Salesforce Admins Podcast

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Christina Nava, Director of Salesforce Strategy at Gaggle. Join us as we chat about making flows more manageable with subflows. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Christina Nava. Creating flows to save time on business processes In the biz, Christina is what we call a long-time listener, first-time caller. She’s been listening to the podcast since 2014, back when I was known as the ButtonClick Admin. And while I’d love to toot my own horn, Christina has come a long way since learning Salesforce from a podcast. She’s an 8x Salesforce Certified Professional, an experienced software consultant, and she recently appeared on Automate This! to talk about how she uses subflows. At Gaggle, Christina uses Salesforce to help her users match patients with mental healthcare providers. It’s a tricky process because both groups have different characteristics, like gender, specialty, and availability, that need to match up. She uses screen flows to make this process much quicker, but it’s her subflows that make all of this possible. How to simplify flows with subflows When she’s building a flow, Christina is always on the hunt for how she can simplify things for herself with subflows. One major tell is if she finds herself rebuilding a process she’s already written. That’s when she knows she might need to write a subflow. That gives her to option to call it in multiple flows, and simplifies things if she needs to make changes. Christina gives the example of how she needs to update the same records in three different scenarios: if they get new information, at certain regular intervals, and if some other piece of information changes. To do this, she calls one subflow in three different ways. If it needs to happen immediately, there’s a screen flow. But there’s also a record trigger flow and a scheduled trigger flow to handle the other scenarios. All three are super simple, they just each call the same subflow a different way. Using more subflows doesn’t make a difference to your users in terms of what they see, but it’s cleaner and easier for you. Think of it as a gift to yourself. Christina’s process for gathering requirements The key to structuring flows and subflows well is to be thorough when you’re gathering requirements. Christina’s process begins by sitting down with a user and asking them to show her what they do. Any time they do something, she asks them why they did it. Why did they set that filter? Why did that provider not work? Why did they pull up that provider instead? The next step is to see if she can do the process herself. If she can’t do what they did, she wants to figure out why that is. The goal is to be able to write instructions for how to do the process as if they’re for someone who has never worked at her company before. That’s when you know you’ll be able to write a good flow. There’s a bunch more that Christina shares in this episode about why she uses one master flow per object, how she debugs, and her tips for naming conventions, so be sure to take a listen. And if you haven’t caught up yet, check out her episode with Jennifer Lee on Automate This! Podcast swag Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store Learn more Christina on Automate This!: Work Smarter, Not Harder with Subflows Admin Trailblazers Group  https://sfdc.co/admintrailblazers Social Christina: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christinanava/ 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 with Christina Nava, who is an 8 time Salesforce certified professional, a ton of experience in software consulting, and hey, she started listening to the podcast back when I began the podcast in 2014. So talk about full circle from learning Salesforce by listening to the podcast to being on the podcast to teach us more about flows and sub flows. She was recently on an Automate This live with Jennifer Lee. So if you're listening to this, be sure to check out the call notes and notice below the link to watch that on YouTube because that's super cool. Now, before we get into the episode, I just want you to do one thing and that's make sure you're following the Salesforce Admins Podcast wherever you get your podcasts, whether it's Spotify or iTunes or iHeartRadio. That way when a new episode drops like this one, which is amazing, it's downloaded right to your phone. So when you hop in your car or you jump in the transportation to get to work or you walk your dog, all you got to do is press play. So really cool there, but let's talk about flows and sub flows with Christina on the podcast. So Christina, welcome to the podcast. Christina Nava: Thank you. I'm really happy to be on here. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, well, if everybody is diligently following all of the awesome admin stuff that we're putting out, they would've watched Automate This yesterday and saw some of the amazing flow stuff that you were doing there. But before we get into that, let's learn a little bit about you. So how did you get started with Salesforce? Christina Nava: So I'll say that I'm probably within the vast majority of people and I got started because I was an also admin or an accidental admin. Back in 2014, I became the director of tech support for a SaaS company and it's like, "Hey, what's this thing called Salesforce that we've been using for our support team?" And so I started looking into it and I'm like, "This is great." Of course, this was before Trailhead, so trying to learn was fun. And fun little tidbit is one way I started learning is I listened to all the different podcasts I could and one of them was the ButtonClick Admin. And so thank you for helping me learn Salesforce in the beginning. So I started listening and started learning the terminology, Googling and just playing. And so that's how I got into it. Then I did that on and off for about five years, and then in 2019 I made the leap and I made Salesforce my full-time career. And so I've been doing it full-time since then. Mike Gerholdt: Wow. Well you're more than welcome and I'm glad to have somebody full circle come on the podcast from listening all the way to now you're teaching. Christina Nava: It's exciting. Mike Gerholdt: Eventually in the next 20 minutes or so, no pressure. Christina Nava: No pressure. Mike Gerholdt: So I teased out with Automate This, which is really cool YouTube series that Jennifer Lee does and she live-streamed it yesterday. You can probably watch it on our YouTube channel. And you were on there and you were talking about flows and specifically the thing that I kind of want to dive into a little bit of sub flows. But if people haven't watched it, I don't want them to feel left out about what we're going to talk about. Can you summarize a little bit of what you talked about on Automate This yesterday? Christina Nava: Yeah, of course. So I built this flow for Gaggle. Here at Gaggle, one of the things we do is we help provide therapy and coaching for students. So the way we do that is when a student comes to us needing services, we match them with a provider. Well, the client has a lot of requirements including why they're being referred, what times of day they can meet, if they want to, male or female providers, lots of different criteria. And then on the other side of it, we have providers who have their own criteria. When they can provide services, their areas of specialty, obviously if they're male or female, what languages they speak, all of it. So when we first started and we had a client come in, a student come in, we needed to match them. It could take five to 10 minutes to find the best match for them. And you can imagine we're getting 5, 10, 15 students a day. That was taking a lot of time. So I decided to create a screen flow that we can run from the student record that would give our internal team a list of providers that were the best match and then they can just click on the button, automatically assigns them, good to go. Ended up saving our internal team 5 to 10 hours a week. Mike Gerholdt: Wow. And the match was done based on criteria that you put in, right? Christina Nava: Yes, exactly. Mike Gerholdt: Okay. I mean, I asked because everything's AI now. Christina Nava: That's actually funny you asked because I was on Automate This previously and the flow I did for that one was how their providers actually add their criteria in. Mike Gerholdt: Oh, okay. Christina Nava: So had a flow for that as well. Mike Gerholdt: This flow is rockstar flow. But God, man, I'm thinking back to the days I was on the platform and I wish I so could have used this for about a million other things. One part that you talked about is creating a sub flow, and I'm not good at creating flows like Jennifer Lee is, which is hard to be on team with her because it's like being on, I don't know, the Olympic team and you're like, "Oh, well I just have to go against this gold world-class Olympian every time I build a flow." But one thing that I am really trying to wrap my head around more is I don't have to create the entire flow every single time. I can reuse components of that and that being sub flows, and then when I do so then it's one place to update things as opposed to, "Oh, we changed this email template, now I got to go into these 20 different flows and update it with this new email template." Christina Nava: Exactly. Mike Gerholdt: Help me understand how you come about creating some of your sub flows. Christina Nava: So I would like to say that I'm the kind of person who listens to my users, sits down, draws it all out and knows exactly what they're going to build when they sit down a flow builder. Mike Gerholdt: You're not perfect? Come on. Christina Nava: I'm not, don't tell the people I work with. Mike Gerholdt: Don't listen. We'll cut that part out. Christina Nava: Exactly. So a lot of times I'm getting in and I'm building a flow and I'll find myself building the exact same loop and I'm like, "Wait, wait, wait. Why am I duplicating my effort here?" So for me, I build a sub flow in a couple of different instances. One is when again, as I just said, I'm in the same flow and I just rebuilt the same code. That's a waste. Let's take that out and make it a sub flow. There are other times when I do sit down and I'm doing my design, I'm thinking in my head and I'm realizing, "I need to actually call this multiple ways." And so as you all know, we have screen flows, we have record triggered flows, we have scheduled triggered flows. I actually have one sub flow that I call three different ways. So for this one, what I'm doing is I'm populating the opportunity team members and I need to do it at specific times. So I will have, well, if I need to do it immediately on the fly, obviously I have a screen flow, we click a button, good to go. There are other times when I need to do it on a record triggered flow when certain criteria happens. So because I don't want to have to reduplicate my effort, what I'm doing for both of those is with my record trigger flow, my entry criteria, I just start it, I immediately call a sub flow. That is all I'm doing in this flow is I'm calling a sub flow. With screen flow, exact same thing. I am, just click a button, call my sub flow. And then I'm doing the same thing with my scheduled triggered flow as well. So I have three different flows that all they do is call one sub flow and I loved that. Mike Gerholdt: So how much of that sub flow, I guess are you setting criteria way before that so that sub flow kind of knows what it's adding those team members to? How complex is that sub flow? Is it very simple, I'm guessing? Christina Nava: So on a scale of say one to five, it's probably at a one, maybe 1.5. It's a fairly simple flow. All I'm doing is I'm sending it the record ID of the opportunity and then it's doing all of the different decisions inside of it. Mike Gerholdt: No, I like that. I always feel like use cases that are easy to identify looking back. You probably were on what your third or fourth flow and you're like, "I need to rebuild this." Right? Christina Nava: About that. I think I was in probably my third or fourth iteration of the first one. And realized, "Wait, wait a minute. I need to give them the ability to actually do this manually as well. Hold on. I don't want to recreate this whole thing. I'll do it in the sub flow." It's kind of had that light bulb moment popped up. Mike Gerholdt: So then kind of walking people through this, I'm assuming at this point I would be thinking, "Oh, I could really go through and kind of do a flow audit and look at some of the stuff that I've built and see if there aren't parts that are replaceable." Have you done something like that? And what would be your process for looking at all of your flows and then finding sub flows that you could build? Christina Nava: Honestly, that's on my to-do list. Mike Gerholdt: Oh, is it? 2024, here we come. Christina Nava: With the new flow stuff that's come out, a couple of things with the whole new validation that's coming out, well tonight for me and some stuff that came out last year, which was when you send an email actually being able to attach it to a record. That's on my list of going through and updating all my flows, just haven't gotten down to it. So as of right now, the way I handle it is if I'm going into a flow and modifying it anyway, I'm making those updates at the same time. Mike Gerholdt: So it's kind of an as needed, but not house cleaning, shut everything down and redo all our flows kind of thing. Christina Nava: Exactly. Because your end users don't see these changes for the most part, especially with the sub flows. What you're doing is you're making things a little bit faster, but you're mainly making things cleaner and easier for you. So because we all live in the admin world and our users come first, what's easier for us gets pushed down on the bottom of the list. Mike Gerholdt: Get cobbler's shoes. Right. Christina Nava: Exactly. Mike Gerholdt: I hear you. Okay, so this was a thing that Jennifer has taught me, and I'm horrible at this, but do you have a naming convention or do you have a way that you always name your sub flows? Christina Nava: I do have a naming convention. Mike Gerholdt: Please share. Please share. Christina Nava: So it goes with the object name first. And by the way, I stole this from... See if I knew you were going to ask this question, I would have the name. Mike Gerholdt: I mean everybody steals stuff. So you copied it. Christina Nava: I'm sorry, I copied this because it was amazing. So the first word is the object name. Then it's dash and then either SF for screen flow, RTF for record trigger flow or STF for schedule triggered flow. Then dash. And then if it's for a record triggered flow, you'll have new or new and update and then after or before. And then if it is a master flow, because I am a big believer in having one flow for one object, if you can, I'll have the word master. If not, it'll be dash what it's for, for example, account RTF new and update after master. I can immediately look and know just from the name what this is going to be for and how it's called. Mike Gerholdt: I love all of that. That needs to be on T-shirt. Christina Nava: So when I have someone new I'm training, I'm like, "Can you rename your flow for me?" Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, because it doesn't work. Christina Nava: Exactly. Mike Gerholdt: I'm going to only slightly deviate. We're going to take a quick exit off the highway. Because you brought up a subject that I have been asked a lot and you said, "I like to have one master flow per object." Can you explain that? Because I've been asked many times, "Should I have one that does everything? Should I have 20, should I have five, should I have three?" And I say yes to all of those answers because yes is correct, but I would love for you to take me into your world of how you manage that one master flow and if there's times that you've ever had to deviate from it. Christina Nava: Okay, so that is a really good question. I still personally Google that about once every two to three months. "Am I doing this the right way?" Because everybody does have their own opinion. So for me personally, I have a lot of flows. I'm a flow addict. I love flows. If I could sit and do flows eight hours a day, I think I'd be the happiest camper imaginable. So that being said, I have a lot of flows in my orgs. And once you get up to 50, 100, 150 flows, it's hard to find what you're looking for. So that almost is, I don't know, maybe a third of the reason why I have one flow where I can just because one place to go to. And of course the old way when I started with process builder and people are thinking, "The old way? I did workflows." Mike Gerholdt: I know. Christina Nava: I can hear that. Mike Gerholdt: I did workflows. Christina Nava: I know. But with process builder, it was definitely one per object because that was the only way you could control the order of things. Well with flows, now you can actually control the order and how they're called, but I got in the habit of that one master, but it's so much easier for me to pull up this one flow and even if it's fairly large, which by the way another reason to use sub flows is to actually pull code out and make your master flow cleaner. So you're looking at less. So side note there, we took a deviation to the deviation. Mike Gerholdt: It's okay. Christina Nava: Thank you. Mike Gerholdt: Sometimes you have to pull around back of the truck stop. Christina Nava: Exactly. So I like being able to pull up this master flow and it's like reminding me, "Oh yeah, this is everything that happens when an account is updated." So that's another reason I like to use one master flow, but there are plenty of times when I have more than one flow, even more than one record trigger flow. So for example, for my cases, I have one that has to do with sending pending emails. So when a case is put in pending, I send an email after one day, three days, seven days and fourteen days. Well I'm obviously not going to have that in my master flow. So I have one flow that just handles kind of those scheduled things after a while just to kind of keep my flows cleaner and it's easier to look at and I have to change that flow a little more often than I have to change others. That was a long answer. Mike Gerholdt: No, it's okay. I was listening and digesting. I'm still just feeling the like here we go, one master flow per object situation. So I'm not saying it's wrong, because you can totally do it and you do. It's just a lot of testing, I feel. Christina Nava: It is. It's a lot of testing. Mike Gerholdt: One thing to get us back on the highway. Christina Nava: Darn it. Mike Gerholdt: Well, we stopped, we had some beef jerky, we looked at the map, we know where we're at and you're like, "Oh look, there's a campground off to the side." Christina Nava: I got some Doritos, I needed my Doritos. Mike Gerholdt: There's always a campground by rest stops. And you're like, "Whoever camps there, why would you want to?" I don't know. I would love to know. So taking requirements for screen flows and sitting and walking through and I'm looking at yours, which was the decision loop of helping pair those students up faster, right? That's the goal, right? Because 15 minutes to pair somebody up, you can obviously do the math and like, "Well here's how many people we need staffed 24 hours a day in order to handle this, right?" What was the level of requirements gathering and how detailed did you have to be when you were building that flow? Because I've worked through decisioning elements before with people and there's in their head they expect how it should work and then there's actually how it works and actually what they told you. I'm curious, what was your requirements gathering like? Christina Nava: I do want to say another really quick side note on this flow. What I showed in the demo and what you see in the blog post is maybe about a quarter of the size of my real flow. If I had the whole thing, it would've been way too big. And so just keeping that in mind, there were a lot of, not necessarily requirements I needed to get for my end user, but a lot of fields that we needed to match up. So going back to the requirements gathering, obviously you have this business process review, you sit down with your end users and you're like, "First thing is show me what you do." And so you watch them pull up this student and pull up all their providers and you start watching them match. And that's when it's like, "Okay, why did you set that filter? Why did you set that filter? Why did that provider not work? Why did you pull this one in?" It's a whole lot of why questions. And so once you get to that, what I kind of like to do afterwards, it's like, "All right, let me reproduce what you did." And so I am now pulling up the student and using what they showed me trying to find a matching provider and I can't find one. Well, how come I couldn't find one? "Oh, we forgot to tell you this." Or I pulled up five instead of, and these four wouldn't match. Well, how come they wouldn't work? "Oh, we forgot." So one of the things I love to tell people is if you can write instructions for someone who has never worked at your company before and it is step one, go here and pull up this record. Step two, click this, and if you can literally give me step-by-step instructions, and if step five is not use your gut, then I can create a flow for you. But you have to be able to give me those steps. Either you give them to me or I develop them working with you, but we have to be able to know exactly what to do at every step in the flow. Mike Gerholdt: That makes sense. I also think it's funny just, "I just go with my gut." Christina Nava: You'd be surprised at how many times I hear that from people. Mike Gerholdt: No, I know. I had a contract routing process that I had to do once that was just kind of like, and then I get it down to four or five and I go with this one and why? Well, it was Wednesday? And that one looked good. Awesome. Let me work that into criteria. So I guess thinking through this with screen flows and with this kind of decisioning element, did you ever create, for lack of a better term, like a backdoor of a, "I can't find anything" and run so that if somebody, because I mean you deployed this to, I don't know how many users and if they run into an issue, they can't just raise their hand and you come running and then that way it would also give you a chance to look at the decisioning criteria that led there to be, "Oh, well it looks like we need to append this flow." Do you have something like that? Christina Nava: No, actually I don't. That'd be a good idea. I'm going to steal that. What it is just if it finds no matches, it pops up a screen saying we couldn't find any. And it's usually because they're just truly isn't a provider that matches those exact requirements and that is when they go use their gut. But what do you mean I can't just come running when they snap their fingers? Is that actually something I cannot do? Mike Gerholdt: Well, just saying there's probably an occasion where maybe you're sitting recording a podcast and then a user can't- Christina Nava: Good point. Mike Gerholdt: Get your attention right away. No, I just happened to think through it as I was looking at what you were building and also thinking through some of the processes I had built where it's, "No, we actually, it's not that I didn't gather all of the requirements, it's that we actually just found a new outlier to a process." And you try to hit the 98 percentile of stuff. But I happen to think because then you'd want to capture stuff like that, especially in a screen flow. Christina Nava: Yeah, that's a good point. I probably do need to make more of a process as to why could we not find a match with this? Maybe these providers got to 98%, but there was that one that we couldn't find a match on. Mike Gerholdt: You mentioned emails in a few of the flows that you've created, and I'm sure there's quite a few emails your flows send out. How do you manage that? I bring this up because I feel like it's always a requirement that admins take and then the four days after you deploy something, you immediately get, ironically an email or a knock at your door and be like, "My inbox is full." Well, criteria that you said for emailing you. Are there red flags or questions you bring up or alternatives to email that you offer? Christina Nava: Absolutely. So we use four different kinds of notifications here. Obviously email is one of them. Another one is the bell notification, just popping that up. The third one would be Chatter, do a Chatter post, which also kind of does the bell notification and email at the same time, but that gives us a record on the record. You know what I'm trying to say. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, a receipt. Christina Nava: Yeah, there we go. We can actually say that, "Hey, we did notify you." We can look back a year later and actually see all of that happening. So that's one I use quite a bit. And then the fourth one that we don't use a lot of, but we do somewhat is Slack notifications because we are a Slack shop as well. Mike Gerholdt: Oh. How do you decide between those? Christina Nava: I let the user decide. I basically say, "Hey, here are the fourth things we can do." There have been times I've pushed back on, "You're getting a lot of emails, are you sure this is what you want?" And I get told, "Yep, absolutely." Like, okay. Mike Gerholdt: Me too. And I've been told that before. I just like, sometimes you sit down and you do that worst case scenario with people and you're like, "You know, there's 50 contracts that could come through and times two steps. That's a hundred emails I might send you in a day." Christina Nava: And half the time I'll get, "Yep, because my inbox is my to-do list." I'm like, "Really"? Mike Gerholdt: I know. Yeah. But to your point, when you or they get promoted, then that inbox now becomes a grave because now there's no to-do list and we got to pull that from somewhere. So I like the posting to Chatter or something as kind of a receipt for what needs to get done. I'll end on this one question, which is fairly simple. If a user is feeling intimidated with flow, where would you suggest they get started? Christina Nava: So if they've never ever seen flows before, first place is obviously going to be Trailhead. Go through the trails, build your own. But if you have a little bit of experience, you've done that and you're in your own org and you need to build something, the first thing I'm going to say is write out the steps I talked about. Actually write down, "Go to the account record, then click on this field, edit" step by step exactly what you need to do and then go to flow and try to build it that way, and then build the bare minimum first. Pull up, do your GI account, do your debug, did it work? Then do your next step. Update your account. Do your debug, did it work? Do step-by-step, debug it because if you try to build out 20 steps and then you debug it and then it fails, you're going to get very confused and you're going to get very frustrated and you might want to quit. If you do it piece by piece, not only can you debug smaller bits, but you're going to feel the satisfaction of the win each time it works and it's going to build your confidence. Mike Gerholdt: No, I like that. That completely makes sense. I've certainly gotten not too deep into flows, but far enough that I wish I would've done the little bites at a time kind of situation and just testing to make sure it works. It also feels good. I mean, you don't have to sit for weeks building a flow and then pressing the button and being like, "huh." It feels good if you spend 10, 15 minutes and then you click something, it populates the field. You're like, "Yes." Christina Nava: Exactly. Never forget the power of debugging. If this is a record triggered flow and you can't figure out what's going on because you can't put up a debug screen, write a debug to your description field. Create a temporary text field that you can write information to. Don't forget those little tricks when you're debugging. Mike Gerholdt: Right? Oh, there's always a ton. Christina, thanks for coming by the podcast to help me understand sub flows and flows and decisioning. Christina Nava: Absolutely. Very happy to be here. Mike Gerholdt: I appreciate that. And we will link to the Automate This in the blog post below. Christina Nava: Sounds great. Mike Gerholdt: It was a great conversation with Christina. I had a lot of questions because I've been building some flows like you and I've been wanting to reuse things, and I really just need to know how people's heads work sometime, and she's really dialed in with some of the stuff that she's doing with flows and decisioning stuff. I think it's really cool. So I hope you enjoyed this episode, and if you did, could you do me a favor? Real simple, could you share it with somebody? Now, if you're listening on iTunes, all you have to do is click on the three dots and click share episode. Then you can post it social, or you can text it to a friend. Maybe you've got a friend that's building a flow and you'd be like, "Hey, listen to Christina. She's got it going on. She can help you build things." And of course, if you're looking for more great resources, your one stop for everything admin is admin.salesforce.com, including a transcript of the show. And be sure to join the Conversation Admin Trailblazer Group that is in the Trailblazer community. Link is over in the show notes. I know there's some flow questions in there. So until next week, we'll see you in the cloud.  

