How Admins Progress Through Stages

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Kate Lessard, Lead Admin Evangelist at Salesforce. Join us as we chat about how the Admin Adoption Framework can help you build confidence with Agentforce and her new video series, “Kate Clicks Through It.”

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

Tackling AI adoption

Admins are feeling the pressure to “get AI-ready,” but the pace (and the jargon) can be intimidating. The key is starting with small, actionable steps that build momentum and confidence. Remember, it’s OK not to know everything on day one.

Luckily, Kate and the Evangelist team have been working on something to give you a helping hand. It’s called the Admin Adoption Framework, and it gives you a structured path to build confidence with Agentforce in five simple steps:

1. Explore what’s possible
2. Get curious
3. Try it out
4. Make it work
5. Use it often

By working through this list, Salesforce Admins can pinpoint their current phase, set goals, and identify the next best step—whether that’s learning about AI use cases or diving into hands-on experimentation with Agentforce.

Keeping pace with new features

While your organization is probably keen to get started with Agentforce, the great thing about the Admin Adoption Framework is that it’s a process that works for just about any implementation. For example, we know that good data is the backbone of effective AI solutions, so we can go through the same five steps with Data Cloud.

Tech changes fast, but how you learn new things and build confidence with them doesn’t. Developed through extensive research and feedback from admins, Salesforce MVPs, and folks on the product team, the Admin Adoption Framework is a template for continuing success.

Hands-on learning with “Kate Clicks Through It”

Hands-on learning is the best way to build confidence with new features, and Kate’s been working on a new video series to help you get started. “I personally am someone who learns best by doing,” she says, “I need to get hands-on, I need to do something. In many cases, I need to do it over and over again.”

In “Kate Clicks Through It,” she walks you step by step through Salesforce processes like how to build an Agentforce data library, or how to use Org Check as an alternative to Optimizer. Each 10-minute video has a demo that will let you click along with her and try things for yourself.

Kate has a lot of great tips to share about how to build confidence with Agentforce, so be sure to listen to the full episode. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast to catch us every Thursday.

Podcast swag

• Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Learn more

• Admin Blog: Your 5-Step Guide to Successful Agentforce Adoption
• YouTube Series: Kate Clicks Through It

Admin Trailblazers Group

• Admin Trailblazers Community Group

Social

• Kate on LinkedIn
• Salesforce Admins on LinkedIn
• Salesforce Admins on X
• Mike on Bluesky social
• Mike on Threads
• Mike on X

Full show transcript

Mike Gerholdt:

Welcome to the Salesforce Admin’s podcast. This week, admin evangelist Kate Lessard joins us to dive into the Agentforce adoption journey. From building a foundation AI to launching the new Kate Clicks Through It YouTube series, Kate walks us through how admins can thoughtfully and confidently bring AI into their organizations. We also chat about how feedback shaped the adoption framework. So if you’ve been wondering where to start or where you are on your AI journey, this episode’s for you. Let’s get Kate on the podcast. So Kate, welcome back to the podcast.

Kate Lessard:

Thanks. It’s been a while.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. January. Was it when we did the kickoff? That was the last time.

Kate Lessard:

Maybe. Or maybe did we do a TDX, prep for TDX call maybe?

Mike Gerholdt:

We might’ve. Other podcasters would remember their episodes, but me, just crank them out.

Kate Lessard:

Yeah, you’re a little busy.

Mike Gerholdt:

It’s okay. So you’ve been busy as well. Let’s talk about Agentforce stuff and YouTube stuff and everything you’ve been working on.

Kate Lessard:

Yeah, absolutely. It has definitely been a busy year. It’s been flying by. And some really exciting stuff that we’ve been working on for admins this year.

Mike Gerholdt:

First up being Agentforce stuff, because Agentforce. I know there’s not too much Agentforce out there. People say that, there’s not. When we’re recording this ChatGPT is coming out with a new model. This is our new norm. It’s like when the iPhone drop, there’s not enough iPhone information out in the world. There’s always iPhone information out in the world. There’s always going to be AI stuff for us to learn.

Kate Lessard:

Yeah, agreed. I think that that’s the really cool thing about Agentforce and the job that we get to do is that we get to play with and learn the new things as they’re coming out because it’s so important for us to share with others and let them learn from our mistakes. So I think that that brings a lot of fun experimentation into our jobs.

Mike Gerholdt:

Right, absolutely. So speaking of that, how do we kind of walk people through the journey to Agentforce?

