Salesforce Admins Podcast

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Alastair Dinning, Senior Solution Architect at Salesforce. Join us as we chat about the process of adding new features to your org, from what to look for when you're reading through release notes to rolling something new out and driving adoption. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Alastair Dinning. Which new features should I pay attention to in the release notes? The exciting thing about working in the Salesforce ecosystem is that it's continually evolving. A new release is always around the corner, chock-full of new features that could improve your org. But how do you sift through everything to figure out what will add value and what's just a shiny new toy? My guest this week is Alastair Dinning, a Senior Solution Architect with Salesforce Professional Services. He has 14 years of experience as a consultant for businesses of all sizes, helping admins change their orgs for the better. For Alastair, the most important thing when you're looking through release notes is to have a clear understanding of your business processes and problems. Do any of these new features address a pain point? Whether you practice SABWA, run a steering committee of power users, or use a case management system for feedback, you need to have your finger on the pulse of your users. Three pathways for adding a new feature to your org Once you've identified a problem you'd like to address, Alastair lays out three options: you can build a declarative solution yourself, you can buy a solution off of the AppExchange, or you can work with a developer to code something custom. Building your own declarative solution means that you end up with something that's tailored exactly to your specific business requirements, but it also costs you resources in terms of time. Buying something off the AppExchange, on the other hand, costs you money up front, but you're saving a lot of time and can deploy the change quite quickly. Even if the solution isn't 100% right for your specific problem, Alastair encourages you to reach out to the AppExchange partner because they're often willing to make improvements. Finally, coding a custom solution is probably the most expensive in terms of internal resources, but gets you exactly what you want. The drawback here is flexibility. You don't want to end up with a solution that you can't update if your business context changes in the future. Know when to keep Salesforce steady for your users If you've spent time with your users and really understand their pain points, adoption should come easily. But at the end of the day, the job of the admin isn't to constantly roll out new features—it's to make life easier for your users. Sometimes, the best thing you can do is to keep your Salesforce environment consistent and stable. That means not only identifying which new features could possibly be helpful for your org, but having proactive conversations with leadership about the bigger picture. Make sure to listen to my full conversation with Alastair for more about how to roll out new features to your org and how admins can best work with consultants. And remember to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you never miss an episode. Podcast swag Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store Learn more Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: September Monthly Retro: What Changed, What Matters, and What Admins Should Do Next Admin Trailblazers Group Admin Trailblazers Community Group Social Alastair on LinkedIn Salesforce Admins on LinkedIn Salesforce Admins on X Mike on Bluesky social Mike on Threads Mike on X Full show transcript Mike: This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, I'm talking with Alastair Dinning, a senior solution architect with Salesforce Professional Services about how admins can decide if a feature is right for their org. We're going to dig into how to spot the business problem behind a feature, when to click, buy, or code your solution, how to prototype before making a big investment, and why timing and support ability matter just as much as functionality. So next time you find yourself reading the release notes and thinking, "Oh, that looks cool," you'll have a framework for deciding when to implement it. With that, let's get Alastair on the podcast. So Alistair, welcome to the podcast. Alistair Dinning: Thank you, Mike. It's good to be here. Mike: We connected ironically over Slack. Not ironic. Is it ironic? I always get hung up because I'm afraid I say ironic because I learned irony from Alanis Morissette, but we connected over Slack because you're a fan of the podcast and you work at Salesforce. And I was like, "Hey, I have this topic that I think you're perfect for." So let's start off by you letting everybody know what you do at Salesforce and how you got there. Alistair Dinning: So I am a senior solution architect with Salesforce Professional Services. I've been at Salesforce for give or take five years. I've been working in the ecosystem for 13 and my entire career has been as a declarative consultant and into being in the architect world. And I came to Salesforce through the acquisition attraction on demand and having spent my whole career, my Salesforce career in Salesforce consulting. So I've worked with a good number of organizations, whether they be small business, medium business, large business, government. I'm working currently with the Canadian federal government. I've worked with education, with nonprofit. And I mean, as a consultant, that's my approach to this job. And it's like, how do we as admins do things declaratively and do things well? And what can we bring to the table? Mike: Yeah. Wow. Worked with government. You must have a lot of scissors to cut all the red tape. Alistair Dinning: Yeah, government does bring a lot of red tape with it, but you make sense when you're talking about taxpayers' money. Mike: Yeah, no. I mean, it's all intentional for a reason. So let's talk... One of the biggest questions I always get, and it's a question I had as a Salesforce admin, which is how do I decide if this feature is right for my org? And feature could be anywhere from the biggest feature do we flip on? At one time we had customers had a choice of turning on lightning all the way down to the smallest little checkbox that maybe we added. And I was reading through some of the stuff that you do at Salesforce and I thought it'd be great to have that conversation with you about helping admins figure out if a feature is right and maybe give them some of your thought process into that. So I think that's where we'll start. Alistair Dinning: Absolutely. So one of the fun things about Salesforce that I've always appreciated is the three releases a year and the fact that we get new functionality every four months or so, and there's always something that's in those release notes that's exciting. And again, the advantage of having been a consultant is I've seen all of these different organizations and I see these new tools coming from the release notes and I'm like, "Oh, that's cool. That's really fun, and I think that's going to add value." But to your question, is it just this shiny new toy or is it actually going to add some real value into the solution? I think I always start with, "Okay, so that looks cool, but how is the business going to utilize it?" From two points, either is there a business value that we can add with this new feature or is there a pain point that I as an admin have seen, I've heard from my users time and time and time again where they're all like, "I don't like this. I don't like this. This is a slow process. This is in my way," boom, boom, boom. And does this new feature address that pain point? So if I was to take Dynamic orms in the Lightning Page Builder, they're super cool because we could do all sorts of fun things with it. But it's only useful if, for example, the business say to me, "Hey, my page layout is completely cluttered with all this stuff that I don't use at the beginning of a opportunity process. So why do I have deep fields on or a whole ton of fields on opportunity development when really we're just trying to identify what the opportunity value might be, value prop might be for this customer?" Mike: I think that's a great start. And I know I thought of that. I'll say this, I would really love it if the business was as explicit as you say they are like, "Oh, there's really this problem with too many fields." I think oftentimes you have to peel back a layer and listen to users say, "I'm just struggling to find the right information on this page." Or I remember when I was an admin, we brought on a different business unit and I remember the business unit asking why there was this entire section of the account page and it was kind of in the middle and it was above all of the information that they needed. And I said, "Well, if you don't like it, you can just collapse that section." And they said, "Yeah, but shouldn't it know whether or not it should show that to me?" And this was before Dynamic Pages. And so I bring that up to say, I hear you. I wish it was that explicit, but sometimes you almost have to listen and put two and two together for them. Alistair Dinning: That's right. It can be hard for the business to know how to articulate what they want from the solution. But as an admin, there are a couple of tools you've got. One is you could spend some time desk side with your key users or have a steering committee of users who are giving you feedback on a regular basis on what they're using, what they like, what they don't like. The other option is that if you have an ITSM light solution where you've got case management, so your users are providing functionality cases or technical cases on Salesforce, on their usage of Salesforce, then you can actually scroll through the data and see what people are saying, "This works for me. This doesn't work for me." And I mean, if all the cases are coming around a particular topic, then you know that there's a problem there and that's got to go in your admin backlog of things to address in due accord. Mike: Yeah. And I think you mentioned the three releases a year. Obviously we're always working to solve issues that enough customers have brought up, maybe not specifically in your case, but somebody has that issue. That feature didn't just get born out of a wishlist. It got born out of somebody really had that pain. I also think you bring up an interesting point of, so when you're looking at, should I just implement this feature? Is it actually solving a real problem or do I have to invent the problem or is there a better way to solve that problem? Alistair Dinning: So when we come to, is there a better way to solve that problem, there's a three step process that I've always applied to implementing functionality in Salesforce. And there's two steps to this process. One is those, are we going to click it? Are we going to buy it? Are we going to code it? In terms of solving the problem for the business requirements? We've identified a business requirement. We've said, "We need to fix it." Can I declaratively solve this problem? Can I just build it out of the box with the tools that come? And I mean, I'm a declarative consultant. I don't write code. So could I do it? Can I build a piece of functionality that's going to allow me to do that? Do I want to buy it or do I want to install it? So do I want to go to the AppExchange and pull something from the AppExchange that's going to solve the problem because this is a problem, to your point, this is a problem that multiple people have had. And so somebody else already went and built the solution and put it on the AppExchange. So we already know that those requirements exist. We already know that the solution exists and somebody's taken the onus of really digging through that solution and thinking through the problems and debugging the solution, whether they've built a very comprehensive declarative solution or they've coded a solution and they've put it on the AppExchange and just made everybody else's life easier. And sure, do you have to pay for that product? Most of the time, yes. But does that take away from you having to invest in development time? Also, yes. So paying somebody for a solution off the shelf can be a lot easier than coding it, but then coding it is our third option. So you've looked at the declarative solution, you've gone, "This isn't quite going to solve the problem the business has brought to me." You've looked at the AppExchange and there's nothing quite there that's going to fit the bill. Again, this isn't solving the problem the business bought to me. So then yes, then you're into the point where you want to code a solution and work with your developers, work maybe with your UX team, work with your testing team on actually coding out a comprehensive solution to solve the problem, solve that business requirement that was there in the first place. But that's a heavy investment. So the flip side to that is that if you were to declaratively build it, can you get 80% of the way to the business requirement, whereas a coded solution would get you 100% of the way there? If you declaratively build it and you get 80% of the way there, what you also get is a lot of feedback from the business before you make a big investment in coding a solution. And that accelerates your development path, gives you a lot of feedback into what your coded solution might look like, but it does help you mitigate the cost and stop you going down the wrong path because your view as an admin as to what the business is after versus their feedback when they start road testing something in production is going to be two different things. So either declarative and be done with it or declarative and use that as the prototype to inform your development path, again, assuming there was nothing on the AppExchange that met that requirement. Mike: Right. Or a hybrid of the two. I know there's some AppExchange apps that you can even add on to. Alistair Dinning: Oh, yeah. Mike: And that would help out. I think that you bring up a good point and it's one I never brought up when I was an admin, but not everything on the AppExchange is free. There's a cost to it, but the cost would be ongoing as opposed to massive upfront that they would spend on you and it's a small monthly fee. And you also benefit from, then they get time to upgrade it. Whereas if you've built something, who knows if you're going to have time to upgrade it. Alistair Dinning: All of the above is true. The other thing with the AppExchange, which has blown my socks off in such a good way in some occasions, is that I found a product on the AppExchange that met 85%, 90% of my business requirements, presented it to the business, the business, "It would be nice if... I really needed to do X plus." And I've actually been able to go back to the AppExchange partner, have a conversation with them because some of these... These are not giant software houses that are difficult to talk to. Some of these are very small independent consulting shops or software development shops and they will take your feedback and they'll go, "Oh, that's a good idea. That's not on my product roadmap," or, "That is on my product roadmap. Let me accelerate it." Or, "Let me bring that into my roadmap and we will bring it to you as part of the product." And they will actually take that feedback if you ask. And I think the important thing to consider there is don't assume that what's in the app exchange is locked and finite and immutable, but it could be a discussion. And they will take that feedback because they want their product out there as much as anybody else does. Mike: Yeah. And if it's a feature you're requesting, who's to say it's not a feature that a lot more of their customers aren't requesting? I like that. One thing I wonder in your day-to-day, because you have a really cool title of senior solution architect, how much, when you sit down with an organization or you sit down with an admin and the people that use Salesforce, how much do you talk to them about the amount of change that's going on outside of just implementing Salesforce? Alistair Dinning: It can be some very extensive discussions because when I get pulled in to work with a customer, we're typically doing a technology overhaul or a migration from a legacy platform into Salesforce. So there's a lot of business process change that has to happen to make sure that Salesforce meets those requirements, but also make sure that the business users understand that Salesforce is going to support them and how Salesforce is going to support them. And these requirements will... The method of working can change quite drastically, even if the end goal is the same. The process of spending time and training people and understanding what motivating them before you actually even get into making any development change is really important. So I try and step out of the weeds of, I need a form that asks X, Y, Z and fields, but what are we trying to achieve with this form? What are we trying to achieve with this business process? Or maybe even what is the metric that the business users are being evaluated on or being comped on? Because if you understand how people are being evaluated or how people are being compensated, that will drive and you can build a platform that will support those behaviors that will drive adoption and that will bring people into your world or into your process. Mike: The second you talk money, that's when it becomes real for people, especially compensation. For every time I've rolled out a sales process, the salespeople want to know if X, when, Y, what's my pay? Because A, that's why we work, but also I want to make sure that I'm doing things right. And the reason I ask that is for the longest time as an admin, if I was pushing out new features, I felt I was doing my job. If I was constantly giving, and not constantly, not every day, but on a regular basis, if I was giving my users new features, I felt like I was doing my job. And it didn't really dawn on me until one of the organizations I was working at went through a massive leadership change. And here I am pushing out new features on opportunities for salespeople and stuff across the board, and everyone else is kind of grappling with also massive organization changes. And I remember I sat back for at least two months and just didn't push anything new because if I could control that environment and give my users a sense of normalcy when the rest of the organization is changing, then I wasn't contributing to their stress. Alistair Dinning: That's a very reasonable way of moving things forward and allowing the team to stay on an even keel. Mike: Well, I mean, part of, I think, understanding and thinking through is this feature right, is, is this feature right right now? Or would it be more right later given where everything's at? The last thing, the cliche of that is you don't want to push something new the last two weeks of a quarter because you're radically changing a possible sales process or something that could affect books and numbers. So obviously that seems to make sense, but the same also holds true for other parts of the year when other parts of the organization are maybe going through a different change. Alistair Dinning: And this taps onto another point, which has just occurred to me. So yes, absolutely. When we are making changes in the Salesforce platform, we've got to be organizationally aware to, for example, to your point, where salespeople are in their sales cycle. Are we at the end of the month? Are we at the end of the quarter? Is this the end of the fiscal? I mean, everything should be end of fiscal. Big sales organizations that I've worked with or worked at, you don't make any changes in the last month of the fiscal because the sales people are always focused on a single task and that is getting to their number. And we're talking about salespeople, but it could be any other organizational goal and team where you need stability because there is a bigger goal to move to. The second thought, when we look at how do we implement major change or how do we bring new product forward, it's being organizationally aware in terms of understanding where the business is going and having conversations with leadership about, "Hey, we've got these brand new features, but are they going to be relevant in six months? If we look at a new quoting system to bring in new products, are we still going to be selling this line of product or do we need this level of complexity? Is this still going to be a thing? Is this worth the investment in the time and the change and the development if this doesn't line up with the strategic objectives of the business?" So being organizationally aware to what your changes are doing, how your business users are in their, not their life cycle, but their business cycle and where the business is going. These are all important points when we look at how do we bring new functionality forward. Mike: Yep. You talked in the future and roadmap and boy, every release, every time we have a major event, there's always roadmap sessions, people want to look ahead. I know for a few times there's been times where I've looked at a feature and thought, "Oh, I really want to implement it now, but if I just wait three months, they're going to have this functionality and it's going to be a lot easier for me." And I think knowing that and being able to have your organization on pause to say, "No, let's let the future mature," then we'll be ready for it as well, as opposed to implementing it too early. One of the things I think we're thinking about is taking that inventory of your own skill and thinking, "Once I implement this, is this something I can support?" And as somebody that helps architect solutions, at what point do you think through how much features can be deployed versus if a customer organization just doesn't have the people power to support it? Alistair Dinning: So having been a consultant for 13 years, 14 years, whatever it is now- Mike: Your consulting is a teenager right now. Alistair Dinning: Basically, yes. Having been a consultant for quite a while, I've worked with a lot of small organizations and one of the things I've learned in that process is you can build, as an architect, I can design and build a really fancy whizbang solution that'll really knock the socks off the business users, but for that thing to have legs, for that thing to have durability down the road, I need to trust that the admin team in the organization that I'm working with can keep it going. I've always kept an open door to any admin I've worked with, but at the end of the day, as a consultant, I'm in there for a period of time and then I do my job, I deliver my functionality and I leave. And it's always the bit about my job that I like and I don't like. I get to work with lots of great companies, but I also don't see where things go six, 12, 18 months down the road. So it is a concern that we make sure that the admin team, the development team have enough handover and enough technical capability to maintain any solution we deliver because we don't want them looking at this in six months time or 12 months time thinking, "Oh my God, this was great at the time, but they didn't know..." I mean, nobody's got a crystal ball when you build functionality. You don't know where companies are going, you don't know what's going to happen in the market, you don't know how product's going to get adopted and unpacked by your business users. So things have to be built scalably and things have to be built with the intent that somebody can maintain and continue to use it going forward. Because if it's too complex, the admins that, as a consultant, that I've left behind are going to be cursing my name down the road. They'll be like, "What did he build me? This worked to begin with, but now I need to make some change. I don't understand how I expand on this." And so I'm really conscious of making sure two things. One is that the solutions I build are scalable, but two is that I have empowered the team that I'm working with, the client team, the admin team, that they have the tools to carry that product forward and they have the documentation to carry that product forward and they don't inherit a bunch of tech debt and that they're in a good place where they can understand it and debug it and enhance it and move it forward as their business dictates. Mike: So let me ask you this, because I think it's very poignant. As having been a consultant and done that for a while- Alistair Dinning: A while. Mike: ... what are questions that you really wish the Salesforce admin had asked you across the table? Alistair Dinning: I think it's about understanding what the Salesforce admin skillset is and what their background is and what their appetite to learning Salesforce is. Actually, sometimes the other thing to know, and it's not directly answering your question, but what I look for in that relationship with the admin is to understand their skills, their capabilities, their bandwidth for Salesforce, because in some smaller organizations, the Salesforce admin is not just the Salesforce admin, they're doing other things too. They may be an operational support person, they may be a financial support person, they may be a sales admin type individual on top of having to learn Salesforce. So again, it's making sure that they've got the tool sets and that we've had a conversation about, "Hey, are you understanding that this is how this is built? Do you have access to resources? Do you have access to a local user group, a local admin user group to help you get support? What are the other resources and tools that you've got that we can make sure that you are good to go with this product once it's gone? Do you understand how it's built? Do you have the documentation? Do you understand the designs? Do you have this in a sandbox? Have you unpacked it in a sandbox or maybe a POC environment where you can really play with this thing without breaking what's in prod? Mike: That's really good. I mean, I think back to the consultants I've worked with and the really good ones, part of their pitch for that solution was, "And here's how you configure it as an admin." One of them was just a matter of changing some static resources and then you didn't have to touch code. Alistair Dinning: Yeah. So static resources, custom metadata, custom labels, these are really important tools because you make all of the scalability of that buried, not buried, available to the admin in simple tool sets, which to your point, you don't have to touch code, you don't have to go and unpack a flow and rewrite business logic in a flow. You don't want to be doing that. Mike: Talk to me about, have you ever had an inside group of a handful of users that was your internal champions that maybe when you were looking to roll a feature out, you would beta test it on them? Alistair Dinning: Absolutely. So the best example I can think of this is a university in Ontario where I was working with the business school. And that school we had Salesforce was being used by the professional services team, the student services team, the marketing team, the alumni group. I'm going to say there were two other groups there as well. I'm trying to think of all the different departments. Mike: Wow. Alistair Dinning: This business school had a COE, a Center of Excellence for Salesforce that was represented by business users from all of those individual departments and the IT group were there. They were there to answer the question that we were answering today, which was, "Hey, there's this brand new feature in Salesforce. Do you want it? This is what it could look like. This is what we've heard from your users, but does this make sense to you?" And this school had a, they met on a regular basis. I would say every two weeks the COE would meet. And again, it was driven by business users who demonstrated an interest in both learning Salesforce and expanding Salesforce and contributing to the overall picture that we had one record of a student that we could follow their life cycle through. So we had good transparency on what the motivation behind Salesforce was in this organization. And they had a forum where the business users could come with problems, the business users could come with ideas, and the IT group and myself as the consultant were there to say, "Yeah, Salesforce can support that and this is how we could look at it." Or, "Salesforce can support that. Give us a couple of weeks. Let's have some detailed conversations, then we'll come back and see how this fits into the big picture." So having in any organization that we had, I think 120 Salesforce users in this group, this school, having a team of business users that would come together in a well-structured discussion forum where people were learning the product and able to contribute was really, really valuable for the development part of that because it wasn't one executive who just determined that this is the way we're going. It was the business who said, "This is the way we're going." Because the business asked for it, the business adopted it, because the business adopted it, they got really deep into owning the solution and they had true ownership of what that environment was and where that product was going. Mike: Wow. I've ran into something similar where the contract group of an organization really, really had a defined vision on what they wanted. And I created the demo and pushed it to them. And once it went live, they were the biggest champions because they were so invested in that feature. And it made the old system they were moving from just light years worth of antiquated. And it was kind of cool because then they could be at the forefront to help push change for other parts of the organization that maybe were a little less innovative. Alistair Dinning: Well, it's not just less innovative. It's maybe scared in some respects or unsure. I mean, I think when you have multiple groups working in Salesforce and you've got somebody who can really demonstrate the value and say, "Right, we can move an application from potential students signing in to application submission and review process. And we can drop the timeline that was that process that was four months. We can drop it to two and a half months because we were able to take time out here and take time out here because we can make the process more rigorous and more efficient and more locked down." If one team can show the rest of the business that, that's far more valuable than myself as a consultant saying, "I can save you money. I can save you time." It's far more valuable than the admin even saying, "I can save you money and I can save you time." Because if the business will step up and say, "Hey, we did cut costs," or, "We did improve our opportunity close," or, "We did cut our service response time," then those are the wins that really matter that other business users hear and then get incentive to go, "Right, well tell me more. Tell me how did you achieve that efficiency? What did you do? Who did you partner with? What did they bring to the table?" Mike: Yep. I hear you. Thinking about timing of this podcast as it comes out, we're right on the heels of the newest winter release. For an admin listening to this that's reading the title very literally, How Do I Decide If a New Feature Belongs In My Org? Is there a thinking structure or I don't know, a plan at which you go through release notes that you could give them as a way to think about how they look at features they see in the newest releases? Alistair Dinning: So I think the first thing to do is to marry up, "Hey, that looks fabulous in the release notes," to where does that align to the business requirements that we're hearing or the business problems that I'm hearing from my users? So if we have something that looks cool and we know it's going to resonate, that's the place where we start. If we've got 10... and there are hundreds of features in every release. But if you've got 10 things that catch your eye, which of those 10 things resonate against what the business has been asking for or complaining about? Because we can deliver what they're asking for, you can fix a problem, that's a great place to be. Then we're going to look to see how do we pilot that? We're going to look at how do I get this in front of the business in a way that I can, for low investment, how can I build a proof of concept that the business can see and see whether it actually resonates and does this solve the problem? So whether this is building it out in the sandbox and turning on all its features, is this going to developer.salesforce.com/freetrials and grabbing a free trial that's pre-built with this feature enabled because the developer of free trials, you have two choices. You can get an empty org or you can get an org that's pre-populated with data. If you get an org that's pre-populated with data, you don't have to seed it, you don't have to make it look fancy. It's already done for you. So either do a sandbox or a free trial and prototype it. And then you can put that in front of the business and get the feedback from the business. And then if it looks right and the feedback is positive, does this fall into the life cycle of where the business is at? Is this a good time to launch new functionality? And then if all of those things align, look at the technical complexity of doing it. In my case as a consultant, I'm going to be like, "Right, how much do I need to then knowledge transfer to the admin team so that they can maintain it after I'm done? If I am the admin building it, does this make sense?" And from that point you can move forward with, "Hey, yeah, let's run with this new feature, or not." Mike: I think that makes sense. Alastair, thanks for coming on the podcast and helping us walk through what can be a myriad of constant decisions in not only just the number of features that Salesforce comes out with, but the number of ways that we can build and deploy those features. Alistair Dinning: Mike, it's been my pleasure. Mike: And I want to thank Alistair for taking time out of his day to join me on the podcast and really give me a practical way to think through what it can feel like with an endless stream of feature decisions. And here's something you can try for the next release. I want you to take the features that catch your attention and match each one against an actual business problem or a request that you've heard from your users. You can prototype the strongest candidate, put it in front of a few people and pay attention to what happens. Then ask whether the timing is right and whether your team can realistically own what you're about to introduce. A feature that earns its way into your org by solving something that matters and leaving you with a solution you can keep after you support for launch. Well, that's it for this week. Thanks for listening and until next time, we'll see you in the cloud.