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Marissa Scalercio, VP of Sales Operations at Carnegie Learning. Join us as we chat about Prompt Builder, why it will be a game changer, and how her Salesforce Admin skills help her be a better sales leader. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Marissa Scalercio. A Sales VP and a Salesforce Admin Marissa is the VP of Sales Operations at Carnegie Learning, an ed-tech company that was founded 26 years ago with a product created on AI. “That’s why I’m really excited to start including AI in our sales processes,” she says. Marissa is also a Salesforce Admin, which is why I was so excited to bring her on the pod. She’s not afraid to crack open her org and help build things for her team so she knows how it will actually work. She’s also involved in a pilot program for the new Prompt Builder feature and, of course, I wanted to hear all about it. What’s coming with Prompt Builder The pilot only gave access to a couple of features, but they demonstrated the power and potential of Prompt Builder in a big way. The first was the ability to create sales emails. It can instantly generate a sales email to your specifications, incorporating web pages for products and events, and personalizing it with CRM information. Even better, anyone else on your team can use that prompt to scale your work and generate as many emails as needed. The other thing Marissa and her team got to play with were field summaries. This feature can take all of the information on an object and summarize it. This is great for getting a new hire up to speed with their accounts, or to prep before a meeting with a client and check up on past action items or key bullet points. “Once I really got to learn and understand how to create a prompt, I just started thinking about how I’m going to implement this everywhere,” Marissa says. Prompting AI is a skill that everyone needs to practice, so take advantage of the free tools out there to learn the ins and outs. Prompt Builder is coming soon™, but you want to be ready to hit the ground running. How to talk to executives about new tools As a VP herself, Marissa has some practical advice for any admin who needs to persuade executives to add new tools. She urges you to make your case in terms of ROI. Have numbers ready for how much time you’ll save, for how many people, and how that translates into total dollars saved. There’s so much more in this episode about Marissa’s career path, what the future holds for AI in Salesforce, and what you can do to get ready, so be sure to take a listen.   Podcast swag Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store Learn more Trailhead: Get Started with Prompts and Prompt Builder Introducing Prompt Builder: Supercharge Every Workflow with Trusted AI Prompts AI Prompt Builder demo   Admin Trailblazers Group  https://sfdc.co/admintrailblazers Social Marissa: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marissascalercio/ Salesforce Admins: @SalesforceAdmns  Mike on Threads: https://www.threads.net/@mikegerholdt/ Mike on Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@salesforce.mike` Mike on X: @MikeGerholdt Mike: Prompt Builder is the first low-code, prompt management tool that allows you, Salesforce admins, to build, test, and fine tune trusted AI prompts within the Einstein Trust Layer, ground AI prompts with dynamic CRM data via merge fields and flow, and enable prompted actions across the Salesforce customer 360. And today on The Salesforce Admins Podcast, we are talking with Marissa Scalercio, VP Sales Operations at Carnegie Learning, and she was part of the Prompt Builder pilot for customers, and she's a VP admin. She was in configuring prompts, testing out the pilot in her sandbox, doing all kinds of stuff that us Salesforce admins can't wait to get our hands on. So we're going to talk to her about her experience in the Prompt Builder pilot, some of the stuff that she worked on. And I'm also going to dig into how she went from being in sales, sales operations, to VP to having an admin license like the admins at Carnegie Learning let her in, set up menu. She's configuring shoulder to shoulder with them, which I think is awesome. Now before we get into that episode, I want to make sure you're following The Salesforce Admins Podcast on iTunes, Spotify, wherever you get your podcast. That way when an awesome new episode like this one drops on a Thursday, it's immediately on your phone. So all you got to do is press play when you wake up to go walk the dog or hit the gym or get on the bus to go to work. So with that, let's get to our fun conversation with Marissa. So Marissa, welcome to the podcast. Marissa Scalercio: Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to be here. Mike: Well, I'm excited to talk about our newest Coming Soon product that you've actually got your hands on, which is Prompt Builder. So before we get into that, because the tease to get everybody to listen, tell me a little bit about what you do and where you're at. Marissa Scalercio: Of course. So I am the Vice President of Sales Operations at Carnegie Learning, and we are an EdTech company that actually was founded about 26 years ago with a product created on AI. So I'm really excited to be including AI in our sales processes and was really excited to be able to pilot Prompt Builder. Mike: Yeah, and you are a VP that does admin work. Marissa Scalercio: I am an accidental admin. As my colleagues will call me. I am very involved in how the sales team specifically, but really how everybody in our company works, how we can make things more efficient, and I really like to test things out and build them so I can see how it's actually going to work. So yeah, I'm an accidental admin. Mike: Yeah, we need more of you, but we'll get into that in the second part because Prompt Builder... So Carnegie Learning built on AI, now you're excited to use some AI. What was some of the things that you were trying out with Prompt Builder? What were you doing? Marissa Scalercio: Yeah, so the best part of Prompt Builder was that once I really got to learn and understand how to create a prompt, I just started thinking about how I'm going to implement this everywhere. But the two pieces of Prompt Builder that you could do in the pilot, the first one was create emails, sales emails specifically. You could tell it to include a webpage or include an event page, and it would include an email that is specific and grabs CRM information along with whatever information you provide it and builds this great email that would take me 10, 15 minutes at least to create and it probably wouldn't be as good. And it is that easy just to create that, have it ready to go, and it already takes in the information about the account and the person that you're delivering it to. Mike: Now you created that prompt and then anybody could use it. So it was 10 or 15 minutes for you to write it. Marissa Scalercio: Yes. Mike: But if you have a hundred salespeople, that's 1,500 minutes of email writing time. Marissa Scalercio: It's lot of time savings. Yes. Mike: And that's if you're good at writing emails, which I'm not. Marissa Scalercio: Exactly, and I mean these emails that came out were better than I can write them. Absolutely. And I started as a salesperson and just being able to click a button and it create an email that was better than I used to create was amazing. It is so exciting to actually come out... what comes out next month or a couple days. Mike: A while. A forward-looking statement. Soon-ish or now. Maybe. That's what I always say. But so help me walk through this because what level of approval and kind of demos did you do? Because as an admin, I love to sit down, I configure stuff all day long and then I'm like boom, click, boom, it works, and then I run the flow twice. But then you unleash it on the users and they find, how did you make it do that? How would you turn your screen pink? I've had users do all kinds of stuff. What kind of process did you go through when you were starting to create some of these to be like, "No, no, no, people, this will generate stuff consistently and it's something we need to use." What was that rollout like? Marissa Scalercio: So we haven't rolled it out to the teams yet. We had Prompt Builder in our sandbox, but I did experiment with several of our account executives where I would ask them for emails that they're typically writing. I would create a prompt for it and send them back what came out and they were thrilled. So they are really excited to implement this. Mike: Okay. How do you feel... So I think prompt building, you go back five years ago for the rest of us, maybe not you guys. Prompt building's a new word, right? Marissa Scalercio: Yeah. Mike: Something we're just getting. I remember, this is a funny story. When we rolled out Chatter, I rolled it out internally at an organization and I had to explain hashtags as like it's the pound sign and my user base was super... It was up there in years and they go, "Well, it's the pound sign from the phone." And I was like, "Right." So if you were selling something to a sand and gravel company, you could put hashtag sand, which is like pound sand, and I thought it was really funny. Marissa Scalercio: I remember having to use that. Mike: Yeah. But Prompt Builder, this is a new term for us, too. How do you feel configuring working in Prompt Builder has made you a better prompt builder? Do you feel you use AI better now? Marissa Scalercio: Yes. I think it made me a prompt builder. I did not know what I was doing prior to this pilot. I kind of just played around with several of the ChatGPT, but I really feel like you can add tone and you can kind of ask it to change the email. So if it's too long, it's too short. If you want to add something specific, I mean, it really helped me understand what... Well, start to understand what all it can do and the power behind it, which is just phenomenal. I mean, everything around being able to edit and change on the fly, it did take me a while to create my first prompt to get it right because I was testing all of those things. But then once you have it, you really can build the prompts themselves fast. Mike: So knowing what you know now, when Prompt Builder rolls out for other admins, if you were to have a time machine, which I'm sure is just in the near future to be created at this point and go back and tell yourself, what would be some things that you're like, "Oh, I wish I'd gone back and done these three things first." Marissa Scalercio: So how far are we going back? Are we going back to just the sandbox? Mike: Yeah. I mean pre Prompt Builder days. Like, "I wish I would've got ready for Prompt Builder by..." Marissa Scalercio: Yeah, honestly, I wish in general, I had used AI more to feel more comfortable with using it in a daily basis. I started using it last year, which already was behind the bandwagon, and I am already behind, and I can see how other people, even in my organization and other people outside of the organization are using it on a daily basis. I would tell myself to start learning and using AI every single day years ago. It is just so much of an efficiency boosting tool that is going to change the way we all work. Mike: Yeah, I mean, there are times when I watch a TikTok from somebody and it's like, wow, they have three paragraphs of a prompt that they're putting in the ChatGPT, and I'm like, "Draw an apple with a kitten next to it." Marissa Scalercio: Exactly. So building the prompting out was hard. Mike: I feel like I'm in kindergarten sometimes. Yeah. How did that... So in your pilot, I think it was pilot, right, of Prompt Builder, how much did you experiment with different templates or different prompts? You said you used it for sales emails, right? Marissa Scalercio: Yep. So we did sales emails and we also did field summaries, which also was really exciting. Mike: Oh, tell me about those. Marissa Scalercio: The field summaries allow you to take all of the information on an object, an account, a case, a opportunity, and summarize it, which I'm just seeing a world of possibilities with that as an efficiency piece to our new hires, especially, whenever they come on and have to inherit territory and understand accounts. Whenever you're going into a meeting and understanding meeting notes that have taken place, any action items that were supposed to be accomplished, and even after a meeting or a phone call, understanding what can be grabbed out of there. So those field summaries are really going to be important along with all of the other AI tools that are coming out from Salesforce to really help with every salesperson and it's really going to be a true assistant to them. Mike: Yeah. You think about it, how many times, I don't know if you reassigned territories, but that seemed to be like a quarterly thing for me. As an admin I get new sales territories that I got to put into Salesforce, and how much do you have to spend for those salespeople getting those different accounts up to speed? Marissa Scalercio: Exactly. I mean, it is really hard to take over a territory or even just one customer and understand what has happened prior to you coming on board. Mike: Yeah, a hundred percent. When you were building the prompts, you said you were pulling in data, which I think is what we expect from when we look at other AIs, but Prompt Builder in specific, when you're building those sales templates where actually you tell it what data to look for, is that correct? Or help give a sneak peek to some admins? Marissa Scalercio: Yeah, you can add some grounding data into all of your prompts, which really I was experimenting with of course names, accounts, titles, states, and then adding in, of course outside information into that as well. But I imagine whenever it comes out, and I wasn't able to pilot this part of it, but I imagine that you can grab pretty much anything in Salesforce. You can throw it into a flow, so it can actually ask different questions based on what type of customer it is, and you really can get down to a specific email based on everything that's in your CRM plus any outside information you push into it. So is the world of possibilities are endless with it. Mike: Yeah, no, that's good. That also speaks to data cleanliness because- Marissa Scalercio: It does. Mike: If the contact's first name spelled wrong and it's grabbing that field, it probably spelled it wrong because doing what it's told. Marissa Scalercio: Exactly. So definitely data cleanliness is going to be a big issue. If it isn't clean, but hopefully we will figure it out as we go and hopefully our data's clean enough that it'll work. Mike: Right. Well, if not, it will be. You start off by saying VP of sales operations. You're also an admin and you called yourself an accidental admin. So I would love, first of all, to have more VP admins on, but how did you kind of get into that role, but yet still stay so connected with the setup menu? Marissa Scalercio: Oh, that's a good question. So we started with Salesforce, I want to say 2016 I believe. And honestly, I really like to learn new things and build new things. So I was asked... actually, I might have volunteered myself to be part of the sales side of implementing Salesforce. So for two years I just kind of embedded myself into those meetings and made sure that I was part of the conversation, part of the implementation. We then rolled out CPQ was the next one, and I was really part of that piece, but at the same time, I was still a salesperson actually at Carnegie Learning. So really trying to do my full-time job, which was a salesperson and this side job, which was really helping with the flow of how sales was going to be more efficient. So I started doing it kind of half-and-half until I really had to make the decision in 2018 and no questions asked. I was all on board with sales operations. So you can kind of say that Salesforce has kind of crafted where my career path went. Mike: It's done that for a lot of people. Marissa Scalercio: Mm-hmm. And since then, I mean, it's just been so exciting to learn, and I wasn't an admin at that point, but as I kept trying to learn new pieces of Salesforce and how it could be more efficient, they gave me an admin sandbox license so that I was able to really start building and using Trailhead to learn everything I could learn, and now they gave me a production license so I can now build within our production instance. So accidental admin. Mike: Yeah, but also good because I mean, to be honest with you, I was an admin for eight years. I've been at Salesforce for a long time. There seems to be a point at which a lot of executives, rightfully so, there's just so much on their plate that they can't get into that backend part of it, and sometimes adoption and usage really hurts because of it, because they're connected to the process, but they're not connected to the technology or vice versa. When it's both. Marissa Scalercio: Yes, it can absolutely be a struggle when I want to build something, but I also have those responsibilities of strategy or just sales operations as a whole. So I do still struggle with that, but building in Salesforce and understanding what it can do helps me be a VP of sales operations. So it really does impact everything that we are doing as a sales team, and my entire goal in sales operations is to improve the efficiency and productivity of them. How can you do