Salesforce Admins Podcast

Why Mentorship is Crucial in the Salesforce Ecosystem   Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Warren Walters, Salesforce MVP and host of the Salesforce Mentor YouTube channel and website.   Join us as we chat about what admins and devs can learn from each other and why everyone can learn to code.   You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Warren Walter. The rise of the Admin-eloper If you’ve ever taken a peek at Warren’s content, you may have noticed that a lot of it is about learning how to code in Apex. So why have him on a podcast for admins? That’s dev stuff, right?   Warren has noted that there's an increasing convergence between these two roles. Personally, I've gained confidence in implementing code because AI assists in clarifying the processes involved. Similarly, for developers, using declarative tools such as flows and formulas can be much simpler than crafting solutions in Apex.   In short, we’re all becoming admin-elopers. Why Salesforce Admins should learn to code One of the biggest misconceptions that Warren wants to dispel is that only geniuses can understand coding. The truth is that some of the best developers he knows are people who never went to school for it and taught themselves everything they know.   As an admin, you don’t necessarily need to know how to build complex Apex customizations. A basic working knowledge of how programming works can get you far, especially when combined with all the declarative tools at your disposal. Soft skills can help you build your career Finally, Warren emphasizes the importance of honing your soft skills. A self-described introvert, he’s found that focusing on becoming a better communicator has helped him find his way into new roles and bigger opportunities.   He also urges you to think about your personal branding or, as he puts it, “how you want to present yourself to the outside world.” His YouTube channel has opened doors for him, but even something as simple as a portfolio can really help you stand out from the crowd.   There’s a lot more great stuff from Warren about his experience as a consultant and as a mentor, so be sure to listen to the full episode. And don’t forget to subscribe to hear more from the Salesforce Admins Podcast.   Podcast swag Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store Learn more SalesforceMentor.com Video: Salesforce Mentor on YouTube Video: Salesforce Apex Hours on YouTube Video: Coding with the Force on YouTube freeCodeCamp.org Podcast: How Can Solving Sudoku and Wordle Enhance Your Critical Thinking Skills?   Admin Trailblazers Group Admin Trailblazers Community Group Social Warren on X: @TheWalter954 Salesforce Admins: @SalesforceAdmns  Mike on Threads: https://www.threads.net/@mikegerholdt/ Mike on Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@salesforce.mike Mike on X: @MikeGerholdt Full show transcript Mike Gerholdt: This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we are talking about mentorship and learning how to code. Surprisingly, not surprisingly, because admins and developers need to know the best practices for creating our apps and deploying the best technology for our organizations. So I'm going to bring on Warren Walters who is a Salesforce consultant. He's an admin, he's a developer, he's a mentor and a self-described general geek. Now, Warren's on because he runs a really cool YouTube channel, and I came across his TikToks where he does Salesforce tutorials to help you understand and master the concept of different things in Salesforce. He has this really cool site, salesforcementor.com, and just a really fun guy to talk about in terms of the world of mentorship, what a lot of skills are that he's seeing, and things that people should be paying attention to. Now, before we get Warren on the podcast, I just want to make sure that whatever you're using to listen to the Salesforce Admins podcast, make sure you hit that follow or subscribe button because then new episodes will show up on your phone or on your computer right away. So with that, let's get to our conversation with Warren. So Warren, welcome to the podcast. Warren Walters: Well, hey Mike, I'm happy to be here. Super excited because I've been listening to the podcast for such a long time and I'm finally on it, which is, I don't know if it's a dream come true or an honor, but I'm just happy to be here. Mike Gerholdt: It's destiny. Warren Walters: I'll take that. Mike Gerholdt: That's what I'll call it, it's destiny. Well, I ran across your TikToks when I was posting stuff about the podcast and really loved some of the videos that you're doing and the topics you're talking about. So let's just start off with what you do in the Salesforce ecosystem and how you got started. Warren Walters: Sure. So my name is Warren Walters. I am a Salesforce engineer. I do lots and lots of development. I probably talk too much about development. Some of you may or may not have seen my face on YouTube, and that's where I primarily host a lot of my content. And just from my side, I've been in development for about 10 years now. Various different companies, various types of companies to consulting ISVs in-House. And more recently, I've been focusing on a lot of mentorship and training in the Salesforce development space. So that's a little bit about me. I can dive deeper depending on where you want to go. Mike Gerholdt: Well, I think the mentorship part is intriguing. You said development a lot in this is admin podcast, but we kind of all live in the same space now. I think what's interesting is when I started doing Salesforce things back in 2006, there was a clear line between here's things I can do with the UI. Drag-and-drop GUI was a thing. Oh my God, it's WYSIWYG now, that was the new acronym back in '06. But then there was also really hard things that you had to learn. I remember going across to another part of my organization and talking to a developer who had to learn Python, how to deploy stuff. So there was code and there was the hard way of doing things, and there was the unhard way of doing things as people looked at it. Now those lines seem to be blurred. I mean, I'm looking at some of the data cloud stuff that we're coming out with, and you can very seamlessly connect things through a UI. So let's start with that is sometimes you hear terms where people mash together names of personas of admin and developer, and they think just because it's declarative, it must be developer or it must be admin. And because it's code, it must be developer. Warren Walters: Yeah. So it's funny you bring up those personas in the mashing admin and developer together, because as far as I know, it's called or it's rising to be called admineloper. I've heard that a couple of times [inaudible 00:04:25]- Mike Gerholdt: It makes me think of Jackalope. Have you ever heard of a Jackalope? It's a rabbit with weird horns. Warren Walters: Yeah, maybe that'll be their mask on it in a couple of weeks. Dream Forces around the corner. Mike Gerholdt: It is. Warren Walters: But yeah, so from my side, especially with the mentorship and what I like to do or a lot of what I do is to help people understand that there's not just one type of person anymore. Maybe years ago it was like that, but now it is very fruitful for you to understand all sides of the Salesforce. And this could be the configuration. So knowing how to set things up and the fields and the whizzy wigs like you mentioned, but also the benefits of knowing some development things. Now, maybe you don't need to jump all the way in where you're writing custom integrations yourself, but to just understand those core fundamental concepts of development can really help you build out more complex solutions and communicate better with your teams. And through mentorship, especially with a lot of admins, it's all about encouraging them and showing them different resources they can use to really understand some of the concepts that were traditionally a bit foreign to them or locked away in a separate area that's only for developers, which is not true anymore. Mike Gerholdt: They'll be developers, let's put that on the map. It's interesting because I think maybe, I'll go back 18 months ago before I had a really cognizant working awareness of AI. Learning code meant copy the snippet of code, find a developer friend and be like, what does this do? Now, I put a validation rule into ChatGPT just to have it double check what I was doing. And it can tell you back, you can copy snippets of code into AI and have it tell you what it's doing. So I have to believe that some of that acceleration for admins, just basic understanding of code is a little bit greater now that we have some tools like that, right? Warren Walters: Yeah, it's really been an explosion of what tools we have at our availability to help us understand it a lot better. In the past, we had maybe things like Stack Overflow and different websites you could go to, or if you were taking it back, you have to buy a book or something and try to read it. And that barrier to entry- Mike Gerholdt: The library. Warren Walters: That barrier to entry really stopped a lot of people from diving in and understanding certain things that were going on in Salesforce development and in code. But now with those other types of tools and even the tools that Salesforce is releasing, we're able to more easily understand different code and formula fields. Even our flows now, we're starting to be able to just reduce all of the headache and all of the additional knowledge that you needed to have to be able to work with those particular items. Now, there are some benefits of going, getting that deeper understanding, really learning the fundamentals and branching out further into programming concepts. But at least to get you started, get your feet wet, these AI tools have been really great for helping people get some encouragement and seeing if they're on the right path and getting more, down to complex questions where you're saying, all right, you needed to go to a developer friend to get that looked up. You might come with a more refined question now that you're using AI instead of just, here's the code, help me out. It's, I have this particular piece of code, it should do this. How does this look to you? Is it best practice? So the conversations are shifting a little bit more. Mike Gerholdt: Plus also just disseminating some of the code that admins would look at, it's not foreign into, I don't know what this does, pages and pages of stuff. I can at least copy it and maybe have AI give me an idea of where to start. Warren Walters: Yeah, that's funny too where the starting piece, just because it's really about what it gives you. So in certain aspects you have to be a little bit careful of AI because of it could produce code in a different language other than Apex, you get Python code. And if you don't know those fundamentals, it can really set you down maybe a rabbit hole or not be as helpful as you think. So it's a word of caution to a lot of my mentees. I definitely want them to use it, but make sure that you're still doing that due diligence to understand some of the basics of it. Mike Gerholdt: If you're having it generate code for you, I think I'm in the translation part of the world. So let's start there though with mentorship, what comes up most in the mentorship and in mentees that you work with? Warren Walters: Certifications is always a big topic. What search should they get and what should they focus on? What's next? So I think that one is really fun. And another big one is a lot of encouragement, especially for administrators that want to start to look in and dabble with code. A lot of people here, they have this perception that, oh, it's for the geniuses or only people that go to university, which is not true at all. I've met many, many developers that could code me into a box that have never gone to school, have just learned by themselves, and they're very passionate problem solvers and they really stick with that craft. So a lot of what I do is encouragement and then giving people resources for, if you're trying to learn integrations, start with either this Trailhead module or this specific article and bring it back to me and let's see if we can figure it out together. Mike Gerholdt: Do you find when individuals are coming into the ecosystem maybe with a coding background, that it's less obvious for them to pay attention to some of the declarative tools that are already built in Salesforce? Or is it intuitive to have them under... Is it natural to just look at everything first and then only go to code as a solution, or do they see everything's a nail and they've got a hammer and I'm going to code them into a box, as you said? Warren Walters: Yeah, it definitely starts out as everything is a nail and code is the hammer. It's funny because if you're in a lot of different orgs, especially when I was doing consulting, I got into a few orgs that had code written for very simple things that you can do in configuration, like creating a validation rule or sending an email, that kind of stuff. Just tons and tons and lines of code that were not necessary. But whoever got in there first, their mindset was, okay, I know how to code, let me just stick with that. So a lot of people that I talk with and mentor, especially if they have a coding background there, that's their first idea and that's one of the things that I have to educate them on, is Salesforce has so many different tools at your disposal. It's better to at least be familiar with everything that's available, like flows and the formula fields, and even just simple things like knowing how a lookup field works, especially if you're not coming from this sort of space, it can be a little confusing to understand what it is and how it works. So I generally recommend going on that journey of starting at the beginning, especially hitting a lot of those beginner admin trails where you can learn the fundamentals and work your way up into a good spot of understanding all the tools that are available and then you can jump into code. The code wall, always be there. There's plenty of reasons to use it, but you want to use the right tool for the right situation. Mike Gerholdt: And it's also, I have to think of just best use of your time. You could code escalation rules, you could code a workflow, but flow leaves you with an artifact that's easily upgradable and reproducible as opposed to something custom that, who knows, maybe something 10 releases down the line, Salesforce is going to change and now you might have to rebuild that Apex code. Warren Walters: Yeah, that's a big point, especially in consulting that you have to think about because a lot of times you may not be there one year later, two years later just because the contract or the project is ending. So designing for the team that is going to be there is very important. If you're going to leave a ton of code only with a team of admins, and that may not be the best solution for you. Or there might be a little bit of in-between where you can build out the complex pieces inside of code, but also leave the administrative side or leave the ability for the administrative side to have configuration or custom settings that can manipulate the code. All things like that are things that you need to start to think about when you look at the longevity of your code and the maintainability. Mike Gerholdt: Do people that you work with and start to work with, when they come into the ecosystem, do they know their path? Are they looking at consulting or being a developer first? Or is it just eyes wide open, help me figure something out, Warren? Warren Walters: A lot of it is eyes wide open. Lots of existing admins know that the developer path is out there, but people just starting out often they hear about development from other tech stacks and they know that it's out there, but it's hard to understand where should I be going? What should I be looking at? So there's a lot of education that goes on and there are so many different opportunities in Salesforce. So you need to try to find... Or I recommend trying out a bunch of things, but especially if maybe you have a background in project management or system management like databases and things like that. Take a look at how that translates directly over into a Salesforce career. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, no, that makes sense. Often you start off with an idea, and I've had a lot of friends too that were admins for a while and then they see that consulting dollar sign and they start chasing the money and obviously you can do that in any career. So that's interesting. You mentioned something that I wanted to think a little bit about, which is the topics that admins and developers should think about. So I started a little bit dumped into the deep end with AI, but we have declarative side, we have the code side. What is some of the stuff that admins and developers that you're mentoring aren't paying attention to and you're like, folks, the streetlight, the spotlight is on, you totally missed the sign on the side of the road. How did you blow past this exit kind of scenario? Warren Walters: That is really cool topic to bring up. I think a lot of it stems to one, everybody they know about AI, they probably are at least dabbling in it. If you're not dabbling in it, I would recommend at least looking at it. So that's one big piece. But the other part is probably more, I want to say on the soft skills or it's really around communication, especially for a lot of introverted people. It may not seem like it, but I'm pretty introverted. But it's around how you can communicate effectively either with your boss or your teams or anybody that you're working with. And that can be a huge valuable asset to you as an individual because it can help propel you into different types of roles that maybe somebody else that's lacking those skills or still working on those skills, they're not able to jump into what goes hand in hand with that is more personal branding as well. So this is how you present yourself on LinkedIn, doing things like YouTube channels, having a blog and that can also propel you above the rest, especially in a competitive market. Having that awareness of where you're at and how you want to be presented to the outside world can be very important for a hiring manager to make a decision on. So I recommend everybody working on a portfolio or having some sort of additional thing above the defaults of your resume and having a basic LinkedIn portfolio and that kind of stuff. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, I'm so on board with everything you just said because I feel like for a lot of my career when I was an admin, not only was it just understanding the configuration, but for lack of a better phrase, I'll say it was selling the configuration, really communicating to the organization, no, no, no, no. I know how to do this and this is what's best for right now based on what you told me and confidently communicating that. And then to your second point, showing up, I love it when people look like their profile pictures. It's so much because you look at, you think of how much you're online and when you see, especially with a coworker, your slack avatar all the time, and then you see them in person and they look the same, you're like, oh, I know I have the right person. Because I've always joked that I'm an introvert, but I play an extrovert for work. I can summon up a solid eight or nine hours of extrovertness, but 5:30 at Dreamforce, the bell tolls, Mike is running down the stairs, glass slippers falling off, he's turning into a pumpkin. He really wants to get back to his hotel room and just have some quiet stare at the wall time. But being able to show up and look familiar and then interact with people and that's how you network and that's how you get different ideas shared with everybody too. Warren Walters: I'm on board with that a hundred percent because at least for me, a lot of what you see online, a hundred percent of what you see online, I'm going to be the same exact way at a conference. As soon as you see me after I say hello, what is your name? I'm going to start spewing development and Salesforce right at you. So I think that that is important though to be authentic wherever you're presenting yourself because it's going to take that toll on you, especially over time, especially if you're at working at a place where either you have to change yourself to do that. It's important to be at home as much as you can in where you work and how you're presenting yourself. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, I mean for the longest time I wore a red shirt everywhere and it was very easy to spot Mike in the red shirt. So I had this question down, but in hearing you answer it, and I've done a million of these podcasts, I'm going to ask it to you different. So one of the questions, and you probably get this too, is like, all right, so what is good places to start learning? I'm going to ask you that, but I'm going to give you the caveat of you can't say the word Trailhead. And the reason I'm going to say that is, look, I work at Salesforce, Trailhead's table stakes. We all know to go there. Everybody in the community knows to go there. If you don't know to go there, you should go there. You're going to hear it at user groups. What are other places that you should go that are good places to learn in addition to Trailhead? Warren Walters: How much can I plug websites? How much is allowed? There are a few sites that I really love for either practicing Salesforce development or even Salesforce administration. I'm a big YouTube person. If you've looked me up at all, I love video, that kind of stuff. So there are some really major channels on there that I definitely follow. So some of them are Apex hours on YouTube. There's Matt Gary's channel, which is also very focused on Salesforce development, so also look at those. And then especially thinking more either when I'm studying for a certification or being more well-rounded, a lot of us know about Focus on Force, which is great. But what I like to do whenever I'm either taking exam or studying is, okay, maybe I'm doing some practice items, but I'm also actually building out the practice scenarios, maybe the exam question or something like that inside a Salesforce org so that I'm Retaining the knowledge a little bit better than just clicking through a few different examples. So this works really well for both administration and development. Just recreate the scenario the best you can when you're working through those. On top of that, there are some really great, if you're looking to dive and learn development, really great sites for that. So there's free code camp org, which is more of HTML JavaScript, it's like web languages. But like I've been mentioning, once you learn the fundamentals of development, you can transfer it around to any language and it will really help out in your configuration inside of Salesforce. So if you know how to do flows, either on the basic levels, if statement is an if statement, iterator, a loop is a loop in every different language. So you're able to translate some of those a little bit easier once you know how they work under the hood. I'm trying to think of some other ones. I know there are a ton and maybe I can link some down in the show notes and stuff like that. Mike Gerholdt: I didn't mean to put you on the spot but to be honest with you, every time I ask a question I'm like, oh, go to Trailhead. It's like, where do you start? Well, what are you looking for? Trailhead's been around I think almost 10 years to me now, it's to the point where it's like the help and FAQ part of a website. The first time that you saw a help or an FAQ on a website, you're like, oh, I wish every website had this. And to me, that feels table stakes. You should be able to do that. But then to your point, there are things that you should learn like communication skills and presenting skills and personal branding skills, and some of that's on there, but there's also good sites and good places to go to learn stuff like that. Last question, a little bit of a curve ball, but as a mentor, you've worked with a lot of people. What is one quality that is consistent across all of your mentees that seems to really drive their success? Warren Walters: I think one of the big ones is around persistence. Especially in the Salesforce space, configuration and development. I prescribed to a notion of, let me give you just enough so that you know where to look, you can be very dangerous. But not giving you everything to complete or solve challenges or whatever wacky idea that I've come up with at that point. So knowing that there is a light at the end of the tunnel, there is a solution for every problem, especially in coding. We're not inventing anything new and if statement is an if statement, some of these things that we are creating have been studied and perfected over a long period of time. So all you need to do is really find it and then use that solution and make that existing solution work for whatever your problem is. So understanding that idea of, okay, as long as I keep working at it, keep pushing, something will come from this that will put me in a better situation than I am currently, is really what I start to stress in a lot of the mentees that I work with. I think it can get overwhelming to learn development and maybe you don't feel like you're making progress, but a lot of times it's about looking back and reflecting on how far you've come to see some of the progress that you've actually been doing, which is really cool. So I think that's a big one, right? Persistence and then knowing when to ask questions may have come up before. But you're working on your own, you've found a lot of resources and you're going through and you end up getting stuck on one particular piece. I think it's important once you are completely stuck and you've done as much research as you can, of course to reach out. And it's humbling because maybe years ago, I didn't like to ask for questions read. I was like, oh, I should know everything, or I should be able to figure this out on my own. And I started progressing so much faster once I was able to say, all right, I've done enough research, I've looked at it, I'm going to ask a very educated question to somebody that has done this before, somebody who has been through whatever experience. It could be as small as making a formula field or as big as writing an integration to a third party system. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, you're spot on. Persistence is right there. You said that answer educated question, and this actually came up I want to say about a month ago or so. I interviewed David who does Wordle and Sudoku on YouTube and TikTok, he rather he also does coding, which is interesting. I feel like maybe a lot of software engineers and developers do Wordle and Sudoku. But I would rather, he said in working with team members would rather have a team member spend 10 minutes working through what they know to try and solve the problem and then come to me with a question as opposed to just immediately hitting a problem going, how do I do this? Throw your hands up. And I think when I've worked with people too well, how would you work through this? Because you need to start putting those connections together because every time something like this happens, there isn't going to be a Warren behind you that you can just turn around and be like, now what do I do? So educated question. That was really good. Warren, thanks for taking time out of your day and being persistent and mentoring people and being a part of the great Salesforce community. Warren Walters: Yeah, Mike, it's been a pleasure and an honor and I guess destiny to finally end up on the Salesforce Admin podcast. Super happy that I was able to make it out and spread the word about development. If you're scared about it, if you don't think it's for you, do not worry. I don't think it's for me, right? Everybody thinks that just try to take it one step at a time or reach out to me. A lot of developers are very, very helpful in the Salesforce Ohana. So yeah, so happy that we finally made this happen. Mike Gerholdt: Thanks, Warren. So that was a fun discussion with Warren. I love the term educated question. Going back and really thinking through it makes me think of that podcast that I did with David or ranks on Sudoku and Wordle solving, which is thinking through what are all the possible ways I can solve this, exercising those, and then turning to my community and seeing how they can help me based on what I've done. Because you might find a creative way of doing something, but I couldn't agree more, persistence, persistence, persistence. There is a light at the end of every tunnel, and I think his sight is very inspiring. I just pulled it up and the first thing it says, remember, I believe in you. So, thank you Warren for being on the podcast. Now, if you enjoyed the episode, be sure to click that follow or subscribe button so that new episodes are downloaded. And of course, if you're looking for resources, folks write down below in the show notes. I'm going to link to anything that Warren mentioned, including his social profile. But you can always find resources at admin.salesforce.com. That is your one stop for everything admin. Release information, more podcasts and a transcript of the show. Now be sure to join our conversation in the admin Trailblazer group. That is, of course, on the Trailblazer community, and you know where to find the link for that. That's right. It's in the show notes on admin.salesforce.com. So with that, I hope you enjoyed this episode. I enjoyed it a lot. And until next week, I'll see you in the cloud.  

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, it’s time for a deep dive with Josh Birk, who talks to Raveesh Raina, Principal Solutions Engineer at Salesforce. Join us as we chat about what Prompt Builder can do and how to write effective prompts. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Raveesh Raina. Intro to Prompt Builder Raveesh is the perfect person to talk to about Prompt Builder and all the cool stuff you can do with it. As a Solutions Engineer, he works with customers to implement the latest and greatest Salesforce innovations and right now, that’s Prompt Builder. Prompt Builder takes all the power of LLMs and combines it with your Salesforce data. You can use it to help you write personalized emails to customers, build out records with more information, and much, much more. The four prompt template types and what they do Right now, there are four prompt template types in Salesforce: The sales email template drafts an email you need to send to your customer. Some examples include introducing them to a new product, or reminding them about an appointment. With the field generation template, you can quickly and easily populate or complete a specific field on a record page with a summary or description created by an LLM. The record summary template does exactly what it says it does: summarizes a record. This one is really easy to use via Einstein Copilot, and his clients love it for meeting prep. Finally, there’s the flex prompt template. This can be used anywhere and everywhere on the platform to create a customized prompt template that incorporates records from multiple objects simultaneously. An example would be to create a personalized product recommendation for a customer based on an Einstein Next Best Action. With all of these prompt templates, you can dynamically ground them with data from Salesforce or Data Cloud. That gives the LLM the power to pull data from records or, with flows, from pretty much any object—standard or custom—in your Salesforce org. How admins can write effective prompts So how do you write effective prompts that do what you want them to do? Raveesh has four tips to share with us: Be explicit about your expectations and goals. What are you hoping to get out of the response? The AI needs a clearly defined goal in order to generate a good response. Contextualize the information. State if you want to add related records to contextualize the response. Specify your role. What is the persona for which this prompt template is built? Add limitations and set boundaries. For example, “do not exceed 500 characters.” The AI needs to be told, and sometimes told again, what not to do. This is especially important to think about as you test and refine your prompt in order to get consistent results. There’s a lot more great stuff from Raveesh about building better prompts and how Salesforce protects your data, so be sure to listen to the full episode. And don’t forget to subscribe to hear more from the Salesforce Admins Podcast. Podcast swag Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store Learn more Blog: The Ultimate Guide to Prompt Builder | Spring ’24 Trailhead: Get Started with Prompts and Prompt Builder Video: Salesforce Admins Innovate with Prompt Builder Podcast: Get to Know Prompt Builder with Marissa Scalercio Admin Trailblazers Group Admin Trailblazers Community Group Social Connect with Raveesh Salesforce Admins: @SalesforceAdmns  Mike on Threads: https://www.threads.net/@mikegerholdt/ Mike on Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@salesforce.mike Mike on X: @MikeGerholdt Full show transcript Josh Birk: Greetings everybody. Guest host, Josh Birk here, to take another deep dive into a topic. And this week, the topic is going to be Prompt Builder and Building on Prompts. I am joined by my good old colleague, Raveesh Raina, who is one of the people who wrote, for instance, our Ultimate Guide to Prompt Builder. Now, with no other hesitation, let's get over and talk to Raveesh. All right, today on the show, we welcome Raveesh Raina to tell us about all things Prompt Builder. Raveesh, welcome to the show. Raveesh Raina : Thank you very much, Josh. It's an honor to be here and thank you for having me. Josh Birk: Excellent. Well, let's start off with a little bit about you. Tell me, what is your current role at Salesforce? Raveesh Raina : So I am a Principal Solutions Engineer. I work predominantly with our account executives and account directors to helping customers get inspired with our latest and greatest innovations that we are publishing and that we are releasing into the market. So I have a specific focus towards financial services. I'm based out of Toronto, Canada, so I work with all of our major enterprise banks with a lot of the different innovations and as far as financial services cloud is concerned, which is our flagship industries product. So helping them get inspired and sharing ideas on how we can help them better meet their goals. Josh Birk: And was computer something you always wanted to get into? Raveesh Raina : No, it's definitely an area that I personally have tried to get better at. Josh Birk: Okay. Raveesh Raina : And it's definitely an amazing opportunity and an amazing space to be. Josh Birk: What did you go to college for? Raveesh Raina : So funnily enough, even though I am based out of Canada, I actually went to the United States for my undergrad and I did mechanical engineering. Josh Birk: Ah. Raveesh Raina : So I graduated from New Jersey Institute of Technology, NJIT, with a mechanical engineering degree. But life had a different set of actions for me and somehow, I ended up aligned to the Salesforce ecosystem a long time ago. Josh Birk: Nice. Okay. Now, today we're going to talk about Prompt Builder. And when customers ask you about Prompt Builder, they're not familiar with it, what's the early elevator pitch you give them? Raveesh Raina : I essentially tell customers that Prompt Builder is an easy to use tool, which allows them to send a predefined set of instructions to an AI model, with the expectation of getting a response that has both value and meaning to them. And by value and meaning, I'm specifically referring to within the context of the data that they are providing via their CRM for Salesforce. Josh Birk: Okay. And walk us through the four templates we have right now that frame that data and that value add? Raveesh Raina : Yeah, absolutely. So right now, as of today, we have four prompt template types, sales email prompt templates, that's the first one. The second one is going to be field generation. The third one is what we call flex prompt templates. And the fourth one is record summary prompt templates. Josh Birk: Yeah. Now, I think the first two there are pretty straightforward. We're generating an email to send out to somebody, and if we're summarizing or we're generating a field, it means instead of a human putting in things manually, the GenAI is going to create it. Tell me a little bit more about the second two because I feel they're off to the corners and they're also very different from each other. Right? What's the purpose of a flex template and what's the purpose of the record summary template? Raveesh Raina : Yeah, so what I'll do is let me tackle record summary template first. Josh Birk: Okay. Raveesh Raina : Just as its name suggests, a record summary template is used by an admin to summarize a record or to get a succinct overview of a particular record. It is best served, best delivered in the UI via Copilot. So that is what we've seen greatest success in, in that record summary prompt templates can be surfaced up via Copilot, but it allows the admin to summarize a record based on whatever data model that they have already implemented. Josh Birk: Got it. Raveesh Raina : So that's a record summary template. Now, flex prompt templates, they are really powerful and versatile because what they allow an admin to do is to connect up to five objects together in a prompt template for the purposes of grounding. Those five objects could be standard objects or custom objects. They don't have to be related to each other in any way, shape or form, but through the power of the UI that the admin is surfacing, they can ground the flex prompt templates with each of those different objects with the expectation of getting a response from the LLM. Josh Birk: And for listeners at home, if you have somehow missed all of the wonderful Salesforce marketing about Einstein Copilot, it is a conversational AI for your platform and we will discuss that in another episode. Now, when it comes to these kind of templates, let's focus on the sales email, as I think it's the most straightforward. Some people listening might be like, "Well, I already know how to generate an email. Why do I need generative AI to do this?" What do you think the value add specifically that these are being pulled in through an AI model and having a generative response as opposed to a human created one? Where do you think the power lies there? Raveesh Raina : So the way I like to think of it where generative AI sales email templates provide value is the fact that it provides an easy mechanism for a user to craft an email in a conversational style that includes human and natural language text into it. If I were to use a standard email template as an example, that is static text, but replaced with either merge fields or even sometimes even with related records. But it removes that humanality sort of, from crafting an email. And the recipient may recognize that this is static text, but with generative AI, it adds more humanity towards that email template type. So that's where I feel is some of that value added. Josh Birk: And I think to some people, they might be scratching their eyebrows there because they're like, "But Raveesh, I'm using a computer to generate this email." But I think that's exactly spot on because we've all gotten that email that's like, "Hello, first name at company name. Congratulations on your date." And it's like you know instantly, this isn't from a human, but what these GenAI models are really good at is mimicking a human-like response, this human-like writing. And so it's like you get something that's acting like it's somebody to draft an email every single time you're sending this out to somebody. Raveesh Raina : Absolutely. Absolutely. It adds a little bit more personalization to a piece of communication that was missing with your static email templates in the past. Josh Birk: And also, I think it's hard to do it on a podcast, right? It's hard to show it on the podcast, the power of being able to ground this in Salesforce data. Tell me a little bit about... For each one of these templates we're talking about, what kind of data can we bring into the AI model to let it represent whatever it is that we're trying to generate? Raveesh Raina : Absolutely. So the real power of our generative AI tools with Salesforce, in my personal opinion, is the fact that we allow admins and customers the option to dynamically ground these prompt templates. What we mean by dynamically grounding is adding placeholders in these prompt templates that will be automatically replaced with either merge fields directly from a record or related lists that trace back to the origin of that record, or even through the power of flows. Once again, get a subset of related records associated to that original parent record as well. So dynamically grounding can be done using merge fields, related lists, flows to get subset of records. And you can take it two steps further by grounding with Apex classes or even through the power of Data Cloud data model objects as well. Josh Birk: And what I think is also going back to the old way of doing things and doing things with this way, using flow, but also just because it's a conversational model, you can instruct the AI to do things based on the data. So it's not just, "Say something about this person's description." It could also be like, "Based on the fact that this person has no survey scores, change your response based on that." And what are some things that people who have flow skills can do to apply that extra layer of logic? Give me a good example of something that would change the course of the outcome based on a flow? Raveesh Raina : Yeah, absolutely. So I did mention that the power of flows is the fact that you can get subsets of records. So for example, if I want to surface up using a generative AI response, a summary of all open cases associated to a client or an account. If I were to use the standard related list component or resource picker, then it would give me a summary of all the cases associated to an account, whether it's open, closed, escalated, high priority, so on and so forth. But with flows, if I just want to surface up open cases only, that is what I can do through the power of dynamic grounding as well. Josh Birk: And what I love about it, if anybody's here, maybe for some reason, you haven't dipped your toe into the flow pool, the flows we're talking about can be very... I can do these flows, and I'm not Jen Lee. Flows are her job. She's the one who goes like, "Oh yeah, flow can do that crazy, impossible thing. Wait a minute, I'm going to show you how." Going on the other side of the spectrum, tell me a little bit about how data cloud can help complete this picture? Raveesh Raina : Yeah, absolutely. So as we all know, Data Cloud is an amazing tool that unlocks an organization's ability to tap into their enterprise data. So what that means is that for an organization that is using Salesforce, they may have a good portion of their data sitting in CRM, sitting in Salesforce, but a lot of it could also be sitting off platform in, for example, a lot of organizations, they have a separate dedicated app for their orders or their accounting, or even if they have a public website or mobile app, then some of that web traffic is logged in those third party systems. Josh Birk: Yep. Raveesh Raina : So through the power of Data Cloud, if they want to bring those insights and have a summarization or generative AI information associated to that data, customers are able to take all of that third party data that is sitting in those systems and have that surfaced up in Data Cloud. And the power of Prompt Builder allows for grounding with those Data Cloud objects or data model objects, I should say, and then surface up that information directly within the flow of work in Salesforce. Josh Birk: Yeah. Now, let's take a couple steps back because we've been talking a lot about data and grounding the data, taking the data from sources like Data Cloud, and I think that a lot of people have cautionary tales about AI. Describe the Einstein Trust Layer to me and how does it keep all of this stuff safe? Raveesh Raina : So one of the biggest messages that we have is the fact that we have zero retention policies with all of the public AI model providers that we have partnerships with. Whether those are, as an example OpenAI. So what that means is that I think we have to also take a step back and appreciate the fact that Salesforce's number one value is trust. And what we mean by that is the fact that we value our customers, we value that they are trusting us to securing their data. And we also take it one step further in ensuring that we are not sharing their data in any way, shape or form with any of these third party AI model providers. So a big part of the Einstein Trust Layer is the fact that we are not sharing customer data directly or indirectly with AI model providers there. And also at the same time, those AI models are not learning from Salesforce's and customers' data as well. Josh Birk: And to be clear there, it's not like some generally handshake between us and Sam Altman. We filter that stuff out. OpenAI does not have the chance to train their models based on our data because they never see it. Raveesh Raina : Correct. Absolutely. Josh Birk: Okay. And then just to bring this to another level, because we think about things like in P-term, P2 and privacy and stuff like that, that's also stuff that's not being shared with entities that don't need to see it. Raveesh Raina: That is correct. Yeah, absolutely. We as a company have gone the extra mile to ensure that PII, personally identifiable information, or PHI, that is not shared, and it is actively masked and obfuscated before it is even sent to an AI model for processing as well. Josh Birk: Got it. Now, you've written a blog post, Ultimate Prompt Builder Guide, thank you for that, it's very extensive, and in it you include some very good tips on how to effectively write a prompt. Give me the high level like what are some really good tips to let me be more effective with that? Raveesh Raina: Absolutely. So a couple of pointers that I will suggest as admins and customers are looking to design prompts are that there are a few different areas that you should try to focus on. First is be explicit in your instructions in terms of the expectations and goals as far as what is it that you're hoping to get out of the response. So making sure that you are setting those expectations. Second is contextualizing information, meaning that state if you are adding in some related records to further contextualize the set of instructions. Third would be to specify your role. What is the persona for which the prompt template was built out for, whether it was a customer support manager or an account executive? An important aspect of the prompt template that I would suggest is also ensuring that you add limitations and setting boundaries, so by being explicit with instructions such as, "Do not exceed past 500 characters," as an example. That is an explicit instruction and a guardrail, ensuring that the prompt template is not going to give a response longer than 500 characters. So those are some areas that I would suggest that folks go in on as far as designing prompt templates. Josh Birk: Yeah, one of the earliest things I realized in working with AI was, and this is in general, AI has this sort of default setting, shall we say, like a default tone, a default style. It thinks its response should be two paragraphs long, paragraphs should be three to four sentences. It's almost exactly what we'd learned back in high school for what a good writing style was kind of thing. Raveesh Raina: Right. Josh Birk: And it will default to that all the time unless you tell it not to. My favorite thing what you just said is explicit. Raveesh Raina: Correct. Josh Birk: I would actually add to that explicit and occasionally repetitive. Raveesh Raina: Yes. Yes, absolutely. It doesn't hurt being repetitive with your instructions because it's about ensuring that the AI model is going to meet your expectations of a response that has both value and trust. Josh Birk: Right. Because this is dynamically generated, which means even if you see the thing that you wanted to do once, run it three more times. Raveesh Raina: Correct. Exactly. Josh Birk: Because it might break one of your rules at one of those points. And then one of favorite anecdotes I give people is, if you saw the Dreamforce '23 keynote, we use Prompt Builder to do a sales email, and to have some fun, we added emojis to the sales email, which worked about three times out of five. Raveesh Raina: Yes. Josh Birk: Right? The team kept on coming out, they're like, "How do you fix this?" I'm like, "I have no idea. I'm going to go talk to the AI and figure it out." What it turned out was I had to beat the AI over the head and be like, "Not just use an emoji with this email, make heavy use of emojis all through this email." Be very, very explicit. Raveesh Raina: Absolutely, [inaudible 00:03:52]. Josh Birk: Now, unlike myself, you have actually had the advantage of working directly with customers on some of these issues, and feel free to nerd out on fintech and banks in general, but what are some specific problems that you've seen from customers? Obviously, if you need to not name names, that's great, but what are some specific problems that you're seeing Prompt Builder help solve? Raveesh Raina: Yeah, absolutely. I think one of the reasons why I have been able to talk to a lot of customers is just because I've been also listening to a lot of customers as well. I think one of the most glaring areas where generative AI and Prompt Builder can provide most value is the use case for meeting prep. So I'm a rep, or I'm a customer support manager, and I need to prepare for an upcoming engagement with a client for a meeting. Using generative AI, I can quickly get a succinct overview on a particular client with all of the different data points that has both value and meaning to me, which I can use as part of my conversation in that meeting with that client as well. So meeting prep or account summarization is of immense value where we are seeing a lot of success with sharing this value with customers, and they are absolutely head over heels signing up for using Prompt Builder to address this need. Josh Birk: Got it. Well, to learn more, everybody, we're going to point to Raveesh wonderful blog post. We'll point you to a couple of Trailhead resources, some help documents. Raveesh, thank you so much. I do have one final question for you. What is your favorite hobby? Raveesh Raina: My favorite hobby at the moment right now is cycling. I use that as an opportunity to bond and to spend time with my kids. I have a seven-year-old and four-year-old, so any chance we get, especially with the weather that we're having this summer, we go outside, we go for cycling around the trails and around our neighborhood. So yeah, right now it's cycling for me. Josh Birk: Wonderful. Raveesh, thank you so much for the great conversation and information. That was a lot of fun. Raveesh Raina: Thank you very much, Josh. Josh Birk: I want to thank Raveesh for sitting down with us this week. And as always, I want to thank you for listening. Now, if you want to learn more about this show and stories about being a Salesforce admin in general, go down over to admin.salesforce.com. Thanks again, everybody, and we will talk to you next week.

