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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Sharon Klardie, Senior Director of AppExchange Labs & Innovation at Salesforce.

Join us as we chat about how Labs empowers Salesforce employees to build and share solutions on the AppExchange, and what that means for admins navigating the new world of AI.

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

What is Salesforce Labs?Next year, Salesforce Labs will celebrate its twentieth birthday. If you haven’t checked it out, it’s an innovation program for Salesforce employees to create solutions, package them, and share them with customers like you.

That’s why I was so excited to sit down with Sharon Klardie. She’s the Senior Director of AppExchange Labs & Innovation, and as she puts it, her team’s job is to “showcase the art of the possible.”

If you’ve ever stared at a new feature and felt some blank canvas anxiety when it comes to how to actually implement it in your org, browsing through Salesforce Labs solutions could be a great starting point. Even if you don’t end up using something, you can see what’s possible and even look at how they did it on GitHub.

The key to AI implementationIf you’re like most of the admins I talk to, you’re probably looking for new ways to use Agentforce. As Sharon puts it, “How do you have meaningful and mindful implementations of AI at your organization?”

You can get a lot of ideas looking through Labs apps that incorporate Agentforce. However, as Sharon points out, that’s only one piece of the puzzle. You need to get your data in a good place and build a solid foundation for scalable AI, and there are several Salesforce Labs solutions that can help you get started.

Best practices for AppExchangeFinally, we talk through some AppExchange best practices that will help you get the most out of any Labs solutions you want to try out.

First and foremost, never install an app you haven’t used directly into production. Spin up a dev org or sandbox so you can test without breaking anything. But more importantly, make sure you have a solid rollout and change management plan for any new functionality you’re adding to your org. You need to tell users what’s new, teach them how to use it, and be ready to handle any edge cases that will inevitably pop up.

Be sure to catch Sharon’s presentations at Dreamforce, and say hi if you see her! And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you never miss an episode.

Podcast swag* Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Learn more* Trailhead Module: Salesforce Labs Basics * Trailhead Module: AppExchange Basics * AppExchange: Trending on Salesforce Labs * AppExchange: Salesforce Labs App Guide * YouTube channel: AppExchangeTV * GitHub: Salesforce Labs * Help Article: How To Get Support for Salesforce Labs Created Applications * Dreamforce session: 7 Free Solutions to drive Your AI Strategy Forward

Admin Trailblazers Group* Admin Trailblazers Community Group

Social* Sharon on LinkedIn * Salesforce Admins on LinkedIn * Salesforce Admins on X * Mike on Bluesky social * Mike on Threads * Mike on X

Full show transcriptMike:
This week on the Salesforce Admin Podcast, I sit down with Sharon Klardie, who’s the senior director of Salesforce Labs, to talk about, well, what else? Free innovation. Sharon shares how labs empower Salesforce employees to build and share solutions on the AppExchange and what that means for Salesforce admins navigating the new world of AI and why, this is important, you should never install a new app straight into production. Now, whether you’re Dreamforce-bound or catching up after Dreamforce, this one’s packed with a lot of great tips from Sharon and a lot of AI strategy gold. So tune in, take notes, and let’s get Sharon on the podcast.

So, Sharon, welcome to the podcast.

Sharon Klardie:
Thank you for having me, Mike.

Mike:
I find it hard to believe, but you are one of the few people in the world that hasn’t been on the Salesforce Admin podcast despite you and me being in the ecosystem for like a thousand years.

Sharon Klardie:
I know. I was thinking about this morning and I was like, “I can’t believe I haven’t been on here yet.” So I’m super excited to share with the listeners here today.

Mike:
Well, let’s talk about that. So how did you get started in Salesforce and in the ecosystem, and what do you do at Salesforce?

Sharon Klardie:
Oh, I love a Salesforce origin story. So picture, it’s 2010, and I’m working at a software company that gets bought by an equity partner, and that equity partner implements Salesforce at every company they buy. And that was my first introduction of Salesforce back when it was just Sales and Service Cloud. And I absolutely felt in love with the platform. I felt empowered. There was community behind it. And ever since then, so from 2010 till today, I’ve been all Salesforce all the time.

Mike:
Wow. And you joined Salesforce. What part of Salesforce did you join?

Sharon Klardie:
So when I joined Salesforce in 2018, I joined leading the Salesforce Labs program. That was exclusively my focus. It’s been part of my remit my entire time, almost eight years here at Salesforce. And I’ve added some other things to what I do on the daily basis, but the Salesforce Labs program, community innovation, it’s my passion area. It’s what brings me joy. I just actually love being part of it, seeing the creativity of the employee community, creating labs, and seeing the creativity of our trailblazers who are using Labs solutions.

Mike:
So for anybody that hasn’t heard about Labs, when you say Salesforce Labs, what do you mean?

Sharon Klardie:
So Salesforce Labs is a program that’s actually turning 20 next year, if you can believe it. It’s an innovation program where we empower Salesforce employees to create solutions, package them, and share them on AppExchange for our customers to use. And Salesforce Labs solutions are always free. They’re community-driven. You can think of them like an open-source project. So it’s volunteered by employees. It’s not an employee who is on a product team and this is part of their regular release roadmap. This is an employee who sees a problem in the space that they want to solve, or they have a really creative idea on how to use our technology. So the Labs program really helps trailblazers to learn new technology, play around with it, get starter packs and templates. Blank canvas anxiety is a real struggle as an admin, throwing back a few years from my admin days, but sometimes a new feature would be rolled out and you’d be like, “I’m not sure where to start.” So the Labs program really tries to help trailblazers be able to adopt new technology, understand how you can use it, and showcase the art of the possible.

Mike:
That’s good. I know as an admin, I found Labs because I needed a project management app, and at the time, Reid Carlberg had a really cool one, so I was like, “Oh, that’s kind of cool.” And then from there on, I looked for the little beaker logo.

Sharon Klardie:
Yeah, we love that beaker logo, and then we evolved the logo to actually use the periodic elements of tables to use labs spelled out because we’re geeky like that.

Mike:
Right. I know. It kind of has like a Breaking Bad feel to it.

Sharon Klardie:
Yeah.

Mike:
I’m all about that.
So at Dreamforce you’re going to talk about seven free solutions to drive your AI strategy forward, and it’s going to be a really cool presentation, and some people are going to get to see it, some people aren’t. Why is it important for admins to look to the AppExchange and some of our Labs apps in terms of moving AI forward in their organizations?

Sharon Klardie:
Yeah. So right now, AI is moving at the speed of light or whatever is faster than the speed of light. I’m not sure what that is, but there’s probably something faster than the speed of light, and that’s what it feels like is happening right now. So one of the benefits that the Labs program will have is we can showcase different solutions on how to use this new technology, but also I think even more importantly is how do we think about how do we want to implement AI at our organization. And sometimes that might actually be using a Labs solution or another partner solution on AppExchange that isn’t actually AI-driven, but helps set the groundwork for how do you have a strong AI strategy. So an example of that would be, is there a set of technology or tools or processes that you should have in place at your organization to really help you identify what are your goals and use cases for using AI?

And we have a number of different Labs solutions that we’ll share. Pro-tip for anybody who’s going to see the content, it would be probably a few more solutions than seven. We’ll throw a couple bonus things in there and some shout-outs. But there’s a lot of technology out there to really help you frame is your data ready. Data readiness is super important as an AI strategy to move forward in the space. If you’re going to train your AI or use AI on your data and if your data is no good, then you’re going to have a problem. The AI isn’t going to respond the way that you expect or what your business needs. So we want to showcase these solutions that you can use to get started to help ground you in strong AI strategies.

Mike:
So it’s not just downloading agents.

Sharon Klardie:
Exactly. It’s going to be more than that. It’s really about thinking about how do you have meaningful and mindful implementation of AI at your organization. And we’ll also have some showcases of how to use cool Agentforce and AI technology.

Mike:
Oh, nice.
I noticed you put the word free in your title. That implies that there’s some that aren’t free.

Sharon Klardie:
Yes. So all Salesforce Labs solutions are free. So anything that our employees create and contribute are free to download from AppExchange. But there are other solutions from our partner ecosystem and some are free and some are paid. It is important to note for anybody who’s not familiar with the Salesforce Labs program is these are not official Salesforce products, which is actually called out in the master service agreement, the MSA. These are community contributions, so you can’t pick up the phone and call support and get help for them. We generally try to open-source all of our Labs solutions on GitHub so you can actually use it to learn new technology, see how an employee built that solution, or maybe that solution does 80% of what you want, but you want to change it. You can go get the source code and then go customize it for whatever works for your business. And if the solution that the employee built hits a home run and it solves your business challenge you’re trying to solve, you can go install the managed package and off to the races.

Mike:
Yeah. And I’m also thinking any of your Labs apps are also going to immediately be able to be agentified?

Sharon Klardie:
I would say. So we have some Labs solutions. I wouldn’t say that’s a hundred percent guarantee, although most of them should be able to be extended, but we have over 500 Labs solutions on AppExchange and I can’t say conclusively that all 500 would become-

Mike:
You don’t know all 500 just like the back of your hand? Come on now.

Sharon Klardie:
I, unfortunately, do not. I know many of them, but not all 500.
But yeah, most of them should be extended. We’re actually looking at engaging with some of our more popular Labs solutions and having conversations with the builders to say like, “What are ways that we could extend this using newer technology that’s come out?” Either adjacent, something like if you want to use AI, you can add onto it, but if you still want to use the main core functionality, like custom objects and flows that was there but not to have an AI arm to it, then you could still use the original. But how can we take these to the next level using the great technology that’s come out over the past couple of years?

Mike:
Yeah. Now, I think the use of apps within Salesforce has probably evolved since you and I were out in the world as we little admins wandering blindly through the Salesforce universe, because it’s become ubiquitous that you’d use an app on your phone, right? Like there’s specialized apps to do things. Oftentimes on my iPhone, I’ll get an app, I’ll try it out, it won’t work, I’ll just delete it, but I don’t have a spare phone. What is best practice for admins evaluating apps, be it from Labs or somewhere on the AppExchange, in terms of trying and testing something out perhaps before it goes into production?

Sharon Klardie:
There absolutely are some best practices. Number one will be we do not install brand-new apps we’ve never explored into production. We do not do that. I’ll repeat, we do not do that. Some trailblazers like to explore in a dev org first, but the cons of that is you don’t have your unique customizations. A lot of trailblazers have a lot of success in installing a Labs solution or a partner solution in a sandbox first so you can see how it interacts with the customizations you’ve made to the platform. But both either a dev org or a sandbox is absolutely where you want to start to check out any new solution, whether it be Labs or partner solution.

Mike:
Yeah. So that was the first mistake that I made back in the day. I would just try things out in production. Why not?

Sharon Klardie:
Yeah, no, hopefully nobody takes that guidance, Mike. Definitely it’s much more advantageous for everyone to play around and see how things work. And it gives you a little bit more freedom as an admin to look under the hood and see how exactly it’s going to work and then what your rollout plan is. Because it’s just like what I tell my Labs builders, it’s not if you build it, they will come. It’s not if you install it, it will work, right?

Mike:
Right.

Sharon Klardie:
So you also need to have that kind of change management process at your organization. If you just install a new app and have some great functionality, if you don’t tell your users about it once you move it to production, they might not know what to do with it or they might not use it in the way that you had in mind. I think we all know in technology, when we release things into the wild of our user base, we are going to come across some use cases and edge cases that we never thought might be the reality. So the more that you can get ahead of that and the change management process, it’s just going to be smoother for both you as an admin and also for your end users.

Mike:
Yeah. Now, one thing I’d be remiss not to cover, we talked a lot about consumption part, but you mentioned Labs is also open to non-Salesforce employees, correct?

Sharon Klardie:
No. So only Salesforce employees today can create and distribute a Salesforce Labs solution.

Mike:
Gotcha. But our AppExchange is open to non-Salesforce?

Sharon Klardie:
Absolutely. We have a very robust partner ecosystem and a process to engage. It can be a free solution that somebody wants to create as a business to kind of spin up and share with the community. You can go through our partner program to do that. And of course, it’s an ecosystem, so if you have a solution, idea that you believe is of value to our broader trailblazer community and customers, then you can engage with our program and list there. But anything created by Salesforce Labs is created by a Salesforce employee.

Mike:
Yeah.

Sharon Klardie:
And I just also want to note Labs go through the same security review process that all of our partner solutions go through as well.

Mike:
Oh, so no cheating because it’s a Salesforce employee?

Sharon Klardie:
That’s exactly right. Trust is our number one value here. We want all the Labs to adhere to that as well.

Mike:
Right, yeah. No, it’s same rules apply for everybody. That way you get the same quality and consistency. So that makes sense.
Well, Sharon, thanks for coming on the podcast. I think this session’s going to be awesome. I can’t wait to hear what people have to say about it, and I can’t wait to see what new stuff comes out from the Labs team.

Sharon Klardie:
Yeah. Well, thank you for having me. Hopefully, it’s the first time, but hopefully not the last time. I’ve really enjoyed chatting with you, Mike, and if anybody is at the session and shows up at Dreamforce, stop by and say hello. I’d love to meet you. And I’m on LinkedIn, and if you want to engage with that way, share any feedback about the Labs program, I’m happy to engage.

Mike:
So a big thanks to Sharon for joining us and sharing some behind-the-scenes look at the Salesforce Labs. I don’t know about you, but I’m ready to fire up a sandbox and test drive some :abs apps. That was always the most fun part for me as an admin. But remember, not in production, just in a sandbox or not in production. But hey, if you’re heading to Dreamforce, don’t miss her session on the seven, plus she says a few bonus free sessions to fuel your AI strategy. And remember, best part about Salesforce Labs apps is they’re free and open, and they’re built with you, the community, the Salesforce admins, developers, architects in mind. So with that, until next time, we’ll see you in the cloud.

The post How Can Admins Use Labs Apps To Get AI-Ready? appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Abhishek Saxena, Technical Architect at Copado. Join us as we chat about how he learned Data Cloud and why understanding context is the key to making Agentforce shine.

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

Overcoming the complexity of Data CloudAs a developer and architect, Abhishek isn’t lacking for technical knowledge about the Salesforce platform. But even he found it hard to get his head around what Data Cloud was and what it could do.

Abhishek attended community events, scoured LinkedIn posts, studied videos, and even read a book about Data Cloud. But there were so many new terms being thrown around, and he still couldn’t explain the difference between a data lake object, a data model object, and a data source object.

“Even though there was a lot of buzz around Data Cloud and how it is such an amazing, innovative solution,” Abhishek says, “I was not able to grasp what it does in an easy fashion.” Luckily, he had an “aha” moment that helped him see the big picture, and so he’s giving a presentation at Dreamforce to share what he’s learned.

What Data Cloud actually doesAbhishek’s talk, “A Beginner’s Guide to Data Cloud,” will get you up to speed in 20 minutes or less. As he explains, the main thing to understand is that Data Cloud is about data unification.

If you have your data in a bunch of different places, you used to have to dedicate significant developer time to maintaining APIs that allowed Salesforce to share information with your other platforms. With Data Cloud, you have everything on one record, with Salesforce and Slack as the front door. You have a complete 360 view of your customer, regardless of where the information is.

Why Data Cloud is crucial for AgentforceGetting a complete picture of your customers is doubly important when it comes to Agentforce. AI agents are extremely context-dependent: they do a much better job when you “ground” them with extra parameters.

As Abhishek says, “If you give agents good data, your responses are going to be much more personalized and better.” Data Cloud allows you to give your AI agents a much more specific picture of your customers, opening the door for better and more effective automations.

If you’re coming to Dreamforce, make sure to come to Abhishek’s presentation so you can be a Data Cloud pro. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you never miss an episode.

Podcast swag* Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Learn more* Dreamforce session: A Beginner’s Guide to Data Cloud * Salesforce Admins Blog: From Pillars to Lakes: Using Data Cloud As Your Source of Truth

Admin Trailblazers Group* Admin Trailblazers Community Group

Social

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

Full TranscriptMike:
So have you ever tried to figure out what a data lake is and then ended up wondering where the lifeguard’s at? Ditto. Today on the Salesforce Admins podcast, we’re talking with Abhishek Saxena, a Salesforce consultant with a developer’s mindset and a teacher’s heart. Abhishek’s going to take us through his journey of learning Data Cloud and how it went from something buzzworthy to something he could really explain to a five-year-old. So if you’ve ever felt overwhelmed by new tech or just really weren’t sure where to begin this episode’s for you. Plus Abhishek gives us a sneak peek at his Dreamforce session and why understanding context is key in making AI tools like Agentforce shine. So with that, let’s get Abhishek on the podcast. So Abhishek, welcome to the podcast.

Abhishek:
Thank you so much for having me, Mike.

Mike:
I’m excited to talk about this because of all the things going on at Salesforce, we’ve got a big event coming up in just a few weeks from when this is going to air, and you’re doing a presentation there, but before we talk about that, let’s find out a little bit about you. How did you get started doing stuff in the Salesforce ecosystem and want to present at Dreamforce?

Abhishek:
Certainly. So I have been working in the Salesforce ecosystem for about 10 years now, it’ll be 10 years later in November. I started off immediately after my college where I was studying computer science engineering. I always had an affinity to computers and how they work, so it was an easy choice to what to study.

But getting into Salesforce, that was a happy coincidence. My hometown, where I’m originally from, it’s called Jaipur, it’s in India, and that’s where I did my engineering from as well, Jaipur is traditionally not touted as a tech hub, but for some divine reasons there were several Salesforce consultancies that were trying to make it big in that area when I was just graduating, I got an offer to work for one of them as a Salesforce consultant after a series of intense grueling interviews. But yeah, that’s how I got started, and I have never looked back since then.

Mike:
Fresh out of college. And let’s see, people heard this in the past, I’ve recently had somebody point out to me that my Salesforce experience is old enough it could graduate from high school. So your Salesforce experience is somewhere in middle school, I guess, at this point.

Abhishek:
Yeah, sounds about right. I’m eager to get to high school and get to be the cool kid.

Mike:
Well, right now it’s getting its first iPhone and being popular. I don’t know what ten-year-old kids do nowadays, I don’t have kids, so we’ll just move on. Eventually my experience will be in college and that’ll scare me.

Abhishek:
Yeah, I hope I can get the certified technical architect or MVP or one of those cool badges to show around everyone.

Mike:
Yeah, I don’t know. I mean, being in the ecosystem is just fun enough too. It’s not going down the road with all those biker patches or like a race suit. It’s not, what was that game? Pokemon? You don’t have to collect them all. But you’re talking Data Cloud, so tell me from your experience, what’s so interesting about Data Cloud that admins need to know about it?

Abhishek:
So as I mentioned, I’ve been in the ecosystem for a long time and got decent exposure on Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Experience Cloud, so yeah, just the core platform in general. But over the last few years, Data Cloud has been one of those top things, and most talked about things from Salesforce at events everywhere. So even though there was a lot of buzz around Data Cloud about how it is such an amazing innovative solution, it could replace some of the other tools that an organization might be using, I was not able to grasp what it does in an easy fashion. Especially around two years back, 2023 Dreamforce when it was relaunched after being renamed from Genie, I was trying to understand what it does, what could be its use cases, maybe look at some Trailhead modules, but at that point in time, there wasn’t a lot that was available.

So Trailhead modules weren’t baked out completely. There weren’t any demo environments that I could get hands on, and it just felt a little bit overwhelming. I knew my friends who were doing Marketing Cloud, Einstein, CDP, that sort of stuff, knew what was going on, but us commoners who were just working on the core clouds.

Mike:
Us commoners.

Abhishek:
Yeah, we weren’t privy to that information as much as they were. So I started to get down on this journey to learn a little bit myself because yes, seems like everyone was talking about it. So I started by attending different community events in the States and Canada, trying to attend the Data Cloud specific sessions, read people’s LinkedIn posts, watch some videos. I even read a book on Data Cloud-

Mike:
Wow.

Abhishek:
… that one of our friends in the community had put out, but even then it was just so overwhelming trying to think about it logically. I am an engineer, I like to think about things in a logical analytical manner that, okay, I’ll first learn the alphabets, then I’ll start to learn words, sentences, so on and so forth. So I wasn’t able to get that topography down in my mind that way to get started with Data Cloud. There was these few workshops or actually Salesforce Data Cloud trainings that Salesforce teams were doing several times a month. I had to attend that one training probably four times until it finally clicked to me that, okay, now it feels that I have the basics down of what’s going on with Data Cloud, and if someone comes up to me and asks me about it, I’ll probably be able to give at least a satisfactory answer on what exactly is Data Cloud.

But at this point, now I had several months of experience trying to learn Data Cloud, I thought that, okay, let me go ahead and do the Data Cloud certification as well just to quiz myself if I know enough. I did that and I passed. So that was the validation I was seeking that, okay, now I am somewhat of a Data Cloud consultant. But I wanted to share this journey with everyone else because I consider myself fairly technical with a consultant and a developer background, and if it took me a lot of time to get through, then I would not blame anyone else in the ecosystem who’s not as technical to not completely understand that, Hey, why Data Cloud? What is Data Cloud? Why is this important? So that’s why I thought that yes, I need to share my knowledge with everyone else.

Mike:
No, I get that. And what’s so relevant about all that is when companies roll out features, and I’m not just speaking for Salesforce, but anybody, there’s often a lot of thought and process that has gone into it, and just because you don’t get it right away within a sentence or two or 10 seconds into somebody’s presentation, that’s not on you. That’s just speaking to the complexity of perhaps the situation, where you’re at in your learning journey, and then also just the complexity of the product that you’re trying to understand. I think it’s a lot for you to say, it took me a few months to kind of wrap my head around this. It doesn’t just happen right away. And I think some people get really frustrated in themselves when they’re like, well, I just don’t get it.

Abhishek:
No, absolutely. I agree with you. And yeah, I have been very lucky that I like what I do. So even after work, I’m not afraid to put in some hours to just sharpen my skills. But everyone’s situation is not the same, you’ve got a life outside work as well, you’ve got so many things going on that sometimes you’re just not able to put in those 10,000 hours to get perfect on something. And that’s why I feel that if you attend my session on A Beginner’s Guide to Data Cloud, at least in those 20 minutes that we are together, I could give you a good framework about, okay, after you leave it that I understand what is Data Cloud. I know what are some key use cases and why everyone says that it’s needed for Agentforce. So that’s what I’m trying to get out in those 20 minutes for everyone who has not yet had the opportunity and the luxury to actually focus on going through the Data Cloud trail certification modules or just having the training on the job of their own organization adopting Data Cloud yet.

Mike:
Yeah. What was it for you, as you were investigating looking into and learning about Data Cloud, what was the first kind of piece of it that started to click for you that really was like, oh, I think I’m starting to understand it?

Abhishek:
Yeah, great question. So when I was learning about it, and as I said, Data Cloud is a slightly different beast than the regular core clouds like Sales, Service, Experience, it’s something called as a near core cloud. So it’s not directly built on Salesforce, it’s Salesforce adjusting, you can say. So some of the concepts that were being introduced, they were not getting my other knowledge that I had gained through learning Sales, Service and Experience Cloud. There were concepts called as Data Lakes, there were some activations, segmentations, things that I had never really learned in the other clouds while working on it. So even though it was somewhat difficult to get the vocabulary for Data Cloud to get started, once I was able to work through those first few basic things, the biggest aha moment for me was when I saw that Data Cloud can help you consolidate a lot of different records.

So I’ll try to explain this and I go into much more detail in my session as well. If anyone in our listeners is in the attendance, I would love to have you in my session. But just to give you a recap or a quick preview of what I’m going to talk about is that let’s say your company uses Salesforce, your company also uses SAP for something else. Your company maybe uses Trello for tracking some stuff as well. So you have your record your identity as, since my name is Abhishek, all these systems have my identity there in SAP or ServiceNow, Abhishek can do certain things, maybe that has my personal email for some reason, or maybe a different phone number. And then the Abhishek on the Salesforce ecosystem, that record, that contact or user, has slightly different details. Maybe the address I put in is different. Maybe the phone number I put in is my work phone, and in the other one I put in my personal phone.

So what Data Cloud ends up doing is that from these different identities of Abhishek that exist in these separate platforms that are not linked, it allows you to create one record where all of your identities are linked. So in case I want to get Abhishek’s email in SAP, I can just call out to Data Cloud and Data Cloud will give that to me instead of myself having to write three or four different APIs trying to de-duplicate records, trying to find some common way or how it’s called an external key of linking that, okay, this Abhishek in Salesforce and that Abhishek in SAP are the same person.

Data Cloud takes all of that complexity out of this and just tells you that, okay, Abhishek’s record exists in five systems, here are the values of different things in those five systems. And I could just get that. So once I understood this, I was like, wow, this unified data that Data Cloud is giving you could have so many ramifications. And that’s again, one of those things that I explored in that presentation that how agents that need this sort of information can benefit from Data Cloud.

Mike:
You were so close. I was about to say, wow, you just described Data Cloud and you didn’t talk about agents. But no, what’s crazy is thinking back in my umpteen hundred years of Salesforce experience, there’s been different waves of where’s your data? For a while it was, well, Salesforce is CRM, and then they had Service and then that takes care of that. But there’s another system for this and there’s another system for that, another system for that. And the world just kind of operated that way. It was like just understood, people had multiple systems to log into. And I remember for a long time when I was a Salesforce administrator, the big question was, well, such and such system, does X, can’t Salesforce do that? And there was a big push for admins and developers to kind of rebuild all of this functionality into Salesforce.

And so you would have these really robust time management or project management apps and the platform could more than easily handle it. And you didn’t have to be a coder, you could build a project management app with a few objects and a couple dozen fields and some relationships, and there you’re ready to go. And then it kind of became like, well, wait a minute, why are we spending all this time building on this platform when we can just connect things? But there was no sense of unification there. And I think in your description, what I heard is finally now you can have an entire enterprise where the front door is Salesforce or Slack and it can access all of that data and you’re getting a complete view of a customer regardless of where the system information is, and that allows other applications and other things to run and do their job just well, but you still get that unified pull back in, and then you don’t have the burden of a developer maintaining 200 APIs on the back end.

Abhishek:
100%, Mike, you got a spot on.

Mike:
See, you’re a good teacher. Look at what you just taught me.

Abhishek:
Well, you are not a bad student either.

Mike:
Well, I think a lot of people have had Data Cloud explained to them in terms of agents and Agentforce, and there’s power there, but there’s also the first step out the front door, which is, yeah, but what if your customer service people or your salespeople sit down and actually get that full view that we’ve been talking about regardless of where the system of that information lives?

Abhishek:
Certainly, and that reminds me actually, so the terminology that Data Cloud uses is that you get the customer 360 view. Meaning that, okay, your organization uses Salesforce for CRM, you are using Azure to actually log into different systems, single sign on, maybe Excel and other Azure products. You’re using Workday for HR related things. You’re using Asana for project tracking. And like I said, you have different identities in these different systems, different values for maybe same fields, similar fields like email address, regular address, phone number, et cetera. But with Data Cloud, you are able to unify all of these different identities of a single user and then present that within your Salesforce systems as the customer 360 where you can access all these different details and take much more intelligent decisions. So hopefully now our listeners are able to get that, okay, why is it so important for Agentforce and why is it so important in general.

Mike:
Yeah. So then that’s my next question. Why is it so important for Agentforce?

Abhishek:
So agents, like any AI, and I’m sure our listeners must have used some sort of AI at this point, ChatGPT, Gemini or anything. When do agents do their best work? They do their best work when they have good context to go on and a good prompt that the user asks. Now, what is context? Context means that if you ask it to write me a sales email, if that’s your prompt, it’s going to give you a very generic answer, a generic response that, okay, Dear ABC, are you interested in our sales services? Are you interested in buying our product? But that’s going to be it. It’s going to imagine a few things, it’s going to skip out some important details. So basically the answer is going to be generic and not as helpful for your particular organization’s scenarios.

Now, if you provide the agent with good context that whenever agent responds, it knows that I’m working for Coral Cloud Resorts, I am responsible for handling bookings, I can refund things, I can access customer details and which objects to look at, where to get the information from. If your agent has these informations, or again, a simpler example that if you are in ChatGPT and tell it that, okay, I want to write a sales email as a customer service agent for Coral Clouds, my name is Abhishek Saxena, when you start your email, start with the salutation. This is intended to be for the guests who are staying at the resort. And if I give all of these details and then hit enter, the response I’m going to get is going to be a lot more personalized.

And that’s how you can automate it to send to any user that is using your agent. That’s what I mean by why context is so important for any AI to work. And with Data Cloud, as we have discussed in the podcast so far, it gives you that unified profile. It gives you the customer 360 so that your agents have all the information about your particular user who is asking the question or to wherever you’re trying to use it. Because good data, if you give it good data, your responses are going to be much more personalized and better.

Mike:
And that’s a lot of what we do in the Agentforce Now workshops like the one I do, the intro one where we talk about just prompts and even just writing a better, more descriptive prompt. If you think about it, I kind of reference it in the same way of it’s like learning to cook with one cookbook or learning to cook with a library of cookbooks. If you have more references then you have more ways of looking at things and more context into providing better information and a better response.

Abhishek:
Certainly.

Mike:
I love it. I’m curious to know, in learning something, there’s always something you’re going to run into that maybe frustrates you or maybe for me, just bounces off the surface. What was it about Data Cloud that was kind of something you really had to work to try and understand that maybe other admins might be having difficulty understanding as well?

Abhishek:
Yeah, great question. Like I said, most of my experience was on Sales Service Experience Cloud, so I was not a data specialist or a data consultant. So wrapping my head around what is a data lake? What is a data warehouse? What is the difference between a data lake object versus a data model object versus a data source object? How are they getting stored? Where are they getting stored? Is it not just another Salesforce object in which we are storing everything?

So that’s sort of basics of data processing that a typical data engineer knows, but a typical Salesforce consultant, admin developer does not, that was somewhat difficult for me to wrap my head around because in my training on working on Salesforce platform for so many years, I have been accustomed to think about data in terms of objects, Socket queries, and that form. But with Data Cloud, it’s a little bit different. So that was one of the things that threw me off initially, and I had to look at some resources even outside of Salesforce’s Data Cloud trainings to understand that data lake is not actually a lake. Data warehouse is not a big factory in which there are tons of books with data. So yes, that was something that threw me off initially.

Mike:
Yeah, those terms when they first came out, I know I’ve done some podcasts like with Skip Sauls, and he’s talked about putting a cabin next to the data lake and stuff that. I’m like, okay, who comes up with these terms? It’s not helping me understand. Where’s the data pond? Can you have a data swimming pool? Somebody decided lake.

Abhishek, this has been a fun conversation. I think it’s going to be a very compelling presentation at Dreamforce, but also I think it’s been very inspirational, at least for me, that even the hard stuff is still not that hard to learn. I go back to a saying, everything in the world is created by somebody at some time, and if that somebody can figure it out, you certainly can too. So Data Cloud and Data Lakes was created by somebody, which means they figured it out, so it can’t be that hard for anyone else to figure it out.

Abhishek:
Yeah, no, absolutely. And as I said, you got to learn the alphabet before you can learn to work with words and work with sentences. And I firmly believe that if you cannot explain something to a five-year-old, then you don’t understand it yourself. And again, a five-year-old needs to have that structure to understand it. So hopefully with the session that I’ve put together, everyone can learn the alphabet of Data Cloud and even start to make their own sentences.

Mike:
I like it. Well, we’ll see how many people can describe it to a five-year-old after we’re done. Thanks so much for coming on the podcast. This was a lot of fun.

Abhishek:
The pleasure has been mine, Mike. Thank you for having me.

Mike:
Okay, big thanks to Abhishek for joining us and breaking down what it really means to learn Data Cloud. I think I picked up a few things in just that short bit of time. Now, whether you’re prepping for a certification or just trying to make sense of new tech, I really think his story was a reminder that persistence pays off and that even you as a Salesforce admin don’t need to have to figure it all out in one day.

So be sure to catch his session if you’re going to dream for us and share this episode with a fellow Salesforce admin maybe who’s also struggling to understand some new technology or just getting started with Data Cloud. Either way, until next time, we’ll see you in the cloud.

The post Making Data Cloud Understandable for Admins appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Denise Carbone, Director of Delivery at ImagineCRM. Join us as we chat about her journey from business analyst to external consultant admin and why AI makes BA skills even more valuable.

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

Why business analyst skills are so important for AIDenise was working as a business analyst when she was first handed the keys to a Salesforce org. She remembers getting a plaque in the mail for being one of the first 500 people to become Salesforce certified.

Obviously we’ve come a long way since then, but the skills needed to understand a business problem and map out the requirements for a solution haven’t changed. As Denise explains, you have to be “process first, technology second.” I sat down with her for this episode to find out how these BA skills are even more important with Agentforce.

The power of asking whyIn order to really do your job well, an admin needs to be more than just an order taker. But if you’re spending your time running through a list of requests without having conversations with users and really understanding the business process, well, that’s a tough row to hoe.

Instead, you need to ask why. That’s where your business analyst skills come into play. You need to have a full understanding of how things currently work, where they could be improved, and who cares about it the most.

Admins in the age of AIAnother key business analyst skill is change management. You may have built the coolest solution in the world, but how do you get folks to actually use it?

As Denise explains, if you want your solution to be adopted, you need to make it adaptive. As you’re building, you need to keep going back to your users for input. If they feel like their feedback is a part of the process, they’ll have ownership over the results.

While Agentforce has greatly expanded what the platform can do, it’s still just technology you’re using to help solve a business problem. As long as you understand the why behind a request, you can build solutions that transform your organization.

Be sure to listen to the full episode for more from Denise on business analyst best practices and the importance of establishing AI governance policies. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast to catch us every Thursday.

Podcast swag* Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Learn more* Salesforce Admins Blog: Why Every Admin Should Adopt a Consulting Mindset * Denise’s Dreamforce Session: Why Admin & BA Skills Matter More Than Ever in the Age of AI * Admin Trailblazers Community Group

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Full show transcriptMike:
This week on the Salesforce Admins podcast, I’m joined by Denise Carbone, longtime admin, Salesforce MVP, and all-around champion of business analysis. We unpack her journey from BA to external admin through the power of asking why, and why AI makes those foundational skills more valuable than ever. So, whether you’re like me and you’ve just figured out dependent picklists, or you’re leading delivery teams, I promise Denise’s insight on governance, process and career growth is a must-listen. So with that, let’s get Denise on the podcast. So Denise, welcome to the podcast.

Denise Carbone:
Awesome. Thanks, Mike. I’m really happy to be here.

Mike:
I know, I’ve been to a whole bunch of Chicago user groups, I can’t believe I haven’t had you on the podcast. So, I’ve tipped the scale a little bit in your favor, but tell us how you got into the ecosystem and what you do in Chicago.

Denise Carbone:
Yeah. No, thank you. Thank you. Yes, longtime listener of the podcast so happy to be here. So, I actually started in the ecosystem in 2004. I was a BA turned external admin. I was working for a technology company in Chicago, and I was bestowed the ownership of our Salesforce platform. I was a BA operations kind of girl. I’ve done work in CRM systems like Goldmine and Act!, so really old system. So, when Salesforce was presented to me I wasn’t totally intimidated. I knew it was a CRM platform, I just didn’t know much about it. I will be honest, I did not fall immediately in love with it. Later on I found out why. It was not because of the platform or the technology, it was because of lack of governance and processes. So, when I was doing reporting and operational metrics and things weren’t being presented, as the CEO was saying, as they wanted to see them, it turned out just a lack of the governance and the processes is what really caused those issues.

So, I put my BA hat back on and went back to the team, and explained some of these points we had to clean up and just do better with some guidance, and some structure and rigor around using the tool in the platform me. And that was in 2004, so in 2006 I attended my first Chicago user group meeting. Completely intimidated. I had major imposter syndrome because I really didn’t know much about the platform. Do I even belong here? But I needed to learn, I had that desire and curiosity to really build out my skill set. So, I got a little bit more comfortable in this ecosystem. And then, in 2008 I was presented an opportunity to help co-lead the group.

The user group leader was moving on and actually going to work for Salesforce at that time, and left a vacancy in Chicago. So I said, “Yes, sure.” At the time I agreed to helping co-lead the Metro Chicago area, so just anything in the city limits. And that same year I actually took the certification exam. So, in October of 2008 I was certified as an admin. So that solidified, put to rest slightly the imposter syndrome that I was carrying along, but felt really confident and good about that. And a few months later I received a plaque in the mail, I was one of the first 500 people globally to become Salesforce certified.

Mike:
Welcome to the club.

Denise Carbone:
Thank you. It was a really cool designation at the time, but yet looking back how many years later, I’m like, “Oh my God.” And today with the number of certified professionals out there and all the different types of certifications available, it’s a pretty cool little fun fact. So, I like to share that. And going into my career, and again, I was on the client side for the past, starting my career from 2004 on the client side, learning the platform, being that admin, external admin, utilizing my business analyst skills, always asking the questions of why. In 2013, I actually joined the MVP program, so super, again, imposter syndrome, why am I here? Appreciate all the peer support, love being there, but also completely intimidated.

I wasn’t sure if I belong, but it was a really cool opportunity for me to learn and grow, get to meet amazing people like yourself, Mike.

Mike:
Oh, thank you.

Denise Carbone:
And Steve Moe, actually, I was a huge fan of Steve’s. Met him through the MVP program, became friends to date. The MVP program just helped me solidify my career and just learning journeys I think is where it helped me the most. In 2015 I took the leap over to the partner side, so I needed the opportunity to really stretch my skillset. Working on the client side, you really are focused on industry specific workflows and processes, your growth opportunities on the industry side, at least for me at that time, were a little bit limited. So, going over to the partner side was really an opportunity for me to stretch my skillsets in both BA and admin, working with clients, getting to know why they’re building something and less about the how. So, one of my mantras I use all the time is it should always be process first and then technology second. I’ve seen situations where people love the shiny things and, “Oh, we can automate this and turn this on, and doesn’t this look great?” And the design of the layout is, it’s not intuitive, it’s hard to follow. It doesn’t make sense.

It’s over-automated, over-architected, over-engineered, so I always like to peel it back and ask the questions why, and get to learn more about the users, more about what we’re trying to solve for. I love that journey, and when I joined the partner side I had the opportunity to really upskill myself in both BA, administration, and then just focused on delivery. So on the partner side today, I am a director of delivery. I stepped into a leadership role in the past 10 years. So, I started as a director of delivery in 2015 with a team of one. I was able to build a team of 14 people, which means I manage a team of consultants, and I am accountable for all of our project success. Today I’m in the same industry, work for a smaller SI. We are focused in the philanthropy space and also nonprofits. Again, I support a team of consultants and I am very client-facing.

I work day-to-day with our teams, I meet with our clients, and I’m accountable for the overall project success. So, one of the things I really love about the job I do today is the coaching and the mentoring for learning and upskilling. In this space in the day and age that we’re in today, things change fast. I remember last summer seeing a preview of the Dreamforce keynote where they’re talking about agents, and being presented to us, and what do we think about this, and how does this work? I will say Salesforce has done an amazing job at providing enablement so that we can all start this learning journey, and you have to stay up to date with it because it changes, as you know, as the ecosystem knows, almost weekly. So, it’s been fantastic. But today, again, I focus on project delivery with my teams, and upskilling, and supporting, and mentoring folks.

Mike:
Wow, you said a lot in all of that answer. So, I want to dig into what you’re presenting at Dreamforce, but there was a theme in your answer that’s come through on quite a few podcasts, which is imposter syndrome. Do you feel that a lot of admins get into their role because they weren’t pursuing something in tech and they fell into it? Is that where you were feeling your imposter syndrome? And to be fair, I also want you to clarify, when you say BA you mean business analyst, right?

Denise Carbone:
Correct, yes. Business analyst.

Mike:
Okay. So I mean, you had a background in business analyst skills. That’s not a skill to scoff at. What do you think was giving you the imposter syndrome?

Denise Carbone:
That’s a great question. I think it was learning the technology and learning the platforms, I felt at the time when I fell into it, anything technology related you would be categorized as a developer, and it was very tech heavy. We used technology, we used business tools, but it was just a tool. I didn’t have to learn the behind the scenes. So, I felt a little intimidated that we’re learning the system, and I think the power of the platform, which really helped solidify my career and I think a lot of people’s career back at that time was the clicks not code focus and everything that you’re able to do declaratively. That was a huge lift for people’s career. Obviously when I started back in 2004 I wasn’t seeking out a role in the Salesforce ecosystem, and I’m using my air quotes here, because it wasn’t really a thing. We didn’t call it out at that time. It was a business tool, and it took you through a whole wave and phase of a career path.

And today in this space, I think it was even maybe eight years ago when people were really talking about career transitions, and they wanted to get into the Salesforce ecosystem and they wanted to learn Salesforce, and it was definitely a shift in that learning and it became a career back in 2004. And I don’t know about even yourself and folks, was that something people aim for? I think it started becoming a career path more towards maybe 2008, 9, 10, when certifications become more prevalent.

Mike:
I mean, I ask because I’m the similar path. I was hired to do something else, and along the way of improving business process Salesforce became vital. And so it was, “Well, I have to learn this because it’s really at the crux of improving our business process.” There’s only so much I can do to suggest sales stages and stuff, but without the technology supporting it. And so yeah, I mean, I accidentally fell into it, and within easily a couple years I was like, “This is my full-time job.”

Denise Carbone:
It does become full-time job, for sure. I think my skillset in being a business analyst, my superpower, if I’m getting asked that today what’s my superpower, is being able to break down complexity and talk in layman terms. That is a huge, again, superpower, because I have this ability to hear and kind of visualize in my head a process flow chart. Like, “Okay, we start here.” I always ask people if we’re trying to elicit requirements and gather requirements, understand a day in the life of the X persona, “Walk me through your day,” and they walk through stuff. And you start getting a visual and how you can build it, but outside of the technology is really getting to know their process and building out.

Because sometimes people say, “Oh, this is so different. You’ve probably never seen this before.” Well, some cases maybe because maybe really broken, or sometimes it’s just they never took time to step a few steps back and optimize, make things more efficient. So, I love efficiencies, I love optimization, I love the ability to break down complexities, I love the ability to speak in layman terms. I think that’s a learning that I’ve taken wholeheartedly through my journey because I can speak business speak, I don’t want to speak Salesforce speak if the recipient on the other end doesn’t speak Salesforce. So, I want to speak in a language that’s going to be comfortable for them, and then break down the complexity and really help and work to build systems that are going to bring the client along for the journey.

Mike:
I feel like we’ve gotten a hell of a preview of your Dreamforce presentation. Because I don’t know if admins always think, “Well, I’m doing business analysis,” how do you look at business analysis maybe different than somebody that’s never been formally trained?

Denise Carbone:
That’s a great question, and this will definitely be part of my session, is I always ask why. There’s been a mantra back in the admin world-

Mike:
Forever.

Denise Carbone:
Yeah, we’re not order takers. We should ask the question on why. I’ve heard people say, “You should say no,” but I would challenge that and say, “Well, ask why,” because that is the root of what a business analyst is doing is they have this curiosity mindset where they are just like, “Well, why? Why do you do this? Have you ever considered this?” Just not saying no per se. I like to say, “Yes, and,” but you give the options. Because you can do it, this, this or this, but what are the impacts of your decision if you go that route? So, I believe that admins inherently have some BA, business analyst built into their skills, it’s just maybe they don’t realize it yet, it’s unrealized. But they actually do in a way, if they’re asking what somebody wants, and they should also follow up with why.

I think that should be the starting question honestly, and then go forward and then do the build if applicable. But it’s definitely a learned skill. The other flip side to that is, I think there was, I’ve heard it before and it’s so not true, that business analysts are not just note takers. They should never be a note taker. I mean, they can do documentation, but they’re not glorified note takers. It’s definitely a skillset where you talk about a user story, or a requirement, or use cases. Those are all three very separate things. And the reason why you do some of this documentation upfront is to make sure that what we’re building as admins meet the technical requirements for the end user.

Mike:
What is your best advice for an admin to not be a note taker? Because I think when I first started, I knew improvements that needed to be done because I was in sales and I was working on sales. And so, very easily out of the box I was like, “Well, I know we need this. I know we need to track that.” And then it quickly became my user seeing the change and offering for, “Well, can you add this? Can you add this? Can you add that?” And I think what I realized early on was I really wanted to appease my users right away. Like, “Oh yeah, absolutely I can do this.” Or I remember the time, this is going to sound silly, I remember I figured out how to do dependent picklists, and let me tell you, I was like, “I can code the internet, because I can make a picklist where if you pick hot dogs it can say ‘Red Hots,’ and if you pick hamburgers it can say, ‘Rare, medium, well.'” And I just thought I was the cat’s pajamas.

Denise Carbone:
[inaudible 00:16:51] it was very powerful.

Mike:
Yeah. And then your users are like, “Well, can you make it do this?” I was like, “Yes, I can. Ha-ha. That’s a dependent picklist.” For a while all I wanted to build was dependent picklists. But how do you move from that to like, “No, I need to set a vision. I need to understand more of what’s going on”? How do you make that your approach versus piling up a bunch of tickets?

Denise Carbone:
That’s a great question. So, you want to make sure that it’s going to be adopted, that we always talk about adoption in the space, and adapted, being adaptable to things and change. So, there’s a whole change management aspect of what we do. I do believe that through the journey and empowering the admins, it’s making sure, so partnering with the end user. I think it’s on the consulting side we always say, “We’re a partner,” so we partner with our clients. It is a partnership because we can do the work but we need their input, and we want feedback. So, it’s like a continuous feedback loop. So, we have a hybrid methodology in how we do things today, but it’s definitely we will gather requirements, and get approval of these requirements, and do some build, and we build that. We break it up in sprints, maybe theme it out by certain features and functionality and present it back to the end user and get their feedback. “Does this work? Does this look good? Are we missing anything? Is there any key step that we did not capture?”

It’s really getting that buy-in as you’re doing the build so that it can easily be adopted, and you’re getting the feedback in the time where it’s more real time. So, if it’s features and functionalities that are, like you said, the bells and whistles of dependent picklists were amazing, but after a while it could become stale and they’re not using it. The goal is, I always say less is more. You don’t want to overkill something that’s not going to be used. Even today I was talking to somebody earlier about utilizing a tool to be able to scan all the metadata and see all the unused fields that were created at one point in time that are just sitting out there and untouched for a long time. So, we have to get rid of that technical debt.

So, my approach and my recommendation or suggestion is for people to really partner with who they’re building it for so that they can get the buy-in, get feedback. “Does it work? What would you like to see? Does the user interface still, is that intuitive?” I feel like with the new Lightning design pages, Mike, we grew up on Classic, remember that?

Mike:
Oh, I know. We’ve called it a few other things too, like Aloha. But yeah, Classic. I remember describing to my users, Salesforce is like the Amazon interface because at the time Amazon had those tabs. The world has gotten away from tabs on websites now.

Denise Carbone:
They have.

Mike:
We’re too fancy for that.

Denise Carbone:
When I log into something I’m like, “Wait, where do I go?” So, the intuitiveness of some of these apps and the design is escaping the newer, what’s being published today. But it’s really, you want to make sure whatever you’re building is going to be usable, it’s intuitive. All the things like practical foundational serum, best practices should always be applied, and I feel like it’s really partnering with who you’re building it for. And the business analyst aspect that feeds into the admin role is that why are you building it? What are you building? The how is always something, I don’t necessarily know if the end users need to see behind the curtain for it, but you want to make sure that what you’re building is, it works and it flows well.

I always still laugh because it still comes up today, we don’t want to do all these clicking. So, there’s many magical ways to make things a lot faster than to do all these clickings. The automation tools that are available today on the platform are amazing, the flow automation is just next level. So, I feel like there’s a lot of opportunity there to do really cool things, but you want to make sure the cool things are really going to support the folks that are going to use the platform.

Mike:
I couldn’t agree more. So, let’s talk about the cool things. AI is everywhere, and that’s in your session.

Denise Carbone:
It is.

Mike:
So, let’s talk about why. I mean, there’s been a lot. There’s always new features coming out with Salesforce, and sometimes we cover features too heavily but I feel like there’s AI in everything. I was at a car dealer website the other day and they had an AI chatbot on the homepage. I was like, “Man, if car dealers got it, you know everybody’s got it now.” So, what makes it different for admins about why we need to learn and understand business and analyst skills in the age of AI?

Denise Carbone:
That is a great question. There’s truly a distinction between our human skills and the strengths of AI. AI is definitely a tool. It can be your autonomous agent, it can support different tasks, but the human skills are and will always hopefully remain relevant in this space. Right now, humans bring to the table we can do critical thinking, we provide judgment. Most people have emotional intelligence. The thing about BAs too, I talk about, and I think this is a skill that crosses both the adaptability and growth mindset, we have to be able to think differently. As humans, we are, “Okay, so what’s the new shiny thing out there? Do I need to learn this? How is it impacting the work I do today?” That statement I just said about, “Do I need to learn this? How does it impact the work today?” For me, just a full transparency, I did not need to learn how to actually build flows for a while.

I needed to be able to document and explain what needed to happen based on a client’s experience, or their workflow, or their processes. So, I would document processes and I would be able to document the heck out of how to explain or the build steps to create a flow. But I didn’t have to be hands-on right away. I do know how to build flow and I can build flows, but it wasn’t a skill that I had to learn because I was able to document that, write that, and I was able to articulate it well enough so that an admin or one of our builders was able to pick it up and run with it to build. But this day and age today with AI, it is here, it is not going away. It is not like a nice to learn later, it is if you don’t know it or if you haven’t started, you’re already behind.

And that’s one of the pieces I really want to emphasize is that if you have, and I would beg to differ with the folks attending Dreamforce, if this is not on the radar, if they’re not already in this learning journey, I’m sure a good majority of them are because it is so prevalent. But if they’re not, they’re already left behind. But I do feel that the human skills, storytelling, communication, ethnical reasoning, these are things that we bring to the table to it. Using AI, AI is really good at processing, data processing, or summarizing, maybe some automation. They’re good at pattern recognition, but they’re lacking certain human emotions, human elements that go into the work that we do today.

Mike:
I can agree with that. It’s also fun if you ask it for things and it’s like, “Yep, that sounds bad.” And you’re like, “No, you wouldn’t understand.”

Denise Carbone:
Yeah, one of another piece I’m going to hone in on a bit in the session is admin skills and BA skills are needed because you have to vet it. So many times I’ve seen people generate, the generative AI, I read this thing, I was like, “This is so AI generated.” I’ll go back to my team and I’m like, “All right, so here’s my problem. What other sources did you reference this on? Is this validated? This to me,” and I’ll point out a spot, “This looks like a hallucination. Is this a real thing?” “I don’t know.” And I was like, “Well, you need to check that.”

Mike:
Yeah. I was recently on a long road trip and some people in the car were scrolling through Facebook ads and stuff, and the one was like, “Oh, hey. Hey, I think I found one.” And they read it and I go, “That was 100% generated by AI.” It was describing some 1992 used car, and it said, “With a fresh battery for those cold starts on Iowa mornings.” And I was like, “Anybody that’s selling a $2,000 car probably doesn’t have the copy editing skills to put that level of detail into the ad.” So, yeah.

Denise Carbone:
Yeah, the description and the adjectives totally give it away.

Mike:
I mean, I am starting to get to the point where you look at an article and you’re like, “That’s AI generated,” and I’ll just give it to another AI and be like, “Just tell me what this says.” So, great. And so, I have to think back that somewhere AI is sitting going, “Isn’t it fun that the humans make us type all this stuff out and then the human make us decode all of our own stuff?”

Denise Carbone:
Probably, probably. It is a little humorous in what we ask it to do. I know someone that actually wanted constructive feedback on his code, so he fed, and he actually asked the bot or the agent to change his tone to be, I don’t know, he called irrigate or snotty. So, he wanted to get the constructive feedback versus the, “Oh, this is great.” So, it was pretty funny and it was actually a pretty fun read on some of the feedback, and there’s a lot of experiments you can do with it. But yeah, in the end I think you really need to validate, at least from a solution perspective what it’s doing. It’s entertaining in some ways, but other ways you really need to validate against other true sources.

Mike:
So I’ll end on, I hope it’s not a hard question but it is something I’m curious about.

Denise Carbone:
Sure.

Mike:
As a business analyst, what is a question you ask now because of AI that you didn’t ask before?

Denise Carbone:
That is a great question. One of the things we ask people or clients today is, “What is your AI policy?” And what that actually entails is also governance, because there’s certain aspects of the platform that based on industry certain people not are allowed to use it. Or we have even some scenarios where we would use a Zoom recording and there’s an AI summary function. Some people don’t allow that. But actually when it comes to platform questions, it’s relevant in that do you have a policy? You’re thinking about a governance, there is a good 50-50 that don’t and a good 50-50 that do. It’s also what are your thoughts about using AI? Do you have any use cases today that you’re thinking about using? We also recommend maybe AI readiness, which means do you have those use cases? Do you have policies or governance in place? How do you think you want to use AI? And then we can provide use case examples based on those responses, but those are the top few questions we ask.

Mike:
Yeah, I could understand that because otherwise everybody’s just going to be, “Well, at this point I just have Bob,” because I’m waiting for somebody to call AI Bob, “Generate this,” and cool. So, isn’t that your job? Yes, it is. Yes, it is.

Denise Carbone:
It is.

Mike:
Denise, I think your session at Dreamforce is going to be amazing. I hope you can get out into the user group world and share more BA skills with admins, because I want us to be more than order takers. And I say that for all of the personas, I don’t think a developer should be an order taker or an architect. I mean, bring yourself into the role, and bring your knowledge and experience because that’s what they hired you for, right?

Denise Carbone:
Yeah, for sure. No, I love it. And we have some really great BAs out there in the space, but I’m also happy to support and share knowledge, and just talk through these scenarios, because the work is not going away. It’s only getting deeper.

Mike:
Right, I know. The work’s not going away, it’s just going to change.

Denise Carbone:
Right.

Mike:
Right? Thanks so much for being on the podcast.

Denise Carbone:
Awesome. Thank you, Mike.

Mike:
Big thanks to Denise for sharing her story and dropping some really insightful knowledge about the intersection of business analysis and admin work in the age of AI. And her message, ask why, build smart, and don’t let imposter syndrome hold you back really resonates with me. Now, if you found this episode helpful, pass it along to a fellow Salesforce admin, or a teammate, or a friend maybe. Until next time, we’ll see you in the cloud.

The post How Do Admins Use Business Analysis Skills Effectively? appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Nicole Pomponio, Director of Delivery Management and Operations at SaltClick.

Join us as we chat about how admins can unlock the full potential of Slack in Salesforce. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Nicole Pomponio.

Why Slack is changing what it means to be an adminIf you’re planning on coming to Dreamforce this year (or catching it at home), you’re probably going to hear a lot about new ways of combining Agentforce and Slack. That’s why I’m excited I got a chance to sit down with Nicole for this episode and have a conversation about her Dreamforce presentation.

Nicole is the Director of Delivery Management and Operations at SaltClick, a consultancy for Salesforce and Slack, so she’s eager to find new ways to get the most out of both platforms. The ever-deepening integration between Salesforce and Slack means there are all sorts of new ways to connect users with data.

As Nicole explains, all this means that the entire idea of what an admin can do is becoming more and more expansive.

Getting organizational buy-in for SlackIf your organization isn’t using Slack, how do you get the buy-in you need to overcome inertia? And if you are using Slack, how do you get the most out of it?

Nicole is an admin, but she’s also a decision-maker at SaltClick, and when she puts on her leadership hat, she wants to hear about business problems and possible solutions. So the key to getting buy-in is to reposition Slack from something that sends messages to something that can solve real business problems.

“I think the magic of Slack is that when you’re using it and when you’re using it right, it’s easily adopted,” Nicole says, “you don’t have to sell it because when you use it, you showcase it.” For example, identify how many meetings can be eliminated with a dedicated channel on Slack, or show how much you can simplify your team’s workflow with the Jira integration.

Tips, tricks, and best practices for SlackAs Nicole explains, it’s helpful to establish some rules of the road for how your organization will use Slack. Here are a few tips to get started:

• Have consistent naming conventions for channels. SaltClick uses prefixes to keep things organized: #ext for external channels, #int for internal channels, and #salt for fun stuff like #salt-babies.
• Let your users know how to organize things for themselves, especially how to leave or mute a channel that they don’t need to use every day.
• Make a channel for dedicated Slack support, so you can quickly help folks who get stuck.
• Establish guidelines for what Slack etiquette means at your organization and any emojis you’re using.
• Make space for fun, but mostly on a different channel from work.

Make sure to check out Nicole’s Dreamforce presentation, in-person or online. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you never miss an episode.

Podcast swag* Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Learn more* Add her Dreamforce session to your agenda: Discover Salesforce Channels in Slack * Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: What Can Salesforce Admins Do With Slack and Agents? * Salesforce Admins Blog: Slack and Salesforce: The Power of No-Code Automation * Salesforce Admins Blog: Getting Started With Slack and Agentforce Integration

Admin Trailblazers Group* Admin Trailblazers Community Group

Social* Nicole on LinkedIn * Salesforce Admins on LinkedIn * Salesforce Admins on X * Mike on Bluesky social * Mike on Threads * Mike on X

Full show transcriptMike:
Slack-first doesn’t have to mean Slack-only. And today’s guest, Nicole Pomponio, tells us why. Nicole is the delivery and operations manager at SaltClick, and she’s going to tell us, Salesforce admins, how we can unlock the full potential of Slack and Salesforce.

In addition, Nicole shares her journey from accidental admin to leadership, and she gives us some insight into building intentional channel structure, integrating external platforms, like Jira, and reshaping the admin role in this new very connected era. So whether you’re Slack-curious or already swimming in salty channels, you’re going to walk away with some ideas you can use.

And with that, let’s get Nicole on the podcast.

So Nicole, welcome to the podcast.

Nicole Pomponio:
Thank you so much for having me, Mike. Super excited to be here.

Mike:
I’m excited for everything that’s coming up for Dreamforce. Last week we got done talking about navigating flow errors as an administrator, and the irony is I had to do a workshop and navigate my own flow error. So it’s fortuitous the way things happen sometimes when you report a podcast.

Nicole Pomponio:
It was meant to be. It was meant to be.

Mike:
But Slack is a thing, and Slack’s been a thing for a while, and you’re going to present about Salesforce channels inside Slack. Before we talk about that, let’s learn a little bit about you, Nicole. Tell us what you do in your everyday life and how you got into the Salesforce ecosystem.

Nicole Pomponio:
Absolutely. I have been in the Salesforce ecosystem for about 14 plus years. I stopped counting because it makes me feel old. Got started reporting, and it grew from there. I was lucky enough to become a solo accidental admin, and then the opportunities just spun up from there.

My day-to-day life right now, I manage delivery and operations over at SaltClick. We’re a consultancy for Salesforce and Slack, so I get to work with very bright people building out super fun solutions for customers and ourselves, and that’s Salesforce and Slack together, which also gets me very excited.

Mike:
I reached the same kind of milestone where my Salesforce experience, somebody said, oh, it’s old enough that it could have graduated from high school.

Nicole Pomponio:
Oh, ouch.

Mike:
Yeah, burn. Yours at least has a learner’s permit.

Nicole Pomponio:
I’m almost driving, yeah.

Mike:
Right, almost driving.

Nicole Pomponio:
I’m almost driving.

Mike:
There’s no segue to talk about Slack and driving. Things you shouldn’t do while driving.

Nicole Pomponio:
There you go.

Mike:
Have your phone and use Slack. Why do admins need to discover channels in Slack?

Nicole Pomponio:
It’s such a great timely question, Mike. For me, there’s no better time because Slack is being positioned in front of Salesforce, and I know we just aged ourselves a little bit, but it’s really the first time that I’ve seen that happen and seen it done in a really meaningful way.

So from my perspective, we’re starting to see a really close merge of Slack, this communication powerhouse, with Salesforce and having the ability to understand and navigate both right now is going to be such an amazing opportunity, and I think it starts to rewrite the narrative of what an admin is.

Mike:
Oh, how so?

Nicole Pomponio:
An admin, I think it’s been changing over the years. If we look at what a Salesforce admin historically was, we’re creating workflows, we’re navigating some fields, some page layouts, and then we’re growing from there. We’re working with flows, and we’re starting to dip our toe into becoming developers maybe, if we want to take that path.

And now it’s merging more with other platforms. As a Salesforce admin, I need to also understand connected platforms, how to maybe connect to different systems. So over the course of, I think rapidly the past three years, what an admin has been I think is no longer just those foundational Salesforce elements. It’s really starting to evolve. So I see that happening too with Slack, so bridging the gap a little bit, expanding out to other systems. So I do think it’s shifting, and Slack has helped shaping that.

Mike:
I mean, I always look at how many meetings are people in. And I remember when Salesforce required Slack. Of course, we had a lot of collaboration tools, and organizations have a lot of collaboration tools. With channels, does the collaboration tool become the channel, or how does it really narrowly define what some of the users are looking for in terms of supplemental data outside of what’s on the record?

Nicole Pomponio:
That Slack channel, now merging with Salesforce, of course, we’ve got Salesforce channels, really is that collaboration. It’s a point where teams are coming together. They’re not having to wait for that weekly meeting. I’m not having to wait for my monthly meeting, my weekly meeting. I can work async in Slack, but all of that information is being condensed and surfaced in that Slack channel, so it’s easier for us to find what we’re looking for. Everything stays together. If we’re using threads like we should, all of those answers are within one thread. We’re seeing associated files. And now with Salesforce channels, we’re seeing that Salesforce data as well in details tabs and related lists. Everything’s right there surfaced and condensed for us, so it really creates an efficiency that I don’t think we’ve seen before.

Mike:
Do you feel in terms of broadening the reach and looking at other platforms, I mean at Salesforce we look at Slack and Salesforce is really just the platform, how have you navigated working with others in your organization to integrate platforms into Salesforce?

Nicole Pomponio:
It’s one of my favorite questions.

Mike:
Ooh.

Nicole Pomponio:
I love to bring things into Slack. I really want to, and this is a little bit selfish of me, I just want to be in Slack. I’m biased heavily here. So the more that I can bring in, I think the better it’s going to be for me.

But also our teams. We talk about Slack being our work operating system and wanting to do more in the flow of work, all these buzzwords and phrases we hear. What does that really mean? It’s bringing those systems in, whether it’s just the data or it’s actually actions and connecting out too.

So I think the example that is top of mind for me, because I’m in it constantly, is Jira. So I want to connect with Jira through Slack so that I can create issues, I can update issues. I just get things done faster with pulling in those external systems, the data, but now the actions too, right?

Mike:
Right.

Nicole Pomponio:
Which that gets me really excited because if we’re talking about our agentic era, then if I start to think about the data that’s available to me and the actions I could potentially do, I think natural next step is can I get an agent to do them for me? Which, if we’re talking about efficiency, frees up my time for the higher level things.

I love to spend my time with people. So I know that was a long way from connecting systems and bringing things in, but it becomes my favorite question because we can start to do so much when we connect systems that we’re using every day and when we’re actioning in those systems too.

Mike:
Well I, just for clarity’s sake, I prefer the long scenic route of the answer, not the short, short route.

Nicole Pomponio:
Oh, good. Oh, good. Yeah, mine are long.

Mike:
Drive around the block, got to see everything, take the long way. Sunday afternoon cruise in the convertible.

Nicole Pomponio:
Perfect.

Mike:
So one question I have, and this goes back to maybe I was an admin in a different era, it sounds like your organization is bought in and your leadership is bought in to let’s make Slack the interface for a lot of our work. Is that true?

Nicole Pomponio:
Yeah, we are Slack-first.

Mike:
Okay. Did you sell that vision or was that a consensus that came down from leadership that you embraced and get to work towards?

Nicole Pomponio:
I mean, Mike, I would love to take all of the credit for this. Sometimes I do. Just kidding. I don’t. It’s a top-down, bottom-up type of approach. I think the magic of Slack is that when you’re using it and when you’re using it right, it’s easily adopted, and I don’t have to sell it, if you will, because I use it, I showcase it, and then everyone sees the power of that. My favorite thing is the light bulb moments. So the more that we can do that, the easier that story becomes.

But I will say when I started at SaltClick, it was almost three years ago, time flies, it was already heavily being used, and one of my predecessors was really starting to push on what is Slack, how can we use it? And I really gravitated toward that, so I just started to pick that up, training sessions for folks, really empowering people and pushing them to Slack’s help articles because they’re amazing. So it just became a natural conversation for us.

And now it’s people coming to me saying, hey, can we do this with Slack? I just posted something about Gearset and getting notifications and then linking out to pull requests to understand what’s being validated, what’s failing. That wasn’t my idea. Shout out to Jacob on my team because he knows that we can use Slack for many different things, and he wants to make his own life easier.

So it’s become a natural conversation for us. What can we do in Slack, and how can we do it? People come to me with half-baked ideas. I love it, and then I just help get it to the finish line. I might have an idea I reach out to somebody about, but it is really all hands in on Slack.

Mike:
Okay, you win. You got the fun leadership. So let’s play the opposite side of that coin. The admin’s bought in, you, and you see the vision, you see the potential, but perhaps leadership, they’re busy. They don’t pay attention 24/7, like you do, to the innovation that’s coming out of Salesforce and Slack. But you know your users and you know the pains and the gaps within the organization. What would your advice be for an admin that’s maybe going to go to Dreamforce or maybe watched a YouTube video online about Slack or just knows that their organization has Slack, but it’s like, to me it’s like Slack’s like a Ferrari and you use it to go to the store and buy a gallon of milk every week and you don’t use it to its full potential. What would your advice be for those admins to get the organization to flip to where you are at?

Nicole Pomponio:
I think that’s such a great question. And just to be fair for the previous question, I am on our leadership team, so that was-

Mike:
So you have sway there too.

Nicole Pomponio:
…it’s an unfair advantage for me. But if I put my leadership hat on, what I’m looking for is not just the problem but the solution. So for folks that are trying to navigate, well, how do I really showcase this, it’s really difficult sometimes to get enough data to show ROI. But if you go to leaders in your organization, you say, hey, I see this problem. I think that Slack can solve this for us, can fill this gap, here’s how we could do it, I don’t know many leaders that would just say, hard pass. I don’t want to even look at that. I think taking that initiative would really show that you’re invested and showing the solution to that problem I think would be phenomenal.

I think as leaders we tend to see problems and we have potential solutions, but we really want input and buy-in from the people that are using the tools, right?

Mike:
Right.

Nicole Pomponio:
It shouldn’t just be the Nicole show. I want to definitely understand that it’s going to add value for folks. So if you are one of those people that are really trying to showcase what Slack can do, I would suggest going to Slack sessions at Dreamforce. I would suggest joining the Slack community and making some friends in there. I’ll definitely say hi to you, but really poke around at here’s a problem I’m trying to solve, what’s a way I could do it With Slack? I know I would be willing to help folks, but anyone in the community would be willing to help too. And I bet you, in some of the sessions that you’re going to, you’re going to see a lot of use cases and a lot of ways to solve those problems.

So that’s what comes to mind for me when I think, how do I reposition this tool that might just be seen as a way to send messages to something that can actually solve some business problems for us.

Mike:
I mean, I’ve felt that way. So you opened up a whole other can of questions when you said you’re on leadership. I think that’s incredibly awesome that you’re a Salesforce admin and you’re in leadership. For admins that aren’t in leadership, was this just the way that your organization operates, the admin is part of leadership, or how did you get that seat at the table?

Nicole Pomponio:
Such a great question. Many of your questions are great questions.

Mike:
I try really hard. I’m thinking of hosting a podcast where I ask questions. What do you think?

Nicole Pomponio:
I think this would be a great journey for you [inaudible 00:14:58].

Mike:
Okay, we’ll see how it works out.

Nicole Pomponio:
I think in our organization I have the flexibility and opportunity to be the Slack owner as well as participate in being that Salesforce admin as well. It’s a shared responsibility, so it’s not just me doing it. But because of the experiences I’ve had, not only being a Salesforce admin, being a Salesforce BA, being the doer and the navigator in different business units in my past life, I’ve been able to take that with me wherever I go. So it is a gift that I’m able to bring at SaltClick to be able to do multiple things, but I really enjoy coaching others on that too.

So for me in leadership, it’s been very powerful because I can understand how we can use our systems to really solve our business needs. And again, SaltClick gives me the opportunity to continue to do the things that bring me joy.

Mike:
That’s a really good, really good answer. See good questions, good answers. On the subject of Slack, because I’d love to know, how often do you communicate with your users broadly? Do you have a dedicated Slack channel? Do you run help through Slack? Is there a place for them to ask questions? How do you run user engagement on your end?

Nicole Pomponio:
So from the SaltClick lens, we have fun channels. We have learning channels, training channels. We have chit-chat channels. We all have some salty channels as well because we like to have fun. We have Salty Babies and Salty Pets. I’m a jokester, and I can’t help but bring corny jokes into every aspect of my life. And then as a Slack community group leader, I have a channel in our Slack workspace as well.

So from the Slack community lens, the engagement there is really answering questions that come in. Sometimes you’re going to get a meme. Sometimes you’ll get some help articles and some directions and a path forward. And it’s really posting consistently there to help people understand that you’re there for them, that you can bring them information in the flow of their lives that’s going to help them.

On the SaltClick side, it really is about trying to organize because I did some kind of research pretty recently to understand how many channels are we in, how many messages and files and all kinds of stuff are we sending around. It’s a lot. I think on average people are in 100 or 200 channels, so the noise can become pretty robust. You want to try and organize that and make it meaningful. So really helping navigate with channel descriptions. What are we even doing in this channel, what’s our goal, what can you expect? Letting people know that they don’t have to be in a channel. They can exit it. They can leave. They can set their own notifications. I really like to advocate for not only the way that we have our channels set up, but the way that they can help themselves in that experience as well.
But we have all kinds of fun. I think my favorite is probably the Salty Babies one.

Mike:
I won’t dig into that because who knows where that goes. I would like to know because, and we have this a little bit at Salesforce, did you enforce or did you… Enforce sounds bad. I don’t have a different word for it. Parameter, I don’t know, fence. Did you put out guidelines? That feels the best.

Nicole Pomponio:
Guidelines feels right.

Mike:
You put out guidelines. Guidepost, yeah. Because people can name channels whatever they want, did you put out a naming thing so that people know… You mentioned salty channels and chit-chat channels, and boy, say that one five times fast.

Nicole Pomponio:
I can’t. I can’t.

Mike:
I will. I’ll just get myself kicked off the air. And work channels, and we have that at Salesforce too, did you put out a guide and get leadership, I mean, you’re on leadership, but a corporate understanding of here’s how we should name things so that people can easily quantify stuff?

Nicole Pomponio:
Yes. You want to have some pretty solid channel naming conventions to help people organize their day and to make it easier to find things. So I did mention the Salty Babies channel. The fun ones could start with Salty. They could start with Fun, but you want to make sure that you are outlining what those are for your teams and that you’re building out some Slack etiquette. But thinking about too not only our internal channels, our external ones as well.

Mike:
Oh.

Nicole Pomponio:
So yes, we don’t want to confuse ourselves or our vendors or customers, so. And I’m sure you know, you might be in many different channels. And you have an external channel, you want to quickly know that it’s external, so putting ext in the front of it is definitely helpful for your eye to make sure you understand you’re posting something in the right location. And then if it’s internal, putting an int in front of it.

And then we did develop a standard naming convention for our project channels because again, we are Slack-first. So we are running our projects through Slack, and then we have our customers in Slack channels as well. So we wanted to define what those naming conventions were so that we could organize ourselves a lot more efficiently.

And then we also think about too what should go in that channel. Should there be a canvas or not? So not only are we thinking about standard naming conventions for channels, we’re also thinking about what would add value right there in the channel. So if I have a canvas for a project, what should I have in that canvas? If I have a canvas and a DM with one of my direct reports, what should I have in that canvas to make it meaningful?

So in my mind, it’s definitely thinking about the structures of the channels, how we’re using Slack, what our etiquette is for each other. And even things like defining the emojis that you use. A thumbs up or thumbs down could mean something else to someone.

I like to give the example of my parents texting one another back and forth. My mom sent a long paragraph to my dad, and then his response was a thumbs up, but we probably had a good five-minute conversation around what his thumbs up meant. Was it a good thumbs up? Was it a sarcastic thumbs up? So defining what your emojis mean could avoid some confusion down the line.

Mike:
Yeah, I would agree. There’s a few channels that, well, we have one internally on the admin team, and we use an emoji just to recognize or put your hand up for something, and I never realized how many different hands there were as emojis. Because it also kicks off a workflow that like, hey, so-and-so said, yes, and they would do this. And I’m like, I put my hand up. Why didn’t the workflow fire? Oh, I used the wrong hand. I used hand two instead of hand one.

Nicole Pomponio:
There are a lot. There are a lot. And then you can make your own custom emojis. That can get real.

Mike:
Oh, well, that’s a requirement on my team. Everybody has to have their own emoji.

Nicole Pomponio:
You have to have it. I love that.

Mike:
And I’m blessed enough somebody made one of me giving a thumbs up, so I got both.

Nicole Pomponio:
Nice.

Mike:
I got me and a thumbs up.

Nicole Pomponio:
That’s awesome.

Mike:
Last question. For all of the stuff that you’re working on for Salesforce, for Dreamforce… Sorry, so many forces. I’m sure it’ll be Slackforce, right?

Nicole Pomponio:
It could be.

Mike:
If admins were listening to this and they had to go what’s one reason I need to talk to my leadership about Slack and why because I heard it from Nicole, what would that answer be?

Nicole Pomponio:
My gosh, Mike, no pressure.

Mike:
No, none.

Nicole Pomponio:
I truly believe that we are going to continue to see an evolution of the integration between Slack and Salesforce. It feels like we’re on the arc, we’re on that path, right?

Mike:
Uh-huh.

Nicole Pomponio:
Purchased in 2021, started to hear some rumors about things being connected, started to see it happen. We’ve got Salesforce channels. We have to be empowered to understand what we can do with both systems. And the best way to do that is to immerse yourself in at least three days of sessions heavily centered around what you can do with Slack, what you can do with Salesforce, and what you can do by combining them.

I think it is the perfect opportunity. I was at TDX and started to hear a lot of Salesforce people asking, what’s up with Slack, what can we do there? A lot of people are starting to join the Slack community. It’s the perfect time. And I think with how fast things are changing, I don’t want anyone to get left behind. I don’t want them to feel like they’re being left behind, certainly not anyone’s company.

So I think, for me, it’s really, really being at this point of being able to understand both and connect them.

Mike:
Well, I think that’s very, very solid reasoning right there. I can’t think of anything better.

Nicole Pomponio:
It feels right. I feel like anyone would say yes to that.

Mike:
I mean, it’s also one of those pretty obvious things. AI is a very conversational tool, and so is Slack.

Nicole Pomponio:
Yes.

Mike:
It’s made for each other.

Nicole Pomponio:
I think so. I want an agent right in there chatting with me helping me with my day.

Mike:
I would love. I’m a fan of Marvel. One of these days I’m going to get my own assistant.

Nicole Pomponio:
Yes, yes.

Mike:
And it fires up, “Good morning, Mike.”

Nicole Pomponio:
I want my own J.A.R.V.I.S. I wouldn’t name them J.A.R.V.I.S., but-

Mike:
Oh, I would totally name them J.A.R.V.I.S., and I expect him to have a British accent because it sounds just very proper. But yes, open up my shades, tell me what the weather’s going to be in my first meeting and summarize the urgency of Slack messages that I got. That’s what I want.

Nicole Pomponio:
I don’t think we’re asking for too much.

Mike:
No. I mean, we were supposed to have flying cars by now.

Nicole Pomponio:
Yes.

Mike:
So…

Nicole Pomponio:
The least we can do is have a Slack agent that could do work around our house.

Mike:
That speaks in a British voice.

Nicole Pomponio:
Yes.

Mike:
Cool. Thanks, Nicole, for coming on the podcast. I appreciate it.

Nicole Pomponio:
Thank you so much for the opportunity.

Mike:
Big thanks to Nicole for sharing how she’s leading with Slack and evolving the admin role along the way. I really love the fact that she is an admin for multiple platforms and has leadership in leadership at her organization. It’s great to hear from her how she’s building smart channel conversations and also, yes, finding that seat at the table. I don’t know about you, but I got a lot of strategy. I got a ton of inspiration out of this episode.

Now I know not everybody’s headed to Dreamforce, but if you are, I hope this session got you excited for some of the content that’s out there. If you’re not, that’s okay. There is a ton of content on Slack, on both Trailhead, on our YouTube channels. You’re not going to miss out. We’ll also broadcast a whole bunch of this. I do believe Nicole’s session will probably also be online, so I’ll just let that out as a sneak peek.

Now, if you learned something new or you enjoyed this episode, do me a favor, share it with somebody, promote it on social, spread the word.

Let other admins find some of this great content that you enjoy listening to.

And with that, until next time, I’ll see you in the cloud.

The post Slack Is Redefining the Salesforce Admin Role appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to David Simpson, Salesforce Admin at the 1916 Company. Join us as we chat about his process for troubleshooting Flow errors and his unexpected path into the Salesforce ecosystem.

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

Why can Flow errors be so intimidating?If you’ve ever received an emergency ticket from a user because they’ve encountered a Flow error, you know just how cryptic they can be. It’s not always clear at first glance what’s going on, or what your user can do to fix it.

What’s more, if you’re hearing about an error from a user, that means it’s made it to production. So now you need to start worrying about your testing and anything else that might pop up. And oh yeah, you need to fix the dang thing, too.

That’s why I was so excited to sit down this week with David Simpson. He’s doing a Dreamforce presentation about how to better navigate Flow errors and how to prevent them from happening in the first place.

Five steps to resolve a Flow errorDavid breaks down the process of fixing a Flow error into five steps:

1. Gather information about the Flow error. What’s in the error notification? Is it specific to a particular user or record?
2. Try to replicate the error in a sandbox environment.
3. Find the fix.
4. Test the fix in your sandbox, and test for any similar scenarios.
5. Push your fix to production.

David emphasizes the importance of communicating with stakeholders at every stage of your solve. You don’t need to share every single detail, but you want to make sure your user knows that you’ve identified the error, how long it will take to fix it, and if there are any workarounds in the meantime.

Reach out to the communityWe also discuss David’s path from finance into the Salesforce ecosystem. He started out as a staff accountant, but when he was asked to take over some of the Salesforce administration duties, he realized he loved working with the platform far more than burying his head in spreadsheets.

Finally, I ask David about his top tips for getting better at solving Flow errors. He points to the Trailblazer Community and Salesforce Help articles as two of his best resources. However, he also suggests getting hands-on in a sandbox by trying to build things that might break. It’s a low-risk way to flex your problem-solving skills and will give you valuable experience for when a real error ends up in production.

Make sure to listen to our full conversation for more from David about how to solve Flow errors. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you never miss an episode.

Podcast swag* Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Learn more* Navigating Flow Errors Session at Dreamforce * True to the Core Deep Dive: Flow Testing and Debugging * Test or Troubleshoot Flows With the Flow Builder Debugger

Admin Trailblazers Group* Admin Trailblazers Community Group

Social* David on LinkedIn * Salesforce Admins on LinkedIn * Salesforce Admins on X * Mike on Bluesky social * Mike on Threads * Mike on X

Full show transcriptMike:
Ever had a flow error throw your day off track? You’re not alone. This week on the podcast, we welcome David Simpson, Salesforce Admin at the 1916 Company who’s bringing his session from Dreamforce navigating flow errors as a new admin right into your old earbuds. David’s going to walk us through his process for troubleshooting errors, he shares tips for smarter flow testing, and we even talk about his unexpected path from finance into the Salesforce ecosystem. Now, if you’ve ever stared down an Apex exception email and wondered what is this trying to tell me? I promise you this episode is for you. So with that, let’s get David on the podcast.
So David, welcome to the podcast.

David Simpson:
Thank you for having me.

Mike:
Let’s get started with what you do in the Salesforce ecosystem and the topic you’re going to talk about at Dreamforce this year.

David Simpson:
Sounds good. My name is David Simpson. I am a Salesforce Administrator at the 1916 Company. I have been an admin for a little over eight years now and a flownatic for over five years now, and my session is Navigating Flow Errors as a New Salesforce Administrator.

Mike:
Okay, do you have a robe?

David Simpson:
I had a cape from being an awesome admin back at Dreamforce 2018, but that has been lost in multiple moves.

Mike:
Okay, well I’ll say this publicly. I have an extra one in my basement and I’m going to get it after this podcast. You getting the cape back.

David Simpson:
Sounds good to me.

Mike:
So there we got that solved and all 35 people who are listening are like, cool, David’s getting a cape, what else can I learn? But I saw your session. So navigating flow errors as a new administrator. I think for me, I’ve built demos for Flow. I am nowhere near Jennifer Lee level, Jennifer Lee’s admin evangelist on my team. I think she knows more about Flow than Flow knows about itself. But I’ve always, I’ll run into that error and be like, cool. I don’t know Jennifer, what do I do? And for those people that don’t have Jennifers, why are flow errors daunting?

David Simpson:
Flow errors can be daunting first off because the error message itself can be very vague. You’re dealing with developer query language and it might not be incredibly clear on first glance what the error is. So you have this issue where your end user or your stakeholder is stopped in doing their job, and they get some cryptic error that they don’t know how they can fix it and they are now looking to you and now you have to decipher this cryptic error message. So it can be pretty daunting even when you have experience in the Salesforce ecosystem to know exactly where to go and what to do to solve that error.

Mike:
So when do you find… New administrators, even experienced administrators get flow errors. Are you focused on when users get the flow error or when the admin is building a flow and testing it?

David Simpson:
So it’s actually both. My session is planning on covering what happens when you encounter an error, more specifically once it’s live in your production environment and maybe somebody has encountered it and maybe your testing didn’t cover that aspect. How you can handle that, how you can troubleshoot it and get to the bottom of it. But then also how you can do some more comprehensive testing when building your flows. So if you get those errors, you can adjust them immediately or you can read those errors and understand what you have to do without going through a bunch of help documents online and figuring out what that code means.

Mike:
Yeah. So let’s take us through David’s thought process when you get a flow error. What happens?

David Simpson:
So the first thing I do is I go see how I was notified of the flow error. If it is an Apex exception email, I’ll read through the Apex exception email and try and see, okay, who caused this? What’s the record? What step in the process did it fail? And just all of that information that’s in those emails. Alternatively, if it happened to have been triggered via a Flows fault path, I will then investigate that notification.

But then what I try to do is I first see what the error message is, if it’s something that I’m familiar with, if it seems like it might be related to a validation rule or permissions or just general access, I’ll see if I can address that quickly. But if it’s something a little bit more convoluted or harder to decipher, normally what I like to do is to take that same flow and we have sandboxes, so I’ll go into the sandbox and I’ll just try to replicate those steps. I will perhaps use the flow debug and run it as the user who encountered the issue. Maybe I’ll try and recreate the record if it feels like a particularly daunting error and then just run through the flow and see where it fails.

Those are normally my processes and through that I will eventually encounter the cause of the error. And then at that point it’s just going through the process of fixing the error in the flow, performing more tests to make sure that I’ve covered that as well as any other potential unexpected issues that might arise from the change and then getting that pushed out, all the while communicating to whoever encountered the issue that this is being taken care of, this is the ETA, and if possible, any workarounds for that fix and error.

Mike:
Wow, you’re better than the local mechanic that works on your car. Here’s my car, it’s making a noise. Three weeks later, you find anything out?

David Simpson:
Yeah. With Salesforce, it’s really nice because there is so much information that it can almost seem a little bit overwhelming, but that information can be used to get to the problem a lot faster. We’re not getting just some generic error that says, oh, an issue occurred, good luck. We’re getting a more specific error that is pointing us where we need to go. We just need to be able to translate that into human readable language in order to solve it.

Mike:
Yeah, so I’m thinking of this. You’ve mentioned you’ve been an admin for eight years now, that’s a decent time in the seat. How has working with Flow changed over time for you?

David Simpson:
It has gotten so much better, so much easier, but also more complicated. I remember just a few years ago having to perform a process builder that triggers an auto-launched flow that might have some issues accessing certain records or a collection of records. And throughout the years with all of these releases and updates, it’s just gotten a lot easier and more intuitive.

A great example would be just the introduction of an auto-layout in a flow. Being able to see that clear process and order of operations to the flows, it’s really helped. But also with all of these features, it does get a little bit more complex. What is the best element to put on your flow in order for this to not only run but run efficiently? Is it multiple update records? Is it doing a loop and an assignment and then an update? Is it using Transform? There’s so many options and there’s no particular right way to do a lot of stuff, which is really freeing. You can get super creative with these solutions and I think that that’s been an awesome thing.

And not to mention testing, going back to the flow errors. The recent introduction of an enhanced flow debug has really made my life a lot easier. I can see so much more detail in what’s going on in my flows than what I just built. I can see the technical specs behind it, and that’s really helped me narrow down what exactly needs to be done or what needs to be fixed in my flows when I do encounter an issue.

Mike:
I’m going to say this respectfully. You sound like you have a lot of technical knowledge coming into the role of Salesforce Admin.

David Simpson:
Oh, well thank you.

Mike:
What was your history before being a Salesforce Admin?

David Simpson:
Before I was a Salesforce Admin, I actually worked in accounting and finance. I was a staff accountant.

Mike:
Oh, detail. Hello?

David Simpson:
Yeah. Very process-oriented, very consistent in my day to day, and I at one point made a transition from being a staff accountant to a financial analyst, which was just essentially more spreadsheets. But during that time, my supervisor said, “Hey, I administer our Salesforce instance here. I think you’d be good at it. I need some help. Our professional services team, they put their opportunities in and we need to clean up their financials at the end of each month, but you should probably know the system in which they’re putting this in.”

So he gave me an admin license and told me go on Trailhead, start learning some of the beginner stuff, and I just instantly fell in love with it. I love the problem solving aspect. I love the ability that there’s so much you can do and build, that Salesforce is just a canvas of process creativity that I said, you know what? I don’t think I want to do finance related work anymore. I want to do Salesforce full time.

Mike:
Wow. Okay. So that’s another podcast I’m going to have you on because I want to talk about career path. I think that’d be really cool, but I can see now the structured way that Flows work really could appeal to an accounting mindset. Is that the first feature that you really gravitated to?

David Simpson:
Interesting that you asked that. It did take me a few years to get into the flow space and the automation space. When I became an admin, the first automations I touched were Workflow and a little bit of Process Builder, but I was really moreso focused on user access and just general custom object setup. It wasn’t until a few years into being an admin that my manager, I had switched jobs, he said, “I need you to build this automation and it’s not going to work in Process Builder. It’s not going to work in Workflow. You’ll have to do Flow.”

And I was very intimidated at the point. But I had a mentor who walked me through flows that they had built and it just clicked. It was so logical and just made so much sense while still being flexible that it was, I didn’t go back to Workflows and Process Builders unless I absolutely needed to.

Mike:
Yeah.

David Simpson:
So yeah, it took a few years, but once I was on the flow train, I could not stop.

Mike:
Yeah, no, I get you. I remember seeing Flow in its early early days back in 2012 when you used to have to actually download software to use it and the various iterations that it went through. But it’s very useful now I think because of the visual aspect of it.

David Simpson:
Yes.

Mike:
I’m a very visual person and I’ve always, that’s the thing that I loved about Process Builder was it looked like a process flow that you would diagram, and I’m glad that Flow has caught back up to that now.

David Simpson:
Yeah.

Mike:
Where do you stand on, so new admins, building flows, I’ve seen all kinds of flows. What’s your process on how complicated you get a flow and testing it as you get more complicated?

David Simpson:
Well, the complexity of a flow, I try to start by being simple first and only using some basic decision elements and update or create records elements, something that is really just a simple if/then statement and then add the complexities as the business requirements change. But with every single change that is made, I just test. That debug button is right there on the flow and is so easy to use. You just click it, pick a record or put your inputs in and let it run and just make sure that you’re seeing everything that should be happening with each step.

It’s like cooking. You should be tasting as you go to make sure that nothing unexpected is happening. And you can do the same with the flow. You add a new element, you click the debug and you test it. You add a couple of decisions or a loop, click that debug and test it. So it can get as complicated or as complex as you need it to be. But you can also just start very simple and you can test along the way and it will come out fine, just provided that you’re being proactive in your testing.

Mike:
Yeah, no, sometimes I just dive in, I just want to build the whole thing and then it throws a million errors and I’m like, I should have built this more step-by-step. What was I thinking? It’s the reason when they build houses, they home inspectors come at every stage. There’s a reason for that. Let’s talk about screen flows. I’m sure you touch on them in your session. I personally think they’re really cool. I’m from, I was a Salesforce admin back in ’06, and I remember thinking if only I could do a screen pop that walked people through filling out an account page or something, and now I could right? My fear if somebody turned me loose as an admin or I would do screen flows for everything. What is your decisioning on should I make this screen flow or not?

David Simpson:
I am incredibly pro screen flow, much like yourself. In our company, we use screen flows for almost everything that requires end user interaction. The idea is to provide our users only what they need to interact with or change or take action on, and nothing beyond that for both an efficiency sake and also to make sure that there’s no confusion or there’s potential bad data.

So we utilize opportunities to process our sales. We actually use Salesforce as our main point of sale, and when they go to close out their sales, they click a button which triggers a screen flow that says “Have you gotten all of your tasks in order for this opportunity? Do you have the opportunity products added? Are they available for sale? Have you synced this opportunity to our external system?” And then all they have to do is just fill out a few fields, probably less than a dozen throughout the entire screen flow, and then it completes the sale for them.

Similarly, when they want to create a brand new sale, they click a button on the account that creates a screen flow instead of the new opportunity standard action. Because it has many less fields on it, they only need to fill out, okay, who the customer is, what’s the deal name, and then some just basic additional info that our customer experience team likes to have. So it’s a very streamlined process and we find that it not only saves them clicks, but it saves them time and gets them back to helping out their clients a lot faster.

So I’m very much screen flow. I just gave an example about opportunities, but we use it throughout the entire Salesforce org.

Mike:
Yeah, no, I’m with you. Pop a flow for everything. That’d be what I would do. So you’re going to present this at Dreamforce next month. For people going, they’ll see the presentation, not everybody goes and they listen. For people not going, but still really want to dig into what are things I should understand or how should I navigate flow errors as an administrator, what are some resources that helped you learn how to read through those error messages and understand them as a Salesforce administrator?

David Simpson:
So the first thing I would suggest is the Trailblazer community. There are so many helpful people on those forums, and if you encounter an issue, you can post a question and in a matter of minutes you’ll get a response. But they’re also just generally friendly people and they just want to see you succeed and they will help you out. So that is an incredible resource. Just the community that is built up around Salesforce and administrators is so great, and I highly recommend that if you ever run into an issue that you check out the Trailblazer community. Additionally, the Salesforce help articles have been super helpful for me. They’re a little bit more technical. They’re more about the steps that a process or a system can do, but those are also great for getting a foundational knowledge.

And then the third and final resource that I would say is just build and break in a sandbox. Just try to make things that don’t work and see what happens, and then try to fix them. Because it’s a sandbox and it’s not real data you’re not at risk of causing any issues. But I learned the most by making mistakes, by building a flow and maybe not testing it thoroughly enough or forgetting a field or forgetting a step where I get a certain record and then seeing what that error is and then adjusting that. That generally happens to all of us eventually, but try and do it deliberately and see what error results you get back. You’ll be surprised to find that they’re the same errors that you get when you’re not trying to make mistakes. So a great way to learn is just by simply doing.

Mike:
Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. I’m from the days when you used to get a little help box and you just hit this most frustrating error and try it again, try it again, try it again. It goes back to that was it Thomas Edison, he didn’t find one way to invent the light bulb, he found 99 ways to not invent the light bulb or something like that. I feel like we’re all that way. I’ve found 99 different ways to make a flow not work out of trial and error. And sometimes that’s all it takes. But you can only read so much and then you have to actually go do and try things out and poke around in the org.

So last thing that’s on my mind, and I wonder. AI in the last few years has just erupted. What in your job has changed because of AI? And I just mean in general. Doesn’t have to be Agentforce, nothing like that. Just in general, has anything changed for you as an admin because of AI?

David Simpson:
Yes. With the advent of AI, there is this unspoken expectation to be a little bit faster and a little bit more efficient. We are encouraged to use AI to help assist in creating solutions for the tasks that we are given and turn them around a little bit faster. It’s just a general efficiency overall with AI. And I use AI in my day-to-day to help maybe create some tickets. We use Jira to spin up our tickets for the work that we need to do, and I will use AI to put my thoughts in. If I don’t know a solution to something, I can say, “Give me the best recommended suggestions for implementing this type of action on the flow.”

Additionally, I can put in a solution that I’ve already had and have it output a nice format so that way if maybe I’m not the one doing the ticket, whoever I hand this off to, it can be much easier understood. So overall, just AI is making us more efficient and making us have a faster turnaround time, and that’s just in turn building up the expectations for our stakeholders to deliver faster.

Mike:
Yeah, plus now they’re the ones feeding the error messages to AI being like I think I know what the answer is, David.

David Simpson:
Yeah.

Mike:
Really? Did AI tell you that? I bet it told you to go buy me a cookie and a coffee at Starbucks because if it didn’t say that, then it was wrong. It’s lying to you, Alice.

David Simpson:
It’s hallucinating.

Mike:
It’s hallucinating, Alice. AI’s hallucinating. All right, David, this has been super fun. I look forward to your session. I will ping you after this and get you that cape because I have one downstairs and I don’t like it when people lose their capes.

David Simpson:
Sounds good.

Mike:
We’ll get that taken care of. Absolutely. Thanks for being on the podcast.

David Simpson:
Yeah, thank you.

Mike:
Big thanks to David Simpson for joining us and sharing his approach to navigating flow errors. Whether you’re a new admin or just trying to make sense of that latest debug message, I think David’s insights really offer some practical steps to take the fear out of flow troubleshooting.
Now, I’d love for you to get the whole story. So if you’re able to make his session at Dreamforce, that’s great. If not, follow his tips and learn on Trailhead like he did. And I will say this, cape not required, but bonus if you do Trailhead with a cape on because I think that’s really cool.
Do me a favor, if you enjoyed this or you have friends that are navigating flow errors, share this episode with them and I would appreciate that. And until next time, we’ll see you in the cloud.

The post Navigating Flow Errors as a New Salesforce Admin appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Jim Ray, Director of Developer Relations and Advocacy at Slack. Join us as we chat about enhancements to Workflow Builder, the Slack features everyone should be using, and the future of AI and Slack.

