Salesforce Admins Podcast

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Lizz Hellinga, Consultant and Salesforce MVP. Join us as we chat about why clean data is more important than ever if you want to leverage the potential of generative AI. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Lizz Hellinga. Generative AI needs clean data I brought Lizz on the pod to bring you an important message: clean data is no longer optional. “If your data isn’t ready for generative AI, your business isn’t ready,” she says. This was the theme of her presentation at Florida Dreamin’, and I thought it was something every admin needed to hear. Everyone is excited about the new generative AI tools coming to Salesforce and it’s potential to revolutionize how we use data. Something that Lizz feels gets lost in the conversation, however, is that these insights will only be as good as the data you use to generate them. That’s why clean data is more important than ever before. What is bad data? This naturally begs the question, what makes for bad data? Some common examples Lizz shares include: Duplicate data Inaccurate data Incomplete data Stale data Hoarded data Hoarded data sticks out to me as something that isn’t discussed as much. As Lizz explains, not too long ago we went through a phase of “more data = good.” This has led many organizations to blindly hold onto data they’ll never use but are too afraid to throw away. For Lizz, the key here is to work with your stakeholders to create a data governance policy. That way you’re clear on what data quality means for your organization and what data you don’t need to retain. As Lizz points out, reporting is a good opportunity to highlight why this is important to everyone involved. How to get started cleaning your data for generative AI When you’re looking at what data is most important to clean up for generative AI, Lizz recommends that you start by documenting the process you’re going to be working with. What are the essential data points in that journey? How does the data come in, and how can you make that easier? It’s hard to get people motivated to clean up their data. Whether it’s the end of the quarter or the beginning of the new one, it’s never the right time. For Lizz, you need to talk about the why. You need to sell your stakeholders on what generative AI can do to make their lives easier, and why you need high-quality data to do that. We get into a lot of specifics with Lizz on the podcast, so be sure to take a listen to learn more. And remember, now’s the time to clean up your data! Podcast swag Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store Resources Podcast: Sarah Flamion on Generative AI McKinsey Article: The data dividend: Fueling generative AI Clean Your Room! Dashboard Social Lizz:  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 Shannon Tran, Principal Architect Director at Salesforce. Join us as we chat about career changes, career progression, and chasing a vision. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Shannon Tran. The admin skill set is broad Shannon is just over a month into her new role as a Principal Architect Director at Salesforce, so I thought it would be the perfect time to have her on the pod to talk about careers and how admins can branch out. It’s easy to get caught up in a particular career path and chase the next title up the ladder, but that’s not the only way to grow your career. “The admin skill set is so broad,” Shannon says, “it can open so many doors for you.” She points to things we practice every day, like active listening or explaining technical processes, as examples of skills that can help you in a wide variety of roles. Get a swim buddy We all have different strengths and weaknesses, and it can feel like that creates walls for what we can and can’t do with our careers. As Shannon explains, we can invest a lot of time and energy into climbing over those walls, or we can look around and see if someone might be willing to offer us a ladder. In the Navy SEAL training program, every recruit is paired with a “swim buddy,” whose responsibility is to “support them unfailingly through the trials and tribulations of their rigorous training program.” Shannon recommends finding a swim buddy for your career, someone in the same place as you who can share the load as you both work towards your goals. Fake it till you make it When you’re looking at that next job, it’s easy to get caught up in what qualifications you don’t have. But Shannon reminds us to think about it from the job poster’s perspective. They don’t want to hire someone who can already do everything because they’ll pretty quickly get bored and move on. “Growing isn’t just growing your title, growing is growing in your role,” she says. The most important thing you do for your career is to believe in yourself and what you can accomplish. We talk a lot in this episode about the idea of “fake it till you make it” and how that’s been misunderstood. If you want to be a consultant, you don’t go around telling everyone you’re a consultant, you start acting like one. How would a consultant approach this problem? How would they document this process? Shannon has a lot of great stories and advice for how to take control of your Salesforce career, so be sure to listen to the full episode for more great tips and a free pep talk.   Podcast swag Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store Resources   Social 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 LeeAnne Rimel, Senior Director of Admin and Developer Strategic Content at Salesforce. Join us as we chat about the call for presentations for TrailblazerDX and why you should submit. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with LeeAnne Rimel. A focus on community at TDX TrailblazerDX isn’t until March, but our team is already hard at work on all the great stuff we’re planning for you. TDX has always been a unique opportunity to learn directly from the product owners and engineers behind your friendly neighborhood platform and, this year, we’re excited to create even more opportunities to engage and connect. It’s almost like an in-person version of the podcast. This year, we’re also programming all sorts of community-led content from Trailblazers like you. We want to dig into real-life use cases and implementations to see these products in action. That’s why LeeAnne asked me to come on the pod. She wants you (yes, you!) to submit a presentation and be a part of this year’s TDX. TDX is not just for devs TDX 2024 will be the AI developer conference of the year. We’ll be focused on how you can build the next generation of AI-powered apps for your business using Einstein 1. While Einstein AI is a big part of the picture, core platform technologies like user management, app building, dev ops, Apex, Flow, and APIs are all key ingredients in making these solutions work well. As LeeAnne says, “not every session has to be an AI session.” And also, just because it’s TDX doesn’t mean you have to be a developer in order to present. We want to hear from admins, architects, and ISVs, too. Different sessions in the CFP There are all sorts of ways to get involved. There are theater sessions focused on a specific product with demos and slides, but there are also more intimate and conversational campfire sessions. This year, we’re adding a new session type called the Deep Dive Panel. If you have a solution that you’ve built that could be interesting to look at in-depth, we’d love for you to share it at TDX. We’ll pair these real-world examples panel discussions with customer experts and Salesforce experts to break everything down. The CFP is open now, but it closes on December 1st. So get started on your title and abstract soon and I’ll see you at TDX! Podcast swag Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store Resources The TrailblazerDX 2024 Call for Participation Is Now Open! Social LeeAnne: @LeeAnndroid 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 Full Transcript Mike: Trailblazer DX is the AI developer conference of the year, where you can learn directly from product owners and engineers how to build the next generation of apps on the Einstein 1 Platform and take your career to the next level. So it only makes sense that we talk with LeeAnne Rimel, senior director of admin and developer strategic content, about the call for presentations for Trailblazer DX. Now before we get into that episode, I want you to get sure you're following the Salesforce Admins Podcast on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. That way, you get a new episode every Thursday right on your phone. So let's get to that conversation with LeeAnne. So LeeAnne, welcome to the podcast.  LeeAnne Rimel: Hi, Mike. Thanks so much for having me. Mike: It's November, but we're talking Trailblazer DX, which is in March. LeeAnne Rimel: It is, yes. We're talking about TDX. We never stop working on the next awesome event for our Trailblazer community. And we came off of Dreamforce and we dove right into TDX planning. Mike: I mean, it's nonstop. Right? All the time. LeeAnne Rimel: Nonstop. I love it. Mike: So let's talk about Trailblazer DX. What do we have so planned so far? And what do you want to talk about? LeeAnne Rimel: Yeah. So I'm incredibly excited for TDX this year. Actually, you and me both, Mike, have been around since the first TDX, which was in 2016. And to take us down memory lane a little bit, the origin story of TDX was very much around let's have a Salesforce developer conference and dive deep into product, connect with product owners, engineers, really make it about learning, about the technology, connection. And so we are really excited to have laser focus on those goals for this year's TDX. And really, I think TDX has always been about learning, but really dive in deeper to that deep learning, more technical content, more technical presenters, more technical opportunities to engage and connect and network, so we're super excited about this year's TDX. Mike: Yeah. I always feel like TDX is kind of an in-person version of the podcast because I get to sit down with product managers all the time and talk to them about what they built and how they built it, and some of the concepts behind why they built things, like dynamic forms and stuff like that. And TDX is almost like you get to do that in person. You get to see the person that actually built the thing that makes you successful every day on stage. LeeAnne Rimel: Absolutely. So some sessions and some of the content will be things that maybe if you did go to Dreamforce, or watched some of the Dreamforce content, there will be some similarities there. And then at TDX, that's what we're going to do wall to wall, is these roadmap sessions, deep dive technical product sessions, solution oriented sessions, community led, Trailblazer led sessions focused on real life solutions that they've built, so we're really excited to I think have that opportunity to have Q and A with PMs, have sessions that are really built around that model. So I think we're looking at some different session formats and different ways to really cultivate that opportunity for discussion and Q and A, and asking questions of people who are implementation experts and also experts in the products, experts in the roadmap, so that we're all walking away with some deep learning under our belt and really feel like we've gotten answers in key areas that we need to continue building.  Mike: Well, you mentioned, you teased out a little bit of the change in the format. I also saw there was for the first time, a public facing call for presentation, so that's new as well. LeeAnne Rimel: Yeah. So we're really looking at: How do we feature alongside all of this roadmap, technical deep dive content that we get from our engineers, from our PMs, from our solution architects, alongside that, how do we partner that type of content track with also community led content from our practitioners out in the field, if you will, our Trailblazers, who are hands on with these products every day and have built and learned a lot of lessons and built successful implementations with many of these different features and products, so that we can learn some of those real life stories and use cases? And so we're excited to see that. So yes, you mentioned the CFP. I'm going to do my little plug for the CFP. We will have dedicated community space and track, and we're really excited to feature our Trailblazer speakers at TDX, so I encourage all of you, I know you're going to link it in the show notes, Mike, to go through and submit your session idea. So that could be a theater session, which might involve more of a product coverage, more demos, more slides, as well as a campfire is another session option, which might be more conversational, more of a panel, maybe more career focused, maybe no demos or slides usually in campfire, so more of a kind of intimate conversational vibe. And then we also have a new option on the CFP for a deep dive panel. So if you have a solution that you've built that is well-suited to do kind of a deep dive, technical walk through, and then are willing to participate in a panel discussion afterwards, we're going to be introducing that on the CFP as well. So really look forward to seeing all of your ideas and session ideas come through the CFP. Mike: And the deep dive is a longer session version. So the amount of work and prep that would go into that's a little bit more than a breakout. Right? LeeAnne Rimel: Yes. It would be a bigger commitment to be sure. If you were involved or attended TDX '18 or '19, we had a session type called the extracurricular. And this is not exactly the same, but it's similar in many ways. It's a longer session format. We would be working together to identify people who would be on the panel with you, maybe a Salesforce product manager could be on the panel with you as well. So we have this kind of combination of customer experts and Salesforce experts. And yes, it would be a longer form presentation, so definitely more of a commitment, but really meaningful sessions. Mike: I think when I've submitted for call for presentations for other events, I've always kind of wanted to know: What is the main theme, or what is the main vision that the organization has for this event? Can you kind of help summarize that up? LeeAnne Rimel: Yes. So TDX is the AI developer conference of the year. So really, a huge focus of TDX will be: How do you build the next generation of AI apps on our Einstein 1 Platform? So how do you build apps, AI enabled apps for your business? And a key part of that, it's of course our Einstein product coverage, all of our new Einstein AI products that are coming out, as well as that core platform technologies, so user management, app building, devops, apex, flow, working with APIs, all of these core elements are incredibly important to build performant AI apps. And so I would encourage, not every session has to be an AI session, but of course AI sessions, very popular. But then these core technologies, what are those foundational lessons that help people build great apps? I mean, really going not back to basics, because we want to have some deep dive lessons, but going back to those fundamental tenets of: What do admins, developers, and architects and ISEs need to know in order to build performant apps that can be performant AI apps?  Mike: I know you said admin, architects, ISVs, but it's a developer conference. So if I'm an admin or an architect, should I submit to the CFP?  LeeAnne Rimel: Absolutely. So we definitely will have great learning experiences for developers and admins and architects and RISVs, so please submit your session. I think there is absolutely a very important place for all of those audiences. So we do call it a developer conference, but it's a wider reaching word developer that we're using here for really all of our technical practitioners will be prioritized at this conference and learning first for sessions, whether that's no code, low code, or code building, whether you're thinking about architectural tenets of building, or you're thinking about building partner app. Mike: One of the things that I've seen as a track leader at Dreamforce, and somebody that's submitted for other events is, it's real easy and I think sometimes people view it as beneficial to submit kind of 101 content because events are always looking for that, as opposed to the 301 content, where it's a deeper dive and it's super advanced. And it's like, "Maybe the event organizer isn't going to take this because it's so advanced, and they're going to be worried about putting 200, 300 people in a room. And my session isn't going to do that, so maybe I just shouldn't submit 301 content." What would you say to that? LeeAnne Rimel: Submit it. We need it. Looking at, I've spent a lot of time, Mike, I've spent a lot of time looking at the numbers, if you will, for all of our events. And I spend a lot of time looking at who comes to Salesforce events, and to TDX, or to the Trailblazer Forest and tracks of Dreamforce. And there is a wide range of skill levels and a wide range of expertise levels with all of our products and features across all of our audiences. So there are absolutely admins and developers that are attending these events who have successfully built many flows, or know what they're doing, and they want to see these niche solutions that may be much more advanced, or maybe much more technical. They want to go beyond maybe the learning tools that have already been available to them. And so I think definitely submit those. I think we're going to be looking for very much a breadth, so if you feel very well-versed to present an amazing flow 101 type session, please submit that. If you want to share some really edge cases of how you are pushing the limits with Salesforce technologies and building great solutions with them, and it is more advanced and it requires an existing skillset, submit that as well. We'll be looking for the whole breadth of level.  Mike: Yeah. I've always felt like if you've gone to an event and felt, I could be presenting all of this, then that's what you should be doing, so that the event gets to that next level, so that more people like yourself can get farther into the learning journey, as opposed to letting it sort of plateau. What, if people are sitting down and kind of looking at their first quarter of the year, what else? We have sessions planned for TDX, how is that whole experience kind of planned out? What are we doing more of? LeeAnne Rimel: Yeah, more learning. I mean, that's if there's a TL;DR, it's going to be more deep technical learning. That's going to be the experience this year. We'll of course have workshops. We're going to have hopefully more workshops, more breakouts, really deep diving into more learning, more sessions. We will still absolutely have wonderful opportunities to connect and to network. So having special programming for some of our attendees, and having Q and As, and having spaces and opportunities to connect with your peers and with other Trailblazers and with product owners. Of course, we're going to have fun. That's always one of our values. Mike: Do you know the band? Do we know the ... Is there a band?  LeeAnne Rimel: I do not know the band.  Mike: That's okay. It's fine. LeeAnne Rimel: But the really having fun, diving in, connecting with the community partners, activities, events, so we're really excited about that, and then of course, giving back. How can we always build giving back into our experience? So I think if you're coming to TDX, I think it'll feel different than last year. I think TDX has not been around as long as Dreamforce, and I think we've always kind of been open to really listening to our customers and our community, and fine-tuning and shifting and changing and growing TDX. And so I think this year, we've heard very much from our community that deep learning, connecting with experts, that's what I want at TDX. And so that's what we are working on right now to really prioritize and deliver.  Mike: Okay. So LeeAnne, it sounds like step one is really thinking about if you want to submit to the call for presentations. Can you give us just a quick overview of that and when it closes? LeeAnne Rimel: Yes. So the call for presentations, often called the CFP, so we use those interchangeably, the CFP is open right now. It opened at the beginning of November. It is closing on December 1st, and it is not a quick thing to write your title and abstract because you want to be thoughtful. We pick the sessions based on great titles and abstracts, and so you want to be thoughtful about it. So give yourself some time to sit down and really workshop and work on your title and abstract and make sure it represents the content you'd like to deliver. So the next step for all of you is to ... I recommend visit the CFP blog. It's got a great overview of the CFP and adds additional clarity and reiterates some of those points that I made around the session types and what type of content is the right fit for each session type. Read the blog, start working and start thinking about your session that you'd like to submit, and send us your submission. I think we really want to see your submissions and we really want to learn from our community and make sure that our attendees have the opportunity to learn from our community. And so, Mike, I think you had an excellent point earlier when you said, "If you've ever been at an event and you said, 'We need more X content, or I could be delivering this content,'" please do it. We want fresh, new faces. We're very excited to open this opportunity up and to learn from our Trailblazers. So please consider submitting your CFP. Read the blog first, I do recommend. It just offers some helpful insight. Mike: Awesome. Well, thanks so much, LeeAnne, for coming on the podcast. LeeAnne Rimel: Thanks for having me, Mike. Mike: Trailblazer DX is an AI conference for admins, developers, and architects. I can't wait to see some of the things that are going to be presented there. Now please share this episode with somebody because I mean, seriously, sharing is caring. And I love the podcast. Do you have thoughts on this episode? Let me know in the Trailblazer community. I'll link it in the show notes. You want to learn more about everything that you heard today? Check out admin.salesforce.com for show notes and a transcript of the podcast. So that's it for today, but stay tuned because next week, we're joined by Shannon Tran, who gives us her take on career growth and not chasing titles.   