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we sit down for an Admin Evangelist roundtable discussion with Josh Birk, Jennifer Lee, and yours truly. Join us as we chat about how AI can help you be a better Salesforce Admin and what you can do to improve your prompts. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Josh Birk and Jen Lee. Practice your AI prompts With everything going on with Einstein Copilot and Prompt Builder, I wanted to bring the Admin Evangelists together to find out how they’re thinking about AI and what you should do to get ready. The number one thing that everyone agreed on is to start practicing your AI prompts. Josh recommends seeing if you can get your LLM of choice to tell you a dad joke. Then try and get it to tell you a better one. Just like how we had to learn how to write a good Google query, you’ll quickly find out that some prompts are more effective than others. Jennifer shares the story of how her husband used ChatGPT to help with their itinerary on their trip to Italy. They still had to double-check that the restaurants it recommended were still open and that the timing of everything made sense, but it was a great starting point for planning their vacation. How Salesforce Admins can get help from AI Both Josh and Jennifer also use AI to help with work. Jennifer’s found ChatGPT to be really helpful for writing formulas. She used to spend hours on Google trying to find an example that matched the exact scenario she needed. These days, she can just write a prompt with her specific parameters and get back something useful in seconds. If Salesforce gives her an error, she can tell ChatGPT about it and it’ll try to fix the code. Josh, meanwhile, has been using AI to help generate Apex code from scratch when he’s spinning up a demo org. As he’s quick to point out, it’s not necessarily helpful for the maintenance and debugging tasks that most developers do on a daily basis, but it’s perfect for his particular use case. The human in the loop One last thing we talked about that I want to highlight is the importance of the human in the loop. We used the example of someone calling a power company to find out why their electricity bill is higher. If a human has realized that the weather has a major effect on usage rates and created a screen flow to call the right API, then an AI might be able to give the customer the right answer. But you need a human in the loop to do that second-order thinking. We’ll have even more about how Salesforce Admins can use AI next week in Josh’s deep dive episode, so be sure to subscribe to hear more from the Salesforce Admins Podcast. Podcast swag Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store Learn more Trailhead: Get Started with Prompts and Prompt Builder   Admin Trailblazers Group Admin Trailblazers Community Group Social Jennifer on X: @JenWLee Josh on X: @JoshBirk Salesforce Admins: @SalesforceAdmns  Mike on Threads: https://www.threads.net/@mikegerholdt/ Mike on Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@salesforce.mike Mike on X: @MikeGerholdt Love our podcasts? Subscribe today or review us on iTunes!   Full show transcript Mike Gerholdt: So in the world of AI and GPTs, and I think one's called Hugging Face, maybe it's Hugging Chat, I don't know. There is a lot to learn and people maybe you're afraid of it or you haven't tried something out. I don't know. We've heard a lot as evangelists on the admin relations team. And so this week I wanted to dive in with all of the rockstar evangelists that I have. Josh Birk, our Senior Admin Evangelist, and Jen, our Lead Admin Evangelist. Also, everything flow about let's dive into prompts and let's start learning about prompts and what should we be afraid of or what shouldn't we be afraid of, or what should we start doing? So that was a really long, highly caffeinated intro, but welcome to the show, Jennifer and Josh. Joshua Birk: Thanks for having us. Jennifer: Hey. Mike Gerholdt: So I won't name names, but I have been around in the community, and I have heard people like, "Cool, oh, you've done something with ChatGPT." And to be frank, if you follow me on Instagram, you'll realize that my feed, sometime in March, quickly took over crazy images generated by Dall-E. Because I find it fascinating that I can give it words to a 1970s music classic rock and say, "Make a picture." And it will produce something that would take me years to put together. And sometimes it's crazy, and I have to share that with the world because I think that's just so cool. But I guess I'm not afraid to try things out. So that's where I was with the world of AI. Where do you guys fall? Joshua Birk: Well, first of all, I want to go back to something you just said about what's dangerous about talking to something like let's just call it ChatGPT. Just use that as the generic one since it's the most famous and most popular. But I go back to- Mike Gerholdt: It's like the Kleenex of AI. Joshua Birk: Yeah, exactly. Mike Gerholdt: Everybody knows about it. Joshua Birk: Exactly. And I'm going to say this and I'm going to add a huge caveat to it. But when it comes to going to especially a free one, and just tinkering around with it, it's the same thing that one of the best pieces of advice I ever got before I started programming on a pretty basic on an Apple II. And my teacher at the time, I don't even remember what the class was called, it wasn't computer science or anything like that. But basically he was like, "Do whatever you want. You're not going to break the computer." There's nothing you're going to do that's going to... Nothing's going to blow up. Nothing's going to go in smoke.  The dangers of using AI right now is not the conversation you're having with the AI, it's what you do with the result. So Mike, you're posting things to Facebook. What's the nefarious outcome to that? There's not, right? Now, if I use the generation of AI to submit my legal brief without checking it, you might run into some troubles. But what I always tell people is just jump in and just try talking to it, because until you do... I usually start with have it tell you a dad joke, have it tell you five dad jokes.  My favorite, actually, one of my favorites is go in and play 20 questions with it. Because having an AI guess the object that you're thinking in your brain is actually, it's an interesting way to prove how a conversational model works. But basically to go back to my teacher's advice, don't be scared. Go in an experiment. Jennifer: Yeah, I have to say that when it first came out, I wasn't one of the people who went running to play with it. But when we were planning our trip to Italy last year, my now husband went and used it to come up with the itinerary. He said, "Okay, we're going to start here. Here are the sites we're going to, recommend some restaurants for me." So then it came back and it said, "Okay, you should go here and here." He, of course, human in the loop, had to go verify that these restaurants still existed. Mike Gerholdt: Yup. Joshua Birk: Sure. Jennifer: But it helped put together our agenda. And then nowadays I've been using it to help me with formula creation, because I am the worst when it comes to the parens, commas, nested if statements, they drive me nuts. I used to spend hours Googling to find the exact scenario I needed that someone else posted, and then tweaked it. But now I can go and say, "ChatGPT, I need a if statement for three things. Give me the structure," and then I would put it in there. So it's been really helpful to me in that regard. Joshua Birk: And not to throw down Jen, but being the worst, I might have to, I'm not sure. I think I might be worse than you are, because I've done the same thing. And the nice thing is, so ChatGPT is what's called a chained conversational AI. Which means when you create that formula, if you get... Like you put it in and you get an error from Salesforce, you can give that error back to ChatGPT and be like, "You got this wrong," and it already has the context of the formula it gave you, and it'd be like, "Oh, you're right. Let me fix that for you." Jennifer: Right.  Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. And then just to clarify, in the context of what we're talking about, a prompt, because we spelled this out in our workshops, but a prompt is a starting line for an AI conversation or task where you tell the large language model what you're looking for using natural language, right? Joshua Birk: Yeah. Mike Gerholdt: So tell me this, because sometimes I struggle with this. How do you write your prompts differently, than say, putting in a search for Google? Joshua Birk: Yeah. So first of all, I think that's one of the reasons we call it... People are like, why prompt? It's a weird word. And I think the reason why we refer to it as prompt, because it's a more generic thing than saying query or question or request, or anything like that. Because the thing that you need to provide in a prompt... So let's compare those two directly. When you do a search in Google, it's basically going to a database of a whole bunch of really fancy stuff Google's done, and then you're always going to get the same answer.  If you do the same prompt in ChatGPT you might get slightly different answers because that answer is being generated on the fly. And so in order to be successful with... The nice thing with ChatGPT, once again, because it's a chain conversation AI, so you can start slow and then just keep adding context to it. But in a non-chained one like Prompt Builder, it's adding in all the instruction and the explicit instruction, and the repeated instruction, and the context of, "No, that's sort of the response I wanted, but that's not exactly. Here's how to correct it," kind of thing.  So to compare it to a Google search, it would kind of be like, no, give me the Google searches that are actually relevant to the problem I have at hand. Which Google can't do because it doesn't understand context. Mike Gerholdt: Right. That makes sense. Jen, you said human in the loop, and I feel like we've naturally in just comparing Google searches to prompting a GPT to return a result, naturally put the human in the loop. But what did your husband do in terms of planning to put the human in the loop for other things? Jennifer: Yeah, I mean, he had to go, even though it would return an itinerary for us of sites to see in Italy, he still had to go and check and say, "Okay, is this the right path that it should take?" Confirm the hours that... Even though it suggested here's the order, well, is it even open at that time, right? Can you imagine just showing up there and like, oh, nope, it's not open until noon, but you have me going there the first thing in the morning. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. Or it figures your itinerary is you just drive there, spend one second there, back out of the driveway.  Joshua Birk: Right. Mike Gerholdt: Like, no, I'm going there for a reason. Joshua Birk: Yeah, it doesn't always get the context of time correctly the first time. The last time I tried to do an itinerary, it gave me so many things to do in three hours that no human being could possibly do it. Mike Gerholdt: Oh my goodness. Yeah. I will say I have tried... So one of the first things I experimented with was, I think it's called Gemini Now, because it was Google and it plugged into their Google Maps. And I think planning road trips and stuff, when you're looking for specific stops, not touristy stops, but okay, a couple hours into the drive, I'm going to want to stop and get some diesel. I want to take a break from driving for 10 or 15 minutes.  I don't want to just sit there and figure out on the map and scroll mile by mile on the map. Does that look like a gas station? Does that look like a gas station? And have it go through that. But oftentimes I also have to go back through the map and validate like, oh, is that still open? Joshua Birk: Right. Yeah. So I think they've gotten better because these large models at one point were impossible to pre-train on small amounts of data. They basically had to re-consume the entire internet over and over again. And that's why when they first became popular, they warned you it doesn't understand anything. Basically pre-pandemic, if I remember right. And that was a problem here in Chicago because a lot of very famous places had shut down.  So to your point, Jen, about itinerary, making sure they're still there, it would've been spot on recommendations in 2019, but now not so much. And again, I think they've learned how to train them with smaller bits of data. So I think this is better. But yeah, it's whatever moment in time it's looking at when it was grounded in that data. Jennifer: Well, when I was looking at free GPT products, I used Perplexity AI, and that was using the internet and not data up until a certain timeframe.  Joshua Birk: Nice. Jennifer: And it came back and said, here's my answer, but then here's my sources.  Joshua Birk: Nice. Jennifer: So then if I wanted, I could go click on that to get more information Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, as an article from 2007. Like, "Oh, cool, five star Michelin restaurant." What do you feel, in terms of using AI just for your everyday life, is helping you understand AI better as we work to understand the capabilities of prompt builder and copilot? Joshua Birk: So for work, I'm going to confess, because I've been using AI to generate a lot of APEX. And it's not that I can't write that APEX. And I'm going to say this because I think this is a very unique situation because I'm writing a lot of APEX that's from scratch. I'm not an enterprise developer who has to go in and maintain large bits of code and large project related code and things like that. And there's this huge question out there for the everyday developer, is AI something that's really useful? Because a lot of everyday development is maintenance and it's bug fixes and it's very detailed work. And there's probably a role for AI when it comes to code reviews and things like that. But for what I'm using it for, it's like I know how to write this and I know I've written something like this, but AI will do it 90% correctly in about three seconds. I can't type that fast, especially these days. I cannot type that fast. And so if I just kind of go back in and I'll reiterate it and stuff like that, and because of that in very short period of time, for instance, the demo works we're spinning up. I have APEX that can recreate all the data for me in these styles. And that's, I think, the important thing is it's in the style that I want the data to look like. It's in the level of realism that I want the data to look like. Which actually would've been... That's the part that would've been very difficult me to do because to sit back and be like, I want 30 companies that sound like they would work with Northern Trail Outfitters. Mike Gerholdt: Oh yeah. Joshua Birk: Right? I'd have to sit back and actually ideate about that and spit out ideas and all of this kind of stuff. And ChatGPT is just like- Mike Gerholdt: I'd come up with a whole bunch of Southern Trail Outfitters and Western Trail Outfitters and Eastern Trail Outfitters. Joshua Birk: Exactly, exactly. It's not shy. It will just try to give you that kind of slightly creative information shoved inside of an APEX class. And it's definitely, I mean, I can't even calculate how much time it saved me. Jennifer: I think for me, outside of the formula piece, which it has definitely helped me build formulas faster, but I use it to shorten things that I've written. Here's this thing, I need to narrow it down into this many characters. So that's been helpful in shortening that up. I have a problem of condensing things. Mike Gerholdt: No, I think that's great. I mean, that's actually to look back at admin track at Dreamforce a few years ago, the biggest session that was always attended was documenting your org. And I think it's because you always would have to start from scratch as opposed to, Jen, I use AI for a lot of that as well. I will write a description in X number of characters following this style of writing and then give me three versions of it. Because Josh, to your point, I don't have three versions in my head, or I need a fourth version, but I need you to give me three to kind of push the cart down the hill a little bit. Joshua Birk: Yeah. And it's like, why do we keep going back to summarization as such a classic AI use case? Part of it is because it can read it and then write that summarization faster than you could read it by a 100th percent. It can do it. So it's not just the speed of generation, it's the speed of consumption as well. Mike Gerholdt: So working with, looking ahead, because Prompt Builders GA, we're doing workshops. What are some of the things that we should think about as admins for what organizations may be looking for in terms of prompts, so that... Because I literally think the amount of creativity that we have in our heads is the limitations we all have for delivering on super useful prompts. Joshua Birk: Well, Mike, I don't know if you know this yet, but we have an upcoming episode with my friend Ravish [inaudible 00:14:47], where we talk about this a little- Mike Gerholdt: Next week.  Joshua Birk: Right. So one of the things I asked him, because Ravish actually is working with customers and working with billing out some of these solutions. And I think the answer to that question is start looking at... Let's focus very specifically on this field generation prompt builder template. Look at your page layout and ask yourself, is there something here, or can I add a field to this that would be useful? Because going back to our friend summarization, that we could summarize not just the object that we're looking at on the record, but summarize it in its related data. And it's a data next to it and data that Flow can find to it and data that's in Data Cloud and all of these points of data. And what Ravish said, not to spoil my own content, but he's like, "One of the most useful things is either meeting prep or call prep." Like if you have a call with a customer coming up, you want to pull up the account and you want to get a one paragraph overview of all the activity of that account so that you are enlightened almost right away as to what to do with this. So I think it's going to be hard until you see the fields actually being generated, because it's a very different kind of data that we're used to.  But the question is going to be, I'm trying to think of if, and maybe one of you two have a good example, because Salesforce has evolved so much over the years, right? I always joke with people, you don't know how good you have it because you can do GO selection and SOQL queries. I had to write an entire APEX class in order to make that work, and I couldn't even do it with Radius. I had to select zip codes by a square because we didn't have the capacity to do sign and co-sign back then. The things that we've added that make the platform so much more intelligent, and this is another step in that evolution. And so it's time to start asking yourself, what layer of generative data can I add to my object model that's going to make my users more successful? Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, I would agree. I think along those lines, looking at what's available, looking at what GPT, even if you can't get your hands on anything Einstein and all you do is Trailhead modules and you listen to some podcasts like this. I think the one thing, not that worries me, but the one thing that I would have a serious conversation sit down with stakeholders is I would look at what's all the anecdotal data that we store in Salesforce and where is it at?  And so I bring that up because Josh, your example of zip codes, phone numbers, hard data, super hard data, a zip code, a phone number, even a street address anymore, you can write a call out and verify that. The number of websites I go to now, and I literally type the three numbers of my house in, and it's already narrowed it down to the five possible addresses this could be, I think is amazing, it didn't exist before. But what I think the power of what people are wanting is, so give me a summarization of the last five calls and what their pain points were. And if you're not running some sort of reports or like Jen, if you don't have, I'm thinking screen flows with really good fields to prompt people on, you need to fill this stuff out and we need to prepare for it. I don't care how good the AI is, it's not going to weed through bad call notes if the salespeople didn't put that stuff in. Joshua Birk: Yeah. And I want to call out one of the demos I saw here internally, because I think it touches on that a lot. And the demo was case support, and I think this was Copilot. And the ticket was, "Why is my power bill so high?" And the AI doesn't know how to answer that question properly. And this is like when we keep the human in the loop, the human in the middle, we have to remember that's in the whole... It's from beginning to end, because a human had to realize, oh, we charge people for electricity.  And what is one of the things that determines how much electricity you use? Oh, it's the weather. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to build a Flow that calls out to the weather API that brings me back the weather for the last whatever period of time this ticket was for. And then the AI is like, oh, well, your power bill was high because it was super cold, or it was super hot, or whatever. But the case support person can basically just ask, analyze the support ticket and with the power of Flow that a human created, then the AI can add into it and be like, oh, this is why we think this is wrong. Jennifer: Yeah. I think back to the demo that we created for Dreamforce, for the admin keynote, we were using NTO, right? They did expeditions and we were able to say, okay, take the customer's expeditions that they've already been on and take the customer state, and then now go and based on what they've done in the past, recommend something similar. And looking at all the expeditions that were available. So that would've taken some time for the rep to then go research that and see what expeditions they've been to, what they might like, based on those things, to recommend other things. But with Prompt Builder and field generation, click a button, AI does it all for you. Mike Gerholdt: I would agree. Well, thanks for sitting around and jawing about prompts and GPTs, because I feel like it's June, we've been talking about this... Has it been for over a year or has it just been a few months? Or has it just been a year- Joshua Birk: It feels like over a year. Mike Gerholdt: Right. Right. But it's a little more advanced. It's interesting because I wonder in a year from now if we listen to this episode, if it'll sound super dated or not. Joshua Birk: Yeah, I think that's an interesting question. And it's hard to answer because you have OpenAI saying the AI you're talking to right now are, oh gosh, I think I'm trying to remember their exact quote and realizing it might not be something we want to record on a podcast. So let's just say not nearly as evolved as the models that they are trying to bring into the near future. And the near future ones are supposed to be much more intelligent, much more capable of reading your contacts, much more behaving like a human, kind of thing. And so I think that poses the question of when I say how much context and how much repetition you have to put in your prompt to make it do what you want.  That statement might sound dated in about six months to a year. Because the person listening to it at that time might be like, "What are you talking about? The AI just knows who I am and they just talk to me like a travel agent. It's just normal." But I think in general, what we're going to get is better results, and prompt building in general is going to remain relatively the same. We might get to the end faster. We might get more better concise data. It's going to realize that that great pizza shop is actually closed in Chicago, and it won't recommend it, and things like that. But I think the actual concepts of prompt building, I think they're here to stay for a while. Mike Gerholdt: Wow. Well, that's good to know. It doesn't feel like fly-by-night anymore. Well, I'll stick a bow on this episode for now, and thankfully none of our AI's hallucinated. If you enjoyed this episode, do me a favor and share it with one person, just one. It's not that hard. If you're listening in the Apple Podcast app, you can just tap the three dots up in the right-hand corner, click the share episode, and then you can post it to social. You can text it to a friend and be like, "Let's listen to the prompt building episode together." If you're looking for more great resources, of course, admin.salesforce.com. The number of people I know that don't know about admin.salesforce.com is hopefully dwindling in the world because I keep bringing it up. But the good news is the reason you can go there, all the resources, if we mentioned any in the show, will be there, a transcript of the show, and links to our Admin Trailblazer group on the Trailblazer Community will be there as well. So with that, until next week when Josh talks to Ravish, and you already had a preview of that episode, we'll see you in the cloud.  