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

Usability upgrades to core Slack featuresJim and his team have been improving the core Slack experience. “We’ve really been focusing on those little paper cuts, the smaller features that just never quite made it into the next release,” he says. So essentially, Slack is a little better everywhere.

One area they’ve focused on is Workflow Builder. In particular, they’ve added new branching functionality—allowing admins to create conditional paths like “if/then” logic.

They’ve also been hard at work upgrading canvases and lists. With new data like AI-generated meeting notes, canvases provide a central place for all the relevant information. Jim also urges you to check out lists as a sort of “semi-database” for data you want handy in Slack.

Slack’s AI vision centralizes agent interactionsFor Jim, Slack is one of the best tools to interact with and fully take advantage of the AI agents you build with Agentforce. It’s already the place your team communicates with each other, so why not be able to loop in AI teammates?

“In the same way that Slack is the single place where every person in your organization is communicating, now it’s the place where you’re all working with those agents,” Jim says. And so his team is looking at how Slack can bring together every AI agent your team uses, whether they’re built in Agentforce or another third-party platform.

Dreamforce 2025 will spotlight Salesforce-Slack integrationI asked Jim for a sneak preview of what he has in store for Dreamforce 2025, and he did not disappoint. We’ve come a long way with tools like Salesforce channels and the ability to deploy an Agentforce agent directly to Slack. Now his team is working on ways to deepen the integration. So look for improvements to search and embedded Salesforce data in the coming year.

There are so many more great insights into how you can get the most out of Slack in the Agentforce era, so be sure to listen to our full conversation with Jim. And be sure to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you never miss an episode.

Podcast swag* Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Learn more* Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: What Can Salesforce Admins Do with Slack Integrations? * Heroku

Admin Trailblazers Group* Admin Trailblazers Community Group

Social* Jim on LinkedIn * Salesforce Admins on LinkedIn * Salesforce Admins on X * Mike on Bluesky social * Mike on Threads * Mike on X

Full show transcriptMike:
Welcome to the Salesforce Admins Podcast. This week we’re catching up with Jim Ray from Slack because it’s very conversational. He’s going to walk us through what’s new in Slack from major releases that you may or may not have been paying attention to on Workflow Builder, Lists, and Canvases to, of course, all of the latest around AI and Agentforce. Plus, we’re going to talk about what’s coming at Dreamforce this year and how admins and developers like yourself can get the most out of Slack. So whether you’re all in on automation or just exploring Slack’s potential, I promise you there’s something here for you. So you’ve already got those earbuds in? Let’s get Jim on the podcast. So Jim, welcome back to the podcast.

Jim Ray:
Mike, thanks so much for having me. It’s a pleasure to be back. I’m excited to talk to admins and maybe we’ll talk a little bit about what’s coming at Dreamforce.

Mike:
I mean all the things, because it’s not that I didn’t want you back sooner. It’s just a really big platform and there’s so many things to talk about.

Jim Ray:
Of course.

Mike:
But we use Slack every day at Salesforce and a lot of our customers do too. So it’s been a while since we’ve chatted, but what’s some of the big stuff that Slack has come out with this year that admins should be excited for if they haven’t been paying attention?

Jim Ray:
Oh, that’s such a great question, and obviously we use Slack every day as well, and nobody uses Slack quite like Slack uses Slack.

Mike:
Oh.

Jim Ray:
And I think that’s probably true for Salesforce in some ways too. But we’ve been really excited to talk to some of our admins. We’re continuing to learn more about the Salesforce developers in particular, and so always excited to hear about the use cases there. A few exciting things that have come out recently that I think will be pretty interesting. So our Workflow Builder product, so this is our no-code automation product that’s built right into Slack, I think that’s probably something that a lot of Salesforce admins and Slack admins are using. I like to think of Workflow Builder as the front door to the platform. And it’s certainly adjacent to the platform in a lot of ways.

So we’ve had some really great development happening in Workflow Builder. Something I’m actually really proud of is we’ve been really focusing on the core user experience of Workflow Builder. We’ve got a whole team that’s working on something that internally we call Back to Basics, which is really just all about focusing on those little paper cuts or the smaller features that just never quite made it into the next release. So they’ve been building that out. So hopefully just the experience of using Workflow Builder is a little bit nicer, which is something that we always aim for.

Mike:
I never found it bad.

Jim Ray:
It’s not that it’s been bad, it’s just that as the-

Mike:
To be fair.

Jim Ray:
Yeah, it’s a great point. As the surface area of Workflow Builder has grown, we’ve added lots of new functionality and we’ve just needed to go back and polish here and spit-shine there.

Mike:
Sure. I mean, for me as an admin, it was the most intuitive thing that I could immediately jump into and kind of feel like I made a difference when we got Slack and when we started setting up channels. Because I think you probably hear this a lot, but to me the fallacy of, well, Slack is just where we communicate. No, you can actually guide the communication, and we do that with our team to help get the right information to the right spots. Because there’s data and then there’s contextual data, which is the conversation, and that’s where we use a lot of workflows. And I was almost overwhelmed by the number of options that I had on ways and things I could do with the conversation or the input, like we use it, like an input form. I was like, “Wow.”

Jim Ray:
Right, exactly.

Mike:
“Oh my God, now I got to go back and rethink this.” It wasn’t something where I was diving into it and thinking, “Okay, well, I’ll just figure out what I got and just work with what I had.” It was showing up to the grocery store and being like, “Oh, so you guys really do have everything? All right, cool.” Kind of wasn’t expecting that. I was expecting three kinds of cheeses and you got a whole cheese counter.

Jim Ray:
That’s really great to hear. And even with the addition of things like Lists and Canvases, which are some features that we’re continuing to expand on, we released those a while ago and obviously we use them a ton internally, but we’re hearing from our customers that they’re putting more and more of their mission-critical data. Canvases are fantastic because it’s a really lightweight form of documents. You’re not overwhelmed with all the different formatting options, but they’re still really quite powerful, still a great way to capture information and add context to your channels. And my team uses them with Notes and with some of the AI generated notes that are happening within huddles and things like that.

But I think Lists are another place that we’re seeing a ton of value with things like Workflow Builder. So you were saying you’ve got an input form, but where are you going to put that once somebody has filled out the form? Lists are a perfect place for that. And again, it’s not a full-blown database or even as powerful as something like an Excel or a Google Sheet, but if you just need to capture that data and you want it native inside of Slack, something that’s searchable inside of Slack, something that you can easily add workflows to, I love Lists. And so they’re both really fantastic features.

Mike:
I haven’t used Lists. I can’t speak for them yet, but I have used Canvases.

Jim Ray:
If you don’t need something as full-featured as Jira, for instance.

Mike:
Maybe that’s why.

Jim Ray:
My team, we use Lists a lot to track the projects that we’re working on. We don’t need a full suite of Jira tools. We’re not working [inaudible 00:06:19] and things like that. So it’s actually a really great way to do some lightweight project management as well.

Mike:
Ooh, I like that. You said a magic word, AI.

Jim Ray:
Yes.

Mike:
So I feel like Slack’s built for AI because AI everywhere is just conversation, and I’m like, “Well, naturally, that’s Slack.” So talk to me about Agentforce and AI and Slack.

Jim Ray:
Absolutely. Before I jump to AI, I do want to mention one more Workflow Builder feature-

Mike:
Oh, yeah.

Jim Ray:
… that I want people to check out is this is probably the longest standing request, which is the ability to branch your workflows. Essentially think of them as an if statement or a case statement if you’re a programmer. But this was, when we gave people the ability to start doing some automation, the first thing they said is, “Oh, I need to branch my automation.” So if they hit this button, do this thing, and if they hit this button, do that thing. We have finally built that into the product. It’s a really fantastic way to make your automations even more powerful.
If you are a programmer or if you’re a developer and you’re building on the Slack platform, one thing that I like about the new branching feature is that you can actually handle a lot of the, for lack of a better word, validation that you would normally be doing on the back end. Now, you can do a lot of that on the front end inside of Workflow Builder itself. So quick plug for branches there, another fantastic feature that we rolled out to Workflow Builder. And it’s going to make those workflows even more powerful, but now we’re ready to talk AI.

Mike:
Yeah, no, that’s good. I do like that. I kind of want to play with that now.

Jim Ray:
It’s really great. So yeah, so with AI, obviously, and Mike, as you implied, Slack is the best place to interface with the agents that are popping up in every single application that we use. And in some ways this is a return to form for Slack and the Slack platform. So when Slack launched in 2014, part of the reason that we were able to be so successful is we were riding this wave of a few trends that were happening in the industry. One of them, I’m sure you remember, DevOps.

And DevOps was hugely successful to Slack being successful because a lot of our earliest customers were startups, engineering-focused organizations, media organizations, places that understood kind of the basic premise of DevOps, and we could just plug Slack right into it. So many developers looked at Slack and they were like, “Oh, this will fit right into my GitHub pipeline or my Jenkins pipeline, and then I can just pipe messages right into Slack. I can have all my entire engineering team in a channel and they can all come take a look at this.”

But as the platform grew and evolved, we added all of these features for interactivity. We added Block Kit, which is our UI composition framework. And now that we have all of these large language model and other generative AI tools, it is kind of this return to form for the platform in many ways.

And so 10 years ago, if you wanted to build a Slack app that interacted with you, it was almost like a command line more than anything. It wasn’t a natural place to chat. You would kind of send off some commands and then wait for the response. It felt very much like using a terminal or a Unix command line or something like that. But now with all of these LLM tools that are being plugged into all of the various systems of record, Slack is of course the place to bring all of that into the same place where you’re working with your colleagues. And that’s kind of been the basic pitch of the platform for a long time.

Mike:
So I do want to touch on that because it’s a thing that I’ve been thinking of a lot. And of course it’s the admin podcast, but that doesn’t mean that admins don’t code.

Jim Ray:
Sure.

Mike:
Lots of admins code and they just choose to identify as admins. Some developers only code. I don’t want the perception to be, well, Slack is just for admins because they don’t have to write code to do anything. But I think as you sit and look at when you’re working with your team, whatever, of stakeholders, it’s an admin and a developer, especially at a large organization, probably an architect. There’s a lot of roles involved. Slack can really interface with a lot of different products that you have across the enterprise. What do we do for admins that had to be like, “No, let me talk to my developer because Slack is very developer friendly”? When we say Slack is very developer friendly, what do we mean by that?

Jim Ray:
Well, I like to think that our platform, first and foremost, is just one that developers really like to use. Again, that was something that was really critical to the success of the platform pretty early on. It doesn’t feel like developing on a piece of enterprise software. And so we would hear from these developers that were used to these massive Java stacks, or they had to use an SDK that they weren’t familiar with, or even a programming language that they weren’t familiar with.

And the premise for the Slack platform from the very beginning, and this is still true today, is that you can bring whatever programming language you want to. We make some first party SDKs available, but you don’t have to use those. We have some frameworks that are even a little bit higher level than the SDKs. Those are all available in Python, Java, and JavaScript, but you don’t have to use them if you don’t want to. We have some amazing community-developed SDKs and frameworks as well.

So that’s the initial thinking as to what makes developing on the Slack platform great. But then the other part is that you can do things with the Slack platform that really you couldn’t do with other forms of communication. They just didn’t make sense in the context of email, for example. Even if you wanted to use email as the ultimate endpoint, it kind of didn’t make sense because an email inbox is a one-to-one relationship with every person in the organization. Well, there’s no really good way to collaborate until you pull people into these channels.
And so that was another part of Slack’s big success we kind of created, and again, we were pulling from a lot of what was happening in the world at the time, but we pulled a lot of these ideas and we put them into this kind of channel-based interface. And now you bring groups of people together that are working on a similar project, similar feature.

And then when you layer on top of that, the platform pieces, that’s where it starts to get really powerful. So again, think about your engineering org within your organization. So you’ve got a team and they get an alert from somebody has pushed some code and the tests fail. Well, now everybody on that team can see why the tests failed. So the engineer who pushed the code, that test probably wouldn’t have failed if they knew what the problem was. So another engineer that might have a different bit of context, oh, I just checked in this bit of code, that’s probably why your tests are breaking, for example. They can see that. And so now you’re maximizing that visibility.

And so when we layer on these other tools, to bring us back to this AI, so now every tool that you’re using in your organization, they’re starting to add these agentic features. And we were talking about, so if you’re an admin, well, Slack now becomes the place. Rather than having to administer an agent in every single platform that you use, you bring those agents into Slack, so now you have a single place to work with them. In the same place that Slack is the single place where every person in your organization is communicating, now it’s the place where you’re all working with those agents.

And so we’re not there yet. We’re still working on it. Obviously Agentforce is the best place to, if you’re just getting started with this and you have a ton of data inside of Salesforce, of course Agentforce is the place where you’re going to go, maybe try out some of these agents built on top of your data. But as we’re seeing many of our partners, many of the other SaaS tools that our customers are using, all of these agent features are being built on top of the systems of record that they manage. And so what we’ve got, we’ve made those same AI features available to everybody on the platform. So now anybody can build an agent that works inside of Slack. And if you’re an admin, this is fantastic news because now you’ve just got one place to manage all of these.

Mike:
And we use agents a lot at Salesforce. It’s kind of fun. Sometimes I don’t know where to look for my approvals.

Jim Ray:
Yeah.

Mike:
One thing to look forward to, bury the lead there, Dreamforce, it’s coming now.

Jim Ray:
Absolutely. Absolutely.

Mike:
They just announced the band. Are you going to go?

Jim Ray:
I have never made it. Usually, because I’m so swamped, I’ve never made it to see the show.

Mike:
I know.

Jim Ray:
But we’ve got two choices this year, I think. Is this the first time that there’s going to be two different stages?

Mike:
I don’t know. I feel like they’re doing that now because there’s a generation of us that are coming up in the years, and then there’s a younger generation. I remember a couple Dreamforces ago, I didn’t even know one of the opening acts.

Jim Ray:
Oh, boy.

Mike:
And I was like, “Oh, I didn’t know what my parents feel like now when I was a kid, and be like, “But Mom, of course it’s Michael Jackson.”

Jim Ray:
Right, exactly.

Mike:
“Duh.” And that happened. I’m with you though. I have been once to the concert because that year we had the admin keynote the first day and we could go and it was almost like, I don’t know, a celebration for us because it’s like, “Yay, our keynote’s over, we can go.”

Jim Ray:
Oh, nice.

Mike:
And it was fun because it was Foo Fighters. I don’t know if you were around then. I can’t remember the year, but it was the one year it felt like it was out in a field or somewhere.

Jim Ray:
I think that was our first year as an official Salesforce company.

Mike:
Okay. I went, we got in, it was like, “Okay, I really need something to eat.” They had hamburgers and stuff. I had that. And I was like, “Oh, the stage is that way. Let’s walk that way.” We got to what we thought the stage was, it was a giant TV screen.

Jim Ray:
Oh, no.

Mike:
Because they had all these satellite stages.

Jim Ray:
Yeah, exactly.

Mike:
And I was like, “Oh, well, this isn’t so bad.” And it was Foo Fighters, which was awesome. It was one of the years that Dave Grohl broke his foot, and so he was in that really cool throne. But I mean, of all the people that could still put on a show, he put on a show.

Jim Ray:
Nice.

Mike:
And I looked over and I was like, “Well, no, it looks like the stage is over there.” Long story short, we ended up walking to all three of the satellite stages and never found the main stage because we kept thinking we were. And I was like, “You know what? I think this is the point at which I need to stop going to the concerts because-”

Jim Ray:
Yeah, there you go. And so this year we have a choice between, and you were talking about that generational divide, so it’ll be very obvious. We’ve got Metallica on one stage and then Benson Boone on the other.

Mike:
Yes. Yes.

Jim Ray:
I can definitely remember buying Metallica on cassette tape.

Mike:
Yeah. Yep. I used to buy Metallica stuff when you could go to the convenience store and buy a glass bottle of 16-ounce Mountain Dew.

Jim Ray:
Oh, wow. Now there’s a throwback right there.

Mike:
Everybody’s like, “Oh man, old dudes on the podcast.” Anyway.

Jim Ray:
Yeah, exactly.

Mike:
Let’s give admins and developers some sneak peek stuff or what are some of the stuff, Jim, maybe that you’re working on for Dreamforce this year?

Jim Ray:
Well, everything is still very much in flight.

Mike:
Oh, absolutely.

Jim Ray:
We just had our half year-

Mike:
Full-on forward-looking statement.

Jim Ray:
Absolutely. We just had the half-year company kickoff, but it was super exciting. The things that we’re most excited about, obviously continuing to deepen the integration between Slack and Salesforce. And I think certainly from the Slack perspective, but I think even from the Salesforce perspective, that’s really going to be a big story at Dreamforce, is deepening that connection. We’ve had things like Salesforce channels and these agents, the ability to deploy an agent from Agentforce into Slack with just clicks without having to manage any of the deployment bits. So super excited to just see that deepening continue to happen.

And we’ve been working behind the scenes on some things that I think will continue to make Salesforce even more embedded and useful with the context of Slack, a lot of them having to do with things like search. And so we’ve been releasing these new features to search that allow you to search not just your Slack corpus, but your Salesforce data and your Google Docs data and your Microsoft data. And so continuing to broaden and make search that much more useful. I feel like search is one of those hidden superpowers inside of Slack. People will sometimes come ask me a question and I don’t know the answer, but I know how to search for it and where to find it.

Mike:
Oh, literally how to search for it. Ha-ha. I see what you did there.

Jim Ray:
Well, and you kind of become the oracle within an organization in some ways. But there are some things that we can do on the product side to make some of those things a bit more obvious. So I think that’ll be good.

I’m excited about our continued partnership with Heroku. Heroku is really doing some really amazing work. And they’re in a big reboot phase right now over there in Heroku, and they’re really leaning heavily into AI. But if you are doing custom development work, Heroku really is the best place to deploy those apps, especially if you want those apps to show up inside of Slack. But some of the work that they’re doing with their custom inference and the databases that they’ve got for AI tools, I think is really, really cool.

So if you’re a developer, if you’ve got a team of developers that’s really interested in pushing pretty hard into some of this custom AI tools, it’s probably time to give another look to Heroku and see what they’ve got going on. Really, we’re doing some workshops with that team as well, and so we’ll be showcasing how to build great custom apps, deploy them to Heroku and have them show up inside of Slack.

Mike:
Oh, very cool. Awesome. Well, thanks for making time out of your day, Jim. And I mean, you’re always welcome back to the podcast. I’m sure after Dreamforce, we should have a debrief and be like, “Okay, remember all those things we talked about? Here’s where we’re at.”

Jim Ray:
Absolutely. And by then, we’ll have figured out what we’re actually going to be talking about. So that’ll be great.

Mike:
That’s always the plan. That’s always the plan. Jim, it’s great to have you on the pod. You’re always welcome back. So thanks for keeping us enlightened.

Jim Ray:
Excellent. Thanks so much, Mike. I appreciate it.

Mike:
Well, that was a Slack-tastic time with Jim. You know I had to throw that in, try something, right? I appreciate him giving us a sneak peek on what’s ahead for Dreamforce. It’s going to be exciting this year. And enhanced workflows, smarter agents, I’m telling you, there’s just never been a better time for admins to explore what Slack can do. Now, if you enjoyed this episode, do me a favor, share it with a fellow Salesforce admin or somebody else in the community that you think would enjoy listening to it. And until next time, we’ll see you in the cloud.

The post How Can Admins Use Slack To Manage AI Agents More Easily? appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

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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 True to the Core Deep Dive and how it will give Salesforce Admins more chances to engage with product leaders, ask questions, and influence the roadmap.

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

True to the Core with a spinIf you’ve been to a Dreamforce or TDX, you’re probably familiar with True to the Core. Typically, it’s a keynote session with Salesforce product leaders where you can get key insights and engage them in a Q&A. However, as LeeAnne points out, we’ve noticed over the years that there isn’t always time to go deep on a particular topic.

That’s why we’re launching a special monthly video series, True to the Core Deep Dive. Each month, we’ll focus in on one core Salesforce Platform product area, with product leaders there to answer questions and really get down to the nitty-gritty.

First episode focus: Setup and user access managementFor our first episode, we looked at the most highly voted topic area on IdeaExchange: Setup and user access management. So we sat down with Senior PMs Cheryl Feldman and Elizabeth Martin to walk through recent feature updates and look at what’s on the roadmap.

The highlight was definitely the 40-minute question and answer section, which really let us go so much deeper than your average keynote session. Other product owners Larry Tung and Laurent Kubaski were firing away answering even more questions in the chat. If you missed it, be sure to check out the video on LinkedIn or YouTube.

We need you to help pick future topicsIf LeeAnne wants you to take one thing away from this episode, it’s that we need you to help us pick future topics. That’s right, this series is all about transparency and that includes topic selection. So each episode ends with a survey to determine what next month’s episode will be about.

“I read every single comment,” LeeAnne says, “we read all of the feedback and it directly informs every episode we’re going to put together.” So tune in next month for the first community-chosen topic, Flow testing and debugging, and help us figure out what to look at next.

Be sure to listen to the full episode for more from LeeAnne about what she’s working on for Dreamforce. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast to catch us in your feed every Thursday.

Podcast swag* Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Learn more* Salesforce Admins Blog: Introducing True to the Core Deep Dive: In-Depth Product Conversations with Salesforce PMs * First Episode On Demand: True to the Core Deep Dive: Setup and User Access * Second Episode Event Page: True to the Core Deep Dive: Flow Testing and Debugging

Admin Trailblazers Group* Admin Trailblazers Community Group

Social* LeeAnne on LinkedIn * LeeAnne on X * Salesforce Admins on LinkedIn * Salesforce Admins on X * Mike on Bluesky social * Mike on Threads * Mike on X

Full show transcriptMike:
Welcome to Salesforce Admins Podcast. Today, we’re diving into a brand new way that Salesforce is connecting with the community called True to the Core Deep Dive. So LeeAnne Rimel, who’s been on the podcast before, is going to join me and talk about this new series that gives you, the Salesforce admin, more chances to engage with product leaders, ask questions, and influence the roadmap based on your feedback.

You’ll have to hear how the first episode went. I’ll have the link in the show notes. We’re going to hear a little bit about what’s coming next, but more importantly, how you can shape future topics. So if you’re as excited as I am, keep walking or riding the train or listening, and let’s get LeeAnne on the podcast.
So LeeAnne, welcome back to the podcast.

LeeAnne Rimel:
Hi, Mike. Thanks for having me.

Mike:
Yeah, it’s been exciting. And last I checked, there was live, there some event that just melted my social feeds about True to the Core, so we have to start there. Tell me what’s going on.

LeeAnne Rimel:
Well, we love True to the Core and we love True to the Core so much that we are bringing it to you virtually throughout the year. So if you’re not familiar with True to the Core, if you haven’t attended True to the Core in the past, it’s a program with Salesforce that typically is a keynote setting at TrailblazerDX and at Dreamforce where all of our senior product leadership, senior Salesforce executives get on stage and they talk about Salesforce and the future of Salesforce and they answer questions from the audience.

And I think, I should know this, I can’t remember exactly when it started, but it’s more than 10 years old. So it’s a little bit of a fan favorite if you’ve been in the Salesforce ecosystem for a while because it’s such a great opportunity to get transparency into roadmap, to ask very direct questions about things that impact you as a Salesforce professional.
However, we got feedback from our community about True to the Core that there wasn’t enough of them. We only really do it at Dreamforce and at TrailblazerDX typically. And the product suite has gotten big. There’s a lot of features, there’s a lot of product in the Salesforce world, as we all know. So it was a little bit like a mile wide, an inch deep, I think is how people were feeling. Like, yes, maybe I got the opportunity to ask a question, but I wanted to spend more time on that question and more time in that area with the product managers.

So with that context, that’s why we created True to the Core Deep Dive. So that’s what we launched in August. August 12th was the first episode. And it’s very much directly in response to that community feedback that we heard. We want more opportunities for this feedback loop. We want more transparency into roadmap. We want to ask more questions, we want to dive deeper into specific features that matter to us.
So the first episode, which you can find on LinkedIn, was in August. And it was with Cheryl Feldman and Elizabeth Martin, who look after set up and user access. And it was so much fun, Mike. We did like 40 minutes of questions, which is a ton. So it was a lot of-

Mike:
It’s still not enough. It’s still not enough.

LeeAnne Rimel:
Not enough. I know, I hear you. I did see a couple notes-

Mike:
You could do 400 minutes of questions, still not enough.

LeeAnne Rimel:
I know. I know. But it’s definitely more than we had before. So we did over 40 minutes of questions, ton of live Q&A. We had product owners Larry Tung and Laurent we’re in the chat also firing away. It was the meme of doing the keyboard and the keyboard’s lighting on fire because we’re typing so fast. I felt like they were just answering so many questions in the chat about pilot programs, about roadmap, and then really specific technical questions about things that members of the community are facing.

So it was really exciting. I’m really proud of it. I’m really excited that it’s so deeply connected to community feedback. I think it’s really important. That’s basically the north star of True to the Court Deep Dive is community feedback and community voting and community questions. So it was really fun. It was great.

Mike:
So if they missed that first August 12th episode, we’ll link to that. You could still watch, it’s still worth watching, right?

LeeAnne Rimel:
Oh, absolutely. I think there was a ton Cheryl and Elizabeth, like I said, they look after user access and permissions, so they shared some of what’s coming. They also shared, Cheryl shared, “Here’s things that we’re not working on,” right? Because we’re really active on the idea exchange and they-

Mike:
Can’t work on everything.

LeeAnne Rimel:
Yeah, and I think that level of transparency is one of the reasons that Cheryl is so well-connected with the community and really listens to the community is like we need to know, as admins, as developers, we need to know what’s coming on the roadmap. And also we need to know for planning what’s not going to be worked on. If I had my heart set on a particular feature area, I think that transparency is really valuable to have the information to make plans.

Mike:
So let’s talk about the future of this series. Is it series? I think that’s fair to [inaudible 00:05:40]-

LeeAnne Rimel:
It is a special monthly series.

Mike:
Special monthly series. Oh, boy. I feel like get home from school and you get your carrot sticks and your ranch.

LeeAnne Rimel:
Exactly.

Mike:
That’s what everybody got as a kid, right?

LeeAnne Rimel:
Maybe ants on a log.

Mike:
Oh, ants on a log. I forgot about that. Yeah. Okay. There’s always food in the podcast.

So first of all, I’m Salesforce admin and I really want to contribute to this series. What are ways that I can participate?

LeeAnne Rimel:
We need you to contribute to this series, Salesforce admins. The topics for this are entirely chosen by the community. So the very first topic was chosen based on idea exchange trending topics and highly voted topic areas. But all subsequent episodes will be chosen based on the surveys and the voting that we’re hosting on each episode.

So in episode one, at the end of episode one, we had the episode one survey. And the top topic that came out of that and also happens to be a top trending idea exchange topic is flow, and within that, testing and debugging. So that’s our next episode is flow testing and debugging.

So we’ll link, Mike will link in the show notes the blog announcing this, and within that we’ll have both the recordings for the previous episodes, the link to register for the upcoming episode, and also the opportunity to vote on topics that are meaningful to you.

So that is very much, that community feedback specifically from that voting mechanism that we will have in every episode is incredibly important for us to ensure that we are putting together episodes and shows that are directly meeting the community with what you need to talk about. And we’re going very deep. We’re really getting granular with the features. So notice it’s not just a flow episode, which is a very popular topic, but there’s so much within flow.

So we went into the subtopic of what is the most hot, trending, highly voted subtopic within flow? And that was, for this round, was testing and debugging. So I think your feedback and I read every single comment, so if you’ve filled out a survey, thank you so much, from episode one. And then if you fill out surveys in the future, I want you to know we read every single comment, we read all of the feedback, and it directly informs every episode we’re going to put together.

Mike:
So you got to put Easter eggs in your comments. That’s what I hear.

LeeAnne Rimel:
You can throw a little joke in there.

Mike:
If I was [inaudible 00:08:32] I got to put something in there.

LeeAnne Rimel:
I like dad jokes. You can put little dad jokes in there if you want.

Mike:
Well, but that was actually-

LeeAnne Rimel:
As long as you pick a topic.

Mike:
Right, pick a topic. That was actually my question is so I’m glad you’re going granular. Is there a world where flow debugging gets two episodes because it just keeps rising to the top?

LeeAnne Rimel:
Yeah, I think that’s a really good question. I think we’re going to have to see what the data show us. So I think if we see something that is really persistent in where it is on the priority list, I think we will have to talk about should we have repeat kind of follow-on episodes for that. Maybe there’s additional content forms or forms that we should create for that topic area. So I think this is, I think as we face those, we’ll see the best way to make sure we’re meeting the community where they’re asking us for more information.

I would anticipate, safe harbor, but I would anticipate over the next year we’re probably going to have more than one episode on flow because it is such a prevalent topic and there’s so many areas within flow to talk about. And we do really want to be able to have this space to go really deep, really granular on those subtopic areas, if you will, like those feature areas within a larger area.

It’s a great question and I think, yeah, there’s no rules around, well, we spend time on this feature area and we’re never going to talk about it again. I think that that’s not true to the nature of True to the Core and what we’re intending here. And then also I think we’ll see what the data show and what’s demanded.

Mike:
Yeah, because I was going to say it could also be kind of frustrating if you suggest a topic. I’ll be honest, security is a topic we should cover. It never gets voted up very high. Nobody likes talking about all of the padlocks and security features, but it is important. It’s in everything that we do, and so-

LeeAnne Rimel:
Well, and I think we’re going to-

Mike:
… it’d be kind of fun to see.

LeeAnne Rimel:
Yeah, I hear you, right? If something isn’t always a number one topic, will we get to it?

Mike:
Right.

LeeAnne Rimel:
And I think to that, we’ll definitely be kind of moving down the list, if you will. Yeah, so to answer your question more clearly, I think we’ll definitely be kind of moving down the list and moving onto the, for the episode in November, we’ll be looking at, okay, based on the data that we collected so far, and we just had a flow episode, kind of what’s number two? And then we’ll be moving down in that way.

Mike:
Gotcha. So Dreamforce will be a little over a month and a half away when this episode drops. Are there big True to the Core Deep Dive plans for Dreamforce?

LeeAnne Rimel:
Well, there will be a, that we’re anticipating a True to the Core keynote at Dreamforce. So I think that is, if you are newer to Dreamforce or haven’t attended True to the Core at Dreamforce in the past, I really recommend, if you’re going to be there in person, attending the True to the Core keynote. I think it’s a really meaningful part of a Dreamforce experience.
And then also, if you’re not attending Dreamforce in person, it will, typically, it is on Salesforce+, so you can watch it on VOD afterwards. But I think that will be our big… Dreamforce is in mid-October. That will be the True to the Core for October will be the Dreamforce keynote.

We’re hoping to share more opportunities to vote, to really increase the feedback that we get on future episodes. So stay tuned for Dreamforce posts and things like that. And we’re hoping to share more opportunities for Dreamforce attendees to share what they would like to see more of with True to the Core Deep Dive episodes. And then when we’ll be back with our regularly scheduled programming, if you will, [inaudible 00:12:34].

Mike:
Right, because Dreamforce interrupts everything. For fans of LeeAnne, because they had the how… You did the Did You Know series. That was what I was thinking of. Are there other things that you’re working on that you want to share or is it all forward-looking statement right now?

LeeAnne Rimel:
Forward-looking statements. I think we’re working on, I think for Dreamforce this year, so I’m hard at work on Dreamforce technical content in general, sort of the experiences that you have in the Trailblazer Forest and across our technical tracks. And I think I am really excited to see what all the teams are working on for Dreamforce, specifically for our admin, developer, and architect audiences. I think there’s just going to be a lot of great technical learnings.

We also, I will share, are going to have more community-led sessions than ever before, so there’ll be more information coming out about that. But I think we’re going to have a lot of technical sessions, a lot of opportunities for admins and developers and architects and more community-led sessions than… We’ve always had a lot of community-led sessions, we have even more. So I’m really excited to hear and learn from our community.

Mike:
Well, thank you LeeAnne, for coming on the podcast. I know one fun fact, if people are hungry at Dreamforce, you always have snacks.

LeeAnne Rimel:
I do always have snacks,

Mike:
Always. Not candy, but snacks. So that’s always good to have

LeeAnne Rimel:
Snacks to help sustain you through… I think I have a few blogs floating out about there about my preferred snacks, but-

Mike:
I’m sure you do. You’ve always kept the team energized in a healthy way, not in a sugar inducing caffeine coma way, which is great.

LeeAnne Rimel:
Yeah, if someone’s having low blood sugar, I probably have a protein bar for you. You’ll probably be-

Mike:
Yes. Yep.

LeeAnne Rimel:
Or some sort of like-

Mike:
A nutritious organic environmental perfect protein bar.

LeeAnne Rimel:
I do my best.

Mike:
Thanks for coming on the podcast, LeeAnne. We will tune into the True to the Core sessions and I can’t wait to see what you come up with for Dreamforce.

LeeAnne Rimel:
Awesome. Thanks for having me, Mike.

Mike:
Big thanks to LeeAnne for coming on the podcast and giving us the scoop on the True to the Core Deep Dive. I have a question for you. What after school snack did you get that wasn’t carrot sticks and ranch or ants on a log? Curious minds want to know. I also got Ritz Crackers with peanut butter, chunky peanut butter because chunky peanut butter on Ritz crackers is awesome. So there we go. There’s a little nugget. Share that on social, be sure to ping me. I’d be curious.

Don’t forget now, all these True to the Core Deep Dive episodes are going to be built on your questions and your input, so be sure to jump in, vote, share your thoughts, jump on the lives, ask questions. I don’t anticipate these ending for a while. We’ll have links in the show notes to the first episode and any other information that I have about it as of when this comes out.
So that’s it. I’m going to go maybe have some carrot sticks and ranch. And until next time, we’ll see you in the cloud.

The post What Is True to the Core Deep Dive? appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Kate Lessard, Lead Admin Evangelist at Salesforce. Join us as we chat about the new Agentforce Adoption Framework and her new YouTube series, “Kate Clicks Through It.”

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

A flexible, nonlinear learning journey for adminsIt’s been a while since we’ve had Kate on the pod, but she’s been cooking up something cool, and I wanted to sit down with her to hear all about it. It’s called the Agentforce Adoption Framework, and it’s your guide for bringing the power of AI into your organization.

Kate and the Evangelist team identified a gap: admins needed a structured path to get up to speed with everything Agentforce has to offer. The framework breaks this down into five areas of focus:

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

You can check out Kate’s post on the Admin Blog for more details, but the goal is to help you set goals for your organization and get ready for what’s coming next with AI.

Hands-on learning through “Kate Clicks Through It”Kate’s also started a new YouTube series, “Kate Clicks Through It,” where she walks you through Salesforce processes step by step, with demos so you can click along and try them yourself.

“I personally am someone who learns best by doing,” Kate says, “I need to get hands-on, I need to do something. In many cases, I need to do it over and over again.” The videos are around 10 minutes long, giving you quick tutorials on subjects like how to build an Agentforce data library, or how to use Org Check as an alternative to Optimizer.

A framework for learning just about anythingThe Agentforce Adoption Framework was developed through tons of research and feedback from admins, Salesforce MVPs, and folks on the product team. We think it’s pretty spiffy—so keep an eye out for more adoption-focused content at Dreamforce or even an event near you.

As Kate points out, while Agentforce might be the shiny new toy, the adoption framework can be adapted to just about anything you want to implement. She uses the example of Data Cloud to highlight how important it is to have that fundamental level of adoption for both your users and your external customers.

There are so many more great insights from Kate about how to level up your understanding of Agentforce, so be sure to check out the full episode. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you can catch us every Thursday.

Podcast swag* Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

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

Admin Trailblazers Group* Admin Trailblazers Community Group

Social* Kate on LinkedIn * Salesforce Admins on LinkedIn * Salesforce Admins on X * Mike on Bluesky social * Mike on Threads * Mike on X

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

Kate Lessard:
Thanks. It’s been a while.

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

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

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

Kate Lessard:
Yeah, you’re a little busy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mike:
It’s kind of like a Salesforce Twitch stream.

Kate Lessard:
Yeah, absolutely.

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

Kate Lessard:
Exactly.

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

Kate Lessard:
I don’t know the answer to that.

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

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

Mike:
I forgot about the safari.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kate Lessard:
The secret admin sauce.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kate Lessard:
Right. Yeah. Do I look good in this?

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

Kate Lessard:
Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

The post The 5-Step Framework To Help You Navigate Agentforce appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Amit Malik, the Content Portfolio Lead for AI within Product Education at Salesforce. Join us as we chat about how we can teach AI effectively to admins and the easiest way to learn Agentforce.

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

The shift from knowledge to valueAs the Content Portfolio Lead for AI in Product Education at Salesforce, Amit is the perfect person to talk to about where admins should get started with learning Agentforce. After all, his job is all about planning the courses that are offered globally about Agentforce and Data Cloud.

What Amit emphasizes is that past knowledge matters less than what learners do in the next 12 months. Agentforce’s capabilities are growing with every release, so he recommends focusing on understanding the core concepts of how AI works and building from there.

Malik’s agent framework for adminsWhen you’re building with AI, the first step is aligning on why an agent is needed in the first place. From there, he recommends asking five questions to guide your process:

1. Is an AI agent the best way to solve this problem? Would it be easier to build a flow? Just because you can solve something with Agentforce doesn’t mean you should.
2. What agent type do you need? Salesforce has several pre-built agent templates for specific use cases, like Service Agent, Employee Agent, or Guided Shopping Agents. Consider those options before trying to build something more complicated.
3. What topics do you want to assign to this agent? Define the set of business problems you want your agent to solve. There are standard pre-built topics like FAQ or escalation, but you can make a custom topic if needed.
4. How will you provide data to your agent? AI is only as good as the data you provide it, so you need to make sure you have everything you need in Data Cloud and set up access with the Agentforce Data Library.
5. What actions do you want the agent to perform? “This is where the magic happens,” Amit says. There are four types of actions: Flow, Apex, API, and Prompt Template.

It’s important to understand that Agentforce is the final layer of the org, the interface. An agent is really an aggregation of the topics you build it to solve. Those topics comprise the specific actions you enable your agent to perform, and those topics, in turn, are possible based on the data you’ve integrated into Data Cloud.

Adopting a learner’s mindsetFor Amit, the most important thing you can do if you want to learn Agentforce is to adopt a learner’s mindset. “The art of learning is to become curious,” he explains, “education is not about the instructor, it’s more about the learner.”

Where many businesses go wrong is viewing AI as a solution in search of a problem. But once you start to get curious about the specifics of your business processes, you’ll start to find all sorts of new ways that AI agents can help. And building around these specific, real-world use cases is the easiest way to get started mastering Agentforce.

Amit has a lot to share about learning, teaching, and working with Agentforce, so be sure to tune in for the full episode. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast to catch a new episode every Thursday.

Podcast swag* Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Learn more* Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: Architect Courses for Admins with Amit Malik * Trailhead: Discover Agentforce * Trailhead: Review Agentforce and Data Library

Admin Trailblazers Group* Admin Trailblazers Community Group

Social* Amit on LinkedIn * Salesforce Admins on LinkedIn * Salesforce Admins on X * Mike on Bluesky social * Mike on Threads * Mike on X

Full show transcriptMike Gerholdt:

This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we’re welcoming back, Amit Malik to talk about a topic that’s very top of mind for every Salesforce admin right now, which is how do we teach AI effectively? Amit’s going to share with us some insights from over a decade of Salesforce instruction diving into why teaching AI is a little bit different now, and how admins can use his five question agent framework to put to better use. Now, whether you’re just getting started with Agent Force or you’re already experimenting with Data Cloud, this conversation’s packed with practical ways to bring clarity to your learning and to your users. So with that, let’s get Amit on the podcast.

All right, Amit, so welcome to the podcast.

Amit Malik:

Thank you.

Mike Gerholdt:

I know a few years back you were on to talk about the architect mindset, so I’ll be sure to link to that episode, but now we’re talking everything Agentforce and Data Cloud and Metadata and Customer 360. But for people that haven’t been around listening to the podcast for three years, and there’s a few of them, could you reacquaint the audience with what you do at Salesforce and your journey to Salesforce?

Amit Malik:

Sure. I joined Salesforce in 2013 and I have been lucky to teach audiences across the globe on Salesforce technologies every year, and I’ve trained on different topics about Salesforce, like whether it’s about teaching administrators or developers or consultants, architects. So I’ve been fortunate to talk about Salesforce aspects to different audiences. In my current role, I’m working on as a cloud content portfolio lead where I’m specializing in Agentforce and Data Cloud. So my role is to plan what kind of courses should we offer to our customers globally so that we can enable our ecosystem on Agentforce and Data Cloud.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, I mean, there’s a lot to learn. I started using the platform back in 2006 and even trying to keep up is a lot, and so I can imagine learning constantly, there’s so much.

Amit Malik:

It’s easy. I would say nobody cares what we know in the past. What matters is what we are working today and for next 12 months.

Mike Gerholdt:

Well, there you go.

Amit Malik:

So I’ve always retrained my mind that what I have done in the past does not matter today. What matter is what I will do in next 12 months.

Mike Gerholdt:

So let’s talk about what we’re going to do in the next 12 months. I would love to know, this is going to be my first hard question, they’re all hard, I think, not to scare you. I don’t think it’s hard. But I am curious because you’re on a different side of the fence than I’m at. What is different about teaching AI than teaching other technologies?

Amit Malik:

I would say the interesting part here is there is knowledge explosion in the current times. And when a learner is learning, he has multiple channels to learn from and there is no direction what is the right way to spend your time. So what we need is knowledge distillation. We need to tell our learners, if you only have 10 hours, what should you learn in your first 10 hours. Or if you’re not time-bound, what are the first 10 words should you know to do your project better in next three months. That my suggestion, that we should stop the noise and try to develop our attention span in these current time of knowledge explosion.

Mike Gerholdt:

I really like that because there is a sense of needing clarity when there is this much noise out in the world. Do you find when individuals come to your classes that they have a preconceived idea of AI that you might have to work past?

Amit Malik:

Yes, because the interesting part is that, for example, let’s take a word AI agent. If someone is learning about AI agent from Google’s perspective or OpenAI perspective or how Claude thinks about it, how we think about it at Salesforce, we may have different explanations, but at the core, AI agent is an AI system. So once we start getting a clarity of thought that where are we heading, we are trying to suggest how do you build a digital labor who will work along with the human at present. Once you know the goal, I think then it does not matter what is your understanding. You just need to understand why are we learning AI agents. Just because people are saying about it? Or do you really believe in the spirit of, “Oh yeah, it makes sense. If I can get my job done autonomously by a AI system, I can be more productive than I am.” I think that’s where, the why has to start first before you start doing what is what.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. Yeah, I often think a lot of times solutions come before people see problems and so they make up problems for the solution when in fact they didn’t need to make up the problem. They already had it.

Amit Malik:

Very well said, very well said. I would say in a different way that for every problem, Agentforce is not the answer. So we need to find out a use case and say, “Oh, this is fit for predictive AI, this is fit for generative AI, this is fit for autonomous agents.” So when you start as an architect, you start questioning to yourself, “How should you think to arrive at the solution that, oh, this is a use case of Agentforce now.”

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, absolutely. So as somebody that has instructed admins, architects, probably even developers, I mean, you run the gamut, because I know I’ve signed up for developer courses. If you had to describe Data Cloud to an admin and give its relevancy, what would you say?

Amit Malik:

Very good. So think of Data Cloud as a portion of all your data from multiple data sources. It’s a one repository where we want to bring data from multiple data sources. It could be Snowflake, it could be Databricks, it could be AWS, it could be any data source in your enterprise business. And once we have all this data in Data Cloud, that can act as a knowledge for your agent. As the analogy, think like this. When you join as a employee to a new organization, you need to learn about the system. In the same way we want to give the knowledge about systems to our agent so that they can understand the business and then talk to the customer on our behalf about our business.

Mike Gerholdt:

And I even think beyond just the customer, I mean, even the employee. If you only set up an agent to look internally within your CRM data, that’s almost like giving them a book, whereas if you use Data Cloud, it’s like giving them a library. Is that a kind of a competent analogy? Would you use that?

Amit Malik:

Yes. So see, Data Cloud is in simple way exposing all the data sources and how we attach it to the agent technically with the help of Agentforce data library. So we do not want our learners to get worried about Data Cloud so much because in the future or in the present world, we are trying to encapsulate the plumbing of Data Cloud. So if you’re a [inaudible 00:08:50], we just ask you to upload the PDF file to Agentforce data library, and then we take care of all the plumbing behind the scene. So as the admin, you just need to know how to upload your data and we take care of everything. And that’s the beauty of Salesforce platform that we try to make things simple because our engineers have done a complex job for you.

Mike Gerholdt:

The irony is it’s usually the businesses that make things complex with processes or approvals or reviews.

Amit Malik:

That’s fine. See, we cannot change the business. I think as a technical person, what I’ve learned over the years is never challenge the business, rather adapt to business.

Mike Gerholdt:

That’s very good.

Amit Malik:

Because that’s a very important learning. If you keep on challenging, because as a technical mindset, we always think, “No, business is not right,” but hey, business exist and that where technology exists. So we need to adapt to the business needs and that’s where as you grow as an architect, your fight is not to learn technology because you will have lot many people under you who knows much better than you. But your job is to understand what business value business need to create and how do you bridge that gap with the technology solution. That’s where the real fun is. You tie up the business outcome.

Mike Gerholdt:

And I feel like, because I was just going to ask you, back to our first question, how do you kind of filter out the noise? I feel like your previous answer is kind of that, right? Really focusing on what the business outcome, the business need is, right?

Amit Malik:

Yeah. So I would like to give you a very small framework which I have been using for myself as I’ve been learning Agentforce from the front, and I’m lucky to be part of all the teams here whom I interact with internally.

Mike Gerholdt:

I love frameworks.

Amit Malik:

The first question I would like to give to my learner is ask yourself, do you need AI agent? If the answer comes yes, that yes, you need AI agent, then move forward in Agentforce thinking, because it could be that you can handle something without AI agent and you don’t need it. Once your first question is answered to yes, then you move to the second question, what agent type do you need? For that, you need to know what agent types are offered by Salesforce. Like we offer, say, customer agent, which is implemented through Agentforce Service Agent. We offer employee agent, which is for employees. We offer sales agents like SDR agent for initial outreach and booking meetings. We have coach agent, which is for coaching and mentoring. So once you understand our offerings, then you see, okay, given a use case where customer says, “I want my agent to answer business questions and handle my refunds, or tell about my loyalty balance,” we know that I need something for service, I need something for customer, so I need a customer agent.

So once you start reasoning that I need a agent and I need a customer agent and I can implement customer agent using Service Agent, then comes a third question, what topics do you want to assign to this agent? Now topic is a very interesting vocabulary which we have launched in Salesforce ecosystem, which is how do you define the job to be done? So think of topic as a aggregation of your business process. So if you want your agent to work on, say, loyalty balance check. So that’s all the questions about loyalty balance will be handled by loyalty management topic. So that loyalty management topic is like a grouping of all the actions. Once you know the right topics that do you want to leverage the existing topics like standard topics, like say general FAQ or escalation, or do you want to make a custom topic, your third question is answered.

Once you have answered the third question, the fourth question is, how will you provide data to your agent? And here where your Data Cloud come into play. Because agent is dumb. Agent does not know anything about your business. So to provide the value to your agent, you need to connect your agent with the data library. And now with Agentforce data library, we support web search, we support files, we support your knowledge articles. So once you understand how do you want to educate your agent, your agent is now having a data about your business. Once these four questions are answered, the fifth question is, do you just want agent to answer the questions or do you also want agent to act upon it? Customer says, “No, I want agent to act upon.” And then comes the fifth thing, which is what actions do you want agent to perform?

Now this action is where the magic happens, and this is where all the administrators and developers can start working on leveraging their past knowledge. So if you’re good in flows, you can have a flow agent action. If you are good in Apex, you can have Apex agent actions. If you’re good in API, you can have new soft calls, you can call external services. If you’re good in prompt engineering, you can use Prompt template. So depending on the use cases, we give you four reference action types, which is Flow, Apex, API, and Prompt template. Once you have answered to this five questions, now you know a lot about solutioning. So this framework will help you through how to position the right solution for your customer.

Mike Gerholdt:

I really like that. Thanks for sharing that. And I was thinking through as you were talking through that because we have, I mean, internally we use Salesforce on the admin team to manage our content. And Josh Birk built what we call Agent Goat, which helps us answer questions and create relevant records. We even did something fun, I don’t know if you think this is cool, we think this is cool. We uploaded the release notes to Agent Goat and gave that as a resource.

Amit Malik:

Wonderful.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. Because then we can ask it about new features.

Amit Malik:

And recently we launched our Salesforce documentation action. So we can just plug in that action to our agent and now it can start answering questions based on our Salesforce documentation. We just launched.

Mike Gerholdt:

I mean, there’s so much to do.

Amit Malik:

Yes, that’s the fun thing. Once you understand that agent is nothing but aggregation of topics and topic is nothing but aggregation of actions, and actions can happen on your data. So agent, topic, action, data, that’s a master framework.

Mike Gerholdt:

Right.

Amit Malik:

Once you start thinking on this four words, agent, topic, action, and data, everything will start falling into place.

Mike Gerholdt:

So I’m curious, and I genuinely don’t know the answer to this, but have you been to any of our events and happened to see any of the agents that customers have built that you find really inspiring?

Amit Malik:

Yes, I was lucky to be part of TDX Bengaluru Hackathon.

Mike Gerholdt:

Ah, yes. Tell me more.

Amit Malik:

It was so wonderful to see our customers showcasing the real use cases. Let’s say a job application agent, some student is applying for a job, that how we can have a agent which can read the resume and do the shortlisting and send the further steps for the candidate. Or it could be other scenarios which customers were showing in insurance that how we can process the claims with the claim agent. Or as we know in the Conquer, for example, expenses, how we can have expenses being reviewed by agent and auto approve, saving the time of senior management to approve the expenses. So see, once you start thinking of use cases, then the value is derived. The value is not in technology. The value is in applying the technology to benefit the customer and improving the customer experience.

Mike Gerholdt:

And would you also extend the customer for admins and architects and developers to users of Salesforce, not just external customers of your organization?

Amit Malik:

Yes. So let me define this. So here, when I say customer, so customer is, say, Marriott who is buying our Salesforce license, or any customer who buys our Salesforce license. And then in that customer, we have employees who are using our product, they’re our end users, and if this customer is further implementing our solution for their customers, then they become end user.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yep, that makes sense. Amit, I’m curious, in the instructional side of Salesforce and having done instruction for a long time, if you were to look into a crystal ball a year out from now, how do you see AI influencing instruction at Salesforce?

Amit Malik:

See, it’s very funny. I would say this. Everyone believes that in the future we all will learn through ChatGPT, Claude, and we’ll keep on learning through AI tools. But to me, there’s a need for clarity of thought. Because if you don’t know what to ask, you will never get the answer. So the magic of learning is your curiosity. So as everybody’s moving, we are moving towards AI teaching us step by step, but if you do not know how to leverage AI, then AI will be useless to you. So the art of learning is to become curious, and once you know how much curious you are, then AI or human does not matter. Then you can learn from AI also because you know how to ask right questions. So I think, in my mind, education is not about the instructor. Education is more about the learner. If learner is good, he can extract more from a teacher. If learner is not curious, then teacher or AI does not make a difference.

Mike Gerholdt:

That’s a really powerful point.

Amit Malik:

This is my experience of teaching for last 20 plus years that I’ve seen some interesting audience and it changes the whole class when you interact with the different kind of groups. Just a good example, the way you are asking me questions, that is a prompt to my mind and I’m giving you live answers. So you are getting best out of me because of you, not because of me. So it’s just a very interesting phenomenon to understand that it’s all about how much you extract from my mind. My mind is prepared.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. I never really thought of it that way of when you go in, because as a customer before joining Salesforce, I’ve taken quite a few of our, I believe five day or four day classes, instructor led. One of those was with Wendy Braid.

Amit Malik:

This is amusing.

Mike Gerholdt:

They were all great, but they all, to your point, all of the classes were different. And they’re different, well, one of them just because the instructor is different, but because the people are different and the goal of what the people are trying to get out of the instructor changes, and it also changes based on the level of curiosity, I think you said that, of the learner, right? So if they’re genuinely curious, they’re going to get more out of the learner than if they’re just kind of sitting there expecting to be brought up to speed, right?

Amit Malik:

Exactly. I would like to add one more point to this discussion here.

Mike Gerholdt:

Oh, please.

Amit Malik:

So the role of the instructor is not information sharing. Information is available in abundance through internet channels these days. So the goal of the learner is to help learner connect to their business goals. So when a learner is listening to the instructor, instructor need to understand what is the goal learner trying to achieve in their business goals. And you only get to know that when you’re in the classroom. Before that you don’t know. So how can you plan your speech? And that’s where I believe in dynamic speeches where the real agenda gets opened up when you start engaging with the real audience. Topic remains same.

Mike Gerholdt:

So I just had a question pop to me that I really thought brings this kind of all the way 360. One of the roles that admins, developers, and architects play is your role. They have to be an instructor to end users. When they roll out a new feature, whether it’s a new application, Data Cloud, an Agentforce agent or whatever, part of their role is to teach their end users what the feature is, how to use it, how to be productive in their role. With your vast experience in teaching and educating individuals, what advice would you give to people that kind of have to temporarily step into that role and be productive?

Amit Malik:

I would say listen more, speak less, think more and process your thoughts. Articulate your answer well before you speak to the listener, because sometimes we try to propose what we know and what we want, but that is not the winning edge. The winning edge is trying to understand what is the business problem customer is trying to solve, and then within your mind, you know all the products what we offer, and then find out the best solution and say, “This is what will suit you. Use Agentforce Service Agent, and that will solve you in this use case. Let me show you how.”

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, well, that’s powerful advice. You would think it would be the opposite, right? Talk more. But sometimes there’s a reason we have two ears and one mouth.

Amit Malik:

I agree. And I have learned, again, I’m fortunate thanks to God that I’ve learned this by, I’ve been teaching for more than 20 years now, I’ve learned this skill in real world that the best teachers speak less and personalize to diversified audience where every audience should feel that he is speaking for me.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, I like that. Thanks so much for coming on the podcast, Amit. I appreciate these check-ins and really giving us this perspective on what our team is doing to get people up to speed and really also just have admins and developers and architects think about how they can be better educators themselves when they have to demonstrate the platform to their end users. I appreciate this.

Amit Malik:

Thank you. I will just say at the end, as a good practice, make sure you are spending at least 30 minutes doing something on the Salesforce org. There’s nothing which is better than doing something. People are watching YouTube, people are reading blogs, listening to podcast. But 30 minute of doing on Salesforce org is the most powerful experience.

Mike Gerholdt:

Absolutely. I mean, if you follow pro sports or any entertainment, all of those players practice for a reason. And it’s not just to be out on the field, but it’s actually the motion and going through it and keeping themselves sharp and the same holds true for us. Thanks so much for coming on the podcast, Amit.

Amit Malik:

Yes, thank you. Excellent. Thank you for the opportunity.

Mike Gerholdt:

Big thanks to Amit for joining us and sharing such a clear and thoughtful perspective on teaching AI in a way that actually works for admins, for users, hopefully for your organization. I really think his framework is something you’ll want to listen to, take notes, and probably come back to again, so. Hey, if you thought this episode got you thinking about how to introduce AI to your org, share it with somebody that you are working with so they can give it a listen. And until next time, we’ll see you in the cloud.

The post What’s the Best Way To Teach AI to Salesforce Users? appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to John Wall, co-host of the Marketing Over Coffee Podcast. Join us as we chat about how new generative AI tools are enabling marketers to get more personalized.

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

Six core marketing use cases for AIThanks to Agentforce, generative AI has moved from novelty to necessity for most organizations. It’s a key tool for strategic content creation, customer insight, and business transformation. That’s why I sat down with John Wall, co-host of the Marketing Over Coffee Podcast, with guests like Simon Sinek, Seth Godin, and Debbie Millman.

John identifies six key areas where marketers can lean on AI support:

1. Generation
2. Summarization
3. Extraction
4. Rewriting
5. Classification
6. Question answering

These tasks are helping marketers analyze massive datasets, repurpose content, and simulate customer feedback in ways that were previously unimaginable. So my question for John was: what can we, as admins, build to help them out?

Better data, smarter personasMarketers use personas to help them think about the specific people in their audience that they want to reach. “Right now, that’s four people in a conference room coming up with cute nicknames like Sally Shopper or Wally the Weekend Warrior,” John says.

In the future, however, AI will make it possible to decide on marketing personas based on data-driven profiling. Marketers can extract customer patterns from engagement data and train real models based on statistics, not spitballing.

Even more exciting, these new persona agents are essentially customers on demand. You can ask them questions and get their feedback while you plan your next marketing campaign.

Why you need a human in the loopAs everyone rushes to deploy AI, John emphasizes the importance of the human in the loop. Mistakes are bound to happen, and rushed implementations can harm brand trust. You need to make sure that any solution you deploy has gone through a thorough internal vetting process before it goes live.

As John says, AI advancements are probably not going to put you out of a job, but they’ll definitely make your job easier. “The big thing is you have to be curious,” he says, “go play with something and see what you can make it do and what kind of results you can get from it.”

Listen to the full episode for more from John about how AI is transforming marketing. And make sure you’re subscribed to the Salesforce Admins Podcast to catch us every Thursday.

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Learn more* John’s Podcast: Marketing Over Coffee * Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: 2025 Roadmap for Salesforce Admins: AI, Agentforce, and Emerging Trends * Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: How Agentforce Transforms Customer Interactions at Salesforce * Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: How Agentforce Is Changing the Career Landscape

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Social* John on LinkedIn * Salesforce Admins on LinkedIn * Salesforce Admins on X * Mike on Bluesky social * Mike on Threads * Mike on X

Full show transcriptMike Gerholdt:

This week on the Salesforce Admin’s Podcast, we’re catching up with John Wall, longtime marketer, podcaster, and co-host of Marketing Over Coffee. We’re going to dive into the rise of AI in marketing from smart summarization and rewriting tools to full-blown virtual agents. We’re going to unpack how marketers can stay ahead and why AI is not magic, even though it kind of feels that way, and what smart Salesforce admins should be watching for next. Plus, you’ll hear why having a human in the loop is still the secret sauce to marketing. So give this episode a listen and join me in welcoming John Wall to the podcast.

So, John, welcome to the podcast.

John Wall:

Mike, it’s great to be on the mic with you again.

Mike Gerholdt:

I know, it’s been a while. I feel the last time we recorded was in Boston, 100 years ago.

John Wall:

Yeah, downtown Boston. I remember we were live on Newbury Street. That was like the heart of all the action.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yep. We were recording the old style podcast. We had an Edison, it was putting it on a phonograph and some wax tubes.

John Wall:

That’s right. Sitting there with my ear trumpet listening.

Mike Gerholdt:

Ear trumpet, I love it. For those people, like the two people in the world that don’t listen to Marketing Over Coffee, can you give us a brief overview of what you do and what Marketing Over Coffee is?

John Wall:

Yeah, sure. So, my whole career I worked in marketing and tech, and God, going on what, 16, 17 years ago when podcasting was just done with steam engine and hammers and nails. We created Marketing Over Coffee, with my co-host Christopher Penn. And we’ve had this ongoing dialogue of just every week, 25 to 30 minutes talking about what’s going on in marketing and tech. And just like CRM, this space is so insane and changing every week, there’s no shortage of stuff to talk about. But then, and it’s also grown up enough that I’ve been fortunate enough to get a lot of big marketing brains and authors on, like Simon Sinek and Debbie Millman, Seth Godin, folks like that. So yeah, it’s really kind of opened up the world because the family doesn’t want to hear what I have to say about marketing over Thanksgiving, so I have somewhere to talk about that.

Mike Gerholdt:

Oh, that could be another, you should rename the podcast that for the holidays, Marketing over Thanksgiving.

John Wall:

Yeah.

Mike Gerholdt:

Just see if anybody notices.

John Wall:

That glazed overlook when I’m talking about what I do for a living.

Mike Gerholdt:

So I make ads, I’m like Jon Hamm on Mad Men. No, and I remember the Boston. So much of what admins do I remember, is interface with marketing. And that’s why I love having you on because not only as a personal brand, but also as somebody that does a lot of podcasts and content creation, it just overlaps with what admins do. And marketing is such a big facet of any organization now. I mean, you can’t sit down and talk sales without, well, we should have the marketing person in here, and they always want 5,000 more requirements than what you started with, but that’s why I love having you on.

So, let’s dive in. I feel like we woke up from the pandemic and AI just was everywhere now. I’d love to know on what the world of AI looks like for marketers now.

John Wall:

Yeah, I mean, you totally nailed that, and the world has changed yet again. We were kind of finally, things were finally stabilizing a little bit. Platforms that matured, as far as email and text messaging and advertising and things are fairly solid, and now AI has shown up to destroy everything.

It’s been a little weird though, because our world didn’t change as much. We’ve been working a lot with machine learning to do data analysis for years. So my co-host on the show and partner at Trust Insights, Christopher Penn, had long been using machine learning to measure PR and advertising results. Doing statistical models to prove like, okay, what’s actually working in your branding and your advertising? These things that you can’t easily measure with clicks. And so that has been an area where we were able to kind of provide some value and insight that nobody else could get. But then really, I don’t know, about a year and a half ago when generative AI became the hottest thing going on all fronts for marketing, the amount of interest in that has just exploded.

So yeah, we have a bunch of fronts that we’re applying the technology and it’s just amazing to see the range of how marketers adapt. There’s still plenty of marketers that don’t want to look at it and have their head in the sand, and all the way up to, we have clients that are like, “Hey, we want to reimagine our entire business because we think it’s going to be something completely different in the next five years.”

So yeah, we spent a lot of time thinking about where this stuff is going to go, and it’s amazing how… And literally we have, Christopher works full time on monitoring this space and seeing what’s new and what’s coming next, because it’s just insane when you look at the fact that we’ve had six major models this year. There’s never been a time in tech history where you have six major products show up at once. So, yeah, everything is changing and it’s just a challenge to keep track of what’s happening this week.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, I remember not that long ago, thinking how long in the tooth we’ve been working in tech, when I heard some statistic of, today we’ll create more content than was ever previously created in human history. So now with AI, are we exponentially creating more? Are we creating better content? Is that the converse… I always dig into like, what’s that next layer down? Are we really caring about creating better content with AI or are we just creating more content with AI?

John Wall:

Right. Well, of course, marketers ruin everything, right?

Mike Gerholdt:

Right.

John Wall:

This is nothing new. Yeah, there’s a whole army of people that are taking their stuff that was pretty crappy and now we have an exponential amount of pretty crappy stuff out there. So yeah, and it’s going to be really weird to see how all this goes because it’s the classic antivirus defense too. It’s, as soon as people are creating exponentially more junk, all of the search engines or AI powered search engines are adding defenses to pull all that stuff back out. So it’s just this never ending battle and yeah, the level of content, I don’t know, it’s so much so that we’re going to burn more electricity in the next year than the power of the sun. I mean, it’s just insane how this is all changing.

Mike Gerholdt:

But we’ll have better copy for our websites.

John Wall:

Right, you’ll have a better landing page. It’s going to convert for you. But then we do see, as with everything, right? There’s people that are using the technology to automate the foolishness of the past, we have electronic yellow pages being created. But at the other end, there’s people who are using these tools in totally brand new and novel ways to get some insight that they’ve never had before, or automate things that used to be just insanely difficult to automate, and yeah, go to new places and create advantage. So there are ways to win and yeah, there’s going to be a ton of things that we never even expected that will change everything for us.

Mike Gerholdt:

I mean, the biggest thing before AI, the wave of AI hit, the biggest thing we were dealing with was data lakes and these massive data volumes. And I think even marketers were dealing with that too, because you have people going to their website and they’re unauthenticated and we’re assigning a profile to them. How do we dig through when you’ve got millions of impressions on a page? What was that journey of that person? How did they actually get to the pair of shoes that they bought? Now with AI, are we getting smarter at doing that? Is that kind of the data that we’re digging into?

John Wall:

Yeah, absolutely. And so yeah, when you look back, step back and look at the landscape. Generation, we consider that one of only six different options to use AI for to help get you places. And two of them extraction and summarization, that’s just what you’re talking about. It’s like to finally be able to have all of these different data sources all over the place, load them up into a system and have it do the heavy lifting of, okay, find the commonalities between these things.

And yet it’s just, we had been promising this for decades, this idea that when people in marketing talk about personas, that’s just because four people in a conference room came up with cute nicknames and an idea of who these people should be. They’re like, oh yeah, Sally Shopper and George Weekend Warrior, or whatever. But now you can get actual summarizations based on the data itself. And you actually know that, okay, we do see that 40% of the buyers look like this, and they have these things in common, and it’s all based on statistics, none of it’s based on gut. So yeah, those kinds of insights are really interesting.

And we’ve actually been pushing another level. You can go ahead and create these profiles of who these people are, but then use those profiles to train the large language models. So now that you can actually treat that as a customer on demand that you can survey and ask questions to, instead of emailing everybody with every purchase of $0.35 to ask for feedback on what’s going on, you just go to the large language model and say, “Hey, here’s the next four marketing campaigns. Tell us what you think about those and does this resonate with you?” And you can get similar insight but not cause as much trouble and not have to wait.

Mike Gerholdt:

You mentioned six, I think you gave us one or two. What were the other four?

John Wall:

Yeah, so obviously generative AI, you’ve got generation, we just talked about extraction and summarization. The other three, rewriting, which is just something that can easily raise your productivity, right? If you’re somebody who’s having to, okay, I wrote this white paper for the construction industry. I want to write about the same kind of stuff for the food service industry. Rewriting is very easy and instant for generative AI to do.

Classification is another use case. We see this a lot where people that have multiple products, they don’t know how they fit in together, or even if you just have large amounts of data. A good example is for a call center, you’ve got 30,000 calls a month. To have AI transcribe those and go through and find the 20 features that you should fix to make 10% of your calls go away. That kind of stuff is a huge benefit, huge lift.

And then out of the six, yeah, the last is just question answering. You can really get better insight into topics than search engine results by asking AI to not only give you the answer, but explain how it got there and educate you on, what do you need to know to kind of understand the space a little bit more.

Mike Gerholdt:

And I think we’re seeing, I mean, from the Salesforce side, we’re showing a lot of use cases and we have a lot of customers that are standing up agents on public facing sites. Are you seeing that more and more as a trend for marketers to work with? I think one of the things, as I say this, one of the stereotypes that most marketing falls into is, how do we drive more sales? But I think a lot of marketers are also, how do we divert service cases as well and drive sales through service? Are you seeing agents on public-facing websites as something marketers are paying attention to for that?

John Wall:

Yeah. I mean, everybody wants that, right? And unfortunately, we’ve all seen this cycle. This happens where there’s the board meeting and the board is saying, “Hey, we got to get onto this,” and so now somebody’s like, okay, I need to get me one of these shiny object things. And unfortunately, it’s mostly disaster-ville, right? We were seeing these things of people hooking up a chatbot or whatever, and it’s starting to just spout off lies and crazy answers and it just becomes a train wreck. So yeah, that is one thing that’s going to be huge over the next couple of years. The idea of, okay, yeah, you’ve got these bots or these agents, but which ones are enterprise-ready? There’s a huge difference between something that’s been vetted and tested.

For most of our clients we’re saying, no, you need to have a human in the loop. A great… The use case that you just talked about would be, yeah, have the AI generate the top 2,000 answers for problems that it sees, but then that goes through the product manager for verification to prove that they’re all real. You can’t go live with that, but yeah, there’s definitely going to be a lot of, unfortunately, we’re going to see a lot of scary news as people pull the trigger on something that goes awry.

Mike Gerholdt:

Well, that’s kind of like we saw like the, we’re not ready for the self-driving cars. We’ve seen that in San Francisco, but they still have somebody in the passenger seat or in the driver’s seat just in case. The human in the loop.

John Wall:

Right, and that’s always been, even you look back in history and it’s like, yeah, escalators and elevators. There used to be people that was their job just to make sure that nothing went wrong.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, and of course not to be predictive, but I don’t know the last time I rode an elevator where there was a person there to press the buttons for me.

John Wall:

Right, exactly. And yeah, there are… Well, yeah, it’s just so much of that is the media and the way information gets presented to us as news. It’s like, yeah, okay, these three automated cars got in some kind of weird accident, but we’re not getting the story of all the ridiculous stuff humans did over the past month in cars. That’s just not news for us anymore.

Mike Gerholdt:

Right, contextual. You mentioned at the beginning, sort of the great spectrum of marketers with their head in the sand, all the way to, we want to revolutionize our business. Where do most marketers fall, in terms of thinking with AI, thinking about AI? And where should that be?

John Wall:

Yeah, that’s a great question because it’s really, in a lot of ways this is a retooling for everybody. You have to go back and look at all your processes and figure out which ones apply. And because, and you’ve talked about this in the past, the fact that it’s not about AI showing up and it’s just like the marketing department’s going to get wiped out. What’s going to happen is over time, there’s going to be three or four marketers that have added AI to a bunch of their workflows, things that they’ve hated doing, and so they’ve figured out how to automate them. And those people are going to be exponentially more productive than the folks that are avoiding AI and trying to stay away from it.

So yeah, where people should be. The big thing is you have to be curious. It’s just like with every other major tech change. Go start playing around with something and see what you can make it do and what kind of results you can get out of it. Because at this stage of it, you’re going to find these really crazy things. You’re like, oh man, I never thought that I could use that to come up with an intelligent email address predictor. Every sales and marketing person has this where they’re like, oh, I have to get in touch with this person and they haven’t put their email up on the social networks that I normally follow. And so getting some suggestions to do that kind of stuff.

And the other one is, yeah, so much of marketing is combing through spreadsheets and trying to prove results or manage copy and things like that. So much of that stuff can be automated and give you hours back in your day. So yeah, it’s a matter of having… Be bold, play around and kind of see what you can break.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, I think back to, and I’ve tried to look this up, but I’ve heard the story of in the late-1800s, I forget who it was. I want to say Thomas Jefferson but that’s probably not right, writing a letter to the US patent office saying, “You can shut down because everything that’s been invented has been invented.” And correlating that to, we can’t let cars happen in the world because they’ll put wagon wheel manufacturers out of business. And the labor force of wagon wheel manufacturers, it’ll be devastating to the economy that all these wagon wheel manufacturers will go out of business. And I think back to, well, they just didn’t understand. If you’re a wagon wheel manufacturer, you’re just really good at making things with wood. And if cars come around, then make things with wood for the car, as opposed to making wagon wheels.

And I feel like we’re in that age now where people are, if AI comes out, AI’s going to take my job. AI can generate an image, there’s no more graphic designers. No. Have you seen AI’s images? Graphic designers are going to be around for a while, but there will be a point where I feel we’re riding on the elevator where it’ll be pretty good, but the really good stuff will be the boutique stuff. And you think about it now, probably what, 90% of the furniture in your home probably was made by a robot. I mean, it’s slapped together really good, but the craftsmen, the people that know how to make that stuff, they’re still in high demand. There’s just a smaller labor force of them.

John Wall:

Yeah, right, and that’s the, we see this all the time, is the expert tools versus tools for experts, right?

Mike Gerholdt:

Right.

John Wall:

The idea that the tool is just going to do all the things for me. But yeah, no, the real neat, interesting stuff, like you said, the master woodworker who doesn’t have to deal with all of the paper instructions and measuring things. They can just work on picking the right wood and thinking about the design of the furniture itself, rather than the more mundane tasks. And yeah, that’s where things are going to… And you hit another great point of freeing resources up. I mean, yeah, okay, the big one is stock photo. Stock photo takes a huge hit if people are able to generate and just kind of get images that they want. But now it’s the thing of, okay, all these companies that really had a hard time having quality graphics and images on their website, what happens if they finally have the ability to create a better website and be able to kind of do more with less? What kind of lift can they see from that?

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. So I’ll ask a big question. Does AI make us better?

John Wall:

Well, it’s like any tech tool, right? That’s the problem. It can make us better and it can make us worse. It’s all about whose hands is it in and what are they trying to do with it and where are they trying to go? But it is weird in that it, again, tech, it makes everything faster and bigger and accelerating. And unfortunately, our kind of caveman brains are already having enough difficulty handling the speed and volume of everything that’s going on around us in the world. So yeah, it’s going to get a little bit wonky and weird, and the idea of me even trying to predict something is kind of silly.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. Well, I think that’s the hardest part of it is, great tech appears as magic. Right? Isn’t that the saying? And we’re getting to the point now where we can’t tell magic from great tech. So, I guess that’s always where we’re going, but we’re always trying to out-invent ourselves. You know?

John Wall:

Yeah, and ultimately, it just comes down to the good news is, okay, what are people actually willing to pay for? I mean, we can do a lot of weird and crazy stuff, but what’s actually going to find something that fits? And that’s funny, that’s something that’s kind of evolved over the past 10 years too, is that we’d always thought about sales as kind of guiding people to your thing and moving the river to go in your direction. But really what we’re seeing is that business is more about, what is the existing system already there and how do we move our business so that we can get in front of whatever’s coming next and where to go? And so that idea of being able to strategically see what’s coming next and already be there waiting for the customers as they show up with the money, that’s a different approach and kind of changes everything for sales and marketing. Right? It’s not about just banging the drum, it’s more about listening ahead and figuring out where to be.

Mike Gerholdt:

Well, and that’s the part that I think all of this and we’ve never touched on, is the economics of AI, right? So we’re approaching all of this now because almost everything has some sort of freemium model, which means we’re the product. And it’s free because they need our data, they need our prompts, they need to be able to comb the internet. They need to be able to read our blog post and our white papers. But when they don’t need that anymore, then what is the economics of AI? Will there quickly become a have and have-nots layer? Because the have-nots can’t afford the AI, because there is a cost to it now.

John Wall:

Yeah, that is a gigantic question that I think is just underappreciated, is the fact that AI has taken all the oxygen out of the room as far as VC. And we normally would kind of see money being sprinkled across a whole bunch of places, but everybody is just putting all their chips on this and it’s, yeah, the-

Mike Gerholdt:

Well, everybody wants to have the iPod. They want to be the one that invested in the Facebook and the one that wins.

John Wall:

Right, yeah, yeah. Everybody is going for the top. But I can’t think of a period of time where we’re getting more powerful, free stuff than ever before.

Mike Gerholdt:

True.

John Wall:

And so, yeah, yeah, there’s huge questions as far as like, okay, when this shakes out and suddenly maybe there’s three winners or one winner or whatever, how does that change? Yeah, unfortunately, marketing again, has a horrible track record for like, yeah, it’s great and free at the beginning, but then once it starts getting tuned for ads and traffic, yeah, it gets expensive fast, and a lot of people get left behind.

Mike Gerholdt:

Right. I mean, that was just as you were answering that, that was something I was thinking of is, at some point, and I suppose we thought about this with social networks too, at some point they’re going to start charging. And we didn’t think that day would come, and I actually thought the model would be very different. Now, the social networks charge to verify you’re a human, which I wouldn’t have expected. We thought everything on social would go to a subscription price. We’re seeing AI be subscription price early on, but I don’t even know if in five years AILB subscription price, because there could be a completely different cost model to it because of, I don’t know, right? Could you have predicted that Facebook is going to charge you to become a verified Facebook user, as opposed to a monthly subscription, which was the traditional magazine model?

John Wall:

Yeah, that’s a turn that is bizarre. And I don’t know, part of me too is still hoping one day we get to that point where it’s more about verified users. Because when you get back to all these platforms, the problem is, they do violate the laws of communication. Right? Anybody can go on any platform and just say whatever they want and it can be unchallenged. Whereas for all of human history prior to that, if you were talking some crazy stuff, there was instant ramifications, whether it was somebody throwing a tomato at you or whatever, but there were repercussions for this. And so we see this as a crisis to entrust across the board in all institutions and yeah, I kind of think at some point somebody’s going to get the bright idea that by verifying who’s real and what’s fake and what’s not in anybody’s best interest, when that stuff gets filtered, how does that make it different? But I [inaudible 00:24:35], I thought that that would’ve happened a long time ago and it’s not here yet, so I don’t know. Can it even happen?

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, yeah. I mean, selfishly, I know I’ve had a friend have a YouTube video of his transcribed and turned into three online magazine articles, all without his consent. And then posted to Facebook via a bot, and the bot 100% had an AI-generated profile image. So, I’d be afraid. Yeah, verified users, that would be.

John Wall:

Yeah, it would be.

Mike Gerholdt:

It’s like when you get pulled over by the police, you have to hand them your ID. We need some sort of digital ID for that.

John Wall:

Yeah, that use case that you’ve described as crazy when you think about it, right? Because that’s playing under old SEO rules. Somebody’s thinking like, oh, I’m going to get in three or four more different channels and I’m going to take that traffic. And the reality is, all the search engines now, the first five things they’re throwing up are their own internally-generated AI. Organic traffic just continues to crater.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, yeah. Well, especially when you take other people’s stuff and you duplicate it, at least they’re not rewarding that bad behavior.

John Wall:

Yeah, right.

Mike Gerholdt:

John, it was great having you on the podcast. I’m sorry it took so long, but I promise I’ve not stopped drinking coffee since then, nor will I ever, usually.

John Wall:

That sounds great. Yeah, no, it’s good to be back. We haven’t had a chance to hang out at Dreamforce like I used to do all the time, so it’s good to catch up.

Mike Gerholdt:

I know, but there is still the Dreamforce Marathon. I don’t even know what people are wearing now for wearables. You remember, it used to be Fitbits, and-

John Wall:

Oh, yeah. Right, yeah, yeah-

Mike Gerholdt:

I mean, we were all Fitbits and everybody had that, and it was the Dreamforce Marathon. I think, to be fair because I am Salesforce, we did hear that. And there has been a very long look at, how do we not necessarily keep people in the same space, but reduce the amount of-

John Wall:

Yeah, [inaudible 00:26:35]-

Mike Gerholdt:

… the 30-mile across San Francisco. Because it can be banned, there’s a few of them hills that you just look at and be like, yep, I’m just going to stay at the bottom.

John Wall:

Always a fan. I just get the cable car pass for the week and take care of that.

Mike Gerholdt:

There you go, there you go. Well, it was great having you on. I promise to have you back on sooner, because I’m sure we’re going to have more AI to talk about as it’s ever evolving so quickly.

John Wall:

Yeah, yeah. Hopefully it’ll still be us and not just avatars of us having to do it for us.

Mike Gerholdt:

Well, that’ll be fine too. We’ll see. Maybe people won’t know the difference, and then you and I can be riding a cable car in San Francisco.

John Wall:

Right, right, as they’re watching the video of me with my third arm wave.

Mike Gerholdt:

Don’t forget your sixth finger. It always gets the fingers wrong too.

Huge thanks to John for joining us and bringing his insights on AI marketing trends and why curiosity is your greatest asset right now. I know I’m always curious to hear his podcast, Marketing Over Coffee. And it being summer, I like to listen to it while I’m on my yard. That’s just how I listen the podcast. How do you listen to this podcast, mowing and walking the dog? I’d love to know. Shoot me a message on social somewhere.

If this episode got you thinking or questioning some AI landing pages, hey, as an admin, time to meet with your fellow marketing peer and learn more about what we can do with Agentforce and everything else. Until next time, we’ll see you in the cloud.

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Ben Sklar, Director of Product Management at Salesforce. Join us as we chat about how he’s making setup into a better, more consistent experience. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Ben Sklar.

The problems with Salesforce setupIf there’s one thing Salesforce Admins know a lot about, it’s setup. It’s time-consuming, complicated, and varies wildly depending on what you’re looking at. Answering a simple question like “what objects does this user have access to and why?” turns into an arduous process.

That’s why I was so excited to bring Ben Sklar on the pod to talk about how his team is fixing setup in Salesforce. We’ll find out how they’re laying the groundwork for faster updates and creating a more consistent user experience.

Gradual improvements to setupA big question I had for Ben was how the changes he’s making to setup will show up for those of us who use it every day. “All these amazing enhancements we’re making to the setup platform are really behind the scenes,” he says, “if we do this right way you don’t really even need to know that it’s there.”

However, you might notice a few improvements here or there. For example, there are new user summaries that allow you to see all the permission sets that a user has, all in one place. They’re also working with the Sales Cloud Go team to make sure that you can turn on features, discover new ones, and assign permissions, all in one place.

Creating a consistent experienceAt the end of the day, the goal is to make things easier for the people who use it the most (that’s you!). “We’ve heard our admins often complain about inconsistent experiences,” Ben says, “and by being able to reuse components across setup you’ll be able to see more consistency.”

As Ben says, setup was turning into the “Wild West” and it would feel different across experiences. His team has done a lot of work behind the scenes to make sure that setup always has a consistent look and feel, and they’ve established a setup design council to create guidelines that make sense. The future of Salesforce Setup is bright, and a whole lot easier.

You should listen to the full episode for more from Ben, including what’s next for setup and why he loves ultimate frisbee. And subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you never miss an episode.

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Full show transcriptMike:
This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we’re talking about Setup, and I joked before I pressed record with Ben Sklar, Admins live in Setup. We probably could pay a mortgage based on the amount of time that we spend in Setup. And the reason I talk about Setup and Ben Sklar is Ben is one of the product managers who’s tackling Setup and fixing Setup, and he’s working very close with another product major that you may have heard of, Cheryl Feldman. And so that’s how Ben came to the podcast. He was a suggestion from Cheryl. Hey, you got to talk about all the cool stuff that Ben’s working on with Setup on the podcast. And so we cover that and I’m sure many of you probably have seen some of the very cool stuff that Ben and his team are working on in Setup, but at Dreamforce last week, and so we’re going to talk about that.

But of course, before we get into it with Ben, just a quick reminder, wherever you’re listening to the Salesforce podcast, if it’s in app, go ahead and hit that subscribe or follow button. That allows you to get new downloads anytime a podcast drops, and every time a new podcast drops, you what time that is? It’s Thursday mornings, so that way new pod right on your phone. If you’re listening on the website, you don’t have to worry about it. You should sign up for our Admin newsletter though, because we highlight podcasts in the newsletter. But enough about that, let’s talk about the exciting world of Setup. It’s really where all of us Admins live, and all of the cool stuff that Ben and his team are doing. So let’s get Ben on the podcast. So Ben, welcome to the podcast.

Ben Sklar:
Hey, Mike. Thank you. I’m excited to be here.

Mike:
Yeah, well, when Cheryl comes knocking at the proverbial podcast door and recommends a guest, I can’t turn her down, because every time Cheryl Feldman gets on stage to talk about the future of something in Salesforce, Admins flock to those sessions. So she recommended that we have a discussion. I’m very excited for this, but before we get into that, why don’t we learn a little bit about you? So tell us briefly how you got the journey to becoming a PM at Salesforce.

Ben Sklar:
Yeah, absolutely. So I started at Salesforce a few years ago. I joined as a product manager in our backend data services area. I became the product manager for our UI API, or user interface API, and I also launched our GraphQL API. And the reason I mention these things, I’ve been working on improving Setup, and it all starts at improving the way that we can pull in the right data and metadata inside of Setup. And so I’m really excited to talk more about how we’re going to be fixing Setup.

Mike:
You said the magical words, Setup. Now we’re all excited. I’ve been in Setup, I think Admins live most of their work days in Setup. What are some of the challenges that we have with Setup right now?

Ben Sklar:
Absolutely. We’ve heard a lot from our Admins and our customers. We’ve heard it can feel like when you’re inside of Setup, it’s really like being stuck on a deserted island.

Mike:
Oh.

Ben Sklar:
You’re using these primitive tools and you really need a survivalist guide just to use it. So there’s a lot of challenges we’ve heard. We’ve heard that it’s very time-consuming and it takes forever to find out, what does a user have access to? Why do they have access to this object but not this other object? So we’ve heard a lot of challenges so far inside of Setup.

Mike:
So to be clear, are you working on all of Setup or just Setup around users?

Ben Sklar:
That’s a great question. So we are working on all of Setup, but we needed to start somewhere. Where we started was around user access and user management, and as we’ve started building up, what we’re calling, the Setup platform, and by the way, the Setup platform really allows us and will allow us to build features in Setup much faster than we ever have before. It’s also allowing us to move experiences that are broken in Classic into Lightning.

Mike:
Gotcha. Fun thing we should try out is naming this platform, because I can’t envision Salesforce is going to go with the Setup Platform. That doesn’t feel like us.

Ben Sklar:
That’s right.

Mike:
We have Hyperforce and we have a lot of things, something force, we should… Is this like Benforce, Cherylforce, the Ben and Cherylforce? I don’t know, Ben and-

Ben Sklar:
Setupforce.

Mike:
Setupforce. Yeah, people should share their ideas for the name of it. Setup1, there’s a cadence of things. We got to have a one, and then that won’t work for a while, and then we got to have a Thingforce, right?

Ben Sklar:
That’s right. What I will say is, all of these amazing enhancements we’re making that we’re calling the Setup platform, it’s really behind the scenes. It’s really just to let you all know that we’re making amazing foundational changes to Setup, but if we do this the right way, you don’t really even need to know that it’s there.

Mike:
So does this mean that as releases come out, the Setup menu’s going to change for me? Or is this going to be a gradual thing that maybe I might not even notice because it’s so seamless in the background?

Ben Sklar:
That’s a great question. This is more of a gradual change that you shouldn’t notice at all, really, if we do our job the right way. What you will see are new features. You’ll start seeing more consistency inside of Setup, where it looks like features are being developed by the same Salesforce and not disjointed experiences. And there’s a lot of cool new things that are going to come every release because we can finally start moving, like I said before, these broken Classic experiences into Lightning?

Mike:
What’s one example that you think, well, that’s top of your list to move, that you know Admins are running into?

Ben Sklar:
Yeah, so if you were able to catch Dreamforce last week, you probably saw that the user list view, which was for some of our customers, a completely broken experience, we have finally moved that over into Lightning. And we’re going to be expanding the functionality in that new Lightning Experience, release over release.

Mike:
Wow, and you mentioned, so you called it the Setup platform. Platform implies a lot. Allowing Setup to become a platform, what is that going to give us in terms of an advantage in the future?

Ben Sklar:
Absolutely. I think it really goes back to time to market for new features. As we build new features inside of Setup, like I said before, we can really build these features faster than we ever have before. Just to give you a little bit more context and information, when we’re building features inside of Setup, in order to really populate that page with the components and all of the data that you see, we need to get it somewhere. And so we’ve really enhanced the way that we retrieve this data and put it on the page. And all of this is allowing us to really build the features much faster. And we’ve heard our Admins often complain about inconsistent experiences, and by being able to reuse components across Setup, that’s when you’re going to start seeing that consistency, and that similar look and feel for all these new features that are to come inside of Setup.

Mike:
Can you share with me an example of that? Because I know when we went to Lightning Page Builder, I think we just call it Page Builder now, but I also noticed that as we launched some of the Agentforce Prompt Builder and Copilot stuff, that the configuration looks very similar. Is that what you’re referring to in Setup?

Ben Sklar:
Yeah, there’s a few things to call out here. So the first is, I’m not sure if you’ve already seen the new summaries that we’ve built inside of Setup. So a good example would be if you go inside for a particular user, and you’re trying to understand, okay, what permissions does this user have? What permission sets are they a part of? We can now see a summary of all that information in one place. We built one component, one summary component, but we’re reusing that, not just for user but also now for objects, and for permission sets, and permission set groups.

So this Setup platform really allows us to build once and use all over the place. And so the next thing that we are focusing on are list views, and so you will now see that new user list view. You’re going to see list views being built across Setup, us moving from Classic to Lightning. And one last example, the Sales Cloud team has developed a framework inside of Setup, called Sales Cloud Go. And this allows Admins really to turn new features on, faster. It puts it all in one place. And we’ve been partnering with that team, and in that same experience that you go to turn on your features and discover new features, you’ll also be able to assign permissions in that same place.

Mike:
So I’ve seen the release notes on Sales Cloud Go, there was some stuff that came out in our most recent release about that. Is that an example where now we have a standard template and framework for all of the other teams to use? Was that one of the reasons that Setup had so many different experiences, is when somebody would put an item into the Setup menu, they really controlled the experience and there was no real, I guess, you’re a UI guy, there was no real UI dictation for what it had to look like or act like?

Ben Sklar:
That’s right. Exactly. So in the past, it often felt like Setup was starting to turn into the Wild West, where teams who were building inside of Setup could really do so many different things, and make it look and feel so different across experiences. What we’re trying to do now is really templatize this so that we have a similar look and feel for all new features, and we’ve even established a Setup design council, which helps teams.

Mike:
Ooh.

Ben Sklar:
Yeah, it helps teams who are building in Setup, understand how should this look and feel? How do I get started using these new features and templates that have been created? It’s really exciting, all the things that are coming out for Setup.

Mike:
To think of the amount of time that I’ve spent presenting and talking about even deployment best practices, and user acceptance testing, and feedback, you’re always thinking of the frontend of the app, where the user will use the app. And it’s just neat to think of, wow, we actually have a design council for the people that, when they click Setup, they click the gear, there’s people that that’s their world to think about, because for a lot of us, that’s the world we live in. You think of, too often, there’s so much emphasis put on the outside design of a car, but you know somewhere, at one of the manufacturing plants, somebody’s job has to be, yeah, but what happens when you pop the hood? How much of a mess does that engine have to be and what’s that like for the mechanic to work on it? And I feel like that’s what you’re telling me. No, we’re actually thinking about it. What happens when you have to live under the hood of the car all day in Setup, what that experience looks like? So that’s really neat to hear.

Ben Sklar:
Absolutely.

Mike:
So you mentioned platform. I’d be remiss for some of our very experienced Admins, when I hear platform, I think, “Well, maybe there’s an API that I can tap into.” Is there going to be any kind of developer experience for this new Setup platform?

Ben Sklar:
That’s a great question. We often are asked by our Admins and ISPs, “All of these amazing new enhancements that you’re making to Setup and changes to existing APIs, or may be new APIs that are being created, can we have access to these?” And what I would say is, we are really enhancing the same APIs that some of you already use, know and love today, including our UI API or user interface API and our GraphQL API. We are enhancing these APIs to improve the experience and the ease of bringing data and metadata directly into Setup. And so for all of you ISPs and Admins out there, again, those are the same services that we already make available externally. We are just improving the ability for us to tap into these APIs directly from Setup. We’re reducing the barrier that we had before in accessing these APIs, and we’re making it a lot easier for us to develop inside of Setup.

Mike:
Hmm, well, that’s really cool. Can it envision how much farther we’ll be, maybe a year from now when we’ve got all the user stuff tackled?

Ben Sklar:
That’s right, and that leads me to say, we really started with user access and user management, really is the first customer or consumer of these new Setup platform enhancements we’re making. That was really just the start, and we’re now really talking to and partnering across our clouds, Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Data Cloud, Industries, Commerce, you name it, so that they too can make sure to take advantage of all these new things we’re doing inside of Setup, to build better features for all of you admins.

Mike:
Yeah. That way it feels more unified, like everybody’s building from the same playbook, right?

Ben Sklar:
That’s right.

Mike:
Yeah. So Ben, when you’re not fixing Setup, which I feel like is a 24/7, 365 thing, is there anything fun you like to do on the side? I know I’ve talked to product managers and some of them have smelted metals, and some run marathons and play board games, and they have all kinds of fun hobbies. Do you have any fun, tangible hobby you’d care to share with us?

Ben Sklar:
I do. During the summer, I’m a big Ultimate frisbee player.

Mike:
Oh, what’s Ultimate frisbee? Tell us.

Ben Sklar:
It’s like a combination between football and soccer, and maybe some other sports, it’s-

Mike:
But with frisbees.

Ben Sklar:
But with frisbees. It’s a non-contact sport. But once you catch the frisbee, you become the quarterback, like in football, and everyone on your team becomes a wide receiver that you can throw to. And when you’re on defense, everyone, including you on your team, is like a cornerback in football. So you’re trying to intercept the frisbee from the other team when you’re on defense. And when you’re on offense, you’re trying to either throw the frisbee into the end zone for a touchdown like football, or catch it in the end zone like a touchdown in football.

Mike:
Wow. Do you have flags on the side since it’s no contact, or you got to get that frisbee, that’s the only way to stop the… is be to play good D.

Ben Sklar:
That’s right. So once you catch the frisbee, you cannot move. So there’s no flag that you’re trying to-

Mike:
Oh, oh, you didn’t say that before.

Ben Sklar:
Yeah. Yep.

Mike:
See, I didn’t know that.

Ben Sklar:
So as soon as you catch it, you have to stop, and then the only way you can continue to move the frisbee forward is by throwing it to someone on your team.

Mike:
Okay. Okay. All right. I was envisioning people running and throwing, and I’ve never played this frisbee before, clearly. This sounds awesome. I fell into a rabbit hole of frisbee golf on YouTube for a while, and I live by a big, there’s a big recreational dam by me that’s like a, 10 minutes away, and they have a huge frisbee golf course, and it’s through woods, and streams, and stuff. I played it once and I was like, “Wow, this is really cool.” And I totally banged my friend’s frisbees against the trees a lot. Are they like the same frisbees used with frisbee golf? Are they harder? Some of them that I would use had the hole in the middle.

Ben Sklar:
Interesting. So the weight is definitely different between a frisbee you use for Ultimate frisbee versus frisbee golf, and the shape can be a little bit different too. Like you mentioned, there’s could be a hole in the middle for frisbee golf. Ultimate frisbee, it’s a standard size and weight. There is no change to that, unlike frisbee golf where-

Mike:
Right. Yeah.

Ben Sklar:
… you can use different types of frisbees.

Mike:
Yeah, I know there was a driver and he had a putting frisbee.

Ben Sklar:
That’s right, a driver frisbee, putter frisbee, et cetera.

Mike:
Well, how many is on a team?

Ben Sklar:
Typically, you go up to seven people out in the line. Depending on if you’re on a serious team or not, you might have an O line of seven and then maybe you switch out for a D line of seven. But typically, for the most part, I really just play pickup.

Mike:
[inaudible 00:19:55].

Ben Sklar:
And so just seven of us get together onto one team, seven of us onto another team.

Mike:
Wow, that’s a lot of people.

Ben Sklar:
Yeah.

Mike:
I don’t know, for a pickup game.