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Cheryl Feldman, Director of Product Management at Salesforce covering all user access features.   Join us as we chat about best practices for configuring user access and what Cheryl is working on to help you out.   You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Cheryl Feldman. Everything user access We’re so excited to have Cheryl back on the pod to talk permissions and more. As a product area lead, she’s in charge of all the features you use every day to define user access and user management. Think things like user records, profiles, permission sets, permission set groups, roles, org-wide default, etc.   As an admin and manager of admin for 18 years, Cheryl recognizes just how much work goes into configuring user access. That’s why her team is hard at work to make everything easier for you and, in the meantime, she’s here to share best practices that might help you out. The right amount of access Cheryl recommends thinking about user access from the eye of the principle of least privilege “You want to think about the least amount of access somebody needs to do their job, you don’t want to give them any less or any more,” she says. Think about if you have a bunch of personas that need object access to the account object. If you do that via profiles, you’d need to go through every profile and modify them if something changes. It’s simpler, instead, to create one wide permission set for all of your account access and then use permission set groups to mute what you don’t want. It’s definitely a lot of work to set up, but it’ll save you so much time in the long run because your permission sets can be reused. What’s next for user access in Salesforce If you’re looking to evaluate user access in your org, you should know that Cheryl and her team have put out several tools to help you. They’ve created an app, User Access and Permissions Assistant, that helps you understand what a user has access to and how they are getting that access. And there’s more coming in the Winter ‘24 release, including user access reporting on standard reports and dashboards. Looking forward, they’re releasing a new feature (currently in beta) called User Access Policies. It allows you to describe the type of users you want added to a specific group, or permission set, or profile, and automatically assign them to it when a user is created or updated. Cheryl is on a mission to, as she puts it, “summary all of the things.” It shouldn’t be so hard to figure out what a user has access to and why. That’s why she needs your help. Check out the links below to the IdeaExchange to see if you might be able to join Cheryl on her quest to simplify user access in Salesforce. Podcast swag Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store Resources Video series: Who Sees What in Salesforce App: User Access and Permissions Assistant Feature: Enable User Access Policies (Beta) IdeaExchange: ​​View & Manage Object CRUD Access in Object Manager IdeaExchange: Access Summary on User Social Cheryl: @CherFeldman 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 Ajaay Ravi, Senior Technical Product Manager at Salesforce.   Join us as we chat about AI, Einstein for Flow (which at the time of the recording was called Flow GPT), and why admins should pay close attention.   You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Ajaay Ravi. Do Androids Dream of Bohemian Furniture? Ajaay learned a lot about AI when he led a team at Amazon tasked with building technology to recommend furniture. The only problem was that they were all engineers and didn’t know the first thing about interior design. They brought in some experts who could tell them what individual components made something a particular style, and used their knowledge to train the AI by giving it high-quality data in bite-sized pieces that it could understand.   What’s important to understand here is that any AI model requires training. And to do that, you need to break a concept like “furniture style” down into tags like “upholstery,” “seat,” “legs,” “paisley,” etc. Then you can give it a group of tagged images to try to teach it a broader concept, like “Bohemian.” Finally, you test it to see if it can identify new images that have Bohemian furniture in them, give the model feedback on how it did, and start the loop again. Einstein for Flow For Salesforce, Ajaay has been building Einstein for Flow. The goal is to create a tool where you can just describe the automation you need and it will build you a flow—automagically. They’re still in the testing and training phase but the possibilities are tantalizing.   Depending on what type of user you are, you might use Einstein for Flow in several different ways. For those that are already experienced with Flow, you can leverage it to eliminate some steps and work faster. And for people newer to the ecosystem, Ajaay hopes it can remove barriers to unlocking the full potential of the platform. Learning to crawl Just like with the interior design tool Ajaay built earlier in his career, Einstein for Flow needs some time to learn. For now, they’re focused on building simple flows of five steps or less with minimal decision elements and branches. But it’ll only get better as they keep working on it and getting feedback from test users.   Be sure to check out the full episode for more about what makes for a good prompt, what you can do to get ready for Einstein for Flow, and how AI can “hallucinate.”   Podcast swag Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store Learn more Sarah Flamion on Generative AI Social Connect with Ajaay on LinkedIn 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 Full Transcript Mike: Hey, Salesforce Admins. I am bringing back an episode that you might've missed in July, where we talked about what was then called Flow GPT. It's now called Einstein for Flow. And now that we're past Dreamforce, we can kind of dive into it a little bit more. This is a really cool product that Salesforce is working on. And way back in July, I had the privilege of speaking with Ajaay Ravi, who is an engineer with Salesforce and, really, the tip of the spear working on all of this. We talk about AI and GPT and what is now Einstein for Flow, and really just why you as a Salesforce Admin should pay attention to it. So I want to call that out. Also, because we recorded this back in July, we do say “Einstein GPT” a lot, or “Flow GPT.” Of course, that naming convention has been changed, so we couldn't really go back through and change that. But this is a good episode. Dig into it. Before you get into it, though, I just want to be sure you're doing one thing and you're following the podcast. So if you're just listening to this for the first time and you're not subscribed on iTunes or Spotify, go ahead and click that follow or subscribe button. And then, that way, every time a new podcast drops, which is Thursday morning, it'll be automatically put on your phone. And so you don't have to worry about it. And then you can just get in your car and ride to work or the train or ride your bike or take your dog for a walk. But anyway, this is a really fun conversation about Einstein for Flow with Ajaay. Ajaay Ravi: Thank you, Mike. Happy to be here. Mike: We're talking about AI and GPT, and I feel like you are the right person to do that, so let's start off by just giving everybody a background on your history of AI and GPT and how you got to Salesforce. Ajaay Ravi: Yeah, absolutely. Primarily, I have an engineering background and I used to design hardware chips, primarily networking and storage chip sets, and then I moved into the management carrier after doing my MBA. My initial brush with AI was at my previous job at Amazon, so I was a product manager. I did create a product called Shop by Style, which is live on Amazon Home. Essentially, it deals with how do you sell furniture, heavy, bulky home furnishings to customers via the phone and online. Traditionally, those are things that customers would like to walk into a store, touch, see, feel, and then figure out if it passes the squish test or not, and then purchase it. But then our focus was on how do we actually get customers to imagine what a particular piece of furniture will look like inside their own house and how do we enable every single person to become an interior designer of sorts and give them the skillset to do that? So that's where we put together a team of computer vision scientists and we said, "Let's go and let's teach an AI model how to recognize style and stylistically put furniture together," and we realized that none of us knew anything about style or interior design, given that all of us had engineering backgrounds, and we were like, "Oops, what do we do now?" And then, to be very honest with you, I did not know what Bohemian meant, and what is the difference between industrial and glam and California casual and... Mike: Farmhouse chic. Don't forget about that. Ajaay Ravi: Absolutely. Farmhouse chic. Mike: Yep. Ajaay Ravi: So one of my first design [inaudible 00:03:01] was to hire some interior designers, actually new college grads fresh out of school. And they had two things. One was they had to come and teach blokes like us what style was about, and educate us on design and design concepts. And then they helped go through every single product or home furnishings product that Amazon sold, and tagged every single image with what style it pertained to. And that's when I realized that a single piece of furniture could also pertain to multiple different styles, and you had to break it down into the components. You had to see what kind of arm it had, what kind of upholstery, what kind of leather, what kind of back, what kind of seat, what kind of cushioning. Oh my God, they did a wonderful job. So that was one of our first inputs into our computer vision models, and then we started teaching the computer how to discern style. And then we put together this product called Shop by Style, where now the AI could automatically go in and if there was a product that a seller or anybody posted on Amazon, it would automatically look at the images that they post and determine what kind of style it pertained to. A particular piece of furniture could pertain to multiple styles too. And then the best piece was depending on what it is that you're browsing, it could also recommend stylistically appropriate complementary products to go with it. For example, if you were looking at a couch, it could help you complete the look by suggesting a coffee table and an end table and a lamp to go with it. So that was my first foray into everything AI-related. And essentially, we used things like AR and VR. Then how do we show these pictures on a phone and get you to just take a picture of your room from your phone and then superpose these images at scale, on that picture, and then help you visualize if you purchased all these things and put it in your house and whatever places that you wanted to, how would it look like and complete the look for you? So yeah, that's where I started. And then, after my time at Amazon, I moved into Salesforce. Seattle was getting a little too... Mike: Rainy? Ajaay Ravi: ... rainy and cold and snowy for my liking. Mike: Oh, no. Ajaay Ravi: So as I like to tell people, I've spent three years in Cincinnati in the Midwest and I've paid my dues to the Midwest, and given that Seattle was starting to get snowy, I wanted to get out of there. So yeah, that brought me back to my origins here in the Bay Area. And then, yeah, it's been a wonderful journey with Salesforce. I started off as a product owner on the Marketing Cloud Einstein team, where we were building AI-driven products to help marketers reach their customers at the right time, on the right channel, with the right frequency to help them be successful and help sell more products to their customers. Mike: Well, I can speak on behalf of maybe thousands of bachelors across the world that you've helped at Amazon design cool living rooms as a thank you, because that's generally how I shop when I'm on Amazon is I find one thing I like and then everything else that goes with it. Yes, I'll take all of that. I need basically that room. So thanks for inventing that and making us look good. Ajaay Ravi: Yeah. Well, you are very welcome. Like I said, I had an absolutely wonderful team that worked the magic behind the scenes, so I can't take all the credit for it. Mike: Yeah, so I feel like I should just upfront let you know, I'm going to ask a lot of stupid questions or questions that I feel are stupid, but are questions that I think everybody's trying to figure out. In your description, you talked about furniture and having these interior designers come in and tag the images with the style. And when Salesforce launched a lot of Salesforce Einstein and the Einstein product and Next Best Action, a lot of the discussion for admins was, "Okay, we need to make sure our data's good so that we can train the data model," and it sounds like that was something you were working on. I bring that up because the juxtaposition now that I feel is, and I did this the other day, I went to ChatGPT. I didn't train it on a data model. I just asked it, write a one paragraph summary of X, Y, and Z, and it did that. So, long question short, can you help me understand the difference between when you were training that data model to show only Bohemian-style furniture versus what's happening when I just type in a text prompt with ChatGPT? Ajaay Ravi: Absolutely. Yeah, that is actually a fantastic question. So whether you're typing a text-based input on ChatGPT or it is something more sophisticated and targeted that you're looking for, any kind of AI model that runs behind the scenes requires training. Even these LLMs or large language models as we talk about, like OpenAI's ChatGPT, that is also pre-trained on multiple different kinds of inputs and the responses and texts, just that we don't go in and personally train those models. Those models are already pre-trained and they are hosted by ChatGPT, which we just access. Mike: Okay. Ajaay Ravi: So the way I like to talk about models are I have a two-year-old and a four-month-old at home. It's like trying to teach them anything about how to communicate or language or anything in general. If I go to my younger one, who's four months old, and I try to talk to him, sometimes I try to talk world politics or philosophy, he just blinks back at me and all he says is, "Baba." Mike: That's all sometimes I say too, when people talk world politics with me. Ajaay Ravi: Well, that is true. Unfortunately, I'm not good at talking baby language, I guess, when my wife drops me off with him. I need to find topics to talk to him about, so I just scroll the news and then I'm like, "Hey, do you want to hear about a new piece of news today?" Anyway, that's how my interactions go with him. It was the same with my two-year-old as well when he was an infant. But then you have to constantly keep, one, talking to them, and two, keep introducing them to these new simpler concepts because their mind is like a blank slate, and then they start forming these connections and maps as you keep trying to do things, as you keep trying to tell them things. And you have to keep repeating. It's not only just once if you tell them, they just get it right out of the bat. Another example is my toddler recently, I told him he shouldn't be kicking the ball on the road when there's nobody present. And I thought he would understand that, hey, balls should not be kicked on the road. And what he understood was that particular ball, which was a soccer ball that he had, should not be kicked on the road. So he brings his basketball next and he is like, "Dad, can I kick this ball on the road?" Mike: I like your kids. Ajaay Ravi: Yeah. And then I realized my instruction to him was wrong because I did not specify the fact that any kind of ball should not be kicked on the road. I just said, "Don't kick that ball on the road." So that's how it comes in. That's how you think about when you're