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Joshua Birk, Senior Director of Admin Evangelism, and Kate Lessard, Lead Admin Evangelist at Salesforce. Join us as we chat about what caught our attention at Dreamforce, what surprised us, and what's worth spending time on. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Joshua Birk and Kate Lessard. Build fast and accurately with Builder Central Probably the most exciting announcement from the keynote is Builder Central. It's a low and no-code workspace to enable admins to build fast and accurately, without compromising on security. From React sites to flows to agents, you can get an idea off the ground with plain language prompts. But just because you move fast doesn't mean you need to break things, thanks to automated testing, safety checks, and built-in controls. "We can take what we as admins already know about data models and our org structure and really, truly define what we're building," Kate says. You can upload requirements documents and information about your organization's business processes to make sure everything that you build works from the get-go. Create consistently amazing Salesforce experiences The other thing that was touched on in the keynote was Headless 360 and the Headless Experience Layer. You can bring Salesforce to Slack, Claude, and anywhere else your users need to interact with your data. If you're feeling overwhelmed by how many different ways there are for users to interact with your Salesforce data, know that you're not alone. But at the end of the day, these are experiences that you're designing for your users to make their lives easier where they're already working. Admins need to focus on governance and security Finally, the biggest takeaway from Dreamforce this year is that governance and trust are more important than ever. Hackers use AI too, and the threat landscape is constantly evolving. Now more than ever, the role of the Salesforce Admin has shifted into governance. That means data cleanup and strict permissions controls to make sure that your agents are working as intended. And that also means getting a better handle on how your data is moving across platforms and who might have access to it. Trust is a core principle at Salesforce, and so we're rolling out new tools like Security Center Essentials and the Transaction Security Policy Accelerator to help you take control of what's going on in your org. There's so much more great stuff in our September Monthly Retro recap of Dreamforce, so make sure to listen to the full episode. And don't forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast to catch us in your feed every Thursday. Podcast swag Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store Learn more Salesforce Admins Blog Post: Dreamforce 2026 Product Highlights for Admins Salesforce 360 Blog Post: Introducing Builder Central: The No Code AI Workspace for Salesforce Salesforce Platform Guide: Your Guide to the Headless Toolkit: Bring Salesforce Anywhere Humans and Agents Work Salesforce 360 Blog Post: Deploy Best-Practice Security Policies Instantly with Transaction Security Policy Accelerator Admin Trailblazers Group Admin Trailblazers Community Group Social Josh on LinkedIn 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: Before we jump into today's conversation, I want to give you a quick heads up about what's coming on the Salesforce Admins Podcast. Starting in October, we're moving to two episodes a month with a little bonus episode to kick things off. So October 1st, we're talking about how do I decide if a new Salesforce feature belongs in my org? Because Salesforce just released it and we should turn it on, are two very different things. Then on October 15th, Jennifer Lee joins me for a special video and audio episode, Winter '27, What Admins Should Check Before Their Org Updates. We'll help you figure out what deserves your attention, what you should test, and what you need to be ready for before the release hits your org. And then on October 29th, we're asking the question, what does an admin certification prove in the Agentforce era? We'll look at what certification tells employers and admins today and where hands-on experience and judgment fit into that picture. So after October, you can expect two episodes a month focused on helping you understand what matters, why it matters to your work, and what you can actually do with it when you get back to your organization. And that brings us to today's episode. So I'm joined by Kate Lessard and Josh Birk for a post Dreamforce conversation about what caught our attention, what surprised us, and more importantly, what's actually worth an admin spending time on. We're going to talk about Builder Central and what it could change about how admins build, new ways Salesforce can show up in tools like Slack and Claude, and why that data permissions and security in your org are even more important. We'll also get into Security Center Essentials, transaction security policy accelerators, Agentforce vibes, and some of the new tools that can help admins understand and work with their org faster. But there's a bigger thread running through all of it. AI can help you build, investigate, and move faster, but it doesn't replace knowing your business or knowing when something is actually right for your org. Josh calls it trust but verify. And I think that's a pretty good way to head into this conversation. So let's get Kate and Josh on the podcast. So Josh and Kate, welcome to the podcast. Joshua Birk: Thanks for having us, Mike. Kate Lessard: Thanks. Mike Gerholdt: We all have a little post Dreamforce voice in our step because it's been a long few days, but I wanted to get something together with all of us really fresh right after we landed. Some of us landed sooner rather than later leaving San Francisco and talk about what we saw, what really stuck out to us, maybe some of the demos we got to work on and things that surprised us. So Kate, you are in the keynote and keynotes always get top billing, so we're going to start with you. Kate Lessard: Woo, I love it. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. Talk to me about some of the stuff that you guys showed in the keynote for people that missed it and what you're excited for. Kate Lessard: Yeah, the keynote this year was really fun to work on the demos because there's just some really exciting new technology out there for admins to leverage. I think that there are just a lot of exciting new features that are specifically for admins that are really designed to improve our building experience. And if you are able to catch any of the sneak peaks or any roadmap sessions, you know that there are even more coming. But if you did join us for the keynote or if you plan to go watch it later, a really great example is Builder Central. And this is an amazing AI builder that is specifically designed for low-code and no-code builders. So not only can we use it to build fast and accurately, but we can also use it to edit directly in the Explorer, which is I think my favorite feature. And we can really visualize everything that we build and that spans from things like react sites to flows to agents, and then even all the way over to data model and permissions, which is super cool as an admin. And I want to say that I think that the most important thing to note though as an admin is that using tools like this, my expertise and my strong foundational skills that I've developed are still really necessary. With Builder Central, we have the ability to add things like requirements, documents, or information about the different business processes from our organization so that we can take what we as admins already know about data model and our org structure and really truly define what we're building. And so I think to me, the message and the excitement here is that as admins, we still need to understand the business and the technology to be successful and that doesn't go away, but using a fantastic product like Builder Central, we're more important than ever and we get to create these exceptional experiences and that really has lit me up this Dreamforce. Mike Gerholdt: I'm going to pause you there because I know you've got more to talk about. Kate Lessard: Oh, yeah. Mike Gerholdt: I'm so glad you brought up Builder Central first. I was floored. So I had seen, obviously we work on stuff prior to seeing it at Dreamforce and I'd seen demos and I think maybe it just kind of skipped off the surface for me as, "Oh, it's another AI thing and it can do this." And it kind of looked like a little bit of setup with Agentforce or Agentforce for setup. And I gave it some credibility, but I didn't really understand what I was looking at. And then I got on the show floor and this was Thursday and Daivat, who works for Tiaan, who was in the keynote, pulled me aside and said, "Mike, you got to come to our demo booth." And I'm like, "Okay." And he showed me a customer that came up and was really into Star Trek and this is why I'm like, "Okay," took a screenshot of a Star Trek set, kind of like those glittery panels that 70s, 60s tech ad. And he said, I think I want to make a dashboard for my executives because they're really into Star Trek. And they gave Builder Central that screenshot and the data it should pull and it created a dashboard, I kid you not, that looked just like Gene Roddenberry had created it for the 1960s Star Trek episodes. Kate Lessard: Oh, very cool. I love to hear stuff like that. Mike Gerholdt: I was like, "Seriously?" Joshua Birk: Right. Mike Gerholdt: Now I have no idea. This is where my limited information comes in because Josh, it's a React site or it's a React page or I don't know what to do with it after that, but I was just like, "Oh, I could make my whole instance look awesome." Joshua Birk: Yeah. And well, we're moving towards this realm of you can use Lightning, you can use React, and you have a lot of flexibility in the technology that's driving this. And that's, I think lending to that your dashboards don't have to look like what you think your classic dashboards are like. And it goes back to not that there's anything wrong with the Salesforce UI, but it's like, as was said during the main keynote, was the UI really ever our main driver? Was that what made us distinct? And I don't think that's the answer. I think the answer is the platform, it's the APIs, it's the features. And if you can update your UI to be like Star Trek, which is freaking awesome, all the better for everybody. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. I think that's a demo video somebody should do. Kate Lessard: Yeah. It really takes that concept of storytelling with data to a whole new level and making it really impactful for the people that are digesting that information. Mike Gerholdt: I mean, if that's what your company wants, then that's what people... If you want people to look at dashboards or whatever, then put it into something they're at. So, Kate, I share with you the same concern. Am I right to worry that it's almost like when we first get the calculator in algebra class and everybody just uses the calculator and assumes it's right for admins in terms of Builder Central? Because my worry is I see that and I'm like, "Okay, but wait a minute, how do I know if that number's right?" And I know how to pull that dashboard. Should we do something else besides build that Sparkle dashboard in Builder Central? Kate Lessard: Yeah. And I think the really important thing to know as you start working with Builder Central is you have to have a strong admin foundation. Everything that you know is important because you are sharing that information about your data model and what you need in that either prompt area, that box where you're entering in your prompt, or through your requirements' information where you add in a file. And so I think that it's actually incredibly important to have your strong admin foundation to be able to create these exceptional experiences. Joshua Birk: Yeah. And say it with me everybody, always do it in your sandbox first, press but verify. And these are the same skills and the same habits that we've been forming all along is even if you were working with a developer team, you wouldn't necessarily assume everything that was coming out was 100% accurate. And the same's going to be true with Builder Central and these other tools. Mike Gerholdt: Continuing on, Kate, after that Builder Central, I think that was the first chapter in the keynote, right? Kate Lessard: Yeah, that was our chapter one, building trusted AI. Mike Gerholdt: What did we talk about for chapter two? Kate Lessard: Chapter two was all about delivering trusted AI everywhere. So I think that admins go to Dreamforce. I know that when I was an admin, I would go to Dreamforce and I would feel a little bit of overwhelm because there's just so much to take in. And I think that maybe that was something that I was hearing from admins this year that they're feeling a little bit overwhelmed because everything that they do is actually now expanding to all of these different interfaces as well. So we saw examples of Salesforce and Slack, we saw examples of Salesforce and Claude, and this is going to continue across other interfaces. So I think that the big takeaway here and what I'm continuing to watch is how admins can deliver to new and more interfaces without changing that true foundational work that we've done in Salesforce. And that's super exciting. And that was really what our second chapter in the keynote was about. I think the example we used was a really good one. In the keynote, we showed exposing and running a flow directly in Claude. And that example was super simple. It was just a really easy auto launch flow to escalate a case. But that business implication is huge because as admins, I feel like one of our superpowers that moving forward is really meeting users where they are working and providing that same exceptional experience, whether they're in lightning or in a different interface. So I think that that is really cool and something I'm really excited to see how it progresses because we're only going to more interfaces. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, I agree. Was that the chapter where, maybe I'm confusing my keynotes, where you could preview what the Salesforce, I'll call it a card, would look like in Claude or Slack or ChatGPT? Kate Lessard: Yeah, we did show HXL, the headless experience layer. We did show an HXL component in Slack as well. And HXL is really a way to be able to take that component, that experience, and exactly display it in Slack, display it in Claude. So that's really cool. And admins can get hands on with the HXL playground if they want to try that out. It's been one of my favorite places to spend time lately. Mike Gerholdt: I mean, to me, and I said in the architect and developer keynotes too, it only served to almost refocus me more as an admin to think of, I have the Salesforce core as my foundation and everybody's going to be coming to use it. I have to make sure that my data and my security are the utmost because once somebody uses that headless layer or AI force to ask Salesforce a question in Claude, if my data's not right, then their answers aren't right. And I was thinking of that as that's the home base for me. And it almost just reaffirmed it that we weren't interface engineers because now the interface is everywhere. We're really data and security. Joshua Birk: Yeah. And I mean, this is the promise of headless, is that it's the client that you need, not necessarily the client that we are going to enforce on you. And I think there's a lot of interesting variations of using Claude and using Slackbot and using Coworker and things like that, but you're not wrong. It's like the core responsibilities are still going to be the same and that's what's going to drive, and context is king and you can't have good contacts without good data and you can't have good data without good security. So a lot of the foundations, they're just still there and they're going to help you through whatever agentic route that you're going to be going through. But as Kate was saying, the importance of those core responsibilities is never going to go away. Mike Gerholdt: You brought up Coworker. Josh, did you make it to any coworker sessions? Joshua Birk: I did not, but I have been poking around with Coworker and I think Coworker's a really interesting feature. What's interesting to me is that we are now seeing these tools that are very similar but different. We have Coworker, we have employee agents, we have Slackbot, and they all kind of overlap each other in various ways. Coworker, I think the big strength at Coworker is that it's basically you turn it on, you connect it to your sources and then you let it go. Whereas an employee agent is something that you are involved in highly customizing. And then Slackbot is kind of its own tool and obviously it's something that's very important if you're actually using Slack. And I think the nice thing is we don't have to put all our eggs in one basket. You can utilize the client, the agent, the AI that is best for you, whether that's Coworker or Claude or Claudeforce, it's whatever's going to be best suited and they all have their little distinctions for using it. I'm a big Coworker fan because it puts a lot of feature and functionality and information right at your fingertips, but it doesn't have the customization that say an employee agent does. Mike Gerholdt: Right. Kate Lessard: Yeah. And I want to hop in and specify, we're talking Agentforce Coworker here. And I think the really cool thing for admins to know here is... that you can turn this on in under five minutes and have it set up and ready to go and supporting your users and providing them with the information they need, which is, I mean, talk about just a really quick win for us to be able to deliver these awesome AI experiences to our users. Mike Gerholdt: So would you do that first, Kate, instead of building out an employee specific agent? Kate Lessard: I think it depends on the situation and what you need the agent to do. I think that Agentforce Coworker is going to allow users to help themselves quite a bit, and it's going to be a really straightforward, quick win that you can get them moving in the right direction. If you need your employee agent to do kind of other things and have a lot of different connected data sources, I think that maybe you would go in that direction, but I think it always comes down to that what is the use case? Joshua Birk: Yeah. And to throw a little bit in favor of an Agentforce employee agent is you can enforce a certain level of determinism using flow, right? So you have a lot of control over what that employee agent can do, whereas Coworker is just sort of out of the box. Kate Lessard: Absolutely. Mike Gerholdt: I will say this. So the architect keynote finally, because there are things that Mike can read five and six times and it still doesn't make sense to him, the architect keynote finally described to me the difference between probabilistic and deterministic. I think I'm saying both those right. Kate Lessard: That's a mouthful. Yeah. Mike Gerholdt: It is. I know. It feels like when you go... But that word- Kate Lessard: Oh, look what we did to you. Oh, no. Joshua Birk: Yeah, you tricked your brain into you didn't know how to pronounce it. Mike Gerholdt: There's only so many times you can say that word before the fuse breaks and I already said it. I already broke the fuse. But that is the AI saying, "Oh, well to win the deal, you need 18%." And then deterministic is the AI using its reasoning, but also being grounded in saying, "Well, 18% would win the deal, but our max is 15%." And I was like, "Oh." Joshua Birk: That's a good way of putting it. Mike Gerholdt: Maybe it was a developer keynote. Again, they kind of all smeared together for me. But I remember seeing that slide and I thought, "Now it makes sense to me." I had a light bulb moment. Joshua Birk: Nice. Mike Gerholdt: Just didn't appear as normal. And then of course I've already blown the fuse on terministic and probabilistic times I can say that. It's like exclamation points. Do you ever have an English teacher that told you only had five exclamation points you could use the rest of your life? Joshua Birk: No, but that's not bad advice. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. So hey, we got that going for us. Kate, I think chapter three of the admin keynote was around security. Kate Lessard: Yeah, exactly. It was all about governing trusted AI. And I think that security had a really big presence at Dreamforce in general. With the rise of agentic AI, we're seeing new security threats. Everyone listening has heard us say it a million times before, but I really do think that we mean it when we say that at Salesforce, trust is our number one value. And we really do firmly believe in a shared responsibility model that helps protect customer orgs and data. So with all of these new security threats that we're seeing, Salesforce is really proactively rolling out new and enhanced features for admins to monitor as well as to improve their security posture. So I think that that's one of the things I would actually really be coming out of this Dreamforce, feeling really proactive about security and what I can do as an admin to protect my organization. And in the keynote, we showed a couple different examples of both security as well as data privacy. We showed compliance agents. We gave a sneak peek of the enhanced DSAR policies that are going to be rolling out in the future. We shared transaction security policy accelerators, which are just a fantastic new addition for anyone that's leveraging Shields, event monitoring, using transaction security policies. And then we also showed Security Center Essentials, which is I think something really cool to call out because it is something that is free and available to all admins regardless of your org, your industry, what type of data you have going on, that's something that you can leverage to really be more proactive about your security. And I'll also add that it was really nice to see an increased amount of sessions focused on security this year. I was looking at everything in the Admin Meadow and we had tons of security sessions. It was fantastic. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. What was the thing that you demoed in the keynote? Because I felt like you had a hot minute of talking, you were scrolling through something. What was that? Kate Lessard: Absolutely. So those were the Transaction Security Policy Accelerator, which is a Salesforce Labs app that's available right now in the Agent Exchange. And I think this is really important because if you have used transaction security policies in the past, you were writing these security policies from scratch and you were doing that either with complex Apex code or you were creating these kind of multistep configuration steps and set up. And it was really challenging. And with Transaction Security Policy Accelerator, we actually took a list of all of the most requested security policies and made them into pre-built templates that you can just really easily deploy in your org. So that is just a huge game changer for any of our Shield customers that are leveraging event monitoring. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, I was going to say that when I saw that, I though I'd known stuff about security. And to be fair, back when it was a little different, the amount that we could do for enforcement, but to see you scroll through that and the amount of policies that were there, the documentation that was behind it, not just the part that everybody saw, and I think you deployed actually one of them, which was, it was pretty, I'd call it mild configuration. The part that got me floored was the documentation because I was horrible at documenting stuff. I knew where things were because I was the only admin. And when it came to working with IT and making sure security stuff synced up, documentation was always something I was constantly working on. The configuration would be right. It's the documentation that I needed to constantly report in on. And I saw that in that and I thought, "Man, that would've put me miles ahead. I wouldn't have had to buy my IT department so many donuts." Kate Lessard: Yeah. And I do think that when you deploy these, and if you go back and watch the keynote, you can see a little bit of it. There is the documentation and there's also the information that's like the description of what's happening, the why it's important, which I love to see, as well as the triggering event. So it's definitely above and beyond. And then you can kind of review those prefilled settings and fine tune them for your org. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, absolutely. And we had Kylie on to talk about Security Center Essentials on the podcast, so I'll link to that episode too. Kate Lessard: Awesome. Yeah. I think it's just such a great thing for everyone to have access to. Mike Gerholdt: I mean, that was easily my number two of Dreamforce walking away. So Josh, I think you did a session on, it sounds like I didn't do any research for this, but I have a whole list of things, but you did a session that was similar to one that we'd given at TDX that you partnered up with somebody new. Was that on AI Force? No. Joshua Birk: On Agentforce Vibes. They partnered with- Mike Gerholdt: Agentforce Vibes. Oh, that little thing. Joshua Birk: That little thing. Mike Gerholdt: Remember that thing that we launched back in March? Joshua Birk: Yeah. Yeah. I partnered with the great Lay Durafé, who I think inherited the presentation from another TN, and I'm blanking on his last name, but it was a presentation that they had presented at TDX, but it was more of a walkthrough of five coding tools. And we focused heavily on Agentforce Vibes itself when it comes to admins using it. Kate really hit a lot of the good highlights when it comes to where I think we're heading, but I think we're heading into this age of, for lack of a better term, and until I come up with a better term, it's the best one I've got, but vibe admining, which is basically the ability to use these AI tools. And this was a very interesting session to me because for one thing, I have slow walk talking about Agentforce Vibes to admins because it's basically Visual Studio Code in the cloud and that's a developer environment. And so there's some things that if you're using it as a developer environment, would not be particularly admin friendly. But what we've evolved to is this scenario where the Agentforce Vibes panel is actually very user-friendly in general, and you can do a lot of work within the panel itself. And then the rest of VS Code really just kind of turns into a preview state. So you don't have to try to code Apex within VS Code or anything like that. And so that was one thing that I think the tool is friendlier. The other thing is that the models have just gotten so much better. And so Kate was talking about the example of being able to do an auto launch flow two years earlier, maybe even a year earlier, there's no way I would recommend admins trying to create an auto launch Flow within any of these tools because they simply weren't very good at it. And there's technical reasons for that. Flow is kind of our own creation, whereas things like Apex and WC have a lot more information out there for the models to consume. But the models have become much friendlier and much more powerful. And what I would invite people to do is if you can find it in the Salesforce events, Lay created this prompt builder library, or I'm sorry, prompt library. And it shows just the breadth and the width of the things that these tools can do. And we used Vibes as our example in part because it's built right there in the org, it's a Salesforce product, et cetera, et cetera. But as I was saying before, many of these other clients, many of these other agentic things can still do very similar things. And it's like the most popular use case that I think I'm seeing is like, "Hey, go tell me this thing that I'm very concerned about in my org," or, "Hey, I'm a day one admin and I need to know what's going on in my org. So can you generate a markdown file that gives me a report of all the flows that are in my org, which ones might be redundant, which ones might be old, that kind of thing. And these tools can just really generate that kind of thing in a fraction of a time that it would take a human to go through and go file by file by file and actually try to consume the information that's in your org and then try to compile it into something that you could hand off to another human being. Kate Lessard: Yeah, that's one of my favorite use cases for Vibes actually, is to just ask questions that I need to know about my org and my metadata. It's been incredibly helpful and powerful for that. Mike Gerholdt: I happen to, because I've owned Track long enough, look back 10 years ago in 2015 in the wayback machine. The top performing sessions were by Salesforce MVPs talking about I just inherited an org, now what do I do? And documenting an org. And it's interesting because now we're still talking about that, but we're talking about it through the lens of how can AI help me do this and move on to the stuff I really need to get done. Joshua Birk: Yep, exactly. Mike Gerholdt: I mean, it's the same problems. It's just we're using more advanced tools to solve it faster. Joshua Birk: Yeah. The other thing that I thought, I did not know we were going to announce at Dreamforce because there's- Mike Gerholdt: Because there's things that even we don't know. Joshua Birk: Even we don't know. And the big one for me was COA. So COA is a model that Salesforce has created in partnership with NVIDIA. And COA is what's called a post-train model, which means basically you take an empty bucket and you fill it with your own information. And the information we have filled it with is years of what's called synthetic data. So we're not using customer data, we're using artificial data we've created that looks like customer data. And the few interesting things about COA is, first of all, it's running on our own iron. So it should be cheaper and faster for us to run, but also it should be more efficient because it doesn't have to know what the sourdough bread recipe is that your grandma... it's only trying to answer solutions from about CRM, right? It's very, very specific and very fine-tuned. And it should be available, I want to say now, I'd have to probably check the press release, but when you go to your dropdown of the models that you can select for Prompt Builder and Agentforce 5s, et cetera, it should be available under those. And I highly recommend, people. I'm dying to try it myself just to see what kind of distinctions I can see. Mike Gerholdt: I mean, that's interesting that COA is also was the name of Mark's dog when Salesforce was founded. Joshua Birk: Yes. Mike Gerholdt: We tend to do that. Tend to keep things interesting. Well, we're getting about to the point where most of my listeners are either getting ready to hop off a train or complete their dog walk. I know because I survey them. I'd love to think of, we're headed back to work on Monday after Dreamforce. What is the one thing that you would do or what is the one thing that you would dive into or two things, but stack rank them. And I started with Kate, so I'll start with Josh this time. Joshua Birk: Well, not to repeat myself, but like I said, I want to tinker with COA. I want to see if it has the tangible results that I do from a technical point of view, really believe it will. And then also just Lay gave me this whole library of prompts. And I mean, it was an interesting session to prepare for because these things have been moving so quickly that I really honestly wasn't sure what Vibes would be capable and what wasn't. And so one of the things I want to do is just take a turn and just start putting Vibes really through its faces, really push it to its limits and see exactly where it is. So keep an eye out. We've got a blog coming out about skills in general, and skills are the things that allow tools like Vibes to be quick and efficient because they're little micro instructions of how to do things like create a soccer query, create a custom object, update a custom object, create a dashboard. But then I think we're going to have some blog posts coming up that's going to take that one step further. Mike Gerholdt: Kate, how about you? You flew in. Kate Lessard: Yeah. Mike Gerholdt: Back to reality. There's nine or 10 users that need password resets, that's a given. Kate Lessard: Oh my gosh. Absolutely. Yeah, I've got them all set up with MFA. My baggage finally got here. Yeah, a couple things. And I think it goes back to when we were talking about the keynote, you'll hear some reiterated themes from me as well. I would start with security and I would start with that security essential front, security... Wow. Mike Gerholdt: Your fuse broke too. Kate Lessard: There's my fuse. Yeah, the Security Center Essentials and really those free things that I could present to my stakeholders, my leadership team as ways that we can really get more proactive about our security and then maybe evaluate some of the other enhanceable features that were discussed depending on what I have available in my org. So I think I'd start with security, which I'm sure is not a surprise from anyone listening that knows me at all. And then the second thing, I would get hands on with Builder Central. So it's available as beta now and you can start building and even better, it's free. It's free with reasonable usage limits in every org. So I think that that would be my big exciting hands-on moment and really go experience for myself what I can build for my org and how AI can impact me and help me be both faster and then just continue to build these awesome trusted AI experiences for my users. Mike Gerholdt: I couldn't agree more. I'm of the generation that we used to say if it's not in Salesforce, it doesn't count because we got to drive people to log into Salesforce. And I remember I created a dashboard for an executive of logins and records changed to try and figure out, to show them that we're using the tool. And to them, I always told them, I said, "There's no dashboard for email at this company." And he said, "Well, no, because you can't get business done without email." And I said, "Well, there's your answer right there." I think this Dreamforce for me kind of reiterated the fact that it's still, if it's not in Salesforce, it doesn't matter, but now I need to get ready because the interface that somebody's going to be using might not be Salesforce. And I need to think about do I have the foundation right? Have I been putting off all those business process changes, those field cleanups? I just did a blog post on metadata cleanup and I used Vibes for that. And I was scared to death using Vibes because there's still a whole lot of tabs that I had to ping Josh and be like, "What does this do?" And he's like, "Stay away from that tab. Fine. Just talk to it and it's okay. It's like hell." But that to me really, I need to make sure home base is set up so that when I sit down and have that next conversation, because I'm with you, Kate, on Builder Central to talk about, so where are we going? Is there an AI tool that we're predisposed to rolling out company-wide? And then making that available to grab Salesforce data, but also making sure that when it does it, it doesn't just return gobbledygook because I have 1300 accounts with phone notes in the phone field because we never cleaned up our data. And so it's like one part of it is make the foundation so that whatever we decide to build, it's there. But the other thing is I now have all these tools that can compress time for me and really put... This was an idea I was floating past somebody because we've heard the term human in the loop, which was AI returning something, but then giving it to you. And we see that in all the builders too. You need to approve this, you need to do that. Even Slackbot will put together a message, but I was thinking more of admin at the helm. Joshua Birk: I like that. Mike Gerholdt: Which is you're in Builder Central and here's what I need done. I'm going to check what you're going to do, but you're going to build this stuff, but I'm going to check it and then we're still going to fix it and put eyes on it before it goes out the door. And I'm not just going to turn it loose. Even for Coworker, I would really want the five people that I feel are knowledgeable about AI and knowledgeable about our data to ask it questions so that I'm getting it thoroughly tested before I roll it out to Bob in Atlanta, who's going to ask it to make a list view every Thursday afternoon for his Friday call downs. Kate Lessard: Well, and that's it. The human at the helm, the admin at the helm. Admins are more important than ever, and we really need that strong knowledge that we already have. Everything that we've learned has set us up for this moment. Joshua Birk: Yeah. I'm trying to think of the phrase that Lay ended with, with his section of the presentation, but it was something along the lines of, do not replace your expertise with AI. Mike Gerholdt: That's good. Joshua Birk: Your expertise is still the driving force of making sure this stuff is going to work correctly. Mike Gerholdt: That's good. And it's still the differentiator for all that AI can create for you. It's the expertise of you saying, is this right for my org or is this right, right now? Joshua Birk: Yeah. Mike Gerholdt: Well, this is a fun conversation? Thank you all for joining me after Dreamforce and giving us a little bit to think about. I think the second half of the year is usually heading down and going into the holidays, but we have stuff to build and I'm kind of curious what dashboards are going to look like just given we can give it screenshots. So I think that's interesting. But Kate and Josh, thanks for coming on the podcast. Joshua Birk: Thanks for having us. Kate Lessard: Yeah, great to be here. Mike Gerholdt: So a big thanks to Kate and Josh for jumping in and recording this while our minds were still fresh off of Dreamforce. As always, I hope there's something from the conversation you can take back to your organization, your users, or the way that you think about your work as a Salesforce admin. Be sure to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins podcast so you don't miss an episode because we have some really good ones coming up. And until next time, we'll see you in the cloud.