that if you don't know the tool that they're using 80% of the time? Mike: Couldn't agree more. I couldn't agree more. If you don't know how to run the report on the tool that you're holding people accountable for, then that's kind of also on you. So being in both roles, as advice for other admins maybe looking to grow their career and get more into a C-suite role like that, but also as somebody that's pitching ideas, like admins are going to have to go out and talk about Prompt Builder and they're going to have to do it to other VPs or probably Ps or maybe a whole board. There was a time when I had a governance board. What would your advice be? Because I feel like you're in such a unique position to help admins both craft that executive message, but also understand the backend part. As Prompt Builder goes GA, and as some of these AI tools go GA, how are you pushing that messaging through that isn't overwhelming to other executives? Marissa Scalercio: I think the first thing to understand about a new tool is how will this help the business? What are the use cases? What is the ROI? What's the business value? If you can start answering those questions as you are an admin or as you are a builder, those are the questions that you're going to be asked by the board, the CEO. They're going to want to know why and what impact this is going to have. So really being able to understand the product, really understanding what values it brings and what... Especially ROI, and being able to show and prove that, that is the number one way to talk to an executive board. I mean, bringing them where they can save money is what they're looking for. Either save money or really innovate and improve the lives of their employees. Mike: Yeah, no, I couldn't agree. Was there anything, and this is kind of specific to Prompt Builder, in your case with emails, how did you get some of that data on? Was it just like a simple poll of your salespeople like, "Hey, how long do you on average spend writing emails?" And did you collect a handful of emails to get a before and after example? Because I guess in my head, what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to gather that case for the ROI specific around your Prompt Builder. Marissa Scalercio: So we didn't grab that information then. But being a salesperson and knowing this has been kind of our job since 2018, our team's job, is knowing how long things take to do in the sales department. Writing an email, scouring the account to understand what's going on with the account. So we already kind of had a baseline of how long that takes. And then being able to write that prompt and have it come out with a similar or better outcome in seconds is really a huge value add. Being able to increase the amount of time that a salesperson actually is selling and decrease that administrative burden, that's where I am seeing the best ROI. If I can prove that I can give time back to the sales team because of these processes, you can then extrapolate that into what their salaries are and add in all of the costs that you have for that sales team into, well, 10% more selling time would equal X amount. Mike: Right. Yeah, no, I mean it's always how much time can you save a salesperson so they can sell more? Marissa Scalercio: Exactly. Mike: I used to sell things and I used to be like, "Great, Matt, thank you for the 10% more quota. I appreciate that." Marissa Scalercio: Also that. Mike: Because you also modulate your time as a salesperson, too. None of us do that. None of them. They all, foot on the gas all the time, I promise you. So as you look forward to this year, I also think rate of change. There are... and I went through this where I had to merge a couple orgs together and bring two companies together, and there was also a lot of organizational change going on. We're at the beginning of the year. I know you've got your plans. There's new products and features and services from Salesforce coming. As a VP, as an admin, how do you think through the amount of change that you push on your users throughout the year? What does your planning cycle feel like? Marissa Scalercio: We are usually very thoughtful about large changes within the organization and making sure we're rolling them out slowly where we get some of our best or worst people to really get on board with what we're doing first and then roll it out in that process where we have a smaller group rollout and then a larger group. So we really are thoughtful about having those people that have already tested and like the tools that we're rolling out. This year is going to be a lot of change, though. I am really excited by it, but the tools that are coming out are game changers for our organization. I'm really lucky that we are embracing change and the AI era. We even have a department that is called CL Next that their sole mission is innovation, and they have developed a project drive where they are asking every single department to bring artificial intelligence into their area and show that it can be used on a daily basis. So I'm very lucky that I am in an organization that really is embracing it, so it is easier for me to implement these AI products and tools, but rolling them out, the best thing you can do is get people on board with it that will talk to their peers about how useful it's been or how useful it's going to be. Mike: Yeah. That made me think of something. I don't know if you did this, and maybe you can answer, but when you were piloting this, did you set up a Chatter group or anything to kind of gather that information? Or when it goes GA, do you plan to do something like that or do you do that for other features? Marissa Scalercio: I plan to do it for pretty much any feature that we roll out. We always bring in somebody. It is so much easier to have a better adoption if you have people, their peers that they look up to, on board with it. So I always try to roll it out or at least show what's coming, have them test it, really play around with new tools, because that is the best way to get adoption throughout the entire sales org. Mike: Yeah, nothing like a group of people asking questions to see what everyone else is asking. I'm telling you. Marissa Scalercio: Exactly. Mike: It sounds scary, but that's the best part of rolling out a new feature because to some degree kind of helps everybody feel like, "Oh, I had that question too. I'm not alone." And like, yep, we're all in this together kind of situation. As you're using AI and different tools for admins, you mentioned you wish you would've gotten up to speed. Are there things that you are doing or trying, trying to incorporate more? For instance, I am trying to use different AI tools and just write different prompts to try to almost... We did this in third grade. It was really weird. My teacher who apparently was kind of ahead of the game, she's like, "I need you to pretend that you're an alien and you have to tell another human how to pick up the phone." And we played this game called telephone. And it sounds crazy because you're like in third grade, you're like, "Well, I know how to pick up the phone." And you pick up the phone. She goes, "No, that's wrong because you're picking up the receiver." And she's like, "Pick up the phone." And I find there's a huge correlation between that and what you tell AI because when you tell AI, "Pick up the phone," it doesn't understand a receiver or just the headset part of a phone. It would pick up the entire phone. That's just a funny story, only to make this question longer, but are there things that you are doing personally in using AI that you feel are making you understand it or build better prompts? Marissa Scalercio: Yeah. I mean, I'm using it in my personal life. I'm using it with my personal email. I'm trying my best to use it every single day, whether that is new products that I'm seeing that are coming out, the new tools that Salesforce is rolling out, the new tools that... Outlook's rolling out some stuff. Google's rolling out a lot of different AI tools. So really being able to test those throughout your personal and professional life. That's really what I've been trying to do. I also am asking a lot of questions of my peers as to how they're using it, and even my friends, just to make sure that if they have something really cool that they are using on a daily basis and it's making them more efficient, I want it. So I want to make sure that I am trying to find what is going to help me personally be more efficient and then help what is going to help our entire organization or sales organization. Mike: That's smart. I mean, much like the last few podcasts that I've done, it's practice, practice, practice and use, use, use. Right? Marissa Scalercio: Yes. Mike: I have a friend that told me, he's like, "Writer's write." Yep. They sure do. That's how you get better at it. So we'll end on a fun note. Is there anything funny you could share that you've asked AI to do that you just kind of thought was an interesting response? Marissa Scalercio: I mean, funny pictures. Putting me in some interesting pictures, like basketball photos, which I don't play basketball. I'm very short. So I mean, there are some really fun things that you can do with AI as well. So those are some of the fun things I've been doing. Mike: Yeah. I asked AI to make a Pixar version of myself, and that was a hilarious outcome. Marissa Scalercio: Yeah, exactly. It's just fun to play around with it. Mike: Yeah. Well, and it's fun for me, I think, to try and repeat different things and see what the different, especially with images, response was. I did have a coworker. I thought this was really interesting. She's like, "I didn't know what to make for dinner. So I plugged some of the stuff that I had in the fridge, in the cupboard, into AI and asked it for a recipe." I was like, oh, it's like Iron Chef Kitchen AI. Marissa Scalercio: How smart. Mike: I know, right? Marissa Scalercio: I love that. Oh, I'm absolutely going to use that. Mike: Yeah, you're going to end up with a tuna noodle, taco shell, Dorito, rice and beans. I don't know. Kind of... Marissa Scalercio: Sounds delicious. Mike: Yeah, well, AI said it was good. Yeah, well, AI is not eating it. Marissa, thanks so much for being on the podcast. I can't wait to see everything else that you guys are working on. I'm sure we'll see you elsewhere. You're going to be at TrailblazerDx and Dreamforce and all those fun events. Marissa Scalercio: Absolutely. Mike: Yeah. Marissa Scalercio: Thank you so much for having me. It was so nice to meet you and I'm honored to be here. Mike: So it was a great conversation with Marissa. I learned a lot. I feel like I can't wait to see all of the stuff that we can configure with Prompt Builder. I know she was very specific in emails, but it's one thing that we're improving constantly over user's time and building better emails for salespeople. They always need a better email. And I also loved her insight into being a Salesforce admin as a VP, helping us understand going across to other VPs, communication and also up and down within organizations. It's very important that we pay attention to that, especially as some of these new features come out and we plan our roadmaps for this year. Now, if you enjoyed this episode, which I bet you did because I did, and you're listening on iTunes, I want you to share it. All you got to do is tap the three dots and click Share Episode. Then you can post it socially, you can text it to a friend. And of course, if you're looking for more great resources, Everything Admin is at admin.salesforce.com, including links to learn about AI and Trailhead and a full transcript of the show. And of course, you can join our conversation, The Admin Trailblazer Group in the Trailblazer community. The link is also in the show notes. So with that, until next week, I'll see you in the cloud.

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Jennifer Lee, Lead Admin Evangelist at Salesforce. Join us as we chat about what you need to do to be ready for the upcoming Spring ‘24 Release. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Jennifer Lee. Video Content for the Spring ‘24 Release If you’ve come across any admin Release Readiness content, then you’re probably familiar with Jennifer Lee and her army of GIFs. That’s why I was excited to sit down with her and talk about what’s coming in the Spring ‘24 Release and what content is coming out to help you get ready. Jennifer’s comprehensive blog post about her top Spring ‘24 Release features is a good place to start, but she’s also putting together a truckload of video content that is not to be missed. There will be new episodes of “Automate This!” and “How I Solved It” on YouTube. Meanwhile, on Salesforce+, mark your calendar for a special Admin Preview Live on Thursday, February 8th at 9 a.m. (PST). Join Jennifer and all the PMs for presentations, demos, and everything admins need to know for the Spring ‘24 Release. It’s all a part of Release Readiness Live, which will be on Salesforce+ next week on February 6th, 7th, and 8th. Spring ‘24 Release highlights For Jennifer, the release notes are like an onion—you always seem to find something new each time you go through them. Some features she’s particularly excited about include: Enhanced security management, like error messages that appear if you try to delete a permission set that is still assigned to users or permission set groups. Flow enhancements like text templates, repeaters (no more placeholders!), and debugging data cloud-triggered flows. An email alert page in setup to see which flows are sending things to your users. Better report ownership management. Sandbox best practices for release management Jennifer also fills us in on some best practices for sandboxes to get your production org ready for a new release. You want to have two sandboxes: one that matches your production release that you use for deployment, and one that’s on the upcoming release to try out new features. That way you have somewhere to prep for the future without accidentally breaking your current deployment. Finally, Jennifer recommends that every admin should pull up “release updates” in the quickfind. That’s the easiest way to see what changes coming up and how long you have to get ready. Armed with your pre-release sandbox, you’ll be ready for all the new features before they’re auto-enabled. This episode was a great supplement to all the other Spring ‘24 Release content we’re putting out there, so be sure to take a listen. And don’t miss Admin Preview Live next Thursday, February 8th at 9 a.m. (PST).   Podcast swag Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store Learn more Tune in to Admin Preview Live on Feb 8 Release Readiness Live on Salesforce+ Be Release Ready Jen’s Top Spring ’24 Release Features Salesforce Release in a Box – Spring ’24 Automate This! live How I Solved It YouTube Playlist   Admin Trailblazers Group  https://sfdc.co/admintrailblazers Social Jennifer: @JenWLee 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: Salesforce does three releases a year, and I don't know about you, but I could use some warm weather thinking. So this week on the Salesforce Admins podcast, we are going to get release ready with Jennifer Lee, who is lead admin evangelist here at Salesforce, she was an MVP. You know her for all of the flow stuff that she does. By the way, she's got a really cool thing she's going to talk about on this podcast that's not release ready, but I bet you're going to want to hear that. Then of course, we talk about some of the release features that she's not going to feature on Release Readiness Live, which is next week if you're listening to this. So this is a fun episode. We're going to help you get release ready. Let's get Jennifer on the podcast. So, Jennifer, welcome to the podcast. Jennifer Lee: Hey, Mike, thanks for having me. Mike: Yeah, well, it is springtime, despite the fact that I think you and I have been indoors for the last, I don't know how many days, and it's freezing cold, but spring '24 release features are right around the corner. You had an awesome blog post about it and we were looking through the release notes and heck, it's about to drop for everybody, so why not do a podcast to talk about it, right? Jennifer Lee: Super excited. Mike: Before we get into that, what else you got going on? You've got some video series and stuff coming out this year. I want to make sure that people up front know about that before we start talking about all the fun release stuff. Jennifer Lee: All right, so if you haven't heard about Automate This, it's a livestream series that I do monthly on the Salesforce Admins YouTube channel, so check that out. We also do deep dive blogs on it as well from our trailblazers. We're going to be bringing back How I Solved It back to the YouTube channel, so very excited to continue to feature awesome admins doing amazing things on the Salesforce platform. So, that will start next, actually this month. Mike: This month, yeah. It's February already. Jennifer Lee: This month on the 21st. Mike: Clock's ticking down. Here we go. Yeah, I mean to sit and watch Jen Lee build flows live, we should charge tickets for that, but you can just watch it for free on YouTube. Okay, so we've got some pilot, some beta, some GA features coming in the spring release. What are you excited for? Jennifer Lee: A few things. So when we're talking about