training models. You have a certain kind of inputs that you're training the models on. For example, let's go back for the training that model to recognize furniture style. So essentially, if you look at training, it consists of two pieces. One is you have a training data set and the other one is you have a testing data set. So you first train a model to recognize or do something, and then you test it against various other inputs to see how it responds to your test scenario. So the thing is, you can't train it for all the scenarios that include your test also, because then tomorrow, if there is a scenario that comes up that it doesn't know about or that it hasn't seen, then it will react in a way that you don't expect it to react. So what I mean by that is, going back to this ball example, I needed to tell my son repeatedly that he cannot kick the soccer ball on the road without supervision, he cannot kick the basketball on the road, and he cannot kick his bouncy ball on the road. So I had to tell him one after the other, patiently answer his questions. And then what I did was I just brought a tennis ball and then I gave it to him and I said, "What do you want to do with this?" And then he finally was like, "No, I'm not going to kick it on the road because dad said no kicking any ball on the road." I was like, "Okay, you finally got it," so that's essentially the thing. So you try to train a model by giving it a few inputs. For example, what we did was we took 300 pictures of different furniture types that were Bohemian, and then we broke it down and you have to do what is called labeling or tagging. And then we labeled each one of those parts. For example, what is the arm? What was the seat, the cushion, the upholstery, the legs, the back, the arch of the back? And all of that, and then we gave it to the model and we said, "Hey, if you see this tag and this image, and if you can understand that this tag pertains to this image, these are what constitute Bohemian." So it repeatedly looked through all those 300 sets of images and tags that we provided, and it formed a neural network where it was like, "Okay, I think I now understand what Bohemian looks like." And the next step, what we need to do is the testing after the training is now we give it 600 new images that it has not seen, and then we tell it, "Now go and find out if this is Bohemian or not." And then of course you expect it to get it right at least a fair few number of times. And then every time it gets it wrong, you provide feedback. You tell it, "Hey, for this image, you got it wrong." And then it learns from that feedback. So over time, the accuracy improves. That is what training constitutes. It's the same thing for the large language model. If you look at OpenAI, whatever text you're typing in today, there are billions of users across the world who have been typing in everything that ranges from, "Write me a poem for Mother's Day," to what I recently did was I wanted an overnight oats recipe that did not use nuts, so different kinds of inputs from billions of people around the world. It's continually learning. And then the best part is that is also feedback that is captured. And every time you think that ChatGPT hasn't gotten something right, you hit that thumbs down button so ChatGPT knows the model which was trained on some training data is now being used against testing data, and then it learns as it keeps going and then it keeps getting better. And there's the same thing with the internal models that we have in Salesforce as well. One of the coolest things that we're working on right now is called Einstein GPT for Flow, because, as we know, Flow is a very nuanced and sophisticated product that our admins use. So we were just thinking about, "Hey, there is this new GPT feature where you can just talk to it in natural language and it can do something really technical and cool and just give you an output. Why don't we take that and try to help our customers and just have them describe a flow that they want to create?" And then we just automatically create it for them. They don't have to go through the steps of opening Flow Builder, bringing in different elements, actually configuring them, connecting them, and going into the property editors and making sure that they have the right information because all of this is time-consuming. What if we just had them describe in two sentences or three sentences what it is that they're trying to do and then voila, just go ahead and automatically create it for them? So that I think is a long-winded answer to your question. Mike: No, it's good. And you took us there because I did want to talk about why Salesforce is paying attention to GPT and what we're trying to do with Flow GPT, because I feel like at least my interaction so far with this new tech is, "Tell me how many pizzas to order for a birthday party," or like you did, "Help me find a recipe." And I'm thinking, so what are we trying to do here at Salesforce with that? But you tipped the answer of have the person describe essentially the automation that they need created in Salesforce, and then so what exactly are we trying to do with Flow GPT? Do we want it to create the entire flow? Do we want it to just get started or return a nice image of a pirate cat? Ajaay Ravi: That is a lovely way of putting it. I would like a pirate cat. So what we are trying to do is just, in very simple terms, make life easy for our customers. And that could mean different things for different people. For certain people, it might mean reducing the amount of time that they spent in trying to create these flows. For certain people, probably the barriers to entry or adoption is pretty high where they feel like they're new users and there are just a million options that are available for them. They don't know where to start. And there are some users who are like, "I manage multiple things during my day. I wear so many different hats, so I need some kind of personal assistant for me who can help do some mundane tasks if I just ask them to go do it without me doing it." So there are these different kinds of use cases. So with Flow, what we are trying to solve is whatever it is for you that makes your life easy. Let's say you're an admin and let's say you are somebody who's an expert user of flow, how do we help save some time for you? So before I go there, there's one thing that I would like to mention. It is with anything that is AI and training-related, as they say, Rome wasn't built in a day, so you have to crawl, walk, and then run. Because it takes time initially for that training to happen, and then the testing is the slow crawling phase where the model starts learning. And then once the model slowly starts getting better, then you can start adding more complexity to the point where you can now start walking and then finally you can start running. For example, with my two-year-old, I can only talk to him about balls in the road and kicking the ball right now. I still can't go and talk to him about algebra and trigonometry. He's not going to understand that. So my natural progression should be, I talk about this, and the next thing is I've taught him how to count from one to 10, and he can go up to 11 today, but that's all he can do. So he first has to figure out how to get to about a hundred, how to do some basic math additions and subtractions, and then once these initial few foundational years, you do it correctly, and then that running phase is very simple because at that point he would start grasping things much faster, and then algebra and trigonometry would become much easier. Similarly, here, our crawl phase is we are going to start with simpler flows. Can we go ahead and reliably create flows that are four or five steps long, for example, that do not have multiple decision elements, multiple branches, just have simple formulas and things like that, or maybe even simple MuleSoft connectors and do something very simple? For example, as an admin, if there are let's say five different kinds of flows that you wanted to create, out of which two are simple, and we can help save some time for you by creating those simple flows ,if you just come in and say, "Hey, I want to send an email when a lead is converted to an opportunity and just send that email to this email address," done. We can go ahead and create it for you. We don't want you to go into Flow Builder, open it up, and spend all the time in doing it when you have other things to do with your time. And like I said, there are some people who would want to come in and who are like, "Hey, Flow has a million options." Crawl here, which is basic flows. "I want to create some basic flows. I want to know how these flows are created, but what if I can just describe what I want and you can create a simple flow for me and then I can go and look it up, and maybe I understand how it actually works?" So that is essentially what we're trying to do here is make life easy and simple for our customers. Mike: Yeah. No, that makes sense. As I've heard you describe this, and the ball analogy with your children I think is perfect, one thing that I just want to bounce this idea off you and see if I'm correct, can you tell me how important it will be for admins to correctly articulate what they want Flow GPT to do? Ajaay Ravi: That is an excellent question. So with anything GPT-related, your output or whatever you get out of it at the end of the day is going only going to be as good as what your input was or what you told it that you wanted. And given that natural language is something that is very subjective and different people can understand things in different ways, it is very, very important that we get that input very correct. So we call that as an input prompt, because prompt is the term that is used for anything that's natural language-related. So there are two things here. One is as we are training, we are trying to train the model to look for certain keywords in that input prompt and make certain decisions. So for example, if it looks at, "Create an email when a lead is converted into an opportunity," so the model recognizes the word lead there and says, "Okay, fine," so it is going to be a record keyword flow on the object called lead, and it makes those assumptions as it looks at the prompt. In this initial crawl phase, it is very important for us to make sure that our admins that we are working with help give us as much detail as possible in those prompts, because the more specific they are, the higher are the chances of getting a more reliable output. And then, like I said, the second piece that is more important is feedback. So we are trying to collect feedback from customers. We don't want to take up too much of their time. Something as simple as a thumbs up, thumbs down mechanism. If you think that we really got the flow correct and we got the output that you expected or you wanted, just give us a thumbs up so we know, or if you think we were off target, give us a thumbs down, so what we would do is we would go take your feedback and then look at the prompt that you had and see where we missed. Why did we misunderstand your prompt? How can we get better? The other thing is, to get absolutely great, if you were also to go in and create the right flow that you expected for the input prompt that you created and you gave us permission to access that. Now, that would be absolutely wonderful because not only do we know that we got it wrong, but we also have the right one that you were expecting or you wanted, so we can train our models even better, but again, that's a long shot. I'm not even going to go all the way there. As long as you can give me feedback to say it was thumbs up or thumbs down, then I can start training the model to better understand what your intent is and have it stop what is called hallucinating in the GPT world. Hallucination is when the prompt can start just going into some kind of loops and then the output is not always technically correct and it doesn't get you what it is that you wanted. Mike: Wow. Ajaay Ravi: And then at the same time, there are two things here. As far as we're talking about Flow GPT or Einstein GPT for Flow, one is we should be able to reliably get you a flow that can be rendered on the Flow canvas. And then the second piece is how accurate was that? So right now in the first stage, what we are targeting is to be able to reliably get you a flow. So whatever input prompt that you type in, and of course this is subject to ethical and legal guidelines. So whatever input prompt you type in, we want to make sure that we can take it, translate it, create a flow, and then render the flow on the canvas. That in itself is a very hard problem. And once we solve that, the next step is did we get that correctly? Did we understand your intent? Then how do we tune ourselves to make sure that every time there is a prompt, we actually understand it correctly? And actually, we can even take this one step further. There is something called prompt engineering that is being discussed these days, is when as a customer or as an admin, they type their prompt, how do we help? Think about it as fill in the blanks. Can we provide you with a template of sorts where you just come in and say what kind of inputs and what kind of outputs to use? You just fill in certain blanks. Or can we add certain deterministic descriptions to those prompts above and below what you write in order to make sure that we pass on the right information to the model? So the reason there is a lot of research and work that's going on around prompt engineering these days is people have come to realize that that input prompt is so important to get the correct outputs. Mike: Yeah, no, and I'll actually link to a podcast. We talked with Sarah Flamion at Salesforce about prompt engineering and the importance of it back in June, so you can see that podcast episode. I think as we wrap up, Ajaay, I'd love to know, I can't get my hands on Flow GPT. Admins can't. That's a thing that's coming. Absent of that, from your perspective, what advice would you give admins to get ready for Flow GPT? Ajaay Ravi: That is a great question. Yeah. Shortly, whenever you see that Flow GPT is available, please do go ahead and use Flow GPT as much as possible, because the more you use it and the more input prompts that you specify, the better it will become with the days and with the years. So eventually, there will come a point when you have a really complicated use case that could probably take days to set up, which Flow GPT can go and do it for you in seconds. But it takes all of us to come together with those simpler use cases at the offset or at the start and then provide that feedback. Even if it is as simple as just indicating thumbs up, thumbs down, please do do that. And yeah, we will make your life simpler and better as we go together. Mike: You make it sound so easy, so go out and don't learn to kick a ball down a street. That's what I heard. Ajaay Ravi: That's precisely what it is, if you're on the street. Mike: This has been fun. You are a fountain of knowledge. You probably have forgotten more about GPT than most of us know to date, so I appreciate you taking time to be on the podcast with us. Ajaay Ravi: Absolutely, Mike. It was lovely talking to you. Mike: So, that was fun. I learned a lot. I didn't know AI could hallucinate. This is a new thing. Learning together, folks. Now, if you enjoyed the episode, can you do me a favor? Just share it with one person. If you're listening on iTunes, all you need to do is tap the dots and choose, Share Episode. Then you can post it to social, you can text it to a friend. If you're looking for more great resources, your one stop for literally everything admin is admin.salesforce.com. We even include a transcript of the show. And be sure to join our conversation in the Admin Trailblazer group, which is on the Trailblazer community. Don't worry, there's a lot of links, a lot of things I mentioned. All of that is in the show notes for this episode. So until next week, we'll see you in the cloud.  