Kate Lessard:

At TDX last year we, or I guess this year, we announced that we have this Agentforce development life cycle. But then we kind of started asking what comes before that? How do we get into this cycle where we’re iterating through ideation, configuration, testing, deployment, and supervising our agents? How can we get ready to actually go live with agents and Agentforce and using it? And so on the admin relations team, we kind of took a step back and started to think about adoption and how we can set up adoption for admins and get them not only familiar with Agentforce, if they have no idea what it is, where they can get started, how they can start to learn the fundamentals of AI just in general, and then dive into Salesforce and Agentforce and using AI within their CRM. That’s been something we’ve been really focused on, is creating the concept of this adoption framework to help admins get ready to move their organizations towards actually using Agentforce consistently.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, because I think it’s one thing … I mean, it’s a little different than … And I use this a lot when we talk about Flow or some of our other products. Automation within the CRM space has always been there. We didn’t really have to learn it. But with AI, we’re all learning AI on top of our organizations learning AI, on top of us going, “Okay, so now how do we use this? And what’s the best use of this?” And all of that has to transfer into the admin sitting there going, “Oh my, I have a lot to learn. Where am I at?” And I think that’s really one of the goals of coming out with the journey, is helping people understand where are you at, where do you want to go?

Kate Lessard:

Agreed. I think that the development of Agentforce and of course more widely artificial intelligence, it’s fast. It feels like there’s something new to learn every week. I think that can cause a lot of overwhelm because we’re trying to keep up without maybe even having a solid foundation. So this concept of the adoption framework was really designed as a baseline for admins to be able to take stock of where they are in their Agentforce learning journey, overcome that analysis paralysis that I think many of us have been feeling over the past couple years, and then have resources and a guide for exactly where they are now and what is coming next.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. So where is this guide or the adoption journey going to show up for us?

Kate Lessard:

So you will be able to see it, we have a nice blog on the admin’s website right now. It is called Your Five Step Guide to Successful Agentforce Adoption. Just double checking that title, but that is correct. And this kind of introduces that adoption framework, the steps that are included with it, some resources for each step along the way. And then you might see this show up in a couple other places. It might show up in a Dreamforce session or it might show up on our website or any other place that I could maybe tease that it would come out. I think it’s something that you might see here and there. And the nice thing is that it’s ever-changing because we’re constantly having new content and new resources to add to it in each step. So I think it’s something that you’re going to see in multiple places moving forward.

Mike Gerholdt:

And I was a part of you brainstorming this and bringing it to the team, and really it was everybody on the team had something to contribute to this. Where do you feel like admins are progressing through in terms of the journey? Are we starting off? Does everybody start off at the beginning, or we jump in steps? I mean, is it like a step method, everybody has to go through every single step?

Kate Lessard:

I think you go through every step, but maybe you don’t recognize that you’ve gone through some of them. So our first step is really exploring what’s possible and just really understanding what AI fundamentals are, what is Agentforce? And a lot of our admins are really active. They’ve already been hands-on in Trailhead. So they’ve maybe gone through this stage themselves without even realizing it because they’ve kind of figured out how the technology works. They’ve actually done a little hands-on work. They have been picturing use cases for their organization. And so maybe they’re hopping into that next phase where they’re actually sharing this and doing demos to their stakeholders and trying to bring this to their organization. So I think everyone goes through all the stages, but you might not be just starting directly at the beginning. Once you become aware of this framework, I think that you can hop in and find the point that is most relevant to where you are on your journey and be able to kind of pick up from there.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. And hopefully it kind of helps you gut check content and say, “Hmm, Maybe this is for next week when I’m moving into a different phase.” Not to say that it would be a week that you would be in a phase. I’m just using it as a example.

Kate Lessard:

Absolutely. I mean, admins move fast. I would not be shocked if some of them were moving from phase week to week. Although I would be surprised if they didn’t spend some time in that phase where they’re building out a demo and getting stakeholders involved in really building that support. I feel like that always takes time.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, absolutely. So in addition to the adoption journey, what else have you been working on?

Kate Lessard:

Lots. It’s been a busy year. I’m super excited to share some of the things that I’ve been working on and the team’s been working on. We recently launched a new series on YouTube called Kate Clicks Through It, which has been just a labor of love. And I feel like it has been something that I’m really excited about, really excited to put out into the world because it is a series that allows admins to get hands-on and follow along different Salesforce processes step by step. And I personally am someone who learns best by doing. I need to get hands-on. I need to do something. In many cases, I need to do it over and over again. I need to try. I need to fail. That’s why admins love sandboxes so much. That’s why we love Trailhead, so that we can get in there and we can actually just try things out and see what works and what doesn’t, and then take the best version of that to our business.