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Maria Alvarez-Zarrilli, Founder and Principal Consultant for Throughline HR LLC, and William Walsh, Salesforce and AI Recruitment Lead at Harvey Nash. Join us as we chat about what Salesforce employers are looking for in new hires and how to get your career started. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Maria Alvarez-Zarrilli and William Walsh. How the Salesforce Admin job market has changed Over the past few years, the role of the admin has changed a lot. It's no longer about how many certifications you have or how many users you can manage. While those skills are still important, being a great Salesforce Admin is much more about how you put that knowledge into action to support core business processes and generate value for your organization. So how do you stand out from the crowd? That's what I wanted to talk about with Maria Alvarez-Zarrilli and William Walsh. As recruiters, they see the Salesforce Admin job market from both sides: what it's like when you're looking for a role and what employers are asking for when they hire. Increasingly, it's not just about what you can do in Salesforce, but how you can connect it to the business and make an impact. Talk about business impact The number one thing that Maria looks for in a Salesforce Admin is requirements literacy. "It's not just being able to take a set of orders and execute it, but really be able to fine-tune that," she says. "Push back, make recommendations, be in front of what's happening and have that longer future vision, knowing that so many of these runways are going to be short with AI." Showing you have that skill is tricky, but it starts with how you talk about your experience. Are you describing features, or are you talking about the benefits? Don't just list outcomes; talk about impact. You need to show that you can think bigger than what you're building and understand how it fits with larger organizational goals. The power of showing up William urges job seekers to spend real, face-to-face time in the Salesforce community. At this point, everybody has shiny, AI-polished LinkedIn profiles and resumes. But meeting someone and making a connection with them can be so much more powerful than sitting in front of your computer mass-applying to every job opening you come across. "This ecosystem is super welcoming, and everybody wants to see everybody succeed," William says. "So go to some user groups, some local events, and you'll see how quickly people around you start to root for you and start to put your resume in front of the people they know." Maria and William have a ton of great tips for interviews and navigating the Salesforce Admin job market, so make sure to listen to the full episode. And while you're at it, subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast to catch us every Thursday. Podcast swag Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store Learn more Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: What Skills Transfer Well Into a Salesforce Admin Career? Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: How the Salesforce Administrator Role Is Evolving in the Agentic AI Era Admin Trailblazers Group Admin Trailblazers Community Group Social Maria on LinkedIn William on LinkedIn Salesforce Admins on LinkedIn Salesforce Admins on X Mike on Bluesky social Mike on Threads Mike on X Full show transcript Mike: The Salesforce admin job market looks a lot different than it did a few years ago. So, what are employers actually looking for right now? And how do you make sure your resume, experience, and interview skills line up with that? Well, today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, I'm talking with Maria Alvarez-Zarrilli, founder of Throughline HR, and William Walsh, who leads Salesforce and AI recruitment at Harvey Nash. We get into why certifications alone aren't enough, how industry experience can help you stand out, and why curiosity and communication matter so much once you get into the interview. So, whether you're looking for your first admin job or your next admin, we're also going to tell you about where it's worth spending your time. With that, let's get Maria and William on the podcast. So, Maria and William, welcome to the podcast. Maria Alvarez-Zarrilli: Thank you so much for having. William Walsh: Thank you. Thank you for having us. Mike: This is going to be exciting. I have not had two people on in the job space ever, so I go from zero to two, which is smart. But Maria, let's start with you. Tell us a little bit about what you do in the job recruiting, job placement space. Maria Alvarez-Zarrilli: Absolutely. Well, thanks so much for having us. My name is Maria Alvarez-Zarrilli. I am the founder and CEO and principal consultant for Throughline HR LLC. And very much in the vein of what we're talking about, this is my new solopreneurship venture launched in the last two months in response to everything that's happening in the job market. I've done every side of the recruiting, staffing, hired and being hired from doing Salesforce recruiting at Robert Half, supporting them, Protiviti, staff augmentation to going in-house with Vicasso, formerly Internet Creations, helping build both professional services and their ISV side. I worked at Salesforce directly in workforce development in Salesforce Talent Alliance under alliances and channels and helped get employer commitments to continuing to grow the ecosystem, investing in that top of the funnel Salesforce talent, building programs to help bring people in, admins, BAs, developers. And now I am working all different roles, but still very much in touch with the Salesforce ecosystem, still working with so many of the amazing partners that I've built relationships with over the years, supporting outsource hiring, staffing, job coaching, and career guidance. Mike: Wow. So, a few things. Maria Alvarez-Zarrilli: Just a couple things. Mike: William, how about yourself? William Walsh: Yeah, I don't know if I'm as impressive as Maria, but I'll try to keep up as we go along here. But I lead our Salesforce and AI recruitment practice at Harvey Nash. So, here, what I basically do is work with companies across not only the Salesforce ecosystem, but multiple CRMs as we continue to grow. And that ranges to help them build out their teams of admins, business analysts, all the way up to architects, AI specialists, data focused people and leadership roles as well. The neat thing about what I do is I work really closely with both sides of the market. So, I'm talking to not only hiring managers for what they need for their teams, but also speaking with Salesforce professionals every day on what they're seeing in the market and where they want to take their careers next. So, I think I get a pretty unique view of the market from both the employer and candidate side. And a big part of my job is understanding obviously where those two things line up. So, hope we can give everybody some good information today as to what employers are really looking for and how to stand out in this ever-changing job market. Mike: Yeah, I think that's why I was so excited. Shout out to Umer who was on the podcast a long time before he even joined Salesforce that connected all of us. But I love that both of you had the same but different lenses into the job market. And William, you set me up perfectly. So, I mean that's the first question on my list, which is when you look at the Salesforce job market right now, specifically for the admin role, what are you seeing? William Walsh: Yeah, I think it's definitely a more competitive market than it was a few years ago. I think there's a lot of really good admins out there. So, just being that Salesforce admin and having a few certifications on your resume isn't really necessarily enough anymore. What I'm seeing clients respond to is admins who really understand businesses behind the platform, whether it's sales, service, operations, data, which I'm sure we'll talk about a little bit more, but really admins who can show they've solved business problems in Salesforce are the ones that are standing out currently. People that can, again, not just be that general admin, but can differentiate themselves with whether it's an AI tool or a specific industry, that's kind of been the biggest thing that I've seen change. It's become a much broader role. Again, a company would just look for someone who was able to manage users, build reports, handle workflows, keep the org up and running. Now they really want someone who can be a real business partner for them, understand the data and automation integrations. So, I don't think the admin role has necessarily become much of a different role, but it's definitely, you want to add some more skill sets to just your generalist admin at this point. Maria Alvarez-Zarrilli: Absolutely agree. I think we're seeing a really important evolution and one that really follows a lot of what we've seen before in ERP and MCSC before where you're getting a role that used to be about just configuration, build this, set this up. You had a lot of single seat admins that assist admin, a lot of people didn't even call themselves Salesforce admins when I first started recruiting in this space, which is what made it so difficult. And now there's this concentrated branding and it's evolving into this governance and you really need to be able to stand out in ways that say, to William's point, this is an outcome I can provide, not here's the number of seats I can manage, but this is what I'm able to do in terms of business impact. I understand how this is going to affect what the top line is for the company, how this evolves into the mission. People need to understand the actual companies, not just the platform itself. Mike: Those are really good points, I think. And that's one thing to jump off of too is so broader, I heard partnering with the organization, not just managing. Over the last few years then, what kind of roles or skills have changed or grew in terms of what employers are looking for in Salesforce admins? Maria, I'll start with you. Maria Alvarez-Zarrilli: Absolutely. One of the things I've seen the most is really that requirements literacy, not just being able to take a set of orders and execute it, but really be able to fine tune that, push back, make recommendations, be in front of what's happening and have that longer future vision knowing that so many of these runways are going to be short with AI. Things are going to continue to change at such an insane pace that's not going to slow down. It's not, well, after this week, after this cycle, after this next set of release notes, things are going to calm down. They're just not. And that resiliency means that when an admin has a set of requirements, they need to be able to show judgment and wisdom, not just knowledge holding. Mike: William, you mentioned in yours that there was a certain set of things you kind of look for, things that are changing. Could you expand on that? William Walsh: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we all know AI has been the big point as of late over the last few years, and I think data is kind of the big one, right? You can have any AI tool in the world. If your data isn't clean, it's not going to work correctly for your business, right? And so, I think data's a big one, automation's a big one. And as we see AI show up more and more, you're seeing a lot more demand for admin to have the experience with your specific industry clouds as well, your specific Salesforce products. And I think that people would honestly rather hire admin to understand, again, how to use Salesforce to improve business process rather than just someone who has that long list of certifications. I think when people first get into Salesforce early on, at least back in the day, it was, "Hey, get as many search as possible." And search are great. They get you in the door, but the real world experience is kind of what gets you over the finish line. And I think that's super important for people to understand. Mike: So, we've danced a little bit on industry and William, you brought it up. I think Maria, your answers have alluded to it. If I'm a Salesforce admin or looking to become a Salesforce admin, and I have a lot of a certain industry perspective, let's say Finserv or banking or automotive, I'm picking the big categories, should I really lean into that or should I just look for an admin role in any industry because I know Salesforce administration? William Walsh: Yeah, I would say either or, right? I think it totally depends on if you surely have a true love for that specific industry and working in that industry, you can definitely stick with it, but you just have to, again, not just be a generalist admin. I think within that industry, then you have to start diving a bit deeper into, again, if it's Finserv, say specifically Revenue Cloud and more that you can do within Revenue Cloud and CPQ. And again, learning more AI integration tools that'll help your specific business within that industry. Again, it's like I said, not just being that generalist admin I think is the main part, but I also find that sometimes you can get yourself into a spot where I feel too niche, right? And when I'm looking for a role, I can only go for roles in this specific industry because that's where my experience is. And so, I can see where people have those pain points. I think, again, if that's what you would really enjoy to do and that's your passion, stick with it and just broaden yourself within that industry. Otherwise, it's definitely, I always find being at a consultancy or being at a partner is always good because you get to have your hands on a few different platforms at once or get to be in a few different engagements to where you can really work on a Sales Cloud environment here, but then be in a Service Cloud org over here. And so, you get your hands on multiple different things and continue to grow your skill sets, not only in one specific industry, but all throughout all the Salesforce clouds. Mike: Maria, I'd love your thoughts. Should I lean into my industry first or should I lean into my admin skills and apply across the board? Maria Alvarez-Zarrilli: It's a very tricky question because ideally it's one of those, well, it depends, the lawyer answer. On the surface level, I would say yes, lead into the industry because of how that supports the differentiator of understanding the business outcomes. If you are coming from banking, if you are coming from healthcare, if you are coming from education and re-skilling into Salesforce, you're going to be able to speak more intelligently, especially at some of these, I'm going to use this phrase lightly now, entry level roles because you don't have entry level understanding of what the company is trying to do, what kind of outcomes they're looking to drive. And that's going to really support what I said about that requirements, scrutiny, the wisdom, the choices that you're making, and that's going to be an important differentiator. However, in today's job market, I would not tell somebody to limit themselves to only applying to jobs inside of their industry because there is a transferability, there is a lot of change happening inside of all of these industries, and people at the end of the day need to pay their bills. And sometimes, there just may not be enough opportunities in a given industry that makes sense for them when they're looking at jobs that are either available for remote, that are in their geographical area, if they're looking at companies that are pushing RTO, et cetera. So, if somebody really had a passion to what William and I believe you alluded to earlier about an industry that maybe they don't have deep experience in or maybe they don't have a lot of career experience at all, finding ways to stand out and deepen that industry knowledge so that you can stand out, I think is just as important as having that deep industry experience and figuring it out. Mike: Again, you set me up perfect for what I was thinking because I was kind of hovering around this question, but let's jump into this part of it. For each of you, when a candidate lands on your desk, what is it that makes them stand out versus others? William Walsh: Yeah, so I can start. I mean, like I said, I think for me, certifications matter. It shows commitment, it shows employers that they've got some confidence in your technical foundation, that kind of stuff. But what's really important to me is when I sit down, not only look at a resume, but when I speak to someone, can they walk me through three really impactful, at least three really impactful kind of projects that they've delivered? And nine times out of 10, a client is going to want to talk to someone who can walk them through really impactful projects they've been able to deliver rather than someone who's just got a list of certifications on their resume. So, I think that's super important. Another thing is having a bit of technical ability as well. Again, having that crossover, differentiating yourself from just your generalist admin, someone that can. Again, when I say technical sales, I do not mean coding Apex, but more so building and configuring and being able to do a lot of work with workflows nowadays. And again, having some AI focused tools that you've worked with in your current role. Most clients now are using AI one way or another, and when they're hiring an admin, again, they want that person. A lot of times they are taking on the headache of trying to integrate that tool correctly, and it's probably not their role. And so, they want to have someone that they can bring in right away and understand what exactly is going to work for their business and how they can best get their platform to where they need it to get to. So, like I said, I do look for certifications, they're great, but at the same time, it's really about real life impactful projects you've been able to deliver on and what your role was in those projects. If you're able to get a bit more technical and tell me you did some of the configuring yourself, that goes a long way when you put it in front of a client rather than, again, I was just kind of creating dashboards and all the other generalist admin stuff that we would usually look at five, six years ago. Mike: Yeah. Maria, I'd love your perspective on what makes a candidate stand out to you. Maria Alvarez-Zarrilli: Yeah, I think there's a handful of things. One, just being completely candid, that they look like a real candidate. The fake candidate's a real thing now, that they have verifiable information that they are active in whether it's LinkedIn, the Trailblazer community. I'm seeing posts that look like they're written by a real person. I've seen a resume that looks like it's written by a real person, just really to start at the surface level. And that can be really tricky because I have seen profiles, LinkedIn profiles, resumes, emails, communication, LinkedIn posts that because of trying to demonstrate this very, I think, professional demeanor and best practices, sometimes it can come across so boilerplate. My spidey sense tingles for a second and I catch myself going, "Is this person real?" And that is a real risk that people run now in polishing their information off. So, I'm just going to start at that surface level. Once we're actually interacting with a candidate and we verify this is a real person, not a bot, what really looks is that what's driving a person's? Where is the learning resiliency? Where is the resiliency within the stories that they are telling, not just the polished, "I was able to increase this by this percent and that percent." That's wonderful. Having those numbers is great. That is now the bare minimum. When somebody can say, "But," adding to the star method, that an extra R, that reflection, "But now with this new technology, I would do it differently. But now knowing how our customer base changed six months later, I would do this. But now knowing that more and more companies are going to be absorbing other companies, I would approach this slightly differently." Right? That reflection piece of saying, not just giving me the story outcome, but how they would take that into a similar project going forward, or even if they're at that level, right at that cusp of people leadership, how they would train somebody else based on their experience of going through those steps, that to me is a significant differentiator because that tells me that person has the ability to stay the long run, that they are not just looking at just having that list of facts and figures for the resume, the output, the promotions, but that they're actually looking to build both within themselves and around them. Mike: So, along those lines, thinking of where candidates spend their time, because I mean, I'm old enough to remember that I used to have to go to a bookstore to look up resume templates and go buy special resume paper. Now everything's electronic. I won't date myself, but I did in high school have to check out the internet for 15 minutes at a time. It's amazing we had anything done with dial-up back then, but we did. But you mentioned polish, and I think it's crazy that there's bots out there, but we're talking about real humans. Where are the real humans putting too much energy into either their resume or their experience or something that's not actually helping them in the hiring process? Maria Alvarez-Zarrilli: Well, one of the top ways I think is just in their general job search. So, LinkedIn did a pretty big overhaul of their algorithm in 2025 to an algorithm called 360 Brew, and it really rewards humanity and consistency within the process, their post, their about section, their experience, the resume that's uploaded, their interactions with recruiters on the backend, et cetera. And putting everything into a ChatGPT, a Claude, a AI of choice and spitting it out is actually. I'm finding a lot of very talented people are telling me, "Oh my gosh, three years ago I couldn't open my LinkedIn because every recruiter from here to Singapore was in my DMs and now it's just crickets." And most of that is because everything is so polished and saturated and M-dashed and if not this, then that that it's getting downgraded on the algorithms. And the same things happen, and that means that they're not showing up high in the recruiter back end of LinkedIn as much as high in the results. So, really being able to have a unique voice and tone and sounds like the person that shows up in the interview, it does matter. And it's a hard line to draw because people want to present the best version of themselves, but that kind of certified human best version of themselves is mattering more and more. Mike: Yeah. I mean, it's very tempting to feed your resume or your LinkedIn URL to AI, pick which one and have it spit stuff out. I mean, it can write how remarkable you are in some pretty punchy language that you're like, "Oh, I don't think I would've written that before." But the other half of that is everyone else is doing it, so now yours sounds less human just like everyone's. William, let's take a different angle for you. Opposite of that, what are candidates sometimes underestimating they should spend time with that hiring managers are really looking for out of candidates? William Walsh: Yeah, I mean, I think it's tough on the resume side of things. What I would tell people is communication is the number one thing. Like you both just hit on, your resume can be great. It can look like you are the number one person that should get this job, but at the end of the day, I think, again, an admin is kind of sitting between that business and the technology team, and they need to understand how to talk to VP of sales one minute. They need to understand how to talk to a developer the next minute, and communication is key. And so, it's hard to say on paper, "Hey, what am I maybe overlooking here?" But it's really the communication aspect, and that comes from working on projects, volunteering. If it's tough to get a role, volunteer somewhere on a real project, get hands-on experience where you'll be able to explain what you really did. Again, I think it's tough to say what people are overlooking on their resume. Again, everybody's resume can look great. It's really, once you get in front of someone, the communication aspect, because that's the differentiator at this point. Like we just said, everybody's got their resumes being made by an AI tool somewhere. They're all going to look great. What are you like when we get on the phone? And if you are really able to, again, explain what you can do for a business, the value you can bring for a business, and not just your typical reading off your resume, which a lot of folks do, a lot of folks will just rely strictly on their resume and just go into an interview studying up their resume and the bullet points that they have in there so they can just hit those soon as a question comes up. You need to be able to be a real person. People want to work with people they enjoy working with. I think that's a big thing that a lot of times people forget. You can be the best candidate for a role, but if you aren't clear with your communication, you don't seem like an enjoyable person to work with on a daily basis, there's a good chance they'll go with someone that may have a lesser skillset just because, hey, we can train this person up to be where you are and we really enjoy working with them. Again, they're clear with their communication. They can translate business needs and requirements to our technology team well. So, that stuff is what really I see matters the most once you get into that intro stage and meeting a client. Maria Alvarez-Zarrilli: And just to add to that, William, I think the asking questions, not just having answers. I think your point about having the answers, the mission statements, the details memorized is so spot on because I think the risk of that is there isn't that conversation where people are figuring it out together sometimes and showing up and saying, "I'm not sure, but here's how I think I would approach the problem." Or even just asking back, "Well, what's your internal method? Where would you start?" And then taking that from there. Sometimes even within the not knowing, how people approach that situation of not knowing, I think is really underestimated of how to show up or coming back. I had a candidate years ago who bombed a question, just stumbled and fumbled and got flustered and frustrated and 24, 48 hours later, sent me an email and said, "I looked it up. I actually didn't know about this. Here's what I learned. Here's how I would approach it right now. I actually though this was really interesting. I found a community group. They have a call here. If anybody else struggles with this question, you can send them this link and they can learn more about it." And actually gave me their references, the work that they did, and that's what comes into that learning resiliency that was... I think people underestimate the ability to come back or not know and demonstrate how that not knowing makes them someone that would be enjoyable to work with, that the team could see themselves being with. In real life, you don't have the answers sometimes when you're figuring the problems out. William Walsh: I was just going to jump in there and say, what does a good admin do? They ask questions, right? Maria Alvarez-Zarrilli: Yeah. William Walsh: You don't get told to do something and then just put your head down and do it. Usually you want to know, "Hey, why do we want to do this? What is the value for the business that we're able to do this?" Right? Maria Alvarez-Zarrilli: 100%. William Walsh: And so, you want to know what that outcome is going to lead to, or where in that business is this going to help support if we're able to create this workflow this way or whatever the case may be. And so, a good admin asks questions and you have to have that same approach when you're going into an interview. You have to, again, not just be there with. You have no idea how many times I get feedback from a client where they say, "Hey, they seem like they're great, but they seem very robotic, right? They were just kind of reading off a sheet. Here's question, answer, question, answer." And a lot of times, clients want candidates to put them on their toes and ask questions that they might not even know the answers to. But for them, that's in their head they're going, "Oh wow, you know what? That's great. I didn't even think about that." Maria Alvarez-Zarrilli: And that can be a small failure of the hiring process as well because the roboticness happens on both sides. You have hiring managers that have their rubrics and going through, and it's very important that we have non-biased criterion that we're hiring towards the competencies and the skill sets. And also, there needs to be room in that interview process to have that conversation and measure someone not just on their. Did they guess the answer correctly? Did they memorize the right answer? Were they able to regurgitate that? But were they thoughtful? Did they have really good questions, inviting and making enough time and room for that instead of filling every single space with call and response? Mike: Yeah, I can't agree more with both of what you've said. I think in the times that I've been interviewing for different positions, both myself and interviewing to fill positions for other teams, nine times out of 10, I enjoy it if the candidate doesn't know the answer, but tells me their thought process to getting to an answer. I say an answer because they may not know if it's correct or not until they continue to research it, but it's understanding their thought process in that interview that I always wanted to know. At least for me, that's what I've always found valuable. William Walsh: Absolutely. And you see a lot of times, there's many different ways to do things within Salesforce, within many orgs. And a lot of times when people are interviewing, the main basis of it is, "I want to see how your mind works. I want to see how you get from point A to point B." Not to say it's wrong or right, but I'm curious. I think, again, like you just said, a lot of it is how does your mind work? And that's a huge part of what we see on a lot of interviews as well. Not necessarily it was the wrong or right answer, because usually there's a lot of right answers, but just how did you get there in your mind? How do you get from point A to B? It's always interesting for people to see. Maria Alvarez-Zarrilli: Curiosity is such an important word there because there's such a performance to the interview process and whereas the actual job requires so much curiosity. And if you can demonstrate that, I think that's going to be a significant differentiator toward and hit all the points I think we hit, making somebody be able to understand, "I understand what it's going to be like to work with this person. Maybe they didn't come to the right answer, but I feel like we could have the type of conversation that would yield the best answer, the learning resiliency, the ability to continue to develop knowledge." Mike: Yeah. It's interesting, Maria, you bring that up because on the admin relations team, we've done surveys and had some research done. More than a few times. And every single time, curiosity or curiousness is usually one or two on the list of traits. I want to jump ahead to that first job, but I want to think about it a little bit differently because for a long time in the ecosystem it was, do I become an admin? Do I become a consultant? I think it's probably changed now where a lot of companies are hiring admins. A lot of, William, you brought it up. Some people are choosing to be consultants, but I also think there's contracting work. And the bulk of the people I know do contracting work. And I kind of almost think of that as you can work for an organization, you can do consulting where you're under somebody else's shingle, or you can do contract work. And I'd be curious, what is a trait or how would an admin, a person looking to get into that job role say, "Oh, I need to work for an organization and I'll be a good fit or I'm really a good fit to be a contract admin or I really want to do consulting." How would they find that or what is something they should look at themselves to determine what path of those three to go down? Maria Alvarez-Zarrilli: I think to start, I can start on that one as I moved into the consultant contractor seat myself. I think looking at what part of the work excites you the most is important. If it's that initial gathering the requirements, figuring it out, solving the problem, meeting new people, working with new teams, if that initial part of it is not what you overcome to get to the solution that then you maintain, then you continue to build upon, I think the contracting consulting often can tend to be a path that people will continue to stay very motivated in because there is a Groundhog's Day to that type of work, right? You have to meet a lot of new people over and over again. You kind of very Sisyphean, you roll that boulder up the hill, you get to the top and boom, it's right back down at the bottom with a new project. Whereas somebody who enjoys finishing a project, scratching something off the to-do list, looking upon the Simba, everything the light touches is what you have configured landscape and then continuing to improve upon that probably is looking for more of that in-house seat, looking for more of that stability and is not going to enjoy that contract work where they're just constantly inheriting a new mess, a new series of problems and nothing ever feels finished. William Walsh: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I'm a big believer in contract work. I've done a lot of work with a lot of partners with contractors. I think if you're trying to break into the ecosystem, I think it's great. You get exposure to a lot of different environments like I kind of touched on before, different businesses, different problems. And a lot of it comes at a quicker speed. Again, if you were just at that solo in-house role, you're dealing with your org and at the pace that your organization wants to go with that. And from an employer's perspective, I think you're able to actually point to projects, real projects that you've studied that you've worked on rather than just saying, "Hey, I've studied Salesforce. I've gotten my certifications." And so, I think, again, people can help... What I think is always interesting is people sometimes feel like they have to completely start over if they're trying to get their start in Salesforce. And what I always try to tell people is use your previous career when you come into Salesforce, connect those dots. If you come from a sales background, you understand sales processes, right? If you come from a finance background, you understand financial processes. If you come from customer service, you understand that whole customer journey, right? And so, go into a role within Salesforce to where you can utilize your previous career and again, the business knowledge that can actually make you a better Salesforce admin is ultimately being able to... Again, the business knowledge can actually make you a better Salesforce admin because Salesforce is ultimately a business platform, right? So, if you have that experience, you can utilize that in multiple different ways in Salesforce. And whether that's with a partner, whether that's in-house, I think, again, contracting is a great way to get your foot in the door. And there's not much commitment on the client side either, so it's a lot easier where a client, it's almost, they can call it a try before they buy type of period. And it's the same on both sides, right? I think it's the same for a candidate as well, right? It's for them to try out the role without much of a large commitment as well. Mike: I like that. I'm realizing we spent a lot of time from the admin perspective, which makes sense. It's an admin podcast, but I do want to focus at least one question on employers, and I'm going to try and go right for the heart of the main thing. In both of your experiences, what is the number one thing employers are getting wrong when they're writing admin job descriptions? Maria Alvarez-Zarrilli: William, do you want to start on that one? I'm happy to jump in. William Walsh: Yeah, yeah, I can start on that one. I think, again, the funny part is, and Maria would probably say the same thing, I don't know if anybody writes job descriptions anymore, unfortunately. And so, I think that's a big problem is they go into, again, your ChatGPT or your clone and say, "Hey, create me a Salesforce admin job description." And you look at a lot of them, it's your basic, again, like we talked about your generalist admin kind of bullet points in there and people will apply and then they go to talk to people and then they start to realize these are all great generalist admins, but not what we need. And so, I think a lot of it comes on the employer side where they need to really have a human type up that job description, have someone who's working with Salesforce every day in the business say exactly what our pain points are and what someone can come in and help us bring value right away. And I think that's the big issue. Like I said, most of the, I would say nine out of 10 job descriptions I see are written by some type of AI tool. And you can tell right away, you could copy and paste most of them and put them into the same job description for different companies, for different industries. They're all basically the same. So, I think that's on the employer to really be better at doing their due diligence on what we're actually looking for. And when I work with a client, we'll see it time and time again where, "Hey, we're missing the mark here, we're missing the mark here." And that's on us to do our due diligence to say, okay, what is really needed? Not just your Salesforce. I know you need a Salesforce admin, but what does your Salesforce admin look like compared to what this organization's Salesforce admin might look like? They can be totally different job titles and requirements, right? And so, employers need to do a much better job of actually describing what that role is going to look like and not just your basic, "Hey, we want someone who can, again, create flows and document requirements and all your basic kind of stuff." Right? So, I think that's what I would say is most of the stuff I see is AI written and they don't really take their time and then they find two, three months down the road, why have we still not found this person? Maybe it's because we're not targeting the right audience. Maria Alvarez-Zarrilli: 100% agree. I'll put a bold prediction that if in three to six months you go and start looking at admin jobs, how many of them are going to have completely retired certs still listed as the relevant or we had talked about it before, must have five years of experience in something that has existed in five months. There is a basic lack of understanding of what they're looking for in the job description. And a lot of time it's a speed thing, right? People want to go for, "Okay, we want to hit same as the candidates. They want to hit the keywords, they want to hit a high search, they want to show up on the right people's feed." So, a lot of times it's kind of a regurgitation, it's thrown into AI. It's dusting off an old job description from the last time they hired, whether that was three years or three months ago and reposting it. And what employers really need to be doing, it's something that I work with a lot of employers on is looking forward in the requisition. I need somebody who is going to join us for this thing that we're doing, not just a list of what we've needed up until now, right? Showing where that investment is going to be and having that path in mind, not just, I need someone who checks this boxes and great drinking game in recruiting and hiring is hit the ground running, right? You'll be blasted. I need someone who can hit the ground running and said, "Okay, when we get to the finish line, what do they do then?" Because you have to think forward. Understanding what that rubric is and what the weighting is around things. I can't tell you what, especially in, I would say 2012 through '17, you saw the job descriptions, excellent verbal communication skills and jobs that are not client facing, right? Being clear about what the job actually requires and making sure that those requirements fit, that they're just not the grab bag of keywords that people are just used to seeing, but say looking at, "Hey, what does the data judgment look like? How good are they at requirements gathering? How are we going to actually measure that in the interview process? Why is that important? Who is it important for? What should that look like? What does success look like in the past?" But also what could success look like in the future and not narrowing it down so tightly. And then the last piece, and I'll say the kind of small kind of controversial thing is I think more companies need to pay for the work product from the interviews. A lot of times they give them real business problems and there is a very exploitative aspect of interviewing where sometimes you get a lot of knowledge from very excellent candidates and these candidates are going on a lot of job interviews. It's exhaustive. You go on LinkedIn and see, I interviewed a hundred times to get this job. I applied to 200 jobs to get this. If somebody gets to the end of the process and you are going to ask them to do a take home assignment, the best way you can get the most out of them, give them a reasonable contractor rate, give them work that you can use and get the information from them and really narrow it down because you will be really intense about who you get to that final process if you know you have to pay for that work product. And candidates would really respect, I think, being able to give work that matters, especially if they're looking for work. Mike: Wow, I like that. That's very different than anything I've ever heard. And it would make me rethink a lot of the stuff that I've delivered because I know in the interviews I've been asked to deliver some sort of project or here's an org and here's a scenario that we gave 20 other candidates. We want to see what you do. I like that twist to be really something tangible. When I push my presenters in admin track for Dreamforce or TDX, I always say, when you get done with your presentation, think about what the person's going to do when they stand up. What do they do next? And I'm going to do the same and hold myself accountable for when we end the podcast, the listener doesn't just take out their earbuds or probably switch over to Apple Music or something and finish the rest of their dog walk. But if you were, because in my world, it would be really cool to get the three of us on stage at TDX, which is about six months from now. But if somebody was listening today and looking for an admin job, maybe they're employed, maybe it's their first job, maybe it's their third job, depending on no matter where they're at, where would you tell them to focus their energy? William Walsh: I guess I could jump in on this one, Maria. And I would just say, I think we've hit on it a few times, but be very clear about what you actually want to be hired for, right? I think a lot of people's resumes can be a bit ambiguous in that. Make your resume and LinkedIn reflect that as well, right? Don't make a hiring manager dig through four or five pages to figure out what you can do. I'd spend a lot of time networking. I'd go to Salesforce as an awesome ecosystem. We talked about Mid-Atlantic Dreaming, which myself and Maria were at. We've talked about obviously Dreamforce coming up and TDX. And so, there's a bunch of networking events out there and obviously myself and Maria are also part of user groups. There's a ton of user groups out there that are obviously free to join, right? Be involved, network. Again, talk to Salesforce professionals, talk to as many recruiters as you can. I know sometimes, people can think recruiters can be annoying, but I promise you, they're just getting you in front of people that you would've otherwise not been in front of. Our goal is to just introduce you to other people. And so, get as many recruiters as possible, consulting partners. The job market is super competitive, right? You can't rely exclusively on applying to jobs on LinkedIn all day long. You have to know people in the ecosystem. You have to get your name out there, get your face out there, make it known that you're a part of this ecosystem and this ecosystem is super welcoming and everybody wants to see everybody succeed. So, you get to network a bit, get a chance to get to some user groups, some local events, and you'll see how quickly people around you start to root for you and start to put your resume in front of people that they know in the ecosystem as well. And so, that's the one thing that I think some people miss out on. They kind of really rely on just, "Hey, I applied to 20 jobs today on LinkedIn." Again, get out there, network with people in the ecosystem. This ecosystem is awesome and super welcoming. I don't know if I've ever met somebody in this ecosystem that wasn't rooting for everybody else around them. Everybody can win. So, I would say network as much as possible. There's a ton of different things out there for people that are trying to make their way into the ecosystem to get into. And again, you get in front of the right people, you get yourself, make some friends in the ecosystem and you'll see how quickly things start to move in the right direction for you. Maria Alvarez-Zarrilli: Yeah, I 100% agree. I think the networking aspect has not changed. With everything that has changed in the last 15, 20 years in Salesforce, what has not changed is the power of community, the power of showing up, asking questions and getting connected. And that does not mean you have to be the most active on social media. You can be active in real life, but really showing up and participating in community events, the events that are available, listening to the podcast, et cetera, is so important to engage. The other thing I would say is to really look at your LinkedIn profile, your resume, your email communications, and also your networking prep and kind of filter everything through. Why are you asking? Why this person? Why this company? Why this outcome? So, what? Why does it matter inside of all of it? And then the how. So, when you're answering interview questions, when you're networking, when you're sharing your elevator pitch, really honing in on those three aspects I think are going to yield more human conversations versus just a bullet list brag show. People are trying to get so much information out. We forget that within that efficiency, it still needs to be a conversation. So, really practicing that human aspect and giving people context and understanding and not trying to be perfect, but just showing up consistently I think is going to be the most important thing that people can do. And try to un-AI your LinkedIn information. I cannot stress that enough. Your headline, your about, and your experience section should match. It should be consistent and it should have some sort of human aspect to it because I don't think people realize how many profiles and information get passed over because of either algorithmically, it's too polished or the lead is buried. Mike: Yeah. I mean, I think that's a perfect way to end this podcast. I couldn't think of it any better. I mean, I know the more than handful of people I've interviewed, every single one of them has come back to a user group or some sort of Salesforce event that, hey, I went to and I didn't have a job and I walked around the room and sure enough, a couple weeks later, people were calling me or an employer called me because they saw me and got to talk with me, which essentially elevated you above that stack of resumes that they were already looking at. So, I appreciate it. Maria, William, thank you for spending this time going over what is an ever-changing job market, what is constantly being invaded by AI and uninvaded by AI, I think, and helping admins try to find that niche and try to find those jobs that are really rewarding for them because I know the ones that do end up presenting everywhere and you can always just tell it in them. So, thanks for spending the time with us and thanks for helping out the admin community. Maria Alvarez-Zarrilli: Well, thank you so much. William Walsh: Awesome. Thank you so much for having us. Mike: Well, I really want to thank Maria and William for being on the podcast. It was great that I could be connected with you to talk about everything that admins are looking for in this job market and really help us make sense of what employers are actually looking for in Salesforce admins right now. For me, I think the big takeaway is that job search can't be just about adding another certification or sending out more applications. You've got to be clear about the problems you've solved, show how you think, ask good questions, and most importantly, get involved in the Salesforce community so people know who you are and what you can do. Now I want to thank you for listening and if you know a Salesforce admin who's looking for their next opportunity, share this episode with them. Until next time, we'll see you in the cloud.