security management, I'm going to geek out on security, of all things. Mike: Hey, it's the security stuff's cool. It keeps us doing our jobs. People overlook that. Jennifer Lee: Yeah, so when you go and try and delete a permission set, previously if it had people assigned to it or it's assigned to a permission set group, it allowed you to delete it, it didn't even tell you. Now we're going to throw up an error and let you know someone's assigned to it, so get rid of them first before you go ahead and delete it or just check first that you really want to delete that permission set. So thanks to Cheryl and team for putting that in. But a lot of the things that are going into this release, surprise surprise, are flow enhancements, being the Flownatic that I love, so. Mike: I'm just shocked you didn't start there. I'm going to throw a curve and talk about one security thing, talk about fly. That's like being a hamburger reviewer and being like, so they have chocolate shakes at this burger restaurant, but let's talk about burgers. Jennifer Lee: So threw you guys for a loop, huh? Mike: A little bit, yep. Jennifer Lee: So I love the reactivity that's been going on in screen flows and Adam White and team, Sam Raynard, have been doing amazing things. So continuing on with reactivity, being able to have one component behave a certain way and then another component react to that. So, they're adding text templates, display texts going GA. They're also adding as a beta feature, repeaters. Now when you think of a repeater component, think of like you're filling out an application and let's say you're adding beneficiaries. Instead of thinking ahead and thinking like, oh, this person's going to add five and I'm going to put five placeholders, what about just adding the one? Then you let the user decide, hey, I want to add another and add another. So you don't have to build out this UI that has 10 placeholders or something. It's letting the user take charge and they're adding and removing accordingly. So I think that's got to be super cool for screen flows as well. Mike: I'm watching your GIF on that right now on this blog. I'm thinking, how many times haven't we built flow, really cool flow components on a page? Then they had to go through it and like, okay, now I've got to do this again, because you've got to add somebody else. Now they can just bang, bang, bang, bang, add them all. Jennifer Lee: Or you thought they're going to add five and they needed 10. Mike: [inaudible 00:05:29]. Jennifer Lee: Then they complain about your form. Mike: Well, I mean, this is always the question I would ask in doing requirements gathering. So what's the maximum insane crazy number you would think we could add? They'd be like, oh four, I don't ever see us adding more than four. You're like, the third use case they give you is like seven. You're like, awesome. We're just going to add 10. Jennifer Lee: Then a couple of other enhancements. So that data table component. So now when you search for other records, it doesn't clear out your previously selected records, which is good. Then when you have flows that use email alerts, you can go to the email alert page and setup and see what flows are using it. Mike: Oh, that's so cool. Jennifer Lee: No more guessing where it is. Mike: Or no more just guessing how many emails I'm sending with all of my flows. Jennifer Lee: Then the last piece on the data cloud front is now you could debug your data cloud triggered flows, rather than build them and fingers crossed, hope they work. Mike: Right? Oh wow, yeah. You start off with, I'm going to geek out on security stuff. I think it's the debug stuff that we need to see more of. Everybody always talks about all the building of flows and stuff, but nobody ever gets into the debug and everything that you read or you go to events is always how you troubleshoot stuff. I feel like it's not that people just don't love the debug, it's that people just don't spend time in the debug. That'd also be a really cool place. Just call your, have a tech bar that serves coffee and scones and has free internet, and you call it the debug. Nope, not with me? All right, let's talk about more release features because Mike's not got a good coffee shop name yet. Jennifer Lee: Don't make me laugh because I might go into a coffee thing. Mike: Yeah, the winter has been hard on us East Midwesterners, I got the Barry White going, so. Jennifer Lee: Jen Lee has a bronchitis going, so that's great. We don't talk for a living. Mike: No, no. I have a friend of mine that has a podcast and he texted me a couple days after Christmas, he's like, dude, I broke my ankle, I got to go into surgery. And I said, good thing you talk for a living. He didn't find that funny. I did, because I said, you could be a marathoner. Nope, all right, zero for two. What else you got, Jen? There's some cool stuff in here. I mean, I'm busy watching all the GIFs in your posts. Jennifer Lee: I love creating those GIFs because it brings the feature to life. It's not just a description of what the thing is, but you actually get to see it. Mike: Yep, and it also doesn't feel like a commitment like watching a video, like click here to watch this video. It's like, no, it just plays. But yeah, I mean the release notes should have more GIFs in it, add that to the idea exchange. I can feel somebody crying already over that. Jennifer Lee: So some of the other changes on the analytics side, the reports and dashboard side. Now when you have changes in report ownership, I guess before you needed to do a clone of it and start from the beginning, now you could just change owners, so that's big. Then they had widgets that were only available to, I think it was enterprise and unlimited. So now it's available across the board for all editions, which is like, you have a widget and you have a widget, doing the Oprah thing. Mike: Wow. No, that's good. I just saw your GIF on the email thing. I'm still stuck on that. Jennifer Lee: You're just distracted by my GIFs. Mike: No, just the fact, I mean, I think I remember still old school, building a workflow and thinking, how cool is this? But you never had the ability, you always had email templates and you're like, I have no idea how many workflows are using this, but to see this as a related list, like, oh, okay, so these two flows are using this workflow or using this email. I love it. It's the simple things sometimes. There's the data table one. Jennifer Lee: Yeah, or if you needed to make a change to it, now you know which things are impacted by that change that you're making. Mike: Yeah, yeah, because the number of times I've messed up emails before, that's always a constant. I think we're a little late in this coming out because by now a lot of admins have read the release notes. They probably have their idea, but thinking ahead for the summer release, because I'll be honest with you. The summer release was always super hard for me because vacation and I wanted to be on vacation and then there was stuff coming out and then you had users on vacation. But thinking ahead to the summer release, what are some sandbox strategies that Evan should think about? Jennifer Lee: So when we're in this pre-release cycle, that's when some of the sandboxes are in pre-lease, some aren't. So if you haven't heard the term pre-release, that means you get to have your sandbox be in the upcoming release as opposed to your current release, which is what your production org is in. So the strategy that I've used when I was an admin is, when you're in the cycle and you have a path to production. Let's say you have multiple sandboxes that you build in, and then you push it from a dev sandbox to a UAT sandbox to some other sandbox to production, that's your deployment path. You want to make sure that it's on the current release. So sometimes your sandbox, we're going to say, CS15, let's say that that was slated for preview and that's a sandbox that you use in your production deployment. Well, you don't want it to be in preview, you actually want it to be in the current release because your production is in the current release. What you want to do is build things and test things before it goes into production, as in being in that same release. You don't want to deploy something going from a higher API version because the newer release goes up an API version. You want to deploy like to like, not from higher to lower. The reason is because that new release might have enhancements to the thing that you're building, and now you're building on this newer thing, production doesn't even know about it. You try to deploy it, chances are you're going to run into a deployment error and you can't contact Salesforce support to help you because you went from preview to a non-preview. So definitely keep that in mind. There is a timeframe, a window, and I believe, well, we provide resources that tell you if you want to stay on that current release or you want to move off of preview and go back to your current release, here are the actions you need to take, and that requires a sandbox refresh, for example. But we have blog articles that talk about that, so go to our release ready page and you'll find blog posts on that, but make sure that your deployment path is on the current release. But at the same time, you also want a sandbox that's on preview because you want to test your current features and things like that, the things that you've currently built, and make sure they continue to work as expected and that you don't get some weird behavior as a result of something new that's coming out. So you definitely want to refresh and test the things that you have. Mike: Yeah, and I mean, even for example, we were in something like this, this time last year when reactive components came out. I was working with you to build the demo for our world tour. I couldn't figure out why in one of my environments I couldn't make the reactive component work, and here we need to check a box and go to a different API version. Similar, but yes, I mean you just want, yeah, pressure test against everything. Make sure it works current, make sure it's going to work when the upgrade happens because you'll nine times out of 10 be asleep, not sitting around pining for new- Jennifer Lee: Yeah, you don't want to get that call. Mike: Right? Hey, I don't know why this component doesn't work, because it's always a component. It's never anything in the background. It's always like an email didn't fire or a component is just saying insufficient privileges. Well, did you unplug Salesforce and plug it back in? Jennifer Lee: Reboot. Mike: Reboot. Jennifer Lee: Control, alt, delete. Mike: Control, alt, delete, yeah. Is there anything else that we should think about during release time, either before or after? Jennifer Lee: Oh, yes. So release updates. So you can get to release updates in setup, just go into the quick find, go to release updates, and then you'll see a list of upcoming release updates or you see things that you're behind on. Hopefully you don't, but Salesforce gives you ample time and they announce, okay, we're going to put this release update out there. You have until X date before Salesforce enforces it, and they auto enable it. So when you go into release updates, it tells you all the information you need to know about whatever that update is, how to go about testing it. So definitely go in a sandbox, test it out. Sometimes there are things that might require you to make changes to something that you have in your org so that it doesn't break when we auto enable it in a future release. So definitely go through it periodically to see if there's anything upcoming, and then spend a time to allocate to actually testing it, making sure it doesn't break anything there. In some cases, you can enable it in your after you've tested it so everything's cool, but you definitely don't want to miss the deadline, we auto enable it and then it breaks something in your production org. Mike: Breaking things is bad. You didn't mention this, but I was scrolling along. Access fields from related objects on dynamic forums, forums enabled record pages. This feels like, oh wow, air. I bring this up because there's literally a question in the Trailblazer community, and I'm going to respond to her after we get done with this podcast, where she was trying to pull in, she's trying to write just a simple formula field to return a phone number. This would totally solve it, because why not just pull the field in? You can do that. Just wait for the release. Jennifer Lee: I just realized I forgot to mention all the features that I'm going to highlight on Admin Preview Live. Mike: Well, but that's why you do the podcast because see, now they got to listen to all the features that didn't make it on Admin Preview Live, but when is Admin Preview Live? Jennifer Lee: So you're going to go on Salesforce Plus on Thursday, February 8th at 9:00 A.M. Pacific Time. We're going to live stream the broadcast. So we're going to go in the studio, all of the PMs, I'm going to be there as well. We're going to be in-studio doing live presentations and live demos. So I'm going to be covering admin highlights. I'm going to cover four things, and cross object fields is one of the things that I will be covering. Mike: Oh, darn. Yay, teaser. Jennifer Lee: Then other things. The other things that you'll just have to wait to find out. Mike: No, but look at all you get to find out on listening to podcasts ahead of time. Are you doing anything special for release live? Like we do shoes, I guess there's no really footwear attire for release live- Jennifer Lee: No. Mike: ... anymore. We used to do shirts for a while. Jennifer Lee: I'll have to figure out what my outfit is. Mike: Yeah, maybe sparkly. Sparkly seems to be a thing. Maybe that's out in 2024. Maybe it's got to be something else, I don't know. Cross out [inaudible 00:19:04]. Jennifer Lee: Well, we'll have to figure it out. Mike: I'm excited for this, little stuff. Jen, thanks so much for coming on the podcast and giving us all the cool stuff that you also included in your blog. But I feel like with the releases, you got to hear this stuff two, three times. It's like peeling back an onion. Every time you look at the release notes, you find something else that you didn't see before. Jennifer Lee: Oh, when I was a customer, I would love... So I would read through the release notes. Plus, I would always watch Release Readiness Live because I always find things that I didn't catch while I was reading through the release notes. The release notes are pretty dry, so. Mike: I mean, they're not a novel. But also, I felt like sometimes even reading your blog posts and seeing the GIFs, like the GIFs and that stuff, you read the feature and you're like, meh, okay, but then you see a GIF or then you watch the Release Readiness Live of it and you're like, oh, that's so much cooler than it read in the release note. Well, I will be sure to include the links to all of these. As always, if you've got this far in the podcast and you have a suggestion for themed wear that Jennifer should bring to release. You should have an Easter egg, that something only somebody on the podcast would know about. Then we'll put that on the thing and then see if anybody comments on it. Probably not, but it's fun to think about. Jennifer Lee: Well, Diana Jaffe brought her lamp. Mike: I know, right? Who would've thought that a lamp would- Jennifer Lee: That was on the craze on X or Twitter or whatever. Mike: I know. Yeah, well, that's okay. We have a goat as a mascot, so I'll par for it. I'll put the link in the show notes and then we will, we've got a week to prepare to watch you live on Release Readiness, so thanks for coming by and sharing some of that. Jennifer Lee: Thanks for having me. Mike: You bet. Of course, that was another great discussion with Jennifer. Hey, How I solved It's coming back, which is amazing. I love watching that video series. I also just, the fact that we can watch Jennifer do live flow solutions on YouTube is just the funnest part because that's what I enjoy doing. Also, learning about flow because there's still so much that I need to learn about flow, but there's some pretty cool stuff in the release. I would love to know what is one of your favorite features. Go ahead and shout out on Twitter or any of the social platforms. Let us know. Now, of course, if you enjoyed this episode, I need you to do me a favor. Can you share it with somebody? I mean, you've probably got friends that are getting release ready, right? Do they know about this episode? Do they know about some of the cool features like the reporting and the email stuff that Jen was talking about? If they don't, all you got to do is tap the three dots, choose share episode, and then you can post it on social, you can text it to a friend. You take them to a coffee shop and say, let's listen to the podcast together. I don't know, throwing out ideas there. Full of resources if you're looking for them, admin.salesforce.com. That is where you're going to find transcript of the show, the link to watch Jennifer do Release Readiness Live, which I'll be tuning in for, and a link to the blog post where she has all those fun GIFs. Of course, don't miss out on the conversation we have going on in the admin Trailblazer group that is in the Trailblazer community. The link is in the show notes. Hey, until next week, I'll see you in the cloud.  

