking the week after Dreamforce off, which I know some people do. Good for you, but you'll be able to immediately go in, play within that pre-lease environment and make sure that you're starting to prepare your org for the new capabilities you want to take advantage of with winter 23.
Ella, one thing that I know that's different about this year is because we get to do it in person, we may not have as much time as we usually do to answer all of the questions. We will have time for Q and A, but what happens..? What are we doing for folks who maybe don't get their question answered live in this session?

Ella Marks: That is a great question, Gillian. It is something that we know everybody is going to be thinking about during this session. We will provide an opportunity to follow up on those questions that you've asked after Dreamforce. We're still working out some of those details. I will make sure that we share them with you as soon as we have them, but do not worry. Your opportunities to connect with these product managers and get your questions answered are not limited to this session. Do not fear. We will answer as many questions as we can live at Dreamforce from online and in the room. But if we don't get to your question, there will be additional opportunities to ask it. Just stay tuned.

Gillian Bruce: Well, and yeah, you'll know exactly which PM to harass on Twitter too. It'll be all good.

Ella Marks: We'll share their Twitter handles. You can ask them directly.

Gillian Bruce: This is so great, Ella. Now, I would love to just ask you, since this is the first time we're doing release readiness live in real life, IRL, what are some of the differences in putting together release readiness live for an in person and online experience versus just that online experience?

Ella Marks: That's a really good question. I think that when it comes to anything, that's going to be onsite, especially at Dreamforce. If you ever participated in a Dreamforce session before, or you have dreams of participating, it is such a different experience to be live in the room with people. You really want to make sure with a session like release readiness live, that we're considering both that in room audience and the experience for those folks, and the experience for folks who are going to be tuning in online.
One thing that we haven't really had to think about before, which is really fun, but we're thinking about this time is, we're showing some really exciting new features that we think you're going to be really excited about. We're having to think, do we need to pause for an audience reaction? That is something we've never had to think about before. Is anybody going to clap? When there's an announcement? Are we going to hear some rumblings in the audience? What is this going to look like? This is a totally new experience for us. It relates a little bit less to the content, but just that general atmosphere that we want to create with this experience is, it is real. It is live. We are engaging with you, but I don't know. I'm excited to see what it looks like, but it's definitely not something we've experienced in the studio or in the online little Brady bunch box before.

Gillian Bruce: Well, yeah, instead of relying on basically the other attendees in the Brady box bunch, just to show excitement over a feature, we're going to get real actual reactions that are audible from the audience, in addition to the normal online forever that happens, and the great gifts, like Squire I know we always posts the great gifts. But yeah. It's fun to bring both of those together. Amazing job, Ella, of bringing both that in person, that new in person experience together with the live existing experience. It's going to be really fun. It's like the first real deal, hybrid live content. Honestly, cause it's so interactive. I's going to be really fun to see that go down. Any tips for folks who are going to be attending in person or attending online to get the most out of the session?

Ella Marks: I think to get the most out of the session, I would just recommend having a way to take notes, whether it's your phone, or you are taking photos of the slides or of a demo, or making a note of a new feature that you might be excited about. You don't want to lose those moments of inspiration that you might get during a session like this that is so jam packed of features. Just make sure that you have an easy way to capture something that you might get excited about because we're going to show a lot.
If I can add one more, bring your questions. We're going to be sharing what we're covering before the event. If you have questions about automation, you have questions about DevOps center, or permissions and user access, you can think about those now. When the session starts, be ready to post those questions because we will be looking for them. Start thinking about those. Start thinking about what you'd want to ask to our amazing product managers. We can't wait to answer as many of them as we can.

Gillian Bruce: Bring all the questions. All of them.

Ella Marks: Yeah.

Gillian Bruce: All of them. Well, Ella, thank you for joining us on the podcast. Thank you so much for bringing IRL at DF 22, because I'm just going to list all the acronyms at once. I know we're all looking forward to this amazing closing party at Dreamforce. We cannot wait to see you there. Ella, it's going to be some admin magic.

Lisa Dick: I can't wait. See you all there.

Gillian Bruce: With that, everyone, I hope you are so pumped for next week. It is happening in just a few days. I cannot even believe it's the 20th Dreamforce. I don't even know what number Dreamforce this is for me. I think my first Dreamforce was 2010. Maybe it's my 12th Dreamforce. Yikes. Wow. Anyway, Dreamforce is a magical time. I hope you're able to join us. If you're not able to join us in person, please, please, please stay tuned to Salesforce plus, and you can stay up to date again with all things happening in the admin community by following #awesomeadmin on Twitter and Salesforce admins, no eye. I hope you all are pumped to have an incredible Dreamforce, whether you're joining us in San Francisco or you're joining us from your comfort of your own home. I cannot wait to see you. I cannot wait to hear from you. I cannot wait to see what you think of your admin experience at this year's 20th Dreamforce.
With that, have an amazing rest of your day. Safe travels. Have a great weekend. I'll catch you next time, in the cloud.



Direct download: The_Admin_Experience_at_Dreamforce_22.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:00am PDT

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Mary Tagler, Salesforce MVP and Salesforce Applications Manager at Relativity.

Join us as we talk about Mary’s upcoming presentation at Dreamforce, “The Fundamentals of Formulas.”

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

Best of Dreamforce

Not everyone can make it to Dreamforce this year and, even if you can, we know it’s impossible to catch everything. Don’t worry, we’ve got your back. This month, we’re bringing the best speakers from the Admin Stage on the pod so you won’t miss a thing.

Formulas for the Rest of Us

Longtime listeners may remember Mary from way back in 2016. These days, she manages a team of admins for Chicago-based legal software company Relativity. Most importantly, she’s speaking at Dreamforce this year about the fundamentals of formulas. “I wanted to get down to the fundamentals, best practices, and the how-tos for people who just don’t know where to start,” she says.

Mary wants to point you towards the resources that are already out there to help set you up for success. There are a lot of ways to get help but the number of options can become overwhelming, so she wants to give you some pointers on how to help yourself. “One of the best resources—the bookmark I have on every machine I own—is the formulas and operators help document,” she says. And even better, it has examples for everything.

Why It Helps to Write Things Out on Paper

Mary also wants to help you understand where formulas are used and why you use them. She’ll talk through the most common types of functions and operators you use, writing out every exercise in plain language so you know how it works. “Even if you feel like walking away not knowing how to build the formula, you’re going to know how to write out that logic in a coherent way that anyone can digest.”

Finally, Mary will cover best practices. “Sometimes the way you write your formula sets you up for failure,” she says. She always hand writes her formulas following a specific format, underling ANDs and circling ORs. That helps her identify how she wrote the formula and find any logic gaps, and also gives her a way to run it by stakeholders to see if it’ll solve the business problem.

Asking For Help

One thing Mary did when she was starting to learn formulas was taking a look in the Answers Community. There are always a ton of questions there, and she figured a good way to hone her skills was to see if she could figure them out.

Even better, the Answers Community is still there for you no matter where you are in your journey. “Time formulas are my kryptonite,” Mary says, “and you will see me posting for help anytime I have to do something time-related.” And she’s giving a presentation about formulas at Dreamforce, so you shouldn’t be afraid to ask for help if you need it!

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Full show transcript

Gillian Bruce: Welcome to the Salesforce Admins Podcast where we talk about product, community, and careers to help you be an awesome admin. I'm your host today, Gillian Bruce, and we are bringing you the best of Dreamforce. Listeners, we have picked some of the top sessions from the admin track at Dreamforce, both breakout sessions and theater, and we're bringing them to you here on the podcast because we know not everyone's going to be able to come to Dreamforce.
And even if you are coming to Dreamforce in person, there's zero likelihood that you're going to be able to hit every single session in the admin track. It's just physically impossible. You can't clone yourself. So wanted to make sure that I bring some of our top presentations and presenters on the podcast so you can hear more about what they're going to be sharing, learn a little bit more from what they're going to be teaching in their session, and just have a good time getting ready and getting that mindset of Dreamforce.
So without further ado, I want to introduce you to today, reintroduce you if you've been listening to the podcast for a long time. We have Mary Tagler who is going to be joining us today, and she's got a great session on the fundamentals of formulas that she's going to be presenting at Dreamforce.
And fun fact, she was last on the podcast I think back in like 2016 and it was right before she won an awesome admin award, which in those days wasn't even the golden hoodie yet, but now it has evolved to that. So without further ado, let's welcome Mary to the podcast. Mary, welcome back to the podcast.

Mary Tagler: Thanks for having me, Gillian.

Gillian Bruce: Well, we were talking, I think it's been a long time since we've had you on the podcast.

Mary Tagler: It has. It's been in excess of four years and at least one job ago.

Gillian Bruce: So, all right, so before we get into it, why don't you update us? What are you up to now? What are you doing these days?

Mary Tagler: Sure. I'm actually a manager these days and I manage a team of admins at Relativity. We're a legal software company based in Chicago.

Gillian Bruce: I like it managing a team of admins. All right, so clearly you've got a lot of awesome admin knowledge to share with everyone. Now, I wanted to have you on the podcast, Mary, because we are getting ready for a little something called Dreamforce here just in a few weeks. And I know you are presenting a session and I know several of our listeners are not going to be able to make it to your session, even if they make it to Dreamforce, because there's a zillion things going on. So I wanted to get you on the podcast to talk a little bit about what you are presenting and share some of these amazing takeaways that you're going to give your captive audience on site to some of our listeners here today.

Mary Tagler: Sure. So I'm going to be speaking at Dreamforce about the fundamentals of formulas. It's a topic that I hold near and dear. It's something that as an organizer of our Salesforce Saturday group, I really had looked for a way to build on that great presentation that Steve Mo does about formulas, but getting more basic, getting down to really the fundamentals, the best practices, and the how-tos for people who just don't even know where to start.
I spend a lot of my time either in the community or Ohana Slack, and I see a lot of folks come with questions where they're like, "I need to do X and I don't even know where to begin." And so my goal is to really start teaching folks how to map out what they need to do and then feel comfortable with the tools that are provided for them.

Gillian Bruce: I love that. I think that's so important. It's kind of like instead of just helping you troubleshoot every single issue, let's get some framework and some longer term strategy in place so that when these come up, you have a way to think about them and process them. And as someone who personally has always struggled with math, and then when I was trying to get the grasp on Salesforce formulas, I was like, "Oh no, here we go again." So I very much appreciate your work in this area to try and help people understand. So what are some of the things that you're going to cover in your session that's really kind of help people get that, that fundamental knowledge about how to use a formula and when to use it?

Mary Tagler: Sure. So we're going to start out, we're going to talk about some of the resources available to you, because there's a lot of resources out there both within and outside of Salesforce that'll help set you up for success. We're going to talk about where you use formula. So why are formulas even important? Because there are so many places in the system we use them and it's really important to understand like, "Why should I even use this skill?"
We're going to talk about best practices. Sometimes the way you write your formula actually sets you up for failure. My favorite thing to do is I write it out, I write it out for a couple reasons and I have very specific ways. I hand write it and I underline my ands and I circle my ors. And I do it for two reasons. One, it helps me identify how I'm writing the formula and any logic gaps. But the other thing is I can take what I wrote, type it up and share it with my business stakeholders and say, "Is this what you're asking for?" Versus giving them a formula and they're just going to look at me like I have two heads.

Gillian Bruce: Right. You're speaking a language they do not understand.

Mary Tagler: Exactly. And so I want to make sure that people feel like they have a support system in place to really get help. One of the best resources, the bookmark I have on every single machine I own is the formulas and operators help document. And I love it because it shows examples. And a lot of times people don't even get to that first step of knowing that exists and seeing how it's used in action.

Gillian Bruce: As I do remember in my early days of trying to figure out how to write my first formulas, finding that and being like, "Oh." It's like the decoder of trying to decode a secret language of the back of the cereal box for those of us who are older." Remember back in the day when these things existed.

Mary Tagler: Oh yeah.

Gillian Bruce: All right, so it's super helpful. So then, okay, so you got some resources down and what else are you going to share in trying to help people?

Mary Tagler: So then we're really going to jump into it and we're going to do a bunch of exercises. So what I've done is I've really taken a series of common but simple validation rules and formulas and automation examples and really broken them down. I'm going to talk about the most common types of functions and operators you're going to use, because there's a really long list. And frankly, there may be some you never use in your admin career, but there's going to be a number that you're probably going to use quite frequently.
And we're going to go through it. We're going to write out every exercise. So we're going to write it in plain language. So even if you feel like you walk away not knowing how to build the formula, you're going to walk away knowing how to write out that logic in a coherent way that anyone can digest it. Then we're going to go through the actual formula itself. And I've added some visualizations to help break down what we're doing in each spot.
And I really analogize formula building to creative writing in a way, because you're separating your clauses with punctuation, you have to close out all your parentheses. It's somewhat math based, but it's also somewhat very language based. And I think when you start thinking about it that way, it helps you put the pieces together.
We're going to do examples of where we might nest one function around another function. We'll wrap them together to do what we need to do or we'll do a nested if statement so that we can have more than two outcomes. So we're going to go through things like that that are practical everyday used case examples.

Gillian Bruce: Okay. So I want to go to the session, I'm like, [inaudible].

Mary Tagler: I hope you do.

Gillian Bruce: Yeah, I will definitely put it on my calendar and do everything I can to make it. But what I really like about this Mary is though your approach is so ... it's very practical, but it's also really relatable. I love what you just said about, "Hey, yes there's some math to it, but it's also creative writing." It's the same like you have to use your creative brain to make these things work, because there's a zillion different ways you could write a formula to accomplish a couple different things. Right?

Mary Tagler: Exactly.

Gillian Bruce: So Mary, you said you manage a team of admins and I imagine this is probably something that you are helping your team of admins get a better grasp on. Can you talk to us a little bit more about how you've honed this skill with formulas and how you've come up with this content? You mentioned a little bit, but observations in the community, but take us a little deeper and tell us a little bit more about how you've gained this skill?

Mary Tagler: Sure. So I originally learned how to use formulas from a consultant that helped us implement Salesforce and really just tried to iterate on what I saw there. But then once I started getting involved in the community, what I did, which is something I recommend for a variety of skill sets, is I really started to look in the answers community and there are tons of formula based questions there.
And so then I kind of posed that as a challenge to myself like, "Can I figure that out? Can I apply that?" And that really helped me flex that muscle and strengthen that muscle where I really felt confident and comfortable writing formulas. I will also say though, I'm the first to admit, time formulas are my kryptonite. I absolutely hate time formulas and you'll see me posting for help anytime I have to do something time related.
So you can be strong in some areas and still weaker in others too and that's okay. With my team, I think I was lucky to join a team with a lot of senior folks already on it. So really having those formula skills in place. But I think where I've really focused in on is ensuring we're following best practices. I don't want to see people putting IDs in fields like, "Let's stop the hard coding, let's clean up things where we can." And we've really created that best practice mentality.
And as I work with some of our newer hires, we talk a lot about that where it's like as we have an opportunity to change the logic, let's take the opportunity to move it into best practices.

Gillian Bruce: Yeah. Because oh, hard coding. Gosh, I remember the first time I learned about hard coding and I was like, "I know this is bad. This just doesn't feel right. Let's not do this because yeah, it'll break all the time."

Mary Tagler: It will. And I analogize it to it's be a friend to your future self and your future and current teammates because nothing is more frustrating than getting to a formula somewhere and getting this idea and being like, "Where the heck does that go?" And then having to try and figure out what it is. And a lot of times it'll be something that's maybe obsolete because no one knew what that silly ID did.

Gillian Bruce: Yeah, and now it's gone and so, oh well, you got to rebuild it again. Got it.

Mary Tagler: Yeah.

Gillian Bruce: So Mary, this I would imagine is not your first Dreamforce. Do you know how many Dreamforces you've been to?

Mary Tagler: The first Dreamforce I went to was in 2012. So including the years we were virtual, this will be my 10th Dreamforce.

Gillian Bruce: There you go.

Mary Tagler: Yeah.

Gillian Bruce: So yeah, my first Dreamforce I think was 2010. So we're about on the same page there. There you go.

Mary Tagler: Yeah.

Gillian Bruce: Since you are a veteran of the Dreamforce experience, do you have any top level tips for folks who may be getting ready to come to their first in-person Dreamforce?

Mary Tagler: So my tip, I don't know how popular it's going to be, is I would say don't obsess over the agenda. Go with the flow. I know the first couple years I went, I would try and bookmark and register for everything and obsess over my agenda. And after a few years in, I actually found it more impactful where I picked the things as they came. I looked every day and decided, "Hey, this sounds interesting." Or I heard the buzz from someone else that a session was going to be repeated and went there. So I would say, be flexible.

Gillian Bruce: That's great advice because yes, there's a lot of content and if you try and go back to back sessions all day, A, you're not going to be successful and B, you're just going to set yourself up to be frustrated.

Mary Tagler: Yeah. And to be frustrated to wear yourself out too early in the conference, it's not worth it. And the obvious one, comfortable shoes.

Gillian Bruce: Yes, comfortable shoes and comfortable, fun shoes. Yeah.

Mary Tagler: Yes.

Gillian Bruce: It's comfortable fun shoe game going on at Dreamforce. Awesome. Well Mary, thank you so much for joining us and thank you so much for putting together such a great presentation to share and help other people. And for those who aren't able to come in person, at least they got a little bit of your nuggets of wisdom here on the podcast. And hey, who knows, maybe we'll do some more to help further spread your message after Dreamforce, so.

Mary Tagler: Well, thanks. Thanks for having me and I hope to see you at my session.

Gillian Bruce: I will do everything I can to be there, nothing else. Will for sure see you at Dreamforce.

Mary Tagler: Sounds good.

Gillian Bruce: Well, thank you, Mary for taking time out of your Dreamforce preparation schedule to join us on the podcast and share so much great wisdom about formulas. To me, formulas is a weak spot and it always has been, but honestly, some of the things that Mary just shared are transformative and now I'm looking forward to putting them into practice so that I can be better with formulas. And if you are not going to be able to make her session at Dreamforce, don't worry, I am sure that we will be doing something with Mary in the future to get that great content to you.
So she had some great words of wisdom. It's about knowing how in the context of when to use formulas, thinking that more, not just of a math problem, but also as a creative process of how to put clauses and different phrases together and the idea of making it easy on yourself and following best practices like no hard coding people, just don't do it. It's just not. No, don't our hard code.
Anyway, so Mary was great. Really appreciate her coming on the podcast. If you want to follow Mary, you can find her on Twitter. She's got a great Twitter handle and it sounds really weird when you spell it out, but when you see it, it makes sense. It's @YramtSFDC. That's Tmary, backwards. You get that? Yeah.
Well, you can always stay up-to-date with everything happening in the admin community, especially Dreamforce related by following us on Twitter, @SalesforceAdmns, no I, or using #AwesomeAdmin. You can follow me @gilliankbruce and my co-host Mike Gerholdt, @MikeGerholdt.
With that, I hope you have a fantastic rest of your day. And if you're getting ready to come to Dreamforce, continue to get excited. If you're getting ready to tune in to Dreamforce via Salesforce Live, start bookmarking those sessions, check out the broadcast schedule. There is so much great content coming your way, and I'll catch you next time in the cloud.



Direct download: Best_of_Dreamforce__Fundamentals_of_Formulas_with_Mary_Tagler.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:00am PDT

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Keizra Tyson-Griffin, Salesforce Business Analyst at Esor Consulting Group and a soon-to-be Dreamforce presenter.

Join us as we talk about her Dreamforce presentation about evaluating AppExchange apps as a Salesforce Business Analyst.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Keizra Tyson-Griffin.

Best of Dreamforce

With Dreamforce happening this month, we wanted to take a moment to bring some of that content directly to your ears. We know not everyone can make it and, even if you can, you might not be able to catch everything. So we’re bringing on the best speakers from the Admin Track to tell you what they’ve been cooking up.

There’s a First Time for Everything

It’s not only Keizra’s first time presenting at Dreamforce, it’ll be her first time attending as well—talk about jumping straight into the deep end. Her presentation will cover AppExchange strategies for Salesforce Business Analysts, and we wanted to bring her on the pod to give us a sneak preview of what she’s going to cover.

“I kept coming across clients who wanted to add an application to their org but there were tons of questions around [it] and they didn’t really understand how best to identify the best app for their org,” Keizra says. Instead of being distracted by bells and whistles, the key is to focus on your goals for your business and how an app can make them possible. Is a new app really aligned with your core business objectives, or does it just make you feel cool?

The Questions You Need to Ask About a New App

The most important thing you can do to start is to talk to your key stakeholders to understand where you are now and where you’re trying to go. You want to find out how each department would use a potential new app in their day-to-day activities. Most importantly, you need to know where each department is now and where they’d like to be in the future. Are there any other technologies that your potential app needs to integrate with? Will this app grow with your business or will you need to do something different in a year or two?

 

We also pick Keirzra’s brain about how she came to be a business analyst and what skills you need to get started in that career. “One of the excellent things about being a Salesforce Business Analyst is that you can pull from other careers that you’ve had,” she says, “if you’re an inquisitive person and you like understanding how things work and why, these are absolutely skills you can pull into your career.” 

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Full show transcript

Gillian Bruce: Welcome to the Salesforce Admins Podcast, where we talk about product, community and careers to help you be an awesome admin. I'm your host today Gillian Bruce, and I am joined by an amazing brand new Dreamforce presenter, Keizra Tyson-Griffin. Now she has an amazing presentation about evaluating AppExchange apps as a Salesforce business analyst, which is useful for every single Salesforce admin out there. She's the first of a series that we're going to be doing where I'm calling the best of Dreamforce. So we're bringing some of the top presentations from the admin track both in the admin theater and breakout sessions to you listeners on the podcast. Because I fully realized that even if you're going to make it to Dreamforce, you're probably not going to make it to every single admin track session. If you do, I don't know how you're going to do it because that means you got to clone yourself and be in three places at the same time.
So I have been partnering with Jennifer Lee, who's owning the admin track this year and we have got some amazing presenters who are going to join us on the podcast and deliver right to you the presentations that they are sharing with attendees at Dreamforce. So without further ado, let's welcome Keizra to the podcast. Keizra, welcome to the podcast.

Keizra Tyson-Gr...: Hi, Gillian. Thank you so much for having me.

Gillian Bruce: Well, I am very happy that you are here because not only are we getting ready for Dreamforce here, everyone, whether you're joining virtually or in person, but this is also the first time that I've gotten to meet you because this is not only your first Dreamforce, but your first time presenting at Dreamforce, correct?

Keizra Tyson-Gr...: It is.

Gillian Bruce: Well, so that's really exciting and also a really big deal. Can you tell us a little bit about what you are putting together to share at Dreamforce?

Keizra Tyson-Gr...: Yes. So at Dreamforce this year, I'll be speaking on AppExchange strategies for Salesforce business analysts.

Gillian Bruce: Well, you said a few things that I know all admins care about right there in the title of that. So let's talk a little bit about kind of where you're coming from to talk about this. So can you introduce yourself a little bit to the listeners about who you are, what you do in the ecosystem and why this is a topic that you've chosen to focus on?

Keizra Tyson-Gr...: So my name again is Keizra Tyson-Griffin. I am a Salesforce business analyst at Esor Consulting Group, which is a bit wise company, and I've been a business analyst for a little over a year now. And the reason I selected this topic is because it absolutely matters. So I kept coming across clients who wanted to add an application to their org, but there were tons of questions they had around that application that they wanted to add and not really understanding how best to identify the right app for their org. Sometimes being distracted by shiny objects or all the bells and whistles and not really taking a good look at these are the goals for my business and these are the goals for my org, not only short term but long term. I mean just really trying to help them navigate that.

Gillian Bruce: I think that is such an important topic because as you said, you're getting distracted by shiny objects. I mean, we all do it. And a lot of times when you're looking at AppExchange, there are so many options out there and there are so many things that you're like, I want that because that looks like it's going to give me this and it's going to give me that. But it sounds like you're really kind of helping folks understand more about the why and how these things might fit in and you talked about kind of aligning to business goals. So can you talk to us a little bit more about breaking that down and how you come out, let's say, Hey, I want to find an app that helps me automate a certain part of my business. There's three different options out there. So how would you go about evaluating that and deciding which direction to go?

Keizra Tyson-Gr...: So one of the things I'll be talking about in my presentation is the discovery aspect of talking to those key stakeholders, and just really getting a sense of how each department will be using that app in their day to day, what their current state is versus their desired state, and then getting an understanding of the business goals, right? Where are we today? Where do we want to be short term? Where do we want to be in the long term?
And then also taking into consideration some of the other technologies, platforms and applications that they're using or integrating with their Salesforce org and how those applications might play with something that you're looking to implement from the AppExchange. And so just getting an understanding of those needs and those requirements, and then doing the research in the AppExchange based on what the client or the end-user has stated that they need, what applications actually meet those requirements that exist on the AppExchange today.

Gillian Bruce: All right. So I'm hearing a lot of probably the wheels turning that a lot of admins go through like, great, so I have this business unit that wants to use this specific AppExchange idea. I have this business unit who uses something that's kind of over here, but maybe similar, but maybe also have a different goal. How do you negotiate kind of working those issues out maybe with some competing interests within the same organization?

Keizra Tyson-Gr...: One of the things with a client that I worked with specifically is that they had to go through procurement to really vet that technology because they have a good understanding of what they've already purchased and what the purpose of those purchases were. And so they'll be able to help identify whether or not this application or these applications that you're recommending will actually work with what the organization is doing as a whole.

Gillian Bruce: Excellent. Now I know here you are in the business analysis space now being a business analyst is something we've talked a lot about especially when we talk about. It's one of the top skills from our Salesforce admin skills kit is the idea of being able to do business analysis as a Salesforce administrator. Can you talk to us a little bit about how you have kind of developed and honed that skill so that other people might be able to follow your footsteps?

Keizra Tyson-Gr...: So Tony V Martin has been on this show before. So I've learned a lot from her. Also, Tiffany Spencer, I've learned a lot from her as well. And then just one of the excellent things about being a Salesforce business analyst is that you can actually pull from other careers that you've had. If you are just a very inquisitive person and you like understanding how things work or understanding why people make the decisions that they make, these are absolutely skills that you can pull into your career as a business analyst. I think that you just have to have a natural curiosity about why people do the things that they do, why organizations are structured the way that they're structured and work the way that they work.
But then a more tactical thing that I would implement is documenting. Having a good understanding of what the client is giving you and then capturing that, whether it's in audio or video form, or just writing it out, really capturing that information that they're providing to you because then you can go back to that and then pull from that when you're making your decisions or when you want to refine those requirements and say, Hey, you said this, am I understanding this correctly? Or you said this, but it sparked my interest or curiosity in another way. So let me ask you this set of questions so that you can get that holistic picture.

Gillian Bruce: Well, you touched on a few things there. I mean, the idea of being curious and just asking questions, I think is something I found in every single, truly awesome admin that we've talked to, that I've met, is that it's so important because you actually have to want to know and learn things, right? [inaudible] to fake curiosity. And then the other thing you mentioned was the idea is you can bring this kind of business analysis skillset from previous roles and previous experiences. Can you maybe dive a little deeper on that? What kind of experiences were you maybe able to bring over from other industries or whatever other things that you've done and then transfer that skillset into really kind of this business analysis ability within the Salesforce context?

Keizra Tyson-Gr...: So my first job out of college actually I was a contracts negotiator for an aerospace and defense company. And so I was very heavily involved in proposal writing and working with different departments to pull that proposal together, get it back to the client for them to then look at it and then actually going through the different clauses and negotiating those clauses. And so I kind of tie that into going to the client and finding out what their needs are and then looking at those requirements and documenting what their needs are, what their future goals are, creating those user stories for them to make sure that we're actually building what it is that they desire to be built.
Then I also have a background in marketing. I have my master's degree in marketing. And so I'm very curious about the way consumers think. And so when Salesforce as a platform takes that 360 degree customer view, that really plays into what I do as a BA and understanding those short term long term goals, what the business is trying to accomplish overall, and how that could potentially feed into their different departments within the organization.

Gillian Bruce: Well, that's awesome. I mean, I love from looking and evaluating clauses of very complex contracts, which also by the way you said aerospace engineering was the...

Keizra Tyson-Gr...: Aerospace and defense.

Gillian Bruce: Aerospace and defense. That's pretty cool. And also I imagine super complex. And then at face value, you probably are like, how does that relate to Salesforce? But the way you just broke that down was really clear. And I think a lot of people that I talked to that are maybe struggling to figure out how do I transition from this at face value industry that has nothing to do with tech or Salesforce into Salesforce. I think the story you just told, made it really clear of a path to do that.
And then the other thing, your marketing experience, again, a lot of people probably don't immediately think like, I'm a marketer. So I'm going to be working in the Salesforce space. I mean, I'm a marketer in Salesforce in Salesforce, but I don't have a marketing degree. So I think it's really interesting how you explain those perspectives help you really become a great BA. I think that's really great. So thank you for sharing that.

Keizra Tyson-Gr...: No problem. I think a lot of people can get caught up in the technical aspect of it. And what I mean is as a contracts person, this is what I do. Or as a marketing person, I focus specifically on content. Well, a marketing person can focus on the customer journey. They can focus on the analytics and understanding what the analytics say to then inform business decisions. And so it's important to take a look at the whole and then be able to see the different paths that can come out of that whole.

Gillian Bruce: A hundred percent. Very well said. And look at you even bringing in some of the Salesforce corporate platform right there. Thank you Keizra. You're making me look good. So before we get towards the latter part of our conversation, I just want to talk about the fact that this is your first time going to Dreamforce and you're presenting at Dreamforce. How are you feeling about that?

Keizra Tyson-Gr...: So I am excited and nervous at the same time. I'm excited to just be able to go there and meet all the people that I'm going to meet that exist in the ecosystem today and have really built their careers in the ecosystem. And there's something to be said to you about people that have been going for 13, 15, the full 20 years, right? And then nervous because I submitted my topic and I was like, I'll submit, this is my first time, I probably won't get selected. And then I was selected. And so it's exciting but I'm also nervous.

Gillian Bruce: Well, you it's totally okay to be nervous, but I promise that we've got you and you're going to do an amazing job.

Keizra Tyson-Gr...: Yes. Everyone's been wonderful so far.

Gillian Bruce: Well, that's good. You'll really get to experience the online Trailblazer community love in person...

Keizra Tyson-Gr...: Yes.

Gillian Bruce: ... which will be really fine. Hey listeners, if there's anyone listening to this episode that is also going to be going to Dreamforce for your first time, make sure that you meet up with Keizra because Hey, you've got another first timer to connect with.

Keizra Tyson-Gr...: Yes.

Gillian Bruce: So, Keizra, before we totally wrap, I just wanted to give you an opportunity. So I'm sure there's a lot of people who are listening in the pod that aren't going to be able to come to Dreamforce, which is totally normal. It is a big deal to try and come to Dreamforce. What do you want to share with those folks? So maybe top takeaways that the in person people are going to get from your presentation that maybe the listeners can get right now.

Keizra Tyson-Gr...: So I would say when you are evaluating an app on the AppExchange to make sure that not only it meets the requirements that your end-users have laid out for you, but that also it's an application that is supported in terms of is this email support, chat support. Can you pick up the phone and call someone if you have any issues, when you integrate that you are able to test in a sandbox environment, you obviously don't want to test in production.

Gillian Bruce: No.

Keizra Tyson-Gr...: And that it's an application that's really going to grow with the business, right?. You don't want to integrate something that just isn't going to work for them in a year, two years down the line and you're back at square one. I would also say that you need to make sure that you review the system requirements of the application. And so for example, you'll want to make sure that your client has the appropriate Salesforce edition. You don't want to recommend an application for them that is not supported by the addition of Salesforce that they currently have.
And then I would say something that's key is that you want to make sure that you think about who is going to be responsible for maintaining that solution post implementation and how secure that application is. So Salesforce has its own set of security requirements for native applications. But if this is a third party application, there are going to be some other security concerns there. So you want to make sure that you keep that in mind.

Gillian Bruce: Great takeaways. Keizra, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast.

Keizra Tyson-Gr...: Thank you so much for having me.

Gillian Bruce: It's been great to get to know you a little. And I am very much looking forward to seeing you at Dreamforce. And I'm also very much looking forward to seeing your presentation and I'm sure lots of people are now going to want to connect with you and get more of Keizra. So be prepared.

Keizra Tyson-Gr...: Thank you so much, Gillian, for having me. I'm really looking forward to hearing the episode and then again, attending Dreamforce and presenting on this topic.

Gillian Bruce: Excellent. Well, I'll see you soon and I'm sure we'll have you back on the podcast in the future as well.

Keizra Tyson-Gr...: Awesome. I'm looking forward to it.

Gillian Bruce: Well, thank you so much, Keizra, for joining us on the podcast and taking time out of your busy Dreamforce prep to share some of your incredible insights and knowledge and your Dreamforce content to us on the podcast. Now, if you want to learn anything more about what we talked about today, especially if you want to learn anything more about being a great business analyst, make sure you check out admin.salesforce.com there's a whole section of the admin skills kit dedicated to business analysis. I'll also put some good links in the show notes for Trailhead content that'll help you with your business analysis skills and then some good AppExchange resources as well. And I hope that you all want to connect with Keizra who first time Dreamforce attendee, first time Dreamforce presenter. Obviously she's got a lot of great knowledge to share with the Trailblazer community. So connect with her. She's on Twitter @keizramakeba that's k-e-i-r-a-m-a-k-e-b-a. Again, we'll put the link in the show notes. You can find myself @gilliankbruce and you can find our other co-host Mike Gerholdt, @MikeGerholdt. And as always you can join all the awesome admin greatness online @SalesforceAdmns. No-i.
Now if you're coming to Dreamforce, I want to really remind you to check out all those great sessions that are already listed on the Dreamforce site. If you're not physically coming to Dreamforce, don't [inaudible]. We're going to have great content streaming to you on Salesforce plus. So there's going to be a lot of admin stuff on there. There's also going to be some great content available on demand after Dreamforce. So hope you have a great day. Thanks for listening this episode and I'll catch you next time in the cloud.




Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Keizra Tyson-Griffin, Salesforce Business Analyst at Esor Consulting Group and a soon-to-be Dreamforce presenter.

Join us as we talk about her Dreamforce presentation about evaluating AppExchange apps as a Salesforce Business Analyst.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Keizra Tyson-Griffin.

Best of Dreamforce

With Dreamforce happening this month, we wanted to take a moment to bring some of that content directly to your ears. We know not everyone can make it and, even if you can, you might not be able to catch everything. So we’re bringing on the best speakers from the Admin Track to tell you what they’ve been cooking up.

There’s a First Time for Everything

It’s not only Keizra’s first time presenting at Dreamforce, it’ll be her first time attending as well—talk about jumping straight into the deep end. Her presentation will cover AppExchange strategies for Salesforce Business Analysts, and we wanted to bring her on the pod to give us a sneak preview of what she’s going to cover.

“I kept coming across clients who wanted to add an application to their org but there were tons of questions around [it] and they didn’t really understand how best to identify the best app for their org,” Keizra says. Instead of being distracted by bells and whistles, the key is to focus on your goals for your business and how an app can make them possible. Is a new app really aligned with your core business objectives, or does it just make you feel cool?

The Questions You Need to Ask About a New App

The most important thing you can do to start is to talk to your key stakeholders to understand where you are now and where you’re trying to go. You want to find out how each department would use a potential new app in their day-to-day activities. Most importantly, you need to know where each department is now and where they’d like to be in the future. Are there any other technologies that your potential app needs to integrate with? Will this app grow with your business or will you need to do something different in a year or two?

 

We also pick Keirzra’s brain about how she came to be a business analyst and what skills you need to get started in that career. “One of the excellent things about being a Salesforce Business Analyst is that you can pull from other careers that you’ve had,” she says, “if you’re an inquisitive person and you like understanding how things work and why, these are absolutely skills you can pull into your career.” 

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Full show transcript

Gillian Bruce: Welcome to the Salesforce Admins Podcast, where we talk about product, community and careers to help you be an awesome admin. I'm your host today Gillian Bruce, and I am joined by an amazing brand new Dreamforce presenter, Keizra Tyson-Griffin. Now she has an amazing presentation about evaluating AppExchange apps as a Salesforce business analyst, which is useful for every single Salesforce admin out there. She's the first of a series that we're going to be doing where I'm calling the best of Dreamforce. So we're bringing some of the top presentations from the admin track both in the admin theater and breakout sessions to you listeners on the podcast. Because I fully realized that even if you're going to make it to Dreamforce, you're probably not going to make it to every single admin track session. If you do, I don't know how you're going to do it because that means you got to clone yourself and be in three places at the same time.
So I have been partnering with Jennifer Lee, who's owning the admin track this year and we have got some amazing presenters who are going to join us on the podcast and deliver right to you the presentations that they are sharing with attendees at Dreamforce. So without further ado, let's welcome Keizra to the podcast. Keizra, welcome to the podcast.

Keizra Tyson-Gr...: Hi, Gillian. Thank you so much for having me.

Gillian Bruce: Well, I am very happy that you are here because not only are we getting ready for Dreamforce here, everyone, whether you're joining virtually or in person, but this is also the first time that I've gotten to meet you because this is not only your first Dreamforce, but your first time presenting at Dreamforce, correct?

Keizra Tyson-Gr...: It is.

Gillian Bruce: Well, so that's really exciting and also a really big deal. Can you tell us a little bit about what you are putting together to share at Dreamforce?

Keizra Tyson-Gr...: Yes. So at Dreamforce this year, I'll be speaking on AppExchange strategies for Salesforce business analysts.

Gillian Bruce: Well, you said a few things that I know all admins care about right there in the title of that. So let's talk a little bit about kind of where you're coming from to talk about this. So can you introduce yourself a little bit to the listeners about who you are, what you do in the ecosystem and why this is a topic that you've chosen to focus on?

Keizra Tyson-Gr...: So my name again is Keizra Tyson-Griffin. I am a Salesforce business analyst at Esor Consulting Group, which is a bit wise company, and I've been a business analyst for a little over a year now. And the reason I selected this topic is because it absolutely matters. So I kept coming across clients who wanted to add an application to their org, but there were tons of questions they had around that application that they wanted to add and not really understanding how best to identify the right app for their org. Sometimes being distracted by shiny objects or all the bells and whistles and not really taking a good look at these are the goals for my business and these are the goals for my org, not only short term but long term. I mean just really trying to help them navigate that.

Gillian Bruce: I think that is such an important topic because as you said, you're getting distracted by shiny objects. I mean, we all do it. And a lot of times when you're looking at AppExchange, there are so many options out there and there are so many things that you're like, I want that because that looks like it's going to give me this and it's going to give me that. But it sounds like you're really kind of helping folks understand more about the why and how these things might fit in and you talked about kind of aligning to business goals. So can you talk to us a little bit more about breaking that down and how you come out, let's say, Hey, I want to find an app that helps me automate a certain part of my business. There's three different options out there. So how would you go about evaluating that and deciding which direction to go?

Keizra Tyson-Gr...: So one of the things I'll be talking about in my presentation is the discovery aspect of talking to those key stakeholders, and just really getting a sense of how each department will be using that app in their day to day, what their current state is versus their desired state, and then getting an understanding of the business goals, right? Where are we today? Where do we want to be short term? Where do we want to be in the long term?
And then also taking into consideration some of the other technologies, platforms and applications that they're using or integrating with their Salesforce org and how those applications might play with something that you're looking to implement from the AppExchange. And so just getting an understanding of those needs and those requirements, and then doing the research in the AppExchange based on what the client or the end-user has stated that they need, what applications actually meet those requirements that exist on the AppExchange today.

Gillian Bruce: All right. So I'm hearing a lot of probably the wheels turning that a lot of admins go through like, great, so I have this business unit that wants to use this specific AppExchange idea. I have this business unit who uses something that's kind of over here, but maybe similar, but maybe also have a different goal. How do you negotiate kind of working those issues out maybe with some competing interests within the same organization?

Keizra Tyson-Gr...: One of the things with a client that I worked with specifically is that they had to go through procurement to really vet that technology because they have a good understanding of what they've already purchased and what the purpose of those purchases were. And so they'll be able to help identify whether or not this application or these applications that you're recommending will actually work with what the organization is doing as a whole.

Gillian Bruce: Excellent. Now I know here you are in the business analysis space now being a business analyst is something we've talked a lot about especially when we talk about. It's one of the top skills from our Salesforce admin skills kit is the idea of being able to do business analysis as a Salesforce administrator. Can you talk to us a little bit about how you have kind of developed and honed that skill so that other people might be able to follow your footsteps?

Keizra Tyson-Gr...: So Tony V Martin has been on this show before. So I've learned a lot from her. Also, Tiffany Spencer, I've learned a lot from her as well. And then just one of the excellent things about being a Salesforce business analyst is that you can actually pull from other careers that you've had. If you are just a very inquisitive person and you like understanding how things work or understanding why people make the decisions that they make, these are absolutely skills that you can pull into your career as a business analyst. I think that you just have to have a natural curiosity about why people do the things that they do, why organizations are structured the way that they're structured and work the way that they work.
But then a more tactical thing that I would implement is documenting. Having a good understanding of what the client is giving you and then capturing that, whether it's in audio or video form, or just writing it out, really capturing that information that they're providing to you because then you can go back to that and then pull from that when you're making your decisions or when you want to refine those requirements and say, Hey, you said this, am I understanding this correctly? Or you said this, but it sparked my interest or curiosity in another way. So let me ask you this set of questions so that you can get that holistic picture.

Gillian Bruce: Well, you touched on a few things there. I mean, the idea of being curious and just asking questions, I think is something I found in every single, truly awesome admin that we've talked to, that I've met, is that it's so important because you actually have to want to know and learn things, right? [inaudible] to fake curiosity. And then the other thing you mentioned was the idea is you can bring this kind of business analysis skillset from previous roles and previous experiences. Can you maybe dive a little deeper on that? What kind of experiences were you maybe able to bring over from other industries or whatever other things that you've done and then transfer that skillset into really kind of this business analysis ability within the Salesforce context?

Keizra Tyson-Gr...: So my first job out of college actually I was a contracts negotiator for an aerospace and defense company. And so I was very heavily involved in proposal writing and working with different departments to pull that proposal together, get it back to the client for them to then look at it and then actually going through the different clauses and negotiating those clauses. And so I kind of tie that into going to the client and finding out what their needs are and then looking at those requirements and documenting what their needs are, what their future goals are, creating those user stories for them to make sure that we're actually building what it is that they desire to be built.
Then I also have a background in marketing. I have my master's degree in marketing. And so I'm very curious about the way consumers think. And so when Salesforce as a platform takes that 360 degree customer view, that really plays into what I do as a BA and understanding those short term long term goals, what the business is trying to accomplish overall, and how that could potentially feed into their different departments within the organization.

Gillian Bruce: Well, that's awesome. I mean, I love from looking and evaluating clauses of very complex contracts, which also by the way you said aerospace engineering was the...

Keizra Tyson-Gr...: Aerospace and defense.

Gillian Bruce: Aerospace and defense. That's pretty cool. And also I imagine super complex. And then at face value, you probably are like, how does that relate to Salesforce? But the way you just broke that down was really clear. And I think a lot of people that I talked to that are maybe struggling to figure out how do I transition from this at face value industry that has nothing to do with tech or Salesforce into Salesforce. I think the story you just told, made it really clear of a path to do that.
And then the other thing, your marketing experience, again, a lot of people probably don't immediately think like, I'm a marketer. So I'm going to be working in the Salesforce space. I mean, I'm a marketer in Salesforce in Salesforce, but I don't have a marketing degree. So I think it's really interesting how you explain those perspectives help you really become a great BA. I think that's really great. So thank you for sharing that.

Keizra Tyson-Gr...: No problem. I think a lot of people can get caught up in the technical aspect of it. And what I mean is as a contracts person, this is what I do. Or as a marketing person, I focus specifically on content. Well, a marketing person can focus on the customer journey. They can focus on the analytics and understanding what the analytics say to then inform business decisions. And so it's important to take a look at the whole and then be able to see the different paths that can come out of that whole.

Gillian Bruce: A hundred percent. Very well said. And look at you even bringing in some of the Salesforce corporate platform right there. Thank you Keizra. You're making me look good. So before we get towards the latter part of our conversation, I just want to talk about the fact that this is your first time going to Dreamforce and you're presenting at Dreamforce. How are you feeling about that?

Keizra Tyson-Gr...: So I am excited and nervous at the same time. I'm excited to just be able to go there and meet all the people that I'm going to meet that exist in the ecosystem today and have really built their careers in the ecosystem. And there's something to be said to you about people that have been going for 13, 15, the full 20 years, right? And then nervous because I submitted my topic and I was like, I'll submit, this is my first time, I probably won't get selected. And then I was selected. And so it's exciting but I'm also nervous.

Gillian Bruce: Well, you it's totally okay to be nervous, but I promise that we've got you and you're going to do an amazing job.

Keizra Tyson-Gr...: Yes. Everyone's been wonderful so far.

Gillian Bruce: Well, that's good. You'll really get to experience the online Trailblazer community love in person...

Keizra Tyson-Gr...: Yes.

Gillian Bruce: ... which will be really fine. Hey listeners, if there's anyone listening to this episode that is also going to be going to Dreamforce for your first time, make sure that you meet up with Keizra because Hey, you've got another first timer to connect with.

Keizra Tyson-Gr...: Yes.

Gillian Bruce: So, Keizra, before we totally wrap, I just wanted to give you an opportunity. So I'm sure there's a lot of people who are listening in the pod that aren't going to be able to come to Dreamforce, which is totally normal. It is a big deal to try and come to Dreamforce. What do you want to share with those folks? So maybe top takeaways that the in person people are going to get from your presentation that maybe the listeners can get right now.

Keizra Tyson-Gr...: So I would say when you are evaluating an app on the AppExchange to make sure that not only it meets the requirements that your end-users have laid out for you, but that also it's an application that is supported in terms of is this email support, chat support. Can you pick up the phone and call someone if you have any issues, when you integrate that you are able to test in a sandbox environment, you obviously don't want to test in production.

Gillian Bruce: No.

Keizra Tyson-Gr...: And that it's an application that's really going to grow with the business, right?. You don't want to integrate something that just isn't going to work for them in a year, two years down the line and you're back at square one. I would also say that you need to make sure that you review the system requirements of the application. And so for example, you'll want to make sure that your client has the appropriate Salesforce edition. You don't want to recommend an application for them that is not supported by the addition of Salesforce that they currently have.
And then I would say something that's key is that you want to make sure that you think about who is going to be responsible for maintaining that solution post implementation and how secure that application is. So Salesforce has its own set of security requirements for native applications. But if this is a third party application, there are going to be some other security concerns there. So you want to make sure that you keep that in mind.

Gillian Bruce: Great takeaways. Keizra, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast.

Keizra Tyson-Gr...: Thank you so much for having me.

Gillian Bruce: It's been great to get to know you a little. And I am very much looking forward to seeing you at Dreamforce. And I'm also very much looking forward to seeing your presentation and I'm sure lots of people are now going to want to connect with you and get more of Keizra. So be prepared.

Keizra Tyson-Gr...: Thank you so much, Gillian, for having me. I'm really looking forward to hearing the episode and then again, attending Dreamforce and presenting on this topic.

Gillian Bruce: Excellent. Well, I'll see you soon and I'm sure we'll have you back on the podcast in the future as well.

Keizra Tyson-Gr...: Awesome. I'm looking forward to it.

Gillian Bruce: Well, thank you so much, Keizra, for joining us on the podcast and taking time out of your busy Dreamforce prep to share some of your incredible insights and knowledge and your Dreamforce content to us on the podcast. Now, if you want to learn anything more about what we talked about today, especially if you want to learn anything more about being a great business analyst, make sure you check out admin.salesforce.com there's a whole section of the admin skills kit dedicated to business analysis. I'll also put some good links in the show notes for Trailhead content that'll help you with your business analysis skills and then some good AppExchange resources as well. And I hope that you all want to connect with Keizra who first time Dreamforce attendee, first time Dreamforce presenter. Obviously she's got a lot of great knowledge to share with the Trailblazer community. So connect with her. She's on Twitter @keizramakeba that's k-e-i-r-a-m-a-k-e-b-a. Again, we'll put the link in the show notes. You can find myself @gilliankbruce and you can find our other co-host Mike Gerholdt, @MikeGerholdt. And as always you can join all the awesome admin greatness online @SalesforceAdmns. No-i.
Now if you're coming to Dreamforce, I want to really remind you to check out all those great sessions that are already listed on the Dreamforce site. If you're not physically coming to Dreamforce, don't [inaudible]. We're going to have great content streaming to you on Salesforce plus. So there's going to be a lot of admin stuff on there. There's also going to be some great content available on demand after Dreamforce. So hope you have a great day. Thanks for listening this episode and I'll catch you next time in the cloud.