So Kate Clicks Through It launched in July. We have two episodes out right now, one on Agentforce data libraries and one on using Org Check as an alternative to Optimizer, which is retiring this winter. And it’s just a way to follow along step by step. They’re short episodes, less than 10 minutes spent on each demo so that you can actually have your computer up and click along beside me, and by the end we’ve accomplished something together.

Mike Gerholdt:

It’s kind of like a Salesforce Twitch stream.

Kate Lessard:

Yeah, absolutely.

Mike Gerholdt:

You’re not playing the video game, you’re building the app or clicking through the app.

Kate Lessard:

Exactly.

Mike Gerholdt:

Cool. So Kate, it is, boy, end of August. Well, end-ish of August. I swear these months, it’s like it took forever … February took like eight or nine months. And then we had TDX, and then it was spring for a day, and now Summer is flying by, it’s already the end of August. The kids are back in school. Dreamforce is right around the corner. Which usually for most of us is September. It’s October this year. It’s not close enough to Halloween, but it still would be close enough that you could totally get away with wearing a Halloween costume at Dreamforce. I just realized that, that might be kind of fun. I mean, the biggest costume is Cloudy and Codey. They would win, I suppose. Would they wear a costume? Would the costume wear a costume?

Kate Lessard:

I don’t know the answer to that.

Mike Gerholdt:

It’s inception, like Astro in his Tanooki suit, would he wear another costume on top of that? These are the things that keep Mike up at night. We did wear a Yeti suit.

Kate Lessard:

[inaudible 00:11:30]. That is true. The Yeti suit and the safari suit.

Mike Gerholdt:

I forgot about the safari.

Kate Lessard:

I think we could all just call it a win across the board and wear some awesome admin capes.

Mike Gerholdt:

Right. I mean, if you don’t wear that in your every day, just because you could. We’re going to see some of the Agentforce adoption journey show up at Dreamforce, maybe in the keynotes, maybe in the track?

Kate Lessard:

Maybe. I think that the nice thing about the adoption journey is that it really is applicable to so many situations. I think that it is, even if it’s not called out directly, it is going to be there and you’re going to start noticing it as part of that underlying education and the foundation of how we’re talking about and building things. It’s also really nice because it doesn’t just have to be for Agentforce either. I think that what we’ve created is really applicable for a lot of different adoptions of different technologies. So I think that it’s something that maybe we’ll see as the world continues to progress and AI gets more advanced. So it’s definitely something that you’ll start to notice at Dreamforce.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. I’m also thinking of, it always seemed as when I was an admin going to Dreamforce, nine times out of 10 it was, I need to learn about this other cloud because we’re getting ready to implement it. So I could see that Agentforce adoption journey being applicable as you’re looking at additional clouds as well.

Kate Lessard:

Yeah, I think especially if you’re using something like Data Cloud to unify your data and bring things from multiple sources, that it becomes really important to have that foundational level of adoption for your users in general and your customers, external customers as well.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. One thing we didn’t touch on, and we’re not giving away the chili recipe … I always think back to Food Network where they’re, I’ve got some … It’s always they’re making a sauce and they put in, “Well, I’ve got some salt and pepper and some onion powder,” and you’re like, “Yeah, that goes in everything.” And then I got my seasoning blend, and you’re like, “Oh, that’s you don’t want to tell us everything else that you put in there.”

Kate Lessard:

The secret admin sauce.

Mike Gerholdt:

The secret … Yeah. But I mean, I don’t want people to think like, “Oh, well, Kate just sat down and mapped out a journey and presented it to the team, and then now it’s on the website.” What was some of the process or the input that we got on the adoption journey?

Kate Lessard:

Absolutely. That is a great question because we involved a lot of people in creating this. Not only the team, although that’s where we certainly started, but the framework was not built in a vacuum. We had a ton of feedback and interaction both internally and from the community as we developed this. So we got feedback from members of our product team at Salesforce. We did a very soft launch at TDX as part of my demo to deployment session and got some feedback from that. And then we continued to refine and then get feedback from admins in a survey that we shared at a local community conference. And then after that, we took that survey to the Salesforce MVPs and got some more feedback from some of them as well. So everyone that weighed in helped us refine this framework. They called out some things that maybe we hadn’t thought were really that important for admins to include in this journey, this roadmap. But once we heard that and we saw it consistently show up, we added it in. So a lot of people weighed in and helped us create this journey map.