Ben Sklar:
Yeah, we often get maybe over 20 people who will show up, so we’ll sub out and allow other people to come in and have fun too.

Mike:
Sure. Wow, that sounds cool. I’m going to have to check that out. See, there’s always stuff that people that work in technology do that’s very tangible, because at the end of the day when you turn the monitor off, where did the Setup go? Well, it’s off because there’s no power, right? But extreme frisbee, and frisbee golf, and stuff, it still exists when you turn the monitor off because the frisbee’s in the corner. So-

Ben Sklar:
That’s right.

Mike:
That’s awesome. Well, Ben, thanks so much for joining us on the podcast. I’m sure I will do my best if the recordings are up, post-Dreamforce, to link them in the show. Otherwise, I know our social team will share them out, and I look forward to seeing all of the updates and new things coming to the Setup menu for all of us.

Ben Sklar:
Thanks, Mike. Again, thank you so much for having me. It’s been a pleasure.

Mike:
Okay. How much fun was that? Oh, by the way, Ben’s into extreme frisbee playing golf tournament rugby. It sounds cool and it’s a hundred percent not anything I could play, but I promise you this, I would sign up to watch that if some sports network put that on a television because that looks like fun to me. I don’t know. Have you ever frisbee golfed? I frisbee golfed. Have you ever extreme frisbee’d? It sounds like fun. I can’t throw very well, so maybe that’s why I didn’t do it. But anyway, how about all that stuff coming to Setup? I’m excited for it.

I know that jumping around in Setup has felt a little different, and there’s a lot of things to work on, and it’s just cool that somebody’s tackling… Also, there’s a whole group of people that sit around and think about what the Setup experience should be like in UI, that is just like a warm glass of cocoa next to a crackling fire on a snowy winter’s day, for me. That’s what that makes me feel like. And a teddy bear. Let’s throw that in for fun because it’s fall, so I’m sure you got to have something pumpkin spiced. Anyway, I appreciate Ben coming on the podcast. I appreciate you listening to the podcast and being this far into the episode. We’ve got a lot of really cool guests lined up, and working on getting even more. So with that, be sure to join us next week, and until then, I’ll see you in the cloud.

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Douane James, Salesforce Application Product Manager. Join us as we chat about his Dreamforce presentation covering how reducing profiles in your org can enable faster deployments. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Douane James.

How permission sets can help you reduce Salesforce profiles in your orgDouane’s giving a talk at Dreamforce this year so I was excited to get him on the pod and hear more. He recently went through the process of reducing the number of profiles in his org from 11 down to only 2, so his talk is centered around why you can and should do the same.

I know I don’t need to tell you this, but Salesforce best practices change over time. Most Salesforce orgs are built to work right now, which is how you can wind up with technical debt. For example, permission sets have become a much more elegant solution to the problems we used to solve with profiles. Sounds like a big project, but Douane’s here to tell you that reducing the number of profiles in your org is not as hard as you might think.

Profile footprint reduction speeds up deploymentA few years ago, Douane’s organization started using a new dev ops process. And while this made it easier to identify what needed to be built and do it quickly, he couldn’t help but notice how long the deployments were taking. More often than not, the delays were related to configuring profiles. He realized they needed to do an overhaul and reduce the number of profiles in their org.

The first step was to get buy in. For Douane, the key was to emphasize how much quicker his team would be able to respond to requests if they spent time on cleaning up profiles. It also helped that they were committed to gradual improvements over time. Profile footprint reduction isn’t something that happens overnight, but it takes less time than you might think if you go step by step.

How to move from profiles to permission set groupsDouane and his team set out to move everything they could from profiles into permission set groups. They identified a representative for each user role they could interview to make sure everything was still working as intended throughout the process.

When you’re looking at your existing profiles, you need to find out:

1. What are the permissions in the profiles?
2. What permissions are common to each job function?
3. Are there any special cases?

For users that need a lot of special access, Douane recommends creating a “heavy” permission set that allows you to give them exactly what they need.

If Douane has one message for you, it’s that the hardest part of reducing their Salesforce profiles was getting started. And the impact was felt immediately in terms of much quicker deployments and better security.

Make sure to catch Douane at Dreamforce and subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you never miss an episode.

Podcast swag* Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Learn more* Trailhead Module: Permission Set Groups * Trailhead Module: Data Security Best Practices

Admin Trailblazers Group* Admin Trailblazers Community Group

Social* Douane on LinkedIn * Salesforce Admins on LinkedIn * Salesforce Admins on X * Mike on Threads * Mike on Tiktok * Mike on X

Full show transcriptMike Gerholdt:
This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we’re talking to Douane James, who presented at Dreamforce this year on the reduction of profiles that he helped manage for his organization, he went from 11 down to two, so profile reduction footprint, that’s pretty cool, and his journey to Salesforce. He is an intentional admin. He wanted to become a Salesforce admin because he saw the potential and how it aligned with his critical thinking and his business problem solving skills.

So we’re going to talk through how he reduced profiles and also kept permission sets and permission set groups from being bloated. This is an awesome conversation. Now, before we get started, just a reminder, if you love what you’re listening to, hey, drop a review on your favorite app. Be sure to click that follow or subscribe button. A lot of apps have that now.

The reason I ask you to do that is then a new episode just shows up right on your phone. You don’t have to think about it. Every Thursday morning you get a brand new Salesforce Admins Podcast. So when you wake up and you’re walking the dog or commuting to work or going for a bike ride, you’ve got something you didn’t even have to download it. Phone took care of it for you. So with that, let’s get Douane on the podcast. So Douane, welcome to the podcast.

Douane James:
Oh, great. Thank you for having me. This is awesome.

Mike Gerholdt:
Absolutely. Well, it is the last day of Dreamforce, and your session was incredibly popular talking about reducing profiles and adopting permission sets. So that’s my teaser. But before we get into that, tell us a little bit about yourself. How did you get started as a Salesforce admin?

Douane James:
Yeah, it’s a story I always tell, and it’s that I got my start around the time when accidental admins was a thing. You would hear that a lot, “Oh, I’m an accidental admin,” and I would say I’m the opposite of an accidental admin. I got into Salesforce specifically to get into Salesforce. And it’s funny, because before I got into Salesforce, I used to work in the healthcare field, and I used to do different things in a community like recreational leagues. And I’d always have people…

You’d meet new people and would ask me, “Oh, what do you do?” And even before I could say anything, they would say, “Oh, you seem like you work in IT,” and I would say, “No, no, I don’t work in IT. I have nothing to do with IT.” But I kind of recognized, oh, I’m an analytical person and somebody keeps telling me this, maybe I should work in IT. I just happened to come across Salesforce.

This was about seven, eight years ago. And what appealed to me was I was able to get into it without having to go back into college. And I saw Trailhead, and I was actually able to follow those steps where I was a volunteer. After I got certified and I got my first contract, that led to a second contract, and then second contract position, and then that led to a full-time position.

And I’ve been able to really work my way up and now working in an organization as definitely a team lead Salesforce admin and just a mix of roles, business analyst, internal consultant, all these things where I’m just supporting the Salesforce platform and working with users on the regular.

Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, no, that’s definitely one thing that in admin relations we’ve seen in all of our research, which is the combination of Salesforce’s focus on being a declarative platform, like a platform where you can visually configure a lot of not just the interface, but the automation, the connections, how it pulls and sends data on top of just people having really strong business analytical, critical thinking skills is kind of almost like… It’s like the perfect chili recipe.

Douane James:
What I say a lot is, I wish I would’ve paid attention to people before and gotten into Salesforce before because this just seems like such a great fit for me. I’m so happy I got into it when I did.

Mike Gerholdt:
I’ve often tried to narrow down what part of it is the most rewarding for me, and I think it’s the ability to sit. I’ve always loved mapping business processes and just understanding the flow of things and understanding procedure. And I think for me, it’s being able to take that and then immediately configure the tech and see its impact.

It’s not like a three or four month thing. I mean, sometimes it is, but sometimes you can implement little changes and do things that immediately have impact on the process. And it’s kind of that reward, that immediate burst of endorphins that you get.

Douane James:
Yeah, there’s that. Just being able to make something digitally, let’s say, and then actually see the impact and then have other people be amazed like, “Wow, you did that. Oh wow. How’d you do that?”

Mike Gerholdt:
I know.

Douane James:
Well, it’s a special recipe. I have these skills that I have over the years, that kind of a thing.

Mike Gerholdt:
I’m a very talented individual. You don’t understand.

Douane James:
Yes. Yes. Yes.

Mike Gerholdt:
I think probably most people were like me and we went a little nuts with profiles. I grew up in the era where there was just profiles, and you didn’t have such things as permission set. So anytime you had to create something that was a marketing manager, but not a marketing manager, you had to create another profile. And boy, did your org quickly have an unmanageable amount of little profiles.

It was almost like little mini-me’s running around. And I think that’s probably why people are gravitating towards the session because you’re talking about how you reduce profiles and really adopted permission sets, which is a best practice. So let’s start at the very beginning. Why did you sit back and say, “You know what, let’s do the hard work and make this reduction?”

Douane James:
Yeah, definitely. I think I really look at it like every… It’s like a house. It’s like every house has an eyesore that you know should work on, but you say, “Oh, let me procrastinate. I’ll deal with it later,” that kind of a thing. And that’s how we viewed profiles. Because at a certain point, we looked at it and we knew, okay, every time we have to make a change, we have to change 11 profiles.

It’s like we do not have 11 different types of users or 11 types of roles and functions. It’s much, much fewer than that. So what happened is it basically just reached a point where we saw, okay, there’s definitely too many to manage. As you mentioned, the issue was we started with too many at the original implementation, and we had some profiles with one or two people assigned and then others with way too many people assigned.

And certainly we noticed that users had more access then they needed. And this was something that really, like I said, this was just a known issue for a while, but what made us want to address it specifically is because we started… A few years ago at our organization, we went to using this DevOps process. And I just noticed over time, deployments just took longer.

It’s almost like we had to add 10% longer because we had, okay, wait, I got to change this profile. I’m making this change. I got to change the field level security here. And then, oh wait, I changed it in this sandbox and I didn’t change in another sandbox. Oh no, I meant to sync it, but then I forgot. Things get out of sync. It got to a point where we said, this is something that it really makes sense to carve out time.

And definitely we had no fear of saying, well, all right, normally when we’re presenting to users things that we’re doing, there’s all this ROI, all these things, oh, look at what we did, we added this new feature, or we implemented this, and that’s not the case so much with profiles and permissions. That’s something that users definitely don’t see. So one thing that we had to do, and I think we were successful at doing this, is get buy-in.

And the way we got buy-in was just really being honest. If we take the time to move from profiles to permission sets, we believe that we will see the benefit of being able to respond to your request quicker. Our users will typically have change requests or different things that we’re building. It might oftentimes requires profile changes because it’s relating to permissions.

And we were just able to connect the two and to say that this is something that we want to work on and not necessarily carve out a lot of time, but just a little time and just work on it in phases incrementally over a period of time.

Mike Gerholdt:
Well, that was going to be my next question because I feel like… This is the joke I always make. It’s like the cobbler’s shoes. Every time you want to sit and carve time out to make a thing better for yourself, it’s always at the sometimes detriment of other features coming out. So my question was how did you phase this into what you already had to do in terms of change management and product management?

Douane James:
Yeah, certainly. It was just the matter of saying, okay, in a given sprint, if there’s 40 hours, let’s at least take five and let’s at least look at it. And actually, the reason it was easier to do is because, like I said, we had 11 profiles. So our approach was what can we do to knock off this profile? What can we do to knock off this other profile? And that’s the stage.

We’ll go into more on the specific stages, but just at the starting level, that’s the way we said we’re going to do it. It just like one profile down, then another profile, then another profile, in the sense of changing it into a permission set or basically not necessarily changing it, but moving the permissions over to a permission set.

Mike Gerholdt:
I mean, thinking about your users, it’s always the joke I make with my friends, which is we go on these long driving trips, the best long driving trip is the most boring because nothing happened. No flat tire, no engine problems, no accidents. And it’s almost the same for users. Going from how many profiles down to a few, essentially for them, they should log in and not feel a change.

Douane James:
Exactly. Exactly.

Mike Gerholdt:
It should be a boring day. Oh, congratulations. You just logged in. You didn’t even know we switched everything on you.

Douane James:
Yes, exactly.

Mike Gerholdt:
So it was two year goal when you started out, or what was your goal?

Douane James:
Well, yeah, definitely, for sure. You could look at two as a little bit of a failure because we wanted to go down to one. And really that one is it’s just a minimum access profile that we assign to everybody because everything is going to be on the permission sets. But definitely we knew 11 was too many and we ended up going down to two mainly because we’re considering the new purpose of profiles where they’re minimum access. They don’t have any permissions on them.

The permissions are now going to be moved to our role-based permission sets. But one thing that we found is just because of the nature of our organization, we have certain issues with page layouts and then default assignments for apps and also record types, it’s like in the future we will be able to go down to one minimum access, but for right now, 11 to two, we thought that’s pretty successful.

Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, hugely successful. I think one of the things I’m thinking of is you started and you worked it into your sprints. So how long did it take realistically for you to get down to two?

Douane James:
I will say that’s one where we had to be flexible. I think if you were to add up the time, it would probably be maybe three or four months or so. But we had a break in there and then we ran into… Basically the first one that we started with, we had some pushback because we didn’t get everything right. And what we did in order to get the full idea of what the permissions are that needed to be moved over to a role-based permission set, what we’re doing is we’re looking at a persona, a job function and we’re capturing that.

And in order to do that, what we did was we had a good idea because we’re able to look at the permissions that are already there, but what was really helpful was we did a interview, just a brief interview, and we picked a representative user for each role. And what happened in the issue I was just mentioning is for the first one, it turns out we didn’t pick the right representative.

Mike Gerholdt:
Oh no!

Douane James:
They didn’t actually know everything that their colleagues in that particular role, this was marketing, everything that marketing users should do. So the first change that we heard, “Wait, I’m not seeing this. Why am I seeing this?” That kind of a thing. And this was after we’d gone through doing testing. And the representative user that we picked said, “Oh, yeah, everything is fine,” but then someone else said it so we had to roll back.

So that can happen. That can happen. But actually, just to answer your question, I think it ended up definitely a few months and we were okay with that. We were okay with that because we weren’t looking at it as something that we had to do. It’s like we had to get done by a certain time. It’s like it just works well that, okay, we have this goal, and if it takes us a few months, that’s fine.

Mike Gerholdt:
No. I mean, it’s definitely not a precipice that you’re heading towards. You mentioned earlier in one of your answers the stages, and I’d be curious because I think that part, as a fellow Salesforce admin, I always love to know how people work through the problem so that I can either copy it because they’ve already done the hard work for me, or I can understand how I can use it and maybe modify it from my situation.

So you mentioned the stages. I’d be curious, can you give us a little bit of an overview of what those stages were and how you worked through?

Douane James:
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. So we had what we call or what we’re not calling legacy profiles. So we had all of these, but what we needed to do really was just to find what are those permissions in the profiles, what permissions are common to each job function? And we might have four, three, four, five or so different roles or personas that we could clearly identify.

And it just made sense, like I said, to analyze those permissions, identify what’s common, and then we also had to identify what’s not so common, what’s unique, so like which is unique to this persona, to this role? In order to do that, we were able to… We did the interview, like I mentioned. Hopefully, we’re able to pick a representative user for each function.

And really what we did was we made sure that we captured every profile. So actually now that I recall it, I think we actually did it was maybe some more interviews because we wanted to see, okay, well, there’s only this one person in this profile. Is there a reason that they need this, a unique profile? So we were able to do that. And once we had that, then we were able to get, like I said, the permissions in the permission set.

And obviously these are everything relating to I guess you would call it user permissions, object permissions, the field permissions, custom permissions, anything that’s related. What we did, we sought to make what I call or what I’ve heard called, so I won’t say I coined this term, but a heavy permission set that was based on a persona. So it has a lot in it, but it captures what that role needs to do in Salesforce. And it doesn’t give them more than they need, and it doesn’t give them less than they need.

Mike Gerholdt:
I like that term, heavy permission.

Douane James:
Yeah, I’ve heard that before. I did not coin it.

Mike Gerholdt:
No, it’s okay. But you said it here and it’s on the podcast. It’s on the internet forever now.

Douane James:
Yes. The reason it came up is because I was so used or we were so used to at the beginning of this process thinking of permission sets as this lighter thing. Because before this, we had plenty of permission sets in the org, but typically it was just a permission set for one specific thing or one thing that a person needed to do on an object. Maybe they needed to edit and it would just be that.

It would just be you have this permission set gives you edit permission for the accounts object, or it gives you delete permission. That’s something that we had to get over to understand that, yeah, we can still have those light permission sets, but for this setup, it just didn’t make sense. That’s one thing I think that may have steered us off for a while is because we were thinking, oh man, this is going to be such a long thing.

If I have to do a permission set for this object and a permission set for this object, that’s going to take too long. But no, no, you actually don’t have to do that. You can just look at it like I want one permission set to capture my sales manager users or another one for my marketing users or another one to represent my event manager users, with the understanding that there could be some overlap with somebody having two roles, and that’s fine. That’s fine.

Mike Gerholdt:
Well, that’s where, to play devil’s advocate a little bit, I was thinking, are we just kicking the can farther down the road? So you had 11 profiles, how many permission sets do you have? It’s also, yay, I got down to two profiles, but now I have 400 permission sets to manage.

When you are creating those permission sets, I have to believe you were actively thinking through how we’re going to create groups, keep these things grouped together so that you’re not just moving the problem farther out of profiles into permissions, right?

Douane James:
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, absolutely, because the idea is profiles are one to one. And for us, it just didn’t make any sense to have everything bundled into one profile and to say that this person is just this when they may be more than this. And it just so happens for us, the one thing that we did not, we did not, we did not want to do is to have tons and tons of permission sets and then not know… It’s like, well, what does this person need to do?

So that’s definitely, I think, we did that more at the end where we were able to say, okay, for our permission set groups, typically the way we set it up is we have this one heavy permission set based on persona where it captures that person’s role, and then the permission set group, that would also have some smaller permission sets maybe for more granular access that is going to be specific to that role or to that function in our organization.

An example of that might be export reports, because that’s a specific permission that some need to have and others don’t, or merging contacts and accounts because we have duplicates. And when you merge contacts and accounts, you need to have a delete permission. So that’s a specific permission set that’s assigned separately. We don’t want to have those unique permissions to be bundled in with the role-based permission sets. We can leave those. We’ll leave those that we can assign as needed.

Mike Gerholdt:
In seeing your presentation, having you say heavier permission set really makes sense because one of the things that you talk about is layering. And can you just expand on that? Because I really think with the principle of least privilege and then your approach to personas and layering permission sets, it actually made it a lot easier for you to think through. And I bet somebody probably made a really cool graphic. I don’t know. It is graphic in my head. I’m thinking of layers of permission sets.

Douane James:
Yes, yes. There probably is a graphic out there. And definitely I think in our organization, we have these different roles and we have noticed it where… I would say this is a benefit of knowing our work and knowing our users. So it was maybe easier for me to approach this because I’ve been there a while.

And I was able to say, okay, at certain point of the year, there will be an area where our recruiters, our advisors, which each of those would be a role, a recruiter, an advisor, marketing would be a different role, event manager. But in some cases, our recruiter can also be an event manager. We will have certain event managers where that’s all they do. That’s all they do.

Their focus is on managing events, and that’s all they really use Salesforce for. But then we have recruiters that sometimes they’ll come in and they’ll need to manage events. So we were able to approach it in that way where if somebody says, okay, someone’s on maternity leave, let’s say, this happens a lot, I’ll be handling this. So we’re able to just add that permission set and it’s no big deal. It covers all the things that they would need to do.

Mike Gerholdt:
I so remember when I was a Salesforce admin before permission sets, I had a couple people in my office that had to go on leave, and one of them was a marketing use case, just exactly that, where another marketing individual had to take over while a person went on leave.

And I had to create this hybrid profile that was what they did in their day job plus the event management stuff. And I remember thinking, I wish I could just… It should be just like a thing I could plug in and then unplug a permission set, if only.

Douane James:
Yes. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And what’s good, another thing that relates to that, because usually when you say the first thing that people would think of is like, well, aren’t you going to give them too much permission? Well, if you design these permission sets really according to principle of least privilege, you’re not putting in things that don’t need to be there, and you don’t have to worry about somebody being able to delete everything by accident.

Because our permission sets, it’s like typically everything that you would need to do in your role, then it would be standard, read, create, edit permissions. I don’t think any of our users have by standard delete permissions. So when we’re layering, we’re doing it without fear, without fear that that’s going to happen.

And that’s something that under our previous setup, it just so happened that, however it happened with profiles, some of our users had these delete permissions. And sometimes users just think of deleting as no big deal, and they don’t realize that on the backend you can’t just delete one thing, this is connected and it’s related, and then you have orphan records. We don’t want that, that kind of a thing.

Mike Gerholdt:
Yep. The cascade delete.

Douane James:
Yes.

Mike Gerholdt:
As we wrap up here, if you had to go back and do it all again, is there something you’d do different? Or for admins looking to get into this endeavor, what piece of advice would you give them?

Douane James:
Well, you know what? There’s two different levels of that. I mean, the biggest thing I would say is you don’t have to be like us where we were procrastinating until it really bit us and was taking so much time. You don’t have to run away from it. You can run toward it. And that’s the reason why I wanted to do the presentation at Dreamforce is because I thought, wow, I was so afraid of doing this because I thought, oh, it’s going to take so much time.

And in reality, it didn’t take that much time. Definitely if you add up the amount of time, we were able to do it pretty easily. Granted nothing ever goes smooth as you expected, but yeah, we were able to do it. It’s just like, don’t run from it. You can absolutely do this. And I think the benefits and definitely is something that’s worth it, it’s just quicker deployments.

It’s like we just had something the other day where we had this new integration and the new integration was basically a whole new custom object, and there were fields bringing in and people needed access. And the question that a developer was asking is like, okay, what about the profiles? How are we going to change all the profiles? I was like, wait, remember, we’re not on profiles anymore.

All you have to do, is it in a permission set? And he says, “Well, yeah, I can put in a permission set.” Then yeah, that’s it. That’s all you have to do. Just assign it and we’re good.

Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, no. I mean, the part that you’re at right now is that over the big hump and now we just have to maintain and keep this philosophy going part, which is so enviable for everyone. So thank you for coming on the podcast and inspiring us to go to the profile gym and lose some profile weight, I’ll say. How’s that?

Douane James:
Yes, absolutely. See? I love…

Mike Gerholdt:
It’s true. It’s true. We’re all a little over. We got too many profiles and we need to go to the gym, lose it. And that’s the hardest part, getting there and doing it.

Douane James:
Getting started. Getting started. It’s definitely something that helps when you’re thinking of it. Like, let me just work on getting rid of this.

Mike Gerholdt:
Well, that’s what I like that you guys did is you just, we’re not going to tackle the whole thing. We’re not going to go from 11 to one or two overnight. Let’s just get rid of one.

Douane James:
Right.

Mike Gerholdt:
Yay!

Douane James:
Yeah, that’s exactly the way it worked. That’s the way it worked. It was, oh man, I’m refreshing my memory now because that’s something else that we went through where…

Mike Gerholdt:
I can hear the joy in your voice.

Douane James:
Where it was time to remove this profile. We didn’t have any… So we were able to… And then we were just… It’s chopping a tree. It’s like, okay, then we’re down to this. And then, of course, that last one, it took the most time. We wanted to make sure everything was everything, because it’s also important to have a rollback plan because you may need to roll back. But we were able to do that.

It’s something that the more progress we made, the more confident we felt about doing it. And that’s something that I think people in the Salesforce ecosystem would benefit from is just getting started. And then just like you mentioned, you’ll find you get more confident about doing it and you will be able to show benefits even to the business users as far as moving things through quicker and being able to be more flexible in how your permissions are set up.

Mike Gerholdt:
I would agree. Thank you, James, for coming on the podcast, and I look forward to hearing more from you in upcoming Dreamforces and content because you’re definitely giving us a lot of best practices to work on.

Douane James:
Sure, sure. I look forward to it myself. Thanks a lot. I really appreciate the feedback, and this is great. Dreamforce is excellent. Excellent. Always so happy to attend.

Mike Gerholdt:
So it was a great discussion with Douane. I really enjoyed it. A little bit longer because I had a lot of questions about how he tackled it. I think the metaphor of going to the gym kind of works, right? It feels like, oh, we’ve got to do this great big thing and we have to tackle it all in one big chunk. We have to go from a lot of profiles to very few in just one fell swoop.

But Douane actually proved us wrong and said, you just take it one little bit at a time and work on it, and you modify and you change, and you learn from your mistakes. I mean, that’s every day for me. So I’m really glad he could come on, walk us through this, and set the bar high for us. So I feel being a North Star and being able to show us how it can be done and give us that best practices really inspires me.

Of course, there’s a ton of Trailhead modules and there’s stuff on profiles and permission sets and permission set groups. We’ll link to those in the show notes, which you’ll find at admin.salesforce.com, and we’ll also include a transcript of the show. Now, be sure to jump over to the Trailblazer community. We have a group there called Admin Trailblazers. You can jump in, ask questions.

There’s always a lot of admins asking questions in that group. Don’t worry, the link to that is also in the show notes. So with that, until next week, I’ll see you in the cloud.

The post Reduce Salesforce Profiles for Greater Efficiency appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Jason Atwood, CEO and Co-Founder of Arkus. Join us as we chat about how to land your first Salesforce Admin role, from where to find good opportunities to how to prep for the job interview and more.

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

How Salesforce Admins should split their learning timeWe’re talking with Jason because he spends a lot of time interviewing and hiring people for Salesforce roles. So if you want to be a Salesforce Admin, how should you split up your learning time?

Jason recommends following the 20/30/50 rule. Spend 20% of your time on Trailhead, 30% on acquiring certifications, and 50% on finding some way to gain experience. This split corresponds to how important they are on your resume.

• Trailhead: Becoming a Ranger is priority one, followed by getting some Superbadges. Take the time to set up your profile with a photo, a description of yourself, and a custom URL so that you look like you’re an active member of the community.
• Certifications: When is the best time to take a Salesforce certification test? As soon as possible! If you don’t get it this time, you can use your results to help you prep for the next exam. And if you do pass, you can get the next cert sooner.
• Gain Experience: Volunteering isn’t the only way to get experience. You can enroll in a program where you build mock projects in Salesforce, or just build something on your own. The important thing is to have projects you’ve built in Salesforce that you can demo in your job interview.

Interview preparation and skill assessmentsWhen you’re going for your first Salesforce job interview be ready for some sort of skill assessment. Time pressure is usually a factor in these tests, so Jason recommends doing a practice run.

Talk to a friend, find out what kind of data they collect, and then give yourself a day to build them an app. It could track the books they’ve read or the distance they’ve run, the important thing is that you don’t know what it’s going to be before you talk to them.

All admins are consultantsIt’s also important to realize that an interview isn’t just about showing your skills—it’s about showing who you are. It’s a chance to listen and empathize with the person on the other side of the table. It’s a chance to share something that stood out to you in your research about the company. And most importantly, to show who you are by asking questions.

Why does Jason place such an emphasis on soft skills in a Salesforce Admin job interview? Because, at the end of the day, every admin is a Salesforce consultant for their organization. You talk to people about their problems to get requirements, come up with a solution, and then iterate on that solution.

We touch on a lot more in this conversation about how to look for Salesforce jobs, developing listening skills, and what it’s like to be a Salesforce consultant, so be sure to listen to the full episode and subscribe so you don’t miss out.

Podcast swag* Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Learn more* Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: Pei Mun Lim on the Skills of a Business Analyst * Salesforce Admins Blog: Develop Your Communication Skills as a Salesforce Admin

Admin Trailblazers Group* Admin Trailblazers Community Group

Social* Jason on X * Jason on LinkedIn * Salesforce Admins on LinkedIn * Salesforce Admins on X * Mike on Threads * Mike on Tiktok * Mike on X

Full show transcriptMike Gerholdt:

I got an idea. How about we tackle the hardest question on the Salesforce Trailblazer community? That’s right. This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we’re going to look for advice on finding your first admin job and doing the interview, getting experience, and more. And we’re going to do all that with CEO and co-founder of Arkus, Jason Atwood. Jason and I chatted at TrailblazerDX and really wanted to dive into this topic. Now, before we bring Jason on, I just want to make sure that you’re following the Salesforce Admins Podcast on iTunes or Spotify. That way, when new episodes like this one come out, they’re automatically downloaded to your phone. But enough about that. Let’s talk about finding that first job or even finding your next job as a Salesforce administrator. Oh, I almost forgot to mention we tackle the myth of “but it’s just an admin job.” So with that, let’s get Jason on the podcast. So, Jason, welcome to the podcast.

Jason Atwood:

Thank you for having me. It’s been a long time since we’ve podcast together.

Mike Gerholdt:

I know. I was thinking back; well, we were just reminiscing of the days at the Marriott Marquis and the Arkus podcast.

Jason Atwood:

Yep. You were on an episode of CloudFocus Weekly. We had it as part of our trivia once there was only four or five guests ever on the podcast, and you were one of them.

Mike Gerholdt:

Snuck in, only proximity. I’m going to say. So catch people up. What have you been up to?

Jason Atwood:

Well, since then, whatever that was, 10 years ago. Yeah. So I am now the current CEO and co-founder of Arkus. We’re a Salesforce consulting firm. We deal mostly in the nonprofit space, and we’ve grown from that little company back then. We’re almost up to 75 people. And now I run around between putting out fires, talking on podcasts, and trying to educate myself on the whole changing landscape of technology.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, it does feel like in the last decade, it’s gone from everything we know to a brand new world.

Jason Atwood:

It certainly is. And I just spent three hours at a Heroku dev meetup and could hang there mentally for a bit, but they lost me at a little point. So it’s both fun, interesting, and challenging to stay up with all this stuff.

Mike Gerholdt:

So one of the things that everyone’s trying to stay up with is the ever-changing job market and hiring. We see a lot of the questions in the Trailblazer community from new admins, people getting into the ecosystem that want to become Salesforce admins, people in the ecosystem that are looking for jobs, or maybe have kind of hit a career plateau. And you and I were chatting, and boy, I think it’d be fun to kind of delve into that topic with you.

Jason Atwood:

Let’s do it. I have some experience in hiring people over the last 15 years, so I can certainly talk about it.

Mike Gerholdt:

A little bit more than me. More than me.

Well, let’s get started. So let’s start fresh. There’s a lot of new people. As we were talking about in the intro, there’s a lot of new people coming into the ecosystem that maybe don’t have tech advice. They are doing Trailhead modules, completing challenges, getting a lot of badges, trying to round out their resumes, and they don’t know A, what to look for, or B, what to put on their resumes. So somebody that’s hired a bunch of people and been around for a long time, let’s start there with some of your advice and where they should go.

Jason Atwood:

Sure. This is a very common thing, and the first thing I would tell everybody is relax. It’s going to be okay. I know it feels daunting, and you see these triple all-star rangers and you see all these, the hoodies, and you see the people with the 15 certifications and 10 years of experience, and you feel like, “How am I ever going to get there?” You will; you’ll get there. So the first thing is just to take it easy and not to get too worked up on it. It does feel like a lot. It’s a very big community and filled with lots of hungry people for jobs, a lot of recruiters, a lot of activity. When I talk to people about getting started in the ecosystem, and certainly on the admin track, and we can talk about other tracks if you want, but on the admin track, I kind of say all those things matter.

So when it comes to certifications, when it comes to Trailhead, when it comes to experience, they all matter. And usually the question I get is, “But what should I focus on?” And so I came up with something, I maybe made it up years and years ago. I call it the 30, 20, 50 rule, or 20, 30, 50. It doesn’t matter; you can break it up anyway. And if you’re going to take your time, right, you’re in the hunt for a job, and you need to do the education, you need to get enabled, you need to build your experience level. I break it down into those percentages. So 20% of the time, I’d focus on Trailhead. And the trick for Trailhead is A, you just have to be a ranger. We don’t even look at people who aren’t rangers. I had an intern apply the other day, and I said, “No, you’re not even on Trailhead. Go get a ranger before I even talk to you.”

So that, to me, is just a minimum bar. Just go be a ranger, and then if you can go up from there, that’s great. And then, if you’re still in your Trailhead worlds, the thing that we then look for besides looking at their profile, is it filled out? Have they thought about it? Have they created it like LinkedIn? So second advice on the Trailhead side is treat your profile like LinkedIn: fill it out, put your picture, put your description, do all the things. It’ll probably take you no more than a half an hour. Make your URL; you can make your customized URL so people can find you; do all the things so it looks like you’re part of the community, right? Make sure that your profile is rich and full. And then the third thing on the Trailhead side of things is to go for super badges.

So I can look at double ranger, triple ranger all day long, but if I don’t see some super badges and I speak from someone who doesn’t have any super badges.

Mike Gerholdt:

Oh, no.

Jason Atwood:

I know, I know, it’s on my hit list for this year. I know, I know, I mean, I have 15 certs, and so I have some experience, but I’d say, get some super badges. We see that when we look at that as a higher level of dedication and of expertise, because, as you know and as I’ve been doing them, they’re difficult. They show that you have really dug in, and they’re more than just answering some questions or watching videos, or getting fun ones. I love badges, but the super badges really show that kind of a deeper level of education and sort of just being in the Trailhead world. So that’s the 20%. Then the 30% is certifications.

You need to have both. You can’t have one without the other. I don’t know what that commercial was, peanut butter and chocolate or something, but-

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, I think so, yeah.

Jason Atwood:

You might be [inaudible 00:07:08]. Certifications are important; you should focus on them. What I tell people is you need to get them, but you can’t stall. Most people, I think, when we talk to them and we’ll find in the ecosystem, say, “Oh, I’m thinking about getting that, or I’m planning to get that one next year.” And our advice is, “Nope, go get it. Go get it now. Go take it. Go take the test a couple of times.” Do whatever it is you can do to start your certification journey; don’t put it off; don’t procrastinate on it. You don’t have to be perfect; just go get some. And obviously there’s a path of which ones you should get, blah, blah, blah.

It depends on where you’re going in your world, but having at least one or two certs is kind of a bare minimum. So if you’re starting off and you’re trying to get into the ecosystem, that’s your 20 and your 30, and then the 50 is the hardest part. And it’s just hard to tell people because it’s the experience. The third thing we look for is experience. I want to see that you’ve done something obviously new to the ecosystem, harder to have the experience, but that’s where I say spend 50% of your time trying to gain that experience. There’s the old adage: try to go work with a non-profit. Although there’s some pushback on that nowadays because of the complexity of the platform, you don’t want to hurt a non-profit.

There’s definitely… Get in in a way, there’s programs, there’s tons of programs out there that will help you do mock projects and things where you can just get your hands dirty. And even if you have to build your own thing that you’re going to demo, you got to get experience because I’ve not hired people with 22 certifications, and because it didn’t add up to any experience, and I’ve seen people with tons and tons of experience with zero certs, and I would hire anyway, just from the experience. But for me, that’s how I tell spend your time: 20% trailhead, 30% certifications, and 50% getting that experience.

Mike Gerholdt:

I think that 50%, that part that you’re talking about is always the part that feels like the hardest to get into. Because if you’re not in tech and you don’t have any experience and you’re trying to land that first job, that can feel like, “If I could get this job, then I could get the experience.” And so, part of that lends to my next question is, so you’re new, we’ve checked all the boxes on filling out our profiles and done that part. What should I get ready for when I interview?

Jason Atwood:

So every interview’s going to be different, obviously, but a lot of places are using assessments now. So I would say be prepared for an assessment. That means functionally, they’re going to ask you to do something; they’re going to ask you to build something or take something they’ve done and turn it into something on the platform, using Salesforce as the platform. So I would just be ready for that, be prepared, be okay with it. Even do mock versions of it, go have a friend, and I have to given this advice to some people, but go have a friend, sit down with them, talk to them about what they do, and you’ll uncover something that they’re collecting data.

And as soon as you can figure out what the data they’re collecting, whether it’s books or they collect comic books, or they’re a skier or they’re a runner, anything you do, you can just come up with, “Ooh, what if I built you an app to track that?” So be prepared to have an assessment of your skills and be able to show that in a short period of time. Meaning it might be a take-home. Sometimes it’s a take-home. Like, “Hey, go do this over the weekend.” Other times it’s, “You have an hour; come back and show us what you did.”

Mike Gerholdt:

Ooh!

Jason Atwood:

So I’d say… Ooh! Yeah, I know. I’ve been doing that for 15 years to people. Trust me. I’ve seen a lot of, oohs.

Mike Gerholdt:

I would imagine.

Jason Atwood:

Even had one person pass out in the…

Mike Gerholdt:

Oh, my. Oh, goodness.

Jason Atwood:

It happens.

Mike Gerholdt:

You get an extra hour now.

Jason Atwood:

Yeah. So I think that it’s coming more and more in the ecosystem, because again, when you look at a resume, when you look at LinkedIn, a lot of it’s just you can’t tell whether they know what they’re doing. If you actually do an assessment, you can then assess, “Okay, you know, you functionally know how to do things.” So I’d be prepared for that. The other thing is, I think when you’re really, especially in the new, just be honest about what you do and do not know. That’s really, really key. Don’t fluff up your resume; don’t put things that you don’t know; don’t put clouds, don’t throw in data cloud if you don’t know what data cloud is and haven’t used it or can’t really explain it. Just because you took a Trailhead on something doesn’t mean that platform or know that cloud. So I’d really say be honest with what you know and the clouds, and the products, because that’s going to be super important in the interview process.

Mike Gerholdt:

Wow. How much… In prep work for resumes, there’s a lot of AI tools out there, so I’d love to know your perspective on both sides of this one: how much do you, as somebody hiring, kind of look for, “Oh, they used AI to generate most of this resume?” And on the flip side, how much should somebody building their resume that could really benefit from an AI tool? How much should they lean into it?

Jason Atwood:

So I’m going to be the strange answer on this one, or…

Mike Gerholdt:

Oh, good.

Jason Atwood:

Yeah, because I’m going to say, resumes don’t matter.

Mike Gerholdt:

Okay.

Jason Atwood:

They’re just checking a box. When people get to me in the interview process, they’re beyond the resume. So yes, you need to have a resume; you need it because that’s the part. It’s like you have to have the internet; you have to have a way to fill out the form. So you need to have a resume, and it should have your accomplishments and stuff on it. But I don’t look at resumes because they’re just lies. They’re just you telling me all these things, and sometimes I don’t know if any of that’s really true or not true. So to me, it’s like it’s just a checking the box. “Yes, you have to have a resume. Yes, it should be okay.” Honestly, your LinkedIn profile should be your resume, right? Because that’s real; it’s on the web. And if you’re lying, someone might actually call you out for it.

“Hey, you didn’t work at that company for 10 years.” So I would say focus more on the LinkedIn. Because I’ll look at that. If you gave me 10 minutes, I’d look at your LinkedIn first. I would not look at your resume, what you’ve put on, rather than what your actual history has been. That being said, you want to throw all this stuff on there for this ecosystem. So I do think showing work that you’ve done and really pointing to problems you’ve solved, if you really think about any job, especially as an administrator, you’re a Salesforce admin, you’re basically solving problems all day all.

And you’re communicating. So two things that I tell people about the resume and the process is how do you show that you’ve solved problems in the past in your resume, and then how do you show that you are a great communicator? Because great communication, it doesn’t matter what, I mean, well, not what job, but certainly in this world, you are basically talking to people, helping them out, doing stuff, re-communicating with them, getting what they need to do, building it, whatever. You might work with different groups or whatever. But that communication skill is something we deeply look at. So again, if you’re going to focus on stuff, don’t so much focus on your resume as focus on how to be a great communicator.

Mike Gerholdt:

That’s really good advice because I have been at that level where people show up and the resume looked good, but they couldn’t facilitate the conversation or articulate any kind of answer in the interview.

Jason Atwood:

It is a skill that not a lot of people have, but it’s a skill, you can learn it. So a couple of things to put into that communication bucket. We’ll go down a little rathole here.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, let’s do.

Jason Atwood:

One is empathy.

Mike Gerholdt:

Okay.

Jason Atwood:

Have the ability to show empathy, and that means sort of having a conversation with somebody and throwing in stuff that’s like listening to them, talking to them, obviously pulling out information about them, but having the empathy when they say something’s not going to happen or whatever, they could say, “It’s a rainy day.” I look for it in every interview that I do. Now this is going to be on the podcast; everybody’s going to know this, but I will actually throw things into my talk track or as just the warm-up when you’re sort of, “How are you and what’s going on?” I will always throw in something to test empathy.

I’ll say, “Oh, I’m okay, but I didn’t sleep well last night. Or I had a bad egg sandwich this morning, or I’ve tripped over the dog when I came into the room.” And I just listened to hear what they react. If they go, “Oh, that’s terrible. Oh, yeah, I know dogs can be really difficult. Or you know what? I get my egg sandwiches from downstairs, whatever.” But hearing that back of that empathy, super important. Second is actually listening, so I will listen to people, how they listen to me. Are they interrupting me? Are they talking over me? Are they going? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, as I speak, I listen for their real intent and true conversational skills. And so the ability to actually listen, pause, and then answer is a really big; it’s a great skill to have. And so the people who can do that, I know that they can do almost any job better because they’ve intently done that listening skill and they’ve got it working. So those are two that I throw out to most people when they’re trying to build their conversational habits.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, I’m listening to you answer that, and I’m playing devil’s advocate in my head and saying, “Maybe people are hearing Jason say this because he’s hiring consultants.” So why do you think this also translates over to people that are embedded in different work groups, or teams, or have stakeholders within an organization and aren’t consultants, like for your organization?

Jason Atwood:

Because basically, being an admin is being a consultant in one organization. You are a consultant. What are you doing? You’re talking to people; they’re coming to you with their problems; you are getting their requirements; you’re satisfying their needs; you’re working with them; you’re iterating; you’re changing it; you’re updating things, and then you’re presenting it back to them. The thing that changes when you become a consultant is you’re paying for someone’s time, which then becomes a whole other thing. But also, you might be working with other organizations, and the level of expectation of how you do that and your expertise goes way up. And this is something I tell, I warn people about moving into consulting is that when you’re an admin, you have the ability to take some time. Someone says, “Hey, can you build me these three dashboards that I want to track my sales forecasting?”

You go, “Sure,” and you can go Google it, and you spend a week, and you come back, and you’re like, “Here’s your three dashboards.” They’re ecstatic; they’re like, “Great, thank you.” They don’t care that it took you three weeks or whatever, and then you had to ask your friend and Google it or ask ChatGPT to do it for you. In the consulting space, it’s different. They don’t ask, “Could you build this for me?” They say, A, “What are the options to build it? How long is it going to take you, and can you get it to me by next Tuesday?” So the expectation level of what you’re doing goes way up, and they expect you to be expert. They don’t expect you to ever say, “I don’t know, but I’ll figure it out.” As an admin, I said, “I don’t know. I’ll figure it out.”

“Oh, you want to build some tracker for your feedback form? Sure, let go figure it out.” Go away for a week, and I’ll come back and show you something. So I think that’s part of it, but as an admin, you’re still doing all this stuff. It’s the same stuff inside the organization. You’re just not working with external companies or people; you work with internal people. So you still have Mary from accounting coming over and wants to synchronize with the QuickBooks, and you still have the CEO come over and they want an update to some dashboard because they can’t figure it out, and you’re doing the same stuff; it’s more internal, more ad hoc, generally.

Mike Gerholdt:

I mean, I couldn’t agree more. Also, Mary from accounting, they always want to, for some reason, can’t seem to get opportunities flowing through your sales org, but let’s integrate finance.

Jason Atwood:

So true, so true.

Mike Gerholdt:

But you kind of led into that. So what are the different jobs, or different tasks, types of jobs that admins would tackle within an organization?

Jason Atwood:

Yeah, I mean, we kind of started in there. You do become an internal consultant, but I think you first off just think of what, especially when you’re applying for it, and this goes back to sort of the applying and getting the jobs’ thing. When you’re looking at the organization, you obviously want to know what their Salesforce landscape is. So if I were in the interview process, what I would do is come loaded with a bunch of really good questions, and I would pepper that person with tons of questions about their Salesforce instance, or, as we call it in the biz, we call it their org.

But I would come in with, “What kind of licenses? How old is it? What kind of integrations? What kind of applications do you have? When’s the last time you did a health tech? Do you use permission sets or permission set groups? Or did you flip the lightning yet?” I mean, I would be peppering them showing my expertise to get that admin job. So that’s just on the interview side; I just want to throw that in. But coming back to what you do, again, it really depends on the organization, and this is actually a myth that is out there in the ecosystem, is that admins get bored and admins don’t get to play with lots of different clouds, and admins don’t do a lot of diverse things. That’s completely not true because it depends on what organization you’re with. I was with a company who had 375,000 people.

I had a team; I had five people, or five, including me; we were all admins; that’s what we did. And we had 12 different production orgs, 12 orgs with production, and I think nine different applications running in them with thousands and thousands and thousands of users. We were not bored; we had plenty to do; we were playing with great, big, unlimited licensing and integrations and projects, but we were admins. At the end of the day, we were admins. Same thing: you go work for a small company that’s four… I don’t think anyone would hire a full-time admin with four people. But the smaller the organization who’s just using Salesforce for one thing and has no chance of expanding it or doing it, or going anywhere.

Yeah. You’re going to get bored, right? You come in, you’re going to help out Mary in accounting, you get that one project done, and then they’re going to be like, “Can you reset passwords all day?” So I think as part of the interview process to pulling it back in to that, and when your job seeking, you should be really interested in what their, especially if you want to be a Salesforce admin and you really want to do it full time, what’s their Salesforce roadmap? Are they just solid? They have it, and they have had it up and running for five years, and that’s it? Or do they have things that they want to do? New stuff you can build? Do you want to do the integration with that? We want to bring in marketing cloud next year. We’re looking at how to do predictive AI, whatever.

So if I were bringing more questions as the trying to get the job, I would bring in that to the organization. I’d say, “What do you guys, where’s your roadmap? Or do you not have one?” And I think that would show as a hiring person; I’d be like, “Oh, they’re forward-looking.” And it’ll also give you the idea of: “Are you going to get bored in six months?” Because you don’t want to get bored in six months.

Mike Gerholdt:

Right. Although maybe a smaller footprint would be really good if you’re looking to get that first admin job.

Jason Atwood:

Exactly. Exactly right. But then you have the counter, right? You have a smaller footprint, but they have 40 users, and they only use it for service. So you get in, you do some work, you do all the stuff, and then you’re like, “Now what?”

Mike Gerholdt:

Right. So you brought up myths of admins, and one is, well, “I don’t get exposed to enough clouds,” and I’ve heard that at various events. “Well, we only use data cloud, or I just don’t get to see it.” And I feel like, and this still exists, all of these articles on admin to something else, as though admin is just the front door; all you got to do is get in and do that for a few months. But the real money and the real challenge is elsewhere. What would you say to that myth of just an admin?

Jason Atwood:

I think it is a bit of a myth, and it makes admins and being an administrator, Salesforce administrators feel like this… It’s like you’re the fry person in the back at McDonald’s. It’s like, “Well, I don’t ever go back and cook the hamburgers.” I don’t know. And it’s not true.

Mike Gerholdt:

Although the fries are kind of the best part.

Jason Atwood:

That’s true. I actually worked at McDonald’s, and I was the fry person, so that’s why I brought it up.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah.

Jason Atwood:

But yes, at some organizations, you could be the one admin, and that could be your role for a long period of time. And you could get bored, and it could just be a starter. At other organizations, you could run an entire group of admins. You could have six or seven admins, you could be part of a team of people supporting a lot of different Salesforce instances, and it could go anywhere from just administrative down to sort of more the solution architect type of stuff, or more towards the BA towards so stuff or more towards the development.

One of the things you and I have been in this ecosystem for a long time, what we were able to do 10 years ago on the platform with our clicks and what we’re able to do with clicks now, we’re programming. Let’s be clear: when we’re building flows, we’re programming; we’re just programming with a user interface. But that’s programming, and the stuff you can do is stunning, that you just couldn’t do with any of the tools unless you’re writing Apex. So I think even the idea that admins who are getting that technical acumen and are going into the more programmatic type of world of admin that could go long, there’s lots of paths you can go down for that. So that’s where I think some of the myths should go away because you’re not just the admin who’s building a report, adding a field to a page way out, and assigning a permission set. There’s many, many different pieces of that platform. And that’s before you even talk about the clouds; before you’d say there’s now, I don’t know how many clouds. There’s a lot of clouds.

Mike Gerholdt:

There is a lot.

Jason Atwood:

Yeah.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. I mean, you brought up flow. I think back to the days of, “Boy, if I could just stand up like a window pane that a screen that people could input the data into as opposed to just editing raw right on the record.” And now we can do that, and you can do that just using the interface. You don’t have to try a single line of code, which is…

Jason Atwood:

It is stunning what you can do with that tool. And it’s one of the things that has left me a little bit behind because I’m old school admin. I’m a work-for-rule person. And for that, I would’ve gone wrote in a user story and had someone written up a Visualforce, and with Apex in the background, and now it’s… The stuff that we can produce with flows, screen flows, and even the call-outs. I was watching the call-out today, a flow that made a call-out to a Heroku Dyno that did a hookup to a Postgres database that pulled in AI predictions. I was like, “What?” So yeah, the world of an admin is becoming very, very broad in some ways.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, no, I agree. And you can also now trigger flows through prompts and have it call AI. And I mean, in a year from now, this is all going to sound like super, “Wow, they were impressed they could do that. Now look at where we are.” kind of stuff. One thing we didn’t touch on is there’s a lot of job places to look at and career stuff. Often, when looking for a developer architect, I think those are a little more defined also, especially with developer, they’ve got experience in writing developer job titles for other platforms. So it’s very easy to translate that over to Salesforce. What are things that an admin should look for in job descriptions? That maybe if the title or description doesn’t say Salesforce admin, that will be the role?

Jason Atwood:

Yeah, it’s a tough one because, I mean, the easiest thing to say is look for the keyword Salesforce. Obviously, there’s going to be some sort of piece of that. I think you’d have to go a little old-school and think of the platform and what it’s doing. So I would start to look for things that were based on what Salesforce, the platform’s doing? Is it sales, right? Is it marketing? Is it service? Is it nonprofit? Especially in the nonprofit space, which is for me. So we would look at grant writing, fundraising, and all that stuff, which could be keywords for, we’re using Salesforce in the background, but we’re using it to do all these things. So I guess the meta hint without giving you the keywords is: What is this organization doing? What is the output of their world? And then looking at what the tool set they’re using.

They might not be Salesforce, right? There are other ways of saying the word. They might say something like health cloud and a health cloud administrator, and you’re like, “Well, that’s Salesforce.” Or they might say, “net-zero cloud.” Or they might say, “nonprofit cloud.” Again, not saying Salesforce, but that’s what it’s based on. So sometimes, as an administrator and as part of this ecosystem, you have to know that there are products that are sitting on top of the platform that don’t necessarily say the word in it. Remember when they named everything Force? Everything was Force something Force, this Force, that Force.

Mike Gerholdt:

We had everything named Lightning for a while, too.

Jason Atwood:

That too. That was fun.

Mike Gerholdt:

We like to do that a lot. I think everything’s named Einstein now.

Jason Atwood:

Pretty much.

Mike Gerholdt:

I’ll probably get in trouble for saying that.

Jason Atwood:

Yes, you will.

Mike Gerholdt:

But you could do the bingo card of name everything, Einstein, Lightning, Force, and then you’re covered.

Jason Atwood:

I’m going to win that Bingo.

Mike Gerholdt:

Einstein, Lightning, Force, and then the actual product. Then you’re covered.

Jason Atwood:

Totally.

Mike Gerholdt:

I was looking through all my notes, roles and descriptions and interviewing and challenges, and certifications, and I feel we touched on a lot. What is something that you feel we missed, that you talk about, that you bring up that maybe people aren’t thinking about when they’re looking to interview or get an admin position?

Jason Atwood:

Sure. I think there’s a couple of things. A couple more things I would, if I were giving advice, which I happen to do all the time.

Mike Gerholdt:

You’re full of advice.

Jason Atwood:

I’m full of advice, maybe too much. So one thing, and this is just generic to not Salesforce, but as anybody looking for a job, cultural fit, I think, is becoming more and more of a need. And I think, as people applying for jobs, you should be looking at it both ways. Do I fit that culture, and does that culture fit me? And that’s do my values and the company’s values or the organization’s values align together. And asking a lot of questions around culture is going to become more and more important, especially because we go do remote work and all that. So I think what we used to think of, like, “Oh, we had coffee breaks and pizza parties for every quarter,” is now a much bigger discussion. So I would say bring culture into the conversation. Another tip that I hadn’t given yet is just preparedness.

It seems silly to say you have to be prepared for an interview, but I can tell you the amount of people who show up who are not prepared, they’re just not prepared; they don’t know their resume; they don’t have good questions; they don’t know how to talk to their experiences. And I’m stunned when it happens, but it happens a lot. And one of my little pet peeves, I’m giving away all my hints, boy, anybody interviewing is going to be able to nail the interview the next time they get to me.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, you say that, but I bet not.

Jason Atwood:

Probably not, right? No one’s even going to pay attention. But having really good questions is something that I look for. Again, we work in an industry where being able to ask your users what they want and question them, and being insightful is a great skill. So if I get to the end of one of my diatribe speeches and I say, “Do you have any questions?” And they’re like, “No, I’m good.” I immediately go, “Okay.” And then I’m not good because I… So have questions ready at the go; have them sitting in front of you on a piece of paper, on a sticky note in a NeverNote, wherever. It’s super important, and don’t be generic. Don’t say, “Where do you see yourself?” Don’t interview the interviewee.

Ask really stuff that’s based on homework you did. And that’s sort of the prepared thing too. When people come in and they say, “Oh, I read your blog post last week about blah, blah, blah. I was really interested about this key point.” Immediately, I’m like, “They did their homework; they know what they’re talking about, and they’re asking me something interesting.” Don’t say, “How do you guys do raises?” That’s not going to be; you need to have the questions about the culture or the stuff. I mean, I’ve had some really good in the past, but I’ve had some really terrible questions. And then two more, I’ll give you two more tips. This is like the hundred tips for interviewing the Salesforce Ecosystem Podcast.

Mike Gerholdt:

We’ll call it 98.

Jason Atwood:

There you go.

Mike Gerholdt:

So there’s two.

Jason Atwood:

Two more is you can never, if you want to get two skills. If I told someone to go get two skills before they get any job to be super useful on day one, two things they should be focusing on: data and documentation. Your ability to understand data is like you need to have it, you have to have it as a skill; you need to know data; you need to know how data interconnects with other data, you need to know how to report on it. It’s getting more and more and more important. So I look for data skills, even data nerds, people who say, “I love data.” So if you’re not that type of person, I would say these jobs are going to be tough. Because I don’t know anywhere in the ecosystem that we are not just really crazed about and or dealing with lots of data.

It is sort of what Salesforce is, in the back of all of it. So understanding data, taking courses on it, go learn SQL, go learn regular databases, go learn third normal form, learn it, and understand it because any of your skill sets that you have that are based in data will make you better at any job in this ecosystem. So data. Second is documentation, because one of the things you can do very quickly in any role is document things. You need to be able to document; you need to be able to take what people say, summarize it, put it into something, and spit it back out for people to take in. If you’re an admin, you’ve got to come up with a training plan or a training agenda. You are an admin; you have to come up with a user story; you hand it off to a developer or someone to build something.

Documenting is, and it’s, I know there’s Trailheads on it, and you can go to those, but really learning how to document even so much prove that skill when you talk to somebody and you follow up with an email. Follow up with an email that proved that you listened and that you’re following up with documentation skills, coming back with key points or things that you wanted or questions, all great ways to show. But I would say two things you could just learn to show up on day one to start working and doing things is know data very well and know how to document things.

Mike Gerholdt:

Well, that was a really good point. I would hammer on that cultural fit and question part a lot because I always feel like you and I are of a certain generation that we kind of almost interviewed in the hopes that they chose us, right? The best of the survivor, we get picked. But the part that really dawned on me as I moved through my career was I also need to interview that person to see, is this the type of person that I’m comfortable… Would I be excited to get on a call with them every day? Does this feel like the type of company that I’m going to be excited to go to work at? Or do I just want to get in to get in? And I’ve made the mistakes of going to work for companies and then realizing I didn’t ask enough cultural questions. The way things operate here and my expectations for this job are very different than what I had in my head, and it’s my fault because I didn’t talk about it.

Jason Atwood:

Yeah. And again, I think it’s different. Even again, culture was, I hate to say it, but it wasn’t really that much. It wasn’t that important. 20 years ago, I wasn’t worried about culture; now I think it’s above compensation.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah.

Jason Atwood:

I think it really is. And I’ve seen people go to places for less compensation because of a better culture. I’ve seen people leave terrible cultures that were highly paid. So really bringing that in, and that means how do they work? How do people collaborate? And you can ask these questions in the interview. You can say, “What are the three things you’re doing this year to help your culture be better or to improve your culture at your company?” If someone asked me that, I’d be like, “Ooh, wow. Okay.”

Mike Gerholdt:

That’s a good question.

Jason Atwood:

That’s a great question, right? You’re then learning A; are they doing anything to make it better.

Mike Gerholdt:

Right.

Jason Atwood:

Or ask about… One of the things that we take at Arkus as very important is when I was doing my key goals for the next five years, and I was doing some presentations and talking to the staff about it. I had culture as a fifth thing, and then after doing it, I thought, “Wait, no, that’s wrong. It’s got to be number one.” So for me, you ask a company, you say, “What are the main things you’re thinking about doing for the next five years? What are the five key things that you’re doing? What are your pillars?” Or whatever. And if they don’t say culture, then you’d be like, “Oh, why isn’t culture there?” And then you’ll probably catch someone off guard; maybe they won’t hire you there, but they should be thinking that keeping the company culture and embracing it, and making sure that it is… Culture isn’t something that you set up and then walk away from.

It’s not a database system. You don’t just go, “Oh, it’s set up, and it’s running in the corner.” It’s something that needs to be cultivated; it’s something that needs to be put into; it’s something that needs to be fed and loved, and thought of, and changed as the ecosystem and the world changes. Our culture changed when COVID happened, right? We had to adapt; we adapted to that; it wasn’t the same culture as before. When we were three people, now 75, but the culture’s different, but we’re adapting to that. So again, it is a really, really big point. It is something you can catch people on, you can ask, and everybody likes to talk about their culture. Everybody will tell you that they have a great culture, but that’s how, as an interviewer or interviewee, you should be questioning it and really ask the deep questions. So when they say they have a great culture, “Say, can you give me three examples from last week where you prove that or that you know that it is a great culture?”

Mike Gerholdt:

That’s a good question. Thanks for coming by, Jason, and sharing your wisdom with us. You said you present some of this. Are you going to be presenting any of this at upcoming Dreamin’ events after?

Jason Atwood:

I am. Well, you’re catching me on my road tour. I don’t know if this podcast…

Mike Gerholdt:

Oh, there’s a road tour.

Jason Atwood:

There’s a road tour.

Mike Gerholdt:

Are you going to have shirts made up?

Jason Atwood:

I might. So yeah, I actually-

Mike Gerholdt:

Have dates on the back.

Jason Atwood:

-I go to a lot… A lot of things, I will be at World Tour this year. World Tour New York in two days, but I don’t think this podcast will be out by then. But you can catch me at Texas Dreamin’, I’m doing this year. You can catch me at WITness Success, you can catch me at Mile High Dreamin’, you can catch me at Dreamforce, you can catch me at Northeast Dreamin’. And is that it? I think that’s it.

Mike Gerholdt:

I mean, Northeast Dreamin’ is kind of the tail end of the year for us.

Jason Atwood:

Yeah, it is. It’s the last one. So I’ll be at all those. I don’t know if I’ll always be presenting this, but you can at least find me if you wanted to.

Mike Gerholdt:

Right. I appreciate you coming by.

Jason Atwood:

Thank you. It’s been great talking to you. Let’s do it in another 10 years.

Mike Gerholdt:

Or sooner.

Jason Atwood:

Or a little sooner.

Mike Gerholdt:

Well, I thought that episode turned out phenomenal. I’m so glad I got to have Jason back, and he is going to be on a road tour presenting and helping admins at different Dreamin’ events. So hopefully, you can get to some of those that he mentioned. I think that’d be really neat, and some really solid tips on interviewing, and even I couldn’t agree more on building experience when you’ve never had a job in the tech industry. So thanks, Jason, for coming on and sharing everything. And speaking of sharing, if you love this episode and you’ve got friends, or maybe you’re going to a user group and you’d love to say, “Hey, I’ve got a podcast for you to listen to on finding that first job or getting your next Salesforce admin’s job,” here’s how you do it. You click the three dots in the corner; most of these apps, podcast apps, have this now.

And you can click share episode and you can post it to social; you could send it as an email to somebody, and then they get a link and they can listen to the podcast right on their phone, maybe as they’re walking their dog, and even more. Now, if you wanted to look for any links or any resources, everything, everything I’m telling you, start your day admin.salesforce.com; everything is there for you. And of course, we also include a link to the Admin Trailblazer community, which is the admin group in the Trailblazer community, which is a great place and also the place I went to get all of these questions. Now, we’ll also include a transcript if there’s something you need to go back and read through; that is all going to be in the show notes. So, of course, until next week, we’ll see you in the cloud.

The post What Are the Key Skills for a Successful Salesforce Admin Interview? appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Rangsk, a Wordle and Sudoku educational YouTuber. Join us as we chat about how solving puzzles every day can help you sharpen your critical thinking skills.

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

The role of puzzles in critical thinking developmentI’m addicted to word games. They give me a chance to practice my problem solving skills and, hopefully, get better. That’s why I was so excited for this week’s guest, Rangsk, because he makes some of the best educational content out there on how to get better at solving puzzles.

For Rangsk, puzzles are a way to develop your critical thinking skills. They give you an opportunity to think about how you think. “Overthinking has a negative connotation,” he says, “all I’m doing is thinking, and there’s nothing wrong with thinking when you’re solving a puzzle.”

Practicing your problem solving skills in a low-stakes environment like a puzzle gives you the experience to fall back on in high-pressure situations.

The process over the resultA key part of using puzzles to develop critical thinking skills is taking the time to reflect on your thought process. When you solve a problem, don’t just move on to the next one. Instead, Rangsk encourages you to do a postmortem so you can learn something about how you think.

Look through each step of a solve and analyze your decision-making. Where did you get stuck or tricked and why? What could you have done differently? And where did you make good choices that got you closer to the solution? If you take the time to internalize what worked and what didn’t work you’ll improve your critical thinking skills over time.

How to know when to ask for helpWhen I’m solving puzzles, one thing I always struggle with is when to hit that hint button. Rangsk’s advice is to make an honest assessment of your mindset. Are you well and truly stuck? Or have you hit a snag but are still enjoying the process of working through it?

In puzzles and the workplace, we might not be able to solve every problem we encounter on our own. Maybe there’s some trick that we don’t know about or some key piece of information we don’t have. Puzzles help you teach your brain how to learn, and that’s something Salesforce Admins need to do every day.

Listen to the full episode for more from Rangsk on his approach to teaching and some other word puzzles you might like if you’re already hooked on Wordle. And don’t forget to subscribe to hear more from the Salesforce Admins Podcast.

Podcast swag* Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Learn more* Connections and Wordle games from the New York Times are wildly popular. Can they improve cognitive function as you age? * Follow Rangsk on YouTube * Cracking the Cryptic on YouTube

Other word puzzles* Cell Tower * Squardle * Squaredle

Admin Trailblazers Group* Admin Trailblazers Community Group

Social* @Rangsk_YT on TikTok * Salesforce Admins on LinkedIn * Salesforce Admins on X * Mike on Threads * Mike on Tiktok * Mike on X

Full show transcriptMike Gerholdt:

Wordle, Strands, Connections, not just random words, but word games. And I am addicted to them. So, this week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, I had to get arguably the best word and logic solver I can find from TikTok and YouTube on the podcast. He goes by Rangsk on TikTok, and I’ll put a link below.

But David and I are talking about critical thinking and problem-solving using word games. Also, just how that applies to life. This is a phenomenal conversation. Don’t be scared about the time because this is such a fun discussion. Also, how looking for answers and the journey of problem solving really applies to just everything that we do, not only as Salesforce admins, but in our learning journeys and as we navigate life.

So, this is fun. Let’s get David on the podcast. So, David, welcome to the podcast.

Rangsk:

Well, thank you.

Mike Gerholdt:

I’m glad to have you on. I feel this is one of those times where I’m way more the super fanboy because I have seen a ton of your TikTok videos and your New York Times solves. But without tipping too much, how did you get into word gaming and solving word games online?

Rangsk:

Well, it’s a long story, but I can give the short version. Basically, YouTube likes to give random recommendations, and one day it recommended me a Sudoku video by Cracking the Cryptic. And I was familiar with Sudoku because it was a huge craze in the early 2000s. Do you remember that?

Mike Gerholdt:

Oh, yeah. Absolutely.

Rangsk:

Everyone was doing Sudoku.

Mike Gerholdt:

On the planes, there were books. Every airport had a Sudoku book.

Rangsk:

Yeah. And so, I got into that craze back then, but then I burned out of it. And now, I realize it’s because of the way I was solving it. It’s because of the way everyone was solving it, it burned out quickly. But I was like, “You know what? Sudoku, I’m familiar with that.” I clicked the video and I just immediately got hooked because this was not the Sudoku that I used to do.

And I just really got hooked on watching Cracking the Cryptic on YouTube and the various different kinds of logic puzzles that they solve. And then, I actually started creating my own Sudoku puzzles. I crafted them myself. And I would do things like… I would submit them to Cracking the Cryptic. They actually have solved a few of my puzzles in the past.

Mike Gerholdt:

Wow.

Rangsk:

Featured in front of tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people, which is great. And what I wanted to do is I wanted to document how I intended those puzzles to be solved and walk through the logic of them. Because I’ve always been… I had sort of an instructor mindset. I’ve always liked teaching. I’ve never been a teacher, but I’ve always liked teaching anyway.

And so, I decided to make my own videos where I walked through how to solve my own puzzles and I just uploaded them to my YouTube channel, which had nothing otherwise. And one day, Cracking the Cryptic featured one of my puzzles, and I commented saying, “Hey, I’ve got a walkthrough solve of this on my channel if anyone’s interested.” And I instantly gained 200, 300 subscribers.

Mike Gerholdt:

Oh, wow.

Rangsk:

And at that point, I was like, “Well, I better start making content.” So, I decided, “Hey, maybe I’ll start solving Sudoku’s on there, not just my own, and see if I can grow that audience.” And I was really enjoying the feedback I was getting from that. Flash forward to Wordle becoming popular, I was very much entrenched at that point within the logic puzzle community.

And Wordle, of course, really became popular within that community. And so, I decided, “Well, I’m already making Sudoku content. Why don’t I make YouTube shorts where I solve Wordle?” And so, that’s really where I get started on that. And then, I went from… it had taken me two years to reach a thousand subscribers where I could finally monetize on YouTube. And then, within two months, my Wordle shorts had brought me to 10,000 subscribers.

Mike Gerholdt:

Wow.

Rangsk:

And so, that was like, wow, Wordle’s my thing, I guess. And so, I decided just to… in addition to my Sudoku content, I started making word game content as well.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, I definitely was on the sideline for the Wordle wave. I remember it kind of crashing through. And I feel like for me, it was, “Oh, everybody’s playing it, so I’m not going to play it.” I also was afraid that I would never get a word. “Oh, man.” Because my Facebook feed was filled with all of the little Wordle squares that everybody would post. I’m like, “Oh, I know so-and-so.”

I know some book editors and I know some people that are in the education space, and they were struggling with Wordle. And I was like, “I have no shot. Maybe I just shouldn’t play this.” But now that I’ve played it, I confess, today is my 40th day playing Wordle.

Rangsk:

Okay. I hope you’re enjoying it.

Mike Gerholdt:

I am. I also have come now to the realization that I will never get it in one word. So, I have purposely looked ahead to see what words haven’t been used as solutions, and then picked my beginning word now pending, the solution hasn’t happened. My beginning word now is spoil because it has two vowels in it and it hasn’t been used as a solution.

Rangsk:

Got you. Yeah. So, for me, getting word in one, of course, it would be exciting, but I would also feel a bit cheated because I didn’t get to play that day.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yes.

Rangsk:

And to me, Wordle… I’m very much a logic puzzle guy. I approach even word games as if they were logic puzzles. And I think that’s why I like Wordle so much is because you can treat it like a logic puzzle, where you’re given information and then you want to come up with the best possible guess to utilize that information and get as much information as you can more.

And you think about patterns in the words, not just, “Here’s all the words I know,” but “Okay, E likes to be at the end. R likes to be second. These letters like to be near each other. These letters don’t like to be near each other.” And so, you can kind of think about the patterns that you notice within words. And of course, every once in a while, you get tripped up by a weird word that comes from French or something and doesn’t follow any of the rules.

But even then, you get there by logically eliminating, it’s not a regular word. So, I now have to investigate, is it one of those weird esoteric ones that came from French, for example, or came from a different language? So, yeah, I like to approach it as a logic problem, and I think that’s why people enjoy watching me solve it. I constantly get feedback, “I’m better at the game after watching you play it.”

That warms my heart. That’s exactly what I want. I’m not out here trying to impress people. I’m not trying to be a magician. I’m trying to be an instructor, and I’m trying to get people to understand that these games can be approached from a logical perspective. You can learn to get better at it without just going and memorizing a bunch of words.

Mike Gerholdt:

Right. Perfect segue to exactly why I’m having you on the podcast, because I ran across one of your TikTok videos on Connections, and I’d never played Connections. And the tone and the manner, now that you say instructor, I joked with a colleague that I called you the Bob Ross of Connections. But your tone was very calming.

“And let’s work through this, and here’s all the words. We have to come up with four groups of four. Let me walk you through the way I’m going to think through this,” which your logic or your critical thinking. And it wasn’t just, “Well, these four have to go together. Why don’t those go together?” And it’s like, “No, but let’s think about every possible meaning of this one word.”

Or I love when you, especially on some of the Connections, “What is the, not weirdest, but what is the farthest outlying word? And let’s pick that and see how it can connect to other things.”

Rangsk:

Yeah, I’m glad you recognized both my logical approach, but also the demeanor that I try to give to my content. I’ve been called Bob Ross by more than just yourself, also Mr. Rogers. Just having that calming presence is really important to me because people have so much going on in their lives. They have stress coming from everywhere, and then they try to escape that with the free time that they have.

They’re scrolling TikTok or they’re scrolling YouTube or whatever it is. And when you do that, you’re just getting people yelling at you. You’re getting people trying to make you afraid, trying to make you angry. And I want to counter that. I want to be a place where I come up on your feed and you feel like, “Okay, this is a setting where I can understand what’s going on. I’m not being yelled at.”

“Things are calm, things are straightforward and I’m learning, but I don’t feel like I’m being talked at.” I don’t know the best way to put that.

Mike Gerholdt:

Or chastise. I mean really, because I think that’s one thing, how this kind of carries over to software is critical thinking, but also when you’re building applications or you’re building programs, it’s change that you’re going to introduce to somebody. And I’ve always told people, when you roll out something, nobody wants to show up to work and feel stupid.

And the easiest way to feel stupid is by showing them something they don’t understand. And you can walk into some of these games and be like, “I don’t understand. It doesn’t make sense.” And then, it makes you feel stupid when actually if you just sit and look at it.

To me, I use a few of these games in the morning when I have a cup of coffee to kind of warm my brain up, kind of get me thinking through the day and sitting there thinking, “Okay,” so this word for example, and maybe Connections is coat. Okay. So, coat and I started, “Well, how would David describe this?” Well, coat could be a jacket. Coat could be a heavy coat.

Coat could also, you coat something with paint. I try to use some of the stuff that you teach to like, how would I talk through this and not just take it as the first thing that comes to mind?

Rangsk:

Right. And I get a lot of feedback, which I honestly don’t appreciate very much because it’s counter to what I’m trying to put across, which means I’m not communicating that effectively enough. But a lot of feedback is like “You’re overthinking it. If you’d just gone with your instinct, it would’ve been correct.” And they’re ignoring all the times, probably the majority of the times, where had I gone with my instinct, it would’ve been wrong.

Because these puzzles are designed to trick you. They are logic puzzles. And it’s not much of a puzzle if it’s just find four things that go together and that will be right. And so, the game is all about… I just made a comment today where someone was like, “Overthinking the easy ones is detrimental, but overthinking the hard ones is actually useful.”

And my response to that was, “Well, overthinking has a negative connotation to it, by definition. All I’m doing is thinking. And there’s nothing wrong with thinking when you’re solving a puzzle.” So, yeah, the game is trying to get you to think. And you can either let it get you to think and follow along with the human creator of this puzzle and what they were trying to achieve in getting you to think about, or you can bash your head against it and try to get lucky, which to me isn’t fun.

And sometimes I have to resort to that and I feel bad about it. But most of the time, I try to logically approach the problem and also try to see what did the creator of this puzzle intend me to think about? And that’s going to be fun and that’s going to give longevity to the gameplay.

Mike Gerholdt:

Overthinking also comes from a position of I know the answer and you don’t. At one point, they didn’t know the answer. So, how can I overthink something if I don’t know the answer? In hindsight, yes, I can look back at a solution, “Oh, I way overthought that. But I only know that because I went down that path and then I came back.”

Much like thinking through different situations or different, we talked about software debugging before I pressed record. Can you overthink software debugging? Well, yeah, I suppose. But you only know that once you go down that entire path and then come back.

Rangsk:

And I will say there’s kind of a corollary to that where you said in hindsight, and I think that’s another aspect of my content that you don’t see a lot, and I think it’s a really important aspect, which is after I’ve solved it, go and do a post-mortem basically, to use the industry term. Go and look back and say, “What is it that I did right? What is it that I did wrong?”

“How could I have thought about this differently to have succeeded when I failed? Or why did I succeed at this? What did I do that I liked that I should try to do more of?” And I think that’s a really important aspect of after you’ve solved a puzzle, or if you’re working on debugging software, if you’re working on any problem that you’re trying to solve, don’t just say, “Oh, I solved it. Let me throw that out.”

You say, “I solved it. Let me now internalize what worked and didn’t work so that when I have a problem again in the future, I can utilize that and gain wisdom and gain experience.”

Mike Gerholdt:

I’ll be honest, one of the coolest things, I’ll get off Connections. One of the coolest things that you added to your Wordle solutions is you go into a website that somebody create a bot and you kind of, “Okay, so here’s the word I put in and we got orange, yellow, and green here. What is the bot say is the next one? What did I guess? Here’s what I guessed. Here’s this, that. Here’s what I guessed. Okay.”

And oftentimes you’re either… it helps you do that post-mortem because with Connections, you have a little bit different, you can see your categories, but with Wordle, you’re like, “Was this the next best thing for me to guess to try and get to the solution?” And I love that you kind of walk through that with that bot and the bot’s like, “Oh, yeah, so you basically had two choices after this word and you went to this one, which no harm, no foul, it was the other word.” I need that bot for everything.

Rangsk:

Yeah. And what’s nice about Wordle is a bot like that can exist because it’s pretty easy to write a perfect solver. I wouldn’t say it’s easy, but it’s viable to write a perfect solver for Wordle. And there’s not a perfect solver for every problem you’re going to encounter, but you can at least go back and analyze that.

And I think an aspect that I thought about while you were describing what I do with that Wordle bot that I’d like to touch on is the question is, did I get lucky? Because a lot of times in problem-solving, there is a luck factor. Did I look at the right thing first or did I look at the right thing after struggling for three days on this problem? And the Wordle bot will answer that question for you.

It’ll say, “Oh, yeah, you totally got lucky. There were 60 possible words and you picked out the right one.” So, what I learned from that is maybe it was a lucky decision, but maybe it wasn’t the optimal decision, even though the optimal decision would’ve had a worse outcome in this situation. And recognize because… I guess to put it this way, if you can’t separate what was lucky from what was good, then you’re going to depend on getting lucky more and more.

You’re going to internalize what you did that made you get lucky rather than internalizing what you did that actually set yourself up for success.

Mike Gerholdt:

Well, I think that’s… some of that has to do with why people gamble. They just feel they’re lucky as opposed to working through the, I go back to the… I love the movie Apollo 13. Let’s work the problem and go through it. Kind of transitioning that because I obviously could talk Wordle. You also do that really good on the mini crossword, where if by chance you happen to get all the downs, all the downs also solve all the acrosses for the most part.

And so, you’ll go back through and be like, “Oh, well, let’s look and see actually what these questions were that the answer just autofilled back in.” I think there has to be something that it does to your brain because it also trains it. You’re like, “Oh, now, I’m not just reading this word, I’m also reading the clue that the creator of the puzzle had in addition to what the word is, and it just happened to be filled in for me.”

Rangsk:

Yeah. If we want to even just touch back on Connections for a little bit.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, please.

Rangsk:

Every day I get comments from people saying, “Oh, the first thing I do is shuffle because they put in these red herrings and I don’t want to be tricked by them.” And I feel like this is just intentionally throwing out information about the puzzle because we’ve been told that they think very, very hard actually. They put a lot of thought into the arrangement of the words that are presented to you, which means they’ve added information to the system.

And by hitting shuffle immediately, without even attempting to interpret that information, you’ve thrown out part of the puzzle. And to me, I feel like I can go, “Okay, well, they decided to put these tiles next to each other. What does that mean? Are they trying to trick me? Are they trying to hint me towards the solution? What is the information that they are trying to give me by this placement?”

And I would lose all that if I hit shuffle. And so, I feel like it’s kind of a short-sighted strategy because you can’t learn to overcome the tricks that they’re trying to put into the puzzle if you just wipe them clean first thing without even appreciating them.

Mike Gerholdt:

Right. Absolutely. Actually, you’re the one that taught me that. I was partway through at Connections the other day and I think that two words were iron and steel, and I was like, “Those started right next to each other. I bet those don’t have anything to do with each other. I’m not going to fall for it.”

Rangsk:

Yeah, sure enough, they didn’t. Exactly. And had you hit shuffle, you wouldn’t have known that.

Mike Gerholdt:

No idea.

Rangsk:

And you might’ve said, “Well, iron and steel, those are both metals. Maybe that’s a thing.” I think they’re getting wise to me. I think the other day they actually put three of them all on top of each other that were in the same category.

Mike Gerholdt:

Oh, no.

Rangsk:

In general, they are adding information when they, instead of presenting the tiles in a random order, just having a piece of software randomize it and presenting it, they are laying it out and they’re discussing how they want to lay it out. And I think that’s part of the puzzle. You’re removing some of the interest in the puzzle by hitting shuffle. And it’s the same with mini crossword.

Yeah, you can solve it with just the acrosses or just the downs, but you’re losing something by not at least going back and looking what was the whole puzzle. Because these kinds of clues are going to come up over and over again and this is a perfect opportunity, while it’s fresh in your mind and while you’re in the context, to use it as a learning experience for future puzzles.

Mike Gerholdt:

I completely agree. So, I think one of the things that fascinates me and I love using, I’ll call them word games and maybe they’re logic games. You need to tell me the difference. But using these to keep my mind sharp is I feel like it helps me be a better thinker just in general, just at my job, just working through decisions in life. You’ve been solving games a lot longer than me. How have you seen that kind of help you in your professional career?

Rangsk:

It’s really interesting that you asked that because an aspect of my day job is actually studying transference is what the psychology term is, which is if you are to play a game and get good at it or do a logic puzzle and get good at that puzzle, does that have transference? Does that transfer to other aspects of your life? Are you just getting better at that game? Or is there sort of a rippling effect to the rest of your life?

Okay. If I play GeoGuessr where I’m trying to locate where I am in the world, does that make me a better driver on my commute? Or if I am playing logic puzzles a lot, does that make me better at debugging software? Whatever it is that you’re trying to actually accomplish in your life, are these things just games and you get good at that one game, or are these things that are going to transfer to other areas of your life?

And that’s actually a pretty hot topic of study within psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience. And there’s a lot of studies going on right now related to that with mixed results. Some of these things that they claim, “Hey, if you play this game every day, you’re going to get smarter. You’re going to get better in these other areas of your life.” And it may not be true.

For me personally, I find it beneficial to just keep using my brain. Think of the brain as a muscle and just keep using it. Make sure those connections are strong. And by practicing it in low-stakes scenarios, when you get hit with a high-stakes scenario, you have this sort of instinct to fall back on for how you’re going to handle that. Yeah. Does that-

Mike Gerholdt:

No, I’m still processing all of that transference information you gave because I was just thinking about how that applies to other things like prepping for tests. Did you just get good at taking the test, or did you genuinely learn the information? We can also talk about tests, but nobody wants to do that anyway.

Rangsk:

I’ll talk about it.

Mike Gerholdt:

Are you just good at taking the test too? That’s the third thing to bring up.

Rangsk:

Yeah, exactly. And this is a big topic in education, has been for a long time, which is how much do we lean on standardized tests and how much do we teach to the test? And is the standardized test important because we just need metrics on how students are generally doing, or is the standardized test also something that can direct curriculum? That’s a question that every teacher has.

And I don’t think there’s a perfect answer to that, and I’m also not much of an expert on that at all. But in my opinion, I think that anything you learn is good. I’ve always hated the question, when am I going to use this? The answer is, you use your brain every day. And the more you can teach your brain how to learn and all these cool things, that expands your horizons.

It expands your use of your brain. Yeah, sure, you might not use algebra if you’re not an accountant or a scientist or a mathematician. Yeah, you might not use algebra, but one day you’re going to have the question and you’re going to have the curiosity that’s going to relate to math in some way. And you either have the tools to think about it properly or you don’t, and that’s something that you could have internalized, but you decided you weren’t going to use it, and so you didn’t.

But there’s the expression, when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. I have always thought that the more tools you have in your toolbox, the more versatile you can be in problem-solving and just living your life properly. Properly is not the right word. I didn’t mean to say it that way, but living your life to its fullest extent, being able to accomplish the goals that you want to accomplish, being successful.

It’s all about setting yourself up for success. And you don’t know what problems are going to arise. And so, the more tools you give yourself, the less everything starts looking like a nail, and the more you can be exacting and fall back on previous experience.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, I often think of… it’s funny you bring up that algebra example. I was also that kid that was really horrible at math, so I never played Sudoku. But the concept sometimes of how you solve the algebra problem, I think to me, was also more important than what the answer was.

And that to me is almost like the first time you pull the cover off a toy and realize there’s a whole bunch of gears inside that make the bear move and kind of understanding, “Oh, there’s more to this that I need to understand as opposed to just what the outcome is.” We had this discussion the other day, outputs versus outcomes.

And if your outputs is solved puzzles, are you smarter than if your outcome is no, but I learned the process and I learned how to work through difficult situations. The outcome is very different than the outputs.

Rangsk:

I love the way you put that and that’s something… I solve The New York Times hard Sudoku every day on my YouTube channel. And my goal is not to say, “Look, I solved the puzzle.” My goal is to help the viewers be able to solve the puzzle, but not just that. To understand that it’s the act of solving it that’s the fun part, not having that completed grid with all the correct numbers in it.

And it seems obvious when I say it that way, but I get so many people commenting saying, “Well, if I just go through and fill out all the candidates first, which by the way is super boring, then I can solve it in four minutes, and you took 12 minutes.” I feel like I failed that person because now they’re going to get bored of Sudoku very quickly.

Because who wants the first thing they do when they first receive that piece of paper or the digitally, the Sudoku puzzle, is go cell by cell and do accounting work? The puzzle can tell you a story if you let it tell you the story. And there are ways that you can approach the problem solving such that you are following along. It’s like you’re reading a book.

You’re following along the story. And in a sense, it’s almost like a “choose your own adventure book” where you can choose where you want to go next. What do I want to discover about this puzzle? And just put a smile on your face every day because you found this really cool piece of logic and you go, “Ooh, that’s really neat. It just told me about this cool structure.”

And people who are like, “Oh, well, I solve it in two minutes and I can just plunk them down, and I don’t understand why you’re doing all of this.” And a year later, they’ve moved on. They’re not doing Sudoku anymore, and they think it’s boring. And I’m still doing it and I’m still learning from it every day.

Mike Gerholdt:

Right. Because the outcome for you is a lot different. The euphemism is the journey versus the destination.

Rangsk:

Yes. I’m a big fan of Brandon Sanderson and that’s a big thing in Stormlight Archive, which is there’s… not to get too spoilery, I won’t spoil Stormlight Archive for people. But there is a group of people who basically have a mantra and part of that is journey before destination. We all have the same destination. And when it comes to puzzles, the destination is the solved puzzle, but it’s about how you got there.

The journey is the important thing. And you can start talking about things, do the ends justify the means? It’s much of a corollary to that when you start talking about how you live your life. And I feel like if you start approaching even a logic puzzle that you’re doing for fun, if you approach that in a way where you’re trying to take shortcuts, that’s training yourself to take shortcuts in all areas of your life.

And I feel like that’s… you’re cheating yourself. That’s another thing. People are like, “Is it cheating if I do this? Is it cheating if I do that?” And it’s like, it’s a single-player game. There’s no stakes to it. The only person you’re cheating is yourself. Are you enjoying the way that you’re solving this? And that’s the important thing. Okay, if I’m doing a crossword or if I’m doing Connections and there’s a word I don’t know, is it cheating if I look it up?

Well, that’s up to you. Do you want this to be a trivia game where you need to be going into the puzzle with a certain set of knowledge, and you want to learn as you go, and you learn from your failures because you didn’t know what that word meant? And now you’ve looked it up and now you’re going to remember it? That’s one way to approach it.

And a perfectly other valid way to approach it is, “Oh, this puzzle has shown me this word that I don’t know. This is a perfect opportunity to look it up and have some success because I looked it up.” And I think both approaches are valid.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. There’s so much to unpack there, but the first thing I wanted to say was the best and worst times of doing any of the logic puzzles or The New York Times stuff is when it’s solved is the best because I was like, “Yes, I did it.” And the worst is, “Ugh, it’s over.” Especially a few times with Wordle or with Connections or even the mini crossword, “Oh, I finally got it.”

And to that other point, there have been times when I was like, “Okay, I clearly…” I don’t know some… I think one of the questions was something and it was super pop culture. I was like, “I just need to Google this. That’s my mulligan. I’m going to take it, I’m going to Google it and that’s going to give me the answer.” Because I’m past the point of enjoyment for this game and I need a little boost to get me back and going for that, and it’s my game, so I can do that.

Rangsk:

Yeah. And it’s all about knowing yourself and knowing what you’re going to be happy with later and what you might be sad about later. And I think you kind of hit the nail on the head. Are you still enjoying the puzzle? Because that’s the important thing. We don’t do these because it’s our job. We’re doing puzzles because it’s fun and enriching.

And so, it’s all about sustainability. What’s going to sustain your interest in this hobby? And are you going to be a flash in the pan where you deep dive into crosswords or Sudoku or whatever word game for a month and then you’re done with it and you move on? That’s one personality style. Another personality style is crosswords are something that I do every morning for 50 years.

There are people like that too. There are a lot of people like that. And there’s a big difference. Someone who’s going to do that every morning for 50 years, they’re enjoying it every day and they’ve found ways to sustain that enjoyment. Whereas there-

Mike Gerholdt:

Go ahead.

Rangsk:

Sorry, go ahead.

Mike Gerholdt:

No, I’m 100% with you. I was going to ask because we didn’t touch on it and maybe it’s for a reason because it’s in beta, but Strands. I think you said it in one of your puzzles, I was like, “I just need you. Can you just tell me if any of the four letters I put together are close to one of the words you want as opposed to just nothing?” And I think that for me, we get some of that.

Well, you can tell me more of the game logic. But with Wordle and with Connections, at least with Wordle, I get a yellow. I get a colored square. Regardless of what I put in, I’m getting a color back. And with Connections, oftentimes I’m like, “Please just say one away.” But you get kind of that.

Rangsk:

But even if it’s not one away, it’s still information.

Mike Gerholdt:

It is, yes. Except with Strands.

Rangsk:

Yeah, Strands is missing that. And the reason Strands is missing that is because I really feel like they built the hint system because they knew this was an issue. But the hint system is terrible because people don’t want to use it. Some people do use it, but I don’t like using it. I think that, first of all, making it a choice. Wordle, you don’t have the choice to see whether a tile was yellow or green.

It’s just going to tell you. It’s part of the game. A hint system feels like it’s external to the game as like a, “I’m not good enough, so I’m going to press the hint button.” And I don’t think that was their intent, but I think that’s what’s happened because they realized that most of these games have some kind of lockstep functionality where you make as you progress through the puzzle and you gain information as you go.

Whereas with Strands, you can be sitting there for 15 minutes and know as much as you did on minute one, even though you have found 100 words because you didn’t find any of the words that they’re intending and you’re not understanding what the theme is trying to hit you towards. And it’s just frustrating. And so, they probably saw that in the playtest and went, “Well, if you get three words, we’ll give you a word.”

But that doesn’t feel good because, first of all, they gave the choice. I kind of wonder what would the game be like? Is it just you get three words and it just reveals one without pressing hint? And it was just part of the game. I feel like more people would accept that rather than opting into admitting that you’re not good enough at the game.

But also the hint system is just simultaneously not powerful enough and too powerful. And I could rant about this. I feel like it’s a bit off-topic.

Mike Gerholdt:

No, this is 100% on topic.

Rangsk:

All right. Well, I’ll rant about it then. Early on, it’s too powerful because it gives you… for those not familiar with Strands, it’s like a word search game, but they don’t tell you what words you’re looking for.

Mike Gerholdt:

Nope.

Rangsk:

Instead, they all follow a theme. Maybe the theme is names of football teams or the theme is pieces of time, so seconds, minutes, hours. And some of them are a bit more esoteric. They might be words that are slaying for money, but are also food was one of them. And so, it really varies in difficulty. And they give you a little kind of crossword style clue hint at the start of what the theme might be.

But it’s usually not. Usually, it’s either, “Oh, I know exactly what the theme is from this clue,” or, “I have no idea what the theme is from this clue.” There’s not much in between. But anyway, what the hint does is if you get three words that they didn’t intend, if you find three words, you can press the hint button and it highlights all of the letters involved in one of the words.

And then, it becomes an unscramble basically. And then, you find that word. And I think the ideal situation when using the hint is then, okay, now that I know what one of the words is, I’ve now gained information about what the theme might be and I can try to think of other words that match. And if that’s not enough, I’ll find three more and I’ll press hint again and I’ll get another word.

But it’s too powerful because people don’t want to just be shown one of the words. That’s literally taking away from the enjoyment of the game because the game is only finding the words. And so, you’re literally pressing a button saying, “I want one last word to find please.” But then, at the end, sometimes you’re down to one word left, it tells you how many words you need to find, and you’re down to one word left.

And I’ve literally spent 10, 15 minutes trying to unscramble that word because I can’t figure it out. When it was Broadway shows, and I couldn’t unscramble Carousel for the life of me because I hadn’t heard of that Broadway show, and it’s a weird word. Carousel. And so, the hint wouldn’t have helped me. If I’d pressed hint, it would’ve highlighted all the letters.

So, the hint is simultaneously too powerful early on and not powerful enough at the end. And then, also on top of that, isn’t giving you what you want from a hint. So, I feel like it’s a failure in game design there. And what they should have done is built-in ratcheting game mechanics that aren’t opt-in.

Mike Gerholdt:

What are ratcheting game mechanics? Please tell me.

Rangsk:

So, if you think about a ratchet wrench. When you go one way, it doesn’t lose progress on tightening, and then you go the other way and it tightens more. That’s what a ratchet is. And so, you can make progress without losing progress. So, as you put input into the system and as you find things towards the game mechanics, you have now ratcheted yourself, you’ve given yourself more information.

It’s a ratchet-style gameplay. So, like Wordle, you input a guess and you get those yellows and greens and grays, and now you have more information about what the answer might be. And you never lose that information. That information never becomes obsolete. You can always use it. So, in the same way, that’s why some of my suggestions for Strands were, “Hey, you know what?”

“If I get partial word, maybe it should tell me, ‘Hey, you got a partial word. You’re on the right track.'” It’s ratcheted that information into the system. It’s like getting a green or a yellow in Wordle. Or if they want to keep the hint system, maybe one option for the hint system would be show me the starting letter of one of the words. Not the whole word, just give me somewhere to start.

Mike Gerholdt:

Where do I start? Yeah.

Rangsk:

Yeah. This letter I know is the start of a word now and I can focus my search on that. And so, I wouldn’t feel as bad pressing that. But what if that were just part of the game mechanics? It’s like rewarding you for finding words. They aren’t the right words, but you’re still finding valid words that exist. So, why not have those, just add information to the system as you guess in certain creative ways.

So, it feels like a failure of game design that there isn’t that sort of ratchet other than the opt-in very heavy-handed hint system that they have right now.

Mike Gerholdt:

Right. I am so glad you brought up that Broadway Strands because I was about… I’m like, “I think I’m done. I think I’m done with Strands now.” It took me so long to get… the first thing I found with Strands is you either get started and it starts to make sense, or you’re sitting there and you’re looking at these two words and the clue and you’re like, “I have no idea what these three things have to do with each other. I don’t know what another word to look for.”

But that Broadway with Carousel, I was stuck on Carousel. I got everything else. Those are the only letters left. I never hit the hint button. And I thought, “What happens if you hit the hint button when you’re done?” Because at that point, I’ll be honest, the game Joy, it was no joy in Mudville right now. I just wanted to be done. Just please tell me what the answer is. I think I went through… I watched your TikTok.

I went through all the same words you did. I’m like, “I don’t know what word this is. Just tell me.” And when I hit hint, it just put the little things around. I was like, “I know it’s those letters.”

Rangsk:

Yeah, exactly.

Mike Gerholdt:

I know it’s those letters. Get me out of here. Where is the escape room button? That’s the only time I wanted the hint button to just be like, “Nope, we’re just going to solve this because we feel bad for you.”

Rangsk:

And people use my videos as hints. They’ll be like, “Well, I’m done with this puzzle. I haven’t solved it, but I’m not getting joy out of it. Let’s see what Rangsk did.” Rangsk being my handle. “Let’s see what he did and maybe that’ll give me a hint.” And that’s actually the entire premise of me doing The New York Times hard Sudoku every day in that instructive way is I know that there’s always going to be someone who’s stuck on that specific Sudoku puzzle because it’s so widespread.