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Sabrina Simeroth, Product Manager on the Salesforce Security Product Team. Join us as we chat about the new Security Center Essentials feature and how to work security reviews into the rhythm of your organization. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Sabrina Simeroth. What is Security Center Essentials? The last time we had Sabrina on the pod, we were talking about Health Check scores. However, as she explains, that number is meant to be an assessment of your organization's security Configurables at a single point in time. But what about continuous monitoring? That's where Security Center Essentials comes in. "With Essentials, we're trying to give a broader and more ongoing visibility," Sabrina explains, with a focused set of security metrics you can monitor over time. It makes it easy to see things like what managed packages are supported, which third-party platforms have access to your data, and who in your organization made changes. In other words, Security Center Essentials gives you a map for how your org is structured, making it easier to spot potential problems and make sure your security and governance are aligned with your business goals. Two questions to ask for security reviews So how do you get started with Security Center Essentials? For Sabrina, it's all about context. Once you've run Health Check and dialed in your security settings and policies, you want to use the metrics on Security Center Essentials to get context for how things work in your organization. From there, Sabrina recommends asking yourself two key questions: What should be in my environment? Who owns this managed package? Who installed it? Who is using it? What has changed most recently? Were you expecting it? Who did it? How does it affect your business processes? Sabrina recommends establishing a monitoring cadence around regular business process milestones. If something is updated every Tuesday, check before and after to make sure everything happened as expected. As an admin, you have the best operational context to flag potential problems and bring them to your security and governance team. Why you shouldn't chase a perfect Health Check score While your Health Check score is helpful for giving you a general understanding of how your security standards compare to industry best practices, Sabrina urges you not to chase a perfect score. "Your Health Check score should begin a security review, rather than ending a review," she explains. It's there to flag areas of your org that need a closer look, so you can make decisions about how much intentional risk your business needs to carry. The most dangerous security threats are the ones you don't know about. It's OK not to have a perfect Health Check score, as long as you know why you're doing it. Make sure to listen to my full conversation with Sabrina about how to use Security Center Essentials and Health Check. And don't forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you never miss an episode. Podcast swag Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store Learn more Salesforce Help Docs: Security Center Essentials Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: What Are Security Essentials for Salesforce Admins? Kate Clicks Through It: Protect Your Salesforce Org With Health Check Admin Trailblazers Group Admin Trailblazers Community Group Social Sabrina on LinkedIn Salesforce Admins on LinkedIn Salesforce Admins on X Mike on Bluesky social Mike on Threads Mike on X Full show transcript Mike: Security is one of those things where it's really easy to look at a score and think, "Great. I'm done." But your Salesforce org doesn't sit still and neither does your security posture. Today I'm talking with Sabrina Simeroth from the Salesforce Security product team about Security Center Essentials and how admins can use it to understand what's connected to their org, what's changed, and what deserves a closer look. We talk about why getting a perfect Health Check score isn't necessarily the goal and how to work security reviews into the rhythms of your organization. So if you've ever opened up a security dashboard and wondered, "Okay, what am I actually supposed to pay attention to?" This episode is for you. Let's get Sabrina on the podcast. So Sabrina, welcome to the podcast. Sabrina Simeroth: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me back. Mike: Well, it's worth talking about because security is always top of mind for Salesforce admins. And the last time I had you and Laura on, we were talking about Security Center Essentials. And I think if memory serves me right, people now have that available to them and admins can start getting in touch with it, right? Sabrina Simeroth: Yeah. Absolutely. So that has been launched and it is fully rolled out. They should be able to see that in production orgs and some sandbox orgs as well. Mike: Sweet. So you're integral part of security at Salesforce and you do a lot. Refresh my memory, what's your domain and what do you handle at Salesforce? Sabrina Simeroth: Yeah, absolutely. So I sit on the product management team. I support our security center product and that also incorporates the Essentials product that we just launched and some of our other free tools like Health Check in setup. And then I actually work really closely with a few other PMs that support other features of the premium products like our agentic features and work really closely with the Shield team as well. Mike: Shield. Sabrina Simeroth: Yes. Mike: Yes. Sabrina Simeroth: All security, all the time. Mike: Our secret MCU product. So let's talk about Security Center Essentials and actually Health Check. I'd love to know, and probably admins too, we love when we get these features, but what exactly were you trying to solve with Health Check? Sabrina Simeroth: Yeah. So Health Check is a really valuable ... I would call it a point in time assessment of some of the critical settings that we find in setup. These are your security configurations. Oftentimes if you've been to any events, you hear them called configurables. So these are settings like your password policies, your session settings, some of those toggles that you can turn on and off. But with the Essentials, we're trying to give a broader and more ongoing visibility. So it's not just a point in time, this is something that extends that capability. Health Check is still really valuable and it is a collection of these configurations that are set against a baseline or a set of standards so that you can see where your posture is at at any given time. But we really wanted to extend that and allow admins the ability to see how changes in their system, how changes in their configuration occur over time, as well as broaden the view of what they're actually looking at. So not just those toggles. Mike: I always liked Health Check was like right now, here's where you're at with links to open things. So that makes sense. It's making the dashboard a little bit bigger. I think for a Salesforce admin who just opens Security Center Essentials for the first time and they have a whole bunch of different metrics looking back at them, where should they focus? I think of a car dashboard. Well, if I start my car and the fuel light comes on, probably the most important thing to pay attention to. But as an admin, depending on the level of security awareness that I have, I may not know what number is the most important number. So help me walk through those different metrics that they're seeing. Sabrina Simeroth: Yeah. You are so spot on. So I think there's a tendency to want to stack rank, which is the most important thing to look at. If I could put it very simply, so we started with a very narrow scope of, let's call it metrics. So we wanted to extend the capabilities of Health Check. We wanted to give a broader view and give admins access to what does the actual state of your org look like? What are the things that are connected to your org? What are the managed packages that are being supported? Where are your access points? Those types of things. These are all really critical things for admins to be aware of because it's basically how is your org structured? So I think that that's the key. It's not that you should focus on or stack rank immediately any one metric in Essentials. It's more around let's figure out what our baseline is and what is the actual standard for our environment. So I would resist saying one over the other. Obviously, I think the tendency is to lean towards let me look at the thing that has a score. Let me look at Health Check. I would actually say, ask yourself two questions as an admin. What looks unfamiliar to me? So look at the seven metrics. And I apologize in advance because come Dreamforce, we're extending that seven metrics to 14 metrics, but we're still keeping the scope very narrow. Mike: It's no like Salesforce to just double anything, right? Sabrina Simeroth: No. Not at all. But we're trying to bring the most critical things for you to pay attention to the forefront and just keep it narrow so that you have a really, really solid idea of what should be in my environment and then what has changed most recently. Those are the two things to be really looking at so that you can start asking yourself questions. Does this actually make sense? Should it be here? Is there an assigned owner? These are the types of questions. It's really about laying out a map for the admin to start getting the right context about how the org is configured and then start evaluating is this good or bad and does it align with the business needs? So that would be my advice using essentials. Mike: Yeah. No. It makes sense. And I think you pointed out that what's really nice is you're not just seeing today's configuration, you're seeing how things changed and that if you're a Salesforce admin, whether you're just getting started in a new org, you can watch that progression. Or if you're coming to a fresh org, if you just got hired, that was always, and I still think is top of mind for a lot of admins. "Hey, when I parachute into a new company, what do I do to look at an org that I'm inheriting?" And so I think let's apply security center essentials to that and say, "If I inherited an org tomorrow, how could I use that to see how things are changed or understand a little bit more about the org that I'm working in?" Sabrina Simeroth: Yeah. That's a great question. So if we look at the metrics that are included in Essentials, it's things like what types of packages do I have installed? What type of connected apps? So how is data interacting with third party packages? How is data interacting? And the great thing about these metrics is we're giving you visibility into who actually installed these packages? So is that normal? It's that type of context. First take inventory, see what's connected into your apps, see what IP ranges you have associated with your different profiles. What are your trusted IP ranges? Take a look at your security configurations through the Health Checkout. Are you using any baselines that were already set up? So if this is a new org did somebody already have a baseline, have they already done a security review? Check those things first and then start establishing your context. So the metrics do a really great job of showing you who may have been the owner of those, who may have installed or made specific changes at any given time. So use that as your starting point and start to do your own investigation, building context around which teams are using this? Who is the true owner at this point? Does this make sense? Is it still actively being used? That context is going to be really helpful when you start to get into the monitoring piece, which is when changes are made, then an admin can more easily flag like, that doesn't align with what I'm expecting. Does that make sense? Mike: Oh, absolutely. That whole connected apps and packages part is ... If you're working with people in a larger team or ... Boy, I got to tell you, I've done this accidentally where you set up a user and you forgot to deny them access to install packages. Sabrina Simeroth: Oh yeah. Just delete access. Mike: And I remember I had this power user. I found this whole app exchange and we can download apps. And my face just went white. Because I was like, "But you couldn't do that, right?" And they're like, "Oh no, I did totally." "Oh, well, you're not going to be able to after I finish my salad." Sabrina Simeroth: Yeah. And that's so true. It's very hard when things are scattered all over the place to maintain that. It is a very complex platform for a reason. It provides so much flexibility to the users to really align with business. The challenge then becomes like, okay, how do you make sense of that to make sure that you're doing the right things as it relates to security? And so that's the whole goal. It's let's bring some of those key elements so that you can quickly identify where those changes, those missteps, they always happen. They're not going to be able to be avoided. But how quickly can you evaluate and then shift and make changes to address any gaps or concerns or what we consider gaps in your posture? Mike: Right. Right. One thing that I loved about Health Check was it gave me a score and admins love score, got to get perfect score on everything. The idea of making it to a hundred on Health Check being perfect as a goal, is that really a goal or how should admins think about that number? Sabrina Simeroth: That is such a good question, and this is so common. So I was a part of the Own acquisition. I've been working with Salesforce security products for the past 10 years. And in that previous role, I actually helped customers implement their security programs and implement their security tooling. And we would get this all the time, customers just really wanting to reach 100. There is this- Mike: I want to be perfect. Come on Sabrina. Sabrina Simeroth: Strive for perfection. It's so common. And when it comes to risk scoring, the desire is always to reach perfection. Here's how I would look at it. A higher score is a very useful signal. A low score is a very useful signal, but 100, I would say, should not become like a trophy or the end goal without very valuable context. So context really matters. So Health Check compares settings with a standard baseline, but every organization can have very legitimate reasons for different settings or the need to actually carry some risk in their system in order to be able to operate the business. So not every setting makes sense for every customer. So the score should really begin a review rather than ending a review. It really needs to be treated more of ... We were talking about the car. It's more of a gauge. It's not like a report card that tells you you're good or bad. It is telling you where to look so that you can actually evaluate and get the right context to say, does it make sense for our business to actually secure this or remove this or lock this down, restrict this? Because there will be some legitimate reasons why you don't want to align with that. There will be impacts to the system or things that are restricted from users that need access to sensitive data in order to do their job. That is acceptable risk if it's well documented, if it's intentional, if it makes sense for the organization. So a hundred I would say is not the goal. You can always reset a baseline in-house check so that it makes sense so that you can reach that 100 state. But I would definitely use it more as a signal to review what's going on and to provide awareness of your configurations rather than the end goal. And don't ever think like I've reached a hundred, I'm perfect, I'm going home and I'm never looking at this again. A system is always changing, it's always evolving. And so a regular review is really critical. So that would be my advice there as it relates to a score. Mike: Yeah. Well, I got to ask, often admins will have governance. They'll hold monthly governance meetings or quarterly. You can refresh Security Center Essentials a lot. What is the pattern that you would suggest admins do a data refresh on that? And then part two of that, because I'll just make the question harder, how would they work that into a governance meeting? Sabrina Simeroth: Oh gosh. So now see, you're putting me in a corner because I always give a soft answer on this one, but let me try to be really practical because I want our customers to really have a clear idea of how to manage this. The cadence that we've set for in the background running these metrics is once a week. So use that as the baseline. Once a week gives you plenty of time to see actual changes in the environment, but that's not to say that you shouldn't do these manual refreshes so you can manually update these and do more targeted. What I would say is avoid just every hour, update, update, update. That's excessive. And if it doesn't align with your actual business cadences. So it's going to be different for every customer, but try to align it with known milestones or known practices. So these are things like your development life cycle. When are your planned releases? When do you traditionally install new packages? Are there large onboarding events? Do you have regularly scheduled security reviews? And this is why it's a fuzzy answer where it's like it's going to be different for every customer. But as an admin, if you know that you also have an internal regular cadence ... Maybe you're doing a security review at the first of the week every week, maybe then you do deployments on Thursday every week. I would actually align the update cadence to those known activities because then you have context. It's a starting point where you say, "This was an expected activity and here's the changes that I saw." I also saw changes outside of that activity. And so that's a really good point when you talk about bringing it into a governance meeting. When you are speaking with security folks, when you're speaking with compliance folks, it's incredible context to be able to say, "Hey, I was expecting this activity. I was not expecting anything on this date. Is there anything in your world that would indicate that this is actually an appropriate action that was taken? Should we investigate this further?" And that's a really clear starting point given the context of I'm an admin, I have a lot of the operational context of how we're operating our business and here's that context. And this from my perspective sits outside. It's a little bit anomalous to what we would expect in terms of our own personal cadences. So I can't tell you it should be every day, it should be every five hours. That's really challenging. But it should try to align with some known milestones, some known events that you have going on in the business. Mike: That makes sense. You don't want to refresh it every day if once a month you make your changes and you're getting the same number day after day like, okay, well obviously it's expected. Sabrina Simeroth: Right. And then you become numb to it a little bit. You're just like, yeah, okay. Mike: You do. And then a number of changes, you're like, wait a minute, should that have been up or down? And you forget. So I get that. Let's talk about Security Center as a whole, because Essentials is the starting point. And I think for a lot of the admin work that I've done, it sounds like it more than fills the bill. But Security Center, you've got multi-org, you've got advanced capabilities. At what point would an admin look at Security Center Essentials and say, "Not enough. We need more." Sabrina Simeroth: Yeah. Yeah. It's a great question. I think everybody leans towards it's when it's multi-org. I think that's the default. Everybody says, "Okay, well the premium products, that's for multi-org, that's for these massive organizations." I would avoid thinking that way. For me, it's more around, let's call it organizational or operational complexity, and this can mean many things. So if you are starting to have more frequent changes like adding users, your company is growing drastically and you have a lot more users that are needing access to things, the hierarchy is changing. You're having a little bit more complex structure where there's management teams and then there's people under there. Regionally, you're expanding. If you are adding a lot of applications, you are doing a lot of customization within the environments. You are incorporating more custom code or more custom applications that are third party. Anytime that the system becomes slightly more complex, that is when I would think that it is very critical to evaluate the full product where you're going to get that more advanced management, advanced monitoring, broader security controls that are in the purview. So I would base it more on when you start to feel like your org is maturing enough to a point where there is enough complexity, the full product is where you're going to see a lot of value. And it's not just about how many orgs you're managing because sandboxes are important to manage security in as well because that's the feeding point into your production orgs, but it's about the data that you're looking at, how complex are your regulations becoming in your industry, what are the standards, what are the types of controls that you actually need to manage now as an admin? And I think basing it off of that gut feeling of this is becoming more complex, that's when it's a good time to start evaluating the tool. Mike: It's almost like when you need more information behind the warning light. Sabrina Simeroth: Exactly. Exactly. Mike: We're running out of gas, but how much do we really have? Sabrina Simeroth: Yes. Mike: Can't go another 10 miles. Sabrina Simeroth: When you start to feel like security is your only focus, that is a really good time to start looking at the automation for the premium features. Mike: Absolutely. So I think thinking about that, I always love giving admins something very practical to do. And I think connecting with ... Depending on the size org that they have, it could be a security officer, it could be a person in IT. If they were to sit down with somebody at their organization and show them Security Center Essentials, in your mind, who should that person be and what should they point out to them? Sabrina Simeroth: Yeah. So every organization's going to be different. Some people do have a dedicated security team. Some of them just have a center of excellence that ensures all things related to administration and security for an environment. I would say one, if you have someone who owns internal InfoSec policies. So whether that is your compliance policies, your data governance policies, any InfoSec team, I would build a relationship with one of those connections because they're going to have context that you need in terms of what are the right policies that we need to be aligning with, but that will be a really critical relationship. If there is just a platform owner for your team, that's what I would say. The admin needs to work with a platform owner and just really establish themselves like, "Here is where we're at with the system. Does this align with your expectations? Is this where we want to head? And is there anything that you want me to focus on?" So I would say those. If there isn't a dedicated security setup in your organization, then definitely whoever is the platform owner you want to connect with. Otherwise, a security personnel building a relationship with one person in security who really understands from a business perspective what the security concerns are, that would be the right relationship to say, "And here for this system, this is what we have in terms of our security controls and configurations." Mike: Yeah. I remember how humbling it is sometimes to sit down and show them dashboards, be like, "Look at all we have." And they're like, "But what about ..." And you're like, "Let me get back to you on that." That's a really good question. And inevitably, you always learn and there's always one more thing to pay attention to. Sabrina Simeroth: Absolutely. So that's a great point. What I would love for our admins to know as well is we're learning right along with you. So we are making decisions about what we feel admins should be paying attention to, but if there's feedback, feedback is such a gift. That's what we always say at Salesforce, feedback is a gift. So if there are really large gaps or there are really problems that you are trying to solve where the tool doesn't quite hit the mark, please let us know. Send it in to your account reps, send it in to your connections at Salesforce and feed it back to the product team because we would love to start seeing how our admins are using our security tools and really becoming security professionals for their companies. And we do take that feedback to heart and we are trying to incorporate what our customers truly need. Mike: When this episode airs, it'll be 11 days, hard to believe, until Dreamforce. But you said that there's new stuff coming. Sabrina Simeroth: Yes. Mike: Without spilling all of the news, can you give us a preview of what admins can expect? Sabrina Simeroth: Yeah. Absolutely. Mike: We'll say later in September. How's that? Sabrina Simeroth: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it should actually be able to be demoed at Dreamforce, and we will even actually have some additional materials. So we're working on a quick look in Trailhead for Essential specifically. But we mentioned this, I think, on our last episode as well, but we are going to be introducing a few of those critical user permissions that are going to now be a part of the required MFA enforcement and the increased restrictions on who actually requires tighter controls as a user. So those permission metrics will actually give really good insight on who are your highly privileged users in this environment? Who do you need to really focus on in terms of making sure that they have the right level of access to the right data and that there's the right controls in place, that their user credentials are protected? Mike: Wow. This is neat. This is so cool. This is all the stuff that I wish I had a hundred years ago when I was an admin just clicking around like, "I wish I could run this report now." Now, not only do you get the report, but you probably have set up with Agentforce that can help you re-permission somebody. It's an exciting time. Sabrina, thanks for coming back on the podcast and helping us out. Sabrina Simeroth: Of course. It was my pleasure. Thank you for having me. Mike: Thanks again to Sabrina for joining us. My big takeaway is that security isn't about choosing a perfect score, it's about knowing what normal looks like in your org so you can spot it when something just doesn't fit. Take a look at the Security Center Essentials, establish that baseline, and then bring what you find into the conversations you're already having about releases, governance, and access. And until next time, we'll see you in the cloud.