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Chris Zullo, Global Practice Director of Customer 360 and Marketing at AllCloud. Join us as we chat about integrating Marketing Cloud and Data Cloud and how you can do more with your data. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Chris Zullo. Bring all your customer data together in Salesforce Chris is kind of my go-to Marketing Cloud guy, so I wanted to bring him on the pod to talk through how Data Cloud and Marketing Cloud go hand-in-hand. In his role as Global Practice Director of both Customer 360 and Marketing at AllCloud, he’s seen firsthand just how much of an impact Data Cloud can have by allowing both departments to work in tandem. There are so many applications businesses use in today’s environment that each store data about your customers. But there’s a problem. As Chris puts it, “The likelihood of all of those systems talking to each other in any cohesive fashion is slim to none.” That’s where Data Cloud comes in. It allows you to bring all of that data into one place in Salesforce, and that’s where the magic happens. Data Cloud creates a consistent customer experience When a customer interacts with your business, they don’t care who they’re talking to—they just want to be treated consistently and as if they’re the same person. If they had a conversation with a sales rep about a certain product or feature, they expect the customer service rep they call to know what they’re talking about. With Data Cloud, your customer service rep can look at all the communications a customer might have had with sales so they’re on the same page. And if they notice that there’s an email sequence scheduled next week to remind them about their warranty, maybe they can cancel it ahead of time and head things off at the pass. That’s why it’s so important to give everyone a seat at the table when you’re establishing Data Cloud at your organization: marketing, sales, service, eCommerce, IT, and your data team. You want everyone working together to create a unified experience for your customers. Data Cloud makes your data actionable Some business units get really attached to their data. Sure, they’ll build you an API to provide a one-way glass view of their data, but why do you need them to integrate it with Data Cloud? “It’s all about making it actionable,” Chris says, “it’s a verb, it’s an action. Just because I have a view doesn’t mean I can do something with it.” Data Cloud lets you do segmentation and targeting at scale without having to copy-paste into a bunch of pivot tables. And with AI features like lookalike segments, the possibilities are endless. There’s a lot more great stuff from Chris about how Data Cloud can transform your organization so be sure to listen to the full episode. And don’t forget to subscribe to hear more from the Salesforce Admins Podcast. Podcast swag Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store Learn more Trailhead: Explore Data Cloud Watch: Data Cloud Decoded   Admin Trailblazers Group Admin Trailblazers Community Group Social Chris on Twitter: @ChrisZullo Salesforce Admins: @SalesforceAdmns  Mike on Threads: https://www.threads.net/@mikegerholdt/ Mike on Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@salesforce.mike Mike on X: @MikeGerholdt Full show transcript Mike: With Data Cloud, you can organize and unify data across Salesforce and other external data sources. After data has been ingested into Data Cloud, it can be used to drive personalization and engagement through the creation of audience segments. So that's what our help documents say. And I wanted to find out from Chris Zullo, who is a business puzzle solver, Salesforce MVP and Global C360 and marketing practice director at AllCloud. What he's seeing when he's helped other admins integrate Marketing Cloud and Data Cloud and all of the benefits across the organization from having visibility into that. Also, what are some of the questions that admins should be asking in order to get that integration going? Now, before we get into the podcast, I want to be sure you're doing one thing and that's following the Salesforce Admins Podcast. And the reason I ask is if you're doing that on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or iHeartRadio, then the newest episode will automatically be downloaded right to your phone so you can listen to it on your bike ride or your dog walk, or maybe you just walk around the neighborhood to clear your head. But let's talk about integrating data with Chris and get Chris on the podcast. So Chris, welcome back to the podcast. Chris Zullo: Thanks for having me. Mike: It's probably been a while, but you're my go-to Marketing Cloud guy, and I feel a lot of people have seen you present in the ecosystem and talking Marketing Cloud. But catch us up. What have you been up to? What do you do? What's your exciting passion in the Salesforce ecosystem? Chris Zullo: Sure. So I mean, right now, I am doing a lot of things around Marketing Cloud and Data Cloud as a global practice director for Customer 360 and marketing for a company called AllCloud and just really trying to figure out how best to utilize the data that we have. Mike: I love it when you get titles based on marketing and you go, "Had that for a while." Chris Zullo: It's a long one. Mike: I used to be a director of social enterprise. I was like, "Ooh, that sounds neat." And then Salesforce dropped Social enterprise and I was like, "Oh, now I'm stuck with this." So I'm going to play devil's advocate because Marketing Cloud and Salesforce, I've done stuff, isn't campaigns enough? I mean, as an admin, I signed up my marketing people and they can create campaigns and they can put contacts in as campaign members. Chris Zullo: I mean unofficially the campaign object is the first part of the Marketing Cloud going back in time. But no, it is not in fact enough by itself as that is merely just a folder, if you will, a job folder that you can manage any engagement and activities that you plan to execute and engage with your customer base. So yeah, you need to do more. Mike: So what do we get when we sit down and have the grownup discussion of let's pull in Data Cloud? Chris Zullo: So when you think about pulling in Data cloud or why you would need Data Cloud, you got to think about how many systems and applications store customer data and it's never just one. The likelihood of all of those systems talking to each other in any cohesive fashion is slim to none. So with Data Cloud, you have the ability to connect and create a number of bridges, if you will, to allow all of these systems and applications to feed into one centralized location where we can harmonize, centralize, standardize all of that data to create a unified view of any one individual to better engage with them, to better service them, whatever the topic may be, and not have to swivel chair across multiple systems and try and remove a lot of the manual labor that goes into historically accessing customer data in a lot of different locations. Mike: So what are some of the things that you are finding when you work with marketers that they're excited to get data on with Data Cloud? Chris Zullo: Well, some of the bigger things are some of the more advanced segmentation capabilities that you're able to do. If you think about from retail businesses that are selling goods or products and they're wanting to figure out what's the customer lifetime value of an individual or how much are they spending with us? Recency frequency and monetary models where you can get into these more robust modeling above and beyond your typical segments of, okay, give me all the people who like the color red. You can get more just deeper into the weeds to create these more robust groupings of individuals that you can then break down into smaller parts as you need. And so, that's one of the bigger things is just really being able to look at that and isolate at scale what people are doing, how are they interacting with us and how much do they really like us? Mike: Yeah, how much do they really like us? Dear Marketing Cloud, how much do... Please, no, don't do that. So if I'm listening to this and I'm an admin, I'm putting myself back in those days of sitting in the chair and it's usually an executive or a stakeholder sees something at an event is like Data Cloud. We should talk about that. Where are you finding when you're helping admins or doing some of this work yourself? The admin should start this conversation. Does it start with the marketing team because the marketing team needs to pull that in and then they're going to service? Where are some of these conversations originating? Chris Zullo: Marketing certainly has a seat at the table since the concept that Data Cloud is built upon originated within the marketing realm over 10 years ago, the concept of a customer data platform, which really was to make their jobs easier. That being said, they're not the only ones that can benefit from data. So I think if you're going to do it right, you have the right heads of each of the major business units or teams or departments, however you organize your company at the discussion around what do we want to do? Who is our customer? Even before you get to the technology, it's really around alignment across sales, marketing, service, e-comm, maybe IT is involved or if you have a dedicated data team, these are some of the main voices that should have input into creating that centralized model because you may have different uses in each of those teams. The customer doesn't changed and they don't care who they're talking to. They expect to be treated consistently as if they're the same person regardless of the context of what their conversation is on. Mike: Yeah, sitting back as an admin where the data's at and that your customer doesn't know where their data's at, they don't get, like when you go check into a hotel, why don't you have all my information? I don't know where you keep all my information. I don't know where my name is stored versus my hotel room preferences and I don't care, I shouldn't because I'm talking to the front desk person. They should have all that. That's a thing that I always seem to forget. So what are some of the conversations like because I have to feel like a few of these databases or wherever this information stored have owners and they own the database. I've worked with orgs before where, yeah, well, IT owns the invoice server or whatever. Boy, they don't want to give that data up. What is the benefit in that? Or they'll come back and say, "Well, I can just write you an API that gives you a view into the order table." What is the benefit of going Data cloud versus a one-way, maybe pane of glass view? Chris Zullo: It's really making it actionable. I don't recall the specific quote, but you were in the room with me- Mike: Oh, boy. Chris Zullo: ... back in the day. And it was a difference between a noun and a verb. If you recall the particular event we were at, it was it's all about making it actionable. It's a verb, it's an action. And so, just because you have a view doesn't mean I can actually do something with it. I mean, that's still swivel chair because if I've got to copy and paste or manually key something in that's not making it frictionless, and not only is that making my job harder, that is making the customer experience less enjoyable because that prolongs the conversation that slows down the resolution of whatever activity that individual's trying to carry out. And so, Data Cloud makes it actionable so that once we have that data in, and something that I don't think a lot of people realize is Data Cloud is not overriding those source systems. It's not a survivorship model. So the systems of record are still the systems of record. The system owners are still in charge of what goes on in their domain. Data cloud is just making it so that we can combine the data from these various systems and make it more usable for business users. And if you want, you can activate or push data back to those systems if you see fit. Otherwise, you're going to activate it into the channels where you can do something with it that's going to benefit the customer and hopefully make your day job a little bit easier. Mike: So what I'm hearing is, as a marketer because that's where we started, I can query contacts and with Data Cloud also look at maybe contacts with invoices greater than a $1,000 and not have to do a pivot table with contacts I pulled out at Salesforce and then invoices that I got out of this other system because the data is actionable within Salesforce. Chris Zullo: That's absolutely correct. Mike: Just letting that moment of silence kind of fall upon people as you hear 10,000 pivot tables in the background screaming, because I feel like that. It's a different scenario, but I remember just Salesforce a long time ago used to be able to do web tabs or whatever. And so, I set up a web tab, which was our travel portal, and I remember the salesperson being like, "Oh my god, Mike, this is amazing. So this means that when I booked the travel, it's going to put it on my calendar." And I was like, "No, it's just a pane of glass to our travel portal. It is just that there is no integration." And too often I think people get caught up in what the visual looks like. You asked for order information, so here it is on another tab when you click this and now you have access to it. Except as a marketer, I still have to go to this other system, to the invoice domain on this other server and pull customer numbers and pull contact records and then pivot table the two as opposed to using a report in Salesforce or something in Tableau to create that campaign. Chris Zullo: That can be a brutal way to go about things. And frankly, a lot of us have been used to that for so long because that's just the way it was done. But now there's a better way to utilize that data and like I said, make it more actionable to speed up the process and the time to value both for the business as well as the individual that you're supporting or trying to provide great customer experience to. So another example of that is you mentioned orders, but think about from a case perspective, and this is going to touch across multiple teams. If somebody calls in with an issue or have questions about a product or service that they've bought, so you have the customer service rep on the phone, there was an order placed and fulfilled at some point in the recent memory. And you may have active marketing communications going out to this individual on a regular basis. And so, that's just three teams that could be involved in that one call. And so, in that moment, does the customer service rep know what you have bought recently without having to ask and make you repeat 15 times after they've done that to validate that you are who you say you are? But then can I see your order history? Can I see that there's some marketing communications scheduled very soon that might be touching upon this very same topic or related topic, which maybe we let go? Maybe we want to hit pause for a second and say maybe we don't want to hit them up with this marketing communication because they've called in, they have a question, we haven't resolved it. It may or may not be negative, it may just be a neutral situation, but we don't want to potentially turn this into something bigger than it is. And so, you've got those three different teams that can be influenced by that one call, but how many systems does that rep have to go to see what this person has, what they have bought, what email communications are coming up, or SMS if it's a different channel? All of that can be in one view if you are able to unify everything through Data Cloud. Mike: Yeah, I always feel like the conversation with marketing is sales oriented, but the real increase in fidelity is when as an admin, marketing and service talk to each other, because that's normally where the joy can be maintained of the sale. After the salesperson not walks away, but closes the deal, to your point, if they have say, a warranty issue, the last thing they want is two days later after a customer service call to get a marketing email reminding them to sign up for a three-year extended warranty. Like, "Hi, welcome to Tone Deaf Marketing." But it happens, right? And I always feel like when you sit down with marketing people, their initial inclination is sales oriented. But I feel like what I'm definitely hearing is a big value comes to the customer service rep who is, "Hey, I hear you. Let's work through this issue. I see you're on a couple of warranty reminder emails. I'm going to go ahead and uncheck you from those." And you can correct me on this, the marketing team, empowering the service team to do something like that, right? Chris Zullo: Yes, exactly. Work smarter, not harder. Mike: What are other examples that you're finding of, I won't say it's unintended, but unintended collaboration like that unlocked because of Data Cloud? Chris Zullo: Sure. So I think other ones is to your point, from a sales perspective, sometimes people lump marketing and sales into the same team oftentimes and stereotypically and very humorously, it's like Westside story and they're on rival factions where we agree on nothing. Mike: I would love to think that every sales and marketing meeting begins with teams snapping at each other. Chris Zullo: Oh, I feel like there's a nice skit in the future with that one. Mike: There is. Chris Zullo: But so think about how those two can be working more collaboratively whether they want to or not, they should be. But thinking about you have people selling on an interactive basis, and if you are, say it's multithreaded in its account-based marketing, and you have different sellers talking to different people in the same organization, do they know that? Mike: Oh, yeah. Chris Zullo: Do we know if the left hand is doing while the right hand's over here shaking a new hand? How are we connecting the dots not only internally, but also looking at the target organization? Who is getting what communications? How are we bombarding them with all these different communications? Or potentially, do we want to empower the sales team to drop somebody into a nurture campaign? It would be a lot more effective if A, we can bubble up the fact that, okay, we have one organization, we have got two sellers talking to five different people and they're on all these different communications. One's not. And then we can look at a broader picture from an account level at the individual level and internally who's doing what, when, where, and why. All of that rolls into how can we provide a better service from a sales perspective, and how can we empower bidirectionally marketing and sales to help each other to put them into the right communication? Or maybe again, similar to the previous example, maybe dial it back. Maybe we don't want to hit them as much because they're talking to a human being. We don't need to prompt them to schedule their next appointment. Mike: Right. Yeah, that's always fun when you're getting the email. So moving ahead, AI is a thing, it's been a thing for a while. We have Prompt Builder, we have Einstein Copilot. What are some of the cool things that you're hearing marketers are really looking forward to with some of the AI stuff that's out there? Chris Zullo: I think some of the predictive capabilities, I think really being able to leverage the AI from an ideation perspective, creating content or I don't know about you, but I do enjoy writing, but I don't always hit the ground running and wanting to be able to throw an idea out there, get something back and go, okay, that's not exactly what I wanted, but I can work with this. And so, then I can tweak it. And so, I might have a great idea, but I don't have the words to get it going. And so, that's one example from a marketing perspective. The other is from a data perspective, thinking about, again, the data has a story to tell and the better your data, the better the story can become. And with AI in particular leveraging good data, we can then identify trends or identify opportunities that maybe we're not looking at as closely as we could or should, but also would take us a lot more time to effectively do if we were doing it manually and allowing that to create a lookalike audience, a lookalike segment to say, "Hey, here's your best audience based on these parameters. You've got this whole group of untapped potential that would potentially be really interested in this same product or this same service, but you've never bothered to ask." Mike: Yeah, I mean, you put a lot on the salesperson to make those connections in their head, and sometimes it's just not going to happen depending on the salesperson, right? Chris Zullo: Exactly. Mike: This is more of a Mike question because Mike's curious. So where are marketers falling with a lot of the advancements in AI writing emails to customers? Because you and I, we're from the days when marketing had to go over every single letter word, consonant vowel period in an email, and we built email templates and we would build workflows with email templates. And somewhere a marketer would lay his head down or her head down at night and be like, "I know exactly word for word what the customer got when we closed the deal." But now with AI we can kind of say, "Hey, tone and voice..." And maybe be softer or maybe be happier or funnier. And I suppose it's no different than just letting people write emails, but I'd be curious kind of what you're hearing because I feel you're a little more plugged into marketers than I'm. Chris Zullo: Yeah, I think there's a relative split. I think you've got a number of folks who are embracing it and leveraging it for the benefits that it offers. I do feel that there's still a bit of skepticism and fear. And to be honest, two years ago I was very much skeptical on what AI was going to do for me as a marketer. So I decided to investigate a little bit further and learn more about it and saw that there really is a lot of potential with AI. And I think the way I would explain it is AI is not going to replace you. I think people who understand and learn how to harness the power of AI are going to have an inherent advantage over others because it is a productivity play, in my opinion. And so, the way I have been explaining it to people is it's not so much artificial intelligence, but it's supplemental intelligence. You don't replace the human. The human still needs to be involved. You're still the chaperone. You still going to be a hand on the wheel, but it's almost like having Jarvis from a very popular. Mike: [inaudible 00:25:27]. Chris Zullo: Yes, our boy, he is a helper, but he can't do all the things without your guidance. Jarvis was a product of Tony. And so, the AI that we're using in our organization, it's really going to be a product of how you utilize it to increase your time to [inaudible 00:25:54], your speed to market, or reduce the friction to process data. It's really about taking that and leveraging that in a way to be more efficient with the time that you have and still have the final say. I'm not asking Einstein to create an email and just send it blindly. No, I'm doing it to jumpstart the process and then I can refine it and revise it with a trained human hand that knows, you know what? That might not work the way that the output provided it. And you can either train it to get better, which it can do, but at the end of the day, it still requires you or me to be involved in the process. It doesn't work asynchronously. It just doesn't. Mike: Yeah. I was talking with a friend this weekend, and of course, this'll date me in 10 or 15 years, he's a professor at university. He said, "AI's not going to take your job. What's going to take your job is the people that know how to use AI." Chris Zullo: Exactly. Mike: And I was like, "Oh, you're so spot on." We diverged a little bit. Last question, anyone who's looking to get interested in Data Cloud, what would your suggestion be? Chris Zullo: I would jump on Trailhead for one. That is a great place to start because you can get hands-on exposure and experience. And honestly, whether you realize it or not, admins, you have such an important role in your organization and Data Cloud can have such a significant impact on how your data is managed, that it really is in your best interest to understand how it works, how it can impact your environment and how you can influence it. And so, number one, go to Trailhead and get started there. There's a number of resources out there. I'm trying to think of the name. There is a great YouTube series that Danielle Larregui oversees, the specific Data Cloud series and has a number of different guests from Salesforce on there about how Data Cloud works and how to use some of the various features within that, and it's a really good resource. Mike: I like it. Thanks for coming on the podcast, Chris. It's always good to hear from you and I'm sure we'll hear some crazy visionary insights from you at Dreamforce this year, right? Chris Zullo: I will certainly be there. I've been around for a while, so I don't know if anybody really wants to hear from me anymore, but I'm always happy to share. Mike: I don't know, I got to believe so, right. Chris Zullo: Hey, I'm willing and ready. If the invite's there, I'll be there. Mike: I appreciate it. So it was a great discussion with Chris I, You always think of what's the immediate benefit of doing something with another cloud? So what will Data Cloud get sales? Or immediately, as you heard in the conversation, my head goes right into marketing and sales, but there's also a lot of other benefits that other departments are seeing and we had that discussion about service, how you can actually talk and service your customers better. Having that integration, that information, it just kind of makes sense. So I hope you enjoyed the episode. I thought it was a lot of fun.

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Joe Sterne, a Solutions Architect and Salesforce contractor. Join us as we chat about his tips for job interviews, what to look for in a job description, and how you can use AI to help you prep. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Joe Sterne. Contract work in the Salesforce ecosystem Last month, we talked to Jason Atwood about how to prepare for a Salesforce job interview. That episode was fantastic because Jason interviews job candidates all the time, but I wanted to hear from someone who’s had experience sitting on the other side of the table. That’s why I was so excited to hear from Joe Sterne about his experience as a contractor. Contracting is becoming more common in the Salesforce ecosystem, and it can be a great way to get experience to land that next-level position. “At the end of the day, certifications are great,” Joe says, “but certifications aren’t the be-all, end-all—it’s also experience.” Of course, being a contractor means that you’re constantly looking for that next gig, so Joe has a lot of great tips to share from going out on so many interviews. What to look for in a Salesforce job description Looking for a new position usually starts with reading through a bunch of job descriptions. Joe recommends taking a close look at what responsibilities are actually listed because it doesn’t always match the job title. It can happen for any number of reasons, but it’s important information to know going into the interview process because it can affect the salary band. Joe also suggests investing the time to make sure you have something to talk about once you land that big interview, especially if you’re bound by an NDA. It could be Superbadges, or work you’ve done for a nonprofit, or, as Joe says, “maybe it’s something you did for fun just so you could talk about it in an interview.” No matter what, you need a way to demonstrate your skills and knowledge and how they’re a fit for your new role. How to prep for a Salesforce job interview When you’re prepping for an interview, Joe recommends taking some time to learn about the business and the industry they’re in. Who are their clients? What problems are they trying to solve? And, most importantly, why are you a good candidate for them to help them address those problems? At the end of the day, that’s what you’re selling. As Joe says, you want to be able to walk into the interview and say, “Here are your problems, I understand them, I’m going to be able to fix them, here are some ways I should be able to fix them, and here are other ideas I have that I could work on with other people as I learn more to evolve those solutions.” There’s a lot more great stuff from Joe in this episode about how to deal with weird interview questions and how he uses ChatGPT to help him prep, so be sure to listen to the full episode. And don’t forget to subscribe to hear more from the Salesforce Admins Podcast.   Podcast swag Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store Learn more Listen: How to Prepare for a Salesforce Job Interview Listen: Being Neurodivergent in the Salesforce Ecosystem with Joe Sterne 5 Ways to Make Your Sales and Service Reps’ Lives Easier with AI   Admin Trailblazers Group Admin Trailblazers Community Group Social Joe on Twitter: @MrJoeSterne Salesforce Admins: @SalesforceAdmns  Mike on Threads: https://www.threads.net/@mikegerholdt/ Mike on Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@salesforce.mike Mike on X: @MikeGerholdt Full show transcript Mike: So let's say you're out there as a Salesforce admin and you're interviewing and you get a crazy question like, "If you could be any animal, what animal would you be?" Well, I won't tell you the answer that Joe Sterne gave but Joe Sterne is on the podcast today and he's going to help us flip on the other side of the coin. That's right. So it's June. If you remember back in May, I had Jason Atwood on the podcast. He's from Arkus and he was talking about what he does to interview Salesforce admins. My hope was to get you in the mindset of what a hiring manager is looking for. Today, I got Joe Sterne, who is out there in the job market and he's interviewing as a Salesforce admin, at least he was at the time that we reported this. And gave some tips to help you get ready for your interview, some things that he's doing. Also, you know what? We talk about contract work because I think that's a very viable solution as a new admin. Now, of course, before we get into the episode, I want to make sure you're following the Salesforce Admins Podcast wherever you listen to podcasts, whether it be Apple Podcasts or Spotify or iHeartRadio. Go ahead and click that follow button and the reason is then a new episode will be put on your phone right away when you wake up Thursday morning. So with that, let's get to our conversation with Joe. So Joe, welcome back to the podcast. Joe Sterne: Hello. Mike: Good to have you on again. It's been a while. But let's talk about, so back in May for the people that follow along with the podcast, because I know everybody does. I published an episode How to Prepare for a Salesforce Job Interview in 2024 and Jason Atwood was my guest. And I think he did a really good job of prepping us on the employer side. You, I know, are currently now on the admin side. So I wanted to get the... Does it show my age if I say the peanut butter cup scenario, like the chocolate and the peanut butter version? Joe Sterne: I mean, I don't think so. I'm still a big fan of Reese's Peanut Butter Cup. Wait. Can I name drop brands on this? Mike: Yeah. You can. Joe Sterne: So- Mike: I mean, if they want to want to send me a care package of peanut butter and chocolate, I'm all for that. Joe Sterne: There you go. Yes. I mean, to me, that does not date you. If you were saying something more along the lines of... I'm trying to think of... Not Milk Duds. There's some candy that's coated in chocolate that has powder in the middle of it that's from the 1940s. Mike: That's Milk Duds. That's Milk Duds. Every time I've had Milk Duds- Joe Sterne: Oh, okay. Mike: Oh. No, no. Malto- Joe Sterne: Malt... yes. Malted Stuff. Yeah. Mike: Malted Dots or something they're called. Joe Sterne: Yes. Yeah. Those- Mike: Yeah. Those things- Joe Sterne: Are old. Mike: You bite into it, you're like, "Oh, chocolate," and then it's like a puff of dry dust. Joe Sterne: Exactly. Yes. That, I feel like, would date you. Mike: Wow. All right. So Joe, since we've last spoke, what have you been up to? Joe Sterne: Oh man. So was I still at Salesforce when we last spoke? I think I might have been. Mike: You were still? Joe Sterne: So yeah, I was wrapped up in part of the layoffs in the beginning of 2023 and landed a couple different solution architecture specific roles at companies over the course of 2023 that also had layoffs sadly. The market has been quite chaotic over the last year and a half in the Salesforce space. I am currently right now doing contract work for another company, still doing solution architecture, but doing it under my own LLC. Mike: Ah. So what have you found interviewing... And I guess being an LLC and pitching consulting services, you're interviewing, right? Joe Sterne: Right. Oh, yeah. Yeah. You're still interviewing. It's just, to me... Well, I'll take one step back here. I'm still interviewing for full-time or W2 positions as they like to call it when I've been talking about positions but I'm also open to 10-99 or corp to corp. Corp to corp is one of the main reasons that I decided to do an LLC. Besides the tax reasons, it's the ability just for somebody to come back to me and be like, "Hey, we can do contract but it needs to be corp to corp." It's like, "Cool. We can do that. I have one." Mike: Gotcha. Joe Sterne: And not have that be a limitation where it's like, "Hey, we can't do 10-99 or W2 on this engagement," that knocks you out of the rutting. It's like, "Well, okay, that doesn't really help me and I would love to be able to deduct stuff from a business standpoint. Since I'm going to be using my own hardware in most of these contract situations, I'd rather just wrap that up from a business perspective." So I know that's not necessarily totally viable for a lot of people, especially just starting out in the industry. But I would say, it's something to be aware of because I have seen a pretty big shift within the last 18 months in the industry. Well, big for me. I've been in the industry since 2013 and I fell into it. That there's been a dramatic increase in contract roles of any sort and a pretty pronounced pullback in full-time W2 roles. Mike: Okay. But let's tackle that first part. Let's say you are, for your opinion, a newer admin. What is the level of experience you feel people should be at before they would go and do what you did which is start an LLC and do, we'll just call it contract admin work, as opposed to being hired on as a position within the company? Joe Sterne: Yeah. I would recommend probably being at some sort of a senior level, so a few years of hands-on experience ideally. That you can then use to translate some of the value of why you would be a good candidate for them from a hiring role in general, whether it's contract or not. But here's some of the stuff that I've done, here's some of the things that I'm a part of, here's some of the knowledge that I have, that I've encountered on the job, some stuff that I may have not necessarily encountered on the job but dabbled in. Because at the end of the day, certifications are great. I am a certification ambassador for Salesforce so I will not say anything different. But obviously, certifications aren't the be all end all either. It's also experience. Experience both helps you get a certification as well as certifications help you get experience. So it's this chicken and the egg scenario sometimes when you're first starting out where it's like, "How do I get that experience if no one's willing to take a chance on me?" That is obviously a much larger conversation than what we're having today. But having some of that experience, I think, is helpful if you're trying to go that contract admin route or a fractional admin. Which I feel like as the rise of some of these C-suites, I think that some of that "fractional work" may start coming up where you may be working for two or three companies at once. That you're all doing admin things, but they just don't have the level of requests or tickets or change that would require somebody to be on full-time with benefits but they still need some help. Mike: Right. That may be the case, right? In your area or depending on where a person is, maybe they're not hiring for a full-time admin. So you're newer, you need the experience, would you take on a contract role? Let's say a company's like, "Look, we're not going to hire for this position full-time but we will do a 6-month contract with you." As an individual, to me, that sounds like a great way to at least get some experience. Joe Sterne: Absolutely. Mike: And then you're also working towards, "Well, they could renew the contract. It also gives me a few months to get in with an organization," and maybe you may like it. And then, you could... Well, if you made this full-time, look at all that you would get. Joe Sterne: Right. The one thing I've seen over the past few months as I've navigated the new contract world. Because historically, I've only looked for W2, but with this market I've had to open myself up to contract roles, is that there definitely is the concept of contract to hire. Where essentially instead of testing out an employee for 60 or 90 days, you're essentially testing them out for six months, a year, or so. Some of those offers might just be dangling in front of you to get you to be willing to do a contract. But I feel like others actually do convert and drawing some parallels to outside the Salesforce ecosystem when it comes to community management or marketing, having a bunch of contract roles before you land a full-time one is not unusual. It used to be unusual in the Salesforce realm and I feel like that is also starting to change just with the way that the current market is and the pullback on head counts. That is forcing companies to arguably prioritize their bottomline over their employees. But again, slightly separate conversation. But making sure that from a cost standpoint, that they're not necessarily wasting money on separate groups that they don't "need" too. So I think that having the ability to grab a contact role for six months is great. It's just that one of the things that you will need to be aware of is that from a interviewing perspective, you don't... Sometimes when you get a full-time job, especially if it's one that you've been pining for, for a while, you take a step back from the LinkedIn and the job application market for a period of time. When it comes to contracting like sales, you don't really have that luxury. So yes, I am currently contracting for one company but I've never stopped looking for additional work. Just because I don't necessarily have an exclusivity with my current company and I'm also... I'm trying to get to 40 hours a week billable right now which they can't offer and that's okay. It was only pitched as part-time anyway. But for me, it's always trying to find more work and more potential pipeline. So it's very similar. It's from a consulting standpoint of trying to build a book of business and trying to build a pipeline and trying to line that up. Because ideally, if I stayed in this world of contracting work and whatnot, I would be trying to make sure that I'm fully booked out for a year or so in advance and turn away work or refer work to other people rather than trying to scramble for it. It's the typical feast or famine concept. Mike: What were... I guess I started in the past tense. But what are some of the things that you do when getting ready for a job interview, either as a W2 or a 10-99, that you feel is applicable to a lot of admins? Joe Sterne: Oh, man. So I would say, one of the things that I've really started to leverage. And I know that the whole AI, AI, AI thing has been beat over- Mike: Really? You don't get that anywhere? I haven't- Joe Sterne: Yeah. No, I- Mike: I haven't seen AI anywhere. That's the first I've heard of it. Joe Sterne: Yeah. Exactly. Over the last year, I've definitely started to leverage at least ChatGDP more and more to a point where I'm actually paying for it. I tried to actually set up my own custom GDP around Salesforce architecture that got kicked off the store because it used the term Salesforce. But that is something that I've found to be helpful when I have been, A, researching the company and the industries that company is in. Because asking questions about that, diving deep, granted for most of the stuff that people think of AI today, arguably it's just spicy autocorrect. But there are some areas where it can definitely start doing things for you that are either tedious or just time-consuming. So I just saw an article that Shannon Tran posted around a Salesforce Ben posting where they were trying to implement different types of AI in an org and they were just trying to figure out what made sense. It turns out, a lot of it, they had to go off platform for and that brings up a ton of complexity. As an admin, you're not necessarily required to know all of that. But you would want to know at least on the Salesforce side, what they're planning on doing and what tools that they are implementing. And what different areas or different features that may have not been available in the past are now available. Is the company going to be paying for those extra licenses? How are those going to be implemented? Are you implementing them? Is a third party implementing them? So there's a lot of different questions that would probably come up in an interview if you start diving down into that. I have found that tools like ChatGDP are very helpful to navigate those flows beforehand and potentially, give you a talk track before you actually even talk to them. So I mean, you can use ChatGDP as a pseudo interviewer and have it just drill you for questions. You can use it as a certification prep tool and have it ask you questions. Now, granted, especially in the latter example, I would want to verify that those answers are correct because they do have the chance to hallucinate every now and then. Obviously, I always joke that because it's on the internet, everything is true. But I do feel that when people see things that are typed out, they usually default to thinking that is true rather than potentially critically thinking that it may not be. So just a word of caution that you may not have 100% accuracy in truthfulness. But, to me, that's been a great way to prep for interviews just because I can almost have a conversation rather than me just doing a few Google searches and having to potentially connect the dots here and there which is also very useful. Mike: You said something that... Well, right at the beginning of your answer, it's been just echoing in my head that I want to know in the current landscape... You said, "When I'm looking at a company and how I would work with them..." How much does that come up in the interview? How important is it in the age of the internet that you actually do the prep work on the about page and the history page and the about us page or if they have a corporate values page? How much do you do that when you're prepping as an individual or as a consultant? Joe Sterne: So I would say that you don't necessarily need to know their entire executive suite by the back of your hand and be able to recite off what they've done like you're talking about a sports player. Unless you want to, by all means, go for it. I've found that knowing a initial amount about what the industry that they're in, some of the customers that they deal with, whether that's other businesses, whether that's end consumers, whether that's both, it helps you figure out some of the problems that they're searching for. Because eventually, that's what you're trying to help them solve. That's what you're selling to them as a solution is, "Here. Here are your problems. I understand them. I'm going to be able to fix them. Here are some certain ways that I should be able to fix them. And there are other ideas that I have that I could work with other people as I learn more to evolve those solutions." I mean, that's true if you're a consultant, that's true if you're in-house. You're there to solve problems and make the company money or make the company money by making other people more efficient, stuff like that. So having a baseline knowledge of what they're doing helps you because from an initial interview standpoint, you may not necessarily have a lot of the... The best way to describe this is like a contact situation where it's, "Hey, given this certain issue that we're having, we're going to give you a quick brief background, tell us how you might approach it or tell us how you might solve it." I see that all the time. Those, if you don't know what the business does, you don't know how they necessarily act with their clients or partners or anything in their ecosystem, it's going to be a struggle for you to answer those. Because you won't know that off the top of your head and then you might have to fumble your way through it. As opposed to doing a little bit of research, not a ton. Because granted like right now in this market, I've found that there is a lot of quantity that you may have to go after initially before you can start focusing on quality as those amounts of interviews narrow as you go through the process. So it does take a lot of time to fully memorize a company. I'm not recommending that you do that. But not knowing anything about them and going in "cold" is not going to help you either because you won't be able to answer those hypothetical situations. Mike: Right. Yeah. It's funny just having been in the world and seeing that change, just the difference that the internet brought interviewing people. God. Before times? So what are things that you... Always, we get asked, and a lot of people get asked like job description. What should I look for in a job description? How do I know if this is... Is this a Salesforce admin job? Some companies call it that. They call a duck a duck, you're a Salesforce admin. Some don't. The business technology specialist or corporations sometimes have different naming conventions. What are things that you look for in job descriptions? Joe Sterne: Okay. So- Mike: Buckle up. I feel like this is an answer. Joe Sterne: Yeah. So it's funny that you bring this up because from the one thing that I have definitely noticed as being a solution architect, for the last half a decade or so, is that a solution architect these days isn't always a solution architect. You have to actually read the job description. Because a lot of times, I've encountered where you have a "solution architect", like that's what they call you. But you're asked to do Apex coding and debugging and all these other things that a technical architect would be responsible for. I don't know if it's just people don't understand that there is a fairly clear delineation between technical architects and solution architects when it comes to the amount of code that they should be required to do or if they're just trying to get a technical architect for cheap. Because arguably, the pay band for a technical architect, like any other dev, is a little bit higher than a solution architect which is generally not responsible for stuff like that. So I have seen a lot of that confusion in the marketplace when it comes to the position that I'm currently in. And I think that definitely also cascades down into even the difference between a "junior admin" where they're asking you to do everything an admin would do, but they're only trying to have you at the junior level to save cost or that they may not know better. It definitely depends on, if you can tease out, how long they've been using Salesforce. Because obviously, the newer they are to Salesforce, I think, the more struggle of understanding titles and how they reference to typical other titles in the ecosystem. It's a little bit more of a struggle if you've just started Salesforce as opposed to, "Hey, we've been on Salesforce for a decade. HR is caught up to this. We're well aware of pay bands. So that's not something that we're going to necessarily be able to," I don't want to say con, but, "argue with the level of talent that we want." Because that's something where if you're applying for a job that says junior and all of the stuff that they're asking and all the things that you talk about in the interview says, "This is actually a typical admin or a senior admin level," that's something to call out. Because that's probably going to show up, maybe not necessarily on the title side, but it's probably going to show up on the pay band side. So being aware of what a typical admin is responsible for is generally pretty helpful when you're reading these job descriptions. Because then, you can get a gut check of like, "Hey, are they really asking for an admin or are they asking for a senior admin? They just happen to have it marketed as something different."? Mike: Yeah. Well, and a lot of times, a lot of what we find and this is true for a... I don't want to pick on just admins because I know I've talked to the developer relations side. It's that way, too, with a lot of roles that people write. Especially if it's a new role within the organization, they just blanket, "Here's everything you should do," and it's like... I remember reading job descriptions in... Was it 2017? And they said, "You need five years of Lightning experience." It's like, "Well, it's only been out for two." And it's no fault to the company, they just... I don't think they somehow know to categorize stuff like that. So yeah, job descriptions can be all over the place. Joe Sterne: But as long as you're comfortable with what they're asking you to do, at least on the ten, that is usually a good start. Because the other thing to note about the job descriptions is it's generally, not always, but it's generally a starting place to some of the questions that you're going to start getting from the interviewers. One of the things that I get all the time when I am pitching companies or just interviewing generally is they're like, "Hey, you gave me an example about X, Y, Z. Can you go into more detail?" It's like, "No, I can't. I'm under NDA, so you can go talk to this company and have them sign a waiver if you want but I can't tell you exactly what I did. I can tell you that I worked on it." That happens more often than people think because they're trying to not necessarily see what the competition is doing but they're trying to gauge your skills. So being able to have ways that you can talk about your skills that aren't necessarily bound by an NDA can be really helpful. Maybe, that's some stuff that you've done with Superbadges, maybe that's something that you've done with a nonprofit that isn't necessarily bound by NDA, or maybe that's just something that you did for fun, literally, so you could speak about it in an interview. There's nothing wrong with that. But those questions generally do come up. It may not be first round. It might be second or third. And God, hopefully not fourth or fifth. But those- Mike: You never know. Joe Sterne: Yeah. You never know. Those examples usually directly relate back to that job description. Because there are people that you may be talking to that aren't necessarily very close to Salesforce. But they're brought into the interview process because they are a department that you're working with or a division that you're going to be embedded in. They may not know everything about Salesforce, so they may just go down the job description part and ask you questions. They may go down your resume and just drill you on, "Hey, why do you have this on here? Can you tell me a little bit more about it?" So being able to say, "Oh, cool. Thanks for asking me about that here. And I'm going to go into a 2-minute monologue of the question that you just asked." That's definitely very helpful because it shows that, A, you understand what they want and you also understand what you've done and you're able to talk about it at arguably a snap of your fingers. And not necessarily have to be like, "Oh, well, hold on a second. Let me look that up," and, "What did I write here?", kind of thing Mike: As we wrap things up, I... It sounds like a fun question. Fun is a word that means a lot of things in my head so we won't use- Joe Sterne: Are we using air quotes right now? Mike: No. I'm trying not to. Nobody can see them. Let's use the word interesting. Joe Sterne: Okay. Mike: What is the most interesting question you feel comfortable sharing that you got in a job interview? Joe Sterne: Oh, man. Mike: See how fun could also work? Joe Sterne: Yeah. Yeah. Fun could also work. I feel like that is... I've gotten a lot. I've had a... So I would say within the last year and a half across the last few jobs that I've gotten ever since I left Salesforce, I've probably put in well over a thousand applications. Mike: Wow. Joe Sterne: I've had not a very good conversion rate to interviews but I have had some interviews. I think that the more bizarre questions that I get are usually something that has absolutely nothing to relate to Salesforce. I think it's the ones that they're trying to figure you out from a psychological perspective but they haven't really thought it through. So it's the ones where it's like, "Hey, if you could be any animal, what animal would you be?" "I don't know. An elephant? So I can't forget all this stuff." Like, "How does this relate to what we're doing?" That was- Mike: Joe, how are you going to type with elephant feet? Joe Sterne: Right. Exactly. I'm like, "I'll have to use-" Mike: [inaudible 00:29:30]. Joe Sterne: Right. I'm like, "Do I need to ask for accommodations here?" So it's questions like that, that I've gotten, where it's just been completely oddball. Like, "This has nothing to do with the job at all. How..." I even struggle to how connect the dot back to the interview process itself where it's like, "Hey, what are you trying to ask me?" Because it's not something simple of like, "Hey, I'm having this issue. How would you tackle it?" It's like, "Well, I'd try to do it in configuration and this is the way that I think I would tackle it based on this information. If that changes, then maybe I'd look at the App Exchange and see if I could find anything there. If that didn't necessarily work, then I'd have to start talking about custom code and understanding..." That's a whole train of thought that you can have with a question that is semi-technical related. But if you have somebody asking, "Hey, what brand of soda would you be and why?" Where do I go with that? Mike: Yeah. First of all, you've got the big two. And then, what if you go a regional flavor that nobody understands with limited distribution? Joe Sterne: Right. Or what if you go something retro like, "Hey, I'd like to be Tab or Crystal Clear Pepsi," like- Mike: I was going to say Crystal Pepsi, yes. Joe Sterne: Yeah. Mike: That's the second or third time it's come up on this podcast. It's awesome. Joe Sterne: Yeah. I mean, bringing it back full circle, talking about something that will date you, Gen Z has no idea what Crystal Clear Pepsi is. But it is definitely one of the, I would say, the rare failures of soda, up there with new Coke which is also- Mike: It still doesn't... Coke still doesn't taste right. I remember what Coke tastes like as a kid and the whole new Coke, new Coke tasted like Pepsi. Joe Sterne: Yeah. Exactly. They were trying to go after the sweeter market. I only remember this because Stranger Things did a Coke tie-in, I think, for Season 2 or 3 where you could buy redone new Coke in the can. And so, I bought it just to taste it and I remember sipping it and I was like, "This is horrible. This is knockoff Pepsi, store brand Pepsi." And I was like, "Yeah. I can see why this didn't go anywhere." Mike: Right. Joe Sterne: So yeah, so I would say that I don't know if you could necessarily prepare for those questions of, "If you were a soda, what soda would you be and why?" But those are usually ones that I would found there, it's like, "All right. Maybe I should reconsider wanting to work for this company in general if you're going to be asking me questions like this. Because I don't know if this is going to be a reflection of the type of company that it is too." Because I mean... I feel like one thing that a lot of people forget, and it's easy to especially when you're desperate for a job, is that you're also interviewing the company. You're trying to figure out if you want to work there too. So there are times where the interviewers are trying to sell you on working there and there are times where they may not be. But that's something that, ideally, is on you to figure out, "Hey, I need to be able to ask questions that would determine if I want to work there," and those can vary from people. So I can't say there's a list of questions that you should ask every company, period. But a very good one to start teasing out how they were is what is their stance on return to office? Because that's usually a really good indicator of, "Do we listen to our employees actually or do we say we listen to our employees and ignore them?" So it's questions like that... Obviously, if you want to be in the office full-time, you can ask that question. It doesn't necessarily matter what they say. But if you don't want to be in the office full-time or if this was marketed as a remote job and they're actually saying it's hybrid, that's something to think about like, "Hey, if they can't get this right in the job application, what else are they going to potentially be getting wrong or not necessarily telling you the truth when you're working there?" So make sure that you don't forget that you're also interviewing them to see if they're a place that you want to work for too. Not necessarily just... It's not one-sided. It's always two sides of a conversation. It's a conversation. It's not a monologue. It's something where you need to have back and forth and it's for the... Ideally, it's for both sides to make sure that, "Hey, we're both in agreement of what's expected." Mike: Yep. I completely agree. I wasn't trying to teach admins anything out of this other than just sometimes getting funny questions is a fun way to end things. Joe, I want to thank- Joe Sterne: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Sorry. I probably went on a serious tangent there. Mike: No, you're fine. We know you want to be an elephant. Joe Sterne: Yeah. I mean, sometimes that's also to keep with a funny thing like, "Do you have any questions?" That's also something that you can just throw back at them too. "Hey, if you were a soda, what soda would you be and why?" Because I guarantee that 99 point something percent of people aren't expecting that question. So it's a... Depending on the banter that you have with your interviewer, it might be a fun way to end it out. Mike: Right. Good. Joe, thanks for stopping by and- Joe Sterne: Of course. Mike: Keeping us up to date on what's going on out there. If people wanted to follow you on anything social, I'll go ahead and link it down in our show notes. Joe Sterne: Yes, that would be great. Yeah. You can find me on Twitter, I refuse to call it X. You can find me on LinkedIn and I mean, heck, you couldn't find me at my new company. You can shoot me an email. Feel free to reach out to me. I still have people reaching out to me from our past conversation I've had on this podcast periodically so I always love to get those notes. Yeah. I love to get those notes because I mean, I'm here to help other people. So if I haven't helped you, I'm sorry. That was definitely my goal of today. And if I have helped you, I'd love to hear that I have because it's always a nice ego boost. Mike: Absolutely. Thanks so much, Joe. Joe Sterne: Thank you. Mike: It was a great discussion with Joe. I'd love to know, so what answer would you be for an animal? The whole time that he was asking that question, for some reason, the tiger came to mind. But I'd be curious, I'd love to know what animal you could be if you were a Salesforce admin at a job interview. But I did think that Joe gave us some really good tips and from an experience standpoint, oftentimes, it's brought up, "Go help a nonprofit." But sometimes looking for a full-time FTE job versus a contract job, a contract job might be a good path for getting some experience. If it's a trend that a lot of organizations are going to, it's a great way to get into the front door of that organization. So thanks, Joe, for being on here and sharing some of those wisdom. Now, if you're doing one thing and you enjoyed this, I want you to help share and spread the word. So if you're listening on Apple Podcasts, just go ahead and tap the three dots in the upper right and click Share Episode. What you can do there is you can post at social or you can text it to a friend, maybe you have somebody else that's out there looking for a job. Of course, I mentioned resources, links to Joe's social stuff, all of that will be in the show notes for the episode. All of the Salesforce Admin episodes can be found at admin.salesforce.com. That is your one-stop for everything admin, including a transcript of this episode. Be sure to join our conversation in the Admin Trailblazer Group that is in the Trailblazer Community. Again, link is in the show notes. So until next week, we'll see you in the cloud.  