It’s published by The New York Times. They’re going to search on YouTube or Google. They’re going to search “New York Times Sudoku today walkthrough or hint.”

Mike Gerholdt:

Solve or something.

Rangsk:

Yeah, solve. And they’re going to find my video and that’ll track them to my channel. And not only will they find my video, but this video is going to blow their mind if they don’t know modern Sudoku-solving techniques. And they’re going to be like, “Wow, I need to watch more of these because this is way more fun than how I’ve been solving Sudoku, and I don’t get stuck as much.”

“And if I do get stuck, I watch him until he does something I didn’t know, and then I can continue.” So, almost using me as a hint button. And I feel like with Strands, there’s no strategy. Strands feels like a trivia game to me almost. I’ve been trying so hard to make it a logic game, which you probably have noticed if you watched my Strand solves, where I’m like, “Okay, corner strategy, edge strategy.”

And it kind of works, but it’s not perfect and there’s not a whole lot of logic involved. I will say there are word search games that do feel a lot more like a logic puzzle. One of them that I play is called Cell Tower. And this is probably the coolest word search game I’ve played. Normally, I’m not a big fan of word search-style games. I’m not very good at them.

But to briefly explain this game, it’s a grid of letters just as you’d expect a word search to be. And the way that these letters form words is a little bit unique, and that’s not that important to describe, except basically you’re drawing shapes in the grid. So, you’re connecting the letters together in kind of a different way that you’d normally expect.

You’re not drawing a line through the letters to make words in order. You’re just sort of highlighting them, and they have to be connected in some way. And it’s red left to right, top to bottom. And so, it’s sort of limiting you on… you can’t make a word bottom right to top left. You can’t just draw a line that way, or you can’t zigzag around. Instead, there’s a specific logical order to how the letters are going to appear in a word.

In addition to that, every letter is part of a word, similar to Strands in that way. So, every letter will be involved in a word, and there is only one solution. So, you can’t just go, “Okay, I found this word. Let’s lock that in. Okay, now I found this word.” You’re going to find a bunch of words, but you need to look at how that affects the rest of the grid around it and make sure you’re not preventing the ability for the letters around it to also be part of words.

And that’s where the logic comes in, where you go, “Okay, I think this word might be part of it. Can I add an -ed ending, an -ing ending, an S at the end? Is there a prefix I can add to it to expand that word? But also, how does that affect the letters around it? Am I going to be able to make a word out of these other letters if this was one of the words I use?”

And so, you end up with this really logical approach to how you solve it. And you’re thinking about how letters go together, how they go next to each other, and how words are formed in general. And you’re looking at corners like, “Okay, this letter is going to have to be related to the letters around it in some way because it’s in a corner because it’s been isolated in some way.”

And so, it’s not that you’re trying to just find words that match a theme and the computer tells you, “Oh, yep, you found one of them,” or, “Nope, that wasn’t what I was looking for, sorry,” with no extra information. Instead, you’re trying to solve this logically and the computer is not giving you any help at all there. It’s just the grid, the full information of the grid being used.

So, in a way, it’s a lot like Sudoku, but also like Connections where you can’t just pick any four words that happen to relate because that might disrupt the ability for the other words to relate to each other. So, that’s what really makes a logic puzzle a logic puzzle is you have to take the puzzle as a whole and you have to take steps that are logical. It’s not just a trivia game.

Mike Gerholdt:

That’s so apropos to everything that we talked about. You have to look at the puzzle as a whole. Last question, because I happened to think of this when we were talking about Strands. As somebody that’s online solving problems, word games and stuff, how hard, how many times do you just want to hit that hint button? Does that ever come up?

Maybe you have the patience of a saint, but have you ever gotten to that point where I know you’re creating this for the good of other people and you have to walk through that, but you’re like, “Maybe I just hit the hint button because I’m at 35 minutes on this video?”

Rangsk:

Yeah, for sure. And there’s different forms that that takes in my mind. There’s the built-in hint buttons to the game, but then there’s also like, “Do I just Google this word?” I did do that once. There was a Connections, and I knew I was about to lose. I was like, “Okay, I’ve got no mistakes left. And there are three words on the board that I have no idea what they mean.

Literally never heard these words in my life. So, how am I supposed to… is it good content for me to just make a guess and lose? Or do I go on Google, look up what the words mean, and continue the puzzle?” And in that case, I decided to do that. And I got mostly feedback saying, “Yeah, I Googled it too. It was fine to Google it, looking it up. What’s wrong with that?”

But then, I got a lot of negative feedback too about “How’s it feel to cheat? You’re such a cheater, blah, blah, blah.” Just so much negativity. And so, I have to weigh the decision on how much negativity do I want in my comment section here, because they aren’t just insulting me when they’re calling me a cheater. They’re calling everyone else who Googled a cheater.

So, people are seeing themselves in that comment when they’re reading through the comment section. And that’s something I need to figure… it’s not something I’ve solved. I don’t have an answer. But what I try to do is understand myself and go, “Okay, am I 35 minutes into this puzzle legitimately, or am I just done with it?” There’s a game I play called Squaredle. There’s actually two games I play.

Mike Gerholdt:

It sounds like all the puzzles put together.

Rangsk:

Yeah. There’s two games I play called Squaredle. One of them has an extra E and one doesn’t. The one with the extra E… so one of them removes the E in square and one of them keeps the E in square when they add the -dle ending. They’re completely different games. One of them that I play with the E, it’s another word search game.

It’s a grid of four by four or sometimes five by five letters. And you need to find every possible word other than esoteric ones. They have some list of words that… you know how there’s words that aren’t really words, if you know what I mean? The esoteric ones, the archaic ones, out of use, highly specialized words. You don’t have to find those.

They count as bonus words if you do find them. But there’s a list of words that it’s looking for you to get. And sometimes this list is 60 to 100 words. And this game can take me an hour and a half.

Mike Gerholdt:

Wow.

Rangsk:

I sit there and I record the whole solve. It’s a special occasion usually. I’ll do it once every week or every two weeks and then put it on my YouTube where I solve the hardest Squaredle of the week. Because just like The New York Times puzzles, it gets harder through the week. And so, I’m like, “I’m going to solve the hardest one today.”

And it’s a lesson in patience because you have to find every word, and it can take an hour and a half. And that’s the kind of game where it’s like, “Okay, I’m 30 minutes in, but I’m still solving the puzzle. And that’s okay.” There’s also Sudokus that can take an hour, an hour and a half just because they’re that hard. But it feels like you’re making progress.

If you feel like you’re making progress, that’s just you’re still in the journey. You’re still solving it, and that’s fine. It doesn’t matter how long it’s been, as long as you still feel like you’re in the puzzle and you’re making progress and you’re enjoying it. But then, there’s puzzles where… the puzzle usually takes two minutes, and you’re 30 minutes into it, and you feel like you haven’t made progress in the last 25 minutes or ever.

And you just have to make the decision of like, “Is this worth my time anymore?” And I’ve definitely had puzzles where I hit the stop button on the recording and I delete the video, and I just go, “I’m not solving that one today.” Or ones where I go, “Well, it’s time to get a hint.” Literally, I just say, “I have failed this puzzle, but I want to see the end of it, so I’m going to look stuff up.”

You have to make that decision in your head. And I think you brought up a really important point, which is… I think you brought this point up at least, it became this point in my head, which is you need to decide for yourself when that is and that it’s okay. You gave it your best, time to seek help. And I think that’s something that’s really important in life is that it’s okay to seek help when you need it.

I think people appreciate when you’ve put in some effort yourself first, but at the same time, they don’t want… let me put it this way. I’ve been lead of several different teams as a programmer for my day job. And as a lead programmer, I would rather a junior programmer come to me with a problem that I can solve in a minute than spend six hours banging their head against it.

But at the same time, if it would’ve only taken them 10 minutes, I’d prefer them to learn that on their own. So, it’s important to learn at what point have I stopped being productive? Have I stopped enjoying this? Am I not in the right mindset and I either need to take a break, do something else, or I need to seek help, or both?

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. No, I think you’re right. The hint button and being called a cheater, you’re only cheating yourself. It’s what do you need to move on with? And your example is perfect. Is there something that can be gained by that person asking you? But I also think, what level of thinking did they put into solving this before they came to me?

And I always look at it as I’m very appreciative of, they came to me because they hit that wall, but they also realized quickly that they hit that wall.

Rangsk:

Exactly.

Mike Gerholdt:

And now they need to move on so that that learning journey continues as opposed to being frustrated in themselves.

Rangsk:

Yeah. And that’s a skill unto itself. And that really separates the people you enjoy working with from the people you don’t enjoy working with, people who are team players and people who aren’t. That really separates them because it’s a matter of, “I don’t want to be doing your job for you. I’ve got my own job to do, but also I don’t want you sitting there suffering as if you were alone.”

And there’s that balance. And recognizing in yourself when you’ve hit that state is really important. And I think that… going back to the conversation about transference. That’s something that can transfer. If you’re playing games, and you can learn in a low-stakes scenario, how do I… be in yourself, be in your body, be in your mind, and be like, “I now recognize what I’m like when I’m in this hopeless scenario where I’ve given up without giving up, where I’m frustrated, where I’m tired, where I’m hungry.”

It’s something even like children need to learn. Am I sad or am I just hungry? Or do I need to take a nap? That’s something children need to learn, but it’s not something we stop learning as a child. It’s something we need to always know ourselves, know how our mind works, know what our limitations are, and know what our limitations aren’t.

Is this something I can just continue on, or is this something that I need to use my coping mechanisms that I’ve learned throughout my life to deal with this situation? Part of the problem has now become my own mind. And that’s something you can learn by putting yourself constantly in these difficult situations, like difficult logic puzzles or trivia puzzles, where you’re not very familiar with that trivia or whatever it is for you that puts you out of your comfort zone in a safe, low-stakes environment.

So, you can learn how you yourself react to that and what that’s going to take. And part of my job, implementing things, software. I need to recognize… have you ever had that… I’m sure everyone’s had that late night where you’ve been banging your head against this fog or a thing you’re trying to implement is just not working. You go home dejected. You get some sleep. You come in in the morning and you fix it in two minutes.

And had you just recognized that you were in that situation where you were not going to be productive anymore, and you’d just gone home and you’d gotten rest and you’d accepted that that’s what’s happening. And you actually had your relaxing night and you took the time that you needed for yourself, and you got the good amount of sleep, and then you came in the morning ready to go, and you just solved the problem.

Those two scenarios look the same from a work perspective, but look very different from a personal hygiene, mental hygiene perspective.

Mike Gerholdt:

I couldn’t agree more. I couldn’t agree more. I think it’s also a great way to end this discussion, David. Thanks for coming on the podcast. You gave me so much to think about and here I was just excited to talk about word games. But really a lot of it is how you look at everything in life and how you tackle situations.

And really part of, I think, the word game or the game itself is also helping you understand yourself. So, this is a great discussion. I appreciate it. Thanks so much.

Rangsk:

Well, thanks for having me on. And if people want to watch my content, I’m just going to plug my stuff real quick.

Mike Gerholdt:

Absolutely.

Rangsk:

So, I am Rangsk on all platforms. R-A-N-G-S-K. I’m sure there’ll be something in the description where you can find that. I’m on YouTube and also on TikTok. And I recently had to split my TikTok into multiple accounts. But if you find that Rangsk_YT account, that’s the main one, and you’ll be able to find the others through my videos.

And so, if you enjoy Sudoku, logic puzzles, word games, that sort of thing in an instructive calm environment, then my channel is for you.

Mike Gerholdt:

So, as I write, this was a shot in the dark, I’ll be honest with you. I reached out to David after being completely addicted to his TikTok videos on Connections and Wordle, and just thought, “This is really what critical thinking looks like to me.” And the conversation, I probably could have gone for another hour easily. I had a hundred more questions in my head, but I hope you enjoy it.

I do want you to do one thing. If you enjoyed this episode, go ahead and give David a follow. I promise you it’s super rewarding to watch his critical thinking and the way that he solves problems and word problems and word games online. I honestly do think it will make you a better Salesforce admin and a better business analyst in general.

So, go ahead and give a click on the links below. Also, if you’re not already following the Salesforce Admins Podcast, please do so. We’re available on all the platforms. Click follow. Then new episodes like this one, we’ll download automatically every Thursday morning. So, with that, thanks for listening and of course, we’ll see you in the cloud.

The post Puzzle Solving as a Key to Success in the Workplace appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Kate Lessard, Lead Admin Evangelist at Salesforce. Join us as we chat get to know the newest member of the Admin Evangelist team and her journey through the Salesforce ecosystem.

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

Giving back to the Salesforce communityKate actually got her master’s in museum studies, so how did she get involved in Salesforce? “I started at a nonprofit in Denver, Colorado, and my first day on the job they asked me if I had ever heard of Salesforce,” she says, “and I said no and they said, ‘that’s okay but you’re in charge of it now!”

One thing that really helped Kate, back when she was an accidental admin, was finding a mentor in the Salesforce community. That’s why she’s been so focused on giving back through programs like Super Moms, WITness Success, and Forcelandia. And now, she’s the newest member of the Admin Evangelist team.

Working behind the scenesKate takes the stage at tons of events but she also does work behind the scenes. For Forcelandia, she’s the Communications Lead, where she coordinates with speakers and makes sure they have all the information they need to be successful.

The two main lessons she’s learned from this work are that no question is a dumb question and that you balance how you communicate information. For the first one, you don’t want to be the person who shows up in the wrong place when people are depending on you. For the latter, it’s important to realize that some people want one big communication with all of the facts and others prefer it broken down into smaller snippets.

Kate is greatKate is excited to join the Admin Evangelist team and share how awesome it is to be a Salesforce Admin. “I’m really drawn to this because you get to still be technical and know how to do all the things,” she says, “but you also get to share the excitement behind them.”

We think Kate is great, and if you want to meet her she’ll be presenting two sessions at Dreamforce this year. The first will be on why admins should learn dev fundamentals, and the other will be a security breakout session. Make sure to stop by and say hello!

Podcast swag* Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Learn more* Salesforce Developers Podcast Episode: Creating User Stories with Kate Lessard * WITness Success * Forcelandia

Admin Trailblazers Group* Admin Trailblazers Community Group

Social* Kate on X * Salesforce Admins on LinkedIn * Salesforce Admins on X * Mike on Threads * Mike on Tiktok * Mike on X

Full show transcriptJosh Birk:
Welcome, Salesforce admins. I’m Josh Birk, your guest host for this week. This week we’re going to sit down with our brand new Lead Admin Evangelist, Kate Lessard, and get to know her a little bit better. So let’s go straight to the tape.

All right. Today on the show we welcome Kate Lessard to talk about, well, mostly Kate Lessard, and the things that you’re doing and some of the conferences you’re going to be going to. So Kate, welcome to the show.

Kate Lessard:
Thank you. Excited to be here and to talk about myself.

Josh Birk:
It’s all of our favorite topics. All right, so going into your earlier years, the first thing that I see in your early years is that you studied abroad in France. How did that come about?

Kate Lessard:
Oh, my gosh, I was so lucky to be able to do that, and my study abroad sister is still one of my very best friends. I just went back and saw her this year. She just had a baby, so that was really cool. Yeah, I studied French in high school and just really loved the language and learning about France. And had the opportunity to go with my high school for a really short spring break-style program, and then went back in college.

Josh Birk:

I got it. I did like that underneath you listed some of your activities that included gastronomy. Isn’t that just a fancy word for saying French food?

Kate Lessard:
Oh, yeah. We had a whole class that I got credit for in college on gastronomy, which was wine tasting and learning how to cook desserts and cheese tasting.

Josh Birk:
I had to take PE.

Kate Lessard:
I know it was the best class.

Josh Birk:
Not fair. Okay. And then you went on to study art and eventually a master’s in museum studies. Where did that interest come from, and what’s it like studying museum studies?

Kate Lessard:
Yeah, I’ve always loved art, and that was my favorite subject in school growing up, and especially when I went to France and got to see all these incredible artworks at some of their wonderful museums, decided that I really loved art, loved art history, and wanted to find a career in that. And museum study seemed like a cool way to be able to do that, to just be able to experience some of the best artworks in the world and be able to share that with others. So that was where I went into that kind of study path.

Josh Birk:
Nice, nice. Well, and to put a cap on that, giving you an overview for the, and I’m going to try to get this right, the Pre-Raphaelite female muse in Juliet Margaret Cameron’s, Idols of the King photographs. Did I get any of that pronounced correctly?

Kate Lessard:
That was pretty close.

Josh Birk:
Okay.

Kate Lessard:
That was pretty good, yes. My master’s thesis, the longest paper I will ever write in my life, hopefully. It was really fun to dive into some Pre-Raphaelite photography. It was one of the first actual times that photography was used as artwork and not just capturing the world around us. So that was really cool.

Josh Birk:
That’s really cool. That’s very, very cool. Now, how did you move from French and art and photography into software and computer?

Kate Lessard:
Oh, gosh, what a journey. So, with that museum studies and art background, I was working for some arts and culture organizations, nonprofits, and I started at a nonprofit in Denver, Colorado. And my first day on the job, they asked me if I had ever heard of Salesforce, and I said, “No.” And they said, “That’s okay, but you’re in charge of it now.” So accidental admin is my entry point.

Josh Birk:
Gotcha. Nice, nice. And I mean, I assume you can talk about it, but your first gig was something about counterterrorism?

Kate Lessard:
Yes, it was the Counterterrorism Education Learning Lab. They had an exhibit space, so that’s why I was drawn to it initially, because there was this museum space that still exists in Denver that you can go into and learn about counterterrorism. But the main thing that we did was programs in training up event staff and volunteers about how they could recognize signs of terrorism. And if you see something, say something.

Josh Birk:
Interesting. So in the age of 9/11, because museums, public spaces, all of this kind of stuff… It’s fascinating how our public safety protocol has gotten above flight learning CPR.

Kate Lessard:
Absolutely. Yeah. Your volunteer job is more in-depth these days.

Josh Birk:
Right. Now, before we get into your current job, let’s talk a little bit about your vast experience in volunteering. We’ll start with: How did you get involved with Trailblazer mentoring?

Kate Lessard:
Oh, gosh. When I was an accidental admin, I was so lucky to find a mentor in the community, and as I got more advanced in my career and was able to be like, “Oh, my gosh, I have kind of crossed this threshold of needing someone to mentor me,” which I guess we always need someone to mentor us, but I felt like I was in a space where I could actually start to give back to others, and that’s when I joined the mentorship program.

Josh Birk:
Nice. And we had Heather Black on the DevPod talking about Supermums. Tell me a little bit about that program.

Kate Lessard:
Supermums is such a cool organization. They are based in the UK, and they actually have a Salesforce class that their students go through, and they have these modules that they work through. And the mentors are kind of like, I almost think of it as like a teaching assistant, because you’re not just there to provide career guidance. You are also there to help them develop their Salesforce skills and help them through the training classes.

Josh Birk:
Nice. Nice. And I know there are similar programs, and they find that it’s amazing how much that increases the success of not only gaining the knowledge but knowing what to do when you walk into an office and you have to have an interview for it.

Kate Lessard:
Absolutely. And being able to have a portfolio of work that you can show someone like, “Hey, I’ve actually done this; I’ve built this.” You can see it live.

Josh Birk:
Now you’ve had a lot of experiences, both on the stage but also behind the scenes for events. You’ve been a community group leader; you’ve worked with WITness Success; you’ve worked with one of my favorites, Forcelandia. First of all, what brought you into that side? Because that is very different from mentoring; it’s very different from educational; it’s very organizational program management, working with people. What attracted you to that kind of volunteering?

Kate Lessard:
Yeah, very different, but also a lot of the same group of people. And so, when I was mentoring and becoming involved in the community, I met several people that were involved with the Denver Women in Technology group as well as the Denver Admin group when I was living out in Colorado. And they kind of folded me into WITness Success and were really welcoming and started off just volunteering with the registration table, really enjoying the conference itself, and wanted to just be part of making it happen. It was such a good experience for me, both networking wise and learning wise.

Josh Birk:
Got it. And speaking of learning, what are some lessons you’ve learned from those experiences?

Kate Lessard:
Oh, my goodness. Well, with Forcelandia, I am the communications lead, which means that I am in charge of basically tracking down speakers, communicating with them, making sure that they have all of the information that they need to be successful. And the things that I have learned that I use in just my life project management philosophy is that no question is a dumb question. If you have a question, you should always ask it because you don’t want to be the one that doesn’t have the answer and isn’t where you’re supposed to be, especially at a conference when people are depending on you. And also to balance communication, figuring out how people respond. Do they want one big communication with all the facts? Is it helpful to break it down into littler snippets? Just figuring out the way that different people work and how they absorb information has been something that’s been really helpful.

Josh Birk:
Love it. Now talking about your roles, moving on to the stage, and also the skills that you were just talking about. Now you’re only about two weeks into the gig, but first of all, welcome to the team.

Kate Lessard:
Thank you. Happy to be here.

Josh Birk:
What is your new job, and what’s the one sentence or when people ask you, “Wait, what does an evangelist do?” What do you tell them?

Kate Lessard:
My new job is Lead Admin Evangelist at Salesforce, and evangelists get to be out in the community sharing how awesome it is to be a Salesforce admin and the very cool things that we get to do. So I’m really drawn to this because you get to still be technical and have to understand and know how to do the things, but you also get to share the excitement behind them and be able to share that with others and get them excited and doing all of the really awesome things that you can do as a Salesforce admin.

Josh Birk:
Love it. Is there any early content that you’re working on that you can share with us right now?

Kate Lessard:
Oh, absolutely. I will be at Dreamforce this year presenting two sessions and also kind of helping some other speakers get ready for their sessions on the admin track.

Josh Birk:
So if you’re on the admin track, you might be hearing from Kate pretty soon. Now let’s go ahead and dive into those two sessions. Now, let’s start with the one I’m actually a little familiar with because you presented a version of it at Forcelandia and you talk about jumping into the shoes of a developer and then some of the lessons you learned from that. What enticed you to try to jump into the shoes as a developer?

Kate Lessard:
A few years ago, I was at a point where I was feeling really good in my admin career and didn’t know what the next step was. And I feel like at the time, you were an admin or you were a developer, there was not the amazing options that we have right now to take our career in. They just weren’t as widely publicized. And so I was like, “Oh, I guess a developer is my next step.” And so I went through RAD Women, which was an incredible training program. I learned probably more in those few weeks than I’ve learned in much of my life and got to the end of it and realized that the number one lesson I learned was that I didn’t want to be a developer. And that there’s no such thing as being just an admin, which I think was the big lesson, that you can take skills, and you can continue to learn from different subject areas, and they can just make you a better admin. And that was a really big lesson.

Josh Birk:
Yeah, because that was my follow-up question. So how long did the developer’s life stay for you?

Kate Lessard:
Oh, yeah, that was shattered pretty quickly. Still very dev curious; I am very fascinated by the things that developers do, and now I have the language to be able to speak and understand, which was one of those really important things to learn.

Josh Birk:
And I think it’s something that’s going to become more common because the era you’re talking about is the one before we started using phrases like admineloper, which I have been on the record of saying is both my favorite word and also my least favorite word. It’s my favorite word because it’s like it proves the need. We wouldn’t throw that part together if we didn’t have to describe people who had to carry both roles, but also, as an English major, it just makes my ears ring a little bit every time I say it. But I also feel like admins are being confronted with… As flow expands into being more parity, have more feature parity with APEX. What I’ve heard a lot is it’s not the exercises that programmers go to when it comes to streaming logic together, but understanding what a variable is and what are these nouns that we’re working with. Gives a good framework for using a lot of the more advanced features in flow.

Kate Lessard:
Absolutely. And it just kind of lifts up the curtain. One of my developer friends always likes to say, it drives her crazy when people say that “Dev work is magic,” because it’s not magic.

Josh Birk:
It’s not magic.

Kate Lessard:
It’s logic.

Josh Birk:
Actually, one of my old school jokes was when people found out that I’d gone from English and psychology and I got into computers, and they’re like, “Yeah, but you were never very good at math.” And I’m like, “Of course I’m not good at math; that’s why I have a computer. I’m good at logic; I’ve got a computer that can do all the math for me. I don’t need that.”

Kate Lessard:
That is great. I love it.

Josh Birk:
Now tell me a little bit about your second session.

Kate Lessard:
Second session is going to be a breakout on security.

Josh Birk:
Oh.

Kate Lessard:
So we’re still working out what exactly that’s going to look like. So this is just a teaser, of course, but going to talk about building a security culture at your organization.

Josh Birk:
Oh, I like that. I like that. Don’t worry. You still have about 30 days, so plenty of time.

Kate Lessard:
Thank goodness.

Josh Birk:
To get some slides together. And then I will be seeing you at Mile High Dreamin’. Tell me a little bit about the talk that you’re going to present there.

Kate Lessard:
Yes, this is one of my favorite talks because it’s something that I’ve used in my own life. I will be talking about five tips to ace your interview. So, whether you’re talking to HR, a hiring manager, doing a technical assessment, five tips that are going to help you land that next step, dream job.

Josh Birk:
Nice, nice. Now, in fact, I’m going to be completely honest here. I’m like, I knew I had Kate on the DevPod, and I’m like, “Wait, what did we talk about?” And so I went back, and it was your case study, like how to write a good case study that you had presented at Forcelandia. So you’ve presented a lot of different topics over the years, and this is always a kind of a mean podcast trick, because I’m asking you to pick the favorite of all your children. But out of all your presentations, do you have one that kind of stands out that’s like that was super fun to do?

Kate Lessard:
Oh, gosh. I think that changes year over year.

Josh Birk:
Sure.

Kate Lessard:
I get really connected to one each year, it feels like.

Josh Birk:
Yeah.

Kate Lessard:
So right now I would say the Why Admins Should Learn Dev Fundamentals or Why Admins Should Learn Dev Fundamentals is probably my favorite. I think that’s the most relevant-

Josh Birk:
Got it.

Kate Lessard:
-To my life. And so, that’s the current favorite, but ask me next year.

Josh Birk:
And I will tell you, as the life of an evangelist, chasing after the next shiny object is actually a very good habit to have. So you’re on the right track. All right, well, if people want to hear about the interview tips, they’ll have to visit you in Denver for Mile High Dreamin’. For the other stuff, we’ll see you at Dreamforce. Kate, I have one final question for you. As a yoga instructor, what is your response when people ask, “Why do yoga?”

Kate Lessard:
Oh, my gosh, I actually don’t know that anyone has ever asked me that.

Josh Birk:
Really?

Kate Lessard:
Which is funny. Why not do yoga?

Josh Birk:
There you go.

Kate Lessard:
I love to tell people that… People have this whole concept that yoga is this huge big thing, and I like to tell them to take it back a step. And if you’re in class, if you’re breathing, you’re doing yoga.

Josh Birk:
Nice.

Kate Lessard:
And breathing is good for everybody.

Josh Birk:
Right. Yes. I love that. I love that. All righty, Kate. Well, thank you so much for the time and information. It was a lot of fun.

Kate Lessard:
Yeah, see you soon. See you in Denver.

Josh Birk:
See you in Denver.

I want to thank Kate for the great conversation and information, and as always, I want to thank you for listening. If you want to learn more about this show and being an admin in general, go on over to admin.salesforce.com. Thanks again, everybody, and we’ll talk to you next week.

The post An Inspiring Journey from Admin to Evangelist appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Lisa Tulchin, Senior Curriculum Developer at Salesforce. Join us as we chat about user learning styles and how to use them to create better training sessions.

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

Choose the right learning style for you on TrailheadAs a Senior Curriculum Developer for Salesforce, Lisa spends a lot of time thinking about user learning styles. That’s why there are two paths to learning new Salesforce skills. You can use Trailhead to go at your own pace or sign up for Trailhead Academy to work in an instructor-led group setting.

The best way to choose between Trailhead and Trailhead Academy is to think about what’s worked for you in the past. When have you been able to learn something quickly, and when have you struggled? Remember that it doesn’t have to be an either/or decision. You can always see how far you get working through recommended badges and trails, but consider Trailhead Academy as an option if you get stuck.

Breaking through fear in user trainingFear can be a major barrier to learning, and it’s often what’s behind resistance to a new process. That’s why Lisa recommends starting your training sessions by “hugging the elephant.” Acknowledge that, yes, this new process is tricky while also explaining how it will make their lives easier.

What makes sense to you may not work for other user learning styles—some people want to run down a checklist and others need more context. “Kids are a lot more comfortable making mistakes than we are as adults,” Lisa says, “saying, ‘I don’t know,’ is one of the scariest things for adults to admit.” In any user training, make sure give your users explicit permission to ask questions so no one gets left behind.

Best practices for planning user trainingsWhen she’s writing a new training, Lisa tries to separate what information her users need to know from what would be nice for them to know. She calls it the 80/20 rule. Generally, if you can get your users to 80% with a training, they have what they need to do their job. You can fill in the other 20% as you go.

Another user training hack is to break complicated things down into manageable tasks to make them easier to learn. Lisa explains that our brains tend to remember 5-7 chunks of information at a time (for example, phone numbers or ZIP codes). So if you’re writing out a task and the individual steps get into the double digits, you might want to break it down differently so it’s easier to remember.

Lisa has tons of great tips in this episode for how to keep up with your own learning and take advantage of the resources out there from Salesforce, so be sure to take a listen. And don’t forget to subscribe for more from the Salesforce Admins Podcast.

Podcast swag* Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Learn more* Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: Elizabeth Bochanski on Starting Learning on Trailhead * Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: New Admin Classes from Trailhead Academy with Stuart and Feroz

Admin Trailblazers Group* Admin Trailblazers Community Group

Social* Lisa: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lisatulch/ * Salesforce Admins on LinkedIn * Salesforce Admins on X * Mike on Threads * Mike on Tiktok * Mike on X

Full show transcriptMike Gerholdt:
This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we were talking to Lisa Tulchin about learning and how you can be a better learner, and also, as a Salesforce admin, how you can help teach and educate and drive user adoption with your user. I’ve known Lisa for over a decade now. She’s a senior curriculum developer at Trailhead. She’s done both in-person and self-paced learning. She’s created both.

Mike Gerholdt:
So I feel like she’s a real expert on this, and we cover a lot because I had a lot of great conversations at TrailblazerDX about learning, and I know admins are always learning, so that’s why I wanted to cover that. Now, before we get into the episode, I want to be sure that you’re following the Salesforce Admins Podcast on iTunes or Spotify, wherever you get your podcasts. That way, when a new episode drops like this one, and it’s amazing on learning on Thursday mornings, it’s immediately on your phone. So be sure you’re following that, and then a new episode will drop. So with that, let’s get to, this is such a fun episode, let’s get to Lisa Tulchin. So, Lisa, welcome to the podcast.

Lisa Tulchin:
Thanks. It’s such a privilege to be here.

Mike Gerholdt:
Well, we’ve known each other for a while, but I am unleashing you to the Salesforce ecosystem because I feel like I’ve secretly held this decade of awesomeness of knowing you and talking about learning. That’s what we’re going to talk about today, in case you didn’t listen in the intro. But Lisa, let’s level set because I’ve had the privilege of working with you and seeing you teach, and create, and do, and that’s why I wanted to have you on the podcast. But let’s start with what you do at Salesforce and how you got here.

Lisa Tulchin:
I am a senior curriculum developer, which means I help write content for the product education team. I have been focusing almost exclusively on instructor-led training. So when you sign up through Trailhead Academy or one of the bootcamps before an event to be in a live or virtual classroom with the person. So that’s what I have been focusing on, but the group has expanded over the past year, and I will no longer be focusing just on that type of content.

Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah. And so if you think about it, what’s great about Salesforce is we have lots of different methods of learning.

Lisa Tulchin:
Indeed.

Mike Gerholdt:
And to hover around, I’ve seen you do instructor-led training and we have that. We also have Trailhead, or what’d you call it? Self-paced learning.

Lisa Tulchin:
Yeah, so Trailhead is one example of self-paced, and I have in my past at Salesforce as a full-time employee, because I’ve been here three years, I have actually written a few trails. I may start writing them again. We are still figuring out exactly the roles, but that’s just one example of what we’d like to say self-paced. And self-paced really means that you, as an individual, go to the resource and, I guess, take it in, read it, test it on your own timing. The difference with if you’re in a classroom, you’re following the agenda with the instructor, and you have to do things in a certain order, in a certain pace. But self-paced, and Trailhead is one example. Slack, and Tableau, or other resources that have their own training repositories that you can also take in at your own timing. So that’s why we use the term self-paced.

Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, no, it makes sense. Otherwise, I was just going to call it instructor-led and not instructor-led.

Lisa Tulchin:
Exactly.

Mike Gerholdt:
Like hot dog, not hot dog, right?

Lisa Tulchin:
Exactly.

Mike Gerholdt:
Okay, so I feel like here is the question everybody thinks I’m going to ask, and I’m not because everybody would ask, Okay, Lisa, well, then which is better, instructor-led or self-paced? And I’m not going to ask you that question because I think it’s the wrong question to ask. I think what the right question to ask is how, as a Salesforce administrator getting into the ecosystem, do I figure out if in-person or self-paced learning is best for me?

Lisa Tulchin:
I like that question a lot.

Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, that’s why I’m asking it.

Lisa Tulchin:
Yeah, no, I really like that question a lot. The hardest thing with radio, of course, is that people can’t see me thinking literally when I think, I always think my face shows the wheels turning, but I have to remind myself that you all can’t see that. So I’m thinking through-

Mike Gerholdt:
You’re envisioning.

Lisa Tulchin:
Visualize Lisa looking away, and the [inaudible 00:05:01] the hamster in her brain is running on that wheel.

Mike Gerholdt:
It’s smoking.

Lisa Tulchin:
Yeah, exactly. I think you have to stop and have an honest talk with yourself. What have you found for yourself in the past? We’re all adults going into this scenario for the most part, and I’d like to think that by the time we get to that stage, we understand a little bit about ourselves and how we take information in. So for example, if you’re just starting out in the ecosystem, not even for example, I’d say the first thing you should do if you haven’t already is actually go to trailhead.com and sign up for an account.

Lisa Tulchin:
It’s free to do that, and you automatically then have an enormous number of resources at your fingertip just through that site. There is Trailhead, the slightly gamified, self-paced learning that’s available to you for Trailhead resources. There’s also Trailhead Academy, which are the classes. But there also is the community, and so your peers. So I think that’s one way that you can explore and test out waters. If you’re thinking to yourself, I think I could do this on my own. Well, if you log in and you see how you feel after taking a couple of what they call modules, or trails, or badges, then that may be a sign that you’re good to go. But if you’re doing this and you’re thinking I need a little structure, then you immediately do have resources because you can sign up for ILT, but you also have the community.

Lisa Tulchin:
So you can go there, maybe find a local user group through that site, and ask questions of other people there. So I think that’s the first thing is have an honest talk with yourself. See if you can figure out for yourself what your learning style is. I personally often need that instructor. I need that person in the room either live or virtually helping talk me through things, honestly, helping me keep focused on what I’m actually doing. There are other resources there. I sometimes need a map.

Lisa Tulchin:
I like to have a map and being able to think. I also need to be goal-oriented. So for me, credentials were a natural way to think about things. And even if you’re not going to study and earn a credential, there is a section on the site for credentials, and they have, for example, if you were just starting out in the ecosystem, the Salesforce Associate Certification might be a really good starting point, and they have recommended badges and trails to take. So that’s what I mean there’s some guidance, even if you don’t think that cert is for you, you could look at the map to get that cert and follow that along, and take information in.

Mike Gerholdt:
No, I think, I mean, you’re so spot on. I often see a lot of people in the community ask a question assuming someone else has the answer, and I really think a lot of people forget they have the answer inside them. They know what way they learn best. They just sometimes are looking for validation in that. Listening to your answer, I was thinking back to when I had to tackle something big, I really needed that in class sitting next to somebody with an instructor so that I was focused. And it’s not that I can’t focus at home or at work, it’s that I think you probably know this, people sometimes try to do a trailhead module and answer email and maybe watch a webinar, and it’s like, stop. You can’t get away with that in class.

Lisa Tulchin:
You can’t.

Mike Gerholdt:
So that’s what I find. That’s what I find.

Lisa Tulchin:
Yeah, and I mean, the other benefit is finding a local Salesforce user group can also be super helpful because I think typically they have regular meetings at a certain date and time, and so I find there’s a lot of talk about what they call the beginner’s mindset and how we all have to have the beginner’s mindset, and I think it’s really hard and it’s easy for us to talk about, but truly being beginners, it’s scary. You don’t know something, you don’t know what you don’t know. For me, there’s that fear of messing up, and that’s definitely something I’ve learned like teaching adults, and I have also taught kids or, yeah, kids, they were actually kids, and kids are a lot more comfortable making mistakes than we are as adults.

Mike Gerholdt:
Why do you think that is?

Lisa Tulchin:
I think part of that is that feeling of, as adults, we’re supposed to know everything. If we followed a traditional path, we’ve gone to college, we’ve maybe gone on to graduate school, and we’re just supposed to know. You’re supposed to be able to move and function in an environment. And saying I don’t know, is one of the scariest things I think for adults to admit.

Lisa Tulchin:
And that’s one reason why I just encourage a community and peers because there typically are themes for meetings where people go and either someone’s presenting or sharing what they know or everyone’s there asking questions, and sometimes it’s just being in a room and having somebody else ask a question that you’ve been worrying about. It almost makes you relax a little, feel somewhat more secure. And that’s one reason why I would recommend that. Now, I say that as an ambivert, as someone who is very uncomfortable in situations where I don’t know people. So it’s actually quite challenging for me. It’s easy for me to say, go join the local user group. Actually, showing up to that first meeting of a user group is really hard for me.

Lisa Tulchin:
But once I settle in an environment and I can feel more comfortable, I am very outgoing, but that’s what that ambivert talks to, but that first getting me out the door. So if you’re sitting here and you’re listening to me talk and saying, Lisa, you are crazy. There’s no way I’m ever going to join a user group, that’s talking to people I don’t know. I get it. And that’s why, in a way, there’s a virtual user group, people can chat. I think every cloud, for the most part, has its own section of the community where people can ask questions and help each other. And as I said, we have all these self-paced environments where you can little by little take on information and take it in without having, if you’re truly introverted, you don’t need to interact with anybody else.

Mike Gerholdt:
So flip the coin a little bit from us learning to admins teaching and maybe even user group leaders doing some of this birds of a feather or instructor walking people through stuff. What in your experience in both you’ve said you’ve taught children, you’ve taught adults, what in your experience really resonates when you’re trying to walk some adults through new technology or new functionality and have them learn?

Lisa Tulchin:
There are a lot of different words for this, but yeah, I was thinking about how I was going to answer you while you were asking the question. I came up with three or four different ways of saying the same thing. When we first worked together, it was WIIFM, what’s in it for me? I think now they talk a lot about personas or jobs to be done, so I’m throwing these out there in case folks listening have heard any of these. The really important thing for adults is that when they go into training, or if you’re trying to think of developing training for them, the training speaks very specifically to what they need to know to get the job done.

Lisa Tulchin:
When you’re teaching kids, you can teach them almost any topic, and they’ll be much more trusting about, I don’t see the why, but I understand you’re telling me, and therefore I need to know. But with adults, it is so critical that they understand the why am I sitting here or why am I watching this video? Or why am I reading this Java? I think figure out the why, and everything should hopefully flow a lot easier from that why. For one thing, you’ll have immediate buy-in from the people that you’re working with, because if they don’t understand the why, they tune you out.

Lisa Tulchin:
If you have that why you have their attention. I’m not saying they’re going to be eager, willing, and able when they’re sitting in the room, but they’re going to be more likely to be behind you or stay with you as you go through it. And it also will help them remember what you’re training them. It can be overwhelming to sit down and learn a new technology. Now, Salesforce, as we both know, has evolved and is constantly, I think, improving what they call the user experience, the way that you as an end user take in the system, but it’s still scary, and new, and challenging. So the more that you get what you need to know in the moment that you’re needing to know it and not getting a lot of extra stuff, that’s another thing that’s really important in designing training. Another thing people may have heard or some folks throw around is the 80/20 approach, which is that training should focus on the 80% of what people need to know.

Lisa Tulchin:
So dividing the focus of the training to be almost exclusively on what they need to know 80% of the time, and maybe if you have time, have an extra session or just provide an additional resource for what they need to know 20% of the time. Part of that is I’ve learned a lot about the science behind the way we take information in, the way we remember things, and that’s another reason to emphasize what they need to know now as opposed to the nice to have for that couple times a year. I mean, think about it, right? If you’re a salesperson and you’re learning how to use Salesforce, what do you need to know? You need to know how to enter leads.

Lisa Tulchin:
If you’re doing sales cloud, you need to probably know how to do leads so that you can track potential sales. And then you need to know how to create probably an opportunity so you can track an actual sale and maybe how to add products to that opportunity, but that’s the bulk of your time, right? Creating leads, creating opportunities, tracking activity around those two records. But you may not close, depending on the type of business you do, you may not close that many opportunities in a year. It may be a lot of nurturing. So focusing training on closing opportunities may not be as important. That’s just one example.

Mike Gerholdt:
No, that’s a really good example. So here’s why I was looking forward to this podcast. So can I take those two principles and turn them on their head and ask you, do those two apply, and I’ll regurgitate those, when admins are trying to learn Salesforce through Trailhead? And those two principles I’m pointing at are they may or may not understand why, and they’re trying to focus on the 20% versus the 80%.

Lisa Tulchin:
So that’s a really good question because having from the admin perspective, there’s just so much to learn, and it can be overwhelming. I think, honestly, what I had to do, and I’m trying to remember when I was first starting it out, I broke things down. Instead of looking at the whole 100%. What I did was I looked at, now I admit, because I’ve never sat in the job, I’ve never sat in the chair as an admin. I was looking at the admin certification, and I was looking at the breakdown of the exam and looking at what the breakdown of the exam was and what had the most emphasis in the exam. And then I was thinking, well, that’s probably either what’s the hardest or, I mean, I probably was going about it the wrong way from that point of ignorance, but I felt like that’s most of what admins have to do. And so for me, I would probably break it down and focus section by section of that.

Mike Gerholdt:
I think that’s good philosophy. I mean, I was kind of sneaking that question at you because I feel like it’s one thing to give people advice on how to instruct, but then it’s also on, does that also apply to us learning as well? So you tackled it well. How does some of this work? As we both, I mean, we focus on learning and being new, and that applies throughout the years, but is there anything you think of if you are going into perhaps training an older set of users, and so there’s median age, obviously companies try to hire for diversity, but some companies have older users, and should you think about how to frame things differently or if you are in that set, is there a way to think through maybe because you teased, and I’d love to know more about the science of what you read on learning?

Lisa Tulchin:
Oh, yeah. So there are a couple of things popping into my mind with that. One is that there has been a lot written, and I’ve only read a little bit about generationally differences in learning. So that Gen X, Y, and Z, millennials, I’m not sure exactly the lineup, they learn differently, and the younger employees are having grown up in a much more digital first age, take information in differently. So if you’re training older employees, there are a couple of things that come to mind. One is my feeling, oh my goodness, I may be approaching older employee “as a group.” But the other thing is that try to be sensitive to what you may encounter as resistance may actually be fear.

Lisa Tulchin:
There can be a sense with new, technology in particular, a fear of I know how to do things really, really well in the previous system, method, whatever you want to call it. This is something new, and I don’t know how to do my job well. And the reality is there is age discrimination and so you could be starting to spiral into a fear cycle. What if I can’t catch on? What if I can’t do my job? What if I can’t “wrap my hands” around this new technology? Am I going to lose my job? So I think there’s a level of that that could be behind what you might be perceiving as resistance with older employees that you wouldn’t necessarily be receiving from younger employees. For one thing, they’re closer to being in that true beginner’s mindset where they don’t know things and are taking things in all the time. They’re less likely to be as insecure about their job and potentially a little more open to systems changing.

Lisa Tulchin:
So that’s one thing that pops into my head. And I have gone and I’ve trained people on how to use a CRM system when the previous one was paper, and there was a range of employees in the room; they did tend to be older, and there was a lot of resistance to that. So it could also depend on the shift that you’re making. If you’re going from one online system to another online system, it likely would have less resistance. I kept emphasizing, you’re just carrying around an iPad, you’re not carrying around stacks and stacks and files and files. Look how much easier this is. And a lot of them though still were like, but everything’s in my head. Now you’re making me write it down. So I think the reality is change is hard, no matter what. I think it’s just as someone who might be in charge of training others, being open to the fact that what you may be seeing as intractable resistance could actually be a fear-based response. Yeah.

Mike Gerholdt:
One thing you said, which is the biggest thing in all of learning, which is change is hard, right? Anytime you’re learning something, you’re learning something because something is changing. One, and I believe you were part of this project with me, I’ve always tried to really make it resonate with admins. Hey, when you’re rolling out a new app, make sure you’re paying attention to all the other changes that are going on in the organization. Because I know the project that we worked on together, we had a big change in the organization on top of a technical change. And you can be focused on, well, we’re just rolling out Salesforce, right? Oh, but there’s organizational structure, and there’s a whole bunch of other changes going on. I think it’s one thing, it can be a little hard maybe for an admin to wrap their head around organizational change, although they should. But looking at yourself individually. Is there something to be said for taking an inventory in the amount of change that’s going on in your life while you’re trying to learn something? Does that affect how you gain your knowledge?

Lisa Tulchin:
Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And that’s a really good point, which is that, and actually something popped into my head, sorry, when you were talking about how when we worked together, there was a big change, not just a technology, is that you may encounter resistance to training people on a new technology because the new technology could be the convenient scapegoat for a lot of the anxiety and fear around change that is happening. So sometimes it’s good to just open things up or just acknowledge and be open to the fact. I was in a meeting with someone recently, who I loved the way they opened it. They just opened it with a phrase that they said they’d been taught, which is, “Let’s start off by hugging the elephant,” was what they said.

Mike Gerholdt:
Oh, I’ve never heard that.

Lisa Tulchin:
Isn’t it wonderful? I loved that, and a picture of a baby elephant and people hugging it. But it was really, let’s start out by hugging the elephant, which is to just acknowledge upfront that that elephant in the room. We’re not going to tiptoe around a topic. So it could be as simple as opening up a training with, Hey, I know there’s a lot going on, let’s just acknowledge that right out and maybe give five minutes for people to just talk about it and get it off their chest. And then they’ll feel better. They’ll have cleansed the air a little bit, and you can move into, okay, let’s focus on how the system works. But I’ve noticed myself personally, yeah, if a lot of things are happening and I’m under stress, I could have more trouble focusing, which means that as a learner being in a classroom, it’s harder for me to take things in if things aren’t paced appropriately, which is a great way for me to seg into the science of learning.

Mike Gerholdt:
Nice segue.

Lisa Tulchin:
I took that, and I brought it back where I wanted to go five minutes ago, whatever it was, that was so subtle. So from a science perspective, there’s this feeling of, and as a curriculum developer, we talk about the need to what we call chunk things out. So it’s break things down. And now, admittedly, my research is a little outdated on this, but when I was first learning it, they talked about no more than five or seven things in any given segment. And I know sometimes, especially with software training, it’s really hard because, in order to do a task, you may actually have to do a certain number of steps maybe. But I really try to break training down by tasks. So if I have an exercise, I’ll have broken the exercise down into tasks, and if I’ve written a task out and it’s more than a certain number of steps within that task, that’s usually assigned to me that this might be too big a chunk. And I go back, and I see, do I have to break this down further?

Lisa Tulchin:
And every exercise, I should say, is pinned to a scenario. And so it all goes back to the scenario. Okay, in this exercise, it’s usually a scenario. Either you are an admin or you’re observing an admin who has something to do and they’re trying to do A, B, C, and I’m like, oh, well, maybe A, B, and C is too much, too big a chunk right now, and it has to really be A, B, or maybe even just A, and that’s the way I approach it because you need to only give so much information to a person, and then you need to shift gears and maybe you need to talk about something else for a while, let them process. It’s another reason why a lot of training with systems is around watch me do it. Now you do it. We don’t always have the time. I always wish we were given more time for training, but you may not always have the time. So it may be introduce a concept and then have people walk through, but just make sure you’re not having them walk through too much at one given time.

Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, training, unfortunately, is always like the landscaping when you’re building a new house. It’s the last thing and you have no money left, and it just ends up being here’s a flower from the hardware store.

Lisa Tulchin:
I know, I really wish-

Mike Gerholdt:
Congratulations.

Lisa Tulchin:
I really wish we’d be able to have the full landscape architect at all times.

Mike Gerholdt:
The whole thing. The whole thing, the drawing. Everything.

Lisa Tulchin:
Tear the yard out, rebuild it entirely. That’s what I feel. I mean, that’s one reason why it’s nice that there is a resource such as Trailhead, and I haven’t even talked about it, but when you onboard as a Salesforce customer, there are other resources that are available to you or to companies and to customers, especially if they’re on a success plan. There are whole libraries and resources available to them. So I would say, as an admin, find out is your company, do they have a success plan? And if so, which plan and what resources are available to you? And if you have them, take advantage of them. Some of them are one-on-one coaching, I think for Premier. So you have all these resources, and I would say take advantage of all of the resources that are available to you to help you learn and then help you get everyone else working towards using the system effectively.

Mike Gerholdt:
One thing I thought of as we bring this around to a close. One thing you do that is exactly what admins do, I mean, you do a lot, is approach a brand new feature and have to learn it because you have to write training for it. I mean, you have to write Trailhead modules and all kinds of stuff, and admins maybe don’t necessarily have to train somebody else on that, but they have to learn it themselves. I would love to know, based on your experience, when a new feature comes down into your queue and you’re like, I got to write a module on this and I got to learn this feature, what’s your approach?

Lisa Tulchin:
I personally might be more of a maximalist than a minimalist.

Mike Gerholdt:
Please explain.

Lisa Tulchin:
I want to get my hands on all the things and digest them to try to figure out what is the essence there. Now I admit, Mike, I am learning this not because I’m going to have to use it every day in my job. I’m learning this because I want to understand the full picture in order to be able to distill it down to its basic essence. And so my objective might be a little bit different. I would say that the task is easier if it’s something that is new to me because there will be resources that are out there for me to take in. When it’s net new, the challenge really can be trying to figure out how something works when there aren’t as many resources, but I would definitely say being part of the ecosystem, stay plugged in, keep an ear out for the announcements that happen at the regular events such as the TDX, the conference that just happened.

Lisa Tulchin:
Big announcements will be made at Dreamforce and at TDX. There are also what we call world tours, which are events that take place in different cities around the world. I know that it’s not possible for everyone to attend these, but there is the Salesforce Plus website, and a lot of the keynotes and major presentations from all of these events are available for free streaming. And actually, I think Salesforce Plus has other admin-focused resources that could be amazing right there. And especially if you’re a visual or an auditory learner, and by that I mean watching something or hearing something that could be a really good resource because you can listen to the announcements and then they have sessions that focus on different aspects of different clouds, and so you can listen in and hear announcements and sharing about resources.

Lisa Tulchin:
The Salesforce blog is another good site because there’ll be articles published there talking about new resources, and that’s kind of how I get my information for net new content. And then they release webinars, and I know as an employee, I have access to all of them, but keep an ear out for resources such like that because they’ll share all the changes that are coming and there’ll be demos of how it works.

Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, no, there’s a ton out there. You very much are a maximalist.

Lisa Tulchin:
I know, man. I know. I’m not saying do it all, I’m saying pick and choose, right?

Mike Gerholdt:
Thank you, Lisa, for being on the podcast. I appreciate you coming by and sharing resources, and helping us understand the world of learning. Again, you know what’s funny? Is if you’ve listened to this podcast for a while, you know how many times we keep mentioning know the why. And I’ve done podcasts with Kevin Richardson on the five whys. I’ve worked with the Trailhead team on understanding the why. It really always keeps coming back to the why. But I will tell you this, listening to this episode, I learned something, which was the whole point, but it really sunk into me. The fear could equal resistance when you’re doing training. I run into that where people are super resistant, and it was out of fear, not out of the willingness to learn. So I think that’s interesting. I really hope you got something out of this. I loved the way Lisa approached training and talking about five to seven steps.

Mike Gerholdt:
I feel like that was super important. So I hope you enjoyed this episode, and if you did, can you do me a favor? Share it on social. Share it to one person, maybe send it to a friend that could be doing training. I promise you, you have to know somebody that’s doing training. That, or at a user group, you could share it and be like, Hey, listen to this great podcast about training. And I learned about five to seven steps and the 80/20 rule, but you got to listen for the 80/20 rule. And of course, if you’re looking for more great resources, just check out the show notes. Also, everything is at admin.salesforce.com, including in the show notes a transcript of this episode. And of course, we will post this to the Admin Trailblazer community, which is one of the plethora of places that you can go and ask questions and help other Salesforce admins learn. So, of course, until next time, I’ll see you in the cloud.

The post What Should Salesforce Admins Know About User Learning Styles? appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Ella Marks, Senior Marketing Manager at Salesforce. Join us as we chat about the keys to creating an effective presentation, how to prep, and how to create a strong ending.

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

Core principles to prep any presentationWe’re starting the last quarter of the year and that means it’s presentation season. Whether it’s presenting about the work we did last year or trying to get budget for next year, creating an effective presentation is a core skill for Salesforce Admins.

That’s why I’m so excited to bring Ella Marks on the pod. She’s presented on some of Salesforce’s biggest stages, like Dreamforce and multiple World Tours. So I wanted to hear her tips for how to put together a great presentation.

The cool thing is that no matter the format or venue, Ella uses the same core principles to prep for every presentation.

1. Who is your audience?Ella’s first step is to identify the audience that you’re presenting for. Who’s in the room? What do they already know, and what are you going to teach them? Your content is going to be very different if you’re presenting to a room full of admins versus a room full of new users.

If you don’t know exactly who’s in the audience or what their level of expertise is, just ask them. For example, “Raise your hand if this topic is new to you.” In general, it makes your presentation more engaging if there’s a little bit of back-and-forth with the audience.

1. Make an outline and blue box your slidesThe next step is to make an outline. Ella recommends starting by making a big list of everything you could possibly say about the presentation topic. Then you can start moving things around, whittling it down, and picking some themes. All of this helps you decide on a call to action.

When she’s ready to start creating her slide deck, Ella uses a technique called “blue boxing” to make a rough draft. Essentially, you use blue boxes to rough out what you’re going to put on each slide. So a slide might have three blue boxes that say:

• Title about why this is important right now
• Text of the most important point I’m going to say
• Image to illustrate the point

We’re trying to sketch out just enough to see how the presentation flows as a whole. Look for a balance of slides with more text and slides with more visuals because that variation will keep your audience engaged. That way, we’re not spending time looking for the right image or writing the perfect title until we’re sure we need it.

1. Nail the endingConclusions are always tricky. Ella recommends asking yourself three questions:

2. After my presentation, how do you want them to feel?

3. After my presentation, what do you want them to think?
4. After my presentation, what do you want them to do?

These are your three goals, and the secret to nailing your ending is to address them throughout the presentation. Every slide should be aimed at answering one of these questions so that, by the end, the conclusion feels inevitable.

Ella has lots more great tips for creating effective presentations, including how to prep with a group and the importance of a good pump-up song, so be sure to take a listen. And be sure to subscribe so you’ll never miss an episode.

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Learn more* Trailhead: Storytelling & Communication

Admin Trailblazers Group* https://sfdc.co/admintrailblazers

Social* Ella: @Marks_Ella * Salesforce Admins: @SalesforceAdmns * Mike on Threads: https://www.threads.net/@mikegerholdt/ * Mike on Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@salesforce.mike * Mike on X: @MikeGerholdt

Full show transcriptMike Gerholdt:

So we’re halfway through August, and for many of us, that’s the start or getting real close to the start of the last quarter of the year, which means we’re doing a lot of presenting, either presenting to show our work, what we’ve got done for this year, presenting to get budget for next year as admins for what we’d like to do or, if you’re like me and a few of my colleagues, going to world tours, going to events, going to community events, and presenting. Presenting, presenting, presenting is at the heart of a lot of what Salesforce admins do. So this week on the podcast, I pulled in Ella Marks to talk us through and give us some tips on building phenomenal presentations in the art of presenting. Now, if you’re not familiar with Ella, she’s on our admin relations team, and she has done quite a few Dreamforce keynotes. She’s helped coordinate a lot of our release readiness lives at Dreamforce, both on stage and recorded. So she’s presented to cameras, and she’s presented live on stage, and she’s also coached quite a few presenters.

And I think this is really important for us to learn because no matter how great the app is that we build, and no matter how cool the functionality is, we need to be able to stand up and deliver. And being a solid presenter and really conveying those ideas is key. So that’s why I wanted to have her on the podcast.

Now, just a reminder, if you’re listening to this and you really enjoyed this episode, be sure to hit that Follow button or subscribe, depending on what the app is that you’re listening to. That way you’ll get a new podcast episode every time a new one drops, which is on Thursday mornings. So with that, let’s get Ella on the podcast.

So Ella, welcome to the podcast.

Ella Marks:

Thanks so much, Mike. Thanks for having me.

Mike Gerholdt:

Well, it’s been a while, but I think people have seen you elsewhere in the ecosystem. I mean, we’re on the same team together, but for community members that haven’t run into you or seen the plethora of work that you’ve put out, what are some of the things you do at Salesforce?

Ella Marks:

I’ve been at Salesforce for almost seven years now and I’ve done a lot of different things and I’m so grateful. A lot of the time that I’ve spent here has been working with the admin community. You may have seen my face before on Release Readiness Live or on the keynote stage at Dreamforce, but I have the privilege of focusing on creating and distributing content for admins like you on some of our new release features and really exciting new innovations like AI. It’s really fun. I get to learn a lot about the platform and I’m always really excited to hear from admins and speak to admins and create presentations for admins. So really excited to be here today and talk to you a little bit more about that.

Mike Gerholdt:

Cool. I’m thinking ahead and for some of the admins we’re getting ready. There’s TDX coming up, but also user groups for those of us in the Midwest that aren’t snowed in anymore, we can get to user groups and presentations are important there and there’s all kinds of stuff that we present. Not to mention that it’s probably almost budget season. I got to do some presentations for budget. I got to do a whole bunch of presentations if I’m an admin.

Ella Marks:

There’s no limit I think to the type of presentations and the amount of presentations that you can do as an admin. Like you mentioned, there’s events where you’re speaking to your fellow admins and developers, there’s internal presentations. And I think the most exciting thing or interesting thing to me about presentations is no matter what presentation you’re giving or who you’re giving it to, you can go about planning for it and preparing that presentation in kind of the same way. There’s some fundamentals that go across every type of presentation that you may have or create in your role as an admin.

Mike Gerholdt:

And you’ve done quite a few because I remember seeing you on the Dreamforce keynote stage and Release Readiness. I feel like you’ve done a lot of different style presentations too.

Ella Marks:

I’ve honestly had the privilege to be on a bunch of different stages at Salesforce, whether it’s a virtual presentation or a webinar on the Dreamforce stage or even at an event. This year, I got to present and connect with a lot of people at world tour events, and like I said, they’re all very different. The people in the audience are very different, and so the way that I create content for them, while I might be covering the same things is always going to have a different output because I am trying to tailor it to the audience that I have, but I kind of use the same fundamental principles when approaching any presentation I give, whether it’s online, in person, a hybrid. There’s a few key things that I really go back to.

Mike Gerholdt:

Well, let’s dive into those principles. Where do you start?

Ella Marks:

The first thing that I do when I’m putting together any presentation is identify the audience that I’m presenting for. Now, this can be super straightforward. Sometimes you’re going to know exactly who’s going to be in the room. You might be doing an internal presentation at work, the stakeholders, the names on a meeting invite, and you can take the guidance from there. In other times, you may not have the list of everybody exactly who’s going to be in the room, but you have a sense of who they are. So a user group presentation, for example, you may know there’s a mix of admins and developers and maybe architects in that room.

Ella Marks:

And you need to know who those people are in order to build a presentation that is really going to engage them and teach them or persuade them or whatever your goal is. You need to start with knowing who that audience is to understand where that goal fits in and how can I communicate this information best to them.

Mike Gerholdt:

But I’m going to play devil’s advocate and say, so what if I’m presenting to a user group and maybe I’ve only been there once and I don’t know all the people that are going to see my presentation. What do you do then?

Ella Marks:

One of my favorite things that presenters do, and I use this trick sometimes. And Mike, I’ve seen presentations where I know you’ve done this too, is you can ask the room. I think it’s important for us to not make any assumptions about the audiences that we’re speaking to. I think that can lead sometimes to a lack of clarity and confusion. And so if you’re presenting to a user group about a topic that you know a lot about, I think it’s a great tool. Sometimes even just engage the audience and bring them with you to say, “Before I get started, raise your hand if you’re an admin or raise your hand if you have familiarity with the topic that I’m going to cover.”

Ella Marks:

And that does two things. One, it tells you how you can tailor the rest of your content or your presentation to the people in the room, but it also kind of opens up almost a dialogue between you and the audience. So even if they don’t speak for the rest of your presentation, you’ve created a real human moment of engagement with them that is going to be super important and key to holding their attention for the entire time that you’re presenting.

Mike Gerholdt:

And much like that, and Ella, I’ve seen you do this, is if you’re going to ask the question, make sure it’s data that you’re going to actually act upon. Because I feel if you’re going to somehow tailor your presentation and make a couple versions, which I’ve done for user groups because I wasn’t sure what the level of interest or the level of knowledge of the topic that I was talking about was, then you can kind of immediately pivot based on that. And I think everybody appreciates when they took the time to raise their hand that you’re actually curating the content for that.

Ella Marks:

There absolutely needs to be a payoff. If you’re someone that’s not as comfortable giving presentations, starting with the question at the very beginning and trying to weave that throughout can feel intimidating. And what I would recommend instead is to pick a moment within your content where you can do exactly Mike, what you just said. Which is, you have a slide that hits on, maybe it’s a new feature or a different topic. Instead of asking a super broad question that you then need to weave into your story for the rest of your presentation. You can tailor your question to exactly what you’re talking about on the slide.

Ella Marks:

And that can help you build that muscle to incorporate who’s in the room and that audience into your talk track without having to start with that big broad question at the beginning. We have to start somewhere. And I think a great place to learn that skill is really starting with something small, a specific slide or a specific product, and learning from there how to incorporate the questions that you’re asking to a more broader scale to cover a whole presentation.

Mike Gerholdt:

So sticking on the theme of building content, there’s a lot of mechanics to a presentation, but building the content. Depending on the topic you’re choosing, it can feel like you’re boiling the ocean. “I have all this to show, and I’m on slide 68 already. I can’t possibly show “What are some of the techniques that you use to really boil down what you’re presenting given sometimes the restricted timeline that you have?

Ella Marks:

First, before I go into tips, I just want to reiterate that phrase, don’t boil the ocean. That is the number one thing that literally…

Mike Gerholdt:

Literally don’t. If you have a big death ray, please don’t boil the ocean.

Ella Marks:

Please don’t boil the ocean. Global warming, we don’t need that. But I think with presentations, it’s super important because you usually have limited time to communicate whatever it is in your presentation you’re going to communicate. That’s not even considering the fact that people’s attention spans are short. So you need to do that work to figure out what are your key points. And one of the things that I really like to do is I create a document and I will just start an outline. I’ll start typing out what I think the points are in the story that I need to cover.

Ella Marks:

I’ll include any important examples, include a CTA, kind of those key pieces of a presentation, but I’m not actually putting it together yet. I’m just making a huge list of everything I think might be included. And then from there, I go in and I kind of prioritize. So that list is usually way longer than what the presentation ends up being or has way more information, but it is a starting point. And that’s the starting point that I kind of use to say, “Okay, I’m identifying that I’m seeing a couple common themes in what I’ve written out here. How can I communicate those most effectively?”

Ella Marks:

And what I like about the list is that if you’re doing it… Whatever platform that you’re using, a Google Doc, a Quip Doc, whatever, it’s really easy to copy and paste and move around the order as well to think about not just, “What am I including, but how am I going to start creating this story?” And that gives you kind of a framework to use moving forward.

Mike Gerholdt:

I would agree. So you mentioned story, and I think a big part of storytelling is the visual element. How do you balance just not putting paragraphs of text up on the slides and that imagery?

Ella Marks:

It’s a really good question, and it’s something that I ask myself all the time. Because I’m not a designer, I do not consider myself to be good at graphic design. And so when I build a presentation, it can feel really intimidating to think about what are the visuals that I need to create? And there’s a technique that I learned at Salesforce that I was taught called blue boxing, and that’s really what I use. And the way that it works is once I’ve gotten to that state, I have my outline, I kind of know what I’m going to put on slides. Instead of jumping right to what is my final slide going to look like, here is the exact paragraphs, here’s the exact talk track, here’s the exact visual.

Ella Marks:

I kind of take a step back from that and use blue boxes, literal blue boxes on a slide to map out what I think it could look like and how I think the content on the slide can reinforce what it is that I’m going to say. So if I know that I’m going to put together a slide that has some tips, for example. I might put together a placement of where those tips might go and think, “Oh, there could be a supporting image for this.” What I don’t do is I don’t dive in and find that image right away. I really take that step of thinking through, “Okay, what is a visual that can support what I’m saying?” And I go through the whole deck like that first and then come back to really hone in on what the message is on that particular slide and pull in those core visuals.

Ella Marks:

But taking that step to do that kind of blue boxing framework really helps you identify how the story is going to flow and how those visuals are going to support you. Because I will say there are times when you’re going to want more text on a slide than others, and so you want to have a good balance of that. You don’t want folks to also just only be reading the content on your slides while you’re speaking to them. And so if you take that kind of step to build it out first, you’ll have a better idea of what the mix of your presentation is going to look like, how you might use different slide formats to engage people, because we know people have short attention spans, so you want to make sure that we’re kind of switching things up.

Ella Marks:

We’re providing different visuals every few minutes, and I think using design is a very powerful tool to help you do that.

Mike Gerholdt:

I would agree. I would agree. Plus pacing, when you’re thinking that through, you mentioned people have short attention spans, so keeping the slides moving also helps keep people’s attention as well. I think often when I’m reviewing decks or I’m watching presentations at events, and these are outside of Salesforce too, sometimes people have a hard time closing their presentation. I feel like it’s either one, they kind of fade off into the distance. It’s like an eighties’ movie where they just walk off into the beach into the sunset and we never hear from them again. Or it’s like a steel door slamming shut where it’s like, “Okay, so that’s this. And if you have any questions, thanks.” Bam.

Mike Gerholdt:

And the presentation’s done. What’s your approach for the closure because I feel like the closure is the most important part?

Ella Marks:

I’d agree that if you don’t have people with you at the end, I think you’ve really missed a big opportunity when it comes to creating presentations. The way that I would think about it is throughout your entire presentation, as you’re putting together that outline. There are three things that you can think about that you want people to take away, how you want them to feel, what you want them to think and how you want them to act. And I would say that’s not just your final slide or the thing that you leave the audience with. That should be at the core of why you’re putting that presentation together.

Ella Marks:

I think the final slide in that CTA is incredibly important, but I also think that as someone in the audience who doesn’t know anything about your presentation going into it, I think that they should know where you’re going throughout the presentation. And that’s really how you make whatever it is you share, whatever your CTA is super impactful. So I’ll give you an example of that. If you’re going to do an amazing presentation, let’s say it’s on new release features and you’re going into great depth about… We have the spring 24 release right now, I know that’s top of mind for a lot of admins.

Ella Marks:

If you go through great content throughout, at the end, to your point, if you don’t leave folks with something to do next, they start to question what the purpose was of you sharing all that information. And as a speaker, that is the opposite of what you want. You want to be able to say, “I’m doing this presentation to help you prepare for the release, and I’m going to do that by showing you features and leaving you with either a resource or an approach or tips for you to take and go do this at your own companies or deliver your own presentation.”

Ella Marks:

And I think where sometimes people fall flat is they think, “Great, I’ll throw a CTA in my presentation at the end, and then everybody will go read my blog post or they’ll all go follow me on various social media networks.” And unfortunately, if you’re not working in the purpose of what that CTA is throughout, it’s not going to have that same impact. So you need it to close strong, but it shouldn’t be an afterthought. Everything in your presentation should in essence be pointing towards your end goal, whatever you want to leave the audience with.

Mike Gerholdt:

I’ve many a times seen an entire slide devoted to resources and thought to myself, “I don’t know where to start.” There’s a lot of resources, but a library is a resource too, and it’s full of books, but I don’t know where to start. [inaudible 00:16:32]

Ella Marks:

It’s so common. Well, and that’s the thing, it’s kind of a double-edged sword, right? Because a lot of times there’s so many resources because there are so many good resources out there, and that’s awesome. But one thing to keep in mind when you’re putting together a presentation is you’re presenting because you have expertise or you have a message to share. And so really rely on that. Use that to say, “Okay, great. I know there are tons of resources.” But actually share your recommendation. What is the number one thing that you would do. That’s something that you as a presenter bring that no one else can that’s unique to you, what that next step is.

Ella Marks:

We know that where most presentations, if you put 10 resources, people usually don’t look at all 10. I hate to say it, but they probably won’t look at more than one anyway, so focus on that one thing. And you really use your credibility that you’ve built with your audience to drive towards something more specific than a laundry list of things that people can do or read or engage with.

Mike Gerholdt:

A lot of this content creation focused around a solo presenter, but I think it carries over if you’re presenting with someone else. And I see this a lot at our events, even user groups. It’s a lot easier. And myself included, the first time I presented at Dreamforce, I had a co-presenter. It’s a lot easier to feel like more people carrying the weight of a presentation. What advice or what best practices do you have when you’re pairing up with somebody to present on how you divide up content and how the two of you interact during the presentation?

Ella Marks:

The first thing that I would do if I was presenting with someone else is have a meeting, get together with them, chat with them. I’m someone that prefers a meeting. I know some folks like to communicate on Slack or other formats, but I just love to chat with someone about this because you are going to be presenting and speaking. And to me, that’s the best way to get a sense of that person’s presentation style. And in that conversation, we might divide, if we’re building content together, we might talk about our own expertise and where we feel like we can add the most value to the story and divide up the content that we work on and the slides and who’s speaking based on what we think our strengths are.

Ella Marks:

And then making sure that we’re having a really open conversation about that. And I think one thing that you can do that when you divide a presentation, a lot of times what you see is, “Okay, Mike and I are presenting together. I’ll take one slide, Mike, you take the next one, then we’ll go back and forth.” And sometimes that doesn’t feel super. It feels a little disjointed when you haven’t had the chance to actually talk through your content and rehearse. Rehearsing is so important for any presentation, but if you have more than one person, it is absolutely critical because that’s how you’re going to feel out how that story is going to come together.

Ella Marks:

And what you may find is, “Yeah, I’m presenting with Mike, and Mike has a ton of expertise in this one area, but I have something to add there too.” And actually switching up who’s speaking on a particular slide that can reengage the audience. That’s another tool that we have in our toolkits to make sure that people are staying with us throughout our presentation. And all that’s going to come down to whether or not you’ve communicated all of these things with your co-presenter. Making sure that you guys are connected every step of the way is I think the best way to make a successful presentation with a partner or with the group, whoever it is.

Mike Gerholdt:

I would agree. And I feel to that point of, I’ve seen decks and presentations where it’s every other slide. Change it up where it makes it most relevant because there is a little bit with the audience of context switching going on where they’re trying to understand who’s speaking and it should be relevant if the person’s speaking and not just, “Oh, well, that means if we go every other one, I’m on this slide and I don’t know anything about this.” It can also help you regroup content that you’re putting together.

Ella Marks:

Absolutely. And there’s a lot of different ways that you can do this, but I really think that having that conversation with your co-presenter or co-presenters is going to be the best way to highlight how can you use your collective energy to get your message across in the best way possible?

Mike Gerholdt:

Right. Stage presence or stagecraft, even in small presentations where boardrooms I think are super important. How do you prepare for that? What are some of the things that you’ve gone through as you’ve kind of honed your ability as you were getting ready for a Dreamforce keynote to kind of make sure that your presence was there and it was adding to what the content you were presenting?

Ella Marks:

There are definitely a few things I do before every presentation, but I think a lot of it for me personally comes down to some important self-talk and pump up for a presentation. When you’re chosen to present at an event or you’ve submitted something to a community conference, sometimes you need to remind yourself the day of, you get a little bit nervous, you might be scared to present. You were chosen for this, and you have knowledge and expertise to share. And going back for me and giving myself that confidence is probably the most important step that I take before I present anything. I always have to remind myself there’s a reason I’m here.

Ella Marks:

I have valuable knowledge to share. I’ll reset on whatever the topic or the goal is of the presentation. And then my hidden trick, I would say. I was like, “I don’t know where I was going with that sneaky trick.” I guess. Sneaky trick, my trick or treat tip, which is not uncommon at all, is I love a pump up song. I just love something to help, I don’t know, make me feel energized and excited because I know that if I go into a presentation not pumped up, it’s going to be really hard for people to listen. A lot of times we present… Internally, we present in a meeting and there’s a lot of other people presenting or we’re in a lot of meetings that day, or at Dreamforce, people attend a lot of sessions.

Ella Marks:

That’s a lot of listening. And if you come out there with flat energy and aren’t excited to be there and excited to get going, it shows and it makes it a lot harder for people to actually listen and absorb the content. And so going in pumping myself up is actually something that when I don’t do it, I feel like I can tell in the presentation that my energy is not there, that I’m not communicating what I could in the best way possible.

Mike Gerholdt:

You know I have to ask what your pump up song is, right?

Ella Marks:

I know. It changes. A lot of my pump up songs are Lizzo though. I have to say Lizzo. I do love Taylor Swift as well, but I just… Lizzo, the number one song for me last year was Truth Hurts. There’s some lyrics in there that I can’t repeat on the podcast, but if you listen to the song, I think…

Mike Gerholdt:

My pump up song…

Ella Marks:

I think you’ll know.

Mike Gerholdt:

A lot of lyrics I can’t repeat on the podcast.

Ella Marks:

If you do listen, I think you’ll know exactly what part of the song I’m referring to where I walk out and I’m like, “Aha, let’s go. Let’s get into it.”

Mike Gerholdt:

So if you see people at community events or at Salesforce events, walk up to the stage with their AirPods in, it’s probably a pump up song that they’re listening to. I can’t blame them. If you were to boil down and think of maybe, I don’t know… Let’s choose five because five’s a good number to remember. What are five things that you always try to include that you really look for in like, “Wow, that presentation knocked it out of the park?”

Ella Marks:

That’s a good question. As a reviewer of a lot of content, I’m just trying to think the things that have absolutely wowed me. Well definitely first, when it comes to presenting a good title to me, I’m immediately locked in. If there’s a description associated with it like it would be for an event or maybe even a calendar invite. That to me is a sign of a good presentation. I know what I’m going to see. I’m excited for that content and I’m kind of hopeful to dive in. The second is probably… This is tough. There’s just so many different ways to present, but I think looking for people that engage with the audience.

Ella Marks:

So either doing what we talked about before, getting that post-check of who’s in the room or have some sort of engaging component to their presentation. That for me, because my attention span is very short, tends to be a very effective way to get my attention. And I enjoy presentations that have that. I think when people also set context by sharing their own expertise, we didn’t talk about it in this conversation, but I think one important thing that you really need to do when you present is make sure that you highlight who you are. You need to have an introduction that is, “Here’s who I am, here’s why I’m here.” And that builds credibility.

Ella Marks:

So when I hear something or see a presentation that I know the person is credible, that usually also is an indicator to me that it’s a great presentation. Mike, I feel like you wanted five quick tips, and I’m giving you a lot longer than that.

Mike Gerholdt:

I don’t know. I just picked five out of the air because it sounds good. It doesn’t have to be five.

Ella Marks:

I also can’t count, so I don’t know what I’m on, but I’ll say…

Mike Gerholdt:

Well, as a good host, you’d think I was paying attention and counting.

Ella Marks:

This is where I would use a visual to reinforce what I’m saying and remind me. If I was presenting this, I would put together a slide and I would have probably five horizontal bubbles on the slide and a few words about each, and that would help me stay on track. And at the end, I would have a super effective CTA, which I think would be one of the things that I look out for. If I know what… If I’m feeling inspired or motivated, or even just know the next steps I have to take after a presentation. That’s how I know that it was good and it was effective.

Ella Marks:

And then I think my final thing would be, and this may seem counterintuitive, but if I have questions, a lot of times that’s a sign to me that the content was really interesting. I think if I want to approach a speaker after their presentation and want to learn more and want to continue the conversation. I have follow-ups or things like that, that’s a sign that they did a really good job in engaging me. It could sometimes be a sign that they didn’t share the right information. So I think you have to be careful there, but wanting to connect with the presenter, wanting to learn a little bit more and asking a question, I think is engaging in itself. So that to me is a good sign that it was a good presentation as well.

Mike Gerholdt:

I go back and forth with questions, but I see your point. I think for me, I mean if I was to boil it to one thing. I don’t have a word, but the comfort ability that the presenter has with the content. I really love it when somebody, it doesn’t feel like their first time going through the content. And it so bugs me when I see somebody walk through and they click and goes to the slide and it surprises them. You’re like, “Really? Okay.” I really like it when somebody knows something and the slides are almost happening in the background and they’re really paying attention to the audience. That to me, really gets me. And that comes with rehearsals, it comes with knowing the content, everything that you said previously.

Ella Marks:

Absolutely. I think a lot of us think, especially people who give presentations all the time, we’re like, “Oh, we can win this. It’ll be fine. I know the content.” But the reality is people can tell when you have not done the preparation necessary for a particular presentation. And so I think it is a great sign of a good presentation and good content when someone isn’t overly relying on their visuals or words on the slide to tell the story.

Ella Marks:

It’s actually a story that they’re telling where the visuals are supporting. It’s not at the center of everything that they’re doing. It’s really more of a show that you’re watching.

Mike Gerholdt:

I often compare presenting to athletes. Some of the greatest athletes that we’ve had in baseball or basketball or whatever sport you watch, they practice and there’s a reason for that. They don’t just show up and naturally wing it. Derek Jeter didn’t naturally winged being good. It’s repetition and it’s doing and becoming comfortable with the moment. So it’s great stuff. Thank you, Ella for coming on the pod and sharing. This is very relevant for where we are right now. Not only heading into TDX, but heading into world tour. And I feel like community group season, not to mention just budget presenting. I want more things in Salesforce season to my executives and all kinds of presentation times.

Ella Marks:

This is definitely super timely. So thanks so much, Mike, for having me.

Mike Gerholdt:

So I love that discussion with Ella. That was a lot of fun. And as with anything, presenting, content creation, stagecraft, there’s only so much we can cover, but I feel like we could do so much more. And we’re heading into Dreamforce. So a lot of people are probably getting ready to present or even if you’re not going as a presenter, you might have to do like I did, which was get back and have to present what you learned. So you’re presenting one way or another. But I enjoyed this.

Mike Gerholdt:

I love coaching people on how to present and Ella’s one of truly a few people that can do it super well. So again, if you enjoyed this podcast, make sure you give us a follow on the app that you’re listening to, and then that way you get new episodes. And of course, any resources that we listed can be found at admin.salesforce.com, including a transcript of the show, so that way you can read it and follow along. And of course, participate in the Admin Trailblazer community that is in the Trailblazer Group. And of course the link to that is in the show notes. So with that, until next week, I’ll see you in the cloud.

The post Essential Tips for Creating Effective Presentations appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Jennifer Cole, Director of Business Intelligence and Automation at 908 Devices. Join us as we chat about why understanding and documenting your business processes is critical for collecting quality data in your org.

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

Admins connect the dotsJen recently co-presented at World Tour Boston about business processes and data strategy, and I wanted to get her on the pod to tell you all about it. “Data isn’t helpful if you don’t know your process,” she says, “it’s just interesting facts on a screen that maybe make pretty graphs but what does it tell you if you don’t know what questions you’re answering?”

I think a common misconception is that it’s the people not doing the day-to-day work who don’t understand the business process. As Jen points out, it’s often the folks actually doing the process who don’t understand why they need to log data a certain way.

As we’ll get into, that’s not necessarily their fault—there’s an information gap. So it’s up to us as Salesforce Admins to connect those dots and spell out why accurate data is so important.

How inaccurate data gets in your orgJen often supports sales teams and shares a great example of how inaccurate data can end up in your org. Now it might sound obvious, but sales teams want to sell things. They don’t understand why they need to log an email into Salesforce or create the next step on an opportunity because they don’t know how that information will be used. So you see a lot of rushing through fields or just filling in a random date because it doesn’t matter anyway, right?

And that’s where the problems creep in. Inaccurate data creates inaccurate business decisions. AI tools like Einstein Copilot or Next Best Action turn into useless, expensive toys without accurate data.

So the first step is to figure out what questions you need to answer with data. If you can get to the ‘why’ behind the business process, you can build bridges across your organization and bring people together.

Business processes and getting to the ‘why’The next step is to explain the ‘why’ to the people involved in the business process. For example, “If you log your follow-up calls accurately, we can look at all that data and tell you the best time to make those calls,” or, “Sue from marketing will use this to send a targeted drip campaign that we know makes them more likely to buy from you.” Suddenly, you’ve created a feedback loop that gets the people entering data invested in data quality.

Training is the best time to get started with explaining why. When they fill in this field, who else will use that information and how will it help the business as a whole? You need to get them invested in the process and help them see the broader picture.

There’s so much more great stuff from Jen about how to look at your business processes and data strategy, so be sure to listen to the full episode. And don’t forget to subscribe to hear more from the Salesforce Admins Podcast.

Podcast swag* Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Learn more* Podcast: Solving Business Problems with Composer and Flow with Jennifer Cole * Blog: How to Use Salesforce to Manage Your Documentation * Blog: How to Write Great Documentation to Help with Future Problem Solving * Podcast: Understanding the Importance of Data Health in Salesforce

Admin Trailblazers Group* Admin Trailblazers Community Group

Social* Connect with Jen: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jcole-trailblazer/ * Salesforce Admins on X: @SalesforceAdmns * Salesforce Admins on LinkedIn: Salesforce Admins * Mike on Threads: https://www.threads.net/@mikegerholdt/ * Mike on Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@salesforce.mike * Mike on X: @MikeGerholdt

Full show transcriptMike:
This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we’re talking with Jennifer Cole about data strategy and process. Well, yeah, a little something different because in the world of AI and a lot of tools just in general, not to mention automation tools, it’s good to know what you’re doing with your data and do you have a process in place to make sure you’re collecting good data. Also, I ask her about bad data, so that’s an interesting answer. But really understanding what data are you collecting, and does everybody know the process for data collection because as we know, it’s going to be even more important to have great data so that AI can give us even better insights. But if we don’t know the process, then I think we’re in trouble. So Jennifer’s going to help us with that.

But before we get into the episode, just a reminder that if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts, be sure to click the follow button, that way this podcast can automatically be downloaded right to your device so that when you’re out on your dog walk, you don’t have to worry about downloading it because it’ll already be there. And of course, I always appreciate a good review, so let me know how we’re doing. With that, let’s talk process and data quality and maybe data strategies. There’s quite a few things in this podcast with Jennifer. And let’s get Jennifer on the podcast. So, Jen, welcome back to the podcast.

Jennifer Cole:
Thanks, Mike. I’m really excited to be back.

Mike:
Well, last time, and I’ll put a link in the show notes because you won’t hear that a thousand more times today, but we were talking about documenting your process as an admin when you’re solving things.

Jennifer Cole:
Yes, good stuff.

Mike:
I know. Well, I really enjoyed that. I could spend, again, probably another two hours doing that because, first of all, I constantly forget, “What was I doing here?” I should have wrote that down better. But we’ve since caught up a thousand other times and wanted to expand on that conversation because with AI, there’s so many more shiny tools out there.

Jennifer Cole:
There are.

Mike:
I know, seriously.

Jennifer Cole:
A lot.

Mike:
I’m getting the cart in front of the horse. Let’s refresh people about the amount of awesomeness stuff that you work on and what you do in the community. So let’s start there.

Jennifer Cole:
Sure. Yeah. I am Director of Business Intelligence and Automation at 908 Devices, which is a super cool title that basically says, “I am still an awesome admin.” I’m building apps and supporting my team. I run a team of awesome admins and have recently been able to co-present with one of my awesome admins at the Boston World Tour last, what, two months ago? Wow, time flies.

Mike:
I know. Yeah.

Jennifer Cole:
Oh, so much. Talking about process and data strategy. So that is my sweet spot and what I’m still rocking out at 908.

Mike:
I feel everybody now is paying attention to data with AI. Data, data, data. Pay attention to your data, clean your data, wash your data, put your data in a dishwasher.

Jennifer Cole:
Give me your data.

Mike:
Cascade is going to have special data tabs here pretty soon. Tide’s going to have data pods, right? I’m kidding.

Jennifer Cole:
I was going to ask if they were going to be Salesforce branded, that would’ve been fun. I would’ve bought those.

Mike:
Oh, I know, right? But they only work in the cloud, so you’d have to stand outside in the rain. That wasn’t a well-thought-through joke, so that’s okay. You can’t have a zinger every single time. But you bring up a good point. So what good is data if you don’t know your process, right?

Jennifer Cole:
Yeah. I don’t know that it’s helpful if you don’t know your process. It’s just interesting facts on a screen that maybe make pretty graphs, but what does it tell you if you don’t know what questions you’re answering?

Mike:
Yeah. I guess in the scheme of things, if we’re sitting down and we’re looking at our data and we’re cleaning our data, we should really take a step back and think about, “What are we doing with our process?” And maybe to your point, and you can expand on this, does everybody know the process? Do you run into a lot of organizations that don’t know their process?

Jennifer Cole:
Yes.

Mike:
Or a process, I should say. The process, like there’s one.

Jennifer Cole:
Can I choose C, all of the above?

Mike:
C, all of the above.

Jennifer Cole:
Yeah, actually quite a few. And I would expect most people assume it’s certain pockets of the organization or those who just aren’t doing the day-to-day work, but I don’t think that’s true. I actually experience people that are doing the day-to-day work don’t even fully understand the process or why they’re doing what they’re doing or what information downstream or upstream their process is being leveraged in. So it’s everywhere, honestly.

Mike:
Look, we all go to work. People are probably listening to this podcast going to work, like, “I’m going to go to work and send some emails and do work.” And they do things. So when you say they don’t know the process, what about that do you… Is it there’s no organizational book or they don’t know where the data comes and they don’t know what they’re shipping out or where it goes?

Jennifer Cole:
I think a little bit of both, but if I think about the group of folks I support the largest amount of my time against is the sales organization. They have an objective to make sales, right? They’re in sales. It’s literally in their title. And for them, they just want to get the job done, right? They want to make a customer happy, they want to book that order, and they want to move on to the next one. And they don’t always understand why they have to log an email into Salesforce or why they need to create this next step on their opportunity, and who is actually using the application field that they’re tagging about their customer.

I think they get rightfully so focused on what they’re trying to achieve, they don’t see the broader picture of where their data’s going and how that helps the company refine what they’re doing or tweak the customer they want to focus on or tweak how we do things to make them more efficient. So I think in that particular very specific example, they’re just so focused on their job, they don’t understand why or how it matters.

Mike:
You bring up a very good step in the sales process. If they don’t understand why that step’s required and the data they’re gathering for that step, then they’re less likely to do it, right? They’ll just do it in a spreadsheet and then when the deal’s closed, they’ll just go in Salesforce and just bang through the opportunity as fast as they can, right?

Jennifer Cole:
Right. There’s nothing enriching in that. I can’t look at a bigger scope of data to understand, “Geez, a lot of our opportunities close faster when they do a follow-up call 20 days after X event.” And that would be juicy information to know because then it becomes a feedback loop in the process to say, “Hey, it looks like the odds of closing your deal faster if you do this particular step.” But if all of that is being logged outside of the system and we don’t know how many follow-up calls there are or face-to-face meetings or customer demos that are taking place, then we can’t provide that intel back to help them achieve their goals faster and smarter.

Mike:
So if they’re logging, let’s say, a required field, which is an arbitrary date because they’re trying to get through to the closed one because they think they’re following the process, but they really did the whole thing out of Salesforce, and then it’s Friday night and the quarter closes and they’re trying to get their opportunities in, by not understanding the process, are they then creating bad data?

Jennifer Cole:
Oh, bad’s a funny word. I would say inaccurate data. I would say data that’s going to mislead you. Yes, there’s technically bad data, but in that case, it’s not intentionally bad. It’s more just inaccurate to the true story. And I think that can make it very misleading for the business because they might adjust their workflow based upon the intel they have and it actually isn’t improving anything because nobody was being honest about what they were entering.

Mike:
So CEO goes to, we’ll use your example, Boston World Tour and sees the new AI, Copilot and Einstein stuff, and maybe wants to use Einstein Next Best Action, but because they’re just putting in arbitrary dates, the new shiny isn’t really helping them.

Jennifer Cole:
No, it just becomes a very expensive toy. Sorry, but it does. It doesn’t help them move anything faster, right?

Mike:
Yeah. And I think it’s an interesting concept because we always go back to, “Well, this one thing will just help you do stuff better.” But ultimately, before you even look at those things, it’s, “But what is the process that you’re trying to get to? Do you even understand the process?” Is that where you start with a lot of things?

Jennifer Cole:
It’s where I start everything. When a person comes for an enhancement or wants to report out on this particular metric or get data to understand what’s happening with their business, the question always begins with, “What questions are you trying to answer? I understand you are asking for this data point, but why? Is it something you’re doing today or you’re not doing today and you want to understand how well you are or are not filling that information in or following that process?”

Because understanding the process for me and my experience and my team’s experience helps us serve our customers better. And when I say customer, I mean internal employees in this case because we’re an internal team. We help them achieve so much more when we can get underneath and get to the why. Understanding their why is what drives bigger change for us because it often is not just them who need the help or need the change, but actually other people in the organization have that same why. So process is almost like a keystone in the bridge for us. We have to get to it. We have to understand it before we start building across and bridging islands together.

Mike:
Man, the number of times understanding the why has come up. I should get a shirt that says that.

Jennifer Cole:
That’d be a great shirt.

Mike:
Understand the why. So let me dial in specifically for an admin that’s listening. Are there things that you build into your application when you create something, let’s say for sales or customer service, that helps remind the end user about the why?

Jennifer Cole:
Sometimes, yes. Actually, a recent deployment we did was to enable sales to capture who should get automated booking and shipping notifications. And we moved that into Salesforce so that when it replicates over to our ERP, it’s auto-fed. It’s just more accurate. The sales rep knows who should be getting those notices. And we have those fields there to fill in those addresses, but we did something super simple. We added a little text bubble, an actual text component on the lightning page that explained what field did what, and critical reminders about which field you should fill in and which field you should update this address only.

And the feedback we got was, “That was great. I need that. That always will remind me because I can never remember what I’m supposed to do or why it matters.” And it was just a really simple little text component on the screen. So we try to do small things like that where we nudge them through the workflow with those gentle reminders, conditional visibility reminders, anything that helps them in that moment for that particular step in the process to remember the critical reason why it matters helps.

Mike:
Yeah. That’s really great because you think about the level of complexity that is getting added to everyone’s job. I remember as an admin, I’d spent two, three months with maybe a department or a team working on what their process is and getting their app right in Salesforce. And by the end of it, man, you could have quizzed me Jeopardy-level on what was going on with that team and how the data flowed and I would have nailed it, but two months later-

Jennifer Cole:
It’s gone.

Mike:
… no idea. It’s gone.

Jennifer Cole:
What’s my name? Yes.

Mike:
I’ll take, nope, I don’t know, hodgepodge for 500, Alex.

Jennifer Cole:
Yes. Real admin life.

Mike:
Exactly. But somehow you just expect to turn that app over to your users and like, “Oh, I’m sure they’ll remember this.” So when you’re creating an app and have those epiphanies, “Let’s add this box that reminds people,” how important is it for you? Or how important do you feel it is that admins make sure that their users know where the data that they’re working on comes from and where it goes?

Jennifer Cole:
I think it’s actually critical to adoption. Everyone loves to throw this word adoption around, and it’s more than just logins. It’s actually usability of the system and following the process. And we had a sales meeting, was it two years ago, a year ago? And we were asked to present as a Salesforce team to the sales team about critical fields they need to fill in. And everyone’s done those trainings. They’re painful for the salespeople. They’re just sitting there, “Yeah, okay, I have to fill in the application. Yeah, okay, I have to update my close date. Yeah, okay.” And they go through this monotony. But what we found was so successful and an incredible adoption to following the process was when we told them why.

We said, “Okay, when you fill this in, here are the people after you that are using this data. Here’s your marketing team and how they’re using it to refine the drip campaigns to send to your customers. So if you classify them right, they’re going to get special content against their industry or application usage.” And we found, Mike, it was the coolest thing, we found in our support channel, we use Slack for issues and questions by the business, people after that sales meeting we’re just saying, “Now, what if I choose this and what happens if I choose this?” Because they knew who was using the data that they input and where it went, they started to care. And then we just saw greater adoption and questions around, “Well, what happens if I choose the wrong thing? Can I fix it?” And that’s a win as an admin in my book when your business suddenly cares about the data they’re putting in.

Mike:
Yeah, especially for salespeople. I did an exercise like that where the salespeople went through the call center. And I remember sitting in the break room and the salespeople sitting down with call center agents and like, “Well, whenever we get this from sales, it says this.” And them sitting there going, “Well, we fill it out because we think it’s this.” But those two people had never talked. And the second they talked, it was like, “Oh, well we could 100% get this.” And then the customer service agent is like, “Oh, that would be so helpful because then when they call in and ask, we don’t have to spend 20 minutes looking something up.”

Jennifer Cole:
It’s amazing. It’s powerful.

Mike:
I’ll take ownership of this too, it’s the fact that when you sit down sometimes, you work at processes at a stage gate level and you forget, “Okay, well, I did sales and then sales ends here.” Well, sales doesn’t end there. There’s that gray area, and I just didn’t bring those groups together. I jumped over to service and obviously everything shipped and it was fine or then they’d call, except that gap in between there is the parts you got to work on.

Jennifer Cole:
The bridging of the teams and how the data flows between them.

Mike:
Yeah.

Jennifer Cole:
I think that’s where the secret sauce is.

Mike:
A lot of it is. So let’s touch on this. Automation has always been huge, and I know we’ve talked a lot with you about integrations and bringing data over. How does not knowing the process really impact automations?