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

Join us as we talk about all the Salesforce content you shouldn’t miss from August.

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

Winter ‘23

Pre-release orgs have been available for Winter ‘23 since August 11th, so make sure to sign up, and release notes have been out since the 17th. If you’re trying to move a sandbox onto the new release, the deadline to get that done is TOMORROW, August 26th.

Dreamforce is coming up

Join us for our 20th Dreamforce, coming up September 20-22. Full conference passes are already sold out, but you can jump on a waitlist or tune in via Salesforce+. We also have a full slate of pods to help you get ready coming up in September, so smash that subscribe button!

Blog highlights from August

There was a flurry of great Automate This! content in August, including an appearance by pod regular Karmel James. Jennifer Lee’s blog posts are thorough, fun, and easy to follow so make sure you’re not missing out.

Video highlights from August

We’ve given “How I Solved It” a Salesforce+ glow up and we think it’s worth a watch. A dream team of Trailblazers tackles real problems in their orgs and takes you through the process, every step of the way. 

Podcast highlights from August

A couple podcast episodes stand out from August. We spoke to Amit Malik, a longtime instructor for the Global Architect Program about why admins should take architect courses. We also caught up with Stuart Mills, VP Trailhead EMEA to learn how you can grow your career and why you might end up in a role that hasn’t been invented yet.

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Full show transcript

Mike Gerholdt: Welcome to the Salesforce Admins Podcast in the August Monthly Retro for 2022. I'm your host, Mike Gerholdt. And in this episode, we'll review the top product, community and careers content, well, for the month of August, just like I said. And you know what? Helping me do that the very familiar and excitingly fun posting voice of Gillian Bruce. Hi, Gillian.

Gillian Bruce: Hi, Mike. Thanks for having me.

Mike Gerholdt: Thank you for surviving the heat waves.

Gillian Bruce: Well, we didn't get any heat waves out here in San Francisco, at least not yet, but our summer is coming soon, soon.

Mike Gerholdt: Summer and state fair for everybody right now.

Gillian Bruce: Yeah.

Mike Gerholdt: Things on a stick. Things are fried. People are getting sunburned.

Gillian Bruce: I'm going to have to go to a state fair at some point.

Mike Gerholdt: Funnel cakes. That's the one thing. Funnel cakes and Ferris wheels.

Gillian Bruce: Yeah. I remember as a kid getting on some janky, awesome carnival rides at I think it was the County Fair or something.

Mike Gerholdt: Well, there is no safe fair. They're all sketchy. They all make you question the safety. And that's why they're fun.

Gillian Bruce: I always remember it was like a spaceship one you go into and it's spins really fast and you're on the wall. And then the centrifugal force pushes you up against the wall.

Mike Gerholdt: Oh.

Gillian Bruce: So you're kind of like, yeah, I remember it was like, God, I was really young, but I think we went on that about 10,000 times in a row. So we just spent all of our tickets on that one. I'm surprised nobody got sick.

Mike Gerholdt: Oh yeah. Well, yeah. I usually rode the little thing where the cars went in the circle.

Gillian Bruce: Shocker. You liked the car ride. I'm so surprised.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. I couldn't do anything. The steering wheel, you just spun. There's pictures of me as a child looking over at my mom turning this steering wheel that does nothing.

Gillian Bruce: Aw. You're like, what is this? Come on.

Mike Gerholdt: Come on. Seriously, people get it together. And then two minutes later, you're off. Ugh, waited in line forever. Anyway, nobody wants to hear that. What is going on besides state fairs and things on a stick?

Gillian Bruce: Well, Mike, we are getting ready for a couple of big things in Salesforce world. The first of which is relevant for every single person, no matter whether you are coming to an in-person event that we will talk about in a moment. Winter '23 is coming. Believe it or not it's August, but it's time to start thinking about the Winter release. So August 11th is when the pre-release orgs have been available. So get your hands on that. Release Notes coming out on the 17th. So they've been out for a little bit now that you've heard this podcast. And then if you've got sandboxes that you want to move to the new release or keep on the existing ones, that deadline is the 26th of August. So start thinking about Winter '23, we've got some really awesome Winter '23 release stuff happening at Dreamforce, which is coming soon.

Mike Gerholdt: Ooh.

Gillian Bruce: So stay tuned for more on that. I'm not going to give away all the deets yet. It's a little early, but yeah, Winter '23, here we go. Another release.

Mike Gerholdt: Another release and another Dreamforce.

Gillian Bruce: Yeah. Sorry. I buried the lead there. Yes. Another Dreamforce. A really big deal. Dreamforce. This is our 20th Dreamforce believe it or not.

Mike Gerholdt: Right. I haven't been to 20. I bet some of our listeners have been to 20.

Gillian Bruce: Yeah.

Mike Gerholdt: That's a lot. And we have some Dreamforce themed pods coming up. In fact next week after this one.

Gillian Bruce: Yeah, we've got a couple of really exciting and special Dreamforce pods coming your way. And even if you're not attending Dreamforce, which I totally understand.

Mike Gerholdt: Mm-hmm.

Gillian Bruce: It's still not the easiest thing to travel and all of that.

Mike Gerholdt: Right.

Gillian Bruce: But good news is this Dreamforce is going to be the most digital Dreamforce that's going to be the first real hybrid in person/digital experience. We learned a lot over the last few years about digital and we keep getting better. So there's going to be a lot of content and a lot of great things that we're working on for Dreamforce that everyone will be able to participate in and get a piece of. So we'll cover a lot of that in these upcoming next episodes. So again, we're just full of teasers today.

Mike Gerholdt: We are just full. And to continue the teaser theme, we might actually tell you some of the stuff that we've got planned for Dreamforce in those episodes.

Gillian Bruce: Yeah.

Mike Gerholdt: Just saying.

Gillian Bruce: And ways that you can come be a part of it either virtually or in person, so.

Mike Gerholdt: Mm-hmm. Or just be jealous, be like that sounds cool.

Gillian Bruce: Yes. Yes. Green with envy.

Mike Gerholdt: So for the month of August we did some really cool content. I'll start off, literally the note that I wrote was to highlight, Automate This on the blog, because when I go to our website, it's really hard to miss all of the Automate This stuff.

Gillian Bruce: And it's amazing.

Mike Gerholdt: I know that's why I'm calling it out, because I clicked on it, it was like, I seem to find a link for one of my previous podcasts here. Nope, Automate This. Oh, on this and on this and on this. Seriously, maybe you've been at a state fair and you had too many corn dogs and you took a week off and you missed all the Automate This stuff. Well now is the time to catch back up, because we have a ton of really cool Automate This content on the blog. Jennifer did an amazing job with all of that.

Gillian Bruce: Well, yeah, and she does live Automate This on YouTube, which is incredible.

Mike Gerholdt: Right.

Gillian Bruce: And I think Karmel James was just a guest not too long ago. That's a great episode.

Mike Gerholdt: Mm-hmm.

Gillian Bruce: It's incredible content. So hey, whether you're a flownatic or new to the idea of automation, you're going to get something out of this really incredible content that spans both the blog and video and all of the things.

Mike Gerholdt: Well, speaking of video, it's like you gave yourself your own segue.

Gillian Bruce: Oh, it's natural at this point, Mike. We've been doing this long enough. Yeah, so we had an amazing... Well, the first one came out the end of July, but this whole month of August, we've been releasing How I Solved It videos, specifically made for Salesforce Plus. So it's a long, beloved and amazing series that Jennifer Lee hosts on YouTube as is. And what we wanted to do is kind of bring that magic to Salesforce Plus and expand it beyond kind of our typical admin channels. And we did. So we have five incredible episodes that have been coming out over the last five weeks actually, between Trailblazers solving all different kinds of problems, from user management to marketing automation, to security, to project management. There's five total, so you can check out, I'm going to do some Trailblazer callouts. We got Andrew Russo, we got Madeleine Coutanceau from Brisbane and we've got Karmel James.
We've got Tony Nguyen and we have Sarah Pilzer. So definitely check those out. I don't know how you missed them if you haven't seen them already. But definitely make sure at the end of this pod you go check them out because they're pretty awesome. And if you really like them, or you have feedback or questions, please let us know. Not only does each of the Trailblazers featured in those episodes, super excited to talk more about what they did or to answer any questions, but we also want to know what Salesforce what you think, because we take all of our direction for what we do from what you tell us you like or didn't like, or what worked or didn't work. So let us know. Let us know what you think.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. I was just thinking we should probably spin up an IMDb page for all of them at some point.

Gillian Bruce: I love it. Like an IMDb of the Cloud.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. I mean, where's all of Karmel James been on? And you just go to IMDb. It's like, oh, well she's been on all these Salesforce Plus, this other little thing called podcast that a couple people listen to. So pretty cool.

Gillian Bruce: Yeah. That's good. Yeah. Like a Salesforce IMDb. It's an Internet Movie Database is what it stands for.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, I think so. Yeah.

Gillian Bruce: It could be Internet Salesforce Database.

Mike Gerholdt: Right. Oh, this is why we don't name... Actually it'd be called Internet Salesforce Database for a release.

Gillian Bruce: Right.

Mike Gerholdt: And then it would be called the Lightning Internet Salesforce Database.

Gillian Bruce: It'll be Einstein and it'll be [inaudible].
And then we could go old school and it'll be touch and then it'll be [inaudible].

Mike Gerholdt: Right.

Gillian Bruce: Then it'll be... I mean, let's just go through all of the things.

Mike Gerholdt: Right. Yep. And then we'll scrap all that and we'll go back to our roots, right? We'll stay true to the core. And we'll call it the Internet Salesforce Movie Database 2.

Gillian Bruce: Yes. It's always fun poking at our own [inaudible].

Mike Gerholdt: Well, anyway. So other fun stuff. I recorded a couple podcasts in August. Had to think about the month for a second.

Gillian Bruce: Yeah, you were busy.

Mike Gerholdt: Geez. Wow. Hey, here we go. So the first one was with Amit Malik just, could you bottle his energy? That's all I wanted the whole time. I'm soaking up all the information he's throwing down and I'm just like, wow, I really would love to pick up your energy. But he's so passionate about teaching admins. A lot of the fundamentals that architects know and love. So we covered that in that podcast. And then Stuart Mills, who's the VP of Trailhead for EMEA got on. He was over attending a community conference and had time to chat. Lot of really cool stuff coming from him. A lot of cool perspective on the admin role, on admin careers, trajectory, where things are going, where he sees things going, skills going. I got him talk about admin skills, Gillian.

Gillian Bruce: Good job.

Mike Gerholdt: Yep. But the one line that stuck with me was, "grit is a transferable skill." Thought that was a really great line. So check out those two. We'll include links. Yeah.

Gillian Bruce: So good. That was such a great interview. You did a great job with that, Mike.

Mike Gerholdt: It's a lot of fun. I had a lot of fun with both those. Sometimes you're kind of, especially heading into Dreamforce, availability's tough and getting stuff scheduled is tough. And then people really just don't want to talk about deep subjects. But I think we did the pod proud.

Gillian Bruce: Sure did. Sure did. Good job.

Mike Gerholdt: The last thing that I noted, so I know in the July retro, we gave you a link to filling out a letter to convincing your boss to go to Dreamforce. And if you still need that, if Dreamforce is still open for registration, I've included a link to our blog where we kind of help you fill out that form a little bit. Also it works for other events. If you want to go to a community dreaming event, or a world tour event, which we'll have coming up later this year, I think that form would work as well.

Gillian Bruce: 100%. I mean, even if you were having a hard time getting support to go to a lunchtime user group meeting or something. If nothing else, even if you don't use it, it helps you frame why participating in Salesforce focused events is valuable to not only your career but to your company, right? To me, sometimes it takes a while for people to understand that jump or really how to frame it and talk about it. And this is a great tool to help you.

Mike Gerholdt: Agreed. Agreed. Okay. Well, Gillian, this is our last Retro before Dreamforce.

Gillian Bruce: Oh my gosh. You mean the next time we're going to do a Retro it'll be after Dreamforce?

Mike Gerholdt: We'll be retroing Dreamforce.

Gillian Bruce: Yeah, we will. Hopefully we'll still have voices. How about that?

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. It might be a few octaves lower.

Gillian Bruce: Yeah. We'll make it through.

Mike Gerholdt: Right.

Gillian Bruce: And yeah, again, so much great Dreamforce related content coming your way over the next few weeks. And again, if you're not able to join us in person, don't worry. A lot of this will still be very relevant for you. So stay tuned.

Mike Gerholdt: So if you want to learn more about all of the things we just talked about in today's episode, please go to admin.salesforce.com to find those links and many more resources. You can stay up to date with us for All Things Admin on social. We are @SalesforceAdmns. No I on Twitter. I am on Twitter @MikeGerholdt and Gillian is @gilliankbruce. So with that, stay safe, stay awesome, and stay tuned for the next episode. We'll see you in the Cloud.



Direct download: August_Monthly_Retro_with_Mike_and_Gillian.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:00am PDT

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Trailblazers Karmel James, Senior Associate at Dupont Circle Solutions, and Andrew Russo, Salesforce Architect at BACA Systems.

Join us as we talk about their experiences appearing on How I Solved It for Salesforce+

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Karmel James and Andrew Russo.

How I Solved It on Salesforce+

We’ve taken some greatest hits from the How I Solved It series on Youtube, hosted by Jennifer Lee, and spruced it up for Salesforce+. We have five episodes featuring real Salesforce admins explaining how they solved some big business problems in innovative ways. Be sure to tune in on Salesforce+ and don’t miss out.

Andrew Russo’s super app

We’ve already had Andrew on the pod, and his story was so cool that we thought it would be worth devoting a How I Solved It episode to highlight how his user management super app works. Users can create a case, make a user story to request new features, and communicate with the admin team, all in Salesforce.

Even cooler, at the end of the whole process, Andrew can track how much time his team has spent on a case versus how much time the solution they developed has saved the business. All of this is laid out in a way that you can learn from to implement in your org, and there’s a blog post to help document what’s covered. “Now with How I Solved It,” Andrew says, “each one of the episodes has been actual stuff that you can go implement to bring and deliver value to your company.”

How Karmel James automated a marketing problem

“As a marketing champion, I really wanted to showcase the fact that marketers also have issues in Salesforce,” Karmel says. Her solution shows how you can use Salesforce to automate what happens around someone unsubscribing from a mailing list. You want to know what they’re unsubscribing from, maybe make sure that information gets to someone else on their team, and you may even want to set up a call with the customer to make sure there’s still follow through.

In order to go about solving this problem, Karmel uses Flow, cases, task records, and Groups to send out notifications, showing how these Salesforce tools can combine like Voltron. Karmel and company have been having a blast hosting watch parties for each new episodes, so make sure to follow the link below to join in the fun.

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Full show transcript

Gillian Bruce: Welcome to the Salesforce Admins Podcast, where we talk about product, community and careers to help you be an awesome admin. I'm your host today Gillian Bruce and we are going to talk about one of the most fun projects I've had the opportunity to work on this year. The How I Solved It series that we just premiered on Salesforce+ a few weeks ago. Now, I hope that a lot of you are already familiar with How I Solved It. It's an amazing YouTube series that Jennifer Lee has been hosting on YouTube for the last almost year of real-life admins showing how they solve problems in Salesforce. Showing you their demos, diving into the org and what we did is we kind of spruced it up a bit, shined it up and created five episodes specifically for Salesforce+. Which is our streaming service at Salesforce, and created a mini-series basically of the How I Solved It specifically for Salesforce+ and featuring some incredible trailblazers and we solve all kinds of different problems. We also focus on skills from the Salesforce Admins Skills Kit.
So I wanted to get a couple of the guests that we featured in those episodes to talk a little bit more about what they did in the episode. What it was like to be part of that experience and then kind of what next? If you haven't watched any of those episodes, I want you to pause this podcast right now. I want you to go to Salesforce+, and I want you to click on How I Solved It series and you will see the amazing Andrew Russo, Karmel James, Tony Nguyen, Madeleine Coutanceau and Sarah Pilzer solving real-life business problems and showing you how they did it using Salesforce. So without further ado let's welcome our first guest onto the podcast Andrew Russo. Andrew, welcome back to the podcast.

Andrew Russo: Thanks for having me back.

Gillian Bruce: Well, I had you back because we're going to talk about something pretty fun that you and I got to work on together and that is How I Solved It on Salesforce+. Andrew, talk to me a little bit about what we did in your episode.

Andrew Russo: Yeah. So in my episode, actually we did it based on what we have in our production environment for the company I work for and we're able to track the time spent on cases. So we actually are able to have the users submit cases through a flow for their internal request. Whether it's adding a field, help with a report, anything like that they can submit it through a case. We get the case, we're able to work on it. When they want a new feature like a field getting added, we're able to send an email or a message right back on the case to them and they can actually then go fill out and create a user story right inside of Salesforce. It gives them the training of, hey what a user story is and all of that kind of stuff right in Salesforce so they don't have to actually leave where they're working. Then once they're able to do that, we can actually go and track the process of the actual case.
So we can track the time it spends in each status, we know exactly where every request is and we can go back and understand why we made decisions we did in the future. So it's really all around how to manage user requests and user management of Salesforce itself.

Gillian Bruce: I love it. Well, yeah clearly I liked it because I was like, "Hey, let's feature it in How I Solved It." So let's talk a little bit, get a little kind of behind the scenes info here to our listeners. Andrew, what was it like being part of filming How I solved It for Salesforce+?

Andrew Russo: Honestly, it was kind of a crazy thing. So it was like, "Hey, can you do it?" And I was like, "Yeah. Why not? Let's do it it sounds fun." But overall, it really wasn't a crazy ask do because it's not like I made up some giant process to just go do and I spent hours building it. I took it from production environment, packaged it, put it into a demo org and then I just had to create some test data. Because I can't show our company's data obviously to the world, so put some test data in and that was it. So from the standpoint of building out it really wasn't bad, it's not like it was some crazy made up scenario. The flows were straight out of our production environment and honestly it was a lot of fun to get to share it, and there was a lot of people. I kept seeing the same question come up of, "How do we manage user stuff? Do we use an email?"
And I was like, "Wait for it. There's going to be something coming out in a couple months. You're going to see some awesome stuff, it's going to be great." And I shared it back to the people and they're like, "That's exactly what we wanted." So they ended up going and building it in their org.

Gillian Bruce: That's awesome. Well, see I love that. See, that's the thing about How I Solved It Andrew, right? Is we're taking actual things that you and other people have done and then sharing that with everyone to help everybody else figure out, "Hey, maybe there's something in there that I can replicate or I can use or an idea I can apply." So, that's awesome. Now, I know you say it wasn't that bad but I know we asked a lot of you in terms of filming and the process and all that. Were there any moments that surprised you during that whole process?

Andrew Russo: Yeah. Originally it was like, "Okay, well there'll be people filming and stuff." And I was like, "Okay, this'll be..." And then when they show up at your door at work, and people are all... I just booked a conference room and I was like, "Okay, we're going to film this. It'll be easy." They show up with multiple carts rolling in with camera equipment, lighting stuff and it's like, "Okay, this is not just someone brings a better camera than a webcam and shows up." It was production quality filming of it which was kind of cool but also not what I exactly expected with it.

Gillian Bruce: Yeah. We had a whole film crew coming in and film you, so that was good. I remember also there were some really funny moments while we were filming that didn't make it into the episode, but I think we're going to have a blooper reel coming out at some point. Do you remember what I'm talking about?

Andrew Russo: Yeah. For a second I'm like what is she talking... And then yeah, we had window washers, we had the pest control people show up behind us in the window. I don't know if stuff like that happened with anyone else when they were filming this stuff. But it was just one after the next thing that happened in the background, it was just like, "Don't look at it. Just keep looking at the camera."

Gillian Bruce: This is what happens when you film something live, you just never know what's going to be happening around you. I also remember that you had a little fun with the spinny chair.

Andrew Russo: Oh, we love spinny chairs.

Gillian Bruce: Yes. When we're filming things we like you not to spin around in a chair. So anyone who's about to film something don't sit in a spinny chair because you're going to want to spin.

Andrew Russo: Yeah. But then at the end the spinny chair made it back for the promo stuff. We brought the spinny chair back.

Gillian Bruce: It's good for gifts. Yeah.

Andrew Russo: Having a chair that you can't move in, they're very important I've learned.

Gillian Bruce: Good for gifts. So Andrew, I also wanted to talk to you because this is a series that we launched a few weeks ago. With this week, we actually had Tony's episode go live and we've got one more episode coming next week. But I would love for you to talk to me a little bit about these amazing watch parties. So your episode was first, talk to me about how you all decided to put together a watch party for the premiere.

Andrew Russo: So to be completely honest I wasn't planning on watching mine, I was actually just not going to watch it. Multiple people said like, okay we need to watch part of your stuff up to the day before on the Tuesday. It was like, okay well you need to watch it and I was adamantly not going to watch mine. Because I was like no, and then on Wednesday morning Tony was like, "You need a watch party." So I was like, you know what? Okay we're doing it. So I think this started at 8:00 AM where we're doing a watch party and then from that point to when it went live I think we did the watch party at 3:00 PM in the afternoon. We ended up somehow 30 people I think showed up for the first one, which was kind of crazy to get 30 people in a matter of four hours signed up and going to show up to the watch party.
So we just kind of ran with it and then it was just crazy. Honestly, it was a bunch of fun though watching it and seeing what was there and I'm actually planning on going back to re-watch mine. Because I started to realize I didn't notice... I've noticed in everyone else's there's all the cool sound effects stuff. I didn't even notice that in mine when I was watching it, but I'm thinking that they were probably there unless mine was [inaudible]. So I got to go back and watch it to look for all the small details that I wasn't paying attention to.

Gillian Bruce: Yeah. I mean, it's a lot to take in seeing yourself on the screen and then also, oh right there's all these other things. So yes, you should totally rewatch it. Well, that's awesome. I mean, Andrew seriously thank you for being a part of How I Solved It. Now, if you were to explain How I Solved It to somebody who hasn't seen it yet what would you say?

Andrew Russo: It's like the first technical show. So if you go on Salesforce+ there's a lot of kind storytelling, people's pass up. What there isn't right now before this going back two months ago, it wasn't technical stuff. Stuff that you could watch and then go do in your org, bring back value to your company, it wasn't there before. But now with How I Solved It, each one of the episodes we've seen so far including Tony's this week has been actual stuff that you can go implement and bring value and deliver value to the company which is kind of amazing. So it's really the start I think of something and I'm hopeful that there's going to be more How I Solved It on Salesforce+ in the future to really bring that hands on. Okay, I can watch it. Okay, there's a blog that's also there showing kind of still image of hey here's what was in there and you can go build it out and then be creative with it. Because with flows and everything, pretty much all of them have had flows other than Tony's.
But a lot of them have flows and you can customize it to fit what you need, you don't have to take exactly what you see. So it's kind of a really cool thing to be able to show the world that.

Gillian Bruce: Yeah, well that's great. Thank you, I love that glowing endorsement for How I Solved It. We'll definitely be doing more and also as a reminder for everyone listening, How I Solved It exists on YouTube already. Jen Lee is doing an amazing job hosting How I Solved It for almost the past year and so this really was an adaptation of that for Salesforce+. So check there's lots more How I Solved It, but yes we're going to be working on getting more kind of technical how to great content on Salesforce+ soon. So thanks again Andrew so much for participating and for being an awesome first guest on the Salesforce+ version of How I Solved It and hey we got one more watch party to go. Right?

Andrew Russo: We've got one more to go and then we've got Dreamforce in... I think what is it? Less than 40 days.

Gillian Bruce: It's 30 something days. Yeah.

Andrew Russo: I'm excited.

Gillian Bruce: That's awesome.

Andrew Russo: It's going to be a crazy next month.

Gillian Bruce: It's Dreamforce season is what they say, right? It's Salesforce all the things right now.

Andrew Russo: Salesforce as a lifestyle.

Gillian Bruce: There you go. S-A-A-L.

Karmel James: Capital S, capital L, lowercase As, SaaL.

Gillian Bruce: Well with that, Andrew thank you so much. All right. Well, you just heard from Andrew Russo who is one of the amazing trailblazers we featured in the How I Solved It series, where he showed his amazing user management solution. Definitely check it out. But we've got another trailblazer who was featured in one of the episodes Karmel James, who is going to join us and talk a little bit more about her specific solution she shared and her experience being part of How I Solved It. So without further ado welcome Karmel back to the podcast. Karmel, welcome back to the podcast.

Karmel James: Thank you, Gillian. I'm so happy to be here for my now second time.

Gillian Bruce: Hey, when we find good amazing guests we like to have them back and Karmel, can you tell us a little bit about your episode and what you showed? What problem did you solve?

Karmel James: Yeah. Well of course Gillian, I solved a data management problem. So as a marketing champion I really wanted to showcase the fact that marketers also have issues in Salesforce and say, what happens when someone unsubscribes to a newsletter? I think it's really critical that if you're going to have a Salesforce org that tracks that. You want to know if someone's unsubscribing from something really key that you actually would like them to get that information and be subscribed and know what's happening in your org. So we talked about what happens after someone decides to unsubscribe and then go through a whole process where someone else on another team gets that notification. They get to have a call with that customer and then they get to resolve that case because of it.

Gillian Bruce: Yeah. I mean it was a whole combination of different features that you kind of used to solve that. Can you just give us a highlight of some of the things you used?

Karmel James: Yes. Well, I started with flow because flow is the biggest thing. It's the new transition and if you haven't started thinking about it you should absolutely do that. By all means, go watch some of the Automate This episodes and obviously How I Solved It episodes. We're always talking about flow I think. But I used flow, I used cases to track information, I used task records and I even used groups to send notifications to.

Gillian Bruce: I love it. Yeah, it was a really fun demo. A really great problem that you solved and thank you for being a part of it. Now, Karmel this was the first time you've really done a big video thing with us at Salesforce. Let's pull back the curtain a little bit, give some people some backstage insider intel. What was it like to film this project with me?

Karmel James: Well, it started out as a shock when I learned that I was going to have to let a camera crew into my life and for those who don't know I'm currently on a nomadic adventure right now. So I don't have a home and at the time I couldn't go to my office, it was going to be too noisy. So I actually had to find and rent an office to allow a camera crew to record this. So it was pretty cool because you're like, okay this is cool, you're like it's just maybe a camera and then you watch them bring in all of these boxes and they set up a light and then there's a teleprompter and you're like, "No we're really doing this. Okay, cool. Yeah, no, I can hear you guys. You can hear me. This is awesome. Here's the mic. Yeah, no, we're good. Okay." So as much as I'd like to say it had action and camera, the whole, it was just truly amazing. There's nothing like it.

Gillian Bruce: Yeah. I mean, you kind of feel like you're on TV really, right? It's like a whole nother level. It's a little different than just looking into the webcam.

Karmel James: Yes, it is a full TV production.

Gillian Bruce: Okay. So aside from seeing many, many, many boxes come into this amazing office that you rented. Any part of the process in putting together the content or anything that kind of surprised you?

Karmel James: No. It really felt like I was just being an admin and just having to showcase one of the solutions that I built, right? Getting a dev org to go ahead and build something out, that's what I do every single day. So it was super easy to say let me build out this flow, let me test it and if you go back and watch my episode my flow says version nine because that's true. I had to go through multiple versions of testing and making sure that what I was about to show on camera actually worked. So it was super easy to just dive in and be like, cool here you go. Here's my flow. Here are the records that get created. Here's the automation that's going to fire the chatter notification that's going to come up. It was every day. The only difference was there's a teleprompter in front of me.

Gillian Bruce: Right. Because we had to fit everything into 10 minutes, so we had to keep it concise and that's great. I mean, Karmel this is exactly why we had you, we had Andrew, we had Tony, we had Madeline and we have Sarah coming next week. Sneak peek to listeners. Because these are problems that you are already solving, you weren't making this up specifically for something we had specifically asked you to do. So I think that's really great and I really appreciate you sharing your expertise with our audience. One other thing I wanted to talk about Karmel and that's pretty fun. So we have one more episode coming out, as I said sneak peek Sarah Pilzer is going to be featured in next week's episode. It's the last of five that we're featuring on Salesforce+. Our team discovered at Salesforce that you all, the amazing guests who were featured in these episodes were hosting watch parties for the premiere of your new episodes. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?

Karmel James: Yes. So those watch parties were the culmination of a really great meeting at one of the dreaming events. It's just Tony and Andrew and I, and we're having a great time Midwest dreaming and we're just talking about how we're all really excited for these episodes to come out, right? We're jazzed because none of us have seen anything that we've done. All we have is our own individual experiences in front of the camera. So Andrew's like, "Oh my gosh, should we do a watch party?" And we're like, "Yeah, let's do it." So we just were like we can get the community involved in this. We can absolutely just live stream it for ourselves and all watch it together and oh my gosh, having all of these people show up to watch your episode with you is a little scary. Because you're like, "Oh my God that's where I fumbled. Oh man, I had to do that four times. If I have to repeat that's How I Solved It. Oh my God, I'm so afraid. Please don't make me watch this in front of people."

Gillian Bruce: But you all did it to yourself.

Karmel James: We did, we absolutely did and now we get Tony's watch party and Sarah's watch party it's just rolling. So it's just the best time, I don't even know what to say other than we're just having fun with it.

Gillian Bruce: Well, what's so great is I've been able to jump in on the watch parties and just seeing how many people from all different parts of the community have been a part of that. So, I mean the watch party that we did for your episode was last week. There was a woman who jumped on who's like, "Oh, I'm really brand new to the Salesforce ecosystem and this video just totally made sense to me. I don't know the technology, I don't know the terms. But to see a real problem getting solved by someone who is realistic to me and I can relate to and then seeing the payoff and really walking through the process in a fun way that's easy to consume." So that made me feel really good. Because I mean, this is the work that you all have done so we're just highlighting it. So yeah, it's great. So everyone listening if you want to join in on the last watch party, which will be for Sarah Pilzer's episode coming up on Wednesday.
Check the show notes for deets, because I will definitely put some info there and also follow all of our amazing guests on Twitter because that's where you're going to see everything.

Karmel James: Oh yes. Tony right now is telling me I can't believe that that's the picture that you used and I'm like but it's a beautiful picture of you. Yes, we are going to embarrass you as we embarrassed all of ourselves. We did this to ourselves like you said. But I will say those watch parties are absolutely incredible to see the entire community come together and have that exact reaction of I didn't know that this was possible. Can I come ask you questions? Do you mind if I do that? And I can say for myself and probably for Andrew too we absolutely do not mind if you come ask us questions. That's why we agreed to be part of this. We are more than happy to help other people in the community, especially if you're struggling with flow. If you're struggling to understand a Salesforce concept, we want you to feel supported and we want you to know that there are other people out there who have these same struggles, who know what you're going through and we are live people.
It's not just a thread on the trailblazer community, we are here. We are real. We are the Steve Mo's of the world.

Gillian Bruce: Steve Mo will be so happy that he's been honored in this podcast.

Karmel James: I hope so. Because he has the biggest thread of all of us in the community of just answering every single question.

Gillian Bruce: Well #belikestevemo right?

Karmel James: Yes.

Gillian Bruce: Anyway, Karmel seriously thank you so much. You were fabulous in your episode and I really appreciate you sharing your knowledge and expertise. Once we did this with you, I know that you also were just part of Automate This, which is another amazing series that Jen Lee does on YouTube. So I'll put a link in the show notes so people can check out that episode as well and looking forward to all the other great content that you're going to continue to generate. So thank you.

Karmel James: Oh, thank you Gillian. This has been the most amazing thing and I'm just so honored to be part of the process and I look forward to seeing who the next trailblazer is on more episodes later.

Gillian Bruce: I love it calling out for more trailblazers. All right, thank you so much Karmel.

Karmel James: Thanks Gillian.

Gillian Bruce: Thank you to both Andrew and Karmel and all of our guests that we featured on How I Solved It, not just for the Salesforce+ series. But for the YouTube series as well and huge shout out to Jen Lee who is the host of our YouTube version. She also hosts Automate This, which is another amazing actual live YouTube session where you see how admins are solving real problems. If you haven't watched this series, seriously go to Salesforce+ check out How I Solved It. I want to know what you think as you heard from Andrew and Karmel. If you've got questions and you want to ask more about what they showed please reach out to them. They're super easy to access and I guarantee that our other guests would also be more than happy to answer questions that you have about anything you saw in their episodes. So check out the show notes I've got links for everything in there and if you want to join the watch party for the final episode of this five part series that we're airing on Salesforce+ stay tuned to @salesforceadmns on Twitter.
That's where we will reshare the watch parties that the community is organizing all on their own and you can join in and be a part of the fun. This is I guess a series finale for Salesforce+, but don't worry we're already working on more. So if you want to learn more again about anything you heard about today or about anything that helps you be a more awesome Salesforce admin go to admin.salesforce.com, my favorite website. You can find blogs, you can find videos, you can find product information and if you're getting ready for a little thing called Dreamforce there's going to be some information on there too. So thank you so much for joining us today, if you want to find my co-host Mike Holt, you can find him at Mike Holt. If you want to find any of my guests today, Karmel James is @Armejam on Twitter and if you want to find Andrew Russo, he is @_andrewrusso. Again, all the links are in the show notes, really appreciate you joining us today.
Check out How I Solved It and if you've got an interesting problem that you've solved with Salesforce let me know. You can find me @gilliankbruce on Twitter. With that I hope you have an amazing day and we'll catch you next time in the cloud.



Direct download: How_I_Solved_It_on_Salesforce.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:00am PDT

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Stuart Mills, VP Trailhead EMEA and Ecosystems at Salesforce.

 

Join us as we talk about why Admins are so important, future roles and career paths, as well as the best way to keep learning.

 

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

Essential Habits for Admin Success is now on Trailhead

That's right, the webinar/trailhead live/presentation you have all loved and listened to is now a learning module on Trailhead, so head on over and be one of the first admins to get the new Essential Habits Trailhead Badge.

Why tech is only as valuable as the people behind it

Like a lot of people we talk to on the pod, Stuart got his start as an accidental admin. “We found Salesforce as a colorful version of a CRM technology,” he says, “ever since then it’s been this thing that’s grown with me—I’ve grown with it and it’s grown on its own.” He was actually originally an aeronautical engineer, and Salesforce stuck out as a platform where he could understand what he was looking at and solve his business’s needs.

 

Stuart sees the Admin role as critical for any organization that wants to succeed with Salesforce. “Understanding how you administer and use a technology like Salesforce is how it has value,” he says, “tech is only as valuable as the human solutions it solves for.” 

The power skills are transferable skills

A truth in this industry is that many of the most important jobs people will do in the future don’t exist yet. For example, for many of you reading this today, the Salesforce Admin role probably didn’t exist when you graduated from college.

 

Stuart points out that the growth in technologies like AI is going to necessitate people learning new things and taking on new roles that they can’t even imagine, and so that means you need to focus on the “Power Skills” you bring with you to into that new career path or new function. Transferable skills won’t necessarily show up in your badges and certifications, but they’re just as important to show as anything else on your resume. 

Different approaches to learning

In his role as leading Trailhead Academy EMEA, Stuart gets to see so many different people go through their learning experiences and he has a few observations. While it’s true that almost everyone at one point or another needs a teacher, you also need a peer. Someone to push you and help you engage with problems and with whom you can grow together.

 

Of course, the more diverse your peer group the stronger you are for it, and one of the biggest leaps they’ve taken forward in recent years is improving the accessibility of Trailhead. One of the guiding principles they stick to is the idea of “Ethical by Design,” meaning that accessibility is deeply thought about from the ground up. As Stuart puts it, “you can’t be what you can’t see.”

 

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Direct download: Growing_your_Admin_Role_with_Stuart_Mills.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:00am PDT

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Amit Malik, Senior Manager, Global Architect Program.

Join us as we talk about the Architect courses on Trailhead and why all Admins should think about taking them.

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

Why Admins are already Architecting

We wanted to bring Amit on the pod because he’s the only Architect Trailhead Instructor, and we wanted to find out more about what’s on offer and if they make sense for Admins. One thing he loves about his current role is that he can see “how Administrators, Developers, and Architects are having a similar thought process in terms of how to see Salesforce from different perspectives and how we can add value by sharing the perspective of different personas with each other and expand our mind horizons,” he says.

One message he has for Admins out there is that a lot of the work you’re doing is already giving you the context to upskill into an Architect role, or otherwise expand your knowledge of the Salesforce ecosystem as a whole. If you already know Marketing Cloud, it’s a lot easier to learn Experience Cloud, for example. As Amit puts it, you can look to grow both horizontally (between products) and vertically (in terms of depth of knowledge on a platform) as you advance your career.

The three-step learning process

When you’re looking to learn something new, Amit encourages you to think about it as a three-step process:

  1. Knowledge
  2. Experience
  3. Exposure

Knowledge comes when you read about something, watch a video about it, hear about it at a conference, etc. Experience is applying that knowledge to specific situations in a real-world setting. Finally, exposure comes from conversations with experienced people who may have gained a completely different perspective than they had when they started. It’s that three-dimensional view you get from understanding how something works in conjunction with everything else.

Architect courses on Trailhead

Amit wants you to know that Architect courses aren’t just for Architects. “We all are Salesforce professionals,” he says, “Administrators, Developers, Solution Architects, Technical Architects: we all are Salesforce professionals.” If you’re discussing integration in your meetings, or large data volume, or single sign-on—anything that involves multiple Salesforce products talking together—you have a lot to gain sitting in on an Architect course or two.

The 101 course is there to provide a broad, big-picture overview of what being an Architect is all about. As Amit puts it, the goal is to point you in the direction of what there is to learn about so you can fill in the details in whatever way is most helpful to you. “The challenge of the learner is that they don’t know where to start,” he says, “the moment that they know where to start they can keep on learning faster than I can teach them.” From there, the next level courses are more specialized, after you’ve completed some basic Architect certifications. “Join these courses to discover yourself so you can make the right decision for your career,” he says, “if you don’t know we will help you see the path because we’ve already walked through these journeys.”

 

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

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

 

Join us as we talk about the latest and the greatest Salesforce content from July and the wide variety of midwest-specific treats we tried at Midwest Dreamin.

 

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

Live Events

 

Dreamforce is just around the corner, but we’ve been busy visiting in-person events. We recently stopped by Midwest Dreamin and WITness Sucess, where Mike introduced Gillian to the wonders of puppy chow and scotcheroos. We’re also including a link to a letter that can help you convince your boss to help you get to Dreamforce.

 

Blog highlights from July

Cheryl Feldman’s comprehensive guide on the User Access and Permissions Assistant was a standout post from July. There’s a lot of cool features to play around with, particularly with reports, so make sure to take a look.

 

Video highlights from July

We’re really excited to relaunch How I Solved It on Salesforce+. Jennifer Lee and Marc Baizman team up to solve real Admins’ real problems. The first episode with Andrew Russo is up now, but keep a close eye as more are on the way soon.

 

Podcast highlights from July

While we’ve had some really cool people on the pod over the years this month we had our first Olympic medalist, Christine Magnuson. She’s now a Solution Engineering Manager at Salesforce, and 

 

 

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Full show transcript

Mike Gerholdt: Welcome to the Salesforce Admins Podcast in the July monthly retro for 2022. I'm your host, Mike Gerholdt. And in this episode, we'll review the top product, community and careers content for the month of July. Imagine that. To help me do that is the very familiar and keynoting voice of Gillian Bruce. Hi Gillian.

Gillian Bruce: Hello there, Mike. Nice to be here with you.

Mike Gerholdt: It's good to be back on a pod with you. It's been a month.

Gillian Bruce: It's been a month. It's been a busy month.

Mike Gerholdt: Yes. Quite a few things that we have done and it's been hot all over the world. Just hot everywhere.

Gillian Bruce: Except for where I am.

Mike Gerholdt: Right.

Gillian Bruce: I am still wearing a sweatshirt.

Mike Gerholdt: Don't tell anybody.

Gillian Bruce: Our heat has been on for the last couple weeks.

Mike Gerholdt: Oh my God.

Gillian Bruce: Because if any of you don't know this, for most of San Francisco, June/July is some of our colder months because we are covered in fog and we don't get to see the sun. So it's about 55 to 60 degrees. It's foggy. So if you want to break from the sun and the heat, come on over to San Francisco.

Mike Gerholdt: People are going to be flocking to San Francisco now.

Gillian Bruce: But you got to hurry because it's about to change. Our summer starts the end of August and goes through November. Then we get sunshine and gorgeous weather, but it never gets 100 degrees. That's just craziness.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. So it's going to be gorgeous weather for Dreamforce, which we'll talk about later. Teaser.

Gillian Bruce: Sure is.

Mike Gerholdt: But let's talk about blog content. So we had some really cool, again, ton of blog posts that went out this month. But the one that I want to highlight is the one that Cheryl Feldman wrote on Analyze, Report and Manage Permissions with User Access and Permission Assistant. Not a short title.

Gillian Bruce: But you're permitted to use as many words as you'd like in your title.

Mike Gerholdt: Yes, at some point. But this is really cool. So user access and permission assistant. She details everything that basically admins have been wanting for, I don't even know how long. She even tells a story of when I first joined Salesforce almost a year ago and it took on permission sets, and how do you work with the permission assistant and what can you do with it? The coolest thing down is the third one, report by user permission sets and permission set groups to understand who has what. If you need a moment to sit down, I completely understand.

Gillian Bruce: Game changer.

Mike Gerholdt: I got goosebumps just reading that sentence.

Gillian Bruce: Yeah, if you're an admin and you don't use this, I don't know what to say.

Mike Gerholdt: Well, your days are very long, that's what I would say, while you troubleshoot things. So yeah, this is really cool. There's also a video. And then of course, a link to the app exchange listing. Get all over this because just to sound old, it was a lot different when I was an admin. You had profiles and page layouts and you didn't have to troubleshoot things. We didn't have the tools to be as granular as you can now, and it's just amazing. But with that you need the ability to report on stuff and this is so cool.

Gillian Bruce: Yeah. The technology's come far long ways since your old, early admin days.

Mike Gerholdt: Since back in the day. I walked uphill both ways in the snow just to do a page layout.

Gillian Bruce: Barefoot.

Mike Gerholdt: Barefoot.

Gillian Bruce: Well, Mike, we also have some pretty incredible video content. You mentioned a video in the last post, but we have some videos that I am very fond of and feel so excited to release out on the wild, that have just been released, or at least the first episode has been released this month. That is How I Solved It on Salesforce. Plus we have taken the incredible show that Marc Baizman and then Jennifer Lee have been doing with admins showing how they've solved real actual problems in their orgs. We gave it a little extra production love and shined it up and put it on Salesforce+, which is our free online streaming platform. It's really exciting.
We have five episodes that we're going to be releasing over the next few weeks. But the first one came out and it's all about Andrew Russo, who is an incredible, awesome admin, expanding on that blog post he was featured in many months ago about managing users and really getting into a demo and showing us some of the things that he's built. Man, it is awesome. It is super fun. Watch it. We had a lot of fun making it.

Mike Gerholdt: It shows. You're now a streaming star, Gillian. You could watch stuff on Hulu and Netflix.

Gillian Bruce: I got to say, I feel really special that I'm on the same platform as one of my idols, Kara Swisher. So I feel special about that because they do clips from Kara Swisher's podcast that she does with Scott Galloway, Pivot, on the Salesforce+. So the fact that I get to be a part of the same platform that she is, makes me really excited.

Mike Gerholdt: Kara Swisher, future guest of the Salesforce Admins Podcast.

Gillian Bruce: I am working podcast all my angles there to try and make that happen. So we're just going to put that out there. Kara, we want you on the podcast.

Mike Gerholdt: Yep. Because Kara, listen, so many people do. So you could spend the weekend and watch some Stranger Things or How I Solved It on Salesforce+.

Gillian Bruce: Yeah. It's not a huge time commitment. The last few episodes of Stranger things, which I still haven't watched because there's an hour and then a two hour episode.

Mike Gerholdt: Seriously? That's like a plane ride.

Gillian Bruce: By the time I get the kids to bed, I have about 30 minutes before I fall asleep. So it's really tough. It's tough.

Mike Gerholdt: But you could watch your Salesforce+ video in those 30 minutes.

Gillian Bruce: Sure could, because I think they're 10 minutes-ish, if that.

Mike Gerholdt: They're consumable.

Gillian Bruce: Yeah. There are really actual hands-on tips that you can start using yourself that you can play with, with your own Dev org or Sandbox. Every single one of these episodes, you're going to be able to get something very tangible that you can put to use.

Mike Gerholdt: Your own non-production org.

Gillian Bruce: Yes. Don't do it in production.

Mike Gerholdt: No. We did a bunch of podcasts, July was fun for pods. But one that stood out, Gillian, I actually listened to this on the way to a car show, so I'm a listener of our own podcast. But you did this great interview with Christine Magnuson. Can you tell us about it?

Gillian Bruce: Okay. Well, it was really exciting because she's not only the first Olympian that I've talked to, but the first two time silver medalist Olympian. She competed in Rio and Beijing and she's a swimmer, and now she is got an amazing career. She's a manager of solution engineers here at Salesforce, which means she manages a very technical team. So I wanted to get Christine on the podcast because as you'll listen to her episode, if you have not, go listen to it as soon as you're done with this episode, because-

Mike Gerholdt: It's really good.

Gillian Bruce: It's so good. She talks about the idea of transferable skills. How she really evaluated how she could take the skills that she had as an Olympic athlete and transfer those into another career. How she really had a very detailed strategy behind that. She explains the story. Then she also talks about in her role, she works with a lot of admins. So what things she has seen that makes a very successful admin, and how you get your admin team. Because again, she comes at it from a solutions engineer perspective. So she has seen a lot. In fact, her team supports the largest Salesforce implementation that exists. So they have a lot of knowledge. Anyway, listen to Christine's episode. It's awesome. It's an uplifting one. It'll put you in a good mood for the rest of the day.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. Oh, for sure. There were so many things like, I was driving, I wanted to take notes.

Gillian Bruce: Maybe you can listen to it again.

Mike Gerholdt: Yep. Absolutely. Then just to round out our discussion of, I feel like it's one of the last few months of summer, but we have Dreamforce coming up. We also have some community events that are happening.

Gillian Bruce: Yeah. Mike, you and I and Jennifer Lee actually got to go to a community event, I guess it was a duo community event this month, Midwest Dreamin and WITness Success. I got to go because, well, you were the MC of the whole event.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, I popped up on the stage for a few highlights and Midwest-isms Midwest Dreamin.

Gillian Bruce: Oh, yeah. Actually, can you share one of those Midwest-isms because they're pretty amazing.

Mike Gerholdt: So people in the Midwest use weird terms, one of them is op. Usually we say that as an excuse me or oh, I'm sorry, op. And I op a ton. Man, you go grocery shopping with me because the cart always leaves the aisle before and you're going to run in somebody, op I'm sorry. But so I said, what if we took a whole bunch of Midwest terms and made them into Salesforce features. One of them is op, which I said is clearly a validation rule. Because if Salesforce could be very Midwestern it wouldn't fire the validation rule, it would just say, op. I believe that was one of them. I did put it out there. So for those of you that live in the Midwest or visited the Midwest, you know we like to eat puppy chow, which is actually Chex Mix covered in chocolate with confectioner's sugar all over it. Gillian, you and I kicked around what that feature would be.
Adam Olshansky actually came out on Twitter and said puppy chow is really like custom metadata because it's wonderful and you can use it anywhere. I felt that's very apropos because the second you get puppy chow out, it's everywhere. That confectioner's sugar, I swear it finds every nook and cranny of your life to be.

Gillian Bruce: It's so uniquely a Midwest thing. I remember growing up as a kid, occasionally some kid would bring some to school and I'd be like, what is this magical craziness?

Mike Gerholdt: I know. Yeah. You go to our gas stations, everywhere. You walk into a Casey's and there're cups of puppy chow for you to buy right by the register, along with with scotcheroos. I don't feel like scotcheroos are very Midwestern.

Gillian Bruce: I have no idea what that is. So it's clearly-

Mike Gerholdt: Oh, a scotcheroo is basically like a rice crispy treat, but made with a lot of butter scotch and then covered in chocolate.

Gillian Bruce: Oh. So it's like a healthier rice crispy treat.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah.

Gillian Bruce: I'm kidding.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. But it's so good.

Gillian Bruce: It sounds delicious.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. It's so good.

Gillian Bruce: Okay. All right. Yeah. So those were great and there were lots more. So if you were there, you had lot more.

Mike Gerholdt: Or check Twitter for some people tweet them out, hot dish. What do you think that is as a feature? It was fun. Little time filler before Gillian gets up on stage and wows the crowd with admin skills. I think a few people even tweet about the heels you were in.