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Johnjoe Mena, a self-taught admin and Systems Associate Analyst at Salesforce.   Join us as we chat about how to get started teaching yourself Salesforce and what to do when you feel overwhelmed.   You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Johnjoe Mena. Working his way up Johnjoe worked his way up at Salesforce from the mailroom—literally. “I still didn’t know what Salesforce was when I started working there,” he says, “but in my first and second years I learned so much.”   Johnjoe soon found himself at Dreamforce, working the trading post. As he was handing out prizes to customers, he came to a realization. “Every time I would hand a gift out, I would tell myself this could be me one day,” he says. The next day, he logged into Trailhead for the first time. Getting started on Trailhead One thing we hear from people all the time is how overwhelming it can feel to get started in Trailhead. With so many options, there can be a bit of decision paralysis in deciding what to do next. For Johnjoe, it was knowing when to step back and look at the big picture. He took a break and asked himself, “Why am I doing this in the first place?”   Johnjoe shortly came across the Credentials page, and that’s when everything started to fall into place. Looking through the overview of all of the different roles in the ecosystem, he found himself drawn to the admin page and got some guidance on what to do next. “Once I found the Admin Trailmix, the overwhelm went away,” he says, “everything started working for me after that.” What to do when Trailhead feels overwhelming One of the most amazing parts about Johnjoe’s story is that he managed to skill up into an admin role while working a full-time job. He leaned on Trailhead GO to get through reading material when he had time to fit it in, like on his commute. And he also points out that once you get started, Trailhead has a way of snowballing as you work towards your goals.   Finally, Johnjoe advises you to go at your own pace and not compare yourself to other people. Sure, there are people out there with a ridiculous number of badges but it’s not a race. We’re all still learning—what’s important is to find a path that works for you.   Be sure to listen to the full episode to learn more about how Johnjoe got started at Salesforce in the first place, and why nothing beats hands-on experience.   Podcast swag Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store Resources Trailhead: Credentials Trailhead GO Admin Trailmix Social 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 Full Transcript Mike Gerholdt: This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we're talking to Johnjoe Mena, or JJ, about learning Salesforce literally from scratch, from the very beginning. JJ is an actual Salesforce admin here at Salesforce, which I find super cool. I mean, you're the admin at Salesforce. And he just got a promotion to systems associate analyst, and we cover a lot. Boy, let me tell you, this is a great episode. Now, before we get into it, I want to make sure you're doing something, and that is following the Salesforce Admins Podcast on iTunes or Spotify, wherever you're listening to us, because if you're doing that, then you're automatically going to get new episodes every Thursday right on your phone. They come out in the morning. We try to hit that early morning so that you've got it right away. If you're on East Coast drive time, Midwest, Mountain, especially West Coast, you're going to have them before you even wake up. So be sure to do that, because then, your phone is just going to grab the newest one, like this one, and you're not going to miss out on some amazing stuff that JJ has to give us. With that, let's get into our conversation with JJ. JJ, welcome to the podcast. Johnjoe Mena: Hey, Mike, how's it going? Mike Gerholdt: Good. Why don't we get started, because you and I chatted before this and you have an amazing story. You also did a lot of work and helped the admin relations team out at Dreamforce this year in the Admin Meadow, because I got an email from one of my team members about having you on the podcast. But to introduce you, I'd love for you to get everybody up to speed to where you're at now, but if you could go back to the days of salad and give us a brief overview of how we got to the podcast today, but starting with the days of salad, I would appreciate that. Johnjoe Mena: Yeah, of course. As in the beginning, I started as a salad maker at Mixed Greens, located in San Francisco, California, which was about a two, three minute walk to the Salesforce building. I worked there for about a year and a half, and in that year and a half, I've met a recruiter. And he would always come in, come get his lunch, we'd always just chat, just talk about life. And the more and more he came, we just started getting closer and closer, building a connection. And out of nowhere without even asking anything about where he worked or anything, he just asked, "Hey, are you looking for a job?" I said, "Yeah, I'm looking for something. I don't have much on my resume." And he said, "Don't worry about it. Just send me what you have, and then, I'll connect you." That same day, after he gave me his card, I went home home and my wife helped me write my resume because I didn't have anything on it other than working at the salad place, send it to him. Two days later, he called me saying that he got me a job in the Salesforce mail room at HQ. And then, from there, when I started at Salesforce is when ... I still didn't know what Salesforce was when I started Salesforce, which is funny, but as my first and second year I was at Salesforce, I learned so much about what Salesforce was and what they did. And I just would poke my nose around where I shouldn't have and just looking through content, things that Salesforce provided for free. And I was also able to work with Vanessa Ng, who was on the Trailhead team, and she asked me to help at Dreamforce, at the booth. I think a lot of people know the trading posts where you hand out the gifts for going to demos, trails, you get prizes. That's really where it really motivated me, when customers would come and they would come pick up their prize and they would say, "I'm here for my prize. I'm an admin, I'm a developer," and me handing them a prize motivated me to start this career as a Salesforce admin because every time I would hand a gift out, I would just tell myself, "This could be me one day, me being on the other side, as an admin." And I think going and working at Dreamforce and being in that environment just really motivated me. And then, right after that, I really got into Trailhead, I started doing, figuring out how to work Trailhead, I took classes. And then, once I got my admin cert, I started doing nonprofit work for Salesforce. And then, I would just say my career just took off, really. And then, now, where I'm at now, if we fast forward now, I'm a Salesforce admin for the real estate department, but I got promoted to a systems associate analyst now, but I still do the same work, admin slash developer work. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. No, that's cool, and I think there's a lot of relatable parts to your story. Also, by the way, I really like Mixed Greens. I've been there. That steak salad is wonderful. I also feel like it's the joke on some Midwestern commercials where the guy goes to pay, and it's like 1975. It's like, "No, I'm just paying for my salad." It's funny if you live in the Midwest, because we don't expect salads to be that much, but it's interesting because you got a job here at Salesforce, so you're very immersed in our culture, which obviously, not everybody is, or not everybody listening to the podcast is, but the way that you learned Salesforce, the platform, was the same way that anybody can learn it, which was through Trailhead. And then, you also, I think, got a very unique perspective when you worked our training post booth, I think it was at TDX or Dreamforce too, to see the joy of people getting plushies and T-shirts and stuff. I'm curious, we'll go back to those days. You got a job here at Salesforce, but then, it's also, hey, I want to learn the platform. As somebody, and this is a lot of people, as somebody that's getting started in Trailhead, where did you start? What was the thing you sat down and said, "Oh, I'm going to do these modules first?" Johnjoe Mena: For me, when I first started Trailhead, it's a lot of stuff on Trailhead so you can get lost, but something that stood out to me when, even just on the homepage, really, was credentials. When you see credentials ... It just stood out to me. And when I saw it, I was like ... I would browse the modules that were there, the today ones, the ones that you can do off the bat just when you get on the homepage. But once I got into credentials and I started looking at the roles and I saw it said Salesforce admin, and then, as you look at what they offer, they have trail mix that you can just click and they have all of the modules for you in line and it's like a school, kind of. They give you all these courses in order for you to do so that you can learn what the product is, how the product works, and then, how to use it. For me, those credentials, doing the certified admin trail mix is what really helped me just learn really what Salesforce was, and then, what an admin does. And I think having that trail mix ... I think trail mixes are awesome, awesome things, because they're just a bunch of trails put together for you, but you don't have to go looking for, what trail should I do next? Or if you do a trail and then you click on the next one, sometimes, it can take you to different parts of Salesforce. You start learning one thing, and then, you learn another thing, another product. But the trail mixes, I feel like they're very focused on that one product, that one learning, and that's what really helped me because, like I said before, I didn't know anything about Salesforce. And then, doing the admin one, it teaches you about what Salesforce is as a company, and then, it goes into the product of what the product is, what the features are, and then, how to use the features. Trail mixes is the best thing, I think, that could be created for me, personally, because even for school, it's when the teacher gives you an assignment, you do it. The trail mixes, you see them like, "Okay, I got to do this one. And then, next, I got to do this one." And then, that momentum starts building. You know? Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. No, I completely ... Many in the afternoons I start and think, I'm just going to do these one or two trails, and then, it's almost like potato chips. Then, you're half a bag in, didn't even know you went that far. How did you get past that feeling of scrolling around and seeing how much content there was and just being completely overwhelmed? Johnjoe Mena: I would have to say that I took a break from Trailhead for a moment when I did get overwhelmed, when I started looking into Trailhead and I started doing trails and ... I really didn't know what I was doing because there's no ... You get badges and you get points, but it doesn't say, "Oh, you're building up to get a certification or any kind of certificate or anything." In the beginning, when I did get overwhelmed, I took a little bit of a break and I stopped doing Trailhead for a little bit. And then, when I got back on is when I just thought, what is the purpose of Trailhead? What is it going to benefit me? Why am I doing this? And I think, once I figured that, I was like, "Okay, I want to be an admin. Okay, how do I learn to become an admin?" And then, that's when the credentials, the roles started showing ... I started clicking where I should be clicking to find admin, the role, the trail mix. And then, once I got found the admin trail mix is when the overwhelm went away because it just looked like, "Here's all the trails you need to do. Here's the order." And then, it just started just working perfectly for me after that because the way I was doing it, I was looking for ... I would type "Salesforce admin," and then a bunch of trails would just show up and I would start doing one. And I remember I would do ... I did intermediate trails, and then, all of a sudden, I was doing advanced admin trails, and I felt like I was just going everywhere. There was no trail, no path that I was going down. And then, once I found the trail mix, I felt, I was like, "This is perfect. This is telling me what to do, the steps, how to learn everything." Mike Gerholdt: Did you ever find yourself going back over different modules or different challenges? I know, on a couple occasions this spring, I had to build a demo on Flow. And mind you, Jennifer Lee's on our team and she's probably forgotten more about Flow than I've learned, but it was a point of pride for me. I really wanted to get into it and understand this new version of Flow. And I was working through some Trailhead modules and, at a certain point, I found myself just going through it and being like, "Cool, got it done. Wait, I don't remember if I learned anything." And it's not that I didn't learn anything, it was that I was so focused on completing it and moving on that I'd forgot like, "No, I need to take a breath and actually soak this stuff in and go back to a couple different modules." These are also modules that Mark Ross had wrote. Mark Ross is a Trailhead writer. He's been on the podcast before, and he had suggested to me, and he wrote them for Flow. And I remember going back and thinking, yeah, I remember doing that and getting this one thing, and then, just going back over the module, and it was almost like re-watching a film. I saw so much more. Did you ever go back and kind of redo some of those early Trailhead modules? Johnjoe Mena: Yes, I did, in the beginning. In the beginning, yes, I did. I started- Mike Gerholdt: So it's not just me. That's good. Johnjoe Mena: No. I think it's a lot of people, because when you start doing it, sometimes, you can get in that rhythm of just reading everything, getting to the questions, answering and just next, and you really didn't learn anything because you're going so fast just to complete it. So then, for me, that was, in the beginning, yeah, I would read really fast, read the questions, and then answer, and then move on. And then, what happens is, when you're doing certain trails, then, you have to do the project once. And then, that's when you're like, "Oh," it's telling you to the next step, but you didn't do any of the steps before because you just read through everything, and then, you answered and you skipped what the project was leading up to. When that happened to me, that's when I started to realize, I need to slow down. Even the question ones, you just got to just read it at your own pace and just, how you said it, observe all the information or all the key information they're trying to explain to you and not really think of it as a race. I feel like, sometimes, people can think Trailhead is a race, trying to get as many badges as you can. Also, you never want to compare yourself to another person's badges or points. Trailhead, it's your own trail. And I think, as long as you're learning and you're progressing the way you want to progress and you feel that this is benefiting you, I think that's fine, instead of comparing how many badges you have to your friend or to other people. For me, I have 400 badges compared to a lot of people who may have more, but I feel like I have learned a lot in those 400 badges that I've gotten. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. That's a lot, dude, seriously. Are you a four star ranger? Johnjoe Mena: Yeah, I'm a four star ranger. Mike Gerholdt: Okay. I'm a three star ranger. Johnjoe Mena: [inaudible 00:14:11] two weeks ago. Mike Gerholdt: Oh, congrats. Oh, my God. That's awesome. Johnjoe Mena: Thank you. Mike Gerholdt: I want to reiterate what you said. You never want to compare yourself to someone else's badges or points. That's huge. Trailhead is built to be so gamified, but it's a competition that you're having with yourself, and the winner is knowledge. The winner isn't the points. And I think you saying that, man, that was just like, that hit me. That was serious. You're working in Salesforce, you're doing Trailhead. It's no different than a lot of admins working their day job at an organization, or maybe even not working at an organization as a Salesforce admin. How did you balance ... I'm sure you've got a home life, there's stuff going on there, you got stuff going on at work and you're trying to do Trailhead. How did you fit all that stuff in? Johnjoe Mena: I would have to say it's a little of a mix. I know, for me, once I started getting a rhythm with Trailhead, I almost didn't want to stop doing Trailhead. When you start learning and getting into it, you don't want to stop. But then, I knew I had to take a break at times, but I would always try to find time when I had downtime at work, even five minutes, 10 minutes. If I could knock out a trail in 10 minutes, I would do that. I would try to pick that. Or also just, they have Trailhead Mobile and I would do, on my way home when I would commute, I would do Trailhead on mobile and just learn there, because a lot of trails that were just reading and answering questions. My commute was about 30 minutes, so I would just sit there and just do my Trailhead on my way home from work and on the way to work. It's really ... I try to balance it as good as I could. Mike Gerholdt: No, your answer's good. I think you're reaching to be like, "Is there a better answer in my head?" No. I think it's that balance, right? It's also something new, and I would akin to, when you add something to your life, you're like, "Oh, how am I going to fit this in? My day is super busy already." Have you looked at the screen time on your phone to see how many hours you spend on TikTok? Just spend two less hours on TikTok. I'm guilty. And think about all the badges you could do. But I think you were very poignant in thinking through rationally, "Hey, I've got this commute time, there's Trailhead Mobile. Now, I can't do everything on mobile, but that's okay. I can do challenges that are just questions that give me something to chew on my 30-minute train ride." And that's perfect, because it is a balance. And I think, sometimes, people race too hard because they're comparing themselves to other people's badges and points. I did that for a long time. I'd say, "Oh, man, someone's got so many badges." And it's like, "Okay, cool," but that's the journey that they're on. You can equate it to something else like, I don't know, bank accounts. Cool. You know how many more people in the world got more money than me? A lot. But that's the journey they're on. And there's a lot of people that don't have as much money as me, and that's the journey they're on. But you can't compare yourself to that. Also, what's the point? I think thinking of badges and points for yourself as a celebration of you. You've done 400, cool. I've done 300. Awesome. That's great for both of us, not you're farther ahead and I'm farther behind kind of feeling. I really like that. You mentioned briefly, at the end of your explanation, that you worked for nonprofit, and I know nonprofit stuff comes up a lot. I feel like there's both sides of the opinion on it. For new beginning admins, working at a nonprofit, not really a place to hone your skill because it is very high stakes. But also, I've been doing this now since 2006 and I'm still learning. I don't think, at any one point, we stopped learning. We're just very experienced. What did you learn from working at that nonprofit that maybe you weren't getting at Trailhead? Johnjoe Mena: I would say it was the real use case scenarios that I was exposed to. They had a use case, they wanted ... The nonprofit I worked for, they wanted to track their volunteers and track where the volunteer was going to be going to, what pet they were going to take, how many hours. I was experiencing the real hands-on scenarios, I think, and it was different from Trailhead because Trailhead, there's use cases, but this was, I getting the real experience of what an Salesforce admin really was doing on a day-to-day basis. What I learned from there was just, they traded me as their admin and they would come up with a request, we would meet, go through the request, then, I would come up with the solution and we would build it, and then, we would present it and show them. And then, if they liked it, then, we would deploy it to their production org. I got to learn a lot of just hands-on, really, just working as an admin in an org. Mike Gerholdt: Well, I feel you're spot on with a lot of the nonprofit stuff and bringing it up because working with nonprofits, it's a little more high stakes, right? It's blue sky, green field of some of the solutions that you're trying to work through as opposed to a Trailhead module where you know where the solution is. I think that's very cool. I appreciate you taking time out and sharing your story with us. I really feel like you've given me some insight and just a little bit of a reset on what it can be like to be overwhelmed and prioritizing things, so I appreciate you coming on the pod. Johnjoe Mena: Yeah, thank you for having me, Mike. This was very exciting and fun to be able to share. Mike Gerholdt: Well, and congrats on the promotion as well. Look at this, you're learning and ... Johnjoe Mena: Thank you. Mike Gerholdt: And moving up. You're already ahead of me in badges, but that's okay because I feel like I've got a lot to learn too. Thanks so much for coming on the podcast. Johnjoe Mena: Thank you for having me. Mike Gerholdt: It was a fun discussion. I don't know if you can tell, but I totally got hung up on that. You never want to compare yourself to someone else's badges or points. It's about learning and feeling confident in yourself and moving forward. And boy, if you just didn't get that tidal wave of that feeling in this episode, go back and listen to it again because JJ really, very rightfully so, gives us a lot of lessons. And it's real useful stuff that I feel I see in here in the community, I see in here in the Trailblazer community a lot, overwhelmed and not sure where to go. I really enjoyed this call. I'm glad I had a chance to run into him at Dreamforce. I'm sure you will at some upcoming events. Now, if you could do one thing, if you enjoyed this episode as much as I did, share it with somebody. If you're listening on iTunes, I'm going to tell you how to do that. You tap the dots, there's three dots, look for them. It's right in the interface, and you click "share episode." And then, a little share box will come up and you can post it social, you can text it to a friend, you can send it to wherever you would like. Also, if you're looking for more great resources, everything Salesforce admin is at admin.salesforce.com, including a transcript of the show. If you miss something, you want to go back and maybe reread it because you can't listen to it, I don't know why, there's transcript there. Now, be sure to join our conversation Admin Trailblazer Group, literally the Admin Trailblazer Group. I saw this question come up so much that I booked JJ on the pod to help us answer this. This is where I get my inspiration as well. You can too. It's in the Trailblazer community. Don't worry, links are in the show notes. Like I say every week, until next time, we'll see you in the Cloud.

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we sit down for another cup of coffee with Gillian, Josh Birk, Jennifer Lee, and me, Mike Gerholdt. Join us as we chat about how to get help learning Salesforce when you’re new to the community and where to get guidance for Trailhead. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with the Admin Evangelist Team. "I’m new to the community and I need help learning Salesforce, but I get lost in the different trails. Can someone guide me?” Every month, Gillian, Developer Evangelist Josh Birk, and I sit down with a cup of coffee and a topic. This time, we’re also joined by the one and only Jennifer Lee. For October, we’re tackling one of our most frequently asked questions: how do I get started learning Salesforce?   Join us as we discuss: Why it’s important to “learn the nouns” by reading Salesforce blog content to guide your work in Trailhead. How learning to do a specific thing can give you the context you need to choose Trailhead topics. Why you should pay special attention to hands-on Trailhead modules and community stories. Why learning Salesforce starts with understanding why companies use it in the first place. The importance of getting involved with the Trailblazer community, even if you’re just listening in. Why everyone in the Salesforce community wants to pay it forward. How to find your local Trailblazer community group. What you can learn from working with your own personal dev org. How Gillian made a Salesforce app to help organize her wedding.   Podcast swag Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store Learn more Admin Trailblazers Group Find a Trailblazer community group near you Salesforce Admins on YouTube Automate This! on YouTube October podcast episodes Make a Cybersecurity Plan with Garry Polmateer Sales Cloud Core with Ketan Karkhanis Einstein Lead Scoring with Kalpana Chauhan Social Josh: @JoshBirk 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 Gillian on X: @GillianKBruce Full Transcript Mike Gerholdt: So this month on Coffee With Evangelists, we're going to the Trailblazer Community for inspiration and discussion. Not that you aren't a daily inspiration for us, but this category of question really seems to pop up a lot. And that question is, I'm new to the community and I need help learning Salesforce, but I get lost in all of the different trails. Can somebody guide me? So joining us this month, in October, maybe with pumpkin spice in their latte, is my co-host, Gillian Bruce, host of the Automate This and Everything Flow, Jennifer Lee and, of course, the godfather of Trailhead, Josh Birk. Welcome all. Josh Birk: Hello Mike. Jennifer Lee: Hello. Gillian Bruce: Hello. Hello. Mike Gerholdt: Did you put pumpkin spice in anything? Do you pumpkin spice things now? Josh Birk: I don't avoid it, but I don't seek it out, either. I honestly don't see the appeal, to be frank. Jennifer Lee: Same. Outside of pumpkin seeds, I'm not really a pumpkin person. Josh Birk: The pumpkin seeds, that's a good ... Mike Gerholdt: I forgot about that. Like, roasting them? If you roast them in the oven? Gillian Bruce: Jen, do you do that after you carve your pumpkins? Or do you get pumpkin seeds from the store and roast them? Jennifer Lee: Pumpkin seeds from the store. I've not really carved pumpkins myself. Mike Gerholdt: Really? Oh wow. Heard it here first. Breaking news. Josh Birk: It's a task. It's a lot of work. Mike Gerholdt: It is, and it's not fun. Gillian Bruce: I disagree. Josh Birk: A lot of it's not fun. I love the carving part, but I kind of wish somebody would do all the prep for me and then just going to be fun. Gillian Bruce: You know like the gooey emptying out part of all the pumpkin guts? That's the best part. Mike Gerholdt: That is the worst part. I'm with Josh, I'm with you on the carving. With the reaching in for the guts and the stringiness? Josh Birk: It's not a texture thing for me. I get bored with that step so quickly and yet, I'm so I want to be methodic and make it the cleanest pumpkin inside as possible that I just get, I just get annoyed by it by the time I get to that stuff. Gillian Bruce: Just get a nice sharp spoon, and go for it. Mike Gerholdt: I carved a pumpkin, just on the inside. Gillian Bruce: I have a girlfriend who was so obsessed with pumpkin seeds that for the many years that we were both single and not carving pumpkins with families, she would literally come over, we would scoop out the insides of the pumpkin and stop there because all she wanted to do was roast the seeds. They're like, cool. So we have a hollow pumpkin. Jennifer Lee: Now, I don't know if you all have something like this, but we have a zoo that we go to in Rhode Island and during Halloween they have all these pumpkins that people carve and then they parve some really complex designs in them. There were like Martha Luther King, Michael Jackson. It's pretty cool. Gillian Bruce: That's next level. Josh Birk: I think they do that at the Lincoln Park Zoo here. I know they do Festival of Lights and stuff like that, which is usually pretty cool. Mike Gerholdt: I do have an empty field in my development and I would love to do, if you watch on, I think it's on, it used be on ... Gillian Bruce: Pumpkin chuckin'? Mike Gerholdt: Yes. Pumpkin chucking. Gillian Bruce: They do it in Delaware. It's amazing. I got to go there when I was in DC. Mike Gerholdt: Those things are Legit. Mike Gerholdt: People spend the whole year building those things. Gillian Bruce: They're basically these homemade catapults that people launch pumpkins off of and see how far they can launch the pumpkins. It is so fun. They do it this big huge field in Delaware. The limited amount of time I spent in DC I got to go view this in person one time. It was so amazing. Mike Gerholdt: I mean, they have trebuchets, as well. Gillian Bruce: Yeah, yeah. Mike Gerholdt: But the air cannons, the air cannons are the ones that send it football fields. Gillian Bruce: Wow. So fun. So fun. Mike Gerholdt: Oh, I just like the splat part. Gillian Bruce: And that's exactly how you start learning about Salesforce. Josh Birk: Take a pumpkin. Mike Gerholdt: Okay, so I pulled this question out. I mean, Gillian, Josh, Jennifer, we've all been around the community for, I told somebody I was like, "Oh, like a decade and a half." And they're like, "Oh wow." And I was like, "Oh God, that doesn't make me feel old." Gillian Bruce: It's okay, Mike, you started when you were 15. It's fine. Mike Gerholdt: I did, totally, yes. But I think we've had different onboarding experiences and I wanted us to put that fresh hat on of like, okay, so what if we were brand new Salesforce admins today, knowing what we know that Trailhead exists and there's help documentation, how would we tackle it? Because I feel like the beauty of hindsight is, oh, we know all this stuff now here's how I'd go back and do it, having known that, but not, right? So, that's what I'm throwing out. And of course, it's great that we have Josh on because you built Trailhead. Josh Birk: And it's interesting to me because how you phrased this, right, was like, I know I need to learn Salesforce, I know about Trailhead. It's not a lack of discoverability of Trailhead, the product itself. It's that Trailhead itself has gotten so complicated that it's hard to just jump in and take the right trails and just get to exactly where you want to go. Why that's interesting to me is that was partially the problem we were trying to fix in the first place. Trailhead used to be so simple. It was like, you're a beginner admin, go here, boom, you're done. Because there wasn't, I don't know how many badges we're up to at this point. Jen probably knows. I think you have them all, right? Mike Gerholdt: Right. I was going to say, "How many badges does Jen have?" That's how many we're up to. Josh Birk: That's how many we're up to. So it's interesting that we have developed ourselves into this problem, and I think that's really where it comes down to is, it's like I do this joke. Nobody ever asked me about the zebra that I have in my room. Well, why not? Because who would think I have a zebra in my room. Unless you know the noun, it's hard to go after the information itself. So I think in this day and age where we don't have a lot of workshop tours, we don't have the beginning webinars, I think learning the nouns might be first step. Just start reading the blogs and start reading what is it like to develop and administer on this platform and then dive into the Trailhead, tracking those downs down. Because one thing about Trailhead is that it was intended to be atomic, which means that if you want to just go learn about flow, you can just go learn about flow. Or if you just want to learn about one thing, you can do that. So you can choose your own adventure, so to speak, when it comes to learning a trail. Mike Gerholdt: Josh, I can't help but think of your answer in the same way that college is difficult to navigate, too. You go back a hundred years, I'm sure colleges had what, 10 majors and now there's canoeing. I'm sure you could get a degree in canoe. You could probably get a PhD in ... Josh Birk: You probably could get a PhD. Mike Gerholdt: ... water, hydration, floating. It would be something fancy. But the catalogs are super difficult, but people still manage to get through it. It's because, I think, there's one destination in college and I think we imply, or do we imply, that because other things, there's one way to learn Salesforce and people just can't figure out that one way. Josh Birk: And also people don't, not everybody learns the same way, right? Developers are, frequently people who like to go in and take existing pieces of code and then pull them apart and put them back together again, which is an exercise we have in places in Trailhead, I think, but not consistently. So, I'd be curious to know how many people rely more on say, stack exchange than ever before because of the level of complexity of the platform these times. Gillian Bruce: Well, and you said it's the way people learn. For me, I remember the one thing I took, God, I think I took ADM 201 three times before it finally stuck with me, and I still got out of that course at the last time I took it. I was like, "What did I just do? I have no idea." 'Cos I didn't have the context for how to use this. Now this is pre-Trailhead, but for me it was, "Oh, I should build an app to do this thing," and then going through and doing that, now also, this was right when we were transitioning to Lightning, so there was a lot of push to test and do things, but for me it was putting context behind, I'm trying to accomplish a thing and I'm going to go build the thing. And the parts of Trailhead that really work for me are the projects, right? Because you're working towards completing a specific goal or task versus, here go play around and build a formula or this is how Omnichannel works. Like, okay, "But I need context. How is this fitting into the bigger picture of things?" So I'm a learn by doing person, which Trailhead has a fair amount of that, but I'm more project oriented in Trailhead than I am straight up modules. Jennifer Lee: Yeah, I agree with you, Gillian. I learn best by doing. And so back in the day when I was learning Salesforce, I became a master Googler, right? You go in there, because there wasn't a lot of content provided by Salesforce at that time. So you become a master Googler, you might be able to pull stuff up by ChatGPT, I don't know, but you Google whatever the topic is, Salesforce and then boom. Then you start going through the content and I found the community content was really great, just learning from the practitioners themselves and following along or on Trailhead doing the projects or anything that had the hands-on training. 