Jennifer Cole:
How much time do we have? No, I’m kidding.

Mike:
As much time as you’d like.

Jennifer Cole:
I think it can have a huge impact on the business in not a good way. I think it could accelerate inaccurate data faster. If you don’t understand your process and why you’re filling in what fields, you could be filling in fields that mean nothing to your business, that mean nothing to you learning how to change your process, adapt your process to better suit your business and your customers. I think it can actually be an unfortunate waste of energy for your admins and money for the organization if you just don’t understand what you want to do and who’s doing what and why. Remember the TV show Lost, which is very controversial, no one likes the ending of Lost. But remember-

Mike:
I remember it. I’m one of the few people that never got into it.

Jennifer Cole:
Okay, consider yourself lucky.

Mike:
So I’ve been told.

Jennifer Cole:
You’ve saved so many hours of your life that you’ve done better things with.

Mike:
Oh no, I’ve wasted them with other TV shows.

Jennifer Cole:
Well, I will quickly say, for the audience that does know the show, there’s this scene or episode where this guy just keeps pressing a red button and he has no idea why. And then he leaves and someone else has to take over pressing this red button. And ultimately, it ends up being not as critical as anyone might think, but they’re just doing it because they were told to do it and they have to do it, but nobody knows why.

And I think businesses, if they don’t understand their process, are doing the same thing. They’re demanding fields to be populated by their users that are never used, that are never actually aggregated to understand if there’s value or something to modify an existing workflow or change the direction of how you advertise to customers. They’re just pressing red buttons. So I think it can be dangerous if you don’t understand.

Mike:
Yeah. So is that perpetuated by the fact that a lot of products and services are sold with, “Here’s the easy way to fix your X”?

Jennifer Cole:
Short answer? Yes. And I understand why that’s done. They want to show the ease of use of the tool. But I think the piece that’s really hard is we can’t get underneath to see how it’s built to know if it’s going to work for our challenging business problems that we’re trying to solve. And what isn’t really discussed either is why understanding your data strategy is so important and how that tool fits in. I think that’s missed.

And I don’t think that’s always understood by the C-suite or the folks that are paying for these tools. They just see this really cool tool like, “Hey, AI is going to do this for you. I want to be able to do that too. Let’s just buy it.” But somebody has to understand how it works, and somebody has to understand the process so that it actually becomes valuable. It’s missed. It’s truly, truly missed. And it’s hard for admins.

Mike:
Well, I think you said something that’s even bigger than process that I’m realizing now, which is process exists in a world where there is a data strategy.

Jennifer Cole:
It’s a piece.

Mike:
We’ve probably not sat down, I’ve never sat down, have you ever sat down and written a data strategy with an organization?

Jennifer Cole:
Written it down? No. It’s desperately needed, but conversations are a good place to start, for sure.

Mike:
Yeah, but it’s something that we as a Salesforce admin should think about because then we can create a world in which process can exist because data strategy tells me, “We know where the data is going to originate from, how we’re going to use it, and what our end goals are.” And end goals could be many endpoints. And then within that data strategy world is where we start to build different processes that take that data and transform it into useful things that the business can then use to make decisions on. So we just haven’t sat down and wrote data strategies.

Jennifer Cole:
I think so. And I think that’s hard day one. My own experience has been the process that was just built over time because somebody needed this field or somebody wanted to do this. There wasn’t a broader conversation of, “Well, who else wants to use this field?” And it’s something I need, do you need it too, Mike? Those conversations, I don’t think they happen at the beginning because businesses are just trying to get off the ground and they’re just trying to get customers engaged.

So we’re a little bit backwards in the whole process, but it is critical, I think, for businesses to start and stop… Well, how do I want to say this? They need to stop and think about, “We’ve got all these processes, do they still make sense? Are they where we want to go and do they fit into our larger strategy for what data we want to use to navigate the ship of our business truly?” So I think unfortunately, the data strategy doesn’t come until after processes are baked in, but hopefully not too solidified that they can’t rip them up and start something from scratch if it doesn’t fit the strategy they want to achieve.

Mike:
Right. Yeah, because I’m thinking early day one, which who knows where people are at, but early day one of a sales process is, “How do you get the widget to the customer as fast as possible?” Right?

Jennifer Cole:
Yeah.

Mike:
Later stage day one, as the company matures, “How do we efficiently get the widget to the customer and understand our operational challenges?”

Jennifer Cole:
It’s an evolution, yeah.

Mike:
We’re still shipping widgets, it’s just why does the widget sit for six days at this stage? Is that six days lost or is that six days… I don’t know. And that’s where data strategy figures that out because are we even capturing that data to make that decision to figure that stuff out? And if not, then we need to start doing that.

Jennifer Cole:
Yes. And it makes me think about how I’m hearing more in the community, which very much excites me, of reverse thinking, “Well, what do you want to measure? Okay, let’s go backwards and figure out do you even have the fields to start measuring it. And are you measuring it because you’re curious or are you measuring it because it’s something you want to bake into your workflow and your process there?” So I’m excited to hear more in the community of folks starting to think about this reverse modeling of, “Well, we want to understand what our customers are doing with our widgets. Now that they’re using them, we’re super excited we’ve got this customer base, but should we start to target certain types of customers? Well, what are they doing with our widgets?”

“Okay, great question. Are you set up to even track that? And what do you need in order to start tracking it? And then who’s going to fill it in and do they know why they’re filling it in?” That whole reverse model. So that’s an exciting shift that I’m hearing more of in the industry and fellow admins to support that data strategy. But I think you’re right, that next step is really sitting down to define on paper what that strategy is and then communicating it to everyone in the organization at every level of the organization because that just goes back to the why. When folks understand the why, they get excited, they want to help.

Mike:
I’ll flip back and forth. So then you sit down, you look at process, you think of data strategy. When looking at tools, what are some things that admins shouldn’t be afraid to ask or should really get behind and get their hands dirty looking at?

Jennifer Cole:
Oh, thank you for the question. I think it’s setup. As a customer of Salesforce, your poor sales reps, I’m tough because I always want to see what’s underneath. Don’t give me the shiny YouTube video, let me play with it, let me get in there. So I would love for fellow admins to be just as precocious and go into setup. Let me physically see my options. And that’s super cool what you just showed me, but how did you set it up? Let me in your demo org. And Salesforce demo orgs are incredible, like what your solution engineers build and play with and what’s in there. Ask admins, ask for a sneak peek because you, as an admin, not only need to understand how your business would apply the tool, but you need to understand how it works and how it can scale to solve all the crazy problems that you’ll come across because in a way, you’ve got to sell it to your business. Admins are diverse. They’re builders, and they’re also internal salespeople to their own executive suite. So I would encourage them to say, “Show me how it’s made.”

Mike:
Yeah. I also, as an admin, liked showing my users if they wanted to see how I made the app or parts of it that, say sales, for example, if they asked, “Well, what happens if we add a step here?” Well, then I can just go click, click, boom, and now that new step shows up in path and shows up in the opportunity. And it lets them know two things. One, I understand the value of being agile and changing because if we’re working on a new process, we’ve got to be ready to, “Hey, this really isn’t working despite what we thought it would do on paper.” And also two, when we get to that point, you need to know I have the skill to change the application at the speed of business so that we can make that adjustment and keep moving forward.

Jennifer Cole:
Yes, I fully agree. And it’s interesting too because even my user population loves to see under the hood, even though they’re never-

Mike:
Oh, really?

Jennifer Cole:
… going to use it. Oh, they love it. When they like to see those changes on the fly that you were just speaking to, like, “Yeah, I do know how to manage this application. I do know how to customize it. I can improve it for you.” When we do on-demand changes for them in a meeting when we’re getting app feedback or process feedback that we’ve implemented in Salesforce, they just think it’s so much fun.

Number one, they gain a lot more confidence in the team because they’re seeing something happen in real-time. But number two, they themselves love to see it and enjoy how quickly we can support the business. And also, it allows them to understand when sometimes it takes us more time because it’s more complicated, there’s a better understanding. So totally diverging topics on you, but yeah, users love it too.

Mike:
It’s getting behind the scenes, which is digging into process and digging into data strategies. So a follow-up to that, do you regularly share that, and would you recommend admins regularly do that as well?

Jennifer Cole:
Yes, I would actually. And it’s funny, as an admin, we’re often tagged as being a tiny bit controlling in our orgs and love everything to be precise and buttoned up. But I think it actually gains business trust when we crack open the org in setup for them and they can see how we click around because there’s no risk. If someone wants to join the admin team and they’re that curious and inspired by what they see in setup, oh my gosh, come on over. But at the same breath, admins can gain so much trust, I feel, from their business when they expose what they’re doing.

Because if you think about it, admins are going into the business every day and saying, “Show me your process. How are you doing it? Let me see what you’re doing.” We’re putting our business under the microscope to improve it. I don’t think there’s any harm in the reverse. It just helps build that mutual trust and relationship of sharing how to build something and what the possibilities are or are not. And I encourage it. I think it would be great. Actually, I encourage my team to do it. They do it in front of our users all the time, and it’s been a positive experience.

Mike:
Well, I can’t think of a better way to wrap up the conversation than having brought it completely back around on us where we’re being as transparent with our processes, we’re asking the business to be with us while we create the technology to support it. Thanks for coming back on the pod and sharing your thoughts on this and giving us data strategies to work on.

Jennifer Cole:
Thanks, Mike. It was really great.

Mike:
I’m excited.

Jennifer Cole:
Me too. I’m excited [inaudible 00:32:28] admins do, have fun out there.

Mike:
Well, I don’t know about you, but I was thinking of a thousand different times that I needed to have a conversation between different departments so that they understood the importance of putting fields in. And really, it was interesting, after the call, Jennifer and I talked a little bit because so much of what we do when we sit down with our users is, “Well, how are we going to document this? What are we going to put in Salesforce?” And we get wrapped up with what we’re going to put in Salesforce, which we should, but we forget to talk of why.

And that came up in this conversation is why are we putting this down? Why is this a critical stage? Why is it critical that we capture this data at this point? And then who’s going to do something with it to make us a better organization? When talking sales, it’s not just shipping out the widget as fast as we can, but maybe as efficiently as we can and understanding different parts of our organization so that we can capture data. And I got to agree with Jennifer, boy, it was such a good point, having all of your users understand where the data is coming from and where the data that they create goes, where in the process they sit, and having those individuals meet with each other. I think that was such a great insight that Jennifer brought to this episode.

I hope you enjoyed listening to it. And of course, if you did, you can share it with your friends. Just go ahead and click on those three dots. There’s usually three dots in just about every application now, and you can share it on social. I would so appreciate that. And if you’re looking for resources or anything that we mentioned in the episode itself, show notes are right there. They’re also on our website, admin.salesforce.com, which has got everything you need to read, blog posts, other podcasts you can listen to, and a transcript of this show. And of course, you can join the conversation in the Admin Trailblazer group, which is in the Trailblazer Community, that is also a link in the show notes. A lot of people talk in data quality and process there too. All right, so until next week, we’ll see you in the cloud.

The post Effective Process Documentation for Salesforce Admins appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Elizabeth Awad, Associate Product Manager for Prompt Builder at Salesforce. Join us as we chat about how you can use Prompt Builder to simplify users’ daily tasks by integrating generative AI moments powered by prompt templates into their workflows.

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

What’s the difference between Einstein Copilot and Prompt Builder?There’s been a lot of buzz around Prompt Builder these days, so I was excited to get Liz Awad on the pod to pick her brain about it. She’s a product manager on the Prompt Builder team, so you could say she knows some things.

The first question I had for her is one I hear frequently from the community: What’s the difference between Einstein Copilot and Prompt Builder? “They go hand in hand,” Liz says. “The prompts that you create in Prompt Builder can be connected to custom actions in Copilot.”

In other words, Prompt Builder is where you as the admin create custom prompts to write a sales email or summarize a case, and Einstein Copilot is what allows your end users to invoke those prompts.

Practice your promptsWe’ve had more than a few guests suggest that you jump on an LLM to practice prompting but I wanted to know from Liz, specifically, what she’s found helpful. She had a really interesting answer, which was to try to get ChatGPT to write a birthday text to her mom.

If you think about it, that’s a perfect use case for practicing writing better prompts. It’s pretty simple in terms of information but it’s tricky to get the right tone. More importantly, you probably have a good sense of what sounds right and what doesn’t. And so when you give adjustments, you instantly know how well they worked.

Liz points out that this process is what people mean when they talk about “grounding” a prompt. It’s the extra bits of information you give an AI to adjust the response, like “that sounds too formal” or, “here are three other texts I’ve sent my mom.”

Prompt templates you can use in Salesforce right nowAs a reminder, there are four prompt template types that you can use in Salesforce right now. They are:

1. Sales email
2. Field generation
3. Record summary
4. Flex templates

Josh Birk and Raveesh Raina went over all of this in detail in their episode last month. However, Liz wanted to draw special attention to a new addition to the flex prompt template, which is the ability to use free text as an input. That means you can use something like a chat transcript or a case summary to ground your prompt. It’s super flexible, and the sky’s the limit.

There’s so much more great stuff from Liz about what you can do with Prompt Builder and how she approaches her role as a PM, so be sure to listen to the full episode. And don’t forget to subscribe to hear more from the Salesforce Admins Podcast.

Podcast swag* Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Learn more* Podcast: Salesforce Prompt Builder Features Every Admin Should Know * Podcast: Get to Know Prompt Builder with Marissa Scalercio

Admin Trailblazers Group* Admin Trailblazers Community Group

Social* Connect with Liz: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elizabeth-awad/ * Salesforce Admins: @SalesforceAdmns * Mike on Threads: https://www.threads.net/@mikegerholdt/ * Mike on Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@salesforce.mike * Mike on X: @MikeGerholdt

Full show transcriptMike:
Earlier this year, we talked with Melissa Scalercio about Prompt Builder, because she was on the customer side and she had some pretty neat things to say about how they were using Prompt Builder. You can go back into the Salesforce archives there to listen to that episode.

In case you’re not familiar, Prompt Builder allows you to simplify users’ daily tasks by integrating generative AI moments powered by prompt templates into their workflow. It’s really cool. You get to bind a field and put sparkles on it. That’s what it’s called literally, sparkles. I wanted to talk to one of the product managers that is working on Prompt Builder. That is Liz Awad, who is based in New York. She is helping build the future of Prompt Builder. She not only gives us some really useful insights into Prompt Builder and how she’s seeing other customers use it, but also into what’s coming with Prompt Builder, and you may have already seen it. Then, fun fact, we get to learn a hobby. I bet it’s one maybe that most of you do. I’ve seen it on a ton of TV shows. But I’m not going to tell you because you have to listen to the episode. With that, let’s get Liz on the podcast.

Liz, welcome to the podcast.

Liz Awad:
Thank you. I’m excited to be here.

Mike:
Well, I’m excited to talk about Prompt Builder. We’ve talked about Prompt Builder in the past, with Melissa, earlier. I wanted to hear from somebody that’s actually working on the product and doing some really fun stuff, because not only is Prompt Builder a really cool tool for admins to use. We’re seeing that in all of our AI Now tours. But also, there’s a lot of really cool features coming as well.

Look, I’m getting the cart in front of the horse, like I always do. Let’s start off with you. Liz, how did you get to Salesforce and start owning Prompt Builder?

Liz Awad:
Sure. I’ve been at Salesforce a little over a year now. I’m actually part of a rotational product management program here at Salesforce. Previously, I was on Sales Cloud, and I was working on adoption. Which is actually admin relevant, as a new feature on Sales Cloud is launching soon called Sales Cloud Go. I was part of that development. Then I knew my manager, Avantika. She’s the one that pulled me into Prompt Builder, where I am now.

Mike:
Wow.

Liz Awad:
I’ve been working here for around five months now. I’m very excited. It’s been a great journey. Things have changed really fast, as you know, in the large language model space. There’s new models all of the time. We are, like you said, launching some amazing new features.

Mike:
Yeah. Just trying to keep up with … I remember when Einstein came out and we suddenly had to learn large language models as part of our nomenclature. Then now, we’re having to learn generative AI, and prompts, and grounding. My most fun word to say is hallucinations. Because you know, hallucinations, what could go wrong there? But that’s a different podcast that you can listen about.

Prompt Builder, what are exciting things that you can dug into and are happy to work on out of the gate? We’ll preface that by saying tell me how Prompt Builder is different than Copilot.

Liz Awad:
Yes, great question. Prompt Builder is a low code prompt management tool. This basically allows you to create reusable prompts that are being sent to these large language models. Prompts are just instructions that you send so that the model outputs the correct text.

The way that it’s different than Copilot, the way that we view it actually is they go hand-in-hand. The prompts that you create using Prompt Builder can actually be connected to custom actions in Copilot. Then within Copilot, when you ask Copilot a question, it can invoke the prompt that you have created. They’re different in that Prompt Builder is this tool that allows you to create the custom prompts. Copilot is maybe one area when your end users actually invoke the prompts.

Mike:
Yeah. Copilot’s a little more conversational.

Liz Awad:
Exactly.

Mike:
Yeah. That’s also one of the things that, as a former Salesforce administrator, I love about Prompt Builder is it’s just a little sparkle button that my users have to press and they get magic.

Liz Awad:
Exactly.

Mike:
It doesn’t depend on their ability to write a good prompt.

Liz Awad:
No. It’s the admins, now you all become prompt engineers. I will say you do need to spend some time reworking your prompts, testing your prompts. In Prompt Builder, you can even change the models. Certain models are better at writing sales emails than others. Depending on your use case, that Prompt Builder workspace is really where you can test. Just so, like you said, your end users just get to see magic.

Mike:
Yeah. Let me ask. What do you do to get better at writing prompts?

Liz Awad:
I was introduced to the concept of prompt engineering, like the rest of the world, when ChatGPT came out in November 2022. The first thing I did was just go to the website and start asking it questions that I knew the answers to already. Or I would be able to tell that’s a good response, and that’s a bad response. It was as simple as, “Write a text to my mom, wishing her a happy birthday.” When the LLM responds, it used maybe a formal tone, or something that I personally would never send to my mom. Then I’m like, “Make it sound more casual. I’m very close to my mom, so make sure you include that.” That idea of editing a prompt, and trying to have it fit your tone and your style can be used in an enterprise context as well.

The other thing to think about is, when you’re telling ChatGPT or your LLM more information, that’s called grounding. That’s giving more data to the LLM about the type of response that you want back. All of those things are really important in prompt engineering.

Mike:
Yeah. Well, I’ll be honest with you. The first time I ever heard the term grounding was when I was doing the Data Now workshop. We talked about building a prompt in Prompt Builder. I think the very first line was, “Acting as,” and then you could fill in $user.organization, however that worked. It was literally meant to pull the running user, which is you. I thought, “Oh, that totally makes sense.” Then you could pull in, “Here’s different information.” Because I think back to the way you brought in writing prompts, the rest of the world was just like, “Oh, neat. With ChatGPT I just ask it questions.” But here, we can actually pull in and say, “No, I want you to go into my Salesforce org and really pull that data out,” as opposed to just asking it for a text for your mom.

Liz Awad:
Exactly. That’s what really makes it powerful, is that it’s dynamic. What you said here is you can think of it as a variable, or a field, that’s user.name. When that prompt is invoked at runtime, that is replaced with the actual end user’s running the name in Salesforce. That prevents you from having to create multiple iterations of prompts.

When we say grounding, all we’re really saying is data. It’s just a fancy way of saying injecting more data into your prompts.

Mike:
Right.

Liz Awad:
With Prompt Builder, that data can come from a wide variety of places, not just your CRM. It can come from Data Cloud. You could use a flow to inject data. It can get really powerful, which is really exciting.

Mike:
If you think about it, if you really wanted to go back in time, this is where a time machine would help to tell our parents, “If I’m grounded, it just means I’ve got the data. Thanks.”

Liz Awad:
Yeah, exactly.

Mike:
“You’re grounded for a month.” No, I’m grounded for life because I’ve got data. That’s how you get more grounded. Just realized it, that dawned on me.

One thing that I did for the longest time. I love using the little sticky notes feature on my Mac. When I would write a good prompt for ChatGPT and it would turn something out, it was like, “Oh, awesome.” I would copy that and I’d hang onto it. Then I remember sharing stuff with my team early on. They’re like, “Oh, how did you do that?” I would share the prompt with them, the text.

Liz Awad:
Yes.

Mike:
Then they would plug that in, and they would get something different. I realized early on, with AI, the learning curve for AI is everybody’s different, as opposed to when we were trying to learn Flow Builder. When Flow came out, the admin created the flow, and then the record, or whatever the action was, worked the same for everybody. Then as I started looking at AI I was like, “Boy, this is going to be tough for users,”
because it really depended more on what is that end user’s ability to write a good prompt. Or how do I disseminate good prompts to my users?

That all changed for me when I saw Prompt Builder because we can put all that in there, which means the end user gets a solid experience every single time without having to be good at writing prompts. Right?

Liz Awad:
Exactly. The end user doesn’t need to be the prompt engineer because, as an admin, you are created those instructions every time and it’s following that template.

Now I will say you can have different outputs because it’s generative. Even if you’re invoking the same instructions, the response might be a little different every time you call the large language model. But it should be somewhat the same every time you call.

Mike:
Right. Obviously, if it was the same, then it’d just be like email templates.

Liz Awad:
Exactly. I do want to say, now that you’ve brought up email templates, just a small use case or a small story.

Mike:
Yeah.

Liz Awad:
One of our customers was telling us that they used to use the email templates. Now they’re using the sales email template in Prompt Builder. Because it’s generative, they’re delivery rate was much higher. As in Gmail, Outlook, and these email clients wouldn’t mark it as scam. It would actually deliver in whoever they were contacting, that inbox.

That was really interesting for us to hear. That was the first time we had thought about that metric of tracking delivery rate. And how, when you’re using generative AI, it’s not a pattern, it’s not a template. Those words can change every time you’re calling the large language model, with the same theme throughout.

Mike:
Right.

Liz Awad:
That was really interesting for us to hear on the product management team.

Mike:
No, I like that. That actually leads into the next question I had. Which was where are you seeing admins deploy Prompt Builder the most?

Liz Awad:
It’s a great question. It really depends on industry and use case. But we’ve seen a lot of field generation templates, which is what you described, where your end users see that magic button. You use a prompt template to fill in a field on a record.

Mike:
Okay.

Liz Awad:
We’ve also seen a lot of sales emails use cases. Case summarization use cases. It’s really across the board. The best part is, you as an admin get to be creative with it. Because you can really think of 100 plus use cases, that’s why we have flex template to allow you to customize and put in as many objects, or even now strings or free text, as input to a prompt.

Mike:
Tell me more about the templates. I forget, there’s four types of templates?

Liz Awad:
Yes, there are four types of templates. Sales email.

Mike:
Okay.

Liz Awad:
Field generation. Record summary. And flex templates.

Mike:
Flex sounds the coolest.

Liz Awad:
Yes. Flex, it’s in the namesake. It’s allowing you to create those custom templates where you can call an invokable action, you can use flows.

One feature that we just released is actually called string inputs or free text. Where, using a flex template, you can have text as your only input. Previously, we required templates to be associated with objects. But we heard from customers, “Hey, what if I have a transcript of a chat and I only want to use that as my grounding data?” Well, that’s why we just released this, actually this month. It’s very exciting.

Mike:
That’s interesting. Tell me more about that. Because I think I saw that in one of the release readiness’ that you did.

Liz Awad:
Yes. The use case here is that, if you want to invoke a template from a flow, or maybe using Apex, and all you want as the input is just text itself … Another example could be an agent gathers a question from a user in a chat, and you want to use that question as input into the prompt. Previously, you would still have to associate that template with a record, which would just be wasted time. You’re not actually using that record as grounding data. But now, you can just have that template with the input as a user question, for example.

Mike:
Interesting. Yeah. No, I like that. I think, in the earlier podcast we talked to Melissa, she was using the sales email stuff a lot. I’m curious, do you have any insight … Maybe this is just me, and I’ve worked in these overly micromanaged organizations where marketing needs to see every period, and comma, and I that’s dotted, which is why they loved email templates so much. You mentioned sales templates. Sales email templates. How are marketers adjusting to AI, where it’s not word-for-word every single time?

Liz Awad:
That’s a really good question. I just want to point out that we still recommend that a human’s eyes are on the responses from the large language models before they’re sent out. We don’t recommend automated generation and sending just yet. Primarily for that reason, just to make sure that either a marketer or a sales rep understands exactly what is being sent to their customers. It’s really just used as a tool to help, like an assistant, as opposed to replacing that job of writing the email. It gives you a baseline for you to go in and potentially edit or add certain things that you want, depending on the customer.

Now, like you said, some organizations are stricter than others. Maybe they’ll, in their company, have a process which is you still use the sales email template to start, but then someone either needs to check it before it’s sent. Or the admin can actually go into the audit trail and see all the generated emails, and someone can review those and make sure that that pass is their standard of quality.

Mike:
Sure, sure. Yeah. No, I like that. Plus, you could probably include some stylistic cues in the prompt when you’re building that as an admin as well.

Liz Awad:
Definitely. That is recommended.

Mike:
Write in your voice and tone.

Liz Awad:
Yes, voice and tone is definitely recommended. You really want to be as specific as possible. You can even give an example of a great email in your instructions.

Mike:
Oh! Well, that works out nice.

Liz Awad:
“This is an example of a great email we would want to send to a customer.”

Mike:
Interesting. I like that. There’s so many areas now, I think of Salesforce, to talk about with stakeholders as an admin. Not just features that are coming out, but it’s also … I know working with sales teams, thinking of I’ve always had that sales manager that would come up to me and say, “So-and-so writes great emails. How do we make everybody a great email writer?” Prompt Builder now has that ability. You can work with that great salesperson to get some of their great email ideas, and use those as some initial early prompts, that you can then disseminate to all of your sales team. Which, to me, I’m sure that salesperson doesn’t like that. Salespeople are a little competitive that way.

Liz Awad:
Yes, that’s interesting. That’s true, I never thought about that.

Mike:
As a product manager, I guess, admins do a lot of product managing. Is there any advice that you would give that you’ve learned in your year or so at Salesforce that would help them manage the onslaught of new features or how you balance priorities?

Liz Awad:
Definitely. I think the biggest skill that’s important in being a great PM is just communication, and over communication. And ensuring that everyone is aligned on not only what the priorities are, but why they are prioritized how they are. Because when you explain, “This is the use case, this is the problem, and this is the solution, and this is why it’s important,” then you really get that alignment.

As far as how to understand what’s being released at Salesforce and all the new features, that is a beast within itself. But that’s why we have release notes. That’s why we have all of the help docs. I would encourage you to even engage with your AEs and your SEs to learn more and inquire. As product managers on Prompt Builder and Copilot, we are actually aiming to talk to our customers as much as we can, because we learn from you all. Because you all are the ones that are engaging with the tool every day. That’s also what helps us prioritize, is engaging with customers.

Mike:
Yeah, absolutely. Too often, as an admin, I couldn’t communicate enough with all the features that were coming out.
Thanks for coming on the podcast, Liz. I will end by saying it’s always fun to know, outside of managing Prompt Builder, which is what admins love, if there’s anything fun you do as a hobby?

Liz Awad:
I’ve recently picked up, not recently, but in the past year or two, pickleball.

Mike:
Okay.

Liz Awad:
But I’m based in New York, so that requires me to fight over pickleball courts as there’s limited space. It’s actually turned into quite an expensive hobby recently, because they charge per hour and per court. But I love it. I grew up playing competitive tennis. So this has just been my outlet as I can play tennis and racket sports, but not be too harsh on myself.

Now my brother thinks that pickleball is an abomination. There’s really two groups of thought on that coming from tennis players. But I love it and it’s been really fun.

Mike:
It’s about the size of a tennis court, right? From what I know.

Liz Awad:
No, it’s actually much smaller.

Mike:
Okay. But about?

Liz Awad:
About, about, about.

Mike:
But much smaller. Okay. Okay.

Liz Awad:
Small enough that-

Mike:
My neighbors set up pickleball in their driveway.

Liz Awad:
Yeah. If anyone wants to challenge me to a pickleball game, I’m ready.

Mike:
You should set that up. Do a pickleball tournament in New York. That’s what we should have is a pickleball court at Dreamforce.

Liz Awad:
That would be amazing. Maybe I should go talk to the event team.

Mike:
That would be low impact sort of thing. But there’s shoes, right? There’s pickleball shoes. I know that you have to have a special paddle. Is it called a paddle?

Liz Awad:
Yes.

Mike:
Or is it called a racket?

Liz Awad:
I believe it’s called a paddle.

Mike:
Okay.

Liz Awad:
I’m actually not sure. Yeah.

Mike:
It kind of looks like a ping-pong paddle, just a little bit bigger.

Liz Awad:
Exactly. It is called a paddle.

Mike:
Okay.

Liz Awad:
You can get fancy with it. But you can go out in sneakers and be totally fine. You just have to watch your ankles.

Mike:
Sure. Yeah. Boy, I don’t know. Well, good luck with that because unfortunately, in New York, it’s probably also hard to have an apartment any kind of size at which you could practice pickleball. You should take up ping-pong. It’s New York size friendly.

Liz Awad:
Yes, exactly. Well, thank you so much for having me on.

Mike:
Absolutely. Thanks for being on, Liz.

Okay, I feel like I’ve been on a lot of television shows lately that have featured pickleball. Am I right or am I wrong? It’s just everywhere. I think there was even some sort of deal on pickleball equipment on one of the morning shows I was watching. Good for people playing pickleball. I don’t know, do you play pickleball? I don’t. But my mom wants to play pickleball. We’ll see how that goes. I do think it would be fun to have a pickleball court at Dreamforce. Don’t you? We should ask for that.

Anyway, I thought that was a great, fun discussion with Liz. I think it’s pretty cool, the stuff that admins can do without writing a single line of code in Prompt Builder. I wish I had this when I was a Salesforce Admin. Boy, it’d be really cool. Anyway, if you enjoyed this discussion, I did, I’d love if you could just share it with one person. If you’re listening in iTunes, or if you’re listening in Apple Podcasts, or any of the podcast apps, usually all you have to do is click the three buttons. There’s three buttons somewhere, you get a little arrow. You could share it on social, you could share it with your friends. You could text it, post it to Facebook, LinkedIn. I would appreciate any of those to help spread the word of the podcast. Of course, you can always give me feedback on the podcast if you go to iTunes. I’d love to hear what you think.

Now if you’re looking for any of the resources, links to anything that we mentioned, or just great blog post reading and podcast listening in general, that is on admin.salesforce.com. Including a transcript of this show. You can join with other admins in our Admin Trailblazer community. That, of course, is in the Admin Trailblazer group. I’ll include the link to that in the show notes. Until next week, we’ll see you in the cloud.

The post What Makes Prompt Builder Essential for Salesforce Admins? appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, it’s another deep dive with Josh Birk as he talks to Bobby Brill, Senior Director of Product for Einstein Discovery. Join us as we chat about how you can use Model Builder to harness the power of AI with clicks, not code.

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

What is Model Builder?Bobby started his career at Salesforce in Customer Success before working on Wave Analytics. These days, he’s the Senior Director of Product for Einstein Discovery, and he’s here to talk about what Model Builder can do for your business.

If you have Data Cloud, then you already have access to Model Builder via the Einstein Studio Tab. With it, you can create predictive models with clicks, not code, using AI to look through your data and generate actionable insights. As Bobby says, the AI isn’t really the interesting part—it’s how you can use it as a tool to solve your business problems.

BYOM – Build your own modelIn traditional machine learning, models are trained on data to identify successful and unsuccessful trends, which is fundamental for making accurate predictions. For example, if you want to create an opportunity scoring model, you need to point it to the data you have on which leads converted and which leads didn’t pan out.

Model Builder lets you do just that, building your own model based on the data in your org. What’s more, it fits seamlessly into the structures admins already understand. We can put our opportunity scoring model into a flow to sort high-scoring leads into a priority queue. And we can do all of this with clicks, not code.

Building a predictive model that’s good enoughEinstein’s LLM capabilities offer even more possibilities when it comes to using your data with Model Builder. You can process unstructured texts like chats or emails to do something like measure if a customer is becoming unhappy. And you can plug that into a flow to do something to fix it.

One thing that Bobby points out is that building a model is an iterative process. If you have 100% accuracy, you haven’t really created a predictive model so much as a business rule. As long as the impact of a wrong decision is manageable, it’s okay to build something that’s good enough and know that it will improve over time.

There’s a lot more great stuff from Bobby about how to build predictive models and what’s coming next, so be sure to listen to the full episode. And don’t forget to subscribe to hear more from the Salesforce Admins Podcast.

Podcast swag* Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Learn more* Trailmix: Drive Productivity with Einstein AI * Trailhead: Learn Artificial Intelligence with Trailhead

Admin Trailblazers Group* Admin Trailblazers Community Group

Social* Connect with Bobby: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bobbybrill/ * Salesforce Admins: @SalesforceAdmns * Mike on Threads: https://www.threads.net/@mikegerholdt/ * Mike on Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@salesforce.mike * Mike on X: @MikeGerholdt

Full show transcriptJosh:
Hello, everybody. Your guest host Josh Birk here. Today we are going to talk to Bobby Brill about Model Builder, which is going to allow you to create your own predictive and generative models to use within Salesforce. So without further delay, let’s head on over to Bobby.

All right, today on the show we welcome Bobby Brill to talk about Model Builder. Do you prefer Robert, Bob, Bobby? What do you like to go by?

Bobby:
It’s an excellent question. So I’m a junior. My dad is Robert Howard Brill Sr. I have the same first middle and last name. He goes by Robert, Rob, or Bob, so I’ve always been Bobby my whole life.

Josh:
Yeah, I feel you. My brother is Peter. My father was a Carl Peter and my grandfather was a Carl Peter.

Bobby:
Wow.

Josh:
Got very confusing sometimes. Yeah, yeah. So introduce yourself a little bit to the crowd. What do you do at Salesforce?

Bobby:
That’s a great question. I’ve been at Salesforce almost 13 years. I was a customer of Salesforce for about three and a half years prior to joining, so I’ve been in the ecosystem for quite some time.

Josh:
Got it.

Bobby:
I started off in actually customer success group, actually it was called Customers for Life. So I worked with customers getting on boarded onto Salesforce. I joined the product team back in 2015 in analytics, so we had this thing called Wave Analytics. So even well before AI I’ve been working with data. The last year I’ve actually been part of the data cloud team, so I do AI for data cloud, so it’s called Model Builder.

Josh:
Got it. Got it. Were you interested in AI before it blew up, before it got all big?

Bobby:
Am I interested in AI? I think it’s interesting. I think it’s really cool technology, but what I really like is how the technology can help our customers solve their business problems. I was a customer, I understood what it was like to just have this tool available and put my data in and what can I do with that data. What I like is showing customers how AI can help them achieve their business goals. I really focus on how the AI helps business goals versus really caring about all the new technology and all the new models that are out. I’ve got other people that do that. I focus in on how are these models going to be used.

Josh:
Chasing solutions and not trends.

Bobby:
Correct.

Josh:
Like it. Now, before we get into the product, one other question, I just like to ask people this because in technology I find the answers are so varied, was software something you always wanted to get into?

Bobby:
Yes. I actually had a computer science degree, so I was writing software. What I realized is, while writing software is fun, I actually really like to debug software still, what I really enjoy is coming up with the ideas of what software should do or how it can help solve problems. Product management has really been the thing for me. When I started Salesforce, I just wanted to get into the company any way I could, so I didn’t try for a product manager position-

Josh:
Got it.

Bobby:
… but the second I got in, I had to figure out how to get to this position.

Josh:
I like it. From a very high level, what is your elevator pitch for Model Builder?

Bobby:
Okay, elevator pitch for Model Builder is build predictive models with clicks, not code. It started with actually predictive models. Now that GenAI is available, it’s utilize custom, predictive, or generative models with clicks, not code.

Josh:
Okay. Now, when we say model, how do you describe that within the input and output of how we interact with an AI?

Bobby:
That’s a great question, I don’t think anyone’s really asked me this specifically. But I think the way I would best describe it is a model is just a function. You first want to know what do you want that function to do. You have to understand what that function is capable of doing. AI is only as good as what the model is capable of doing. So in traditional machine learning, you would have a model that perhaps could tell you what is the likelihood of this lead to convert. And how did it understand that? Well, it had to get some examples of what did conversion look like, give me some leads that successfully converted, give me some lead that didn’t, so the model can understand what are the trends for a successful outcome or a non-successful outcome.

That was traditional machine learning. You’d have to train your model. Now, large language models are really good at putting sentences together. It understood text, it’s read so much text, it’s trained on that, and it knows when it sees certain words, here’s the potential. It can predict the next word and the next sets of words to come out. And so if you think of models as just it’s a function and you’re going to give it some input and it’s going to give you an output, what that function can do is totally dependent and there’s so many different use cases. But that’s I think how I would best describe a model, is it’s a function.

Josh:
Gotcha. Now let’s talk a little bit about building models with clicks, not code. I’m trying to think of the right way to ask this. Let’s start with what’s your basic user scenario of something that they’re going to try to build?

Bobby:
So thankfully when we’re talking about models, it’s all around business data. We are a company that sells to businesses. They put their data in our systems, and while a model can do lots of things, we try to focus on what are the things that our customers are likely doing. The easiest one, Salesforce has had Sales Cloud the longest, so you would build an opportunity scoring model. And that is nothing more than a predictive model that understands what are the traits that go towards an opportunity that’s going to close, or win I guess, versus an opportunity that’s going to lose. That’s probably the simplest thing, and this is what machine learning has really done over the past probably 20 years. People have been solving this problem forever. But every single customer wants this, and they want to make sure that it’s trained on their data. They use Salesforce because they can fully customize how they want that data to be stored, what object. They’re going to have relationships across other objects. It’s not going to be everything in an opportunity object. It’s going to be across multiple things.

And they want to make sure it’s their data. So why they don’t want to use an out-of-the-box model is they don’t know what goes into that. Some people like that, but our large enterprises, they like to understand what goes in that. So by giving our customers control and just saying, “Tell us where this data is,” we will then go train that model, and we can predict the likelihood of an opportunity closing or take Service Cloud, predict the likelihood of a case escalating or processes, business processes are really important, predict the time it’s going to take for an opportunity to close or go from stage one to stage two or service case from the time it was created till when we think it’s going to be predicted resolution. These are all things that I think are bread and butter to Salesforce and things that they can predict. And then again, that’s your traditional machine learning, that’s where you’re going to need to use your data to train that model.

Josh:
I think it’s very interesting because as you say, this isn’t a brand new problem, these are questions people have had and have tried to answer,. Right now I’m imagining the world’s worst formula field that’s trying to connect 17 different data points and make a guess about the probability of an opportunity closing.

Bobby:
Exactly, yes.

Josh:
How would you describe the level of precision that you’re seeing from Model Builder these days?

Bobby:
The level precision depends on the data. Some models can be really accurate, but if you have a predictive model that’s 100% accurate, then it’s not a predictive model, it’s some business rule. You’ve basically told the model, “Look at this field. When you see this value, 100% of the time it’s going to be a converted opportunity or… ” Sorry, I guess a closed one opportunity. “And when you see this variable, it’s always going to be a loss.” So there’s a lot of times this is data leakage. This is very common in machine learning where you introduce something that basically the model just looks at that and it’s like, “I know what I’m going to do.” So you never want it to be perfectly accurate. And then there’s other levels of accuracy. You could say that, “60% accurate, is that good enough?” Well, it’s better than a coin flip, so you are already getting some uplift.

Josh:
Right.

Bobby:
So then really it’s up to the business to figure out what is the impact of a wrong prediction. And a lot of times the businesses, they know the impact of that wrong prediction. If it helps you prioritize the things faster, great. Then start with something that’s, let’s say, 60% accurate and then work towards something that is a little bit more accurate. It’s an iterative process, so try to not be afraid of doing those iterations because you can get some uplift.

Josh:
Yeah. I’m going to ask you the world’s most leading question, but it’s something that we keep trying to get people to think about, because when it comes to the data that the model is going to leverage, there’s size, but there’s also quality. How important is the concept of clean data to getting that prediction model?

Bobby:
Clean data is very important to getting a good model. However, I don’t think there’s any company that thinks they have clean data. They all think their data’s terrible. I think if you were to look at Salesforce, I mean, we know the data really well here, and I wouldn’t say that it’s clean. But I think you could argue that you have enough clean data to train these models. So it really depends on the use case.

Josh:
Got it.

Bobby:
If we’re talking about sales data, you probably have a lot. Service data, that’s probably the cleanest data out there. Service processes are very much you got to get the data in, you work on SLAs, there’s very much these touch points. That data is really good. So if you ever want to try something like, “Where is my data the cleanest?” I guarantee you it’s service. Sale is people don’t enter things in right.

Josh:
Okay, so I really love that messaging because it’s not that cleanliness isn’t important, but you don’t need perfection to start using these tools.

Bobby:
Right. And then I will say that with generative AI and the ability to process a lot of, I’m going to call it, unstructured text, let’s say chats or email, and getting information out of that is perfect for actually cleaning up your data or even putting it into a predictive model. Then the next thing is layer these two things together. There’s going to be a data cleanup. You’re going to be training a model, but then when you’re actually delivering the predictions, you don’t want to have to worry about cleaning up that data. That’s where the LLMs can be used. Something comes in, you get a signal that says, “Hey, this customer, let’s say, their sentiment is dropping.” Well, how do you know their sentiment is dropping? Because an LLM is figuring it out and saying, “The customer’s not happy,” and the models are really good at understanding that, which is pretty cool.

Josh:
That’s a really interesting point. I’ve actually not tried to really consider that before, because to an LLM, let’s take one of the most common data quality problems, if you have, say, redundant fields or you have duplicate data, the LLM isn’t actually as worried about that as, say, a standard reporting tool would be.

Bobby:
That’s correct. Yep.

Josh:
So I think we’ve been touching on it as we’ve been talking about this, but where do you see the role of an admin being when it comes to constructing and maintaining these models?

Bobby:
The best part about Model Builder, which I haven’t even talked about, is how it integrates back with Salesforce. What we’ve tried to do is we give you this tool where you can build this really, really good function. It’s got an input, it’s got an output. As long as admins understand that there’s going to be some inputs needing to go into this and it’s going to have an output, you can actually put the models wherever you want. The same way that you’re building, let’s say, a flow, and within the flow there’s a decision tree, admins know how that works really well, or even the admins that can write a little bit of Apex code. So as long as you know how to do that, as long as you know how these different Salesforce functions are coming together, models are going to be just another input to that.

So take a flow with a decision. Perhaps it’s a case escalation… Or no, let’s not even take case escalation, let’s talk about leads and lead prioritization. You built a flow, you want to put leads in the right queue. Well, what if before you even put a lead into a queue you can predict the likelihood that this lead is going to be converted. You can say, “Hey, everything that has a score between, let’s say, 80 and 100, 100 being the highest score, maybe you want to route that to a special queue. You understand queues, you understand decision trees in a flow. So now all you need to know is, hey, I have this score. How do I get the score? Maybe there’s another team that figured that out or maybe you were comfortable enough because you know the data to actually train that model. Now you can just use this as a decision. You don’t have to actually show the prediction to anyone. Who cares if that prediction is written anywhere. You don’t need that for anything, you just need it at that point.

So admins should start thinking about this just says another function. I think flow is a great way to look at it because a process. Something goes through step one, you do this, step two, you do that, and so on. And that model might be just part of that process.

Josh:
When you’re saying that’s interacting with flow, are you saying that it’s like I have a custom object, I have a custom field, I can make a decision tree based on that? Is it that same level of implementation?

Bobby:
It could be. You don’t have to write that prediction out anywhere. We can actually generate it live within that flow. So let’s say a lead comes in, you kick off a flow, so you have a lead form, the lead comes in, it goes through a flow. You’re not sure where that lead is going to go. You technically I guess created the record, and then you want to figure out where does this lead go.

Well, you don’t need to score it and write that score back to the lead. You can actually within the flow call our model endpoint so we can get an on-demand prediction. We’re going to give you that on-demand prediction and we can route it somewhere. What’s really cool within a flow, you can also call LLM models. So perhaps the lead comes in, you have some unstructured text, maybe you care about sentiment, maybe you want to understand what’s the intent from some texts, an LLM theoretically can go do that. And then you get the output of that LLM and you pass that into the model. Now we know more about this lead or this person and then make a prediction, then file the lead away in a queue. That prediction becomes sort of, I’m going to call it, throwaway. You don’t need to use it anywhere.

Josh:
Got it. It’s a fun rule [inaudible 00:15:42]. You get the data-

Bobby:
Correct.

Josh:
… on demand and then… Yes, gotcha. Now I think we just touched on sort of two different forms of Model Builder. We have the clicks, declarative generate your own model, and then we have bringing in an LLM, and I think this is what we keep referring to as bring your own model. What does bring your own model look like and what kind of models are we supporting there?

Bobby:
That’s a good question. When I talked about what’s the value of Model Builder, my elevator pitch, it was all about building stuff with clicks. And that’s because we’re really allowing all of our customers to have access to this stuff. But the reality is there’s only so much you can do with clicks and then the rest you’re going to do with code. We have this idea of bring your own model, whether it’s a predictive model or an LLM. You’re just connecting these models that live in your infrastructure, customer’s infrastructure, whether it’s SageMaker, Vertex, Databricks, or maybe it’s your Azure OpenAI model, or maybe it’s your Google Gemini model. We’re giving you the ability to just connect these models directly to Salesforce so you can operationalize them the same way that you would as if it was built on the platform. So you’d have full platform functionality, but the models themselves, they’re not hosted in Salesforce.

So there’s all kinds of things you can do with that. Your data science team can make sure that they have full control. Let’s say they fine tune the LLM so it talks specifically in your brand language, for instance. That’s a use case.

Josh:
Gotcha.

Bobby:
We want to give customers the ability to do this on the platform as well. So the same clicks, not code, we want to bring that to LLMs. That’s a future thing. We want to give that capability.

Josh:
I’m going to make a comparison here, and I’m going to be a little controversial to my artist friends who I’ve had these arguments with, but I know artists who have actually built their own LLM model based on their own art, and then they’re treating these models as their little AI buddy to try different things very quickly and then kind of motivates them in a very specific direction. Is that a quality comparison to what you’re seeing people are doing when building their own models?

Bobby:
It’s a good question. I don’t know that that’s… Well, I don’t know. I think what we are seeing, so brand voice for sure is something that people want an LLM to do. They put sentences together really well, but if you are distributing anything to your customers, you want to make sure that the sentences that are generated are on point to how you would speak as if it was a regular person. So fine-tuning that with specific words and phrases, that’s what we’re starting to see some customers do with their own LLM. But we’re also seeing that there’s other techniques, retrieval augmented generation, or RAG. People call it RAG, which I feel like is a… I can’t just say RAG without saying retrieval augmented generation to customers because I don’t want to be looked at like I’m a crazy. But then also-

Josh:
It is a sort of unfortunate acronym. You’re correct, yeah.

Bobby:
It is. But I guess it’s getting common, so I’m correcting it… Or not correcting, I’m not saying the full thing as often. But we’re finding that that is another approach to not having to train those models. I think research is still out on which is the most effective mechanism because you can say at the time that you want that LLM to process something, say, here’s some examples. So you don’t have to train because training an LLM is pretty expensive right now.

Josh:
Yeah. Both from a quantity and processing point of view, right?

Bobby:
That’s correct.

Josh:
Yeah. Take that one step further for me. How does RAG change the game a little bit?

Bobby:
With the ability to quickly find some examples of things that you’re looking for… Okay, let’s say you are replying back to a customer for customer service, you want to automate it. So customer asks a question, and the LLM obviously can’t really answer the question unless you provide it some information. So you could give it some knowledge right away. So first, find some similar cases, find the resolution of these cases, and summarize that and go back to the customer. So simply by searching for certain resolutions and responding back or summarizing those resolutions, you already have brand voice because those resolutions themselves we’re assuming that was all typed in by someone who understands how you’re supposed to respond back. And then, let’s say the LLM responds back, it’s already similar, and that gets recorded as the resolution. Now the next you’re responding back it already sort of knew how to respond and the next time if you’re searching for similar things, you’ll probably get the same kind of response back. Did that make sense?

Josh:
It did. It did actually. Yeah. It’s like, as a fishing analogy, you’re fishing in the sea that you already have. You’re bringing in examples that have already been contextualized within your data and you’re just like, “Go ahead and just start there.” Does that sound accurate?

Bobby:
Exactly. Yeah, that’s exactly it. And then the other thing is, as you’re responding back you could… Because when you’re talking to an LLM, you have to generate this prompt. I know this isn’t part of the subject here, but Prompt Builder is another great tool that’s on top of Model Builder where you basically tell the LLM what you want do. You program that LLM, and you can insert the retrieval augmented generation wherever you want. It’s like you’re building an email template and you’re just saying, “Hey, here’s some similar cases.” And then around that within the Prompt Builder you can say, “Here are some examples summarized like this.”

Josh:
Got it.

Bobby:
So you’re using this LLM as if it’s an assistant that can go do something for you and you give it a bunch of instructions and you put that all in one place. It’s pretty cool.

Josh:
Yeah, no, it’s okay. I still get another nickel if we say Prompt Builder, so it’s a good advertisement.

Bobby:
Perfect.

Josh:
And on that note, so I’m thinking of the Prompt Builder interface and where you build out the prompt and then over on the right we’ve got like, “Here are the models you can use.” So are we going to make that portion transparent to Model Builder and be like, “Oh, hey, my data science team created this specialized model based on our marketing, our brand, our voice. Please use that instead of, say, OpenAPI… or OpenAI 3.0 or something like that.”

Bobby:
Yep. So that’s actually in there today. So if you’re using Prompt Builder, when you look at the models, there’s a drop-down. The default is going to be the standard model. There’s a drop-down there, you can change that to custom models. Once you change that to custom models, it’s any other thing that shows up in Model Builder.

So this could just be, let’s say, OpenAI 3.5 turbo and you’ve configured it slightly, you’ve changed the temperature, one of those parameters. We have a model playground that allows you to do that. Or it’s a LLM that you brought in. So whether it’s the ones that we have, GA today or the ones that are coming, it’s a model that’s your own and you have full control. So then that just shows up in Prompt Builder and you build the prompt. In the future, we’re looking at how to, I don’t know, give you more controls over which LLM should show up in Prompt Builder versus the ones that you don’t want to have show up. So while today it’s everything, we know that our customers want that finer granularity, so we’re thinking about that.

Josh:
Got it. Well, let’s touch on those two points. What is availability for Model Builder looking like today?

Bobby:
Model Builder, it’s actually packaged with Data Cloud. So if you have Data Cloud… I didn’t say buy Data Cloud because Data Cloud is now being packaged with many different things. It’s a consumption-based pricing model, so this is new to a lot of our customers. But what’s cool about doing a consumption-based model for pricing is this tool can just be there. We want Data Cloud to be an extension of the platform, just like you’re building custom objects and things like that, we want Data Cloud to be as easy as that. It’s just there for everyone. It’s a tab called Einstein Studio within Data Cloud. That name may or may not change in the future, so just bear with me if it does. I know we’re talking about Model Builder and we have a tab called Einstein Studio, and we like to say Einstein 1 Copilot Studio.

I love marketing at Salesforce. It’s fun because it changes and I’m like, “I got to just go with it.” So Einstein Studio, it’s packaged with Data Cloud. So you get Data Cloud, you go into the Data Cloud app, you find Einstein Studio. But it’s just a tab. So just like you can find the Reports tab and any app that you want, you can put Einstein Studio in whatever app you want. So if you’re an admin, it’s just a tab, you’ll find it. It’s only there if you have Data Cloud turned on in your org, but that is currently how it’s packaged. If that’s the future, whether it changes, who knows?

Josh:
Who knows? I do feel like if there’s one thing our audience has learned if they’ve been in the Salesforce ecosystem for even half a second, is that all things might change. They might change their name, they might change their location, they might change their pricing. So if you’re listening to this and you’re interested, please check out your health documents or talk to your account executive. Speaking of things that might change, anything on the roadmap you want to give a shout-out to?

Bobby:
Model Builder itself, I mean, there’s lots of things we’re doing with Model Builder just in this release. Actually here, this is really important, for all you admins out there, we are working as fast as we can to get features out. We are no longer on the Salesforce three-release cycle. We are going to be coming out with stuff on some monthly cycle. You’re going to see that across all AI. You’re going to see that across Data Cloud. We’re coming out with things just on a different cycle, so please bear with us. I know how difficult it is even to keep up with our three releases, so just bear with us.

We, in fact, have a release coming up very soon with Model Builder for some of the predictive AI stuff. We’re making it easier so that you can build models with clicks even easier than you could before. I would say there’s nothing earth-shattering there, but we’re making it easier. You’re going to see a lot more LLMs that you can bring. You’re also going to see a lot more default LLMs, ones that are just shipped. We have a handful of models today from OpenAI and Azure OpenAI. You’re going to start to see ones from other vendors as well. So they’re just going to show up, everyone just has access to it.

Josh:
Got it.

Bobby:
And configuring those models within flows and prompts and all these things, it’s just going to get a lot easier. So please bear with us. Keep up with the release notes because release notes are only three times a year. We’re just updating release notes mid-release, which is weird.

Josh:
Got it.

Bobby:
Trust me, I know this is weird because I’ve been around a long time and I keep asking myself, “Should we be doing this?” And you know what? We’re doing it, so here we are.

Josh:
Not to panic anybody, it feels like a fundamental change that Salesforce might be evolving to in the long run. So everybody obviously can keep your eyes on admin.salesforce.com, and we will try to keep you in the loop as those changes make. And Bobby, do we have Trailhead content on this?

Bobby:
Yes. In fact, we just came out with a Trailhead for Model Builder, just the predictive model piece. I think there’s some coming for LLMs in the future, but just the predictive model piece that just shipped, so take a look.

Josh:
Sounds great. Bobby, thank you so much for the great conversation and information. That was a lot of fun.

Bobby:
Absolutely. Thanks for having me.

Josh:
Once again, I want to thank Bobby for joining us and telling us all the great things about Model Builder. Now, if you want to learn more about Model Builder and of course Salesforce in general, head on over to admin.salesforce.com, where you can hear more of this show, and also, of course, our friend Trailhead for learning about the Salesforce platform. Once again, everybody, thank you for listening, and we’ll talk to you next week.

The post What Are the Key Features of Salesforce’s Model Builder? appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Mehmet Orun, GM and Data Strategist at PeerNova. Join us as we chat about why data health is easier than you think and what you can do to get started.

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

Healthy data drives business outcomesWe talk a lot about getting your data ready for AI, but there’s a simpler question you need to ask yourself: is your data driving business outcomes? After all, AI insights are only as good as the data they’re based on.

That’s why I’ve been looking forward to this episode with Mehmet Orun. He recently gave a presentation about all this and more, entitled, “Harnessing AI: Strategic Planning & Data Best Practices for Salesforce Success,” and I was able to grab him for a quick conversation how you can improve data health in your org.

Questions for a foundational data health checkIf you’re cooking, you want to make sure that you have the basic ingredients and enough space on your countertop. And the same is true with your org. You need to have your data health squared away before you can cook up something tasty.

For Mehmet, a foundational data health check starts with asking three questions:

1. Do you have any objects that are close to or past their limits?
2. Are you retaining too much data in your CRM that you don’t use?
3. Do you have unintentional duplicates in your solution and do you know where they come from?

You want to zero in on which data matters for which specific business need. You don’t need it to be perfect, you just need a solution that is good enough to do what you want it to do.

How to get started with data cleanupEvery org is going to have some duplicates, and Mehmet recommends thinking through a few things about how data works in your business before you merge everything. Is there a business reason to have duplicate records? Do you have other information in objects or fields that can help you decide whether to match or merge?

Above all, Mehmet wants you to know that obtaining good data health in your org isn’t as difficult or time consuming as it sounds. There are free data profiling tools on AppExchange that can help you get most of the way there. So what are you waiting for?

There’s a lot more great stuff from Mehmet about what to look for when you’re doing a data health checkup, so be sure to listen to the full episode. And don’t forget to subscribe to hear more from the Salesforce Admins Podcast.

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Learn more* Video: Harnessing AI: Strategic Planning & Data Best Practices for Salesforce Success * Podcast: Why Clean Data Is Non-Negotiable in the AI Era with Lizz Hellinga

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Social* Connect with Mehmet: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mehmetorun * Salesforce Admins: @SalesforceAdmns * Mike on Threads: https://www.threads.net/@mikegerholdt/ * Mike on Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@salesforce.mike * Mike on X: @MikeGerholdt

Full show transcriptMike:
We talk a lot about data readiness and getting ready for AI, but let’s take a step back. Is your data really driving business outcomes? So that’s what we’re going to talk about today on the podcast, and I am bringing in Mehmet Orun, who is the GM and Data Strategist at PeerNova. I mean, just looking through his LinkedIn profile, he has a ton of publications and a ton of patents. I actually don’t think I’ve ever had anybody on the podcast that has had patents. And I should have asked him about that. So spoiler, I don’t ask him about patents. But we’re going to talk about getting your data ready to drive business outcomes. You know what? Even if you’re not ready to use AI, this is still a good podcast for it. So with that, let’s get Mehmet on the podcast. So Mehmet, welcome to the podcast.

Mehmet:
Thank you, Mike. It’s a true pleasure to be here.

Mike:
Yeah, well, you ran into colleague of mine at World Tour London. And well, I mean everybody’s talking to AI and you’re talking to AI and data. But before we get into that, why don’t you give me a little bit of a brief history of how you got into the Salesforce ecosystem?

Mehmet:
So before I was a partner, I was a Salesforce employee. Before I was an employee, I was a customer. I worked for Genentech, which is a biotech company, for a period of time. And what was interesting about Genentech was our CEO was a scientist. We looked at problems like they were clinical trials. You formed a hypothesis. In a safe way, you chose to assess if that hypothesis was going to be true or not. And then we would look at how can we solve it at greater scale. What that meant was when we were getting ready to launch a new set of products, and the enterprise architecture was going to be shifting from 150 or so disconnected applications, this is 20 years ago by the way, and the story today may sound much the same for many customers and companies, we wanted to bet on a new CRM solution, rather than the homegrown or the older technology ones.
And Genentech became the first life sciences company to chose Salesforce. Because the idea of not needing to spend time just working on an upgrade, rather than solving business problems, made a lot of sense to us. There were a few challenges, like a contact model didn’t really work for life sciences, because we are really engaging with a doctor or a prescriber who may teach at a university hospital, they may see patients at a different facility, they may have their own practice. By the way, this is why person account was born. If you’re curious about the trivia, happy to dive into the details.

Mike:
You need one of those shirts. “I’m the reason person accounts exist.”

Mehmet:
Yeah, I’m not sure how popular it may be, but maybe I’ll submit to shirt force.

Mike:
Yeah, you never know. Might try. So I’ve had Liz Helengo on the podcast, we’ve talked about data quality. And you have a great presentation out there, Best Practices for AI Ready Salesforce Data. Do you think people’s Salesforce data is AI ready?

Mehmet:
From what I have seen, and I do engage with many organizations still, neither the data nor metadata is AI ready, vast majority of the time. Now the question of readiness is interesting because it depends on how far you want to go. What is it that you’re trying to solve or accomplish? If you just want to see if you can get recommendations, it’s a proof of technology, great. You can definitely use it. If you’re trying to get consistent answers based on reliable data, and make sure it is behind the trust layer, at a minimum, organizations need to do an assessment of the current state of their data and metadata, and make sure that their architecture is going to meet their needs, not just today, but on an ongoing basis.

Mike:
One of the questions that you ask, and I think this is pretty paramount, because anytime we talk about data and data cleanliness, is oh, I’ve got to look at everything. And there could be some objects that have two 300 fields on it. Lord knows why, but there’s a lot of fields, right? Because we’re capturing everything. One of the things that you point out, is how do I know if it’s good enough data to drive business outcomes? And I think that’s second part, that clarifying part, is really important. Because when we’re looking at data, yes we need to look at everything. But what is the data that we really need to have perfected to drive a business outcome? So what should admins be looking at?

Mehmet:
Before diving into data that matters to business outcomes, one of the things I suggest is what is the foundational data health of your org in general? And I use cooking or dance analogies. Usually I’m [inaudible 00:05:27].

Mike:
I use cooking analogies too.

Mehmet:
Great. So if I’m getting ready to cook a big meal, I want to make sure I have the right ingredients, and the ingredients I have are also fresh. They haven’t passed their expired date. I want to make sure that I have enough space on my countertop. Not everything has to be cleaned, not everything has to be put away. I don’t need to have every single ingredient up there, but I need to have just enough. So when I mean a foundational data health check, we should always know, do we have new objects that are close to or past their limits. You mentioned two or 300 fields. I have seen 900 custom fields, which is the upper limit.

Mike:
I was trying to be nice.

Mehmet:
Salesforce platform is incredibly flexible. We can add packages from AppExchange, which we install [inaudible 00:06:21] custom fields at times. And then after a while processes change, people change, new people come in, we stop using fields that we used to. Or perhaps fields were added, but we weren’t quite sure what they were going to be. User adoption head gaps. I think you can find many parts of this, but if your org is more than five years old, your foundational objects, account contact case opportunity probably have 25% of custom fields or more that haven’t been used in the current last one or two years. So one aspects of foundational data health is about understand if any of your objects are nearing or at their limits. Number two is are you retaining too much data in your CRM org, because that is going to be part of what data you want to act on.
If you have rubbish data or if you have data that has outlived its usefulness, archiving solutions are great. And the third piece to be mindful of is do you have unintentional versus intentional duplicates in your solution. Just looking at those three areas is going to give you a sense of data consistency, data completeness, data relevance risks. Once we look at that, then it is a matter of looking at what is the fields that matter, What is the data that matters to add specific business need at a point in time. I’m happy to dive into more details, but do you have any questions on the foundational data health outline I just gave?

Mike:
Well, I think you mentioned duplicates. So I’m an admin, I’m looking at my data, and I find duplicates. Where should I start talking to understand are these intentional and good, are these intentional and bad, do I need to deduplicate? What are the types of questions, who are the stakeholders that I should be looking at to understand if we should have duplicates in our system, let alone not even talking about looking at other systems?

Mehmet:
Yeah. When I talk to people, let’s say that you’re an admin for… You can make up a scenario.

Mike:
Sure.

Mehmet:
So how did you find out about the duplicate problem, and can you describe to me what is the problem these records are causing on your end users? The reason I start with that question is I am listening for the answer that is telling me whether stakeholder impact is well understood, and what is the nature of that impact that can really help drive the type of solution we could put in place. Time to value is something that’s going to be quite important, as well as seeking to avoid nonreversible fixes. Because many solutions are not going to be 100% right. Especially when it comes to match [inaudible 00:09:23] type scenarios.
A common challenge is let’s say that it’s a call center operation and we have a lot of context, but the data is distributed, which means it may be out of state, information may be incomplete, I would often ask the question, “So what if regardless of how many duplicates you have, every single record you click on shows the exact same transactional history? Would that solve your business need?” Or if it’s a marketing challenge and they are concerned about consent and compliance, and they are unsure about which of these values should we pick, I would ask a question, “That’s great. Do you have the policies in place on how would you approach these different related records?” And the question that I get incomplete answers most often, is, “Do you know why you have these duplicates, and if you are supposed to have some of these duplicates by design?”

Mike:
I can only imagine the look on people’s faces when you ask that.

Mehmet:
Well, their examples help. I’ve written a few articles on that and I sent people pictures, and asked them how this could relate to their line of business. One of the things I love about how Salesforce talks about solutions is they put a person in the middle surround by the icons of the era. Every industry can use that mindset and think about their interaction with an individual or with an organization. The reality is, whether you’re a nonprofit, whether you’re a consumer company, you are a B2B company, you are likely to encounter the same individual or same organization in more than one business context.

Mike:
Yeah, Very true.

Mehmet:
There’s a high risk in being overzealous in approaching duplicates, that I worked for Salesforce in the past, I worked for Genentech in the past, I work for PeerNova now, I’m involved in the trailblazer community. I Mehmet as a single human being, have at least four different business contexts in my engagement and relationship. So if you try to combine and merge all four of the records into one, first off, which email address do you take or keep, given the nature of the CRM data model? But what is some of the interactions were contact specific, account specific? Are we going to introduce more risks or would we be better off recognizing all of these records are associated with one person, and then use the contact record when it makes sense, use the individual record when that makes sense? Is the example helpful?

Mike:
No, it is, because I think that’s what a lot of people run into, is you run reports and you look at the data very, I don’t want to say abstractly, but you try to look at it very black and white, and say, “Well, there is four Mehmets, so we should merge them. There shouldn’t be four.” But you bring up a very important point, is the associated, let’s say account for this person, really brings context to what you were discussing with that person at the time. Which is lost when you merge it all. Because to your point, all of those activities would just merge together, and it’s like it wouldn’t make sense. It’s like, so we talked to them one minute about partnering and the next minute about this, and it’s like, wait, why was this happening? And you’re losing the context of where this individual contact was employed at. So I think that’s important. Those are the questions that people have to have, is yes, that is one person four times, but the context of what was our relationship with them is very important.

Mehmet:
One of the other aspects is when we’re looking at the records. I think people jump into, “Oh, I know they are duplicates because they have the same name and email, or they have the same name and address, or they have the same name and LinkedIn profile. Whatever it may be.” It is incredibly important to look at the object as a whole, to look at the fields as a whole, for three reasons. There may be fields, record types, types, some other custom field for classification, that actually indicate this person, this organization is playing a different role. That may be the basis of what else to include in a match role. So if the context is different, you may want to match them, but you may not want to merge them. Or you still want to match them, but you want to create a unified profile in data cloud.
Number two, there may be other fields that you can use, that increases matchability of that particular record. When I talk about account matching, I often say account matching is not a string matching problem. You are not trying to match Salesforce to salesforce.com or Salesforce Inc. What you are trying to do is understand Salesforce in San Francisco at 1 Market Street, which is the old address, is the same location as the new headquarters. Salesforce in Bishopsgate, London is part of Salesforce corporate hierarchy, but it’s a distinct entity and subsidiary. By the way, Slack in San Francisco, completely different name, is also a legitimate distinct but related account record.
If you don’t have the depths of the B2B domain, let’s say that you’re a new admin, but you profile your account object, you may discover there are other fields that are not standard fields. They were brought in by a managed package, let’s say D&B connect or BVD Connect, but then you see fields like dance number, global ultimate dance number, that have a high population rate, but low distinct rate. Maybe you can use these fields as part of your match rules also, and discover that you have a lot more attributes at your disposal than just name and contact points.

Mike:
Right. Yeah, it’s really diving deeper.

Mehmet:
Absolutely. And the third and final reason, and I ask this question to everyone, “Mike, what is your favorite fake email address or phone number?”

Mike:
I can’t tell you.

Mehmet:
Without exception, every single org I’ve analyzed, either had invalid or fake contact points in it. What is invalid? Maybe it is sales@companyname.com, or supportedcompanyname.com. They didn’t have an email address, it was a required field. They just put a group email, or perhaps they put their own. Na@na.com. Noemail@noemail.com. If we do not discover the data content that may also throw off our match result, not only we may over merge where the contacts needed to be separate, we may actually incorrectly match and merge accounts and contacts the way they should never be. So we started this from duplicate management. I know the session is for data reliability and not just for AI. At the end of the day, we want to discover what is knowable with statistical techniques with data profiling, as much as we can. And once we determine that we want to define what an experiment would look like, how would we know for certain is this the outcome we’re looking for, and then drive it forward?

Mike:
Yeah. No, you’re right. One thing you bring up, and I’m going to ask, maybe it’s a bit of a facetious question, but I’d be curious what your answer is. Do most organizations have someone responsible for data quality?

Mehmet:
I think most organizations have someone that cares about data quality, but that doesn’t mean they’re necessarily responsible or empowered.

Mike:
What’s the difference?

Mehmet:
I have been in orgs where let’s say there’s a data quality manager, it’s an independent role, it reports to the business, sounds great, but it is outside of the org hierarchy where the CRM administrator is reporting into. Even if they get long, if the CRM administrator cannot act on requests, unless it is associated with a specific project task, there tends to be delays or friction. Because I don’t see a lot of organizations saying we need to launch a data quality initiative. Most of the initiatives are business initiatives where data quality assessments, verification, and as needed improvement should be a part of it. But if your job is to ensure data quality is good, if you are not authorized to be able to initiate projects that can then be prioritized, you may not even be able to get an AppExchange package installed in a quick and timely manner.
Now on the flip side, you may be an admin and you have the rights and you are close to the system. You may not know that there are tools and techniques out there that helps you discover whether that field that was so urgent that you just edit and rolled out, is being used at all. Tracking user adoption of fields be rolled out, pick list values be rolled out, is something admins ideally would and should do if they’re informed by effective techniques, and if their [inaudible 00:19:26] allow them to not just add a field but put in place the processes to monitor the usage of that field.
Honestly, one of the reasons I’m most excited to be on this podcast is to be able to talk about these things being not only possible. But fairly easy and not time-consuming. So we can broaden the conversation on how do we make sure the good work admins put in is actually being impactful. And admins can even be more empowered to monitor what is being used, what is not being used, what is being used poorly. To be able to raise these to their stakeholders and drive that level of awareness, so they’re being more impactful on any line of business.

Mike:
No, I understand. Okay, so if I’m hearing this, depends on how big my backlog is and my requests are for new features, in your opinion, how much time should admins be spending ensuring data quality is happening in their org?

Mehmet:
I don’t know that I can answer that with number of days or percentage of time, as opposed to when should they look at their quality and act accordingly. Because each work is going to be a little bit different. One of the things I believe in, is if I’m a new admin, and you mentioned this earlier, she has a great LinkedIn post she did on what is the first thing you look at as a admin in a new org, and the answer is very broadly, “I like looking at for the foundational objects, what can I tell about the usage in current plus one year versus the life of the object?” That’s a starting point data profiling scenario for me. And the reason is when I look at accounts, contacts, opportunities, and cases alone, or let’s throw in leads for good measure, it’s going to give me a sense of how well adapted is this org.
It’s a really good baseline. I want to know what fields are not used or no longer used, what fields appear to be used but not really used, because they only have the default value. The number of times I see 100% populated fields with one and only one value, is pretty significant. And to me that means it either is driving code somehow, or someone has set up a field with a default value and never looked at it again. I then look at what is my foundational health, and with the right tools on AppExchange, you can get much of these insights in a single business day. Then you have the ability to have a conversation with your manager, with your stakeholder, that is about starting the job and having an understanding of the foundational health. The other piece I look at, is if I’m starting on a new project, and my role as an admin is supporting the needs of that project, I’m going to focus on a scenario that is specifically for that.
Maybe we have HR cases, customer cases, and partner cases in our org, but this project is just about customer cases. I’m going to want to look at what can I tell about the cases that are coming in that have caused successfully or unsuccessfully, whatever is the definition for my business. And I want to look at the fields that are being consistently populated with high fidelity, and then compare the difference between successful and unsuccessful outcomes. The way admins can minimize the amount of time they are spending analyzing data, is reports are great, but creating reports just on field rates are incredibly time-consuming and not scalable. There are great free data profiling tools that are 100% native on AppExchange. Start with one and start running different scenarios to see what you can tell about the state of your data. And then the best way to make sure that you don’t have to keep checking is, set up and monitoring scenario.
Salesforce CFJ has been talking about the importance of profiling, cleanup, and monitoring for a long time. When I go to roundtables, I see almost no one monitoring their data reliability. And with flow, with the right profiling tools, it is something you can very easily configure, and detect deviations whether your sale rates are going down, or you used to capture an active pick list value, it’s no longer being picked up. Send a targeted alert based on understanding the fields that matter to a particular outcome. And I think three to six months, from the beginning of this journey, people are going to start noticing a higher level of either user or admin engagement.

Mike:
Yeah. I also like you point out the idea of a data owner. I think that’s important. That’s something that admins when they’re meeting with stakeholders, can sit down and really kind of empower one or two, maybe multiple people, within a team, along with the stakeholder to really kind of be the overseer of that data. And these can be that next level admin, maybe people that are looking to move up into the organize, and take ownership of that. I think that’s a powerful idea.

Mehmet:
And the nice thing about what you mentioned, is it could be an admin who wants to increase their scope and impact. It could be somebody in a line of business. At Salesforce, for example, the owner for account and opportunity fits within sales operations.

Mike:
Makes sense.

Mehmet:
Yeah, because that is where you’re going to be closer to it. And if I recall, the ownership for contact and lead, set in the marketing organization. Because that is where you’re wanting to make sure you have a holistic understanding from lead to contact, and you’re also being consistent and compliant. For shared entities or when you are starting new, an admin would make sense, especially admins that are close to their business, and know what data matters or not. It is about increasing impact. And for anyone that doesn’t know, you can capture data owner along with data sensitivity as part of your object manager and CRM metadata. A lot of people do not seem these attributes exist.

Mike:
Yeah. As we kind of wrap things up, we talked a lot about the doing. And sometimes ironically we get caught up on the doing, and we forget to actually look at what the goal is. And so how do you define success when you’re doing data cleanup? I mean, I’m sure there’s multiple ways to define it, but what are things that admin should look at in terms of creating that definition of success so that they can show progress to the stakeholders that they’re making their way towards AI ready data?

Mehmet:
I was lucky to have a mentor that would say, “Unless you can define how you’re going to demonstrate success at the end of your project, you’re not going to start working on it.” Now, we don’t always have that luxury, but part of it is to be able to say what do we need to demonstrate differently. We started the conversation with duplicate management. And if people are seeing too many duplicates, and the concern is inconsistent data when they look at one record versus the other, perhaps the definition of success is they see consistent, complete, correct data. Which makes it not about merging anymore, by the way. It’s about data consistency and correctness, which is what is impacting the end users. And if you think about it that way, we can now start taking about hiding records over time. Because everyone is already looking at information the same way, rather than taking the riskier task of merging records and then worry about, “Can I on unmerge?”
If it’s about an AI outcome, how would we know and users are going to be able to rely on the information? AI is not just one flavor of technology. We have deterministic solutions, we have probabilistic solutions, right? We have Einstein Discovery as well as Einstein Copilot. So at the end of the day, can we define a process that is human repeatable, to then demonstrate how this is being automated at scale? This is one of the things that AI is very good at. If it is going to be about judgment calls, an AI may or may not be as good at it, so we need to look at what is that feedback loop that can also be provided back to an admin. And sometimes data readiness is about having just the right data and just the right metadata you need for completeness sake. Einstein Copilot leverages the field description metadata in finding what fields to look at for information. Sensitivity classifications are also important.
And sometimes you need to add a few additional fields in order to inform what AI could do for you. Just last week, gave a brief presentation on what if we can leverage copilot to inform end users that while their opportunity cost probability is at 75%, because as you move it along the stage, it updates the probability percentage, AI could tell you when that opportunity was actually at risk. It says, actually your risk of closing on time was 50%, 75%, whatever it may be. The idea of adding formula fields that most admins know about, to assess record level data quality, is something you can actually define, and then feed into your prompts, so you can look at information completeness at the record level, and then use that to inform your end users. The key message here is sometimes data completeness is about knowing what to remove, and sometimes it’s about knowing what to add. And it all has to be about specific business use cases and specific business outcomes at the point of customer engagement.

Mike:
Yeah. Oh, there’s never a simple answer, is there?

Mehmet:
Rarely, and I think this is what makes this a fulfilling journey. None of us have all the answers, but there are positive patterns and anti-patterns out there. I love reading the admin blog and listening to this podcast, I love reading articles on Salesforce Ben, going to Trailblazer community events, and in person get togethers. Because we shared stories, we complain, but then we make suggestions on, “Have you considered this way of approaching it?” And this is how we keep learning and how we keep being better.

Mike:
Yeah, I would agree. I think it’s much like when earlier this year I talked to David about puzzle solving, and sometimes it’s like you literally just have to sit down, put the puzzle down, give your brain a break, and then come back to it refreshed, and with a different perspective, and that changes everything. So I would agree. Mehmet, thanks for coming on the podcast and talking about a different perspective to AI readiness, than what I’ve already covered. Because I feel there’s a lot to cover, so I appreciate you sharing your insights, and getting us hopefully AI ready.

Mehmet:
As you said, it is a journey. I hope this conversation helps all the listeners on what are some of the things to consider, right? It is not visual, we are not pointing to a roadmap. Much of this is really a mindset. And if anyone is curious about furthering the conversation, I am happy to be a part of that conversation. Feel free to reach out to me.

Mike:
So that was a fun conversation with Mehmet. I love the idea of a data owner. I don’t know why I haven’t thought of that. Somebody that works with the stakeholders in every department, and kind of owns the data, right? It’s like when you get a puppy, making sure that somebody is always going to keep their bowl of kibble full.
I guess the kibble is the data in this scenario. That’s the best I can come up with, but I really like that idea. I think that’s something that we and Salesforce administrators are doing our quarterly check-ins with our stakeholders, and talking about business objectives. I think that’s something we should start bringing up, and really having that conversation even with the larger organization, as we branch out and maybe bring in data cloud, and have the conversations with IT. Data owners. That’s the next thing we need to be talking about. But anyway, if you love this episode, and I did, I thought it was great. Because it’s more than just really reducing duplicates and figuring out good data and bad data, as you heard. But let’s go ahead and just share this episode. You do me a favor, just share it. Just click share in whatever podcasting app you’re listening to, and then that way you can send it to your friends who are maybe thinking about doing some data stuff.
I promise you everybody’s doing data cleanup. Now, Mehmet mentioned some things and some links. I’ll be sure to put those in the show notes as always. And of course, if you enjoyed this episode, there’s tons more episodes. Everything can be found admin.salesforce.com, which is just your one stop for everything Salesforce admin, including a transcript of the show. Now, if you want to join the conversation, there is the Admin Trailblazer group, and that of course is in the Trailblazer community. Of course, the link is in the show notes there. So with that, until next week, all of you data fans, I will see you in the cloud.

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Warren Walters, Salesforce MVP and host of the Salesforce Mentor YouTube channel and website.

Join us as we chat about what admins and devs can learn from each other and why everyone can learn to code.

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

The rise of the admin-eloperIf you’ve ever taken a peek at Warren’s content, you may have noticed that a lot of it is about learning how to code in Apex. So why have him on a podcast for admins? That’s dev stuff, right?

Warren has noted that there’s an increasing convergence between these two roles. Personally, I’ve gained confidence in implementing code because AI assists in clarifying the processes involved. Similarly, for developers, using declarative tools such as flows and formulas can be much simpler than crafting solutions in Apex.

In short, we’re all becoming admin-elopers.

Why Salesforce Admins should learn to codeOne of the biggest misconceptions that Warren wants to dispel is that only geniuses can understand coding. The truth is that some of the best developers he knows are people who never went to school for it and taught themselves everything they know.

As an admin, you don’t necessarily need to know how to build complex Apex customizations. A basic working knowledge of how programming works can get you far, especially when combined with all the declarative tools at your disposal.

Soft skills can help you build your careerFinally, Warren emphasizes the importance of honing your soft skills. A self-described introvert, he’s found that focusing on becoming a better communicator has helped him find his way into new roles and bigger opportunities.

He also urges you to think about your personal branding or, as he puts it, “how you want to present yourself to the outside world.” His YouTube channel has opened doors for him, but even something as simple as a portfolio can really help you stand out from the crowd.

There’s a lot more great stuff from Warren about his experience as a consultant and as a mentor, so be sure to listen to the full episode. And don’t forget to subscribe to hear more from the Salesforce Admins Podcast.

Podcast swag* Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Learn more* SalesforceMentor.com * Video: Salesforce Mentor on YouTube * Video: Salesforce Apex Hours on YouTube * Video: Coding with the Force on YouTube * freeCodeCamp.org * Podcast: How Can Solving Sudoku and Wordle Enhance Your Critical Thinking Skills?

Admin Trailblazers Group* Admin Trailblazers Community Group

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Full show transcriptMike Gerholdt:
This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we are talking about mentorship and learning how to code. Surprisingly, not surprisingly, because admins and developers need to know the best practices for creating our apps and deploying the best technology for our organizations.

So I’m going to bring on Warren Walters who is a Salesforce consultant. He’s an admin, he’s a developer, he’s a mentor and a self-described general geek. Now, Warren’s on because he runs a really cool YouTube channel, and I came across his TikToks where he does Salesforce tutorials to help you understand and master the concept of different things in Salesforce.

He has this really cool site, salesforcementor.com, and just a really fun guy to talk about in terms of the world of mentorship, what a lot of skills are that he’s seeing, and things that people should be paying attention to.

Now, before we get Warren on the podcast, I just want to make sure that whatever you’re using to listen to the Salesforce Admins podcast, make sure you hit that follow or subscribe button because then new episodes will show up on your phone or on your computer right away. So with that, let’s get to our conversation with Warren.
So Warren, welcome to the podcast.

Warren Walters:
Well, hey Mike, I’m happy to be here. Super excited because I’ve been listening to the podcast for such a long time and I’m finally on it, which is, I don’t know if it’s a dream come true or an honor, but I’m just happy to be here.

Mike Gerholdt:
It’s destiny.

Warren Walters:
I’ll take that.

Mike Gerholdt:
That’s what I’ll call it, it’s destiny. Well, I ran across your TikToks when I was posting stuff about the podcast and really loved some of the videos that you’re doing and the topics you’re talking about. So let’s just start off with what you do in the Salesforce ecosystem and how you got started.

Warren Walters:
Sure. So my name is Warren Walters. I am a Salesforce engineer. I do lots and lots of development. I probably talk too much about development. Some of you may or may not have seen my face on YouTube, and that’s where I primarily host a lot of my content.
And just from my side, I’ve been in development for about 10 years now. Various different companies, various types of companies to consulting ISVs in-House. And more recently, I’ve been focusing on a lot of mentorship and training in the Salesforce development space. So that’s a little bit about me. I can dive deeper depending on where you want to go.

Mike Gerholdt:
Well, I think the mentorship part is intriguing. You said development a lot in this is admin podcast, but we kind of all live in the same space now. I think what’s interesting is when I started doing Salesforce things back in 2006, there was a clear line between here’s things I can do with the UI.

Drag-and-drop GUI was a thing. Oh my God, it’s WYSIWYG now, that was the new acronym back in ’06. But then there was also really hard things that you had to learn. I remember going across to another part of my organization and talking to a developer who had to learn Python, how to deploy stuff.

So there was code and there was the hard way of doing things, and there was the unhard way of doing things as people looked at it. Now those lines seem to be blurred. I mean, I’m looking at some of the data cloud stuff that we’re coming out with, and you can very seamlessly connect things through a UI.

So let’s start with that is sometimes you hear terms where people mash together names of personas of admin and developer, and they think just because it’s declarative, it must be developer or it must be admin. And because it’s code, it must be developer.

Warren Walters:
Yeah. So it’s funny you bring up those personas in the mashing admin and developer together, because as far as I know, it’s called or it’s rising to be called admineloper. I’ve heard that a couple of times [inaudible 00:04:25]-

Mike Gerholdt:
It makes me think of Jackalope. Have you ever heard of a Jackalope? It’s a rabbit with weird horns.

Warren Walters:
Yeah, maybe that’ll be their mask on it in a couple of weeks. Dream Forces around the corner.

Mike Gerholdt:
It is.

Warren Walters:
But yeah, so from my side, especially with the mentorship and what I like to do or a lot of what I do is to help people understand that there’s not just one type of person anymore. Maybe years ago it was like that, but now it is very fruitful for you to understand all sides of the Salesforce. And this could be the configuration.

So knowing how to set things up and the fields and the whizzy wigs like you mentioned, but also the benefits of knowing some development things. Now, maybe you don’t need to jump all the way in where you’re writing custom integrations yourself, but to just understand those core fundamental concepts of development can really help you build out more complex solutions and communicate better with your teams.

And through mentorship, especially with a lot of admins, it’s all about encouraging them and showing them different resources they can use to really understand some of the concepts that were traditionally a bit foreign to them or locked away in a separate area that’s only for developers, which is not true anymore.

Mike Gerholdt:
They’ll be developers, let’s put that on the map. It’s interesting because I think maybe, I’ll go back 18 months ago before I had a really cognizant working awareness of AI. Learning code meant copy the snippet of code, find a developer friend and be like, what does this do?
Now, I put a validation rule into ChatGPT just to have it double check what I was doing. And it can tell you back, you can copy snippets of code into AI and have it tell you what it’s doing. So I have to believe that some of that acceleration for admins, just basic understanding of code is a little bit greater now that we have some tools like that, right?

Warren Walters:
Yeah, it’s really been an explosion of what tools we have at our availability to help us understand it a lot better. In the past, we had maybe things like Stack Overflow and different websites you could go to, or if you were taking it back, you have to buy a book or something and try to read it. And that barrier to entry-

Mike Gerholdt:
The library.

Warren Walters:
That barrier to entry really stopped a lot of people from diving in and understanding certain things that were going on in Salesforce development and in code. But now with those other types of tools and even the tools that Salesforce is releasing, we’re able to more easily understand different code and formula fields.

Even our flows now, we’re starting to be able to just reduce all of the headache and all of the additional knowledge that you needed to have to be able to work with those particular items. Now, there are some benefits of going, getting that deeper understanding, really learning the fundamentals and branching out further into programming concepts.

But at least to get you started, get your feet wet, these AI tools have been really great for helping people get some encouragement and seeing if they’re on the right path and getting more, down to complex questions where you’re saying, all right, you needed to go to a developer friend to get that looked up.

You might come with a more refined question now that you’re using AI instead of just, here’s the code, help me out. It’s, I have this particular piece of code, it should do this. How does this look to you? Is it best practice? So the conversations are shifting a little bit more.

Mike Gerholdt:
Plus also just disseminating some of the code that admins would look at, it’s not foreign into, I don’t know what this does, pages and pages of stuff. I can at least copy it and maybe have AI give me an idea of where to start.

Warren Walters:
Yeah, that’s funny too where the starting piece, just because it’s really about what it gives you. So in certain aspects you have to be a little bit careful of AI because of it could produce code in a different language other than Apex, you get Python code.

And if you don’t know those fundamentals, it can really set you down maybe a rabbit hole or not be as helpful as you think. So it’s a word of caution to a lot of my mentees. I definitely want them to use it, but make sure that you’re still doing that due diligence to understand some of the basics of it.

Mike Gerholdt:
If you’re having it generate code for you, I think I’m in the translation part of the world. So let’s start there though with mentorship, what comes up most in the mentorship and in mentees that you work with?

Warren Walters:
Certifications is always a big topic. What search should they get and what should they focus on? What’s next? So I think that one is really fun. And another big one is a lot of encouragement, especially for administrators that want to start to look in and dabble with code.

A lot of people here, they have this perception that, oh, it’s for the geniuses or only people that go to university, which is not true at all. I’ve met many, many developers that could code me into a box that have never gone to school, have just learned by themselves, and they’re very passionate problem solvers and they really stick with that craft.

So a lot of what I do is encouragement and then giving people resources for, if you’re trying to learn integrations, start with either this Trailhead module or this specific article and bring it back to me and let’s see if we can figure it out together.

Mike Gerholdt:
Do you find when individuals are coming into the ecosystem maybe with a coding background, that it’s less obvious for them to pay attention to some of the declarative tools that are already built in Salesforce?

Or is it intuitive to have them under… Is it natural to just look at everything first and then only go to code as a solution, or do they see everything’s a nail and they’ve got a hammer and I’m going to code them into a box, as you said?

Warren Walters:
Yeah, it definitely starts out as everything is a nail and code is the hammer. It’s funny because if you’re in a lot of different orgs, especially when I was doing consulting, I got into a few orgs that had code written for very simple things that you can do in configuration, like creating a validation rule or sending an email, that kind of stuff. Just tons and tons and lines of code that were not necessary.

But whoever got in there first, their mindset was, okay, I know how to code, let me just stick with that. So a lot of people that I talk with and mentor, especially if they have a coding background there, that’s their first idea and that’s one of the things that I have to educate them on, is Salesforce has so many different tools at your disposal.

It’s better to at least be familiar with everything that’s available, like flows and the formula fields, and even just simple things like knowing how a lookup field works, especially if you’re not coming from this sort of space, it can be a little confusing to understand what it is and how it works.

So I generally recommend going on that journey of starting at the beginning, especially hitting a lot of those beginner admin trails where you can learn the fundamentals and work your way up into a good spot of understanding all the tools that are available and then you can jump into code. The code wall, always be there. There’s plenty of reasons to use it, but you want to use the right tool for the right situation.

Mike Gerholdt:
And it’s also, I have to think of just best use of your time. You could code escalation rules, you could code a workflow, but flow leaves you with an artifact that’s easily upgradable and reproducible as opposed to something custom that, who knows, maybe something 10 releases down the line, Salesforce is going to change and now you might have to rebuild that Apex code.

Warren Walters:
Yeah, that’s a big point, especially in consulting that you have to think about because a lot of times you may not be there one year later, two years later just because the contract or the project is ending.

So designing for the team that is going to be there is very important. If you’re going to leave a ton of code only with a team of admins, and that may not be the best solution for you.

Or there might be a little bit of in-between where you can build out the complex pieces inside of code, but also leave the administrative side or leave the ability for the administrative side to have configuration or custom settings that can manipulate the code.

All things like that are things that you need to start to think about when you look at the longevity of your code and the maintainability.

Mike Gerholdt:
Do people that you work with and start to work with, when they come into the ecosystem, do they know their path? Are they looking at consulting or being a developer first? Or is it just eyes wide open, help me figure something out, Warren?

Warren Walters:
A lot of it is eyes wide open. Lots of existing admins know that the developer path is out there, but people just starting out often they hear about development from other tech stacks and they know that it’s out there, but it’s hard to understand where should I be going? What should I be looking at?

So there’s a lot of education that goes on and there are so many different opportunities in Salesforce. So you need to try to find… Or I recommend trying out a bunch of things, but especially if maybe you have a background in project management or system management like databases and things like that. Take a look at how that translates directly over into a Salesforce career.

Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, no, that makes sense. Often you start off with an idea, and I’ve had a lot of friends too that were admins for a while and then they see that consulting dollar sign and they start chasing the money and obviously you can do that in any career. So that’s interesting.

You mentioned something that I wanted to think a little bit about, which is the topics that admins and developers should think about. So I started a little bit dumped into the deep end with AI, but we have declarative side, we have the code side.

What is some of the stuff that admins and developers that you’re mentoring aren’t paying attention to and you’re like, folks, the streetlight, the spotlight is on, you totally missed the sign on the side of the road. How did you blow past this exit kind of scenario?

Warren Walters:
That is really cool topic to bring up. I think a lot of it stems to one, everybody they know about AI, they probably are at least dabbling in it. If you’re not dabbling in it, I would recommend at least looking at it. So that’s one big piece.

But the other part is probably more, I want to say on the soft skills or it’s really around communication, especially for a lot of introverted people. It may not seem like it, but I’m pretty introverted. But it’s around how you can communicate effectively either with your boss or your teams or anybody that you’re working with.

And that can be a huge valuable asset to you as an individual because it can help propel you into different types of roles that maybe somebody else that’s lacking those skills or still working on those skills, they’re not able to jump into what goes hand in hand with that is more personal branding as well.

So this is how you present yourself on LinkedIn, doing things like YouTube channels, having a blog and that can also propel you above the rest, especially in a competitive market. Having that awareness of where you’re at and how you want to be presented to the outside world can be very important for a hiring manager to make a decision on.

So I recommend everybody working on a portfolio or having some sort of additional thing above the defaults of your resume and having a basic LinkedIn portfolio and that kind of stuff.

Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, I’m so on board with everything you just said because I feel like for a lot of my career when I was an admin, not only was it just understanding the configuration, but for lack of a better phrase, I’ll say it was selling the configuration, really communicating to the organization, no, no, no, no. I know how to do this and this is what’s best for right now based on what you told me and confidently communicating that.

And then to your second point, showing up, I love it when people look like their profile pictures. It’s so much because you look at, you think of how much you’re online and when you see, especially with a coworker, your slack avatar all the time, and then you see them in person and they look the same, you’re like, oh, I know I have the right person.

Because I’ve always joked that I’m an introvert, but I play an extrovert for work. I can summon up a solid eight or nine hours of extrovertness, but 5:30 at Dreamforce, the bell tolls, Mike is running down the stairs, glass slippers falling off, he’s turning into a pumpkin. He really wants to get back to his hotel room and just have some quiet stare at the wall time.

But being able to show up and look familiar and then interact with people and that’s how you network and that’s how you get different ideas shared with everybody too.

Warren Walters:
I’m on board with that a hundred percent because at least for me, a lot of what you see online, a hundred percent of what you see online, I’m going to be the same exact way at a conference. As soon as you see me after I say hello, what is your name? I’m going to start spewing development and Salesforce right at you.

So I think that that is important though to be authentic wherever you’re presenting yourself because it’s going to take that toll on you, especially over time, especially if you’re at working at a place where either you have to change yourself to do that. It’s important to be at home as much as you can in where you work and how you’re presenting yourself.

Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, I mean for the longest time I wore a red shirt everywhere and it was very easy to spot Mike in the red shirt. So I had this question down, but in hearing you answer it, and I’ve done a million of these podcasts, I’m going to ask it to you different.

So one of the questions, and you probably get this too, is like, all right, so what is good places to start learning? I’m going to ask you that, but I’m going to give you the caveat of you can’t say the word Trailhead.

And the reason I’m going to say that is, look, I work at Salesforce, Trailhead’s table stakes. We all know to go there. Everybody in the community knows to go there. If you don’t know to go there, you should go there. You’re going to hear it at user groups. What are other places that you should go that are good places to learn in addition to Trailhead?

Warren Walters:
How much can I plug websites? How much is allowed? There are a few sites that I really love for either practicing Salesforce development or even Salesforce administration.

I’m a big YouTube person. If you’ve looked me up at all, I love video, that kind of stuff. So there are some really major channels on there that I definitely follow. So some of them are Apex hours on YouTube. There’s Matt Gary’s channel, which is also very focused on Salesforce development, so also look at those.

And then especially thinking more either when I’m studying for a certification or being more well-rounded, a lot of us know about Focus on Force, which is great. But what I like to do whenever I’m either taking exam or studying is, okay, maybe I’m doing some practice items, but I’m also actually building out the practice scenarios, maybe the exam question or something like that inside a Salesforce org so that I’m Retaining the knowledge a little bit better than just clicking through a few different examples. So this works really well for both administration and development.