Gillian Bruce: Well you always got to have a good pair of heels to deliver a talk properly, at least for me. Maybe not the same for you, Mike. But yeah, I had the honor of giving a keynote and it was really great to get back up on stage in front of actual people. It was exhilarating to do it, and it felt really fun to share very important content about skills and transferable skills and how to really discover your skills, hone them, and then find ways to use them to help make you shine. So, really amazing experience. Then Jennifer Lee stayed for WITness Success and presented a session about Flow, which I also saw all kinds of Twitter love for.
The reason I wanted to bring up these community events is because Dreamforce is coming and we would love you to come to Dreamforce. If there's some reason that you can't swing it, there are community events happening near you all of the time. So whether that's your local user group or there's a Dreamin event in your region, you can find out all about that on the Trailblazer community. I highly encourage you to go, especially now that people are coming back together in person, it's really incredibly valuable and powerful. I had so many amazing talks with folks. I had some people coming up to me with tears because of just the meaningfulness of being connected again. Especially in the Salesforce community, there's so much you can get by being in person with each other. So I highly encourage you to check out your local community gatherings.

Mike Gerholdt: I agree. To be honest with you, I showed up, I wore a mask for a while.

Gillian Bruce: So did I, until I got on stage.

Mike Gerholdt: So we're past that now. Yeah. There were times that I actually checked out of some areas because I'm not too comfortable with this many people. That's okay, it's up to you. But it was great. So many people that I hadn't seen in person in forever.

Gillian Bruce: It felt good.

Mike Gerholdt: You mentioned Dreamforce. I will include a link in the show notes to the convince your boss letter, which is on the homepage. If you haven't registered for this little event that we're doing in September. I have actually used versions of this letter when I was a customer, rewrote it, changed some things around. I will say it's effective. It's super easy to customize. It'll be great. We're going to have session content up, so you can start talking to your boss about the sessions you're going to go to and the keynotes you're going to see. There's that unspoken just ability to connect with people that doesn't happen anywhere else. You're sitting in a session and you're both there to learn Flow or something, next thing you know, you leave with a new best friend that helps you solve that problem.

Gillian Bruce: Yeah. It's people that you never would've probably connected with, either virtually or in your own local community. Also, it's just going to be great. We're going to have so much fun at Dreamforce. We talk about it being the ultimate family reunion and gosh, aren't we all ready for that. So it's going to be really magical, really fun. I know our team is planning all kinds of really fun, exciting things for admins.

Mike Gerholdt: A few things in the works.

Gillian Bruce: Just a few.

Mike Gerholdt: Stay tuned.

Gillian Bruce: Yeah. Can't tell you anything yet. It's top secret.

Mike Gerholdt: Nope. Not yet. Gillian, you said it's going to be nice weather because it'll be past the cold.

Gillian Bruce: Yeah. San Francisco summer is late August through early November. I grew up here and every year I forget, and then I'm like, all right, we're going to have summer. It's just three months later than everybody else.

Mike Gerholdt: It just comes at a different time. Good.

Gillian Bruce: Late bloomers out here on the west coast.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. All right. Well, if you want to learn more about all things we talked about in today's episode, please go to admin.salesforce.com to find those links and many more resources. You can stay up to date with us on social for all things admins. We are @Salesforceadmns, no I, on Twitter. Of course, Gillian is on Twitter. She is @GillianKBruce, and I am @MikeGerholdt. Give us a follow. You can read about puppy chow or other Midwest-isms, more so on my Twitter feed. But with that, stay safe, stay awesome, and stay tuned for the next episode. We'll see you in the cloud.

Gillian Bruce: Roar.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah.

Gillian Bruce: Is that the first thing that's going to be on the recording, roar?

Mike Gerholdt: I don't know if that's a lion or is that a cat?

Gillian Bruce: It's like a lion cub.



Direct download: July_Monthly_Retro_with_Mike_and_Gillian_1.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:00am PDT

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

 

Join us as we talk about the latest and the greatest Salesforce content from July and the wide variety of midwest-specific treats we tried at Midwest Dreamin.

 

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

Live Events

 

Dreamforce is just around the corner, but we’ve been busy visiting in-person events. We recently stopped by Midwest Dreamin and WITness Sucess, where Mike introduced Gillian to the wonders of puppy chow and scotcheroos. We’re also including a link to a letter that can help you convince your boss to help you get to Dreamforce.

 

Blog highlights from July

Cheryl Feldman’s comprehensive guide on the User Access and Permissions Assistant was a standout post from July. There’s a lot of cool features to play around with, particularly with reports, so make sure to take a look.

 

Video highlights from July

We’re really excited to relaunch How I Solved It on Salesforce+. Jennifer Lee and Marc Baizman team up to solve real Admins’ real problems. The first episode with Andrew Russo is up now, but keep a close eye as more are on the way soon.

 

Podcast highlights from July

While we’ve had some really cool people on the pod over the years this month we had our first Olympic medalist, Christine Magnuson. She’s now a Solution Engineering Manager at Salesforce, and 

 

 

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Full show transcript

Mike Gerholdt: Welcome to the Salesforce Admins Podcast in the July monthly retro for 2022. I'm your host, Mike Gerholdt. And in this episode, we'll review the top product, community and careers content for the month of July. Imagine that. To help me do that is the very familiar and keynoting voice of Gillian Bruce. Hi Gillian.

Gillian Bruce: Hello there, Mike. Nice to be here with you.

Mike Gerholdt: It's good to be back on a pod with you. It's been a month.

Gillian Bruce: It's been a month. It's been a busy month.

Mike Gerholdt: Yes. Quite a few things that we have done and it's been hot all over the world. Just hot everywhere.

Gillian Bruce: Except for where I am.

Mike Gerholdt: Right.

Gillian Bruce: I am still wearing a sweatshirt.

Mike Gerholdt: Don't tell anybody.

Gillian Bruce: Our heat has been on for the last couple weeks.

Mike Gerholdt: Oh my God.

Gillian Bruce: Because if any of you don't know this, for most of San Francisco, June/July is some of our colder months because we are covered in fog and we don't get to see the sun. So it's about 55 to 60 degrees. It's foggy. So if you want to break from the sun and the heat, come on over to San Francisco.

Mike Gerholdt: People are going to be flocking to San Francisco now.

Gillian Bruce: But you got to hurry because it's about to change. Our summer starts the end of August and goes through November. Then we get sunshine and gorgeous weather, but it never gets 100 degrees. That's just craziness.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. So it's going to be gorgeous weather for Dreamforce, which we'll talk about later. Teaser.

Gillian Bruce: Sure is.

Mike Gerholdt: But let's talk about blog content. So we had some really cool, again, ton of blog posts that went out this month. But the one that I want to highlight is the one that Cheryl Feldman wrote on Analyze, Report and Manage Permissions with User Access and Permission Assistant. Not a short title.

Gillian Bruce: But you're permitted to use as many words as you'd like in your title.

Mike Gerholdt: Yes, at some point. But this is really cool. So user access and permission assistant. She details everything that basically admins have been wanting for, I don't even know how long. She even tells a story of when I first joined Salesforce almost a year ago and it took on permission sets, and how do you work with the permission assistant and what can you do with it? The coolest thing down is the third one, report by user permission sets and permission set groups to understand who has what. If you need a moment to sit down, I completely understand.

Gillian Bruce: Game changer.

Mike Gerholdt: I got goosebumps just reading that sentence.

Gillian Bruce: Yeah, if you're an admin and you don't use this, I don't know what to say.

Mike Gerholdt: Well, your days are very long, that's what I would say, while you troubleshoot things. So yeah, this is really cool. There's also a video. And then of course, a link to the app exchange listing. Get all over this because just to sound old, it was a lot different when I was an admin. You had profiles and page layouts and you didn't have to troubleshoot things. We didn't have the tools to be as granular as you can now, and it's just amazing. But with that you need the ability to report on stuff and this is so cool.

Gillian Bruce: Yeah. The technology's come far long ways since your old, early admin days.

Mike Gerholdt: Since back in the day. I walked uphill both ways in the snow just to do a page layout.

Gillian Bruce: Barefoot.

Mike Gerholdt: Barefoot.

Gillian Bruce: Well, Mike, we also have some pretty incredible video content. You mentioned a video in the last post, but we have some videos that I am very fond of and feel so excited to release out on the wild, that have just been released, or at least the first episode has been released this month. That is How I Solved It on Salesforce. Plus we have taken the incredible show that Marc Baizman and then Jennifer Lee have been doing with admins showing how they've solved real actual problems in their orgs. We gave it a little extra production love and shined it up and put it on Salesforce+, which is our free online streaming platform. It's really exciting.
We have five episodes that we're going to be releasing over the next few weeks. But the first one came out and it's all about Andrew Russo, who is an incredible, awesome admin, expanding on that blog post he was featured in many months ago about managing users and really getting into a demo and showing us some of the things that he's built. Man, it is awesome. It is super fun. Watch it. We had a lot of fun making it.

Mike Gerholdt: It shows. You're now a streaming star, Gillian. You could watch stuff on Hulu and Netflix.

Gillian Bruce: I got to say, I feel really special that I'm on the same platform as one of my idols, Kara Swisher. So I feel special about that because they do clips from Kara Swisher's podcast that she does with Scott Galloway, Pivot, on the Salesforce+. So the fact that I get to be a part of the same platform that she is, makes me really excited.

Mike Gerholdt: Kara Swisher, future guest of the Salesforce Admins Podcast.

Gillian Bruce: I am working podcast all my angles there to try and make that happen. So we're just going to put that out there. Kara, we want you on the podcast.

Mike Gerholdt: Yep. Because Kara, listen, so many people do. So you could spend the weekend and watch some Stranger Things or How I Solved It on Salesforce+.

Gillian Bruce: Yeah. It's not a huge time commitment. The last few episodes of Stranger things, which I still haven't watched because there's an hour and then a two hour episode.

Mike Gerholdt: Seriously? That's like a plane ride.

Gillian Bruce: By the time I get the kids to bed, I have about 30 minutes before I fall asleep. So it's really tough. It's tough.

Mike Gerholdt: But you could watch your Salesforce+ video in those 30 minutes.

Gillian Bruce: Sure could, because I think they're 10 minutes-ish, if that.

Mike Gerholdt: They're consumable.

Gillian Bruce: Yeah. There are really actual hands-on tips that you can start using yourself that you can play with, with your own Dev org or Sandbox. Every single one of these episodes, you're going to be able to get something very tangible that you can put to use.

Mike Gerholdt: Your own non-production org.

Gillian Bruce: Yes. Don't do it in production.

Mike Gerholdt: No. We did a bunch of podcasts, July was fun for pods. But one that stood out, Gillian, I actually listened to this on the way to a car show, so I'm a listener of our own podcast. But you did this great interview with Christine Magnuson. Can you tell us about it?

Gillian Bruce: Okay. Well, it was really exciting because she's not only the first Olympian that I've talked to, but the first two time silver medalist Olympian. She competed in Rio and Beijing and she's a swimmer, and now she is got an amazing career. She's a manager of solution engineers here at Salesforce, which means she manages a very technical team. So I wanted to get Christine on the podcast because as you'll listen to her episode, if you have not, go listen to it as soon as you're done with this episode, because-

Mike Gerholdt: It's really good.

Gillian Bruce: It's so good. She talks about the idea of transferable skills. How she really evaluated how she could take the skills that she had as an Olympic athlete and transfer those into another career. How she really had a very detailed strategy behind that. She explains the story. Then she also talks about in her role, she works with a lot of admins. So what things she has seen that makes a very successful admin, and how you get your admin team. Because again, she comes at it from a solutions engineer perspective. So she has seen a lot. In fact, her team supports the largest Salesforce implementation that exists. So they have a lot of knowledge. Anyway, listen to Christine's episode. It's awesome. It's an uplifting one. It'll put you in a good mood for the rest of the day.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. Oh, for sure. There were so many things like, I was driving, I wanted to take notes.

Gillian Bruce: Maybe you can listen to it again.

Mike Gerholdt: Yep. Absolutely. Then just to round out our discussion of, I feel like it's one of the last few months of summer, but we have Dreamforce coming up. We also have some community events that are happening.

Gillian Bruce: Yeah. Mike, you and I and Jennifer Lee actually got to go to a community event, I guess it was a duo community event this month, Midwest Dreamin and WITness Success. I got to go because, well, you were the MC of the whole event.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, I popped up on the stage for a few highlights and Midwest-isms Midwest Dreamin.

Gillian Bruce: Oh, yeah. Actually, can you share one of those Midwest-isms because they're pretty amazing.

Mike Gerholdt: So people in the Midwest use weird terms, one of them is op. Usually we say that as an excuse me or oh, I'm sorry, op. And I op a ton. Man, you go grocery shopping with me because the cart always leaves the aisle before and you're going to run in somebody, op I'm sorry. But so I said, what if we took a whole bunch of Midwest terms and made them into Salesforce features. One of them is op, which I said is clearly a validation rule. Because if Salesforce could be very Midwestern it wouldn't fire the validation rule, it would just say, op. I believe that was one of them. I did put it out there. So for those of you that live in the Midwest or visited the Midwest, you know we like to eat puppy chow, which is actually Chex Mix covered in chocolate with confectioner's sugar all over it. Gillian, you and I kicked around what that feature would be.
Adam Olshansky actually came out on Twitter and said puppy chow is really like custom metadata because it's wonderful and you can use it anywhere. I felt that's very apropos because the second you get puppy chow out, it's everywhere. That confectioner's sugar, I swear it finds every nook and cranny of your life to be.

Gillian Bruce: It's so uniquely a Midwest thing. I remember growing up as a kid, occasionally some kid would bring some to school and I'd be like, what is this magical craziness?

Mike Gerholdt: I know. Yeah. You go to our gas stations, everywhere. You walk into a Casey's and there're cups of puppy chow for you to buy right by the register, along with with scotcheroos. I don't feel like scotcheroos are very Midwestern.

Gillian Bruce: I have no idea what that is. So it's clearly-

Mike Gerholdt: Oh, a scotcheroo is basically like a rice crispy treat, but made with a lot of butter scotch and then covered in chocolate.

Gillian Bruce: Oh. So it's like a healthier rice crispy treat.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah.

Gillian Bruce: I'm kidding.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. But it's so good.

Gillian Bruce: It sounds delicious.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. It's so good.

Gillian Bruce: Okay. All right. Yeah. So those were great and there were lots more. So if you were there, you had lot more.

Mike Gerholdt: Or check Twitter for some people tweet them out, hot dish. What do you think that is as a feature? It was fun. Little time filler before Gillian gets up on stage and wows the crowd with admin skills. I think a few people even tweet about the heels you were in.

Gillian Bruce: Well you always got to have a good pair of heels to deliver a talk properly, at least for me. Maybe not the same for you, Mike. But yeah, I had the honor of giving a keynote and it was really great to get back up on stage in front of actual people. It was exhilarating to do it, and it felt really fun to share very important content about skills and transferable skills and how to really discover your skills, hone them, and then find ways to use them to help make you shine. So, really amazing experience. Then Jennifer Lee stayed for WITness Success and presented a session about Flow, which I also saw all kinds of Twitter love for.
The reason I wanted to bring up these community events is because Dreamforce is coming and we would love you to come to Dreamforce. If there's some reason that you can't swing it, there are community events happening near you all of the time. So whether that's your local user group or there's a Dreamin event in your region, you can find out all about that on the Trailblazer community. I highly encourage you to go, especially now that people are coming back together in person, it's really incredibly valuable and powerful. I had so many amazing talks with folks. I had some people coming up to me with tears because of just the meaningfulness of being connected again. Especially in the Salesforce community, there's so much you can get by being in person with each other. So I highly encourage you to check out your local community gatherings.

Mike Gerholdt: I agree. To be honest with you, I showed up, I wore a mask for a while.

Gillian Bruce: So did I, until I got on stage.

Mike Gerholdt: So we're past that now. Yeah. There were times that I actually checked out of some areas because I'm not too comfortable with this many people. That's okay, it's up to you. But it was great. So many people that I hadn't seen in person in forever.

Gillian Bruce: It felt good.

Mike Gerholdt: You mentioned Dreamforce. I will include a link in the show notes to the convince your boss letter, which is on the homepage. If you haven't registered for this little event that we're doing in September. I have actually used versions of this letter when I was a customer, rewrote it, changed some things around. I will say it's effective. It's super easy to customize. It'll be great. We're going to have session content up, so you can start talking to your boss about the sessions you're going to go to and the keynotes you're going to see. There's that unspoken just ability to connect with people that doesn't happen anywhere else. You're sitting in a session and you're both there to learn Flow or something, next thing you know, you leave with a new best friend that helps you solve that problem.

Gillian Bruce: Yeah. It's people that you never would've probably connected with, either virtually or in your own local community. Also, it's just going to be great. We're going to have so much fun at Dreamforce. We talk about it being the ultimate family reunion and gosh, aren't we all ready for that. So it's going to be really magical, really fun. I know our team is planning all kinds of really fun, exciting things for admins.

Mike Gerholdt: A few things in the works.

Gillian Bruce: Just a few.

Mike Gerholdt: Stay tuned.

Gillian Bruce: Yeah. Can't tell you anything yet. It's top secret.

Mike Gerholdt: Nope. Not yet. Gillian, you said it's going to be nice weather because it'll be past the cold.

Gillian Bruce: Yeah. San Francisco summer is late August through early November. I grew up here and every year I forget, and then I'm like, all right, we're going to have summer. It's just three months later than everybody else.

Mike Gerholdt: It just comes at a different time. Good.

Gillian Bruce: Late bloomers out here on the west coast.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. All right. Well, if you want to learn more about all things we talked about in today's episode, please go to admin.salesforce.com to find those links and many more resources. You can stay up to date with us on social for all things admins. We are @Salesforceadmns, no I, on Twitter. Of course, Gillian is on Twitter. She is @GillianKBruce, and I am @MikeGerholdt. Give us a follow. You can read about puppy chow or other Midwest-isms, more so on my Twitter feed. But with that, stay safe, stay awesome, and stay tuned for the next episode. We'll see you in the cloud.

Gillian Bruce: Roar.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah.

Gillian Bruce: Is that the first thing that's going to be on the recording, roar?

Mike Gerholdt: I don't know if that's a lion or is that a cat?

Gillian Bruce: It's like a lion cub.



Direct download: July_Monthly_Retro_with_Mike_and_Gillian_1.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:00am PDT

Today’s Salesforce Admins Podcast we’re replaying our episode with Lissa Smith, Senior Manager of Business Architecture at Salesforce. In the context of the launch of the Salesforce Admin Skills Kit, we wanted to revisit our conversation about how she hired a team of Salesforce Admins, what she looks for in the interview, and important advice for anyone hiring a Salesforce Administrator.

Join us as we talk about how to stand out when you’re applying for a job, and what makes the difference between and junior and senior Admin candidate.

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

Why you should listen to Lissa’s advice

Lissa started out as a Salesforce Admin. “I’m obsessed with improving processes and solving problems,” she says, “so I’ve been happy in this space for 15 years.” One thing she did a lot of in previous positions was hiring Salesforce Admins. It’s something we know that many of our listeners are curious about, so we thought we would take the time to hear about her process.

The first step is to get a new headcount approved, and Lissa was able to hire both junior and senior-level Admins. She’s interviewed candidates with backgrounds only in Trailhead or a program like PepUp Tech, as well as more experienced folks who had been in the space for years. “Overall, what I was always looking for was someone who was motivated and excited,” she says, “regardless of if they were brand new to the ecosystem or had been doing it for a long time, I wanted someone who could identify and look for problems and then come up with ways to solve them.”

The difference between Admin roles

When looking at someone for those junior-level positions, where a candidate didn’t necessarily have any paid experience on the platform, there were a few things that Lissa looked for. She wanted to see apps that they had built, even if it was simply to track their job applications and interviews or books they had read. Anything that used the platform to show her that they understood what it was capable of doing.

Another thing that could make a less experienced candidate stand out was someone who had experience as a user on the platform. Understanding and empathizing with the customer experience as a salesperson or customer sales rep is a really important skill because you’ll know where your users are coming from.

For more senior positions, you could get by with less experience building things on the platform if you understood something key about business analysis, whether that was documentation or process analysis. For principal admins, she was looking for a thorough understanding of the platform and advanced certifications.

Tell a good story

The important thing to realize about hiring for these roles and something that comes up time and time again on this podcast is that even though Lissa was hiring Salesforce Admins, the roles she was hiring for were often not called that explicitly. They could be business analysts or system admins, but those roles need those Salesforce Admin skills.

No matter what, make sure that you’re telling a story that shows you can identify a problem and build a solution that makes everyone’s lives easier. “It’s the story that sells your skills,” Lissa says, “when you tell a good story it’s showing off your communication skills, it shows that you understand the why.”

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Full Show Transcript

Mike Gerholdt: Welcome to the Salesforce Admins Podcast, where we talk about product, community, and career to help you become an awesome admin. This week, we’re talking with Lissa Smith, Senior Manager, Business Architecture here at Salesforce about her strategy for hiring a Salesforce Admin. That’s right. We’re kicking off 2022 by putting our best foot forward and helping you get the information that you have been talking about in the community and on social, around finding and landing that perfect admin career. So let’s not waste any time and let’s get Lissa on the podcast. So, Lissa, welcome to the podcast.

Lissa Smith: Awesome. Thank you. I’m excited to be here.

Mike Gerholdt: Well, it’s good to kick off the new year, talking about starting your career, getting hiring on as a Salesforce Admin. And I think you are one of the most perfect guests to have on to talk about that. So let’s dive right in, because I know everybody’s interested. How did you get started in the Salesforce ecosystem?

Lissa Smith: Yeah, I’ve been working in the Salesforce ecosystem for about 15 years now. And most of that was as a Salesforce admin. I actually started on a sales team and moved into an admin role shortly after that because I really liked building reports and that just kind of took off from there. I’m obsessed with improving processes and solving problems and I just love the Salesforce platform. So I have been happy in this space for 15 years.

Mike Gerholdt: 15 years, that’s a veteran level.

Lissa Smith: Yeah.

Mike Gerholdt: Long time. Now, one of the important things that kicked off our conversation internally here at Salesforce was you told me, you were in charge in previous careers prior to joining Salesforce for hiring Salesforce admins. And as I say that, I can feel everybody’s earbuds just tighten up a little bit more, as they listen to the podcast. Because I will tell you as somebody that pays attention to the community and everything that’s on social, that is probably the number one question of I’m doing Trailhead. I’m getting my certification. Now, how do I get hired as a Salesforce admin? So tell me a little bit about what you did to hire admins and kind of what that position was for you?

Lissa Smith: Awesome. Sure. So, yep, before working at Salesforce, I actually led a team of 13 Salesforce admins and business analysts. And it was a team of, I mean, they were definitely hashtag awesome admins. They’re a really great team. And eight of them, I hired myself and of the five that I kind of inherited when I got promoted into that role. Three of those five, I was involved in their hiring process as well. So I participated in their interviews. And so of those 13 at 11 of them, I was involved in the hiring of-

Mike Gerholdt: So most?

Lissa Smith: … most of them. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Mike Gerholdt: I was… You lost me on the math.

Lissa Smith: Yeah.

Mike Gerholdt: Everybody’s hiring process is going to be a little bit different. Let’s start at the beginning, you had a baker’s dozen admins on your team when a spot opened up, what was kind of those initial first steps that you did as a hiring manager?

Lissa Smith: Yep. So I actually had several different levels of positions that I opened up and so I had to get headcount approved to get those positions. I saw a need, developed a business case internally to get that headcount approved. And so I was able to get headcount for some junior admins and some senior and principal level admins as well.

So I was kind of hiring all different skill levels, which made it also interesting when I was reviewing resumes and going through the interview process because some of those admins had only the Trailhead background or had gone through Pathfinder, PEP and tech programs like that, which are amazing programs. And that was their background, the Trailhead and those programs.
And then I also hired other admins who had been working in the space for quite a while and were more senior. So different mindset going into those interviews and different approach when looking at those resumes. But, overall, what I was always looking for was someone who was motivated and excited. I really love the Salesforce platform. I really love my job and really love what I do.

I don’t think everyone has to love their job a 100% of the time, but you don’t have to settle. And so I wanted to look for people who also were motivated and excited and passionate, and really those passionate and proactive problem solvers, regardless of if they were brand new to the ecosystem or if they’d been doing it for a long time.

I wanted somebody who could identify problems and look for problems and then come up with solutions and come up with, or just identify those problems and then come up with ways to potentially solve those problems. And I think that’s what every hiring manager is looking for like, how can you help me solve my business problems?

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. I want to go back. You mentioned junior admin, senior principal. And I know those levels are different at different categories, as somebody that’s hired admins and you’re thinking, “Okay, I need a junior Salesforce admin.” What was a junior Salesforce admin for you?

Lissa Smith: To me, it was somebody who really didn’t have experience on the platform, paid experience on the platform.

Mike Gerholdt: Oh, that’s important. I’ve never heard that term paid experience. I think that’s a good callout.

Lissa Smith: Yeah, it’s a good differentiator because, I mean, I did want somebody who had gone through Trailhead modules, had built out their own apps. As I was talking to candidates, there were candidates who had built apps to track their interview and application process. And they were excited to share that with me.

So maybe they hadn’t been paid to do admin work, but they had built cool apps and tracking even, just all sorts of apps that they had built. It could be the books that they’re reading or genres and author. Just something that they had done using the platform to show me that they understood the capabilities because they hadn’t had that paid experience, or maybe they had experience as a user on the platform.

So maybe they weren’t ever an actual admin, but I interviewed several candidates who had been Salesforce users. So they understood and could empathize with the customer experience. So as, like a salesperson or as a customer support rep or they had used the platform. And I just think that’s a really important skill to have somebody who has been a user on the platform.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. I’ve got friends that start off as users and they make for the best admins. Just plain and simple.

Lissa Smith: Absolutely. And then there’s so much out there now on Trailhead and with these different programs that you can take different training and go through these different programs and do all the Trailhead and do the super badges and earn your certifications. That’s all available now to anyone. But the people who were going out there and proactively figuring out, how they can solve a problem.

I have a bunch of house plans. I keep thinking, it would be really great if I had some sort of automated app in Salesforce that reminded me when I need to water my plants because some of them are on, in every two-week cycle and some of them are more frequently.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah.

Lissa Smith: And just that could be something that someone could build for themselves. And then it gets them that experience using the platform.

Mike Gerholdt: And you could capture pictures so you could see if the [inaudible]-

Lissa Smith: It’s so true, right?

Mike Gerholdt: … yeah. Don’t get us started. So junior admin, I like your definition paid… really the differentiator is they have a lot of knowledge. They have a lot of curiosity. I inferred that.

Lissa Smith: Huge.

Mike Gerholdt: Huge.

Lissa Smith: Yes. Huge.

Mike Gerholdt: Big problem solvers, but really didn’t have that paid experience. So was paid experience the differentiator for you in junior admin versus senior admin? I think that’s the term you used.

Lissa Smith: Yeah. I think that would be probably the biggest. So the senior admins that I was hiring for that I interviewed, they had been working as an admin. They were a system admin in their org and understood platform capabilities. They may not be super experts, but they had been doing it for one, three years, just depending on that. Also, there were business analysts that I was hiring too. So all of it, the titles were actually business analysts.

So some were even more senior from a business analysis perspective and maybe had less experience building on the Salesforce platform. But they really understood documentation and analysis and process analysis and had been doing that for a long time, so they could still come in. And with that experience and the help of me and other members of the team and Trailhead could build on that experience and be a more senior admin.

And then the principal admins are the ones who come in. They already understand flow and when to use flow and they are, and this was a few years ago. So that now flow is everywhere. But a few years ago, it was a little harder to find some of those candidates, or they have several certifications and understand when to use a feature, when not to use a feature, when some of those more advanced topics too, that when you’re thinking about even just admin certification, some of the security and sharing rules and that it’s important for all admins to know, but they’ve been there, done that-

Mike Gerholdt: Sure.

Lissa Smith: … and really get it.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. Little more org-wide implications to different things as opposed to the features. Got it.

Lissa Smith: Yep.

Mike Gerholdt: Got it. No, that’s often. And I think one big thing that I heard was rarely were you hiring Salesforce admin. And we had just done a podcast on this in December with Leanne and Jay and I. Salesforce admin is that strong identity that we have, but rarely is it in our job title. And even your job title, senior manager, business architecture. Sometimes our job titles isn’t what we are.

Lissa Smith: Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, for sure. I don’t know that. And I have said, 15 years, I’ve been in this ecosystem, most of those as a Salesforce admin. And I don’t think my title has ever been Salesforce admin, so that’s very true.

Mike Gerholdt: And that’s something that we see a lot in, not only our ecosystem, but other ecosystems too. Is rarely does the persona or the identity of the person also be the job title because companies have different naming conventions. So I know in a lot of the programs that we speak at, there, I was on LinkedIn. I couldn’t find Salesforce admin. Well, it may be, as you mentioned, you were hiring a lot for business analyst.

Lissa Smith: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Mike Gerholdt: So-

Lissa Smith: Yep.

Mike Gerholdt: … that’s great.

Lissa Smith: Yeah. And then what they ended up being were business analysts who were system admins in Salesforce and they were writing requirements, but also doing some of the config and building and, or a lot of the config, all of the config.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah.

Lissa Smith: And actually working with users to solve those problems, so-

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. Had that responsibility.

Lissa Smith: … Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. That’s key. So junior admin, senior principal, I keep kind of anchoring on those because the next part is, you mentioned, they had showed apps that they had built. I did this great podcast with Gordon Lee, which I’ll link to in the show notes where we talk about as new admins, there’s this trust gap. And I think you talked about it or inferred it actually in the junior admins is, they built apps, they showed me, they did all the learning, they just didn’t have that paid experience.

And I think there’s that trust gap of, you haven’t been paid to do this. So you have to span kind of that gap with me, I would love to know, what were some of the questions? I’m a, put on my hat, I’m a Salesforce admin, and maybe one of these roles looking to apply, and I’m getting ready to walk into an interview with Lissa Smith. What are some of the things she’s going to ask me?

Lissa Smith: So I really like the, tell me about a time when questions. Tell me about a time when you had to collaborate with people, maybe you disagreed with, or tell me about a time where you had to manage a project. Are you responsible for a project or a program? And this doesn’t have to be even Salesforce related. I think it’s really important for candidates to come to an interview prepared with maybe a repository of stories that their success stories, these don’t have to be on your resume, these don’t have to be anywhere.

But if you were writing your success stories in work and just life, I mean, I had, I heard about Eagle Scout Projects. It doesn’t have to be work. But your success stories, problems you identified, ways that you solve those problems, how you collaborated with others while solving those problems, how you prioritized, how you influenced others, how you communicated, how you learned, how you asked questions. Come up with a list of those stories, of those problems that you solved and run through those stories out loud with a friend or family, out loud run through those stories.

So that when someone like me comes in and says, “Tell me about a time that you collaborated with multiple stakeholders or when you proactively identified a flawed or inefficient process.” You can come in and say, “Oh, well, which one of my stories can I tell?” Like, come up with… And then tell those stories in a meaningful way too. It shouldn’t just be like I could say, “Well, I built a way for sales people to register their customers and prospects for a training that we offered.” Well, that doesn’t really tell me anything.

But if I come in and say, “You know, I got an out-of-office response from someone on the training team that told me how many seats were left in the training.” And I realized, why are they managing that? And this is a true story, in an out-of-office response, why are they telling sales people? There are only six seats left in this training in the San Francisco training for July 15th, if you want to register, write me back.

Mike Gerholdt: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Lissa Smith: So I worked with the training team to develop a solution for this in Salesforce, right on the contact record that allowed the salespeople to enroll from the contact and they could see how many people will… How many seats were left in each training. And then the training team could see the actual revenue impact of adding these contacts to their training. I mean, it’s a much better story than just, I made this way for sales people to register people in training and automated it and even getting too much into the details. It’s the story I think that sells your skills and makes it more meaningful to the hiring manager too.

Mike Gerholdt: It’s a richer story-

Lissa Smith: Absolutely.

Mike Gerholdt: … you’re walking through those two. I’m thinking it’s comparable to, it was a sunny day. I went for a walk. Okay. I don’t have much visualization to that. But the second story that you told was, it was a sunny day and my parents ware coming to town and you’re adding context and you’re adding depth. Right. And you’re also, to me, showing something that I feel is very important for [Edmonds], you’re showing your critical thinking skills, you’re showing how you, not only saw an out-of-office, you saw an out-of-office with an opportunity.

Lissa Smith: Absolutely. Yeah, 100%.

Mike Gerholdt: Love that. I love that.

Lissa Smith: Yeah. And I think that everyone, I mean, there, like I said, Eagle Scout Project. I mean, there’s these transferable skills that you have, that all, everyone has. And I think it’s just, you really have to sit down and focus and how can I translate these skills into this job description?

And I think it’s also pretty job description specific too, you’ll want to look at the job description and see what is this role asking for? Are they asking for that someone with strong process automation skills? Okay, well, then let me look through my list of stories, my role at expert repository of stories, and see which ones might relate to process automation.
It might be this, my out-of-office story here, or is there a lot of mention of collaboration in the job description? Is there a lot of a mention of working with stakeholders? Okay. Well, let me think of my past experience and make sure that I’m coming prepared to this interview with examples of how I’ve done that.

And good stories too. Like you said, you can give numbers, you can give the facts, but when you tell a good story, I mean, it’s also showing off your communication skills. It’s showing off that you understand the why, which is really important. And it feeds into a little of that passion too, that you can hear the passion in someone’s story. You don’t really hear a passion in facts.

Mike Gerholdt: Right. That’s true. How would you… So I’m listening to this and I’m lack of a better term, playing devil’s advocate. And thinking, “Boy, if I was a new admin and I’m applying for that junior role, and maybe I don’t have the paid experience, maybe I’m fresh out of Pathfinders, or I’m fresh out of college, and I’ve got two Salesforce certifications or 120 Trailhead badges. I don’t have those relatable stories. Were the interview questions for junior admins maybe a little bit different, or were the answers or way that I should be thinking about answering as a junior admin, a little bit different?

Lissa Smith: I think a little both. The questions are pretty much the same for me. I mean, in thinking of past skills, if you were a bartender, you could figure out how to translate the skills that you used as a bartender to managing projects, prioritizing, there’s collaborating with others. There’s still a lot of those transferable skills. And being able to tell that story, I think is part of this that’s huge. So it’s a lot of the same questions.

Mike Gerholdt: I think you absolutely 100% nailed it because I’m thinking of the college student. And you’re like, “Well, the time that I really had to collaborate, well, I don’t have a time in the workplace. But let me tell you about this project I was on in advanced biochemistry where I had a difficult teammate. You could walk through a scenario there, and it’s showing you the same principles and skills. It’s just a different environment that they were used in.

Lissa Smith: Absolutely. I also, personally, I mean, even, I think certification can be a story in itself and it was for some of the candidates that I hired.

Mike Gerholdt: Oh, how so?

Lissa Smith: I heard stories of, it took me five times to pass my certification exam, is what a candidate told me. And they told me that kind of slumping, shoulders down, disappointed in themselves. I would reframe that story. I was so persistent, I went back and I know that content inside and out, it wasn’t just guessing to pass that exam. I know that content inside and out, it took me five tries and I passed, that’s, it’s, it can all be a story. It can all be something that sells you. And so even certification can be a story. It’s all in how you frame it.

Mike Gerholdt: One thing I wanted to touch on in this point was I shared with you prior to the call, kind of that admin skills that we’d rolled out. Rebecca showed us in the admin Keynote at Dreamforce. And I know it was the first time you’d seen it. So I kind of blindsided you with it. But of those 14 skills, was there one that stood out for you?

Lissa Smith: Problem solving stands out the most for me. I mean, when I come in, me, personally, into an interview, I am selling myself as a passionate, proactive problem solver. That’s what I am. I’m enthusiastic. I love finding problems. I love helping connect dots to figure out how to solve those problems. I think that’s the heart of an admin, they’re problem solvers and excited to find ways. So for me, personally, I hate saying, “No, that’s not possible on the Salesforce platform.” Because I can pretty much always figure out a way to do it. And so I feel that’s the heart of an admin.

But the learner’s mindset, piece, I think that’s another huge one. When you are looking for roles, admins who are looking for roles, I think it’s important to connect with a company that thinks that this is important too, that failing is okay, that trying new things is okay, innovating is okay. And gives you time to learn and to go to the new release readiness training, to do Trailhead to continue to learn. I think that’s really important when looking for a role.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. I would agree 100%. You need to interview that company for culture. And the one thing I always tell people is, the person you’re sitting across the table from, are you enjoy sitting across the table from them? Because that’s going to be your job. Do you enjoy? If it’s an in person interview, do you enjoy the atmosphere? Do you enjoy just kind of that culture, that feeling that you have there? Because that’s something that’s really hard to change.

Lissa Smith: So important. Before I joined Salesforce, I was a leader of a Salesforce Trailblazer community group here in Indianapolis. And I was very involved in the community, in the Trailblazer community, at the women in tech meetings, at the admin meetings, at the developer meetings, still I am. Although now, everything’s different and virtual.

Mike Gerholdt: Yes.

Lissa Smith: I can participate in meetings all over the world there.

Mike Gerholdt: Everywhere.

Lissa Smith: Yeah. But having a hiring manager who participates in those meetings, I think is, or having a manager, not even a hiring manager, a manager who participates in those meetings is huge. Because they, first of all, the hiring managers, if you’re listening here, go to those meetings because you will find all the excited, passionate candidates you’re looking for.

A large majority of the admins that I hired were already very active within the community. And I already knew them and they already knew me. And I was somebody that they wanted to work for because they knew I was excited about the community and participated in it. And they knew, I would give them time to go to those meetings during lunch, back when they were always in person at lunchtime. It was-

Mike Gerholdt: In the Midwest, those meetings are always over lunch so that we could have meatloaf or lasagna or [inaudible] very ridiculously heavy, Midwestern, a hot dish.

Lissa Smith: Right. Yeah. And I know that that’s not something that’s consistent. But not all hiring managers even know that this exists or even managers know that this community exists. So I think it’s really important for managers to get involved in the Trailblazer community. And there’s a lot of… A ton of great talent. I mean, it’s just packed full of amazing talent.

People who are motivated and excited and then have this big network of people to connect with if they run into issues or if they need help, especially for those junior admins, that it’s something they haven’t done before. But they have this huge network of people that they can connect with. Now, all over the world. Thanks to… I mean, it was already all over the world, but even more so now that everything’s so virtual, they have this network.

Mike Gerholdt: No, I’m with you. And I actually was thinking about that because the number of stories, you go back a few years on the pod, we told the Zac Otero story of how Zac got his certifications and was relentless of going to user groups and introducing himself. There’s a lot of stories where that’s a great place to meet people, if you’re looking to get hired because they share the same interests. And I think it’s something you pointed out early on in our discussions was hiring managers should be at this. It may be called a user group, but hiring managers are users too.

Lissa Smith: Absolutely.

Mike Gerholdt: So-

Lissa Smith: Yep.

Mike Gerholdt: … I love that point. And it’s also, if I was thinking about it, would I want to interview with a hiring manager that I’ve seen at user groups, or would I want to interview with a hiring major where I have to explain user groups?

Lissa Smith: Yes. It’s such a good point. Yes, exactly.

Mike Gerholdt: Very different. So one thing, I think it’s, in common talk about because I feel you’ve run the gamut. I hope we’ve given everybody kind of a good insight into hiring admins and being the hiring manager. But I’d love to know a little bit about what you do at Salesforce because your title’s intriguing.

Lissa Smith: Yeah. So senior manager of business architecture here at Salesforce. I’m responsible for our internal Salesforce instance for sales people. So processes, tools, governance, user experience, within our internal Salesforce instance and within Slack. And I’ve been working a lot on the Slack for sales project for-

Mike Gerholdt: Wow.

Lissa Smith: … the past year and the rollout of Slack now. So it’s very fun and very exciting.

Mike Gerholdt: I will tell you, it’s always been a personal goal of mine when we started the podcast to have on as many Salesforce admins as possible. And I mean, Salesforce, Salesforce admins. But I say that a little tongue in cheek because I think it’s important. And I just did a talk with Pathfinders recently, the reason I bring that up and I say that is, your title, senior manager, business architecture isn’t something that I might search for on LinkedIn as a job-

Lissa Smith: Right.

Mike Gerholdt: … as a Salesforce admin. Right. And I think it’s important that we understand the identity and persona is called that, but the job title and the job descriptions may be very different.

Lissa Smith: So true. And I was lucky with this role that the word or the phrase, Salesforce admin, was included in the description that they were looking for somebody that had previous Salesforce admin experience. And so it showed up in a… This was a 10-year-old job search that I don’t even know how to turn off. It comes into my-

Mike Gerholdt: No.

Lissa Smith: … and it’s fine because I can see the landscape, especially when I was hiring admins, I could see who else is hiring here in Indianapolis. And I could see those other job descriptions and… But this one came through. And like you said, it was senior manager, business architecture. What’s that? And why did this even show up in the job search? I’m not even looking for a job and dug into that. And it’s really cool. And it’s Salesforce uses Salesforce to sell Salesforce, SuperMeta. There’s got to be a team that’s responsible for that. And-

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah.

Lissa Smith: … it’s pretty exciting to be on that team.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. I mean, I think in The Matrix, it’s taking the red pill, but for some reason taking the blue pill, right? So, I mean, you don’t have to give us details. But what kind of projects do you work on that I think… And the reason I ask that is, I want to be clear, not digging into your work-life, but I’m digging into analogous to what Salesforce admins would be doing. So what are, if somebody’s listening to this and thinking, “Hey, maybe I’ll become a Salesforce admin.” What’s kind of your everyday look like?

Lissa Smith: Sure. Yeah. So, I mean, we’re looking at new features. We often get them very early, as customer zero we get them first. So we’re looking at those new features. We also want dynamic forms on standard objects. So we want to be able to have that and make our user experience better. So we’re evaluating new features, we’re looking at how can we make user experience better. We’re collecting feedback from users. We’re governing our objects as well and our processes. We’re making sure that-

Mike Gerholdt: That’s a whole podcast in of itself.

Lissa Smith: … yeah, absolutely it is. We’re now looking at our digital HQ at Slack and how do we incorporate Slack into our processes. Make it Slack first, make Slack the platform of engagement for our users and ultimately, improve and make their processes more efficient. So it’s a day-to-day talking to users, understanding what users are doing and then making things better for them.

Mike Gerholdt: Sounds all the stuff we talk about in the central habits, which just makes me happy. It’s very good. Well, Lissa, this has been a very fun podcast. You are welcome back, anytime. If you have an idea, top of mind that you want to talk about, I will be super excited to see what Twitter has to say about this episode because I know it was one of the very first things that always pops into my inbox. Every time I check the community is, people asking for hiring or interview or questions or just anything around getting a job as being a Salesforce admin. And I thought it was a great way to kick off 2022. So thank you for helping me kick off 2022 on the podcast.

Lissa Smith: You’re welcome. Happy new year. I’m very excited to be here. I’m excited for the future of all of the new Salesforce admins and I’m rooting for you. And, yeah, excited.

Mike Gerholdt: So as I write, that was an amazing episode with Lissa. We literally probably could have talked for another hour, so I’m going to have to have Lissa back on the podcast. But to do that, you got to tweet me and tell me, what did I forget to ask Lissa on this episode? And then I’ll start compiling and we’ll get her back as soon as possible. What would you love to know about a hiring manager and asking questions to get that perfect admin job?

So be sure to tweet at us. And if you’d like to learn more about all things, Salesforce Admin, go to admin.salesforce.com to find more resources, including all of the links that I mentioned in this episode, as well as a full transcript. Now, you can stay up to date with us on social. We are at @SalesforceAdmns, no “I” on Twitter. Gillian is @gilliankbruce and, of course, I am @mikegerholdt. So with that, welcome to 2022 and stay safe, stay awesome and stay tuned for that next episode. We’ll see you in the cloud.



Direct download: Replay__Hiring_an_Admin_with_Lissa_Smith.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:00am PDT

Today’s Salesforce Admins Podcast we’re replaying our episode with Lissa Smith, Senior Manager of Business Architecture at Salesforce. In the context of the launch of the Salesforce Admin Skills Kit, we wanted to revisit our conversation about how she hired a team of Salesforce Admins, what she looks for in the interview, and important advice for anyone hiring a Salesforce Administrator.

Join us as we talk about how to stand out when you’re applying for a job, and what makes the difference between and junior and senior Admin candidate.

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

Why you should listen to Lissa’s advice

Lissa started out as a Salesforce Admin. “I’m obsessed with improving processes and solving problems,” she says, “so I’ve been happy in this space for 15 years.” One thing she did a lot of in previous positions was hiring Salesforce Admins. It’s something we know that many of our listeners are curious about, so we thought we would take the time to hear about her process.

The first step is to get a new headcount approved, and Lissa was able to hire both junior and senior-level Admins. She’s interviewed candidates with backgrounds only in Trailhead or a program like PepUp Tech, as well as more experienced folks who had been in the space for years. “Overall, what I was always looking for was someone who was motivated and excited,” she says, “regardless of if they were brand new to the ecosystem or had been doing it for a long time, I wanted someone who could identify and look for problems and then come up with ways to solve them.”

The difference between Admin roles

When looking at someone for those junior-level positions, where a candidate didn’t necessarily have any paid experience on the platform, there were a few things that Lissa looked for. She wanted to see apps that they had built, even if it was simply to track their job applications and interviews or books they had read. Anything that used the platform to show her that they understood what it was capable of doing.

Another thing that could make a less experienced candidate stand out was someone who had experience as a user on the platform. Understanding and empathizing with the customer experience as a salesperson or customer sales rep is a really important skill because you’ll know where your users are coming from.

For more senior positions, you could get by with less experience building things on the platform if you understood something key about business analysis, whether that was documentation or process analysis. For principal admins, she was looking for a thorough understanding of the platform and advanced certifications.

Tell a good story

The important thing to realize about hiring for these roles and something that comes up time and time again on this podcast is that even though Lissa was hiring Salesforce Admins, the roles she was hiring for were often not called that explicitly. They could be business analysts or system admins, but those roles need those Salesforce Admin skills.

No matter what, make sure that you’re telling a story that shows you can identify a problem and build a solution that makes everyone’s lives easier. “It’s the story that sells your skills,” Lissa says, “when you tell a good story it’s showing off your communication skills, it shows that you understand the why.”

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Full Show Transcript

Mike Gerholdt: Welcome to the Salesforce Admins Podcast, where we talk about product, community, and career to help you become an awesome admin. This week, we’re talking with Lissa Smith, Senior Manager, Business Architecture here at Salesforce about her strategy for hiring a Salesforce Admin. That’s right. We’re kicking off 2022 by putting our best foot forward and helping you get the information that you have been talking about in the community and on social, around finding and landing that perfect admin career. So let’s not waste any time and let’s get Lissa on the podcast. So, Lissa, welcome to the podcast.

Lissa Smith: Awesome. Thank you. I’m excited to be here.

Mike Gerholdt: Well, it’s good to kick off the new year, talking about starting your career, getting hiring on as a Salesforce Admin. And I think you are one of the most perfect guests to have on to talk about that. So let’s dive right in, because I know everybody’s interested. How did you get started in the Salesforce ecosystem?

Lissa Smith: Yeah, I’ve been working in the Salesforce ecosystem for about 15 years now. And most of that was as a Salesforce admin. I actually started on a sales team and moved into an admin role shortly after that because I really liked building reports and that just kind of took off from there. I’m obsessed with improving processes and solving problems and I just love the Salesforce platform. So I have been happy in this space for 15 years.

Mike Gerholdt: 15 years, that’s a veteran level.

Lissa Smith: Yeah.

Mike Gerholdt: Long time. Now, one of the important things that kicked off our conversation internally here at Salesforce was you told me, you were in charge in previous careers prior to joining Salesforce for hiring Salesforce admins. And as I say that, I can feel everybody’s earbuds just tighten up a little bit more, as they listen to the podcast. Because I will tell you as somebody that pays attention to the community and everything that’s on social, that is probably the number one question of I’m doing Trailhead. I’m getting my certification. Now, how do I get hired as a Salesforce admin? So tell me a little bit about what you did to hire admins and kind of what that position was for you?

Lissa Smith: Awesome. Sure. So, yep, before working at Salesforce, I actually led a team of 13 Salesforce admins and business analysts. And it was a team of, I mean, they were definitely hashtag awesome admins. They’re a really great team. And eight of them, I hired myself and of the five that I kind of inherited when I got promoted into that role. Three of those five, I was involved in their hiring process as well. So I participated in their interviews. And so of those 13 at 11 of them, I was involved in the hiring of-

Mike Gerholdt: So most?