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Alexis Kingma, Senior Certification Developer at Salesforce. Join us as we chat about the newly updated Salesforce Certified Platform App Builder exam and the best way to prepare for certifications. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Alexis Kingma. The Salesforce Platform App Builder Certification gets a refresh The Salesforce Certified Platform App Builder exam has been updated, and the process is more complicated than you might think. This week, I'm talking to Alexis Kingma from the Salesforce Certification team to find out what's changed, why it matters, and how to best prepare for an exam. Whenever Alexis and her team are doing a refresh for an exam, they start by interviewing a range of subject matter experts working in the real world. For the Salesforce Certified Platform App Builder exam, they're trying to answer a simple question: "What is the industry saying is most important if somebody's looking to hire an app builder?" Alexis encourages you to think of a certification exam as a validation of your knowledge. In other words, it's proof that you have the expertise to build cutting-edge apps and implement them in your organization. Shifting the focus to Flow and Agentforce So what's changed? The focus is on automations with Flow and Agentforce. As Alexis explains, if you're looking to hire an app builder, you're looking for someone with a deep understanding of Flow. Do you know which flows are best for which situations? Can you troubleshoot them? Can you maintain and monitor them? They want to make sure that anyone who passes the certification exam has the Flow expertise they need to hit the ground running. The other change is including Agentforce as an automation tool for app building. While you don't need to be a power user (there's another certification for that), Alexis and her team want to make sure that you have it as an option in your toolkit. How to prepare for Salesforce certification exams According to Alexis, every Salesforce certification serves as a gauge for your practical, on-the-job skills. This means if you are currently building applications for your company, you are already ahead of the curve. To support the recent updates, her team has curated a specialized Trailhead trail that features interactive badges, allowing you to practice directly within a sandbox environment. Alexis also highly recommends taking a close look at the exam guide for any certification you're going for. They're written very intentionally, she explains, to give you a very specific idea of what level of understanding they're asking for on each topic. Words like "create" or "configure" are asking for much more in-depth knowledge than "describe" or "understand." Finally, if you're attending Dreamforce, Alexis wants to remind you to schedule your free certification exam. Make sure to listen to the full episode for more about the Salesforce Platform App Builder certification exam. 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 Exam Page: Salesforce Certified Platform App Builder Trailhead: Prepare for Your Salesforce Platform App Builder Certification Dreamforce: Guide to Certification Exams at Dreamforce 2026 Admin Trailblazers Group Admin Trailblazers Community Group Social Alexis on LinkedIn Salesforce Admins on LinkedIn Salesforce Admins on X Mike on Bluesky social Mike on Threads Mike on X Full show transcript Mike: This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, I'm talking with Alexis Kingma from the Salesforce certification team about the newly-refreshed Salesforce Certified Platform App Builder exam. We're going to get into exactly what changed, why Flow now has a bigger role on the exam, and where Agentforce fits into the app builder skillset. So whether the Platform App Builder is your next certification or you just want a better sense of where admin skills are headed, this episode is worth a listen. Now, before we get into it, be sure to subscribe and share it with any other admin who's thinking about their next certification. So with that, let's get Alexis on the podcast. So, Alexis, welcome to the podcast. Alexis Kingma: Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here. Mike: Well, I am a huge fan of our exams and certifications. And you can take one, you don't have to have the other, and I like to have both. But I love that we have a lot of exams and we redo them, we update them, we refresh them, at least we try to. I feel the product now is changing super quick. But before we get into all of that, Alexis, tell us a little bit about your history and how you came to Salesforce and what you do at Salesforce. Alexis Kingma: Absolutely. So I am on the Salesforce certification team. We are a team of Salesforce employees who are solely dedicated to creating and updating the whole suite of Salesforce exams. So, historically, I come from a certification industry background. I've done software certification my entire career. And I came to Salesforce about two, two and a half years ago and just hit the ground running. I joined the team updating and creating new Salesforce certifications. So I actually started with the Tableau certifications and have since moved over into my latest, which is refreshing the Salesforce Certified Platform App Builder exam. Mike: Ooh, yes, app builder, that's something all of us admins are near and dear to our hearts on. And that's cool. I mean, I guess there's enough tech out there in the world that there's enough people that need to write certification exams for all of it. Wow. This is one of those ideas of, I bet 20 years ago, that job maybe didn't exist, but it exists now. Alexis Kingma: It's funny, certification is such a rich industry, it's one of those jobs that I feel like nobody knows it exists until you have that job. Nobody grows up saying, "I want to write tests," but now it's all of our favorite things to do. Mike: No, I mean, you're exactly right, nobody sits down and, "What do you want to do when you grow up?" And it's, "I want to sit down and write really hard software questions for people about a cloud-based platform that they can configure declaratively." Alexis Kingma: Right. Mike: I think if you would've answered that, your teacher would've been, "And you're an astronaut today." Alexis Kingma: But it is interesting, the same principles that we use to write Salesforce software certifications are the same principles that are used for the medical boards, for firefighting certifications, for airline certifications. And so when we come together at certification industry events, it's a whole gamut of industries coming together to talk about the same certification principles. So you get to meet a lot of interesting folks. Mike: I mean, you don't ever think of that, but that is really... Wow, I bet that's really interesting to sit across the table from people that write certifications to be a rocket scientist. Alexis Kingma: Absolutely. Yes. A lot of these certifications, like for a professional roofer, that's a high-stakes certification, or an architect. So it's interesting to hear how all these different industries approach the same problems. Mike: Yeah. Well, we're still high stakes too. Alexis Kingma: Absolutely. Mike: So you mentioned Platform App Builder exam. It got a refresh, which it's probably needed, I mean, every few months, right? But I think before we get into that, what does it mean to refresh an exam? Alexis Kingma: So the Platform App Builder exam has been around for over 10 years. It predates me at Salesforce by far. We're actually in our 11th year this year, which is awesome. And so it's been around for so long and the role changes and evolves so much in that time. And so it's important for us to look at the role, look at the requirements in the industry, what are admins doing, what are app builders doing, what are architects doing, what is the most important knowledge that those roles need, and how does our exam align to that? And making sure that the things that we're testing out on the exam are actually things that are the most important for these roles in the real world. Mike: Yeah. I mean, that was always one of the hard parts, I remember, when I first got one of my certifications. At the time, we didn't use a lot of Service Cloud, Agentforce for Service, I think now, but I had to go out and learn it because it was part of the certification. And I thought, "Oh, why should I have to learn that?" And I thought, "Well, just because you don't use it or your company doesn't use it, doesn't mean it shouldn't be part of that certification as well or that exam." Alexis Kingma: Absolutely. And so when we approach doing a refresh like we did with app builder, we try to include subject matter experts from a whole range, internal Salesforce employees, external Salesforce users, a wide breadth of roles, admins, people who are solely app builders, architects, to try to say, "Okay, Salesforce might say these topics are most important, but what is the industry saying is most important?" If somebody's looking to hire an app builder, what does that person expect the app builder brings to the table and what knowledge should they already have when they start the job? And so we rely on our subject matter experts to say, "What are those most important concepts, and how do we make sure that they're reflected on the exam?" Mike: Makes sense. I mean, that's the part of getting dialed in, to me, that I think is the most important is, one thing for Salesforce to think this is important, but where does that fall in terms of your responsibilities and what you're seeing day to day? Well, let's talk about this new exam, because Platform App Builder, I believe if you said it was been around for 10 years, then I've been at Salesforce when it was launched. What did it originally... Not originally, back in the day have, but what were you refreshing from and really refreshing to? Alexis Kingma: I'll say the biggest change between the previous version of the exam, which had been refreshed maybe one or two years ago, to this new version of the exam is really increasing the emphasis on Flow on the new version of the exam. In talking to our group of subject matter experts, hearing from the community, we just continue to hear Flow is such an important piece of being an app builder and being able to do that role, that it needs to be tested. And we actually added it to the exam with quite some depth, not only testing can you create flows, can you choose which flow for which situation, but also can you troubleshoot flows? Can you maintain and monitor them? Really asking the app builder to get deep into flows and making the assertion that flows are a key piece of being an app builder at Salesforce. Mike: I mean, that makes a lot of sense. It's funny, I'll ask you later, but I'll be curious to see your answer on it. I mean, when I think of app building, it's a collection of stuff and then there's that automation piece. But also, really diving into Flow like you did really helps set the admin up for being an agent builder as well, right? Alexis Kingma: Absolutely. And that's another change we made to the exam is adding Agentforce, specifically how you can use Agentforce as an automation tool on the exam. So I don't want to say you must be an Agentforce superuser to be able to take that exam. That's absolutely not the intention. We have an Agentforce specialist exam for that. But really just more about knowing that Agentforce is a tool in your tool belt that's available, and when might it make sense to reach for that tool. Mike: So I'll come to that question now that I get asked, and you can decide if you want to answer it or not. But I was asked last week, do admins still build apps? Alexis Kingma: Yes. I'll say, from what I've heard, yes. We, as part of this refresh, go through the roles that this exam most aligns to, and Salesforce admin was the number one. So when we got our group of subject matter experts together and asked, "Who is taking this exam? Who should be taking this exam?" Salesforce admins was the number one thing that people said. Mike: Yeah. No, I agree. I think it's interesting to live in the time we do now where, I mean, I had somebody send me a link the other day of a dashboard that an agent had coded for them. And it was kind of temporary. It wasn't meant to be any kind of source of truth. But when you think about it, sometimes the permanency of the app, I think that's where that question was going. And I still very much believe that it's the agent that jumps in and adds the additional layer that perhaps goes across apps. Alexis Kingma: Agree. I hear from our community over and over that knowing how to get in there and actually build the flows and customize and all the checkboxes, and what they do and what they mean and what they cause is so important and continues to be important even with the new agentic world that we live in. Mike: Right. And you mentioned part of the refresh process is also gathering a lot of feedback from not just admins, but customers and employers that hire admins. What were some of the things that they pointed out as admins still need to understand these things? You refreshed it for Flow and Agentforce, but that's not the whole exam, right? Alexis Kingma: Correct. And you'll see, it's funny, we still kept Salesforce fundamentals and we still kept user interface. And the funny part is that I was actually looking at much older versions of this exam through this refresh process, and those are the same topic areas that have been around, I don't want to say since the first version, but that have been around since the beginning. And it's because they continue to still be important. Every refresh, we pressure test and say, "Okay, do you still need to know object record and field access? Do you still need to know reports and dashboards?" And the answer continues to be yes. And so those will continue to live and be tested on this exam because they continue to be important. Mike: Yeah. Now, from your advice, if a Salesforce admin's listening, maybe they don't have a certification yet or they haven't taken any of the exams, what would you advise in terms of preparation to get ready for this exam? Can they come out of the gate and take it or is there kind of understood prerequisites to this? Alexis Kingma: All Salesforce exams are designed to test your hands-on experience. And so they're designed so that, yes, you can read documentation, but they're testing that you have some hands-on experience going into the exam. But, that said, that's where Trailhead becomes a huge asset if you may not have had access to actually get into a sandbox and play around with all these different topics. So exciting for this refresh, we created a brand new exam prep trail. We had existing prep trail badges before, but those have been retired in favor of this new exam prep trail. And what's most exciting is it does prioritize the hands-on badges available on Trailhead. So there's opportunity within each section to get in there, spin up an org, and actually play around with the types of topics that are being tested on the exam. So if you don't have the opportunity to get hands-on experience with every single thing tested, this trail is an excellent opportunity to still be able to prepare for the exam and take the exam regardless. Mike: That makes sense. I mean, I think that's always the biggest question I get asked when I'm at user groups or at an event is, "What should I do to prepare for this?" And it's one part just learning. You don't want to study for the test, as they say. You want to study to learn it and understand it. I think that's why the practical hands-on part of it, really what can they build is important. Alexis Kingma: And I'll say too, a tip that all of us on the Salesforce exam development team share when we can, is every exam, this one included, has the exam guide, and there's really a lot of information and clues within that exam guide. We list all of the exam objectives, what we call them, all the different content areas tested on the exam. And they're really written very intentionally and with a lot of detail in mind. So thinking about if an objective says, "Create and configure flows," we're not just asking you to describe them or have a high-level understanding of what they are or when to use them. We're really asking, can you get in there, get your hands dirty, create and configure them? And so that's kind of a clue, "Hey, I should be getting in there. I should be clicking around. I should know what each of these buttons, each of these checkboxes does," because that's the kind of question that's going to be asked on the exam. Whereas something like describe or understand, maybe that is more of a high-level just, "Hey, can you explain or describe, but maybe not necessarily get in there and do?" So I think paying attention to that can help direct how you study for each of these objectives. Mike: One thing I thought of, and this was back when I was getting my admin certifications, was describing the value of it to my manager and to my users. And I won't tell you my answer because I want to hear your answer first, but if you were to put yourself in the seat of a Salesforce admin listening to this podcast that's like, "I really want to go and take that exam. I really want to get that certification." How do I justify that or how do I make that case to my employer and to my users that this is worthwhile and worth my time? Alexis Kingma: It's such an important question, right? Because that's the big question is how can I get buy-in to study for this, to get support to take this? I think the biggest one is that a certification at its core is a validation of knowledge. A certification is a statement that you possess the knowledge and have the skills and abilities that are tested on this exam. And so for Platform App Builder, these are the knowledge, skills and abilities that not only Salesforce, but the industry in the group of subject matter experts that helped develop this, this is what the industry is saying is most important for an app builder to know and be able to do in the market right now. And so by earning the certification and saying, "Hey, I have the knowledge, skills, and abilities that are most important for an app builder," you're bringing a lot of value to your team. You're bringing a lot of the learning that you gained through studying. You're bringing a lot of expertise to your team to be able to bring back and show what's the latest and greatest that Salesforce is doing now, and actually be able to implement it. Mike: No, spot on. I would also just add one word, confidence. Alexis Kingma: Yes. Mike: I walked on water the day after I passed my admin certification, because I finally felt like everything that I thought I knew, was verified. I don't know what the right word is. Verified comes to mind, but it's probably not the right word. And I was like, "Yes, that feels right to me." We talked about the prep trail, which I think is important because, boy, for a while there, preparing for a certification was reading some sample questions and hoping you kind of had your bases covered. I think that prep trail is really, really good to help get you hands on. Now, I'll say this because I think I know the answer, but I want to make sure. Even if I complete that prep trail, that doesn't mean I'm going to pass the certification exam, right? Alexis Kingma: I'm so glad you asked. Mike: Yeah. Alexis Kingma: The prep trail is one piece, but I think there's no guarantee, to be honest. There's no way to say with 100% certainty, "I will pass this exam." I think the prep trail is one piece. Like I mentioned, the hands-on component or experience is really important. And so, in addition to the prep trail, I think the best way to assess your level of readiness really is to go through that exam guide and those objectives on it, and just kind of do it a little self test, "Hey, let me read this objective. Is this something I'm familiar with? Do I feel like I can explain what this means and explain how I do this in my day to day? Or is this something I need to take a second and read some help documentation and get a little bit deeper on?" So I think those two things combined, the prep trail and the exam guide are your best bet to make sure that you're ready, but it is definitely not a one for one. And no Salesforce certifications are finish the prep trail, pass the exam. We want to add a little extra rigor. Mike: Yeah. Well, and that makes sense because I feel when you complete the Trailhead module that the exam should test on, okay, so you knew the answers. Did you know why those are the right answers? And I always felt like the exams pushed that limit for me because it was one thing to know what to do, I think it's another thing to know why to do it. Alexis Kingma: Absolutely. Mike: We'll talk about one thing in general, and then we have Dreamforce coming up. In general, I'm a Salesforce admin, I listen to this podcast and like, "You know what? I got the green light, I'm going to go get my app builder exam." What should I bring? What do I bring to the... Do I go to a testing center? Can I take it at home? How should I do that outside of just the regular preparation part? Alexis Kingma: We offer a lot of flexibility in this process, so it's totally up to you if you prefer to go to a testing center or if you prefer to test at home. I know for me, right now, looking at my desk, there's six drinks and about a million Post-it notes. And looking around my office, I'm embarrassed at the state. So for me, I typically go to a testing center, because when you take the exam at home, you are asked to make sure that your workspace is clean, your cat's not walking in, like mine just did. All the things. So you have the choice to take it at home or in a testing center. If you do take it at home, I just encourage everybody to run through the system checks that are part of the Pearson exam process. That will just make sure that your computer is able to take the exam. Some work computers or VPNs can need to be shut down first. So run those system checks, read the information that Salesforce has on taking an exam. Or if you go to a testing center, you'll show up to the testing center, bring your ID. Salesforce has documentation on both that will make sure that you're ready and have exactly what you need either way. But we offer our exams almost any time, any day. So you can, when you go to register, obviously, testing centers have hours, but there's a whole breadth of days and times available for you to choose to take your exam. So you can sneak it in before Dreamforce. Mike: There you go. I mean, I really admire the people that take it at home. And I know some people just have to logistics wise. For me, I can get into the mindset of I'm here to take this exam if I have to go somewhere. I think it's the whole process of getting up, getting outside, having to go to a location, it feels very purposeful. And then, I guess because of that, it keeps me focused, right? I don't feel like, "Okay, well, it's 2:15. I guess I'll take the exam now." It's like, nope, my appointment's at this time. I got to leave early, I got to put my shoes on. Alexis Kingma: I agree with you, but I'll say the other side of that coin is that the stress of, okay, now I have to fight through traffic or I have to wait on transit, and then I have to show up and hope that the check... So I think offering both is a huge benefit because it totally depends on each individual person. Mike: Yeah, no, absolutely. So I asked that because I also wanted to kind of sneakily, if that's a word, sneakily, work in the fact that you can get your certification at Dreamforce if you attend, correct? Alexis Kingma: Correct. We are very excited, Salesforce certification will be onsite at Dreamforce. And really exciting, not everybody, I think, realizes who attends Dreamforce, but everybody who attends Dreamforce gets one complimentary certification exam while they're at Dreamforce. So a huge opportunity there in having a free exam that you can take onsite and actually earn a certification while you're at Dreamforce. Mike: Wow. And that's not just limited to app builder, it's any of our certifications. Alexis Kingma: It is any of our certifications, including the architect certifications, which is exciting. Mike: Wow. Alexis Kingma: And I will say, just a shameless plug for everybody listening too, if you're interested in taking an exam at Dreamforce, I highly recommend adding that exam session to your agenda. That way, that secures your space to take an exam at Dreamforce. Otherwise, if you don't have it added to your agenda, you'll have to show up in the standby line, which we ask that you join an hour before the exam. Mike: [inaudible 00:25:49]. Alexis Kingma: Yes. We get very crowded, so it saves a lot of time to add the exam session that you'd like to attend to your agenda, we have them Monday through Thursday, to make sure that you're prepared and you have a spot to take your exam. Mike: I mean, why you would leave Dreamforce without one more certification is beyond me. Alexis Kingma: Especially when it's free. Mike: I mean, it's part of your ticket. I also get, you know what, you could fail. I will say this, there has been exams that I've studied for and went in and failed, and that's okay. I mean, it just helped me really understand what I had digested and understood, and the parts that I think I had glossed over or maybe felt I had understood, and that the exam brought that out and told me that. No harm, no foul if you go to take an exam and you don't pass. The expectation isn't that you'll pass or fail, it's that it tests your knowledge. And I think for me, leaving and having that understanding of, "Okay, I passed, great, but did I feel good about how I passed or should I really keep going to build on that knowledge?" Or maybe I didn't pass, and you know what? Now I have an inventory of where I can pay attention to and gaps in my learning. Alexis Kingma: One of the certification developers on our team, Melanie, always says, "We don't use the word fail, we use the word learn. You didn't fail, you learned." And I think that's absolutely how we approach it. Failing is not a failure. It doesn't mean you don't know Salesforce, you don't know your job. It's a learning opportunity. And we tell you the areas to work on in the exam results, and it's just one more opportunity to learn and dig in and try again. Mike: Yeah. That's a very positive note. I want to ask your advice. I mean, as somebody that has been writing software exams and helping people understand, what is, in your opinion, one method or one tip that you give people in terms of how they should approach preparation for this and preparation for other exams? Alexis Kingma: The biggest one is what I was alluding to earlier about really paying attention to the level of knowledge or skill that the exam is asking for. Is it asking for you to be able to do that thing? Is it asking for you to be able to troubleshoot that thing? Or is it just asking you to know and have awareness and be able to explain it? Because when we're writing exam questions, that's what we're looking at to write our questions, is do these questions need to be to the depth of somebody who's actually configuring and troubleshooting or is this just more let's test on the awareness? So that's always my biggest tip. And then I will share my own personal tip when I take an exam, is I sit down and I take three deep breaths before I get started, and that's always helped me. So that's my more practical logistical tip. Mike: Yep. Calm and center yourself. Alexis Kingma: Yes. Mike: Be present where you're at. I'll be honest, sometimes that's the best part about going somewhere is it's always nice and quiet and it's very easy to just stay focused because of it. Alexis Kingma: Absolutely. Mike: Alexis, I think we covered a lot. I'm excited for the refresh. I know our admins will be and our architects and developers. I mean, app builder is applicable to a lot of people in our ecosystem, not just Salesforce admins. But I love that it got refreshed and really reflects what the product can do and where the product is, and also what admins and app builders should think about. So thanks for coming on the podcast and sharing that with us. Alexis Kingma: I'm happy to be here. I am so excited. Like you said, this exam is applicable to so many people in so many roles. I heard so many times throughout working on this exam from folks saying, "This is my favorite exam because it's just so relevant and applicable across the board." So it was such a blast to be able to work on it, and I'm super excited to hear the feedback, hear from folks who take it and pass it. I hope to hear from everybody on LinkedIn after they pass. So super excited to have this out in the world. Mike: I want to thank Alexis again for joining us and giving us a look into what's changed with the Platform App Builder exam. I think this is a big takeaway for admins as certification is more than just knowing the features, it's about validating that you can apply those skills in the real world. So from Flow and configuration, to understanding when tools like Agentforce make sense. Take a look at the exam guide, get hands on, and use those objectives to figure out when you're ready and where you can learn more. And, of course, if this episode helped you, be sure to subscribe, share it with another Salesforce admin. And until next time, we'll see you in the cloud.

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Khushwant Singh, SVP of Product Management for the AI Application Development Platform at Salesforce. Join us as we chat about how rethinking the Salesforce stack for AI with Headless 360 will change the way admins set up complex systems. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Khushwant Singh. Opening Salesforce to AI agents AI is changing more than how we find information or generate content. It could also change how Salesforce Admins configure the platform itself. I sat down with Khushwant "Khush" Singh, to learn about Headless 360 and the work happening behind the scenes to make Salesforce accessible to both humans and AI agents. "Headless 360 is about bringing Salesforce to wherever you need it," Khush says. In a headless platform, he explains, the frontend is separated from the backend. So you can use Salesforce data and visualizations on your website without changing the design, or change records in Slack without having to open an extra tab. But Salesforce Headless 360 is about more than portability. Khush and his team are translating the entire platform into a set of model context protocols (MCPs), skills, and metadata that can interface directly with AI agents. And that opens a world of possibilities for what admins can do with conversational tools. What if setting up Salesforce became a conversation? "For the last 27 years, layers that make up the Salesforce platform have been put in place for a human," Khush says, "so we're trying to open this up for both a human and an agent, so the agent can do that work on behalf of the admin." Setup with Agentforce, which streamlines configuration for admins with the help of an AI assistant, is a great example of what Khush is talking about. You can use natural language prompts to create objects, Lightning pages, and flows; manage users and user access; and troubleshoot formulas. Headless 360 lays the groundwork for a future where setting up Salesforce becomes a conversation about your business goals and processes. No coding required. Admins still stay in control None of this removes the admin from the process. Khush is quick to point out that the goal is for agents and admins to work together, with humans still initiating actions, validating results, and providing governance. His advice for admins right now is simple: try Setup with Agentforce and start getting familiar with what this new way of working feels like. Because the biggest shift may not be AI helping you use Salesforce faster—it may be AI changing how you build Salesforce in the first place. Listen to the full episode for more from Khush about Salesforce Headless 360 and how AI could change the way we set up our orgs. 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 Salesforce 360 Blog Post: Introducing Salesforce Headless 360. No Browser Required. Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: Solving Sharing Mysteries with Setup with Agentforce Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: Setup with Agentforce Makes Salesforce Admin Tasks Easier Salesforce Help Article: Setup with Agentforce (Beta) Salesforce Admins Blog Post: Setup with Agentforce Is Now Generally Available: Built With Admin Feedback at the Center Salesforce Admins Blog Post: What Is MCP? A Simple Guide to Model Context Protocol for Salesforce Admins Trailhead: Salesforce Headless 360: Quick Look Admin Trailblazers Group Admin Trailblazers Community Group Social Khush 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: This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, I'm joined by Khushwant Singh to talk about what happens when Salesforce stops just being a destination and starts becoming part of every system your business already relies on. That's right, from Headless 360 to Setup with Agentforce, Khush breaks down how admins are moving beyond configuring features and into orchestrating how data, AI agents, automation and people work together across the business. Now, we're going to dig into what Headless actually means for admins, why governance and trust matter more than ever in an AI first world, and how Salesforce is building toward a future where setting up complex systems really becomes more of a conversation than a checklist. This episode is really about systems thinking, how admins can connect experiences without forcing teams to rebuild everything from scratch. So if you've been trying to figure out where AI fits into your role or how your role is evolving alongside it, I promise you this episode gives you a practical look at what's already happening and what's coming next. So be sure to hit that subscribe button. Share this episode with your favorite architect or admin friend, and let's get Khush on the podcast. So Khush, welcome back to the podcast. Khushwant Singh: Thank you for having me back, Mike. Mike Gerholdt: I say that because I had to look and it was 2022 back in the day you were talking Experience Cloud when we last had you on. You've since moved on, moved up, had your hands in a lot of things, did an admin keynote with me. So let's start there and let's kind of catch everybody up on some of the products you've been working on, and then we're going to talk about the newest one that we launched at TDX this year. Khushwant Singh: Yeah, happy to. And again, great to be back. I think back in the day, started obviously with Experience Cloud. Experience Cloud really was building a product that is external-facing and again, it's built on the same platform. And again, as we looked at the product portfolio, it just made sense to start to bring things together. So we've actually sort of rolled and morphed into the application development platform, obviously within the platform organization, everything pro-code, low-code, desktop, mobile. And so there've been quite a few products leading up to here, anything from our delivery on mobile, mobile offline, the Salesforce mobile app, all the way to Agentforce Vibes, the Agentforce Experience layer, obviously a fair amount of work on the Headless side of things. So yeah, it's been quite a journey to this particular point, Mike. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. I mean, it's actually hard to point out things that aren't admin-friendly that you've had your hands on because you've always kind of championed everybody being able to build on our platform. So let's talk about TDX this year because we launched Headless 360. Khushwant Singh: Oh yeah, we did. Mike Gerholdt: By the way, in case you forgot. Khushwant Singh: Yeah, it was a massive announcement. I think, look, as you think about what's happening in the market right now, you've got customers engaging through many different surface areas. We've got customers on ChatGPT, on Claude, on Gemini, Teams. At the same time, you've got developers also using a variety of different tools, different IDEs, different coding agents. And so I think Headless 360 really is a testament to acknowledging this change in the market in the industry and trying to meet the customer where they are. The customer being an end user or the customer being a developer and admin, just meeting them where they are in whichever tool, whichever interface they might be. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. I mean, do you recall ever a time in technology when it was, I hate to use the euphemism, but like the Wild West where I feel like there's so many choices for what you can do just in regards to AI? Khushwant Singh: There is. And there is obviously a good side to it. There's also a downside to it. The good side is really your [inaudible 00:04:31] for choice. There is innovation that is helping you drive productivity day in, day out. The downside of this is you just have to be really careful about quality, about trust, about governance. And you have to ensure that while you're going fast, you're not sort of compromising on that trust aspect of things. And that's what we're trying to do here at Salesforce and just trying to be a little bit more thoughtful in our approach over here. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. So my developer friend, Josh Burke, who comes on the podcast, usually has to explain things to me every now and then. I think developers are very familiar with the term headless. Khushwant Singh: Yes. Mike Gerholdt: I'm not sure outside of Headless flows, which I know what those mean, I'm not sure admins could understand or could confidently buzz in on a game show and answer what is Headless 360. So can you help them kind of understand what is Headless 360 if they had to tell their manager? Khushwant Singh: Yeah, sure. So one way to think about it is, let's say you're a customer and you've got your own website, it's built out of React, it's not built on the Salesforce platform, but there is so much of your goodness and investment that you have within the Salesforce platform that you want to be able to easily reuse in the context of this other website that you have, portal that you have, mobile application that you have. All of that may not be built on the Salesforce platform. You want to be able to reuse your investment seamlessly. And so Headless 360 really is about how do we empower you, the customer, to be able to easily use those assets, those investments within the Salesforce platform in that surface area that you've got that may not be on the Salesforce platform. So it's really about giving them that flexibility so that they can easily reuse their investments in all of these various surface areas and just meet their customers wherever they are versus bring their customers into Salesforce. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, I think it makes sense. I mean, I was a customer way back in '06 when I remember it was like transfer and move to Salesforce, and everything was "have it on the platform, have it on the platform." And then shortly thereafter it was kind of like almost the realization that we had was, "Well, it's a lot of friction to constantly move platforms. What if companies just integrate and we become that connector to everything?" And I feel the same way with this. Khushwant Singh: 100%. And you know what? Look, I think the one example is if you go into the Williams Sonoma website, right? Williams Sonoma website, it's not built in Salesforce, but if you use their sous chef AI, I think... I'm not sure what they call it, but- Mike Gerholdt: I'm sure it's something really, really snappy and small. Khushwant Singh: Olive. Olive. There you go. Mike Gerholdt: Olive. Yeah. See? Khushwant Singh: A snappy name right there. That agent is an Agentforce agent, right? So that's on example where Salesforce is being used in whichever head that you'd like us to be in. And so in this particular case, the Salesforce agent is in the Williams Sonoma website. So that's just one example where we are trying to make it easier for this integration to happen through the Headless 360 platform. Now that's one view. And that's the view, I would say, an easy way to try to understand what it means for Headless 360. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, because then as an admin, as a developer, you're not having to sit down and say, "Okay, well, if we move to the Salesforce platform, we have to deprecate everything that we just spent the last two years building on our site." Marketing's like, "No, no, we just got the site pixel perfect the way we want it. Now we can integrate best of everything that we want." For admins who aren't thinking of maybe websites, how does Headless 360 play into other integrations that they may talk to IT or internal stakeholders about? Khushwant Singh: Yeah. So for example, when admins are chatting with their other internal team, they may have a custom application that they already have in place and they want to be able to have Salesforce data, Salesforce visualizations surface in whichever application they may have already, right? That's one example. So again, it is about bringing Salesforce to wherever they may already have. So for example, an admin may have a business application that already runs within ChatGPT. So ChatGPT, for example, it allows companies to create bespoke applications. And if you want to be able to integrate Salesforce into that application, that's doable as well. It doesn't have to be in ChatGPT. It could be in any other existing non-agentic application as well. But it's about that, look, you don't have to rebuild everything. Wherever you are, you've got an existing application, we'll find a way through Headless 360 to be able to bring Salesforce to it. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. No, it totally makes sense. I mean, in that way we can really think about how are we making sure that the departments have the software and the tech that they want, but also access to all of the information that they need to do their jobs the best. Khushwant Singh: Mm-hmm. Mike Gerholdt: So Headless 360 is a big thing we talked about. I also know I saw you in some True to the Core and True to the Core Deep Dive stuff. Was there some features you were talking about in that that possibly play into what admins are going to be working on for the rest of this year? Khushwant Singh: Well, yeah. I mean, a few aspects as we think about Headless 360 that would be of interest to admins. So first and foremost, you've all seen the stack diagram of the Salesforce platform. You've got those four layers. You've got your layers of engagement, you have layers of context, you've got the sort of our data foundation, et cetera. So you've got those layers that make up the Salesforce platform. For the last 27 years, those layers have been put in place for a human, right? And now what the product teams and the engineering teams are doing are going back and saying, "How do we now open this up both for a human and an agent so the agent can do that work on behalf of the admin when the admin sort of wants a task to be done for that particular reason?" And so what that means is that we're translating our entire platform into a set of MCPs, a set of skills, a set of metadata that is grounded so that these agents can do the work on behalf of the admins. So one good example is the setup with Agentforce, which is so far so good. We've gotten great feedback on it. Now behind the scenes is a set of skills, a set of MCPs that are firing off to be able to get their tasks done. And so that's one thing that I think our admins can look to benefit from. The other piece is I know we have some admins who are familiar with some of these IDEs that we have out there. They use Cloud Code quite a bit. They use Vibes quite a bit. It may not be the entire admin audience, but for those audiences, again, the ability to be able to use all of these MCP skills in these development environments is another thing that our admins can really look forward towards. Now the other thing that we've also worked on is, over the last few months, the foundation for these skills, these MCPs, this Headless 360 foundation has been very sort of focused on how do we unblock these pro-code use cases, whether that's in Cloud Code, whether that's in Vibes, et cetera. But this is the same foundation upon which as we speak in safe harbor, I share that we are building what we call our no code offering as well. So how do you go about in an unintimidating sort of type of interface, have this conversation with an agent, which behind the scenes is interacting with that same Headless 360 layer to help you build out your agents, your applications, to help you augment your existing agents and applications, help you set up provision, configure Salesforce from a zero to one point of view, because we all know how setting it all up is quite a taxing task for our admins? So that's the potential I see for Headless 360 for our admin personas. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. I mean, to go back on some of the stuff that you were mentioning, I remember the first time I thought, "Hey, I could have ChatGPT rewrite ChatGPT's instructions." And I remember thinking like, "I'm so far ahead of the curve, man. I'm making AI rebuild AI." And then it was only a few weeks later that Cheryl was demoing Setup with Agentforce and I thought, "Oh, that makes so much more sense because all of the things that you were having that setup agent do are things that not necessarily admins don't like doing. It's like paper cuts." It's the little things that take 20, 30 minutes out of your day when you really wanted that solid hour to build that application kind of start to finish. Khushwant Singh: Indeed. Indeed. So we really viewed Headless 360 as the foundation upon which agents can work on behalf of the admins. And again, look, this is agents and admins working together because again, we've got to have the human presence to be able to validate, to be able to interrupt, to be able to initiate any actions that are performed by the agents. And if these agents can help drive greater productivity, then it's a win-win while at the same time having governance by humans over it. Mike Gerholdt: Right. Absolutely. Do you envision us being at a point where all of setting up Salesforce could just be a conversation with an agent based on the business and what they're trying to accomplish? Khushwant Singh: We are trying to do that. We are trying to do that. Now, I'll give you a view into our approach over here. We're taking a steel thread approach here where just trying to, for example, set up a customer service agent. That cuts across Service Cloud, cuts across platform, cuts across Agentforce, cuts across Data Cloud. So we've got to take a system view, an end-to-end view versus a feature view because that's what our admins go through. That's what a practitioner goes through. They look at it from a steel thread point of view, and that's what we as product teams have to do. And so as we think about using agents to go ahead and help provision, set up, get Salesforce up and running really quickly, that's the new strategy that we are taking over here, a steel thread view so that we can look across the board and say, "Look, which MCPs are missing? Which skills are missing? Which APIs are missing? Which metadata needs to be grounded? How do we ensure that across entire steel thread, quality is being ensured, governance is being woven into?" So we are starting that way and we want to scale that way as well. So my hope is that come Dreamforce this year, we'll be able to at least have a sizable number of steel threads that we feel really, really confident about on Agentforce really helping and agents helping in this particular side of things. So yeah, that's the approach we're taking, Mike. Mike Gerholdt: Wow, that's going to be amazing. Every time you think, "Oh, we've probably invented everything," technology just comes along and pulls the rug out from underneath of you and says, "Haha! There's new stuff. You got to figure this out now." I'd be curious, you're so ingrained in a lot of things that admins do on the platform, a lot of things developers do on the platform and then also having to keep up with AI. What is a piece of advice you could give people for how you personally keep up with the newest news and innovation on what's going on with AI? Khushwant Singh: Wow, that's a good question. I think first and foremost, I spend a lot of time just looking at reading publications like what's on TechCrunch, what's on Techmeme, trying to just understand how are technology providers adapting, how are companies using AI. That's one. The second one is actually you learn a lot via speaking with others in the community, right? Mike Gerholdt: Mm-hmm. Khushwant Singh: You talk to customers, you talk to other admins, you talk to other developers and you get to understand there are use cases that they're working through and some of the very many innovative workarounds or users of AI that they're applying. And then you're thinking about this that, "Wow. There's a trend here, there's something that we should be backing up and maybe providing out of the box within the product." And so I think that community piece speaking with other customers, with your peers, your colleagues from different companies, that sort of brings a very practitioners and practical view to things. So I think if you combine it with some of these ... So if you take a combination of both, what's being published out in the internet, what sort of bleeding edge and all of these various publications and then you sort of marry that and juxtapose that with the practical aspects on how it's implemented in all of these various by your peers in different companies, that's kind of how I ... That's at least the approach that I've taken. And I've seen it help even with some of my teammates who use a similar approach as well, Mike. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, I would agree. I mean, coming fresh off of being at a conference, just even talking with people, you find more resources than you think you could find and it exposes you to different levels of thought. As we kind of close things out, I'd love to know I'm always big, especially when I'm coaching people for events, for TDX, for keynotes, because I've been in keynote with you. I feel like when people are done listening to something, I always want to give them something very actionable that they should do when they get done listening to a session or they get done listening to a podcast like this. So if you are a Salesforce admin listening to this podcast, what is one thing you think you should do right after you listen to this podcast? Khushwant Singh: Good one. It's a tricky question. I would say that, look, I would encourage everyone to go ahead and use and try and give Setup with Agentforce a run, right? Take it out for a spin. It's available in an open beta. And I would encourage all of you all to give it a try, please. We've gotten so much great feedback. We are a stone's throw away before we make it generally available. And this is our first approach to using Agentforce, using AI to help improve the productivity and quality of life of our admins. It's not our last, but it is definitely our best foot forward right now. And we'd love to get your feedback. Like I said, we are in the final mile and your feedback is much appreciated, so try it out. Mike Gerholdt: I love it. Khush, you've always been a fan of admins. And I am so grateful to have you back on the podcast and even more thankful that you are constantly helping Salesforce innovate for everybody in the tech industry to be successful. So I appreciate you spending a little time with us today. Khushwant Singh: No, of course it's my pleasure. Admins are the lifeblood of Salesforce. You're out there, you're representing our products, you're using our products, you're championing our products, you're giving us tough love. And we can't be more appreciative. And so this is an honor to be here on this podcast to speak with you, Mike, and to speak with all of our admins. Mike Gerholdt: And a big thanks to Khushwant Singh for joining me and sharing how Headless 360 and Agentforce are reshaping the way admins build and manage systems across the business. My big takeaway? Well, the future admin isn't just configuring Salesforce. They're designing trusted systems where automation, data, agents, and people all work together for better outcomes. And as Khush said, trust and governance will still sit right at the center of all that work. So if you haven't already, take Setup with Agentforce for a spin and start exploring what human plus agent collaboration can look like in your org. And of course, be sure to subscribe, leave a review. And as always, I would love it if you share this episode with your friends. Until next time, we'll see you in the cloud.