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we have another deep dive with Josh Birk, who talks to Shoby Abdi, Principle Architecture Evangelist at Salesforce. Join us as we chat about the Well-Architected framework, why you should start using Data Cloud, and what you need to do to get ready. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Shoby Abdi. The Well-Architected framework Shoby is the Principle Architecture Evangelist at Salesforce, and he’s come on the pod to tell us about the Salesforce Well-Architected framework. And he’s here to tell you that the framework is not just for Salesforce Architects—everyone should take a look at it. As Shoby puts it, if your customers or users open Salesforce and it scares them, that’s how you know you need to use the framework. It can help you identify anti-patterns in your org and fix them by building solutions that are trusted, easy, and adaptable. Those are the essential ingredients for a healthy org, and that’s what puts you in the best position to take advantage of everything Data Cloud has to offer. If Data Cloud was a parking lot We’ve talked a little about Data Cloud on this podcast in the past, and that’s linked below, but Shoby helped explain why it’s such a big deal. The main point he makes is that by bringing all of your data together  in one place, it can start to tell a story. As he puts it, “What is your customer doing? Where are they? And then how do you interact with them next?” When we talk about Data Cloud, it can often sound like it’s some sort of parking lot for all of the information you have about your customers. But as Shoby points out, it’s so much more than that. It’s more like if your parking lot had a valet that could tell you everything about who’s parked there, what kind of car they drive, how long they’re staying there, and exactly when they plan to leave. Einstein and Data Cloud If you’re a Salesforce Admin looking to enable Data Cloud, Shoby recommends working through the Well-Architected framework to make sure that your org is healthy. After all, these tools are only as good as the data you give them. If you’ve done all that, there’s a lot to get exited about. Data Cloud brings everything into Salesforce as standard objects, which means you can build all sorts of interesting things with flows and everything else you’re already using. And with Einstein Copilot and other AI tools, the possibilities are endless. There’s a lot more great stuff from Shoby in this episode about how Data Cloud works, so be sure to take a listen. And don’t forget to subscribe to hear more from the Salesforce Admins Podcast. Podcast swag Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store Learn more Salesforce Well-Architected Framework Making Data Cloud Work With Your Existing Salesforce CRM Data Salesforce Architects Blog Podcast: Well-Architected Automation with Tom Leddy   Admin Trailblazers Group Admin Trailblazers Community Group Social Shoby on Medium Salesforce Admins: @SalesforceAdmns  Mike on Threads: https://www.threads.net/@mikegerholdt/ Mike on Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@salesforce.mike Mike on X: @MikeGerholdt   Full show transcript Josh Birk: Greetings, Salesforce admins. It's Josh Birk here, your guest host for this week. This week on a deep dive, we're going to dig into data cloud and then talk about data cloud. I brought one of my good friends and old colleagues, Shoby Abdi. All right. Today on the show we're going to welcome back Shoby Abdi to talk about data cloud. Shoby, how you doing? Shoby Abdi: Not too bad. Just doing well. Connections is right around the corner. Just to timestamp this for everybody. Josh Birk: It's a Connections week. It's a DevOps streaming week. Everybody here is in Chicago and I'm still at home talking to you. So that's my social calendar. Shoby Abdi: Exactly. That sounds very similar. I am also in Chicago. Josh Birk: Nice. Okay. So introduce yourself a little bit. Tell me a little bit about your current role. Shoby Abdi: Sure. So my name is Shoby Abdi. I am a principal architecture evangelist on the Salesforce's Architects and Well-Architected team or the other way around. Essentially, if anybody has ever gone to or if you're a Salesforce architect or if you've ever gone to architect.salesforce.com or if you've ever heard of the Well-Architected framework, my role, along with a few others is that we are evangelists. So it's very similar to the work that Josh does or on the admin side or developer advantage to the developer size, except our audience is firmly architects. Architects of all kinds, whether that be our internal ones, customers, partners, architects all over the place. Josh Birk: There's a nice overlap between admins and architects. So actually let's give you that this is the Tonight Show portion where you get to do your own plug. Tell me a little bit about the Well-Architected framework. Shoby Abdi: Sure, absolutely. So the Well-Architected framework in a very simple manner is prescriptive guidance for solution health. When we put it that way... Now remember, it's a Well-Architected framework. Now, Well-Architected frameworks exist not just with Salesforce, but Amazon, Microsoft, all kinds of other cloud providers have created their own Well-Architected frameworks. What's really important about the Well-Architected framework is that it's not simply for architects, right? While it's Well-Architected, it's not a well-built framework for architects. It's a Well-Architected framework. So the idea is that regardless of your role, your function, if you're just a customer, if you're an implementer, everybody should be looking at it. And when we talk about solution health, really what it boils down to is a lot of times when anybody is implementing for the first time, or they're implementing in an existing org, or even at as an administrator, you inherit an org. You start a job and you inherit some eight, nine-year-old org with all kinds of technical debt happening and you're like, "Okay, I don't know what's good and what's bad, what to keep and what to deprecate." What the Well-Architected framework does, and when you look at it from a baseline perspective, is that it was really developed and designed by architects and other individuals in the ecosystem like yourselves, like the folks listening. It was also firmly designed by our individuals within our product and engineering team. And that's important is that the prescriptive guidance within it is really firmly built on top of not just base level knowledge, but it's firm recommendations, firm practices, and we even take the tack of actually dictating specific patterns and anti-patterns. Josh Birk: Got it. Shoby Abdi: Related to how it goes. And the way that Well-Architected framework is structured is around solutions should be trusted, easy and adaptable. And we firmly believe they should be in that order. One of the first elements of trusted is secure, but then easy, it's about being intentional and then adaptable. One of my favorite, one of the last ones is composable. And obviously as Salesforce, trust is our number one value. So obviously we're going to feel trust should be the first thing you focus on. So really the framework itself is really a... The simplest way I can put it is that if you want to build a healthy solution, if you want to maintain a healthy solution, you can utilize a prescriptive guidance within the framework and you can find it at architect.salesforce.com. It's available today. It's not hidden anywhere. You can find it today and utilize it as you need it. Josh Birk: Love it. So if you're an admin and you open up your org and it scares you, this is a good trail guide to get out of it. Shoby Abdi: It's not even if you're an admin, it often scares you, it's more of like if you're a customer or if a business user open up the org and it scares them. Josh Birk: Right. Shoby Abdi: It's like, "I'd love to use Salesforce, but I really can't use it because of the following SB issue. My report-" Josh Birk: Because of all the anxiety it gives me, whatever. Shoby Abdi: "I really want to use this report. I don't know where it is, but I really want to use this report, Meredith, but it takes five minutes to run. I can't use it." Okay, well, it may be full of anti-patterns. So that's where utilizing some of the guidance within our performance, topics, around throughput and latency could come in handy to really understand, are these reports I need to modify? Do I need to do skinny tables? Do I need to optimize any queries if it's custom? That's what that guidance really is. It's not simply an admin even or an architect or developer or anybody looking at it themselves. It could also be based on actual customer and end user feedback of what they're seeing and what they're telling you that needs to be fixed. Josh Birk: Because that's the commonality between these three roles is that the users are always in the middle. Shoby Abdi: And Salesforce. Josh Birk: And Salesforce, yeah. Shoby Abdi: There you go. Josh Birk: Okay. So we're talking data cloud today, and let's take the very, very high level. If you have to introduce data cloud as a product to somebody, how do you describe it? Shoby Abdi: The way that I describe data cloud is that when it's so much like you hear a lot of different capabilities around it. You'll hear data lake, data warehouse. Really what data cloud is, is it provides the ability for any organization, regardless of the amount of data sources that your organization has to make those data sources and all of that data, that disparate data that can be everywhere doing many things. It makes it useful in the context of your customer. If you're a B2C organization that has end customers out there in the world buying things, then it could be useful as far as a unified profile for that person goes. As you're a B2B organization where you're more business oriented and account oriented, it could be useful for you as well. I was actually describing this to someone yesterday where when you look at data cloud and its capabilities, and a lot of people will always think of different data sources, data lakes, data warehouses where it's different and important is that data cloud is not simply a place where you park your data, hope it works, and hope you can find it. It's not a parking lot for your data. Right? Josh Birk: Right. Shoby Abdi: What it is when you bring it into data cloud, you can automate it. You can get a view of your customer. Right? Josh Birk: Yeah. Shoby Abdi: When we talk about that single view of the customer. And really what drives that view is the customer's interactions and activity. Whether you're a consumer based organization or a business to business based organization, your customer is going to interact with you in some way that involves data. They're going to be creating data, whether they're clicking on websites, they're paying invoices, they're paying credit cards, they're creating cases, they're telling you that they want to buy 500,000 of these and you're closing a deal and they're paying off an invoice and agreeing to an order over email. All of these actions, all of these functions, all this data as it comes into data cloud starts to tell you what are the behaviors? What is your customer doing? What is your customer doing today? Where is your customer? And then how do you interact with them next? So that's the power of data cloud is, it's not simply a, "Okay, I've got all my data in. That's great." No, that's literally step zero. That's what we tell everybody. Get your data into data cloud. Just get it in. Because once you get it in, then it's the power of automation, analytics, unification, segmenting, activations. That's where it starts to matter. So that's really when we talk about the data cloud, that's what we look at. Josh Birk: Yeah. I love the parking lot analogy because first of all, it's so easy to think of it like that. I've got my data in Salesforce, but then blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. There's something over here. I'll use data cloud to connect it. But to kind of extend that analogy, it's not just a parking lot. It's a parking lot with a valet and a security officer and a scheduling system. It's got all the moving parts you need in order to efficiently move cars in and out of that parking lot. Shoby Abdi: Yeah, absolutely. It's not just lot covered. So really what it is, it's similar to everything that Salesforce does. Like I said before, trust is our number one value. Similar to the Well-Architected framework as well, it's built with trust in mind. It's built with security in mind. So because we have that trust first. Now, when it comes to data cloud, you can be secure that when your data comes in, we handle that. We can take care of that part. Then what starts to matter is what you do with it like automation. Josh Birk: Yeah. What are some specific use cases that you see? What's an example of somebody who just clicked and they're like, "Oh, this is actually the problem that I need data cloud to be the solution"? Shoby Abdi: So a lot of it really comes in terms of, okay, data cloud obviously started from its CDP days and it's evolved significantly. A lot of use cases that we'll see are simply around, "Okay, I need to understand how do I interact with my end customer next?" So principally you'll see some of that around unified profile. If you've ever seen a demo of data cloud, you'll see first use case of, "Okay, who is this human being? What websites are they going to? And then finally, what is it that we need to really work them with?" And then people often ask like, "Okay, I've got that element of data cloud and I've got all this data in. I see this person, but who's going to help me next?" That's where our friend Einstein comes in handy, right? Because you can create an email within Einstein utilizing different prompts, different capabilities, but once you include data cloud data into that prompt, now all of a sudden you've enriched it significantly. Where now because CRM data, while powerful is often limited. It's limited based on what your business does and how your business updates still that CRM data, whether it's case data or opportunity data. But data cloud data is your customer's data. Right? Josh Birk: Mm-hmm. Shoby Abdi: They're the ones who are constantly making it happen. So now all of a sudden if your email or if the campaign is a part of, is a reflection of actual real life activity they're doing and they didn't need to tell you, "Put me here next," that makes a big difference in that process. So that's fundamentally a use case that we see. It's like while it's very general, it could apply to marketing, it could apply to sales, in the end, the reason I articulate this specific use case is that it starts to really combine the power of the data cloud with the power of what you probably already have if you're looking at data cloud, which is your Salesforce CRM. Josh Birk: Yeah. Well, and I like... Every now and then in tech, we get the handiness of a phrase that just makes sense. Unified profile, I feel like honestly gives you the solution, but also defines the problem in the first place, right? Shoby Abdi: Yeah, absolutely. Josh Birk: If I'm trying to communicate with you, Shoby Abdi, but you as a digital identity is actually strewn about 15 different data sources, then when I go to Salesforce, I have to cobble that together before I have an accurate representation of you. Shoby Abdi: No, absolutely. A lot of the challenge is, someone even asked me this... Yesterday was apparently a busy day, but someone asked me this yesterday as well, was just around, "Well, can you use data cloud for de-duping?" Josh Birk: Right. Shoby Abdi: And then I said, "One of the things you have to think about is de-duping is a you problem. It's not a customer problem. The customer's problem is you don't know who they are. So if you've got eight different versions of that human being's name and you don't know which one is the which one that actually has bought anything, or maybe they've changed their name, they've changed their address, they've changed their phone number, but then all of a sudden when you bring in the data cloud, you bring in all those unified data sources and one of those John Smiths is clicking on a lot of your websites, ordering a lot of your product. And the John Smith you thought that was in your CRM was the one that was actually doing it, is not that one. Then you really don't have to de-dupe anything. Then you know which one is the actual human being, John Smith, like the ones you should actually start having that enriched discussion with, that enriched engagement with, whether it's through sales, service, marketing support, however. That's where you can start. Josh Birk: So data cloud's not there to try to fix your bad data management, but it can help focus the lens, so to speak, so that you're looking at the right part of the data. Shoby Abdi: No, absolutely. Right? Because by bringing all those data sources in, now all of a sudden your customer is almost in the data driver's seat because as they interact with your online properties, as they interact with your organizational properties and data created, now all of a sudden their activities start to reflect within those profiles and you start to see and understand what it is they do. Josh Birk: To extend to that, how would you compare, because you and I are old school technologists and we grew up in the days where what we are talking about now would mostly be in the realm of extract, transform, and load, right? Like an ETL process. How does data cloud compare or how is it similar or different from those old school solutions? Shoby Abdi: Yeah. And I think that comes up quite a bit of like, "Well, how do I do ETL with data cloud? Do I go with this ETL tool or do I go with data cloud? Do I do this or do I do that?" And invariably the power... One of the things that often comes up is it becomes a... When you look at what data lakes we're looking to solve and data warehouses were looking to solve was like, "Okay, we've got all of our data all over the place. We need and to be one specific place." And then it's like, "Okay, we've put it now in one specific place." And it's like, "All right, now what? Now, are we all of a sudden... Once again, it's the parking lot." Are we all of a sudden like, "Okay. Well, this person's claiming they need to leave the building at 9:00 PM. This person is leaving at 10:00. So why don't we park their car up here and then with there and then go over there." Right? Josh Birk: Right. Shoby Abdi: So now all of a sudden as a customer because of something I really didn't do, I may have gotten there really early. But because I got there early, I'm getting penalized for leaving early because a lot of people came after me. So the way that I compare it with ETL, it goes back to the ability to create that unified profile, activate on that unified profile, create some [inaudible 00:15:45] unified profile, is that you start to worry less about how to get clean amazing data. I don't even compare it to MDM. I'm sorry ETL, but it's MDM. How do you do data cloud with MDM? And it's like, well, once again, who is it for? Is it for your internal organization to have its perfect golden record situation when in fact the golden record should be the customer? It should be that customer. It should be the individual account record or that individual record inside of Salesforce. And then what's really driving it being meaningful golden are the interactions and activities that are happening. And that's where that power of data cloud comes in with you bring in from data sources through batch elements or through streaming elements, whether you bring it through our Insights API or any other API or an SDK. As you bring that data in, now all of a sudden you're simply enriching that profile more and more and you're able to automate on that more and more as it goes along. So that's why it's hard for me to compare it to base level ETL or anything because the power of it is that just bring the data in. Bring the data in. Where with ETL it's all about, "Well, before you bring the data in, let's talk about at least 50 things." Where now it's like, "No, just bring the data in. And then utilizing the power of the data cloud itself, the power of automation built within our platform like Flows, and Apex, and Orchestration, others, you can do a lot more with it. But the first step, I'm going to go back to what the first episode will be on, it's just got to bring it in. Josh Birk: You just got to bring it in. Right. Well, and let's use that as a launching point because you just said automation a lot and you said Flow. So an admin who knows Flow, what are some things that they can use Flow to interact with data cloud? Shoby Abdi: Yeah, absolutely. And what's interesting is a couple of weeks ago we actually put out a blog. So if anybody's ever read our blog, medium.com/salesforcearchitects actually blog post about this very thing. It's essentially, if you want to look, it's called Making Data Cloud Work With Your Existing Salesforce CRM data. And while I'm not good at titles, the end goal of it was really to talk about when we talk about data cloud and Salesforce and our entire platform, our Einstein 1 platform, it's really all about... One of the things that you'll see is that shared metadata framework. And that's one thing if anybody takes anything away from whatever it is I'm saying, it's really that all of this is a shared metadata framework. What that shared metadata framework means is that now as we just keep saying, "You bring that data in, bring that data in." It's not simply, "Okay, now that I've brought that data in, I don't know what to do with it. Can I actually access it? Can I use the tools that I have in place in platform to actually do anything with it?" Or it's like a marketing cloud thing. I need to learn marketing cloud automation. So one of the drivers behind creating that blog post was to say, "No. Data cloud was built with the power of the platform in mind." It's the marrying of data cloud capabilities with Salesforce CRM. So when data cloud comes in, it comes in as different kinds of objects. It's objects. So it starts usually from data streams as DSOs. And DSOs is essentially that data from all these different third-party sources. And this is where data starts to reflect within your data cloud environment, whether it's zero copy or it's registered. It's essentially there. It's available to you to actually start to proceed with. That's when you start to create essentially data lake objects as well as DLOs. And those DLOs is when you start to look at, "All right, what are those specific data use cases I want?" It could be sales-related, it could be service-related, it could be marketing-related, it could be telemetry-related, it could be anything. But then beyond those DLOs, once again, we're still talking about objects. That's when we're going to create other kinds of objects. So the first kind of object is usually what's called a DMO. Now, if you're an administrator or developer architect, when you're working with data cloud, you're probably going to be working with DMOs quite a bit because DMOs are more often than not, where a lot of the automation is happening. So a DMO is essentially to harmonized group in those DLO. So you could have those data lake objects. Let's just say, one of the things about I always miss is those fun old school MarTech diagrams where they're like, "Oh, let's show all the hundreds of billions of kinds of applications that exist out there for marketing." Josh Birk: Right. Shoby Abdi: It's true. Right? You may have 55 Google Sheets and ADRPs and etc, etc. As you start to go down the source object, DSO, data lake object, DLO, DMO object in a DMO process, you start to essentially build out, parse out what the object model needs to look like, what that harmonized elements of data needs to look like for your specific use case. And I'll go over a Sales Cloud, use case that'll be relevant. So for DMO, and then you'll have another kind of object, which is actually a calculated insight object, calculated insights, which is a CIO, now that you can create basically based on essentially an insight based on a query, based on specific analytics like certain... Old school calculated insight or [inaudible 00:21:33] review. There's a lot of different ways you can call it, but it is essentially based on a calculation that occurs where someone hits this website these many times, or they've made these many orders or that kind of thing. Josh Birk: Gotcha. Shoby Abdi: But those are the kinds of objects. So now all of a sudden, okay. You've got all these kinds of objects within data cloud, these data cloud objects. What happens then? So that is where the power of our fliend, friend. Not fliend, but friend. Josh Birk: Fliend. Shoby Abdi: Friend Flow comes in. So when we look at flow, it's really the one thing we need to realize about data cloud is that a data cloud instance can exist in one environment. It could exist as a single data cloud instance across multiple environments. Josh Birk: Gotcha. Shoby Abdi: So if you're an administrator who's like, "Well, it's not as easy for me Josh, because I've got 55 environments in this one data cloud instance, catering to all of them." You could still use Flow. The way that it changes the way that you design it slightly differs. And this is obviously evolving, but for now, this is the way it is at the time of this recording where if your data cloud and your Salesforce CRM are in a single environment, the same environment, that's where you're going to create a data cloud triggered flow. And the data cloud triggered flow, if anybody has an activated data cloud org, or if you've gotten a data cloud environment from Trailhead, you'll see the ability to create a data cloud triggered flow, and that's launched when a DMO or CIO have a change of data. So now all of a sudden it's like, "Okay. How do I then associate that triggered flow with my Salesforce data?" Well, you do it the way you do it. Josh Birk: You would do it normally. Shoby Abdi: You create a record or you essentially update a record or you do something, right? Because now all of a sudden that customer activity within that Flow can then drive whatever updates you want within that CRM object. Josh Birk: Gotcha. Shoby Abdi: So that's one of the first ways you can correlate, or you can actually directly link your data cloud, data model data that's being generated to your Salesforce CRM data model data. Josh Birk: Got it. Shoby Abdi: The second way to use Flow is that if it's in different environments. Now you may say, "Okay, well it's in different environments. Am I in trouble now? Now the answer is no. Once again, data cloud is designed for this in mind. Now, there are many ways to actually utilize a data action and data cloud, and what a data action does is very similar to the trigger flow. It looks for any data changes in the DMO or CIO, right? One of the specific ones, you could do web hooks and other means that work with all of our clouds, but the one that people probably most know is a platform event, because a platform event is basically another kind of object. And that now all of a sudden you can create a platform event and then that can hit a flow within another org, a platform event, and then all of a sudden it becomes, "Well, now how do I associate that data cloud platform event, data to my CRM data in my other org?" Well, you do it the way that you would do it today, right? Josh Birk: Right. Shoby Abdi: You essentially do it the way that it would work with the platform event today if it came from data cloud, if it came from grandma's Microsoft Access table, whichever one. So that's where you can operationally use it, where in those situations, whether it's the same or different environment, how you can use Flow if you want to create read, update or delete any and all Salesforce data. Josh Birk: Gotcha. Shoby Abdi: The other path that you can do is you can also... You have the ability to actually view some data cloud data associated with CRM data, and that's relatively new, what are called data cloud related lists and data cloud copy fields. A related list is essentially the way it sounds where it's just specific DMO like data model object data associated to a lead contact or person account or a field, or a field data that can be updated from data cloud. So that once again, the lead contact and person account. The only distinction on that one is that it's view only at the moment, and it's really restricted to lead contact person account at the moment. Whereas through our Flow process, any implementer, administrator, anybody can use the existing skills they have from a clicks or a code perspective to make it work Flow. I keep using Flow. People are like, "Well, what about Apex?" Same rules. Same principle rules. You can create a trigger on platform events. You can create a trigger off of... And utilize the triggered Flow and data cloud in the same environment to kick off Apex. You have a lot of those options as well. So in the blog, I have an example of like, "All right, I talked about it in very ethereal terms." How do I talk about that in terms of an actual use case, like a useful one? So the way that it's described is that essentially we have data like a Sales Cloud one because Sales Cloud is our number one biggest cloud, and we have Sales Cloud data coming in from order management systems and ERPs. And it used to be, "Well, if I'm bringing in from order management and ERPs, that's all ETL talk. Do I need to do that?" No, no, no, no. You can absolutely bring that data in into Salesforce using data cloud. And once it's in data cloud, you can create those data lake objects, you can create those DMO objects and even calculated insights. The example that I gave was if you have all these order management systems and all these ERPs, you can create DMO records that combine all of the order data across all these different sources into a single object model. Josh Birk: Gotcha. Shoby Abdi: You can combine all of them if they're, let's say, direct. In fact you're selling through like grandmas... I'm really harping on grandma today. Grandma's like a local convenience store. You can get their data as well. And then you could also create this calculated insight record and you could say you want to group all the order data by an individual across all of them, whether they went into grandma store or they went on your online e-commerce website. E-commerce, That's a good way to put it. You're online. E-commerce, I'm going to really age myself. Then regardless of which direction you go, you can get that data from all those disparate data sources, Salesforce, and that can create an order record and associated to a lead and opportunity or quote that can update data within your CRM. It could do all of those things. You can actually show those copy field data, those related list data associated to that lead contact or person account because it's probably you making that order regardless of where you go. So now all of a sudden, that order, whether you went to the store, whether you did it online, showing up under you. It's coming in from data cloud. So that's a very base level one example that's described in more visual diagram detail inside of the blog post. But the reason that we went with the route of a Sales Cloud, one, is that right now, obviously data cloud is activated in everybody's environment. You could turn it on today. Josh Birk: Gotcha. Shoby Abdi: The first thing that people turn on, they've got Sales Cloud. It's like, "Oh, let's see what this looks like with my Sales Cloud. Can I use it with Sales Cloud?" The answer is yes. Josh Birk: The answer is yes. Shoby Abdi: Absolutely you can and you should. So that's really the goal of that. Josh Birk: Nice. Now, if somebody is listening to this and they're like, "Oh, this might be me. I use Sales Cloud. I have other clouds, I have other data sources, et cetera," are there considerations? I mean, other than the obvious stuff, don't go blow up your production just because you listened to Shoby and Josh on a podcast. But are there considerations an admin should take before flipping that switch and turning on data cloud? Shoby Abdi: Yeah, absolutely. A lot of those considerations are obviously looking at the state of your existing environment. If all of a sudden you're going to open up all the sources of data, the source of very powerful automation, I think people should absolutely not underestimate how powerful is because in many respects is that it's going to be meaningful. It's going to be meaningful is because when we talk about bringing those data sources in, it's your data. It's your organization's data. But the end, you want to look at your org and essentially understand, okay, is it in the best place it can be to do that? Right? Josh Birk: Yeah. Shoby Abdi: And bar another word because I'm setting myself here, up here, am I healthy? Josh Birk: Exactly. Shoby Abdi: Is the organization healthy? So now all of a sudden it's like, "All right, well if I got to get healthy, where do I find that?" You could look at the prescriptive guidance that exists within the well architected framework, because while you'll find a lot of items there that maybe specific data cloud, one of the things over the next few months, our product managers associated with the framework and with data cloud, they're adding more as it goes along. But one of the things to keep in mind is that if you're going to bring that data into Salesforce, CRM, anyway, the guidance within what Well-Architected framework is all about that. Josh Birk: Gotcha. Shoby Abdi: So I wouldn't even say it's more of a, well, before you blow up your org... Remember, data clouds are really designed for such a significant amount of data. You may be listening to everything right now, I was like, "Well, Shoby, I got way too much data. I got way too much data." I can't handle this. Once again, that data cloud was designed so that problem doesn't exist. Because you may say, "Well, I've got too much data in Salesforce. How do I solve that?" Well, that's where data cloud has these amazing CRM connectors. Sales and service. And you can actually ingest your own data and utilize the analytics and automation capability at scale to make it work where if all of a sudden an account is 20 years old, you don't want to lose out on all the amazingness of the last 19 and a half years. Only the last six months matter from an automation perspective. It used to be used be, "Well, you just got to archive that data and then hope for the best." Now, you could still right, but in the end, bring it back in data cloud. Josh Birk: Get the insights. Shoby Abdi: Get the insights, absolutely. Get that historical insight. All of a sudden you're... And if you start to inject Einstein into this, because it's the Einstein 1 platform, you start to inject Einstein into it. That is where all of a sudden you may be using the latest and greatest in technology, but your customers aren't losing out on the historical context that you are providing them. They will gain. They will absolutely gain from what you're providing. Josh Birk: And since we get paid every time, we can say AI on the air, it also completes that picture. When we talk things about like grounding prompts and putting your data into what the model is going to understand, if you haven't fixed that lens problem, if I haven't figured out who Shoby Abdi is or who John Smith is, then AI won't either. Shoby Abdi: No, absolutely not. Josh Birk: Data collect can help you point in that direction for the AI. Shoby Abdi: And really that's where all of a sudden, even when we talk about principally AI, we talk about that human at the helm. Josh Birk: Right. Shoby Abdi: Right? For a long time we obviously called it human at the loop, but now we're talking human at the helm. And really the whole end goal of the human at the helm is that you in many respects need to co-pilot this. It's almost like we have this product called like Copilot. Josh Birk: It's like, "We've thought about that name first." Shoby Abdi: It's like, "Oh my God." And really the end goal of being a co-pilot... And the way that I'd like to think about it principally, especially with co-pilot and how it relates to data cloud, is that when you're a co-pilot and you're flying a plane, some large 747, what you're not having to do is go outside on the plane and the flaps, raise them up, go down to the fuselage, put the wheels down, and then when the plane is in the air, "Boy, now I got to get it for cruising. So now you got to go back outside when you're 10,000 feet in the air. Josh Birk: In the air, yeah. Shoby Abdi: But the flap is back down. Raise the wheels up. Our aviation technology has evolved beyond that. So when you look at the power of Einstein, look at data cloud, really what it is, is that you truly become the co-pilot where all of this automation, everything is there to help you as the human being to just do your job. But what it's not doing right is it's not adding more complexity to it, right? Aviation technology has gotten to that point where it's like... There's been jokes of like, "Well, if I fall asleep, who's going to flip the switch to land? When we have to land." It's like, "Okay." It's almost to that stage. It's like, once again, but would you ever fly a plane? Would you ever fly in a plane that didn't have a pilot? I don't think anybody is ready for that yet, right? So having a human at the helm providing all of this, so increasing the ability for that just makes things more trustworthy. It makes things a lot safer for you and your customer. So that's why I like to... Once again, I don't think it's an AI, but now I just did. But in the end, when I think about AI in terms of all this, it's really, it relates to me. The data cloud story is a huge part of it, right? The Salesforce CRM story is a huge part of it. You can't talk AI. You can't talk Einstein without data cloud and without CRM. Josh Birk: Yep. All righty. Well, thank you very much, sir. We will give references and resources in the show notes, including to the Architect site and Shoby's blog post on this topic. Shoby, thanks for being on the show. Shoby Abdi: Thank you. Josh Birk: I want to thank Shoby for the great conversation and information. As always, I want to thank you for listening. Now if you want to learn more about this show, head on over to admin.salesforce.com where you can hear old episodes, see the show notes, and also read other resources on the topic. Once again, everybody thank you for listening and I'll talk to you soon.  