Lissa Smith: … most of them. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Mike Gerholdt: I was… You lost me on the math.

Lissa Smith: Yeah.

Mike Gerholdt: Everybody’s hiring process is going to be a little bit different. Let’s start at the beginning, you had a baker’s dozen admins on your team when a spot opened up, what was kind of those initial first steps that you did as a hiring manager?

Lissa Smith: Yep. So I actually had several different levels of positions that I opened up and so I had to get headcount approved to get those positions. I saw a need, developed a business case internally to get that headcount approved. And so I was able to get headcount for some junior admins and some senior and principal level admins as well.

So I was kind of hiring all different skill levels, which made it also interesting when I was reviewing resumes and going through the interview process because some of those admins had only the Trailhead background or had gone through Pathfinder, PEP and tech programs like that, which are amazing programs. And that was their background, the Trailhead and those programs.
And then I also hired other admins who had been working in the space for quite a while and were more senior. So different mindset going into those interviews and different approach when looking at those resumes. But, overall, what I was always looking for was someone who was motivated and excited. I really love the Salesforce platform. I really love my job and really love what I do.

I don’t think everyone has to love their job a 100% of the time, but you don’t have to settle. And so I wanted to look for people who also were motivated and excited and passionate, and really those passionate and proactive problem solvers, regardless of if they were brand new to the ecosystem or if they’d been doing it for a long time.

I wanted somebody who could identify problems and look for problems and then come up with solutions and come up with, or just identify those problems and then come up with ways to potentially solve those problems. And I think that’s what every hiring manager is looking for like, how can you help me solve my business problems?

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. I want to go back. You mentioned junior admin, senior principal. And I know those levels are different at different categories, as somebody that’s hired admins and you’re thinking, “Okay, I need a junior Salesforce admin.” What was a junior Salesforce admin for you?

Lissa Smith: To me, it was somebody who really didn’t have experience on the platform, paid experience on the platform.

Mike Gerholdt: Oh, that’s important. I’ve never heard that term paid experience. I think that’s a good callout.

Lissa Smith: Yeah, it’s a good differentiator because, I mean, I did want somebody who had gone through Trailhead modules, had built out their own apps. As I was talking to candidates, there were candidates who had built apps to track their interview and application process. And they were excited to share that with me.

So maybe they hadn’t been paid to do admin work, but they had built cool apps and tracking even, just all sorts of apps that they had built. It could be the books that they’re reading or genres and author. Just something that they had done using the platform to show me that they understood the capabilities because they hadn’t had that paid experience, or maybe they had experience as a user on the platform.

So maybe they weren’t ever an actual admin, but I interviewed several candidates who had been Salesforce users. So they understood and could empathize with the customer experience. So as, like a salesperson or as a customer support rep or they had used the platform. And I just think that’s a really important skill to have somebody who has been a user on the platform.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. I’ve got friends that start off as users and they make for the best admins. Just plain and simple.

Lissa Smith: Absolutely. And then there’s so much out there now on Trailhead and with these different programs that you can take different training and go through these different programs and do all the Trailhead and do the super badges and earn your certifications. That’s all available now to anyone. But the people who were going out there and proactively figuring out, how they can solve a problem.

I have a bunch of house plans. I keep thinking, it would be really great if I had some sort of automated app in Salesforce that reminded me when I need to water my plants because some of them are on, in every two-week cycle and some of them are more frequently.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah.

Lissa Smith: And just that could be something that someone could build for themselves. And then it gets them that experience using the platform.

Mike Gerholdt: And you could capture pictures so you could see if the [inaudible]-

Lissa Smith: It’s so true, right?

Mike Gerholdt: … yeah. Don’t get us started. So junior admin, I like your definition paid… really the differentiator is they have a lot of knowledge. They have a lot of curiosity. I inferred that.

Lissa Smith: Huge.

Mike Gerholdt: Huge.

Lissa Smith: Yes. Huge.

Mike Gerholdt: Big problem solvers, but really didn’t have that paid experience. So was paid experience the differentiator for you in junior admin versus senior admin? I think that’s the term you used.

Lissa Smith: Yeah. I think that would be probably the biggest. So the senior admins that I was hiring for that I interviewed, they had been working as an admin. They were a system admin in their org and understood platform capabilities. They may not be super experts, but they had been doing it for one, three years, just depending on that. Also, there were business analysts that I was hiring too. So all of it, the titles were actually business analysts.

So some were even more senior from a business analysis perspective and maybe had less experience building on the Salesforce platform. But they really understood documentation and analysis and process analysis and had been doing that for a long time, so they could still come in. And with that experience and the help of me and other members of the team and Trailhead could build on that experience and be a more senior admin.

And then the principal admins are the ones who come in. They already understand flow and when to use flow and they are, and this was a few years ago. So that now flow is everywhere. But a few years ago, it was a little harder to find some of those candidates, or they have several certifications and understand when to use a feature, when not to use a feature, when some of those more advanced topics too, that when you’re thinking about even just admin certification, some of the security and sharing rules and that it’s important for all admins to know, but they’ve been there, done that-

Mike Gerholdt: Sure.

Lissa Smith: … and really get it.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. Little more org-wide implications to different things as opposed to the features. Got it.

Lissa Smith: Yep.

Mike Gerholdt: Got it. No, that’s often. And I think one big thing that I heard was rarely were you hiring Salesforce admin. And we had just done a podcast on this in December with Leanne and Jay and I. Salesforce admin is that strong identity that we have, but rarely is it in our job title. And even your job title, senior manager, business architecture. Sometimes our job titles isn’t what we are.

Lissa Smith: Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, for sure. I don’t know that. And I have said, 15 years, I’ve been in this ecosystem, most of those as a Salesforce admin. And I don’t think my title has ever been Salesforce admin, so that’s very true.

Mike Gerholdt: And that’s something that we see a lot in, not only our ecosystem, but other ecosystems too. Is rarely does the persona or the identity of the person also be the job title because companies have different naming conventions. So I know in a lot of the programs that we speak at, there, I was on LinkedIn. I couldn’t find Salesforce admin. Well, it may be, as you mentioned, you were hiring a lot for business analyst.

Lissa Smith: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Mike Gerholdt: So-

Lissa Smith: Yep.

Mike Gerholdt: … that’s great.

Lissa Smith: Yeah. And then what they ended up being were business analysts who were system admins in Salesforce and they were writing requirements, but also doing some of the config and building and, or a lot of the config, all of the config.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah.

Lissa Smith: And actually working with users to solve those problems, so-

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. Had that responsibility.

Lissa Smith: … Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. That’s key. So junior admin, senior principal, I keep kind of anchoring on those because the next part is, you mentioned, they had showed apps that they had built. I did this great podcast with Gordon Lee, which I’ll link to in the show notes where we talk about as new admins, there’s this trust gap. And I think you talked about it or inferred it actually in the junior admins is, they built apps, they showed me, they did all the learning, they just didn’t have that paid experience.

And I think there’s that trust gap of, you haven’t been paid to do this. So you have to span kind of that gap with me, I would love to know, what were some of the questions? I’m a, put on my hat, I’m a Salesforce admin, and maybe one of these roles looking to apply, and I’m getting ready to walk into an interview with Lissa Smith. What are some of the things she’s going to ask me?

Lissa Smith: So I really like the, tell me about a time when questions. Tell me about a time when you had to collaborate with people, maybe you disagreed with, or tell me about a time where you had to manage a project. Are you responsible for a project or a program? And this doesn’t have to be even Salesforce related. I think it’s really important for candidates to come to an interview prepared with maybe a repository of stories that their success stories, these don’t have to be on your resume, these don’t have to be anywhere.

But if you were writing your success stories in work and just life, I mean, I had, I heard about Eagle Scout Projects. It doesn’t have to be work. But your success stories, problems you identified, ways that you solve those problems, how you collaborated with others while solving those problems, how you prioritized, how you influenced others, how you communicated, how you learned, how you asked questions. Come up with a list of those stories, of those problems that you solved and run through those stories out loud with a friend or family, out loud run through those stories.

So that when someone like me comes in and says, “Tell me about a time that you collaborated with multiple stakeholders or when you proactively identified a flawed or inefficient process.” You can come in and say, “Oh, well, which one of my stories can I tell?” Like, come up with… And then tell those stories in a meaningful way too. It shouldn’t just be like I could say, “Well, I built a way for sales people to register their customers and prospects for a training that we offered.” Well, that doesn’t really tell me anything.

But if I come in and say, “You know, I got an out-of-office response from someone on the training team that told me how many seats were left in the training.” And I realized, why are they managing that? And this is a true story, in an out-of-office response, why are they telling sales people? There are only six seats left in this training in the San Francisco training for July 15th, if you want to register, write me back.

Mike Gerholdt: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Lissa Smith: So I worked with the training team to develop a solution for this in Salesforce, right on the contact record that allowed the salespeople to enroll from the contact and they could see how many people will… How many seats were left in each training. And then the training team could see the actual revenue impact of adding these contacts to their training. I mean, it’s a much better story than just, I made this way for sales people to register people in training and automated it and even getting too much into the details. It’s the story I think that sells your skills and makes it more meaningful to the hiring manager too.

Mike Gerholdt: It’s a richer story-

Lissa Smith: Absolutely.

Mike Gerholdt: … you’re walking through those two. I’m thinking it’s comparable to, it was a sunny day. I went for a walk. Okay. I don’t have much visualization to that. But the second story that you told was, it was a sunny day and my parents ware coming to town and you’re adding context and you’re adding depth. Right. And you’re also, to me, showing something that I feel is very important for [Edmonds], you’re showing your critical thinking skills, you’re showing how you, not only saw an out-of-office, you saw an out-of-office with an opportunity.

Lissa Smith: Absolutely. Yeah, 100%.

Mike Gerholdt: Love that. I love that.

Lissa Smith: Yeah. And I think that everyone, I mean, there, like I said, Eagle Scout Project. I mean, there’s these transferable skills that you have, that all, everyone has. And I think it’s just, you really have to sit down and focus and how can I translate these skills into this job description?

And I think it’s also pretty job description specific too, you’ll want to look at the job description and see what is this role asking for? Are they asking for that someone with strong process automation skills? Okay, well, then let me look through my list of stories, my role at expert repository of stories, and see which ones might relate to process automation.
It might be this, my out-of-office story here, or is there a lot of mention of collaboration in the job description? Is there a lot of a mention of working with stakeholders? Okay. Well, let me think of my past experience and make sure that I’m coming prepared to this interview with examples of how I’ve done that.

And good stories too. Like you said, you can give numbers, you can give the facts, but when you tell a good story, I mean, it’s also showing off your communication skills. It’s showing off that you understand the why, which is really important. And it feeds into a little of that passion too, that you can hear the passion in someone’s story. You don’t really hear a passion in facts.

Mike Gerholdt: Right. That’s true. How would you… So I’m listening to this and I’m lack of a better term, playing devil’s advocate. And thinking, “Boy, if I was a new admin and I’m applying for that junior role, and maybe I don’t have the paid experience, maybe I’m fresh out of Pathfinders, or I’m fresh out of college, and I’ve got two Salesforce certifications or 120 Trailhead badges. I don’t have those relatable stories. Were the interview questions for junior admins maybe a little bit different, or were the answers or way that I should be thinking about answering as a junior admin, a little bit different?

Lissa Smith: I think a little both. The questions are pretty much the same for me. I mean, in thinking of past skills, if you were a bartender, you could figure out how to translate the skills that you used as a bartender to managing projects, prioritizing, there’s collaborating with others. There’s still a lot of those transferable skills. And being able to tell that story, I think is part of this that’s huge. So it’s a lot of the same questions.

Mike Gerholdt: I think you absolutely 100% nailed it because I’m thinking of the college student. And you’re like, “Well, the time that I really had to collaborate, well, I don’t have a time in the workplace. But let me tell you about this project I was on in advanced biochemistry where I had a difficult teammate. You could walk through a scenario there, and it’s showing you the same principles and skills. It’s just a different environment that they were used in.

Lissa Smith: Absolutely. I also, personally, I mean, even, I think certification can be a story in itself and it was for some of the candidates that I hired.

Mike Gerholdt: Oh, how so?

Lissa Smith: I heard stories of, it took me five times to pass my certification exam, is what a candidate told me. And they told me that kind of slumping, shoulders down, disappointed in themselves. I would reframe that story. I was so persistent, I went back and I know that content inside and out, it wasn’t just guessing to pass that exam. I know that content inside and out, it took me five tries and I passed, that’s, it’s, it can all be a story. It can all be something that sells you. And so even certification can be a story. It’s all in how you frame it.

Mike Gerholdt: One thing I wanted to touch on in this point was I shared with you prior to the call, kind of that admin skills that we’d rolled out. Rebecca showed us in the admin Keynote at Dreamforce. And I know it was the first time you’d seen it. So I kind of blindsided you with it. But of those 14 skills, was there one that stood out for you?

Lissa Smith: Problem solving stands out the most for me. I mean, when I come in, me, personally, into an interview, I am selling myself as a passionate, proactive problem solver. That’s what I am. I’m enthusiastic. I love finding problems. I love helping connect dots to figure out how to solve those problems. I think that’s the heart of an admin, they’re problem solvers and excited to find ways. So for me, personally, I hate saying, “No, that’s not possible on the Salesforce platform.” Because I can pretty much always figure out a way to do it. And so I feel that’s the heart of an admin.

But the learner’s mindset, piece, I think that’s another huge one. When you are looking for roles, admins who are looking for roles, I think it’s important to connect with a company that thinks that this is important too, that failing is okay, that trying new things is okay, innovating is okay. And gives you time to learn and to go to the new release readiness training, to do Trailhead to continue to learn. I think that’s really important when looking for a role.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. I would agree 100%. You need to interview that company for culture. And the one thing I always tell people is, the person you’re sitting across the table from, are you enjoy sitting across the table from them? Because that’s going to be your job. Do you enjoy? If it’s an in person interview, do you enjoy the atmosphere? Do you enjoy just kind of that culture, that feeling that you have there? Because that’s something that’s really hard to change.

Lissa Smith: So important. Before I joined Salesforce, I was a leader of a Salesforce Trailblazer community group here in Indianapolis. And I was very involved in the community, in the Trailblazer community, at the women in tech meetings, at the admin meetings, at the developer meetings, still I am. Although now, everything’s different and virtual.

Mike Gerholdt: Yes.

Lissa Smith: I can participate in meetings all over the world there.

Mike Gerholdt: Everywhere.

Lissa Smith: Yeah. But having a hiring manager who participates in those meetings, I think is, or having a manager, not even a hiring manager, a manager who participates in those meetings is huge. Because they, first of all, the hiring managers, if you’re listening here, go to those meetings because you will find all the excited, passionate candidates you’re looking for.

A large majority of the admins that I hired were already very active within the community. And I already knew them and they already knew me. And I was somebody that they wanted to work for because they knew I was excited about the community and participated in it. And they knew, I would give them time to go to those meetings during lunch, back when they were always in person at lunchtime. It was-

Mike Gerholdt: In the Midwest, those meetings are always over lunch so that we could have meatloaf or lasagna or [inaudible] very ridiculously heavy, Midwestern, a hot dish.

Lissa Smith: Right. Yeah. And I know that that’s not something that’s consistent. But not all hiring managers even know that this exists or even managers know that this community exists. So I think it’s really important for managers to get involved in the Trailblazer community. And there’s a lot of… A ton of great talent. I mean, it’s just packed full of amazing talent.

People who are motivated and excited and then have this big network of people to connect with if they run into issues or if they need help, especially for those junior admins, that it’s something they haven’t done before. But they have this huge network of people that they can connect with. Now, all over the world. Thanks to… I mean, it was already all over the world, but even more so now that everything’s so virtual, they have this network.

Mike Gerholdt: No, I’m with you. And I actually was thinking about that because the number of stories, you go back a few years on the pod, we told the Zac Otero story of how Zac got his certifications and was relentless of going to user groups and introducing himself. There’s a lot of stories where that’s a great place to meet people, if you’re looking to get hired because they share the same interests. And I think it’s something you pointed out early on in our discussions was hiring managers should be at this. It may be called a user group, but hiring managers are users too.

Lissa Smith: Absolutely.

Mike Gerholdt: So-

Lissa Smith: Yep.

Mike Gerholdt: … I love that point. And it’s also, if I was thinking about it, would I want to interview with a hiring manager that I’ve seen at user groups, or would I want to interview with a hiring major where I have to explain user groups?

Lissa Smith: Yes. It’s such a good point. Yes, exactly.

Mike Gerholdt: Very different. So one thing, I think it’s, in common talk about because I feel you’ve run the gamut. I hope we’ve given everybody kind of a good insight into hiring admins and being the hiring manager. But I’d love to know a little bit about what you do at Salesforce because your title’s intriguing.

Lissa Smith: Yeah. So senior manager of business architecture here at Salesforce. I’m responsible for our internal Salesforce instance for sales people. So processes, tools, governance, user experience, within our internal Salesforce instance and within Slack. And I’ve been working a lot on the Slack for sales project for-

Mike Gerholdt: Wow.

Lissa Smith: … the past year and the rollout of Slack now. So it’s very fun and very exciting.

Mike Gerholdt: I will tell you, it’s always been a personal goal of mine when we started the podcast to have on as many Salesforce admins as possible. And I mean, Salesforce, Salesforce admins. But I say that a little tongue in cheek because I think it’s important. And I just did a talk with Pathfinders recently, the reason I bring that up and I say that is, your title, senior manager, business architecture isn’t something that I might search for on LinkedIn as a job-

Lissa Smith: Right.

Mike Gerholdt: … as a Salesforce admin. Right. And I think it’s important that we understand the identity and persona is called that, but the job title and the job descriptions may be very different.

Lissa Smith: So true. And I was lucky with this role that the word or the phrase, Salesforce admin, was included in the description that they were looking for somebody that had previous Salesforce admin experience. And so it showed up in a… This was a 10-year-old job search that I don’t even know how to turn off. It comes into my-

Mike Gerholdt: No.

Lissa Smith: … and it’s fine because I can see the landscape, especially when I was hiring admins, I could see who else is hiring here in Indianapolis. And I could see those other job descriptions and… But this one came through. And like you said, it was senior manager, business architecture. What’s that? And why did this even show up in the job search? I’m not even looking for a job and dug into that. And it’s really cool. And it’s Salesforce uses Salesforce to sell Salesforce, SuperMeta. There’s got to be a team that’s responsible for that. And-

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah.

Lissa Smith: … it’s pretty exciting to be on that team.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. I mean, I think in The Matrix, it’s taking the red pill, but for some reason taking the blue pill, right? So, I mean, you don’t have to give us details. But what kind of projects do you work on that I think… And the reason I ask that is, I want to be clear, not digging into your work-life, but I’m digging into analogous to what Salesforce admins would be doing. So what are, if somebody’s listening to this and thinking, “Hey, maybe I’ll become a Salesforce admin.” What’s kind of your everyday look like?

Lissa Smith: Sure. Yeah. So, I mean, we’re looking at new features. We often get them very early, as customer zero we get them first. So we’re looking at those new features. We also want dynamic forms on standard objects. So we want to be able to have that and make our user experience better. So we’re evaluating new features, we’re looking at how can we make user experience better. We’re collecting feedback from users. We’re governing our objects as well and our processes. We’re making sure that-

Mike Gerholdt: That’s a whole podcast in of itself.

Lissa Smith: … yeah, absolutely it is. We’re now looking at our digital HQ at Slack and how do we incorporate Slack into our processes. Make it Slack first, make Slack the platform of engagement for our users and ultimately, improve and make their processes more efficient. So it’s a day-to-day talking to users, understanding what users are doing and then making things better for them.

Mike Gerholdt: Sounds all the stuff we talk about in the central habits, which just makes me happy. It’s very good. Well, Lissa, this has been a very fun podcast. You are welcome back, anytime. If you have an idea, top of mind that you want to talk about, I will be super excited to see what Twitter has to say about this episode because I know it was one of the very first things that always pops into my inbox. Every time I check the community is, people asking for hiring or interview or questions or just anything around getting a job as being a Salesforce admin. And I thought it was a great way to kick off 2022. So thank you for helping me kick off 2022 on the podcast.

Lissa Smith: You’re welcome. Happy new year. I’m very excited to be here. I’m excited for the future of all of the new Salesforce admins and I’m rooting for you. And, yeah, excited.

Mike Gerholdt: So as I write, that was an amazing episode with Lissa. We literally probably could have talked for another hour, so I’m going to have to have Lissa back on the podcast. But to do that, you got to tweet me and tell me, what did I forget to ask Lissa on this episode? And then I’ll start compiling and we’ll get her back as soon as possible. What would you love to know about a hiring manager and asking questions to get that perfect admin job?

So be sure to tweet at us. And if you’d like to learn more about all things, Salesforce Admin, go to admin.salesforce.com to find more resources, including all of the links that I mentioned in this episode, as well as a full transcript. Now, you can stay up to date with us on social. We are at @SalesforceAdmns, no “I” on Twitter. Gillian is @gilliankbruce and, of course, I am @mikegerholdt. So with that, welcome to 2022 and stay safe, stay awesome and stay tuned for that next episode. We’ll see you in the cloud.



Direct download: Replay__Hiring_an_Admin_with_Lissa_Smith.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:00am PDT

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Belinda Wong, VP, Product Platform Management at Salesforce.

Join us as we talk about why sometimes Admins who are doing the best job go unnoticed and everything user access policy.

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

Thank you, Admins

Belinda is a Salesforce veteran in the midst of her 16th year with the organization. She actually got her start as an Admin way back when. She knows what it’s like to be asked over and over again to “just make it work” when so much more goes into understanding the problem and coming up with a solution that makes sense. She feels like often all you’ll get is a thanks for sorting things out without a deeper appreciation of what you’ve actually pulled off, so to everyone out there who’s been in that situation: she says thanks.

“Some of the best Admins I’ve talked to know how to anticipate,” Belinda says, they’re doing the research before a new Release drops to ensure everything goes smoothly. It can often feel like you get recognition only when you put out a big fire when things going smoothly on the other 364 days of the year is actually the bigger achievement.

What the Login Access Policy will mean for you

One thing Belinda and her team are working on to improve productivity for Admins is adding the ability to better group together Permissions and find ways for Salesforce to help with that out of the box. “We’ve had standard profiles for 20 years—they haven’t really come along,” she says, which is why they’ve been moving into creating standard permission sets and permission set groups to help.

Belinda and her team are working on Login Access Policy to really tackle those problems and help you manage everything. It’ll not only include permissions sets but also things that are currently a little more peripheral, like record level access controls, public groups, and more. Look out for an early pilot of that later this year (safe harbor) and hopefully, try it out and give Belinda your feedback.

Be sure to listen to the whole episode for what Belinda’s up to with video games and knitting, and what you should wear to Dreamforce.

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Full show transcript

Mike Gerholdt: Welcome to the Salesforce Admins Podcast, where we talk about product, community, and career to help you become an awesome admin. This week I'm talking with Belinda Wong, who's the VP of product management at Salesforce. Now, before we get into the conversation with Belinda, she has been at Salesforce for 16 years. That's a long time. And she is actually heading up... I'm sure you're familiar with the name Cheryl Feldman. If not, Cheryl's working on all of the user access and permission policy things. So Belinda heads up that area. She has a really interesting take on some of the things that we do as admins I look at it as kind of celebrating zero. And so that's going to make more sense when you listen to the podcast, but really doing those things where we're being preventative and working ahead. Belinda even gives some advice on how to coach that up to your manager and make a big deal of being proactive. So with that, let's get Belinda on the podcast.
So Belinda, welcome to the podcast.

Belinda Wong: Thank you, Mike. I am so excited.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. Well, it's your first podcast, which is hard to believe because I feel like I have spoken to Belinda Wong quite a bit in my career, but maybe just not on the podcast. So welcome to your first podcast.

Belinda Wong: Thank you. Thank you. I'm excited.

Mike Gerholdt: Now, you have a really cool title, VP product management at Salesforce. So hey, you've done some things. I would love to start off by you kind of introducing yourself to what are some of the products that perhaps you've managed that admins have used?

Belinda Wong: So I am nearly at my 16th year.

Mike Gerholdt: Oh, congrats.

Belinda Wong: Finishing my 16th year at Salesforce. So I have done a lot of different things here. But from a product perspective, I moved into product management probably about halfway through that stint. I started off with owning our licensing and provisioning framework basically. I call it our digital delivery. This is how we play the role of the FedEx and UPS for all the products that Salesforce sells. So that was my first product. Then I expanded into some of our authorization space. And it was originally called admin, but it's really authorization, meaning how do you entitle your users. And think profiles, permission sets and all the goodness around that. So those are my two main areas. I started off doing the direct management. And then now I have a team of PMs. You guys will know that I recently brought Cheryl Feldman to take over that authorization space and she's been amazing.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, rockstar. Rockstar.

Belinda Wong: Yeah, absolutely rockstar. So that's my space. I affectionately call it entitlement services. So it's basically all the capabilities and services to entitle your system as well entitling your end users. Is that helpful?

Mike Gerholdt: Gotcha. Yeah. I mean, you are part of the delivery and now you're the person that keeps the doors locked or unlocked and gives admins the ability to hand out permissions. I like it.

Belinda Wong: That's great. I'm going to steal that.

Mike Gerholdt: Okay. Use it. So it feels like last year, but it was actually just April, if you can believe, that we did TrailblazerDX in San Francisco and we were crossing paths in the setup area. And I will joke, we found the most splinterable picnic table, I think, available on the planet to sit down and have a chat. One of the topics that you brought up, which was really keen and why I wanted to have you on the podcast, was you said sometimes tasks that admins do are undervalued. And I'd really love for you to elaborate more on that.

Belinda Wong: Yeah, absolutely. In fact, my personal history with Salesforce started as an admin. I mean, before I joined Salesforce as an employee, my first introduction to Salesforce was administering an org for a startup. So one of the things that I figured out that, I mean, it was a great learning and it was also the reason why I fell in love with Salesforce as a product to start with is all the flexibility, all the things that you can figure out, but at the same time, people don't necessarily appreciate it, right? I remember being on the receiving end of, "Just make it work," you know?

Mike Gerholdt: Right.

Belinda Wong: "Just give me the... Look, he could do something that I can't. Just make it so that it works." Since then, I've talked to a lot of administrators that's come up to me either in conference shows or I've reached out and talked to that that said the same thing. It's like, my users just want it to work, so they don't necessarily appreciate how much time the administrator has to go and understand what happened, have to go figure out what is or isn't set up right. And at the end of the day, all they get appreciated for is, "Okay, you fix the problem. Great!" Not that you spent 20 hours figuring out how to do it. And that's the part that I think we need to really highlight and just give that thanks. And I want to thank every administrator, everybody out there that's had that experience, even if it's only once in a while. But it's like, thank you. Thank you for persevering and staying with us.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, I think there's... And I'll paraphrase. I read a note somewhere that kind of summarizes what you said, which was, a pipe in a house is clogged and person calls the plumber. Plumber comes over and says, "It'll be $400 to fix it." "Well, how, long's it going to take you to fix it?" "Oh, it'll be fixed in five minutes. You're not paying me for my time. You're paying me for the fact that I know how to fix this in five minutes." I think that's what you're saying, right? It's a little bit of the reverse of that, but it's like, "Thank you for doing the thing I asked. However, I lacked to gain the insight into the amount of time that it took for you to get that correct."
I mean, I have auto bill set up on how many of my home bills and cell bills and stuff like that. When the money just comes out of your account and you pay the bill and the service always works, you have a really hard time finding fault with the service. It's when the thing doesn't work that you're like, "Yeah, this company's horrible," right?

Belinda Wong: Exactly. Exactly. And that's the other part, is talking about another underappreciate, is that anticipation. Some of the best admins that I've talked to anticipates, right? They're the ones doing all the research on, "Hey, I hear a release is coming. Let's go learn about what's going to change. How's that going to impact me? I'm going to go figure it out before it actually impacts my end users." And again, they're doing it naturally. They just know that's the best way for them to get ahead of what might be problems. But I don't see that as appreciated by all the companies and the managers out there so we should advertise that that is important work.

Mike Gerholdt: Right. So let's talk about that because I feel like there's always one part and I listen to other podcasts and like, "Yeah, that's a problem." It's really easy to point out problems, but I think the second part of that is like, "So what's a solution?" I mean think of it from, I'll put it very astutely right into your seat, you're a manager of people and if you have somebody that does anticipate problems and does it very well and somebody that doesn't, what are things that you do to try and coach the other person and reward one of them for doing that and kind of help the other person not? Or conversely, what should that admin think of them out there, learning all the release notes, proactively putting out, "Here's what's coming. Here's things we need to think about," but feeling that undervalue from their manager? What should they do to communicate that to their manager? What would you want communicated to you?

Belinda Wong: I'm going to tell you a story. One of the things that I say especially for about my licensing and provisioning area is we are an enormous success when there are no incidents, right?

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah.

Belinda Wong: But reporting zero incidents is not normally what people do. Although, I do. Now that I think about it, I don't know if they have them around anymore but I remember days when I would go into the office, this was like my pre Salesforce days, I worked at an environmental engineering firm. You would walk into the office in the kitchen and there would be a poster that says, "Number of days with no OSHA violations."

Mike Gerholdt: Oh, yeah. There's a construction site I go past to take my dog to daycare and they have a sign that's similar to that.

Belinda Wong: Right. But you notice that the metric they're reporting is a number that goes up, right?

Mike Gerholdt: Mm-hmm.

Belinda Wong: And we seem to have a natural tendency towards the bigger the number, the more vanity the better it is to have. But the reality is, what we want to measure is no incident. We actually want a zero.

Mike Gerholdt: Right.

Belinda Wong: But in that particular story, they had to represent it with a number that goes up so that people recognize the importance, like bigger is better. So maybe that's what we need to do is to say, "Let's figure out how to celebrate that. A no incident is not just, 'Okay nothing happened,' but that there's greatness in that. There's a metric what we should come up with to celebrate that." I don't know if that answers the question.

Mike Gerholdt: No, I do think... Yeah, it is funny. I didn't realize that, but I drive past that construction site and you notice the double or triple digit number. And then sometimes you drive by and you're like, "Oh, it's at five. Something must have happened, right?

Belinda Wong: Right.

Mike Gerholdt: And it's similar to like that auto bill that I have set up on some of my accounts. When they just bill me and my cell phone service works and I don't have issues, it's kind of cool. But man, you can get me flaming mad if I get out in the middle of nowhere and my cell service drops or something happens and it's like, "Wait a minute, I forgot about the 364 other days that boring was not even celebrated, but it totally meant they were doing their job."

Belinda Wong: Exactly. Yeah. I think that's what I would... I think your question was about how I would coach the people into, "Okay, you're not anticipating" because they got attention for the incidents that happened, right?

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah.

Belinda Wong: We always jump on escalations. So the person's name had recognition because there was an escalation. I mean, you could say there's a small negative connotation to that, but it's still, there was recognition. Whereas the other person who was doing the job, like doing their job well, was not getting recognized, right? So my coaching or my job as a manager would be, okay, let's find a way to celebrate that. And like I said, let's find a way that people understand it's important and that they see that big number or that big recognition.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. I think a lot of what we talk about in admin relations and putting together sample dashboards is, "Look at all of the stories or the case tickets that I've burned down over the month." Like, "Look at all the things I've solved." I think the reverse of that is also... And I apologize I can't remember the year, but I know at Dreamforce one year we had a presentation that an individual in the community did. It was like dashboard of zeros is what I remember.

Belinda Wong: Right.

Mike Gerholdt: It's almost like celebrating that, right? Thinking through, "I know we want to talk about here's all the big stuff that's happened, but let's talk about how this dashboard month over month is still zero." And that could be number of incidences because we've anticipated problems that were coming up and proactively worked on solutions. So thinking that through, I can hear admins in my ear. They want to know like, "So Belinda, you manage Cheryl and you got this whole team of people. What's some of the stuff that you're proactively working on to make admins life easier?"

Belinda Wong: There's a couple of efforts that in our authorization space that we're looking at. One upcoming is something called user access policies. So one of the things that we know will improve our administrators productivity is to be able to better group together permissions, and maybe even to have Salesforce be much better at providing the prescriptive out of the box representation. I mean, the reality is we've had standard profiles for 20 years. They haven't really come along.

Mike Gerholdt: [inaudible].

Belinda Wong: We've started moving into a space we call permission sets and permission set groups. We've slowly started to put out standard permission sets, but usually along with incremental add on features, things like Einstein or maybe Health Cloud coming out with, "Hey, this is how you can configure a Health Cloud person." But we need to get a better way to do that in a standardized across all of our features and services. And that's what user access policy is intended to be, is a way for us to create a grouping that not only includes the permission sets, but also things that are a little more peripheral, like the record level access controls, like public groups and things like that. So look out for that. That is definitely on Cheryl's roadmap, user access policies. We're looking to do that, a pilot, an early pilot of that this year, so safe harbor. And then really get more feedback and iterate on that over the next year or so.

Mike Gerholdt: So is that feature functionality just a result of technology changing or the granularity of Salesforce needing to be even tighter? I guess the question I'm poking at is really for kind of newer admins. What about the profile doesn't work? And I say that because I've got a profile on Twitter and I've got a profile on Facebook and I've got a profile on other things that I log into. And I think maybe the new admin looks at that as like why are we splitting this up a little bit more?

Belinda Wong: The main aspect of it is definitely the growth of different types of functionality in the platform. I mean, when we first started 20 years ago or over 20 years ago, we only had sales, right?

Mike Gerholdt: Mm-hmm.

Belinda Wong: So profiles were set up to say, "Okay, you're a standard sales user. You do a little bit of contract management, or you just need read-only access to the sales objects."

Mike Gerholdt: Right.

Belinda Wong: We've since grown into service cloud. We've grown into experience communities, portals. And our enormous app exchange ecosystem has added a lot more ISV partner solutions that sometimes play with the same objects, but often are their own set of entities, right?It's kind of like that bolt on. You start putting all this stuff onto the one item, it's like, "Oh, let me put on an extra pocket on this jacket. Let me put this badge or this pin." So now you've got this really heavyweight jacket that you have to put on. And you actually have to change it completely when something needs to be tweaked.

Mike Gerholdt: Right.

Belinda Wong: So what we've said is, "You know what? We need to redesign that jacket so that it is more like the type of jacket where there's an inner lining that you can take off, or the sleeves comes off and you can actually be able to use this in a much more flexible way." That's kind of where that thought process, that design was coming from.

Mike Gerholdt: No, that's good. That's a really good analogy. I never really thought of that. I can only say, to me, I see it akin to a lot of the changes that we saw with Apple products. Like if you remember when the iPod came out, well, we synced it with iTunes, right?

Belinda Wong: Mm-hmm.

Mike Gerholdt: And then the phone came out, except now the phone has apps. But you get apps through iTunes, right?It kind of felt weird. They really had to figure out a way to kind of like, this one thing can't do everything anymore, you know?

Belinda Wong: Right.

Mike Gerholdt: I like your analogy of pins and buttons. You end up with this huge, massive jacket that isn't as functional because you've just kept adding to it as opposed to being able to scope out that vision. So it's a great analogy. Belinda, one of the things that I love to ask and feel free to answer however you wish. We've had a few PMs on and we'll probably see you at Dreamforce. Admins will be walking around. What is something you love to do in your spare time when you're not making user access policy products awesome for Salesforce admins?

Belinda Wong: So my two favorite hobbies, they're actually very different, but my two favorite hobbies, my first favorite hobby really the time sync one is video games.

Mike Gerholdt: Ooh.

Belinda Wong: It's actually a way for me to get connected with my own family, because my husband's a big video gamer.

Mike Gerholdt: Okay.

Belinda Wong: The two of us from even before we had children, we would sit side by side and play Final Fantasy in Co Op mode together. It was a great way for us to learn from each other and really connect and be together, because I was always the puzzle solver while he was the one who was like the fighter. He was much more dextrous than me, but we would get to a portion of the game where he is like, "I can't figure out where to go from here anymore." And it's like, "No, you just need to solve that little... Move those boxes around and then you'll be able to get to that extra passage way."
And we started doing that with our kids too. It's like we would play the Lego. I mean, Lego is big French. They take all of these different movies and then turn them into games with the Lego characters. So we just love those. We just love those. Our time sync is family time, video gaming. Although we also do occasionally board games when we're like, "Okay, maybe we're a little over indexed on the screen time now."
But the other thing that I do for me, which is more of a personal thing is knitting.

Mike Gerholdt: Ooh.

Belinda Wong: Because I just love being able to produce something. I'm not as talented as other crafters that we have at Salesforce. I am just totally envious of what Chris Duarte can do with the [inaudible] machine. But I've been trying to figure out how do I want designing, knitting a cap with the cloud on it and stuff like that. I'm working on it. Maybe I'll figure it out by Dreamforce and get you in.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. I will take anything knitted. I love knitted stuff. It's so cool. That's so neat. I think you probably tapped into a lot of the things that I see our community do. I know there's a lot of video game people out there. Josh who hosts the Dev Podcast is a big video gamer. I think they're also on Twitch. I don't know if you Twitch stream your video games. That's a whole thing I just figured out, but you can watch a channel where you watch people play video games. One of my friends' kids told me about it. And I remember thinking to myself, "That's got to be incredibly boring." And then later that night I found myself two hours in watching somebody play a video game on Twitch. And I was like, "Okay. Note taken." So, yeah. Interesting.

Belinda Wong: Yeah. I haven't quite gotten into that yet. Although my daughters do. My younger daughter loves Roblox.

Mike Gerholdt: Oh.

Belinda Wong: I mean, that is the video game of choice for at least my 11 year old.

Mike Gerholdt: Okay.

Belinda Wong: And she's watched people do... That and Minecraft, because she's loves the building aspect, being able to just make giant towers and things like that.

Mike Gerholdt: Yes. Yes.

Belinda Wong: So I've seen her do watch a Twitch channel on Roblox or Minecraft.

Mike Gerholdt: Right. Yeah.

Belinda Wong: I haven't gotten into it myself yet.

Mike Gerholdt: I did the Minecraft Creative mode for a while. I totally got into it. And then I built this huge house thing. I think it's Creative mode or something, Design mode, you can fly around. And I was flying around and I got lost. I couldn't find my way back to this big house that I had built. And I was just so devastated that I was like, "Oh." And so I just never picked it up again.

Belinda Wong: No.

Mike Gerholdt: That, and then I made the mistake of going online and seeing other stuff that people had built. And I was like, "Oh my thing's not even close to that." So hey, there we go. But yeah, video games and knitting. Belinda, thanks for taking time out of the day and talking about some of the stuff you're working on at Salesforce and recognizing that some of the things our admins do that we've always realized are things that they should talk a little bit more about.

Belinda Wong: Yeah, absolutely. And thank you for everything. I want to just say again, thank you to all the admins and everything they do in making Salesforce easy to use.

Mike Gerholdt: So it was great talking with Belinda. We can always go down host different alleys. I'd love to know if there's video game players or knitters out there. I see that all over my Twitter feed quite a bit. And holy cow, if you're coming to Dreamforce this year, it's going to be warm, but bring something knitted because that's going to be super cool. I truly wish I could knit. I have not picked it up. I played some video games, but it was neat to see some of the hobbies that Belinda has. I really enjoyed her advice that she gave us as admins about thinking about some of those tasks that we do and the time we put into it and celebrating ourselves and also paying attention, being ahead of the curve and anticipating new features, new releases or maybe new issues. It's always worth bringing those up to our managers as well as we work through those things.
So of course, if you want to learn more about all things Salesforce admin, just go to admin.salesforce.com to find resources including any of the links that we mentioned in today's episode as well as a full transcript. Of course you can stay up to date with us on social, we are @SalesforceAdmins. No I on Twitter. Gillian is on Twitter. She is @gilliankbruce. And of course, I am on Twitter @MikeGerholdt. And with that, stay safe, stay awesome, and stay tuned for the next episode. We'll see you in the cloud.



Direct download: Celebrating_Admins_with_Belinda_Wong.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:00am PDT

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Christine Magnuson, a Solution Engineering Manager at Salesforce and 2008 Olympic swimmer and two-time silver medalist.

Join us as we talk about what skills transferred from being a top athlete to working in the Salesforce ecosystem, why you shouldn’t sell yourself short, and why Admins are great partners in Solution Engineering.

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

Transitioning into a Salesforce career

Christine is officially the first Olympic medalist we’ve had on the pod. “You have to constantly check yourself that you’re in reality,” she says, “you’re just among the best of the best in what they do and it’s an honor to be in that community.”

So we know how she got her start, but how did Christine wind up in Solution Engineering? She started with a master's in Public Administration and hit the pavement to network. Almost anyone was willing to give 30 minutes to an Olympian asking about their lives. “Actually,” she says, “I don’t think you need to be an Olympian to call somebody up to ask about what they do and what they like and what they don’t—everyone says yes because they like talking about themselves.”

How Sales was the perfect jumping-off point for Christine

The overwhelming advice was to start in Sales because it applies to so many different things. “I came to realize that it was really about me believing in the product I was selling,” Christine says, “and as long as I believed in the product I was doing everybody else a favor by telling them about it and not them doing a favor for me.” The business she was working for had started leveraging Salesforce and, since she was the youngest person on the team, she was the de facto accidental Admin.

Christine found herself working at Quip soon after they were acquired. She worked in Sales for a year “but I nerded out on the product so much and working with the PMs and the marketing team and having that cross-functional view was really fun for me,” she says, so when they decided to build out the Solution Engineering team she volunteered. From there it was a transition to the core team working with key Salesforce clients like Amazon, Dell, and BMWare.

Why Admins are visionaries

Admins are particularly helpful in this work because they know their user base inside and out: what they want to do, where their pain points are, and what needs automating. “Some of the Admins I work with are so innovative about not just thinking about what is a small step forward, but what are five steps forwards and should we be taking those big leaps forward,” Christine says.

One of the secret powers that good Admins have is the ability to use the tools already in Salesforce to the max. As the old saying goes, when you have a hammer everything looks like a nail, and sometimes in these large organizations, Devs jump straight to coding and customizing when there might already be a tool you can use in your org. 

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Full Show Transcript

Gillian Bruce: Welcome to the Salesforce Admins Podcast, where we talk about product, community, and careers to help you be an awesome admin. I am your host, Gillian Bruce. And today, we have a first, listeners. We are joined by a two-time Olympic silver medalist and solution engineering manager at Salesforce, Christine Magnuson. She has so much great knowledge and experience to share. I asked her about all of the things, everything from what's it like to build a team of Salesforce professionals to how do you transfer skills from being an elite athlete to working in the Salesforce ecosystem, and so much more. So without further ado, let's welcome Christine on the pod. Christine, welcome to the podcast.

Christine Magnuson: Thanks so much for having me.

Gillian Bruce: Okay. So it is official. You are the first official Olympian and medal winner to appear on the Salesforce Admins Podcast. I just have to lead with that because it's pretty amazing. Tell me, what was it like to win a silver medal at the Olympics? Two of them.

Christine Magnuson: Two of them. Well, I am happy to be your first. I have a feeling I won't be your last, but very excited to be the trailblazer here on that front. Yes. My Olympic career was so fun. I mean, I highly suggest becoming an Olympian if you have the chance to.

Gillian Bruce: Totally on my list.

Christine Magnuson: Yes. Exactly. Sign yourself up. It's a really amazing community to be a part of, and to stand up and represent your country in that form is just such an honor. It takes your breath away. You have to constantly check yourself that you're in reality. And just to be in that space with so many amazing competitors from not just Team USA, but around the world. It's so such a hard feeling to describe because you're just amongst the best of the best in what they do. And it's an honor. It's an honor to be amongst that community. And it's something that it never leaves you. Once you're an Olympian, you're always an Olympian. There's never former Olympians. There's just Olympians. And so it's definitely a club that you're part of for your entire life once you're there once, and that's pretty incredible.

Gillian Bruce: So it's like being part of Salesforce ecosystem, right? I mean, once you're a part of it.

Christine Magnuson: It's like being a ranger. Once you're a ranger, they don't take it away. You get to be a ranger for life. Now you can always do more, but yes, it's 100%. It doesn't leave you. You can always come back. I mean, how many boomerangs do we know in this Salesforce... Well, Salesforce is a company. Of course, there's boomerangs, but then also just in the ecosystem as well.

Gillian Bruce: Yeah. Once you get in, you can't really get out because it's a good place to be. So speaking of that, talk to me a little bit about your transition from being an amazing Olympic athlete to now being... I mean, you work with solution engineers here at Salesforce. Tell me a little bit about that journey.

Christine Magnuson: Oh, man. I have the best job. At least I think so. So when I retired in 2013, I had just finished up my master's program from the University of Arizona. I have a master's in public administration. I thought I wanted to go into non-profits or athletic governances, and then through that experience, really felt like I wanted to actually go into the corporate world and get more experience before applying those things potentially back to those communities. And so I networked with really anyone who talked me. Good news was that pretty much everybody was willing to give 30 minutes to an Olympian who was just asking them about their lives. Actually, I don't think you'd need to be an Olympian to call somebody up and say, "Can you tell me about what you do and what you like and what you don't?" Everyone says yes. They love talking about themselves, which is great.
And so I net networked my way and everybody said, "Sales is a great place to start. You'll never regret it. You can apply it to so many different ways even if you end up not liking sales." It took me a while to realize that that was the case. When you think about sales, you think about that used car salesman and people selling, pushing things on you that you don't want. And I came to realize that it was really about me believing in the product I was selling. And as long as I believed in the product, I was doing everybody else a favor by telling them about it and not them doing a favor for me. And so-

Gillian Bruce: That shift. Yeah.

Christine Magnuson: Total shift in mindset. And so I joined a great small company out of Chicago that was placing consultants into life science companies and learned full life cycle sales from them. And they were also doing a lot with their Salesforce implementation during that time. And of course, I was one of the younger ones in the company and new to sales, and they were like, "Christine can figure this out. What should the experience be?" And so I was the super user. And then towards my end, I was actually part-time admin with no qualification whatsoever other than I could pick it up. That's I think the amazing thing about the product itself is that you can pick it up without going and learning how to code. And so I really fell in love with the technology.
I had moved to San Francisco because I was in Chicago and Chicago's really cold. Growing up there, I knew what it meant. And I spent a couple of adult years there and just decided to get out. So I moved to San Francisco, wanted to get into tech, and there was this little company called Quip that had just been acquired. They were ramping things up. I joined their sales team, did sales for a year, but felt I was basically... I nerded out on the product so much and working with the PMs and the marketing team, and having that cross-functional view was really fun for me, that when they decided to build out the solution engineering team, I raised my hand and everybody around me was really supportive. And so I moved to the new role, was immediately put on some of our top accounts, which was mind-blowing to see how these really complex accounts worked. And a few years later, I was leading the SE team and helping expand my knowledge across the US with our [inaudible] based team.
And now, about six or nine months ago, I came over to what we call core, which is thinking about the whole Salesforce portfolio for particular customer bases. And I have the honor of leading some really elite SEs who cover companies like Amazon and Dell and VMware and a few others. And they're just some of the sharpest individuals that I've ever met. And I get the honor of managing them and then meeting with our customers and seeing what they're doing and trying to help them through a lot of really complex issues. And so I'm never bored. I'm always using my brain. And it's a really fun job, and all because I just nerded out on the Salesforce products.

Gillian Bruce: Well, you're preaching to the choir here because admins are the ultimate Salesforce nerds. We're very proud of our nerdom.

Christine Magnuson: I love it.

Gillian Bruce: And I think what's so interesting is you interact with admins and customers at these very complex companies and these complex implementations. I want to touch more on how you transferred some of your skills as an Olympian to your skills in the Salesforce ecosystem. But before we get there, can you talk to me about some of the things that you see make an admin at one of these very complex implementations successful?

Christine Magnuson: Yeah. I think when they really understand their user base, that helps an extreme amount because they understand what their user base is trying to do, where they can automate, where they're struggling. And so the more they can understand their end user, the better. And then it comes down to, okay, understanding the actual implementation, pros and cons. Let's be real. No implementation out there is perfect.

Gillian Bruce: What? What are you talking about?

Christine Magnuson: Well, if somebody knows of one, please call me and let me know how it went and how you got there. But it's just because things change. Companies grow and you can't predict the future when you're implementing. And so hindsight is 20-20. But some of the admins I work with are so innovative of not just thinking about what is a small step forward, but what are five step forward? Should we be doing five steps instead of one in certain areas and taking those big leaps forward? And how does global changes affect us? Not just scale and a global distributed user base, but also data residency requirements. And oh my goodness, how do we push changes if we're going to have multi-org? And what does hyper force look like? And all of these things, they're a part of the conversation. And that is one, really fulfilling, I think for everybody involved because we're getting the full picture, but it helps us break down what is realistic for this customer moving forward and what's their timeline? It's all about being in sync. But some just really great work being done out there by our admins.