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Anna Szabo, ISV Platform Expert at Salesforce. Join us as we chat about getting started with Trailhead, how to decide which certifications to go for, and why we all need to embrace failure. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Anna Szabo. Give yourself a chance Anna wanted to be Salesforce certified for a long time before she actually jumped into Trailhead and got started. “To be honest with you, I didn’t believe I could,” she says. But in 2022, she decided: she’d get her certification by the end of the year. She left notes for herself everywhere that she’d be a certified Salesforce Administrator, but still couldn’t seem to get started. On May 23, 2022, she wrote herself a poem:   "Give Yourself a Chance" by Anna Szabo When feeling scared, just give yourself a chance! By analyzing paralyzed, you can’t advance. To make some progress, starting is a must! While outcomes pursuing, please the process trust!   Just give yourself a chance so you can soar! View learning as a blessing, not a chore! For outcomes to happen, you must start the process!  Engage in learning to ensure your progress!    Yes, you can do it; give yourself a chance! At future, not the past I recommend you glance. A vision helps you through the journey to advance! Get started please! Just give yourself a chance!   Within 30 days, Anna earned her Admin certification. She became 19x Salesforce certified in 1 year, and earned the All Star Ranger rank in only 477 days. Today, she works for Salesforce as an ISV Platform Expert and has helped over a thousand Trailblazers get their certifications, too. Be the CEO of your career One of the most common questions I get asked at events is some version of, “How do I decide which certifications to pursue on Trailhead?” Anna’s advice is to be the CEO of your career and, as CEO, you need to look at which certifications are demanded in the marketplace. What shows up on job listings? What about for your dream job? When you’re going for these certifications, Anna encourages you to embrace failure. “Studying for these exams only exposes how much you don’t know,” she says. Even with all of her accomplishments, Anna had to retake several certification exams. Keep on giving yourself a chance and you’re bound to succeed. More content from Anna to help with your certifications In addition to her role at Salesforce, Anna creates a ton of content to help other Trailblazers follow their dreams. If you’re thinking about getting more certifications or going for your first, make sure to check out her YouTube channel or find her on LinkedIn. This episode is jam-packed with inspiring words and motivation, so be sure to take a listen if you haven’t already. See you next week!   Podcast swag Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store Learn more Anna Szabo on YouTube Anna’s Story   Admin Trailblazers Group  https://sfdc.co/admintrailblazers Social Anna: @AnnaSzaboJDMBA Salesforce Admins: @SalesforceAdmns  Mike on Threads: https://www.threads.net/@mikegerholdt/ Mike on Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@salesforce.mike` Mike on X: @MikeGerholdt  

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we’re revisiting our episode with Emma Keeling, Salesforce Consultant and Nonprofit Community Group Leader. Join us as we chat about the skill of project management and some best practices to help you keep things organized. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Emma Keeling. Why everyone needs Project Management skills Emma is one of our guests on this month’s Skills for Success video series, which breaks down the skills Salesforce Admins need to succeed in today’s world. And even though we brought her on to talk about Project Management, she actually doesn’t call herself a project manager. But she uses those skills all the time as a Salesforce Consultant, which is kind of the point. When we think of Project Management, we imagine an array of timetables and Kanban Boards, and, indeed, there are some project managers who use those things to do big jobs at large organizations. What Emma does, however is a little different. She keeps her team on task, on schedule, and working together effectively. And those are skills that every admin should have. Start with the starting point Often, your starting point is figuring out what you’re even starting with. Is this a new process or an old process? Has it been documented before or are you coming in to make those decisions? And what are the priorities for the organization? Sometimes someone is saying they need this feature or that feature but the problem you really need to be solving is something else entirely. “One of the key things is people,” Emma says, “if you’re doing an implementation, you’re probably not the expert on everything.” If you’re adding a new feature for fundraising, for example, you probably need to talk to the people doing the fundraising to figure out the best way to do things. Timelines for your organization and your people Even if you’re not a Kanban Master, you need to be aware of what timelines are important for your organization. For the nonprofit world that Emma operates in, November 1st is an important date because it marks the start of the holiday giving season. That means you probably want to get anything related to donations squared away and tested before it sees heavy use. You also want to be aware of how timelines affect your people. Is everyone busy at the same time, or are their schedules independent from each other? Who is going to make plans based on the timeline that you’re outlining? It’s crucial to communicate which dates are firm and which dates are flexible. And it’s important to build in flexibility in case the unexpected happens. Be sure to listen to the full episode for Emma’s four key Project Management skills for admins. Podcast swag Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store Resources Skills for Success—A New Video Series to Help Salesforce Admins Succeed Salesforce Admin Skills Kit The Human Stack Social Emma: @Salesforce_Em Salesforce Admins: @SalesforceAdmns  Mike on Threads: https://www.threads.net/@mikegerholdt/ Mike on Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@salesforce.mike Mike on X: @MikeGerholdt  

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Dorian Earl, Founder & CEO of Development Consulting Partners. Join us as we chat about how to integrate Salesforce with your business processes by working backwards. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Dorian Earl. A lost rolodex and a new career in Salesforce Dorian and I have been running into each other at event after event, and I finally got him to come on the pod. He does a lot of work with different companies on refreshing their Salesforce org to match their business processes, so I’m excited to share his insights with you. 20 years ago, Dorian was selling medical supplies and using an old-school planner to keep track of everything. One day, he was driving home from some client visits when he had the funny feeling he had forgotten something. “I saw about $80,000 in pipeline go flying on the interstate,” he says, and that’s when he knew he needed a better way. Dorian started using Salesforce, initially as an org of one, keeping track of his own pipeline. He got hooked and ended up founding a string of businesses based around the platform. These days, he uses his experience in sales and his knowledge of the Salesforce platform to help companies map their business processes over their tech stack to get the most out of both. Defining business processes for Salesforce Time again, the biggest issue that Dorian sees is that his clients haven’t defined their processes in terms of Salesforce. “Every company defines an account a little differently,” he says, “so I push my clients to say what an account means to them, and what it means to them when somebody creates an account, or when we convert a lead into an account.” No matter what internal terms you use, it’s important to be clear about how Salesforce is built to work. For example, you should only create an opportunity for a qualified lead. It means something specific on the platform, but you might need to do some work to help your users understand that. Otherwise, you end up with a request for a field to track whether or not a prospect is interested. How to start a business process backwards The most helpful thing you can do is start with the end goal in mind and work backward from there. What does the business want to look at to measure success? What report is that in Salesforce? From there, you can figure out what steps need to happen on the platform to run that report, and how those correlate to the business processes already in place. Businesses that have had Salesforce for a while sometimes start to wonder if it’s still working for them. Usually, it’s a question of refreshing the business processes and bringing them into alignment with what needs to happen in the org. Dorian compares it to owning a home: if you want to have a workout space, you don’t go around looking for a new house, you make space in your garage. Dorian has tons of experience helping all sorts of businesses helping them to get the most out of Salesforce, so be sure to listen to the full episode for more tips and insights, including why exception reports are the best place to start when you’re refreshing an org. Podcast swag Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store Learn more Business Process Mapping on Trailhead Admin Trailblazers Group  https://sfdc.co/admintrailblazers Social Dorian on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dorianearl/ Salesforce Admins: @SalesforceAdmns  Mike on Threads: https://www.threads.net/@mikegerholdt/ Mike on Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@salesforce.mike` Mike on X: @MikeGerholdt  

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Joy Shutters-Helbing, Salesforce MVP, Chicago Admin Co-Leader, and Golden Hoodie recipient. Join us as we chat about why frontline experience is so important to your Salesforce career and the importance of networking. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Joy Shutters-Helbing. Getting experience as a Salesforce user I recently ran into Joy at World Tour Chicago, where I was shocked to discover that we’ve never had her on the pod. One of the most common questions I get asked is how to get started in a Salesforce career, and I think she has some great advice on the subject. Joy and I both got involved with Salesforce as users, first, before transitioning into an admin career. That meant we already understood how business processes were supposed to work and how Salesforce could help. And that’s what can be the missing step for someone armed with Salesforce credentials but not a lot of real-world experience. Get frontline experience while you learn Salesforce Joy’s biggest piece of advice for someone looking to get started in Salesforce is to get experience in an industry you’re passionate about. “Go and answer those phones as a call center rep,” she says, “be that first line of employees that are working with customers that are going to be using Salesforce with a high frequency.” In the meantime, you should be working through Trailhead and enhancing your skills on the platform. In short, you’ll be able to learn the ins and outs of business processes while you’re building up your Salesforce knowledge. And be on the lookout for opportunities to make suggestions and get involved in how the platform is used in your organization. Why networking is misunderstood Joy also has a great perspective on networking and how it’s misunderstood. When she’s looking for a new role, she updates her resume and makes cold applications like everyone else. But she also isn’t afraid to let people know that she’s looking, which creates an invitation for people to send things her way. The difference here is between asking someone for a favor and allowing them to help you. And people will want to help you if you’re active in the community and have helped them in the past. It’s all about looking for ways to get involved in your local user group and pay it forward. Be sure to listen to the full episode for more insights from Joy, and more about what it’s like to don the coveted Golden Hoodie. Podcast swag Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store Learn more Chicago Area Community Groups: https://trailblazercommunitygroups.com/chicago-il/ Chicago Admin: https://trailblazercommunitygroups.com/salesforce-admin-group-chicago-united-states/  Chicago Architect: https://trailblazercommunitygroups.com/salesforce-architect-group-chicago-united-states/  Downers Grove Admin: https://trailblazercommunitygroups.com/salesforce-admin-group-downers-grove-united-states/ Chicago Non-Profit: https://trailblazercommunitygroups.com/salesforce-nonprofit-user-group-chicago-united-states/ Chicago WIT: https://trailblazercommunitygroups.com/salesforce-women-in-tech-group-chicago-united-states/ MVP Office Hours: https://bit.ly/MVPOH    Admin Trailblazers Group  https://sfdc.co/admintrailblazers Social Joy: @Joy_SH Salesforce Admins: @SalesforceAdmns  Mike on Threads: https://www.threads.net/@mikegerholdt/ Mike on Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@salesforce.mike` Mike on X: @MikeGerholdt  

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we revisit our episode with Ko Forte, Salesforce Business Analyst at RGP. Join us as we chat about business analysis, career transitions, and the BA mindset. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Ko Forte. August was Business Analyst Month For August, we took a deep dive into the Business Analyst skillset. We started by talking to Ko, a consultant who helps organizations as both a Business Analyst and a Salesforce Admin. She’s recently given a talk at some Salesforce events entitled “BA Where You Are,” so we thought we should bring her on the pod to hear all about it. Ko’s talk is focused on developing the mindset and habits for a Salesforce Business Analyst role. It’s geared toward people who are admins and want to move into business analysis, as well as folks who might be new to the ecosystem and looking for a potential fit. The Business Analyst mindset For Ko, the key to being an effective Business Analyst begins with mindset. Before she starts work with a new client, she asks herself: Who is this company? How are they positioned in the industry? Who are their customers? What do they do to make money? And therefore, what’s important to them? Thoroughly understanding these things grounds Ko with a clear understanding of what the company she’s working with needs their technology to do for them. It’s also important to cultivate a mindset of compassion, both for why business processes are the way they are and for the people who will be affected if you make a change. People do things for a reason, and you need to understand those factors to find something that works. Transitioning your career The biggest thing Ko recommends for admins making the transition into business analysis is to not be afraid of asking questions. Someone else may be wondering the same thing and something that seems obvious to an expert might need to be better understood by everyone else on the team. You should also start making a habit of turning the camera on for meetings. You want to create the impression that you’re reliable, you’re present, and you’re listening. Our brains have evolved to look at faces and, especially in remote work, it helps to show yours to the world. And, again, have compassion for everyone else attending a meeting by clearly communicating what you’re trying to do with an agenda and some goals. Be sure to listen to the full episode for more about Ko, and why it’s important to take a look at your job description if you’re trying to advance your career. And we’ve included links to the other Business Analyst August episodes if you want to learn more. Podcast swag Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store Learn more Get Started as a Salesforce Business Analyst Toni V. Martin on Business Analysis Skills Amber Boaz on Slack Best Practices Pei Mun Lim on the Skills of a Business Analyst Social Ko: https://www.salesforce.com/trailblazer/kforte 