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Skye Tyler, Principal Solution Consultant at Beyond the Horizon Technology. Join us as we chat about why clean metadata is crucial for getting the most out of AI. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Skye Tyler. Why metadata is your training manual for AI You've done it, I've done it. Sales wants a name changed on a report, so you just change the field label rather than create something new and mess with the integrations. Or maybe you have four different dates, but your marketing team knows which one they're actually looking for. What's the big deal? The problem is that while humans can get by on institutional knowledge, AI agents need a bit more help from your metadata. As my guest this week, Skye Tyler, explains, you should think of AI like an overenthusiastic intern with short-term memory problems. It really wants to answer your question, so if it sees four different dates, it's going to take a guess. Think of metadata like an onboarding manual for AI. With clear field descriptions and help texts, you can point your agents in the right direction and prevent hallucinations. How to get started with metadata cleanup Obviously, cleaning up your org's metadata is easier said than done. However, Skye has some great tips for how to get started. If your business has busy periods and slow periods, you might be able to schedule time specifically to work on your metadata. But for the rest of us, Skye recommends a clean-as-you-go approach. Any time you update an object, set aside some time to review all of the related metadata and update the description. Similarly, any time your organization is building a new business process that includes AI, you need to clean up any metadata an agent could interact with. As Skye points out, while you don't necessarily have time to deep clean your house every week, a little spot cleaning can go a long way. Skye's Salesforce journey and the value of sharing what you know We also took some time to talk about Skye's career path from nonprofit arts and what advice she has for folks who are new to the Salesforce ecosystem. AI is changing things fast, and that means there are more opportunities. "With all of these newer technologies and tools, anybody who's looking to come into the space today is learning the same things that I'm learning, having been in the space for a decade," she says. The Salesforce community is incredibly supportive, and Skye recommends putting yourself out there. You never know who you'll meet at an event, and where those connections could take you. "No matter where you are in your journey, you know something that other people don't," she says, "put yourself out there, and I guarantee you someone's going to appreciate it." Listen to my full conversation with Skye for more on how to clean up your metadata and stop AI hallucinations. And make sure you're subscribed to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you never miss an episode. Podcast swag Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store Learn more Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: How Should I Clean Metadata for Salesforce AI Agents? Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: Use Metadata To Empower Salesforce Agents Salesforce Admins Blog Post: Metadata Is Your Admin Blueprint for Building Better Agents Admin Trailblazers Group Admin Trailblazers Community Group Social Skye on LinkedIn Salesforce Admins on LinkedIn Salesforce Admins on X Mike on Bluesky social Mike on Threads Mike on X Full show transcript Mike: This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, I'm talking with Skye Tyler about the part of AI readiness that, well, it's easy to overlook. That's your metadata. We all know that clean data matters, but agents also need clear field descriptions, documentation, permissions, and context to understand what your business actually means. Skye explains why metadata acts like onboarding for an enthusiastic new employee and why a confident answer isn't always a correct one. We'll also talk about practical ways admins can improve metadata without trying to clean the entire org overnight. So give this episode a listen, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and of course share it with an admin who maybe has prepared their platform for Agentforce. And with that, let's get Skye on the podcast. So Skye, welcome to the podcast. Skye Tyler: Hi, thanks for having me back. Mike: I'm excited. Going through everything that we're doing to prepare for Dreamforce and admins are preparing for the agentic future, which is coming faster than eve, I stumbled across your session. And I thought, hey, before we get into Dreamforce, maybe we can dive into all of the stuff that you might not be able to cover in your 40-minute breakout session. So we'll talk about that because it's data related and data related is agent related. But before we get started, can you just refresh everybody on how you got started with Salesforce and what you do in the ecosystem? Skye Tyler: Oh, I'd love to. So I've been fortunate enough to be working in the Salesforce space with the nonprofit industry for a little over a decade now, and started off doing implementation work with nonprofit arts organizations, doing ticketing and donation. And then I've moved in and through the consulting space. Again, focusing primarily on nonprofits with a little bit of dipping into education along the way. And over the course of that decade, I've been fortunate enough to meet some amazing folks, yourself included, that has given me an opportunity to have the chance to share not just my journey, but my experiences, my struggles, successes, failures. And some of those avenues have included things like coaching and mentoring with super moms and the Salesforce military program, and then also just being really honored to be able to speak at community dream and events and events like Dreamforce and Trailblazer DX. Mike: I mean, that's a great answer. You know what's funny is so many people ask me, "How do I get started in the community," or, "What should I do?" And I feel like now I'm just going to point back to your answer because what you said was just perfect. Well, don't be afraid to share what you've learned, or what you're learning, or how you've learned it, or things you're working on because that's what people love to see. They love to see how you're doing it so that they can get an idea for how to do it. So thanks for answering a question I didn't have. Skye Tyler: Yeah, absolutely. I also just want to throw in, and I say this at many of my live sessions, that no matter where you are in your journey, you know something that other people don't. And everybody learns more when folks show up, and are vulnerable, and are willing to share those things. So definitely just give it a try. Put yourself out there and I guarantee you someone's going to appreciate it. Mike: Yeah, absolutely. Plus the thing I add to that is there's probably somebody out there like you that really needs to see somebody like you on stage. Skye Tyler: Yes, absolutely. Mike: So we talk a lot about data with agents and cleaning data, making sure your data's up-to-date, making sure your data's fresh, which every time I use the word fresh, I always think of how that plastic comes off an iPhone. I don't know why, but that's where my brain goes, because agents and AI and LLMs do a really good job of consuming a vast amount of information and giving it back to you in what you asked for. I think one of the things that we talk less about and that I want to talk to you about is your metadata, because I'll be honest, I pay attention to my metadata for five seconds when I'm creating the field. Skye Tyler: I'd say that's four seconds more than most people. Mike: Right, because all you got to do is click outside the box and it fills in the developer name, so I'm good. And description, ah, fill it in later. Skye Tyler: Yeah. And for the longest time, that's been really standard. And again, working across several consultancies and with lots of different works, people assume, well, we know what this field means. You give it a field name, the team knows what this means. I don't need to fill in description. I don't need to fill in help text. It's fine. And again, for the longest time, that institutional knowledge was enough of a stopgap that it was fine. Nothing was going to break or go horribly wrong if you left the description field empty. But all of that changes when you start introducing agents. And an example I may reference a couple times on this podcast is, I don't know if you've ever heard this, but the idea of thinking about your agent as a really enthusiastic intern with short-term memory problems. Mike: Like memory of a goldfish. Skye Tyler: Yes, exactly. So if you've got a new intern and they don't have deep industry experience, or they don't have longer term institutional memory within your organization, and they come on site, they're excited to be there, they're energized, they're probably young and enthusiastic, and they're going to sound really confident. You're going to ask them a question. They're like, "Yeah, absolutely. I can absolutely do that." But there's a difference between sounding confident and actually knowing the answer. And where AI gets really tricky is not only does it sound confident, it usually has a certain level of fluency to it with the amazing jumps in natural language processing over the past few years, it sounds both confident and right because it's just a well-structured sentence. And there's a huge gap between the structure of the sentence and the actual understanding of the data behind it. Mike: Right. It reads to us as so confident in its own answer that we would be silly to think it's wrong. Skye Tyler: Oh, absolutely. It would be a waste of time to go back and check it because look at how confident it is. Mike: Yeah. And look at all the part that I always think of is look at all the information it gave me. I asked it two sentences and it gave me four paragraphs of an answer. It must be right. Skye Tyler: Yes. And of course, don't forget that at the beginning, it also flattered you and said, "Oh, Mike, that's a great question. Let's dig into that." Mike: Yeah. You sound just like my AI. Skye Tyler: Exactly. Mike: "Of course it's a great idea, Mike. You should totally do that. Everything's a great idea." So when we think about that though, why is it making those mistakes? Because if we're paying attention, and I mean, I was even working on some content today that's like, got to keep your stuff fresh. If you're going to do call notes or have a summary agent, then make sure your salespeople are doing call notes and keeping it up to date or keeping the data up to date. Then why is it so confidently giving us, I don't want to say the wrong answer, but confidently providing us with information that it thinks is correct, but isn't? Skye Tyler: Yeah. So a big part of this comes down to the difference between how humans think and form answers and how the large language models do it. And one of the real risks around this false fluency framework is that you pose a question, you ask a question, and first there's the basic understanding that the agent, whichever model or system you're using, their goal is to accomplish the thing that you asked. So the first thing is getting really careful about how you ask your questions so that you're not sort of setting it up to just affirm the thing that you have asked. But then beyond that, the way that these LLMs, these large language models work, is it's basically a really complex pattern completing process. And so you mentioned peeling that plastic off of your new iPhone. How many times are you typing a text message on your iPhone and it has that auto recommend that comes up right above your keyboard? Mike: Yeah. Skye Tyler: So that's a good example of a simple version of this. So depending on how often you type in "Oh my," and then it's going to recommend a couple of different things that often come after "Oh my" in the training data. When we're thinking about this in the context of asking an agent something in Salesforce, the way that it identifies what to propose for an answer is not looking at just the data in the field, it first has to go look and see what information is available and that's when it dips into the metadata. So if you've got four different fields that have very similar field names, but have no metadata to tell the agent field one means this, field two means that, field three means this, and field four means this completely other thing, it's just going to guess. Mike: So if you had four dates on a record that were, I don't know, draft dates because it ties to a contract or something, and it's draft one, draft two, draft three, draft four, and you know as the user, those are the dates that you completed those drafts, but your metadata just shows four draft dates and there's no explanation for the agent. So the agent's like, "Here's when all the drafts were completed." Skye Tyler: Right, it's going to guess. And because it's non-deterministic, it might guess right the first time you ask it a question. It might guess right the second, third, fourth, fifth, 20th time, and then the 21st time, it guesses wrong. Mike: But confidently. Skye Tyler: But confidently wrong. Mike: Confidently. Right. Skye Tyler: Right. And so when we're thinking about how to support our agents, if we go back to that analogy of the over-enthusiastic summer intern, the metadata is effectively the onboarding process for that new intern or a new employee. It's the manual about what your data means, and it's the context that the agent can use to give you more consistently reliable, correct answers. Mike: Love it. So I remember, I think it was TDX two years ago, we were talking kind of on this subject. And whenever we roll out a new feature, it's here's the things you need to do to prepare. And I remember getting up and talking with a lot of people of like, "Hey, it's more than just the data that's got to be cleaned because there's a lot of data cleaning services and hopefully you have a lot of validation rules and stuff in place, but also your metadata needs to be cleaned as well." And I looked over in the audience, I felt this guy just shrug his shoulders and just kind of turn a lighter shade of pale, I'll say. And I walked up to him afterward and I asked him, I was like, "Are you okay?" And he's like, "Yeah, your words just hit me really hard. I was thinking of all the metadata I have to clean up." So obviously it would be awesome if every day people woke up and you cleaned your whole house. But let's be honest, you don't have to wake up every day just to live in your house to clean your whole house. What is the approach that an admin should think of in terms of getting their metadata to that next level and to prepare for an agent force implementation? Skye Tyler: Yeah, I love the analogy of cleaning your house every day because I'll tell you, I do not wipe my baseboards every day. Mike: oh, man. I would pay somebody to come once a week to do my baseboards. It would be awesome. Skye Tyler: Yeah. So there's a couple of ways that you can look at this. The first one is figuring out within your workflows, your day-to-day and annual workflows, where you can build metadata maintenance into your process. And so what this might look like for admins is the next time someone on your team asks for an update on an object, whether it's a page layout, or some new fields or what have you, taking and building some extra time into however long you budget or allocate for that task to include reviewing related metadata. Every time you need to update a flow because the business process has changed and you say save as new version, as soon as you click save as new version, update the description of the flow. That's the first thing that agents are looking at to be able to figure out what automations do I call, what automations are related to a process, et cetera. So building it into the workflow of what you already do is one avenue to consider. If you have an amazing organization that lets you do proactive maintenance, working that into your project plan and saying, "Hey, this is a usually kind of quiet time of the year for new admin requests. Let's go ahead and block two weeks or three weeks and do a more thorough or a deeper dive into updating the metadata." If you work at one of those organizations, let me know, because I've heard they exist. I haven't encountered one in the wild. But then lastly, when you have any new agent related process, it should be considered mandatory as part of that project to do a metadata review of every aspect of metadata that that agentic process is going to interact with. Because one of the big challenges that organizations have been seeing is they're putting a lot of time and resources and money into creating agentic solutions, but the research and the data is just not showing the level of return on investment or the level of success that people are expecting. And one of several underlying factors is you're not setting your agents up for success. You've got this new employee, this new agent employee, but you didn't onboard them. You didn't provide them with adequate institutional knowledge and training. You gave them some direction. But if you think about it, Mike, when you've got a new employee that comes on and they go to that podcast or that blog record for the first time and they see your four review dates and they don't know, they stop and ask someone. They ping you on Slack and be like, "Mike, can you explain these four review dates to me?" Your agent can't do that. So set them up for success with that onboarding through the metadata updates. Mike: And I think that also, I mean, I really like how you approach that. I think that's also a funnel or a pathway that you could flip. So you don't have to think of, I have to tackle everything and clean all my metadata first, as opposed to, well, if we're going to roll out an agent and it's going to touch these three objects and these 15 fields, then that's where you start. Skye Tyler: Absolutely. Mike: Because then that will help you set up a plan for here's how we're going to tackle this part of it. And then as the agent responsibilities or you build additional sub-agents expands, then you can tackle two or three more objects that maybe that sub-agent has to talk to as opposed to, okay, we're going to wake up at 3:00 AM, clean the whole house just to live in it, which is a good idea. I think sometimes readiness to the extreme can feel overwhelming. Skye Tyler: Right. And if it's overwhelming to the point where you don't make any progress on it, then it's not useful either. So definitely thinking about what's within scope. Where I would challenge that a little bit though is unless you have put very firm guardrails on your agent, there's always the possibility that it's going to get creative. So you might intend for that agent to only look at these four fields, or these 15 fields, or these two objects, but if you don't actually instantiate that guardrail or that limit into how you build the agent, it could start to be like, huh, I wonder if this related record might impact me being able to answer Mike's question better. Let me just go take a look at that. And that's where we could get into some of the more deeper technical things, but the idea that authentication is not the same as permission. And so making sure that each of your agents has very clearly defined, and that ties in with the metadata too, because all of those settings in Agentforce and Agentforce builder are set up, the sub-agent descriptions, the scope, all of those things are metadata around your agents. Mike: And I think there's downstream effects to this that are also positive too. I'm thinking of all of the reports that you're dealing with that will suddenly get better because I know you're always building reports, sometimes not off of the report label. So help me through this. You've got an implementation and you have an integration with another system and you change metadata descriptions or field names. How do you need to approach that? Because obviously you need to identify that early in your discovery. Skye Tyler: Yeah. This is a little bit of a catch-22. Let's just say that we've got five fields on, I'm going to just call it the case object, that are updated through some form of integration. Maybe it's a form submission, maybe it's an external data source, whatever. But there's five fields that are tracked and interact outside of Salesforce, and you're going to set up an agent that does something that impacts those five fields. When you set up the previous integration, if you didn't put in the description somewhere on those five fields that this field is part of X integration or this field is populated via X external data source, one, past you did future you no favors by not putting that in there. Mike: Man, when the DeLorean gets out of the shop, I'm going to go back and really tell myself. Skye Tyler: Exactly. So again, going back to that idea of you've got a new project, you've got a new request, you've got a new thing that you're building. Taking the time to do that slew thing and to really investigate what are all of the things that touch this piece of data or this particular metadata. The simplest sort of way to address that is whatever else you're changing, don't change the API name. Mike: Smart. Skye Tyler: Now where that kind of gets, I've seen more orgs than I can count where the field label is something completely different from the API name because it had some kind of external connection or integration, and if you try to change it would break it. So they just changed what referenced to the human. That's going to be a problem for your agent. If you are expecting interaction around review date one and the API name is something completely unrelated and there's no description to give the agent more context, they may not even look at that field. They might not even recognize it. Mike: Oh man, I am so guilty as charged. Skye Tyler: We've all done it. We've all done it. Mike: I mean, businesses change process and I was like, I can just change the field label. If it says this on the screen, are you happy with that? Mostly because I didn't want to ... It always happened where I didn't want to have to create a new field, move the data over just because they wanted a different name. Skye Tyler: Yeah. Yeah. Well, and if you are an admin that does not do Apex, which most admins don't, right? Mike: Not me. Nope. Skye Tyler: They're differentiated roles for a reason, and you have Apex that's running against those custom fields, you can't just go in and change the API name. You are going to break things. And so this is where that cascading effect can come into play and you say, okay, well maybe this one quick fix that the marketing team was asking for isn't actually a quick fix because we do want to get the org as ready as possible for future agentic improvements. Mike: I love how you set me up for my next question there because I was just going to ask you. So I could see somebody's listening to this and hopefully they got this far and they're like, "That was a fun podcast, but we're not really getting ready to deploy Agentforce, so why should I care about my metadata?" Skye Tyler: Yeah, this is one of those things, and I'll admit early in my consulting career, this wasn't as emphasized. It was all about the user's experience. Does the page layout make sense? Can the user click through and do the things they need to do? And the stuff that's behind the scenes, the admins can cope with that or the consultants can deal with that, and it just wasn't as important. But even things like as flow gets more complex and now, I mean, we're talking about moving to this whole headless experience, the system itself has just matured to a point where if your top or only priority is the UI, the user experience and the user interface, you are limiting the capacity of what your organization can do on Salesforce. Mike: Very true. Very true. I feel like as an admin that did focus very much on the UI, would bounce back and forth on trying to make Salesforce the one-stop shop for everybody. I remember way back in the day, do you remember when we used to be able to build web tabs? Skye Tyler: Oh, yes. Oh, those days. Mike: And so I remember we had a travel system, and I put it in a web tab because I need my users not only to sign in, but sign in and update their opportunities and update the accounts and stuff. And so I asked the salespeople back then, "What is the number one thing you check almost every day?" And they're like, "Our travel thing," because they're traveling and they need to book things and stuff like that. And I said, "Cool. I can do that." And so I put it in as a tab, but it was like a simple I-frame. It's just there. And I had one user, when I showed it to them, they were like, "Oh, this is amazing, but I booked my travel and it didn't sync with my calendar." And I was like, right, because it's literally a pane of glass that I'm giving you into another system. But your whole conversation about this made me think back to when I would try to bring all of my users together in Salesforce, and then when I would try to make it so that they didn't have to pay attention to the UI in Salesforce. And I feel like I tried to make both, because you brought up headless. And headless in theory is you use a tool and then you just at Salesforce or something, you can bring all of that knowledge in. Skye Tyler: Well, I mean, you and I have both been in the space long enough that we remember the days when the mantra was, if it's not in Salesforce, it doesn't exist. Mike: Oh, yeah. I mean, I still say that. Skye Tyler: Right. But the reality of the world now is there's a lot of data and there are a lot of processes that don't exist in Salesforce. They can be surfaced there or they can be represented there, but they live somewhere else. And that's where, going back to my previous comment that the platform, the system itself has just matured beyond that. You have to log into Salesforce, you have to create a record or update a field in Salesforce for it to count. And that's not the case anymore. And even things like using experience cloud sites to be able to allow external partners or site guest users to be able to get information into Salesforce, all of those connections, all of those disparate data points are potentially accessible by agents, and then if you move into a headless environment from a headless perspective. And so taking whatever time and resources you have at this moment and making whatever improvements or whatever cleanups you can make is just going to help future you, future admins who manage the system, be more successful in doing that. And I know right now in the nonprofit space, there's lots of conversations for folks who are considering moving from the nonprofit success pack to Agentforce Nonprofit. And when I talk to folks who are considering the move, one of the things, even before Agentforce Nonprofit, moving from a different data system into Salesforce, really doing an audit. And we were talking about cleaning houses. I have this great story from one of the times we moved when I was a kid and my mom was real stressed out, she ended up packing the trash can full of trash. And by the time we got around to unpacking that box, you can imagine how pleasant that was. So when you're packing up your house, when you're packing up your data house or your data system and you're planning to move, don't pack your trash. Go through and do a data audit. Go through and update your metadata. Make sure that you're moving into your clean new house with just the things that you want, and they're going to be easier to access and more effective. And then your over-enthusiastic summer intern of an agent is going to be much more likely to give you a coherent, fluent, and accurate response, not just a confidently wrong one. Mike: I like that. Packed your trash. It is odd when you move because there's stuff that lives in the world that when you move, you have to figure out what to do with it. Skye Tyler: See, I can't relate. Having been associated with the military for a decade, I can now fit my entire house in a U-Haul. Every time I move, it's a purging process. Mike: Sure. Yeah, I can understand that. I'd love to end on that, but I have one other thought, which is, this doesn't just apply for Salesforce. When we're working with our IT colleagues or people in the organization that own other platforms, a lot of the power comes not only from Agentforce being able to bring in Salesforce information, but to be able to consume other information. And I have to believe that we have to sit down and do the same kind of audit when we're looking to integrate with another platform. Skye Tyler: Oh, absolutely. And this is where, I mean, the kind of highest level way to think about this is it's the context. You have to have some mechanism in Salesforce, it's primarily metadata, but you have to have some mechanism for the agent to understand and to have the context of what you're actually asking them to do. So these large language models have been trained on the entirety of human knowledge that has been encoded into the internet. Well, that's not helpful for your specific question or your specific query. So having systems in place, whether it's knowledge articles, whether it's Jira tickets, whether it's Confluence folder structures, having mechanisms that give the agents the proper level of context for them to be able to support you in solving the problem, designing the solution, answering the question, whatever your purpose is, this is transferable across any touchpoint of agentic work. Mike: Yeah, totally makes sense. I always push the speakers that I work with for Dreamforce, or TDX, or any event to think about what happens when the person stands up after your presentation is over. And so I'll ask you the same thing. So what happens when somebody presses stop on the podcast and goes about their day? What's the one thing they should do after they listen to this? Skye Tyler: Well, obviously keep listening to the other podcast episodes. Mike: Right. Just continue on to the next episode. Skye Tyler: I think the takeaway that's sort of bigger than just data or metadata or even agentic work, is keep learning. All of these systems and all of these tools are evolving so quickly. And while that can be a challenge and can be maybe intimidating, it's also potentially very democratizing. And when we think about your comment earlier about people trying to get into the ecosystem, for a while it got very hard. There was the age of the accidental admin when Salesforce was young enough that just if you were good at fixing the printer, you became a Salesforce admin. And then we moved into a period of time where it had matured enough that organizations wanted people with deep experience. With all of these newer technologies and tools, anybody who's looking to come into the space today is learning the same things that I'm learning having been in the space for a decade. So my call to action for anyone listening to this podcast would be find other avenues of learning. And then if it's in your wheelhouse or your interest, offer what you've learned to other people and share that experience. Mike: I think that's great. I mean, that ties right in with the podcast I did with Gene Velonis, which was open up a Trailhead org and just start playing around and- Skye Tyler: Just try it out. Mike: ... don't be afraid to break things. I think there was a point in time when I would work with a lot of community members and they were always afraid, "But what if it doesn't work?" And I'm like, "Cool." And then we know we have to go back and get to tinker with something. Skye Tyler: Yeah. Mike: That to me is half the fun. Skye Tyler: If it works the first time, then it means you weren't trying something hard enough. Mike: I know. Yeah. Yeah. That or I'm worried when it's going to stop working, because if it worked the first time, then I didn't get to troubleshoot stuff. Skye Tyler: This is true. This is true. Mike: Skye, it's always a pleasure to have you on the podcast. And in the ever-changing world of AI, and metadata, and data, and everything else, it's good to have you kind of keeping us honest and keeping us on our toes. Skye Tyler: Well, I don't know if I want to bear that responsibility, but I'm happy to try. Mike: You're one of many people. Skye Tyler: Great. Thank you so much, Mike. Mike: Big thanks to Skye for joining us and making metadata feel practical, useful, and well, a lot less overwhelming. My key takeaway was for admins, it's really simple. Agents can only act reliably when Salesforce clearly reflects what the business means. So build metadata review into the work you're already doing. Maybe pick one active process and document the fields and the automation it depends on, and give the future you and the future agents the context they need. Now, of course, you should subscribe to the Salesforce Admins podcast wherever you listen to podcasts, and be sure to keep learning and trying something new in your org. Until next time, we'll see you in the cloud.