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Brandon Walton, President, Owner, and Principal Consultant at Cypress Learning Solutions. Join us as we chat about discovery, building trust, and why building with core Salesforce features is the best option for small organizations. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Brandon Walton. Creating a puppy pipeline in Salesforce Brandon started his career as a car salesman and support tech in the Redmond, Washington area when a fateful call with a tech executive who liked how he explained things led to a job offer. That company used Pardot and, when it was acquired by Salesforce, he had the opportunity to become the implementation partner. The rest is history. Today, Brandon’s a Salesforce Consultant for small businesses. One of his clients is Family Bred Puppies, which works to maximize the quality of life for dogs by matching families with small breeders. I wanted to bring him on the pod to share how he created a Salesforce implementation for them that’s scalable and easy to maintain. After all, who doesn’t love talking about puppies? Creating a low-maintenance, scalable Salesforce implementation As Brandon explains, when you’re working with a small team they want Salesforce to help them do what they do best. They often don’t have the resources to hire a full-time admin or developer. However, as he was doing discovery, Brandon realized that there was a way to map their already-existing business process onto basic Salesforce architecture. Family Bred Puppies needs to go through an application and interview process to qualify families looking to adopt, which are handled with the standard Salesforce lead and lead status objects. If they’ve found a suitable candidate, they can upgrade that lead to a contact and use the stages of an opportunity to track the adoption process. There is, however, a custom puppy object for puppy-specific information like vaccinations and genealogy. Because almost everything is built with standard Salesforce objects, the implementation is extremely low maintenance. It’s also easy to upgrade and expand. In fact, Brandon just came from a meeting to talk about adding case management and Marketing Cloud, and AI features like Einstein Next Best Action just work because it’s all standard. How to build trust with clients While all of this is good in theory, I really wanted to know how Brandon was so successful at getting his client to follow his advice. That’s the real challenge, isn’t it? You can explain all day why an opportunity would work better than building a custom adoption object, but how do you get them to believe you? For Brandon, it comes down to building trust. “When someone believes that you’re listening to them and have their best interests as your top priority, that’s the foundation of trust,” he says. Keep asking questions instead of jumping to a solution right away, and get them involved in the process of creating a Salesforce implementation that works for them. There’s a lot more great stuff from Brandon in this episode about scalability, user training, and puppies, so be sure to listen to the full episode. And don’t forget to subscribe to hear more from the Salesforce Admins Podcast. Podcast swag Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store Learn more How I Solved It: We Turned Salesforce Into a Puppy Adoption Platform! Puppies: Family Bred Puppies Admin Trailblazers Group Admin Trailblazers Community Group Social Brandon on Twitter: @WaltonForce Salesforce Admins: @SalesforceAdmns  Mike on Threads: https://www.threads.net/@mikegerholdt/ Mike on Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@salesforce.mike Mike on X: @MikeGerholdt Full show transcript Mike Gerholdt: I got a plan. How about this week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk about the Puppy 360 instead of the customer 360. That's right. So this week we're doing a follow-up. You might've seen Brandon Walton on How I Solved This with Jennifer Lee. If not, I'll include that link in the show notes. But Brandon helped a small family business that helps place puppies with the right people to use Salesforce. And so I'm having him on the podcast to talk about discovery, and building trust, and really building applications with native Salesforce features that require some, let's call it minimal maintenance, because I think there's parts of organizations that you build high maintenance or applications for because their business is constantly changing and ones that will require minimal maintenance. We also talk about the art of building trust, which is fascinating, but also puppies. So I'll warn you, there's a few puppy talks in there. But before we get into the episode, I want to be sure that you're following the Salesforce Admins Podcast on iTunes or wherever you get your podcast. It's super easy. Just click on the follow or subscribe button inside the app. And the reason I tell you to do that is then the app will automatically download new episodes. So you can wake up, say it's Thursday morning, because that's when new episodes drop, and you're like, "I'm going to go for a walk this morning. It's a beautiful May day, and I want to immediately listen to this fantastic episode about puppies." The Apple have taken care of it for you while you were sleeping, so all you got to do is subscribe and do that right on your phone. But with that, let's get into the conversation with Brandon. So Brandon, welcome to the podcast. Brandon Walton: Thanks, Mike. Thanks for having me. Mike Gerholdt: You bet. Well, I'm excited after watching Jennifer's How I solved It on her YouTube channel, see all the amazing things you do. Plus, when she recorded the episode, there was puppies all over our Slack feed. So I'm a dog lover. Got to have people on the podcast that help people out with dogs. But let's get started with you Brandon. How did you get started in the Salesforce ecosystem and what do you do? Brandon Walton: Yeah, Mike, thanks. And before I get started, love puppies too. I love working with the Family Bred Puppies team. They're just a great group of folks, and puppies barking, yapping. Just add a little of excitement that you don't get to enjoy all the time. So rewind a long, long time ago, my first jobs out of college were sales jobs. And I was the young just out of college guy who became that impromptu help fix someone's computer here, help fix a printer there. This is back in the mid 2000s when we were still sending faxes back and forth. So I became- Mike Gerholdt: VGA ports. Don't forget those. Never forget. Brandon Walton: Yes, you get it. You've been there. Mike Gerholdt: Oh, yeah. Brandon Walton: So I worked at a car dealership actually, I was selling cars in Bellevue, Washington. And a big demographic that we serviced were Microsoft folks. So I was the dealership sales/tech support specialist guy, if you will, just by function, not by job title. And I was working with an executive and he said, "Brandon, I like the way you talk and explain things. [inaudible 00:03:49]. Do you want to sell cars the rest of your life? And do you want to come work for me, work with me?". And I didn't look back. And so from there I did technical sales, business analysts work, a lot of it related to Microsoft, that being from Bellevue Redmond at the time, that was the big employer there. And the team I was on started using a tool called Pardot for communications, an email automation platform. Pardot eventually became acquired by Salesforce, and there was this opportunity to be an implementation partner. So I jumped at that opportunity, started working in the Salesforce ecosystem, and I've been a consultant in the ecosystem since 2014 now. So gosh, that's 10 years in doing Salesforce work specifically. 2018, started my own Salesforce partner consulting firm, and get to work with small teams like Family Bred Puppies every day. And I love the challenges. I love solving things for different businesses. It's kind of like you get to solve a new puzzle all the time. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. Well, you lasted in consulting 10x more than I did, so congrats. You mentioned Family Bred Puppies quite a bit. Let's talk about them and a little bit of the solution that you built. Brandon Walton: Sure. So Family Bred Puppies is a client of mine. They work with small family-owned breeders. So their whole thing is they believe in quality of life for puppies, for dogs, especially the ones that they work with. And also making sure that families are getting a good experience through the adoption process. So when they came to Salesforce, looking at exploring Salesforce to facilitate not only relationships with the different breeders that they work with, but also the families that are adopting these puppies, they were looking for that all-in-one solution of being able to qualify applicants, also work with breeders, but manage the life cycle of a family that's adopting a puppy, and also managing the relationships with the small family breeders that they're working with on a regular basis. So one of the things that we do as consultants, and where we start out with is, okay, let's understand what this business is looking to do, and let's understand how we can map what the business is looking to do with Salesforce's core platform. Because that's the other thing. Working with small teams like this is, they're not necessarily developers. The Family Bred Puppy team, they love working with dogs. They don't have a computer science background. So what's good about that is they're very open to our suggestions and recommendations. They really needed something that was easy to use, that didn't require a solution that was so advanced that they would need to hire a full-time admin or a full-time developer. So we start taking a look at all the parts of their business that they need to manage in order for them to deliver on their mission of providing a good adoption experience for families, providing a good relationship with the small family breeders that they're working with, and having something that they can manage very easily. So we started taking a look at just that core Salesforce architecture. You've got your lead, a lead can be converted into an account and a contact, and you're managing opportunities.And then down the road you look at cases and stuff like that. So they have an application process. You can go to their website, familybredpuppies.com, submit an application. They're asking questions that are important for the application process. So they want to make sure that families that they're working with, they're not looking to start their own puppy mills and things like that. All those things are very important for the team. So we took a look at all of the questions that they needed to have to qualify a family looking to adopt a puppy. We mapped that to a web-to-lead form. Again, keeping it very simple out of the box. We set up that web-to-lead form on their website. And so now when someone goes to Family Bred Puppies and submits an application to adopt, that gets added to their Salesforce account as a lead. And all of those fields are being mapped in so they can see it all inside of Salesforce. The team uses lead status as they're qualifying the family, so there's an interview process. The first part of that interview, if some of those questions aren't answered correctly, maybe they're looking for a breed of puppy that Family Bred Puppies doesn't have or doesn't work with, or maybe they're looking to adopt a puppy for a reason that the team doesn't want folks adopting puppies for, like they want to be very careful about people wanting to adopt a puppy and then go create a puppy mill from the puppies. They disqualify. So you have this using lead statuses, disqualify, [inaudible 00:09:34], disqualify. When someone goes through that application process and they are someone that would be a good fit, that's when we convert them from a lead to a contact. A contact gets associated with an account, a household, it's a specific record type that we're using. And then we have the opportunity. And what we did on the opportunity is we mapped the sales stages of the opportunity to the steps of their adoption process. So first step is let's match the family with a puppy. Let's have the family out to meet. Let's make sure that the puppy's gone through all their vaccinations and all these things. And then throughout the process, the final step is the puppy's been taken home. And so what we did with Family Bred Puppies is let's map your business process as close to the Salesforce process as we possibly can. And what was good about working with the team is sometimes you work with small businesses that say, "ell, this isn't an opportunity. This isn't a product, this is an adoption. So rather than using opportunity, we should create something totally custom and call it adoption." And then you end up recreating a lot of these out of the box features. And so what was really important for, I think the success of this project was the fact that they were so open to listening to our advice and leveraging that standard Salesforce architecture. So now they have a solution where we were having a discussion earlier today about adding cases so they can actually do case management. And because it's all built off of accounts and contacts in the core architecture, looking to add these things is just easier and easier and easier. We're early on in the conversations about looking at things like Marketing Cloud so they can send follow-ups a year in, two years in, three years in, when they're working with these families. Or if someone refers a friend, being able to manage all of those kinds of relationships. And because it's built on that core architecture, adding these new features and looking other things that we can do on the platform is just way more attainable because they're designed for scale. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, no, I think you said something key at the beginning there, which is... And I get you're a consultant and people listening to the, oh, why is he talking to a consultant? Well, essentially where admins are consultants are internal, right? We're just paid differently. But you'll go into an organization, and I've gone into different parts when I've worked in organizations, and this client for you needed an app that didn't need to be highly maintained because it was pretty sturdy. We're not going with a lot of crazy out of the box stuff. And I've had different departments that use Salesforce the same way. And I think it's kind of figuring out what does this department need, and how custom do they want to go, and how much can I support it? Because you were clearly wanting to set them up with something solid that they didn't really need to pay. It is essentially like buying a new car. I just need to be able to put gas in it and manage everything. You said something at the beginning before we pressed record that I thought was really interesting, because a lot of getting an organization or getting a department to use standard objects, and getting past the, "Well, but we adopt things and we don't sell things," is trust. And I wrote it down, you said, 'There's an art to getting them to trust you," and I think that's for the admin as well. What is that art for you? What does that mean for you? Brandon Walton: Yeah, I think trust in my world starts with the client, or the team, or the department, understanding that you're listening and you understand. And I think for so many people, and sometimes by accident, that it's a skill that you learn over time, is to listen and to listen to understand. And I think when someone believes you, that's part of trusting, is believing. When someone believes that you're A, listening to them, and two, have their best interests as your top priority, that's the foundation of trust. How many times are we in a conversation, a conference maybe where we're meeting someone, or just whatever it is, meeting someone for the first time, and you're talking to them, and you can't get a word in because they're just talking, talking, talking, talking, talking? But when you are engaging with someone who's listening, and listening to understand, and asking questions, like we use the example, "Okay, Mike, you're not really selling, but it's more of this adoption process. But let's talk about this adoption process and what goes into that?". Just by asking questions rather than jumping to what that conclusion might be, it helps, not only it helps me really understand what you're looking to do, but my goal is that you understand that I'm here to try to understand as well. And then you can dig dig dig dig into a topic, and then at the tail end of that session, it might be a couple of days or a couple of hours depending on the complexity of the project, the goal for trust is to come out with we understand each other. And if we're talking from a place of understanding, then I can make a suggestion to you and you trust that my suggestion comes from a place of, "All right, Brandon understands what I'm looking to do, and now we can have a conversation." But when you rush that, it's kind of like if we were just going out for dinner, if we were going out on a date for the first time and I asked you to marry me after an hour, "Well, hold on, hold on. I don't know if we're ready for that." So I think trust comes from listening and from a place of mutually understanding each other, and then believing that the person who you're talking to really has your best interest in mind and can get you there because that person understands what you're looking to do. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, I do feel like there's a TV show of One Hour Date And Marriage. But one thing you mentioned that I think is huge is you started with all of the core functionality web to lead. You mentioned lead object, you mentioned opportunity. And then you also, well, they're looking to expand. It's so easy to sit down and say, "Well, I was just at World Tour," or, "I was just at this fancy user group and I'm all juiced up. I'm going to build a custom object. And I can create an adoption object. And maybe I call it adoption process object." For you, what was the benefit for them being able to expand, having used that core just opportunity object, just the core lead object? Brandon Walton: Well, in my world, I work with a lot of, whether it's an app exchange package that a customer wants to install down the road, or even just expanding with more Salesforce products, I've seen it happen so many times where, "Oh, you know what? We're ready to try CPQ," or, "We're ready to try Account Engagement or a Marketing Cloud." And you go in there and you realize, "Okay, well you can't use that right now because instead of using a lead or a contact, we've got something totally custom that's been rebuilt." So there's two things that come from that is one, just having gone through the pain of, "Oh yeah, you want to add on this DocuSign thing here," or something like that, and not being able to do it because you have to map all the custom stuff back into standard objects anyways. But also getting so familiar with all of those pre-built dependencies, and I think that's one of the mistakes that is easy to make early on, whether you are an admin that's just getting started, or a small business that's just purchased Salesforce and you're going to be your own admin, in my shoes, is understanding over time all of the relationships, like with opportunities, you get so much great stuff out of the box. You've got your opportunity line items, products and price books, and quotes, and just knowing all of these things and all of these relationships that exist out of the box without having to reconstruct them is a huge benefit. And I remember early days of being an admin, you don't necessarily know all of those things, and that's where you make those mistakes. "Oh, we need one other thing, so let's build it all custom." But I think a big part of it for me in my journey is getting to the point where you just understand all of the connections that are made available for you when you use that standard architecture, and you understand how an account relates to an opportunity, and all the great stuff you can do with that, and how a contact and account are related, and how all of the other, there's all this great new AI stuff that's coming out that supports some of the custom stuff that's out there, but when you're using the standard architecture, it understands what you're looking to do already. And that's so important. And sometimes you learn it the hard way, but we do our best to explain those things, and teach others and newer users about the benefit. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, no, absolutely. In fact, well, and so I'll use it as a jumping off point, thanks for setting me up, to teach the other users. Trust is also when you roll it out. I mean the trust factor, they get you in the door and you're listening to them, and I'm going to build a puppy pipeline report, which has to sound fun. The amount of paw prints and puppy knows things that must exist in this app. I can only envision your Google search results right now are up there. But the second part is also rolling it out. I mean, I've sat in weeks and weeks of discovery, and apps, and building, and then user testing. And then you go to roll it out. And this is a small company that has to sit and say, "Okay, so then how are we going to support this?". How did you build trust when you also rolled it out? Brandon Walton: Yeah, so we meet regularly. In fact, we met earlier today and had a working session together. So we do these working sessions where we talk about what the business objectives are, "Okay, what do we need to do? How are we going to make this experience better for," maybe it's a family breeder that they're working with or an applicant that they might be working with, because now we have all this great data in Salesforce, we can take a look at these kinds of things. And I'll tell you what is the most exciting thing for me, is when we are talking about making an update to part one in the puppy pipeline, which is a puppy application. And Sydney, who started out on this thing, never using Salesforce before is like, "Oh, that sounds like a checkbox. I understand how check boxes work on a lead. And yeah, I can map that over to it." So for me, that's always the yes, the slam dunk home run moment, if you will, when we're talking about these concepts that when we first got started, it was still intimidating for them, but under understanding, "Oh yeah, that's going to be a pick list. And not only that, once we make the pick list here on the lead, let me go and add this to the lead mapping, so it's going to just move over to the contact when I hit that convert button." And so the first question, how we get there is just regular working sessions. Let's go through, let's talk about the business objectives here. Let's talk about what's been created and how it's all going to work. That's probably the most instrumental piece. So it's not Brandon going and locking myself in a room for three weeks, and now there's all these new fields and buttons, and let's teach you how it's done. It really has been collaborative the whole way through. And the discussion really is led by the business. So it's not necessarily Salesforce feature driven. We don't go in here with an objective of, "Oh, you know what? There's a lot of great new AI stuff, so let's just add all this AI stuff, whether we know what we're going to do with it or not." It has to be driven by the business first. And when the business users are able to say, "Yes, this makes sense, because when I check this box, I understand what that means versus when I'm checking this pick list or this, dare I say it, multi-select pick list, which some"- Mike Gerholdt: Oh, I was just going to ask. They clearly aren't to reporting yet, or they'd understand the fallacy of multi-select pick lists. Brandon Walton: Well, going back, that's one of the things that I am able to bring to the table, and why they want to avoid it. But the fun part in it for me is when those users are in the platform and they understand what the platform is doing, so more than just, "Oh, I have to go in and enter my data." I'm here to work with puppies, not enter data. But when Sydney and Peter understand why they're adding that, and it's not a burden for them, but they see the benefit because I think it really starts with them being involved in that process, so they feel like they were heard, they feel like their input was heard. And with larger organizations that might not be an entire puppy management portal or puppy pipeline, or some of the fun things that we're doing. Some larger organizations, it's a lot more work just to get small changes made. Just like with trust, when people feel heard, and people feel like they're part of something, and part of the creation of something, there's that bit of ownership. I found that those are the folks that are going to adopt it a lot more. "If my say was included when we were coming up with the sales process, because yes, it's important. On this step we need to make sure that we understand how they're going to pick up their puppy. And Brandon knows that I contributed to step five. Well, now Brandon's pumped up and excited because I was part of this thing, and so now I'm more excited to adopt the technology," versus something that was set up and it's a burden. It's maybe an extra step. I think that's a big differentiator I see in working with, especially small teams. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, I've always said when I'm doing training, is this is how you do your job, not another thing to do your job. And it sounds like a small word change, but it's part of the job to get it complete. Ensuring in this case that the puppy has a great home, putting good data in and keeping track of that is part of that journey. It's not another thing to do. And when people look at data input, or data collection, or data reporting as another thing to do, then it feels superfluous to their mission and they get off track. So yeah, I can completely understand that. You've seen a lot, not only with this company, but in general. You brought up the AI thing, so I'll kind of wrap on that. If you were to start brainstorming, we're obviously not going to ask Einstein to draw us a puppy. I think I spend my countless hours making poor ChatGPT draw different versions of dogs. But how would you see, based on what you've built, that AI layer starting to come into what this organization uses Salesforce for? Brandon Walton: Yeah. And we've already started having those conversations as well, starting out with some of those Einstein features that have been around for a while. We're looking at things like Einstein recommended next actions, things like that. And what's great about those is it's data driven. So going back to users adopting the importance of entering information, understanding how family breeder A, how Mike's pups is working compared to Brandon's pups, and being able to understand, okay, when I am entering the data on vaccines, and health of these puppies, and all of these other details, that's going to allow us to leverage this platform to assist our team in making better decisions, then data entry isn't a burden, it's a necessity. And we're very, very clear on the benefit. If we know that puppies from this family breeder are getting a certain type of worm, we know that we can work with that breeder. And that's the beauty of what Family Bred Puppies do, because they're working family to family, it's not a situation where their breeders aren't working with them. So they've got these great relationships already. And using the technology to improve the relationships and be better partners to their breeders, match families, whether that's getting through the adoption process quicker, what have you. It's, how can we drive business outcomes through this platform? Not, well, we have to put it in there because my boss says we're using this tool and we have to put it in there. Mike Gerholdt: The number of times I've heard that. I'll end on a fun question. Oftentimes when you sit down, even in organizations that I've worked for, but as a consultant, you get to learn the business and fun facts. Was there something fun or interesting that you learned about puppies during all of this that you didn't know heading in? Brandon Walton: Oh, there's so much. What's one thing I can summarize? I think, well, this might tell a little bit more about the kinds of things that I find fun and interesting. But you assume it, or I assume it, you assume that there's a lot of production that goes into raising breeding puppies. But the amount of planning that goes in... So where we did do some custom objects is we have a custom puppies object with litters. And so we are able to track the genealogy of the puppies through some custom objects. It was more than what opportunity products could do. We'll say that. So we started, can we do it from the... But- Mike Gerholdt: I don't think opportunity products were ever envisioned to be used that way. Brandon Walton: Yeah. So that was one place where we did go a bit custom, but it's just a couple of objects that have relationships to each other. And again, I didn't come in there as the puppy breeding expert, but being able to understand what those timelines are, what's happening at one week, what's happening at two weeks. And I think all the orchestration that goes into that is what was just really fascinating. And it's more than just shots, but it's, are the puppies, how much time are they spending with their mom? And then when you move them from indoor to outdoor facility, all these details that go in. And what's been really cool is, of course, we track those details on the platform. And so now it exists as part of the PMP, the Puppy Management Portal. But I think that was one of the takeaways that I thought was really interesting, is just how calculated that process is, just to make sure that, again, the mission is that the puppies are raised in a nurturing environment, that they're healthy when a family receives them. I would say that orchestration and seeing all of that come together was one of the coolest things for me. Mike Gerholdt: Wow. Yeah. No, very cool. Brandon, thanks for coming on the podcast, oh let's talk puppies. This had to have been easily one of the most fun projects to work on. Brandon Walton: Oh, for sure. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. Well, thanks for sharing it with us, and keep on keeping on with helping puppies in the world. Brandon Walton: Will do, Mike, will do, Mike, I'll keep doing my part. Mike Gerholdt: See, again, I told you that was a fun discussion. Also, tell me how quickly you wouldn't sign up to build a puppy pipeline report. If I saw that in my list of requests for things that needed to be built in Salesforce, a puppy pipeline report would definitely top the list. Also, I might take a little bit too long doing that. But I enjoyed that conversation. That was fun talking with Brandon. Now, if you enjoyed this episode and you're listening on iTunes or another app, go ahead and click the three dots in the upper right-hand corner or see if there's an arrow. You can share the episode, and you can post it on social, you can text it to a friend, you can DM it. And of course, if you're looking for more great resources, the entire transcript, all the links are in the show notes, and everything can be found at admin.salesforce.com. And until next week, we'll see you in the cloud.  