Gillian Bruce: I love that. Knowing your user base, knowing what your users are trying to do, and then really that forward visionary thinking of what the product can do and the direction that things are going. I think very, very important skills and traits of every successful admin. So it's great hearing it from you because you really work with some of the most complex.

Christine Magnuson: Yeah. I'll add in one more because I know a lot of our admins work with IT groups. I'm renovating my house right now. I was talking to you about that earlier. When you talk to somebody who's a builder, they always want to build. And if you're talking to somebody who is a woodworker, they're just like, "Oh. Do this." And it's always in their frame of reference. And when we talk to customers, if we're talking to a highly IT-oriented or builder-oriented customer, they're like, "Oh. We'll just customize it. We'll just build it." And I think one of the powers that admins can come in is saying, "That's out-of-the-box. Stop building. Stop wasting our time and stop doing over-customized things that are going to hurt us down the road because again, we can't predict the future. Let's do as much out-of-the-box as possible. And then we can apply our own flavor to it if need be. And the customer or the user base should tell us if we actually need to do that or not."
And so that's the third one I would put in is they're so valuable with saving their company's time by not developing things that are already just there for them.

Gillian Bruce: You hit the nail in my head with that. That is something that is just... It comes up time and time again. And often it's like you mentioned, working with IT. There's also sometimes that conflict when you're a developer mindset versus an admin mindset because they'll go straight to like, "Oh. I can build this really, really cool thing that's super complex and blah, blah, blah." And the admin's like, "Hold up a second. You realize that we already have this in Salesforce."

Christine Magnuson: Totally. We already own it.

Gillian Bruce: Why don't you spend your time customizing something on top of that? Let's start with this base first.

Christine Magnuson: I know. And some of these larger customers, they have a lot in their contracts that they should be using. It's just use it. You've already paid for it. So if you use more of it, it's kind of free because you've already put that-

Gillian Bruce: It's included.

Christine Magnuson: Yeah. It's included. You've already made the investment. So get more value out of it. And so stepping back and making sure that they're using that full value is something that the admins can do so much for their companies on.

Gillian Bruce: Oh. I love that because that's such... I mean, again, talk about not only driving efficiency for the users and the user base and helping people get their jobs done, but you're saving the company resources and time as [inaudible]-

Christine Magnuson: It's huge. The ROI behind it is huge.

Gillian Bruce: I love those three really, really great points. So I want to dive back into the story of Christine for a second. So we have been talking a lot about the admin skills kit, which we just launched at TrailblazerDX a few months ago, and it's all about helping identify those business skills that help admins be successful. So on top of the product knowledge, these are things like communication and problem-solving, designer's mindset that really make an admin successful. And one element of that is we have language in there about how to represent these skills in the context of the Salesforce ecosystem. So this is how it might look like on your resume. This is how it might look like in a job posting you create to hire someone with that skill. How do you think about transferable skills? Because clearly you transferred a very unique skillset from being a very high level competitive athlete, an Olympian, to now the technology sector and the Salesforce ecosystem. So can you talk to me a little bit about how you managed transferring your skillset?

Christine Magnuson: Yeah. Well, especially from the athletic world... and we're talking to the Team USA athletes about this right now... is what are those athlete skillsets that we probably took for granted, frankly? When you're in an elite level of whatever it is, but in my case, athleticism, you are surrounded by other people in that environment. And so you just start to take those skills for granted because they're normalized. And so how do you actually step away from that normalization and say, "Actually, that wasn't normal. That was special. And how do I articulate that it is special?" And so when it comes to the athletic population, we're very good at time management. When you're going from practice to school or work back to practice and you have to... I mean, even fitting in meals and strategic rest, all of that goes into just having really good time management.
And especially now in a remote workforce world with distractions all around us and family coming in and out, my dogs were just here, it can get a little crazy. And so being able to focus on time management is huge. So that would, I would say, is an obvious number one. Two, coachability. Oh, my goodness. We're always constantly going to be learning new technology and picking up new skills and we should be getting feedback about how we're doing and what more should we be doing? And being able to... And athletes, believe me, we tend to be confident people. Takes a lot to stand up in front of a lot of people with a bathing suit on.

Gillian Bruce: Sure does.

Christine Magnuson: Most athletes don't lack in confidence, but I will say we know when to check our egos at the door because somebody's about to make us better. And that translates really well to a workforce where you have to actually invite feedback. Not everybody is good at giving or receiving feedback, and we can all get better by doing it. When somebody gives me feedback, it's such a compliment to me. They have just invested in me. They took the time to think something through, invest in me, and make me better. What a compliment, even if the feedback is harsh. And athletes are so used to that.

Gillian Bruce: Feedback is a gift, right? Isn't that what we were saying? Yeah.

Christine Magnuson: Exactly. All feedback is good feedback, even if it's-

Gillian Bruce: It doesn't feel good.

Christine Magnuson: It doesn't feel good. Exactly. And so the feedback loop is huge for athletes. The other, which I think we definitely take for granted, is attention to detail. Attention to detail, but still flexibility. So when I was swimming, I was talking to my coach about moving my arm a slightly different way at a slightly different angle. It was maybe an inch difference, and then doing that thousands, tens of thousands of times perfectly. And so that attention to detail is huge. But also knowing that you're working within a rule of constraints, and sometimes you need to be flexible. My first job, I remember coming in and working with somebody who's in operations, and they were extremely rule-oriented. There was no breaking her rules. And I had a situation where I was like, "Hey. I think we need to break this... We're going to have to do this differently," is how I phrased it. And she was like, "Absolutely not."
And it shocked me because I had the logical argument. I had all of my data. I had backed it up and I said, "This is why this is different." And she said, "Nope, too bad." And I was just like, "I've never encountered someone like you before. I have to change the way I communicate." And all of it was really interesting lessons learned, but I think athletes can stay pretty fluid in these really changing dynamic environments. Still know what rules are important, but then apply details to them like, "Well, do we even make a shift here or shift there?" So that's kind of two in one with the flexibility and detail. But I would say that's another big one.

Gillian Bruce: Yeah. And I like the way that you paired those two together because especially as I think about admins specifically, the attention to detail is critical because you got to dot all the I's and cross all the Ts and make sure everything is locked down or assigned correctly or every single workflow is thought of. But at the same time, you do. You have to remain flexible because you may have to adjust that solution and adjust it for this specific user type or adjust it for this specific situation and... Yeah.

Christine Magnuson: Oh, my goodness. Yes. I mean, how many companies do we see right now holistically changing their business models? Moving to subscription. I mean, what a huge difference and what an impact on their Salesforce instances. Totally complex. You need to be very into the details, but you also need to be flexible because we're going to change a lot. And we're probably not going to predict everything on day one no matter how good we are planning.

Gillian Bruce: We can't see the future. What are you talking about? Come on.

Christine Magnuson: Oh, man. Well, maybe some of them out there can. I've never been good at it.

Gillian Bruce: No. I mean, I think that's really interesting. One of the things that I hear a lot from admins who are either transferring from another industry into the Salesforce ecosystem is really that idea of not throwing away all that experience they had let's say if they worked in a warehouse for 15 years or worked as a teacher. And it can feel like you have to start at ground zero a little bit because everything sounds different. It looks different. But I really like how you identify those skills that you were able to take from something that's very seemingly different from the technology space, but then rethink about them and apply them in a way that has made you successful in a completely different industry. What tips and advice do you have for someone who's maybe in that moment of like, "Oh, my gosh. I'm switching my career and I feel like I don't know what I can pull from."?

Christine Magnuson: Yeah. My advice is actually... and I've done this with a couple of my direct reports... is step back and take your titles away. Have literally a pen and paper. Go old school. Sit down away from all technology and think to yourself, "What do I love to do on a day-to-day basis? What skills do I love and want to develop more? And where are my strengths?" Almost a strength finder type exercise, and just write them down. And then we are like, "Okay. What are the skills do I think I need for this new career?" And then cross-reference and don't forget that a lot of them transfer, but maybe just the verbiage is different.
And so here's a great example. I did swim clinics all the time when I was swimming professionally, which meant I had anywhere between 30 and 100 kids, ages between 6 and 18 for four hours in a day where I was teaching them something and taking photos with them and telling them about life as a professional swimmer, as an Olympian. My storytelling and presentation skills and public speaking skills were pretty well-honed because if you can hold the attention of a bunch of eight-year-olds, guess what? A room of business people who are supposed to pay attention to you, a lot less intimidating and probably more on topic.
And so I was thinking, "Oh, yeah. I'm good at public speaking." Well, no. I'm good at storytelling. Do you know what every job in corporate America needs, is more storytellers? And how do I fit this into a really logical timeline and personas and make it interesting to people? Well, okay. I was just using the wrong verbiage. And so you'll find a lot of that, I think, no matter what careers you're talking about. Both my parents were teachers. Oh, my goodness. The things that I learned from them that I apply now today, there's a long, long list. And so take that time and make that list for yourself. And then if you're not sure how it translates to the other side of things, you can have conversations with people who are already there and maybe show them the list.
Heck, use your thesaurus. Sometimes, it's as simple as that. You're like, "I didn't think that. That was kind of similar." And so it's just a translation exercise. But really step back and think about the skills you probably take for granted because those are the ones that you'll end up keeping into your job that will stay with you and still be of real high value to your employer.

Gillian Bruce: Great advice. Well, and we've got the admin skills kit to help elucidate at least 14 of them that [inaudible]-

Christine Magnuson: There you go.

Gillian Bruce: ... help you see some connections there.

Christine Magnuson: Exactly.

Gillian Bruce: One other thing I wanted to talk to you about, Christine, is I mean, I could just keep you on the podcast for hours and hours and hours, I'm sure. But you've got an actual job to do. But before we get to wrapping, I wanted to ask you, in the context of the Salesforce admin skills kit, I know that you actually pulled me a while ago like, "Hey. I'm going to send this to one of my customers." From a customer who is hiring an admin or... I'm sure you talk to your customers all the time who are trying to figure out how to properly build a team to administer Salesforce. Could you maybe share what are the common issues that they usually face? What are some things that an admin listening to this who's either hiring someone or wanting to hire someone or be that next best person who can get hired, what kind of advice can you share from being in your role and what you've seen?

Christine Magnuson: Well, the war for talent is real. So I'll talk about Amazon for a second. And this is all public knowledge. You can go on their website and just do your own search and find this yourself. If you search AWS and Salesforce... I did this the other week... there were over 440 jobs listed. That's just AWS. And Amazon is big. They have a lot of Salesforce instances. They are hunting for talent and they're hunting for talent at all levels. And I think that's where we sometimes forget is everyone thinks like, "Oh. To go work at a company like Amazon, oh, my goodness. I need to be so senior." And that's just not the case. They need people of all levels. And sometimes they need the doers who are in on the details more than the strategic thinkers. They got a bunch of strategic thinkers. They need the doers.
And so when you go look at their websites and then have conversations with them, they're willing to invest in somebody who's sharp and has the basics and is willing to just learn with them and continue to upscale as they're with the employer. And so I think don't count yourself out. If you're looking for the job, apply to a job you might not think you're qualified for. And whether they put you in that position or a different position, it starts the conversation, and I think it's really good for everyone. So definitely don't undersell your skills. They're needed out there right now. There's a lot of companies. I cited one, which is probably extreme example, just because the volume of people they have. But every company out there that I talk to is concerned about more talent in-house, in their tools, and Salesforce is a go-to tool.
For those hiring admins, I would say take a little bit of the DEI approach, diversity, equity, and inclusion. It doesn't need to be somebody who checks all your boxes for every role. Talk to people. Be a little bit more flexible. Tell your recruiters to be more flexible. I mean, I have found some of the best people on my team who were not either in the Salesforce ecosystem or where they weren't SEs. And they're amazing because they come with such transferable skills and they maybe had a basis in one or the other. And so working with your recruiters to be really flexible and take that diversity, equity, and inclusion approach of, "I don't need somebody who checks all the boxes. I need the right person for the job." And that's a different mindset.

Gillian Bruce: I love that. That is great advice. It's very rare that we talk about the employer, the hiring manager perspective on the podcast. So I think that is really, really excellent advice. Christine, oh, my gosh. Thank you so much for everything you-

Christine Magnuson: Thanks for having me.

Gillian Bruce: ... [inaudible] with us today. I feel so lucky. You're my first also Olympic medalist that I've ever gotten to speak to. So it's a double whammy. You're the first one on the pod. It's my first time getting to talk to an elite Olympian. So thank you so much. And also, thank you for all you do at Salesforce. I mean, you have clearly done a lot already, and I know you're going to do more. And thanks for being a great advocate for admins and advocate for athletes and people transferring skills, and we'll have to have you back on at some point.

Christine Magnuson: I would love to come back on. Thank you so much for having me. I love the admin community. They make such a difference. And when we find really good ones to work with, it's so much more fun for me and my team. So thank you. We appreciate you. Keep doing what you're doing. And of course, give some love to your SEs out there at Salesforce and other ISV customers. We're a good crew. We love working with you.

Gillian Bruce: Hey. A good SE makes every admin happy too, I got to tell you.

Christine Magnuson: It's a partnership. It's a partnership.

Gillian Bruce: Well, thank you so much, Christine. And thank you for joining us on the podcast, and we will have you back.

Christine Magnuson: Love it.

Gillian Bruce: Wow. That was an amazing conversation. Christine has so much great knowledge to share. Everything that she shared about identifying those skills that she had for being an elite athlete and how to transfer them into her Salesforce career, I mean, everyone can identify with that. I love that. Take time. Turn off all the devices. Get out a pen and paper and really think about what your skills are, and then map them. And then I also really appreciated hearing about how you should strategize when you build a team of admins, about thinking about diversity, equality, inclusion, and thinking about maybe applying for that job that you aren't necessarily ticking all the boxes for. Working with admins at those really big implementations who have hundreds and hundreds of people who work with Salesforce, you don't have to be an expert to apply for those jobs. I thought that was a really interesting perspective.
So I hope you got something out of this episode. I got a ton. And wow, I got to talk to an Olympic medalist. Amazing. Anyway, thank you so much for joining us today. If you want to learn more about anything we chatted about, go to admin.salesforce.com. You'll find the skills kit there to identify some of your transferable skills. And as always, you can follow all of the fun on Twitter using #AwesomeAdmin and following Salesforce admins, no I. If you want to follow our amazing Olympian we just heard from, Christine Magnuson, you can find her on Twitter @CMagsFlyer. She is a swimmer. So put that together. You can follow me on Twitter @GillianKBruce and my amazing co-host Mike Gerholdt @MikeGerholdt. I really hope you enjoyed this episode. I hope you're inspired to go out there and reach for a medal. And with that, I'll catch you next time in the cloud.



Direct download: From_Olympian_to_Solution_Engineer_with_Christine_Magnuson.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:00am PDT

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Christine Magnuson, a Solution Engineering Manager at Salesforce and 2008 Olympic swimmer and two-time silver medalist.

Join us as we talk about what skills transferred from being a top athlete to working in the Salesforce ecosystem, why you shouldn’t sell yourself short, and why Admins are great partners in Solution Engineering.

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

Transitioning into a Salesforce career

Christine is officially the first Olympic medalist we’ve had on the pod. “You have to constantly check yourself that you’re in reality,” she says, “you’re just among the best of the best in what they do and it’s an honor to be in that community.”

So we know how she got her start, but how did Christine wind up in Solution Engineering? She started with a master's in Public Administration and hit the pavement to network. Almost anyone was willing to give 30 minutes to an Olympian asking about their lives. “Actually,” she says, “I don’t think you need to be an Olympian to call somebody up to ask about what they do and what they like and what they don’t—everyone says yes because they like talking about themselves.”

How Sales was the perfect jumping-off point for Christine

The overwhelming advice was to start in Sales because it applies to so many different things. “I came to realize that it was really about me believing in the product I was selling,” Christine says, “and as long as I believed in the product I was doing everybody else a favor by telling them about it and not them doing a favor for me.” The business she was working for had started leveraging Salesforce and, since she was the youngest person on the team, she was the de facto accidental Admin.

Christine found herself working at Quip soon after they were acquired. She worked in Sales for a year “but I nerded out on the product so much and working with the PMs and the marketing team and having that cross-functional view was really fun for me,” she says, so when they decided to build out the Solution Engineering team she volunteered. From there it was a transition to the core team working with key Salesforce clients like Amazon, Dell, and BMWare.

Why Admins are visionaries

Admins are particularly helpful in this work because they know their user base inside and out: what they want to do, where their pain points are, and what needs automating. “Some of the Admins I work with are so innovative about not just thinking about what is a small step forward, but what are five steps forwards and should we be taking those big leaps forward,” Christine says.

One of the secret powers that good Admins have is the ability to use the tools already in Salesforce to the max. As the old saying goes, when you have a hammer everything looks like a nail, and sometimes in these large organizations, Devs jump straight to coding and customizing when there might already be a tool you can use in your org. 

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Full Show Transcript

Gillian Bruce: Welcome to the Salesforce Admins Podcast, where we talk about product, community, and careers to help you be an awesome admin. I am your host, Gillian Bruce. And today, we have a first, listeners. We are joined by a two-time Olympic silver medalist and solution engineering manager at Salesforce, Christine Magnuson. She has so much great knowledge and experience to share. I asked her about all of the things, everything from what's it like to build a team of Salesforce professionals to how do you transfer skills from being an elite athlete to working in the Salesforce ecosystem, and so much more. So without further ado, let's welcome Christine on the pod. Christine, welcome to the podcast.

Christine Magnuson: Thanks so much for having me.

Gillian Bruce: Okay. So it is official. You are the first official Olympian and medal winner to appear on the Salesforce Admins Podcast. I just have to lead with that because it's pretty amazing. Tell me, what was it like to win a silver medal at the Olympics? Two of them.

Christine Magnuson: Two of them. Well, I am happy to be your first. I have a feeling I won't be your last, but very excited to be the trailblazer here on that front. Yes. My Olympic career was so fun. I mean, I highly suggest becoming an Olympian if you have the chance to.

Gillian Bruce: Totally on my list.

Christine Magnuson: Yes. Exactly. Sign yourself up. It's a really amazing community to be a part of, and to stand up and represent your country in that form is just such an honor. It takes your breath away. You have to constantly check yourself that you're in reality. And just to be in that space with so many amazing competitors from not just Team USA, but around the world. It's so such a hard feeling to describe because you're just amongst the best of the best in what they do. And it's an honor. It's an honor to be amongst that community. And it's something that it never leaves you. Once you're an Olympian, you're always an Olympian. There's never former Olympians. There's just Olympians. And so it's definitely a club that you're part of for your entire life once you're there once, and that's pretty incredible.

Gillian Bruce: So it's like being part of Salesforce ecosystem, right? I mean, once you're a part of it.

Christine Magnuson: It's like being a ranger. Once you're a ranger, they don't take it away. You get to be a ranger for life. Now you can always do more, but yes, it's 100%. It doesn't leave you. You can always come back. I mean, how many boomerangs do we know in this Salesforce... Well, Salesforce is a company. Of course, there's boomerangs, but then also just in the ecosystem as well.

Gillian Bruce: Yeah. Once you get in, you can't really get out because it's a good place to be. So speaking of that, talk to me a little bit about your transition from being an amazing Olympic athlete to now being... I mean, you work with solution engineers here at Salesforce. Tell me a little bit about that journey.

Christine Magnuson: Oh, man. I have the best job. At least I think so. So when I retired in 2013, I had just finished up my master's program from the University of Arizona. I have a master's in public administration. I thought I wanted to go into non-profits or athletic governances, and then through that experience, really felt like I wanted to actually go into the corporate world and get more experience before applying those things potentially back to those communities. And so I networked with really anyone who talked me. Good news was that pretty much everybody was willing to give 30 minutes to an Olympian who was just asking them about their lives. Actually, I don't think you'd need to be an Olympian to call somebody up and say, "Can you tell me about what you do and what you like and what you don't?" Everyone says yes. They love talking about themselves, which is great.
And so I net networked my way and everybody said, "Sales is a great place to start. You'll never regret it. You can apply it to so many different ways even if you end up not liking sales." It took me a while to realize that that was the case. When you think about sales, you think about that used car salesman and people selling, pushing things on you that you don't want. And I came to realize that it was really about me believing in the product I was selling. And as long as I believed in the product, I was doing everybody else a favor by telling them about it and not them doing a favor for me. And so-

Gillian Bruce: That shift. Yeah.

Christine Magnuson: Total shift in mindset. And so I joined a great small company out of Chicago that was placing consultants into life science companies and learned full life cycle sales from them. And they were also doing a lot with their Salesforce implementation during that time. And of course, I was one of the younger ones in the company and new to sales, and they were like, "Christine can figure this out. What should the experience be?" And so I was the super user. And then towards my end, I was actually part-time admin with no qualification whatsoever other than I could pick it up. That's I think the amazing thing about the product itself is that you can pick it up without going and learning how to code. And so I really fell in love with the technology.
I had moved to San Francisco because I was in Chicago and Chicago's really cold. Growing up there, I knew what it meant. And I spent a couple of adult years there and just decided to get out. So I moved to San Francisco, wanted to get into tech, and there was this little company called Quip that had just been acquired. They were ramping things up. I joined their sales team, did sales for a year, but felt I was basically... I nerded out on the product so much and working with the PMs and the marketing team, and having that cross-functional view was really fun for me, that when they decided to build out the solution engineering team, I raised my hand and everybody around me was really supportive. And so I moved to the new role, was immediately put on some of our top accounts, which was mind-blowing to see how these really complex accounts worked. And a few years later, I was leading the SE team and helping expand my knowledge across the US with our [inaudible] based team.
And now, about six or nine months ago, I came over to what we call core, which is thinking about the whole Salesforce portfolio for particular customer bases. And I have the honor of leading some really elite SEs who cover companies like Amazon and Dell and VMware and a few others. And they're just some of the sharpest individuals that I've ever met. And I get the honor of managing them and then meeting with our customers and seeing what they're doing and trying to help them through a lot of really complex issues. And so I'm never bored. I'm always using my brain. And it's a really fun job, and all because I just nerded out on the Salesforce products.

Gillian Bruce: Well, you're preaching to the choir here because admins are the ultimate Salesforce nerds. We're very proud of our nerdom.

Christine Magnuson: I love it.

Gillian Bruce: And I think what's so interesting is you interact with admins and customers at these very complex companies and these complex implementations. I want to touch more on how you transferred some of your skills as an Olympian to your skills in the Salesforce ecosystem. But before we get there, can you talk to me about some of the things that you see make an admin at one of these very complex implementations successful?

Christine Magnuson: Yeah. I think when they really understand their user base, that helps an extreme amount because they understand what their user base is trying to do, where they can automate, where they're struggling. And so the more they can understand their end user, the better. And then it comes down to, okay, understanding the actual implementation, pros and cons. Let's be real. No implementation out there is perfect.

Gillian Bruce: What? What are you talking about?

Christine Magnuson: Well, if somebody knows of one, please call me and let me know how it went and how you got there. But it's just because things change. Companies grow and you can't predict the future when you're implementing. And so hindsight is 20-20. But some of the admins I work with are so innovative of not just thinking about what is a small step forward, but what are five step forward? Should we be doing five steps instead of one in certain areas and taking those big leaps forward? And how does global changes affect us? Not just scale and a global distributed user base, but also data residency requirements. And oh my goodness, how do we push changes if we're going to have multi-org? And what does hyper force look like? And all of these things, they're a part of the conversation. And that is one, really fulfilling, I think for everybody involved because we're getting the full picture, but it helps us break down what is realistic for this customer moving forward and what's their timeline? It's all about being in sync. But some just really great work being done out there by our admins.

Gillian Bruce: I love that. Knowing your user base, knowing what your users are trying to do, and then really that forward visionary thinking of what the product can do and the direction that things are going. I think very, very important skills and traits of every successful admin. So it's great hearing it from you because you really work with some of the most complex.

Christine Magnuson: Yeah. I'll add in one more because I know a lot of our admins work with IT groups. I'm renovating my house right now. I was talking to you about that earlier. When you talk to somebody who's a builder, they always want to build. And if you're talking to somebody who is a woodworker, they're just like, "Oh. Do this." And it's always in their frame of reference. And when we talk to customers, if we're talking to a highly IT-oriented or builder-oriented customer, they're like, "Oh. We'll just customize it. We'll just build it." And I think one of the powers that admins can come in is saying, "That's out-of-the-box. Stop building. Stop wasting our time and stop doing over-customized things that are going to hurt us down the road because again, we can't predict the future. Let's do as much out-of-the-box as possible. And then we can apply our own flavor to it if need be. And the customer or the user base should tell us if we actually need to do that or not."
And so that's the third one I would put in is they're so valuable with saving their company's time by not developing things that are already just there for them.

Gillian Bruce: You hit the nail in my head with that. That is something that is just... It comes up time and time again. And often it's like you mentioned, working with IT. There's also sometimes that conflict when you're a developer mindset versus an admin mindset because they'll go straight to like, "Oh. I can build this really, really cool thing that's super complex and blah, blah, blah." And the admin's like, "Hold up a second. You realize that we already have this in Salesforce."

Christine Magnuson: Totally. We already own it.

Gillian Bruce: Why don't you spend your time customizing something on top of that? Let's start with this base first.

Christine Magnuson: I know. And some of these larger customers, they have a lot in their contracts that they should be using. It's just use it. You've already paid for it. So if you use more of it, it's kind of free because you've already put that-

Gillian Bruce: It's included.

Christine Magnuson: Yeah. It's included. You've already made the investment. So get more value out of it. And so stepping back and making sure that they're using that full value is something that the admins can do so much for their companies on.

Gillian Bruce: Oh. I love that because that's such... I mean, again, talk about not only driving efficiency for the users and the user base and helping people get their jobs done, but you're saving the company resources and time as [inaudible]-

Christine Magnuson: It's huge. The ROI behind it is huge.

Gillian Bruce: I love those three really, really great points. So I want to dive back into the story of Christine for a second. So we have been talking a lot about the admin skills kit, which we just launched at TrailblazerDX a few months ago, and it's all about helping identify those business skills that help admins be successful. So on top of the product knowledge, these are things like communication and problem-solving, designer's mindset that really make an admin successful. And one element of that is we have language in there about how to represent these skills in the context of the Salesforce ecosystem. So this is how it might look like on your resume. This is how it might look like in a job posting you create to hire someone with that skill. How do you think about transferable skills? Because clearly you transferred a very unique skillset from being a very high level competitive athlete, an Olympian, to now the technology sector and the Salesforce ecosystem. So can you talk to me a little bit about how you managed transferring your skillset?

Christine Magnuson: Yeah. Well, especially from the athletic world... and we're talking to the Team USA athletes about this right now... is what are those athlete skillsets that we probably took for granted, frankly? When you're in an elite level of whatever it is, but in my case, athleticism, you are surrounded by other people in that environment. And so you just start to take those skills for granted because they're normalized. And so how do you actually step away from that normalization and say, "Actually, that wasn't normal. That was special. And how do I articulate that it is special?" And so when it comes to the athletic population, we're very good at time management. When you're going from practice to school or work back to practice and you have to... I mean, even fitting in meals and strategic rest, all of that goes into just having really good time management.
And especially now in a remote workforce world with distractions all around us and family coming in and out, my dogs were just here, it can get a little crazy. And so being able to focus on time management is huge. So that would, I would say, is an obvious number one. Two, coachability. Oh, my goodness. We're always constantly going to be learning new technology and picking up new skills and we should be getting feedback about how we're doing and what more should we be doing? And being able to... And athletes, believe me, we tend to be confident people. Takes a lot to stand up in front of a lot of people with a bathing suit on.

Gillian Bruce: Sure does.

Christine Magnuson: Most athletes don't lack in confidence, but I will say we know when to check our egos at the door because somebody's about to make us better. And that translates really well to a workforce where you have to actually invite feedback. Not everybody is good at giving or receiving feedback, and we can all get better by doing it. When somebody gives me feedback, it's such a compliment to me. They have just invested in me. They took the time to think something through, invest in me, and make me better. What a compliment, even if the feedback is harsh. And athletes are so used to that.

Gillian Bruce: Feedback is a gift, right? Isn't that what we were saying? Yeah.

Christine Magnuson: Exactly. All feedback is good feedback, even if it's-

Gillian Bruce: It doesn't feel good.

Christine Magnuson: It doesn't feel good. Exactly. And so the feedback loop is huge for athletes. The other, which I think we definitely take for granted, is attention to detail. Attention to detail, but still flexibility. So when I was swimming, I was talking to my coach about moving my arm a slightly different way at a slightly different angle. It was maybe an inch difference, and then doing that thousands, tens of thousands of times perfectly. And so that attention to detail is huge. But also knowing that you're working within a rule of constraints, and sometimes you need to be flexible. My first job, I remember coming in and working with somebody who's in operations, and they were extremely rule-oriented. There was no breaking her rules. And I had a situation where I was like, "Hey. I think we need to break this... We're going to have to do this differently," is how I phrased it. And she was like, "Absolutely not."
And it shocked me because I had the logical argument. I had all of my data. I had backed it up and I said, "This is why this is different." And she said, "Nope, too bad." And I was just like, "I've never encountered someone like you before. I have to change the way I communicate." And all of it was really interesting lessons learned, but I think athletes can stay pretty fluid in these really changing dynamic environments. Still know what rules are important, but then apply details to them like, "Well, do we even make a shift here or shift there?" So that's kind of two in one with the flexibility and detail. But I would say that's another big one.

Gillian Bruce: Yeah. And I like the way that you paired those two together because especially as I think about admins specifically, the attention to detail is critical because you got to dot all the I's and cross all the Ts and make sure everything is locked down or assigned correctly or every single workflow is thought of. But at the same time, you do. You have to remain flexible because you may have to adjust that solution and adjust it for this specific user type or adjust it for this specific situation and... Yeah.

Christine Magnuson: Oh, my goodness. Yes. I mean, how many companies do we see right now holistically changing their business models? Moving to subscription. I mean, what a huge difference and what an impact on their Salesforce instances. Totally complex. You need to be very into the details, but you also need to be flexible because we're going to change a lot. And we're probably not going to predict everything on day one no matter how good we are planning.

Gillian Bruce: We can't see the future. What are you talking about? Come on.

Christine Magnuson: Oh, man. Well, maybe some of them out there can. I've never been good at it.

Gillian Bruce: No. I mean, I think that's really interesting. One of the things that I hear a lot from admins who are either transferring from another industry into the Salesforce ecosystem is really that idea of not throwing away all that experience they had let's say if they worked in a warehouse for 15 years or worked as a teacher. And it can feel like you have to start at ground zero a little bit because everything sounds different. It looks different. But I really like how you identify those skills that you were able to take from something that's very seemingly different from the technology space, but then rethink about them and apply them in a way that has made you successful in a completely different industry. What tips and advice do you have for someone who's maybe in that moment of like, "Oh, my gosh. I'm switching my career and I feel like I don't know what I can pull from."?

Christine Magnuson: Yeah. My advice is actually... and I've done this with a couple of my direct reports... is step back and take your titles away. Have literally a pen and paper. Go old school. Sit down away from all technology and think to yourself, "What do I love to do on a day-to-day basis? What skills do I love and want to develop more? And where are my strengths?" Almost a strength finder type exercise, and just write them down. And then we are like, "Okay. What are the skills do I think I need for this new career?" And then cross-reference and don't forget that a lot of them transfer, but maybe just the verbiage is different.
And so here's a great example. I did swim clinics all the time when I was swimming professionally, which meant I had anywhere between 30 and 100 kids, ages between 6 and 18 for four hours in a day where I was teaching them something and taking photos with them and telling them about life as a professional swimmer, as an Olympian. My storytelling and presentation skills and public speaking skills were pretty well-honed because if you can hold the attention of a bunch of eight-year-olds, guess what? A room of business people who are supposed to pay attention to you, a lot less intimidating and probably more on topic.
And so I was thinking, "Oh, yeah. I'm good at public speaking." Well, no. I'm good at storytelling. Do you know what every job in corporate America needs, is more storytellers? And how do I fit this into a really logical timeline and personas and make it interesting to people? Well, okay. I was just using the wrong verbiage. And so you'll find a lot of that, I think, no matter what careers you're talking about. Both my parents were teachers. Oh, my goodness. The things that I learned from them that I apply now today, there's a long, long list. And so take that time and make that list for yourself. And then if you're not sure how it translates to the other side of things, you can have conversations with people who are already there and maybe show them the list.
Heck, use your thesaurus. Sometimes, it's as simple as that. You're like, "I didn't think that. That was kind of similar." And so it's just a translation exercise. But really step back and think about the skills you probably take for granted because those are the ones that you'll end up keeping into your job that will stay with you and still be of real high value to your employer.

Gillian Bruce: Great advice. Well, and we've got the admin skills kit to help elucidate at least 14 of them that [inaudible]-

Christine Magnuson: There you go.

Gillian Bruce: ... help you see some connections there.

Christine Magnuson: Exactly.

Gillian Bruce: One other thing I wanted to talk to you about, Christine, is I mean, I could just keep you on the podcast for hours and hours and hours, I'm sure. But you've got an actual job to do. But before we get to wrapping, I wanted to ask you, in the context of the Salesforce admin skills kit, I know that you actually pulled me a while ago like, "Hey. I'm going to send this to one of my customers." From a customer who is hiring an admin or... I'm sure you talk to your customers all the time who are trying to figure out how to properly build a team to administer Salesforce. Could you maybe share what are the common issues that they usually face? What are some things that an admin listening to this who's either hiring someone or wanting to hire someone or be that next best person who can get hired, what kind of advice can you share from being in your role and what you've seen?

Christine Magnuson: Well, the war for talent is real. So I'll talk about Amazon for a second. And this is all public knowledge. You can go on their website and just do your own search and find this yourself. If you search AWS and Salesforce... I did this the other week... there were over 440 jobs listed. That's just AWS. And Amazon is big. They have a lot of Salesforce instances. They are hunting for talent and they're hunting for talent at all levels. And I think that's where we sometimes forget is everyone thinks like, "Oh. To go work at a company like Amazon, oh, my goodness. I need to be so senior." And that's just not the case. They need people of all levels. And sometimes they need the doers who are in on the details more than the strategic thinkers. They got a bunch of strategic thinkers. They need the doers.
And so when you go look at their websites and then have conversations with them, they're willing to invest in somebody who's sharp and has the basics and is willing to just learn with them and continue to upscale as they're with the employer. And so I think don't count yourself out. If you're looking for the job, apply to a job you might not think you're qualified for. And whether they put you in that position or a different position, it starts the conversation, and I think it's really good for everyone. So definitely don't undersell your skills. They're needed out there right now. There's a lot of companies. I cited one, which is probably extreme example, just because the volume of people they have. But every company out there that I talk to is concerned about more talent in-house, in their tools, and Salesforce is a go-to tool.
For those hiring admins, I would say take a little bit of the DEI approach, diversity, equity, and inclusion. It doesn't need to be somebody who checks all your boxes for every role. Talk to people. Be a little bit more flexible. Tell your recruiters to be more flexible. I mean, I have found some of the best people on my team who were not either in the Salesforce ecosystem or where they weren't SEs. And they're amazing because they come with such transferable skills and they maybe had a basis in one or the other. And so working with your recruiters to be really flexible and take that diversity, equity, and inclusion approach of, "I don't need somebody who checks all the boxes. I need the right person for the job." And that's a different mindset.

Gillian Bruce: I love that. That is great advice. It's very rare that we talk about the employer, the hiring manager perspective on the podcast. So I think that is really, really excellent advice. Christine, oh, my gosh. Thank you so much for everything you-

Christine Magnuson: Thanks for having me.

Gillian Bruce: ... [inaudible] with us today. I feel so lucky. You're my first also Olympic medalist that I've ever gotten to speak to. So it's a double whammy. You're the first one on the pod. It's my first time getting to talk to an elite Olympian. So thank you so much. And also, thank you for all you do at Salesforce. I mean, you have clearly done a lot already, and I know you're going to do more. And thanks for being a great advocate for admins and advocate for athletes and people transferring skills, and we'll have to have you back on at some point.

Christine Magnuson: I would love to come back on. Thank you so much for having me. I love the admin community. They make such a difference. And when we find really good ones to work with, it's so much more fun for me and my team. So thank you. We appreciate you. Keep doing what you're doing. And of course, give some love to your SEs out there at Salesforce and other ISV customers. We're a good crew. We love working with you.

Gillian Bruce: Hey. A good SE makes every admin happy too, I got to tell you.

Christine Magnuson: It's a partnership. It's a partnership.

Gillian Bruce: Well, thank you so much, Christine. And thank you for joining us on the podcast, and we will have you back.

Christine Magnuson: Love it.

Gillian Bruce: Wow. That was an amazing conversation. Christine has so much great knowledge to share. Everything that she shared about identifying those skills that she had for being an elite athlete and how to transfer them into her Salesforce career, I mean, everyone can identify with that. I love that. Take time. Turn off all the devices. Get out a pen and paper and really think about what your skills are, and then map them. And then I also really appreciated hearing about how you should strategize when you build a team of admins, about thinking about diversity, equality, inclusion, and thinking about maybe applying for that job that you aren't necessarily ticking all the boxes for. Working with admins at those really big implementations who have hundreds and hundreds of people who work with Salesforce, you don't have to be an expert to apply for those jobs. I thought that was a really interesting perspective.
So I hope you got something out of this episode. I got a ton. And wow, I got to talk to an Olympic medalist. Amazing. Anyway, thank you so much for joining us today. If you want to learn more about anything we chatted about, go to admin.salesforce.com. You'll find the skills kit there to identify some of your transferable skills. And as always, you can follow all of the fun on Twitter using #AwesomeAdmin and following Salesforce admins, no I. If you want to follow our amazing Olympian we just heard from, Christine Magnuson, you can find her on Twitter @CMagsFlyer. She is a swimmer. So put that together. You can follow me on Twitter @GillianKBruce and my amazing co-host Mike Gerholdt @MikeGerholdt. I really hope you enjoyed this episode. I hope you're inspired to go out there and reach for a medal. And with that, I'll catch you next time in the cloud.



Direct download: From_Olympian_to_Solution_Engineer_with_Christine_Magnuson.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:00am PDT

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

Join us as we talk about all the can’t-miss Salesforce content from June and why you should submit a presentation for the Admin Track at this year’s Dreamforce.

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

Live Events

We just got back from World Tour London which was a blast, and the NYC version just wrapped. There were tons of great presentations and it was so great to see everyone in person again, so make sure you catch up on all the action.

Blog highlights from June

LeeAnne and Mike put together a great roundup about what CDP is and how it will make our lives as admins that much easier. There are a lot of fun use cases and it can help you get a handle on how CDP will turn your rich customer data into action.

Video highlights from June

Another month, another great batch of video content from Jennifer Lee. This time, she’s on the hunt for how to stop unwanted changes to reports you thought were good to go. There’s also a throwback to the old Salesforce UI for those in know.

Podcast highlights from June

“Skills pay the bills,” as they say, and we’ve spent a lot of June highlighting our new Salesforce Admin Skills Kit. We think you should listen to our episode with David Nava, where we catch up on all the amazing things he’s been doing since the last time he was on the pod in 2019 and how he helps other veterans make the transition to the ecosystem.

Dreamforce 2022 Admin Track Call for Presentations

Dreamforce is coming up soon, and submissions are officially open for Admin Track presentations, which are due by July 8th. Make sure to read through this handy blog post to label your submission correctly and, hopefully, we’ll see you soon!

 

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Full show transcript

Mike Gerholdt: Welcome to the Salesforce Admins Podcast in the June monthly retro for 2022. I'm your host Mike Gerholdt. And in this episode, we're going to review the top product, community and careers content for June. And of course, helping me do that in a bright yellow Jersey, I don't know why, is the familiar voice of Gillian Bruce. Hello, Gillian.

Gillian Bruce: Go warriors.

Mike Gerholdt: Oh, is that why it is? The basketball is over. You know what's crazy along those lines, I think I heard ESPN talk about the Stanley Cup playoffs.

Gillian Bruce: Those are also happening now. Yes.

Mike Gerholdt: Okay. So if we didn't have artificial ice, where would we have these playoffs, because it's hot everywhere. It's like a hundred or something in Iowa.

Gillian Bruce: Well, if they really wanted hockey to be seasonal, it would all be in the fall in the winter. Right?

Mike Gerholdt: As it should be, yes. We'd also be done playing basketball by now, because summer's just for messing around and going to pools and vacations.

Gillian Bruce: To be fair, everyone has been done playing basketball for about a month. It's just the Warriors who managed to win the finals, play into June.

Mike Gerholdt: I see.

Gillian Bruce: The fourth time in recent history.

Mike Gerholdt: Who did they play this year?

Gillian Bruce: Oh, we just beat Boston.

Mike Gerholdt: Boston. Okay.

Gillian Bruce: The Celtics.

Mike Gerholdt: Oh yeah.

Gillian Bruce: Bye Boston.

Mike Gerholdt: I just saw the winning time on that, where the Lakers beat Boston.

Gillian Bruce: Boston Celtics have a very rich history of winning a lot, but now the Warriors have a dynasty themselves. So there you go. There you go.

Mike Gerholdt: We just lost all our Celtic's fans.

Gillian Bruce: Oh, don't worry. Celtics fans love to hear people hate on them. This is kind of what feeds the Boston [inaudible].

Mike Gerholdt: It's a thing?

Gillian Bruce: Yeah. They thrive on the hate. So it's not even hate, it's respect. Good job Celtics. But Steph Clay, [inaudible] Andre are back. All right. Enough of that. It's not a sport's podcast. That's what my husband does.

Mike Gerholdt: Not yet anyway.

Gillian Bruce: We're going to be talking about all the great Salesforce admin content from June.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. But first we had people on planes traveling.

Gillian Bruce: Oh gosh, that's right. Planes, trains, and automobiles. Happening.

Mike Gerholdt: Jumping the pond, as they call it.

Gillian Bruce: Yeah. We had some of our team members over in London, not too long ago for the World Tour, which by all things appearing on the social medias looked amazing.

Mike Gerholdt: So shout out to the London admin user group. We love you guys. Thank you for hosting and having Ella and Leanne join. It's always fun presenting there. Gillian, I think all of us have presented there. It's like a right of passage, right?

Gillian Bruce: It really is. It really is. The London admin user group is ... will always hold a special place in my heart, because I feel like it was one of the first admin user groups. And it's just full of just some amazing people who are doing a lot to help each other out and their career growth. And it's just ... yeah, I think that was my first trip to London was ...

Mike Gerholdt: Could be. We did a live podcast there.

Gillian Bruce: We sure did. We sure did.

Mike Gerholdt: That was fun.

Gillian Bruce: Yeah.

Mike Gerholdt: And exciting. Jumping ahead to the tour, the pictures that Ella and Leanne ... Ella and London sent back, all of London sent pictures back to me on my Slack channel.

Gillian Bruce: Ella, Leanne, London.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. The theaters look really packed. So everybody really showed up. It's always fun doing stuff at the Excel Center.

Gillian Bruce: Yeah. People are clearly excited to be back in person and to connect and learn and have fun. And that's what it's all about. So it's great to get that vibe and we're just going to carry that vibe right on into the next tour, because Mike, I am literally stepping out the door to go to New York City to go to the New York World Tour.

Mike Gerholdt: Great segue.

Gillian Bruce: Great segue.

Mike Gerholdt: It's going to be awesome.

Gillian Bruce: It's going to be amazing. It's going to be great to connect with the very vibrant, all of the community groups that are in the New York area are going to be representing in full force. We are doing quite a few sessions in both the Trailblazer Theater and we've got a whole breakout session we've got together. Jennifer Lee is presenting a whole bunch, because that's what she does.

Mike Gerholdt: Right.

Gillian Bruce: So it's going to be a really great chance to see everybody and yeah, just meeting some new trailblazers, which is always fun.

Mike Gerholdt: Is there any food that you get in New York that you look forward to?

Gillian Bruce: Oh God, it's been so long since I was there.

Mike Gerholdt: I know, that's why I asked.

Gillian Bruce: I think actually the last time I was in New York was before my first born was born.

Mike Gerholdt: Oh boy.

Gillian Bruce: So I do remember there's a steak place that Damon, my husband is obsessed with called Peter Luger's, which is actually across the bridge. It's not in Manhattan and it's ... Mike, next time you and I are there together, we will go.

Mike Gerholdt: Steak. Yes. The Midwest in me wants steak.

Gillian Bruce: It's one of the most famous steakhouses in the world. So that's fun. I don't know if I'm going to hit that up, but I am going to get to go to hopefully a show on Broadway, which will be really fun.

Mike Gerholdt: Oh fun.

Gillian Bruce: So I looking forward to that.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. Pre-pandemic, my last trip to New York was in December and a few of us got to go see a lived tape of Stephen Colbert.

Gillian Bruce: Nice. Nice.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. Super fun. Oh man. That was blast. All right. So we can talk more food.

Gillian Bruce: Food. I will say of my-

Mike Gerholdt: It's the Salesforce Admins Podcast where we cover sports and food. Totally makes sense. Right?

Gillian Bruce: Yeah. I'm going to sprinkle in a little bit of trashy TV, because I also say that I have been trying to get tickets to go to a live taping of Watch What Happens Live With Andy Cohen. Needless to say, I've gotten nowhere. It's one of the hardest things to get into. But if anybody on this podcast who's listening right now has a trick of how to do that, I will specifically go back to New York to get in on that taping. So any Bravo diehards or anyone with a connection, let me know.

Mike Gerholdt: That's filmed in New York? I always saw it was filmed in LA. Andy Cohen always comes off to me as very LA.

Gillian Bruce: He's very New York.

Mike Gerholdt: Oh, interesting. I judged that one wrong.

Gillian Bruce: Yeah.

Mike Gerholdt: So top content. First thing I want to point out is the Introduction To Salesforce CDP For Admins, which Leanne wrote. I helped write, but we only get one author. So I chose Leanne. This is a fun little article to dig into. We've heard CDP. Gillian, you were in New York. CDP was everywhere in New York. I'd say as an admin, for sure, jump in.
This was really insightful for me to understand how CDP, which is customer data platform, what it means for admins, how we can do it. And really what are the actual fun cases of sitting around, talking with different parts of our organization, understanding market segmentation, owners, what the business case is for it. To me, it's a good way to really drive that next level engagement with Salesforce. So I enjoyed writing it, check it out.

Gillian Bruce: Yeah. It's a great article. Good job, Mike. I also will say listeners, stay tuned, because we have James Richter, who's going to be joining us on the podcast in a future episode to talk all about CDP for admins. And talking about what he has seen help admins be successful with CDP, how you talk about the strategy of one to implement a CDP, and how to set yourself up for success. So stay tuned. We got more CDP goodness coming your way.

Mike Gerholdt: More CDP. James Richter. Is he any relation to Andy Richter, speaking of Late Night?

Gillian Bruce: I didn't ask. I don't think so.

Mike Gerholdt: Well, there's your first question.

Gillian Bruce: We've already had this conversation, but maybe on Twitter when we release it, we can pile on announcing that.

Mike Gerholdt: "Are you related to Andy Richter." "No, I get asked that all the time though. Thanks." The next thing I wanted to point out was a video that Jennifer Lee put out. A part of The How I solved It series, Monitor Unwanted Changes To Reports. The title says it all, right?

Gillian Bruce: Who doesn't want that?

Mike Gerholdt: Oh my. Come on.

Gillian Bruce: Stop changing my reports, people.

Mike Gerholdt: It's like, it just ... so it was really good how she worked through it. I really enjoyed watching her talk with Cassie. The screenshots, walking you through everything, for those of us in the know, there's even some throwback days to the old field layout properties, where you get to see the old Salesforce interface. But man, let me tell you. The number of times that I've put reports out into the world and then a few months later come back and reran it. It's like, what did you do? How is it possible for you to have tangled up and changed things this bad? So I really appreciate this post. I'm sure admins will too.

Gillian Bruce: It's a must view. It's a must view.

Mike Gerholdt: It is. And Gillian and tee you up for the trifecta of the content that we put out in June. You did a podcast with David on transferable skills, because you're the skills person.

Gillian Bruce: Hey skills pay the bills, as they say.

Mike Gerholdt: Yep.

Gillian Bruce: Or do they say that? I don't know.

Mike Gerholdt: They do now.