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 Transcript Mike Gerholdt: This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we are doing a replay episode from Business Analyst August, which was we featured a lot of business analysts back in August talking about being and doing the active business analysis as part of being a Salesforce Admin and the whole BA mindset. So, I'll include a link at the bottom for all of those episodes, but this really focuses on Ko Forte and kind of the business analyst mindset. Now, before we get into Ko's episode, I just want to make sure that you're doing one thing, which is following the Salesforce Admins podcast on the iTunes, or wherever you get your podcasts. That way, a new episode like this one will just download to your phone every Thursday and you don't have to think about it. So with that, let's get to our conversation with Ko. So, Ko, Welcome to the Salesforce Admins Podcast. Ko Forte: Thanks, Mike. Great to be here. Mike Gerholdt: Let's get started. It's August already. Hey. Glad to be out of July. Felt like it was never going to end. Ko Forte: Agreed. Mike Gerholdt: But we're talking business analysts. Actually, I have quite a few episodes this month, spoiler alert, that will be focused around the BA. I know you and I have talked while Atlanta World Tour was going on. Tell me how you got started in the Salesforce ecosystem. Ko Forte: Sure. My journey to the Salesforce ecosystem came as a really great surprise to me. I was actually a theater major. I graduated from the University of Georgia with an MFA and just needed a quote, unquote, "Real job," in the interim. Definitely, graduating during a housing bubble and things like that contributed to that decision. But a lot of my friends from there were going to work for a small upstart tech company here in Atlanta, and they needed some entry level folks to do some data entry. And so, I applied for that job and I got it. No experience needed or anything like that. You're literally just typing in numbers. But this company used Salesforce as their tool to build cases and quotes and opportunities and things like that. I was just very curious about this tool that we were using. I said, "I notice that when I do this, then that happens. I wonder why? What's behind this thing that's making all this stuff do what it does?" That was really my introduction to what is Salesforce as a tool. Why are we using it? Why does it do what it does? How can I learn more? Mike Gerholdt: Wow. I would love for us to do some survey on the number of degrees that admins have that aren't tech. Ko Forte: Right. Mike Gerholdt: Because I'm a communication studies degree. I also did theater in high school and I loved doing it. So I can totally talk theater, but we won't on this podcast. You went to into data entry, which is as fun as watching paint dry, but it pays the bills. What got you into business analysis? Ko Forte: Well, it took some years, to be honest. Being at the level that I was and at the type of company that I was in, it was just, "We've got to do the job." That's first and foremost. As long as there's nothing else in queue, you can do whatever you want. The company being smaller, I was able to talk to different departments and bring my questions to other people who knew a lot more than I did. There were thankfully enough supportive people around me to say, "Hey. Well, this is Salesforce. There's some help articles out there. You can understand what it does and study up on how this thing works." From there, I just went on a journey of self-study. This was before Trailhead, so it was a lot of help articles and Googling and asking people around me, "What does this mean?" Befriending admins, befriending those people who were working in the IT departments and things like that to say, "Hey. I'm studying this thing. If you have any advice or if you can give me any mentorship, I would really appreciate it." Just building upon my knowledge from there. Mike Gerholdt: What do you do now then? Ko Forte: Now, I am a Salesforce business analyst. I work for a consultant agency and I am sent on different projects to help both in admin capacity and business analyst capacity for different Salesforce implementations and projects. Mike Gerholdt: You're the person who has to go into the bowl of spaghetti and untangle all of the noodles. Ko Forte: Yes. Mike Gerholdt: It's always been the analogy. It's been in my head since ever I can remember of, "Here's our business processes and it looks like a bowl of noodles." You do a lot of speaking at community conferences. I know you talk about business analysis there. Can you try and tell me, what do you talk about there? How are you getting people into the BA role? Ko Forte: Absolutely. Recently, I spoke at both the Southeast Dreamin' in Atlanta and Dreamin' In Color, both two really great community conferences. My session is BA Where You Are. My session is geared towards developing the mindset and habits for a Salesforce business analyst role. This is for people who are admins and want to expand their admin career into more of a BA role. Or for people who are not yet in an admin position. Maybe they're in customer service or sales or something like that, and they want to pursue a business analyst career. And I talk about the mindset and habits and competencies that can be developed in order to build a business analyst career. Mike Gerholdt: Let's dig into that. Help me understand. Because I feel ... You're very fortunate in that you get to do business analyst stuff all the time. I feel for a lot of admins, it's kind of, "Well, that's part of the project." That's part of the day-to-day is to jump into a department and figure out the challenge and then have to solve it. Let's talk about that mindset. What is your mindset going into that first-time, say, meeting with a client or a department, knowing they've got a bowl of spaghetti that you have to untangle? What should admins ... How do they start being that BA where they are? Ko Forte: My mindset work happens even before the project begins. It's taking a step back to review, "Who is that company? How are they positioned in the industry? What do they do to make money? What's important to them?" Look at their overall profile, so that as I walk into the project, I have more of a grounded understanding of, "This is who this company is and how they show up. This is how they make money and these are their customers." And so, I have their story of who they are, where they're going, and what they need their technology to do in order to support that mission. Mike Gerholdt: Wow. You start a long time before I thought, as any good professional should. As you're walking through some of these business processes, I feel like you are almost solving a mystery to some degree. Is it just the fact that so many processes are put together and then changed and are not well-documented? Where does it start? Where does the mess start? Ko Forte: I'll just offer that it feels less like I am solving a mystery and more that I am being content with being in the mystery that is happening. I am in the mystery as it is unfolding, and even I am an audience to it, but a compassionate audience to the process. Because as a business analyst, you are both dealing with technical information, process information, but you're also navigating the human aspect. The emotions of making a transition from where you currently are to where you're trying to get, and the reactions to change that happen throughout all of that. Mystery is a good word, but we don't understand how many micro-mysteries there are within that process. Because like many great teams, there's somebody on the team who is a rockstar, who everybody goes to them because they do the thing and they know the information. And if we ask them this one thing, they'll take it and they'll do it. That person is great and valuable and necessary, but that person usually is not writing down what they do, how they do it, so that when they're gone, it can be repeated by someone else. Or just to give transparency to what that process is and how they're solving it. So as a business analyst, those are the things that I am looking for. That hidden knowledge and those people who are key players that make the magic happen and solve the mysteries for the business, but make those mysteries more transparent. Mike Gerholdt: I'm going to stitch a couple of things together. What part of your theater degree do you have to rely on most in those meetings? Ko Forte: I appreciate this question, because the parts of the creative mindset that are so valuable in this space has to do with having that capacity to sit and let things unfold, but also allow repetition to be comfortable. Coming to the table and setting up a meeting where you're giving people space to talk and share about what they do. That's kind of like a rehearsal. We're coming together. We're trying to get all the information out there. But there's also a great deal of synthesizing that must happen. We talked about this piece of work that this team is going to do and this process over here, but what are the threads that link all those together to help us move this project forward? And that's something that you're doing with a text that's in front of you, that you're studying to put on as a performance. You have to find the themes within. You have to find the patterns. You have to synthesize the information and bring it to that larger context of, "What is the overarching idea that we're trying to put forward when we do this play?" It's kind of the same thing. We're helping organizations navigate that change, and in the end, curtains up. We've got a great Salesforce implementation and all is well. Mike Gerholdt: I love the play theme because we can run with that. There's always a part of a play that I feel people struggle with. Or somebody has a hard time with their lines. What is the hardest part that you had to learn in being a business analyst that you feel maybe other admins are going to run into as well? Ko Forte: Absolutely. The hardest part for me personally has been the speaking up and showing up. Mike Gerholdt: Really? For a theater major? Ko Forte: Absolutely. It makes sense now as I look back on my journey, because I had that imposter syndrome. I'm here, but I really am not the smartest person in the room. I don't know if I'm supposed to be here. I don't know if I can measure up to all these people who are more technically inclined. And that had to do with a lot of, "Let's just be quiet. Let's just hold that. I see this thing and I am curious about this and I have questions and concerns, but let me not rock the boat, because someone else over there is smarter than me." But I learned that level of insight and curiosity that I have and the ability to say, "This doesn't make sense. Can we go through that again," is actually appreciated in the end. Because a lot of times in these IT settings, we're talking about things while somebody else is multitasking over there. Not everybody is fully at the table, and so things get missed. And if you're a person who's sitting in there and that is actually listening and attuned to what's going on and a question comes up ... That's a benefit, because someone else might have that question. Someone else might have that concern. Shrinking back is really something that I encourage myself constantly to avoid doing. You want to bring relevant questions to the table. You don't want to just be taking meetings off the rails. You want to have the ability to say, "This could use some clarification." Not from a place of, "I know better and I am the smartest person in the room. You need to say that again." But from a real question of, "You said A and you said B, but I feel like that doesn't equal C." Or, "Tell me how that equals C." Mike Gerholdt: No. I can 100% understand that. The imposter syndrome part, I feel like you deal with every day. Because you're sitting there and all of these people know the process or pretend to know the process. And then, you're the expert and they almost look for you to, "Well, can you answer this?" You're like, "We are just in the learning about you phase. We are not into the solving about you phase at this point." Ko Forte: Right. Mike Gerholdt: What is one thing ... I feel like maybe you pick up on this a little bit more with your theater background, but dealing with personalities. I'm trying to dig into the mindset part of this, because I feel like a lot of it is understanding business process and what people are telling you. But I feel the other part of it too is dealing with personalities in a meeting. Because you mentioned, and I could literally visualize as you were telling me, the person over there multitasking. The one person talking, who is super excited telling you about the process. And then, two or three other people that are like they have to be there. What would your advice be for admins who are going into this? Who are like, "Look, we're all in this room. We're trying to solve this." How do I manage personalities? Ko Forte: Managing personalities for me has a lot to do with helping people understand their value within the context of the meeting or the workshop that you're doing. So it's really appropriate what you said about feeling like I have to be here. That is definitely an energy that I've dealt with. When you haven't communicated beforehand in your meeting agenda ... Or not having an agenda. That's a big one. Or in your meeting invite, "What is the purpose of this meeting? What are we going to do there? What are we going to talk about?" Those are big things that contribute to the feeling of, "I have to be here. I really don't want to. I have nothing to contribute." And that's not going to be the case. So as much as I can, helping people have information upfront. Even if within that meeting we don't get through that whole agenda. Just having them understand, "This is a snapshot of what I hope to achieve here and what kind of feedback I'm hoping to get. Thank you so much for making the time. I'll see you there." That goes a long way to creating an environment of participation and shared value. Mike Gerholdt: I know every meeting is different. In every business analysis session, you've probably had 20 or 30 people and two or three. Is there a physical activity that you feel you do in most every meeting that really helps move it along? That may be a normal Salesforce ... Normal. That may be a Salesforce admin who is getting into the business analysis role and maybe doesn't know what to do. Ko Forte: Well, the one big one, since a lot of us are working remotely now and we are having Zoom meetings and video meetings and things like that. The biggest thing I would say is, "Turn your camera on." Even if you are not facilitating the meeting, you're not leading the meeting ... Even if you're not a BA. Especially, if you're not a BA and you're hoping to land a BA role. Turn your camera on. Let people see your face. As human beings, we have evolved to enjoy seeing a person's face, seeing the eyes. That's going to be important to create an image of, "I'm a safe person. I'm a reliable person. I'm here. I'm present." That goes a long way. Having the ability to show up and be seen, and to be seen as someone who is actively participating and present goes a very long way. Mike Gerholdt: I 100% can tell you I react differently in a meeting when I see the organizer's face versus when I don't. Ko Forte: Absolutely. Mike Gerholdt: Because I'm like, "Are you even paying attention? Are you phoning this in literally? Phoning it in?" I want to dig into a little bit of ... We talked a lot about inputs and managing stuff. We're never going to cover all of the business analyst role in a podcast. And if we are, it's going to be a long podcast. Ko Forte: Right. Mike Gerholdt: What are some of the outputs that you feel are different that maybe admins should shift to as they're doing more business discovery and business analysis work? Ko Forte: Sure. Just some simple things that I like to keep track of, especially if I'm working with other teams in their processes, is a process document. How do people currently do their work? And I like to say it doesn't have to be anything fancy. A lot of times when it comes to