How Can Solving Sudoku and Wordle Enhance Your Critical Thinking Skills? Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Rangsk, a Wordle and Sudoku YouTuber. Join us as we chat about critical thinking, problem solving, and why puzzles are a great way to practice and improve your thinking. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Rangsk. Who is Rangsk? I’m a big word puzzle fan. Sudoku, Wordle, Connections, I love ‘em all! I think they’re a great way to warm up your brain and stay sharp. That’s why I was so excited to sit down with this week’s guest, Rangsk. His YouTube and TikTok videos have helped me become a better puzzle solver, and I wanted to bring him on the pod to talk through his unique approach. Rangsk first got into puzzle solving via a recommended video on YouTube for Cracking the Cryptic. He fell down the rabbit hole and became obsessed with the logic game that happens behind the numbers. He created his own sudokus and started posting walkthrough videos of how he made them and how to solve them. Rangsk’s channel has grown exponentially since then. The thing that sticks out to me about his content is the tone: he’s positive, gentle, and clear. He really helps you become a better critical thinker, and have some fun along the way. Word games are logic puzzles “I approach word games as if they were logic puzzles,” Rangsk says, “you’re given information and you want to come up with the best possible guess to utilize that information and get as much information as you can.” Some feedback Rangsk often gets about his solves is that he’s “overthinking it.” For him, that misses the point of doing these sorts of puzzles in the first place. Yes, you can brute force a sudoku or get a lucky guess on a Wordle. But what do you learn from that? As Rangsk puts it, “It’s a single player game, there are no stakes to it. The only person you’re cheating is yourself.” Practice your critical thinking skills Instead, Rangsk recommends using puzzles as a low-stakes opportunity to practice thinking through things logically. It’s an opportunity to build up your critical thinking skills for when there’s more on the line than beating your high score. At the end of the day, it’s all about learning. Whether you solve a puzzle or get stuck halfway through, Rangsk encourages you take a close look at your thought process and learn from it. Why did you solve it? Why did you get stuck? It’s the chance to learn about yourself and how you think through things that makes these puzzles worthwhile. Listen to the full episode for more from Rangsk on when it’s OK to hit the hint button, and some other word puzzles you might like if you’re already hooked on Wordle. And don’t forget to subscribe to hear more from the Salesforce Admins Podcast. Podcast swag Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store Learn more Connections and Wordle games from the New York Times are wildly popular. Can they improve cognitive function as you age? Follow Rangsk on YouTube Cracking the Cryptic on YouTube Other word puzzles Cell Tower Squardle Squaredle   Admin Trailblazers Group Admin Trailblazers Community Group Social Rangsk on TikTok: @Rangsk_YT Salesforce Admins: @SalesforceAdmns  Mike on Threads: https://www.threads.net/@mikegerholdt/ Mike on Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@salesforce.mike Mike on X: @MikeGerholdt   Full show transcript Mike Gerholdt: Wordle, Strands, Connections, not just random words, but word games. And I am addicted to them. So, this week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, I had to get arguably the best word and logic solver I can find from TikTok and YouTube on the podcast. He goes by Rangsk on TikTok, and I'll put a link below. But David and I are talking about critical thinking and problem-solving using word games. Also, just how that applies to life. This is a phenomenal conversation. Don't be scared about the time because this is such a fun discussion. Also, how looking for answers and the journey of problem solving really applies to just everything that we do, not only as Salesforce admins, but in our learning journeys and as we navigate life. So, this is fun. Let's get David on the podcast. So, David, welcome to the podcast. Rangsk: Well, thank you. Mike Gerholdt: I'm glad to have you on. I feel this is one of those times where I'm way more the super fanboy because I have seen a ton of your TikTok videos and your New York Times solves. But without tipping too much, how did you get into word gaming and solving word games online? Rangsk: Well, it's a long story, but I can give the short version. Basically, YouTube likes to give random recommendations, and one day it recommended me a Sudoku video by Cracking the Cryptic. And I was familiar with Sudoku because it was a huge craze in the early 2000s. Do you remember that? Mike Gerholdt: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Rangsk: Everyone was doing Sudoku. Mike Gerholdt: On the planes, there were books. Every airport had a Sudoku book. Rangsk: Yeah. And so, I got into that craze back then, but then I burned out of it. And now, I realize it's because of the way I was solving it. It's because of the way everyone was solving it, it burned out quickly. But I was like, "You know what? Sudoku, I'm familiar with that." I clicked the video and I just immediately got hooked because this was not the Sudoku that I used to do. And I just really got hooked on watching Cracking the Cryptic on YouTube and the various different kinds of logic puzzles that they solve. And then, I actually started creating my own Sudoku puzzles. I crafted them myself. And I would do things like... I would submit them to Cracking the Cryptic. They actually have solved a few of my puzzles in the past. Mike Gerholdt: Wow. Rangsk: Featured in front of tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people, which is great. And what I wanted to do is I wanted to document how I intended those puzzles to be solved and walk through the logic of them. Because I've always been... I had sort of an instructor mindset. I've always liked teaching. I've never been a teacher, but I've always liked teaching anyway. And so, I decided to make my own videos where I walked through how to solve my own puzzles and I just uploaded them to my YouTube channel, which had nothing otherwise. And one day, Cracking the Cryptic featured one of my puzzles, and I commented saying, "Hey, I've got a walkthrough solve of this on my channel if anyone's interested." And I instantly gained 200, 300 subscribers. Mike Gerholdt: Oh, wow. Rangsk: And at that point, I was like, "Well, I better start making content." So, I decided, "Hey, maybe I'll start solving Sudoku's on there, not just my own, and see if I can grow that audience." And I was really enjoying the feedback I was getting from that. Flash forward to Wordle becoming popular, I was very much entrenched at that point within the logic puzzle community. And Wordle, of course, really became popular within that community. And so, I decided, "Well, I'm already making Sudoku content. Why don't I make YouTube shorts where I solve Wordle?" And so, that's really where I get started on that. And then, I went from... it had taken me two years to reach a thousand subscribers where I could finally monetize on YouTube. And then, within two months, my Wordle shorts had brought me to 10,000 subscribers. Mike Gerholdt: Wow. Rangsk: And so, that was like, wow, Wordle's my thing, I guess. And so, I decided just to... in addition to my Sudoku content, I started making word game content as well. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, I definitely was on the sideline for the Wordle wave. I remember it kind of crashing through. And I feel like for me, it was, "Oh, everybody's playing it, so I'm not going to play it." I also was afraid that I would never get a word. "Oh, man." Because my Facebook feed was filled with all of the little Wordle squares that everybody would post. I'm like, "Oh, I know so-and-so." I know some book editors and I know some people that are in the education space, and they were struggling with Wordle. And I was like, "I have no shot. Maybe I just shouldn't play this." But now that I've played it, I confess, today is my 40th day playing Wordle. Rangsk: Okay. I hope you're enjoying it. Mike Gerholdt: I am. I also have come now to the realization that I will never get it in one word. So, I have purposely looked ahead to see what words haven't been used as solutions, and then picked my beginning word now pending, the solution hasn't happened. My beginning word now is spoil because it has two vowels in it and it hasn't been used as a solution. Rangsk: Got you. Yeah. So, for me, getting word in one, of course, it would be exciting, but I would also feel a bit cheated because I didn't get to play that day. Mike Gerholdt: Yes. Rangsk: And to me, Wordle... I'm very much a logic puzzle guy. I approach even word games as if they were logic puzzles. And I think that's why I like Wordle so much is because you can treat it like a logic puzzle, where you're given information and then you want to come up with the best possible guess to utilize that information and get as much information as you can more. And you think about patterns in the words, not just, "Here's all the words I know," but "Okay, E likes to be at the end. R likes to be second. These letters like to be near each other. These letters don't like to be near each other." And so, you can kind of think about the patterns that you notice within words. And of course, every once in a while, you get tripped up by a weird word that comes from French or something and doesn't follow any of the rules. But even then, you get there by logically eliminating, it's not a regular word. So, I now have to investigate, is it one of those weird esoteric ones that came from French, for example, or came from a different language? So, yeah, I like to approach it as a logic problem, and I think that's why people enjoy watching me solve it. I constantly get feedback, "I'm better at the game after watching you play it." That warms my heart. That's exactly what I want. I'm not out here trying to impress people. I'm not trying to be a magician. I'm trying to be an instructor, and I'm trying to get people to understand that these games can be approached from a logical perspective. You can learn to get better at it without just going and memorizing a bunch of words. Mike Gerholdt: Right. Perfect segue to exactly why I'm having you on the podcast, because I ran across one of your TikTok videos on Connections, and I'd never played Connections. And the tone and the manner, now that you say instructor, I joked with a colleague that I called you the Bob Ross of Connections. But your tone was very calming. "And let's work through this, and here's all the words. We have to come up with four groups of four. Let me walk you through the way I'm going to think through this," which your logic or your critical thinking. And it wasn't just, "Well, these four have to go together. Why don't those go together?" And it's like, "No, but let's think about every possible meaning of this one word." Or I love when you, especially on some of the Connections, "What is the, not weirdest, but what is the farthest outlying word? And let's pick that and see how it can connect to other things." Rangsk: Yeah, I'm glad you recognized both my logical approach, but also the demeanor that I try to give to my content. I've been called Bob Ross by more than just yourself, also Mr. Rogers. Just having that calming presence is really important to me because people have so much going on in their lives. They have stress coming from everywhere, and then they try to escape that with the free time that they have. They're scrolling TikTok or they're scrolling YouTube or whatever it is. And when you do that, you're just getting people yelling at you. You're getting people trying to make you afraid, trying to make you angry. And I want to counter that. I want to be a place where I come up on your feed and you feel like, "Okay, this is a setting where I can understand what's going on. I'm not being yelled at." "Things are calm, things are straightforward and I'm learning, but I don't feel like I'm being talked at." I don't know the best way to put that. Mike Gerholdt: Or chastise. I mean really, because I think that's one thing, how this kind of carries over to software is critical thinking, but also when you're building applications or you're building programs, it's change that you're going to introduce to somebody. And I've always told people, when you roll out something, nobody wants to show up to work and feel stupid. And the easiest way to feel stupid is by showing them something they don't understand. And you can walk into some of these games and be like, "I don't understand. It doesn't make sense." And then, it makes you feel stupid when actually if you just sit and look at it. To me, I use a few of these games in the morning when I have a cup of coffee to kind of warm my brain up, kind of get me thinking through the day and sitting there thinking, "Okay," so this word for example, and maybe Connections is coat. Okay. So, coat and I started, "Well, how would David describe this?" Well, coat could be a jacket. Coat could be a heavy coat. Coat could also, you coat something with paint. I try to use some of the stuff that you teach to like, how would I talk through this and not just take it as the first thing that comes to mind? Rangsk: Right. And I get a lot of feedback, which I honestly don't appreciate very much because it's counter to what I'm trying to put across, which means I'm not communicating that effectively enough. But a lot of feedback is like "You're overthinking it. If you'd just gone with your instinct, it would've been correct." And they're ignoring all the times, probably the majority of the times, where had I gone with my instinct, it would've been wrong. Because these puzzles are designed to trick you. They are logic puzzles. And it's not much of a puzzle if it's just find four things that go together and that will be right. And so, the game is all about... I just made a comment today where someone was like, "Overthinking the easy ones is detrimental, but overthinking the hard ones is actually useful." And my response to that was, "Well, overthinking has a negative connotation to it, by definition. All I'm doing is thinking. And there's nothing wrong with thinking when you're solving a puzzle." So, yeah, the game is trying to get you to think. And you can either let it get you to think and follow along with the human creator of this puzzle and what they were trying to achieve in getting you to think about, or you can bash your head against it and try to get lucky, which to me isn't fun. And sometimes I have to resort to that and I feel bad about it. But most of the time, I try to logically approach the problem and also try to see what did the creator of this puzzle intend me to think about? And that's going to be fun and that's going to give longevity to the gameplay. Mike Gerholdt: Overthinking also comes from a position of I know the answer and you don't. At one point, they didn't know the answer. So, how can I overthink something if I don't know the answer? In hindsight, yes, I can look back at a solution, "Oh, I way overthought that. But I only know that because I went down that path and then I came back." Much like thinking through different situations or different, we talked about software debugging before I pressed record. Can you overthink software debugging? Well, yeah, I suppose. But you only know that once you go down that entire path and then come back. Rangsk: And I will say there's kind of a corollary to that where you said in hindsight, and I think that's another aspect of my content that you don't see a lot, and I think it's a really important aspect, which is after I've solved it, go and do a post-mortem basically, to use the industry term. Go and look back and say, "What is it that I did right? What is it that I did wrong?" "How could I have thought about this differently to have succeeded when I failed? Or why did I succeed at this? What did I do that I liked that I should try to do more of?" And I think that's a really important aspect of after you've solved a puzzle, or if you're working on debugging software, if you're working on any problem that you're trying to solve, don't just say, "Oh, I solved it. Let me throw that out." You say, "I solved it. Let me now internalize what worked and didn't work so that when I have a problem again in the future, I can utilize that and gain wisdom and gain experience." Mike Gerholdt: I'll be honest, one of the coolest things, I'll get off Connections. One of the coolest things that you added to your Wordle solutions is you go into a website that somebody create a bot and you kind of, "Okay, so here's the word I put in and we got orange, yellow, and green here. What is the bot say is the next one? What did I guess? Here's what I guessed. Here's this, that. Here's what I guessed. Okay." And oftentimes you're either... it helps you do that post-mortem because with Connections, you have a little bit different, you can see your categories, but with Wordle, you're like, "Was this the next best thing for me to guess to try and get to the solution?" And I love that you kind of walk through that with that bot and the bot's like, "Oh, yeah, so you basically had two choices after this word and you went to this one, which no harm, no foul, it was the other word." I need that bot for everything. Rangsk: Yeah. And what's nice about Wordle is a bot like that can exist because it's pretty easy to write a perfect solver. I wouldn't say it's easy, but it's viable to write a perfect solver for Wordle. And there's not a perfect solver for every problem you're going to encounter, but you can at least go back and analyze that. And I think an aspect that I thought about while you were describing what I do with that Wordle bot that I'd like to touch on is the question is, did I get lucky? Because a lot of times in problem-solving, there is a luck factor. Did I look at the right thing first or did I look at the right thing after struggling for three days on this problem? And the Wordle bot will answer that question for you. It'll say, "Oh, yeah, you totally got lucky. There were 60 possible words and you picked out the right one." So, what I learned from that is maybe it was a lucky decision, but maybe it wasn't the optimal decision, even though the optimal decision would've had a worse outcome in this situation. And recognize because... I guess to put it this way, if you can't separate what was lucky from what was good, then you're going to depend on getting lucky more and more. You're going to internalize what you did that made you get lucky rather than internalizing what you did that actually set yourself up for success. Mike Gerholdt: Well, I think that's... some of that has to do with why people gamble. They just feel they're lucky as opposed to working through the, I go back to the... I love the movie Apollo 13. Let's work the problem and go through it. Kind of transitioning that because I obviously could talk Wordle. You also do that really good on the mini crossword, where if by chance you happen to get all the downs, all the downs also solve all the acrosses for the most part. And so, you'll go back through and be like, "Oh, well, let's look and see actually what these questions were that the answer just autofilled back in." I think there has to be something that it does to your brain because it also trains it. You're like, "Oh, now, I'm not just reading this word, I'm also reading the clue that the creator of the puzzle had in addition to what the word is, and it just happened to be filled in for me." Rangsk: Yeah. If we want to even just touch back on Connections for a little bit. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, please. Rangsk: Every day I get comments from people saying, "Oh, the first thing I do is shuffle because they put in these red herrings and I don't want to be tricked by them." And I feel like this is just intentionally throwing out information about the puzzle because we've been told that they think very, very hard actually. They put a lot of thought into the arrangement of the words that are presented to you, which means they've added information to the system. And by hitting shuffle immediately, without even attempting to interpret that information, you've thrown out part of the puzzle. And to me, I feel like I can go, "Okay, well, they decided to put these tiles next to each other. What does that mean? Are they trying to trick me? Are they trying to hint me towards the solution? What is the information that they are trying to give me by this placement?" And I would lose all that if I hit shuffle. And so, I feel like it's kind of a short-sighted strategy because you can't learn to overcome the tricks that they're trying to put into the puzzle if you just wipe them clean first thing without even appreciating them. Mike Gerholdt: Right. Absolutely. Actually, you're the one that taught me that. I was partway through at Connections the other day and I think that two words were iron and steel, and I was like, "Those started right next to each other. I bet those don't have anything to do with each other. I'm not going to fall for it." Rangsk: Yeah, sure enough, they didn't. Exactly. And had you hit shuffle, you wouldn't have known that. Mike Gerholdt: No idea. Rangsk: And you might've said, "Well, iron and steel, those are both metals. Maybe that's a thing." I think they're getting wise to me. I think the other day they actually put three of them all on top of each other that were in the same category. Mike Gerholdt: Oh, no. Rangsk: In general, they are adding information when they, instead of presenting the tiles in a random order, just having a piece of software randomize it and presenting it, they are laying it out and they're discussing how they want to lay it out. And I think that's part of the puzzle. You're removing some of the interest in the puzzle by hitting shuffle. And it's the same with mini crossword. Yeah, you can solve it with just the acrosses or just the downs, but you're losing something by not at least going back and looking what was the whole puzzle. Because these kinds of clues are going to come up over and over again and this is a perfect opportunity, while it's fresh in your mind and while you're in the context, to use it as a learning experience for future puzzles. Mike Gerholdt: I completely agree. So, I think one of the things that fascinates me and I love using, I'll call them word games and maybe they're logic games. You need to tell me the difference. But using these to keep my mind sharp is I feel like it helps me be a better thinker just in general, just at my job, just working through decisions in life. You've been solving games a lot longer than me. How have you seen that kind of help you in your professional career? Rangsk: It's really interesting that you asked that because an aspect of my day job is actually studying transference is what the psychology term is, which is if you are to play a game and get good at it or do a logic puzzle and get good at that puzzle, does that have transference? Does that transfer to other aspects of your life? Are you just getting better at that game? Or is there sort of a rippling effect to the rest of your life? Okay. If I play GeoGuessr where I'm trying to locate where I am in the world, does that make me a better driver on my commute? Or if I am playing logic puzzles a lot, does that make me better at debugging software? Whatever it is that you're trying to actually accomplish in your life, are these things just games and you get good at that one game, or are these things that are going to transfer to other areas of your life? And that's actually a pretty hot topic of study within psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience. And there's a lot of studies going on right now related to that with mixed results. Some of these things that they claim, "Hey, if you play this game every day, you're going to get smarter. You're going to get better in these other areas of your life." And it may not be true. For me personally, I find it beneficial to just keep using my brain. Think of the brain as a muscle and just keep using it. Make sure those connections are strong. And by practicing it in low-stakes scenarios, when you get hit with a high-stakes scenario, you have this sort of instinct to fall back on for how you're going to handle that. Yeah. Does that- Mike Gerholdt: No, I'm still processing all of that transference information you gave because I was just thinking about how that applies to other things like prepping for tests. Did you just get good at taking the test, or did you genuinely learn the information? We can also talk about tests, but nobody wants to do that anyway. Rangsk: I'll talk about it. Mike Gerholdt: Are you just good at taking the test too? That's the third thing to bring up. Rangsk: Yeah, exactly. And this is a big topic in education, has been for a long time, which is how much do we lean on standardized tests and how much do we teach to the test? And is the standardized test important because we just need metrics on how students are generally doing, or is the standardized test also something that can direct curriculum? That's a question that every teacher has. And I don't think there's a perfect answer to that, and I'm also not much of an expert on that at all. But in my opinion, I think that anything you learn is good. I've always hated the question, when am I going to use this? The answer is, you use your brain every day. And the more you can teach your brain how to learn and all these cool things, that expands your horizons. It expands your use of your brain. Yeah, sure, you might not use algebra if you're not an accountant or a scientist or a mathematician. Yeah, you might not use algebra, but one day you're going to have the question and you're going to have the curiosity that's going to relate to math in some way. And you either have the tools to think about it properly or you don't, and that's something that you could have internalized, but you decided you weren't going to use it, and so you didn't. But there's the expression, when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. I have always thought that the more tools you have in your toolbox, the more versatile you can be in problem-solving and just living your life properly. Properly is not the right word. I didn't mean to say it that way, but living your life to its fullest extent, being able to accomplish the goals that you want to accomplish, being successful. It's all about setting yourself up for success. And you don't know what problems are going to arise. And so, the more tools you give yourself, the less everything starts looking like a nail, and the more you can be exacting and fall back on previous experience. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, I often think of... it's funny you bring up that algebra example. I was also that kid that was really horrible at math, so I never played Sudoku. But the concept sometimes of how you solve the algebra problem, I think to me, was also more important than what the answer was. And that to me is almost like the first time you pull the cover off a toy and realize there's a whole bunch of gears inside that make the bear move and kind of understanding, "Oh, there's more to this that I need to understand as opposed to just what the outcome is." We had this discussion the other day, outputs versus outcomes. And if your outputs is solved puzzles, are you smarter than if your outcome is no, but I learned the process and I learned how to work through difficult situations. The outcome is very different than the outputs. Rangsk: I love the way you put that and that's something... I solve The New York Times hard Sudoku every day on my YouTube channel. And my goal is not to say, "Look, I solved the puzzle." My goal is to help the viewers be able to solve the puzzle, but not just that. To understand that it's the act of solving it that's the fun part, not having that completed grid with all the correct numbers in it. And it seems obvious when I say it that way, but I get so many people commenting saying, "Well, if I just go through and fill out all the candidates first, which by the way is super boring, then I can solve it in four minutes, and you took 12 minutes." I feel like I failed that person because now they're going to get bored of Sudoku very quickly. Because who wants the first thing they do when they first receive that piece of paper or the digitally, the Sudoku puzzle, is go cell by cell and do accounting work? The puzzle can tell you a story if you let it tell you the story. And there are ways that you can approach the problem solving such that you are following along. It's like you're reading a book. You're following along the story. And in a sense, it's almost like a "choose your own adventure book" where you can choose where you want to go next. What do I want to discover about this puzzle? And just put a smile on your face every day because you found this really cool piece of logic and you go, "Ooh, that's really neat. It just told me about this cool structure." And people who are like, "Oh, well, I solve it in two minutes and I can just plunk them down, and I don't understand why you're doing all of this." And a year later, they've moved on. They're not doing Sudoku anymore, and they think it's boring. And I'm still doing it and I'm still learning from it every day. Mike Gerholdt: Right. Because the outcome for you is a lot different. The euphemism is the journey versus the destination. Rangsk: Yes. I'm a big fan of Brandon Sanderson and that's a big thing in Stormlight Archive, which is there's... not to get too spoilery, I won't spoil Stormlight Archive for people. But there is a group of people who basically have a mantra and part of that is journey before destination. We all have the same destination. And when it comes to puzzles, the destination is the solved puzzle, but it's about how you got there. The journey is the important thing. And you can start talking about things, do the ends justify the means? It's much of a corollary to that when you start talking about how you live your life. And I feel like if you start approaching even a logic puzzle that you're doing for fun, if you approach that in a way where you're trying to take shortcuts, that's training yourself to take shortcuts in all areas of your life. And I feel like that's... you're cheating yourself. That's another thing. People are like, "Is it cheating if I do this? Is it cheating if I do that?" And it's like, it's a single-player game. There's no stakes to it. The only person you're cheating is yourself. Are you enjoying the way that you're solving this? And that's the important thing. Okay, if I'm doing a crossword or if I'm doing Connections and there's a word I don't know, is it cheating if I look it up? Well, that's up to you. Do you want this to be a trivia game where you need to be going into the puzzle with a certain set of knowledge, and you want to learn as you go, and you learn from your failures because you didn't know what that word meant? And now you've looked it up and now you're going to remember it? That's one way to approach it. And a perfectly other valid way to approach it is, "Oh, this puzzle has shown me this word that I don't know. This is a perfect opportunity to look it up and have some success because I looked it up." And I think both approaches are valid. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. There's so much to unpack there, but the first thing I wanted to say was the best and worst times of doing any of the logic puzzles or The New York Times stuff is when it's solved is the best because I was like, "Yes, I did it." And the worst is, "Ugh, it's over." Especially a few times with Wordle or with Connections or even the mini crossword, "Oh, I finally got it." And to that other point, there have been times when I was like, "Okay, I clearly..." I don't know some... I think one of the questions was something and it was super pop culture. I was like, "I just need to Google this. That's my mulligan. I'm going to take it, I'm going to Google it and that's going to give me the answer." Because I'm past the point of enjoyment for this game and I need a little boost to get me back and going for that, and it's my game, so I can do that. Rangsk: Yeah. And it's all about knowing yourself and knowing what you're going to be happy with later and what you might be sad about later. And I think you kind of hit the nail on the head. Are you still enjoying the puzzle? Because that's the important thing. We don't do these because it's our job. We're doing puzzles because it's fun and enriching. And so, it's all about sustainability. What's going to sustain your interest in this hobby? And are you going to be a flash in the pan where you deep dive into crosswords or Sudoku or whatever word game for a month and then you're done with it and you move on? That's one personality style. Another personality style is crosswords are something that I do every morning for 50 years. There are people like that too. There are a lot of people like that. And there's a big difference. Someone who's going to do that every morning for 50 years, they're enjoying it every day and they've found ways to sustain that enjoyment. Whereas there- Mike Gerholdt: Go ahead. Rangsk: Sorry, go ahead. Mike Gerholdt: No, I'm 100% with you. I was going to ask because we didn't touch on it and maybe it's for a reason because it's in beta, but Strands. I think you said it in one of your puzzles, I was like, "I just need you. Can you just tell me if any of the four letters I put together are close to one of the words you want as opposed to just nothing?" And I think that for me, we get some of that. Well, you can tell me more of the game logic. But with Wordle and with Connections, at least with Wordle, I get a yellow. I get a colored square. Regardless of what I put in, I'm getting a color back. And with Connections, oftentimes I'm like, "Please just say one away." But you get kind of that. Rangsk: But even if it's not one away, it's still information. Mike Gerholdt: It is, yes. Except with Strands. Rangsk: Yeah, Strands is missing that. And the reason Strands is missing that is because I really feel like they built the hint system because they knew this was an issue. But the hint system is terrible because people don't want to use it. Some people do use it, but I don't like using it. I think that, first of all, making it a choice. Wordle, you don't have the choice to see whether a tile was yellow or green. It's just going to tell you. It's part of the game. A hint system feels like it's external to the game as like a, "I'm not good enough, so I'm going to press the hint button." And I don't think that was their intent, but I think that's what's happened because they realized that most of these games have some kind of lockstep functionality where you make as you progress through the puzzle and you gain information as you go. Whereas with Strands, you can be sitting there for 15 minutes and know as much as you did on minute one, even though you have found 100 words because you didn't find any of the words that they're intending and you're not understanding what the theme is trying to hit you towards. And it's just frustrating. And so, they probably saw that in the playtest and went, "Well, if you get three words, we'll give you a word." But that doesn't feel good because, first of all, they gave the choice. I kind of wonder what would the game be like? Is it just you get three words and it just reveals one without pressing hint? And it was just part of the game. I feel like more people would accept that rather than opting into admitting that you're not good enough at the game. But also the hint system is just simultaneously not powerful enough and too powerful. And I could rant about this. I feel like it's a bit off-topic. Mike Gerholdt: No, this is 100% on topic. Rangsk: All right. Well, I'll rant about it then. Early on, it's too powerful because it gives you... for those not familiar with Strands, it's like a word search game, but they don't tell you what words you're looking for. Mike Gerholdt: Nope. Rangsk: Instead, they all follow a theme. Maybe the theme is names of football teams or the theme is pieces of time, so seconds, minutes, hours. And some of them are a bit more esoteric. They might be words that are slaying for money, but are also food was one of them. And so, it really varies in difficulty. And they give you a little kind of crossword style clue hint at the start of what the theme might be. But it's usually not. Usually, it's either, "Oh, I know exactly what the theme is from this clue," or, "I have no idea what the theme is from this clue." There's not much in between. But anyway, what the hint does is if you get three words that they didn't intend, if you find three words, you can press the hint button and it highlights all of the letters involved in one of the words. And then, it becomes an unscramble basically. And then, you find that word. And I think the ideal situation when using the hint is then, okay, now that I know what one of the words is, I've now gained information about what the theme might be and I can try to think of other words that match. And if that's not enough, I'll find three more and I'll press hint again and I'll get another word. But it's too powerful because people don't want to just be shown one of the words. That's literally taking away from the enjoyment of the game because the game is only finding the words. And so, you're literally pressing a button saying, "I want one last word to find please." But then, at the end, sometimes you're down to one word left, it tells you how many words you need to find, and you're down to one word left. And I've literally spent 10, 15 minutes trying to unscramble that word because I can't figure it out. When it was Broadway shows, and I couldn't unscramble Carousel for the life of me because I hadn't heard of that Broadway show, and it's a weird word. Carousel. And so, the hint wouldn't have helped me. If I'd pressed hint, it would've highlighted all the letters. So, the hint is simultaneously too powerful early on and not powerful enough at the end. And then, also on top of that, isn't giving you what you want from a hint. So, I feel like it's a failure in game design there. And what they should have done is built-in ratcheting game mechanics that aren't opt-in. Mike Gerholdt: What are ratcheting game mechanics? Please tell me. Rangsk: So, if you think about a ratchet wrench. When you go one way, it doesn't lose progress on tightening, and then you go the other way and it tightens more. That's what a ratchet is. And so, you can make progress without losing progress. So, as you put input into the system and as you find things towards the game mechanics, you have now ratcheted yourself, you've given yourself more information. It's a ratchet-style gameplay. So, like Wordle, you input a guess and you get those yellows and greens and grays, and now you have more information about what the answer might be. And you never lose that information. That information never becomes obsolete. You can always use it. So, in the same way, that's why some of my suggestions for Strands were, "Hey, you know what?" "If I get partial word, maybe it should tell me, 'Hey, you got a partial word. You're on the right track.'" It's ratcheted that information into the system. It's like getting a green or a yellow in Wordle. Or if they want to keep the hint system, maybe one option for the hint system would be show me the starting letter of one of the words. Not the whole word, just give me somewhere to start. Mike Gerholdt: Where do I start? Yeah. Rangsk: Yeah. This letter I know is the start of a word now and I can focus my search on that. And so, I wouldn't feel as bad pressing that. But what if that were just part of the game mechanics? It's like rewarding you for finding words. They aren't the right words, but you're still finding valid words that exist. So, why not have those, just add information to the system as you guess in certain creative ways. So, it feels like a failure of game design that there isn't that sort of ratchet other than the opt-in very heavy-handed hint system that they have right now. Mike Gerholdt: Right. I am so glad you brought up that Broadway Strands because I was about... I'm like, "I think I'm done. I think I'm done with Strands now." It took me so long to get... the first thing I found with Strands is you either get started and it starts to make sense, or you're sitting there and you're looking at these two words and the clue and you're like, "I have no idea what these three things have to do with each other. I don't know what another word to look for." But that Broadway with Carousel, I was stuck on Carousel. I got everything else. Those are the only letters left. I never hit the hint button. And I thought, "What happens if you hit the hint button when you're done?" Because at that point, I'll be