'Cos then you're learning the concept, but then you're exercising the muscles and actually going through the step-by-step. And that's how I retain information better than if I just read it. Mike Gerholdt: Gillian, you brought up a good point, the context. I actually had a friend a while back lose their job in that big retail layoff and showed them Trailhead, and that was the biggest problem that they ran into. Mind you, they're a college graduate in philosophy, which I mean, again, degree in canoeing. But really smart guy, didn't understand why things existed in the platform because they didn't have the context. And so I'm wondering if people that are asking this question, are trying to learn the platform agnostic of having any context to either maybe having the role or how organizations would use Salesforce. Gillian Bruce: I will say in the dozens, I don't know, probably more than that, hundreds of presentations I've done as an evangelist in the last however many years. 'Cos again, I started Salesforce when I was nine years old, it keeps getting younger. It's weird. As the years go on, I started Salesforce as a younger person. Josh Birk: Sooner later, child labor laws are going to be ... Gillian Bruce: You're right. But the one thing that I have found that helps me explain what Salesforce is to people who don't know what Salesforce is, but know that maybe this is a career trajectory they might be interested in, they're like, "Okay, so how do I get certified? Okay, how do I do that?" I'm like, "Okay, but do you understand why people use this platform? Why do people build things in Salesforce? Why are there jobs for people who are Salesforce practitioners? Let's talk about big picture. Salesforce helps companies do X, Y, and Z." And you can pull out a handful of very general examples. And then doing that next level. Salesforce helps companies organize their customers data because then they're able to do better marketing to sell their widgets better. And it's that kind of trajectory of that context and that bigger picture I find really helps. And so if you are net new, you're like, "Great, I need a new job, or I want to get into the Salesforce ecosystem," don't just do it to be part of the Salesforce ecosystem. Understand what the technology does for companies, why do companies buy it? And I think a lot of times we bypass that and go straight to Trailhead. And I feel like that maybe is a piece for me. At least, that was very important to understand before I started learning the technology on top of it. Mike Gerholdt: It's understanding why people would buy a car before you start working on the car to fix it. Josh Birk: Well, and even the presence of the car, because as evangelists we all know part of our problem is convincing people we actually have a platform. It's not just CRM, and it can be extended through all sorts of custom data and processes and stuff like that. So there's people running around in a car, but they don't even realize there's multiple gears. I don't know. I'm losing the analogy here, Mike. Mike Gerholdt: I know I boxed you in with that. Also, I could hear Gillian be like, damn, another Mike analogy about a car. Totally heard that. Gillian Bruce: No. I'm so used to them. I'm be like, well, I mean, Josh, to add for the metaphor, I think what you were saying is like, "Well, sometimes you need a truck to do it and sometimes you need a fast car and sometimes you need a rider mower." And it all depends on what you're trying to accomplish. But Salesforce can do all of those things. Josh Birk: I mean, I remember doing just a basic 101, here's how you build out a custom object type thing at a world tour. And somebody came up to me afterwards and they're like, "That was mind-blowing." And I'm like, "No." Mike Gerholdt: No, there's so much more. Josh Birk: You haven't seen the mind-blowing stuff. That was watching me put the rabbit in the hat and then being like, "I'm going to pull a rabbit out of my hat. That's how mind blowing that was." Mike Gerholdt: Well, object permanency sometimes. Josh Birk: Right. Mike Gerholdt: I mean, but I think to that end, it's so, understanding the why, maybe that's where they get lost. Because Trailhead shows you the how and absent of being able to connect it to the why, to me, it sounds like understanding just how to do things on the platform is maybe where they're getting lost because Gillian, to your point, I would learn Omnichannel, but I wouldn't understand why I would do Omnichannel. So I could understand how to customize it. I just wouldn't understand how to talk about it or why I should care. Josh Birk: And I think that's also speaks to, because our platform has gotten so broad. So we're talking about Salesforce Core for the most part, but I think you can ask those exact same questions about things like MuleSoft and even some of our clouds and things like that. It's like it's hard to know why you care until you've actually gotten into it, but it's also hard to learn it until why you care. Mike Gerholdt: Absent of Trailhead, what role would help documentation, which I feel is its own group of things. And then just turning to the community play for each of you. Jennifer Lee: I know when I first started, I was a data consumer of the Trailblazer Community. I was absorbing every single post that was posted, and then I was like, "Oh, well, this person has this problem. How did other people solve it?" And I'm like, "Oh, that's really cool." But I also recommend going to user groups, finding that local user group, going there and listening to what other people are facing, learning from their solutions as well, and networking. Gillian Bruce: Jen, I think there's something to that as just being around it to understand how people talk about it and what types of problems they're solving. I mean, I remember still to this day, one of the first recommendations I say to people who are like, "Okay, I'm net new. What do I do?" It's like, "Okay, yes, learn what Salesforce does, learn the technology, but honestly, go be like a creeper in the Trailblazer Community." Maybe not creeper, creeper is the wrong word, but hover. Just listen. Just see what people are posting, see what answers are getting posted, see what questions are getting posted, see what's happening in their local Trailblazer group, even if you're like, "I don't want to go to a meeting yet." But just being around it and reading and consuming that I think is such a great way to get oriented in terms of, A. What are people doing as practitioners with Salesforce and B. What kind of problems are they solving and how? And I think that's, and even just the language, right? The jargon, what things are called, how we describe certain parts of the platform, I think that's one of the easiest things you can do to get yourself going in the Salesforce space. Josh Birk: I mean it's part of our special sauce. It's part of the thing that makes Salesforce the communities distinct. I've had so many people in interviews who talked about learning the platform, and it's hard for us, I think, to say it without it sounding like hype. But we have a community that believes firmly in giving back to the community, and they learn from the community. And so they want to teach you the community. And there's no way of saying that without it making it sound like, I'm just trying to hype it, but it's like we've got rad women, we've got Salesforce Saturdays, we have people who spend time helping other people for free on this platform. And not every tech community out there is like that. And I totally agree with you, Jen. It's like that, don't miss that because it's a special thing out there. And especially now post pandemic, I feel like it's even easier than ever because I think there's still a virtual Salesforce Saturdays that's going on. Wherever you are, there's something that should be accessible to you. Gillian Bruce: Well, and Jen and Mike, I mean, this is how you started your careers, right? I mean, you were members of the community, you were giving back, helping other people solve problems, being very active and participatory. I mean, you were evangelists outside of Salesforce before Salesforce hired you, right? I think that's what's so unique and special is because your authentic, there's an authenticity there to how vibrant the community is. 'Cos it's not just Salesforce pushing stuff out. It's what actual people are doing and saying and using, Jennifer Lee: Sorry. Go ahead, Mike. Mike Gerholdt: Look at these two evangelists, talk over each other. Go ahead, Jennifer. Jennifer Lee: So when I joined the community, I was like, "Oh my goodness, these people are just going out of the way to help one another. Don't they have day jobs? What's going on here?" And then when I attended my first in-person event, I think it was Dreamforce, and I was telling my family, I'm like, "Oh, I'm getting to meet these people in person. They're my friends, but I've never seen them before." And they're like, "What? How's that possible?" So, as I mentioned, I was a data consumer, and then eventually I had enough knowledge where I'm like, "Oh, I know the answer to this, so I'm going to start typing." And it was, okay, well, these people before me who knew Salesforce were sharing their knowledge, their time. Now that I get, I'm building up my knowledge, well, I want to give back, too, because someone before me helped me and I'm going to help the people after me. And it's just this natural thing of wanting to give. Mike Gerholdt: I think, so a lot of what you said, Jennifer, I was trying to think back as you were all talking, what was the catalyst that got me in? Josh Birk: Because I feel like that's the next hurdle, right? Mike Gerholdt: You kind of look at Salesforce, oh, there's a lot to learn. There's a lot of things on Trailhead and there's community, but it feels like a lot of work. And I often joke is being so passionate about vacuums that you would join a vacuum community. Gillian Bruce: It sounds like it would suck. Mike Gerholdt: I remember, so this was back when I was just turned 18 and it was 2006, because I'm following Gillian's Benjamin Button style of aging. But I was just fresh on Twitter, and I remember TweetDeck was a thing, and I started to call them like, "Oh, there's people I tweet about Salesforce." And up to that point, I had just tried to do it all myself. I'll just try to figure it out. And I remember I asked a question and I'm sure I can go back and try and find that tweet. It'd be cool. But I asked a question and I got 20 responses. And one of the responses, somebody was like, "Hey, send me a DM and I'll give you my email because I think we can solve this. I just need more than ..." it was 120 characters or whatever. Remember when Twitter had that limit? And I remember that. So I did that and it was probably a Thursday or a Friday, and then over the weekend I made a remark to somebody. I said, "This guy from Canada is going to email me this solution, and they're totally going to do it on their own time." And I remember thinking to myself like, wow, that's pretty neat. Maybe there's more to this. But it felt like, I don't know. And I think a lot of people approach that. They hear community and they hear all this stuff. I should be a part of it. And it's like, yeah, I don't, but it's until you just go out there and ask one question and then you see five different responses that are probably four different ways of solving a solution that you're like, oh, maybe there's something to this. And that was, for me, which then turned me into like, well, if I can get these answers and build this stuff, then why isn't, because Gillian, to your point, Salesforce wasn't putting that stuff out there. That was the gap, that was the void that Jennifer filled as well, too. Salesforce wasn't putting this stuff out there. Gillian Bruce: I mean, it's special. It is something unique and it's something really special. It's one of the magical things about our community. Our community. Magical things about the Salesforce, just ecosystem in general, is the community. And until you're in it, it's very hard to describe it. It's very hard to explain it. And I love the stories that you both shared about, yes, so my family didn't quite get it, and I thought this was really special. It's something you don't find in other technologies, other platforms. And I think if you're trying to orient yourself and figure out where do I start? What do I do? I mean, yes, of course you need to learn the technology and go to Trailhead. There's a lot of great things there. I would start with the admin basics trail, if you're going on an admin path, or beginner admin trail, I think is what it's called. But honestly, get in the community. I mean, if nothing that you've heard between Mike and Jen and Josh, just dip in and let it wash over you. Mike Gerholdt: I would add to that, simply ask yourself why you are trying to learn this and if it's interesting and fun for you. And I go back to that because I can still remember, Gillian, as you were talking, I was thinking back to the very first time, and this will date me to when I was 19 years old, in 2007, and I built my first workflow and it worked. And I remember sending an email to the sales team, and it was a simple workflow that literally just updated a field that was locked on a contact, based on a pick list value. And it was such a huge thing. And it gave me this sense of accomplishment that I feel probably was lacking that I wasn't getting in my current job. And that was that reason why. But unlocking that was, I was like, oh, I think I found something I'm passionate about. And I've always heard this quote that was, if you find your passion, you never have to look for your drive, because it will always be there, right? And I think for Jen, I always look at how innate her skill is to build stuff in flow, but it's because she found her passion in flow. And I don't share that passion. I would love to. Mine exists in other parts of the platform. But once you have that, then it feels like the wind is at your back. Josh Birk: Well, I think the rise of flow is also interesting because it used to be developers would learn most of, they wouldn't get as expert in admin skills, but we were expected to know what a workflow was. We were expected to know what a validation rule was. We were expected to know what a formula was, et cetera. But flow is so much of its own skillset that it's, but also so powerful. If you want that thing in your resume that's going to help you get that next job, it's really an important one. But I think it also just speaks to not just the number of products and companies that Mark has bought over the last 10 years, but just to the power and the complexity of the platform itself. Mike Gerholdt: Jen, Gillian, final thoughts? Jennifer Lee: I think what's also important is as you're learning Salesforce, whatever that thing is, whether it's writing a validation rule or what have you, spin up a personal dev org and you can sign up for that and that will be yours forever. And what I do is I play around with things, right? If I'm trying to learn something new rather than mess up my company's org? I go and play out in my own sandbox, play around with it and get familiar with it. Build apps. Also use Salesforce for your personal lives. That's something that you're creating your own use cases, right? And then you're just using Salesforce as a solution, but then you're practicing using things in Salesforce. Gillian Bruce: Well, and Jen, that's basically exactly what I was going to say. But not only are you practicing using Salesforce and building out the app, but you're practicing all the other things that come along with being an admin. If you are building out an app for your own personal use case, right? You're figuring out what are the requirements? How am I going to test this to make sure it works? I am the user of this, right? I remember I built an app to help manage my wedding as an excuse to tinker around with things. And I was like, "Oh my gosh, how would I do a guest list? How would I do all the event pieces of this?" And it was such a huge learning curve for me, and it helped lock in so many of these concepts of not only how do I build the thing, but why do I build the thing and how do I make sure the thing does what I want it to do? And I think there's no better way to learn than to build something for yourself. It also, if you make it nice, it's a good thing to demo if you're trying to get a job. Make a screencast, include it in the process of how you're looking for jobs. Shoot, post it on the Trailblazer community. Maybe somebody sees it is like, "Ooh, that person's got talent. I like what they're doing. Maybe they could be my next Salesforce admin." So it serves a lot of purposes, and so great recommendation done. And that is my number one thing to recommend to folks. Get your dev org, spin it up, build out your own use case. Use it as a demo going forward. Mike Gerholdt: I couldn't agree more. And that gives you even more things to showcase to somebody to show your skill. Well, this is a great discussion. Thank you all. Gillian Bruce: Thank you, Mike. Mike Gerholdt: Thank you. Jennifer Lee: Thanks for having me. Mike Gerholdt: If you enjoyed this episode, I need you, the listener, to do one thing, and that is share it with somebody that you think would enjoy it as well. If you're listening on iTunes, all you got to do is tap the three dots and choose Share episode, then you can post it to social, you can text it to a friend, put it on any of the socials. And if you're looking for more great resources, like some of the links that probably Jennifer and Gillian and myself mentioned, you can always go to Everything Admin, which is admin.salesforce.com. And, of course, there will be a transcript and links in the show notes below. And, of course, I know we mentioned the Admin Trailblazer group, so you can join the conversation there in the Trailblazer community. Don't worry, link is also in those show notes. So, until then, we'll see you next week in the cloud.  