Gillian Bruce: I'm just saying that. So yes. I had a fantastic conversation with David Nava, who is a repeat guest on the podcast, but he's done a lot since the first time he was on in 2019. That's when he was just starting to make his transition from the military to working in the Salesforce ecosystem. Now not only is he working in the Salesforce ecosystem, but he's on his second kind of Salesforce ecosystem company and that happens to be Salesforce.
So, and he's a now not just making his own transition from military to Salesforce, he's helping hundreds and hundreds of other people in the military community make the same transition. So really great to catch up with him, talk really about kind of how that admin skills kit can play into helping folks figure out which skills they can transfer from their previous or current industries into the Salesforce ecosystem. So give it a listen, if you haven't already. David is fantastic. So many great things. I mean, hey, who doesn't want to hear from a Naval flight officer who is-

Mike Gerholdt: Oh, seriously.

Gillian Bruce: An amazing Salesforce professional. And he's got such a passion for giving back and helping other people make similar transitions.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. Yeah. Very cool.

Gillian Bruce: Yeah. Must listen.

Mike Gerholdt: What I fear or what I'm happy to announce will be a new segment on the pod, that we will wrap things up with is, hey, it's just about Dreamforce time.

Gillian Bruce: It's beginning to feel a lot like Dreamforce.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah.

Gillian Bruce: Coming back this year.

Mike Gerholdt: In person in San Francisco, where they have a winning basketball team.

Gillian Bruce: Yeah, we do. Dynasty.

Mike Gerholdt: See, I worked that in there.

Gillian Bruce: Dynasty.

Mike Gerholdt: Want to remind everybody and the link will be in the show notes, you have until July 8th to submit to the admin track call for presentations. Please take a second, read that blog post. And I mean read it, not skim it and like, "Oh cool. It's open. Here's the link." But actually read through it. There's some fields we want you to fill out, because this is open for all of Salesforce. So all of Salesforce is collecting submissions through the CFP, not just Admin developer and Architect Track and want to make sure that you label your submission correctly, so that we can adequately review it, because we have a tight little turnaround.
It's going to be Dreamforce before we know it. So if you have an idea, start sketching it down. As soon as you're done listening to the podcast, which it's almost over, I promise, maybe another block and a half to home and then we're done. But think through, submit early, don't wait till July 8th, because I promise you're going to wake up and you're going to be like, "Oh it's July 8th. Oh it closed." Or the tab died, or your internet goes out, or something. It's going to happen. Get it in early. There's no reward for being last in the door.

Gillian Bruce: Yeah. Get it in early. Make sure that you really kind of think about why this belongs at Dreamforce. Again, read the posts. It's all in there about how to put it together. What kind of content we're looking to feature at Dreamforce. So, it's a great opportunity. If you've never thought about presenting a Dreamforce, here is your opportunity. And if you're a little nervous, partner with somebody who has presented before. There are a lot of people who presented before, who would love to have a collaborator. So great opportunity to develop some content, share it and get a really cool experience.

Mike Gerholdt: Yep. I would agree. If you want to learn more about anything that we talked about on today's episode, please go to admin.salesforce.com to find those links and resources, including the one to the CFP. You can stay up to date with us on social for all things admins. We are at Salesforceadmns, no eye on Twitter. I'm on Twitter at MikeGerholdt and Gillian is at GillianKBruce. So that, stay safe, stay awesome and stay tuned for the next episode. We'll see you in the cloud.



Direct download: June_2022_Monthly_Retro_with_Mike_and_Gillian.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:00am PDT

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to James Richter, Director, Cloud Success & CSG Global Program Lead, Salesforce Customer Data Platform (CDP). Join us as we talk about what CDP is, how it will be the single source of truth across all platforms, and how to get your org ready.

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

What is CDP?

If you’ve been puzzling over CDP and what it could do for your org, you’re not alone. “My team is focused on getting CDP into the market, so you’re not the only one wondering what it is,” James says. So what is it?

“Have you ever read Dr. Seuss’s I Wish That I Had Duck Feet?” James asks. In the book, a kid wants to have duck feet to splash around and not have to keep them dry. However, he soon realizes there are some downsides to duck feet. For example, he can’t wear shoes. “What we’ve found is marketers and admins are the same way,” James says, you get all these shiny new tools but end up with a bunch of extra data you don’t know what to do with. CDP is being built to help you manage all that data so you can play with the fun stuff and not worry about wearing shoes.

The Single Source of Truth

You can do so much with all of the tools out there for the platform, but the data is really hard to deal with. CDP aims to segment and manage everything for you. For now, they’re building it to help with Marketing Cloud, but in the near future CDP will be the single source of truth across all the different Salesforce platforms for everything that a customer has done.

A lot of the stuff that CDP does is possible with tools like SQL, but CDP will make it possible with a lot less code and effort.

Getting Ready for CDP

So how do you get ready? The first thing is to make sure you have someone in the room who understands each of your systems. Before you start building, you need to understand what you’re building with. You need to know what data is the same across each platform so you can harmonize it, but that means you need someone to translate for you and explain what you’re looking at.

Once you’re able to show just how easy it is to get any piece of data you’re after with clicks, not code, the power of CDP will speak for itself. “It makes everybody’s life easier,” James says, “and that’s an easy thing to advocate for.”

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Full show transcript

Gillian Bruce: Welcome to the Salesforce Admins Podcast, where we talk about product, community, and careers, to help you be an awesome admin. I'm your host today, Gillian Bruce, and we are talking about CDP. You might be saying, "Gillian, what is CDP?" Well, don't worry, we're going to get into it, because it is a big deal, and it is an amazing thing for all admins to think about, because it really truly brings the single source of truth to your Salesforce platform. To talk about that today, we have James Richter joining us, he's a director, cloud success, and CSG global program lead at Salesforce. He is doing all things CDP with customers, so he's the right person to come on and explain what it is. Without further ado, let's get James on the pod. James, welcome to the podcast.

James Richter: Thank you so much, thanks for having me.

Gillian Bruce: It's so great to have you, and I'm very looking forward to our conversation, because we're going to talk about something that I don't know much about, and that is CDP. Before we get into all of that, can you tell us a little bit about what you do at Salesforce?

James Richter: Yeah, absolutely, so I am part of our shared success team, my team is focused on getting CDP into the market. It's new for everybody, so you're not the only one wondering what it is. We've been trying to teach people and also learn from everybody, so we're out there working with our customers and partners to get CDP stood up in their environments, and just learn alongside them, and also, teach them as we go, and share that knowledge across to everybody else.

Gillian Bruce: All right, I like it. Okay, so here you are on the podcast, you got a whole audience of admins to talk to about CDP. Let's get right into it, what is CDP? What does it stand for?

James Richter: What a great question. Yeah, so CDP is a customer data platform, and I think if you go out in Google, you will find a lot of answers as to what a CDP is. I'll give you my take on it, and then we can talk later about how that checks out with your understanding. I don't know, you've you've got kids, have you ever read Dr. Seuss' I Wish That I Had Duck Feet?

Gillian Bruce: Okay, my kids are a little too young for that yet, but I do remember that book, yes. This is the greatest leading off explanation I think we've ever had on the pod, so please, take me from Dr. Seuss to CDP?

James Richter: Yeah, so Dr. Seuss, there's a kid that says, "I Wish that I had duck feet, I can tell you why, I can splash around, I don't have to keep them dry." But then he realizes like, "Hey, if I had duck feet, I couldn't have any shoes," and he says, "I wish I had an elephant nose, so I could put out fires. He's like, "But then they'd make me wash the windows." What we've found is marketers and admins, we're the same way, we see all these cool, shiny tools and we're like, "Hey, I want to go out and get that," and we get it.
We realize like, "Hey, we had a consequence to that, the consequence is usually I got a bunch of data. I've got a bunch of different records of people, I've got all this data out there." What we've tried to do with CDP is say, "Hey, bring us all that data. Let's let you have all the cool things, and let's be the platform where you can bring the data ,and hopefully we can give it to you in a way that you can use it. You can have all the fun with it, and not have to suffer the consequence," that's the goal.

Gillian Bruce: I love this. Okay, data is like admin love language kind of. Let's dig into a little bit... CDP is not unique to Salesforce, and so tell us a little bit about why now Salesforce is in the CDP space? What does that look like?

James Richter: Yeah, so I obviously we have been in the data space for a very long time, and everybody has come to this conclusion at the same time that we've got to have a way to start leveraging all these systems. We've got all these great companies out there that are offering so many great tools, but as admins, you get overwhelmed by them. We saw the writing on the wall that we were going to have to have something that would allow people to take full advantage of them, and so I think that's why we've landed here.

Gillian Bruce: Okay, so you mentioned we have a lot of tools, which is very true. Admins are at the crux of all of the tools, and especially the last few years. It's not just what we used to think of as core Salesforce tools, but now we've got MuleSoft, we've got Slack, we've got Tableau, how does CDP sit in the context of this expanded one Salesforce platform?

James Richter: Yeah, so right now, a lot of the use cases that we're talking about are for marketers. We look at marketing cloud as our primary recipient of the data at the moment, and so you're in CDP, you're running these segments, you're building these audiences, you're finding all the different versions of Gillian. You're saying, "Hey, tell me all the things she's done across all these different tools that I have?" Then I want to be able to send her a message that's the right message for her. At the moment, we're seeing it sit within our core platform, that's where we're doing all the segmentation. That's where we're bringing all the data, we're storing the data, we're doing the segmentation. Then we're sending that over to marketing cloud for action via email, via SMS, whatever it may be.
Long-term though, what we're saying is we want to bring those segments back into core, we want to bring them into CRM and say, "Hey, when somebody calls our call center, I want to be able to look Gillian up, I want to be able to see all the times I've known Gillian, I want to see what's local to this system that I'm in, what's local to this CRM that I'm in. Then let's also pull in all our other ones." We're multi-tenant we want to be able to bring all those back in and say, "I know what you have done on each one of these platforms, and that makes me better able to help you, and better able to serve your needs."

Gillian Bruce: We're talking about a real true single source of truth for a customer within the context of all of the systems, which is pretty exciting.

James Richter: It's awesome. Yeah, it's finding the harmonization across all those different records and saying you can finally reference all of them. You can finally look at all these instances of the customers, all the things we've been talking about, and that's the goal, that's the dream, and that's the need that the market has, and so that's what we're after.

Gillian Bruce: I mean, I'm already just building dashboards in my head of all of the incredible things that you could now display, thinking of how you can connect all of those interactions into one beautiful thing that we can look at. That's a really descriptive word, but so what are some of the... You mentioned you've got some use cases, can you talk to us a little bit more about maybe one or two examples of initial CDP use cases, that maybe some customers are working on right now?

James Richter: Sure, a lot of them aren't new, a lot of these are use cases that we've talked about forever. It's I want to be able to see all the customers that I have that have bought a pair of red shoes, and we've always been able to do it, we've always talked about it, but we've done it with SQL. We've done it with different tools and we've done it sort of inefficiently, because I can find all the times that I've bought red shoes, but maybe, I don't know that it's me all three times that you found me.
What we're saying now is, as we build this segment, I want to know all the people who have bought red shoes, or blue shoes, or green shoes. I might fit one of those or all three of those across all of my different records. That's what we're after is bringing that back in and being able to say, "We can do it better than what we used to," it's not necessarily new. We're not necessarily unlocking anything that we haven't talked about before, but now we're able to do it hopefully with a lot less code, and hopefully in a way more efficient manner.

Gillian Bruce: Hooray, I'm cheering for admins everywhere. Let's talk a little bit about some of the specific things that maybe admins should think about when we're toying with the idea of making use of the CDP. What are some initial things that you should think about from an admin perspective in terms of strategy, when you're talking about basically implementing CDP or starting to use it?

James Richter: Sure, so the main thing that we should worry about is how do I take all of these systems and make sure I have all of the people in the room that understand each one of them? The first task that we're after is harmonizing the data, and that means looking at all the different ways that we've stored it, and all of the systems and saying, "I know that field first name is the same as field F name is the same as field F," and making sure that you've got the people in the room that represent those tools, so that they can translate that for you, and you can get the data ready. Because, like I said, we're harmonizing it, but we can't do that without the influence of the people who are responsible for those tools, and so that's really step one.

Gillian Bruce: Really important. Hey, before you start building anything, let's make sure that we understand what we're building with.

James Richter: Yeah, for sure.

Gillian Bruce: Okay, so we start that strategy, we're talking about how we're going to harmonize the data, getting the right people in the room, understanding how to translate these different, maybe similar activities, across different systems and now that we're going to pull them into one place. What are some of the cool initial wins or things that an admin might be able to look for to start saying, "Hey, look at this, this is a successful thing," what are some initial things that maybe might help get more people on board in the process of trying to put this together?

James Richter: Yeah, so I think it is going back to those use cases and showing people just how easy it is to find those records, just how easy it is to search, just how easy it is to build the segment. Just how quickly you can get the insight into what it is that you've been after for so long, and not having to go check 10 systems, and export all of that, to bring it to another place, to have to export it again, to have to get it to somewhere that you can actually do something with it. I think once you start to show off the power of, hey, I did this through clicks and not code, hey, I did this through something that's been saved and you can repeat it, that's what's getting people excited.

Gillian Bruce: Okay, so I think that's the... You just tapped into the major admin superpower right there. Because here's the thing, if you're as an admin able to save all of those steps, and all of that time, and all of that processing, I mean, that puts you in an incredible position. I mean, CDP seems like this could be a really powerful thing for an admin to use.

James Richter: For sure. Yeah, once we get that data in, and once we've had a chance to harmonize it, once we've got this thing up and running, it's really impressive. I think it makes it so that everybody's life gets easier, and that's an easy thing to advocate for. It's an easy thing to go and show off and say, "Hey, I know that you've been wanting to do this, watch," and you can actually get a feel for just how quickly it comes together. Then once you get past that, you can start to expand the use cases. We can start to get into calculating lifetime value, we can take all that data across everything and say, "I can now see how many times Gillian's made a purchase, and I don't have to wonder do I have all the records of her. If I've got that harmonization, I can actually go in and calculate that and show people the data that you've been after or the data that we've had for so long, now we can actually start to do something with it."

Gillian Bruce: I love that. Okay, so I am imagining that there might be a listener or two out there who's now saying, "Great, I am super interested in trying to figure out how I can bring this to my organization," what resources or what is out there to help an admin as they begin to basically put the business case forward for making CDP a thing for their organization?

James Richter: For sure. Yeah, so you can go out and there's a lot of great resources that we've got, a lot of blogs. I think you've got one that's recently come out that breaks down some of the content, and some of the things that we have available to work through, to figure out what is next for CDP? How do I get started? We also have a lot of great content out on Trailhead, so you can go out and take a look, and take some of those certifications, and get an idea for just exactly what it is that you're getting yourself into, and what those first steps look like. Then obviously, the marketing cloud account executive is the one that represents this at the moment, and so they can help you connect those dots. They can get the demo for you, they can show you what the tool looks like in person, and start to show you all the power that's really there.

Gillian Bruce: I love it. Yeah, you mentioned the resources that we just put out. Just actually last week we put out a CDP for admins blog post, and so yes, it does list all those resources. We'll, of course, also put those in the show notes here, there's an implementation guide, there's all kinds of great stuff. Of course, hey, Trailhead, we always love more great Trailhead content.

James Richter: The Trailhead content is really great, actually, it's been put together in a way that's a lot easier to understand. 18 months ago, I didn't know what a CDP was, and I started [inaudible] Trailhead. It definitely gets you started in a way that makes sense, and I definitely recommend checking it out.

Gillian Bruce: Awesome, I love it. Okay, so since now that you are an 18 month expert on CDP, can you talk to us a little bit about maybe are there any roadmap or fun next things you see in the CDT space for Salesforce? Anything that you can give us a little what future looking, safe harbor, forward looking statement, anything in the pipeline?

James Richter: Absolutely, you have to love the safe harbor. It's not a complete meeting if you don't mention the safe harbor. Yeah, so right now, as I mentioned, we've got a lot of use cases that we've been focused on that are marketing cloud specific. We've taught a little bit about some of the core use cases that's out there, right now, we're really focused on integrating it out, so that we can get it to more use cases. There's a lot of work being done with our partners, with our activation channels, to make sure that you can take the data from CBP and use it in lots of different app exchange packages. We want to be able to leverage that data, not just for Salesforce, but for all the different channels. I think that's where a lot of the work is being put in is how do we better orchestrate where you can go with the data?

Gillian Bruce: I love that. Hey, bringing it to the app exchange, those are other notes of music to an admin's ears, so that's fantastic. James, before I let you go, we're very happy to now have you as one of our experts in the Awesome Admin realm here. What things have you seen? You've been talking to admins, you've been talking to people working with the Salesforce platform for a while. Do you have any overall top tips that you've seen from people who have been successful in implementing either CDP, or just successful from your perspective as an admin implementing Salesforce?

James Richter: Yeah, I think it sounds silly, but I heard somebody say it at Connections last week and I love it. It's the slow is smooth and smooth is fast. As you get ready for CDP, we always buy new shiny tools and we're like, "Hey, let's go, we got to start using it right away, we got to just go." It comes down to, we got to plan. We have to plan, we have to get our data aligned, we have to get ready to go. Then once we have that understanding of the data, we can really get in there and take off. That's the biggest advice I have for anybody is plan for that time of we got to figure this thing out, and then once you get it figured out and off and running, life gets better in a hurry.

Gillian Bruce: I love that, slow is smooth and smooth is fast, that's fantastic.

James Richter: I liked it a lot, too. I didn't come up with it, obviously, but I heard it last week and I was like, "This is the highlight of Connections, I love it."

Gillian Bruce: Hey, marketers know how to make everything sound good, I mean-

James Richter: Right.

Gillian Bruce: Awesome, well, James, thank you so much for coming on the podcast and helping demystify CDP for admins. I am very excited to see what our admin community is going to start doing with it. I envision so many admins basically harnessing this technology, and really propelling not only their organizations, but their own careers forward pretty quickly, so this is great. Thank you so much.

James Richter: Yeah, thanks for having me, I really appreciate it.

Gillian Bruce: Well, thank you so much, James, for joining us and demystifying CDP. Wow, it is a powerful, powerful way to bring all of your customers' data and interactions to one single place. Hey, you talk about the ultimate awesome admin tool, I don't know about you, but I cannot wait to start playing with that and seeing it in action. CDP is great, now I love some of the points that James made about how you get ready to set yourself up for CDP. Slow is smooth and smooth as fast, words of wisdom from James. Make sure that as you get into the planning process for CDP, or even exploring if this is something that you and your organization want to do, take the time to really understand the data. Get the right people in the room to understand where the data is sitting, what it all means, and what it might look like to pull it all together, because then you'll be really set up for success when you roll out CDP.
Wow, the powerful tool it is. Check it out. Okay, as James said, there's lots of resources to help you learn more about CDP. I'll put a link to the blog post that we talked about in the show notes, as well as some great Trailhead content on CDP. Now, if you want to learn more about anything else that we mentioned today on the podcast, or anything else about how you can be an awesome admin, make sure you go to my favorite website in the whole entire world, and that is admin.salesforce.com. You'll find great blogs, videos, and some more podcasts on there. If you would like to follow my guest today, James Richter, he is very active on LinkedIn, so I'll put his LinkedIn in the show notes. You can follow all things Awesome Admin at Salesforce admin's [inaudible] on Twitter. You can follow me at Gillian K. Bruce and my co-host, Mike Gerholdt, at Mike Gerholdt. With that, I hope you have a fantastic rest of your day, thank you for tuning in, and we'll catch you next time in the cloud.

Direct download: CDP_for_Admins_with_James_Richter.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:00am PDT

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to David Nava, Lead Solution Engineer at Salesforce, Host of Military Trailblazer Office Hours, and 20-year Navy veteran.

Join us as we talk about what to do after you pass the Admin cert, how to decide what role in the Salesforce ecosystem is right for you, and how David used the apps he built for his personal life to make an impact at a job interview.

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

How David transitioned from the Navy to a Salesforce career

When last we spoke to David, he was wrapping up his career with the Navy with an eye toward transitioning into a role in the Salesforce ecosystem. On the day that he retired, he jumped right into his new career feet-first as a Junior Solution Architect at a consultancy on one of their largest projects to date.

David was recruited by Salesforce, but the story doesn’t quite go like you think it might. They turned him down at the end of the process, citing his lack of experience. However, they offered him a different role as a Solution Consultant after he pulled out his org during the interview and showed them the apps he had been creating. Most of all, they were impressed by his passion for the platform and were willing to give him a shot.

“Building apps in a dev org helps you focus on all the fundamentals,” David says, “but it also helps you really apply what you’re learning in Trailhead to specific business challenges.” He built apps to manage his workouts, track his finances from the road, and manage his tasks. He built them and rebuilt them to make something he liked, and they really made an impact when he showed them off in the interview.

Paying it forward

8 months later he was recruited internally for his current role, as a Lead Solution Engineer to replace legacy systems for the Navy and Marine Corps. He’s now in a position where he can draw on his years of experience as an officer and replace all the systems he didn’t like using.

David’s always been serious about mentorship, and now he’s in a place where he can give back. He teamed up with Bill Kuehler and Resource Hero to be a part of Military Trailblazer Office Hours focused on career and branding. Since then, he’s helped almost 2,000 people earn certifications, choose career paths, and get hired with his live sessions and YouTube videos.

How to test-drive career paths

So once you get your Admin certification, now what? David advises several people in exactly this position. He recommends you start by “test driving” the career path options by conducting informational interviews with professionals in those roles. “You need to learn about the role’s requirements, responsibilities, challenges, and joys so that you get a sense for what it’s like to work in that role,” he says.

David’s also a big fan of the Salesforce Admins Skills Kit. It gives you a framework for how to think about your skills beyond just the technical aspects. “You can apply your different work experience in the context of these skills to demonstrate its relevance to the Salesforce Admin role,” he says.

Be sure to listen to the full episode for all of David’s great insights, and especially make sure to catch his five tips to help people transition into a new Salesforce career.

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Direct download: Transferrable_Skills_with_David_Nava.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:00am PDT

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Jennifer Lee, Admin Evangelist at Salesforce and the host of Automation Hour.

Join us as we talk about everything in the Summer ‘22 Release, what Jennifer does to prep for an upcoming release, 

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

Summer ‘22 highlights

The Summer ‘22 Release is out, and we’re here to help you get caught up on all the action. To help us, we’ve brought legendary blogger and automation expert Jennifer Lee on the pod to go over all the highlights.

There are a lot of changes to Picklists that are going to make them better than ever. You can bulk update several Picklists at once and it finally tells you which one is a duplicate without you having to guess. Dynamic Related Lists have been added to App Builder beta, which gives you the ability to filter unrelated lists. Flow Trigger Explorer changes, Screen Flows in Slack, and automated Flow testing are other bright spots in a jampacked release.

Tips for release readiness

Jennifer’s been known for a long time in the community for her comprehensive release posts. So how does she prepare for a new release?

  • Stay motivated: There are a lot of release notes to read, and you need to stay committed to getting through everything so you’re prepared.
  • Dive into a pre-release org: “It’s on thing to just read the little blurb,” Jen says, “but when you actually get to see it and touch it, that’s when it really comes to life.”
  • Make what you’ve learned shareable: Jen uses animated GIFs to bring the changes to life in her blog, which you are free to steal or iterate on in your own release readiness prep.

Release Readiness Live

Jennifer is the host of Admin Release Readiness Live, where all the product experts at Salesforce come on the show to present their features and get you ready for what’s coming. You also get to see a roadmap of what’s coming next and the vision of where everything is going. Or at least some forward-looking statements.

Most importantly, you can tune in and ask the experts any questions you may have, live. It’s the best way to get the admin-specific updates you want to hear.

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Direct download: Summer_22_Release_with_Jennifer_Lee.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:00am PDT

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Nana Gregg, Solution Architect and Learning and Development Manager at VFP Consulting.

Join us as we talk about the Salesforce Admin Skills Kit, why your background matters much more than you think when you’re trying to be an Admin, and why the Skills Kit helps employers looking to hire Admins, too.

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

Nana’s EASY Methodology

You might recognize Nana from her stint as an Admin Keynote speaker at Dreamforce ‘18. “What I said to Parker is that it’s actually easy to be an Awesome Admin,” she says, but that’s an acronym for her EASY Methodology:

  • E: Embrace change. Everything changes in tech every single day, and you need to embrace that and go with it.
  • A: Always be learning. There are three new releases a year, not to mention what’s happening in your business and org.
  • S: Show and tell. As Nana says, “When you build it, they will come.” Show what you’re working on and tell them about it!
  • Y: You got this, and if you need help, you have the power of the community behind you.

Your background is just as valuable as your tech skills

With the recent launch of the Admins Skills Kit, we wanted to talk to Nana about how that squares with her EASY Methodology. It’s a recipe for success for Admins and also a guide to help employers figure out what to look for when they’re hiring.

As an accidental Admin, Nana can relate to just how many skills you need to bring to your job that aren’t necessarily technology-facing. No matter your background, there are skills you’ve picked up along your journey that can help you to succeed as an Admin and now you can name them and market them. She sees how things like learner’s mindset, change management, and project management fits into the framework she laid out at Dreamforce four years ago.

Why the Skills Kit matters to employers

As someone who now is in the position to hire Admins, Nana also appreciates how helpful the Admin Skills Kit is as a framework for people making that job posting. When you’re sitting on the other side of it, you might see “Salesforce” and throw in every developer buzz word you can think of hoping you’re saying the right thing, or you might see “Administrator” and go with that.

The Skills Kit not only lists out everything that goes into being an Admin and doing it well, it also gives concrete examples to let both Admins and employers know exactly what they’re looking for. And if you need help, each skill also has resources to help you Always be learning.

Be sure to listen to the full episode for all the great insights, including why S should maybe stand for Showcase your skills, and how the community helped Nana rebuild after a tornado hit her house.

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Direct download: Admin_Skills_Kit_with_Nana_Gregg.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:00am PDT

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

Join us as we talk about the latest and greatest Salesforce content from May and reflect on an amazing, in-person TrailheaDX.

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

TrailblazerDX

The April Retro dropped in the midst of TDX, so we wanted to take a moment to reflect on the amazing experience of being in person again. Many selfies were taken. We also launched the Salesforce Admins Skills Kit, a blueprint for the skills that help make a successful Salesforce Admin. It brings together all the skills beyond technical training that you need to succeed. There were so many great things going on at TDX so be sure to consult the wrap-up and listen to Mike and Gillian’s reflections on this episode.

Blog highlights from May

As we talk about all the skills that go into being an Admin that aren’t necessarily all about the technical side. This post highlights what goes into Business Analysis, and why it’s an essential skill for any Admin to cultivate.

Video highlights from May

Jennifer Lee has been a force of nature on the Admin Evangelist team. She’s doing a Youtube Live series where she uses automation and Flow to solve problems right in front of your very eyes. She stops and answers questions, too, so make sure to tune in and don’t miss this unique learning opportunity. Also, if you haven’t yet caught up on Release Readiness for Summer ‘22, make sure you get the low-down.

Podcast highlights from May

Gillian wanted to highlight two great pods from May. We got to meet Andrew Russo, a true Awesome Admin who broke down how he created a user management super app that does all that and a bag of chips. We also had Khushwant Singh on to demystify Experience Cloud. His team is up to all sorts of great work bringing dynamic forms to standard objects and improving performance all over the platform.

 

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Direct download: May_Monthly_Retro_with_Mike_and_Gillian.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:00am PDT

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Khushwant Singh, SVP, Product Management at Salesforce.

 

Join us as we talk about his role heading up all things Experience—not just Experience Cloud but Experience Services, too.

 

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

The Experience dream team

Khushwant, AKA “Khush”, heads up Experience at Salesforce. If that term is a little nebulous to you, you’re not alone, but Khush breaks it down for us. Experience Services brings a few teams together: the UI Platform team, the Experience Cloud team, the Mobile team, and the Mobify team. “We’re responsible for all things Experience, and it helps us build a common product strategy across the board,” Khush says, “whether you’re building an experience for an employee, a customer, or partner.”

 

Lightning Experience has really changed the game for Admins in terms of stepping up in their thinking about design, but Khush points out there’s also a bit of a divide there. “If you build a component for the App Builder, it may or may not work in the Experience Builder,” he says, “but as a Salesforce Admin or Developer, you want your investments to go across all of your various endpoints.”

Re-architecting to improve scaling, performance, and customizability

Experience Cloud is a very flexible tool that you should really look into if you haven’t yet. You can use it build out a simple marketing website, a self-service destination like a help center or account management site, or even a channel reselling portal or commerce storefront.

 

While Lightning and Aura have done a lot to enable Admins to build out things they never thought possible with low code and fast time to market, Khush admits we seem to have hit a wall from a performance, scale, and customizability point of view. To address that, they’ve been re-architecting to let you build new things more easily at a consumer-grade scale.

What’s next for Experience Cloud

One thing that will be going live soon (forward looking statement) is a major performance boost to public-facing apps and sites. They’ve revamped the out-of-the-box CDN (Content Delivery Network) to allow public aspects of your site and mobile apps to be cached at endpoints closer to the consumer, enabling much faster delivery. One other change is adding dynamic image resizing so the same image looks equally good on mobile, desktop, and tablet. The best part is these and many more improvements are enabled by default, so you get the performance boost without having to lift a finger.

 

Looking forward, Khush and his team are revamping the Salesforce Content Management System (CMS) to make it more robust, powerful, and responsive. They’re breaking down the barriers and rolling out the advanced version of Salesforce CMS to all customers for free, and you can get access to the new-and-improved JSON-based CMS 2.0 beta with an opt-in.

 

Khush also gives a preview into what he and his team are working on to make improvements to data to, for example, bring Dynamic Forms to all standard objects, and even more goodies for desktop, mobile, and everything in between. Make sure you listen to the full episode to hear what’s coming your way soon.

 

 

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Full show transcript

Gillian Bruce: Welcome to the Salesforce Admins Podcast, where we talk about product, community and careers to help you be an awesome admin. I'm your host today, Gillian Bruce, and we have a really fun episode lined up for you. We are talking with Khushwant Singh, AKA Kush, who's SVP of Product Management here at Salesforce, in charge of all things experience. And I mean all things experience, not just experience cloud, but Experience Services. And if you're wondering what all that means, don't worry, he's going to answer that for you. So without further ado, let's get Kush on the pod. Kush, welcome to the podcast.

Khushwant Singh: Thank you, Gillian.

Gillian Bruce: It's wonderful to have you on. I am very much looking forward to our discussion because we are talking about something that might be a little nebulous to some of us, especially if you've been in the Salesforce ecosystem for a while. We have experience cloud, Experience Services, experience all the things. Kush, clarify for us what all of that means.

Khushwant Singh: Well, Gillian, I wish I got that question, or rather I wish I had proactively answered that question at the recent TDX. So just a bit of a sidetrack, a little, for those of you who attended the recent TDX, we had a true to the call session where a few of us were up on stage and I introduced myself as, "My name's Kush, I'm a product manager and I work on all things experiences." Now, I honestly thought that I would be inundated with questions, but I realized that I actually got zero questions, and I realized that people just probably didn't get what all things experience means. So I'm going to learn from that, and be very clear in our conversation over here. So taking a step back, when we say, we just recently realigned some of our teams internally, and we've created this group internally called Experience Services. And what Experience Services is, is that it brings together a few teams together.
First and foremost, we have our UI platform team. And so from a UI platform perspective, think of it as all things web runtime, whether it's Aura, Lightning Web Runtime, LWC or Lightning Web Components. It includes things that all of the good components you have in Lex, so the record forms, lists, performance, et cetera, so that's the UI platform team. Then we also brought the experience cloud team, which really is, takes all the goodness that we have in Lex, and manifests it to customers and partners, external facing customers and partners. We do have instances where it's also facing employees as employee intranets, but it takes all of that goodness. We also brought together our mobile teams. So whether that's the Salesforce Flagship mobile app, whether that's our mobile SDK, whether that's taking an experience cloud side and creating a hybrid mobile app out of it through Mobile Publisher, we brought the mobile team together as well.
And then finally, we brought the MobiFi team, which some of you may know as the managed runtime offering to build out these progressive web apps for commercial use cases. So in a nutshell, this Experience Services team brings together the UI platform, brings together experience cloud, brings together the mobile teams and brings MobiFi together. So what we can do now is collectively, we are responsible for all things experiences, and it helps us build a common product strategy across the board, whether you're building an experience for an employee, a customer, or a partner for that matter.

Gillian Bruce: So that was really helpful, it helped me understand this because again, experience is one of those words that, especially as a Salesforce admin, we're always thinking about our end users experience. That's our whole goal is to make it seamless and make it really useful. But as you just described, experiences is so many things. And I really appreciate that you have explained how the teams are uniting under this umbrella, to really think about the holistic picture when it comes to these different experiences pieces. UI, designers' mindset, is one of the core admin skills that we have because it's always thinking about how is my user experience in this? How can I maximize that experience, make it more efficient? And when you talk about Lightning experience that, God, talk about something that changed the game for admins.

Khushwant Singh: I know, it did. It did entirely. It changed the game, but it also in full transparency, we added a bit of a divide as well. So if you take examples where you build a component for the App Builder, it may or may not work in the Experience Builder. You have a set of record components that look gloriously well on Lex, but they may not surface all of the capabilities, the actions don't surface in the Experience Builder or vice versa, the branding, the themeing, the mobile web responsiveness aspect of things that show up on Experience Builder, don't show up in the App Builder side of things. And so we have introduced this divide, which actually has made our... Well, each team has done a phenomenal job in going deep in their use cases, it's been at an expense of a divide where, as a Salesforce admin, as a Salesforce developer, you want your investments to go across all of your various endpoints. You might be a Salesforce admin for a company that is using Salesforce for their employee experience. For example, the service agents.
Similarly, within your same company, you may have an endpoint, a customer help center, which is customer facing, or you might be selling products through channels, which is also partner facing, and you want your investments to be able to run across ideally. So again, all teams have done great in their specific areas, but by bringing us together, we are really hopeful that we can deliver more value for our Salesforce admins and our developers as they manage all of these various endpoints.

Gillian Bruce: Yeah. I think as a company, for someone who's maybe been in the ecosystem for a long time, this is a familiar road, is that we develop something really close. One team goes down and develops this new way of doing something and then we have shadow examples of it happening all separately within the company. And then, hey, let's bring everybody together, let's make this a more cohesive, holistic experience for our admins, for our developers. And it's exciting to bring all those really smart brains together to work together versus everyone working in a silo.

Khushwant Singh: Indeed. And I think it's also indicative of trying to complete what we start. I think we've heard from admins, just this recent TDX, I mean, and at every TDX or any Dreamforce we do, any through the core session or any feedback we get from our MVPs and our admins out there, developers. They'll give us feedback, which is actually quite true. We start something, but we don't complete it. We say something that we will deliver something, but we, at times, don't deliver it. And so I think by bringing all of our teams together, that manage experience, I think it really... Organizational differences should not be the reason why we are not able to complete what we start or deliver what we say we will deliver. And so we are really hopeful that we'll be able to actually address those two key areas.

Gillian Bruce: Yeah. I've always heard the joke. We don't want to let our org chart show.

Khushwant Singh: Exactly. Across both desktop and mobile for that matter.

Gillian Bruce: Totally. Yeah. So Kush, before we get a little bit further, I mean, clearly you've got a big undertaking that you and your teams are doing. Can you tell me a little bit about you and how you got here? How long have you been at Salesforce because all of these works have been in progress for a long time. You mentioned when we released Lightning experience. Tell me a little bit about your background.

Khushwant Singh: Oh yeah, sure. So I've been at Salesforce, I think, May sometime this month is my seventh year anniversary.

Gillian Bruce: Congratulations.

Khushwant Singh: Thank you. And I have truly enjoyed every single day of my time here at Salesforce. If you look at my background, I rarely spend more than five to six years in a company. And the fact that I'm here for the seventh year and still super challenged, just speaks towards what Salesforce offers from a challenge, point of view. There's always something new, there's always a new challenge for us to work on. And I've actually spent probably six and a half or six and three quarters of that seven years working on Experience Cloud. And so most of my background is from a B2C side of things. I spend some time at eBay, at Microsoft, at a startup called Mozi, working on a number of B2C oriented products. And I wanted to build products in an enterprise setting for enterprise, but I didn't want to veer too far away from the consumer side of things, the B2C side of things. And Experience Cloud really helped me walk that fine line where you're building these digital experience products that are used by enterprises for their customers, for their partners. So it really gave me a good middle ground.
That said, Experience Cloud is a, it's a platform upon the overall Salesforce platform. And so over the last six and a half years or so, I've had the opportunity to work with some immensely dedicated individuals on the platform side of things as well. And so that bring a lot of the goodness that we see in Lex and Experience Cloud and Mobile to life. And so bringing the teams together was like bringing a group of old friends together.

Gillian Bruce: I love that, getting the band back together, that's good.

Khushwant Singh: There you go.

Gillian Bruce: Okay. So let's talk a little bit about what's currently going on in Experience Cloud. So I know there were some good announcements at Dreamforce last year, at DBX this year. Can you talk a little bit about where we're currently at with Experience Cloud and why maybe an admin who hasn't yet dabbled in Experience Cloud might consider it?

Khushwant Singh: Sure. So again, just to level set, one more time, a customer uses Experience Cloud for a number of use cases. You could use Experience Cloud to build out a simple marketing website, corporate website. You could use Experience Cloud to build out a self-service destination, so that self-service destination could be a help center, where you want to surface your knowledge base articles, where you wish to surface chat bots, where you wish to, for example, give your customers the ability to log in and manage their account, manage their profile for that matter. Similarly, you could use Experience Cloud to build out a channel reseller portal, where you may not be selling direct or you may be selling direct, but you also sell through your various channels and you need a way to manage your channels. You could use Experience Cloud to build a commerce storefront, whether it's a B2B commerce storefront, a B2C commerce storefront, et cetera.
So Experience Cloud, you can use it for a variety of different customer facing, partner facing use cases. In fact, I should also mention employee facing use cases. You could build out a company intranet for that very matter as well. And so over the last years, last few years with introduction of Lightning and Aura, for that matter, it really revolutionized the ability for our customers to build all of this out in a very low code, fast time to market aspect of things. And we've seen phenomenal adoption, super humbled, by the adoption, we've gotten North of 70,000 odd sites. I think our MAU is around, our monthly active usage is maybe about 40 to 50 million. We have a daily active usage of about five to 6 million. And so, I mean, again, super thankful to all of the customers and the admins and the developers out there who have invested so much of their time in Experience Cloud.
That said, as with every technology, there comes a time where you've hit a bit of a wall and we hit a wall with Aura, from a performance, from a scale, from a customizability point of view. Where you can see that as you are trying to build out these next generation consumer grade experiences like storefronts, like websites, even these consumer grade portals, where you expect an iPhone like Experience, whether it's employee facing or customer facing experience. So we hit a bit of a wall with Aura. And so over the last, I would say 18 months, we've been, for lack of a better way to put it, somewhat silent in terms of our feature deliverables. Sure, we've been delivering a few features here and there, but like our MVP, we have a really passionate and amazing MVP out there. His name is Phil Weinmeister-

Gillian Bruce: Yes. We know Phil very well.

Khushwant Singh: Exactly. And so I think many of you must have seen his post where he's actually tracking the number of features that Experience Cloud launches. And he showed this bar graph, that showed the decreasing number of features over the last 18 months. And I replied to him and again, huge respect for Phil. And the fact of the matter is that we've had to go under the hood and rebuild from ground up using Lightning Web Runtime, using Lightning Web Components, so that we can actually deliver this consumer grade scale and performance and customizability, whether it's a B2B, B2C or B2E type of use case. And so we've been "silent for a while" but I'm super excited at what's coming in this summer release, and what's going to go. A lot of it going to go generally available this winter release. So again, long story short, we have been re-architecting for consumer grade across the entire customer journey.
So whether you're looking at an awareness use case, whether you're looking for an acquisition use case, a service use case, a loyalty use case, you want to deliver consumer grade across the board. And with Lightning Web Runtime, with Lightning Web Components, we do believe that we've got the right foundation upon which we can actually deliver these experiences. So that's the overarching area where we're headed.

Gillian Bruce: I mean, that's impressive. I mean, we talk, especially even as admins, we have our own technical that we accrue over many years of admining a specific org. And sometimes you do, you got to just go back, peel back the covers and go in and make sure everything, the foundations are updated and running better. And hey, if you got a system that's not working for you, you got to invest the time and pause on the new stuff for a minute. Let's make the core stuff really work and function so that we can continue to build. So I love that transparency. I think it's really useful to help our admins and everybody understand what all of the hard work that your team is doing. And yeah, I mean, hey, now that we talked about all the hard work that you've all been doing, let's talk about some of the shiny new fun things that you have coming down the page.

Khushwant Singh: Yeah, of course. So now I think on that note, I do also want to underscore that we have so many, all of that adoption stats that I talked about, they're all visual force or mostly Aura investments. And I want to underscore that we're not just leaving Aura or VF behind. And so there are many aspects that customers on Aura or customers on VF would also be able to benefit from. So let's dive into those shiny aspects of things. So I think if we think of this as maybe a stack diagram, maybe we'll start at the lowest level of infrastructure. What are we doing from an infrastructure point of view to help deliver that consumer grade type of experiences? So, first and foremost, we've invested a fair amount of time and effort to deliver performance. And so, one of the things you'll start to notice is, our out of the box CDN, so behind the scenes we work with Akamai, and what that does is that it allows, it just provides customers an out of the box CDN that they can actually choose to use.

Gillian Bruce: So Kush, before we go forward, what is a CDN? Let's break down that.

Khushwant Singh: Sure. It's a content delivery network. What that does is it allows your public aspects of your site, of your mobile app to be cashed on these endpoints, which are closer to the consumer, and so that allows for faster delivery. And if it doesn't change, if that public information doesn't change very much, it's served out of cash versus another round hub back. So again, at the end of the day, it's about better delivery of, faster delivery of the experience. Now this used to be a bit of an opt in thing and so what we have done now is as of spring and summer and winter, what we're doing is behind the scenes, we are rolling out as part of the secure domains effort, as secure domains is being enabled across all net new sites and existing sites. We are just enabling the default CDN by default, so it's an opt out versus an opt in.
So from that perspective, we are trying to ensure that everyone gets a phenomenal performance from the get go. Now, similarly, another thing that we are really excited about is, and the teams working on it, is as part of the out the box, CDN from an infrastructure point of view is being able to get more capabilities out of that, out of CDN. Now, have you gone to a site where the images look really weird, wonky, feels like this is a desktop site they're trying to throw onto a mobile or a tablet?

Gillian Bruce: Yeah. Everything's out of perspective. And you got to try and scroll weird ways. Yeah.

Khushwant Singh: Exactly. So another thing that if you use the out of the box CDN, another thing that our customers can look forward to is dynamic image resizing. So when you are the same image renders well on a mobile, a tablet, a desktop, and similarly, if you are an admin, you may inadvertently upload a, I don't know what? 20 MB file, image, and then say, "Look, why is my site loading so slowly?" And so what we're trying to do is also correct that, where you may upload a 20MB file, please don't, but what we'll do on our side, on the CDN side of things, we'll resize that and ensure that we are delivering a more optimized image to the customer. So that's another thing that we are really excited about, from an infrastructure point of view. So lots of good work happening from a perf point of view.
Now, then there is scale. So from a scale point of view, we have aspects like concurrency. So concurrent user scale, so how many users can you support on that portal? Concurrent read scale, so how many requests are coming in concurrently? And before the site just says, "Look I can't handle this." And concurrent rights. So for example, you may be running a promotion and that promotion, you may advertise that on Twitter or on Instagram, and then you suddenly have this massive surge of folks coming to your site and they all want to sign up to know when it's going to be made available. How do we ensure that those rights don't kneel over and just fall over? So again, a lot of the work that we are doing around infrastructure, whether it's performance and scale, are things that we have been rolling out slowly over the last few releases. And then we really look to bring it home over the course of the summer and the winter releases, so that's from an infrastructure point of view.

Gillian Bruce: Nice.

Khushwant Singh: Now, as we move up the stack, we can talk about things like data and content. Now, let's start off with content Salesforce in general, has had a bit of a content management gap for a little while. And we have customers using third party content management systems, et cetera, to compliment the data investments that they have in Salesforce. Now, probably I would say 24 months back, we introduced Salesforce CMS, which was, for the very first time a content management system from Salesforce. Now, what we've come to realize over the 24 months is that boy, do we need a lot more improvements to it. And so over the last, I would say 18 months, we have been actually re-architecting the content management system from ground up. It is going to be JSON based. So very standard point of view.
JSON also would allow our customers to model many different types of content, whether that content is a blog, an email et cetera. Very extensible, so from that point of view, if we don't offer something out of the box, you can add a sidebar extension that allows you, like Grammarly that would say, "Hey, look," while you're typing this thing, it's telling you, you should add X, Y, and Z, et cetera. We also, 24 months back introduced two versions of the content management system. One was a free version, included version I would say, I shouldn't say free, the included version, and the other one was the paid version. What we realized really was, you know what, it's just artificial. Our customers really, they're coming to Salesforce for a variety of different use cases and content really should be something that supports and brings those use cases to life.
And so what we have done is as of the summer release, we have basically provided the paid CMS, which we have gotten rid of, and just given it, included it as part of all experienced cloud licenses. In fact there are so many licenses out there at Salesforce that use Experienced Cloud licenses. And so as of this summer, all of our customers will get the advanced version of content management. And at the same time, they will get access to the beta version of this new, what we call CMS 2.0 internally, we call that the JSON based. They'll get beta access to that as well, without any sort of opt-in, there's a check box, they have to check and they'll be able to take it for a spin. But we look to make that CMS 2.0, our next version of CMS generally available in the winter timeframe as well. So that's another massive uplift and improvement that we're doing from a content management point of view. And democratizing content altogether.

Gillian Bruce: That's great. I mean, I know admins are going to be very excited to be able to access that great capability without having to jump through any additional hoops to get it. So thank you.

Khushwant Singh: Exactly. Now, let's talk about data. Now, when we think about the data side of things, this is where a lot of our investments, at least from an Experience services point of view is that we have teams that are experts in records, Dynamic Forms, lists, and they're doing a lot of good work to expand. For example, Dynamic Forms today it's only available in custom objects, why? It should go across all standard objects. That's something that the team is working on. I'm really glad that we are going to stay really true to the fact that when we start something, we are going to end it and we are going to go all the way, at the same time this team is also working to bring all of that goodness across to not just employee facing experiences in Lex but also to customer facing, partner facing experiences via Experience Cloud.
And so that's one example where, as one unit Experience Services, it really brings benefit across all of the various endpoints, whether it's Lexio Experience Cloud or mobile for that matter. So that's something that we are really looking forward to. And then over on top of that, the ability to surface that data, but represent it in different visualizations. So you may want to show a list view in the form of a grid or in the form of a certain set of tiles. Because again, you want to do that because it's customer facing, it's partner facing, you have to apply your style guide on it, et cetera. So that's all the goodness that you can expect to see over the course of the next two releases from a data point of view.

Gillian Bruce: I mean, that's major stuff. I know that Dynamic Forms is one of the top favorite admin feature overall. And so being able to bring that to standard objects will be huge. So thank you. Thank you on behalf of all admins everywhere.

Khushwant Singh: It's a shout out to all of the good teams that are working on that front. So we touched about infra, we touched about content, we touched about data. Now, let's touch about the UI run time itself, which is Lightning Web Runtime and Lightning Web Components. Clearly the degree of, out of the box components for Aura, there are a lot more out of the box components for Aura than they are for LWCs, no doubt about it. And so what we're trying to do is we are trying to catch up to a certain degree, but catch up in a way that is addressing the most important use cases from out the box component point of view, but at the same time, not sacrificing customizability. And so from an LWR point of view, a few things to call out.
One is, I'll start off first with, when you build a site with Experience Cloud and with LWR and LWCs, search is always a use case that comes up. And by search, we tend to just think maybe at times CRM search, but really our customers are thinking of it as site search. They want to be able to cut across whether it's a CRM, whether it's site meta information, like the page title, the site title, or something that's in a text, a rich text component, whether that's CMS content, whether those are products or any other objects, they want to be able to search the entire site.

Gillian Bruce: Yeah. They don't know the differences between that, they just want to find what they need.

Khushwant Singh: Exactly. And so for them, this is complexity that we should abstract from them. And so again, this is something that our customers can expect to see in beta, in the summer timeframe. And all goes, well, we're going to take the hood off and generally make it available in the winter timeframe, starting with site meta information and CMS content as part of the index. And then we're going to expand that to CRM and to other objects for that matter.

Gillian Bruce: All right. So just a reminder to all listeners, forward looking statement applies to everything that Kush just said, this is what happens when we get excited in product information. Yeah.