honest, the game Joy, it was no joy in Mudville right now. I just wanted to be done. Just please tell me what the answer is. I think I went through... I watched your TikTok. I went through all the same words you did. I'm like, "I don't know what word this is. Just tell me." And when I hit hint, it just put the little things around. I was like, "I know it's those letters." Rangsk: Yeah, exactly. Mike Gerholdt: I know it's those letters. Get me out of here. Where is the escape room button? That's the only time I wanted the hint button to just be like, "Nope, we're just going to solve this because we feel bad for you." Rangsk: And people use my videos as hints. They'll be like, "Well, I'm done with this puzzle. I haven't solved it, but I'm not getting joy out of it. Let's see what Rangsk did." Rangsk being my handle. "Let's see what he did and maybe that'll give me a hint." And that's actually the entire premise of me doing The New York Times hard Sudoku every day in that instructive way is I know that there's always going to be someone who's stuck on that specific Sudoku puzzle because it's so widespread. It's published by The New York Times. They're going to search on YouTube or Google. They're going to search "New York Times Sudoku today walkthrough or hint." Mike Gerholdt: Solve or something. Rangsk: Yeah, solve. And they're going to find my video and that'll track them to my channel. And not only will they find my video, but this video is going to blow their mind if they don't know modern Sudoku-solving techniques. And they're going to be like, "Wow, I need to watch more of these because this is way more fun than how I've been solving Sudoku, and I don't get stuck as much." "And if I do get stuck, I watch him until he does something I didn't know, and then I can continue." So, almost using me as a hint button. And I feel like with Strands, there's no strategy. Strands feels like a trivia game to me almost. I've been trying so hard to make it a logic game, which you probably have noticed if you watched my Strand solves, where I'm like, "Okay, corner strategy, edge strategy." And it kind of works, but it's not perfect and there's not a whole lot of logic involved. I will say there are word search games that do feel a lot more like a logic puzzle. One of them that I play is called Cell Tower. And this is probably the coolest word search game I've played. Normally, I'm not a big fan of word search-style games. I'm not very good at them. But to briefly explain this game, it's a grid of letters just as you'd expect a word search to be. And the way that these letters form words is a little bit unique, and that's not that important to describe, except basically you're drawing shapes in the grid. So, you're connecting the letters together in kind of a different way that you'd normally expect. You're not drawing a line through the letters to make words in order. You're just sort of highlighting them, and they have to be connected in some way. And it's red left to right, top to bottom. And so, it's sort of limiting you on... you can't make a word bottom right to top left. You can't just draw a line that way, or you can't zigzag around. Instead, there's a specific logical order to how the letters are going to appear in a word. In addition to that, every letter is part of a word, similar to Strands in that way. So, every letter will be involved in a word, and there is only one solution. So, you can't just go, "Okay, I found this word. Let's lock that in. Okay, now I found this word." You're going to find a bunch of words, but you need to look at how that affects the rest of the grid around it and make sure you're not preventing the ability for the letters around it to also be part of words. And that's where the logic comes in, where you go, "Okay, I think this word might be part of it. Can I add an -ed ending, an -ing ending, an S at the end? Is there a prefix I can add to it to expand that word? But also, how does that affect the letters around it? Am I going to be able to make a word out of these other letters if this was one of the words I use?" And so, you end up with this really logical approach to how you solve it. And you're thinking about how letters go together, how they go next to each other, and how words are formed in general. And you're looking at corners like, "Okay, this letter is going to have to be related to the letters around it in some way because it's in a corner because it's been isolated in some way." And so, it's not that you're trying to just find words that match a theme and the computer tells you, "Oh, yep, you found one of them," or, "Nope, that wasn't what I was looking for, sorry," with no extra information. Instead, you're trying to solve this logically and the computer is not giving you any help at all there. It's just the grid, the full information of the grid being used. So, in a way, it's a lot like Sudoku, but also like Connections where you can't just pick any four words that happen to relate because that might disrupt the ability for the other words to relate to each other. So, that's what really makes a logic puzzle a logic puzzle is you have to take the puzzle as a whole and you have to take steps that are logical. It's not just a trivia game. Mike Gerholdt: That's so apropos to everything that we talked about. You have to look at the puzzle as a whole. Last question, because I happened to think of this when we were talking about Strands. As somebody that's online solving problems, word games and stuff, how hard, how many times do you just want to hit that hint button? Does that ever come up? Maybe you have the patience of a saint, but have you ever gotten to that point where I know you're creating this for the good of other people and you have to walk through that, but you're like, "Maybe I just hit the hint button because I'm at 35 minutes on this video?" Rangsk: Yeah, for sure. And there's different forms that that takes in my mind. There's the built-in hint buttons to the game, but then there's also like, "Do I just Google this word?" I did do that once. There was a Connections, and I knew I was about to lose. I was like, "Okay, I've got no mistakes left. And there are three words on the board that I have no idea what they mean. Literally never heard these words in my life. So, how am I supposed to... is it good content for me to just make a guess and lose? Or do I go on Google, look up what the words mean, and continue the puzzle?" And in that case, I decided to do that. And I got mostly feedback saying, "Yeah, I Googled it too. It was fine to Google it, looking it up. What's wrong with that?" But then, I got a lot of negative feedback too about "How's it feel to cheat? You're such a cheater, blah, blah, blah." Just so much negativity. And so, I have to weigh the decision on how much negativity do I want in my comment section here, because they aren't just insulting me when they're calling me a cheater. They're calling everyone else who Googled a cheater. So, people are seeing themselves in that comment when they're reading through the comment section. And that's something I need to figure... it's not something I've solved. I don't have an answer. But what I try to do is understand myself and go, "Okay, am I 35 minutes into this puzzle legitimately, or am I just done with it?" There's a game I play called Squaredle. There's actually two games I play. Mike Gerholdt: It sounds like all the puzzles put together. Rangsk: Yeah. There's two games I play called Squaredle. One of them has an extra E and one doesn't. The one with the extra E... so one of them removes the E in square and one of them keeps the E in square when they add the -dle ending. They're completely different games. One of them that I play with the E, it's another word search game. It's a grid of four by four or sometimes five by five letters. And you need to find every possible word other than esoteric ones. They have some list of words that... you know how there's words that aren't really words, if you know what I mean? The esoteric ones, the archaic ones, out of use, highly specialized words. You don't have to find those. They count as bonus words if you do find them. But there's a list of words that it's looking for you to get. And sometimes this list is 60 to 100 words. And this game can take me an hour and a half. Mike Gerholdt: Wow. Rangsk: I sit there and I record the whole solve. It's a special occasion usually. I'll do it once every week or every two weeks and then put it on my YouTube where I solve the hardest Squaredle of the week. Because just like The New York Times puzzles, it gets harder through the week. And so, I'm like, "I'm going to solve the hardest one today." And it's a lesson in patience because you have to find every word, and it can take an hour and a half. And that's the kind of game where it's like, "Okay, I'm 30 minutes in, but I'm still solving the puzzle. And that's okay." There's also Sudokus that can take an hour, an hour and a half just because they're that hard. But it feels like you're making progress. If you feel like you're making progress, that's just you're still in the journey. You're still solving it, and that's fine. It doesn't matter how long it's been, as long as you still feel like you're in the puzzle and you're making progress and you're enjoying it. But then, there's puzzles where... the puzzle usually takes two minutes, and you're 30 minutes into it, and you feel like you haven't made progress in the last 25 minutes or ever. And you just have to make the decision of like, "Is this worth my time anymore?" And I've definitely had puzzles where I hit the stop button on the recording and I delete the video, and I just go, "I'm not solving that one today." Or ones where I go, "Well, it's time to get a hint." Literally, I just say, "I have failed this puzzle, but I want to see the end of it, so I'm going to look stuff up." You have to make that decision in your head. And I think you brought up a really important point, which is... I think you brought this point up at least, it became this point in my head, which is you need to decide for yourself when that is and that it's okay. You gave it your best, time to seek help. And I think that's something that's really important in life is that it's okay to seek help when you need it. I think people appreciate when you've put in some effort yourself first, but at the same time, they don't want... let me put it this way. I've been lead of several different teams as a programmer for my day job. And as a lead programmer, I would rather a junior programmer come to me with a problem that I can solve in a minute than spend six hours banging their head against it. But at the same time, if it would've only taken them 10 minutes, I'd prefer them to learn that on their own. So, it's important to learn at what point have I stopped being productive? Have I stopped enjoying this? Am I not in the right mindset and I either need to take a break, do something else, or I need to seek help, or both? Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. No, I think you're right. The hint button and being called a cheater, you're only cheating yourself. It's what do you need to move on with? And your example is perfect. Is there something that can be gained by that person asking you? But I also think, what level of thinking did they put into solving this before they came to me? And I always look at it as I'm very appreciative of, they came to me because they hit that wall, but they also realized quickly that they hit that wall. Rangsk: Exactly. Mike Gerholdt: And now they need to move on so that that learning journey continues as opposed to being frustrated in themselves. Rangsk: Yeah. And that's a skill unto itself. And that really separates the people you enjoy working with from the people you don't enjoy working with, people who are team players and people who aren't. That really separates them because it's a matter of, "I don't want to be doing your job for you. I've got my own job to do, but also I don't want you sitting there suffering as if you were alone." And there's that balance. And recognizing in yourself when you've hit that state is really important. And I think that... going back to the conversation about transference. That's something that can transfer. If you're playing games, and you can learn in a low-stakes scenario, how do I... be in yourself, be in your body, be in your mind, and be like, "I now recognize what I'm like when I'm in this hopeless scenario where I've given up without giving up, where I'm frustrated, where I'm tired, where I'm hungry." It's something even like children need to learn. Am I sad or am I just hungry? Or do I need to take a nap? That's something children need to learn, but it's not something we stop learning as a child. It's something we need to always know ourselves, know how our mind works, know what our limitations are, and know what our limitations aren't. Is this something I can just continue on, or is this something that I need to use my coping mechanisms that I've learned throughout my life to deal with this situation? Part of the problem has now become my own mind. And that's something you can learn by putting yourself constantly in these difficult situations, like difficult logic puzzles or trivia puzzles, where you're not very familiar with that trivia or whatever it is for you that puts you out of your comfort zone in a safe, low-stakes environment. So, you can learn how you yourself react to that and what that's going to take. And part of my job, implementing things, software. I need to recognize... have you ever had that... I'm sure everyone's had that late night where you've been banging your head against this fog or a thing you're trying to implement is just not working. You go home dejected. You get some sleep. You come in in the morning and you fix it in two minutes. And had you just recognized that you were in that situation where you were not going to be productive anymore, and you'd just gone home and you'd gotten rest and you'd accepted that that's what's happening. And you actually had your relaxing night and you took the time that you needed for yourself, and you got the good amount of sleep, and then you came in the morning ready to go, and you just solved the problem. Those two scenarios look the same from a work perspective, but look very different from a personal hygiene, mental hygiene perspective. Mike Gerholdt: I couldn't agree more. I couldn't agree more. I think it's also a great way to end this discussion, David. Thanks for coming on the podcast. You gave me so much to think about and here I was just excited to talk about word games. But really a lot of it is how you look at everything in life and how you tackle situations. And really part of, I think, the word game or the game itself is also helping you understand yourself. So, this is a great discussion. I appreciate it. Thanks so much. Rangsk: Well, thanks for having me on. And if people want to watch my content, I'm just going to plug my stuff real quick. Mike Gerholdt: Absolutely. Rangsk: So, I am Rangsk on all platforms. R-A-N-G-S-K. I'm sure there'll be something in the description where you can find that. I'm on YouTube and also on TikTok. And I recently had to split my TikTok into multiple accounts. But if you find that Rangsk_YT account, that's the main one, and you'll be able to find the others through my videos. And so, if you enjoy Sudoku, logic puzzles, word games, that sort of thing in an instructive calm environment, then my channel is for you. Mike Gerholdt: So, as I write, this was a shot in the dark, I'll be honest with you. I reached out to David after being completely addicted to his TikTok videos on Connections and Wordle, and just thought, "This is really what critical thinking looks like to me." And the conversation, I probably could have gone for another hour easily. I had a hundred more questions in my head, but I hope you enjoy it. I do want you to do one thing. If you enjoyed this episode, go ahead and give David a follow. I promise you it's super rewarding to watch his critical thinking and the way that he solves problems and word problems and word games online. I honestly do think it will make you a better Salesforce admin and a better business analyst in general. So, go ahead and give a click on the links below. Also, if you're not already following the Salesforce Admins Podcast, please do so. We're available on all the platforms. Click follow. Then new episodes like this one, we'll download automatically every Thursday morning. Thanks for listening and of course, we'll see you in the cloud.  

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Michelle Blair, Community Manager at Salesforce. Join us as we chat about Salesforce Community Events, her work with local event organizers, and why you should attend one near you. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Michelle Blair. By Trailblazers, for Trailblazers Michelle is a part of the Trailblazer Community team, which helps millions of Salesforce users around the world come together and learn. I brought her on the pod to tell us about community conferences and how you can find an event near you. Salesforce community conferences are created by Trailblazers, for Trailblazers. As Michelle shares, over 40 events are happening this year around the world, and they offer a great opportunity to connect with other people in the community and learn more about Salesforce. Get personal at a Salesforce community event near you When you think of Salesforce events, you probably think of Dreamforce or TrailheaDX. These events are huge and offer so much. But all of those choices can get a little overwhelming. The cost can also be a challenge. I remember exactly how much budget I had for attending conferences when I was a solo admin—it was $0. If you’ve ever felt that way, Michelle recommends that you give community events a try. Because they’re volunteer-organized, they have a more intimate, personal, inclusive feel. It’s easier to talk to speakers and make those connections. You can also find one within driving distance so you don’t have to take a flight or book a hotel. Most importantly, the quality of content and professional networking opportunities at community conferences is top-notch. Michelle and her team have put together a handy-dandy calendar so you can easily find a community event near you. Get involved in the Salesforce community Michelle’s team is hard at work making Salesforce community events even better. They offer sponsorships to help with affordability and are connecting organizers with keynote speakers and Salesforce engineers. This year, they’re bringing several hands-on workshops to community events to take your learning to the next level. Be sure to listen to the full episode for more on the Salesforce community events happening around the world and how you can get involved. And make sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode. Podcast swag Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store Learn more Community Conference Calendar Trailblazer Community Groups    Admin Trailblazers Group Admin Trailblazers Community Group Social Michelle: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michelleoblair/ Salesforce Admins: @SalesforceAdmns  Mike on Threads: https://www.threads.net/@mikegerholdt/ Mike on Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@salesforce.mike Mike on X: @MikeGerholdt Love our podcasts?   Full show transcript Mike: Salesforce community events are a great way to connect with Salesforce people in your area, consume some amazing content, dare I say Dreamforce level content, and get connected with your local user group. So this week on the Salesforce Admins podcast I'm talking with Michelle Blair, who's the community major at Salesforce. And she helps all of these community event organizers really propel their event into the next level. We talk about what a community event is, how it's different than an actual Salesforce event, some of the stuff that Salesforce is involved and not involved in when it comes to that. And I'll be honest, why you should go. Now, before we get into that episode, just want to make sure that you're following the Salesforce Admins podcast on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. That way when new episodes like this come out every Thursday morning, it's going to be right on your phone. So with that, let's get to our conversation with Michelle. So Michelle, welcome to the podcast. Michelle: Well, thank you, Mike. It's great to be here. Mike: Yeah. Well, I'm excited to talk about there's a lot of events that Salesforce does, but then the passion that runs through our community also exudes into them running their own events, which we'll talk about. But let's get started with you, how did you get started at Salesforce and what do you do? Michelle: Yeah, so it's been about three years that I've been at Salesforce now. And I actually was a customer prior to joining Salesforce and was implementing our marketing cloud and our social, using a lot of the social platform at the customer company. And came to Dreamforce back in 2018 and was able to lead a session at Dreamforce, and talking about our journey and working with a Salesforce expert within the company. And from there I really experienced the Trailblazer community and was so inspired and just like, okay, got to get in here somehow. And I was already working with our community at the customer. So kind of just got in there eventually and made my way in about three years ago now, and it's been quite a ride. Mike: And so at Salesforce you manage all kinds of stuff? Michelle: Yes, lots of community things. Mike: I feel like the over/under at one time I was a customer, it used to be very unique as an answer. Now it's very common. But our community events, so we do TrailblazerDX, and have Dreamforce and we have World Tours which are smattered across the US and EMEA. But we also have events that our Trailblazer community puts on, so tell me about those. Michelle: Yeah. So a little overview of the team that I'm on. So the Trailblazer community team we support that global network of millions of Salesforce users across the world now. And we really help them to learn, succeed, and enable them with the tools to be able to put on their own events, their own communities, bringing people together to talk all about Salesforce and share that knowledge. And we manage a number of different programs like the online community, our community groups, as well as our community experts like Salesforce MVPs, and of course these community conferences which I'm so excited to dive into a lot deeper on this podcast. Mike: Yeah. No, and I've been to quite a few of them, not all of them because I feel like there's more all the time. So what are we... First of all, they're not put on by Salesforce so you don't have anything in the planning of it, right? Michelle: That is correct. Mike: Okay. Michelle: We do not plan these. So these are a collection of learning conferences and they're created, organized, managed by the community for the community. So they are around Salesforce content, but just not a Salesforce led event. And they really do offer such a unique opportunity to learn network, get inspired and give back to your community. And like you said, they're entirely led by our incredible Trailblazers around the world. And they really just volunteer their time and pour their hearts into these community led events. And there are about 40 plus and counting this year and more to come. So these are just popping up all over, which is really exciting. Mike: And various sizes too, right? Michelle: Correct. Mike: With 40 plus, what are we looking at? Michelle: Yeah, so community conferences typically it'll be about 200 minimum and then can go to 1000s now. I think in certain places it goes, we've seen 1000s up to 2000, in the States about a 1000. And so they really are just quite a range of options as well. And each of them are so unique to their local culture, to their city, their region. And some are single day, some are multi-day, but all of them have tons of content and a lot of robust speaker lineups that really include a range of sessions, workshops, demos, and all of that networking that we know our Trailblazers love. Mike: Yeah. You were a customer and you said you went to Dreamforce, which that was your first event. That's like, ooh, I'm going to go on vacation for the first time and I'm going to go to Vegas or something. But I feel like when I was a customer I had a budget of zero, which made it very easy for me to know my budget every year. And I found community conferences as a super easy way to get connected with content that was, I would say Dreamforce quality but at a different price. What do you see... And you can see this from both angles, what do you see as the advantages of community conferences and some of our customers going? Michelle: Oh, absolutely. And kind of to touch on the Dreamforce part of my experience, it was extremely overwhelming. I remember just walking around and just not really knowing where exactly I should go. There was just so many options and it kind of is easy to feel a bit lost. And I think that is such a benefit of these community conferences. They really do feel like these intimate conferences that if maybe you are newer to the ecosystem, or maybe you're making a career change and you're just breaking in that way, or maybe you're a seasoned Trailblazer and you just enjoy more of these more intimate settings. And I think these community conferences really offer that. They also offer more of affordability in that way too, where they're just more accessible and budget friendly. So I think there's a lot of opportunity to be more inclusive through these than your typical industry event. And make it possible for folks who may not be able to attend those big events like Dreamforce and TDX. So I think that's really important to definitely note. Mike: Yeah, I know for a few of them I didn't even have to spend a night in a hotel. It was great because it was one day, but also the drive, the Midwest, everybody, we drive everywhere. We only fly if we have to go to the coasts. But you could drive, attend the event and drive home. And that also was a huge kind of budget saver. Not to focus on that, but money talks a lot. Michelle: 100%, yes. And I think that is something that we absolutely love about these events, is we have to keep in mind that they're 100% community-led so these are people who are just volunteering to put these events on. So they create these events through sponsors, like ourselves, the Trailblazer community team we do offer a sponsorship. And just to help out with some of those costs, but it really it's a lot of people just have to get creative to put these events on. And I think they do such a wonderful job and really hone in on the community. And that's really the whole point of these is to bring the community together. Mike: Yeah, absolutely. And then for some of the events, I guess, what are you seeing as a trend in, you mentioned 2018 and I often think back to even the Dreamforce and some of the events that we've done pre 2020 and post 2020. What are some of the trends that you're seeing in the style of community event or the length of community event now versus say a few years ago? Michelle: That's a great question, Mike. And I wish as a customer, I had attended a community conference to be able to share that perspective of like this is as a customer back in 2018 versus now working at Salesforce and actually helping to support these events internally. But I will say, I think with the pandemic we definitely saw that these particular events, there was a pause on a lot of them. Many of them had to skip a year or two years or just coming back maybe this year, which is really exciting. And I will say last year in particular, that's when I really helped to bring our focus back to community conferences and really find ways to support internally through our team and build out this sponsorship. And I think there was so much excitement this past year and that continues on through this year. And I think internally, something we have been really honing in on is that internal awareness and making sure that employees know that these are happening. We get out account executives, we get out those engineers who can really get this feedback in person. We also are delivering some hands-on workshops that have been really impactful at some of these pilots that we've had this year. And we have a goal of piloting 10 hands-on workshops at community conferences by the end of this year, which is really exciting. Mike: Yeah, I think that's always the part for me that felt very, I don't know, lack of a better term, real, was you went to the event and it was very local to you unless you flew across the country or something, or you went outside of the United States. But it felt very local. So there's a lot of people that you would know or you could connect with. If you go to an event in the Midwest, you're going to talk about the weather 100%. And then we're going to avoid bumping into you and say, "Oh, [inaudible 00:12:10]." But I think you get a mix of community members presenting, but then you also have Salesforce shows up. It just shows up in a very different way. It's not a heavy-handed message, but in a supportive manner like you said, where we can do a workshop. And so you still get kind of that local flavor, but also some of the big production of a hands-on workshop that you feel like, oh, well, this poor customer didn't have to spend 10 weeks toiling away to create this workshop. Michelle: Right. Yes, I think that is a really important note because we 100% want to respect the community and give them the credit that they all deserve for organizing these events. And one way we can do that is within our sponsorship package, we actually do offer whether it's keynote assistance, where we can make an ask on behalf of the conference organizers if they have a keynote or an internal speaker that they would really like as their keynote speaker or as a session topic. So that is one way we support logistically. And I think it is wherever we can help out, we will try to find a way. And I think it is just that trust piece where the community trusts us to have their back to know that we will support where we can. And then we trust in them to put on these incredible conferences that really just are the heart of this community. Mike: Yeah. Speaking of local, are there... And there's so many, are there unique events that some of these community events do outside of the conference? Michelle: Yes. So I know that... Well, and to give a little history but just on that local piece, Mike- Mike: Oh, please do. Michelle: So the history of these events really came from, I think it was back in 2012, and it's a customer who actually wasn't able to attend Dreamforce. They wanted to offer something similar to their local Salesforce network. So they basically decided to bring this mini Dreamforce to their hometown, and that's been duplicated all over the world now. We're seeing all of these pop up globally, but it really is the overall vision. And the goal here really is to connect local Trailblazer community groups. So those are those regional groups that get together, very product and industry specific groups, so architects, admins, developers. And then those local Salesforce customers who just want to get together and get to know each other as well as share that knowledge and then anyone interested in learning. And that's really the goal here is to spark those connections and ideas for all. And yeah, I think the local piece is just so important because these conferences are a celebration in a sense of that region, that local culture that people really love about their city, about their state. So we do see a lot of very specific, especially in the States, very specific regions that these Dream and events are named after. And then we're seeing a ton come up in EMEA as well as APAC. Yeah, there's so much local flavor that we're seeing and it's amazing. Mike: It sounds like... Well, I'll flip to the other side of the coin because I feel like going to these is paramount. We've talked about that a lot. What if you're on the other side of the coin you're thinking, boy, I think I could do something like this in my area. From your perspective, what does it take to put on a community event? How big are some of these teams that plan these? And I think you said the turnout's kind of all over the place, but if somebody wanted to get started what are they looking at? Michelle: Great question. So typically with our conference planning teams, we see at least three to four members. I would say that's a minimum because you got to think about all the different components that go into these conferences and up to it could be 10 planning team members. So really is just depending on the scope of your conference and what you're trying to bring together. And we really recommend even forming an additional volunteer team to help handle this day of responsibilities as well. So those are additional folks who can jump in if there's any fires, anything going on that need to be addressed as soon as possible. Something we also do recommend is having at least one community group leader that currently is leading one of those regional community groups, just so that they kind of have that full understanding of the Trailblazer community and the importance of bringing the community together. And then typically we also recommend that the planning team is individuals not employed but just by one company. It's really spread out through a company and different organizations coming together. And that could include customers, partners, and making sure that they are active members of the Salesforce ecosystem, the Trailblazer community. And that they really create that open and inclusive environment that these community conferences are known for. Mike: Yeah. No, sometimes it takes an army or what's it? No, it takes a village. Michelle: Takes a village. Mike: It takes a village, yes. May feel like an army sometime, but yeah, I've been to quite a few and I think it's always interesting. I also, just to speak to kind of the vibe, I don't know how best to say that but the vibe, the vibes at a community conference are so different. On top of just the speakers being super approachable, they'll get up and literally there'll be times... There was one time I was sitting in a session, he's like, "I wonder who the speaker is." And he just got up because they're not in this bougie suit like you see at Dreamforce. But also when you're there talking with the partners, the SIs and stuff, they're a little more laid back. It's a little more casual. I really enjoy that you can have what I'll call a human conversation, as opposed to at some of these more formal corporate events where the people at the booth or whatever are just trying to hard sell you the whole time. There you can be like, now, you sit down and it's nothing to walk past a table and see people sketching stuff on a piece of paper. And then really working through the challenge as opposed to like, "Buy my product." I don't know how best to say that. Michelle: I totally agree, Mike. I think that is really the magic is that relaxed environment where you can show up authentically. You don't have to play a certain role or act a certain way. You just show up as yourself, whether you've been in the ecosystem for years and years or you're coming in new, I think it's somewhere that is so welcoming and inclusive of all. And that is something I just absolutely love. And you see that across every single community conference. It really is that's just the vibe of our Dream and events. So it really is incredible. And I think touching on the opportunities that when you can show up authentically, it really does offer or allows you to grow personally and professionally on such a different level because you can be yourself and then you make those really special connections that will allow you to become a better admin, become a better community member, become a better community leader. And then that kind of just flows into your personal everything. So I think that's really such a beautiful thing about these conferences. Mike: If somebody was listening and we'll put the link in the show notes, and wanted to find, do we list all these or is there a listing somewhere that they could find of these events? Michelle: We sure do, yes. Great question. It's exciting because we're actually going to be updating this landing page very soon. So you can find community conferences at Trailblazercommunitygroups.com. And then on that top area you can just click onto community conferences from there. And you will see a calendar of all of the amazing events that are happening throughout this year, and then all of the past events that have happened as well. Mike: So you can find out all the stuff you missed out on. Michelle: Yes, exactly. Mike: I feel like it's that way with me all the time. Like, oh. Every time I hear a band or a comic is going on tour, like, oh. And like, "You didn't know they were going on tour." You're like, "No, I didn't." And then you pull up the event and you're like, "Cool, [inaudible 00:22:19]." Michelle: It was last weekend, yeah. Mike: So conversely, if somebody's listening to this, what would be the bar? Is there a requirement that they should have stuff together before they contact you if they were looking to get into creating a community event? Michelle: Yeah, I think it really is there's quite a range in that too. When a team will come to us and say, "I have interest in this. I really don't know what to do. Can you help guide me?" And then we also see the other side where it's like, we have the date, we have the venue, we have everything already set. All we need from you is really the sponsorship and a point of contact on your team to help support in that planning and execution. So we show up wherever the conference planning team really is. And yeah, once they kind of go through our intake process and we say, "All right, you're approved. Here's the sponsorship, here's your point of contact." We then the point of contact on our team will be able to support them with all the additional items like that internal awareness piece. We do a demo jam trophy, that keynote speaker sourcing, some marketing support as well, as well as some little giveaway items that we provide. And something new that we're piloting at domestic conferences is an onsite community booth where our team, yes, for those who our team is able to travel to some of these conferences. And when we do we kind of bring this community booth kit where we have pop-up banner, we have all of the things that help to identify the Trailblazer community. And we spread some of that awareness of what makes the Trailblazer community unique, and how we support these conferences as well as our community groups and our community experts. So lots of fun things. Mike: I would say, that's quite the welcome wagon. My God. Michelle: Yes. Mike: Well, Michelle, thanks for coming on the pod and talking about our community events. I know that I've been to quite a few and I've got quite a few listeners that go to them and plan them and talk about them. And it's just kind of a neat extra layer of participation that we have as part of this ecosystem. Michelle: Yes, I couldn't agree more, Mike. And thank you so much for supporting these incredible community led events. They really are just exactly what the community is all about. And we couldn't do any of this without the people who are organizing these events, so big shout out to them. Mike: Yeah, absolutely. Michelle: They're the real heroes here. Mike: Yep, absolutely. Well, it was great to have Michelle on the podcast. I'm glad she could join us. I really love going to community events. I think they're a lot of fun, and I wasn't kidding about the vibe. I think it's so much more enjoyable when you can sit down with a lot of the vendors. And also to be honest with you, a lot of the speakers are also a little less rushed too. So if you're working on a budget like I am all the time, community events are a great way to get connected with some great content. Also, a great way for you as a Salesforce admin to try out your presentation skills. If you've been presenting at a local user group and kind of want to go that next level, community event is a great way to get in front of a larger group of people and really try out your speaking abilities. So if you enjoyed this episode, can you do me a favor and just tap on the three dots in Apple Podcasts and click the share episode. That way you can text it to a friend or you can most importantly share it on social. And of course, we mentioned resources, Michelle had a couple of URLs. I want to make sure you know how to get to those. All those resources are in the show notes, and those show notes and along with everything else is at Admin.salesforce.com, including a transcript of the show. Now, be sure to join us in the Admin Trailblazer group in the Trailblazer community if you're not there already. And of course, until next week, we'll see you in the cloud.  