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Kalpana Chauhan, Lead Salesforce Consultant at Mar Dat. Join us as we chat about Einstein lead scoring and the importance of high-quality data. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Kalpana Chauhan. From math teacher to Salesforce Admin Kalpana started out as a math teacher but, as her kids got older and she found herself with time on her hands, she discovered she had an affinity for Salesforce. That foundation has been incredibly helpful in her career as a Salesforce Consultant when she has to untangle something like validation rules. “Coding is easy once you understand the logic and flowchart of how it actually works,” she says. Flows and automation have always held a special place in Kalpana’s heart. There is so much manual work that you can make unnecessary if you’re willing to sit down and thoughtfully analyze a business process. And new tools like Einstein are making that easier than ever before. Scoring leads with Einstein One of Kalpana’s clients needed help resolving issues related to proper lead qualification and marketing engagement. “The marketing team was eager to enhance their engagement with leads, while the sales team was seeking better clarity regarding which leads were sales-qualified so they could focus their efforts on conversion,” she says.  That’s when Einstein came to the rescue. They worked through the AI Wizard and came up with three scores: Behavior, to evaluate how warm a lead is based on engagement. Engagement frequency, to figure out what marketing cadence is best for each lead. Send time optimization, to automate marketing emails to go out at the best time for each lead based on their engagement history. Together, these scores helped marketing engage prospects at the right cadence while sales could pursue an optimal nurturing and conversion strategy for each lead. Getting started with Einstein If you want to start using Einstein in your org, Kalpana recommends starting by taking a close look at your data quality. “Data is the key,” she says, “the more data you feed in, the more accurate your results will be.” That means Implementing solid data validation rules and using screen flows to remove duplicate records.  Getting up-to-speed on Einstein was easy with all of the resources out there from Salesforce. In addition to Trailhead, Kalpana found Bootcamps to be especially useful. “I love anything with visuals,” she says. She also recommends going to your local Trailblazer Community Group meeting to connect with other admins facing similar challenges. Be sure to listen to the full episode to learn more about Einstein, email marketing, and data cleanup. Podcast swag Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store Resources Trailhead: Salesforce Einstein Basics Einstein Lead Scoring Admin Trailblazer Group Social Kalpana: @KalpanaChauhan 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 Ketan Karkhanis, EVP and GM of Sales Cloud at Salesforce.  Join us as we chat about all of the new Sales Cloud features that have gone live recently and how you can use them to transform your organization. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Ketan Karkhanis. New features in Sales Cloud Over the last year, Sales Cloud has gotten a lot of new features and updates. That’s why I was so excited to run into Ketan at World Tour London and get him on the pod. Who better than the EVP and GM of Sales Cloud to tell us all about what’s new? One thing that the Sales Cloud team noticed was how often businesses have been turning to third-party tools to get things done. So they’ve overhauled features like forecasting and pipe inspection to give you more customization options and flexibility without having to use a bunch of different point solutions. Drive adoption with Sales Cloud Everywhere Another problem that Ketan and his team have been working on is how to help drive adoption. As much as we’d like it to be the case, most people don’t do 100% of their job on Salesforce. And the added hassle of going into and out of the platform can create a lot of challenges for users trying to fit it into their workflow. But what if Salesforce could follow you into other applications and be there when you need it? Sales Cloud Everywhere aims to do just that, with extensions for Outlook, Gmail, and more that will give your reps access to your full CRM no matter what they’re doing. We need your help If you only take one thing away from Ketan’s episode, it’s that there are so many new out-of-the-box features in Sales Cloud that it’s practically a new product. If you’re paying for third-party tools, you might be able to save your organization a lot of money just by turning something on. Most importantly, Ketan and his team want you to know that they need your feedback to make Sales Cloud even better. Try Sales Planning, or Revenue Intelligence, or Einstein for Sales, or all of the above, and let us know how we can help you transform your organization with Salesforce. Be sure to listen to the full episode to learn more about Sales Cloud, and what’s been added to Unlimited Edition. Podcast swag Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store Resources Sales Cloud Everywhere Overview Admin Trailblazer Group Social Ketan: @Karkhanis 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 Full Transcript Gillian Bruce: Welcome to the Salesforce Admins Podcast, where we talk about product, community, and careers to help you be successful. I'm your host today, Gillian Bruce. Missed you. Nice to be back. I'm here with a very special interview that I wanted to be able to share with you from Ketan Karkhanis, who is our EVP and GM of Sales Cloud at Salesforce. Now, he is a senior executive in charge of all things Sales Cloud. And we had a chat, just running into each other at London World Tour of all places. And it really sparked my idea to have him join us on the podcast, because Sales Cloud has gone under a huge reboot over the last year. There's a ton of new features that I don't think many people are aware of. So, we wanted to dig into that a little bit. And then also, talk about why Sales Cloud and core are developing the things they are, prioritization, especially in the context of AI and GPT these days. And I promise you, Ketan is going to show you that, hey, core is getting a lot of love despite all of the hype around GPT, which is also very exciting. But we really focus more on that conversation around core development. And he gets into the importance and the role of Salesforce admins. One quick note before we get into Ketan's interview. At the time we were interviewing, the product we were developing was called SalesGPT. That has since changed. And now our AI products for sales is Einstein for Sales. And so, anytime you hear GPT, just think Einstein. So, without further ado, please welcome Ketan to the podcast. Ketan, welcome to the podcast. Ketan Karkhanis: Hey, thank you for having me, Gillian. So good to be here. Gillian Bruce: Oh, it's wonderful to have you on. I can't believe we haven't had you on before. So, first time guest, long overdue. Ketan, can you introduce yourself a little bit to our audience? Ketan Karkhanis: Oh, I sure can. First, a big hello to all of you. I mean this is exciting to be on this podcast with all of you. My name is Ketan Karkhanis. I'm the executive vice president and GM for Sales Cloud. For some of you, I'm a boomerang. So, I was in Salesforce from 2009 to 2019, then I left, did a startup and supply chain, and then I came back to do sales in my prior stint. I've done Einstein Analytics, Lightning Platform, Salesforce Mobile, all the things you probably want to talk to me about also. Gillian Bruce: Some things we're very familiar with in admin land, yes. Ketan Karkhanis: Yeah, great to be here. Gillian Bruce: Excellent. Well, we're happy to have you on. And since you are now leading Sales Cloud, we've got some good questions for you. So, first of all, I would love to know, and I think a lot of our admins are curious, what are some of the top things in Sales Cloud that maybe you think aren't being utilized enough? Ketan Karkhanis: Oh, that's a great question. Look, I'll tell you, and this answer might be slightly long. So, Gillian, you should keep interrupting me, because a lot has changed in Sales Cloud in the last year. One of the fundamental things we have focused on is there are two things that happened. Number one was we realized that there was this hyper proliferation of point solutions around Sales Cloud. To work on one opportunity, customers were using seven, eight different other point solutions. These are not market categories. They are features of Sales Cloud. So, one of the great examples I'll give you is forecasting. And amongst all us, our admin friends, we had not innovated much in that space earlier. And it's okay to be honest and say that. Gillian Bruce: We like transparency on the podcast, Ketan. Appreciate that. Ketan Karkhanis: But we really doubled down on it. And if you now go look at forecasting, you will see that there's still a long journey. I invite you to join me at Dreamforce. But things like customizability, things like bring your own columns, things like adding manager judgment, things like coverage ratio, things like a better user experience, which does not require a help dock. Things like pipe inspection. I don't know how many of you have turned on pipe inspection. Maybe it may not have one or two things you don't need, but it's the new list view for opportunities. Why would you look at opportunities in a list view? Why wouldn't you look at pipe inspection? And everything I said, it's part of core. It's not something new you need to buy. I have a lot of new things I can sell you to. You know me, I'll keep building new things. But the idea is, how do we get more intrinsic value out? So, you asked the question, so I'll say, I invite you all to check out pipe inspection. I invite you all to check out forecasting. I invite all of you to check out... And I'm listing, Gillian, things which are not like, hey, you need to call an AE right now. These are things which are probably already there, you just need to go turn it on or something like that. The next thing I'll tell you is, look, one of the largest problems I've seen a lot of customers espouse is adoption. Gillian, you hear that from admins, and I hear that. How do I drive adoption? What do I do, right? Gillian Bruce: 100%. Ketan Karkhanis: So, one of the capabilities, and it's a very counterintuitive thought, maybe this will work, maybe this will not work, but is we are like we were saying, okay, why can't Sales Cloud or CRM follow you wherever you go? So, let's say you are in Outlook. Yes, I use the O word, Outlook. I can do that on a Salesforce podcast, because hey, a lot of people use Outlook and it's a great email client. I mean, it's fantastic. But what if Salesforce side panel was there right with you? What if your entire CRM was accessible to your end user as a sales rep, while they were in Outlook or they were in Gmail? And even coming one more further is, what if you could do that while you are on LinkedIn? So, this is the idea of Sales Cloud everywhere. It's the Outlook extension, it's the Gmail extension, it is the anywhere extension that's coming out. And again, these are what we think core capabilities, and I invite you to try them. One last thing, because we've just innovated a lot, so Gillian, please interrupt me, okay? Gillian Bruce: Give us all the goodies. I love it. This is great. Ketan Karkhanis: Now, these were just examples, but you can make a long list of this theme. Now, if you're on unlimited edition. So, some of you might be on UE, you have a special bonanza for you now, because everything I said before is available everywhere. Now I'm focusing only on unlimited edition. We added a ton of capability to unlimited edition, which was previously add-ons kind of stuff. So, for example, conversational AI. How many of you have heard of conversational AI? It's a standard capability. ECI, Einstein Conversational Insights. Go turn it on, try it in UE. I'll tell you, sales engagement, some of you probably remember HVS. And again, transparency, there was some work to be done on that, which we have gotten done last year. I know there was a little bit of a pause on that, but we have rebooted everything in the past 12 months. It's included in powerful cadence automation. Every inside sales teams needs it. It's out of the box in Sales Cloud UE. Automated capture, Einstein Automated Capture. Do you know more than 20,000 customers have already used Einstein Automated Capture? Are you one of those 20,000? If you are, thank you very much. If you aren't, why aren't you on that list? Because why do you want sales reps to enter data manually? It should be automatically synced. But anyways, I can keep going on, Gillian. There's just a lot. There's just a lot. Gillian Bruce: That is a lot. And you know what I really like is all of these features that you're talking about are, like you said, your team's been working on this in the last 12 months. But I mean really these are things that are going to help admins make their users happier. And so, especially when you were talking about basically the pipe inspection is a better list view that's going to give you so much more information. So, why train your users on how to use a list view when you've got this? And they can get the insights just from looking at the list of their opportunities. And then in context, I mean when you're talking about the extension, where you can bring Salesforce and your CRM in the context of which you're already working. Because the last thing a sales rep wants to do is switch windows or have multiple tabs open, as all of us are guilty of having too many tabs open as it is. But the idea of having that contextual as you're looking at a LinkedIn, as you're looking at your email, that's fantastic. I mean, those are amazing features. And like you said, they're already part of your core experience. So, I'm going to use a Mike Gerholdt analogy here. "If you paid for the Ferrari, don't just use it to drive to the grocery store." You've got all these bells and whistles, you should use them. And I think another thing that I hear often when I'm at community events or at user groups, is you hear people that are paying for all of these third party solutions that do a lot of the stuff they don't realize core already does. Ketan Karkhanis: Yeah, I mean they're spending a lot of money. You could be a hero by taking all that out and showing your organization, "Hey, guys, I saved you a lot of money." Gillian Bruce: Exactly. Yeah. I mean it's one of those maybe not so secret, should be more overt awesome admin skills, is that if you are really truly an awesome admin, you're probably going to uncover so much money your organization can save when you open the hood and look at all of the third party things that maybe