Just recreate the scenario the best you can when you’re working through those. On top of that, there are some really great, if you’re looking to dive and learn development, really great sites for that. So there’s free code camp org, which is more of HTML JavaScript, it’s like web languages.

But like I’ve been mentioning, once you learn the fundamentals of development, you can transfer it around to any language and it will really help out in your configuration inside of Salesforce. So if you know how to do flows, either on the basic levels, if statement is an if statement, iterator, a loop is a loop in every different language.

So you’re able to translate some of those a little bit easier once you know how they work under the hood. I’m trying to think of some other ones. I know there are a ton and maybe I can link some down in the show notes and stuff like that.

Mike Gerholdt:
I didn’t mean to put you on the spot but to be honest with you, every time I ask a question I’m like, oh, go to Trailhead. It’s like, where do you start? Well, what are you looking for?

Trailhead’s been around I think almost 10 years to me now, it’s to the point where it’s like the help and FAQ part of a website. The first time that you saw a help or an FAQ on a website, you’re like, oh, I wish every website had this. And to me, that feels table stakes. You should be able to do that.

But then to your point, there are things that you should learn like communication skills and presenting skills and personal branding skills, and some of that’s on there, but there’s also good sites and good places to go to learn stuff like that.

Last question, a little bit of a curve ball, but as a mentor, you’ve worked with a lot of people. What is one quality that is consistent across all of your mentees that seems to really drive their success?

Warren Walters:
I think one of the big ones is around persistence. Especially in the Salesforce space, configuration and development. I prescribed to a notion of, let me give you just enough so that you know where to look, you can be very dangerous. But not giving you everything to complete or solve challenges or whatever wacky idea that I’ve come up with at that point.

So knowing that there is a light at the end of the tunnel, there is a solution for every problem, especially in coding. We’re not inventing anything new and if statement is an if statement, some of these things that we are creating have been studied and perfected over a long period of time.

So all you need to do is really find it and then use that solution and make that existing solution work for whatever your problem is. So understanding that idea of, okay, as long as I keep working at it, keep pushing, something will come from this that will put me in a better situation than I am currently, is really what I start to stress in a lot of the mentees that I work with.

I think it can get overwhelming to learn development and maybe you don’t feel like you’re making progress, but a lot of times it’s about looking back and reflecting on how far you’ve come to see some of the progress that you’ve actually been doing, which is really cool. So I think that’s a big one, right?

Persistence and then knowing when to ask questions may have come up before. But you’re working on your own, you’ve found a lot of resources and you’re going through and you end up getting stuck on one particular piece.

I think it’s important once you are completely stuck and you’ve done as much research as you can, of course to reach out. And it’s humbling because maybe years ago, I didn’t like to ask for questions read. I was like, oh, I should know everything, or I should be able to figure this out on my own.

And I started progressing so much faster once I was able to say, all right, I’ve done enough research, I’ve looked at it, I’m going to ask a very educated question to somebody that has done this before, somebody who has been through whatever experience. It could be as small as making a formula field or as big as writing an integration to a third party system.

Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, you’re spot on. Persistence is right there. You said that answer educated question, and this actually came up I want to say about a month ago or so. I interviewed David who does Wordle and Sudoku on YouTube and TikTok, he rather he also does coding, which is interesting. I feel like maybe a lot of software engineers and developers do Wordle and Sudoku.

But I would rather, he said in working with team members would rather have a team member spend 10 minutes working through what they know to try and solve the problem and then come to me with a question as opposed to just immediately hitting a problem going, how do I do this? Throw your hands up.

And I think when I’ve worked with people too well, how would you work through this? Because you need to start putting those connections together because every time something like this happens, there isn’t going to be a Warren behind you that you can just turn around and be like, now what do I do? So educated question. That was really good.

Warren, thanks for taking time out of your day and being persistent and mentoring people and being a part of the great Salesforce community.

Warren Walters:
Yeah, Mike, it’s been a pleasure and an honor and I guess destiny to finally end up on the Salesforce Admin podcast. Super happy that I was able to make it out and spread the word about development. If you’re scared about it, if you don’t think it’s for you, do not worry. I don’t think it’s for me, right?

Everybody thinks that just try to take it one step at a time or reach out to me. A lot of developers are very, very helpful in the Salesforce Ohana. So yeah, so happy that we finally made this happen.

Mike Gerholdt:
Thanks, Warren. So that was a fun discussion with Warren. I love the term educated question. Going back and really thinking through it makes me think of that podcast that I did with David or ranks on Sudoku and Wordle solving, which is thinking through what are all the possible ways I can solve this, exercising those, and then turning to my community and seeing how they can help me based on what I’ve done.

Because you might find a creative way of doing something, but I couldn’t agree more, persistence, persistence, persistence. There is a light at the end of every tunnel, and I think his sight is very inspiring. I just pulled it up and the first thing it says, remember, I believe in you. So, thank you Warren for being on the podcast.

Now, if you enjoyed the episode, be sure to click that follow or subscribe button so that new episodes are downloaded. And of course, if you’re looking for resources, folks write down below in the show notes. I’m going to link to anything that Warren mentioned, including his social profile.

But you can always find resources at admin.salesforce.com. That is your one stop for everything admin. Release information, more podcasts and a transcript of the show. Now be sure to join our conversation in the admin Trailblazer group.

That is, of course, on the Trailblazer community, and you know where to find the link for that. That’s right. It’s in the show notes on admin.salesforce.com. So with that, I hope you enjoyed this episode. I enjoyed it a lot. And until next week, I’ll see you in the cloud.

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, it’s time for a deep dive with Josh Birk, who talks to Raveesh Raina, Principal Solutions Engineer at Salesforce.

Join us as we chat about what Prompt Builder can do and how to write effective prompts.

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

Intro to Prompt BuilderRaveesh is the perfect person to talk to about Prompt Builder and all the cool stuff you can do with it. As a Solutions Engineer, he works with customers to implement the latest and greatest Salesforce innovations and right now, that’s Prompt Builder.

Prompt Builder takes all the power of LLMs and combines it with your Salesforce data. You can use it to help you write personalized emails to customers, build out records with more information, and much, much more.

The four prompt template types and what they doRight now, there are four prompt template types in Salesforce:

1. The sales email template drafts an email you need to send to your customer. Some examples include introducing them to a new product, or reminding them about an appointment.
2. With the field generation template, you can quickly and easily populate or complete a specific field on a record page with a summary or description created by an LLM.
3. The record summary template does exactly what it says it does: summarizes a record. This one is really easy to use via Einstein Copilot, and his clients love it for meeting prep.
4. Finally, there’s the flex prompt template. This can be used anywhere and everywhere on the platform to create a customized prompt template that incorporates records from multiple objects simultaneously. An example would be to create a personalized product recommendation for a customer based on an Einstein Next Best Action.

With all of these prompt templates, you can dynamically ground them with data from Salesforce or Data Cloud. That gives the LLM the power to pull data from records or, with flows, from pretty much any object—standard or custom—in your Salesforce org.

How admins can write effective promptsSo how do you write effective prompts that do what you want them to do? Raveesh has four tips to share with us:

1. Be explicit about your expectations and goals. What are you hoping to get out of the response? The AI needs a clearly defined goal in order to generate a good response.
2. Contextualize the information. State if you want to add related records to contextualize the response.
3. Specify your role. What is the persona for which this prompt template is built?
4. Add limitations and set boundaries. For example, “do not exceed 500 characters.” The AI needs to be told, and sometimes told again, what not to do. This is especially important to think about as you test and refine your prompt in order to get consistent results.

There’s a lot more great stuff from Raveesh about building better prompts and how Salesforce protects your data, so be sure to listen to the full episode. And don’t forget to subscribe to hear more from the Salesforce Admins Podcast.

Podcast swag* Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Learn more* Blog: The Ultimate Guide to Prompt Builder | Spring ’24 * Trailhead: Get Started with Prompts and Prompt Builder * Video: Salesforce Admins Innovate with Prompt Builder * Podcast: Get to Know Prompt Builder with Marissa Scalercio

Admin Trailblazers Group* Admin Trailblazers Community Group

Social* Connect with Raveesh * Salesforce Admins: @SalesforceAdmns * Mike on Threads: https://www.threads.net/@mikegerholdt/ * Mike on Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@salesforce.mike * Mike on X: @MikeGerholdt

Full show transcriptJosh Birk:

Greetings everybody. Guest host, Josh Birk here, to take another deep dive into a topic. And this week, the topic is going to be Prompt Builder and Building on Prompts. I am joined by my good old colleague, Raveesh Raina, who is one of the people who wrote, for instance, our Ultimate Guide to Prompt Builder. Now, with no other hesitation, let’s get over and talk to Raveesh.

All right, today on the show, we welcome Raveesh Raina to tell us about all things Prompt Builder. Raveesh, welcome to the show.

Raveesh Raina:

Thank you very much, Josh. It’s an honor to be here and thank you for having me.

Josh Birk:

Excellent. Well, let’s start off with a little bit about you. Tell me, what is your current role at Salesforce?

Raveesh Raina:

So I am a Principal Solutions Engineer. I work predominantly with our account executives and account directors to helping customers get inspired with our latest and greatest innovations that we are publishing and that we are releasing into the market. So I have a specific focus towards financial services. I’m based out of Toronto, Canada, so I work with all of our major enterprise banks with a lot of the different innovations and as far as financial services cloud is concerned, which is our flagship industries product. So helping them get inspired and sharing ideas on how we can help them better meet their goals.

Josh Birk:

And was computer something you always wanted to get into?

Raveesh Raina:

No, it’s definitely an area that I personally have tried to get better at.

Josh Birk:

Okay.

Raveesh Raina:

And it’s definitely an amazing opportunity and an amazing space to be.

Josh Birk:

What did you go to college for?

Raveesh Raina:

So funnily enough, even though I am based out of Canada, I actually went to the United States for my undergrad and I did mechanical engineering.

Josh Birk:

Ah.

Raveesh Raina:

So I graduated from New Jersey Institute of Technology, NJIT, with a mechanical engineering degree. But life had a different set of actions for me and somehow, I ended up aligned to the Salesforce ecosystem a long time ago.

Josh Birk:

Nice. Okay. Now, today we’re going to talk about Prompt Builder. And when customers ask you about Prompt Builder, they’re not familiar with it, what’s the early elevator pitch you give them?

Raveesh Raina:

I essentially tell customers that Prompt Builder is an easy to use tool, which allows them to send a predefined set of instructions to an AI model, with the expectation of getting a response that has both value and meaning to them. And by value and meaning, I’m specifically referring to within the context of the data that they are providing via their CRM for Salesforce.

Josh Birk:

Okay. And walk us through the four templates we have right now that frame that data and that value add?

Raveesh Raina:

Yeah, absolutely. So right now, as of today, we have four prompt template types, sales email prompt templates, that’s the first one. The second one is going to be field generation. The third one is what we call flex prompt templates. And the fourth one is record summary prompt templates.

Josh Birk:

Yeah. Now, I think the first two there are pretty straightforward. We’re generating an email to send out to somebody, and if we’re summarizing or we’re generating a field, it means instead of a human putting in things manually, the GenAI is going to create it. Tell me a little bit more about the second two because I feel they’re off to the corners and they’re also very different from each other. Right? What’s the purpose of a flex template and what’s the purpose of the record summary template?

Raveesh Raina:

Yeah, so what I’ll do is let me tackle record summary template first.

Josh Birk:

Okay.

Raveesh Raina:

Just as its name suggests, a record summary template is used by an admin to summarize a record or to get a succinct overview of a particular record. It is best served, best delivered in the UI via Copilot. So that is what we’ve seen greatest success in, in that record summary prompt templates can be surfaced up via Copilot, but it allows the admin to summarize a record based on whatever data model that they have already implemented.

Josh Birk:

Got it.

Raveesh Raina:

So that’s a record summary template. Now, flex prompt templates, they are really powerful and versatile because what they allow an admin to do is to connect up to five objects together in a prompt template for the purposes of grounding. Those five objects could be standard objects or custom objects. They don’t have to be related to each other in any way, shape or form, but through the power of the UI that the admin is surfacing, they can ground the flex prompt templates with each of those different objects with the expectation of getting a response from the LLM.

Josh Birk:

And for listeners at home, if you have somehow missed all of the wonderful Salesforce marketing about Einstein Copilot, it is a conversational AI for your platform and we will discuss that in another episode. Now, when it comes to these kind of templates, let’s focus on the sales email, as I think it’s the most straightforward. Some people listening might be like, “Well, I already know how to generate an email. Why do I need generative AI to do this?” What do you think the value add specifically that these are being pulled in through an AI model and having a generative response as opposed to a human created one? Where do you think the power lies there?

Raveesh Raina:

So the way I like to think of it where generative AI sales email templates provide value is the fact that it provides an easy mechanism for a user to craft an email in a conversational style that includes human and natural language text into it. If I were to use a standard email template as an example, that is static text, but replaced with either merge fields or even sometimes even with related records. But it removes that humanality sort of, from crafting an email. And the recipient may recognize that this is static text, but with generative AI, it adds more humanity towards that email template type. So that’s where I feel is some of that value added.

Josh Birk:

And I think to some people, they might be scratching their eyebrows there because they’re like, “But Raveesh, I’m using a computer to generate this email.” But I think that’s exactly spot on because we’ve all gotten that email that’s like, “Hello, first name at company name. Congratulations on your date.” And it’s like you know instantly, this isn’t from a human, but what these GenAI models are really good at is mimicking a human-like response, this human-like writing. And so it’s like you get something that’s acting like it’s somebody to draft an email every single time you’re sending this out to somebody.

Raveesh Raina:

Absolutely. Absolutely. It adds a little bit more personalization to a piece of communication that was missing with your static email templates in the past.

Josh Birk:

And also, I think it’s hard to do it on a podcast, right? It’s hard to show it on the podcast, the power of being able to ground this in Salesforce data. Tell me a little bit about… For each one of these templates we’re talking about, what kind of data can we bring into the AI model to let it represent whatever it is that we’re trying to generate?

Raveesh Raina:

Absolutely. So the real power of our generative AI tools with Salesforce, in my personal opinion, is the fact that we allow admins and customers the option to dynamically ground these prompt templates. What we mean by dynamically grounding is adding placeholders in these prompt templates that will be automatically replaced with either merge fields directly from a record or related lists that trace back to the origin of that record, or even through the power of flows. Once again, get a subset of related records associated to that original parent record as well.

So dynamically grounding can be done using merge fields, related lists, flows to get subset of records. And you can take it two steps further by grounding with Apex classes or even through the power of Data Cloud data model objects as well.

Josh Birk:

And what I think is also going back to the old way of doing things and doing things with this way, using flow, but also just because it’s a conversational model, you can instruct the AI to do things based on the data. So it’s not just, “Say something about this person’s description.” It could also be like, “Based on the fact that this person has no survey scores, change your response based on that.” And what are some things that people who have flow skills can do to apply that extra layer of logic? Give me a good example of something that would change the course of the outcome based on a flow?

Raveesh Raina:

Yeah, absolutely. So I did mention that the power of flows is the fact that you can get subsets of records. So for example, if I want to surface up using a generative AI response, a summary of all open cases associated to a client or an account. If I were to use the standard related list component or resource picker, then it would give me a summary of all the cases associated to an account, whether it’s open, closed, escalated, high priority, so on and so forth. But with flows, if I just want to surface up open cases only, that is what I can do through the power of dynamic grounding as well.

Josh Birk:

And what I love about it, if anybody’s here, maybe for some reason, you haven’t dipped your toe into the flow pool, the flows we’re talking about can be very… I can do these flows, and I’m not Jen Lee. Flows are her job. She’s the one who goes like, “Oh yeah, flow can do that crazy, impossible thing. Wait a minute, I’m going to show you how.” Going on the other side of the spectrum, tell me a little bit about how data cloud can help complete this picture?

Raveesh Raina:

Yeah, absolutely. So as we all know, Data Cloud is an amazing tool that unlocks an organization’s ability to tap into their enterprise data. So what that means is that for an organization that is using Salesforce, they may have a good portion of their data sitting in CRM, sitting in Salesforce, but a lot of it could also be sitting off platform in, for example, a lot of organizations, they have a separate dedicated app for their orders or their accounting, or even if they have a public website or mobile app, then some of that web traffic is logged in those third party systems.

Josh Birk:

Yep.

Raveesh Raina:

So through the power of Data Cloud, if they want to bring those insights and have a summarization or generative AI information associated to that data, customers are able to take all of that third party data that is sitting in those systems and have that surfaced up in Data Cloud. And the power of Prompt Builder allows for grounding with those Data Cloud objects or data model objects, I should say, and then surface up that information directly within the flow of work in Salesforce.

Josh Birk:

Yeah. Now, let’s take a couple steps back because we’ve been talking a lot about data and grounding the data, taking the data from sources like Data Cloud, and I think that a lot of people have cautionary tales about AI. Describe the Einstein Trust Layer to me and how does it keep all of this stuff safe?

Raveesh Raina:

So one of the biggest messages that we have is the fact that we have zero retention policies with all of the public AI model providers that we have partnerships with. Whether those are, as an example OpenAI. So what that means is that I think we have to also take a step back and appreciate the fact that Salesforce’s number one value is trust. And what we mean by that is the fact that we value our customers, we value that they are trusting us to securing their data. And we also take it one step further in ensuring that we are not sharing their data in any way, shape or form with any of these third party AI model providers.

So a big part of the Einstein Trust Layer is the fact that we are not sharing customer data directly or indirectly with AI model providers there. And also at the same time, those AI models are not learning from Salesforce’s and customers’ data as well.

Josh Birk:

And to be clear there, it’s not like some generally handshake between us and Sam Altman. We filter that stuff out. OpenAI does not have the chance to train their models based on our data because they never see it.

Raveesh Raina:

Correct. Absolutely.

Josh Birk:

Okay. And then just to bring this to another level, because we think about things like in P-term, P2 and privacy and stuff like that, that’s also stuff that’s not being shared with entities that don’t need to see it.

Raveesh Raina:

That is correct. Yeah, absolutely. We as a company have gone the extra mile to ensure that PII, personally identifiable information, or PHI, that is not shared, and it is actively masked and obfuscated before it is even sent to an AI model for processing as well.

Josh Birk:

Got it. Now, you’ve written a blog post, Ultimate Prompt Builder Guide, thank you for that, it’s very extensive, and in it you include some very good tips on how to effectively write a prompt. Give me the high level like what are some really good tips to let me be more effective with that?

Raveesh Raina:

Absolutely. So a couple of pointers that I will suggest as admins and customers are looking to design prompts are that there are a few different areas that you should try to focus on. First is be explicit in your instructions in terms of the expectations and goals as far as what is it that you’re hoping to get out of the response. So making sure that you are setting those expectations. Second is contextualizing information, meaning that state if you are adding in some related records to further contextualize the set of instructions. Third would be to specify your role. What is the persona for which the prompt template was built out for, whether it was a customer support manager or an account executive?

An important aspect of the prompt template that I would suggest is also ensuring that you add limitations and setting boundaries, so by being explicit with instructions such as, “Do not exceed past 500 characters,” as an example. That is an explicit instruction and a guardrail, ensuring that the prompt template is not going to give a response longer than 500 characters. So those are some areas that I would suggest that folks go in on as far as designing prompt templates.

Josh Birk:

Yeah, one of the earliest things I realized in working with AI was, and this is in general, AI has this sort of default setting, shall we say, like a default tone, a default style. It thinks its response should be two paragraphs long, paragraphs should be three to four sentences. It’s almost exactly what we’d learned back in high school for what a good writing style was kind of thing.

Raveesh Raina:

Right.

Josh Birk:

And it will default to that all the time unless you tell it not to. My favorite thing what you just said is explicit.

Raveesh Raina:

Correct.

Josh Birk:

I would actually add to that explicit and occasionally repetitive.

Raveesh Raina:

Yes. Yes, absolutely. It doesn’t hurt being repetitive with your instructions because it’s about ensuring that the AI model is going to meet your expectations of a response that has both value and trust.

Josh Birk:

Right. Because this is dynamically generated, which means even if you see the thing that you wanted to do once, run it three more times.

Raveesh Raina:

Correct. Exactly.

Josh Birk:

Because it might break one of your rules at one of those points. And then one of favorite anecdotes I give people is, if you saw the Dreamforce ’23 keynote, we use Prompt Builder to do a sales email, and to have some fun, we added emojis to the sales email, which worked about three times out of five.

Raveesh Raina:

Yes.

Josh Birk:

Right? The team kept on coming out, they’re like, “How do you fix this?” I’m like, “I have no idea. I’m going to go talk to the AI and figure it out.” What it turned out was I had to beat the AI over the head and be like, “Not just use an emoji with this email, make heavy use of emojis all through this email.” Be very, very explicit.

Raveesh Raina:

Absolutely, [inaudible 00:03:52].

Josh Birk:

Now, unlike myself, you have actually had the advantage of working directly with customers on some of these issues, and feel free to nerd out on fintech and banks in general, but what are some specific problems that you’ve seen from customers? Obviously, if you need to not name names, that’s great, but what are some specific problems that you’re seeing Prompt Builder help solve?

Raveesh Raina:

Yeah, absolutely. I think one of the reasons why I have been able to talk to a lot of customers is just because I’ve been also listening to a lot of customers as well. I think one of the most glaring areas where generative AI and Prompt Builder can provide most value is the use case for meeting prep. So I’m a rep, or I’m a customer support manager, and I need to prepare for an upcoming engagement with a client for a meeting. Using generative AI, I can quickly get a succinct overview on a particular client with all of the different data points that has both value and meaning to me, which I can use as part of my conversation in that meeting with that client as well. So meeting prep or account summarization is of immense value where we are seeing a lot of success with sharing this value with customers, and they are absolutely head over heels signing up for using Prompt Builder to address this need.

Josh Birk:

Got it. Well, to learn more, everybody, we’re going to point to Raveesh wonderful blog post. We’ll point you to a couple of Trailhead resources, some help documents. Raveesh, thank you so much. I do have one final question for you. What is your favorite hobby?

Raveesh Raina:

My favorite hobby at the moment right now is cycling. I use that as an opportunity to bond and to spend time with my kids. I have a seven-year-old and four-year-old, so any chance we get, especially with the weather that we’re having this summer, we go outside, we go for cycling around the trails and around our neighborhood. So yeah, right now it’s cycling for me.

Josh Birk:

Wonderful. Raveesh, thank you so much for the great conversation and information. That was a lot of fun.

Raveesh Raina:

Thank you very much, Josh.

Josh Birk:

I want to thank Raveesh for sitting down with us this week. And as always, I want to thank you for listening. Now, if you want to learn more about this show and stories about being a Salesforce admin in general, go down over to admin.salesforce.com. Thanks again, everybody, and we will talk to you next week.

The post Salesforce Prompt Builder Features Every Admin Should Know appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we sit down for an Admin Evangelist roundtable discussion with Josh Birk, Jennifer Lee, and yours truly. Join us as we chat about how AI can help you be a better Salesforce Admin and what you can do to improve your prompts.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Josh Birk and Jen Lee.

Practice your AI promptsWith everything going on with Einstein Copilot and Prompt Builder, I wanted to bring the Admin Evangelists together to find out how they’re thinking about AI and what you should do to get ready.

The number one thing that everyone agreed on is to start practicing your AI prompts. Josh recommends seeing if you can get your LLM of choice to tell you a dad joke. Then try and get it to tell you a better one. Just like how we had to learn how to write a good Google query, you’ll quickly find out that some prompts are more effective than others.

Jennifer shares the story of how her husband used ChatGPT to help with their itinerary on their trip to Italy. They still had to double-check that the restaurants it recommended were still open and that the timing of everything made sense, but it was a great starting point for planning their vacation.

How Salesforce Admins can get help from AIBoth Josh and Jennifer also use AI to help with work. Jennifer’s found ChatGPT to be really helpful for writing formulas. She used to spend hours on Google trying to find an example that matched the exact scenario she needed. These days, she can just write a prompt with her specific parameters and get back something useful in seconds. If Salesforce gives her an error, she can tell ChatGPT about it and it’ll try to fix the code.

Josh, meanwhile, has been using AI to help generate Apex code from scratch when he’s spinning up a demo org. As he’s quick to point out, it’s not necessarily helpful for the maintenance and debugging tasks that most developers do on a daily basis, but it’s perfect for his particular use case.

The human in the loopOne last thing we talked about that I want to highlight is the importance of the human in the loop.

We used the example of someone calling a power company to find out why their electricity bill is higher. If a human has realized that the weather has a major effect on usage rates and created a screen flow to call the right API, then an AI might be able to give the customer the right answer. But you need a human in the loop to do that second-order thinking.

We’ll have even more about how Salesforce Admins can use AI next week in Josh’s deep dive episode, so be sure to subscribe to hear more from the Salesforce Admins Podcast.

Podcast swag* Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Learn more* Trailhead: Get Started with Prompts and Prompt Builder

Admin Trailblazers Group* Admin Trailblazers Community Group

Social* Jennifer on X: @JenWLee * Josh on X: @JoshBirk * Salesforce Admins: @SalesforceAdmns * Mike on Threads: https://www.threads.net/@mikegerholdt/ * Mike on Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@salesforce.mike * Mike on X: @MikeGerholdt

Full show transcriptMike Gerholdt:
So in the world of AI and GPTs, and I think one’s called Hugging Face, maybe it’s Hugging Chat, I don’t know. There is a lot to learn and people maybe you’re afraid of it or you haven’t tried something out. I don’t know. We’ve heard a lot as evangelists on the admin relations team. And so this week I wanted to dive in with all of the rockstar evangelists that I have. Josh Birk, our Senior Admin Evangelist, and Jen, our Lead Admin Evangelist. Also, everything flow about let’s dive into prompts and let’s start learning about prompts and what should we be afraid of or what shouldn’t we be afraid of, or what should we start doing? So that was a really long, highly caffeinated intro, but welcome to the show, Jennifer and Josh.

Joshua Birk:
Thanks for having us.

Jennifer:
Hey.

Mike Gerholdt:
So I won’t name names, but I have been around in the community, and I have heard people like, “Cool, oh, you’ve done something with ChatGPT.” And to be frank, if you follow me on Instagram, you’ll realize that my feed, sometime in March, quickly took over crazy images generated by Dall-E. Because I find it fascinating that I can give it words to a 1970s music classic rock and say, “Make a picture.” And it will produce something that would take me years to put together. And sometimes it’s crazy, and I have to share that with the world because I think that’s just so cool. But I guess I’m not afraid to try things out. So that’s where I was with the world of AI. Where do you guys fall?

Joshua Birk:
Well, first of all, I want to go back to something you just said about what’s dangerous about talking to something like let’s just call it ChatGPT. Just use that as the generic one since it’s the most famous and most popular. But I go back to-

Mike Gerholdt:
It’s like the Kleenex of AI.

Joshua Birk:
Yeah, exactly.

Mike Gerholdt:
Everybody knows about it.

Joshua Birk:
Exactly. And I’m going to say this and I’m going to add a huge caveat to it. But when it comes to going to especially a free one, and just tinkering around with it, it’s the same thing that one of the best pieces of advice I ever got before I started programming on a pretty basic on an Apple II. And my teacher at the time, I don’t even remember what the class was called, it wasn’t computer science or anything like that. But basically he was like, “Do whatever you want. You’re not going to break the computer.” There’s nothing you’re going to do that’s going to… Nothing’s going to blow up. Nothing’s going to go in smoke.

The dangers of using AI right now is not the conversation you’re having with the AI, it’s what you do with the result. So Mike, you’re posting things to Facebook. What’s the nefarious outcome to that? There’s not, right? Now, if I use the generation of AI to submit my legal brief without checking it, you might run into some troubles. But what I always tell people is just jump in and just try talking to it, because until you do… I usually start with have it tell you a dad joke, have it tell you five dad jokes.

My favorite, actually, one of my favorites is go in and play 20 questions with it. Because having an AI guess the object that you’re thinking in your brain is actually, it’s an interesting way to prove how a conversational model works. But basically to go back to my teacher’s advice, don’t be scared. Go in an experiment.

Jennifer:
Yeah, I have to say that when it first came out, I wasn’t one of the people who went running to play with it. But when we were planning our trip to Italy last year, my now husband went and used it to come up with the itinerary. He said, “Okay, we’re going to start here. Here are the sites we’re going to, recommend some restaurants for me.” So then it came back and it said, “Okay, you should go here and here.” He, of course, human in the loop, had to go verify that these restaurants still existed.

Mike Gerholdt:
Yup.

Joshua Birk:
Sure.

Jennifer:
But it helped put together our agenda. And then nowadays I’ve been using it to help me with formula creation, because I am the worst when it comes to the parens, commas, nested if statements, they drive me nuts. I used to spend hours Googling to find the exact scenario I needed that someone else posted, and then tweaked it. But now I can go and say, “ChatGPT, I need a if statement for three things. Give me the structure,” and then I would put it in there. So it’s been really helpful to me in that regard.

Joshua Birk:
And not to throw down Jen, but being the worst, I might have to, I’m not sure. I think I might be worse than you are, because I’ve done the same thing. And the nice thing is, so ChatGPT is what’s called a chained conversational AI. Which means when you create that formula, if you get… Like you put it in and you get an error from Salesforce, you can give that error back to ChatGPT and be like, “You got this wrong,” and it already has the context of the formula it gave you, and it’d be like, “Oh, you’re right. Let me fix that for you.”

Jennifer:
Right.

Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah. And then just to clarify, in the context of what we’re talking about, a prompt, because we spelled this out in our workshops, but a prompt is a starting line for an AI conversation or task where you tell the large language model what you’re looking for using natural language, right?

Joshua Birk:
Yeah.

Mike Gerholdt:
So tell me this, because sometimes I struggle with this. How do you write your prompts differently, than say, putting in a search for Google?

Joshua Birk:
Yeah. So first of all, I think that’s one of the reasons we call it… People are like, why prompt? It’s a weird word. And I think the reason why we refer to it as prompt, because it’s a more generic thing than saying query or question or request, or anything like that. Because the thing that you need to provide in a prompt… So let’s compare those two directly. When you do a search in Google, it’s basically going to a database of a whole bunch of really fancy stuff Google’s done, and then you’re always going to get the same answer.

If you do the same prompt in ChatGPT you might get slightly different answers because that answer is being generated on the fly. And so in order to be successful with… The nice thing with ChatGPT, once again, because it’s a chain conversation AI, so you can start slow and then just keep adding context to it. But in a non-chained one like Prompt Builder, it’s adding in all the instruction and the explicit instruction, and the repeated instruction, and the context of, “No, that’s sort of the response I wanted, but that’s not exactly. Here’s how to correct it,” kind of thing.

So to compare it to a Google search, it would kind of be like, no, give me the Google searches that are actually relevant to the problem I have at hand. Which Google can’t do because it doesn’t understand context.

Mike Gerholdt:
Right. That makes sense. Jen, you said human in the loop, and I feel like we’ve naturally in just comparing Google searches to prompting a GPT to return a result, naturally put the human in the loop. But what did your husband do in terms of planning to put the human in the loop for other things?

Jennifer:
Yeah, I mean, he had to go, even though it would return an itinerary for us of sites to see in Italy, he still had to go and check and say, “Okay, is this the right path that it should take?” Confirm the hours that… Even though it suggested here’s the order, well, is it even open at that time, right? Can you imagine just showing up there and like, oh, nope, it’s not open until noon, but you have me going there the first thing in the morning.

Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah. Or it figures your itinerary is you just drive there, spend one second there, back out of the driveway.

Joshua Birk:
Right.

Mike Gerholdt:
Like, no, I’m going there for a reason.

Joshua Birk:
Yeah, it doesn’t always get the context of time correctly the first time. The last time I tried to do an itinerary, it gave me so many things to do in three hours that no human being could possibly do it.

Mike Gerholdt:
Oh my goodness. Yeah. I will say I have tried… So one of the first things I experimented with was, I think it’s called Gemini Now, because it was Google and it plugged into their Google Maps. And I think planning road trips and stuff, when you’re looking for specific stops, not touristy stops, but okay, a couple hours into the drive, I’m going to want to stop and get some diesel. I want to take a break from driving for 10 or 15 minutes.

I don’t want to just sit there and figure out on the map and scroll mile by mile on the map. Does that look like a gas station? Does that look like a gas station? And have it go through that. But oftentimes I also have to go back through the map and validate like, oh, is that still open?

Joshua Birk:
Right. Yeah. So I think they’ve gotten better because these large models at one point were impossible to pre-train on small amounts of data. They basically had to re-consume the entire internet over and over again. And that’s why when they first became popular, they warned you it doesn’t understand anything. Basically pre-pandemic, if I remember right. And that was a problem here in Chicago because a lot of very famous places had shut down.

So to your point, Jen, about itinerary, making sure they’re still there, it would’ve been spot on recommendations in 2019, but now not so much. And again, I think they’ve learned how to train them with smaller bits of data. So I think this is better. But yeah, it’s whatever moment in time it’s looking at when it was grounded in that data.

Jennifer:
Well, when I was looking at free GPT products, I used Perplexity AI, and that was using the internet and not data up until a certain timeframe.

Joshua Birk:
Nice.

Jennifer:
And it came back and said, here’s my answer, but then here’s my sources.

Joshua Birk:
Nice.

Jennifer:
So then if I wanted, I could go click on that to get more information

Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, as an article from 2007. Like, “Oh, cool, five star Michelin restaurant.” What do you feel, in terms of using AI just for your everyday life, is helping you understand AI better as we work to understand the capabilities of prompt builder and copilot?

Joshua Birk:
So for work, I’m going to confess, because I’ve been using AI to generate a lot of APEX. And it’s not that I can’t write that APEX. And I’m going to say this because I think this is a very unique situation because I’m writing a lot of APEX that’s from scratch. I’m not an enterprise developer who has to go in and maintain large bits of code and large project related code and things like that. And there’s this huge question out there for the everyday developer, is AI something that’s really useful? Because a lot of everyday development is maintenance and it’s bug fixes and it’s very detailed work.

And there’s probably a role for AI when it comes to code reviews and things like that. But for what I’m using it for, it’s like I know how to write this and I know I’ve written something like this, but AI will do it 90% correctly in about three seconds. I can’t type that fast, especially these days. I cannot type that fast. And so if I just kind of go back in and I’ll reiterate it and stuff like that, and because of that in very short period of time, for instance, the demo works we’re spinning up. I have APEX that can recreate all the data for me in these styles.

And that’s, I think, the important thing is it’s in the style that I want the data to look like. It’s in the level of realism that I want the data to look like. Which actually would’ve been… That’s the part that would’ve been very difficult me to do because to sit back and be like, I want 30 companies that sound like they would work with Northern Trail Outfitters.

Mike Gerholdt:
Oh yeah.

Joshua Birk:
Right? I’d have to sit back and actually ideate about that and spit out ideas and all of this kind of stuff. And ChatGPT is just like-

Mike Gerholdt:
I’d come up with a whole bunch of Southern Trail Outfitters and Western Trail Outfitters and Eastern Trail Outfitters.

Joshua Birk:
Exactly, exactly. It’s not shy. It will just try to give you that kind of slightly creative information shoved inside of an APEX class. And it’s definitely, I mean, I can’t even calculate how much time it saved me.

Jennifer:
I think for me, outside of the formula piece, which it has definitely helped me build formulas faster, but I use it to shorten things that I’ve written. Here’s this thing, I need to narrow it down into this many characters. So that’s been helpful in shortening that up. I have a problem of condensing things.

Mike Gerholdt:
No, I think that’s great. I mean, that’s actually to look back at admin track at Dreamforce a few years ago, the biggest session that was always attended was documenting your org. And I think it’s because you always would have to start from scratch as opposed to, Jen, I use AI for a lot of that as well. I will write a description in X number of characters following this style of writing and then give me three versions of it. Because Josh, to your point, I don’t have three versions in my head, or I need a fourth version, but I need you to give me three to kind of push the cart down the hill a little bit.

Joshua Birk:
Yeah. And it’s like, why do we keep going back to summarization as such a classic AI use case? Part of it is because it can read it and then write that summarization faster than you could read it by a 100th percent. It can do it. So it’s not just the speed of generation, it’s the speed of consumption as well.

Mike Gerholdt:
So working with, looking ahead, because Prompt Builders GA, we’re doing workshops. What are some of the things that we should think about as admins for what organizations may be looking for in terms of prompts, so that… Because I literally think the amount of creativity that we have in our heads is the limitations we all have for delivering on super useful prompts.

Joshua Birk:
Well, Mike, I don’t know if you know this yet, but we have an upcoming episode with my friend Ravish [inaudible 00:14:47], where we talk about this a little-

Mike Gerholdt:
Next week.

Joshua Birk:
Right. So one of the things I asked him, because Ravish actually is working with customers and working with billing out some of these solutions. And I think the answer to that question is start looking at… Let’s focus very specifically on this field generation prompt builder template. Look at your page layout and ask yourself, is there something here, or can I add a field to this that would be useful? Because going back to our friend summarization, that we could summarize not just the object that we’re looking at on the record, but summarize it in its related data. And it’s a data next to it and data that Flow can find to it and data that’s in Data Cloud and all of these points of data.

And what Ravish said, not to spoil my own content, but he’s like, “One of the most useful things is either meeting prep or call prep.” Like if you have a call with a customer coming up, you want to pull up the account and you want to get a one paragraph overview of all the activity of that account so that you are enlightened almost right away as to what to do with this. So I think it’s going to be hard until you see the fields actually being generated, because it’s a very different kind of data that we’re used to.

But the question is going to be, I’m trying to think of if, and maybe one of you two have a good example, because Salesforce has evolved so much over the years, right? I always joke with people, you don’t know how good you have it because you can do GO selection and SOQL queries. I had to write an entire APEX class in order to make that work, and I couldn’t even do it with Radius. I had to select zip codes by a square because we didn’t have the capacity to do sign and co-sign back then. The things that we’ve added that make the platform so much more intelligent, and this is another step in that evolution. And so it’s time to start asking yourself, what layer of generative data can I add to my object model that’s going to make my users more successful?

Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, I would agree. I think along those lines, looking at what’s available, looking at what GPT, even if you can’t get your hands on anything Einstein and all you do is Trailhead modules and you listen to some podcasts like this. I think the one thing, not that worries me, but the one thing that I would have a serious conversation sit down with stakeholders is I would look at what’s all the anecdotal data that we store in Salesforce and where is it at?

And so I bring that up because Josh, your example of zip codes, phone numbers, hard data, super hard data, a zip code, a phone number, even a street address anymore, you can write a call out and verify that. The number of websites I go to now, and I literally type the three numbers of my house in, and it’s already narrowed it down to the five possible addresses this could be, I think is amazing, it didn’t exist before. But what I think the power of what people are wanting is, so give me a summarization of the last five calls and what their pain points were.

And if you’re not running some sort of reports or like Jen, if you don’t have, I’m thinking screen flows with really good fields to prompt people on, you need to fill this stuff out and we need to prepare for it. I don’t care how good the AI is, it’s not going to weed through bad call notes if the salespeople didn’t put that stuff in.

Joshua Birk:
Yeah. And I want to call out one of the demos I saw here internally, because I think it touches on that a lot. And the demo was case support, and I think this was Copilot. And the ticket was, “Why is my power bill so high?” And the AI doesn’t know how to answer that question properly. And this is like when we keep the human in the loop, the human in the middle, we have to remember that’s in the whole… It’s from beginning to end, because a human had to realize, oh, we charge people for electricity.

And what is one of the things that determines how much electricity you use? Oh, it’s the weather. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to build a Flow that calls out to the weather API that brings me back the weather for the last whatever period of time this ticket was for. And then the AI is like, oh, well, your power bill was high because it was super cold, or it was super hot, or whatever. But the case support person can basically just ask, analyze the support ticket and with the power of Flow that a human created, then the AI can add into it and be like, oh, this is why we think this is wrong.

Jennifer:
Yeah. I think back to the demo that we created for Dreamforce, for the admin keynote, we were using NTO, right? They did expeditions and we were able to say, okay, take the customer’s expeditions that they’ve already been on and take the customer state, and then now go and based on what they’ve done in the past, recommend something similar. And looking at all the expeditions that were available. So that would’ve taken some time for the rep to then go research that and see what expeditions they’ve been to, what they might like, based on those things, to recommend other things. But with Prompt Builder and field generation, click a button, AI does it all for you.

Mike Gerholdt:
I would agree. Well, thanks for sitting around and jawing about prompts and GPTs, because I feel like it’s June, we’ve been talking about this… Has it been for over a year or has it just been a few months? Or has it just been a year-

Joshua Birk:
It feels like over a year.

Mike Gerholdt:
Right. Right. But it’s a little more advanced. It’s interesting because I wonder in a year from now if we listen to this episode, if it’ll sound super dated or not.

Joshua Birk:
Yeah, I think that’s an interesting question. And it’s hard to answer because you have OpenAI saying the AI you’re talking to right now are, oh gosh, I think I’m trying to remember their exact quote and realizing it might not be something we want to record on a podcast. So let’s just say not nearly as evolved as the models that they are trying to bring into the near future. And the near future ones are supposed to be much more intelligent, much more capable of reading your contacts, much more behaving like a human, kind of thing. And so I think that poses the question of when I say how much context and how much repetition you have to put in your prompt to make it do what you want.

That statement might sound dated in about six months to a year. Because the person listening to it at that time might be like, “What are you talking about? The AI just knows who I am and they just talk to me like a travel agent. It’s just normal.” But I think in general, what we’re going to get is better results, and prompt building in general is going to remain relatively the same. We might get to the end faster. We might get more better concise data. It’s going to realize that that great pizza shop is actually closed in Chicago, and it won’t recommend it, and things like that. But I think the actual concepts of prompt building, I think they’re here to stay for a while.

Mike Gerholdt:
Wow. Well, that’s good to know. It doesn’t feel like fly-by-night anymore. Well, I’ll stick a bow on this episode for now, and thankfully none of our AI’s hallucinated.

If you enjoyed this episode, do me a favor and share it with one person, just one. It’s not that hard. If you’re listening in the Apple Podcast app, you can just tap the three dots up in the right-hand corner, click the share episode, and then you can post it to social. You can text it to a friend and be like, “Let’s listen to the prompt building episode together.”

If you’re looking for more great resources, of course, admin.salesforce.com. The number of people I know that don’t know about admin.salesforce.com is hopefully dwindling in the world because I keep bringing it up. But the good news is the reason you can go there, all the resources, if we mentioned any in the show, will be there, a transcript of the show, and links to our Admin Trailblazer group on the Trailblazer Community will be there as well. So with that, until next week when Josh talks to Ravish, and you already had a preview of that episode, we’ll see you in the cloud.

The post What Are The Key Benefits of AI for Salesforce Admins? appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Chris Zullo, Global Practice Director of Customer 360 and Marketing at AllCloud. Join us as we chat about integrating Marketing Cloud and Data Cloud and how you can do more with your data.

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

Bring all your customer data together in SalesforceChris is kind of my go-to Marketing Cloud guy, so I wanted to bring him on the pod to talk through how Data Cloud and Marketing Cloud go hand-in-hand. In his role as Global Practice Director of both Customer 360 and Marketing at AllCloud, he’s seen firsthand just how much of an impact Data Cloud can have by allowing both departments to work in tandem.

There are so many applications businesses use in today’s environment that store data about your customers. But there’s a problem. As Chris puts it, “The likelihood of all of those systems talking to each other in any cohesive fashion is slim to none.” That’s where Data Cloud comes in. It allows you to bring all of that data into one place in Salesforce, and that’s where the magic happens.

Data Cloud creates a consistent customer experienceWhen a customer interacts with your business, they don’t care who they’re talking to—they just want to be treated consistently and as if they’re the same person. If they had a conversation with a sales rep about a certain product or feature, they expect the customer service rep they call to know what they’re talking about.

With Data Cloud, your customer service rep can look at all the communications a customer might have had with sales so they’re on the same page. And if they notice that there’s an email sequence scheduled next week to remind them about their warranty, maybe they can cancel it ahead of time and head things off at the pass.

That’s why it’s so important to give everyone a seat at the table when you’re establishing Data Cloud at your organization: marketing, sales, service, eCommerce, IT, and your data team. You want everyone working together to create a unified experience for your customers.

Data Cloud makes your data actionableSome business units get really attached to their data. Sure, they’ll build you an API to provide a one-way glass view of their data, but why do you need them to integrate it with Data Cloud?

“It’s all about making it actionable,” Chris says, “it’s a verb, it’s an action. Just because I have a view doesn’t mean I can do something with it.” Data Cloud lets you do segmentation and targeting at scale without having to copy-paste into a bunch of pivot tables. And with AI features like lookalike segments, the possibilities are endless.

There’s a lot more great stuff from Chris about how Data Cloud can transform your organization so be sure to listen to the full episode. And don’t forget to subscribe to hear more from the Salesforce Admins Podcast.

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Full show transcriptMike:
With Data Cloud, you can organize and unify data across Salesforce and other external data sources. After data has been ingested into Data Cloud, it can be used to drive personalization and engagement through the creation of audience segments. So that’s what our help documents say. And I wanted to find out from Chris Zullo, who is a business puzzle solver, Salesforce MVP and Global C360 and marketing practice director at AllCloud. What he’s seeing when he’s helped other admins integrate Marketing Cloud and Data Cloud and all of the benefits across the organization from having visibility into that. Also, what are some of the questions that admins should be asking in order to get that integration going?

Now, before we get into the podcast, I want to be sure you’re doing one thing and that’s following the Salesforce Admins Podcast. And the reason I ask is if you’re doing that on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or iHeartRadio, then the newest episode will automatically be downloaded right to your phone so you can listen to it on your bike ride or your dog walk, or maybe you just walk around the neighborhood to clear your head. But let’s talk about integrating data with Chris and get Chris on the podcast. So Chris, welcome back to the podcast.

Chris Zullo:
Thanks for having me.

Mike:
It’s probably been a while, but you’re my go-to Marketing Cloud guy, and I feel a lot of people have seen you present in the ecosystem and talking Marketing Cloud. But catch us up. What have you been up to? What do you do? What’s your exciting passion in the Salesforce ecosystem?

Chris Zullo:
Sure. So I mean, right now, I am doing a lot of things around Marketing Cloud and Data Cloud as a global practice director for Customer 360 and marketing for a company called AllCloud and just really trying to figure out how best to utilize the data that we have.

Mike:
I love it when you get titles based on marketing and you go, “Had that for a while.”

Chris Zullo:
It’s a long one.

Mike:
I used to be a director of social enterprise. I was like, “Ooh, that sounds neat.” And then Salesforce dropped Social enterprise and I was like, “Oh, now I’m stuck with this.” So I’m going to play devil’s advocate because Marketing Cloud and Salesforce, I’ve done stuff, isn’t campaigns enough? I mean, as an admin, I signed up my marketing people and they can create campaigns and they can put contacts in as campaign members.

Chris Zullo:
I mean unofficially the campaign object is the first part of the Marketing Cloud going back in time. But no, it is not in fact enough by itself as that is merely just a folder, if you will, a job folder that you can manage any engagement and activities that you plan to execute and engage with your customer base. So yeah, you need to do more.

Mike:
So what do we get when we sit down and have the grownup discussion of let’s pull in Data Cloud?

Chris Zullo:
So when you think about pulling in Data cloud or why you would need Data Cloud, you got to think about how many systems and applications store customer data and it’s never just one. The likelihood of all of those systems talking to each other in any cohesive fashion is slim to none. So with Data Cloud, you have the ability to connect and create a number of bridges, if you will, to allow all of these systems and applications to feed into one centralized location where we can harmonize, centralize, standardize all of that data to create a unified view of any one individual to better engage with them, to better service them, whatever the topic may be, and not have to swivel chair across multiple systems and try and remove a lot of the manual labor that goes into historically accessing customer data in a lot of different locations.

Mike:
So what are some of the things that you are finding when you work with marketers that they’re excited to get data on with Data Cloud?

Chris Zullo:
Well, some of the bigger things are some of the more advanced segmentation capabilities that you’re able to do. If you think about from retail businesses that are selling goods or products and they’re wanting to figure out what’s the customer lifetime value of an individual or how much are they spending with us? Recency frequency and monetary models where you can get into these more robust modeling above and beyond your typical segments of, okay, give me all the people who like the color red. You can get more just deeper into the weeds to create these more robust groupings of individuals that you can then break down into smaller parts as you need. And so, that’s one of the bigger things is just really being able to look at that and isolate at scale what people are doing, how are they interacting with us and how much do they really like us?

Mike:
Yeah, how much do they really like us? Dear Marketing Cloud, how much do… Please, no, don’t do that. So if I’m listening to this and I’m an admin, I’m putting myself back in those days of sitting in the chair and it’s usually an executive or a stakeholder sees something at an event is like Data Cloud. We should talk about that. Where are you finding when you’re helping admins or doing some of this work yourself? The admin should start this conversation. Does it start with the marketing team because the marketing team needs to pull that in and then they’re going to service? Where are some of these conversations originating?

Chris Zullo:
Marketing certainly has a seat at the table since the concept that Data Cloud is built upon originated within the marketing realm over 10 years ago, the concept of a customer data platform, which really was to make their jobs easier. That being said, they’re not the only ones that can benefit from data. So I think if you’re going to do it right, you have the right heads of each of the major business units or teams or departments, however you organize your company at the discussion around what do we want to do? Who is our customer? Even before you get to the technology, it’s really around alignment across sales, marketing, service, e-comm, maybe IT is involved or if you have a dedicated data team, these are some of the main voices that should have input into creating that centralized model because you may have different uses in each of those teams. The customer doesn’t changed and they don’t care who they’re talking to. They expect to be treated consistently as if they’re the same person regardless of the context of what their conversation is on.

Mike:
Yeah, sitting back as an admin where the data’s at and that your customer doesn’t know where their data’s at, they don’t get, like when you go check into a hotel, why don’t you have all my information? I don’t know where you keep all my information. I don’t know where my name is stored versus my hotel room preferences and I don’t care, I shouldn’t because I’m talking to the front desk person. They should have all that. That’s a thing that I always seem to forget. So what are some of the conversations like because I have to feel like a few of these databases or wherever this information stored have owners and they own the database. I’ve worked with orgs before where, yeah, well, IT owns the invoice server or whatever. Boy, they don’t want to give that data up. What is the benefit in that? Or they’ll come back and say, “Well, I can just write you an API that gives you a view into the order table.” What is the benefit of going Data cloud versus a one-way, maybe pane of glass view?

Chris Zullo:
It’s really making it actionable. I don’t recall the specific quote, but you were in the room with me-

Mike:
Oh, boy.

Chris Zullo:
… back in the day. And it was a difference between a noun and a verb. If you recall the particular event we were at, it was it’s all about making it actionable. It’s a verb, it’s an action. And so, just because you have a view doesn’t mean I can actually do something with it. I mean, that’s still swivel chair because if I’ve got to copy and paste or manually key something in that’s not making it frictionless, and not only is that making my job harder, that is making the customer experience less enjoyable because that prolongs the conversation that slows down the resolution of whatever activity that individual’s trying to carry out. And so, Data Cloud makes it actionable so that once we have that data in, and something that I don’t think a lot of people realize is Data Cloud is not overriding those source systems.

It’s not a survivorship model. So the systems of record are still the systems of record. The system owners are still in charge of what goes on in their domain. Data cloud is just making it so that we can combine the data from these various systems and make it more usable for business users. And if you want, you can activate or push data back to those systems if you see fit. Otherwise, you’re going to activate it into the channels where you can do something with it that’s going to benefit the customer and hopefully make your day job a little bit easier.

Mike:
So what I’m hearing is, as a marketer because that’s where we started, I can query contacts and with Data Cloud also look at maybe contacts with invoices greater than a $1,000 and not have to do a pivot table with contacts I pulled out at Salesforce and then invoices that I got out of this other system because the data is actionable within Salesforce.

Chris Zullo:
That’s absolutely correct.

Mike:
Just letting that moment of silence kind of fall upon people as you hear 10,000 pivot tables in the background screaming, because I feel like that. It’s a different scenario, but I remember just Salesforce a long time ago used to be able to do web tabs or whatever. And so, I set up a web tab, which was our travel portal, and I remember the salesperson being like, “Oh my god, Mike, this is amazing. So this means that when I booked the travel, it’s going to put it on my calendar.” And I was like, “No, it’s just a pane of glass to our travel portal. It is just that there is no integration.”

And too often I think people get caught up in what the visual looks like. You asked for order information, so here it is on another tab when you click this and now you have access to it. Except as a marketer, I still have to go to this other system, to the invoice domain on this other server and pull customer numbers and pull contact records and then pivot table the two as opposed to using a report in Salesforce or something in Tableau to create that campaign.

Chris Zullo:
That can be a brutal way to go about things. And frankly, a lot of us have been used to that for so long because that’s just the way it was done. But now there’s a better way to utilize that data and like I said, make it more actionable to speed up the process and the time to value both for the business as well as the individual that you’re supporting or trying to provide great customer experience to. So another example of that is you mentioned orders, but think about from a case perspective, and this is going to touch across multiple teams. If somebody calls in with an issue or have questions about a product or service that they’ve bought, so you have the customer service rep on the phone, there was an order placed and fulfilled at some point in the recent memory.

And you may have active marketing communications going out to this individual on a regular basis. And so, that’s just three teams that could be involved in that one call. And so, in that moment, does the customer service rep know what you have bought recently without having to ask and make you repeat 15 times after they’ve done that to validate that you are who you say you are? But then can I see your order history? Can I see that there’s some marketing communications scheduled very soon that might be touching upon this very same topic or related topic, which maybe we let go? Maybe we want to hit pause for a second and say maybe we don’t want to hit them up with this marketing communication because they’ve called in, they have a question, we haven’t resolved it.

It may or may not be negative, it may just be a neutral situation, but we don’t want to potentially turn this into something bigger than it is. And so, you’ve got those three different teams that can be influenced by that one call, but how many systems does that rep have to go to see what this person has, what they have bought, what email communications are coming up, or SMS if it’s a different channel? All of that can be in one view if you are able to unify everything through Data Cloud.

Mike:
Yeah, I always feel like the conversation with marketing is sales oriented, but the real increase in fidelity is when as an admin, marketing and service talk to each other, because that’s normally where the joy can be maintained of the sale. After the salesperson not walks away, but closes the deal, to your point, if they have say, a warranty issue, the last thing they want is two days later after a customer service call to get a marketing email reminding them to sign up for a three-year extended warranty. Like, “Hi, welcome to Tone Deaf Marketing.” But it happens, right? And I always feel like when you sit down with marketing people, their initial inclination is sales oriented. But I feel like what I’m definitely hearing is a big value comes to the customer service rep who is, “Hey, I hear you. Let’s work through this issue. I see you’re on a couple of warranty reminder emails. I’m going to go ahead and uncheck you from those.” And you can correct me on this, the marketing team, empowering the service team to do something like that, right?

Chris Zullo:
Yes, exactly. Work smarter, not harder.

Mike:
What are other examples that you’re finding of, I won’t say it’s unintended, but unintended collaboration like that unlocked because of Data Cloud?

Chris Zullo:
Sure. So I think other ones is to your point, from a sales perspective, sometimes people lump marketing and sales into the same team oftentimes and stereotypically and very humorously, it’s like Westside story and they’re on rival factions where we agree on nothing.

Mike:
I would love to think that every sales and marketing meeting begins with teams snapping at each other.

Chris Zullo:
Oh, I feel like there’s a nice skit in the future with that one.

Mike:
There is.

Chris Zullo:
But so think about how those two can be working more collaboratively whether they want to or not, they should be. But thinking about you have people selling on an interactive basis, and if you are, say it’s multithreaded in its account-based marketing, and you have different sellers talking to different people in the same organization, do they know that?

Mike:
Oh, yeah.

Chris Zullo:
Do we know if the left hand is doing while the right hand’s over here shaking a new hand? How are we connecting the dots not only internally, but also looking at the target organization? Who is getting what communications? How are we bombarding them with all these different communications? Or potentially, do we want to empower the sales team to drop somebody into a nurture campaign? It would be a lot more effective if A, we can bubble up the fact that, okay, we have one organization, we have got two sellers talking to five different people and they’re on all these different communications. One’s not.

And then we can look at a broader picture from an account level at the individual level and internally who’s doing what, when, where, and why. All of that rolls into how can we provide a better service from a sales perspective, and how can we empower bidirectionally marketing and sales to help each other to put them into the right communication? Or maybe again, similar to the previous example, maybe dial it back. Maybe we don’t want to hit them as much because they’re talking to a human being. We don’t need to prompt them to schedule their next appointment.

Mike:
Right. Yeah, that’s always fun when you’re getting the email. So moving ahead, AI is a thing, it’s been a thing for a while. We have Prompt Builder, we have Einstein Copilot. What are some of the cool things that you’re hearing marketers are really looking forward to with some of the AI stuff that’s out there?

Chris Zullo:
I think some of the predictive capabilities, I think really being able to leverage the AI from an ideation perspective, creating content or I don’t know about you, but I do enjoy writing, but I don’t always hit the ground running and wanting to be able to throw an idea out there, get something back and go, okay, that’s not exactly what I wanted, but I can work with this. And so, then I can tweak it. And so, I might have a great idea, but I don’t have the words to get it going. And so, that’s one example from a marketing perspective. The other is from a data perspective, thinking about, again, the data has a story to tell and the better your data, the better the story can become.

And with AI in particular leveraging good data, we can then identify trends or identify opportunities that maybe we’re not looking at as closely as we could or should, but also would take us a lot more time to effectively do if we were doing it manually and allowing that to create a lookalike audience, a lookalike segment to say, “Hey, here’s your best audience based on these parameters. You’ve got this whole group of untapped potential that would potentially be really interested in this same product or this same service, but you’ve never bothered to ask.”

Mike:
Yeah, I mean, you put a lot on the salesperson to make those connections in their head, and sometimes it’s just not going to happen depending on the salesperson, right?

Chris Zullo:
Exactly.

Mike:
This is more of a Mike question because Mike’s curious. So where are marketers falling with a lot of the advancements in AI writing emails to customers? Because you and I, we’re from the days when marketing had to go over every single letter word, consonant vowel period in an email, and we built email templates and we would build workflows with email templates. And somewhere a marketer would lay his head down or her head down at night and be like, “I know exactly word for word what the customer got when we closed the deal.” But now with AI we can kind of say, “Hey, tone and voice…” And maybe be softer or maybe be happier or funnier. And I suppose it’s no different than just letting people write emails, but I’d be curious kind of what you’re hearing because I feel you’re a little more plugged into marketers than I’m.

Chris Zullo:
Yeah, I think there’s a relative split. I think you’ve got a number of folks who are embracing it and leveraging it for the benefits that it offers. I do feel that there’s still a bit of skepticism and fear. And to be honest, two years ago I was very much skeptical on what AI was going to do for me as a marketer. So I decided to investigate a little bit further and learn more about it and saw that there really is a lot of potential with AI. And I think the way I would explain it is AI is not going to replace you. I think people who understand and learn how to harness the power of AI are going to have an inherent advantage over others because it is a productivity play, in my opinion. And so, the way I have been explaining it to people is it’s not so much artificial intelligence, but it’s supplemental intelligence. You don’t replace the human. The human still needs to be involved. You’re still the chaperone. You still going to be a hand on the wheel, but it’s almost like having Jarvis from a very popular.

Mike:
[inaudible 00:25:27].

Chris Zullo:
Yes, our boy, he is a helper, but he can’t do all the things without your guidance. Jarvis was a product of Tony. And so, the AI that we’re using in our organization, it’s really going to be a product of how you utilize it to increase your time to [inaudible 00:25:54], your speed to market, or reduce the friction to process data. It’s really about taking that and leveraging that in a way to be more efficient with the time that you have and still have the final say. I’m not asking Einstein to create an email and just send it blindly. No, I’m doing it to jumpstart the process and then I can refine it and revise it with a trained human hand that knows, you know what? That might not work the way that the output provided it. And you can either train it to get better, which it can do, but at the end of the day, it still requires you or me to be involved in the process. It doesn’t work asynchronously. It just doesn’t.

Mike:
Yeah. I was talking with a friend this weekend, and of course, this’ll date me in 10 or 15 years, he’s a professor at university. He said, “AI’s not going to take your job. What’s going to take your job is the people that know how to use AI.”

Chris Zullo:
Exactly.

Mike:
And I was like, “Oh, you’re so spot on.” We diverged a little bit. Last question, anyone who’s looking to get interested in Data Cloud, what would your suggestion be?

Chris Zullo:
I would jump on Trailhead for one. That is a great place to start because you can get hands-on exposure and experience. And honestly, whether you realize it or not, admins, you have such an important role in your organization and Data Cloud can have such a significant impact on how your data is managed, that it really is in your best interest to understand how it works, how it can impact your environment and how you can influence it. And so, number one, go to Trailhead and get started there. There’s a number of resources out there. I’m trying to think of the name. There is a great YouTube series that Danielle Larregui oversees, the specific Data Cloud series and has a number of different guests from Salesforce on there about how Data Cloud works and how to use some of the various features within that, and it’s a really good resource.

Mike:
I like it. Thanks for coming on the podcast, Chris. It’s always good to hear from you and I’m sure we’ll hear some crazy visionary insights from you at Dreamforce this year, right?

Chris Zullo:
I will certainly be there. I’ve been around for a while, so I don’t know if anybody really wants to hear from me anymore, but I’m always happy to share.

Mike:
I don’t know, I got to believe so, right.

Chris Zullo:
Hey, I’m willing and ready. If the invite’s there, I’ll be there.

Mike:
I appreciate it. So it was a great discussion with Chris I, You always think of what’s the immediate benefit of doing something with another cloud? So what will Data Cloud get sales? Or immediately, as you heard in the conversation, my head goes right into marketing and sales, but there’s also a lot of other benefits that other departments are seeing and we had that discussion about service, how you can actually talk and service your customers better. Having that integration, that information, it just kind of makes sense. So I hope you enjoyed the episode. I thought it was a lot of fun.

I’m enjoying this journey of taking you through different parts of your organization so that we can connect that customer data together because truly providing a great experience is what we’re after. Now, if you enjoyed the episode, be sure to share the episode on a lot of the podcast apps, either iPhone or Android. There’s usually a few dots or maybe there’s a hamburger in the corner and you can click to share the episode. You can do that on social or you can text it to a friend. I would appreciate that. Maybe you are going to a user group and people want to…

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Joe Sterne, a Solutions Architect and Salesforce contractor. Join us as we chat about his tips for job interviews, what to look for in a job description, and how you can use AI to help you prep.

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

Contract work in the Salesforce ecosystemLast month, we talked to Jason Atwood about how to prepare for a Salesforce job interview. That episode was fantastic because Jason interviews job candidates all the time, but I wanted to hear from someone who’s had experience sitting on the other side of the table. That’s why I was so excited to hear from Joe Sterne about his experience as a contractor.

Contracting is becoming more common in the Salesforce ecosystem, and it can be a great way to get experience to land that next-level position. “At the end of the day, certifications are great,” Joe says, “but certifications aren’t the be-all, end-all—it’s also experience.” Of course, being a contractor means that you’re constantly looking for that next gig, so Joe has a lot of great tips to share from going out on so many interviews.

What to look for in a Salesforce job descriptionLooking for a new position usually starts with reading through a bunch of job descriptions. Joe recommends taking a close look at what responsibilities are actually listed because it doesn’t always match the job title. It can happen for any number of reasons, but it’s important information to know going into the interview process because it can affect the salary band.

Joe also suggests investing the time to make sure you have something to talk about once you land that big interview, especially if you’re bound by an NDA. It could be Superbadges, or work you’ve done for a nonprofit, or, as Joe says, “maybe it’s something you did for fun just so you could talk about it in an interview.” No matter what, you need a way to demonstrate your skills and knowledge and how they’re a fit for your new role.

How to prep for a Salesforce job interviewWhen you’re prepping for an interview, Joe recommends taking some time to learn about the business and the industry they’re in. Who are their clients? What problems are they trying to solve? And, most importantly, why are you a good candidate for them to help them address those problems? At the end of the day, that’s what you’re selling.

As Joe says, you want to be able to walk into the interview and say, “Here are your problems, I understand them, I’m going to be able to fix them, here are some ways I should be able to fix them, and here are other ideas I have that I could work on with other people as I learn more to evolve those solutions.”

There’s a lot more great stuff from Joe in this episode about how to deal with weird interview questions and how he uses ChatGPT to help him prep, so be sure to listen to the full episode. And don’t forget to subscribe to hear more from the Salesforce Admins Podcast.

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Full show transcriptMike:
So let’s say you’re out there as a Salesforce admin and you’re interviewing and you get a crazy question like, “If you could be any animal, what animal would you be?” Well, I won’t tell you the answer that Joe Sterne gave but Joe Sterne is on the podcast today and he’s going to help us flip on the other side of the coin. That’s right. So it’s June. If you remember back in May, I had Jason Atwood on the podcast. He’s from Arkus and he was talking about what he does to interview Salesforce admins. My hope was to get you in the mindset of what a hiring manager is looking for.
Today, I got Joe Sterne, who is out there in the job market and he’s interviewing as a Salesforce admin, at least he was at the time that we reported this. And gave some tips to help you get ready for your interview, some things that he’s doing. Also, you know what? We talk about contract work because I think that’s a very viable solution as a new admin. Now, of course, before we get into the episode, I want to make sure you’re following the Salesforce Admins Podcast wherever you listen to podcasts, whether it be Apple Podcasts or Spotify or iHeartRadio. Go ahead and click that follow button and the reason is then a new episode will be put on your phone right away when you wake up Thursday morning. So with that, let’s get to our conversation with Joe.
So Joe, welcome back to the podcast.

Joe Sterne:
Hello.

Mike:
Good to have you on again. It’s been a while. But let’s talk about, so back in May for the people that follow along with the podcast, because I know everybody does. I published an episode How to Prepare for a Salesforce Job Interview in 2024 and Jason Atwood was my guest. And I think he did a really good job of prepping us on the employer side. You, I know, are currently now on the admin side. So I wanted to get the… Does it show my age if I say the peanut butter cup scenario, like the chocolate and the peanut butter version?

Joe Sterne:
I mean, I don’t think so. I’m still a big fan of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup. Wait. Can I name drop brands on this?

Mike:
Yeah. You can.

Joe Sterne:
So-

Mike:
I mean, if they want to want to send me a care package of peanut butter and chocolate, I’m all for that.

Joe Sterne:
There you go. Yes. I mean, to me, that does not date you. If you were saying something more along the lines of… I’m trying to think of… Not Milk Duds. There’s some candy that’s coated in chocolate that has powder in the middle of it that’s from the 1940s.

Mike:
That’s Milk Duds. That’s Milk Duds. Every time I’ve had Milk Duds-

Joe Sterne:
Oh, okay.

Mike:
Oh. No, no. Malto-

Joe Sterne:
Malt… yes. Malted Stuff. Yeah.

Mike:
Malted Dots or something they’re called.

Joe Sterne:
Yes. Yeah. Those-

Mike:
Yeah. Those things-

Joe Sterne:
Are old.

Mike:
You bite into it, you’re like, “Oh, chocolate,” and then it’s like a puff of dry dust.

Joe Sterne:
Exactly. Yes. That, I feel like, would date you.

Mike:
Wow. All right. So Joe, since we’ve last spoke, what have you been up to?

Joe Sterne:
Oh man. So was I still at Salesforce when we last spoke? I think I might have been.

Mike:
You were still?

Joe Sterne:
So yeah, I was wrapped up in part of the layoffs in the beginning of 2023 and landed a couple different solution architecture specific roles at companies over the course of 2023 that also had layoffs sadly. The market has been quite chaotic over the last year and a half in the Salesforce space. I am currently right now doing contract work for another company, still doing solution architecture, but doing it under my own LLC.

Mike:
Ah. So what have you found interviewing… And I guess being an LLC and pitching consulting services, you’re interviewing, right?

Joe Sterne:
Right. Oh, yeah. Yeah. You’re still interviewing. It’s just, to me… Well, I’ll take one step back here. I’m still interviewing for full-time or W2 positions as they like to call it when I’ve been talking about positions but I’m also open to 10-99 or corp to corp. Corp to corp is one of the main reasons that I decided to do an LLC. Besides the tax reasons, it’s the ability just for somebody to come back to me and be like, “Hey, we can do contract but it needs to be corp to corp.” It’s like, “Cool. We can do that. I have one.”

Mike:
Gotcha.

Joe Sterne:
And not have that be a limitation where it’s like, “Hey, we can’t do 10-99 or W2 on this engagement,” that knocks you out of the rutting. It’s like, “Well, okay, that doesn’t really help me and I would love to be able to deduct stuff from a business standpoint. Since I’m going to be using my own hardware in most of these contract situations, I’d rather just wrap that up from a business perspective.” So I know that’s not necessarily totally viable for a lot of people, especially just starting out in the industry. But I would say, it’s something to be aware of because I have seen a pretty big shift within the last 18 months in the industry. Well, big for me. I’ve been in the industry since 2013 and I fell into it. That there’s been a dramatic increase in contract roles of any sort and a pretty pronounced pullback in full-time W2 roles.

Mike:
Okay. But let’s tackle that first part. Let’s say you are, for your opinion, a newer admin. What is the level of experience you feel people should be at before they would go and do what you did which is start an LLC and do, we’ll just call it contract admin work, as opposed to being hired on as a position within the company?

Joe Sterne:
Yeah. I would recommend probably being at some sort of a senior level, so a few years of hands-on experience ideally. That you can then use to translate some of the value of why you would be a good candidate for them from a hiring role in general, whether it’s contract or not. But here’s some of the stuff that I’ve done, here’s some of the things that I’m a part of, here’s some of the knowledge that I have, that I’ve encountered on the job, some stuff that I may have not necessarily encountered on the job but dabbled in.
Because at the end of the day, certifications are great. I am a certification ambassador for Salesforce so I will not say anything different. But obviously, certifications aren’t the be all end all either. It’s also experience. Experience both helps you get a certification as well as certifications help you get experience. So it’s this chicken and the egg scenario sometimes when you’re first starting out where it’s like, “How do I get that experience if no one’s willing to take a chance on me?”
That is obviously a much larger conversation than what we’re having today. But having some of that experience, I think, is helpful if you’re trying to go that contract admin route or a fractional admin. Which I feel like as the rise of some of these C-suites, I think that some of that “fractional work” may start coming up where you may be working for two or three companies at once. That you’re all doing admin things, but they just don’t have the level of requests or tickets or change that would require somebody to be on full-time with benefits but they still need some help.

Mike:
Right. That may be the case, right? In your area or depending on where a person is, maybe they’re not hiring for a full-time admin. So you’re newer, you need the experience, would you take on a contract role? Let’s say a company’s like, “Look, we’re not going to hire for this position full-time but we will do a 6-month contract with you.” As an individual, to me, that sounds like a great way to at least get some experience.

Joe Sterne:
Absolutely.

Mike:
And then you’re also working towards, “Well, they could renew the contract. It also gives me a few months to get in with an organization,” and maybe you may like it. And then, you could… Well, if you made this full-time, look at all that you would get.

Joe Sterne:
Right. The one thing I’ve seen over the past few months as I’ve navigated the new contract world. Because historically, I’ve only looked for W2, but with this market I’ve had to open myself up to contract roles, is that there definitely is the concept of contract to hire.
Where essentially instead of testing out an employee for 60 or 90 days, you’re essentially testing them out for six months, a year, or so. Some of those offers might just be dangling in front of you to get you to be willing to do a contract. But I feel like others actually do convert and drawing some parallels to outside the Salesforce ecosystem when it comes to community management or marketing, having a bunch of contract roles before you land a full-time one is not unusual.
It used to be unusual in the Salesforce realm and I feel like that is also starting to change just with the way that the current market is and the pullback on head counts. That is forcing companies to arguably prioritize their bottomline over their employees. But again, slightly separate conversation. But making sure that from a cost standpoint, that they’re not necessarily wasting money on separate groups that they don’t “need” too.
So I think that having the ability to grab a contact role for six months is great. It’s just that one of the things that you will need to be aware of is that from a interviewing perspective, you don’t… Sometimes when you get a full-time job, especially if it’s one that you’ve been pining for, for a while, you take a step back from the LinkedIn and the job application market for a period of time.
When it comes to contracting like sales, you don’t really have that luxury. So yes, I am currently contracting for one company but I’ve never stopped looking for additional work. Just because I don’t necessarily have an exclusivity with my current company and I’m also… I’m trying to get to 40 hours a week billable right now which they can’t offer and that’s okay. It was only pitched as part-time anyway. But for me, it’s always trying to find more work and more potential pipeline.
So it’s very similar. It’s from a consulting standpoint of trying to build a book of business and trying to build a pipeline and trying to line that up. Because ideally, if I stayed in this world of contracting work and whatnot, I would be trying to make sure that I’m fully booked out for a year or so in advance and turn away work or refer work to other people rather than trying to scramble for it. It’s the typical feast or famine concept.

Mike:
What were… I guess I started in the past tense. But what are some of the things that you do when getting ready for a job interview, either as a W2 or a 10-99, that you feel is applicable to a lot of admins?

Joe Sterne:
Oh, man. So I would say, one of the things that I’ve really started to leverage. And I know that the whole AI, AI, AI thing has been beat over-

Mike:
Really? You don’t get that anywhere? I haven’t-

Joe Sterne:
Yeah. No, I-

Mike:
I haven’t seen AI anywhere. That’s the first I’ve heard of it.

Joe Sterne:
Yeah. Exactly. Over the last year, I’ve definitely started to leverage at least ChatGDP more and more to a point where I’m actually paying for it. I tried to actually set up my own custom GDP around Salesforce architecture that got kicked off the store because it used the term Salesforce. But that is something that I’ve found to be helpful when I have been, A, researching the company and the industries that company is in. Because asking questions about that, diving deep, granted for most of the stuff that people think of AI today, arguably it’s just spicy autocorrect.
But there are some areas where it can definitely start doing things for you that are either tedious or just time-consuming. So I just saw an article that Shannon Tran posted around a Salesforce Ben posting where they were trying to implement different types of AI in an org and they were just trying to figure out what made sense. It turns out, a lot of it, they had to go off platform for and that brings up a ton of complexity. As an admin, you’re not necessarily required to know all of that. But you would want to know at least on the Salesforce side, what they’re planning on doing and what tools that they are implementing. And what different areas or different features that may have not been available in the past are now available. Is the company going to be paying for those extra licenses? How are those going to be implemented? Are you implementing them? Is a third party implementing them?
So there’s a lot of different questions that would probably come up in an interview if you start diving down into that. I have found that tools like ChatGDP are very helpful to navigate those flows beforehand and potentially, give you a talk track before you actually even talk to them. So I mean, you can use ChatGDP as a pseudo interviewer and have it just drill you for questions. You can use it as a certification prep tool and have it ask you questions.
Now, granted, especially in the latter example, I would want to verify that those answers are correct because they do have the chance to hallucinate every now and then. Obviously, I always joke that because it’s on the internet, everything is true. But I do feel that when people see things that are typed out, they usually default to thinking that is true rather than potentially critically thinking that it may not be. So just a word of caution that you may not have 100% accuracy in truthfulness. But, to me, that’s been a great way to prep for interviews just because I can almost have a conversation rather than me just doing a few Google searches and having to potentially connect the dots here and there which is also very useful.

Mike:
You said something that… Well, right at the beginning of your answer, it’s been just echoing in my head that I want to know in the current landscape… You said, “When I’m looking at a company and how I would work with them…” How much does that come up in the interview? How important is it in the age of the internet that you actually do the prep work on the about page and the history page and the about us page or if they have a corporate values page? How much do you do that when you’re prepping as an individual or as a consultant?

Joe Sterne:
So I would say that you don’t necessarily need to know their entire executive suite by the back of your hand and be able to recite off what they’ve done like you’re talking about a sports player. Unless you want to, by all means, go for it. I’ve found that knowing a initial amount about what the industry that they’re in, some of the customers that they deal with, whether that’s other businesses, whether that’s end consumers, whether that’s both, it helps you figure out some of the problems that they’re searching for.
Because eventually, that’s what you’re trying to help them solve. That’s what you’re selling to them as a solution is, “Here. Here are your problems. I understand them. I’m going to be able to fix them. Here are some certain ways that I should be able to fix them. And there are other ideas that I have that I could work with other people as I learn more to evolve those solutions.” I mean, that’s true if you’re a consultant, that’s true if you’re in-house. You’re there to solve problems and make the company money or make the company money by making other people more efficient, stuff like that.
So having a baseline knowledge of what they’re doing helps you because from an initial interview standpoint, you may not necessarily have a lot of the… The best way to describe this is like a contact situation where it’s, “Hey, given this certain issue that we’re having, we’re going to give you a quick brief background, tell us how you might approach it or tell us how you might solve it.” I see that all the time. Those, if you don’t know what the business does, you don’t know how they necessarily act with their clients or partners or anything in their ecosystem, it’s going to be a struggle for you to answer those. Because you won’t know that off the top of your head and then you might have to fumble your way through it.
As opposed to doing a little bit of research, not a ton. Because granted like right now in this market, I’ve found that there is a lot of quantity that you may have to go after initially before you can start focusing on quality as those amounts of interviews narrow as you go through the process. So it does take a lot of time to fully memorize a company. I’m not recommending that you do that. But not knowing anything about them and going in “cold” is not going to help you either because you won’t be able to answer those hypothetical situations.

Mike:
Right. Yeah. It’s funny just having been in the world and seeing that change, just the difference that the internet brought interviewing people. God. Before times? So what are things that you… Always, we get asked, and a lot of people get asked like job description. What should I look for in a job description? How do I know if this is… Is this a Salesforce admin job? Some companies call it that. They call a duck a duck, you’re a Salesforce admin. Some don’t. The business technology specialist or corporations sometimes have different naming conventions. What are things that you look for in job descriptions?

Joe Sterne:
Okay. So-

Mike:
Buckle up. I feel like this is an answer.

Joe Sterne:
Yeah. So it’s funny that you bring this up because from the one thing that I have definitely noticed as being a solution architect, for the last half a decade or so, is that a solution architect these days isn’t always a solution architect. You have to actually read the job description. Because a lot of times, I’ve encountered where you have a “solution architect”, like that’s what they call you. But you’re asked to do Apex coding and debugging and all these other things that a technical architect would be responsible for.
I don’t know if it’s just people don’t understand that there is a fairly clear delineation between technical architects and solution architects when it comes to the amount of code that they should be required to do or if they’re just trying to get a technical architect for cheap. Because arguably, the pay band for a technical architect, like any other dev, is a little bit higher than a solution architect which is generally not responsible for stuff like that.
So I have seen a lot of that confusion in the marketplace when it comes to the position that I’m currently in. And I think that definitely also cascades down into even the difference between a “junior admin” where they’re asking you to do everything an admin would do, but they’re only trying to have you at the junior level to save cost or that they may not know better.
It definitely depends on, if you can tease out, how long they’ve been using Salesforce. Because obviously, the newer they are to Salesforce, I think, the more struggle of understanding titles and how they reference to typical other titles in the ecosystem. It’s a little bit more of a struggle if you’ve just started Salesforce as opposed to, “Hey, we’ve been on Salesforce for a decade. HR is caught up to this. We’re well aware of pay bands. So that’s not something that we’re going to necessarily be able to,” I don’t want to say con, but, “argue with the level of talent that we want.”
Because that’s something where if you’re applying for a job that says junior and all of the stuff that they’re asking and all the things that you talk about in the interview says, “This is actually a typical admin or a senior admin level,” that’s something to call out. Because that’s probably going to show up, maybe not necessarily on the title side, but it’s probably going to show up on the pay band side.
So being aware of what a typical admin is responsible for is generally pretty helpful when you’re reading these job descriptions. Because then, you can get a gut check of like, “Hey, are they really asking for an admin or are they asking for a senior admin? They just happen to have it marketed as something different.”?

Mike:
Yeah. Well, and a lot of times, a lot of what we find and this is true for a… I don’t want to pick on just admins because I know I’ve talked to the developer relations side. It’s that way, too, with a lot of roles that people write. Especially if it’s a new role within the organization, they just blanket, “Here’s everything you should do,” and it’s like… I remember reading job descriptions in… Was it 2017? And they said, “You need five years of Lightning experience.” It’s like, “Well, it’s only been out for two.” And it’s no fault to the company, they just… I don’t think they somehow know to categorize stuff like that. So yeah, job descriptions can be all over the place.

Joe Sterne:
But as long as you’re comfortable with what they’re asking you to do, at least on the ten, that is usually a good start. Because the other thing to note about the job descriptions is it’s generally, not always, but it’s generally a starting place to some of the questions that you’re going to start getting from the interviewers. One of the things that I get all the time when I am pitching companies or just interviewing generally is they’re like, “Hey, you gave me an example about X, Y, Z. Can you go into more detail?” It’s like, “No, I can’t. I’m under NDA, so you can go talk to this company and have them sign a waiver if you want but I can’t tell you exactly what I did. I can tell you that I worked on it.”
That happens more often than people think because they’re trying to not necessarily see what the competition is doing but they’re trying to gauge your skills. So being able to have ways that you can talk about your skills that aren’t necessarily bound by an NDA can be really helpful. Maybe, that’s some stuff that you’ve done with Superbadges, maybe that’s something that you’ve done with a nonprofit that isn’t necessarily bound by NDA, or maybe that’s just something that you did for fun, literally, so you could speak about it in an interview. There’s nothing wrong with that. But those questions generally do come up. It may not be first round. It might be second or third. And God, hopefully not fourth or fifth. But those-

Mike:
You never know.

Joe Sterne:
Yeah. You never know. Those examples usually directly relate back to that job description. Because there are people that you may be talking to that aren’t necessarily very close to Salesforce. But they’re brought into the interview process because they are a department that you’re working with or a division that you’re going to be embedded in. They may not know everything about Salesforce, so they may just go down the job description part and ask you questions.
They may go down your resume and just drill you on, “Hey, why do you have this on here? Can you tell me a little bit more about it?” So being able to say, “Oh, cool. Thanks for asking me about that here. And I’m going to go into a 2-minute monologue of the question that you just asked.” That’s definitely very helpful because it shows that, A, you understand what they want and you also understand what you’ve done and you’re able to talk about it at arguably a snap of your fingers. And not necessarily have to be like, “Oh, well, hold on a second. Let me look that up,” and, “What did I write here?”, kind of thing

Mike:
As we wrap things up, I… It sounds like a fun question. Fun is a word that means a lot of things in my head so we won’t use-

Joe Sterne:
Are we using air quotes right now?

Mike:
No. I’m trying not to. Nobody can see them. Let’s use the word interesting.

Joe Sterne:
Okay.

Mike:
What is the most interesting question you feel comfortable sharing that you got in a job interview?

Joe Sterne:
Oh, man.

Mike:
See how fun could also work?

Joe Sterne:
Yeah. Yeah. Fun could also work. I feel like that is… I’ve gotten a lot. I’ve had a… So I would say within the last year and a half across the last few jobs that I’ve gotten ever since I left Salesforce, I’ve probably put in well over a thousand applications.

Mike:
Wow.

Joe Sterne:
I’ve had not a very good conversion rate to interviews but I have had some interviews. I think that the more bizarre questions that I get are usually something that has absolutely nothing to relate to Salesforce. I think it’s the ones that they’re trying to figure you out from a psychological perspective but they haven’t really thought it through. So it’s the ones where it’s like, “Hey, if you could be any animal, what animal would you be?” “I don’t know. An elephant? So I can’t forget all this stuff.” Like, “How does this relate to what we’re doing?” That was-

Mike:
Joe, how are you going to type with elephant feet?

Joe Sterne:
Right. Exactly. I’m like, “I’ll have to use-”

Mike:
[inaudible 00:29:30].

Joe Sterne:
Right. I’m like, “Do I need to ask for accommodations here?” So it’s questions like that, that I’ve gotten, where it’s just been completely oddball. Like, “This has nothing to do with the job at all. How…” I even struggle to how connect the dot back to the interview process itself where it’s like, “Hey, what are you trying to ask me?” Because it’s not something simple of like, “Hey, I’m having this issue. How would you tackle it?” It’s like, “Well, I’d try to do it in configuration and this is the way that I think I would tackle it based on this information. If that changes, then maybe I’d look at the App Exchange and see if I could find anything there. If that didn’t necessarily work, then I’d have to start talking about custom code and understanding…” That’s a whole train of thought that you can have with a question that is semi-technical related. But if you have somebody asking, “Hey, what brand of soda would you be and why?” Where do I go with that?

Mike:
Yeah. First of all, you’ve got the big two. And then, what if you go a regional flavor that nobody understands with limited distribution?

Joe Sterne:
Right. Or what if you go something retro like, “Hey, I’d like to be Tab or Crystal Clear Pepsi,” like-

Mike:
I was going to say Crystal Pepsi, yes.

Joe Sterne:
Yeah.

Mike:
That’s the second or third time it’s come up on this podcast. It’s awesome.

Joe Sterne:
Yeah. I mean, bringing it back full circle, talking about something that will date you, Gen Z has no idea what Crystal Clear Pepsi is. But it is definitely one of the, I would say, the rare failures of soda, up there with new Coke which is also-

Mike:
It still doesn’t… Coke still doesn’t taste right. I remember what Coke tastes like as a kid and the whole new Coke, new Coke tasted like Pepsi.

Joe Sterne:
Yeah. Exactly. They were trying to go after the sweeter market. I only remember this because Stranger Things did a Coke tie-in, I think, for Season 2 or 3 where you could buy redone new Coke in the can. And so, I bought it just to taste it and I remember sipping it and I was like, “This is horrible. This is knockoff Pepsi, store brand Pepsi.” And I was like, “Yeah. I can see why this didn’t go anywhere.”

Mike:
Right.

Joe Sterne:
So yeah, so I would say that I don’t know if you could necessarily prepare for those questions of, “If you were a soda, what soda would you be and why?” But those are usually ones that I would found there, it’s like, “All right. Maybe I should reconsider wanting to work for this company in general if you’re going to be asking me questions like this. Because I don’t know if this is going to be a reflection of the type of company that it is too.”
Because I mean… I feel like one thing that a lot of people forget, and it’s easy to especially when you’re desperate for a job, is that you’re also interviewing the company. You’re trying to figure out if you want to work there too. So there are times where the interviewers are trying to sell you on working there and there are times where they may not be. But that’s something that, ideally, is on you to figure out, “Hey, I need to be able to ask questions that would determine if I want to work there,” and those can vary from people.
So I can’t say there’s a list of questions that you should ask every company, period. But a very good one to start teasing out how they were is what is their stance on return to office? Because that’s usually a really good indicator of, “Do we listen to our employees actually or do we say we listen to our employees and ignore them?” So it’s questions like that… Obviously, if you want to be in the office full-time, you can ask that question. It doesn’t necessarily matter what they say. But if you don’t want to be in the office full-time or if this was marketed as a remote job and they’re actually saying it’s hybrid, that’s something to think about like, “Hey, if they can’t get this right in the job application, what else are they going to potentially be getting wrong or not necessarily telling you the truth when you’re working there?”
So make sure that you don’t forget that you’re also interviewing them to see if they’re a place that you want to work for too. Not necessarily just… It’s not one-sided. It’s always two sides of a conversation. It’s a conversation. It’s not a monologue. It’s something where you need to have back and forth and it’s for the… Ideally, it’s for both sides to make sure that, “Hey, we’re both in agreement of what’s expected.”

Mike:
Yep. I completely agree. I wasn’t trying to teach admins anything out of this other than just sometimes getting funny questions is a fun way to end things. Joe, I want to thank-

Joe Sterne:
Oh, yeah. Yeah. Sorry. I probably went on a serious tangent there.

Mike:
No, you’re fine. We know you want to be an elephant.

Joe Sterne:
Yeah. I mean, sometimes that’s also to keep with a funny thing like, “Do you have any questions?” That’s also something that you can just throw back at them too. “Hey, if you were a soda, what soda would you be and why?” Because I guarantee that 99 point something percent of people aren’t expecting that question. So it’s a… Depending on the banter that you have with your interviewer, it might be a fun way to end it out.

Mike:
Right. Good. Joe, thanks for stopping by and-

Joe Sterne:
Of course.

Mike:
Keeping us up to date on what’s going on out there. If people wanted to follow you on anything social, I’ll go ahead and link it down in our show notes.

Joe Sterne:
Yes, that would be great. Yeah. You can find me on Twitter, I refuse to call it X. You can find me on LinkedIn and I mean, heck, you couldn’t find me at my new company. You can shoot me an email. Feel free to reach out to me. I still have people reaching out to me from our past conversation I’ve had on this podcast periodically so I always love to get those notes. Yeah. I love to get those notes because I mean, I’m here to help other people. So if I haven’t helped you, I’m sorry. That was definitely my goal of today. And if I have helped you, I’d love to hear that I have because it’s always a nice ego boost.

Mike:
Absolutely. Thanks so much, Joe.

Joe Sterne:
Thank you.

Mike:
It was a great discussion with Joe. I’d love to know, so what answer would you be for an animal? The whole time that he was asking that question, for some reason, the tiger came to mind. But I’d be curious, I’d love to know what animal you could be if you were a Salesforce admin at a job interview. But I did think that Joe gave us some really good tips and from an experience standpoint, oftentimes, it’s brought up, “Go help a nonprofit.” But sometimes looking for a full-time FTE job versus a contract job, a contract job might be a good path for getting some experience. If it’s a trend that a lot of organizations are going to, it’s a great way to get into the front door of that organization. So thanks, Joe, for being on here and sharing some of those wisdom.
Now, if you’re doing one thing and you enjoyed this, I want you to help share and spread the word. So if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts, just go ahead and tap the three dots in the upper right and click Share Episode. What you can do there is you can post at social or you can text it to a friend, maybe you have somebody else that’s out there looking for a job. Of course, I mentioned resources, links to Joe’s social stuff, all of that will be in the show notes for the episode. All of the Salesforce Admin episodes can be found at admin.salesforce.com. That is your one-stop for everything admin, including a transcript of this episode. Be sure to join our conversation in the Admin Trailblazer Group that is in the Trailblazer Community. Again, link is in the show notes. So until next week, we’ll see you in the cloud.

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we have another deep dive with Josh Birk, who talks to Shoby Abdi, Principal Architecture Evangelist at Salesforce. Join us as we chat about the Well-Architected framework, why you should start using Data Cloud, and what you need to do to get ready.

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

The Well-Architected frameworkShoby is the Principal Architecture Evangelist at Salesforce, and he’s come on the pod to tell us about the Salesforce Well-Architected framework. And he’s here to tell you that the framework is not just for Salesforce Architects—everyone should take a look at it.

As Shoby puts it, if your customers or users open Salesforce and it scares them, that’s how you know you need to use the framework. It can help you identify anti-patterns in your org and fix them by building solutions that are trusted, easy, and adaptable. Those are the essential ingredients for a healthy org, and that’s what puts you in the best position to take advantage of everything Data Cloud has to offer.

If Data Cloud were a parking lotWe’ve talked a little about Data Cloud on this podcast in the past, and that’s linked below, but Shoby helped explain why it’s such a big deal. The main point he makes is that by bringing all of your data together in one place, it can start to tell a story. As he puts it, “What is your customer doing? Where are they? And then how do you interact with them next?”

When we talk about Data Cloud, it can often sound like it’s some sort of parking lot for all of the information you have about your customers. But as Shoby points out, it’s so much more than that. It’s more like if your parking lot had a valet that could tell you everything about who’s parked there, what kind of car they drive, how long they’re staying there, and exactly when they plan to leave.

Einstein and Data CloudIf you’re a Salesforce Admin looking to enable Data Cloud, Shoby recommends working through the Well-Architected framework to make sure that your org is healthy. After all, these tools are only as good as the data you give them.

If you’ve done all that, there’s a lot to get exited about. Data Cloud brings everything into Salesforce as standard objects, which means you can build all sorts of interesting things with flows and everything else you’re already using. And with Einstein Copilot and other AI tools, the possibilities are endless.

There’s a lot more great stuff from Shoby in this episode about how Data Cloud works, so be sure to take a listen. And don’t forget to subscribe to hear more from the Salesforce Admins Podcast.

Podcast swag* Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Learn more* Salesforce Well-Architected Framework * Making Data Cloud Work With Your Existing Salesforce CRM Data * Salesforce Architects Blog * Podcast: Well-Architected Automation with Tom Leddy

Admin Trailblazers Group* Admin Trailblazers Community Group

Social* Shoby on Medium * Salesforce Admins: @SalesforceAdmns * Mike on Threads: https://www.threads.net/@mikegerholdt/ * Mike on Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@salesforce.mike * Mike on X: @MikeGerholdt

Full show transcriptJosh Birk:
Greetings, Salesforce admins. It’s Josh Birk here, your guest host for this week. This week on a deep dive, we’re going to dig into data cloud and then talk about data cloud. I brought one of my good friends and old colleagues, Shoby Abdi.

All right. Today on the show we’re going to welcome back Shoby Abdi to talk about data cloud. Shoby, how you doing?

Shoby Abdi:
Not too bad. Just doing well. Connections is right around the corner. Just to timestamp this for everybody.

Josh Birk:
It’s a Connections week. It’s a DevOps streaming week. Everybody here is in Chicago and I’m still at home talking to you. So that’s my social calendar.

Shoby Abdi:
Exactly. That sounds very similar. I am also in Chicago.

Josh Birk:
Nice. Okay. So introduce yourself a little bit. Tell me a little bit about your current role.

Shoby Abdi:
Sure. So my name is Shoby Abdi. I am a principal architecture evangelist on the Salesforce’s Architects and Well-Architected team or the other way around. Essentially, if anybody has ever gone to or if you’re a Salesforce architect or if you’ve ever gone to architect.salesforce.com or if you’ve ever heard of the Well-Architected framework, my role, along with a few others is that we are evangelists. So it’s very similar to the work that Josh does or on the admin side or developer advantage to the developer size, except our audience is firmly architects. Architects of all kinds, whether that be our internal ones, customers, partners, architects all over the place.

Josh Birk:
There’s a nice overlap between admins and architects. So actually let’s give you that this is the Tonight Show portion where you get to do your own plug. Tell me a little bit about the Well-Architected framework.