Khushwant Singh: Exactly. And that too, as well. Yes. So I think, again from an LWR point of view, there's just so much more maturity that customers can expect to see with LWR and Experience Cloud. Because whether it's out of the box components for content, for data, whether it's search, whether it is even the ability to deliver these dynamic experiences. So one of the things that our customers really appreciate in Aura is the ability to personalize the experience using CRM information. So show me this content, this data, if user.account equals to X, Y, Z, et cetera. And so the ability to deliver that type of personalization is key, but at the same time, they want to be able to do things like real time personalization. So using, for example, Evergage or interaction studio for that matter.
So as you're browsing the site or portal, you're able to get relevant information that's on the fly generated. So those are another aspects of LWR that we are investing in very heavily. So whether it's infrastructure, whether it's data, whether it's content, whether it's the UI framework and the various personalization aspects of things, lots of investment happening. Now, all of this has to translate and manifest on mobile. And so that's the other dimension that we are heavily investing in. So whether you are customizing the experience in design time, as an admin, to say, "Hey, look, you know what? I want to show this image on desktop, but another image on mobile, or I want to have this font you applied in mobile versus on desktop. I want to be able to take my LWR site and use Mobile Publisher to create a mobile app that I can deploy via the app stores." Those are all areas that we are working on over the course of the next two releases as well. So again, lots of excitement as we work across this entire site.

Gillian Bruce: Yeah. Lots coming. Well, Kush I so appreciate you taking the time to chat with us here on the podcast about all things, Experience Services, Experience Cloud. I know I got a lot of questions answered. I'm sure a lot of people listening are very happy to hear all of the things that you and your team are working on. And I'm sure they will have many more questions. So I'll include links to some of the great trailblazer community groups that you have set up for Lightning Experience and for Experience Cloud, for people to submit feedback. And thanks again for all of the work that you and your team do. And I look forward to checking back in with you after a couple releases here and coming back to what you all have done and hearing about what is even next from then on.

Khushwant Singh: For sure Gillian. I mean, I truly appreciate the opportunity. And again, to all our Salesforce admins, you are our eyes and ears out there. Feedback is a gift, please keep it coming. And we're so appreciative of all that you do for us.

Gillian Bruce: Huge, thanks to coach for taking the time to chat with us. He and his team have been so busy working on really important foundational improvements to both Experience Cloud and Experience Services. And it's so great to now understand what Experience Services mean because for us admins, it means a lot of the stuff that we use every day. So, hey, I don't know about you, but I'm excited about Dynamic Lightning pages coming for standard objects. Woo, woo. Again, forward looking statement, but I look forward to getting Kush back on the podcast to ask him about that once it has been released in a few releases. So if you want to learn more or you have more feedback about anything, Experience Cloud or Experience Services, Kush, and his team pay close attention to the trailblazer community. So go to the Lightning Experience group or the Experience Cloud group on the trailblazer community and put your feedback in there, put your questions in there. He's got an amazing team of very talented people.
And if you want to learn anything else about how you can be a successful Salesforce admin, go to my favorite website, admin.salesforce.com. There you can find other great podcasts, blogs, and videos to help you in your Salesforce admin journey. I also encourage you to check out the new Salesforce admin skills kit, which we just launched last month. And it is right there on the admin@salesforce.com webpage. Check it out, let me know what you think, we're going to do some great podcast episodes about that, coming up here real soon. If you want to follow my guest today, Kush, you can find him @Kush_singh. You can follow me @Gilliankbruce. And you can follow Mike, my amazing co-host @Mikegerholdt. You can follow everything awesome admin related @Salesforceadmns, no I, on Twitter. With that, I hope you have a great rest of your day and I'll catch you next time in the cloud.



Direct download: Experience_Cloud_with_Khushwant_Singh.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:00am PDT

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Khushwant Singh, SVP, Product Management at Salesforce.

 

Join us as we talk about his role heading up all things Experience—not just Experience Cloud but Experience Services, too.

 

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

The Experience dream team

Khushwant, AKA “Khush”, heads up Experience at Salesforce. If that term is a little nebulous to you, you’re not alone, but Khush breaks it down for us. Experience Services brings a few teams together: the UI Platform team, the Experience Cloud team, the Mobile team, and the Mobify team. “We’re responsible for all things Experience, and it helps us build a common product strategy across the board,” Khush says, “whether you’re building an experience for an employee, a customer, or partner.”

 

Lightning Experience has really changed the game for Admins in terms of stepping up in their thinking about design, but Khush points out there’s also a bit of a divide there. “If you build a component for the App Builder, it may or may not work in the Experience Builder,” he says, “but as a Salesforce Admin or Developer, you want your investments to go across all of your various endpoints.”

Re-architecting to improve scaling, performance, and customizability

Experience Cloud is a very flexible tool that you should really look into if you haven’t yet. You can use it build out a simple marketing website, a self-service destination like a help center or account management site, or even a channel reselling portal or commerce storefront.

 

While Lightning and Aura have done a lot to enable Admins to build out things they never thought possible with low code and fast time to market, Khush admits we seem to have hit a wall from a performance, scale, and customizability point of view. To address that, they’ve been re-architecting to let you build new things more easily at a consumer-grade scale.

What’s next for Experience Cloud

One thing that will be going live soon (forward looking statement) is a major performance boost to public-facing apps and sites. They’ve revamped the out-of-the-box CDN (Content Delivery Network) to allow public aspects of your site and mobile apps to be cached at endpoints closer to the consumer, enabling much faster delivery. One other change is adding dynamic image resizing so the same image looks equally good on mobile, desktop, and tablet. The best part is these and many more improvements are enabled by default, so you get the performance boost without having to lift a finger.

 

Looking forward, Khush and his team are revamping the Salesforce Content Management System (CMS) to make it more robust, powerful, and responsive. They’re breaking down the barriers and rolling out the advanced version of Salesforce CMS to all customers for free, and you can get access to the new-and-improved JSON-based CMS 2.0 beta with an opt-in.

 

Khush also gives a preview into what he and his team are working on to make improvements to data to, for example, bring Dynamic Forms to all standard objects, and even more goodies for desktop, mobile, and everything in between. Make sure you listen to the full episode to hear what’s coming your way soon.

 

 

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Full show transcript

Gillian Bruce: Welcome to the Salesforce Admins Podcast, where we talk about product, community and careers to help you be an awesome admin. I'm your host today, Gillian Bruce, and we have a really fun episode lined up for you. We are talking with Khushwant Singh, AKA Kush, who's SVP of Product Management here at Salesforce, in charge of all things experience. And I mean all things experience, not just experience cloud, but Experience Services. And if you're wondering what all that means, don't worry, he's going to answer that for you. So without further ado, let's get Kush on the pod. Kush, welcome to the podcast.

Khushwant Singh: Thank you, Gillian.

Gillian Bruce: It's wonderful to have you on. I am very much looking forward to our discussion because we are talking about something that might be a little nebulous to some of us, especially if you've been in the Salesforce ecosystem for a while. We have experience cloud, Experience Services, experience all the things. Kush, clarify for us what all of that means.

Khushwant Singh: Well, Gillian, I wish I got that question, or rather I wish I had proactively answered that question at the recent TDX. So just a bit of a sidetrack, a little, for those of you who attended the recent TDX, we had a true to the call session where a few of us were up on stage and I introduced myself as, "My name's Kush, I'm a product manager and I work on all things experiences." Now, I honestly thought that I would be inundated with questions, but I realized that I actually got zero questions, and I realized that people just probably didn't get what all things experience means. So I'm going to learn from that, and be very clear in our conversation over here. So taking a step back, when we say, we just recently realigned some of our teams internally, and we've created this group internally called Experience Services. And what Experience Services is, is that it brings together a few teams together.
First and foremost, we have our UI platform team. And so from a UI platform perspective, think of it as all things web runtime, whether it's Aura, Lightning Web Runtime, LWC or Lightning Web Components. It includes things that all of the good components you have in Lex, so the record forms, lists, performance, et cetera, so that's the UI platform team. Then we also brought the experience cloud team, which really is, takes all the goodness that we have in Lex, and manifests it to customers and partners, external facing customers and partners. We do have instances where it's also facing employees as employee intranets, but it takes all of that goodness. We also brought together our mobile teams. So whether that's the Salesforce Flagship mobile app, whether that's our mobile SDK, whether that's taking an experience cloud side and creating a hybrid mobile app out of it through Mobile Publisher, we brought the mobile team together as well.
And then finally, we brought the MobiFi team, which some of you may know as the managed runtime offering to build out these progressive web apps for commercial use cases. So in a nutshell, this Experience Services team brings together the UI platform, brings together experience cloud, brings together the mobile teams and brings MobiFi together. So what we can do now is collectively, we are responsible for all things experiences, and it helps us build a common product strategy across the board, whether you're building an experience for an employee, a customer, or a partner for that matter.

Gillian Bruce: So that was really helpful, it helped me understand this because again, experience is one of those words that, especially as a Salesforce admin, we're always thinking about our end users experience. That's our whole goal is to make it seamless and make it really useful. But as you just described, experiences is so many things. And I really appreciate that you have explained how the teams are uniting under this umbrella, to really think about the holistic picture when it comes to these different experiences pieces. UI, designers' mindset, is one of the core admin skills that we have because it's always thinking about how is my user experience in this? How can I maximize that experience, make it more efficient? And when you talk about Lightning experience that, God, talk about something that changed the game for admins.

Khushwant Singh: I know, it did. It did entirely. It changed the game, but it also in full transparency, we added a bit of a divide as well. So if you take examples where you build a component for the App Builder, it may or may not work in the Experience Builder. You have a set of record components that look gloriously well on Lex, but they may not surface all of the capabilities, the actions don't surface in the Experience Builder or vice versa, the branding, the themeing, the mobile web responsiveness aspect of things that show up on Experience Builder, don't show up in the App Builder side of things. And so we have introduced this divide, which actually has made our... Well, each team has done a phenomenal job in going deep in their use cases, it's been at an expense of a divide where, as a Salesforce admin, as a Salesforce developer, you want your investments to go across all of your various endpoints. You might be a Salesforce admin for a company that is using Salesforce for their employee experience. For example, the service agents.
Similarly, within your same company, you may have an endpoint, a customer help center, which is customer facing, or you might be selling products through channels, which is also partner facing, and you want your investments to be able to run across ideally. So again, all teams have done great in their specific areas, but by bringing us together, we are really hopeful that we can deliver more value for our Salesforce admins and our developers as they manage all of these various endpoints.

Gillian Bruce: Yeah. I think as a company, for someone who's maybe been in the ecosystem for a long time, this is a familiar road, is that we develop something really close. One team goes down and develops this new way of doing something and then we have shadow examples of it happening all separately within the company. And then, hey, let's bring everybody together, let's make this a more cohesive, holistic experience for our admins, for our developers. And it's exciting to bring all those really smart brains together to work together versus everyone working in a silo.

Khushwant Singh: Indeed. And I think it's also indicative of trying to complete what we start. I think we've heard from admins, just this recent TDX, I mean, and at every TDX or any Dreamforce we do, any through the core session or any feedback we get from our MVPs and our admins out there, developers. They'll give us feedback, which is actually quite true. We start something, but we don't complete it. We say something that we will deliver something, but we, at times, don't deliver it. And so I think by bringing all of our teams together, that manage experience, I think it really... Organizational differences should not be the reason why we are not able to complete what we start or deliver what we say we will deliver. And so we are really hopeful that we'll be able to actually address those two key areas.

Gillian Bruce: Yeah. I've always heard the joke. We don't want to let our org chart show.

Khushwant Singh: Exactly. Across both desktop and mobile for that matter.

Gillian Bruce: Totally. Yeah. So Kush, before we get a little bit further, I mean, clearly you've got a big undertaking that you and your teams are doing. Can you tell me a little bit about you and how you got here? How long have you been at Salesforce because all of these works have been in progress for a long time. You mentioned when we released Lightning experience. Tell me a little bit about your background.

Khushwant Singh: Oh yeah, sure. So I've been at Salesforce, I think, May sometime this month is my seventh year anniversary.

Gillian Bruce: Congratulations.

Khushwant Singh: Thank you. And I have truly enjoyed every single day of my time here at Salesforce. If you look at my background, I rarely spend more than five to six years in a company. And the fact that I'm here for the seventh year and still super challenged, just speaks towards what Salesforce offers from a challenge, point of view. There's always something new, there's always a new challenge for us to work on. And I've actually spent probably six and a half or six and three quarters of that seven years working on Experience Cloud. And so most of my background is from a B2C side of things. I spend some time at eBay, at Microsoft, at a startup called Mozi, working on a number of B2C oriented products. And I wanted to build products in an enterprise setting for enterprise, but I didn't want to veer too far away from the consumer side of things, the B2C side of things. And Experience Cloud really helped me walk that fine line where you're building these digital experience products that are used by enterprises for their customers, for their partners. So it really gave me a good middle ground.
That said, Experience Cloud is a, it's a platform upon the overall Salesforce platform. And so over the last six and a half years or so, I've had the opportunity to work with some immensely dedicated individuals on the platform side of things as well. And so that bring a lot of the goodness that we see in Lex and Experience Cloud and Mobile to life. And so bringing the teams together was like bringing a group of old friends together.

Gillian Bruce: I love that, getting the band back together, that's good.

Khushwant Singh: There you go.

Gillian Bruce: Okay. So let's talk a little bit about what's currently going on in Experience Cloud. So I know there were some good announcements at Dreamforce last year, at DBX this year. Can you talk a little bit about where we're currently at with Experience Cloud and why maybe an admin who hasn't yet dabbled in Experience Cloud might consider it?

Khushwant Singh: Sure. So again, just to level set, one more time, a customer uses Experience Cloud for a number of use cases. You could use Experience Cloud to build out a simple marketing website, corporate website. You could use Experience Cloud to build out a self-service destination, so that self-service destination could be a help center, where you want to surface your knowledge base articles, where you wish to surface chat bots, where you wish to, for example, give your customers the ability to log in and manage their account, manage their profile for that matter. Similarly, you could use Experience Cloud to build out a channel reseller portal, where you may not be selling direct or you may be selling direct, but you also sell through your various channels and you need a way to manage your channels. You could use Experience Cloud to build a commerce storefront, whether it's a B2B commerce storefront, a B2C commerce storefront, et cetera.
So Experience Cloud, you can use it for a variety of different customer facing, partner facing use cases. In fact, I should also mention employee facing use cases. You could build out a company intranet for that very matter as well. And so over the last years, last few years with introduction of Lightning and Aura, for that matter, it really revolutionized the ability for our customers to build all of this out in a very low code, fast time to market aspect of things. And we've seen phenomenal adoption, super humbled, by the adoption, we've gotten North of 70,000 odd sites. I think our MAU is around, our monthly active usage is maybe about 40 to 50 million. We have a daily active usage of about five to 6 million. And so, I mean, again, super thankful to all of the customers and the admins and the developers out there who have invested so much of their time in Experience Cloud.
That said, as with every technology, there comes a time where you've hit a bit of a wall and we hit a wall with Aura, from a performance, from a scale, from a customizability point of view. Where you can see that as you are trying to build out these next generation consumer grade experiences like storefronts, like websites, even these consumer grade portals, where you expect an iPhone like Experience, whether it's employee facing or customer facing experience. So we hit a bit of a wall with Aura. And so over the last, I would say 18 months, we've been, for lack of a better way to put it, somewhat silent in terms of our feature deliverables. Sure, we've been delivering a few features here and there, but like our MVP, we have a really passionate and amazing MVP out there. His name is Phil Weinmeister-

Gillian Bruce: Yes. We know Phil very well.

Khushwant Singh: Exactly. And so I think many of you must have seen his post where he's actually tracking the number of features that Experience Cloud launches. And he showed this bar graph, that showed the decreasing number of features over the last 18 months. And I replied to him and again, huge respect for Phil. And the fact of the matter is that we've had to go under the hood and rebuild from ground up using Lightning Web Runtime, using Lightning Web Components, so that we can actually deliver this consumer grade scale and performance and customizability, whether it's a B2B, B2C or B2E type of use case. And so we've been "silent for a while" but I'm super excited at what's coming in this summer release, and what's going to go. A lot of it going to go generally available this winter release. So again, long story short, we have been re-architecting for consumer grade across the entire customer journey.
So whether you're looking at an awareness use case, whether you're looking for an acquisition use case, a service use case, a loyalty use case, you want to deliver consumer grade across the board. And with Lightning Web Runtime, with Lightning Web Components, we do believe that we've got the right foundation upon which we can actually deliver these experiences. So that's the overarching area where we're headed.

Gillian Bruce: I mean, that's impressive. I mean, we talk, especially even as admins, we have our own technical that we accrue over many years of admining a specific org. And sometimes you do, you got to just go back, peel back the covers and go in and make sure everything, the foundations are updated and running better. And hey, if you got a system that's not working for you, you got to invest the time and pause on the new stuff for a minute. Let's make the core stuff really work and function so that we can continue to build. So I love that transparency. I think it's really useful to help our admins and everybody understand what all of the hard work that your team is doing. And yeah, I mean, hey, now that we talked about all the hard work that you've all been doing, let's talk about some of the shiny new fun things that you have coming down the page.

Khushwant Singh: Yeah, of course. So now I think on that note, I do also want to underscore that we have so many, all of that adoption stats that I talked about, they're all visual force or mostly Aura investments. And I want to underscore that we're not just leaving Aura or VF behind. And so there are many aspects that customers on Aura or customers on VF would also be able to benefit from. So let's dive into those shiny aspects of things. So I think if we think of this as maybe a stack diagram, maybe we'll start at the lowest level of infrastructure. What are we doing from an infrastructure point of view to help deliver that consumer grade type of experiences? So, first and foremost, we've invested a fair amount of time and effort to deliver performance. And so, one of the things you'll start to notice is, our out of the box CDN, so behind the scenes we work with Akamai, and what that does is that it allows, it just provides customers an out of the box CDN that they can actually choose to use.

Gillian Bruce: So Kush, before we go forward, what is a CDN? Let's break down that.

Khushwant Singh: Sure. It's a content delivery network. What that does is it allows your public aspects of your site, of your mobile app to be cashed on these endpoints, which are closer to the consumer, and so that allows for faster delivery. And if it doesn't change, if that public information doesn't change very much, it's served out of cash versus another round hub back. So again, at the end of the day, it's about better delivery of, faster delivery of the experience. Now this used to be a bit of an opt in thing and so what we have done now is as of spring and summer and winter, what we're doing is behind the scenes, we are rolling out as part of the secure domains effort, as secure domains is being enabled across all net new sites and existing sites. We are just enabling the default CDN by default, so it's an opt out versus an opt in.
So from that perspective, we are trying to ensure that everyone gets a phenomenal performance from the get go. Now, similarly, another thing that we are really excited about is, and the teams working on it, is as part of the out the box, CDN from an infrastructure point of view is being able to get more capabilities out of that, out of CDN. Now, have you gone to a site where the images look really weird, wonky, feels like this is a desktop site they're trying to throw onto a mobile or a tablet?

Gillian Bruce: Yeah. Everything's out of perspective. And you got to try and scroll weird ways. Yeah.

Khushwant Singh: Exactly. So another thing that if you use the out of the box CDN, another thing that our customers can look forward to is dynamic image resizing. So when you are the same image renders well on a mobile, a tablet, a desktop, and similarly, if you are an admin, you may inadvertently upload a, I don't know what? 20 MB file, image, and then say, "Look, why is my site loading so slowly?" And so what we're trying to do is also correct that, where you may upload a 20MB file, please don't, but what we'll do on our side, on the CDN side of things, we'll resize that and ensure that we are delivering a more optimized image to the customer. So that's another thing that we are really excited about, from an infrastructure point of view. So lots of good work happening from a perf point of view.
Now, then there is scale. So from a scale point of view, we have aspects like concurrency. So concurrent user scale, so how many users can you support on that portal? Concurrent read scale, so how many requests are coming in concurrently? And before the site just says, "Look I can't handle this." And concurrent rights. So for example, you may be running a promotion and that promotion, you may advertise that on Twitter or on Instagram, and then you suddenly have this massive surge of folks coming to your site and they all want to sign up to know when it's going to be made available. How do we ensure that those rights don't kneel over and just fall over? So again, a lot of the work that we are doing around infrastructure, whether it's performance and scale, are things that we have been rolling out slowly over the last few releases. And then we really look to bring it home over the course of the summer and the winter releases, so that's from an infrastructure point of view.

Gillian Bruce: Nice.

Khushwant Singh: Now, as we move up the stack, we can talk about things like data and content. Now, let's start off with content Salesforce in general, has had a bit of a content management gap for a little while. And we have customers using third party content management systems, et cetera, to compliment the data investments that they have in Salesforce. Now, probably I would say 24 months back, we introduced Salesforce CMS, which was, for the very first time a content management system from Salesforce. Now, what we've come to realize over the 24 months is that boy, do we need a lot more improvements to it. And so over the last, I would say 18 months, we have been actually re-architecting the content management system from ground up. It is going to be JSON based. So very standard point of view.
JSON also would allow our customers to model many different types of content, whether that content is a blog, an email et cetera. Very extensible, so from that point of view, if we don't offer something out of the box, you can add a sidebar extension that allows you, like Grammarly that would say, "Hey, look," while you're typing this thing, it's telling you, you should add X, Y, and Z, et cetera. We also, 24 months back introduced two versions of the content management system. One was a free version, included version I would say, I shouldn't say free, the included version, and the other one was the paid version. What we realized really was, you know what, it's just artificial. Our customers really, they're coming to Salesforce for a variety of different use cases and content really should be something that supports and brings those use cases to life.
And so what we have done is as of the summer release, we have basically provided the paid CMS, which we have gotten rid of, and just given it, included it as part of all experienced cloud licenses. In fact there are so many licenses out there at Salesforce that use Experienced Cloud licenses. And so as of this summer, all of our customers will get the advanced version of content management. And at the same time, they will get access to the beta version of this new, what we call CMS 2.0 internally, we call that the JSON based. They'll get beta access to that as well, without any sort of opt-in, there's a check box, they have to check and they'll be able to take it for a spin. But we look to make that CMS 2.0, our next version of CMS generally available in the winter timeframe as well. So that's another massive uplift and improvement that we're doing from a content management point of view. And democratizing content altogether.

Gillian Bruce: That's great. I mean, I know admins are going to be very excited to be able to access that great capability without having to jump through any additional hoops to get it. So thank you.

Khushwant Singh: Exactly. Now, let's talk about data. Now, when we think about the data side of things, this is where a lot of our investments, at least from an Experience services point of view is that we have teams that are experts in records, Dynamic Forms, lists, and they're doing a lot of good work to expand. For example, Dynamic Forms today it's only available in custom objects, why? It should go across all standard objects. That's something that the team is working on. I'm really glad that we are going to stay really true to the fact that when we start something, we are going to end it and we are going to go all the way, at the same time this team is also working to bring all of that goodness across to not just employee facing experiences in Lex but also to customer facing, partner facing experiences via Experience Cloud.
And so that's one example where, as one unit Experience Services, it really brings benefit across all of the various endpoints, whether it's Lexio Experience Cloud or mobile for that matter. So that's something that we are really looking forward to. And then over on top of that, the ability to surface that data, but represent it in different visualizations. So you may want to show a list view in the form of a grid or in the form of a certain set of tiles. Because again, you want to do that because it's customer facing, it's partner facing, you have to apply your style guide on it, et cetera. So that's all the goodness that you can expect to see over the course of the next two releases from a data point of view.

Gillian Bruce: I mean, that's major stuff. I know that Dynamic Forms is one of the top favorite admin feature overall. And so being able to bring that to standard objects will be huge. So thank you. Thank you on behalf of all admins everywhere.

Khushwant Singh: It's a shout out to all of the good teams that are working on that front. So we touched about infra, we touched about content, we touched about data. Now, let's touch about the UI run time itself, which is Lightning Web Runtime and Lightning Web Components. Clearly the degree of, out of the box components for Aura, there are a lot more out of the box components for Aura than they are for LWCs, no doubt about it. And so what we're trying to do is we are trying to catch up to a certain degree, but catch up in a way that is addressing the most important use cases from out the box component point of view, but at the same time, not sacrificing customizability. And so from an LWR point of view, a few things to call out.
One is, I'll start off first with, when you build a site with Experience Cloud and with LWR and LWCs, search is always a use case that comes up. And by search, we tend to just think maybe at times CRM search, but really our customers are thinking of it as site search. They want to be able to cut across whether it's a CRM, whether it's site meta information, like the page title, the site title, or something that's in a text, a rich text component, whether that's CMS content, whether those are products or any other objects, they want to be able to search the entire site.

Gillian Bruce: Yeah. They don't know the differences between that, they just want to find what they need.

Khushwant Singh: Exactly. And so for them, this is complexity that we should abstract from them. And so again, this is something that our customers can expect to see in beta, in the summer timeframe. And all goes, well, we're going to take the hood off and generally make it available in the winter timeframe, starting with site meta information and CMS content as part of the index. And then we're going to expand that to CRM and to other objects for that matter.

Gillian Bruce: All right. So just a reminder to all listeners, forward looking statement applies to everything that Kush just said, this is what happens when we get excited in product information. Yeah.

Khushwant Singh: Exactly. And that too, as well. Yes. So I think, again from an LWR point of view, there's just so much more maturity that customers can expect to see with LWR and Experience Cloud. Because whether it's out of the box components for content, for data, whether it's search, whether it is even the ability to deliver these dynamic experiences. So one of the things that our customers really appreciate in Aura is the ability to personalize the experience using CRM information. So show me this content, this data, if user.account equals to X, Y, Z, et cetera. And so the ability to deliver that type of personalization is key, but at the same time, they want to be able to do things like real time personalization. So using, for example, Evergage or interaction studio for that matter.
So as you're browsing the site or portal, you're able to get relevant information that's on the fly generated. So those are another aspects of LWR that we are investing in very heavily. So whether it's infrastructure, whether it's data, whether it's content, whether it's the UI framework and the various personalization aspects of things, lots of investment happening. Now, all of this has to translate and manifest on mobile. And so that's the other dimension that we are heavily investing in. So whether you are customizing the experience in design time, as an admin, to say, "Hey, look, you know what? I want to show this image on desktop, but another image on mobile, or I want to have this font you applied in mobile versus on desktop. I want to be able to take my LWR site and use Mobile Publisher to create a mobile app that I can deploy via the app stores." Those are all areas that we are working on over the course of the next two releases as well. So again, lots of excitement as we work across this entire site.

Gillian Bruce: Yeah. Lots coming. Well, Kush I so appreciate you taking the time to chat with us here on the podcast about all things, Experience Services, Experience Cloud. I know I got a lot of questions answered. I'm sure a lot of people listening are very happy to hear all of the things that you and your team are working on. And I'm sure they will have many more questions. So I'll include links to some of the great trailblazer community groups that you have set up for Lightning Experience and for Experience Cloud, for people to submit feedback. And thanks again for all of the work that you and your team do. And I look forward to checking back in with you after a couple releases here and coming back to what you all have done and hearing about what is even next from then on.

Khushwant Singh: For sure Gillian. I mean, I truly appreciate the opportunity. And again, to all our Salesforce admins, you are our eyes and ears out there. Feedback is a gift, please keep it coming. And we're so appreciative of all that you do for us.

Gillian Bruce: Huge, thanks to coach for taking the time to chat with us. He and his team have been so busy working on really important foundational improvements to both Experience Cloud and Experience Services. And it's so great to now understand what Experience Services mean because for us admins, it means a lot of the stuff that we use every day. So, hey, I don't know about you, but I'm excited about Dynamic Lightning pages coming for standard objects. Woo, woo. Again, forward looking statement, but I look forward to getting Kush back on the podcast to ask him about that once it has been released in a few releases. So if you want to learn more or you have more feedback about anything, Experience Cloud or Experience Services, Kush, and his team pay close attention to the trailblazer community. So go to the Lightning Experience group or the Experience Cloud group on the trailblazer community and put your feedback in there, put your questions in there. He's got an amazing team of very talented people.
And if you want to learn anything else about how you can be a successful Salesforce admin, go to my favorite website, admin.salesforce.com. There you can find other great podcasts, blogs, and videos to help you in your Salesforce admin journey. I also encourage you to check out the new Salesforce admin skills kit, which we just launched last month. And it is right there on the admin@salesforce.com webpage. Check it out, let me know what you think, we're going to do some great podcast episodes about that, coming up here real soon. If you want to follow my guest today, Kush, you can find him @Kush_singh. You can follow me @Gilliankbruce. And you can follow Mike, my amazing co-host @Mikegerholdt. You can follow everything awesome admin related @Salesforceadmns, no I, on Twitter. With that, I hope you have a great rest of your day and I'll catch you next time in the cloud.



Direct download: Experience_Cloud_with_Khushwant_Singh.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:00am PDT

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Khushwant Singh, SVP, Product Management at Salesforce.

 

Join us as we talk about his role heading up all things Experience—not just Experience Cloud but Experience Services, too.

 

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

The Experience dream team

Khushwant, AKA “Khush”, heads up Experience at Salesforce. If that term is a little nebulous to you, you’re not alone, but Khush breaks it down for us. Experience Services brings a few teams together: the UI Platform team, the Experience Cloud team, the Mobile team, and the Mobify team. “We’re responsible for all things Experience, and it helps us build a common product strategy across the board,” Khush says, “whether you’re building an experience for an employee, a customer, or partner.”

 

Lightning Experience has really changed the game for Admins in terms of stepping up in their thinking about design, but Khush points out there’s also a bit of a divide there. “If you build a component for the App Builder, it may or may not work in the Experience Builder,” he says, “but as a Salesforce Admin or Developer, you want your investments to go across all of your various endpoints.”

Re-architecting to improve scaling, performance, and customizability

Experience Cloud is a very flexible tool that you should really look into if you haven’t yet. You can use it build out a simple marketing website, a self-service destination like a help center or account management site, or even a channel reselling portal or commerce storefront.

 

While Lightning and Aura have done a lot to enable Admins to build out things they never thought possible with low code and fast time to market, Khush admits we seem to have hit a wall from a performance, scale, and customizability point of view. To address that, they’ve been re-architecting to let you build new things more easily at a consumer-grade scale.

What’s next for Experience Cloud

One thing that will be going live soon (forward looking statement) is a major performance boost to public-facing apps and sites. They’ve revamped the out-of-the-box CDN (Content Delivery Network) to allow public aspects of your site and mobile apps to be cached at endpoints closer to the consumer, enabling much faster delivery. One other change is adding dynamic image resizing so the same image looks equally good on mobile, desktop, and tablet. The best part is these and many more improvements are enabled by default, so you get the performance boost without having to lift a finger.

 

Looking forward, Khush and his team are revamping the Salesforce Content Management System (CMS) to make it more robust, powerful, and responsive. They’re breaking down the barriers and rolling out the advanced version of Salesforce CMS to all customers for free, and you can get access to the new-and-improved JSON-based CMS 2.0 beta with an opt-in.

 

Khush also gives a preview into what he and his team are working on to make improvements to data to, for example, bring Dynamic Forms to all standard objects, and even more goodies for desktop, mobile, and everything in between. Make sure you listen to the full episode to hear what’s coming your way soon.

 

 

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Full show transcript

Gillian Bruce: Welcome to the Salesforce Admins Podcast, where we talk about product, community and careers to help you be an awesome admin. I'm your host today, Gillian Bruce, and we have a really fun episode lined up for you. We are talking with Khushwant Singh, AKA Kush, who's SVP of Product Management here at Salesforce, in charge of all things experience. And I mean all things experience, not just experience cloud, but Experience Services. And if you're wondering what all that means, don't worry, he's going to answer that for you. So without further ado, let's get Kush on the pod. Kush, welcome to the podcast.

Khushwant Singh: Thank you, Gillian.

Gillian Bruce: It's wonderful to have you on. I am very much looking forward to our discussion because we are talking about something that might be a little nebulous to some of us, especially if you've been in the Salesforce ecosystem for a while. We have experience cloud, Experience Services, experience all the things. Kush, clarify for us what all of that means.

Khushwant Singh: Well, Gillian, I wish I got that question, or rather I wish I had proactively answered that question at the recent TDX. So just a bit of a sidetrack, a little, for those of you who attended the recent TDX, we had a true to the call session where a few of us were up on stage and I introduced myself as, "My name's Kush, I'm a product manager and I work on all things experiences." Now, I honestly thought that I would be inundated with questions, but I realized that I actually got zero questions, and I realized that people just probably didn't get what all things experience means. So I'm going to learn from that, and be very clear in our conversation over here. So taking a step back, when we say, we just recently realigned some of our teams internally, and we've created this group internally called Experience Services. And what Experience Services is, is that it brings together a few teams together.
First and foremost, we have our UI platform team. And so from a UI platform perspective, think of it as all things web runtime, whether it's Aura, Lightning Web Runtime, LWC or Lightning Web Components. It includes things that all of the good components you have in Lex, so the record forms, lists, performance, et cetera, so that's the UI platform team. Then we also brought the experience cloud team, which really is, takes all the goodness that we have in Lex, and manifests it to customers and partners, external facing customers and partners. We do have instances where it's also facing employees as employee intranets, but it takes all of that goodness. We also brought together our mobile teams. So whether that's the Salesforce Flagship mobile app, whether that's our mobile SDK, whether that's taking an experience cloud side and creating a hybrid mobile app out of it through Mobile Publisher, we brought the mobile team together as well.
And then finally, we brought the MobiFi team, which some of you may know as the managed runtime offering to build out these progressive web apps for commercial use cases. So in a nutshell, this Experience Services team brings together the UI platform, brings together experience cloud, brings together the mobile teams and brings MobiFi together. So what we can do now is collectively, we are responsible for all things experiences, and it helps us build a common product strategy across the board, whether you're building an experience for an employee, a customer, or a partner for that matter.

Gillian Bruce: So that was really helpful, it helped me understand this because again, experience is one of those words that, especially as a Salesforce admin, we're always thinking about our end users experience. That's our whole goal is to make it seamless and make it really useful. But as you just described, experiences is so many things. And I really appreciate that you have explained how the teams are uniting under this umbrella, to really think about the holistic picture when it comes to these different experiences pieces. UI, designers' mindset, is one of the core admin skills that we have because it's always thinking about how is my user experience in this? How can I maximize that experience, make it more efficient? And when you talk about Lightning experience that, God, talk about something that changed the game for admins.

Khushwant Singh: I know, it did. It did entirely. It changed the game, but it also in full transparency, we added a bit of a divide as well. So if you take examples where you build a component for the App Builder, it may or may not work in the Experience Builder. You have a set of record components that look gloriously well on Lex, but they may not surface all of the capabilities, the actions don't surface in the Experience Builder or vice versa, the branding, the themeing, the mobile web responsiveness aspect of things that show up on Experience Builder, don't show up in the App Builder side of things. And so we have introduced this divide, which actually has made our... Well, each team has done a phenomenal job in going deep in their use cases, it's been at an expense of a divide where, as a Salesforce admin, as a Salesforce developer, you want your investments to go across all of your various endpoints. You might be a Salesforce admin for a company that is using Salesforce for their employee experience. For example, the service agents.
Similarly, within your same company, you may have an endpoint, a customer help center, which is customer facing, or you might be selling products through channels, which is also partner facing, and you want your investments to be able to run across ideally. So again, all teams have done great in their specific areas, but by bringing us together, we are really hopeful that we can deliver more value for our Salesforce admins and our developers as they manage all of these various endpoints.

Gillian Bruce: Yeah. I think as a company, for someone who's maybe been in the ecosystem for a long time, this is a familiar road, is that we develop something really close. One team goes down and develops this new way of doing something and then we have shadow examples of it happening all separately within the company. And then, hey, let's bring everybody together, let's make this a more cohesive, holistic experience for our admins, for our developers. And it's exciting to bring all those really smart brains together to work together versus everyone working in a silo.

Khushwant Singh: Indeed. And I think it's also indicative of trying to complete what we start. I think we've heard from admins, just this recent TDX, I mean, and at every TDX or any Dreamforce we do, any through the core session or any feedback we get from our MVPs and our admins out there, developers. They'll give us feedback, which is actually quite true. We start something, but we don't complete it. We say something that we will deliver something, but we, at times, don't deliver it. And so I think by bringing all of our teams together, that manage experience, I think it really... Organizational differences should not be the reason why we are not able to complete what we start or deliver what we say we will deliver. And so we are really hopeful that we'll be able to actually address those two key areas.

Gillian Bruce: Yeah. I've always heard the joke. We don't want to let our org chart show.

Khushwant Singh: Exactly. Across both desktop and mobile for that matter.

Gillian Bruce: Totally. Yeah. So Kush, before we get a little bit further, I mean, clearly you've got a big undertaking that you and your teams are doing. Can you tell me a little bit about you and how you got here? How long have you been at Salesforce because all of these works have been in progress for a long time. You mentioned when we released Lightning experience. Tell me a little bit about your background.

Khushwant Singh: Oh yeah, sure. So I've been at Salesforce, I think, May sometime this month is my seventh year anniversary.

Gillian Bruce: Congratulations.

Khushwant Singh: Thank you. And I have truly enjoyed every single day of my time here at Salesforce. If you look at my background, I rarely spend more than five to six years in a company. And the fact that I'm here for the seventh year and still super challenged, just speaks towards what Salesforce offers from a challenge, point of view. There's always something new, there's always a new challenge for us to work on. And I've actually spent probably six and a half or six and three quarters of that seven years working on Experience Cloud. And so most of my background is from a B2C side of things. I spend some time at eBay, at Microsoft, at a startup called Mozi, working on a number of B2C oriented products. And I wanted to build products in an enterprise setting for enterprise, but I didn't want to veer too far away from the consumer side of things, the B2C side of things. And Experience Cloud really helped me walk that fine line where you're building these digital experience products that are used by enterprises for their customers, for their partners. So it really gave me a good middle ground.
That said, Experience Cloud is a, it's a platform upon the overall Salesforce platform. And so over the last six and a half years or so, I've had the opportunity to work with some immensely dedicated individuals on the platform side of things as well. And so that bring a lot of the goodness that we see in Lex and Experience Cloud and Mobile to life. And so bringing the teams together was like bringing a group of old friends together.

Gillian Bruce: I love that, getting the band back together, that's good.

Khushwant Singh: There you go.

Gillian Bruce: Okay. So let's talk a little bit about what's currently going on in Experience Cloud. So I know there were some good announcements at Dreamforce last year, at DBX this year. Can you talk a little bit about where we're currently at with Experience Cloud and why maybe an admin who hasn't yet dabbled in Experience Cloud might consider it?

Khushwant Singh: Sure. So again, just to level set, one more time, a customer uses Experience Cloud for a number of use cases. You could use Experience Cloud to build out a simple marketing website, corporate website. You could use Experience Cloud to build out a self-service destination, so that self-service destination could be a help center, where you want to surface your knowledge base articles, where you wish to surface chat bots, where you wish to, for example, give your customers the ability to log in and manage their account, manage their profile for that matter. Similarly, you could use Experience Cloud to build out a channel reseller portal, where you may not be selling direct or you may be selling direct, but you also sell through your various channels and you need a way to manage your channels. You could use Experience Cloud to build a commerce storefront, whether it's a B2B commerce storefront, a B2C commerce storefront, et cetera.
So Experience Cloud, you can use it for a variety of different customer facing, partner facing use cases. In fact, I should also mention employee facing use cases. You could build out a company intranet for that very matter as well. And so over the last years, last few years with introduction of Lightning and Aura, for that matter, it really revolutionized the ability for our customers to build all of this out in a very low code, fast time to market aspect of things. And we've seen phenomenal adoption, super humbled, by the adoption, we've gotten North of 70,000 odd sites. I think our MAU is around, our monthly active usage is maybe about 40 to 50 million. We have a daily active usage of about five to 6 million. And so, I mean, again, super thankful to all of the customers and the admins and the developers out there who have invested so much of their time in Experience Cloud.
That said, as with every technology, there comes a time where you've hit a bit of a wall and we hit a wall with Aura, from a performance, from a scale, from a customizability point of view. Where you can see that as you are trying to build out these next generation consumer grade experiences like storefronts, like websites, even these consumer grade portals, where you expect an iPhone like Experience, whether it's employee facing or customer facing experience. So we hit a bit of a wall with Aura. And so over the last, I would say 18 months, we've been, for lack of a better way to put it, somewhat silent in terms of our feature deliverables. Sure, we've been delivering a few features here and there, but like our MVP, we have a really passionate and amazing MVP out there. His name is Phil Weinmeister-

Gillian Bruce: Yes. We know Phil very well.

Khushwant Singh: Exactly. And so I think many of you must have seen his post where he's actually tracking the number of features that Experience Cloud launches. And he showed this bar graph, that showed the decreasing number of features over the last 18 months. And I replied to him and again, huge respect for Phil. And the fact of the matter is that we've had to go under the hood and rebuild from ground up using Lightning Web Runtime, using Lightning Web Components, so that we can actually deliver this consumer grade scale and performance and customizability, whether it's a B2B, B2C or B2E type of use case. And so we've been "silent for a while" but I'm super excited at what's coming in this summer release, and what's going to go. A lot of it going to go generally available this winter release. So again, long story short, we have been re-architecting for consumer grade across the entire customer journey.
So whether you're looking at an awareness use case, whether you're looking for an acquisition use case, a service use case, a loyalty use case, you want to deliver consumer grade across the board. And with Lightning Web Runtime, with Lightning Web Components, we do believe that we've got the right foundation upon which we can actually deliver these experiences. So that's the overarching area where we're headed.

Gillian Bruce: I mean, that's impressive. I mean, we talk, especially even as admins, we have our own technical that we accrue over many years of admining a specific org. And sometimes you do, you got to just go back, peel back the covers and go in and make sure everything, the foundations are updated and running better. And hey, if you got a system that's not working for you, you got to invest the time and pause on the new stuff for a minute. Let's make the core stuff really work and function so that we can continue to build. So I love that transparency. I think it's really useful to help our admins and everybody understand what all of the hard work that your team is doing. And yeah, I mean, hey, now that we talked about all the hard work that you've all been doing, let's talk about some of the shiny new fun things that you have coming down the page.

Khushwant Singh: Yeah, of course. So now I think on that note, I do also want to underscore that we have so many, all of that adoption stats that I talked about, they're all visual force or mostly Aura investments. And I want to underscore that we're not just leaving Aura or VF behind. And so there are many aspects that customers on Aura or customers on VF would also be able to benefit from. So let's dive into those shiny aspects of things. So I think if we think of this as maybe a stack diagram, maybe we'll start at the lowest level of infrastructure. What are we doing from an infrastructure point of view to help deliver that consumer grade type of experiences? So, first and foremost, we've invested a fair amount of time and effort to deliver performance. And so, one of the things you'll start to notice is, our out of the box CDN, so behind the scenes we work with Akamai, and what that does is that it allows, it just provides customers an out of the box CDN that they can actually choose to use.

Gillian Bruce: So Kush, before we go forward, what is a CDN? Let's break down that.

Khushwant Singh: Sure. It's a content delivery network. What that does is it allows your public aspects of your site, of your mobile app to be cashed on these endpoints, which are closer to the consumer, and so that allows for faster delivery. And if it doesn't change, if that public information doesn't change very much, it's served out of cash versus another round hub back. So again, at the end of the day, it's about better delivery of, faster delivery of the experience. Now this used to be a bit of an opt in thing and so what we have done now is as of spring and summer and winter, what we're doing is behind the scenes, we are rolling out as part of the secure domains effort, as secure domains is being enabled across all net new sites and existing sites. We are just enabling the default CDN by default, so it's an opt out versus an opt in.
So from that perspective, we are trying to ensure that everyone gets a phenomenal performance from the get go. Now, similarly, another thing that we are really excited about is, and the teams working on it, is as part of the out the box, CDN from an infrastructure point of view is being able to get more capabilities out of that, out of CDN. Now, have you gone to a site where the images look really weird, wonky, feels like this is a desktop site they're trying to throw onto a mobile or a tablet?

Gillian Bruce: Yeah. Everything's out of perspective. And you got to try and scroll weird ways. Yeah.

Khushwant Singh: Exactly. So another thing that if you use the out of the box CDN, another thing that our customers can look forward to is dynamic image resizing. So when you are the same image renders well on a mobile, a tablet, a desktop, and similarly, if you are an admin, you may inadvertently upload a, I don't know what? 20 MB file, image, and then say, "Look, why is my site loading so slowly?" And so what we're trying to do is also correct that, where you may upload a 20MB file, please don't, but what we'll do on our side, on the CDN side of things, we'll resize that and ensure that we are delivering a more optimized image to the customer. So that's another thing that we are really excited about, from an infrastructure point of view. So lots of good work happening from a perf point of view.
Now, then there is scale. So from a scale point of view, we have aspects like concurrency. So concurrent user scale, so how many users can you support on that portal? Concurrent read scale, so how many requests are coming in concurrently? And before the site just says, "Look I can't handle this." And concurrent rights. So for example, you may be running a promotion and that promotion, you may advertise that on Twitter or on Instagram, and then you suddenly have this massive surge of folks coming to your site and they all want to sign up to know when it's going to be made available. How do we ensure that those rights don't kneel over and just fall over? So again, a lot of the work that we are doing around infrastructure, whether it's performance and scale, are things that we have been rolling out slowly over the last few releases. And then we really look to bring it home over the course of the summer and the winter releases, so that's from an infrastructure point of view.

Gillian Bruce: Nice.

Khushwant Singh: Now, as we move up the stack, we can talk about things like data and content. Now, let's start off with content Salesforce in general, has had a bit of a content management gap for a little while. And we have customers using third party content management systems, et cetera, to compliment the data investments that they have in Salesforce. Now, probably I would say 24 months back, we introduced Salesforce CMS, which was, for the very first time a content management system from Salesforce. Now, what we've come to realize over the 24 months is that boy, do we need a lot more improvements to it. And so over the last, I would say 18 months, we have been actually re-architecting the content management system from ground up. It is going to be JSON based. So very standard point of view.
JSON also would allow our customers to model many different types of content, whether that content is a blog, an email et cetera. Very extensible, so from that point of view, if we don't offer something out of the box, you can add a sidebar extension that allows you, like Grammarly that would say, "Hey, look," while you're typing this thing, it's telling you, you should add X, Y, and Z, et cetera. We also, 24 months back introduced two versions of the content management system. One was a free version, included version I would say, I shouldn't say free, the included version, and the other one was the paid version. What we realized really was, you know what, it's just artificial. Our customers really, they're coming to Salesforce for a variety of different use cases and content really should be something that supports and brings those use cases to life.
And so what we have done is as of the summer release, we have basically provided the paid CMS, which we have gotten rid of, and just given it, included it as part of all experienced cloud licenses. In fact there are so many licenses out there at Salesforce that use Experienced Cloud licenses. And so as of this summer, all of our customers will get the advanced version of content management. And at the same time, they will get access to the beta version of this new, what we call CMS 2.0 internally, we call that the JSON based. They'll get beta access to that as well, without any sort of opt-in, there's a check box, they have to check and they'll be able to take it for a spin. But we look to make that CMS 2.0, our next version of CMS generally available in the winter timeframe as well. So that's another massive uplift and improvement that we're doing from a content management point of view. And democratizing content altogether.

Gillian Bruce: That's great. I mean, I know admins are going to be very excited to be able to access that great capability without having to jump through any additional hoops to get it. So thank you.

Khushwant Singh: Exactly. Now, let's talk about data. Now, when we think about the data side of things, this is where a lot of our investments, at least from an Experience services point of view is that we have teams that are experts in records, Dynamic Forms, lists, and they're doing a lot of good work to expand. For example, Dynamic Forms today it's only available in custom objects, why? It should go across all standard objects. That's something that the team is working on. I'm really glad that we are going to stay really true to the fact that when we start something, we are going to end it and we are going to go all the way, at the same time this team is also working to bring all of that goodness across to not just employee facing experiences in Lex but also to customer facing, partner facing experiences via Experience Cloud.
And so that's one example where, as one unit Experience Services, it really brings benefit across all of the various endpoints, whether it's Lexio Experience Cloud or mobile for that matter. So that's something that we are really looking forward to. And then over on top of that, the ability to surface that data, but represent it in different visualizations. So you may want to show a list view in the form of a grid or in the form of a certain set of tiles. Because again, you want to do that because it's customer facing, it's partner facing, you have to apply your style guide on it, et cetera. So that's all the goodness that you can expect to see over the course of the next two releases from a data point of view.

Gillian Bruce: I mean, that's major stuff. I know that Dynamic Forms is one of the top favorite admin feature overall. And so being able to bring that to standard objects will be huge. So thank you. Thank you on behalf of all admins everywhere.