you are paying for, that you already have included in core. It's akin to declarative first development. Use what's out of the box before you go building a custom solution. And I think that is one of the things that we don't talk about enough, having that admin eye to look at all the things that maybe we already have on core, but we don't realize, or whoever was managing the org before you didn't realize. Ketan Karkhanis: Or maybe we at Salesforce didn't talk about it too much. I think, so there's some responsibility I need to take too, just because I can. And you're going to see me and my team... As I said, look, it's a new Sales Cloud. Simple as that. The last 12 months, it's a new Sales Cloud. And I invite you, I encourage you, I will gently push you and nudge you to take a look. And more importantly, the two motivation I have behind saying these things is, if you take a look, you will give us great feedback. And that's truly what we want is your feedback. But you can't give me feedback if you have not tried something. It's like a virtual cycle. Gillian Bruce: This is taking me back to when we rolled out Lightning back in, what, 2015. And we were doing all those Lightning tours with our product managers. I was doing a ton of them. The feedback we got from people when we were actually getting them hands-on with the new platform and how it worked, I mean every single piece of feedback got incorporated in some way. And I think that's one of the unique things and special things about Salesforce, is that our product is only what it is because of the feedback that we get from our customers. And we definitely take into account. So, Ketan, as leader of Sales Cloud, how important is it for people to give you feedback? Ketan Karkhanis: I'll just tell you all my best ideas are not mine. They're yours. So, if you want me to do something good, give me feedback. I'm half joking. But you understand the spirit of that comment, I think. So, it's really important we connect with each other in the true sense of the word connection. Look, you all have made Sales Cloud what Sales Cloud is. You are the reason Sales Cloud is here. And I really, really aspire for you to be part of the journey. The last year, we have rebooted it a lot. We have a lot of new capabilities across the board. And I ain't even talking to you about new things like... Do you know last week, Gillian, we just launched a new product called Sales Planning? Now sales Planning can be done native on your CRM. Do you know we've got a brand new product around enablement to run sales programs in context and outcome-based? That's brand new. We just launch a buyer assistant. That's cool. And Gillian, I'm not even talking about GPT. We are going to need a whole podcast on SalesGPT. Gillian Bruce: We can do that. That'll be the follow-up episode, because I know a lot of people are curious about that. But I think speaking of that, we get a lot of feedback, especially now because everyone's excited about AI. Everyone's talking about it, GPT, all the things, great. But the majority of admins I talk to are way more concerned with core features, stuff that their organization's already using. And so, you mentioned that the last 12 months, Sales Cloud has gotten a reboot. Can you give us a little insight into why there was a reboot? What is the priority with Sales Cloud and core features? And give us a little insider lens to why. Ketan Karkhanis: No, no, it's a very fair question. Look, the way I think about it is adoption fueled growth is a key strategy for me and my business. And I use the word adoption as the first word in that sentence, because it's really the key word. To me, one of the thoughts I have after talking to countless customers, I went on the road and I met so many customers, and I'll tell you, it was amazing. You sit down with the customer and one of my favorite questions is, how long have you been using Sales Cloud? That's my first question I ask them. And you will be amazed. Some of them were saying 10 years. I met a customer who's been using it for 18 years. Gillian Bruce: That's almost as long as Salesforce has been around, right? Ketan Karkhanis: Incredible commitment, incredible partnership. And then as I look at their journey and we talk to them, they're like, okay, here's where we need help, here's where we need help, here's where we need help. And how do you build that bridge for them to create a modern selling environment, to create a data-driven selling environment, to create a selling environment where reps are spending less time doing entry, but more time driving deals. And to do all of this, it's not just new capabilities or new products like Planning, like GPT, all those things I talked about, but it's also the foundation capabilities of, okay, let's ensure forecasting is amazing out of the box. Let's ensure a lot of our features are turned on out of the box. Let's ensure we are really funneling our energies into bringing more, I keep saying out of the box, out of the box, out of the box. That's my way of saying core, core, core, core. But it also implies I want to simplify setup and onboarding. We have some more work to do there. It's not done. And I will be the first person to say, hey, need your help, but trust me, we are committed to doing it. I'm committed to doing it. So, there's countless examples I can give you around all these things we are trying to do. But the strategy is adoption driven growth. Element of the strategy is I really don't want our customers to use seven or 10 different products, because I think... So, our customers are giving me feedback. They're like, "Ketan, and this is becoming a bit..." I have seven to 10 different tools I have to use, and this happens in the industry, it's cyclical. There's a hyper proliferation of point solutions, and then we go into a tech consolidation phase. So, that is a very key part. That's what we did with Sales Cloud Unlimited. We took all this. We are like, these are not add-on, we just get them. It's like, okay, Gillian, when you buy a smartphone or you just buy... Nowadays, nobody calls it a smartphone. Gillian Bruce: They're all smart now, right? Ketan Karkhanis: They're all smart, right? Yeah, exactly. But there's a point in that comment. Do you have to choose whether you get the maps functionality or not? Gillian Bruce: No. Ketan Karkhanis: It's there. It's a feature, it's not a category. That's what we think when we think about things like sales engagement, when we think things like revenue intelligence, when we think about enablement, when we think about planning, when our conversational AI. These are capabilities of the new CRM. Gillian Bruce: I love that. Ketan Karkhanis: These are not categories. So, anyways, it was a great question. Thank you for asking that. Gillian Bruce: Yeah. No. And I appreciate the transparency. And I think what you described about the cyclical cycle, about how tack, the many, many points coming together into being one solution. And I think I feel though we're in the consolidation moment right now, especially with Sales Cloud, which I think that's pretty exciting. Now, in the last minute or two here, I would love to hear from you, Ketan. As someone who has been in the Salesforce ecosystem and at Salesforce for I think as long as I have, seems like forever at this point. Can you talk to me a little bit about how you view the role of the Salesforce admin in a successful- Ketan Karkhanis: You're the quarterback. You're the quarterback. Or if the people from other regions, I can use a cricket analogy, I can use a soccer analogy, I can use any analogy you want me to use, but you get the spirit of what I'm trying to say is yes, it's a critical role, it's a pivotal role, it's an important role. Because it's also the role that drives, not just governance and compliance, which is one way to think about it, but also what I call agile innovation. You can show the organization a way to move fast. The person who understands the power of clicks, not core, is connected to the community to bring those best practices from the community into your organization, is connected to product at Salesforce to bring that feedback back to product. You are also now the face of Salesforce in front of your organization, and that's why we love you so much. It's a tough job. Look, it can be stressful, because you're juggling many balls. There's like every day you've got 10 things you're juggling. You are like, oh, I've got these five requests from this business unit, but I need to do this project, which is long-term. And I've still not gotten done with my data governance priorities, which I had. But it's a critical role, and that's why it's my commitment to you that I want to be held accountable by you. And I would aspire to be more connected to you. So, I don't know how we do- Gillian Bruce: Well, this is a first step, Ketan, now everybody knows who you are. So, you're going to start to get feedback as soon as this episode goes live, I promise you. Ketan Karkhanis: I had to open my mouth. Gillian Bruce: You asked for it. You asked for it. Well, Ketan, I so appreciate you coming on the podcast and giving us some context and insight to what's going on with Sales Cloud, priorities within Sales Cloud, some of the features that maybe we don't know about very much and that we should start be using. And then I also just really appreciate your insights and appreciation for Salesforce admins. I think it's always really helpful to hear from someone who's in the leadership position about how Salesforce really does view the role of the admin and prioritizes it and thinks it's so important. So, I appreciate you. Ketan Karkhanis: Thank you so much. Gillian Bruce: And we're going to do an episode about SalesGPT coming up soon. Don't you worry about that. Ketan Karkhanis: Yeah, yeah, 100%. Gillian Bruce: Thanks, Ketan. One quick note and reminder, SalesGPT has changed to Einstein for Sales. So, we're Salesforce, product names change, especially as we come into Dreamforce. So, just wanted to remind you of that. Anytime you hear SalesGPT think of Einstein. Well, that was amazing to have Ketan on the podcast. Appreciate his time. And yes, we are going to do more with him. So, I am looking forward to getting him back on to talk a little bit more about SalesGPT, which I know everyone is clamoring to learn more about. But I did appreciate his honesty and transparency about how Sales Cloud needed a reboot, how they're prioritizing reducing all of the different points of use of other products and other solutions, and trying to consolidate everything into one seamless Sales Cloud solution that helps you with adoption as you're trying to get your users on board. I love the couple of features he mentioned that I didn't even really know about, was the extensions to bring CRM into your email or into LinkedIn, wherever you're working. And then, I mean, gosh, who doesn't love an improved list view, right? So, go ahead and check out the pipeline inspection list view. I mean, I guess it's technically not called a list view, but what a better way to look at your opportunities. So, we're going to do more with Ketan. I also thought it was great how critical he thought the admin role is, as we all know it is. But I hope that gave you a little insight into how our executive leadership views the role of Salesforce admin and how we are really prioritizing making the admin job easier and helping you make your users more successful. Enough from me. Thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today. As always, if you like what you hear, please leave us a review. You can also get more information on my favorite website, admin.salesforce.com, for more great content of all kinds. And if you'd like to follow us at all, we are on all the social medias. You can find us on LinkedIn, or Twitter, or X or whatever it's being called these days, at Salesforce Admns, no I, and all over LinkedIn as well. Thanks to the main host of this podcast, Mike Gerholdt, for giving me the chance to bring this interview to you. And I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day. I'll catch you next time in the cloud.    

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Garry Polmateer, CEO of Red Argyle, a Salesforce Consulting agency and a member of the Salesforce MVP Hall of Fame. Join us as we chat about why admins need to be involved with cybersecurity at their organization and how to start planning. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Garry Pomateer. Admins and cybersecurity Garry and I go way back—we were both in the first class of Salesforce MVPs back in 2010. We recently caught up at Midwest Dreamin’, where Garry gave a great talk about why Salesforce Admins need to be involved in cybersecurity, so I asked him to come on the pod and tell us all about it. It can often feel like cybersecurity is a secondary consideration for Salesforce Admins, that it’s too complicated to get involved with. While Garry isn’t here to scare you, he wants to remind you that there’s a lot you can do as an admin to protect your organization. Running away from a bear When it comes to reducing your risk of a cyberattack, it’s a little like running away from a bear. You don’t have to be faster than the bear, you just have to be faster than the people next to you. Hackers are generally looking for low-hanging fruit, and doing some simple things like enforcing MFA and password best practices is often enough to get them to move on. However, Garry points out that good cybersecurity is a lot more nuanced than simply not getting hacked. A good security plan protects your organization from itself, whether that’s an accident that leads to a data breach or ensuring that you meet regulatory requirements. And if something does happen, you need to know what to do about it. A framework for security Garry lays out a simple framework for looking at security in your organization: Understand your risks Respond Recover What Garry has found in his consulting work is that while most businesses have spent time on #1, they don’t have a clear understanding of what to do if something goes wrong. That comes down to three simple questions: What will you do? Who will you talk to? And what will you do next? “Any admin can do this,” Garry says, “and having a communications plan that’s nailed down with some specificity is like an insurance policy for your peace of mind.” And if something turns out to be serious, you have an action plan in place for what to do next so you can act quickly. Be sure to listen to the full episode to learn more about security considerations you might not be thinking about and everything you need to know about backing up data.   Podcast swag Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store Resources Salesforce Cybersecurity: Climbing the Mountain Admin Trailblazer Group Social Garry: @DarthGarry Salesforce Admins: @SalesforceAdmns  Gillian: @GillianKBruce Mike: @MikeGerholdt