process documents, no one has written this stuff down. Because it's just the process and it's been transferred verbally from one person to another. We just know to do it like this. But as you are creating that document and you are working with the point person to approve and authorize, "Yes. This is the process. We're good to go." So much comes out of that. Because then, you get to discover, "Well, that's what they do. Why are they doing it like that?" Or, "That's actually not the process. We need to figure out who told them to do that and why." "This is the actual process. We need to tweak this process over here and make it more clear that this is the way, and not that." There's so much value that comes from that. Just knowing what people are doing and how. And then, where even the gaps are and the idea of, "We just started doing that. That's just what we do now." And the manager is like, "Well, I didn't know you were doing it like that. Why are you doing it like that?" Mike Gerholdt: Well, we started doing it that way, because we heard the consultants coming in. Ko Forte: Right. Right. Mike Gerholdt: It's like the chef getting the cookbook out. "Well, we started using this recipe the other day." Ko Forte: Well, a lot of times too, it happens because, "Well, that broke, so we couldn't do it like that anymore. We started doing this." Well, let's talk about this part that quote, unquote, "Broke." We can address that as opposed to making a whole other process to get around that thing. Mike Gerholdt: You never start fixing something until it breaks. Boy, let me tell you. That is so relevant for me right now. You have no idea. No idea. Documentation always comes up. I've managed admin track at Dreamforce now for many years. Almost every year outside of the shiny object that Salesforce is releasing, whether it's Dynamic Pages or Flow or whatever the hot new product is, the sessions on documentation are always the biggest. The ways to store documentation, I've talked about this on the podcast. What do you like to give departments or give organizations and advise them in terms of a leave-behind? In terms of, "Now, we've documented this. Here's what I suggest, where to keep it, how to update it, how often to update it." Ko Forte: I'm actually working through that right now, because I'm rolling off of a project. Mike Gerholdt: Good. Ko Forte: What I decided to do was work with their current knowledge base. This is important because I want to be very sensitive not to create yet another space that they have to go to and that they won't go to. What are they actually currently using? Some organizations, they are blessed with lots of different tools. Mike Gerholdt: Sometimes they're rich in tools, but poor in knowledge. Ko Forte: Correct. Correct. Mike Gerholdt: Or they've got so many tools they don't even know where to put them. "Well, we could put this documentation in seven different places." Ko Forte: Correct. So as a consultant, if that's not a process that I'm there to solve for, I'll just ask, "Where will you find this? Where do you want this?" And in a place that everyone can get to it. So that's generally my approach. I actually want what has been created to be something that they can reference again and again. Doing the work to prepare the documentation in such a way that it's not just, "Me, in my mind, I know exactly what that means," but making it for a general population that can go and get value from it after I'm gone is something that I'm really sensitive to. I want to put it in a style that they can easily read and get value from. And I want to store it in a place that they say, "We will come back to here and we will utilize this again." Mike Gerholdt: That's smart. How often do you recommend they update their documentation? Ko Forte: I recommend that documentation is reviewed quarterly. At least, quarterly. Because within a quarter, companies are reviewing what their goals were, what work they've completed, where they need to go to in the next quarter. It's just a good place to stop and say, "Is this still accurate based on where we last were and where we need to be now?" But along with documentation that I create, throughout the lifetime of the project, I am adopting that company's documented information. When was the last time you reviewed your organizational chart? Or a job description? These are very valuable documents that a company provides and we hope that they manage pretty regularly, so that I know who key stakeholders are, how teams interact with one another, where they connect, and who to go to for certain information and guidance. So I'm constantly as the BA looking to interact with that company's documentation as it's stated. Mike Gerholdt: I've got to imagine that org chart is probably the least updated. I don't know. That would be a fun poll to ask people. I feel many companies I have worked at ... They always hand it to you in training or something, "Here's the org chart," but it's from 1982. Ko Forte: Exactly. Mike Gerholdt: You're like, "Wow. That's great." "We fired the guy that took care of it." You're like, "Cool. I love that even more so." Ko Forte: Right. Mike Gerholdt: As we wrap up, the one thing ... If you've ever presented an admin track or any presentation I'm overseeing. I always like to think of the one thing that goes through my mind when I'm done hearing a presentation, which is, "Cool. You gave me a ton of knowledge and I'm super excited to go do it. When I stand up, what should I do next?" That's my question to you. After listening to this now for however many minutes, admins are like, "I need to do business analysis work even better." What should they do next? What's their next step? Ko Forte: What I would suggest is to first go and review your job description and understand for yourself, "Am I currently meeting this description as stated? Am I doing, to the best of my ability, what they are expecting me to do?" And then, from there, if you are, good job. Now, you can understand the ways that you want to start building out in this BA capacity. I feel like that's the most supportive way for you to begin that journey. Because I don't want to put you in a position where you're like, "Well, I created these process documents and I had this workshop and I took meeting notes. I got all this documentation together. Can I be a BA now?" And they're like, "Well, you stopped being a great admin. We can't promote you to a BA, because you're not meeting your job description currently." Make sure you're meeting all the needs and requirements there first to protect yourself and allow yourself to have the best possible path to where you want to go next. And then, start building relationships. That thing of turning on your camera? That's a simple one that you can do immediately. Start building relationships both horizontally with people who are in a similar state as you in the job. And then, vertically. Who's above you? Who can become a sponsor for you at your company? Who can be a mentor? Who can you mentor? That's a very valid question to ask, because as you teach, you learn more. Your network is going to hopefully be full of people who can support you, who can encourage you as you do things like look into certifications and things like that. Because that's going to take not only mental space, but it's an emotional process to some extent as well. You want to be well-fortified in all the ways, so that you can expand your career in the direction you want to go, but keep your mental health intact at the same time. Mike Gerholdt: That was 8,000 pounds of awesome advice. You started with someplace that no one has ever started before. I feel the need to call it out. Take a second to look at your job description and make sure you're doing that well. Wow. Wow. Because I think we forget that, and I got goosebumps when you said that. You're so right. If you're going to move up, make sure you're doing the foundational work right. Ko Forte: Right. Mike Gerholdt: That is huge knowledge. Right at the end of the podcast. This is an amazing discussion, Ko. I could talk to you for days, literally. Thanks for taking time out and sharing some of your information with us, really bringing that mindset to what you do, inspiring admins, and being out there at community conferences and talking about this. Because it is so important. Ko Forte: Thank you so much for having me. It's really important to me and valuable to me to support people to share my journey. It feels like an unlikely journey. And so, that's why I'm happy to share it with others to say, "Hey. If I did it, you can do it." You can do even more. Mike Gerholdt: Yep. Absolutely. Absolutely. Wow. Well, thank you for being amazing at this. Ko Forte: Thanks, Mike. Mike Gerholdt: Okay. Was I right or was I right about Ko's advice on what you should do next? Literally, that might be the best advice I've ever heard about what you do next. So I hope you enjoyed that. I enjoyed the podcast. I will give you a hint that there is more business analysis podcasts coming up in August, because that's how the hosts lined up. And I am totally into business analysis stuff right now. I think this is a great episode. What I want you to do is, if you'd do me a favor, I need you to share the episode with one person. Help us build the listeners. There's a ton of Salesforce admins out there that need to hear this. It's so much fun. I think it's fun to listen to. Now, if you're listening on the iTunes app, here's how you do it. You just tap the three dots and choose Share Episode. Then, you can share it to your social feeds. Or you can text it to a friend and be like, "Hey. I just listened to the Salesforce Admins Podcast. I know you wanted to get into business analysis. Listen to this episode with Ko." That's literally what you need to do. It's not that hard. Of course, if you're looking for more great resources, everything Salesforce admin is at admin.salesforce.com, including a transcript of the show. And of course, be sure to join the conversation over in our Admin Trailblazer Group in the Trailblazer community. I know there's probably some BA questions going on over there. Don't worry. Links to all of those are in the show notes. And until next week, I'll see you in the cloud.

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Will Moeller, Salesforce Administrator. Join us as we chat about why relationships are the key to building trust and engaging with stakeholders and end users alike. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Will Moeller. Lessons from a clinical social worker Will is my first guest with a degree in clinical social work, and I wanted to bring him on the pod to talk about how those skills have translated into his role as a Salesforce Admin. He first started working with databases and data via the Homeless Management Information System (HMIS). When Will’s nonprofit got a significant grant, they decided to move their data into Salesforce. He quickly became a self-described fanboy. His career has taken him to other places, but there are some key lessons he’s learned from social work that can help you connect with stakeholders and end users alike. Finding congruence We focus a lot on the business problems we’re trying to solve and the technical solutions we’re going to implement. Will, however, urges you to attend to the relationships you’re building in your meetings with users and stakeholders. A key part of building relationships is knowing your audience. High-level stakeholders are going to go into a meeting with very different goals and concerns than an end user will have. Will explains the concept of “congruence,” a term from clinical social work. It means taking the time, before a meeting with someone, to understand their perspective and how you need to frame things to get them to listen to you. Navigating Diverse Audience Priorities Different audiences are going to have different priorities. In a meeting with stakeholders, you need to frame things in terms of the bottom line. Convincing your boss to address technical debt will go a lot more smoothly if you frame it in terms of how it’ll save your business time and money as time goes on. For end users, Will finds it helpful to focus on building trust. As he says, they’re going to come into a meeting with you thinking, “This is my job, I need to trust that you’re going to have my best interest at the front of your mind as you’re going through this.” As Will says, the key here is taking time to understand the motivations of the people you’re meeting with before you sit down together. This episode is full of other great tips for managing your business relationships, so be sure to take a listen. Podcast swag Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store Social Will: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wpmoeller/ Salesforce Admins: @SalesforceAdmns  Mike on Threads: https://www.threads.net/@mikegerholdt/ Mike on Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@salesforce.mike Mike on X: @MikeGerholdt Gillian on X: @GillianKBruce  

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to David Giller, CEO of Brainiate. Join us as we chat about project management and how to push back with positivity. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with David Giller. Why admins need project management skills It takes a lot of energy to keep up with everything going on in the Salesforce ecosystem. What David sees, however, is that learning how to do something isn’t the biggest challenge facing most Salesforce Admins. “The things people are struggling with the most,” he says, “involve all of the interactions that they have with end users and business leaders at the companies they work with.” In other words, admins need help with project management. As David points out, admins love to solve problems. We want to show off our skills, make changes quickly, and—let’s be honest—play with some new toys. But we’re often so eager to jump in and implement a request that we don’t take the time to look at the business problem behind it that needs to be solved.  Project management is problem-solving What David is pointing at is the difference between being an order taker and being a problem solver. And being the person who just does what they’re asked to do is limiting for your career. What happens when AI gets smart enough to troubleshoot user requests and generate custom reports? Talking to David made me realize an important distinction: the difference between customization and personalization. When someone makes a request, is it a customization that will help with an entire business process, or is it a personalization that will help that user with their part of the process? How will it affect everything else? What I’m getting at here is that admins need to create customizations that will scale, rather than personalizations that will help only a few users and could create other issues in the org. The power of pushback Solving problems at scale means that sometimes it’s your job to push back. Your users might not understand why you’re asking so many questions about adding a simple checkbox, or even suspect that you don’t know how to fulfill the request at all. When he runs into this, David will explain that while the feature is easy to add, he needs to make sure that it actually solves the problem and doesn’t create other issues. The key here is to push back in a way that positions you as an ally, not an adversary, who is coming together with stakeholders to fix a problem. You’re a coach, a business therapist, a problem solver—in short, you’re on their side.  In all of his consulting work, the most useful question David can ask a client is, “What is the problem we are trying to solve?” Focus on that, and you can position yourself as a problem solver and grow your career. Podcast swag Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store Resources Build Your Admin Skills: Project Management, Business Analysis, and Product Management Strengthen Your Project Management Skills as a Salesforce Admin Social David: @DavidGiller Salesforce Admins: @SalesforceAdmns  Mike on Threads: https://www.threads.net/@mikegerholdt/ Mike on Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@salesforce.mike Mike on X: @MikeGerholdt Gillian on X: @GillianKBruce