Khushwant Singh: It's a shout out to all of the good teams that are working on that front. So we touched about infra, we touched about content, we touched about data. Now, let's touch about the UI run time itself, which is Lightning Web Runtime and Lightning Web Components. Clearly the degree of, out of the box components for Aura, there are a lot more out of the box components for Aura than they are for LWCs, no doubt about it. And so what we're trying to do is we are trying to catch up to a certain degree, but catch up in a way that is addressing the most important use cases from out the box component point of view, but at the same time, not sacrificing customizability. And so from an LWR point of view, a few things to call out.
One is, I'll start off first with, when you build a site with Experience Cloud and with LWR and LWCs, search is always a use case that comes up. And by search, we tend to just think maybe at times CRM search, but really our customers are thinking of it as site search. They want to be able to cut across whether it's a CRM, whether it's site meta information, like the page title, the site title, or something that's in a text, a rich text component, whether that's CMS content, whether those are products or any other objects, they want to be able to search the entire site.

Gillian Bruce: Yeah. They don't know the differences between that, they just want to find what they need.

Khushwant Singh: Exactly. And so for them, this is complexity that we should abstract from them. And so again, this is something that our customers can expect to see in beta, in the summer timeframe. And all goes, well, we're going to take the hood off and generally make it available in the winter timeframe, starting with site meta information and CMS content as part of the index. And then we're going to expand that to CRM and to other objects for that matter.

Gillian Bruce: All right. So just a reminder to all listeners, forward looking statement applies to everything that Kush just said, this is what happens when we get excited in product information. Yeah.

Khushwant Singh: Exactly. And that too, as well. Yes. So I think, again from an LWR point of view, there's just so much more maturity that customers can expect to see with LWR and Experience Cloud. Because whether it's out of the box components for content, for data, whether it's search, whether it is even the ability to deliver these dynamic experiences. So one of the things that our customers really appreciate in Aura is the ability to personalize the experience using CRM information. So show me this content, this data, if user.account equals to X, Y, Z, et cetera. And so the ability to deliver that type of personalization is key, but at the same time, they want to be able to do things like real time personalization. So using, for example, Evergage or interaction studio for that matter.
So as you're browsing the site or portal, you're able to get relevant information that's on the fly generated. So those are another aspects of LWR that we are investing in very heavily. So whether it's infrastructure, whether it's data, whether it's content, whether it's the UI framework and the various personalization aspects of things, lots of investment happening. Now, all of this has to translate and manifest on mobile. And so that's the other dimension that we are heavily investing in. So whether you are customizing the experience in design time, as an admin, to say, "Hey, look, you know what? I want to show this image on desktop, but another image on mobile, or I want to have this font you applied in mobile versus on desktop. I want to be able to take my LWR site and use Mobile Publisher to create a mobile app that I can deploy via the app stores." Those are all areas that we are working on over the course of the next two releases as well. So again, lots of excitement as we work across this entire site.

Gillian Bruce: Yeah. Lots coming. Well, Kush I so appreciate you taking the time to chat with us here on the podcast about all things, Experience Services, Experience Cloud. I know I got a lot of questions answered. I'm sure a lot of people listening are very happy to hear all of the things that you and your team are working on. And I'm sure they will have many more questions. So I'll include links to some of the great trailblazer community groups that you have set up for Lightning Experience and for Experience Cloud, for people to submit feedback. And thanks again for all of the work that you and your team do. And I look forward to checking back in with you after a couple releases here and coming back to what you all have done and hearing about what is even next from then on.

Khushwant Singh: For sure Gillian. I mean, I truly appreciate the opportunity. And again, to all our Salesforce admins, you are our eyes and ears out there. Feedback is a gift, please keep it coming. And we're so appreciative of all that you do for us.

Gillian Bruce: Huge, thanks to coach for taking the time to chat with us. He and his team have been so busy working on really important foundational improvements to both Experience Cloud and Experience Services. And it's so great to now understand what Experience Services mean because for us admins, it means a lot of the stuff that we use every day. So, hey, I don't know about you, but I'm excited about Dynamic Lightning pages coming for standard objects. Woo, woo. Again, forward looking statement, but I look forward to getting Kush back on the podcast to ask him about that once it has been released in a few releases. So if you want to learn more or you have more feedback about anything, Experience Cloud or Experience Services, Kush, and his team pay close attention to the trailblazer community. So go to the Lightning Experience group or the Experience Cloud group on the trailblazer community and put your feedback in there, put your questions in there. He's got an amazing team of very talented people.
And if you want to learn anything else about how you can be a successful Salesforce admin, go to my favorite website, admin.salesforce.com. There you can find other great podcasts, blogs, and videos to help you in your Salesforce admin journey. I also encourage you to check out the new Salesforce admin skills kit, which we just launched last month. And it is right there on the admin@salesforce.com webpage. Check it out, let me know what you think, we're going to do some great podcast episodes about that, coming up here real soon. If you want to follow my guest today, Kush, you can find him @Kush_singh. You can follow me @Gilliankbruce. And you can follow Mike, my amazing co-host @Mikegerholdt. You can follow everything awesome admin related @Salesforceadmns, no I, on Twitter. With that, I hope you have a great rest of your day and I'll catch you next time in the cloud.



Direct download: Experience_Cloud_with_Khushwant_Singh.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:00am PDT

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Andrew Russo, Salesforce Architect at BACA Systems.

 

Join us as we talk about the amazing app user management super app he built and how you can approach building apps to be an even more awesome Admin.

 

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

Ramping up a Salesforce org

Andrew, like so many people we interview on the show, started out as an accidental Admin. He started out needing to pull more and more things from Salesforce to support his company’s email marketing efforts, which put him in the position to get his Admin cert when they wanted to roll out Service Cloud. Now, the entire business is run on a massive org, and Andrew’s main challenge is making sure it’s scalable to handle everything that might come down the pipe.

 

Now that they’ve brought their entire manufacturing department onto Salesforce, they needed to take a second look at how they handle user requests. “Before it was as simple as sending an email or a text and we could have a quick chat,” Andrew says, “now, we have to manage a lot of users and also document it so people can do their jobs well and also make requests for features to help them do their jobs even better.”

Managing user requests and scaling up

When the user requests started flooding in, they knew they needed a plan to handle the large increase in volume. The first step was switching over to cases, but they needed to do a lot of customization to account for the different ways they handle internal vs. external cases. The biggest bottleneck they identified was when they had to ask for more details, so creating a structure for both the person filling out the request and the team member looking at it helped immensely.

 

Specificity around requests is really important because you need to understand the business need that’s driving it. For example, they could be asking for a checkbox because they want to run a report when there’s an easier way to do that. Instead, Andrew and his team send users a link to fill out a user story. “Then when we go back in a year and are trying to figure out why we made something, we have a record of why it was created,” Andrew says, so they’ve built in their documentation process.

 

At the end of every Flow they build there’s a sub-flow that runs at the end. It tracks every time the Flow runs and compares it to how long it took them to build and how long the previous process took. What they end up with is a lot of specificity around how their team is saving everyone time throughout the organization which is a powerful and effective way to prove RoI.

Andrew’s tips for user management

Andrew’s main tips for improving user management in your org are pretty simple to understand but hard to master. For one thing, learn when to say no. Some user requests are going to be unreasonable and learning how to work with them to uncover the real business need can help you find a solution that fits.

 

For another, if you can find core Salesforce functionality that gets you 90% of the way to a solution, it’s far better than building everything from scratch. “Custom equals it’s yours and you own it,” Andrew explains, “not only do you own the development of it—you own the problems could have in the future with it that you can’t foresee.” Less is more.

 

Finally, keep curious. Always keep learning and follow your curiosity because you never know where it will lead you. Salesforce has so many amazing resources and you never know when something you were browsing or an issue you helped someone with will suddenly give you your next great idea.

 

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Full show transcript

Gillian Bruce: Welcome to the Salesforce Admins Podcast, where we talk about product, community, and careers to help you be an awesome admin. I'm your host today, Gillian Bruce, and we are going to talk about how to create a user management super app.
So, a few weeks ago, you may have seen a blog post that we put out on the Admin site talking all about how you can create an app to manage your users. Well, one of the amazing, awesome admins that I met in that process is Andrew Russo. He's a Salesforce architect at BACA Systems. I wanted to have him on the podcast because the app he built is just next level. It's awesome. There are so many elements of it that I think we could all use at different parts of what we're building as admins at our own organizations. So I wanted to get him on the podcast to share a little bit about his overall strategy of how he approaches building apps like that, and in general, how to be an awesome admin. So without further ado, let's welcome Andrew on the podcast.
Andrew, welcome to the podcast.

Andrew Russo: Yeah. I'm happy to be here. I think this will be awesome, to be able to talk about some of the stuff we've built for our company and see how other admins can learn from what we've done.

Gillian Bruce: Yeah. So let's talk a little bit about you first, before we get into some of the app building advice and great strategy that you have to share. Tell us a little bit about what you do and a little bit about your Salesforce journey.

Andrew Russo: Yeah, so I started doing Salesforce stuff as an accidental admin. So in college I was working for a company and I started helping with some of the website stuff. And then that transitioned into email marketing, which involved getting email lists from Salesforce. And it slowly kind of climbed into working more and more on Salesforce stuff. So that was about 2016. And then in 2017 and '18, we started looking at rolling out Service Cloud, which is really when I started to go into learning a lot more about Salesforce.
And then once we did the Service Cloud, I really took over as the main admin and started learning more and more and I got my first Salesforce certification, I think it was about 2019. And then I have grown more. Now we have a massive org where we have an entire business that's fully on the Salesforce platform, which became really challenging to learn from. We have a small, just very basic, standard, out of the box org to now having to manage complex user requests, documenting stuff, and really creating something that's scalable since the entire business depends on everything running properly.

Gillian Bruce: So, how many users do you support?

Andrew Russo: Right now, we have about 70 users inside of our Salesforce org. If you asked that same question in Fall of last year, we had about 30. So we brought on our entire manufacturing, which is really where we started to have to look at, how do we handle user requests? Because before it was as simple as an email or just sending a text and we could have a quick chat. Now we have to manage a lot of users and also document stuff properly so people can do it, do their jobs and make requests for features to help them do their jobs easier.

Gillian Bruce: Well, okay. So, clearly you are an awesome admin plus. I think it's really interesting that you only got your first start a couple years ago, I guess three years ago, 2019 seems like forever ago, but it's not, and how you've been able to grow so much in your knowledge and your abilities within Salesforce. I mean it sounds like a lot of it was kind of hands-on experience, any other external sources or what kind of things really helped you hone that skill so that you can really build, I mean the massive growth that your organization has had just within the last six months?

Andrew Russo: Yeah. I think that really where the big thing, and it's really weird to say, but I think becoming a Master Googler has really helped. And I think that's a skill that's almost vital because there's so many resources out there. You've got the Trailhead community, which there's a lot of questions that get answered on there. There's a lot of information with even guides. There's thousands of different admins who have blogs that have stuff generally who joined the Salesforce team with all of her flow blogs. There's all the different resources out there. So becoming a Master Googler to think, "Okay, how do I want a Google link to get the response of what I'm looking for?" And you can get a lot of different resources, that really helped.
I think though Trailhead was the other thing. I've done a lot of trails in Trailhead, the super badges are super helpful. And then really when I go to try and look at taking another certification exam, Focus on Force is pretty helpful for that last little bit of studying and thinking, "Okay, where do I need to focus some effort towards?" To see where you're lacking, because you don't really know what you're lacking until you take a test, but the Trailhead's really where I do it and hands on, I think where I've learned most of this stuff is trial and error in a sandbox of our current org. If it doesn't work, start over and try another way.

Gillian Bruce: Okay. Well, that's great. We want everyone to use sandboxes. So let's talk a little bit more about specifically some of the solutions that you've built. Now, I know you, thankfully, helped me out with a blog post we did not too long ago about how to build a kick ass management app, which you demoed some of what you've built and shared some of that in our blog post. Can you talk to us a little bit about your approach to building that app and how you think about how to best structure it? Because you got a lot going on there. There's a lot of complexity and clearly, I mean it kind of blew my mind when you were sharing all of the details that you had involved in that, but it also sounds like it is incredibly helpful to you and your team as you're building. So talk to us a little bit about an overview of that app and then how you approached building it.

Andrew Russo: Yeah. So it was something that we had thought about earlier this year of, we need a better way to handle internal user requests because they started off as emails and then we would lose track of emails. If it doesn't hit your inbox for the day, you kind of forget about the request, even though you might have needed to do something. So that started throughout the year and we're like, "We really want to look at cases." And then I posted on the Trailhead screen, has anyone done... Actually it was on Reddit I posted and I just asked if anyone's done cases internally, just to get an idea of it. People responded, "Okay. Think about record types." And I was like, "Okay."
So I let a couple weeks go by and I started to think about it more. And then really once we started to get an inbound rush of emails with different requests that we needed to handle, we're like, "We need cases to do it." So we refreshed one of our full sandboxes so we had everything that was in production. And then we really built out in a matter of a week, we changed all of our current processes that were based on our external service that we use Service Cloud for our customers, we had to customize all of the processes and automations we already had to not apply to our internal cases because it's two different ways that we handle internal cases versus external. There's different fields that we want to track. But we also want some similar things like the status or the case type that are default fields, we want to keep those as the same so we don't have two status fields to report on inside of Salesforce because that doesn't feel right.
So customizing that and really separating it out was that first step. And then we looked at, how do we want to help our users? And what are the different things that we want to track from a reporting standpoint later? Because you can't report on stuff that you don't actually capture. So the first thing that we rolled out was just pretty simple, we're going to use Email-to-Case and we're going to use cases with record types and we added some different fields, like steps to reproduce and expected outcome, actual outcome, things that were helpful for us to right away be able to troubleshoot without having to ask for more details, because that was the biggest thing that we would have through email is they would send one request, not give enough detail because there's no structure to it.
So giving that structure for them to record their request and guide them through, it was really helpful just for that initial problem. Versus we really, in the beginning, we keep it as just, "What do you want?" We don't distinguish. There's an area that they can choose if it's a new feature versus a support case, but past that, it's the same stuff that they're recording and then we can handle the case once we start to look at it.

Gillian Bruce: So, let's pause right there for a second. So you said putting some structure around the ask. What do you mean by that? Because a lot of people will be like, "Oh, can you just add a checkbox to this page?" And I'm sure you have a little bit more structure to help coach them out of that kind of ask. Can you talk a little bit more about that?

Andrew Russo: Yeah. So we used the case initially to gather the, "Hey, I want a check box," because a user just looks as it as, "I want a check box to record this," because they got some type of request from their boss and they need to show something, but then once we are able to review it, it might be, "Oh, that's already there." Or, "Oh no, that's something that's new. We need to gather the requirements. What is the business case supporting it? Why are we trying to do this?" To make sure it's not overlapping with something else or it's not a one-time thing where they want to go make a check box on records and then run a report of the check boxes, because seen that recently a few times where it's like, "Oh, we want to see all accounts with this so let's add a check box," which is not the right way for us to handle that.
So, gathering those type of things, we created a flow that's called a user story and we're able to send out a link from Email-to-Case to the user. When they click on that link, it actually launches the flow in Salesforce and they're able to, it'll kind of prompt them, "Hey, here's a trail you can go take from Trailhead if you don't know what a user story is." It's not required, but it's recommended. Then they're able to go through the steps and do the as a role, I want to, blank, so that I can, blank.
And then we also have another field of, how do you know that this is there and successful? So we can measure the actual outcome of it and say, "Yes, this is successful. No, we were not able to meet what the requirement was." And we like to get that for a single field from really anyone who that touches, not just the person requesting it in their role. So if accounting wants a field, we also might want to look at having sales do a user story that if it impacts the sales or the service side of it to get a full picture, because then when we go back and we look at why did we make this in a year? We have something to support why it was created.

Gillian Bruce: You built in the documentation. Yeah.

Andrew Russo: Exactly. So we have documentation gathered right away while we're building, which is super helpful.

Gillian Bruce: That's awesome. So I mean, what I really like about this is you built it so that it helps you be successful as things are being built, right? You built documentation into the process, you built the coaching of like, "Hey, this is how you properly make a request. This is what a user story is." And I love the promotion of Trailhead in there, I think that's great. But what are some of the other things that you've built into the app that help you and your team be successful? I know one of the things that you had mentioned to me before is having some metrics of the impact of some of the apps and some of the features that you've built. Can you talk to us a little bit more about that?

Andrew Russo: Yes. There's actually two really awesome things that we have done with it. So one of which is for measuring the impact of automations, we have a couple different objects that run. So inside of any of the flows that we build, we add a sub flow that runs at the end and what it does, it tracks every time that the flow runs and then there's a master record that's created that we're able to see, "Okay, this is how many times it ran." We can put in how many hours it took us to build and how many minutes the previous process that was getting used is, so it actually calculates how many hours and minutes are saved by users running it. So if it used to take 10 minutes to do a process and it took us three hours to build it, we can see at what point has the breakeven been met that, "Hey, we've actually just saved the company time?" And then in the future we can say, "This is how much time we've saved with the automation on an ongoing basis."
So that's one of the things that we did to track really the ROI that we bring to the company for our performance. So when you go to look at, Hey, what did I do the last quarter? How did I perform? Yeah, this is the money that we've actually brought and saved the company. So I think that's one of the things. And the other is about tracking the time on cases, because we started to realize, a lot of these cases for internal people make it, then they get busy, they stop responding, and it doesn't look good on us if we want to report on our metrics of, "Hey, how long did it take for this issue to get resolved?" So we actually built out a custom object called Case Time and every time that a case changes status, it records how long it was in that status.
So when a case enters a new status, it creates a new record for that status with a start time. And when it leaves, it puts the end time and it creates the new record for the next status that it's in. So we can go back on any case and look at how much time it spent in statuses. So we can say how much is waiting for the customer, our internal customer, and how much is us working on it, which really is helpful for reporting on our metrics.

Gillian Bruce: Okay. So those two ideas are amazing and I feel like every admin is going to want to implement those in their own org. I mean the fact that you have real, tangible hard metrics on the ROI that you bring to the organization in terms of time saved, I mean you can directly link that to basically money saved. That's awesome. And then the second one about like, "Hey, a lot of people track how long it takes to resolve a case, but it's not always on us." It's actually, "Hey, you make this request, we're waiting for you most of the time on this." So I think that's really, really amazing tips for how to break down and really put hard data and metrics behind the work that you do as an admin or building apps.
So talk to me, I want to learn how to think like Andrew. Because you have come in and clearly, very quickly learned about how to master lots of parts of the Salesforce platform, how to really take that mastery and use it in a very effective way in your organization. What are some overall strategies that you think have really helped you and that maybe some other admins can glean from what you've done and what you've learned?

Andrew Russo: Yeah. I think that really, it's a couple things. One of the things that I think is really important and some people really have a hard time doing is learning to say no, because there's some requests that you get that you just have to say no, and put your foot in the sand and say, "I'm not going to do this. This does not make sense. It's not best practice." Really implementing a strong governance.
It doesn't have to be a written governance over Salesforce, but having this ability and empowerment to say no to some request, to say, "No, that doesn't make sense." Having that, I think is really one of the important things, because I do have to tell users, "No, we cannot do that. No." Today even, I've had a user request to get the ability to modify the homepage layouts on apps and I say, "No, if you'd like to, we can do a working session and in a sandbox we can make the changes to push to production, but I can't just give you access to change the home pages," because that comes with a lot of other access that they don't need to have as an end user. So really learning to say no and be willing to say no is one of the things.
The other is thinking about less is more, I think is one thing. And maybe it's kind of that architect mindset that architects are supposed to have where thinking, does this already exist somewhere in Salesforce that's core functionality? It might not be 100% exactly what I want, but if it gets to 98% and it's already standard functionality, use that rather than trying to build something that's perfect custom fit, but custom equals it's yours and you own it, so not only do you own the development of it, you own the problems that you could have in the future with something that you don't foresee.
So just thinking about less is more, being willing and able to say no, and also spending time researching different Salesforce stuff that you're just curious and interested in. That's where I started to learn different things, that just go build some fun stuff, might be related, might not even bring value, just on your own learning Salesforce has been super helpful for that.

Gillian Bruce: Yeah. So those are three great tips. The ability to say no and hold the line. And then less is more, I think that architect mindset is super important. And then I think that last one you talked about, researching and just basically playing with Salesforce is really important. And it's that learner's mindset idea, right? Is that there's always something to learn. And so, "Hey, if you're curious, go try it out, go build it, go build an app for some one-off use case that isn't necessarily part of your job."
I think that's one of the things I've seen be very successful in the community is folks that are especially looking to demonstrate their skills to maybe even get their first Salesforce job or demonstrate that they have a higher level of mastery to catapult themselves into a different more senior role, building an app that they purely have built to demo to potential employers or to show off what they know. I think that is one of the strongest things you can do. It's like the ultimate Salesforce admin resume, right? "Cool, so I can write all these words, but look what I can show you. This is what I built. This is why and this is how it works."

Andrew Russo: Yeah. Building on that too, one of the things that I think is super helpful is because in my org, I see what I see. We don't use, for example, CPQ at all. We don't use other... We don't use Marketing Cloud. We have Pardot, but we don't have full Marketing Cloud, so thinking about some of these different areas that we don't really use, but understanding them is really helpful. So one thing that I think really helped open my eyes to see different areas is going on the answers and actually helping other users because it exposes you and you can look at a question someone else has that could come to you in the future and you can help answer their question. You might even have to research. You might not know the answer, but being able to see different use cases in other orgs from other people, answering their questions helps to expose you to new ideas and things that you've never looked at, but now when you come across it in the future, you already have an idea of it.
Because like me, I learned from experience, really that is the best way. So if I can go and do that, the amount of flows I've built for other users that want to see stuff, and then I actually have implemented some of those internally after I saw that on the thing of, "Hey, I want to do this. When an inbound email comes in on a case, I want to change the case status," I helped someone build that and then I was like, "We want that." So I built that for our org after. So, those kind of things really help to open your eyes and see different things.

Gillian Bruce: Yeah. Okay. I mean, so now I'm also going to out you for something you told me that you were doing and I know that you are in the midst of it, you had a goal of becoming one of the top answerers in the answers community, I believe. And tell me a little bit more about that. Clearly, I understand why, you've learned about things that then you're putting into your own org, but what is it about doing that that drives you? Or why do you want to do that?

Andrew Russo: I think it's just fun, honestly. So during COVID I got bored and I started answering stuff when I was working from home doing it. And that was 2020 March and I did a good amount of questions and answer stuff, and it was kind of fun doing it. And then two weeks ago I just got bored and I just was like, "You know what? I'm going to go answer them." And then it's kind of addicting because people reply to them and then it draws you back, you go and you help while you answer the questions. The amount of things that... It's a satisfaction you get.
It took me 15 minutes to respond to someone, but they would've spent an entire day trying to learn that thing. So, for me to give 15 minutes and it's going to make their day or their week, it's an awesome feeling doing that, but it also helps me learn more. So it's a mix of both and I ended up in a matter of probably about 20 days moving somewhat high up from not having answered a question over a year or two in the top five in the answer community, so...

Gillian Bruce: That's awesome, Andrew. Okay. So that's the vibe that I love about the admin communities. Everyone just loves to give back and help each other. And here's the thing, clearly you are passionate about solving problems and helping other people solve problems, both in your actual day job, and then clearly this is just part of who you are, because you're doing it externally out of your normal day job for the broader community as well, which is so great, so awesome. You're inspiring me. I'm like, "Maybe I should go try and answer some questions." Don't worry, I'm not going to threaten your leaderboard status, I promise. I have a long ways to go, but that's great.
So Andrew, before we kind of wrap up, I would love to hear if you have any overall tips for someone who's really looking to flex their admin skills or get a little bit more experience under the belt. We heard already some great stuff from you about strategies when you're building apps, about governance, about less is more, about going and tinkering and researching different parts of the platform. Talk to us a little bit more about maybe some of the things that you would tell someone who's maybe a brand new admin or looking for their first admin job. What is the number one or two things that you'd recommend to them to help them beef up their skills and get prepared so they can get that awesome role?

Andrew Russo: Yeah, I think that really some of it, I think there's two different parts of it. There's that new admin and then there's that current accidental admin who works at a company that became the accidental admin. For a new admin, I think really Trailhead is a really great place to start, and then moving over to trying to apply to jobs where they might be a small org with Salesforce that doesn't really have an admin and come in as not an admin, but become the accidental admin. Because I think the accidental admin is a really great place to start because you start to learn a lot of little different things that help you grow.
And then for someone who becomes an accidental admin, I think one of the biggest things, which is actually where I started during COVID and I got experience was, go on different platforms that you can do some small just freelancing stuff after hours at night, stuff that exposes you to other companies, orgs in different areas. I know I've done a big project for a nonprofit that does acupuncture for low-income senior citizens. And we built out an entire community in six different languages. So I did that during COVID. That was massive with a lot of flows in six languages. It was crazy, but now that's really where I became a flownatic, I guess, having massive flow.
So doing that and just getting some experience. It doesn't have to be big projects. Sometimes companies just need help with reporting and being able to help them with reporting, you could make someone on the side do it, but it opens your eyes to see more stuff, because if you don't see stuff or have experience, sometimes it's hard to understand the different things that you don't even know exist. I learned new stuff in Salesforce exists I've never seen almost on a daily basis. Like, "Oh, that's there?" For example, 15,000 character limit for formulas. No one realized it was there, but overnight we all found out on Twitter that it was there.

Gillian Bruce: Yeah. Oh gosh, Andrew, this is great. I so appreciate your time. I think it's so cool that you are so generous with sharing what you know and what you've built. I will, for sure, put a link in the show notes to that great blog post that you contributed a lot to and showing some of the different elements of the part of your user management app. And I really appreciate you imparting your wisdom with the admin community and answering so many questions. I can't wait to see you on the top of the leaderboard. Let's just be clear, we'll have a little celebratory "Andrew made it" and then the next person will try and dethrone you. It'll be great.

Andrew Russo: It'll be Steve Mo who comes to dethrone. We already know it.

Gillian Bruce: I mean he does have a very long history of answering most of the questions.

Andrew Russo: The second that it's a formula question, I'm always hesitant because I know that he's going to step in and he's going to have a better formula way. And it's also cool to see, "Okay, this is how I would've answered and done it. Oh, this is what Steve Mo thinks about it." And generally Steve Mo comes with pretty clean formulas that are really well thought out and work super well, so...

Gillian Bruce: Well, and that's the advantage of participating in the community, right? Is you see all these different ways of attacking the same problem. So I love that. That's great. Well, Andrew, thank you so much. I really appreciate your time and I appreciate everything you do to give back and thank you again for sharing all of these amazing pieces of wisdom with the community.

Andrew Russo: Yeah. Thank you. I think this was really fun.

Gillian Bruce: Well, huge thanks to Andrew for taking the time to chat with me. I don't know about you, but I am definitely inspired to go tinker a little bit more and maybe go answer some questions of my own on the answers community. Now, some of the top takeaways from my chat with Andrew, I hope that you heard these as well, but first of all, it's always good to say no, have some kind of governance strategy when you are building apps. You got to set some boundaries, you got to set up some structures that enable you to actually build something that is effective instead of just building everything that people ask you for.
Next, less is more. I love that he talked about that architect thinking, right? Let's use the existing functionality before we create something super custom because it's a lot easier to maintain something that is on core functionality, because if you build it yourself, then you are also responsible for making sure that it works for the rest of its life. So, let's take some of the load off there.
And then finally, tinkering, researching. Go play with the platform, build something. I think that is one of the best ways to learn and there's an easy way to do that, as Andrew pointed out, by answering all those questions on the community. So if you have not delved into the answers community, do it. It's trailhead.com. You can access all of it there. If nothing else, it's a really good place to hang out and just see what people are asking so that you get a sense of the breadth of the platform and the kind of problems that people are solving using Salesforce.
All right. Well, if you want more great content, you can always find that at admin.salesforce.com where we've got blogs, videos, and more podcasts. You can find our guest today, Andrew Russo, on Twitter @_andrewrusso. You can find me @gilliankbruce, and my co-host, Mike Gerholdt, @mikegerholdt. Hope you enjoyed this episode, stay tuned and I'll catch you next time in the cloud.



Direct download: Create_a_User_Management_Super_App_with_Andrew_Russo.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:00am PDT

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we take the show on the road, live from TrailblazerDX.

Join us as we talk about how we put on events like these, what it’s like to go to a live event for the first time, and tips from a vet about why networking is so important.

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

The man behind the Trailblazer magic

First, we caught up with Kavindra Patel, VP, Trailblazer Events & Digital Experiences at Salesforce. In short, he runs the show, putting together TrailblazerDX as well as Trailblazer events at Dreamforce and all the World Tours. If you spot someone at an event sporting a cool ranger hat, come say hi to KP.

An admin’s first time at TDX

Next, Mike bumped into Grace Villier, an Admin and sales and marketing specialist at her very first TrailblazerDX. One takeaway she has from the event is to make sure to block out time each week to re-up on your knowledge and keep up with all the content coming out on Trailhead. While she looked at the schedule ahead of time, Grace urges you to really focus in on what will maximize value because these events are always shorter than you think they are going into them.

Tips from a Salesforce veteran

The great thing about a live event like TrailblazerDX is that you have a chance to talk to folks with a wide range of experience and backgrounds. Mike went from talking to a first-time attendee to a real vet when he met up with Lauren Dunne Bolopue, Lead Salesforce Evangelist at DocuSign. She’s super psyched for the upcoming Slack integrations and how that will transform the way we work. She also emphasized just how important the networking you do at events is, and how the people you meet can help you grow and get through roadblocks you might run into along the way.

 

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Full show transcript

Speaker 1: Welcome to the Salesforce Admin's podcast. And we are live, here today, at TrailblazerDX. So, I'm going to walk around the event and get some audio snippets, in case the audio's a little bit different. But I want to kick off our TrailblazerDX special episode with Kavindra Patel or KP, as I know. Kavindra is, kind of, my go-to person for the events. KP, what do you do at Salesforce?

Speaker 2: Well, I run Trailblazer events for Salesforce. We do TrailblazerDX. Trailblazer is a Dream Force, as well as, Trailblazers, and all the world tours.

Speaker 1: So, trailblazers are your thing.

Speaker 2: They are my thing, and I love trailblazers.

Speaker 1: So, let's talk about TrailblazerDX. What is an exciting thing that you brought this week, or that you got to plan, or be a part of?

Speaker 2: So, the exciting part is bringing the Slack, Tableau, Mulesoft, as well as all the Salesforce developers, Admins and architects, all together under one umbrella. So, they can learn from each other, connect with each other, and take themselves to another level.

Speaker 1: Cool. If somebody were to see you at an event, you're kind of hard to miss. Where did the hat come from?

Speaker 2: Yeah, I try to hide myself, but it doesn't work really. I've got my signature hat from the old days of Trailhead, when we really brought Trailhead experience, which is the vibe we have, the fun outdoor vibe, and bringing that into events. And at that time, I bought myself an amazing hat, and you will see me on Twitter all the time, with my hat on. And so, that's where it came from. And it has a ranger, a pin, because I am a ranger.

Speaker 1: Because you're a ranger.

Speaker 2: Because I earned it. And so, that's where it comes from. And people find me, and I love talking to the Trailblazers, and just seeing how I can help them.

Speaker 1: So Kavindra, you're on Twitter, people can see your picture. What's your Twitter handle?

Speaker 2: My Twitter handle is @kavindrapatel.

Speaker 1: Perfect. I'll put a link in the show notes. So, we're going to walk the floor and see who else I can run into. Kavindra, thank you for being our first guest.

Speaker 2: You're welcome. Have a nice day, Mike.

Speaker 1: All right. So, we just finished up our interview with Kavindra. We found out cool things that are happening at the event, but I am standing here with Grace, who's a first-time attendee. Grace, can you introduce yourself?

Speaker 3: Yes, my name's Grace Villier. I work for a Construction Aggregate company, and I am our Sales and Marketing Specialist.

Speaker 1: And Grace, I think this is your first TrailblazerDX.

Speaker 3: It is, yes.

Speaker 1: Okay, so tell me what you're taking notes on, because you've been in a ton of sessions.

Speaker 3: So I, like you said, I've been in quite a few sessions. I've been trying to go to as many Admin sessions that I can go to, as well. Because that is my focus, at my job, is being the best Admin I can be for our users, but I've also gone to a couple sessions on the developer side. So, learning more about Apex, just because, as an Admin, we are involved with Flows, and automation. So, I thought the apex could be helpful too. So, trying to get in as many different areas, and sessions, that I can learn about, throughout these couple of days.

Speaker 1: So, you're on your second day, how many notes pages have you filled?

Speaker 3: I actually counted, and it is up to about eight now.

Speaker 1: Wow, eight.

Speaker 3: They're all the sessions.

Speaker 1: That's a lot. That's a lot. What session stood out to you, as like, "Wow. I had no idea I was going to learn that."

Speaker 3: I think the Admin Best Practices, because one of the things I learned about, was this podcast. Because I didn't realize that it had existed before.

Speaker 1: And now you're on it.

Speaker 3: Exactly. So, I think, little things like that, and learning about best practices, and what you can do on a routine basis, as far as getting feedback from your users. What's working, what's not, because I do ride-along's with our users, every so often. So, just to reinforce that... And it was talked about, coffee hours. So, I think, kind of, combining those because when I do my ride-alongs, it's a whole day, which is awesome. But also combining that with coffee sessions, and just reaching out to people on a more regular basis, I think could be good too.

Speaker 1: So, how long have you been in Admin?

Speaker 3: So, I started my Salesforce journey, let's see, January 2020. So, about-

Speaker 1: That whole time period is a little fuzzy for all of us.

Speaker 3: Yes, or excuse me, 21. About a year and a half ago.

Speaker 1: Oh, good.

Speaker 3: Excuse me. Yes.

Speaker 1: In the pandemic.

Speaker 3: '21, yes. Yes, so, and I went through a training program in sales, and then the opportunity, got to be our Project Lead for implementing Salesforce in December 2020, and then actually started with that in January 2021. So, hadn't seen Salesforce before. And I actually got my Admin certification last October. So I've learned a lot, in that period of time.

Speaker 1: Congrats. Congrats.

Speaker 3: Thank you.

Speaker 1: What is one thing you're going to do different, when you get back to your desk?

Speaker 3: I think getting back to my desk, specifically, I think adding blocks to my calendar, and because I think it's always important to keep learning. And as I was studying for my Admin certification, I was so focused on Trailhead, and doing modules, and realizing that those modules, more and more come out, and they're updated. For example, with Flows, that's the way things are going now with automation. So, just to continue those modules, I think we'll be good in blocking out an hour or two each week, just to stay up-to-date on things throughout Trailhead.

Speaker 1: Now, one of the cool things is, since yesterday, when I saw you in a session, you've also built your entourage, which I think is very cool. So, you've also networked with other people at this event. What was the common factor, for you finding someone else to hang out with at TrailblazerDX?

Speaker 3: So, we're actually in the same general area of the country. Within the Southeast, which was cool. And-

Speaker 1: Oh, you're not from England. I thought I heard an accent there. I was going to say Wales, maybe.

Speaker 3: I know, I sound very, very British, yeah.

Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. New Zealand maybe, right?

Speaker 3: Yes. Yes. So, that was a common factor. And just, having been fairly new to Salesforce, within the past year and a half, it was good to meet somebody new. Like you said, make those connections.

Speaker 1: Okay. So, what is one thing, as we kind of wrap up, what is one thing you'll do different the next time you go to a Salesforce event?

Speaker 3: That's a good question. Because I did look through all the sessions before, and kind of, factored in what will bring the most value. And I think, honing in more on that, just because it is only a two day conference. Really looking into what sessions are going to bring the most value. What can I learn the most from? So like I said, I try to combine some of the Admin sessions, and developer sessions, to learn more about that, too. So, I think, just continuing to do that. And then also, networking more, just because there are so many people here. Working on networking, even more next time, to grow my Salesforce community, people that I know.

Speaker 1: Your eco-system, yeah. Well, you have one now, you have two more with us. Thank you, Grace, for being on the podcast.

Speaker 3: Thank you, I appreciate it.

Speaker 1: Best of luck. I'm sure we'll connect, maybe at Dreamforce.

Speaker 3: Yes. Thank you very much.

Speaker 1: Okay. So, we just came off that fun interview with Grace, who is a first time event TDX. And I happened to run into... You walk around TDX, and you run into friends and family you know. So, I found a veteran, we'll say veteran.

Speaker 4: Oh, I like that term better.

Speaker 1: Okay, veteran, TDX attendee Lauren, can you introduce yourself?

Speaker 4: I'm Lauren Dunvalvue. I'm lead Salesforce Evangelist at DocuSign. And this is my second TDX, but my eighth Salesforce big conference.

Speaker 1: Wow. You keep track of the big conference. Okay.

Speaker 4: I do, like my life depends on it.

Speaker 1: But first back, it feels like we're starting all over again.

Speaker 4: Yeah, I've missed people. I'm a people person. And just being able to see people that I see, on a tiny little screen, every week, or every month, at Meetups, and stuff like that, it's just, I'm like, "Oh my God, you're tall." Like people I've met for the first time in the lockdown. And now they're... I'm meeting them in person. I'm like, "I didn't think you were not tall. Okay, I feel really short now." It's just nice to be able to have that, in-person connection. That is something I have definitely missed, definitely missed.

Speaker 1: Yeah. So, now that we're back in person, what was something that surprised you at TDX this year?

Speaker 4: I am loving the Slack API Integration thing. My ears, straight away went off, as soon as it was announced in the keynote. And I was like, "I need to know more." So, as soon as I was able to get to the Slack area, I was like talking to people. I was like, "Tell me more, how do I get involved? How do I get information?" And I was like a little too excited, I think I scared them just a little. But I was like, "I have these people now, in front of me, that can't run away or you know, mute me." I'm like, "I get to talk to people and tell me all this stuff." So, that's something I'm definitely excited to play with, is that API connection. Because Slack is... We all live and work on Slack, like there's the Ohana Slack, just-

Speaker 1: Or we will.

Speaker 4: Well, yeah, true.

Speaker 1: If you're not already.

Speaker 4: Well, if you're not already, there's Ohana Slack, there's the Ohana Coffee Slack, there obviously Work Slack. There's so many different Slack channels now, for the community. And it's just, I'm looking at it in terms of being able to implement it into work, and how I can boost more productivity. And even for the DocuSign side of things, being able to have that product evolve. Because we have an integration, but I'm like, as soon as I saw it, I was like messaging. I was Slack messaging, believe or not, our Product Manager. And I was like, "We need to get on this. We need to do this. Here's our information we need." He is like, "Okay, you need to calm down." I'm just so super excited about it.

Speaker 1: So, it's interesting you bring up connections. It seems to be a theme. Kind of, this podcast, because we just talked with Grace, who made a connection with somebody that was attending first time solo, just like her solo. She was solo, person she met was solo. And we were just talking, before I pressed record, about how you were taking pictures of people's badges, and connecting with somebody. Can you go more into that?

Speaker 4: Sure, there's so many people that are like, "I'm new to the ecosystem, or I don't know where to start." Or, "I've been here, I started Salesforce a couple years ago and I just... What should I do? Should I take my certification exam? Where should I go?" And on a personal level, people brought me into the Ohana and nurtured me, and grew me, and helped me. And I'm like, "Okay, I'm going to connect with you on LinkedIn. I'm going to follow you on Twitter." I'm like, "I want to help you. If I can't help you, I know people who can." And that's the whole point of the community, is helping people grow, and I've missed it. I've done it throughout the lockdown, but having this, like seeing people and go, "Oh my God, thank you so much." And it's, I just... I can't explain it. Having the in-person has really meant so much more than being on a screen.

Speaker 1: So, I'll ask the question I think everybody's thinking about. I didn't make it to TrailblazerDX. Besides the in-person, and oh, by the way, your feet hurting.

Speaker 4: Oh yeah.

Speaker 1: Your feet.

Speaker 4: I forgot.

Speaker 1: That's a new thing. I haven't stood for more than, a little bit of time. I walk my dog, I do stuff, but standing on hard concrete floors. What is something you're surprised that you didn't realize you were missing, by showing up?

Speaker 4: Well, I'm going to do you one better, actually wearing jeans.

Speaker 1: Oh, yeah.

Speaker 4: I lived in pajama pants for two years.

Speaker 1: Yeah, I did those athletic, slicky things.

Speaker 4: No, the jeans, I'm like, "I might need jeans."

Speaker 1: I need jeans. Yeah. We all had to buy different sizes, by the way.

Speaker 4: Yeah, same here.

Speaker 1: None of the jeans fit.

Speaker 4: Yeah. And like, I haven't walked around, the last two days. I think my jeans might be a little loose now, I'm hoping.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Good. Good.

Speaker 4: But one thing about... It's the Trail. Just seeing the excitement of people, and the learning, and you forget, because when you're doing the online stuff, you're not seeing all different areas. I saw the Flow Matics thing and I was like, "That looks really interesting." Whereas if I saw it on an agenda, I would've have been like, "Oh." Whereas I go over, and I'm learning more about that. I'm like, "That's cool." I've never touched Flow. My role, I don't get to play very much with Salesforce. But you know, I'm like, "Okay, I need to learn Flow. This is something I have to..." I'm feeling really encouraged, and inspired, to learn more. And I'm super excited to watch back stuff on Salesforce Plus, as well. Because, obviously, I can't clone myself. I haven't been to everything.

Speaker 1: It could be everywhere.

Speaker 4: I wish I could, but I couldn't. But being able to watch stuff back, that's what I'm excited for, to go back and learn even more.

Speaker 1: So, as a veteran, long-time attendee of TDX.

Speaker 4: That's me, yes.

Speaker 1: As somebody looking ahead at future events, we've got some World Tours coming up, we have a Dreamforce coming up. What would you advise people to, kind of... How should they approach some of these online events, attending. I just talked to my boss. What should I set? Why should I go?

Speaker 4: One thing is, I always tell people, Salesforce is constantly evolving, and you'll never know everything. And that's why having a network is so important. So, going to these events and I'm not a part of specialist, I'm now getting into the marketing cloud side of things, and I don't know where to start. So, I've actually put it out on Twitter and I bumped it to a few people and I'm like, "Where do I start?" And being able to have that person go, "Oh yeah, I was in the same boat. Here's what you need to know."
So if I was to say to my boss, or anyone else trying to say, "Hey, I need to go to an event." It's the connection. So, networking is super, super, important in this environment, especially because we're such a big community. But also, the learning. Roadmaps are talked about in these events, and they're not published anywhere. And it's so important to know where Salesforce is going, in your learning, in the career, what interests you. And I said, "I'm going to go back to it, the Slack API. Learning all these new tools and being, like, "I was in to True to the Core. True to The Core, oh my God.

Speaker 1: Tell me about it.

Speaker 4: If you have, that's the only session. If I couldn't do any others, I was so glad I did True to the Core.

Speaker 1: Why? If I'm new to the platform, why, what is True to the Core?

Speaker 4: I don't want to say it, but it's all the Product Manager's and Parker Harris, are held hostage. They can't squirm out of, "Oh, I'll get back to you on that." They're sitting on a platform, and it's not rehearsed. It's random people coming up from the audience, and asking them pointed questions. And it's like, they're in the hot seat. And, there's nothing terrible. It's like, "Hey, we need accountability for this, and we need this." And it's nice to have that access to Product Managers, to executives, to people who work in Salesforce. That's another selling point for going to these events is having someone... Being able to walk up to someone in the Trailblazer Certification Program and go, "Here's where I'm at, where should I go? Should I go down the developer route? Should I go down the consultant route? I don't know where I want to..."
And having that conversation of, "Well, what you want to be when you grow up?" You can have those kind of conversations, but having a real in-depth, I have no idea what I want to do. Here's what interests me? What would you advise? Having that connection, more than just an email, or a tweet, or a back-and-forth online. So, that's another thing I'd encourage anyone, if you do get to go, the Salesforce events, the Dreaming events, World Tours, I'm excited for World Tours. Just being able to have the access to Salesforce employees is huge.

Speaker 1: So, maybe you've already answered it, but I've been to all this stuff. I can just watch it on Salesforce Plus.

Speaker 4: No, it's a different experience.

Speaker 1: You've been to a bunch of these events. Why do you still keep coming?

Speaker 4: People. The learning, as I said, it's constantly evolving. You don't know what you don't know, until you walk around. And you're like, "Oh, that looks kind of cool." Or, "Oh, I know nothing about this subject, so I'm going to sit there and listen." And having developers who are giving presentations, like in the Parker Harris keynote, there was Stephan Garcia-Chandler. He was demoing his stuff. And then I got to sit at one of his talks and I'm like, "This is a guy who is demoing at a Salesforce keynote. Teaching me his stuff, his knowledge." And I'm like, "This is amazing." Being able to see the experts, and learn from the experts. So, that's what keeps me coming back, is seeing the people, learning from the people, and the excitement, you recharge your batteries when you're talking to the people. Sorry. I'm all about the people. I love people.

Speaker 1: That's good. It's good.

Speaker 4: I miss the people, the last couple years.

Speaker 1: Speaking of people, if people want to follow you on the Twitters.

Speaker 4: Yup. On the Twitter verse, I'm @laurendon__c. Yeah. You get it.

Speaker 1: Double underscore.

Speaker 4: Double underscore. Yeah.

Speaker 1: Because you're a custom object, gotcha.

Speaker 4: Oh, I'm very custom. I'm unique.

Speaker 1: I like that. Thank you Lauren, for being on the podcast.

Speaker 4: Thanks you very much. Very, very, very welcome. Thank you for including me.

Speaker 1: So, we just heard from Lauren on, what it's like to be at TrailblazerDX, as an expert, or a long-time attendee. To wrap up our podcast, I got Gillian, the co-host, back, because she had so many hosting duties at TrailblazerDX. Gillian, why don't you, kind of, put a bow on this episode, in the event for us?

Speaker 5: Sure. So, this was really special. This is our seventh ever TDX. And it's amazing that the first one was back in 2016, both our product and our community have exponentially grown and changed in so many ways. It's been amazing to reconnect in-person for the first time, and meet so many new people. I would say almost everyone that I met at this event was a brand new Salesforce person. Has first event, first time exposed to Salesforce, or very earlier in their Admin career. So all of you who are listening, who are wondering, 'Hey, what should I do to amplify my career, grow your career?" Connect with your local community group, go to a local Dream In event, try and come to Dreamforce, if you can.
There is no replacement for being in an in-person event and meeting Trailblazers, face-to-face. That's the magic of our community, and advents. It's the reason the awesome Admin community is so special. It's the reason that so many Admins are successful, by giving back, connecting with each other, trying to enable and mentor others. If you've got something to help somebody else with, I'm full. All the Trail Hard is real, right now.

Speaker 1: No, it's good. Because when we talked with KP, the goal of this was to make people connect, get people back together. We talked with Grace and she had tons of notes, tons of notes, eight pages. And found a new friend, and Lauren said the same thing, too. And we saw this when we did a ton of sessions too, it's cool to just present, and see people get excited for something.

Speaker 5: Oh, my gosh.

Speaker 1: And clap.

Speaker 5: Yeah. And to get the actual instantaneous feedback of, "That was useful, or, 'I've used that," or, "Hey, I can see how that could be used." Or "Hey, have you thought about this?" I mean, it's so invaluable.

Speaker 1: And I love the... So, one thing Lauren said, was just the unintentionality. Just walking around, seeing vendor booths, running into people, and being like, "Oh, I never would've stopped here if it was on my schedule, but I'm here now. And maybe I can explore this." So, another reason to come back.

Speaker 5: Learning about a new product, a new cloud. Maybe you're like, "Oh, you'll stop Composer. There's somebody right here I could talk to about that. That's great."

Speaker 1: I have a question.

Speaker 5: Yeah, what is this? And how can I use it?

Speaker 1: Exactly. Well, this was a fun TrailblazerDX. We tried to do some kind of different episodes. So, we won't do this all the time, but hopefully we caught some of the energy, and some of the reason, for coming to an event like this. Of course, if you want to learn more about all things Salesforce Admin, go to admin.salesforce.com to find more resources, including any of the links that I mentioned. I don't think I mentioned any links.

Speaker 5: I think salesforce.com is a link.

Speaker 1: Yeah, I'll mention that link. How's that? We'll also have a full transcript there, too. Of course, you can say up-to-date with us on social. I'm sure you've seen some of the picks from TrailblazerDX. We are @SalesforceAdmns, no I, on Twitter. Gillian is @gilliankbruce. And of course, I am @MikeGerholdt on Twitter. So with that, stay safe, stay awesome, and stay tuned for the next episode. We'll see you in the cloud.



Direct download: Live_from_TrailblazerDX.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 8:12am PDT