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Jason Atwood, CEO and Co-Founder of Arkus. Join us as we chat about landing your first Salesforce Admin role, from finding good opportunities to nailing the interview and more. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Jason Atwood. The 20/30/50 rule Jason has interviewed a lot of people for Salesforce roles in his 15 years in the ecosystem. His biggest piece of advice when looking for your first role is pretty simple: “Relax. It’s going to be OK.” But you still need to acquire skills and there’s a lot to do, so Jason recommends following his 20/30/50 rule. Spend 20% of your time on Trailhead, 30% on certifications, and 50% finding some way to gain experience. This split loosely follows what he looks for on a resume when he’s making a new hire. He also shared some advice about each step of your journey. Trailhead: Becoming a Ranger is your number one priority, followed by Superbadges. He also recommends taking the time to set up your profile with a photo, description of yourself, and custom URL. Certifications: Don’t put off taking your certifications. Give it a go as soon as you’re ready. If you don’t get it this time, you can use your results to help you prep better the next time. And if you do pass, you can move on to the next one sooner. Gaining Experience: Volunteering isn’t the only way to do this. You can enroll in a program where you build mock projects, or simply build something on your own that you’re willing to demo in an interview. Preparing for a Salesforce Admin interview Jason interviews a lot of people so I asked him, how should you prepare for your first interview for a Salesforce role? The first thing is to be ready for some sort of assessment. Since there’s often time pressure, Jason recommends doing a practice run. Talk to a friend, find out what kind of data they collect, and build them an app to track the books they’ve read or the distance they’ve run, anything will do. When you sit down in the room, Jason emphasizes the importance of listening and showing empathy. One way to do that is to ask good questions. What’s their Salesforce roadmap and what can you build for them? What’s their organization’s approach to culture? You can also do your homework and bring up a blog post they wrote, or something specific their company has done. Admins are consultants Listening and empathy are so important to Jason because he sees that as the biggest part of the job. “Being an admin is being a consultant for one organization. What are you doing? You’re talking to people, they're coming to you with their problems, you’re getting their requirements, you’re satisfying their needs, you’re working with them, you’re iterating, you’re updating things, and then you’re presenting it back to them.” We touch on a lot more in this conversation about looking for Salesforce jobs, listening, and what it’s like to be a Salesforce consultant, so be sure to listen to the full episode and subscribe so you don’t miss out. Podcast swag Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store Learn more Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: Pei Mun Lim on the Skills of a Business Analyst Salesforce Admins Blog: Develop Your Communication Skills as a Salesforce Admin Admin Trailblazers Group Admin Trailblazers Community Group Social Jason: @JasonMAtwood Salesforce Admins: @SalesforceAdmns  Mike on Threads: https://www.threads.net/@mikegerholdt/ Mike on Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@salesforce.mike Mike on X: @MikeGerholdt Full show transcript Mike: I got an idea. How about we tackle the hardest question on the Salesforce Trailblazer community? That's right. This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we're going to look for advice on finding your first admin job and doing the interview, getting experience, and more. And we're going to do all that with CEO and co-founder of Arkus, Jason Atwood. Jason and I chatted at TrailblazerDX and really wanted to dive into this topic. Now, before we bring Jason on, I just want to make sure that you're following the Salesforce Admins Podcast on iTunes or Spotify. That way, when new episodes like this one come out, they're automatically downloaded to your phone. But enough about that. Let's talk about finding that first job or even finding your next job as a Salesforce administrator. Oh, I almost forgot to mention we tackle the myth of "but it's just an admin job." So with that, let's get Jason on the podcast. So, Jason, welcome to the podcast. Jason Atwood: Thank you for having me. It's been a long time since we've podcast together. Mike: I know. I was thinking back; well, we were just reminiscing of the days at the Marriott Marquis and the Arkus podcast. Jason Atwood: Yep. You were on an episode of CloudFocus Weekly. We had it as part of our trivia once there was only four or five guests ever on the podcast, and you were one of them. Mike: Snuck in, only proximity. I'm going to say. So catch people up. What have you been up to? Jason Atwood: Well, since then, whatever that was, 10 years ago. Yeah. So I am now the current CEO and co-founder of Arkus. We're a Salesforce consulting firm. We deal mostly in the nonprofit space, and we've grown from that little company back then. We're almost up to 75 people. And now I run around between putting out fires, talking on podcasts, and trying to educate myself on the whole changing landscape of technology. Mike: Yeah, it does feel like in the last decade, it's gone from everything we know to a brand new world. Jason Atwood: It certainly is. And I just spent three hours at a Heroku dev meetup and could hang there mentally for a bit, but they lost me at a little point. So it's both fun, interesting, and challenging to stay up with all this stuff. Mike: So one of the things that everyone's trying to stay up with is the ever-changing job market and hiring. We see a lot of the questions in the Trailblazer community from new admins, people getting into the ecosystem that want to become Salesforce admins, people in the ecosystem that are looking for jobs, or maybe have kind of hit a career plateau. And you and I were chatting, and boy, I think it'd be fun to kind of delve into that topic with you. Jason Atwood: Let's do it. I have some experience in hiring people over the last 15 years, so I can certainly talk about it. Mike: A little bit more than me. More than me. Well, let's get started. So let's start fresh. There's a lot of new people. As we were talking about in the intro, there's a lot of new people coming into the ecosystem that maybe don't have tech advice. They are doing Trailhead modules, completing challenges, getting a lot of badges, trying to round out their resumes, and they don't know A, what to look for, or B, what to put on their resumes. So somebody that's hired a bunch of people and been around for a long time, let's start there with some of your advice and where they should go. Jason Atwood: Sure. This is a very common thing, and the first thing I would tell everybody is relax. It's going to be okay. I know it feels daunting, and you see these triple all-star rangers and you see all these, the hoodies, and you see the people with the 15 certifications and 10 years of experience, and you feel like, "How am I ever going to get there?" You will; you'll get there. So the first thing is just to take it easy and not to get too worked up on it. It does feel like a lot. It's a very big community and filled with lots of hungry people for jobs, a lot of recruiters, a lot of activity. When I talk to people about getting started in the ecosystem, and certainly on the admin track, and we can talk about other tracks if you want, but on the admin track, I kind of say all those things matter. So when it comes to certifications, when it comes to Trailhead, when it comes to experience, they all matter. And usually the question I get is, "But what should I focus on?" And so I came up with something, I maybe made it up years and years ago. I call it the 30, 20, 50 rule, or 20, 30, 50. It doesn't matter; you can break it up anyway. And if you're going to take your time, right, you're in the hunt for a job, and you need to do the education, you need to get enabled, you need to build your experience level. I break it down into those percentages. So 20% of the time, I'd focus on Trailhead. And the trick for Trailhead is A, you just have to be a ranger. We don't even look at people who aren't rangers. I had an intern apply the other day, and I said, "No, you're not even on Trailhead. Go get a ranger before I even talk to you." So that, to me, is just a minimum bar. Just go be a ranger, and then if you can go up from there, that's great. And then, if you're still in your Trailhead worlds, the thing that we then look for besides looking at their profile, is it filled out? Have they thought about it? Have they created it like LinkedIn? So second advice on the Trailhead side is treat your profile like LinkedIn: fill it out, put your picture, put your description, do all the things. It'll probably take you no more than a half an hour. Make your URL; you can make your customized URL so people can find you; do all the things so it looks like you're part of the community, right? Make sure that your profile is rich and full. And then the third thing on the Trailhead side of things is to go for super badges. So I can look at double ranger, triple ranger all day long, but if I don't see some super badges and I speak from someone who doesn't have any super badges. Mike: Oh, no. Jason Atwood: I know, I know, it's on my hit list for this year. I know, I know, I mean, I have 15 certs, and so I have some experience, but I'd say, get some super badges. We see that when we look at that as a higher level of dedication and of expertise, because, as you know and as I've been doing them, they're difficult. They show that you have really dug in, and they're more than just answering some questions or watching videos, or getting fun ones. I love badges, but the super badges really show that kind of a deeper level of education and sort of just being in the Trailhead world. So that's the 20%. Then the 30% is certifications. You need to have both. You can't have one without the other. I don't know what that commercial was, peanut butter and chocolate or something, but- Mike: Yeah, I think so, yeah. Jason Atwood: -You might be [inaudible 00:07:08]. Certifications are important; you should focus on them. What I tell people is you need to get them, but you can't stall. Most people, I think, when we talk to them and we'll find in the ecosystem, say, "Oh, I'm thinking about getting that, or I'm planning to get that one next year." And our advice is, "Nope, go get it. Go get it now. Go take it. Go take the test a couple of times." Do whatever it is you can do to start your certification journey; don't put it off; don't procrastinate on it. You don't have to be perfect; just go get some. And obviously there's a path of which ones you should get, blah, blah, blah. It depends on where you're going in your world, but having at least one or two certs is kind of a bare minimum. So if you're starting off and you're trying to get into the ecosystem, that's your 20 and your 30, and then the 50 is the hardest part. And it's just hard to tell people because it's the experience. The third thing we look for is experience. I want to see that you've done something obviously new to the ecosystem, harder to have the experience, but that's where I say spend 50% of your time trying to gain that experience. There's the old adage: try to go work with a non-profit. Although there's some pushback on that nowadays because of the complexity of the platform, you don't want to hurt a non-profit. There's definitely... Get in in a way, there's programs, there's tons of programs out there that will help you do mock projects and things where you can just get your hands dirty. And even if you have to build your own thing that you're going to demo, you got to get experience because I've not hired people with 22 certifications, and because it didn't add up to any experience, and I've seen people with tons and tons of experience with zero certs, and I would hire anyway, just from the experience. But for me, that's how I tell spend your time: 20% trailhead, 30% certifications, and 50% getting that experience. Mike: I think that 50%, that part that you're talking about is always the part that feels like the hardest to get into. Because if you're not in tech and you don't have any experience and you're trying to land that first job, that can feel like, "If I could get this job, then I could get the experience." And so, part of that lends to my next question is, so you're new, we've checked all the boxes on filling out our profiles and done that part. What should I get ready for when I interview? Jason Atwood: So every interview's going to be different, obviously, but a lot of places are using assessments now. So I would say be prepared for an assessment. That means functionally, they're going to ask you to do something; they're going to ask you to build something or take something they've done and turn it into something on the platform, using Salesforce as the platform. So I would just be ready for that, be prepared, be okay with it. Even do mock versions of it, go have a friend, and I have to given this advice to some people, but go have a friend, sit down with them, talk to them about what they do, and you'll uncover something that they're collecting data. And as soon as you can figure out what the data they're collecting, whether it's books or they collect comic books, or they're a skier or they're a runner, anything you do, you can just come up with, "Ooh, what if I built you an app to track that?" So be prepared to have an assessment of your skills and be able to show that in a short period of time. Meaning it might be a take-home. Sometimes it's a take-home. Like, "Hey, go do this over the weekend." Other times it's, "You have an hour; come back and show us what you did." Mike: Ooh! Jason Atwood: So I'd say... Ooh! Yeah, I know. I've been doing that for 15 years to people. Trust me. I've seen a lot of, oohs. Mike: I would imagine. Jason Atwood: Even had one person pass out in the... Mike: Oh, my. Oh, goodness. Jason Atwood: It happens. Mike: You get an extra hour now. Jason Atwood: Yeah. So I think that it's coming more and more in the ecosystem, because again, when you look at a resume, when you look at LinkedIn, a lot of it's just you can't tell whether they know what they're doing. If you actually do an assessment, you can then assess, "Okay, you know, you functionally know how to do things." So I'd be prepared for that. The other thing is, I think when you're really, especially in the new, just be honest about what you do and do not know. That's really, really key. Don't fluff up your resume; don't put things that you don't know; don't put clouds, don't throw in data cloud if you don't know what data cloud is and haven't used it or can't really explain it. Just because you took a Trailhead on something doesn't mean that platform or know that cloud. So I'd really say be honest with what you know and the clouds, and the products, because that's going to be super important in the interview process. Mike: Wow. How much... In prep work for resumes, there's a lot of AI tools out there, so I'd love to know your perspective on both sides of this one: how much do you, as somebody hiring, kind of look for, "Oh, they used AI to generate most of this resume?" And on the flip side, how much should somebody building their resume that could really benefit from an AI tool? How much should they lean into it? Jason Atwood: So I'm going to be the strange answer on this one, or... Mike: Oh, good. Jason Atwood: Yeah, because I'm going to say, resumes don't matter. Mike: Okay. Jason Atwood: They're just checking a box. When people get to me in the interview process, they're beyond the resume. So yes, you need to have a resume; you need it because that's the part. It's like you have to have the internet; you have to have a way to fill out the form. So you need to have a resume, and it should have your accomplishments and stuff on it. But I don't look at resumes because they're just lies. They're just you telling me all these things, and sometimes I don't know if any of that's really true or not true. So to me, it's like it's just a checking the box. "Yes, you have to have a resume. Yes, it should be okay." Honestly, your LinkedIn profile should be your resume, right? Because that's real; it's on the web. And if you're lying, someone might actually call you out for it. "Hey, you didn't work at that company for 10 years." So I would say focus more on the LinkedIn. Because I'll look at that. If you gave me 10 minutes, I'd look at your LinkedIn first. I would not look at your resume, what you've put on, rather than what your actual history has been. That being said, you want to throw all this stuff on there for this ecosystem. So I do think showing work that you've done and really pointing to problems you've solved, if you really think about any job, especially as an administrator, you're a Salesforce admin, you're basically solving problems all day all. And you're communicating. So two things that I tell people about the resume and the process is how do you show that you've solved problems in the past in your resume, and then how do you show that you are a great communicator? Because great communication, it doesn't matter what, I mean, well, not what job, but certainly in this world, you are basically talking to people, helping them out, doing stuff, re-communicating with them, getting what they need to do, building it, whatever. You might work with different groups or whatever. But that communication skill is something we deeply look at. So again, if you're going to focus on stuff, don't so much focus on your resume as focus on how to be a great communicator. Mike: That's really good advice because I have been at that level where people show up and the resume looked good, but they couldn't facilitate the conversation or articulate any kind of answer in the interview. Jason Atwood: It is a skill that not a lot of people have, but it's a skill, you can learn it. So a couple of things to put into that communication bucket. We'll go down a little rathole here. Mike: Yeah, let's do. Jason Atwood: One is empathy. Mike: Okay. Jason Atwood: Have the ability to show empathy, and that means sort of having a conversation with somebody and throwing in stuff that's like listening to them, talking to them, obviously pulling out information about them, but having the empathy when they say something's not going to happen or whatever, they could say, "It's a rainy day." I look for it in every interview that I do. Now this is going to be on the podcast; everybody's going to know this, but I will actually throw things into my talk track or as just the warm-up when you're sort of, "How are you and what's going on?" I will always throw in something to test empathy. I'll say, "Oh, I'm okay, but I didn't sleep well last night. Or I had a bad egg sandwich this morning, or I've tripped over the dog when I came into the room." And I just listened to hear what they react. If they go, "Oh, that's terrible. Oh, yeah, I know dogs can be really difficult. Or you know what? I get my egg sandwiches from downstairs, whatever." But hearing that back of that empathy, super important. Second is actually listening, so I will listen to people, how they listen to me. Are they interrupting me? Are they talking over me? Are they going? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, as I speak, I listen for their real intent and true conversational skills. And so the ability to actually listen, pause, and then answer is a really big; it's a great skill to have. And so the people who can do that, I know that they can do almost any job better because they've intently done that listening skill and they've got it working. So those are two that I throw out to most people when they're trying to build their conversational habits. Mike: Yeah, I'm listening to you answer that, and I'm playing devil's advocate in my head and saying, "Maybe people are hearing Jason say this because he's hiring consultants." So why do you think this also translates over to people that are embedded in different work groups, or teams, or have stakeholders within an organization and aren't consultants, like for your organization? Jason Atwood: Because basically, being an admin is being a consultant in one organization. You are a consultant. What are you doing? You're talking to people; they're coming to you with their problems; you are getting their requirements; you're satisfying their needs; you're working with them; you're iterating; you're changing it; you're updating things, and then you're presenting it back to them. The thing that changes when you become a consultant is you're paying for someone's time, which then becomes a whole other thing. But also, you might be working with other organizations, and the level of expectation of how you do that and your expertise goes way up. And this is something I tell, I warn people about moving into consulting is that when you're an admin, you have the ability to take some time. Someone says, "Hey, can you build me these three dashboards that I want to track my sales forecasting?" You go, "Sure," and you can go Google it, and you spend a week, and you come back, and you're like, "Here's your three dashboards." They're ecstatic; they're like, "Great, thank you." They don't care that it took you three weeks or whatever, and then you had to ask your friend and Google it or ask ChatGPT to do it for you. In the consulting space, it's different. They don't ask, "Could you build this for me?" They say, A, "What are the options to build it? How long is it going to take you, and can you get it to me by next Tuesday?" So the expectation level of what you're doing goes way up, and they expect you to be expert. They don't expect you to ever say, "I don't know, but I'll figure it out." As an admin, I said, "I don't know. I'll figure it out." "Oh, you want to build some tracker for your feedback form? Sure, let go figure it out." Go away for a week, and I'll come back and show you something. So I think that's part of it, but as an admin, you're still doing all this stuff. It's the same stuff inside the organization. You're just not working with external companies or people; you work with internal people. So you still have Mary from accounting coming over and wants to synchronize with the QuickBooks, and you still have the CEO come over and they want an update to some dashboard because they can't figure it out, and you're doing the same stuff; it's more internal, more ad hoc, generally. Mike: I mean, I couldn't agree more. Also, Mary from accounting, they always want to, for some reason, can't seem to get opportunities flowing through your sales org, but let's integrate finance. Jason Atwood: So true, so true. Mike: But you kind of led into that. So what are the different jobs, or different tasks, types of jobs that admins would tackle within an organization? Jason Atwood: Yeah, I mean, we kind of started in there. You do become an internal consultant, but I think you first off just think of what, especially when you're applying for it, and this goes back to sort of the applying and getting the jobs' thing. When you're looking at the organization, you obviously want to know what their Salesforce landscape is. So if I were in the interview process, what I would do is come loaded with a bunch of really good questions, and I would pepper that person with tons of questions about their Salesforce instance, or, as we call it in the biz, we call it their org. But I would come in with, "What kind of licenses? How old is it? What kind of integrations? What kind of applications do you have? When's the last time you did a health tech? Do you use permission sets or permission set groups? Or did you flip the lightning yet?" I mean, I would be peppering them showing my expertise to get that admin job. So that's just on the interview side; I just want to throw that in. But coming back to what you do, again, it really depends on the organization, and this is actually a myth that is out there in the ecosystem, is that admins get bored and admins don't get to play with lots of different clouds, and admins don't do a lot of diverse things. That's completely not true because it depends on what organization you're with. I was with a company who had 375,000 people. I had a team; I had five people, or five, including me; we were all admins; that's what we did. And we had 12 different production orgs, 12 orgs with production, and I think nine different applications running in them with thousands and thousands and thousands of users. We were not bored; we had plenty to do; we were playing with great, big, unlimited licensing and integrations and projects, but we were admins. At the end of the day, we were admins. Same thing: you go work for a small company that's four... I don't think anyone would hire a full-time admin with four people. But the smaller the organization who's just using Salesforce for one thing and has no chance of expanding it or doing it, or going anywhere. Yeah. You're going to get bored, right? You come in, you're going to help out Mary in accounting, you get that one project done, and then they're going to be like, "Can you reset passwords all day?" So I think as part of the interview process to pulling it back in to that, and when your job seeking, you should be really interested in what their, especially if you want to be a Salesforce admin and you really want to do it full time, what's their Salesforce roadmap? Are they just solid? They have it, and they have had it up and running for five years, and that's it? Or do they have things that they want to do? New stuff you can build? Do you want to do the integration with that? We want to bring in marketing cloud next year. We're looking at how to do predictive AI, whatever. So if I were bringing more questions as the trying to get the job, I would bring in that to the organization. I'd say, "What do you guys, where's your roadmap? Or do you not have one?" And I think that would show as a hiring person; I'd be like, "Oh, they're forward-looking." And it'll also give you the idea of: "Are you going to get bored in six months?" Because you don't want to get bored in six months. Mike: Right. Although maybe a smaller footprint would be really good if you're looking to get that first admin job. Jason Atwood: Exactly. Exactly right. But then you have the counter, right? You have a smaller footprint, but they have 40 users, and they only use it for service. So you get in, you do some work, you do all the stuff, and then you're like, "Now what?" Mike: Right. So you brought up myths of admins, and one is, well, "I don't get exposed to enough clouds," and I've heard that at various events. "Well, we only use data cloud, or I just don't get to see it." And I feel like, and this still exists, all of these articles on admin to something else, as though admin is just the front door; all you got to do is get in and do that for a few months. But the real money and the real challenge is elsewhere. What would you say to that myth of just an admin? Jason Atwood: I think it is a bit of a myth, and it makes admins and being an administrator, Salesforce administrators feel like this... It's like you're the fry person in the back at McDonald's. It's like, "Well, I don't ever go back and cook the hamburgers." I don't know. And it's not true. Mike: Although the fries are kind of the best part. Jason Atwood: That's true. I actually worked at McDonald's, and I was the fry person, so that's why I brought it up. Mike: Yeah. Jason Atwood: But yes, at some organizations, you could be the one admin, and that could be your role for a long period of time. And you could get bored, and it could just be a starter. At other organizations, you could run an entire group of admins. You could have six or seven admins, you could be part of a team of people supporting a lot of different Salesforce instances, and it could go anywhere from just administrative down to sort of more the solution architect type of stuff, or more towards the BA towards so stuff or more towards the development. One of the things you and I have been in this ecosystem for a long time, what we were able to do 10 years ago on the platform with our clicks and what we're able to do with clicks now, we're programming. Let's be clear: when we're building flows, we're programming; we're just programming with a user interface. But that's programming, and the stuff you can do is stunning, that you just couldn't do with any of the tools unless you're writing Apex. So I think even the idea that admins who are getting that technical acumen and are going into the more programmatic type of world of admin that could go long, there's lots of paths you can go down for that. So that's where I think some of the myths should go away because you're not just the admin who's building a report, adding a field to a page way out, and assigning a permission set. There's many, many different pieces of that platform. And that's before you even talk about the clouds; before you'd say there's now, I don't know how many clouds. There's a lot of clouds. Mike: There is a lot. Jason Atwood: Yeah. Mike: Yeah. I mean, you brought up flow. I think back to the days of, "Boy, if I could just stand up like a window pane that a screen that people could input the data into as opposed to just editing raw right on the record." And now we can do that, and you can do that just using the interface. You don't have to try a single line of code, which is... Jason Atwood: It is stunning what you can do with that tool. And it's one of the things that has left me a little bit behind because I'm old school admin. I'm a work-for-rule person. And for that, I would've gone wrote in a user story and had someone written up a Visualforce, and with Apex in the background, and now it's... The stuff that we can produce with flows, screen flows, and even the call-outs. I was watching the call-out today, a flow that made a call-out to a Heroku Dyno that did a hookup to a Postgres database that pulled in AI predictions. I was like, "What?" So yeah, the world of an admin is becoming very, very broad in some ways. Mike: Yeah, no, I agree. And you can also now trigger flows through prompts and have it call AI. And I mean, in a year from now, this is all going to sound like super, "Wow, they were impressed they could do that. Now look at where we are." kind of stuff. One thing we didn't touch on is there's a lot of job places to look at and career stuff. Often, when looking for a developer architect, I think those are a little more defined also, especially with developer, they've got experience in writing developer job titles for other platforms. So it's very easy to translate that over to Salesforce. What are things that an admin should look for in job descriptions? That maybe if the title or description doesn't say Salesforce admin, that will be the role? Jason Atwood: Yeah, it's a tough one because, I mean, the easiest thing to say is look for the keyword Salesforce. Obviously, there's going to be some sort of piece of that. I think you'd have to go a little old-school and think of the platform and what it's doing. So I would start to look for things that were based on what Salesforce, the platform's doing? Is it sales, right? Is it marketing? Is it service? Is it nonprofit? Especially in the nonprofit space, which is for me. So we would look at grant writing, fundraising, and all that stuff, which could be keywords for, we're using Salesforce in the background, but we're using it to do all these things. So I guess the meta hint without giving you the keywords is: What is this organization doing? What is the output of their world? And then looking at what the tool set they're using. They might not be Salesforce, right? There are other ways of saying the word. They might say something like health cloud and a health cloud administrator, and you're like, "Well, that's Salesforce." Or they might say, "net-zero cloud." Or they might say, "nonprofit cloud." Again, not saying Salesforce, but that's what it's based on. So sometimes, as an administrator and as part of this ecosystem, you have to know that there are products that are sitting on top of the platform that don't necessarily say the word in it. Remember when they named everything Force? Everything was Force something Force, this Force, that Force. Mike: We had everything named Lightning for a while, too. Jason Atwood: That too. That was fun. Mike: We like to do that a lot. I think everything's named Einstein now. Jason Atwood: Pretty much. Mike: I'll probably get in trouble for saying that. Jason Atwood: Yes, you will. Mike: But you could do the bingo card of name everything, Einstein, Lightning, Force, and then you're covered. Jason Atwood: I'm going to win that Bingo. Mike: Einstein, Lightning, Force, and then the actual product. Then you're covered. Jason Atwood: Totally. Mike: I was looking through all my notes, roles and descriptions and interviewing and challenges, and certifications, and I feel we touched on a lot. What is something that you feel we missed, that you talk about, that you bring up that maybe people aren't thinking about when they're looking to interview or get an admin position? Jason Atwood: Sure. I think there's a couple of things. A couple more things I would, if I were giving advice, which I happen to do all the time. Mike: You're full of advice. Jason Atwood: I'm full of advice, maybe too much. So one thing, and this is just generic to not Salesforce, but as anybody looking for a job, cultural fit, I think, is becoming more and more of a need. And I think, as people applying for jobs, you should be looking at it both ways. Do I fit that culture, and does that culture fit me? And that's do my values and the company's values or the organization's values align together. And asking a lot of questions around culture is going to become more and more important, especially because we go do remote work and all that. So I think what we used to think of, like, "Oh, we had coffee breaks and pizza parties for every quarter," is now a much bigger discussion. So I would say bring culture into the conversation. Another tip that I hadn't given yet is just preparedness. It seems silly to say you have to be prepared for an interview, but I can tell you the amount of people who show up who are not prepared, they're just not prepared; they don't know their resume; they don't have good questions; they don't know how to talk to their experiences. And I'm stunned when it happens, but it happens a lot. And one of my little pet peeves, I'm giving away all my hints, boy, anybody interviewing is going to be able to nail the interview the next time they get to me. Mike: Yeah, you say that, but I bet not. Jason Atwood: Probably not, right? No one's even going to pay attention. But having really good questions is something that I look for. Again, we work in an industry where being able to ask your users what they want and question them, and being insightful is a great skill. So if I get to the end of one of my diatribe speeches and I say, "Do you have any questions?" And they're like, "No, I'm good." I immediately go, "Okay." And then I'm not good because I... So have questions ready at the go; have them sitting in front of you on a piece of paper, on a sticky note in a NeverNote, wherever. It's super important, and don't be generic. Don't say, "Where do you see yourself?" Don't interview the interviewee. Ask really stuff that's based on homework you did. And that's sort of the prepared thing too. When people come in and they say, "Oh, I read your blog post last week about blah, blah, blah. I was really interested about this key point." Immediately, I'm like, "They did their homework; they know what they're talking about, and they're asking me something interesting." Don't say, "How do you guys do raises?" That's not going to be; you need to have the questions about the culture or the stuff. I mean, I've had some really good in the past, but I've had some really terrible questions. And then two more, I'll give you two more tips. This is like the hundred tips for interviewing the Salesforce Ecosystem Podcast. Mike: We'll call it 98. Jason Atwood: There you go. Mike: So there's two. Jason Atwood: Two more is you can never, if you want to get two skills. If I told someone to go get two skills before they get any job to be super useful on day one, two things they should be focusing on: data and documentation. Your ability to understand data is like you need to have it, you have to have it as a skill; you need to know data; you need to know how data interconnects with other data, you need to know how to report on it. It's getting more and more and more important. So I look for data skills, even data nerds, people who say, "I love data." So if you're not that type of person, I would say these jobs are going to be tough. Because I don't know anywhere in the ecosystem that we are not just really crazed about and or dealing with lots of data. It is sort of what Salesforce is, in the back of all of it. So understanding data, taking courses on it, go learn SQL, go learn regular databases, go learn third normal form, learn it, and understand it because any of your skill sets that you have that are based in data will make you better at any job in this ecosystem. So data. Second is documentation, because one of the things you can do very quickly in any role is document things. You need to be able to document; you need to be able to take what people say, summarize it, put it into something, and spit it back out for people to take in. If you're an admin, you've got to come up with a training plan or a training agenda. You are an admin; you have to come up with a user story; you hand it off to a developer or someone to build something. Documenting is, and it's, I know there's Trailheads on it, and you can go to those, but really learning how to document even so much prove that skill when you talk to somebody and you follow up with an email. Follow up with an email that proved that you listened and that you're following up with documentation skills, coming back with key points or things that you wanted or questions, all great ways to show. But I would say two things you could just learn to show up on day one to start working and doing things is know data very well and know how to document things. Mike: Well, that was a really good point. I would hammer on that cultural fit and question part a lot because I always feel like you and I are of a certain generation that we kind of almost interviewed in the hopes that they chose us, right? The best of the survivor, we get picked. But the part that really dawned on me as I moved through my career was I also need to interview that person to see, is this the type of person that I'm comfortable... Would I be excited to get on a call with them every day? Does this feel like the type of company that I'm going to be excited to go to work at? Or do I just want to get in to get in? And I've made the mistakes of going to work for companies and then realizing I didn't ask enough cultural questions. The way things operate here and my expectations for this job are very different than what I had in my head, and it's my fault because I didn't talk about it. Jason Atwood: Yeah. And again, I think it's different. Even again, culture was, I hate to say it, but it wasn't really that much. It wasn't that important. 20 years ago, I wasn't worried about culture; now I think it's above compensation. Mike: Yeah. Jason Atwood: I think it really is. And I've seen people go to places for less compensation because of a better culture. I've seen people leave terrible cultures that were highly paid. So really bringing that in, and that means how do they work? How do people collaborate? And you can ask these questions in the interview. You can say, "What are the three things you're doing this year to help your culture be better or to improve your culture at your company?" If someone asked me that, I'd be like, "Ooh, wow. Okay." Mike: That's a good question. Jason Atwood: That's a great question, right? You're then learning A; are they doing anything to make it better. Mike: Right. Jason Atwood: Or ask about... One of the things that we take at Arkus as very important is when I was doing my key goals for the next five years, and I was doing some presentations and talking to the staff about it. I had culture as a fifth thing, and then after doing it, I thought, "Wait, no, that's wrong. It's got to be number one." So for me, you ask a company, you say, "What are the main things you're thinking about doing for the next five years? What are the five key things that you're doing? What are your pillars?" Or whatever. And if they don't say culture, then you'd be like, "Oh, why isn't culture there?" And then you'll probably catch someone off guard; maybe they won't hire you there, but they should be thinking that keeping the company culture and embracing it, and making sure that it is... Culture isn't something that you set up and then walk away from. It's not a database system. You don't just go, "Oh, it's set up, and it's running in the corner." It's something that needs to be cultivated; it's something that needs to be put into; it's something that needs to be fed and loved, and thought of, and changed as the ecosystem and the world changes. Our culture changed when COVID happened, right? We had to adapt; we adapted to that; it wasn't the same culture as before. When we were three people, now 75, but the culture's different, but we're adapting to that. So again, it is a really, really big point. It is something you can catch people on, you can ask, and everybody likes to talk about their culture. Everybody will tell you that they have a great culture, but that's how, as an interviewer or interviewee, you should be questioning it and really ask the deep questions. So when they say they have a great culture, "Say, can you give me three examples from last week where you prove that or that you know that it is a great culture?" Mike: That's a good question. Thanks for coming by, Jason, and sharing your wisdom with us. You said you present some of this. Are you going to be presenting any of this at upcoming Dreamin' events after? Jason Atwood: I am. Well, you're catching me on my road tour. I don't know if this podcast... Mike: Oh, there's a road tour. Jason Atwood: There's a road tour. Mike: Are you going to have shirts made up? Jason Atwood: I might. So yeah, I actually- Mike: Have dates on the back. Jason Atwood: -I go to a lot... A lot of things, I will be at World Tour this year. World Tour New York in two days, but I don't think this podcast will be out by then. But you can catch me at Texas Dreamin', I'm doing this year. You can catch me at WITness Success, you can catch me at Mile High Dreamin', you can catch me at Dreamforce, you can catch me at Northeast Dreamin'. And is that it? I think that's it. Mike: I mean, Northeast Dreamin' is kind of the tail end of the year for us. Jason Atwood: Yeah, it is. It's the last one. So I'll be at all those. I don't know if I'll always be presenting this, but you can at least find me if you wanted to. Mike: Right. I appreciate you coming by. Jason Atwood: Thank you. It's been great talking to you. Let's do it in another 10 years. Mike: Or sooner. Jason Atwood: Or a little sooner. Mike: Well, I thought that episode turned out phenomenal. I'm so glad I got to have Jason back, and he is going to be on a road tour presenting and helping admins at different Dreamin' events. So hopefully, you can get to some of those that he mentioned. I think that'd be really neat, and some really solid tips on interviewing, and even I couldn't agree more on building experience when you've never had a job in the tech industry. So thanks, Jason, for coming on and sharing everything. And speaking of sharing, if you love this episode and you've got friends, or maybe you're going to a user group and you'd love to say, "Hey, I've got a podcast for you to listen to on finding that first job or getting your next Salesforce admin's job," here's how you do it. You click the three dots in the corner; most of these apps, podcast apps, have this now. And you can click share episode and you can post it to social; you could send it as an email to somebody, and then they get a link and they can listen to the podcast right on their phone, maybe as they're walking their dog, and even more. Now, if you wanted to look for any links or any resources, everything, everything I'm telling you, start your day admin.salesforce.com; everything is there for you. And of course, we also include a link to the Admin Trailblazer community, which is the admin group in the Trailblazer community, which is a great place and also the place I went to get all of these questions. Now, we'll also include a transcript if there's something you need to go back and read through; that is all going to be in the show notes. So, of course, until next week, we'll see you in the cloud.