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Michelle Wolfe, Platform Engineer. Join us as we chat about how she built a Flow-powered user management system to handle requests, approvals, user creation, permissions, communications, and even onboarding. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Michelle Wolfe. Streamlining change requests with screen flows It's a good thing when your organization is growing, right? For Salesforce Admins, however, new hires need new accounts, and that means approvals, permissions, and onboarding. My guest this week, Michelle Wolfe, found herself in exactly this situation. She turned to Flow to build an automated user management system with no code, and she's here to tell us all about it. Michelle's company was bringing in 80+ people per new hire class, but the account creation request process was a mess. Managers would email a random member of the three-person admin team, and then they would manually create the account. So the first step was to wrangle the business process with a screen flow to get the correct information into Salesforce and create a case. But Michelle was just getting started. Now that everything was in Salesforce, she knew that she could use Flow to automate the rest of the process. New account creation with autolaunched flows Once the new user's information was approved by their manager, Michelle set up an autolaunched flow to spin up the account. This took care of data validation, configuring the correct permissions, and creating a username. Finally, a second autolaunched flow would close out the case and send two email actions: one to confirm the request, and one to welcome the new user. With help from Flow and Einstein Copilot, Michelle transformed a complicated manual business process into something streamlined, simple, and scalable. Partner with your training team for a fresh perspective on your org Michelle credits her success with how closely she works with her training team on enhancements. "Because they interact with new employees, they see things differently than someone who's been here for years and knows how we use our Salesforce," she explains. That fresh perspective helps her identify improvements she might otherwise miss. Listen to my full conversation with Michelle for more on how she used Flow to automate user management—we really get into the weeds. And make sure you're subscribed to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you never miss an episode. Podcast swag Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store Admin Trailblazers Group Admin Trailblazers Community Group Social Michelle on LinkedIn Salesforce Admins on LinkedIn Salesforce Admins on X Mike on Bluesky social Mike on Threads Mike on X Full show transcript Mike: This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, I'm joined by Michelle Wolf to talk about what happens when user onboarding stops being a string of emails and becomes a real platform process. So Michelle built a Flow-powered system that handles requests, approvals, user creation, permissions, communications, and even offboarding, while keeping the admin team in control. We're going to talk about the automation behind it, but also the process decisions that make it accurate, secure, and useful for her business. Now, because when admins design access and onboarding well, they're not just saving time. They're protecting trust and helping people get productive faster. So listen in, subscribe, share this episode with an admin who has one too many user requests sitting in their inbox. I'll tell you who doesn't have too many user in requests sitting in their inbox, and that's Michelle. So let's get Michelle on the podcast. So Michelle, welcome to the podcast. Michelle Wolf: Thank you for having me, Mike. Mike: I think this is exciting because I can't recall the number of times I've had people on about onboarding users. And I think it's because whatever cool tool we have come out, it's the second thing people do. They're like, "Oh, I could do this, and I need to figure out how to do X, Y, and Z when I onboard people." Because it was like that with Flow. There was stuff with Chatter when that came out, "How do I onboard people and add them to groups?" And Jennifer Lee was at your session at Midwest Dreaming, and she thought it was just phenomenal. So I had to have you on the podcast to talk about it. But before we get into that, tell me a little bit about yourself, how you got started with Salesforce and what you do. Michelle Wolf: Yeah. So my journey started as a lot of ours as an accidental admin. I was working for a small family-run business who had Salesforce, and they were paying a consultant to basically be their full-time admin. And one day my manager walked into my office and said, "I don't want to pay them anymore. I need you to learn this." And I was like, "Okay." Mike: "I suppose." Michelle Wolf: Yeah. Why not? So yeah, that's what started my journey. And I skilled up on Trailhead and I was on it two, three hours a day trying to figure out how to be an admin in Salesforce. And this was back at the initial transition from Classic to Lightning. Mike: Ooh, fun. Michelle Wolf: So half of my early batches are on Classic. There just wasn't a ton of Lightning stuff out there yet. So I would build a lot in Classic and then flip it over to Lightning to see what it looked like because they did like the Lightning interface, which was great. So that started my journey. And then when I decided to part ways with that company, I took a different position and paused my admin career. And then about five years ago or so, I had an opportunity to be a product SME for Salesforce. And I was like, "Yes, I miss this product. I miss doing this. I miss being able to make things better with just the click of the button. So let's go do this." And I jumped in both feet and never looked back. And so I've been an active admin for a little over five years now. And I'm a Flownatic. Anything I can automate, I am doing it. Mike: I love it. Active admin as opposed to passive. Michelle Wolf: Exactly. Mike: I don't know. So I love when you started because I remember those times and the reason there wasn't enough Lightning things is we were all writing it as fast as we could. Michelle Wolf: Yeah, I know it. Mike: It's kind of like learning to drive with a manual. And then they're like, "Oh, well, here's an automatic." And you're like, "Oh, I already know how to drive with a manual." I mean, if you knew how to do things in Classic, then doing stuff in Lightning was just that much easier, in my opinion anyway. Michelle Wolf: Yeah. I agree. I agree. And the user experience was better for my users. They liked the layout and the feel. It jived with their personalities better instead of that very formal grid-looking everything. Mike: I mean, that was the internet at a certain period in time. And then it grew up and it was like your eyes don't have to squint with white space. Michelle Wolf: Right. Mike: Every field just went from tight polyester pants to sweatpants. And it was like, "Yay." Michelle Wolf: Exactly. Mike: Let's talk about being a Flownatic because I've talked with Jen. I know Jen said she was in your session. I really think, I mean, outside of just it's so incredibly powerful, the amount of things that you can do on the Salesforce platform without writing a single line of code. Flow is one of those. And I remember it was 100 years ago that I saw Flow for the first time at Dreamforce when I was a customer. And I think they called it Business Process Management or something. And it was an app you had to download, and then you had to upload schemas to it. It's since graduated into a much more robust tool. But the nice thing is once you know that, I mean, caveat emptor because AI runs off of all the flows. I mean, if you're good at Flow, there's very few things you can't make Agentforce do. So tell me a little bit about why you built onboarding with Flow. Michelle Wolf: Yeah. The company I was with found themselves in a really big period of growth, which was really amazing. But the new hire classes were like 80 people. And I just could not bring myself to want to spend a week of my life just filling in these boxes to make new users. It was really so time-consuming. And one typo here, one missed field here. My validation rules didn't check out. It was just a pain. It's just very mind-numbing. And I was like, "There has to be a better way." And I went through the different variations of the Add Multiple Users. It's an out-of-the-box function, except I couldn't put my custom fields on there, which means I couldn't save my users because we had validation rules in place. And then I experimented with a bulk upload, but it was such a pain because if I would typo a field, I would mess up my entire formula. Mike: Yeah. Michelle Wolf: And I was like, "There has to be a better way. There just has to be a better way." And- Mike: Plus then all you're doing is just creating the user. Michelle Wolf: Exactly. Mike: With Flow, you can do so much more. Michelle Wolf: Exactly. So by converting it to a Flow, I had a screen. I used my screen flows, and I leveraged the fact that the onboarding team is already putting that information into an email or something. Well, just go here and put it in a case for me. Just hit this button, pull out the fields. Now I don't have to do this. And then I used that screen flow to make a case so I can track my productivity, when the requests are coming in, when the requests are due by, who's doing the request. We started with just managing cases manually and making the users off the cases. And we had built in the approval process to make sure that someone else was double checking the inputs. Did they spell their name right? Did they put in the email right? Because I don't know these people. They're not going to be reporting to me. I'm not part of the onboarding team. I'm just making a user. So we had the managers do the approvals and make sure all that information's correct, make sure they're requesting the right... We use a field called Team Name that we made custom to make sure they're getting put on the right team, the customer service team or senior customer service team, whatever. So someone else is double checking it and then approving it. And I was like, "From here, I have to be able to automate something because the information's already in Salesforce." And that's when I got into utilizing that approval flow to trigger an autolaunched flow to actually make my user and create the alias and create the username and update the profile based off of what was entered on the request form in my screen flow, and just physically make my user. Mike: Wow. We spent a lot of time talking about the tech part of it. I want to dive in because I feel like you conquered a lot, but you probably had to sell it. Maybe you didn't. Tell me about all the non-tech stuff that you had to sell. Who did you have to go to, and what were the people you met with in order to say, "Here's how I'm going to onboard users moving forward"? Michelle Wolf: So the onboarding process had already been moved to our team. And it was just that it was coming to us in a very casual way. We're getting an email request. So it was part of the struggle was they started emailing us individually. We were a team of three, and they would just pick which admin they wanted to work with. Well, if I'm out of office or I have to leave unexpectedly and forget to put my out of office on, then their stuff's getting delayed. And so that was the first big conversation of how do we take out that portion? How do we get them to just put it in so we can decide who does the work? Because if I'm heads down on a project, I don't have five minutes to go make a user. I need to be heads down on my project. Mike: Right. Michelle Wolf: So this allowed us to divvy up work more easily and really even just check our own productivity of handling these types of requests and making sure it's not one person that always gets stuck with the work because they're the one that's always being emailed. So that was the first thing. And so the three of us, we were a really tight-knit group, and we're all very aligned with not wanting to be the only human that was pinged or emailed. And so it was like, let's just get it to a centralized place. And so we just went to our manager and said, "We're going to build this. We need this to be more productive." And they were like, "Yeah, makes sense. Do what you need to do." Mike: I mean, that's awesome. Michelle Wolf: Yeah. Mike: Sometimes when I was an admin would happen and sometimes it wouldn't. But I do think some change has to happen that way of, "No, here's how I'm going to be more productive, and here's what I want to set up." Michelle Wolf: Yeah. Mike: So then were there... I guess what I'm getting at is, for admins that hear this and like, "Oh man, this is me," were there other checks that were already in place that you didn't have to deal with? There was already a check with HR or the person in payroll in terms of onboarding these people. You didn't have to go and say, "Can you..." Because I was the same way, to be honest with you. I would find out when I was an admin, "Oh, so-and-so needs a Salesforce license," two days after they started when HR sent out the announcement of the new hires. And I was like, "Hey, there has to be some process that you onboard these people to the company. Can I be part of that?" And I kind of had to unwind HR and figure that out because they didn't know that Salesforce was a part of this department and they didn't know that people need to be onboarded for it. You sound like you didn't have to deal with any of that. Michelle Wolf: We did not. That onboarding process was already handled by a team. And so when the hiring manager said, "Yes, we're going to offer," and they accept, they already knew what systems, what equipment they need, what systems they need access to, and then what types of permissions they would need to ask for from Salesforce. So like what team they were going to, so that that request could be put in. All that hard legwork was already done. So to those who might not have that, I think the biggest selling point could be onboarding experience. A lot of companies are focusing on what that hiring process, what that onboarding experience is. And as someone's starting a new job, I want to prove myself early on. I want to say, "I'm here, I'm ready to work." And if I can't access my systems, even though it's fully out of my control, I still feel like I'm not doing my best as an employee, as a new employee. So you can leverage just even the onboarding experience that they have, the equipment they need, they have the logins that they need on day one, on the day that they need it. Mike: Yeah. And you don't have to go into detail, but what are the key, I guess I'll call them, milestones in your onboarding flow that the new people get sent? Do you have training materials, or do you have a video that's Michelle being like, "Hi, I'm your Salesforce administrator"? Michelle Wolf: If only. Mike: I know. I always say that and everybody's like, "Oh, that'd be a great idea." Michelle Wolf: It would be. It would be. Mike: "It's just 4,792 on my list of things to do." Michelle Wolf: Exactly. When I have that free minute, I will absolutely get to that next. Mike: Yeah. And also my other two admins, because it can't just be me. Michelle Wolf: Right. "Here's your Salesforce team. We're here to support you." Mike: Yep. Michelle Wolf: So what we built into our process was, in my Flow automation, there was actually a second autolaunched flow that would close out the case. And this did a couple of things. One, it closed out the case so they had a complete close of the loop and updated the reason as completed by automation because a human didn't have to touch any part of this request. Mike: Ooh, that's cool. Michelle Wolf: Yeah. Mike: I like that. Michelle Wolf: Clean reporting. Who doesn't like that? Mike: I mean, for a while, I remember doing approvals or something and somebody asked me, "Well, did you actually do this or did Salesforce, the Flow do it?" And I was like, "Well, the Flow did, but the Flow ran as me." Then it marks that. But I like that you added that completed with automation. Michelle Wolf: Yeah. But we also added two email actions. And one was to the requester. So the individual that opened the case through the screen flow, it sent them an email telling them that the request had been completed. And then the second thing was, when the user record was created, it then updated the Requested For field, which was just a custom field we made on the case for a user lookup with the new user that we'd made. And we sent a welcome email to them and said, "Welcome to Salesforce. Welcome to our company. Here's how you access our org." And it had the link for the SSO. Yeah. Mike: Because at the point that the person's creating the case for you to create the user, they've already had an email assigned to them. Michelle Wolf: Correct. Mike: I like it. That's pretty sweet. Michelle Wolf: Yeah. It was just a nice clean way to close multiple loops that ended up getting started. Mike: So then, not to dig into it, and this is where I wish I should have seen your presentation, do you also have a process for adding them to... I don't know if you guys have Slack or different things like that. How, outside of maybe that user emailing you, do they have not necessarily an open loop, but at least a channel to ping back the admins and say, "Oh, hey, I got everything except this doesn't work, or, "I'm not seeing X," or, "How do I upload a profile picture?"? Michelle Wolf: Yeah, absolutely. So for our new hires, basically all of that was handled in their new hire training, a lot of that initial setup support. However, in our screen flow, we actually made it a full-service utility where when you went to launch the screen flow, you could say, "I need help with Salesforce. Something's broken." Or, "I need a new user." So it was this full access path to us where they could put in multiple requests depending on what they needed. Mike: I like that. And I'm assuming it's not Michelle, but you have people in the organization that do training. How much do you have to keep them updated in terms of, "Here's what the new user experience is like for Salesforce"? Michelle Wolf: As far as? Mike: Just anything. Anything that would change or anything that they may encounter, new features. Michelle Wolf: Oh, yeah. So anytime we would build any type of enhancement, we worked very closely with our training department. We knew if we're going to help make starter material for an announcement for the call center for X, Y, Z enhancement, training's also going to need that material and probably a deep dive hands-on demo so that they can incorporate it into their training materials. So any new builds like that, our training department was really involved even from early-on stages of the development because they interact with new employees, and they see that interaction differently than someone who's been here for five, 10, 12 years and knows how we use our Salesforce. Even just how we design and where we put things on the Lightning page, they would often give us input from a new hire perspective to ensure that we're building good things. Mike: Now, just because we're nerdy here, did you have a way of capturing that? Was that a case as well? Michelle Wolf: That was just conversations. Mike: Oh, okay. Michelle Wolf: Yeah. It was, "Hey, we have this thing. We want a demo for you. Give us feedback," type of stuff. Mike: I didn't know if you were capturing that in terms of tech debt or things we need to build, things we'd like to build, and things we need more money to build. Michelle Wolf: Yeah, depending on what it was. It was just good old-fashioned scope creep. Mike: Okay. Yeah, that usually happens, unfortunately. Michelle Wolf: Yeah. Mike: I've talked about Flow and AgentForce. I've been around now. I remember from 2006 when we finally had drag-and-drop WYSIWYG page editors to now we have... Well, I've seen agents build apps now. So I feel like I'm coming full circle. If you haven't already, if you were to bake some AI into your Flow, are there things that you would change or things you'd want to change and do different? Michelle Wolf: I don't know yet because I spent so much time getting it to do what I wanted it to do with all my magic formulas in that Flow. I don't even know if AI could have helped. Now, AI did help me make those formulas. But I don't know how I might leverage AI to improve this process even more. Mike: Yeah. No, that's fair. I mean, I have friends, and they always razz me a little bit because I work for a tech company, and they're like, "What'd you put AI into today?" And I think that's a call that admins need to make is, "Where do I need to add it?" Not just for the sake of adding it. I think we always talk about internally when we're creating content, "Well, don't AI wash everything." You don't have to include AI in it if it doesn't make sense because for yourself and your other two admins, that's one more thing you have to update or keep track of. And if it doesn't need it and you could do it somewhere else more effectively, then you should. Which sounds crazy, but it should be in the right places for the right interfaces, as opposed to, "Well, I included it because I could include it everywhere." It's like putting frosting on everything. The bacon cheeseburger doesn't need frosting just because you're a frosting company. Michelle Wolf: Yeah, exactly. And I think maybe the next iteration that could include AI would just be on the initial request, especially for individuals wanting help with Salesforce. Maybe leveraging an FAQ-type of document for the things we do get commonly asked questions about. But for the user management, I'd really have to sit down and think of how that could apply. Mike: Yeah. Or even an agent to serve up, "Here are three questions everybody asks and here's links. Do you have any other questions besides that?" And be a little proactive in terms of FAQs and stuff like that. Michelle Wolf: Yeah. Mike: So outside of email and stuff, does that seem to work okay? Or are you more leaning towards if we had Slack or anything different, we can maybe change things? I always worried when execs were like, "And then I want it to email me." I'm like, "You do know you have 10 salespeople. And if they have to close four deals a day, that's 40 emails on top of the eight billion you already get." You didn't have any executives with concerns on email velocity when you're onboarding 80 people? Michelle Wolf: Oh, no, because of the 80 people, the emails from the requesters were really going back to the onboarding team. And so it was a way for them to check off the list that that system is done. So just like they would do it for other systems or other access for Jira or their Microsoft Teams access and all that stuff. It's just closing that loop with the onboarder. We did have one concern when one of the managers was new, and so 20 of the new hires was theirs. Mike: Oh. Michelle Wolf: But that's not the norm. You know what I mean? It's not necessarily that all the time you're going to be hit with all of the approvals, but it did happen. "You're new, you're getting a full class of newbies. Good luck." Mike: "Congratulations. You now have 20 more emails." Michelle Wolf: Exactly. Mike: When you presented this, I'm curious, fresh eyes, sometimes you can sit in silence and between you and your other admins, you're like, "This is boss. I can't wait to show people." And then you show people, and they have a lot of questions. Is there questions that people had that maybe caught you off guard or you didn't think they would ask you about? Michelle Wolf: I don't think any questions really caught me off guard, but the types of questions that came up were, "How did you come up with your approval process?" I was lucky that my approval process was already established within my organization. You get a new hire, it's the direct manager that approves it. Other organizations, it's the system admin that approves that this position and title in human deserves and needs access to do their job function. So it just depends on how your organization slices that cake, but someone should be approving access to an org. Mike: And you know what's funny is, I probably asked you at the beginning of the podcast, but those are always the questions that I try to get out of people because especially when me and my team are building demos, the process behind what we're building, we just don't even think about. It's like, here's how the tech would do it. But the tech is only there to support the process. And nine times out of 10, everybody in the audience watches your presentation like, "Got it. Now I know how to build it. It's going to take me three months to get this process ironed out because either there's a lack of one or there's a shared understanding of how people think things work." And those are the questions to really ask. Are there questions that they came up with that your company hadn't figured out yet? Michelle Wolf: No, of course not. I had all the answers. Mike: Perfect. Michelle Wolf: No, I don't think so. Because my solution covered 80% or more of the situations. Even in the event of your admins, say your admins are responsible for giving an individual an access to the org, but then they're also responsible for giving them access to some connected program that integrates with your org, but your admins are responsible for providing that access. My Flow included that if a manual comment is added or if a checkbox is selected that they need this access, it adds a comment to the case using the case comments and then leaves the case in an open status, like in progress, so that your admins can go in and finish that process. Mike: Oh, cool. Michelle Wolf: And then when they close the case, it just still does the rest of that email magic to tell everybody that it's all done. So we left openings for those situations where manual changes would be necessary to complete the full onboarding from our team. Mike: That opened up a host of questions in my head. So can you create a user without going through your case and Flow? Michelle Wolf: Manually. Yeah. None of that's turned off, but we do prefer them to use the Flow. Mike: Right. I didn't know if you flagged it as, "This went outside the Flow," or something. Michelle Wolf: Yeah. The only situation where it wouldn't... No. No, we stopped making users manually because the user would still get created. It would just leave the case open. So no, it's physically possible. We do not make users manually. Mike: Nice. Michelle Wolf: Yeah. Mike: That warms my heart to know that. Well, it's always, you build the coolest solution and then the process goes around. And I remember having a manager tell me that. He's like, "Nobody's going to use Salesforce as long as they can put orders in on spreadsheets." Michelle Wolf: That's fair. Mike: Yeah, that was the truth. So the opposite of that, do you have an offboarding process? Is it like a similar Flow where if an employee decides to leave, does somebody create a case and that triggers your team to shut down the license? Michelle Wolf: Yeah. We actually built in a deactivate. We called it remove because our business calls it remove users, but it deactivates the user. When you choose that option in the flow, you get to use the lookup to deactivate the user. And then we also had a freeze, and I call it thaw instead of unfreeze. So we had a freeze and thaw process. Mike: I like that. That's awesome. Michelle Wolf: So yeah, we did a freeze and thaw process and we also had an update permission. So if somebody was changing teams, so somebody got promoted from customer service to sales, you can just put in the change request and once it's approved, off it goes. Mike: See, that's what differentiates what you built from everything else, because nine times out of 10, an admin will, "Okay, I'm going to build an onboarding thing." You're building a user management system, and you have the organization bought into it. "This is how we do this for this system." And it keeps a chain of custody, and it keeps a nice record for you as well. Especially the permissions update stuff, that's got to be handy. Are you ever asked to report out people whose permissions have changed or, for whatever reason? Michelle Wolf: I don't know that we were ever asked to report that. And the company that I built this for actually had an Apex that did all of the permission and groups assignments. It was built out with metadata and permissions because when they built that out, user access policies didn't exist. Mike: Gotcha. Michelle Wolf: So when I built it for my demo, I'm not a developer, I'm not going to build out that Apex solution, but I used the user access policies for providing those permissions and assignments for that portion of the automation and access. Mike: Yeah. I have a million more questions. I think one that people would ask. Usernames. So I don't need to know usernames, but did you put in a way to make sure that the person submitting the case doesn't have to think about the username and it's still for- Michelle Wolf: Yes. Mike: Okay. Michelle Wolf: Yeah. So I use a [inaudible 00:32:21]. Mike: So you knew the answer. Michelle Wolf: I did. Mike: It took me longer to put the question together and you're like, "I already know the answer, Mike. Spit it out." Michelle Wolf: So they only gave us their first and last name, their email address, and then the identifier that we used for our SSO or Federation ID, and then what team they belonged to. So we knew what permissions and then who their manager was so we could get the right approval. Everything else was done through the formulas. And that's the tricky part. That is one of the ways in which the automation can fail. And it's the unique username and the unique alias. Because when you're on the new user record, Salesforce does all that magic for you. They do all the hardlifting to figure it out. And so instead of a one in four, because it uses the first initial, the first name, and the first four of the last names, so instead of a one in four, I made it a two and four for the alias to increase my chances of not having a duplicate. Mike: Right, because there could be a lot of Susan Smiths out there. Michelle Wolf: Exactly. Mike: Yeah. Michelle Wolf: And so what I did was I also built in on a fault path, essentially a loop. So if it failed, I would add a digit to the end and then have it try again. Mike: Oh. Would it incremental the digit? Michelle Wolf: Yes. Yeah. Mike: Well, that's smart. Michelle Wolf: And that way I could... I'd still have a chance that it's going to not work. Mike: I mean, if that poor guy hired 20 John Smiths, we're going to work that formula. Michelle Wolf: To the bone, for sure. I used Flow. I used the power of Flow to really be as hands-off as possible with it, up to and including, we wanted to keep a minimum of 10 licenses available. We always wanted 10 emergency licenses available. So before I create a user, I have it go get my org data to make sure I have 10 Salesforce licenses at least available. And if I don't, then it won't make the user. It just leaves a note on the case and leaves the case open. Mike: Saying, "You're at your minimum of 10." Michelle Wolf: Yeah. So we built in some of those custom safeguards that were special to us. We wanted that. So we put that customization in there. Mike: I like that. That's really cool. Michelle, you've enlightened me. I'm excited. I want to go build a Flow and onboard people and make perm sets a thing. I don't know. I feel like you probably have some solid time with an AI writing a lot of formulas. Michelle Wolf: Yes. Copilot and I got real buddy-buddy. Mike: Yeah. I mean, AI is really good at writing formulas, so thank goodness for that, right? Michelle Wolf: Yes, yes. I can do them, but those complex ones were a little on the edge of my capability. Mike: Oh, yeah. I can do with validation rules and stuff, and it requires parens. Once we get past one set of parens, I'm done. I'm cooked. Michelle Wolf: Yeah. Mike: That's it. Nope. I bow out early. I can't swim in the deep end of that pool. And I've seen people work with 15 nested statements. I'm like, "I'm exhausted reading this. How do you even know what it's doing?" Michelle Wolf: Right. Mike: Well, thanks so much for coming on the podcast and telling us about this. I think it's really cool. I hope you have an opportunity to share that onboarding Flow with more people and present it at more user groups. Michelle Wolf: I had a suggestion to make it a hands-on training. Mike: Yeah, it sounds cool. Michelle Wolf: Yeah. Mike: That sounds really cool. Maybe you should suggest it for TDX next year. Michelle Wolf: Yeah. Mike: Because that's a very technical, hands-on... People would love that. Michelle Wolf: Yeah. Well, they didn't pick it up this year, but I'm not sure I sold it very well. So we'll try next year. Mike: I mean, it's all in how you sell it sometimes. Michelle Wolf: Yeah. Mike: And also whether or not places have space for stuff like that. Not every track gets certain kinds of... It's a thing. That's a whole other rabbit hole within a rabbit hole that we could go to. I could do a whole series of podcasts on it, and nobody would listen to it, but I would think it would be interesting. And five people who write submissions would. Michelle Wolf: Yeah. Mike: Awesome. Well, thanks so much for being on the podcast. Michelle Wolf: Thank you so much, Mike. It was a pleasure. Mike: A big thank you to Michelle Wolf for sharing how she turned user onboarding into a thoughtful, scalable Salesforce process. My takeaway for admins is simple. Flow can automate the clicks, but your understanding of approvals, access, permissions, and business context is what makes the process work. Now be sure to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast and share this episode with somebody who is ready to get their user management out of their inbox and into Salesforce. Until next time, we'll see you in the cloud.