Mike Gerholdt:

And some of it was us just looking at each other and being like, “Is this what we’re going through?” Because we’re going through Agentforce adoption as well. I mean, from the moment the product hit some of our orgs for us to try and play around with, it was, what are we learning and is this what we’re going through?

Kate Lessard:

Absolutely. And I think that that really hits the nail on the head. I think that we went through a lot of these different emotions that we associated with each stage here. We were curious, we were frustrated, we were feeling really proud once we got to this stage. So selfishly, this framework has kind of evolved into a game changer for our team internally and our internal content strategy as well, because we’ve been able to see where there are content gaps that we have experienced, as well as what we’ve heard from the community and what we should be focusing on to give admins the knowledge that they need for a successful Agentforce implementation. And we’re able to collect that feedbacks from the admins and the community about what they’ve been struggling with and what resources and discussions they feel have been missing, which was the biggest thing that was contributed to us as we were building this.

Mike Gerholdt:

So here’s a meta question. Did you use AI to create any part of the adoption journey?

Kate Lessard:

I did. Okay. So let’s think back to this … It’s been such … Oh gosh, we’ve been working on this for months. But-

Mike Gerholdt:

Got to do the flashback [inaudible 00:16:51].

Kate Lessard:

First it started off with just a giant brain dump mind map. That was what helped us kind of sort out the emotions and the stages. And then they’ve shifted terminology and what we are referring to them and how we process them a few times. I think AI really helped me with the survey, is where it helped out. So I was like, “These are the things that I’m trying to get. This is how I’m trying to ask the questions. This doesn’t feel quite right. Can you help me refine this?” And so I did use AI to help me with that survey. And then got feedback from our internal marketing team as well to make sure that it was capturing what we needed it to.

Because I think the biggest thing that we see with surveys in general, and this is me going down a total rabbit hole from my past project management and consulting experience, when you send out surveys or you’re gathering requirements or you’re asking questions, if you do so without having the specific goal in mind of what you’re trying to get back, you can get so much information that is valuable, but maybe not what you’re looking for or answering the questions that you really need answered. So I think that AI, as well as our internal marketing team, was super helpful in refining that.

Mike Gerholdt:

That, or what I’ve found is you can ask the question in such a way that it elicits only a certain answer, as opposed to kind of an A, B, C answer. Really you’re asking it, is it this or not this? And then you end up with an answer where the person really kind of hones in. And it’s almost like, I don’t know if the term confirmation bias is right, but I do know a friend once asked me, “When you ask somebody their opinion, it’s because you really want them to confirm that you’re right.” And I was like, “Oh, yeah, that’s kind of true.”

Kate Lessard:

Right. Yeah. Do I look good in this?

Mike Gerholdt:

I mean, all of the time. Yeah. You ask questions like that, “Do you really think I should buy this house?” And it’s like, you don’t want them to say no. You want them to be like, “Yes, it’s going to be an amazing house for you.”

Kate Lessard:

Yeah.

Mike Gerholdt:

“Absolutely. It’s a totally good decision.” I don’t know. That just stuck with me, that kind of thing.

Kate Lessard:

Yeah. Big shout out to our research team that does that every day, right? They’re putting together these questionnaires and they’re talking to people at events like TDX and Dreamforce and having to just put together these thoughtfully designed surveys and questionnaires, and it really is an art.

Mike Gerholdt:

Well, Kate, I appreciate you coming on the podcast and talking about adoption journey and Kate Clicks Through It. You’re out there helping admins progress through different emotions, not just learning. Because that’s also important, because emotions drive a lot of things, and creativity and inspiration are definitely two of those things. So I appreciate you coming on the pod and talking about that.

Kate Lessard:

Absolutely. And I think that you’re exactly right, those emotions are important. And they help make us better admins and the passion that we have for helping out the business and the organizations that we work with. It’s just really important. It’s a driving factor. And that’s part of what makes us so successful and helps make both our users and our external customers happy.

Mike Gerholdt:

Big thanks to Kate for walking us through the Agentforce adoption framework and showing us what a thoughtful community-driven AI adoption can look like. Be sure to check out her YouTube series, Kate Clicks Through It, and explore the resources linked in the show notes. Whether you’re starting or already building AI demos, I promise you this journey’s for you. So until next time, we’ll see you in the cloud.

The post How Admins Build Confidence with Agentforce appeared first on Salesforce Admins.