Shoby Abdi:
Sure, absolutely. So the Well-Architected framework in a very simple manner is prescriptive guidance for solution health. When we put it that way… Now remember, it’s a Well-Architected framework. Now, Well-Architected frameworks exist not just with Salesforce, but Amazon, Microsoft, all kinds of other cloud providers have created their own Well-Architected frameworks. What’s really important about the Well-Architected framework is that it’s not simply for architects, right? While it’s Well-Architected, it’s not a well-built framework for architects. It’s a Well-Architected framework.

So the idea is that regardless of your role, your function, if you’re just a customer, if you’re an implementer, everybody should be looking at it. And when we talk about solution health, really what it boils down to is a lot of times when anybody is implementing for the first time, or they’re implementing in an existing org, or even at as an administrator, you inherit an org. You start a job and you inherit some eight, nine-year-old org with all kinds of technical debt happening and you’re like, “Okay, I don’t know what’s good and what’s bad, what to keep and what to deprecate.”

What the Well-Architected framework does, and when you look at it from a baseline perspective, is that it was really developed and designed by architects and other individuals in the ecosystem like yourselves, like the folks listening. It was also firmly designed by our individuals within our product and engineering team. And that’s important is that the prescriptive guidance within it is really firmly built on top of not just base level knowledge, but it’s firm recommendations, firm practices, and we even take the tack of actually dictating specific patterns and anti-patterns.

Josh Birk:
Got it.

Shoby Abdi:
Related to how it goes. And the way that Well-Architected framework is structured is around solutions should be trusted, easy and adaptable. And we firmly believe they should be in that order. One of the first elements of trusted is secure, but then easy, it’s about being intentional and then adaptable. One of my favorite, one of the last ones is composable. And obviously as Salesforce, trust is our number one value. So obviously we’re going to feel trust should be the first thing you focus on.

So really the framework itself is really a… The simplest way I can put it is that if you want to build a healthy solution, if you want to maintain a healthy solution, you can utilize a prescriptive guidance within the framework and you can find it at architect.salesforce.com. It’s available today. It’s not hidden anywhere. You can find it today and utilize it as you need it.

Josh Birk:
Love it. So if you’re an admin and you open up your org and it scares you, this is a good trail guide to get out of it.

Shoby Abdi:
It’s not even if you’re an admin, it often scares you, it’s more of like if you’re a customer or if a business user open up the org and it scares them.

Josh Birk:
Right.

Shoby Abdi:
It’s like, “I’d love to use Salesforce, but I really can’t use it because of the following SB issue. My report-”

Josh Birk:
Because of all the anxiety it gives me, whatever.

Shoby Abdi:
“I really want to use this report. I don’t know where it is, but I really want to use this report, Meredith, but it takes five minutes to run. I can’t use it.” Okay, well, it may be full of anti-patterns. So that’s where utilizing some of the guidance within our performance, topics, around throughput and latency could come in handy to really understand, are these reports I need to modify? Do I need to do skinny tables? Do I need to optimize any queries if it’s custom? That’s what that guidance really is.

It’s not simply an admin even or an architect or developer or anybody looking at it themselves. It could also be based on actual customer and end user feedback of what they’re seeing and what they’re telling you that needs to be fixed.

Josh Birk:
Because that’s the commonality between these three roles is that the users are always in the middle.

Shoby Abdi:
And Salesforce.

Josh Birk:
And Salesforce, yeah.

Shoby Abdi:
There you go.

Josh Birk:
Okay. So we’re talking data cloud today, and let’s take the very, very high level. If you have to introduce data cloud as a product to somebody, how do you describe it?

Shoby Abdi:
The way that I describe data cloud is that when it’s so much like you hear a lot of different capabilities around it. You’ll hear data lake, data warehouse. Really what data cloud is, is it provides the ability for any organization, regardless of the amount of data sources that your organization has to make those data sources and all of that data, that disparate data that can be everywhere doing many things. It makes it useful in the context of your customer.

If you’re a B2C organization that has end customers out there in the world buying things, then it could be useful as far as a unified profile for that person goes. As you’re a B2B organization where you’re more business oriented and account oriented, it could be useful for you as well. I was actually describing this to someone yesterday where when you look at data cloud and its capabilities, and a lot of people will always think of different data sources, data lakes, data warehouses where it’s different and important is that data cloud is not simply a place where you park your data, hope it works, and hope you can find it. It’s not a parking lot for your data. Right?

Josh Birk:
Right.

Shoby Abdi:
What it is when you bring it into data cloud, you can automate it. You can get a view of your customer. Right?

Josh Birk:
Yeah.

Shoby Abdi:
When we talk about that single view of the customer. And really what drives that view is the customer’s interactions and activity. Whether you’re a consumer based organization or a business to business based organization, your customer is going to interact with you in some way that involves data. They’re going to be creating data, whether they’re clicking on websites, they’re paying invoices, they’re paying credit cards, they’re creating cases, they’re telling you that they want to buy 500,000 of these and you’re closing a deal and they’re paying off an invoice and agreeing to an order over email.

All of these actions, all of these functions, all this data as it comes into data cloud starts to tell you what are the behaviors? What is your customer doing? What is your customer doing today? Where is your customer? And then how do you interact with them next? So that’s the power of data cloud is, it’s not simply a, “Okay, I’ve got all my data in. That’s great.” No, that’s literally step zero.

That’s what we tell everybody. Get your data into data cloud. Just get it in. Because once you get it in, then it’s the power of automation, analytics, unification, segmenting, activations. That’s where it starts to matter. So that’s really when we talk about the data cloud, that’s what we look at.

Josh Birk:
Yeah. I love the parking lot analogy because first of all, it’s so easy to think of it like that. I’ve got my data in Salesforce, but then blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. There’s something over here. I’ll use data cloud to connect it. But to kind of extend that analogy, it’s not just a parking lot. It’s a parking lot with a valet and a security officer and a scheduling system. It’s got all the moving parts you need in order to efficiently move cars in and out of that parking lot.

Shoby Abdi:
Yeah, absolutely. It’s not just lot covered. So really what it is, it’s similar to everything that Salesforce does. Like I said before, trust is our number one value. Similar to the Well-Architected framework as well, it’s built with trust in mind. It’s built with security in mind. So because we have that trust first. Now, when it comes to data cloud, you can be secure that when your data comes in, we handle that. We can take care of that part. Then what starts to matter is what you do with it like automation.

Josh Birk:
Yeah. What are some specific use cases that you see? What’s an example of somebody who just clicked and they’re like, “Oh, this is actually the problem that I need data cloud to be the solution”?

Shoby Abdi:
So a lot of it really comes in terms of, okay, data cloud obviously started from its CDP days and it’s evolved significantly. A lot of use cases that we’ll see are simply around, “Okay, I need to understand how do I interact with my end customer next?” So principally you’ll see some of that around unified profile. If you’ve ever seen a demo of data cloud, you’ll see first use case of, “Okay, who is this human being? What websites are they going to? And then finally, what is it that we need to really work them with?”

And then people often ask like, “Okay, I’ve got that element of data cloud and I’ve got all this data in. I see this person, but who’s going to help me next?” That’s where our friend Einstein comes in handy, right? Because you can create an email within Einstein utilizing different prompts, different capabilities, but once you include data cloud data into that prompt, now all of a sudden you’ve enriched it significantly. Where now because CRM data, while powerful is often limited.

It’s limited based on what your business does and how your business updates still that CRM data, whether it’s case data or opportunity data. But data cloud data is your customer’s data. Right?

Josh Birk:
Mm-hmm.

Shoby Abdi:
They’re the ones who are constantly making it happen. So now all of a sudden if your email or if the campaign is a part of, is a reflection of actual real life activity they’re doing and they didn’t need to tell you, “Put me here next,” that makes a big difference in that process. So that’s fundamentally a use case that we see. It’s like while it’s very general, it could apply to marketing, it could apply to sales, in the end, the reason I articulate this specific use case is that it starts to really combine the power of the data cloud with the power of what you probably already have if you’re looking at data cloud, which is your Salesforce CRM.

Josh Birk:
Yeah. Well, and I like… Every now and then in tech, we get the handiness of a phrase that just makes sense. Unified profile, I feel like honestly gives you the solution, but also defines the problem in the first place, right?

Shoby Abdi:
Yeah, absolutely.

Josh Birk:
If I’m trying to communicate with you, Shoby Abdi, but you as a digital identity is actually strewn about 15 different data sources, then when I go to Salesforce, I have to cobble that together before I have an accurate representation of you.

Shoby Abdi:
No, absolutely. A lot of the challenge is, someone even asked me this… Yesterday was apparently a busy day, but someone asked me this yesterday as well, was just around, “Well, can you use data cloud for de-duping?”

Josh Birk:
Right.

Shoby Abdi:
And then I said, “One of the things you have to think about is de-duping is a you problem. It’s not a customer problem. The customer’s problem is you don’t know who they are. So if you’ve got eight different versions of that human being’s name and you don’t know which one is the which one that actually has bought anything, or maybe they’ve changed their name, they’ve changed their address, they’ve changed their phone number, but then all of a sudden when you bring in the data cloud, you bring in all those unified data sources and one of those John Smiths is clicking on a lot of your websites, ordering a lot of your product.

And the John Smith you thought that was in your CRM was the one that was actually doing it, is not that one. Then you really don’t have to de-dupe anything. Then you know which one is the actual human being, John Smith, like the ones you should actually start having that enriched discussion with, that enriched engagement with, whether it’s through sales, service, marketing support, however. That’s where you can start.

Josh Birk:
So data cloud’s not there to try to fix your bad data management, but it can help focus the lens, so to speak, so that you’re looking at the right part of the data.

Shoby Abdi:
No, absolutely. Right? Because by bringing all those data sources in, now all of a sudden your customer is almost in the data driver’s seat because as they interact with your online properties, as they interact with your organizational properties and data created, now all of a sudden their activities start to reflect within those profiles and you start to see and understand what it is they do.

Josh Birk:
To extend to that, how would you compare, because you and I are old school technologists and we grew up in the days where what we are talking about now would mostly be in the realm of extract, transform, and load, right? Like an ETL process. How does data cloud compare or how is it similar or different from those old school solutions?

Shoby Abdi:
Yeah. And I think that comes up quite a bit of like, “Well, how do I do ETL with data cloud? Do I go with this ETL tool or do I go with data cloud? Do I do this or do I do that?” And invariably the power… One of the things that often comes up is it becomes a… When you look at what data lakes we’re looking to solve and data warehouses were looking to solve was like, “Okay, we’ve got all of our data all over the place. We need and to be one specific place.”

And then it’s like, “Okay, we’ve put it now in one specific place.” And it’s like, “All right, now what? Now, are we all of a sudden… Once again, it’s the parking lot.” Are we all of a sudden like, “Okay. Well, this person’s claiming they need to leave the building at 9:00 PM. This person is leaving at 10:00. So why don’t we park their car up here and then with there and then go over there.” Right?

Josh Birk:
Right.

Shoby Abdi:
So now all of a sudden as a customer because of something I really didn’t do, I may have gotten there really early. But because I got there early, I’m getting penalized for leaving early because a lot of people came after me. So the way that I compare it with ETL, it goes back to the ability to create that unified profile, activate on that unified profile, create some [inaudible 00:15:45] unified profile, is that you start to worry less about how to get clean amazing data.

I don’t even compare it to MDM. I’m sorry ETL, but it’s MDM. How do you do data cloud with MDM? And it’s like, well, once again, who is it for? Is it for your internal organization to have its perfect golden record situation when in fact the golden record should be the customer? It should be that customer. It should be the individual account record or that individual record inside of Salesforce. And then what’s really driving it being meaningful golden are the interactions and activities that are happening.

And that’s where that power of data cloud comes in with you bring in from data sources through batch elements or through streaming elements, whether you bring it through our Insights API or any other API or an SDK. As you bring that data in, now all of a sudden you’re simply enriching that profile more and more and you’re able to automate on that more and more as it goes along.

So that’s why it’s hard for me to compare it to base level ETL or anything because the power of it is that just bring the data in. Bring the data in. Where with ETL it’s all about, “Well, before you bring the data in, let’s talk about at least 50 things.” Where now it’s like, “No, just bring the data in. And then utilizing the power of the data cloud itself, the power of automation built within our platform like Flows, and Apex, and Orchestration, others, you can do a lot more with it. But the first step, I’m going to go back to what the first episode will be on, it’s just got to bring it in.

Josh Birk:
You just got to bring it in. Right. Well, and let’s use that as a launching point because you just said automation a lot and you said Flow. So an admin who knows Flow, what are some things that they can use Flow to interact with data cloud?

Shoby Abdi:
Yeah, absolutely. And what’s interesting is a couple of weeks ago we actually put out a blog. So if anybody’s ever read our blog, medium.com/salesforcearchitects actually blog post about this very thing. It’s essentially, if you want to look, it’s called Making Data Cloud Work With Your Existing Salesforce CRM data. And while I’m not good at titles, the end goal of it was really to talk about when we talk about data cloud and Salesforce and our entire platform, our Einstein 1 platform, it’s really all about… One of the things that you’ll see is that shared metadata framework.

And that’s one thing if anybody takes anything away from whatever it is I’m saying, it’s really that all of this is a shared metadata framework. What that shared metadata framework means is that now as we just keep saying, “You bring that data in, bring that data in.” It’s not simply, “Okay, now that I’ve brought that data in, I don’t know what to do with it. Can I actually access it? Can I use the tools that I have in place in platform to actually do anything with it?”

Or it’s like a marketing cloud thing. I need to learn marketing cloud automation. So one of the drivers behind creating that blog post was to say, “No. Data cloud was built with the power of the platform in mind.” It’s the marrying of data cloud capabilities with Salesforce CRM. So when data cloud comes in, it comes in as different kinds of objects. It’s objects. So it starts usually from data streams as DSOs. And DSOs is essentially that data from all these different third-party sources. And this is where data starts to reflect within your data cloud environment, whether it’s zero copy or it’s registered.

It’s essentially there. It’s available to you to actually start to proceed with. That’s when you start to create essentially data lake objects as well as DLOs. And those DLOs is when you start to look at, “All right, what are those specific data use cases I want?” It could be sales-related, it could be service-related, it could be marketing-related, it could be telemetry-related, it could be anything. But then beyond those DLOs, once again, we’re still talking about objects. That’s when we’re going to create other kinds of objects.

So the first kind of object is usually what’s called a DMO. Now, if you’re an administrator or developer architect, when you’re working with data cloud, you’re probably going to be working with DMOs quite a bit because DMOs are more often than not, where a lot of the automation is happening. So a DMO is essentially to harmonized group in those DLO. So you could have those data lake objects. Let’s just say, one of the things about I always miss is those fun old school MarTech diagrams where they’re like, “Oh, let’s show all the hundreds of billions of kinds of applications that exist out there for marketing.”

Josh Birk:
Right.

Shoby Abdi:
It’s true. Right? You may have 55 Google Sheets and ADRPs and etc, etc. As you start to go down the source object, DSO, data lake object, DLO, DMO object in a DMO process, you start to essentially build out, parse out what the object model needs to look like, what that harmonized elements of data needs to look like for your specific use case. And I’ll go over a Sales Cloud, use case that’ll be relevant.

So for DMO, and then you’ll have another kind of object, which is actually a calculated insight object, calculated insights, which is a CIO, now that you can create basically based on essentially an insight based on a query, based on specific analytics like certain… Old school calculated insight or [inaudible 00:21:33] review. There’s a lot of different ways you can call it, but it is essentially based on a calculation that occurs where someone hits this website these many times, or they’ve made these many orders or that kind of thing.

Josh Birk:
Gotcha.

Shoby Abdi:
But those are the kinds of objects. So now all of a sudden, okay. You’ve got all these kinds of objects within data cloud, these data cloud objects. What happens then? So that is where the power of our fliend, friend. Not fliend, but friend.

Josh Birk:
Fliend.

Shoby Abdi:
Friend Flow comes in. So when we look at flow, it’s really the one thing we need to realize about data cloud is that a data cloud instance can exist in one environment. It could exist as a single data cloud instance across multiple environments.

Josh Birk:
Gotcha.

Shoby Abdi:
So if you’re an administrator who’s like, “Well, it’s not as easy for me Josh, because I’ve got 55 environments in this one data cloud instance, catering to all of them.” You could still use Flow. The way that it changes the way that you design it slightly differs. And this is obviously evolving, but for now, this is the way it is at the time of this recording where if your data cloud and your Salesforce CRM are in a single environment, the same environment, that’s where you’re going to create a data cloud triggered flow. And the data cloud triggered flow, if anybody has an activated data cloud org, or if you’ve gotten a data cloud environment from Trailhead, you’ll see the ability to create a data cloud triggered flow, and that’s launched when a DMO or CIO have a change of data. So now all of a sudden it’s like, “Okay. How do I then associate that triggered flow with my Salesforce data?” Well, you do it the way you do it.

Josh Birk:
You would do it normally.

Shoby Abdi:
You create a record or you essentially update a record or you do something, right? Because now all of a sudden that customer activity within that Flow can then drive whatever updates you want within that CRM object.

Josh Birk:
Gotcha.

Shoby Abdi:
So that’s one of the first ways you can correlate, or you can actually directly link your data cloud, data model data that’s being generated to your Salesforce CRM data model data.

Josh Birk:
Got it.

Shoby Abdi:
The second way to use Flow is that if it’s in different environments. Now you may say, “Okay, well it’s in different environments. Am I in trouble now? Now the answer is no. Once again, data cloud is designed for this in mind. Now, there are many ways to actually utilize a data action and data cloud, and what a data action does is very similar to the trigger flow. It looks for any data changes in the DMO or CIO, right? One of the specific ones, you could do web hooks and other means that work with all of our clouds, but the one that people probably most know is a platform event, because a platform event is basically another kind of object.

And that now all of a sudden you can create a platform event and then that can hit a flow within another org, a platform event, and then all of a sudden it becomes, “Well, now how do I associate that data cloud platform event, data to my CRM data in my other org?” Well, you do it the way that you would do it today, right?

Josh Birk:
Right.

Shoby Abdi:
You essentially do it the way that it would work with the platform event today if it came from data cloud, if it came from grandma’s Microsoft Access table, whichever one. So that’s where you can operationally use it, where in those situations, whether it’s the same or different environment, how you can use Flow if you want to create read, update or delete any and all Salesforce data.

Josh Birk:
Gotcha.

Shoby Abdi:
The other path that you can do is you can also… You have the ability to actually view some data cloud data associated with CRM data, and that’s relatively new, what are called data cloud related lists and data cloud copy fields. A related list is essentially the way it sounds where it’s just specific DMO like data model object data associated to a lead contact or person account or a field, or a field data that can be updated from data cloud.

So that once again, the lead contact and person account. The only distinction on that one is that it’s view only at the moment, and it’s really restricted to lead contact person account at the moment. Whereas through our Flow process, any implementer, administrator, anybody can use the existing skills they have from a clicks or a code perspective to make it work Flow.

I keep using Flow. People are like, “Well, what about Apex?” Same rules. Same principle rules. You can create a trigger on platform events. You can create a trigger off of… And utilize the triggered Flow and data cloud in the same environment to kick off Apex. You have a lot of those options as well. So in the blog, I have an example of like, “All right, I talked about it in very ethereal terms.” How do I talk about that in terms of an actual use case, like a useful one?

So the way that it’s described is that essentially we have data like a Sales Cloud one because Sales Cloud is our number one biggest cloud, and we have Sales Cloud data coming in from order management systems and ERPs. And it used to be, “Well, if I’m bringing in from order management and ERPs, that’s all ETL talk. Do I need to do that?” No, no, no, no. You can absolutely bring that data in into Salesforce using data cloud. And once it’s in data cloud, you can create those data lake objects, you can create those DMO objects and even calculated insights.

The example that I gave was if you have all these order management systems and all these ERPs, you can create DMO records that combine all of the order data across all these different sources into a single object model.

Josh Birk:
Gotcha.

Shoby Abdi:
You can combine all of them if they’re, let’s say, direct. In fact you’re selling through like grandmas… I’m really harping on grandma today. Grandma’s like a local convenience store. You can get their data as well. And then you could also create this calculated insight record and you could say you want to group all the order data by an individual across all of them, whether they went into grandma store or they went on your online e-commerce website. E-commerce, That’s a good way to put it. You’re online. E-commerce, I’m going to really age myself.

Then regardless of which direction you go, you can get that data from all those disparate data sources, Salesforce, and that can create an order record and associated to a lead and opportunity or quote that can update data within your CRM. It could do all of those things. You can actually show those copy field data, those related list data associated to that lead contact or person account because it’s probably you making that order regardless of where you go.

So now all of a sudden, that order, whether you went to the store, whether you did it online, showing up under you. It’s coming in from data cloud. So that’s a very base level one example that’s described in more visual diagram detail inside of the blog post. But the reason that we went with the route of a Sales Cloud, one, is that right now, obviously data cloud is activated in everybody’s environment. You could turn it on today.

Josh Birk:
Gotcha.

Shoby Abdi:
The first thing that people turn on, they’ve got Sales Cloud. It’s like, “Oh, let’s see what this looks like with my Sales Cloud. Can I use it with Sales Cloud?” The answer is yes.

Josh Birk:
The answer is yes.

Shoby Abdi:
Absolutely you can and you should. So that’s really the goal of that.

Josh Birk:
Nice. Now, if somebody is listening to this and they’re like, “Oh, this might be me. I use Sales Cloud. I have other clouds, I have other data sources, et cetera,” are there considerations? I mean, other than the obvious stuff, don’t go blow up your production just because you listened to Shoby and Josh on a podcast. But are there considerations an admin should take before flipping that switch and turning on data cloud?

Shoby Abdi:
Yeah, absolutely. A lot of those considerations are obviously looking at the state of your existing environment. If all of a sudden you’re going to open up all the sources of data, the source of very powerful automation, I think people should absolutely not underestimate how powerful is because in many respects is that it’s going to be meaningful. It’s going to be meaningful is because when we talk about bringing those data sources in, it’s your data. It’s your organization’s data. But the end, you want to look at your org and essentially understand, okay, is it in the best place it can be to do that? Right?

Josh Birk:
Yeah.

Shoby Abdi:
And bar another word because I’m setting myself here, up here, am I healthy?

Josh Birk:
Exactly.

Shoby Abdi:
Is the organization healthy? So now all of a sudden it’s like, “All right, well if I got to get healthy, where do I find that?” You could look at the prescriptive guidance that exists within the well architected framework, because while you’ll find a lot of items there that maybe specific data cloud, one of the things over the next few months, our product managers associated with the framework and with data cloud, they’re adding more as it goes along.

But one of the things to keep in mind is that if you’re going to bring that data into Salesforce, CRM, anyway, the guidance within what Well-Architected framework is all about that.

Josh Birk:
Gotcha.

Shoby Abdi:
So I wouldn’t even say it’s more of a, well, before you blow up your org… Remember, data clouds are really designed for such a significant amount of data. You may be listening to everything right now, I was like, “Well, Shoby, I got way too much data. I got way too much data.” I can’t handle this. Once again, that data cloud was designed so that problem doesn’t exist. Because you may say, “Well, I’ve got too much data in Salesforce. How do I solve that?” Well, that’s where data cloud has these amazing CRM connectors. Sales and service. And you can actually ingest your own data and utilize the analytics and automation capability at scale to make it work where if all of a sudden an account is 20 years old, you don’t want to lose out on all the amazingness of the last 19 and a half years.

Only the last six months matter from an automation perspective. It used to be used be, “Well, you just got to archive that data and then hope for the best.” Now, you could still right, but in the end, bring it back in data cloud.

Josh Birk:
Get the insights.

Shoby Abdi:
Get the insights, absolutely. Get that historical insight. All of a sudden you’re… And if you start to inject Einstein into this, because it’s the Einstein 1 platform, you start to inject Einstein into it. That is where all of a sudden you may be using the latest and greatest in technology, but your customers aren’t losing out on the historical context that you are providing them. They will gain. They will absolutely gain from what you’re providing.

Josh Birk:
And since we get paid every time, we can say AI on the air, it also completes that picture. When we talk things about like grounding prompts and putting your data into what the model is going to understand, if you haven’t fixed that lens problem, if I haven’t figured out who Shoby Abdi is or who John Smith is, then AI won’t either.

Shoby Abdi:
No, absolutely not.

Josh Birk:
Data collect can help you point in that direction for the AI.

Shoby Abdi:
And really that’s where all of a sudden, even when we talk about principally AI, we talk about that human at the helm.

Josh Birk:
Right.

Shoby Abdi:
Right? For a long time we obviously called it human at the loop, but now we’re talking human at the helm. And really the whole end goal of the human at the helm is that you in many respects need to co-pilot this. It’s almost like we have this product called like Copilot.

Josh Birk:
It’s like, “We’ve thought about that name first.”

Shoby Abdi:
It’s like, “Oh my God.” And really the end goal of being a co-pilot… And the way that I’d like to think about it principally, especially with co-pilot and how it relates to data cloud, is that when you’re a co-pilot and you’re flying a plane, some large 747, what you’re not having to do is go outside on the plane and the flaps, raise them up, go down to the fuselage, put the wheels down, and then when the plane is in the air, “Boy, now I got to get it for cruising. So now you got to go back outside when you’re 10,000 feet in the air.

Josh Birk:
In the air, yeah.

Shoby Abdi:
But the flap is back down. Raise the wheels up. Our aviation technology has evolved beyond that. So when you look at the power of Einstein, look at data cloud, really what it is, is that you truly become the co-pilot where all of this automation, everything is there to help you as the human being to just do your job. But what it’s not doing right is it’s not adding more complexity to it, right? Aviation technology has gotten to that point where it’s like… There’s been jokes of like, “Well, if I fall asleep, who’s going to flip the switch to land? When we have to land.” It’s like, “Okay.” It’s almost to that stage.

It’s like, once again, but would you ever fly a plane? Would you ever fly in a plane that didn’t have a pilot? I don’t think anybody is ready for that yet, right? So having a human at the helm providing all of this, so increasing the ability for that just makes things more trustworthy. It makes things a lot safer for you and your customer. So that’s why I like to… Once again, I don’t think it’s an AI, but now I just did. But in the end, when I think about AI in terms of all this, it’s really, it relates to me. The data cloud story is a huge part of it, right? The Salesforce CRM story is a huge part of it. You can’t talk AI. You can’t talk Einstein without data cloud and without CRM.

Josh Birk:
Yep. All righty. Well, thank you very much, sir. We will give references and resources in the show notes, including to the Architect site and Shoby’s blog post on this topic. Shoby, thanks for being on the show.

Shoby Abdi:
Thank you.

Josh Birk:
I want to thank Shoby for the great conversation and information. As always, I want to thank you for listening. Now if you want to learn more about this show, head on over to admin.salesforce.com where you can hear old episodes, see the show notes, and also read other resources on the topic. Once again, everybody thank you for listening and I’ll talk to you soon.

The post Why Should You Integrate Data Cloud with Your Salesforce CRM? appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Brandon Walton, President, Owner, and Principal Consultant at Cypress Learning Solutions. Join us as we chat about discovery, building trust, and why building with core Salesforce features is the best option for small organizations.

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

Creating a puppy pipeline in SalesforceBrandon started his career as a car salesman and support tech in the Redmond, Washington area when a fateful call with a tech executive who liked how he explained things led to a job offer. That company used Pardot and, when it was acquired by Salesforce, he had the opportunity to become the implementation partner. The rest is history.

Today, Brandon’s a Salesforce Consultant for small businesses. One of his clients is Family Bred Puppies, which works to maximize the quality of life for dogs by matching families with small breeders. I wanted to bring him on the pod to share how he created a Salesforce implementation for them that’s scalable and easy to maintain. After all, who doesn’t love talking about puppies?

Creating a low-maintenance, scalable Salesforce implementationAs Brandon explains, when you’re working with a small team they want Salesforce to help them do what they do best. They often don’t have the resources to hire a full-time admin or developer. However, as he was doing discovery, Brandon realized that there was a way to map their already-existing business process onto basic Salesforce architecture.

Family Bred Puppies goes through an application and interview process to qualify families looking to adopt, which are handled with the standard Salesforce lead and lead status objects. If they’ve found a suitable candidate, they can upgrade that lead to a contact and use the stages of an opportunity to track the adoption process. There is, however, a custom puppy object for puppy-specific information like vaccinations and genealogy.

Because almost everything is built with standard Salesforce objects, the implementation is extremely low maintenance. It’s also easy to upgrade and expand. In fact, Brandon just came from a meeting to talk about adding case management and Marketing Cloud, and AI features like Einstein Next Best Action just work because it’s all standard.

How to build trust with clientsWhile all of this is good in theory, I really wanted to know how Brandon was so successful at getting his client to follow his advice. That’s the real challenge, isn’t it? You can explain all day why an opportunity would work better than building a custom adoption object, but how do you get them to believe you?

For Brandon, it comes down to building trust. “When someone believes that you’re listening to them and have their best interests as your top priority, that’s the foundation of trust,” he says. Keep asking questions instead of jumping to a solution right away, and get them involved in the process of creating a Salesforce implementation that works for them.

There’s a lot more great stuff from Brandon in this episode about scalability, user training, and puppies, so be sure to listen to the full episode. And don’t forget to subscribe to hear more from the Salesforce Admins Podcast.

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Learn more* How I Solved It: We Turned Salesforce Into a Puppy Adoption Platform! * Puppies: Family Bred Puppies

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Full show transcriptMike Gerholdt:
I got a plan. How about this week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk about the Puppy 360 instead of the customer 360. That’s right. So this week we’re doing a follow-up. You might’ve seen Brandon Walton on How I Solved This with Jennifer Lee. If not, I’ll include that link in the show notes. But Brandon helped a small family business that helps place puppies with the right people to use Salesforce. And so I’m having him on the podcast to talk about discovery, and building trust, and really building applications with native Salesforce features that require some, let’s call it minimal maintenance, because I think there’s parts of organizations that you build high maintenance or applications for because their business is constantly changing and ones that will require minimal maintenance. We also talk about the art of building trust, which is fascinating, but also puppies. So I’ll warn you, there’s a few puppy talks in there.

But before we get into the episode, I want to be sure that you’re following the Salesforce Admins Podcast on iTunes or wherever you get your podcast. It’s super easy. Just click on the follow or subscribe button inside the app. And the reason I tell you to do that is then the app will automatically download new episodes. So you can wake up, say it’s Thursday morning, because that’s when new episodes drop, and you’re like, “I’m going to go for a walk this morning. It’s a beautiful May day, and I want to immediately listen to this fantastic episode about puppies.” The Apple have taken care of it for you while you were sleeping, so all you got to do is subscribe and do that right on your phone.

But with that, let’s get into the conversation with Brandon.
So Brandon, welcome to the podcast.

Brandon Walton:
Thanks, Mike. Thanks for having me.

Mike Gerholdt:
You bet. Well, I’m excited after watching Jennifer’s How I solved It on her YouTube channel, see all the amazing things you do. Plus, when she recorded the episode, there was puppies all over our Slack feed. So I’m a dog lover. Got to have people on the podcast that help people out with dogs.

But let’s get started with you Brandon. How did you get started in the Salesforce ecosystem and what do you do?

Brandon Walton:
Yeah, Mike, thanks. And before I get started, love puppies too. I love working with the Family Bred Puppies team. They’re just a great group of folks, and puppies barking, yapping. Just add a little of excitement that you don’t get to enjoy all the time.

So rewind a long, long time ago, my first jobs out of college were sales jobs. And I was the young just out of college guy who became that impromptu help fix someone’s computer here, help fix a printer there. This is back in the mid 2000s when we were still sending faxes back and forth. So I became-

Mike Gerholdt:
VGA ports. Don’t forget those. Never forget.

Brandon Walton:
Yes, you get it. You’ve been there.

Mike Gerholdt:
Oh, yeah.

Brandon Walton:
So I worked at a car dealership actually, I was selling cars in Bellevue, Washington. And a big demographic that we serviced were Microsoft folks. So I was the dealership sales/tech support specialist guy, if you will, just by function, not by job title. And I was working with an executive and he said, “Brandon, I like the way you talk and explain things. [inaudible 00:03:49]. Do you want to sell cars the rest of your life? And do you want to come work for me, work with me?”. And I didn’t look back.

And so from there I did technical sales, business analysts work, a lot of it related to Microsoft, that being from Bellevue Redmond at the time, that was the big employer there. And the team I was on started using a tool called Pardot for communications, an email automation platform. Pardot eventually became acquired by Salesforce, and there was this opportunity to be an implementation partner. So I jumped at that opportunity, started working in the Salesforce ecosystem, and I’ve been a consultant in the ecosystem since 2014 now. So gosh, that’s 10 years in doing Salesforce work specifically.

2018, started my own Salesforce partner consulting firm, and get to work with small teams like Family Bred Puppies every day. And I love the challenges. I love solving things for different businesses. It’s kind of like you get to solve a new puzzle all the time.

Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah. Well, you lasted in consulting 10x more than I did, so congrats. You mentioned Family Bred Puppies quite a bit. Let’s talk about them and a little bit of the solution that you built.

Brandon Walton:
Sure. So Family Bred Puppies is a client of mine. They work with small family-owned breeders. So their whole thing is they believe in quality of life for puppies, for dogs, especially the ones that they work with. And also making sure that families are getting a good experience through the adoption process. So when they came to Salesforce, looking at exploring Salesforce to facilitate not only relationships with the different breeders that they work with, but also the families that are adopting these puppies, they were looking for that all-in-one solution of being able to qualify applicants, also work with breeders, but manage the life cycle of a family that’s adopting a puppy, and also managing the relationships with the small family breeders that they’re working with on a regular basis.

So one of the things that we do as consultants, and where we start out with is, okay, let’s understand what this business is looking to do, and let’s understand how we can map what the business is looking to do with Salesforce’s core platform. Because that’s the other thing. Working with small teams like this is, they’re not necessarily developers. The Family Bred Puppy team, they love working with dogs. They don’t have a computer science background. So what’s good about that is they’re very open to our suggestions and recommendations. They really needed something that was easy to use, that didn’t require a solution that was so advanced that they would need to hire a full-time admin or a full-time developer.

So we start taking a look at all the parts of their business that they need to manage in order for them to deliver on their mission of providing a good adoption experience for families, providing a good relationship with the small family breeders that they’re working with, and having something that they can manage very easily. So we started taking a look at just that core Salesforce architecture. You’ve got your lead, a lead can be converted into an account and a contact, and you’re managing opportunities.And then down the road you look at cases and stuff like that.

So they have an application process. You can go to their website, familybredpuppies.com, submit an application. They’re asking questions that are important for the application process. So they want to make sure that families that they’re working with, they’re not looking to start their own puppy mills and things like that. All those things are very important for the team. So we took a look at all of the questions that they needed to have to qualify a family looking to adopt a puppy. We mapped that to a web-to-lead form. Again, keeping it very simple out of the box. We set up that web-to-lead form on their website. And so now when someone goes to Family Bred Puppies and submits an application to adopt, that gets added to their Salesforce account as a lead. And all of those fields are being mapped in so they can see it all inside of Salesforce.

The team uses lead status as they’re qualifying the family, so there’s an interview process. The first part of that interview, if some of those questions aren’t answered correctly, maybe they’re looking for a breed of puppy that Family Bred Puppies doesn’t have or doesn’t work with, or maybe they’re looking to adopt a puppy for a reason that the team doesn’t want folks adopting puppies for, like they want to be very careful about people wanting to adopt a puppy and then go create a puppy mill from the puppies. They disqualify. So you have this using lead statuses, disqualify, [inaudible 00:09:34], disqualify.

When someone goes through that application process and they are someone that would be a good fit, that’s when we convert them from a lead to a contact. A contact gets associated with an account, a household, it’s a specific record type that we’re using. And then we have the opportunity. And what we did on the opportunity is we mapped the sales stages of the opportunity to the steps of their adoption process. So first step is let’s match the family with a puppy. Let’s have the family out to meet. Let’s make sure that the puppy’s gone through all their vaccinations and all these things. And then throughout the process, the final step is the puppy’s been taken home.

And so what we did with Family Bred Puppies is let’s map your business process as close to the Salesforce process as we possibly can. And what was good about working with the team is sometimes you work with small businesses that say, “ell, this isn’t an opportunity. This isn’t a product, this is an adoption. So rather than using opportunity, we should create something totally custom and call it adoption.” And then you end up recreating a lot of these out of the box features.

And so what was really important for, I think the success of this project was the fact that they were so open to listening to our advice and leveraging that standard Salesforce architecture. So now they have a solution where we were having a discussion earlier today about adding cases so they can actually do case management. And because it’s all built off of accounts and contacts in the core architecture, looking to add these things is just easier and easier and easier.

We’re early on in the conversations about looking at things like Marketing Cloud so they can send follow-ups a year in, two years in, three years in, when they’re working with these families. Or if someone refers a friend, being able to manage all of those kinds of relationships. And because it’s built on that core architecture, adding these new features and looking other things that we can do on the platform is just way more attainable because they’re designed for scale.

Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, no, I think you said something key at the beginning there, which is… And I get you’re a consultant and people listening to the, oh, why is he talking to a consultant? Well, essentially where admins are consultants are internal, right? We’re just paid differently.

But you’ll go into an organization, and I’ve gone into different parts when I’ve worked in organizations, and this client for you needed an app that didn’t need to be highly maintained because it was pretty sturdy. We’re not going with a lot of crazy out of the box stuff. And I’ve had different departments that use Salesforce the same way. And I think it’s kind of figuring out what does this department need, and how custom do they want to go, and how much can I support it? Because you were clearly wanting to set them up with something solid that they didn’t really need to pay. It is essentially like buying a new car. I just need to be able to put gas in it and manage everything.

You said something at the beginning before we pressed record that I thought was really interesting, because a lot of getting an organization or getting a department to use standard objects, and getting past the, “Well, but we adopt things and we don’t sell things,” is trust. And I wrote it down, you said, ‘There’s an art to getting them to trust you,” and I think that’s for the admin as well. What is that art for you? What does that mean for you?

Brandon Walton:
Yeah, I think trust in my world starts with the client, or the team, or the department, understanding that you’re listening and you understand. And I think for so many people, and sometimes by accident, that it’s a skill that you learn over time, is to listen and to listen to understand. And I think when someone believes you, that’s part of trusting, is believing. When someone believes that you’re A, listening to them, and two, have their best interests as your top priority, that’s the foundation of trust.

How many times are we in a conversation, a conference maybe where we’re meeting someone, or just whatever it is, meeting someone for the first time, and you’re talking to them, and you can’t get a word in because they’re just talking, talking, talking, talking, talking? But when you are engaging with someone who’s listening, and listening to understand, and asking questions, like we use the example, “Okay, Mike, you’re not really selling, but it’s more of this adoption process. But let’s talk about this adoption process and what goes into that?”. Just by asking questions rather than jumping to what that conclusion might be, it helps, not only it helps me really understand what you’re looking to do, but my goal is that you understand that I’m here to try to understand as well.

And then you can dig dig dig dig into a topic, and then at the tail end of that session, it might be a couple of days or a couple of hours depending on the complexity of the project, the goal for trust is to come out with we understand each other. And if we’re talking from a place of understanding, then I can make a suggestion to you and you trust that my suggestion comes from a place of, “All right, Brandon understands what I’m looking to do, and now we can have a conversation.”

But when you rush that, it’s kind of like if we were just going out for dinner, if we were going out on a date for the first time and I asked you to marry me after an hour, “Well, hold on, hold on. I don’t know if we’re ready for that.” So I think trust comes from listening and from a place of mutually understanding each other, and then believing that the person who you’re talking to really has your best interest in mind and can get you there because that person understands what you’re looking to do.

Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, I do feel like there’s a TV show of One Hour Date And Marriage.

But one thing you mentioned that I think is huge is you started with all of the core functionality web to lead. You mentioned lead object, you mentioned opportunity. And then you also, well, they’re looking to expand. It’s so easy to sit down and say, “Well, I was just at World Tour,” or, “I was just at this fancy user group and I’m all juiced up. I’m going to build a custom object. And I can create an adoption object. And maybe I call it adoption process object.”

For you, what was the benefit for them being able to expand, having used that core just opportunity object, just the core lead object?

Brandon Walton:
Well, in my world, I work with a lot of, whether it’s an app exchange package that a customer wants to install down the road, or even just expanding with more Salesforce products, I’ve seen it happen so many times where, “Oh, you know what? We’re ready to try CPQ,” or, “We’re ready to try Account Engagement or a Marketing Cloud.”

And you go in there and you realize, “Okay, well you can’t use that right now because instead of using a lead or a contact, we’ve got something totally custom that’s been rebuilt.” So there’s two things that come from that is one, just having gone through the pain of, “Oh yeah, you want to add on this DocuSign thing here,” or something like that, and not being able to do it because you have to map all the custom stuff back into standard objects anyways.

But also getting so familiar with all of those pre-built dependencies, and I think that’s one of the mistakes that is easy to make early on, whether you are an admin that’s just getting started, or a small business that’s just purchased Salesforce and you’re going to be your own admin, in my shoes, is understanding over time all of the relationships, like with opportunities, you get so much great stuff out of the box. You’ve got your opportunity line items, products and price books, and quotes, and just knowing all of these things and all of these relationships that exist out of the box without having to reconstruct them is a huge benefit.

And I remember early days of being an admin, you don’t necessarily know all of those things, and that’s where you make those mistakes. “Oh, we need one other thing, so let’s build it all custom.” But I think a big part of it for me in my journey is getting to the point where you just understand all of the connections that are made available for you when you use that standard architecture, and you understand how an account relates to an opportunity, and all the great stuff you can do with that, and how a contact and account are related, and how all of the other, there’s all this great new AI stuff that’s coming out that supports some of the custom stuff that’s out there, but when you’re using the standard architecture, it understands what you’re looking to do already. And that’s so important. And sometimes you learn it the hard way, but we do our best to explain those things, and teach others and newer users about the benefit.

Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, no, absolutely. In fact, well, and so I’ll use it as a jumping off point, thanks for setting me up, to teach the other users. Trust is also when you roll it out. I mean the trust factor, they get you in the door and you’re listening to them, and I’m going to build a puppy pipeline report, which has to sound fun. The amount of paw prints and puppy knows things that must exist in this app. I can only envision your Google search results right now are up there.

But the second part is also rolling it out. I mean, I’ve sat in weeks and weeks of discovery, and apps, and building, and then user testing. And then you go to roll it out. And this is a small company that has to sit and say, “Okay, so then how are we going to support this?”. How did you build trust when you also rolled it out?

Brandon Walton:
Yeah, so we meet regularly. In fact, we met earlier today and had a working session together. So we do these working sessions where we talk about what the business objectives are, “Okay, what do we need to do? How are we going to make this experience better for,” maybe it’s a family breeder that they’re working with or an applicant that they might be working with, because now we have all this great data in Salesforce, we can take a look at these kinds of things.

And I’ll tell you what is the most exciting thing for me, is when we are talking about making an update to part one in the puppy pipeline, which is a puppy application. And Sydney, who started out on this thing, never using Salesforce before is like, “Oh, that sounds like a checkbox. I understand how check boxes work on a lead. And yeah, I can map that over to it.” So for me, that’s always the yes, the slam dunk home run moment, if you will, when we’re talking about these concepts that when we first got started, it was still intimidating for them, but under understanding, “Oh yeah, that’s going to be a pick list. And not only that, once we make the pick list here on the lead, let me go and add this to the lead mapping, so it’s going to just move over to the contact when I hit that convert button.”

And so the first question, how we get there is just regular working sessions. Let’s go through, let’s talk about the business objectives here. Let’s talk about what’s been created and how it’s all going to work. That’s probably the most instrumental piece. So it’s not Brandon going and locking myself in a room for three weeks, and now there’s all these new fields and buttons, and let’s teach you how it’s done. It really has been collaborative the whole way through. And the discussion really is led by the business. So it’s not necessarily Salesforce feature driven. We don’t go in here with an objective of, “Oh, you know what? There’s a lot of great new AI stuff, so let’s just add all this AI stuff, whether we know what we’re going to do with it or not.” It has to be driven by the business first. And when the business users are able to say, “Yes, this makes sense, because when I check this box, I understand what that means versus when I’m checking this pick list or this, dare I say it, multi-select pick list, which some”-

Mike Gerholdt:
Oh, I was just going to ask. They clearly aren’t to reporting yet, or they’d understand the fallacy of multi-select pick lists.

Brandon Walton:
Well, going back, that’s one of the things that I am able to bring to the table, and why they want to avoid it.

But the fun part in it for me is when those users are in the platform and they understand what the platform is doing, so more than just, “Oh, I have to go in and enter my data.” I’m here to work with puppies, not enter data. But when Sydney and Peter understand why they’re adding that, and it’s not a burden for them, but they see the benefit because I think it really starts with them being involved in that process, so they feel like they were heard, they feel like their input was heard.

And with larger organizations that might not be an entire puppy management portal or puppy pipeline, or some of the fun things that we’re doing. Some larger organizations, it’s a lot more work just to get small changes made. Just like with trust, when people feel heard, and people feel like they’re part of something, and part of the creation of something, there’s that bit of ownership. I found that those are the folks that are going to adopt it a lot more. “If my say was included when we were coming up with the sales process, because yes, it’s important. On this step we need to make sure that we understand how they’re going to pick up their puppy. And Brandon knows that I contributed to step five. Well, now Brandon’s pumped up and excited because I was part of this thing, and so now I’m more excited to adopt the technology,” versus something that was set up and it’s a burden. It’s maybe an extra step. I think that’s a big differentiator I see in working with, especially small teams.

Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, I’ve always said when I’m doing training, is this is how you do your job, not another thing to do your job. And it sounds like a small word change, but it’s part of the job to get it complete. Ensuring in this case that the puppy has a great home, putting good data in and keeping track of that is part of that journey. It’s not another thing to do. And when people look at data input, or data collection, or data reporting as another thing to do, then it feels superfluous to their mission and they get off track. So yeah, I can completely understand that.

You’ve seen a lot, not only with this company, but in general. You brought up the AI thing, so I’ll kind of wrap on that. If you were to start brainstorming, we’re obviously not going to ask Einstein to draw us a puppy. I think I spend my countless hours making poor ChatGPT draw different versions of dogs. But how would you see, based on what you’ve built, that AI layer starting to come into what this organization uses Salesforce for?

Brandon Walton:
Yeah. And we’ve already started having those conversations as well, starting out with some of those Einstein features that have been around for a while. We’re looking at things like Einstein recommended next actions, things like that.

And what’s great about those is it’s data driven. So going back to users adopting the importance of entering information, understanding how family breeder A, how Mike’s pups is working compared to Brandon’s pups, and being able to understand, okay, when I am entering the data on vaccines, and health of these puppies, and all of these other details, that’s going to allow us to leverage this platform to assist our team in making better decisions, then data entry isn’t a burden, it’s a necessity. And we’re very, very clear on the benefit.

If we know that puppies from this family breeder are getting a certain type of worm, we know that we can work with that breeder. And that’s the beauty of what Family Bred Puppies do, because they’re working family to family, it’s not a situation where their breeders aren’t working with them. So they’ve got these great relationships already. And using the technology to improve the relationships and be better partners to their breeders, match families, whether that’s getting through the adoption process quicker, what have you. It’s, how can we drive business outcomes through this platform? Not, well, we have to put it in there because my boss says we’re using this tool and we have to put it in there.

Mike Gerholdt:
The number of times I’ve heard that.

I’ll end on a fun question. Oftentimes when you sit down, even in organizations that I’ve worked for, but as a consultant, you get to learn the business and fun facts. Was there something fun or interesting that you learned about puppies during all of this that you didn’t know heading in?

Brandon Walton:
Oh, there’s so much. What’s one thing I can summarize? I think, well, this might tell a little bit more about the kinds of things that I find fun and interesting. But you assume it, or I assume it, you assume that there’s a lot of production that goes into raising breeding puppies. But the amount of planning that goes in… So where we did do some custom objects is we have a custom puppies object with litters. And so we are able to track the genealogy of the puppies through some custom objects. It was more than what opportunity products could do. We’ll say that. So we started, can we do it from the… But-

Mike Gerholdt:
I don’t think opportunity products were ever envisioned to be used that way.

Brandon Walton:
Yeah. So that was one place where we did go a bit custom, but it’s just a couple of objects that have relationships to each other.

And again, I didn’t come in there as the puppy breeding expert, but being able to understand what those timelines are, what’s happening at one week, what’s happening at two weeks. And I think all the orchestration that goes into that is what was just really fascinating. And it’s more than just shots, but it’s, are the puppies, how much time are they spending with their mom? And then when you move them from indoor to outdoor facility, all these details that go in.

And what’s been really cool is, of course, we track those details on the platform. And so now it exists as part of the PMP, the Puppy Management Portal. But I think that was one of the takeaways that I thought was really interesting, is just how calculated that process is, just to make sure that, again, the mission is that the puppies are raised in a nurturing environment, that they’re healthy when a family receives them. I would say that orchestration and seeing all of that come together was one of the coolest things for me.

Mike Gerholdt:
Wow. Yeah. No, very cool.

Brandon, thanks for coming on the podcast, oh let’s talk puppies. This had to have been easily one of the most fun projects to work on.

Brandon Walton:
Oh, for sure.

Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah. Well, thanks for sharing it with us, and keep on keeping on with helping puppies in the world.

Brandon Walton:
Will do, Mike, will do, Mike, I’ll keep doing my part.

Mike Gerholdt:
See, again, I told you that was a fun discussion. Also, tell me how quickly you wouldn’t sign up to build a puppy pipeline report. If I saw that in my list of requests for things that needed to be built in Salesforce, a puppy pipeline report would definitely top the list. Also, I might take a little bit too long doing that. But I enjoyed that conversation. That was fun talking with Brandon.

Now, if you enjoyed this episode and you’re listening on iTunes or another app, go ahead and click the three dots in the upper right-hand corner or see if there’s an arrow. You can share the episode, and you can post it on social, you can text it to a friend, you can DM it. And of course, if you’re looking for more great resources, the entire transcript, all the links are in the show notes, and everything can be found at admin.salesforce.com. And until next week, we’ll see you in the cloud.

The post Building a Better Future for Puppies with Salesforce Solutions appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Rangsk, a Wordle and Sudoku YouTuber. Join us as we chat about critical thinking, problem-solving, and why puzzles are a great way to practice and improve your thinking.

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

Who is Rangsk?I’m a big word puzzle fan. Sudoku, Wordle, Connections, I love ’em all! I think they’re a great way to warm up your brain and stay sharp. That’s why I was so excited to sit down with this week’s guest, Rangsk. His YouTube and TikTok videos have helped me become a better puzzle solver, and I wanted to bring him on the pod to talk through his unique approach.

Rangsk first got into puzzle solving via a recommended video on YouTube for Cracking the Cryptic. He fell down the rabbit hole and became obsessed with the logic game that happens behind the numbers. He created his own sudokus and started posting walkthrough videos of how he made them and how to solve them.

Rangsk’s channel has grown exponentially since then. The thing that sticks out to me about his content is the tone: he’s positive, gentle, and clear. He really helps you become a better critical thinker, and have some fun along the way.

Word games are logic puzzles“I approach word games as if they were logic puzzles,” Rangsk says. “You’re given information and you want to come up with the best possible guess to utilize that information and get as much information as you can.”

Some feedback Rangsk often gets about his solves is that he’s “overthinking it.” For him, that misses the point of doing these sorts of puzzles in the first place. Yes, you can brute force a sudoku or get a lucky guess on a Wordle. But what do you learn from that?

As Rangsk puts it, “it’s a single player game, there are no stakes to it. The only person you’re cheating is yourself.”

Practice your critical thinking skillsInstead, Rangsk recommends using puzzles as a low-stakes opportunity to practice thinking through things logically. It’s an opportunity to build up your critical thinking skills for when there’s more on the line than beating your high score.

At the end of the day, it’s all about learning. Whether you solve a puzzle or get stuck halfway through, Rangsk encourages you take a close look at your thought process and learn from it. Why did you solve it? Why did you get stuck? It’s the chance to learn about yourself and how you think through things that makes these puzzles worthwhile.

Listen to the full episode for more from Rangsk on when it’s OK to hit the hint button, and some other word puzzles you might like if you’re already hooked on Wordle. And don’t forget to subscribe to hear more from the Salesforce Admins Podcast.

Podcast swag* Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Learn more* Connections and Wordle games from the New York Times are wildly popular. Can they improve cognitive function as you age? * Follow Rangsk on YouTube * Cracking the Cryptic on YouTube

Other word puzzles* Cell Tower * Squardle * Squaredle

Admin Trailblazers Group* Admin Trailblazers Community Group

Social* Rangsk on TikTok: @Rangsk_YT * Salesforce Admins: @SalesforceAdmns * Mike on Threads: https://www.threads.net/@mikegerholdt/ * Mike on Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@salesforce.mike * Mike on X: @MikeGerholdt

Full show transcriptMike Gerholdt:
Wordle, Strands, Connections, not just random words, but word games. And I am addicted to them. So, this week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, I had to get arguably the best word and logic solver I can find from TikTok and YouTube on the podcast. He goes by Rangsk on TikTok, and I’ll put a link below.

But David and I are talking about critical thinking and problem-solving using word games. Also, just how that applies to life. This is a phenomenal conversation. Don’t be scared about the time because this is such a fun discussion. Also, how looking for answers and the journey of problem solving really applies to just everything that we do, not only as Salesforce admins, but in our learning journeys and as we navigate life.

So, this is fun. Let’s get David on the podcast. So, David, welcome to the podcast.

Rangsk:
Well, thank you.

Mike Gerholdt:
I’m glad to have you on. I feel this is one of those times where I’m way more the super fanboy because I have seen a ton of your TikTok videos and your New York Times solves. But without tipping too much, how did you get into word gaming and solving word games online?

Rangsk:
Well, it’s a long story, but I can give the short version. Basically, YouTube likes to give random recommendations, and one day it recommended me a Sudoku video by Cracking the Cryptic. And I was familiar with Sudoku because it was a huge craze in the early 2000s. Do you remember that?

Mike Gerholdt:
Oh, yeah. Absolutely.

Rangsk:
Everyone was doing Sudoku.

Mike Gerholdt:
On the planes, there were books. Every airport had a Sudoku book.

Rangsk:
Yeah. And so, I got into that craze back then, but then I burned out of it. And now, I realize it’s because of the way I was solving it. It’s because of the way everyone was solving it, it burned out quickly. But I was like, “You know what? Sudoku, I’m familiar with that.” I clicked the video and I just immediately got hooked because this was not the Sudoku that I used to do.

And I just really got hooked on watching Cracking the Cryptic on YouTube and the various different kinds of logic puzzles that they solve. And then, I actually started creating my own Sudoku puzzles. I crafted them myself. And I would do things like… I would submit them to Cracking the Cryptic. They actually have solved a few of my puzzles in the past.

Mike Gerholdt:
Wow.

Rangsk:
Featured in front of tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people, which is great. And what I wanted to do is I wanted to document how I intended those puzzles to be solved and walk through the logic of them. Because I’ve always been… I had sort of an instructor mindset. I’ve always liked teaching. I’ve never been a teacher, but I’ve always liked teaching anyway.

And so, I decided to make my own videos where I walked through how to solve my own puzzles and I just uploaded them to my YouTube channel, which had nothing otherwise. And one day, Cracking the Cryptic featured one of my puzzles, and I commented saying, “Hey, I’ve got a walkthrough solve of this on my channel if anyone’s interested.” And I instantly gained 200, 300 subscribers.

Mike Gerholdt:
Oh, wow.

Rangsk:
And at that point, I was like, “Well, I better start making content.” So, I decided, “Hey, maybe I’ll start solving Sudoku’s on there, not just my own, and see if I can grow that audience.” And I was really enjoying the feedback I was getting from that. Flash forward to Wordle becoming popular, I was very much entrenched at that point within the logic puzzle community.

And Wordle, of course, really became popular within that community. And so, I decided, “Well, I’m already making Sudoku content. Why don’t I make YouTube shorts where I solve Wordle?” And so, that’s really where I get started on that. And then, I went from… it had taken me two years to reach a thousand subscribers where I could finally monetize on YouTube. And then, within two months, my Wordle shorts had brought me to 10,000 subscribers.

Mike Gerholdt:
Wow.

Rangsk:
And so, that was like, wow, Wordle’s my thing, I guess. And so, I decided just to… in addition to my Sudoku content, I started making word game content as well.

Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, I definitely was on the sideline for the Wordle wave. I remember it kind of crashing through. And I feel like for me, it was, “Oh, everybody’s playing it, so I’m not going to play it.” I also was afraid that I would never get a word. “Oh, man.” Because my Facebook feed was filled with all of the little Wordle squares that everybody would post. I’m like, “Oh, I know so-and-so.”

I know some book editors and I know some people that are in the education space, and they were struggling with Wordle. And I was like, “I have no shot. Maybe I just shouldn’t play this.” But now that I’ve played it, I confess, today is my 40th day playing Wordle.

Rangsk:
Okay. I hope you’re enjoying it.

Mike Gerholdt:
I am. I also have come now to the realization that I will never get it in one word. So, I have purposely looked ahead to see what words haven’t been used as solutions, and then picked my beginning word now pending, the solution hasn’t happened. My beginning word now is spoil because it has two vowels in it and it hasn’t been used as a solution.

Rangsk:
Got you. Yeah. So, for me, getting word in one, of course, it would be exciting, but I would also feel a bit cheated because I didn’t get to play that day.

Mike Gerholdt:
Yes.

Rangsk:
And to me, Wordle… I’m very much a logic puzzle guy. I approach even word games as if they were logic puzzles. And I think that’s why I like Wordle so much is because you can treat it like a logic puzzle, where you’re given information and then you want to come up with the best possible guess to utilize that information and get as much information as you can more.

And you think about patterns in the words, not just, “Here’s all the words I know,” but “Okay, E likes to be at the end. R likes to be second. These letters like to be near each other. These letters don’t like to be near each other.” And so, you can kind of think about the patterns that you notice within words. And of course, every once in a while, you get tripped up by a weird word that comes from French or something and doesn’t follow any of the rules.

But even then, you get there by logically eliminating, it’s not a regular word. So, I now have to investigate, is it one of those weird esoteric ones that came from French, for example, or came from a different language? So, yeah, I like to approach it as a logic problem, and I think that’s why people enjoy watching me solve it. I constantly get feedback, “I’m better at the game after watching you play it.”

That warms my heart. That’s exactly what I want. I’m not out here trying to impress people. I’m not trying to be a magician. I’m trying to be an instructor, and I’m trying to get people to understand that these games can be approached from a logical perspective. You can learn to get better at it without just going and memorizing a bunch of words.

Mike Gerholdt:
Right. Perfect segue to exactly why I’m having you on the podcast, because I ran across one of your TikTok videos on Connections, and I’d never played Connections. And the tone and the manner, now that you say instructor, I joked with a colleague that I called you the Bob Ross of Connections. But your tone was very calming.

“And let’s work through this, and here’s all the words. We have to come up with four groups of four. Let me walk you through the way I’m going to think through this,” which your logic or your critical thinking. And it wasn’t just, “Well, these four have to go together. Why don’t those go together?” And it’s like, “No, but let’s think about every possible meaning of this one word.”

Or I love when you, especially on some of the Connections, “What is the, not weirdest, but what is the farthest outlying word? And let’s pick that and see how it can connect to other things.”

Rangsk:
Yeah, I’m glad you recognized both my logical approach, but also the demeanor that I try to give to my content. I’ve been called Bob Ross by more than just yourself, also Mr. Rogers. Just having that calming presence is really important to me because people have so much going on in their lives. They have stress coming from everywhere, and then they try to escape that with the free time that they have.

They’re scrolling TikTok or they’re scrolling YouTube or whatever it is. And when you do that, you’re just getting people yelling at you. You’re getting people trying to make you afraid, trying to make you angry. And I want to counter that. I want to be a place where I come up on your feed and you feel like, “Okay, this is a setting where I can understand what’s going on. I’m not being yelled at.”

“Things are calm, things are straightforward and I’m learning, but I don’t feel like I’m being talked at.” I don’t know the best way to put that.

Mike Gerholdt:
Or chastise. I mean really, because I think that’s one thing, how this kind of carries over to software is critical thinking, but also when you’re building applications or you’re building programs, it’s change that you’re going to introduce to somebody. And I’ve always told people, when you roll out something, nobody wants to show up to work and feel stupid.

And the easiest way to feel stupid is by showing them something they don’t understand. And you can walk into some of these games and be like, “I don’t understand. It doesn’t make sense.” And then, it makes you feel stupid when actually if you just sit and look at it.

To me, I use a few of these games in the morning when I have a cup of coffee to kind of warm my brain up, kind of get me thinking through the day and sitting there thinking, “Okay,” so this word for example, and maybe Connections is coat. Okay. So, coat and I started, “Well, how would David describe this?” Well, coat could be a jacket. Coat could be a heavy coat.

Coat could also, you coat something with paint. I try to use some of the stuff that you teach to like, how would I talk through this and not just take it as the first thing that comes to mind?

Rangsk:
Right. And I get a lot of feedback, which I honestly don’t appreciate very much because it’s counter to what I’m trying to put across, which means I’m not communicating that effectively enough. But a lot of feedback is like “You’re overthinking it. If you’d just gone with your instinct, it would’ve been correct.” And they’re ignoring all the times, probably the majority of the times, where had I gone with my instinct, it would’ve been wrong.

Because these puzzles are designed to trick you. They are logic puzzles. And it’s not much of a puzzle if it’s just find four things that go together and that will be right. And so, the game is all about… I just made a comment today where someone was like, “Overthinking the easy ones is detrimental, but overthinking the hard ones is actually useful.”

And my response to that was, “Well, overthinking has a negative connotation to it, by definition. All I’m doing is thinking. And there’s nothing wrong with thinking when you’re solving a puzzle.” So, yeah, the game is trying to get you to think. And you can either let it get you to think and follow along with the human creator of this puzzle and what they were trying to achieve in getting you to think about, or you can bash your head against it and try to get lucky, which to me isn’t fun.

And sometimes I have to resort to that and I feel bad about it. But most of the time, I try to logically approach the problem and also try to see what did the creator of this puzzle intend me to think about? And that’s going to be fun and that’s going to give longevity to the gameplay.

Mike Gerholdt:
Overthinking also comes from a position of I know the answer and you don’t. At one point, they didn’t know the answer. So, how can I overthink something if I don’t know the answer? In hindsight, yes, I can look back at a solution, “Oh, I way overthought that. But I only know that because I went down that path and then I came back.”

Much like thinking through different situations or different, we talked about software debugging before I pressed record. Can you overthink software debugging? Well, yeah, I suppose. But you only know that once you go down that entire path and then come back.

Rangsk:
And I will say there’s kind of a corollary to that where you said in hindsight, and I think that’s another aspect of my content that you don’t see a lot, and I think it’s a really important aspect, which is after I’ve solved it, go and do a post-mortem basically, to use the industry term. Go and look back and say, “What is it that I did right? What is it that I did wrong?”

“How could I have thought about this differently to have succeeded when I failed? Or why did I succeed at this? What did I do that I liked that I should try to do more of?” And I think that’s a really important aspect of after you’ve solved a puzzle, or if you’re working on debugging software, if you’re working on any problem that you’re trying to solve, don’t just say, “Oh, I solved it. Let me throw that out.”

You say, “I solved it. Let me now internalize what worked and didn’t work so that when I have a problem again in the future, I can utilize that and gain wisdom and gain experience.”

Mike Gerholdt:
I’ll be honest, one of the coolest things, I’ll get off Connections. One of the coolest things that you added to your Wordle solutions is you go into a website that somebody create a bot and you kind of, “Okay, so here’s the word I put in and we got orange, yellow, and green here. What is the bot say is the next one? What did I guess? Here’s what I guessed. Here’s this, that. Here’s what I guessed. Okay.”

And oftentimes you’re either… it helps you do that post-mortem because with Connections, you have a little bit different, you can see your categories, but with Wordle, you’re like, “Was this the next best thing for me to guess to try and get to the solution?” And I love that you kind of walk through that with that bot and the bot’s like, “Oh, yeah, so you basically had two choices after this word and you went to this one, which no harm, no foul, it was the other word.” I need that bot for everything.

Rangsk:
Yeah. And what’s nice about Wordle is a bot like that can exist because it’s pretty easy to write a perfect solver. I wouldn’t say it’s easy, but it’s viable to write a perfect solver for Wordle. And there’s not a perfect solver for every problem you’re going to encounter, but you can at least go back and analyze that.

And I think an aspect that I thought about while you were describing what I do with that Wordle bot that I’d like to touch on is the question is, did I get lucky? Because a lot of times in problem-solving, there is a luck factor. Did I look at the right thing first or did I look at the right thing after struggling for three days on this problem? And the Wordle bot will answer that question for you.

It’ll say, “Oh, yeah, you totally got lucky. There were 60 possible words and you picked out the right one.” So, what I learned from that is maybe it was a lucky decision, but maybe it wasn’t the optimal decision, even though the optimal decision would’ve had a worse outcome in this situation. And recognize because… I guess to put it this way, if you can’t separate what was lucky from what was good, then you’re going to depend on getting lucky more and more.

You’re going to internalize what you did that made you get lucky rather than internalizing what you did that actually set yourself up for success.

Mike Gerholdt:
Well, I think that’s… some of that has to do with why people gamble. They just feel they’re lucky as opposed to working through the, I go back to the… I love the movie Apollo 13. Let’s work the problem and go through it. Kind of transitioning that because I obviously could talk Wordle. You also do that really good on the mini crossword, where if by chance you happen to get all the downs, all the downs also solve all the acrosses for the most part.

And so, you’ll go back through and be like, “Oh, well, let’s look and see actually what these questions were that the answer just autofilled back in.” I think there has to be something that it does to your brain because it also trains it. You’re like, “Oh, now, I’m not just reading this word, I’m also reading the clue that the creator of the puzzle had in addition to what the word is, and it just happened to be filled in for me.”

Rangsk:
Yeah. If we want to even just touch back on Connections for a little bit.

Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, please.

Rangsk:
Every day I get comments from people saying, “Oh, the first thing I do is shuffle because they put in these red herrings and I don’t want to be tricked by them.” And I feel like this is just intentionally throwing out information about the puzzle because we’ve been told that they think very, very hard actually. They put a lot of thought into the arrangement of the words that are presented to you, which means they’ve added information to the system.

And by hitting shuffle immediately, without even attempting to interpret that information, you’ve thrown out part of the puzzle. And to me, I feel like I can go, “Okay, well, they decided to put these tiles next to each other. What does that mean? Are they trying to trick me? Are they trying to hint me towards the solution? What is the information that they are trying to give me by this placement?”

And I would lose all that if I hit shuffle. And so, I feel like it’s kind of a short-sighted strategy because you can’t learn to overcome the tricks that they’re trying to put into the puzzle if you just wipe them clean first thing without even appreciating them.

Mike Gerholdt:
Right. Absolutely. Actually, you’re the one that taught me that. I was partway through at Connections the other day and I think that two words were iron and steel, and I was like, “Those started right next to each other. I bet those don’t have anything to do with each other. I’m not going to fall for it.”

Rangsk:
Yeah, sure enough, they didn’t. Exactly. And had you hit shuffle, you wouldn’t have known that.

Mike Gerholdt:
No idea.

Rangsk:
And you might’ve said, “Well, iron and steel, those are both metals. Maybe that’s a thing.” I think they’re getting wise to me. I think the other day they actually put three of them all on top of each other that were in the same category.

Mike Gerholdt:
Oh, no.

Rangsk:
In general, they are adding information when they, instead of presenting the tiles in a random order, just having a piece of software randomize it and presenting it, they are laying it out and they’re discussing how they want to lay it out. And I think that’s part of the puzzle. You’re removing some of the interest in the puzzle by hitting shuffle. And it’s the same with mini crossword.

Yeah, you can solve it with just the acrosses or just the downs, but you’re losing something by not at least going back and looking what was the whole puzzle. Because these kinds of clues are going to come up over and over again and this is a perfect opportunity, while it’s fresh in your mind and while you’re in the context, to use it as a learning experience for future puzzles.

Mike Gerholdt:
I completely agree. So, I think one of the things that fascinates me and I love using, I’ll call them word games and maybe they’re logic games. You need to tell me the difference. But using these to keep my mind sharp is I feel like it helps me be a better thinker just in general, just at my job, just working through decisions in life. You’ve been solving games a lot longer than me. How have you seen that kind of help you in your professional career?

Rangsk:
It’s really interesting that you asked that because an aspect of my day job is actually studying transference is what the psychology term is, which is if you are to play a game and get good at it or do a logic puzzle and get good at that puzzle, does that have transference? Does that transfer to other aspects of your life? Are you just getting better at that game? Or is there sort of a rippling effect to the rest of your life?

Okay. If I play GeoGuessr where I’m trying to locate where I am in the world, does that make me a better driver on my commute? Or if I am playing logic puzzles a lot, does that make me better at debugging software? Whatever it is that you’re trying to actually accomplish in your life, are these things just games and you get good at that one game, or are these things that are going to transfer to other areas of your life?

And that’s actually a pretty hot topic of study within psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience. And there’s a lot of studies going on right now related to that with mixed results. Some of these things that they claim, “Hey, if you play this game every day, you’re going to get smarter. You’re going to get better in these other areas of your life.” And it may not be true.

For me personally, I find it beneficial to just keep using my brain. Think of the brain as a muscle and just keep using it. Make sure those connections are strong. And by practicing it in low-stakes scenarios, when you get hit with a high-stakes scenario, you have this sort of instinct to fall back on for how you’re going to handle that. Yeah. Does that-

Mike Gerholdt:
No, I’m still processing all of that transference information you gave because I was just thinking about how that applies to other things like prepping for tests. Did you just get good at taking the test, or did you genuinely learn the information? We can also talk about tests, but nobody wants to do that anyway.

Rangsk:
I’ll talk about it.

Mike Gerholdt:
Are you just good at taking the test too? That’s the third thing to bring up.

Rangsk:
Yeah, exactly. And this is a big topic in education, has been for a long time, which is how much do we lean on standardized tests and how much do we teach to the test? And is the standardized test important because we just need metrics on how students are generally doing, or is the standardized test also something that can direct curriculum? That’s a question that every teacher has.

And I don’t think there’s a perfect answer to that, and I’m also not much of an expert on that at all. But in my opinion, I think that anything you learn is good. I’ve always hated the question, when am I going to use this? The answer is, you use your brain every day. And the more you can teach your brain how to learn and all these cool things, that expands your horizons.

It expands your use of your brain. Yeah, sure, you might not use algebra if you’re not an accountant or a scientist or a mathematician. Yeah, you might not use algebra, but one day you’re going to have the question and you’re going to have the curiosity that’s going to relate to math in some way. And you either have the tools to think about it properly or you don’t, and that’s something that you could have internalized, but you decided you weren’t going to use it, and so you didn’t.

But there’s the expression, when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. I have always thought that the more tools you have in your toolbox, the more versatile you can be in problem-solving and just living your life properly. Properly is not the right word. I didn’t mean to say it that way, but living your life to its fullest extent, being able to accomplish the goals that you want to accomplish, being successful.

It’s all about setting yourself up for success. And you don’t know what problems are going to arise. And so, the more tools you give yourself, the less everything starts looking like a nail, and the more you can be exacting and fall back on previous experience.

Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, I often think of… it’s funny you bring up that algebra example. I was also that kid that was really horrible at math, so I never played Sudoku. But the concept sometimes of how you solve the algebra problem, I think to me, was also more important than what the answer was.

And that to me is almost like the first time you pull the cover off a toy and realize there’s a whole bunch of gears inside that make the bear move and kind of understanding, “Oh, there’s more to this that I need to understand as opposed to just what the outcome is.” We had this discussion the other day, outputs versus outcomes.

And if your outputs is solved puzzles, are you smarter than if your outcome is no, but I learned the process and I learned how to work through difficult situations. The outcome is very different than the outputs.

Rangsk:
I love the way you put that and that’s something… I solve The New York Times hard Sudoku every day on my YouTube channel. And my goal is not to say, “Look, I solved the puzzle.” My goal is to help the viewers be able to solve the puzzle, but not just that. To understand that it’s the act of solving it that’s the fun part, not having that completed grid with all the correct numbers in it.

And it seems obvious when I say it that way, but I get so many people commenting saying, “Well, if I just go through and fill out all the candidates first, which by the way is super boring, then I can solve it in four minutes, and you took 12 minutes.” I feel like I failed that person because now they’re going to get bored of Sudoku very quickly.

Because who wants the first thing they do when they first receive that piece of paper or the digitally, the Sudoku puzzle, is go cell by cell and do accounting work? The puzzle can tell you a story if you let it tell you the story. And there are ways that you can approach the problem solving such that you are following along. It’s like you’re reading a book.

You’re following along the story. And in a sense, it’s almost like a “choose your own adventure book” where you can choose where you want to go next. What do I want to discover about this puzzle? And just put a smile on your face every day because you found this really cool piece of logic and you go, “Ooh, that’s really neat. It just told me about this cool structure.”

And people who are like, “Oh, well, I solve it in two minutes and I can just plunk them down, and I don’t understand why you’re doing all of this.” And a year later, they’ve moved on. They’re not doing Sudoku anymore, and they think it’s boring. And I’m still doing it and I’m still learning from it every day.

Mike Gerholdt:
Right. Because the outcome for you is a lot different. The euphemism is the journey versus the destination.

Rangsk:
Yes. I’m a big fan of Brandon Sanderson and that’s a big thing in Stormlight Archive, which is there’s… not to get too spoilery, I won’t spoil Stormlight Archive for people. But there is a group of people who basically have a mantra and part of that is journey before destination. We all have the same destination. And when it comes to puzzles, the destination is the solved puzzle, but it’s about how you got there.

The journey is the important thing. And you can start talking about things, do the ends justify the means? It’s much of a corollary to that when you start talking about how you live your life. And I feel like if you start approaching even a logic puzzle that you’re doing for fun, if you approach that in a way where you’re trying to take shortcuts, that’s training yourself to take shortcuts in all areas of your life.

And I feel like that’s… you’re cheating yourself. That’s another thing. People are like, “Is it cheating if I do this? Is it cheating if I do that?” And it’s like, it’s a single-player game. There’s no stakes to it. The only person you’re cheating is yourself. Are you enjoying the way that you’re solving this? And that’s the important thing. Okay, if I’m doing a crossword or if I’m doing Connections and there’s a word I don’t know, is it cheating if I look it up?

Well, that’s up to you. Do you want this to be a trivia game where you need to be going into the puzzle with a certain set of knowledge, and you want to learn as you go, and you learn from your failures because you didn’t know what that word meant? And now you’ve looked it up and now you’re going to remember it? That’s one way to approach it.

And a perfectly other valid way to approach it is, “Oh, this puzzle has shown me this word that I don’t know. This is a perfect opportunity to look it up and have some success because I looked it up.” And I think both approaches are valid.

Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah. There’s so much to unpack there, but the first thing I wanted to say was the best and worst times of doing any of the logic puzzles or The New York Times stuff is when it’s solved is the best because I was like, “Yes, I did it.” And the worst is, “Ugh, it’s over.” Especially a few times with Wordle or with Connections or even the mini crossword, “Oh, I finally got it.”

And to that other point, there have been times when I was like, “Okay, I clearly…” I don’t know some… I think one of the questions was something and it was super pop culture. I was like, “I just need to Google this. That’s my mulligan. I’m going to take it, I’m going to Google it and that’s going to give me the answer.” Because I’m past the point of enjoyment for this game and I need a little boost to get me back and going for that, and it’s my game, so I can do that.

Rangsk:
Yeah. And it’s all about knowing yourself and knowing what you’re going to be happy with later and what you might be sad about later. And I think you kind of hit the nail on the head. Are you still enjoying the puzzle? Because that’s the important thing. We don’t do these because it’s our job. We’re doing puzzles because it’s fun and enriching.

And so, it’s all about sustainability. What’s going to sustain your interest in this hobby? And are you going to be a flash in the pan where you deep dive into crosswords or Sudoku or whatever word game for a month and then you’re done with it and you move on? That’s one personality style. Another personality style is crosswords are something that I do every morning for 50 years.

There are people like that too. There are a lot of people like that. And there’s a big difference. Someone who’s going to do that every morning for 50 years, they’re enjoying it every day and they’ve found ways to sustain that enjoyment. Whereas there-

Mike Gerholdt:
Go ahead.

Rangsk:
Sorry, go ahead.

Mike Gerholdt:
No, I’m 100% with you. I was going to ask because we didn’t touch on it and maybe it’s for a reason because it’s in beta, but Strands. I think you said it in one of your puzzles, I was like, “I just need you. Can you just tell me if any of the four letters I put together are close to one of the words you want as opposed to just nothing?” And I think that for me, we get some of that.

Well, you can tell me more of the game logic. But with Wordle and with Connections, at least with Wordle, I get a yellow. I get a colored square. Regardless of what I put in, I’m getting a color back. And with Connections, oftentimes I’m like, “Please just say one away.” But you get kind of that.

Rangsk:
But even if it’s not one away, it’s still information.

Mike Gerholdt:
It is, yes. Except with Strands.

Rangsk:
Yeah, Strands is missing that. And the reason Strands is missing that is because I really feel like they built the hint system because they knew this was an issue. But the hint system is terrible because people don’t want to use it. Some people do use it, but I don’t like using it. I think that, first of all, making it a choice. Wordle, you don’t have the choice to see whether a tile was yellow or green.

It’s just going to tell you. It’s part of the game. A hint system feels like it’s external to the game as like a, “I’m not good enough, so I’m going to press the hint button.” And I don’t think that was their intent, but I think that’s what’s happened because they realized that most of these games have some kind of lockstep functionality where you make as you progress through the puzzle and you gain information as you go.

Whereas with Strands, you can be sitting there for 15 minutes and know as much as you did on minute one, even though you have found 100 words because you didn’t find any of the words that they’re intending and you’re not understanding what the theme is trying to hit you towards. And it’s just frustrating. And so, they probably saw that in the playtest and went, “Well, if you get three words, we’ll give you a word.”

But that doesn’t feel good because, first of all, they gave the choice. I kind of wonder what would the game be like? Is it just you get three words and it just reveals one without pressing hint? And it was just part of the game. I feel like more people would accept that rather than opting into admitting that you’re not good enough at the game.

But also the hint system is just simultaneously not powerful enough and too powerful. And I could rant about this. I feel like it’s a bit off-topic.

Mike Gerholdt:
No, this is 100% on topic.

Rangsk:
All right. Well, I’ll rant about it then. Early on, it’s too powerful because it gives you… for those not familiar with Strands, it’s like a word search game, but they don’t tell you what words you’re looking for.

Mike Gerholdt:
Nope.

Rangsk:
Instead, they all follow a theme. Maybe the theme is names of football teams or the theme is pieces of time, so seconds, minutes, hours. And some of them are a bit more esoteric. They might be words that are slaying for money, but are also food was one of them. And so, it really varies in difficulty. And they give you a little kind of crossword style clue hint at the start of what the theme might be.

But it’s usually not. Usually, it’s either, “Oh, I know exactly what the theme is from this clue,” or, “I have no idea what the theme is from this clue.” There’s not much in between. But anyway, what the hint does is if you get three words that they didn’t intend, if you find three words, you can press the hint button and it highlights all of the letters involved in one of the words.

And then, it becomes an unscramble basically. And then, you find that word. And I think the ideal situation when using the hint is then, okay, now that I know what one of the words is, I’ve now gained information about what the theme might be and I can try to think of other words that match. And if that’s not enough, I’ll find three more and I’ll press hint again and I’ll get another word.

But it’s too powerful because people don’t want to just be shown one of the words. That’s literally taking away from the enjoyment of the game because the game is only finding the words. And so, you’re literally pressing a button saying, “I want one last word to find please.” But then, at the end, sometimes you’re down to one word left, it tells you how many words you need to find, and you’re down to one word left.

And I’ve literally spent 10, 15 minutes trying to unscramble that word because I can’t figure it out. When it was Broadway shows, and I couldn’t unscramble Carousel for the life of me because I hadn’t heard of that Broadway show, and it’s a weird word. Carousel. And so, the hint wouldn’t have helped me. If I’d pressed hint, it would’ve highlighted all the letters.

So, the hint is simultaneously too powerful early on and not powerful enough at the end. And then, also on top of that, isn’t giving you what you want from a hint. So, I feel like it’s a failure in game design there. And what they should have done is built-in ratcheting game mechanics that aren’t opt-in.

Mike Gerholdt:
What are ratcheting game mechanics? Please tell me.

Rangsk:
So, if you think about a ratchet wrench. When you go one way, it doesn’t lose progress on tightening, and then you go the other way and it tightens more. That’s what a ratchet is. And so, you can make progress without losing progress. So, as you put input into the system and as you find things towards the game mechanics, you have now ratcheted yourself, you’ve given yourself more information.

It’s a ratchet-style gameplay. So, like Wordle, you input a guess and you get those yellows and greens and grays, and now you have more information about what the answer might be. And you never lose that information. That information never becomes obsolete. You can always use it. So, in the same way, that’s why some of my suggestions for Strands were, “Hey, you know what?”

“If I get partial word, maybe it should tell me, ‘Hey, you got a partial word. You’re on the right track.'” It’s ratcheted that information into the system. It’s like getting a green or a yellow in Wordle. Or if they want to keep the hint system, maybe one option for the hint system would be show me the starting letter of one of the words. Not the whole word, just give me somewhere to start.

Mike Gerholdt:
Where do I start? Yeah.

Rangsk:
Yeah. This letter I know is the start of a word now and I can focus my search on that. And so, I wouldn’t feel as bad pressing that. But what if that were just part of the game mechanics? It’s like rewarding you for finding words. They aren’t the right words, but you’re still finding valid words that exist. So, why not have those, just add information to the system as you guess in certain creative ways.

So, it feels like a failure of game design that there isn’t that sort of ratchet other than the opt-in very heavy-handed hint system that they have right now.

Mike Gerholdt:
Right. I am so glad you brought up that Broadway Strands because I was about… I’m like, “I think I’m done. I think I’m done with Strands now.” It took me so long to get… the first thing I found with Strands is you either get started and it starts to make sense, or you’re sitting there and you’re looking at these two words and the clue and you’re like, “I have no idea what these three things have to do with each other. I don’t know what another word to look for.”

But that Broadway with Carousel, I was stuck on Carousel. I got everything else. Those are the only letters left. I never hit the hint button. And I thought, “What happens if you hit the hint button when you’re done?” Because at that point, I’ll be honest, the game Joy, it was no joy in Mudville right now. I just wanted to be done. Just please tell me what the answer is. I think I went through… I watched your TikTok.

I went through all the same words you did. I’m like, “I don’t know what word this is. Just tell me.” And when I hit hint, it just put the little things around. I was like, “I know it’s those letters.”

Rangsk:
Yeah, exactly.

Mike Gerholdt:
I know it’s those letters. Get me out of here. Where is the escape room button? That’s the only time I wanted the hint button to just be like, “Nope, we’re just going to solve this because we feel bad for you.”

Rangsk:
And people use my videos as hints. They’ll be like, “Well, I’m done with this puzzle. I haven’t solved it, but I’m not getting joy out of it. Let’s see what Rangsk did.” Rangsk being my handle. “Let’s see what he did and maybe that’ll give me a hint.” And that’s actually the entire premise of me doing The New York Times hard Sudoku every day in that instructive way is I know that there’s always going to be someone who’s stuck on that specific Sudoku puzzle because it’s so widespread.

It’s published by The New York Times. They’re going to search on YouTube or Google. They’re going to search “New York Times Sudoku today walkthrough or hint.”

Mike Gerholdt:
Solve or something.

Rangsk:
Yeah, solve. And they’re going to find my video and that’ll track them to my channel. And not only will they find my video, but this video is going to blow their mind if they don’t know modern Sudoku-solving techniques. And they’re going to be like, “Wow, I need to watch more of these because this is way more fun than how I’ve been solving Sudoku, and I don’t get stuck as much.”

“And if I do get stuck, I watch him until he does something I didn’t know, and then I can continue.” So, almost using me as a hint button. And I feel like with Strands, there’s no strategy. Strands feels like a trivia game to me almost. I’ve been trying so hard to make it a logic game, which you probably have noticed if you watched my Strand solves, where I’m like, “Okay, corner strategy, edge strategy.”

And it kind of works, but it’s not perfect and there’s not a whole lot of logic involved. I will say there are word search games that do feel a lot more like a logic puzzle. One of them that I play is called Cell Tower. And this is probably the coolest word search game I’ve played. Normally, I’m not a big fan of word search-style games. I’m not very good at them.

But to briefly explain this game, it’s a grid of letters just as you’d expect a word search to be. And the way that these letters form words is a little bit unique, and that’s not that important to describe, except basically you’re drawing shapes in the grid. So, you’re connecting the letters together in kind of a different way that you’d normally expect.

You’re not drawing a line through the letters to make words in order. You’re just sort of highlighting them, and they have to be connected in some way. And it’s red left to right, top to bottom. And so, it’s sort of limiting you on… you can’t make a word bottom right to top left. You can’t just draw a line that way, or you can’t zigzag around. Instead, there’s a specific logical order to how the letters are going to appear in a word.

In addition to that, every letter is part of a word, similar to Strands in that way. So, every letter will be involved in a word, and there is only one solution. So, you can’t just go, “Okay, I found this word. Let’s lock that in. Okay, now I found this word.” You’re going to find a bunch of words, but you need to look at how that affects the rest of the grid around it and make sure you’re not preventing the ability for the letters around it to also be part of words.

And that’s where the logic comes in, where you go, “Okay, I think this word might be part of it. Can I add an -ed ending, an -ing ending, an S at the end? Is there a prefix I can add to it to expand that word? But also, how does that affect the letters around it? Am I going to be able to make a word out of these other letters if this was one of the words I use?”

And so, you end up with this really logical approach to how you solve it. And you’re thinking about how letters go together, how they go next to each other, and how words are formed in general. And you’re looking at corners like, “Okay, this letter is going to have to be related to the letters around it in some way because it’s in a corner because it’s been isolated in some way.”

And so, it’s not that you’re trying to just find words that match a theme and the computer tells you, “Oh, yep, you found one of them,” or, “Nope, that wasn’t what I was looking for, sorry,” with no extra information. Instead, you’re trying to solve this logically and the computer is not giving you any help at all there. It’s just the grid, the full information of the grid being used.

So, in a way, it’s a lot like Sudoku, but also like Connections where you can’t just pick any four words that happen to relate because that might disrupt the ability for the other words to relate to each other. So, that’s what really makes a logic puzzle a logic puzzle is you have to take the puzzle as a whole and you have to take steps that are logical. It’s not just a trivia game.

Mike Gerholdt:
That’s so apropos to everything that we talked about. You have to look at the puzzle as a whole. Last question, because I happened to think of this when we were talking about Strands. As somebody that’s online solving problems, word games and stuff, how hard, how many times do you just want to hit that hint button? Does that ever come up?

Maybe you have the patience of a saint, but have you ever gotten to that point where I know you’re creating this for the good of other people and you have to walk through that, but you’re like, “Maybe I just hit the hint button because I’m at 35 minutes on this video?”

Rangsk:
Yeah, for sure. And there’s different forms that that takes in my mind. There’s the built-in hint buttons to the game, but then there’s also like, “Do I just Google this word?” I did do that once. There was a Connections, and I knew I was about to lose. I was like, “Okay, I’ve got no mistakes left. And there are three words on the board that I have no idea what they mean.

Literally never heard these words in my life. So, how am I supposed to… is it good content for me to just make a guess and lose? Or do I go on Google, look up what the words mean, and continue the puzzle?” And in that case, I decided to do that. And I got mostly feedback saying, “Yeah, I Googled it too. It was fine to Google it, looking it up. What’s wrong with that?”

But then, I got a lot of negative feedback too about “How’s it feel to cheat? You’re such a cheater, blah, blah, blah.” Just so much negativity. And so, I have to weigh the decision on how much negativity do I want in my comment section here, because they aren’t just insulting me when they’re calling me a cheater. They’re calling everyone else who Googled a cheater.

So, people are seeing themselves in that comment when they’re reading through the comment section. And that’s something I need to figure… it’s not something I’ve solved. I don’t have an answer. But what I try to do is understand myself and go, “Okay, am I 35 minutes into this puzzle legitimately, or am I just done with it?” There’s a game I play called Squaredle. There’s actually two games I play.

Mike Gerholdt:
It sounds like all the puzzles put together.

Rangsk:
Yeah. There’s two games I play called Squaredle. One of them has an extra E and one doesn’t. The one with the extra E… so one of them removes the E in square and one of them keeps the E in square when they add the -dle ending. They’re completely different games. One of them that I play with the E, it’s another word search game.

It’s a grid of four by four or sometimes five by five letters. And you need to find every possible word other than esoteric ones. They have some list of words that… you know how there’s words that aren’t really words, if you know what I mean? The esoteric ones, the archaic ones, out of use, highly specialized words. You don’t have to find those.

They count as bonus words if you do find them. But there’s a list of words that it’s looking for you to get. And sometimes this list is 60 to 100 words. And this game can take me an hour and a half.

Mike Gerholdt:
Wow.

Rangsk:
I sit there and I record the whole solve. It’s a special occasion usually. I’ll do it once every week or every two weeks and then put it on my YouTube where I solve the hardest Squaredle of the week. Because just like The New York Times puzzles, it gets harder through the week. And so, I’m like, “I’m going to solve the hardest one today.”

And it’s a lesson in patience because you have to find every word, and it can take an hour and a half. And that’s the kind of game where it’s like, “Okay, I’m 30 minutes in, but I’m still solving the puzzle. And that’s okay.” There’s also Sudokus that can take an hour, an hour and a half just because they’re that hard. But it feels like you’re making progress.

If you feel like you’re making progress, that’s just you’re still in the journey. You’re still solving it, and that’s fine. It doesn’t matter how long it’s been, as long as you still feel like you’re in the puzzle and you’re making progress and you’re enjoying it. But then, there’s puzzles where… the puzzle usually takes two minutes, and you’re 30 minutes into it, and you feel like you haven’t made progress in the last 25 minutes or ever.

And you just have to make the decision of like, “Is this worth my time anymore?” And I’ve definitely had puzzles where I hit the stop button on the recording and I delete the video, and I just go, “I’m not solving that one today.” Or ones where I go, “Well, it’s time to get a hint.” Literally, I just say, “I have failed this puzzle, but I want to see the end of it, so I’m going to look stuff up.”

You have to make that decision in your head. And I think you brought up a really important point, which is… I think you brought this point up at least, it became this point in my head, which is you need to decide for yourself when that is and that it’s okay. You gave it your best, time to seek help. And I think that’s something that’s really important in life is that it’s okay to seek help when you need it.

I think people appreciate when you’ve put in some effort yourself first, but at the same time, they don’t want… let me put it this way. I’ve been lead of several different teams as a programmer for my day job. And as a lead programmer, I would rather a junior programmer come to me with a problem that I can solve in a minute than spend six hours banging their head against it.

But at the same time, if it would’ve only taken them 10 minutes, I’d prefer them to learn that on their own. So, it’s important to learn at what point have I stopped being productive? Have I stopped enjoying this? Am I not in the right mindset and I either need to take a break, do something else, or I need to seek help, or both?

Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah. No, I think you’re right. The hint button and being called a cheater, you’re only cheating yourself. It’s what do you need to move on with? And your example is perfect. Is there something that can be gained by that person asking you? But I also think, what level of thinking did they put into solving this before they came to me?

And I always look at it as I’m very appreciative of, they came to me because they hit that wall, but they also realized quickly that they hit that wall.

Rangsk:
Exactly.

Mike Gerholdt:
And now they need to move on so that that learning journey continues as opposed to being frustrated in themselves.

Rangsk:
Yeah. And that’s a skill unto itself. And that really separates the people you enjoy working with from the people you don’t enjoy working with, people who are team players and people who aren’t. That really separates them because it’s a matter of, “I don’t want to be doing your job for you. I’ve got my own job to do, but also I don’t want you sitting there suffering as if you were alone.”

And there’s that balance. And recognizing in yourself when you’ve hit that state is really important. And I think that… going back to the conversation about transference. That’s something that can transfer. If you’re playing games, and you can learn in a low-stakes scenario, how do I… be in yourself, be in your body, be in your mind, and be like, “I now recognize what I’m like when I’m in this hopeless scenario where I’ve given up without giving up, where I’m frustrated, where I’m tired, where I’m hungry.”

It’s something even like children need to learn. Am I sad or am I just hungry? Or do I need to take a nap? That’s something children need to learn, but it’s not something we stop learning as a child. It’s something we need to always know ourselves, know how our mind works, know what our limitations are, and know what our limitations aren’t.

Is this something I can just continue on, or is this something that I need to use my coping mechanisms that I’ve learned throughout my life to deal with this situation? Part of the problem has now become my own mind. And that’s something you can learn by putting yourself constantly in these difficult situations, like difficult logic puzzles or trivia puzzles, where you’re not very familiar with that trivia or whatever it is for you that puts you out of your comfort zone in a safe, low-stakes environment.

So, you can learn how you yourself react to that and what that’s going to take. And part of my job, implementing things, software. I need to recognize… have you ever had that… I’m sure everyone’s had that late night where you’ve been banging your head against this fog or a thing you’re trying to implement is just not working. You go home dejected. You get some sleep. You come in in the morning and you fix it in two minutes.

And had you just recognized that you were in that situation where you were not going to be productive anymore, and you’d just gone home and you’d gotten rest and you’d accepted that that’s what’s happening. And you actually had your relaxing night and you took the time that you needed for yourself, and you got the good amount of sleep, and then you came in the morning ready to go, and you just solved the problem.

Those two scenarios look the same from a work perspective, but look very different from a personal hygiene, mental hygiene perspective.

Mike Gerholdt:
I couldn’t agree more. I couldn’t agree more. I think it’s also a great way to end this discussion, David. Thanks for coming on the podcast. You gave me so much to think about and here I was just excited to talk about word games. But really a lot of it is how you look at everything in life and how you tackle situations.

And really part of, I think, the word game or the game itself is also helping you understand yourself. So, this is a great discussion. I appreciate it. Thanks so much.

Rangsk:
Well, thanks for having me on. And if people want to watch my content, I’m just going to plug my stuff real quick.

Mike Gerholdt:
Absolutely.