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Nikita Kothari, Senior Member of the Technical Staff at Salesforce. Join us as we chat about using Setup with Agentforce to understand and manage record access. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Nikita Kothari. Setup with Agentforce simplifies sharing Why can't I see this record? It's a simple question but, as any admin knows, finding an answer can get complicated quickly. If you've ever found yourself digging through Setup pages and running SOQL queries to troubleshoot permissions and record access issues, this episode is for you. This week, I'm talking to Nikita Kothari, a Senior Member of the Technical Staff at Salesforce. She's here to tell us how Setup with Agentforce can help solve sharing mysteries. Using natural language questions, admins can trace access across org-wide defaults, role hierarchies, sharing rules, groups, and manual shares to figure out what's really going on. Troubleshooting permissions and record access issues As Nikita explains, permissions and record access issues are so complicated because they are affected by many overlapping configuration settings. Small changes can accumulate over time, especially in a reorg. Setup with Agentforce was built to help you detangle these issues with simple natural language prompts. You can put your questions about permissions and record access to an agent, instead of having to wade through 1,300 pages of Setup to figure it out on your own. Once you've got a handle on what the problem is, you can use Setup with Agentforce to help you implement changes and get everything sorted. And it's built with trust in mind: every write action requires your explicit approval, the agent is bounded by your permissions, and every configuration change is captured in the Setup Audit Trail. Plan permissions for your org If you're trying to figure out where to get started, Nikita recommends starting small. "It's very difficult to go back and fix something," she says, "so I would highly recommend trying any changes in a sandbox with the minimum set of users to see if it is working as expected or not." And because Setup with Agentforce makes looking at permissions and record access so much easier, Nikita recommends taking advantage of it to conduct a monthly permissions review. Again, these issues accumulate over time, so an ounce of prevention is truly worth a pound of cure. Make sure to listen to my full conversation with Nikita for more on Setup with Agentforce and how to get sharing straightened out in your org. And don't forget to subscribe for more episodes of the Salesforce Admins Podcast. Podcast swag Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store Learn more Salesforce Admins Blog Post: Mastering Your Org's Sharing Configuration with Setup with Agentforce Salesforce Admins Blog Post: 5 Use Cases To Get Started With Setup with Agentforce Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: Setup with Agentforce Makes Salesforce Admin Tasks Easier Admin Trailblazers Group Admin Trailblazers Community Group Social Nikita 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: Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we're talking with Nikita Kothari, Senior Member of the Technical Staff here at Salesforce, about using Setup with Agentforce to understand and manage record access. Sharing can be one of those invisible parts of the platform until someone can see a record they shouldn't or can't see one they need to. Nikita explains how admins can use natural language questions to trace access across org-wide defaults, role hierarchies, sharing, rules, groups, and manual shares. We also discuss why validation, permissions, testing, and human approval remain essential when AI helps make configuration changes. So give this episode a listen, click that subscribe button, maybe share it with another Salesforce admin who's ever asked, "Why can this user see this record?" Let's get Nikita on the podcast. So Nikita, welcome to the podcast. Nikita Kothari: Thank you, Mike. It is amazing to be here. I'm from the engineering team, so you'll get my lot of perspective on how we are building Setup with Agentforce on sharing. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, that's exactly what I wanted to talk about. Let's first get a little acquainted with you. What do you do at Salesforce, and what are some of the things that you've worked on? Nikita Kothari: So it's been close to two years I'm working with Salesforce. And currently, I'm working with access control and sharing space. What pulled me in is the realization that sharing is one of those invisible infrastructure layer. When it works, nobody thinks about it, but when it breaks, it actually breaks the customer trust. And you know how customer-centric Salesforce is, its number one priority is trust. So there is lot of critical issues that we are dealing with and we are trying to make the sharing as the best place for the admins. And we love our admins and we are trying to make things better for them. Mike Gerholdt: I love our admins too. I used to be one for a while. I'd like to still think I am, but we'll see. Well, let's get into it. So I read your article and I'll link to that in the show notes. Tell me, I mean, before Setup with Agentforce, what did an admin have to do to answer a question of, why can this user see this opportunity and this user not? Nikita Kothari: Oh, good question. So it's the simplest way of dealing with solving the sharing's toughest problems. So just to enable the Agentforce, you don't have to do anything. It comes along with the Agentforce. So go to the setup page, search for the Agentforce agent and enable your Setup with Agentforce, and then you can start writing those questions. You don't have to know anything beforehand, that's the best part of the Agentforce setup. And sharing is the challenging domain, I won't deny that. It is very, very complex. So answering even the simplest question that you ask, like, "Who this person is having access for this thing," it requires to look into a lot of different domains like OWD, role hierarchy, sharing rules, sharing groups, manual shares, to see which layer actually give that access to that particular user. And looking that information, sometimes it's easier with the UI, but most of the time user has to run lots of SQL queries to get the correct answer. And previously, admin was spending hours of work and sometimes even the afternoons just to deal with that single questions. And with Setup with Agentforce, it just a minute of work. You just give prompt to your chatbots and it'll give you the correct answer within seconds. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. I mean, boy, it used to be a lot of archeological digging. I think you called it that in the article. I know I used to have to feel like I was going through a checkbox, but tell me, I mean, walk us through a real investigation where an admin discovers that a user can see a record, they probably shouldn't. How would they use Setup with Agentforce to trace where that access came from? Nikita Kothari: Yeah, great question. So while building these actions, we particularly divide it into two different segments. First segment is the read action and the second segment is the write action. Just to keep it, things untangled, read actions will help you to investigate. When you ask a question like, "Why Nikita has access for these things?" So our agent will go into the background, it will do all kinds of research and it will come up with the best answer. "Okay, Nikita is part of this group, and these groups provide the access to this particular record." And what a write action on the hand will do, it will help you to solve that problem. Now you know Nikita is part of the particular group. You can go ahead and ask your write action, "Can you please remove Nikita from this group?" And your write action will help you to remove that particular user from that group and boom, your problem is solved within a few minutes. It's reliable, it's fast, and I'm sure admin can save a lot of time with these two things. And you don't need to know which action or which thing you need. You just write the plain natural language and our LLM will be able to guess where to navigate and how to solve that problem. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. No, I hear you. I think you walked us through what a good sharing investigation looks like. But for you, is there a sequence admins should follow so that they don't just jump straight to changing configuration? Nikita Kothari: I would say I would highly recommend admin to start playing with the read action. There is no particular sequence, I would say, but mostly how the sharing is defined is like first we have the OWD, which provides the base access to the records and to the objects. And then comes the role hierarchy, then comes sharing rules, then we have public groups and queue and we have the manual shares. So at each level, sharing opens up the door for more access. So if you're going below the hierarchy, sharing will provide more and more access to the user. And if you want to close that access, it's not easier that one sharing rule will open up the access and then you create another sharing rule to close the access. It's not how it works. So in that case, you need to spend a strategic amount of time thinking how you can revoke that access. And sharing is accumulation of the small, small, small decisions over the time. Sometimes adding someone to the group, for the reorg, you have to do lot of things with the sharing, and every decision gets compound. So I highly recommend our admins to at least spend 30 minutes a month to refresh and reanalyze their sharing configuration to avoid the future problem. So this is basically the flow looks like, but I would say there is any of sequencing which admins should follow. It's pretty much open and admin can ask any question to our agent. Mike Gerholdt: No, I think you're right. I mean, Setup with Agentforce can do a lot in terms of explaining the configuration and then help change it. I think you really touched on that last answer of just slowing down for a second, verifying what the answer is to make sure that you're staying in control. My question to you would be, how should an admin validate what the agent tells them? Nikita Kothari: Oh, that's a good question. So for the read action, the information, we have mostly the links added to our prompts. We call it as a clickable link. So if investigation is saying that Nikita is part of this group, actually, there is a link of that group. So you can go to that group by clicking on that link, and you can actually see I'm a part of that group if you want to re-verify the stuff. So, that will give you more confidence that you know how admin is investigating the information or if admin is saying, "Nikita is part of the sharing rule and you'll have the link for the sharing rule." So you can actually go and verify whether that sharing rule contains the group or the users where it is providing that access. And with the write action, I think more critical is the right action. I mean, you don't want somebody, AI is coming to your system and randomly making changes to your system. So to do that, we have the validation layers. The first validation we generally come up with is for every write action, we explicitly ask for the approval, approval from the person who is making the changes. And we also have the permission boundaries, and if particular user doesn't have the permission to edit OWD, the agent won't be able to edit OWD for that person. And then the last part is the accountability. Every change we are logging into the setup audit trail saying that whether the AI agent did it or actual person did it. And then admin can verify it, whatever changes is made by the AI agent are trustable or not. So we will always advise admin to go and do as much as possible testing on the sandbox before making changes into the production. And another backup system is the Einstein Trust layer. We always say trust is our number one priority. So, Salesforce has built trust everywhere to make sure that we are not blindly making any changes, and as this is a very, very critical domain to our customers. Mike Gerholdt: No, that's great. You talked a lot about sharing, and I always feel like making a change with sharing, you want to make sure that you're doing it right. In your opinion, what is the most important thing an admin should review before making a sharing change? Nikita Kothari: So I would say, as I said before, we have some of the steps that I also wrote in my blog, that we have OWD sharing rule, rule hierarchy, and everything opens up the more access. So to close that access, it's very difficult to go back and fix something. So, I would highly recommend whenever our admins are making the changes, try it out first thing on the sandbox if it is working as expected or not. Or have some verification system or another set of eyes whenever you create some rule hierarchy or you're providing some access to the rule, rather than giving access to all of the user, first try with the minimal set of the user. Try with the one user and see if that user are getting right access to the right record. Because even if you fail to provide a single user a wrong access, that means that you're leaking your data. So having those, another, just starting with a small and then going into the bigger and bigger data, that would really help admin to build the reliable system. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, absolutely. I think it can do a lot and I've seen it do a lot, but what is something that Setup with Agentforce can help with today that maybe admins may not realize? Nikita Kothari: I feel like still adoption, it's tricky because people are quite a lot thinking that Setup with Agentforce will replace their job. But I would say rather than replacing, it will provide you a lot of capabilities and it will remove a lot of overhead from your day-to-day work life, rather than going and looking into the SQLs or doing everything by yourself, just give it a try. And then you can see how much opportunity it is opening up for you to save time. And that time you can actually use for building a more structural, and because structure mattered a lot when it comes for sharing. How your roles are getting access or how your groups are getting access. And if you're just blindly following the steps and not thinking much, then you are in a trouble. So you can spend more time and thinking about, how can you better make a structure for your organization? And you can get more time to think about your business. And I feel like most of the troubleshooting cases we have covered into the Setup with Agentforce flow. Yeah. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. You mentioned a lot, admins should get out and use it and try it, and I'm a big proponent of that. So I'll end on this question. What for you is one kind of low risk question that an admin could ask Setup with Agentforce today to better understand their sharing configuration? Nikita Kothari: I think my one of the favorite action among all of it is record access, to ask why this person is having access to this record. And you see how much it can do, it will give you the whole list of the OWD configuration for that particular record, or it will look for the sharing role, it will look for the group membership, it will look for the manual shares. And it will do all kind of investigation for you just when you type a one single natural language to your agent. So you can always think about someone which is having more knowledge about the setup. It's sitting with you and helping you to deal with all of the setup configuration. Because setup, again, we have like 1,300 setup pages, which is lot. And going through all and learning the capabilities of each setup action, it's difficult. So, that's why we built the Setup with Agentforce, which will give you the capability that you don't have to learn everything on the go. And you can start asking question to our bot. If it won't be able to answer, it will guide you in the right direction to help and analyze your queries or your concerns. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. I am so glad that we have Setup with Agentforce. I feel like I could have used it 20 years ago. I know I had a lot of questions and would have to dig through my notes on org-wide and sharing and group sharing and all kinds of that stuff. So, I appreciate it. And I appreciate the article and you taking time out of your day to talk to admins and share your knowledge about sharing and setup and how we can do things better. Nikita Kothari: Yeah. I think admins are always on the top of our list. I would love to hear from our admins how they like this Setup with Agentforce, specifically with the sharing, how it is helping them or what they are looking forward to, because I feel like most of our critical projects and best solution came up with the admin feedback. And we really want to make admin life easier. We always have meetings internally, our engineering team, our product is always so much focused about thinking about our admins, thinking about the newer way to introduce some more features to make their lives easier so that they can focus on building a reliable solution. So, it was great talking to you. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, no, I'm glad you could share your knowledge with us today. Thanks so much. Nikita Kothari: Yeah, thank you so much. And one more thing, we will be at Dreamforce. Larry Sherrill is our Product Manager. They're having a lot to share at Dreamforce. So, feel free to stop at user access booth. I'll be there too, so come and say hi and share your feedback. We would love to hear back from you. And we keep making a lot of progress on Setup with Agentforce, so stay tuned, follow our blogs, and it will be something will be really helpful in future for you guys. Thank you so much. Mike Gerholdt: Thanks again to Nikita for helping us understand how Setup with Agentforce can make sharing investigations faster without taking judgment out of the Salesforce admin's hand. And the takeaway is just really simple, use AI to uncover the source of access, validate what it tells you, and test changes carefully before they reach production. Now, if you enjoyed this episode, and I bet you did, I hope you did, you should subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast. Share this episode maybe with your team, fellow team, user group. Oh, I like that, if you'd share it with the user group, that would be awesome. And then, how about this? Start with one low risk question about your own org sharing configuration and ask that to Setup with Agentforce. Until next time, we'll see you in the cloud.

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Jean Velonis, Senior Technical Program Manager at Salesforce. Join us as we chat about the new Superbadge Cohort Learning pilot program and how you can get involved. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Jean Velonis. Improvements to Superbadges I have to confess, I've always found Superbadges to be a little intimidating. They're locked behind requirements, without clear step-by-step instructions for how to work towards them. That's why I sat down with Jean Velonis, a Senior Technical Program Manager working to improve the Superbadge experience. The first thing Jean wants you to know is that they've overhauled the Superbadge UI. Instead of being locked behind a list of requirements, Superbadges now have a Recommended Learning section. These Trailhead modules and badges are organized into units, giving you a much clearer path to work towards your goal. What is the Superbadge Cohort Learning pilot program? In addition to the UI changes, Jean and her team are launching a new pilot program called Superbadge Cohort Learning. These sessions let you connect with other learners and subject matter experts to work towards a Superbadge together, guided by a facilitator. For now, the pilot program is focused on two of the most popular Superbadges. For admins, the Data Quality and Validation Superbadge gives you the knowledge you need to prep your org for AI. And if you're a dev or looking to improve your coding skills, there will also be groups for the Apex Callouts Superbadge. They're running both in-person and virtual versions of these sessions, so look out for them at a Dreamin' event or community group near you. Volunteer as a subject matter expert or facilitator If you already have these Superbadges, Jean highly recommends volunteering as a subject matter expert or a facilitator. When you're working with new learners, you'll run into questions and situations that deepen your understanding of the topic more than you ever thought possible. The other thing about students is that they keep learning. Teaching is an incredible opportunity to make strong connections that will last throughout your career. As Jean explains, two of her former students are now her go-to people when she has code or Flow questions. Make sure to listen to the full episode for more from Jean about the Superbadge Cohort Learning pilot program. And make sure you're subscribed to the Salesforce Admins Podcast to catch us in your feed every Thursday. Podcast swag Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store Learn more Sign up to be a subject matter expert or facilitator: Superbadge Cohort Learning Pilot Session Salesforce 360 Blog Post: How to Stand Out in the AI Era with Superbadges Admin Trailblazers Group Admin Trailblazers Community Group Social Jean on LinkedIn Salesforce Admins on LinkedIn Salesforce Admins on X Mike on Bluesky social Mike on Threads Mike on X Full Transcript Mike: This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, I'm joined by Jean Velonis to talk about the Superbadge Cohort Learning Pilot and what happens when admins stop learning alone and start solving problems together. We're going to dig into these cohorts and how they bring experts, beginners, and everyone together in the same room to work through real challenges, build confidence, and get comfortable being uncomfortable. Because for Salesforce admins, knowing how to troubleshoot, test, fail safely, and ask better questions matters just as much as knowing where to click. And as AI and agents become part of everyday platform work, well, those fundamental skills help admins validate what is correct, keep data reliable, and make sure that the platform reflects what the business actually needs. So listen in, subscribe and share this episode with an admin who learns best by rolling up their sleeves and figuring it out. Let's get Jean on the podcast. So Jean, welcome to the podcast. Jean Velonis: Thank you so much for having me. I think this is the second time I've been here, but it's been a while. Mike: I know. Well, when you do the podcast for almost 14 years now, I try not to have guests back, only if they're important like yourself. Jean Velonis: Ooh, thank you. Mike: We were Salesforce MVPs together a hundred years ago when the internet was still tubes and wires, and now we're both at Salesforce. And you're on, I would call, what, the curriculum side, the learning side? Jean Velonis: Yeah, I would categorize that. It's more Trailhead, right? So long story short, certification was my jam for so long, and superbadges were part of that. But over the last couple of years, we've decoupled from certification. We're still with Trailhead and we're still considered an assessment, but we don't have all the guardrails of certification on us anymore, which is really exciting. Mike: Gotcha. And just for reference, if anybody thinks they might have met Jean at a Dreaming event or a Salesforce event, you tend to usually have purple hair and a bedazzled Ranger hat. Is that an accurate description? Jean Velonis: These are facts. These are facts. I've had purple hair probably since six months of coming into Salesforce. And if anybody knows the famous Chris Duarte out there, she taught me everything I know about bedazzling. So I made a Ranger hat. Mike: Yeah. A lot of people bedazzle now because of her. Jean Velonis: Yes. Mike: Well, let's talk about this new Superbadge cohort learning pilot that you've kicked off because I think you're trying to bring the best of both worlds together. Jean Velonis: Absolutely. This isn't a new concept either. I'll just throw that out there. We had some amazing trailblazers before the pandemic and even through the pandemic doing Salesforce Saturdays or Salesforce Sundays and they would get together in person or virtually and work on Trailhead. So this is kind of piggybacking off that concept and really bringing some of the community magic to superbadges because I think we can all look at a superbadge and be like, oh, that's kind of intimidating. There's no step-by-step instructions. This looks really hard. There's multiple steps to it, and that just looks hard and I don't want to do it. But the cohort learning brings a facilitator, like a community group leader or a Dreamin event person to come in and help bring people together virtually or in person and work on a Superbadge together. And we've been running a couple of pilots of these. We did one at TDX and WITness Success in Indi. And it's been really successful in person just because you can pair experts and newbies together at a table and make people really uncomfortable, and then they start talking to each other and learning from each other. And I think that's what gets really excited about doing this cohort learning. And then we've done a couple of virtual events as well where we've brought community group leaders, kind of like train the trainer of like, here's how you should run this virtually to be successful, because that virtual is a little bit different beast. It's really easy to hide and stay on mute and turn your camera off where we really try and get people excited to share their skillset with each other. Mike: Yeah. No hiding in the dark corners. So I really like the idea of this. I've always really enjoyed Trailhead because I'm the type of learner that likes to do it at my own pace. Sometimes I even crazily go back and redo a badge just because I feel like if I've rushed through it, did I really learn it or was I just trying to get it done? And when I'm really trying to learn it, I really take my time. I will agree with you, I've written superbadges. I also enjoy the freedom. They're kind of like, "Here, go, do. " And you're like, "Oh yes." It's almost like the days of driver's ed when you get out from behind the desk and you finally get to drive the car in the real world. It's a little more of trying things out. So are these cohorts that you're doing now, are they open to any superbadge or are they just specific ones? Jean Velonis: That's a really good question. We looked at our whole library of Superbadges and we wanted to pick one for admins and one for developers. And that doesn't mean it's just if you have that skill set. It's more of like, here's two of the main roles we see in the community. So we have data quality and validation, which is really for anybody prepping you for this agentic ecosystem that we're in, cleaning up your org. Mike: I mean, to be honest with you, that's what we've needed to do this whole time. Even before AI, it's sweeping the floors, you know? Jean Velonis: Yeah. I mean, it's been that way for a long time. I think I made my whole Salesforce admin career of going in and cleaning up orgs, to be honest. So that was a great place for us to start. And then now we've started looking at the developer side of it and we picked Apex Callouts superbadge for all of our developers. And I was very intimidated by trying to put together a superbadge in a box for that cohort because I'm not a developer. But going through this process, I'm like, "You know what? I think I can actually do this," And that's because of all the great learning badges on Trailhead and being able to go at your own pace. Because that's a whole nother skill set for an admin to try and figure out, right? Mike: Right. I've often thought of, this is just how Mike's brain works. If I had children, I would for sure name one of them Apex because then you just gave them a shout-out. Jean Velonis: That's hilarious. I would've never thought- Mike: That's how I work. My brain today is like, "Oh yeah. Hey, did you hear you were mentioned on a Salesforce podcast?" "Of course I was. I'm an Apex Callout." Jean Velonis: I'll tell you a weird secret. I do put my children's names in superbadge content. All of us over here under the superbadge team put little- Mike: Easter eggs? Jean Velonis: Easter eggs, yeah- Mike: Yeah, I love it. Jean Velonis: ... out there. It's either in the org or it's in the content. We're all moms over here, so we would like to give our kids a shout-out. Mike: Well, I will see your Easter egg and I will call your Easter egg. In almost every admin keynote demo, we have put our pets' names. Jean Velonis: I love that. Mike: So you can go back and figure out whose pets were whom. The only time, the only exception was we had Einstein Voice rollout and my dog's name was yet to be used and we couldn't use it because it wouldn't recognize it. It was too hard to say. And so we had to go with something easy and punchy with hard consonants in it. So anyway, yes. I think there should be, I'm sure there is somewhere, a whole forum of Easter eggs found in Trailhead material. Jean Velonis: 100%. And I think that's what Trailhead is, where it's the weird, it's the hanging out, it's the learning something new, it's the being uncomfortable. Because it really is, learning can be really uncomfortable. Mike: I mean, it exposes a weakness and people don't like feeling weak. It's also the thing I always think about whenever I was doing training because you're changing something. And the person that told me how to do training gave me a very well-rounded, concise piece of advice, which is people don't like to go to work and feel stupid. And when you change something, even in a CRM, that's what that comes from. And people don't like to feel stupid. And I feel that way. You change something, you're like, "Oh, this was here yesterday. Why isn't it here?" And you blame yourself and that's not the point. You do a lot of training. So let's go through just some scenarios of I'm a new Salesforce admin. I stumbled across this podcast. Also, hello. You have a lot of episodes to catch up on. That's okay. You have a lot of time. What should they do to prepare to come to one of these learning cohorts? Jean Velonis: I mean, the easy answer is get on Trailhead and start earning badges, that's number one. Step two is take a look at the new look and feel for superbadges and that will bring you to our recommended learning. It used to be required to unlock the superbadge, but we've just now come onto what I would say the Trailhead UI. Superbadges are put into these units now where the first unit is like, let's get ready. Let's get your developer org. Let's do the recommended learning. Let's connect it to your superbadge now. That's all a little bit different than what we used to do with superbadges. You had to unlock it and then you had to go down all the way to the bottom of the page to hook up your org. Now it looks like a regular module or badge, which is nice because as somebody who struggles with reading and keeping my place on Trailhead, this new guy is really going to help with that. But also doing the recommended learning I think is key even though it's unlocked now and you don't have to do it. I will tell you I am the first person to start doing something and being like, "Oh, I have no idea what I'm doing with this. Maybe I should have done-" Mike: I should have done those recommended modules. Jean Velonis: Yes. And then I will have to go back and learn and figure things out. I did that with the prompt template superbadge. I thought I knew what I was doing. Mike: No. Jean Velonis: I did not. And that's falling, that's failing forward. That's realizing I don't know what I'm doing. Let me go figure this out and then come back to it. So I think that's step number two. Go and read through the superbadges, look at them, look at the recommended learning. And then if you see that there is a Dreamin event or a community group doing one of these superbadges, join them. Even if you've done the superbadge, that's okay. You can go help the other people that are there. Mike: Oh, I almost think that would be the next best thing after doing a superbadge is going and volunteering to help train. Because never will you ever learn more about something than when you have to train somebody about something or walk around the room and answer questions. You're like, "Hey, I didn't run into that when I was doing mine, but let's figure it out." And it's super fun because then you're like, "This wasn't a problem for me, but now it's a problem that I get to work through." Jean Velonis: Yeah. I mean, bringing you all the way back to SABWA. Mike: Oh, sure. Jean Velonis: Call out, Mike. I mean, geez. Yeah, that is my favorite thing to walk around, especially I live in these superbadges every day. Our team builds them. We maintain them. We have to deal with all the product changes that are very quickly changing and trying to keep up with everything. So being able to walk around the room and see how trailblazers are doing things, that not only helps me figure out, okay, here's some of the common pitfalls or where people are getting stuck and I can write some hints to help, but also maybe we don't do that in the next superbadge or maybe we call it out in a different way or let's go update the help article and call this piece out if somebody's getting stuck somewhere. So it's super helpful. But also you get to meet a ton of different people, which we do virtually every day, but it's easy to hide behind the keyboard again. And to be able to connect with somebody and see their aha moment of where they're like, "Yes, I figured this out," that's super gratifying. Mike: Oh, that's almost the time that you make a friend. Jean Velonis: A best friend. Mike: Yeah. I mean, because you're always going to be like, "Well, let's continue chatting while you work through this." And then the next thing you know, they're building Apex Callouts, and you're like, "Oh, I didn't get that far." And then they're teaching you stuff. I promise you it'll happen. Jean Velonis: It will happen. I can say 100% certainty it will happen. I have two people that I call on all the time or that I met through a conference or doing something, and I'm like, "Okay, I know this person knows code and I know this person knows flow. I'm not good at those things, but I can text or call or Slack and be like, I'm stuck." Mike: Right. So I mean, I have a thousand questions, but let's go to the opposite end of that where if you're a community member, maybe you're a user group leader or a Dreamin event person and you're like, "This sounds like a super fun thing for me to include in my agenda," What would their steps be for possibly including, I know it's in a pilot, but for including this or what's your vision for it moving forward? Jean Velonis: Yeah. We have a facilitator signup forum- Mike: Sweet. Jean Velonis: ... which I'm sure you would be happy to put that in the bio or the show notes. Mike: It is in the show notes as we speak. Jean Velonis: Perfect. But yeah, just signing up to raise your hand to be a facilitator is huge. Because I'm going to have this superbadge in a box ready very quickly for people to take to a pilot. I have two Dreamin events that are already wanting to do this in August and a community group that also wants to bring it to their local people. So signing up to be a facilitator and doing this on your own, love that. And I wish I could go to every one of them, to be honest. I looked at a couple of them and I'm like, "I might be able to make this work and just show up." But there's also a piece in that form too to sign up to be a subject matter expert and help if there's somebody locally that wants to do this. And selfishly, I put that in there that if you want to help us build superbadges, that would be awesome too. Mike: Right. And this sounds rhetorical, but it is honest. They should have probably already completed that superbadge that they want to facilitate or host. Jean Velonis: I mean, I'd advise it. And with the new UI, you can redo a superbadge. You can retake it now. So you can do the superbadge over. Mike: To refresher, because maybe you haven't done it in a while and want to see what's new. Jean Velonis: I mean, the facilitator that did WITness Success told me she still had her notes when she originally did the Apex Callouts in 2017. Mike: Wow. Jean Velonis: Right? Mike: I probably have notes from somewhere of 2017 I have nowhere. That's awesome. Jean Velonis: No, that notebook's gone. Mike: Yeah. I always think of admins listening to this and I don't want it to be a pitch session for your cohort, but this is really a neat way to get involved with the community. From all of your work, and this is just stepping out of your role and what you're doing in this superbadge cohort. Out of all of the work that you've done at Salesforce and what you create for Trailhead, what are some of the biggest themes that you run into that really, when that light bulb turns on for an admin, they suddenly just become, I don't want to say instantly become successful, but they really start to click and feel confidence and have that aha moment? Jean Velonis: I think being a Salesforce admin for such a long time, being able to fail and problem solve is probably the best skill you can have. You can learn any technical skill. I can go into a dev org and break things and figure out how products work. But if you don't know how to problem solve through something, getting to that aha moment is going to take you a long time if you're too afraid to break something. And I have broken things. And I think I've told you, I've deleted records from an org before and went, "Uh-oh, how do I get those back?" So that is one of my favorite things is to go into a playground or dev org and just break it, pull things apart, see how it works and be like, "Okay, I know where I want to go, but how do I get there? And I don't know how to get there, but if I go in and break everything, I'm going to learn a lot more than if I follow step-by-step instructions of how to do something." Mike: Right. If it works out perfect the first time. Jean Velonis: Yeah. What did you learn? Oh, I know how to do that. Okay. Well, what's next then? Mike: Do you find that you have to remind people that it's okay to fail when building and it's okay for things to not work the way you want them to the first time? Jean Velonis: Yeah. And I mean, that's how we build superbadges. I mean, we have all these SMEs and we look through different use cases and we go into an org and build it out and we're like, "Well, that's not going to work for this unit," or, "That's not going to work for this use case," or how do we find those different tasks to lead the witness basically in the challenge to get to where we want them to go, but without telling them? And you can do it 97 different ways. There's not necessarily always a right way to get there. Mike: Right. I know I've sat down. We used to have, it was Dreamforce long, long time ago. And I was paired up with Josh Birk and we were helping a customer through a situation. And it was interesting because both he and I came up with a solution. Both he and I came up with a very different path to the solution. Mine was using, at the time, Flows, and his was using some code and some triggers. And the customer's like, "But which one's right?" And we're like, "Both of them." I mean, never could you ever run into a situation where both solutions are equally correct. It's based on what you want to maintain and your knowledge. Jean Velonis: 100%. And now you also have this agentic thing that will try and tell you the right path to go and you can be like, "Well, I don't want to do it that way." And it's like, "Oh yeah, you're right. Let's try it this way." So I think even having that fundamental base of an admin or a dev is really going to serve you well in this ecosystem. So problem solving, having a foundational skill set, and then also knowing where you want to go and problem solving your way to get there. Mike: Right. So let me ask you, you've brought up agents and AI sometimes intentionally, sometimes unintentionally, but I mean, it's definitely something that it's our every day now. From your perspective as building a lot of content and in the learning space, what is the most important thing you think admins should learn about AI and agents? I Jean Velonis: I think the most important... Well, there's two. Learning when to trust that the AI is telling you the right thing and knowing how to ask the prompts and the questions. Because you may not know where you want to go, but if you have your fundamental base of the system, you can ask it the right questions to get you where you're going. And as somebody who struggles with writing content, I know where I want to go, I know what the tasks are for the superbadge. And I can say, "Okay, now help me write an error message," or, "Help me write a hint for a help article that's going to help them get unstuck." And you can ask AI that too. You're like, "Hey, I'm using this Flow element. I'm trying to go here and make this system do this. It's not working. Help me untangle this." Mike: Right. Help me. Teach me, don't tell me. Jean Velonis: That's key. Teach me, don't tell me. I don't need step by step. Mike: I do that all the time with Wordle. Don't tell me the answer, just help me figure out what this word is. I'm stuck. Jean, last question because I know you have to go. It's 2030 and the Superbadge Cohort Learning program is out of pilot. What does it look like? Jean Velonis: It looks like all of our trailblazers getting together, helping each other learn something new, experts and newbies and everybody in the middle taking something away from that hour or that day that they spent with each other and everybody having their own aha moment. Whether it's I helped somebody get unstuck or I got a new superbadge or I made a new contact or I'm out of a job and I made this whole partner and I handed them my resume, those are the things that make the community go round. Those are the things that makes learning so important. And it's okay to break things. Mike: Right. Very well. Very well said. Thank you, Jean, for being on the podcast. Jean Velonis: Thanks, Mike. Happy to be here. Mike: Big thank you to Jean Velonis for joining us and reminding us admins that getting stuck is not the end of learning, it is usually where the useful part begins. Now, whether you join a cohort, you facilitate one, or you know what, you simply just help another Salesforce admin work through a challenge, teaching and problem solving are powerful ways to strengthen your platform judgment. Be sure to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins podcast. Share this episode with somebody who is ready to learn and really earn that next aha moment. Until next time, we'll see you in the cloud.