Rangsk:
So, I am Rangsk on all platforms. R-A-N-G-S-K. I’m sure there’ll be something in the description where you can find that. I’m on YouTube and also on TikTok. And I recently had to split my TikTok into multiple accounts. But if you find that Rangsk_YT account, that’s the main one, and you’ll be able to find the others through my videos.

And so, if you enjoy Sudoku, logic puzzles, word games, that sort of thing in an instructive calm environment, then my channel is for you.

Mike Gerholdt:
So, as I write, this was a shot in the dark, I’ll be honest with you. I reached out to David after being completely addicted to his TikTok videos on Connections and Wordle, and just thought, “This is really what critical thinking looks like to me.” And the conversation, I probably could have gone for another hour easily. I had a hundred more questions in my head, but I hope you enjoy it.

I do want you to do one thing. If you enjoyed this episode, go ahead and give David a follow. I promise you it’s super rewarding to watch his critical thinking and the way that he solves problems and word problems and word games online. I honestly do think it will make you a better Salesforce admin and a better business analyst in general.

So, go ahead and give a click on the links below. Also, if you’re not already following the Salesforce Admins Podcast, please do so. We’re available on all the platforms. Click follow. Then new episodes like this one, we’ll download automatically every Thursday morning. And then, of course, if you’re still listening now, hey, I got a private Slack community.

And if you want to join it, there’s at least a dozen other listeners in there that avidly listen to the podcast. We’re having some fun conversations. I put some quizzes in there. Send me an email, M-G-E-R-H-O-L-D-T @Salesforce.com. That’s mgerholdt@salesforce.com. And let me know you want to be part of the Slack community and I’ll add you, and then you can ask questions of other listeners.

I’m trying to get some guests in there. So, with that, thanks for listening and of course, we’ll see you in the cloud.

The post How Can Solving Sudoku and Wordle Enhance Your Critical Thinking Skills? appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Michelle Blair, Community Manager at Salesforce. Join us as we chat about Salesforce Community Events, her work with local event organizers, and why you should attend one near you.

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

By Trailblazers, for TrailblazersMichelle is a part of the Trailblazer Community team, which helps millions of Salesforce users around the world come together and learn. I brought her on the pod to tell us about community conferences and how you can find an event near you.

Salesforce community conferences are created by Trailblazers, for Trailblazers. As Michelle shares, over 40 events are happening this year around the world, and they offer a great opportunity to connect with other people in the community and learn more about Salesforce.

Get personal at a Salesforce community event near youWhen you think of Salesforce events, you probably think of Dreamforce or TrailheaDX. These events are huge and offer so much. But all of those choices can get a little overwhelming. The cost can also be a challenge. I remember exactly how much budget I had for attending conferences when I was a solo admin—it was $0.

If you’ve ever felt that way, Michelle recommends that you give community events a try. Because they’re volunteer-organized, they have a more intimate, personal, inclusive feel. It’s easier to talk to speakers and make those connections. You can also find one within driving distance so you don’t have to take a flight or book a hotel.

Most importantly, the quality of content and professional networking opportunities at community conferences is top-notch. Michelle and her team have put together a handy-dandy calendar so you can easily find a community event near you.

Get involved in the Salesforce communityMichelle’s team is hard at work making Salesforce community events even better. They offer sponsorships to help with affordability and are connecting organizers with keynote speakers and Salesforce engineers. This year, they’re bringing several hands-on workshops to community events to take your learning to the next level.

Be sure to listen to the full episode for more on the Salesforce community events happening around the world and how you can get involved. And make sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode.

Podcast swag* Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Learn more* Community Conference Calendar * Trailblazer Community Groups * What is a Trailblazer Community Conference?

Admin Trailblazers Group* Admin Trailblazers Community Group

Social* Michelle: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michelleoblair/ * Salesforce Admins: @SalesforceAdmns * Mike on Threads: https://www.threads.net/@mikegerholdt/ * Mike on Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@salesforce.mike * Mike on X: @MikeGerholdt

Full show transcriptMike:
Salesforce community events are a great way to connect with Salesforce people in your area, consume some amazing content, dare I say Dreamforce level content, and get connected with your local user group. So this week on the Salesforce Admins podcast I’m talking with Michelle Blair, who’s the community major at Salesforce. And she helps all of these community event organizers really propel their event into the next level. We talk about what a community event is, how it’s different than an actual Salesforce event, some of the stuff that Salesforce is involved and not involved in when it comes to that. And I’ll be honest, why you should go. Now, before we get into that episode, just want to make sure that you’re following the Salesforce Admins podcast on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. That way when new episodes like this come out every Thursday morning, it’s going to be right on your phone. So with that, let’s get to our conversation with Michelle. So Michelle, welcome to the podcast.

Michelle:
Well, thank you, Mike. It’s great to be here.

Mike:
Yeah. Well, I’m excited to talk about there’s a lot of events that Salesforce does, but then the passion that runs through our community also exudes into them running their own events, which we’ll talk about. But let’s get started with you, how did you get started at Salesforce and what do you do?

Michelle:
Yeah, so it’s been about three years that I’ve been at Salesforce now. And I actually was a customer prior to joining Salesforce and was implementing our marketing cloud and our social, using a lot of the social platform at the customer company. And came to Dreamforce back in 2018 and was able to lead a session at Dreamforce, and talking about our journey and working with a Salesforce expert within the company. And from there I really experienced the Trailblazer community and was so inspired and just like, okay, got to get in here somehow. And I was already working with our community at the customer. So kind of just got in there eventually and made my way in about three years ago now, and it’s been quite a ride.

Mike:
And so at Salesforce you manage all kinds of stuff?

Michelle:
Yes, lots of community things.

Mike:
I feel like the over/under at one time I was a customer, it used to be very unique as an answer. Now it’s very common. But our community events, so we do TrailblazerDX, and have Dreamforce and we have World Tours which are smattered across the US and EMEA. But we also have events that our Trailblazer community puts on, so tell me about those.

Michelle:
Yeah. So a little overview of the team that I’m on. So the Trailblazer community team we support that global network of millions of Salesforce users across the world now. And we really help them to learn, succeed, and enable them with the tools to be able to put on their own events, their own communities, bringing people together to talk all about Salesforce and share that knowledge. And we manage a number of different programs like the online community, our community groups, as well as our community experts like Salesforce MVPs, and of course these community conferences which I’m so excited to dive into a lot deeper on this podcast.

Mike:
Yeah. No, and I’ve been to quite a few of them, not all of them because I feel like there’s more all the time. So what are we… First of all, they’re not put on by Salesforce so you don’t have anything in the planning of it, right?

Michelle:
That is correct.

Mike:
Okay.

Michelle:
We do not plan these. So these are a collection of learning conferences and they’re created, organized, managed by the community for the community. So they are around Salesforce content, but just not a Salesforce led event. And they really do offer such a unique opportunity to learn network, get inspired and give back to your community. And like you said, they’re entirely led by our incredible Trailblazers around the world. And they really just volunteer their time and pour their hearts into these community led events. And there are about 40 plus and counting this year and more to come. So these are just popping up all over, which is really exciting.

Mike:
And various sizes too, right?

Michelle:
Correct.

Mike:
With 40 plus, what are we looking at?

Michelle:
Yeah, so community conferences typically it’ll be about 200 minimum and then can go to 1000s now. I think in certain places it goes, we’ve seen 1000s up to 2000, in the States about a 1000. And so they really are just quite a range of options as well. And each of them are so unique to their local culture, to their city, their region. And some are single day, some are multi-day, but all of them have tons of content and a lot of robust speaker lineups that really include a range of sessions, workshops, demos, and all of that networking that we know our Trailblazers love.

Mike:
Yeah. You were a customer and you said you went to Dreamforce, which that was your first event. That’s like, ooh, I’m going to go on vacation for the first time and I’m going to go to Vegas or something. But I feel like when I was a customer I had a budget of zero, which made it very easy for me to know my budget every year. And I found community conferences as a super easy way to get connected with content that was, I would say Dreamforce quality but at a different price. What do you see… And you can see this from both angles, what do you see as the advantages of community conferences and some of our customers going?

Michelle:
Oh, absolutely. And kind of to touch on the Dreamforce part of my experience, it was extremely overwhelming. I remember just walking around and just not really knowing where exactly I should go. There was just so many options and it kind of is easy to feel a bit lost. And I think that is such a benefit of these community conferences. They really do feel like these intimate conferences that if maybe you are newer to the ecosystem, or maybe you’re making a career change and you’re just breaking in that way, or maybe you’re a seasoned Trailblazer and you just enjoy more of these more intimate settings. And I think these community conferences really offer that. They also offer more of affordability in that way too, where they’re just more accessible and budget friendly. So I think there’s a lot of opportunity to be more inclusive through these than your typical industry event. And make it possible for folks who may not be able to attend those big events like Dreamforce and TDX. So I think that’s really important to definitely note.

Mike:
Yeah, I know for a few of them I didn’t even have to spend a night in a hotel. It was great because it was one day, but also the drive, the Midwest, everybody, we drive everywhere. We only fly if we have to go to the coasts. But you could drive, attend the event and drive home. And that also was a huge kind of budget saver. Not to focus on that, but money talks a lot.

Michelle:
100%, yes. And I think that is something that we absolutely love about these events, is we have to keep in mind that they’re 100% community-led so these are people who are just volunteering to put these events on. So they create these events through sponsors, like ourselves, the Trailblazer community team we do offer a sponsorship. And just to help out with some of those costs, but it really it’s a lot of people just have to get creative to put these events on. And I think they do such a wonderful job and really hone in on the community. And that’s really the whole point of these is to bring the community together.

Mike:
Yeah, absolutely. And then for some of the events, I guess, what are you seeing as a trend in, you mentioned 2018 and I often think back to even the Dreamforce and some of the events that we’ve done pre 2020 and post 2020. What are some of the trends that you’re seeing in the style of community event or the length of community event now versus say a few years ago?

Michelle:
That’s a great question, Mike. And I wish as a customer, I had attended a community conference to be able to share that perspective of like this is as a customer back in 2018 versus now working at Salesforce and actually helping to support these events internally. But I will say, I think with the pandemic we definitely saw that these particular events, there was a pause on a lot of them. Many of them had to skip a year or two years or just coming back maybe this year, which is really exciting. And I will say last year in particular, that’s when I really helped to bring our focus back to community conferences and really find ways to support internally through our team and build out this sponsorship. And I think there was so much excitement this past year and that continues on through this year. And I think internally, something we have been really honing in on is that internal awareness and making sure that employees know that these are happening.

We get out account executives, we get out those engineers who can really get this feedback in person. We also are delivering some hands-on workshops that have been really impactful at some of these pilots that we’ve had this year. And we have a goal of piloting 10 hands-on workshops at community conferences by the end of this year, which is really exciting.

Mike:
Yeah, I think that’s always the part for me that felt very, I don’t know, lack of a better term, real, was you went to the event and it was very local to you unless you flew across the country or something, or you went outside of the United States. But it felt very local. So there’s a lot of people that you would know or you could connect with. If you go to an event in the Midwest, you’re going to talk about the weather 100%. And then we’re going to avoid bumping into you and say, “Oh, [inaudible 00:12:10].” But I think you get a mix of community members presenting, but then you also have Salesforce shows up. It just shows up in a very different way. It’s not a heavy-handed message, but in a supportive manner like you said, where we can do a workshop. And so you still get kind of that local flavor, but also some of the big production of a hands-on workshop that you feel like, oh, well, this poor customer didn’t have to spend 10 weeks toiling away to create this workshop.

Michelle:
Right. Yes, I think that is a really important note because we 100% want to respect the community and give them the credit that they all deserve for organizing these events. And one way we can do that is within our sponsorship package, we actually do offer whether it’s keynote assistance, where we can make an ask on behalf of the conference organizers if they have a keynote or an internal speaker that they would really like as their keynote speaker or as a session topic. So that is one way we support logistically. And I think it is wherever we can help out, we will try to find a way. And I think it is just that trust piece where the community trusts us to have their back to know that we will support where we can. And then we trust in them to put on these incredible conferences that really just are the heart of this community.

Mike:
Yeah. Speaking of local, are there… And there’s so many, are there unique events that some of these community events do outside of the conference?

Michelle:
Yes. So I know that… Well, and to give a little history but just on that local piece, Mike-

Mike:
Oh, please do.

Michelle:
So the history of these events really came from, I think it was back in 2012, and it’s a customer who actually wasn’t able to attend Dreamforce. They wanted to offer something similar to their local Salesforce network. So they basically decided to bring this mini Dreamforce to their hometown, and that’s been duplicated all over the world now. We’re seeing all of these pop up globally, but it really is the overall vision. And the goal here really is to connect local Trailblazer community groups. So those are those regional groups that get together, very product and industry specific groups, so architects, admins, developers. And then those local Salesforce customers who just want to get together and get to know each other as well as share that knowledge and then anyone interested in learning.

And that’s really the goal here is to spark those connections and ideas for all. And yeah, I think the local piece is just so important because these conferences are a celebration in a sense of that region, that local culture that people really love about their city, about their state. So we do see a lot of very specific, especially in the States, very specific regions that these Dream and events are named after. And then we’re seeing a ton come up in EMEA as well as APAC. Yeah, there’s so much local flavor that we’re seeing and it’s amazing.

Mike:
It sounds like… Well, I’ll flip to the other side of the coin because I feel like going to these is paramount. We’ve talked about that a lot. What if you’re on the other side of the coin you’re thinking, boy, I think I could do something like this in my area. From your perspective, what does it take to put on a community event? How big are some of these teams that plan these? And I think you said the turnout’s kind of all over the place, but if somebody wanted to get started what are they looking at?

Michelle:
Great question. So typically with our conference planning teams, we see at least three to four members. I would say that’s a minimum because you got to think about all the different components that go into these conferences and up to it could be 10 planning team members. So really is just depending on the scope of your conference and what you’re trying to bring together. And we really recommend even forming an additional volunteer team to help handle this day of responsibilities as well. So those are additional folks who can jump in if there’s any fires, anything going on that need to be addressed as soon as possible. Something we also do recommend is having at least one community group leader that currently is leading one of those regional community groups, just so that they kind of have that full understanding of the Trailblazer community and the importance of bringing the community together.

And then typically we also recommend that the planning team is individuals not employed but just by one company. It’s really spread out through a company and different organizations coming together. And that could include customers, partners, and making sure that they are active members of the Salesforce ecosystem, the Trailblazer community. And that they really create that open and inclusive environment that these community conferences are known for.

Mike:
Yeah. No, sometimes it takes an army or what’s it? No, it takes a village.

Michelle:
Takes a village.

Mike:
It takes a village, yes. May feel like an army sometime, but yeah, I’ve been to quite a few and I think it’s always interesting. I also, just to speak to kind of the vibe, I don’t know how best to say that but the vibe, the vibes at a community conference are so different. On top of just the speakers being super approachable, they’ll get up and literally there’ll be times… There was one time I was sitting in a session, he’s like, “I wonder who the speaker is.” And he just got up because they’re not in this bougie suit like you see at Dreamforce. But also when you’re there talking with the partners, the SIs and stuff, they’re a little more laid back. It’s a little more casual. I really enjoy that you can have what I’ll call a human conversation, as opposed to at some of these more formal corporate events where the people at the booth or whatever are just trying to hard sell you the whole time.

There you can be like, now, you sit down and it’s nothing to walk past a table and see people sketching stuff on a piece of paper. And then really working through the challenge as opposed to like, “Buy my product.” I don’t know how best to say that.

Michelle:
I totally agree, Mike. I think that is really the magic is that relaxed environment where you can show up authentically. You don’t have to play a certain role or act a certain way. You just show up as yourself, whether you’ve been in the ecosystem for years and years or you’re coming in new, I think it’s somewhere that is so welcoming and inclusive of all. And that is something I just absolutely love. And you see that across every single community conference. It really is that’s just the vibe of our Dream and events. So it really is incredible. And I think touching on the opportunities that when you can show up authentically, it really does offer or allows you to grow personally and professionally on such a different level because you can be yourself and then you make those really special connections that will allow you to become a better admin, become a better community member, become a better community leader. And then that kind of just flows into your personal everything. So I think that’s really such a beautiful thing about these conferences.

Mike:
If somebody was listening and we’ll put the link in the show notes, and wanted to find, do we list all these or is there a listing somewhere that they could find of these events?

Michelle:
We sure do, yes. Great question. It’s exciting because we’re actually going to be updating this landing page very soon. So you can find community conferences at Trailblazercommunitygroups.com. And then on that top area you can just click onto community conferences from there. And you will see a calendar of all of the amazing events that are happening throughout this year, and then all of the past events that have happened as well.

Mike:
So you can find out all the stuff you missed out on.

Michelle:
Yes, exactly.

Mike:
I feel like it’s that way with me all the time. Like, oh. Every time I hear a band or a comic is going on tour, like, oh. And like, “You didn’t know they were going on tour.” You’re like, “No, I didn’t.” And then you pull up the event and you’re like, “Cool, [inaudible 00:22:19].”

Michelle:
It was last weekend, yeah.

Mike:
So conversely, if somebody’s listening to this, what would be the bar? Is there a requirement that they should have stuff together before they contact you if they were looking to get into creating a community event?

Michelle:
Yeah, I think it really is there’s quite a range in that too. When a team will come to us and say, “I have interest in this. I really don’t know what to do. Can you help guide me?” And then we also see the other side where it’s like, we have the date, we have the venue, we have everything already set. All we need from you is really the sponsorship and a point of contact on your team to help support in that planning and execution. So we show up wherever the conference planning team really is. And yeah, once they kind of go through our intake process and we say, “All right, you’re approved. Here’s the sponsorship, here’s your point of contact.” We then the point of contact on our team will be able to support them with all the additional items like that internal awareness piece. We do a demo jam trophy, that keynote speaker sourcing, some marketing support as well, as well as some little giveaway items that we provide.

And something new that we’re piloting at domestic conferences is an onsite community booth where our team, yes, for those who our team is able to travel to some of these conferences. And when we do we kind of bring this community booth kit where we have pop-up banner, we have all of the things that help to identify the Trailblazer community. And we spread some of that awareness of what makes the Trailblazer community unique, and how we support these conferences as well as our community groups and our community experts. So lots of fun things.

Mike:
I would say, that’s quite the welcome wagon. My God.

Michelle:
Yes.

Mike:
Well, Michelle, thanks for coming on the pod and talking about our community events. I know that I’ve been to quite a few and I’ve got quite a few listeners that go to them and plan them and talk about them. And it’s just kind of a neat extra layer of participation that we have as part of this ecosystem.

Michelle:
Yes, I couldn’t agree more, Mike. And thank you so much for supporting these incredible community led events. They really are just exactly what the community is all about. And we couldn’t do any of this without the people who are organizing these events, so big shout out to them.

Mike:
Yeah, absolutely.

Michelle:
They’re the real heroes here.

Mike:
Yep, absolutely. Well, it was great to have Michelle on the podcast. I’m glad she could join us. I really love going to community events. I think they’re a lot of fun, and I wasn’t kidding about the vibe. I think it’s so much more enjoyable when you can sit down with a lot of the vendors. And also to be honest with you, a lot of the speakers are also a little less rushed too. So if you’re working on a budget like I am all the time, community events are a great way to get connected with some great content. Also, a great way for you as a Salesforce admin to try out your presentation skills. If you’ve been presenting at a local user group and kind of want to go that next level, community event is a great way to get in front of a larger group of people and really try out your speaking abilities.

So if you enjoyed this episode, can you do me a favor and just tap on the three dots in Apple Podcasts and click the share episode. That way you can text it to a friend or you can most importantly share it on social. And of course, we mentioned resources, Michelle had a couple of URLs. I want to make sure you know how to get to those. All those resources are in the show notes, and those show notes and along with everything else is at Admin.salesforce.com, including a transcript of the show. Now, be sure to join us in the Admin Trailblazer group in the Trailblazer community if you’re not there already. And of course, until next week, we’ll see you in the cloud.

The post Why Salesforce Community Events Are Crucial for Professional Networking appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Jason Atwood, CEO and Co-Founder of Arkus. Join us as we chat about landing your first Salesforce Admin role, from finding good opportunities to nailing the interview and more.

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

The 20/30/50 ruleJason has interviewed a lot of people for Salesforce roles in his 15 years in the ecosystem. His biggest piece of advice when looking for your first role is pretty simple: “Relax. It’s going to be OK.”

But you still need to acquire skills and there’s a lot to do, so Jason recommends following his 20/30/50 rule. Spend 20% of your time on Trailhead, 30% on certifications, and 50% finding some way to gain experience. This split loosely follows what he looks for on a resume when he’s making a new hire. He also shared some advice about each step of your journey.

Trailhead: Becoming a Ranger is your number one priority, followed by Superbadges. He also recommends taking the time to set up your profile with a photo, description of yourself, and custom URL.

Certifications: Don’t put off taking your certifications. Give it a go as soon as you’re ready. If you don’t get it this time, you can use your results to help you prep better the next time. And if you do pass, you can move on to the next one sooner.

Gaining Experience: Volunteering isn’t the only way to do this. You can enroll in a program where you build mock projects, or simply build something on your own that you’re willing to demo in an interview.

Preparing for a Salesforce Admin interviewJason interviews a lot of people, so I asked him, how should you prepare for your first interview for a Salesforce role? The first thing is to be ready for some sort of assessment. Since there’s often time pressure, Jason recommends doing a practice run. Talk to a friend, find out what kind of data they collect, and build them an app to track the books they’ve read or the distance they’ve run, anything will do.

When you sit down in the room, Jason emphasizes the importance of listening and showing empathy. One way to do that is to ask good questions. What’s their Salesforce roadmap and what can you build for them? What’s their organization’s approach to culture? You can also do your homework and bring up a blog post they wrote, or something specific their company has done.

Admins are consultantsListening and empathy are so important to Jason because he sees them as the biggest part of the job.

“Being an admin is being a consultant for one organization. What are you doing? You’re talking to people, they’re coming to you with their problems, you’re getting their requirements, you’re satisfying their needs, you’re working with them, you’re iterating, you’re updating things, and then you’re presenting it back to them.”

We touch on a lot more in this conversation about looking for Salesforce jobs, listening, and what it’s like to be a Salesforce consultant, so be sure to listen to the full episode and subscribe so you don’t miss out.

Podcast swag* Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Learn more* Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: Pei Mun Lim on the Skills of a Business Analyst * Salesforce Admins Blog: Develop Your Communication Skills as a Salesforce Admin

Admin Trailblazers Group* Admin Trailblazers Community Group

Social* Jason: @JasonMAtwood * Salesforce Admins: @SalesforceAdmns * Mike on Threads: https://www.threads.net/@mikegerholdt/ * Mike on Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@salesforce.mike * Mike on X: @MikeGerholdt

Full show transcriptMike:
I got an idea. How about we tackle the hardest question on the Salesforce Trailblazer community? That’s right. This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we’re going to look for advice on finding your first admin job and doing the interview, getting experience, and more. And we’re going to do all that with CEO and co-founder of Arkus, Jason Atwood. Jason and I chatted at TrailblazerDX and really wanted to dive into this topic. Now, before we bring Jason on, I just want to make sure that you’re following the Salesforce Admins Podcast on iTunes or Spotify. That way, when new episodes like this one come out, they’re automatically downloaded to your phone. But enough about that. Let’s talk about finding that first job or even finding your next job as a Salesforce administrator. Oh, I almost forgot to mention we tackle the myth of “but it’s just an admin job.” So with that, let’s get Jason on the podcast. So, Jason, welcome to the podcast.

Jason Atwood:
Thank you for having me. It’s been a long time since we’ve podcast together.

Mike:
I know. I was thinking back; well, we were just reminiscing of the days at the Marriott Marquis and the Arkus podcast.

Jason Atwood:
Yep. You were on an episode of CloudFocus Weekly. We had it as part of our trivia once there was only four or five guests ever on the podcast, and you were one of them.

Mike:
Snuck in, only proximity. I’m going to say. So catch people up. What have you been up to?

Jason Atwood:
Well, since then, whatever that was, 10 years ago. Yeah. So I am now the current CEO and co-founder of Arkus. We’re a Salesforce consulting firm. We deal mostly in the nonprofit space, and we’ve grown from that little company back then. We’re almost up to 75 people. And now I run around between putting out fires, talking on podcasts, and trying to educate myself on the whole changing landscape of technology.

Mike:
Yeah, it does feel like in the last decade, it’s gone from everything we know to a brand new world.

Jason Atwood:
It certainly is. And I just spent three hours at a Heroku dev meetup and could hang there mentally for a bit, but they lost me at a little point. So it’s both fun, interesting, and challenging to stay up with all this stuff.

Mike:
So one of the things that everyone’s trying to stay up with is the ever-changing job market and hiring. We see a lot of the questions in the Trailblazer community from new admins, people getting into the ecosystem that want to become Salesforce admins, people in the ecosystem that are looking for jobs, or maybe have kind of hit a career plateau. And you and I were chatting, and boy, I think it’d be fun to kind of delve into that topic with you.

Jason Atwood:
Let’s do it. I have some experience in hiring people over the last 15 years, so I can certainly talk about it.

Mike:
A little bit more than me. More than me.
Well, let’s get started. So let’s start fresh. There’s a lot of new people. As we were talking about in the intro, there’s a lot of new people coming into the ecosystem that maybe don’t have tech advice. They are doing Trailhead modules, completing challenges, getting a lot of badges, trying to round out their resumes, and they don’t know A, what to look for, or B, what to put on their resumes. So somebody that’s hired a bunch of people and been around for a long time, let’s start there with some of your advice and where they should go.

Jason Atwood:
Sure. This is a very common thing, and the first thing I would tell everybody is relax. It’s going to be okay. I know it feels daunting, and you see these triple all-star rangers and you see all these, the hoodies, and you see the people with the 15 certifications and 10 years of experience, and you feel like, “How am I ever going to get there?” You will; you’ll get there. So the first thing is just to take it easy and not to get too worked up on it. It does feel like a lot. It’s a very big community and filled with lots of hungry people for jobs, a lot of recruiters, a lot of activity. When I talk to people about getting started in the ecosystem, and certainly on the admin track, and we can talk about other tracks if you want, but on the admin track, I kind of say all those things matter.

So when it comes to certifications, when it comes to Trailhead, when it comes to experience, they all matter. And usually the question I get is, “But what should I focus on?” And so I came up with something, I maybe made it up years and years ago. I call it the 30, 20, 50 rule, or 20, 30, 50. It doesn’t matter; you can break it up anyway. And if you’re going to take your time, right, you’re in the hunt for a job, and you need to do the education, you need to get enabled, you need to build your experience level. I break it down into those percentages. So 20% of the time, I’d focus on Trailhead. And the trick for Trailhead is A, you just have to be a ranger. We don’t even look at people who aren’t rangers. I had an intern apply the other day, and I said, “No, you’re not even on Trailhead. Go get a ranger before I even talk to you.”

So that, to me, is just a minimum bar. Just go be a ranger, and then if you can go up from there, that’s great. And then, if you’re still in your Trailhead worlds, the thing that we then look for besides looking at their profile, is it filled out? Have they thought about it? Have they created it like LinkedIn? So second advice on the Trailhead side is treat your profile like LinkedIn: fill it out, put your picture, put your description, do all the things. It’ll probably take you no more than a half an hour. Make your URL; you can make your customized URL so people can find you; do all the things so it looks like you’re part of the community, right? Make sure that your profile is rich and full. And then the third thing on the Trailhead side of things is to go for super badges.

So I can look at double ranger, triple ranger all day long, but if I don’t see some super badges and I speak from someone who doesn’t have any super badges.

Mike:
Oh, no.

Jason Atwood:
I know, I know, it’s on my hit list for this year. I know, I know, I mean, I have 15 certs, and so I have some experience, but I’d say, get some super badges. We see that when we look at that as a higher level of dedication and of expertise, because, as you know and as I’ve been doing them, they’re difficult. They show that you have really dug in, and they’re more than just answering some questions or watching videos, or getting fun ones. I love badges, but the super badges really show that kind of a deeper level of education and sort of just being in the Trailhead world. So that’s the 20%. Then the 30% is certifications.

You need to have both. You can’t have one without the other. I don’t know what that commercial was, peanut butter and chocolate or something, but-

Mike:
Yeah, I think so, yeah.

Jason Atwood:
-You might be [inaudible 00:07:08]. Certifications are important; you should focus on them. What I tell people is you need to get them, but you can’t stall. Most people, I think, when we talk to them and we’ll find in the ecosystem, say, “Oh, I’m thinking about getting that, or I’m planning to get that one next year.” And our advice is, “Nope, go get it. Go get it now. Go take it. Go take the test a couple of times.” Do whatever it is you can do to start your certification journey; don’t put it off; don’t procrastinate on it. You don’t have to be perfect; just go get some. And obviously there’s a path of which ones you should get, blah, blah, blah.

It depends on where you’re going in your world, but having at least one or two certs is kind of a bare minimum. So if you’re starting off and you’re trying to get into the ecosystem, that’s your 20 and your 30, and then the 50 is the hardest part. And it’s just hard to tell people because it’s the experience. The third thing we look for is experience. I want to see that you’ve done something obviously new to the ecosystem, harder to have the experience, but that’s where I say spend 50% of your time trying to gain that experience. There’s the old adage: try to go work with a non-profit. Although there’s some pushback on that nowadays because of the complexity of the platform, you don’t want to hurt a non-profit.

There’s definitely… Get in in a way, there’s programs, there’s tons of programs out there that will help you do mock projects and things where you can just get your hands dirty. And even if you have to build your own thing that you’re going to demo, you got to get experience because I’ve not hired people with 22 certifications, and because it didn’t add up to any experience, and I’ve seen people with tons and tons of experience with zero certs, and I would hire anyway, just from the experience. But for me, that’s how I tell spend your time: 20% trailhead, 30% certifications, and 50% getting that experience.

Mike:
I think that 50%, that part that you’re talking about is always the part that feels like the hardest to get into. Because if you’re not in tech and you don’t have any experience and you’re trying to land that first job, that can feel like, “If I could get this job, then I could get the experience.” And so, part of that lends to my next question is, so you’re new, we’ve checked all the boxes on filling out our profiles and done that part. What should I get ready for when I interview?

Jason Atwood:
So every interview’s going to be different, obviously, but a lot of places are using assessments now. So I would say be prepared for an assessment. That means functionally, they’re going to ask you to do something; they’re going to ask you to build something or take something they’ve done and turn it into something on the platform, using Salesforce as the platform. So I would just be ready for that, be prepared, be okay with it. Even do mock versions of it, go have a friend, and I have to given this advice to some people, but go have a friend, sit down with them, talk to them about what they do, and you’ll uncover something that they’re collecting data.

And as soon as you can figure out what the data they’re collecting, whether it’s books or they collect comic books, or they’re a skier or they’re a runner, anything you do, you can just come up with, “Ooh, what if I built you an app to track that?” So be prepared to have an assessment of your skills and be able to show that in a short period of time. Meaning it might be a take-home. Sometimes it’s a take-home. Like, “Hey, go do this over the weekend.” Other times it’s, “You have an hour; come back and show us what you did.”

Mike:
Ooh!

Jason Atwood:
So I’d say… Ooh! Yeah, I know. I’ve been doing that for 15 years to people. Trust me. I’ve seen a lot of, oohs.

Mike:
I would imagine.

Jason Atwood:
Even had one person pass out in the…

Mike:
Oh, my. Oh, goodness.

Jason Atwood:
It happens.

Mike:
You get an extra hour now.

Jason Atwood:
Yeah. So I think that it’s coming more and more in the ecosystem, because again, when you look at a resume, when you look at LinkedIn, a lot of it’s just you can’t tell whether they know what they’re doing. If you actually do an assessment, you can then assess, “Okay, you know, you functionally know how to do things.” So I’d be prepared for that. The other thing is, I think when you’re really, especially in the new, just be honest about what you do and do not know. That’s really, really key. Don’t fluff up your resume; don’t put things that you don’t know; don’t put clouds, don’t throw in data cloud if you don’t know what data cloud is and haven’t used it or can’t really explain it. Just because you took a Trailhead on something doesn’t mean that platform or know that cloud. So I’d really say be honest with what you know and the clouds, and the products, because that’s going to be super important in the interview process.

Mike:
Wow. How much… In prep work for resumes, there’s a lot of AI tools out there, so I’d love to know your perspective on both sides of this one: how much do you, as somebody hiring, kind of look for, “Oh, they used AI to generate most of this resume?” And on the flip side, how much should somebody building their resume that could really benefit from an AI tool? How much should they lean into it?

Jason Atwood:
So I’m going to be the strange answer on this one, or…

Mike:
Oh, good.

Jason Atwood:
Yeah, because I’m going to say, resumes don’t matter.

Mike:
Okay.

Jason Atwood:
They’re just checking a box. When people get to me in the interview process, they’re beyond the resume. So yes, you need to have a resume; you need it because that’s the part. It’s like you have to have the internet; you have to have a way to fill out the form. So you need to have a resume, and it should have your accomplishments and stuff on it. But I don’t look at resumes because they’re just lies. They’re just you telling me all these things, and sometimes I don’t know if any of that’s really true or not true. So to me, it’s like it’s just a checking the box. “Yes, you have to have a resume. Yes, it should be okay.” Honestly, your LinkedIn profile should be your resume, right? Because that’s real; it’s on the web. And if you’re lying, someone might actually call you out for it.

“Hey, you didn’t work at that company for 10 years.” So I would say focus more on the LinkedIn. Because I’ll look at that. If you gave me 10 minutes, I’d look at your LinkedIn first. I would not look at your resume, what you’ve put on, rather than what your actual history has been. That being said, you want to throw all this stuff on there for this ecosystem. So I do think showing work that you’ve done and really pointing to problems you’ve solved, if you really think about any job, especially as an administrator, you’re a Salesforce admin, you’re basically solving problems all day all.

And you’re communicating. So two things that I tell people about the resume and the process is how do you show that you’ve solved problems in the past in your resume, and then how do you show that you are a great communicator? Because great communication, it doesn’t matter what, I mean, well, not what job, but certainly in this world, you are basically talking to people, helping them out, doing stuff, re-communicating with them, getting what they need to do, building it, whatever. You might work with different groups or whatever. But that communication skill is something we deeply look at. So again, if you’re going to focus on stuff, don’t so much focus on your resume as focus on how to be a great communicator.

Mike:
That’s really good advice because I have been at that level where people show up and the resume looked good, but they couldn’t facilitate the conversation or articulate any kind of answer in the interview.

Jason Atwood:
It is a skill that not a lot of people have, but it’s a skill, you can learn it. So a couple of things to put into that communication bucket. We’ll go down a little rathole here.

Mike:
Yeah, let’s do.

Jason Atwood:
One is empathy.

Mike:
Okay.

Jason Atwood:
Have the ability to show empathy, and that means sort of having a conversation with somebody and throwing in stuff that’s like listening to them, talking to them, obviously pulling out information about them, but having the empathy when they say something’s not going to happen or whatever, they could say, “It’s a rainy day.” I look for it in every interview that I do. Now this is going to be on the podcast; everybody’s going to know this, but I will actually throw things into my talk track or as just the warm-up when you’re sort of, “How are you and what’s going on?” I will always throw in something to test empathy.

I’ll say, “Oh, I’m okay, but I didn’t sleep well last night. Or I had a bad egg sandwich this morning, or I’ve tripped over the dog when I came into the room.” And I just listened to hear what they react. If they go, “Oh, that’s terrible. Oh, yeah, I know dogs can be really difficult. Or you know what? I get my egg sandwiches from downstairs, whatever.” But hearing that back of that empathy, super important. Second is actually listening, so I will listen to people, how they listen to me. Are they interrupting me? Are they talking over me? Are they going? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, as I speak, I listen for their real intent and true conversational skills. And so the ability to actually listen, pause, and then answer is a really big; it’s a great skill to have. And so the people who can do that, I know that they can do almost any job better because they’ve intently done that listening skill and they’ve got it working. So those are two that I throw out to most people when they’re trying to build their conversational habits.

Mike:
Yeah, I’m listening to you answer that, and I’m playing devil’s advocate in my head and saying, “Maybe people are hearing Jason say this because he’s hiring consultants.” So why do you think this also translates over to people that are embedded in different work groups, or teams, or have stakeholders within an organization and aren’t consultants, like for your organization?

Jason Atwood:
Because basically, being an admin is being a consultant in one organization. You are a consultant. What are you doing? You’re talking to people; they’re coming to you with their problems; you are getting their requirements; you’re satisfying their needs; you’re working with them; you’re iterating; you’re changing it; you’re updating things, and then you’re presenting it back to them. The thing that changes when you become a consultant is you’re paying for someone’s time, which then becomes a whole other thing. But also, you might be working with other organizations, and the level of expectation of how you do that and your expertise goes way up. And this is something I tell, I warn people about moving into consulting is that when you’re an admin, you have the ability to take some time. Someone says, “Hey, can you build me these three dashboards that I want to track my sales forecasting?”

You go, “Sure,” and you can go Google it, and you spend a week, and you come back, and you’re like, “Here’s your three dashboards.” They’re ecstatic; they’re like, “Great, thank you.” They don’t care that it took you three weeks or whatever, and then you had to ask your friend and Google it or ask ChatGPT to do it for you. In the consulting space, it’s different. They don’t ask, “Could you build this for me?” They say, A, “What are the options to build it? How long is it going to take you, and can you get it to me by next Tuesday?” So the expectation level of what you’re doing goes way up, and they expect you to be expert. They don’t expect you to ever say, “I don’t know, but I’ll figure it out.” As an admin, I said, “I don’t know. I’ll figure it out.”

“Oh, you want to build some tracker for your feedback form? Sure, let go figure it out.” Go away for a week, and I’ll come back and show you something. So I think that’s part of it, but as an admin, you’re still doing all this stuff. It’s the same stuff inside the organization. You’re just not working with external companies or people; you work with internal people. So you still have Mary from accounting coming over and wants to synchronize with the QuickBooks, and you still have the CEO come over and they want an update to some dashboard because they can’t figure it out, and you’re doing the same stuff; it’s more internal, more ad hoc, generally.

Mike:
I mean, I couldn’t agree more. Also, Mary from accounting, they always want to, for some reason, can’t seem to get opportunities flowing through your sales org, but let’s integrate finance.

Jason Atwood:
So true, so true.

Mike:
But you kind of led into that. So what are the different jobs, or different tasks, types of jobs that admins would tackle within an organization?

Jason Atwood:
Yeah, I mean, we kind of started in there. You do become an internal consultant, but I think you first off just think of what, especially when you’re applying for it, and this goes back to sort of the applying and getting the jobs’ thing. When you’re looking at the organization, you obviously want to know what their Salesforce landscape is. So if I were in the interview process, what I would do is come loaded with a bunch of really good questions, and I would pepper that person with tons of questions about their Salesforce instance, or, as we call it in the biz, we call it their org.

But I would come in with, “What kind of licenses? How old is it? What kind of integrations? What kind of applications do you have? When’s the last time you did a health tech? Do you use permission sets or permission set groups? Or did you flip the lightning yet?” I mean, I would be peppering them showing my expertise to get that admin job. So that’s just on the interview side; I just want to throw that in. But coming back to what you do, again, it really depends on the organization, and this is actually a myth that is out there in the ecosystem, is that admins get bored and admins don’t get to play with lots of different clouds, and admins don’t do a lot of diverse things. That’s completely not true because it depends on what organization you’re with. I was with a company who had 375,000 people.

I had a team; I had five people, or five, including me; we were all admins; that’s what we did. And we had 12 different production orgs, 12 orgs with production, and I think nine different applications running in them with thousands and thousands and thousands of users. We were not bored; we had plenty to do; we were playing with great, big, unlimited licensing and integrations and projects, but we were admins. At the end of the day, we were admins. Same thing: you go work for a small company that’s four… I don’t think anyone would hire a full-time admin with four people. But the smaller the organization who’s just using Salesforce for one thing and has no chance of expanding it or doing it, or going anywhere.

Yeah. You’re going to get bored, right? You come in, you’re going to help out Mary in accounting, you get that one project done, and then they’re going to be like, “Can you reset passwords all day?” So I think as part of the interview process to pulling it back in to that, and when your job seeking, you should be really interested in what their, especially if you want to be a Salesforce admin and you really want to do it full time, what’s their Salesforce roadmap? Are they just solid? They have it, and they have had it up and running for five years, and that’s it? Or do they have things that they want to do? New stuff you can build? Do you want to do the integration with that? We want to bring in marketing cloud next year. We’re looking at how to do predictive AI, whatever.

So if I were bringing more questions as the trying to get the job, I would bring in that to the organization. I’d say, “What do you guys, where’s your roadmap? Or do you not have one?” And I think that would show as a hiring person; I’d be like, “Oh, they’re forward-looking.” And it’ll also give you the idea of: “Are you going to get bored in six months?” Because you don’t want to get bored in six months.

Mike:
Right. Although maybe a smaller footprint would be really good if you’re looking to get that first admin job.

Jason Atwood:
Exactly. Exactly right. But then you have the counter, right? You have a smaller footprint, but they have 40 users, and they only use it for service. So you get in, you do some work, you do all the stuff, and then you’re like, “Now what?”

Mike:
Right. So you brought up myths of admins, and one is, well, “I don’t get exposed to enough clouds,” and I’ve heard that at various events. “Well, we only use data cloud, or I just don’t get to see it.” And I feel like, and this still exists, all of these articles on admin to something else, as though admin is just the front door; all you got to do is get in and do that for a few months. But the real money and the real challenge is elsewhere. What would you say to that myth of just an admin?

Jason Atwood:
I think it is a bit of a myth, and it makes admins and being an administrator, Salesforce administrators feel like this… It’s like you’re the fry person in the back at McDonald’s. It’s like, “Well, I don’t ever go back and cook the hamburgers.” I don’t know. And it’s not true.

Mike:
Although the fries are kind of the best part.

Jason Atwood:
That’s true. I actually worked at McDonald’s, and I was the fry person, so that’s why I brought it up.

Mike:
Yeah.

Jason Atwood:
But yes, at some organizations, you could be the one admin, and that could be your role for a long period of time. And you could get bored, and it could just be a starter. At other organizations, you could run an entire group of admins. You could have six or seven admins, you could be part of a team of people supporting a lot of different Salesforce instances, and it could go anywhere from just administrative down to sort of more the solution architect type of stuff, or more towards the BA towards so stuff or more towards the development.

One of the things you and I have been in this ecosystem for a long time, what we were able to do 10 years ago on the platform with our clicks and what we’re able to do with clicks now, we’re programming. Let’s be clear: when we’re building flows, we’re programming; we’re just programming with a user interface. But that’s programming, and the stuff you can do is stunning, that you just couldn’t do with any of the tools unless you’re writing Apex. So I think even the idea that admins who are getting that technical acumen and are going into the more programmatic type of world of admin that could go long, there’s lots of paths you can go down for that. So that’s where I think some of the myths should go away because you’re not just the admin who’s building a report, adding a field to a page way out, and assigning a permission set. There’s many, many different pieces of that platform. And that’s before you even talk about the clouds; before you’d say there’s now, I don’t know how many clouds. There’s a lot of clouds.

Mike:
There is a lot.

Jason Atwood:
Yeah.

Mike:
Yeah. I mean, you brought up flow. I think back to the days of, “Boy, if I could just stand up like a window pane that a screen that people could input the data into as opposed to just editing raw right on the record.” And now we can do that, and you can do that just using the interface. You don’t have to try a single line of code, which is…

Jason Atwood:
It is stunning what you can do with that tool. And it’s one of the things that has left me a little bit behind because I’m old school admin. I’m a work-for-rule person. And for that, I would’ve gone wrote in a user story and had someone written up a Visualforce, and with Apex in the background, and now it’s… The stuff that we can produce with flows, screen flows, and even the call-outs. I was watching the call-out today, a flow that made a call-out to a Heroku Dyno that did a hookup to a Postgres database that pulled in AI predictions. I was like, “What?” So yeah, the world of an admin is becoming very, very broad in some ways.

Mike:
Yeah, no, I agree. And you can also now trigger flows through prompts and have it call AI. And I mean, in a year from now, this is all going to sound like super, “Wow, they were impressed they could do that. Now look at where we are.” kind of stuff. One thing we didn’t touch on is there’s a lot of job places to look at and career stuff. Often, when looking for a developer architect, I think those are a little more defined also, especially with developer, they’ve got experience in writing developer job titles for other platforms. So it’s very easy to translate that over to Salesforce. What are things that an admin should look for in job descriptions? That maybe if the title or description doesn’t say Salesforce admin, that will be the role?

Jason Atwood:
Yeah, it’s a tough one because, I mean, the easiest thing to say is look for the keyword Salesforce. Obviously, there’s going to be some sort of piece of that. I think you’d have to go a little old-school and think of the platform and what it’s doing. So I would start to look for things that were based on what Salesforce, the platform’s doing? Is it sales, right? Is it marketing? Is it service? Is it nonprofit? Especially in the nonprofit space, which is for me. So we would look at grant writing, fundraising, and all that stuff, which could be keywords for, we’re using Salesforce in the background, but we’re using it to do all these things. So I guess the meta hint without giving you the keywords is: What is this organization doing? What is the output of their world? And then looking at what the tool set they’re using.

They might not be Salesforce, right? There are other ways of saying the word. They might say something like health cloud and a health cloud administrator, and you’re like, “Well, that’s Salesforce.” Or they might say, “net-zero cloud.” Or they might say, “nonprofit cloud.” Again, not saying Salesforce, but that’s what it’s based on. So sometimes, as an administrator and as part of this ecosystem, you have to know that there are products that are sitting on top of the platform that don’t necessarily say the word in it. Remember when they named everything Force? Everything was Force something Force, this Force, that Force.

Mike:
We had everything named Lightning for a while, too.

Jason Atwood:
That too. That was fun.

Mike:
We like to do that a lot. I think everything’s named Einstein now.

Jason Atwood:
Pretty much.

Mike:
I’ll probably get in trouble for saying that.

Jason Atwood:
Yes, you will.

Mike:
But you could do the bingo card of name everything, Einstein, Lightning, Force, and then you’re covered.

Jason Atwood:
I’m going to win that Bingo.

Mike:
Einstein, Lightning, Force, and then the actual product. Then you’re covered.

Jason Atwood:
Totally.

Mike:
I was looking through all my notes, roles and descriptions and interviewing and challenges, and certifications, and I feel we touched on a lot. What is something that you feel we missed, that you talk about, that you bring up that maybe people aren’t thinking about when they’re looking to interview or get an admin position?

Jason Atwood:
Sure. I think there’s a couple of things. A couple more things I would, if I were giving advice, which I happen to do all the time.

Mike:
You’re full of advice.

Jason Atwood:
I’m full of advice, maybe too much. So one thing, and this is just generic to not Salesforce, but as anybody looking for a job, cultural fit, I think, is becoming more and more of a need. And I think, as people applying for jobs, you should be looking at it both ways. Do I fit that culture, and does that culture fit me? And that’s do my values and the company’s values or the organization’s values align together. And asking a lot of questions around culture is going to become more and more important, especially because we go do remote work and all that. So I think what we used to think of, like, “Oh, we had coffee breaks and pizza parties for every quarter,” is now a much bigger discussion. So I would say bring culture into the conversation. Another tip that I hadn’t given yet is just preparedness.

It seems silly to say you have to be prepared for an interview, but I can tell you the amount of people who show up who are not prepared, they’re just not prepared; they don’t know their resume; they don’t have good questions; they don’t know how to talk to their experiences. And I’m stunned when it happens, but it happens a lot. And one of my little pet peeves, I’m giving away all my hints, boy, anybody interviewing is going to be able to nail the interview the next time they get to me.

Mike:
Yeah, you say that, but I bet not.

Jason Atwood:
Probably not, right? No one’s even going to pay attention. But having really good questions is something that I look for. Again, we work in an industry where being able to ask your users what they want and question them, and being insightful is a great skill. So if I get to the end of one of my diatribe speeches and I say, “Do you have any questions?” And they’re like, “No, I’m good.” I immediately go, “Okay.” And then I’m not good because I… So have questions ready at the go; have them sitting in front of you on a piece of paper, on a sticky note in a NeverNote, wherever. It’s super important, and don’t be generic. Don’t say, “Where do you see yourself?” Don’t interview the interviewee.

Ask really stuff that’s based on homework you did. And that’s sort of the prepared thing too. When people come in and they say, “Oh, I read your blog post last week about blah, blah, blah. I was really interested about this key point.” Immediately, I’m like, “They did their homework; they know what they’re talking about, and they’re asking me something interesting.” Don’t say, “How do you guys do raises?” That’s not going to be; you need to have the questions about the culture or the stuff. I mean, I’ve had some really good in the past, but I’ve had some really terrible questions. And then two more, I’ll give you two more tips. This is like the hundred tips for interviewing the Salesforce Ecosystem Podcast.

Mike:
We’ll call it 98.

Jason Atwood:
There you go.

Mike:
So there’s two.

Jason Atwood:
Two more is you can never, if you want to get two skills. If I told someone to go get two skills before they get any job to be super useful on day one, two things they should be focusing on: data and documentation. Your ability to understand data is like you need to have it, you have to have it as a skill; you need to know data; you need to know how data interconnects with other data, you need to know how to report on it. It’s getting more and more and more important. So I look for data skills, even data nerds, people who say, “I love data.” So if you’re not that type of person, I would say these jobs are going to be tough. Because I don’t know anywhere in the ecosystem that we are not just really crazed about and or dealing with lots of data.

It is sort of what Salesforce is, in the back of all of it. So understanding data, taking courses on it, go learn SQL, go learn regular databases, go learn third normal form, learn it, and understand it because any of your skill sets that you have that are based in data will make you better at any job in this ecosystem. So data. Second is documentation, because one of the things you can do very quickly in any role is document things. You need to be able to document; you need to be able to take what people say, summarize it, put it into something, and spit it back out for people to take in. If you’re an admin, you’ve got to come up with a training plan or a training agenda. You are an admin; you have to come up with a user story; you hand it off to a developer or someone to build something.

Documenting is, and it’s, I know there’s Trailheads on it, and you can go to those, but really learning how to document even so much prove that skill when you talk to somebody and you follow up with an email. Follow up with an email that proved that you listened and that you’re following up with documentation skills, coming back with key points or things that you wanted or questions, all great ways to show. But I would say two things you could just learn to show up on day one to start working and doing things is know data very well and know how to document things.

Mike:
Well, that was a really good point. I would hammer on that cultural fit and question part a lot because I always feel like you and I are of a certain generation that we kind of almost interviewed in the hopes that they chose us, right? The best of the survivor, we get picked. But the part that really dawned on me as I moved through my career was I also need to interview that person to see, is this the type of person that I’m comfortable… Would I be excited to get on a call with them every day? Does this feel like the type of company that I’m going to be excited to go to work at? Or do I just want to get in to get in? And I’ve made the mistakes of going to work for companies and then realizing I didn’t ask enough cultural questions. The way things operate here and my expectations for this job are very different than what I had in my head, and it’s my fault because I didn’t talk about it.

Jason Atwood:
Yeah. And again, I think it’s different. Even again, culture was, I hate to say it, but it wasn’t really that much. It wasn’t that important. 20 years ago, I wasn’t worried about culture; now I think it’s above compensation.

Mike:
Yeah.

Jason Atwood:
I think it really is. And I’ve seen people go to places for less compensation because of a better culture. I’ve seen people leave terrible cultures that were highly paid. So really bringing that in, and that means how do they work? How do people collaborate? And you can ask these questions in the interview. You can say, “What are the three things you’re doing this year to help your culture be better or to improve your culture at your company?” If someone asked me that, I’d be like, “Ooh, wow. Okay.”

Mike:
That’s a good question.

Jason Atwood:
That’s a great question, right? You’re then learning A; are they doing anything to make it better.

Mike:
Right.

Jason Atwood:
Or ask about… One of the things that we take at Arkus as very important is when I was doing my key goals for the next five years, and I was doing some presentations and talking to the staff about it. I had culture as a fifth thing, and then after doing it, I thought, “Wait, no, that’s wrong. It’s got to be number one.” So for me, you ask a company, you say, “What are the main things you’re thinking about doing for the next five years? What are the five key things that you’re doing? What are your pillars?” Or whatever. And if they don’t say culture, then you’d be like, “Oh, why isn’t culture there?” And then you’ll probably catch someone off guard; maybe they won’t hire you there, but they should be thinking that keeping the company culture and embracing it, and making sure that it is… Culture isn’t something that you set up and then walk away from.

It’s not a database system. You don’t just go, “Oh, it’s set up, and it’s running in the corner.” It’s something that needs to be cultivated; it’s something that needs to be put into; it’s something that needs to be fed and loved, and thought of, and changed as the ecosystem and the world changes. Our culture changed when COVID happened, right? We had to adapt; we adapted to that; it wasn’t the same culture as before. When we were three people, now 75, but the culture’s different, but we’re adapting to that. So again, it is a really, really big point. It is something you can catch people on, you can ask, and everybody likes to talk about their culture. Everybody will tell you that they have a great culture, but that’s how, as an interviewer or interviewee, you should be questioning it and really ask the deep questions. So when they say they have a great culture, “Say, can you give me three examples from last week where you prove that or that you know that it is a great culture?”

Mike:
That’s a good question. Thanks for coming by, Jason, and sharing your wisdom with us. You said you present some of this. Are you going to be presenting any of this at upcoming Dreamin’ events after?

Jason Atwood:
I am. Well, you’re catching me on my road tour. I don’t know if this podcast…

Mike:
Oh, there’s a road tour.

Jason Atwood:
There’s a road tour.

Mike:
Are you going to have shirts made up?

Jason Atwood:
I might. So yeah, I actually-

Mike:
Have dates on the back.

Jason Atwood:
-I go to a lot… A lot of things, I will be at World Tour this year. World Tour New York in two days, but I don’t think this podcast will be out by then. But you can catch me at Texas Dreamin’, I’m doing this year. You can catch me at WITness Success, you can catch me at Mile High Dreamin’, you can catch me at Dreamforce, you can catch me at Northeast Dreamin’. And is that it? I think that’s it.

Mike:
I mean, Northeast Dreamin’ is kind of the tail end of the year for us.

Jason Atwood:
Yeah, it is. It’s the last one. So I’ll be at all those. I don’t know if I’ll always be presenting this, but you can at least find me if you wanted to.

Mike:
Right. I appreciate you coming by.

Jason Atwood:
Thank you. It’s been great talking to you. Let’s do it in another 10 years.

Mike:
Or sooner.

Jason Atwood:
Or a little sooner.

Mike:
Well, I thought that episode turned out phenomenal. I’m so glad I got to have Jason back, and he is going to be on a road tour presenting and helping admins at different Dreamin’ events. So hopefully, you can get to some of those that he mentioned. I think that’d be really neat, and some really solid tips on interviewing, and even I couldn’t agree more on building experience when you’ve never had a job in the tech industry. So thanks, Jason, for coming on and sharing everything. And speaking of sharing, if you love this episode and you’ve got friends, or maybe you’re going to a user group and you’d love to say, “Hey, I’ve got a podcast for you to listen to on finding that first job or getting your next Salesforce admin’s job,” here’s how you do it. You click the three dots in the corner; most of these apps, podcast apps, have this now.

And you can click share episode and you can post it to social; you could send it as an email to somebody, and then they get a link and they can listen to the podcast right on their phone, maybe as they’re walking their dog, and even more. Now, if you wanted to look for any links or any resources, everything, everything I’m telling you, start your day admin.salesforce.com; everything is there for you. And of course, we also include a link to the Admin Trailblazer community, which is the admin group in the Trailblazer community, which is a great place and also the place I went to get all of these questions. Now, we’ll also include a transcript if there’s something you need to go back and read through; that is all going to be in the show notes. So, of course, until next week, we’ll see you in the cloud.

The post How to Prepare for a Salesforce Job Interview appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, Admin Evangelist Josh Birk sits down with Kat Holmes, Chief Design Officer and EVP at Salesforce.

Join us as we chat about diversity, accessibility, and her book, Mismatch: How Inclusion Shapes Design.

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

What is a mismatch?I brought Josh on the podcast to host this special deep dive episode of the Salesforce Admins Podcast, and we couldn’t think of a better guest than Kat Holmes. At Salesforce, she’s in charge of User Experience. But she’s also the author of the amazing book, Mismatch: How Inclusion Shapes Design.

The title of the book comes from the World Health Organization. In 2011, they redefined disability as “a mismatched interaction between the features of a person’s body and the features of the environment in which they live.” As Kat explains, thinking of design as a way to solve mismatches leads to innovative solutions you wouldn’t otherwise find.

The problem with designing for the “average user”For decades, designers have tried to make things for the “average user.” Kat takes us through the fascinating history of the bell curve, which goes back to a 19th-century Belgian astronomer who set out to apply the principles of statistics and probability to sociology. The problem, as she points out, is all of the different types of users that this approach leaves out.

Kat’s favorite example is the keyboard. It’s an interface that’s incredibly efficient and enables pretty much everything we do with computers. But it was actually invented to help a blind Italian countess write letters without the need to dictate everything. And there are tons of other examples, like bendy straws and curb cuts. These designs solved one person’s specific mismatch problem but ended up benefiting all sorts of other people, too.

Designing with inclusion and the potential of AIWhen you’re building something, Kat recommends recognizing the abilities on your team and thinking about who might be excluded. As she puts it, “What abilities are missing that are important to the design we’re making?” Then, find a way to include someone with those different abilities in your process.

We also get into AI and what the future holds. As it becomes easier and easier for admins to build things, it’s more important than ever to factor things like accessibility and inclusion into the equation. And there’s a lot of potential to adapt to the interface to the user to give each person a different experience.

There’s so much more in this deep dive episode, so be sure to take a listen for . Be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss out.

Podcast swag* Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Learn more Mismatch: How Inclusion Shapes Design* by Kat Holmes * 99% Invisible: Curb Cuts

Admin Trailblazers Group* Admin Trailblazers Community Group

Social* Kat: @katholmes * Salesforce Admins: @SalesforceAdmns * Mike on Threads: https://www.threads.net/@mikegerholdt/ * Mike on Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@salesforce.mike * Mike on X: @MikeGerholdt

Full show transcriptMike Gerholdt:
This week on the Salesforce Admins podcast, well, it’s our Deep Dive episode. I said we’re launching something new for April, and with a deep dive comes a guest host. Hey Josh, how are you?

Josh:
Hi, Mike. I’m doing pretty good. How are you?

Mike Gerholdt:
I’m excited because I listened in on this episode and I can’t wait to see if this is the pilot episode of where the Deep Dive series is going. Buckle up, folks because it’s going to be awesome.

Josh:
Right? I honestly think maybe we should just, I don’t know if we’re going to do better than this. This was a… And I hate saying things like when people are like, “Oh, who was your favorite guest?” I’m like, “I don’t like picking the favorite of my children.” Kat’s going to get into the top five right away. I never thought I would talk about diversity when it comes to everything from the iPhone to bendy straws. Just almost [inaudible 00:00:58].

Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, it’s fascinating. Let’s get into the episode with Kat.

Josh:
Today on the Salesforce Admin podcast, we are going to talk to Kat Holmes about things, diversity, inclusivity, and AI. Kat, welcome to the show.

Kat Holmes:
Thanks for having me.

Josh:
So let’s talk about your early years. In one of your talks, you speak about growing up in Oakland, and that led you thinking and eventually promoting inclusion. Can you expand on that a little bit? What about Oakland fermented this for you?

Kat Holmes:
Yeah, in the way back machine. So growing up in a city that os incredibly diverse, all the way through my schooling, all of my community engagements, we really learned a lot about many different ways that people live. But the thing that was really interesting for me, all the way through college, so I went to college in the Bay Area as well. I never learned about the fundamentals of accessibility as part of my training as an engineer. I also studied pre-med. We just didn’t learn about ways that people experience disability in the world. So it’s kind of ironic, you’d come up in this environment where you have all these kind of movements that had happened, right? Free Speech Movement, there was the Black Panthers, and at the same time, we never learned about the Disability Rights Movement, which also started in Berkeley in the 19… I’m going to say ’50s and ’60s by students, Ed Roberts, students that really, they created some of the first accessible sidewalks in the United States-

Josh:
Oh, wow.

Kat Holmes:
… right here in Berkeley. And I just never knew it even though I was going to school right there on campus.

Josh:
Gotcha. Now, you’ve talked about how when you were 16 you encountered racism, and I believe even neo-Nazism for the first time. And that left you, and I believe I’m quoting you here, “Activated and angry.” And I have to say, as somebody who has used the written word to try to exact revenge on his enemies, I can appreciate it. But when you say active and angry, what actions were you taking? What led you closer to activism?

Kat Holmes:
The encounter I had, this was when I was a junior in high school. It was right off of the school campus, and I was physically and verbally assaulted by a group of neo-Nazis. I’m going for lunch. And it was a pretty shocking… I had also just moved from Oakland to a suburb, and this is where this encounter happened. So it was really shocking to my system. But the thing that really got to me is, that I told the administrators of the school, the principal, and their response was that there was nothing they could do about it because it was off of school grounds, so therefore it was perfectly legal, and that’s the part that angered me the most.

Because that sense of responsibility, here’s the adults in the environment that are, I thought, there to provide my safety. And what I was really hearing is I only do that within a certain boundary. And the way I got activated was writing. New student in the school, and took the time to write a intense feeling-filled, sixteen-year-old article that was published in the newspaper about my experience. And so when I think about, for me, and it means many different things for different folks, but for me it was about saying what was true and saying what my experience was and what was true about that. And so finding ways to activate people through our experiences, really, to share those experiences. And that’s what I really have taken through my entire life.

Josh:
Did it feel like you were taking the power back?

Kat Holmes:
I felt like I could make myself visible is the way to say it.

Josh:
Got it.

Kat Holmes:
In the moment where I felt very much like people were trying to keep me invisible.

Josh:
Got it. Moving on a few years, what exactly did you study at UC Berkeley?

Kat Holmes:
I studied orthopedic biomechanics and material science engineering. So my goal was to design prosthetic limbs for people and tried to find a way to eke that out of a combination of majors.

Josh:
I got to ask, and I am going to throw in an anecdote here, because my father-in-law actually is blind and has no hands. So prosthetic limbs is something we… I think we have a few in the house here, actually. Why prosthetic limbs? Where were you going with that?

Kat Holmes:
I had been really interested in materials and mechanics for a lot of my young adult life. One of the things that struck me was prosthetics. We often try to replicate a human [inaudible 00:06:13] to try to make some material look like skin or some material shaped like bone or nail. And I thought there were so many other kinds of materials that were more expressive or unique that actually when you pair them up with somebody, you ask them what their preference is, they may choose a really amazing leather over a polymer. So quite honestly, it was just curiosity, following curiosity, connecting with people that I knew in my life who used prosthetics, but also just there had to be a better way to do this.

Josh:
Gotcha. Gotcha. Now at Microsoft, you were, I believe, if I’m correct, you were involved in designing their first-ever smartphone. Which I have to say, I think might’ve been my first-ever smartphone, might’ve been exactly that smartphone, and I remember it pretty clearly because it had this wonderful keyboard that was this very nice, tactile keyboard. And I know that a lot of people out there probably think this sounds weird because we live in… This is before the age of the iPhone where touch screen basically started ruling the world. What was that like at that time? Because smartphones were really just basically being invented. And so what kind of challenges were you facing when it came to designing a product for something that didn’t exist before?

Kat Holmes:
Just to clarify, I did not work on Windows Mobile, and Windows Mobile was a really relatively successful platform for Microsoft. I came in right about the time that the iPhone came out, so 2007. And it was this existential moment for Microsoft because like you said, there’s this physical world, BlackBerrys, and Nokia phones, and some of those great tactile keyboards that you’re talking about. And then the emergence of the iPhone was the pinch and zoom on a map.

Being able to still take a phone call, even though you’re taking photos, amazing. And the first phone that I worked on for Microsoft actually ended up being a spectacular failure, it was called Kin. I don’t know if anybody knows it, but we had a blast building this phone, and it was about tactility. It was really a phone for teenagers, and it’s because Facebook was one of the first apps on the iPhone. It was just emerging as well. And so we thought, wouldn’t it be cool if you could create a full on social media app just for teenagers all built into the phone?

So learning a lot about that time, what I’ll say is the top lesson for me is we poured money, our hearts and souls. We developed beautiful hardware with a company [inaudible 00:08:57] Sharp. But we missed what the success of the iPhone was going to be. And that was the developer ecosystem, the App Store. So you can build the best phone in the world, but the game had changed and we hadn’t realized it. The game was all about activating a tremendous ecosystem of applications and developers that could build on this platform. And so we were still thinking of it as a device-centered world when really it was a platform game.

Josh:
Yeah. Well, and to your credit, I think Apple itself, because for the first year, I want to say of the iPhone, they’re just like, “Oh, no, if you want to do anything custom to this, you have to do it through a website. We’re not going to let you past our Ivory Palace into the App Store.” And then somebody course corrected and here we are now in the middle of history.

Kat Holmes:
Well, that’s where I did then transition into Windows Phone. And so I did help build that product and that platform. And that was a really fun experience, a really interesting experience. I think we pushed the boundaries and the design of user interfaces for mobile, and that did change the game for a lot of companies and how they thought about mobile design.

Josh:
Nice. Can you give me a couple of specifics there? What were some corners that you turned that you feel we might be still seeing today?

Kat Holmes:
If you remember the iPhone in 2007 when it came out, I think we used the term lickable for the advertisements, it looked like pieces of candy. They were shiny, they looked like they had [inaudible 00:10:36] in the phone. And it’s those kind of, we use the term in design of affordances. The shape of the button says, “Push here,” because it’s so clearly indicating that it wants to be touched.

One of the first things that we did with Windows Phone was flat UI is what we called it. And we took all of those affordances out, but it’s because we wanted the content itself to come through, people’s photos. An application’s top metrics, maybe it’s biometrics from your health app. We want that content to come through on the icon or, we now think of them as widgets, but at the time it was very revolutionary to say, “What if the icon was the photo? What if the icon was the biometric data?” And so on a home screen for a user, they’d look at this unique, only looks like their phone, doesn’t look like anybody else’s, flat window into all of their content. And that was pretty revolutionary at the time.

Josh:
To actually surface that detail right up to the phone so that you can just glance at it and be like, “Oh, it’s Tuesday.”

Kat Holmes:
It’s right there. And we still see that. I think the iPhone and its widgets in particular, but many developers have tried to bring, what’s the most important thing a user wants to know both so they can glance and go, but also to maybe entice them to come into the app.

Josh:
Right. One of my favorite T-shirts is from Apple’s WWDC where they announced the App Store, and they must have still, the icons are literally the location and date and time of the WWDC announcement.

Kat Holmes:
Oh, that’s cool.

Josh:
Yeah, they lifted that for sure.

Kat Holmes:
I want a cool T-shirt like that. I have so many cool T-shirts from my 25, 30 years in tech. That’s maybe the best part of working in tech is you get cool T-shirts.

Josh:
You get cool T-shirts. I have found that every now and then I have to double check myself and make sure I don’t have more than three Salesforce logos at a time. And then I just feel like that guy at that concert. So, yeah. Speaking of Salesforce, how would you describe your current job?

Kat Holmes:
I am the Chief Design Officer and Executive VP for our user experience team. So I lead product experience, which means anything that at the end of the day ends up in front of an end user, whether it’s through our amazing admin community, architects, developers, we’re thinking about the platform that you use to build that, but also the end experience that people are going to interact with.

Josh:
Got it. Now in your book Mismatch: How Inclusion Shapes Design, you talk about design leaning to the average person. How are you defining a mismatch here, and what are some examples of design that intentionally are not being inclusive because they’re designing for the average person?

Kat Holmes:
Yeah, the first thing I’ll say is that in all my training as an engineer, in addition to not learning about accessibility, I also was taught the myth of there being an average person. So I’ll get to that in a moment. When I think of… So the term mismatch, I borrowed from the World Health Organization’s definition of disability, and they dramatically redefined it in 2010, they defined it as a mismatched interaction between the features of a person’s body and the features of the environment in which they live. And I loved that as an engineer, as a designer, because it meant that it was my responsibility, in the choices that I make for the product, to make sure that I was considering different types of abilities that somebody might have when they come to use that product. The responsibility sits with me, as a product maker.

Josh:
Got it.

Kat Holmes:
And so some examples of mismatches might be stairs at the front of a library. It’s a public library, but somebody who uses a wheelchair, who has limited mobility, would not be able to access that front entry. So another great example is the keyboard. This is a mismatch for anybody who has limited use of their hands, or doesn’t have hands, completely unworkable for interacting with a computer. And what I love about these examples of mismatches, it means that we can identify who might be experiencing the greatest mismatch when they come to interact with our program or application. We need to make sure that it works for voice as well as keyboards, or it needs to be for different types of audio in addition to tactility. But, what I love about this also is that it’s not about trying to create one solution for all people. You often hear the term universal design. That really means creating one environment that works for everybody. What I love about the keyboard is it was actually invented by a blind countess from Italy, and an inventor named Pellegrino Turri. And the two of them worked together to create a device that she could use to type letters on her own, rather than dictating to somebody else who’d write it for her. So they invented this device originally for someone who is blind, but it went on to benefit so many more people. We’ve used this device multiple times today, all of us. And in that, they’ve created an inclusive design. It started first with somebody who’s highly excluded from some sort of activity. And that solution that they created benefited many more people. And so when I think about coming back to your point on the average person the misinformation that I was certainly taught in engineering is that there’s a bell curve of human abilities, or any kind of human dimension.

And if you think about that bell curve, that the middle of that bell curve is the average human. This is a concept that was created by Adolphe Quetelet, he was a Belgian astronomer in the mid-1800s. And he was actually super jealous, is the way I read it. Super jealous of Isaac Newton, right? Isaac Newton had created these laws governing, deciphering what was happening in the heavens like why does the moon move this way? And Quetelet, who was also an astronomer, he had a pretty curious bombing of his observatory and could not practice astronomy during the Belgian Revolution.

Josh:
Oh my gosh.

Kat Holmes:
So he turned all of his ambitions to be as famous as Newton towards human society, and he started measuring human bodily dimensions. He created the body mass index that we still use today. It actually used to be called the Quetelet Index, to determine is a person healthy based on weight and height, which is a pretty crude measurement. He also developed the foundation of IQ tests, and he also developed really dangerous frameworks that underlie eugenics.

And the challenge with what Quetelet did is he gathered data for as many people as he could, but in the mid-1800s, really hard to believe that he had a true global sample of human [inaudible 00:18:36]. He had a nice Belgian, maybe a couple of countries over sample. So he took all of his data and he was astonished to find his data fit to a curve, a normal curve, which is in mathematics we know of normal curve is there’s a point where the tangent reaches a perpendicular. So he was astonished that it fit this normal curve. And he took the middle of that line and he said, “Well, that curve right in the middle must be the perfect person.” [inaudible 00:19:07] perfect person.

Josh:
Oh, God.

Kat Holmes:
And that became the foundation for saying any deviation from the center of that curve was some kind of abnormality or error. So taking mathematics and applying it to humans can be very powerful in some ways and can be very dangerous in others. But it’s why we refer to people as normal, is actually from a mathematical background. And what I was taught as an engineer is if you design something for the average, you’re going to hit 80% of the population. And then there’s edge cases. I like to talk about edge cases.

There’s 20%. That’s an edge case. All you have to do is really look around at humanity, or do some research of your own, to know that that is just not true. That’s not actually how the world is. But it’s so deeply entrenched. It happens maybe at large sets of data, like large public health issues, and you find anomalies, and that’s good indicators. But when it comes down to one person’s experience sitting in front of whatever technology you’re configuring or building or designing, it actually just isn’t true. So that’s where inclusive design becomes a much more interesting paradigm.

Josh:
It’s fascinating to me that when we say the word average, and we apply that to a person, that we are probably describing a 20- to 30-something-year-old white male in Belgium.

Kat Holmes:
Yes.

Josh:
It’s slightly terrifying, too to be kind of honest. And speaking this. And I honestly, I just want to bring this up because when I was reading about it, it shocked me that this even exists. You talk about Robert Moses, who apparently had, I’m actually struggling to say this to be honest, that he utilized a racist lens in some of his urban planning, which, I’m like, that’s supervillain-level stuff right there. What’s an example of this? I think a lot of what we’re talking about is sort of designed through intention and it’s good intention. We don’t think about the average person being a 30-year-old white male in Belgium, so people don’t intend to exclude people. But here we have an example of somebody who did. What’s the story there?

Kat Holmes:
It’s a really fascinating study, and you always have to remember the context of the time and place. But Robert Moses was the… the term they gave him was the master builder of New York City. He was a city planner, but he had wide-ranging control and power over the design of New York City. And the practices that he employed, and some of these are documented in a book called The Power Broker, is thinking about the types of transit that people had access to or didn’t have access to. And so he’d say, “Hey, the tunnels leading out of Manhattan, heading out to the beaches,” Long Beach, let’s say. So the height of an average public bus, let’s say is X, and the height of an average car is Y. So he would design the tunnels coming out of the city to be low enough that a public bus couldn’t pass underneath it.

In effect, it created limited access to those public spaces outside of the city. But the inherent, nefarious part is, people who predominantly relied on public transportation, or exclusively relied on public transportation, tended to be Black or African-American families or families of low income. And so it’s that it can happen intentionally, and it can happen unintentionally when you think about, oh, I have a car, so I’m going to just make this tunnel to fit my car. And not really think about somebody who maybe doesn’t and somebody who maybe uses other modes of transportation that you’re in fact creating this physical barrier in participating in public spaces outside of the city.

So that’s a great example of sometimes it is nefarious, and sometimes it is accidental or unintentional. I think as people who are problem solvers, we come to this discipline or our jobs because we like solving interesting problems, or we think about how we can solve these and make the world a better place. And it’s that kind of intentionality that fascinates me because when we bring attention to it, you can’t unlearn it. [inaudible 00:23:48] oh, I didn’t realize I created something that made it uncomfortable for somebody else. Just [inaudible 00:23:53]. How can I be a better problem solver?

Josh:
And to flip that script completely to the other end, give me a little bit of backstory. Once again, it was fascinating to learn, why do we have bendy straws?

Kat Holmes:
The story behind the bendy straw is super fascinating. The first design actually came from a man who was watching his four-year-old niece try to drink a milkshake at a counter. And this is the old soda fountain days, and they had straight paper straws in those days, and she kept tipping the glass and spilling the milkshake while she was trying to drink out of this straight straw. So he went home and he put a nail inside of one of these paper straws and he wrapped a wire around the outside and created a flexible joint in the straw and then ended up patenting it. And that’s how we have bendy straws.

Josh:
That’s awesome. That is awesome. Okay, so let’s talk specifics about if I am a designer, how can I identify and address these kind of potential exclusions while I’m working?

Kat Holmes:
The best way to identify this is really first looking at our own abilities, like what abilities… Often the products that we make, there’s teams that are working together. So looking across that group and saying what abilities are represented? And it might be, oh, okay, we all have 20/20 vision, we all are right-handed. We all speak a particular language. These are the abilities that we represent. Now, what abilities are missing that would be really important to the design that we’re creating?

And that might be, okay, somebody who has low vision, or somebody who speaks a different language. And it doesn’t mean you have to solve every scenario, every potential language, every potential ability. But what are you making? And who’s going to need to use it? Are you designing something that’s going to be in healthcare? Do you potentially need to think about somebody who is not well? Somebody who maybe has a different cognitive state, maybe they’re in an emergency situation? If that’s the case, then how can we think about including people in your team who have either experienced that or are experiencing that difference in ability and bring them in as experts to advise and learn from, or even co-design that product with you. So that’s really the starting point is recognizing exclusion and then asking yourself who’s missing? Really seeking out their expertise.

Josh:
And what’s the importance in collaborating directly with people who either have experience or are possibly experts in different forms of disabilities?

Kat Holmes:
There’s a couple of lenses I think are really important. One is, we often do research in design and we think of it more as user or usability research, or we’re putting something in front of a person and asking, how do you think this works? Or does this work for you? We’re treating people a little bit more like a subject, a research subject, which is different than starting before we’ve designed anything, and going to someone who has a different set of abilities than we do, and asking them, how would you solve this problem? Or have you already solved this problem in some way, in your home or in your work? And learning from the workarounds that people already have, or the considerations before you even create any solution is incredibly insightful to the process. And so it gives us a way of A, thinking differently about expertise. I’m not the expert as the designer. The expert is the person who’s experienced exclusion, but still somehow is making a living using the product that I created.

Josh:
Got it.

Kat Holmes:
And then I think the other part’s just, quite candidly ego, just to check my ego as a designer, that there’s collaboration has a way of opening up the creative process. And I think that keeping our egos in check is a really important factor, and bringing other people to the process and letting them be the experts to lead the way is a really great way to do that.

Josh:
So to paraphrase, don’t design a solution and then take it to somebody and be like, “How bad is this for you?” But bring them into the process so that by the time you get to the point where we’re trying the solution, you’ve already brought their feedback in.

Kat Holmes:
Well said. Yeah.

Josh:
Thanks. Now let’s move that kind of conversation to AI because that’s how the world’s revolving these days. So when we talk about AI in collaboration, how do you think people should think about AI itself?

Kat Holmes:
That’s a ginormous question. There’s two lenses I’ll put on for this conversation. I think AI as a tool that can help us think about and the things that we’re not recognizing ourselves. What are other considerations I’m not considering? How do I think more broadly than my own experience? I think AI is a great tool to help us expand the starting points. I do this often just with our own tools, with Einstein or some of the other tools in the world that are AI-related. But it’s just, “Hey, I’m thinking about getting started on this. Where are different considerations that I might have?” So it could be a way of expanding beyond our own biases.

I think the other lens is thinking of AI as a user of what we’re designing. So there’s a whole bunch of behaviors, AI or different types of machine learning, different types of generative and predictive, even machine learning, are going to bring to our applications or businesses that we’re building. So if we think of AI as a user that itself is trying to solve some set of problems. It’s going to encounter certain kinds of errors, it’s going to need to make certain kind of adjustments on the fly. The more we can understand what kind of goals and what kind of barriers AI is going to encounter when they work with the data that we are providing, or working with the applications we’re providing, the more we’re going to be able to design this positive cycle of access and also safe parameters around what AI can access, what it can and can’t do. And so it might be a nuance, but thinking about AI as a tool, versus thinking about AI as a user, I think gives us really two interesting places to design from.

Josh:
Gotcha. Because I think one of the things, it’s very hard, and this is one of the reasons in my own AI talks, I always tell people, just go try it because it’s really hard to describe why it’s a new style of interface, simply because it’s conversational and it’s interactive. What sort of design challenges come up with something that’s having more of a conversation with you than just pressing a submit button?

Kat Holmes:
The interesting thing about AI is that we’re kind of in love with this conversational moment of AI, ChatGPT welcomed us to a really broad and accessible kind of AI through conversation. But most of machine learning and AI applications that I’ve worked with, and I’ve worked with different types of interactions since about 2010, a lot of them aren’t conversational.

Josh:
Got it.

Kat Holmes:
And even in our devices, our smartphones, we may have different types of machine learning or AI that is vision-based, object recognition, or audio-based or tactile. So there’s many different kinds of interaction models that come along with processing information through AI. And the unique design challenges, I think one of the biggest ones comes back to the mismatches we were talking about earlier.

AI could give us a tool to be much more adaptive, to meet people where they are, whether that is, we were talking a lot about physical abilities earlier, whether the person can see or hear, but what about cognitive differences? And that’s a whole frontier that I think is fascinating. There’s so many different ways that people learn or process information or want information presented to them. Can AI help us adapt a design or an interface or an application to meet people where they are? If they’re a novice versus an expert, wouldn’t it be interesting to think about the differences in experience that AI could create to meet people where they are? So that’s one design challenge.

And then another prominent one that there’s many leaders in this field is thinking about the biases in AI itself. And there’s a lot more, I think, visibility and awareness of this now than there was, say, five years ago, certainly 10 years ago. But the training sets of data, or when I go into Midjourney and I say, “Create an image of a doctor treating patients.” [inaudible 00:33:58]. What’s the doctor look like and what does the patient look like? And has this algorithm been trained predominantly on sets of data that favor certain races or for certain experiences, genders. So that kind of bias is a very small example, but a lot of companies have learned early lessons in this. I think Tay at Microsoft being trained overnight, within hours by the Twitter community, formerly known as the Twitter community. And it just went sideways within hours. And so that risk of what we’re teaching and how that shapes the design at the end of the day is a huge challenge as well.

Josh:
I kind of feel like the world should actually kind of thank Tay for being such a horrible, awful example of how things can go wrong.

Kat Holmes:
That’s true. It happened in a relatively safe sandbox.

Josh:
Right. No doubt here, it’s basically speaking Hitler. We all can agree, let’s not do that.

Kat Holmes:
[inaudible 00:35:11]. Thank you, Tay.

Josh:
Thank you, Tay. And I really appreciate it because I’ve talked to women of color who they’re kind of in a generation where they grew up with the concept of what an engineer looks like, and it’s that crew cut guy with glasses and a shirt and a pocket protector in an IBM [inaudible 00:35:31]. And they didn’t think they would be an engineer because they never saw anybody who looked like them be an engineer. And I feel like we just have that history that AI has. I don’t know how AI is even going to try to catch up to it.

Kat Holmes:
The opportunity is there. The opportunity to create a different reflection of reality is there. And it really comes down to the choices that we make in the design of our AI. And who is designing that AI at the end of the day. Can we really broaden… One of the things I love is I think the skillset to become an AI designer will dramatically change because the things that I learned in engineering school, I learned FORTRAN, so that’s not super helpful anymore. But if we don’t need to learn some of these technologies that are going to turn over anyways, what is the important thing to learn about the design of AI and then what skills are needed? And that could open up the field dramatically to a wider range of people.

Josh:
Yeah. And it’s one of the things I’m really excited about with Salesforce because the idea that an admin could use their preexisting skills as a flow builder to then also be an AI builder is very exciting to me. Do you have any tips for some… I think our community’s really in the shallow end of this. They’re slowly getting into the waters of it. When it comes to thinking of solutions for their users, do you have any suggestions or tips for lining up what we can do with AI with a user’s skills or job or role?

Kat Holmes:
Being in the shallow end is I think where everybody is. There’s maybe a very small population that really, really is deep in these waters. Most of the population hasn’t even put their toe in yet. So if you’re in the shallow end, welcome.

Josh:
You’re in good company.

Kat Holmes:
… [inaudible 00:37:29]. And please keep learning and keep walking a little bit further in because this is the first wave of us who, coming into those shallow waters, are going to say, “This is how we apply it to life.” This is where it makes a difference. And I think our admin community understands the work that people are trying to get done on a daily basis. They understand the challenges people encounter. And when we designed Prompt Builder, for example, we were really thinking about the community that understands what an end user is trying to do. We’re thinking about the admin community who can say, “These are the most important mundane tasks that need to be repeated and automated or supported by AI.”

And so I think the most important advice is lean into that understanding who’s using your products or who’s using Salesforce at the end of the day. And help us understand what more will serve the people, and the use cases that they have, in better ways. And going back to inclusive design, think about folks beyond, think about the edge cases or think about the folks who maybe are experiencing challenges without using Salesforce today, and how can we really make this a turning point using AI tools to make sure that we’re doing a better job going forward.

Josh:
Yeah. Okay. I’m going to throw a hypothetical to you and we’re going to pretend you have infinite time and money. Where do you think… One of the things I think is very interesting is that the hardware curve, I feel is still advancing. We’re just now getting things like AR goggles that are associated with AI. Where are some edge cases that you think could AI really help with inclusivity? For instance, I was having a conversation with a friend and I was like, “Well, I have a nephew who is autistic, and he might benefit from glasses that could actually identify social cues that maybe his brain isn’t wired for.” Where do you think we might be going with this?

Kat Holmes:
There’s this interesting debate, I think, between computing power, infinite times and resources to make trillions on infinite computing power. Versus reaching as many people as possible with something that’s beneficial.

Josh:
Got it.

Kat Holmes:
I would lean towards reaching as many people as possible with something beneficial. We may be in a place with what we have today to transform a lot of lives if we can really connect the potential of the technology to what people are trying to achieve. So with infinite time and money, I think there’s tremendous diversity in human… This is such an obvious statement, but it’s one that we haven’t really taken to heart as technologists. There’s infinite diversity in human lives. And understanding unique medical needs, diagnosing those, giving people the power to diagnose them for themselves, or to at least understand some of what’s happening in their lives.

I think about medical, I think about cognitive learning styles, education around the world, just thinking about how I learned versus I have an 11-year-old, it’s my youngest kid who’s learning on YouTube, so fast, guitar virtuoso overnight. And I’m like, “Oh, how’d you do that?” Well, they’ve been watching YouTube videos and [inaudible 00:41:26]. So the learning, the medical applications, and then I think, one of the things I’m really interested in is how language models are going to become local to devices. How are we going to get really personal, device-driven AI that can be a close companion, or just the applications of being able to embed that in different environments? And that’s where I think about climate science. And could we combine sensor technology with local AI device technology and think about climate science differently on a global pattern.

And so we put all our money into computing power for one great AI. Or do we think about the diversification of many different kinds? And I’d say the past 20 years has taught us that this tremendous power in diversification of applications, like we said in the beginning through the iPhone, that whole ecosystem, many, many small things can sometimes solve a problem equally or better than one ginormous thing. And that’s how, I’d apply my money towards the small and the mighty.

Josh:
I love it. Kat, thank you so much for the great time and conversation. This was a lot of fun.

Kat Holmes:
Thank you. It was really good to dive into these topics. I appreciate it.

Josh:
Thank you very much.
I want to thank Kat for the great conversation and information. And as always. Thank you all for listening. Mike, how you think we did?

Mike Gerholdt:
I think it was amazing. I also got into some of the discussions that you were talking about, especially around architecture. I think a lot of times we, as admins, think of, “Oh, well, how does this apply to tech?” Well, how does it apply everywhere? We’re design thinkers everywhere. And some of this is really opening up. I mean, you’ve exposed to me the whole making ChatGPT do illustrations, and now I’m asking it stuff. Like, that’s fascinating. That’s not what I was thinking in my head, but that’s clearly what other people, or a machine, was thinking.

Josh:
Yeah. And I’m really glad that we got Kat to really describe how admins are going to really be in a driver’s seat. They have a really important role based on what they’re already doing. Based on the solutions that they’re already building and their relationship with current users.

Mike Gerholdt:
Yep, absolutely. And of course, any of the resources that Kat or Josh mentioned we’ll include in the show notes, which can be found on admin.salesforce.com, including a transcript of the entire show. And be sure to join our Trailblazer community because we’ll post there to discuss about it. So with that, we’ll see you in the cloud.

The post Unlocking Diversity in Tech: a Deep Dive with Kat Holmes & Josh Birk appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Skip Sauls, Senior Director of Product Management at Salesforce.

Join us as we chat about how Data Cloud can make it easier than ever to roll out enhancements to your org.

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

The challenges of working with external data sourcesPulling data from external sources is always a challenge. For one thing, it usually requires a bunch of work on the back end to get things looking the way you want them to. What’s more, it opens the door to all sorts of potential problems when things don’t match up, not to mention the extra security challenges.

That’s why I was excited to sit down with Skip Sauls. He’s the PM for Data Cloud, and he’s here to tell us how his team has made working with external data sources easier than ever before.

How Data Cloud simplifies data managementData Cloud allows you to combine your external data sources with what’s in Salesforce without hacking together a series of customizations. Connectors allow you to import data from external sources as direct objects, or transform it into something more useful. You can run reports with it, use it in flows, embed it in Lightning pages, and much more, without needing to write specialized code.

Skip’s goal is to minimize the customizations you need to make and seamlessly combine your external data with what’s in Salesforce. Using Data Cloud means that you’ll be able to deploy enhancements to your org without worrying that everything’s going to break, or rebuilding it from the ground up. As Skip says, “we don’t want people to feel like they have to radically change everything in their day-to-day lives just to access something new.”

Get hands-on experience with Data CloudLooking forward, Skip and his team are trying to further simplify how Salesforce works with external data sources. They’re rolling out tools to minimize imports, so your data lives in one place but works the same as what you have in Salesforce. They’re also working on Remote Data Cloud, which will help you consolidate data that’s spread out across multiple orgs.

If you want to learn more about Data Cloud, I have good news for you. Skip and his team are releasing dozens of new hands-on challenges to Trailhead over the next few months. There’s never been a better time to get up to speed with everything that’s possible with Data Cloud.

Podcast swag* Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Learn more* Trailmix: Get Hands on with Data Cloud! * Salesforceblogger.com: Demystifying Data Cloud Concepts * Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: Skip Sauls on Data Cloud

Admin Trailblazers Group* Admin Trailblazers Community Group

Social* Skip on X: @SkipSauls * Salesforce Admins on X: @SalesforceAdmns * Mike on Threads: https://www.threads.net/@mikegerholdt/ * Mike on Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@salesforce.mike * Mike on X: @MikeGerholdt

Full show transcriptMike Gerholdt:
This week on the Admins Podcast, we’re talking lakes, well, not lake lakes, but I mean we do talk about lake-making kits, and I do think that would be a hilarious swag at Dreamforce. But Skip Sauls is back because data lakes and Data Cloud are on our mind, and he’s got a bunch of new features that he’s talking about. Not to mention, he also tells us how we can get hands-on with Data Cloud, which I’m a fan of getting hands-on anything because that really helps me understand it. That’s what we’re going to talk about.

Before we get to the episode, just want to make sure you’re following the podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, iHeartRadio. We’re on all the podcast platforms. You don’t have to follow them everywhere. Just one, your favorite one, and then the new episodes download automatically right to your phone. Every Thursday morning, you can get up head to work or walk the dog or go for a run and get your new episode just by pressing play. With that, let’s get to our conversation with Skip.

Skip, welcome back to the podcast.

Skip Sauls:
Thanks, Mike. I’m glad to be back, and as always, glad to talk to you and to the admin community.

Mike Gerholdt:
I was looking at my notes from the last time we talked, and the last real podcast that we did was about a year ago. To me, a lot of Data Cloud stuff was brand new, and also a lot of the concepts around data lakes and data silos was a new thing. It still may be new to many people in the audience, but I think we’re starting to become even more exposed to it by just the sheer volume of amount of Data Cloud information that’s coming out, and also the number of features that now Salesforce can support. Let’s start with, what’s some of the new stuff that you’ve been rolling out in Data Cloud since we last talked?

Skip Sauls:
One of the most exciting things for the admin community is how you can now leverage data from Data Cloud in your standard Salesforce org, in your lightning pages, in your reports, in your flows. That’s been a big theme for the past year, which is, we’ve got this great technology for unifying the data, manipulating it, doing all kinds of great stuff to the data, but we now need to make it available to our customers, to our respective users. A lot of that focus is what I think is very exciting because now you can actually make use of it, and you’re not trying to write specialized code or you’re not trying to export things somewhere else. You can use it in the standard Salesforce fashions. It’s inside of fields on a form, it’s in inside of a record with related lists, it’s in a report, so it’s in all the places you would expect it to be.

Mike Gerholdt:
That’s good. A lot of the times when we hear stuff like that, when we’re not bringing the in, but we’re surfacing it, I’ve heard the term like a pane of glass?

Skip Sauls:
Mm-hmm.

Mike Gerholdt:
Okay. Just want to make sure that-

Skip Sauls:
That’s a great way to visualize it. The trick for a lot of our customers, as you know, is that you bring things in and enhance their working environments. You make them more productive, giving them better results, better KPIs, whatever that might be. We don’t want people to feel like they have to radically change everything in their day-to-day lives just to access something new. Salesforce has done a pretty good job of that over the years, of bringing things in to lighten the experience, into mobile, making things that are in a low-code, no-code fashion, and really listening to what our customers want, which is, “Make my users more productive. Give them something useful here.” They’re always interested in technology, but really, the reason people want Salesforce is because it makes them more productive. It’s a useful application architecture. That’s what, to me, is very exciting. I look forward to Data Cloud just being assumed as being part of all Salesforce, not as being an add-on or something that’s on the side, so to speak, that it’s actually just it is Salesforce, for that matter.

Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, well, it is.

Skip Sauls:
Exactly.

Mike Gerholdt:
One of the things that’s interesting is I learned more about Data Cloud, I go back to… This was a requirement that I got way, way back when I was an admin, 2008. I remember an executive saying, “Well, this is nice and all, Mike, but how come I can’t see X?” And I remember having to explain to them, “X data is on a different server that we have on location that Salesforce doesn’t have access to.” The fear, for me, was them wanting to integrate, essentially, a data silo into Salesforce. Because back then, data integrations were just crazy. But I think there’s often, this is how I look at Data Cloud is, but how hard is it to really set up?

Skip Sauls:
That’s one thing we’ve focused on is making it so that you can bring data from pretty much any source into Data Cloud. I’ll tell you more about something else that’s even more exciting down the road, but first off, talk about the notions of connectors. You have them in various flavors where you can connect to an external source and you can pull the data in. You can do it in batch, you can do it in streaming, it can be fully scheduled, and you bring that data in either as the direct objects from the remote source or you can transform them into something more useful. You may say, “I need to do something to IT to get it in the standardized formats.” Things like dates and times, all sorts of things that you may want to… Salesforce admins are familiar with this. How do you make the data get into the shape you want?

Data Cloud has a lot of really great functionality for that. We’ve leveraged tooling from the likes of MuleSoft, Tableau, CRMA, plus the traditional Salesforce loaders and that sort of thing, and unified that in Data Cloud. We made that part of it as simple as possible, and we’re adding more and more connectors to external sites. We’ll have a very rich array. In theory, an admin can say, “I need to pull data in from…” Even something relatively obscure. There’ll be a way to do that, and in the future, even custom connectors will be possible. You’ll be able to do one that isn’t sold by Salesforce or by a partner. That all is very exciting, and that fits into the traditional model where you’re importing things in, but you’re now doing it into one place i.e. in the data cloud, as opposed into multiple places, or directly into Salesforce itself, which is the part that’s nerve wracking, as I think you were saying.

You don’t want to necessarily modify all of your existing records, so with Data Cloud, you’d bring those external sources in. You can have as many as you want to. It’s highly scalable to work with almost anything. Then you’ll bring in your data from Salesforce, you’ll have that mapped in effectively, and then you can have that unified into a single object. You look at it as being the same person, account, contact, et cetera, across all the different data sources. And you’re not having to go and manually map everything in and do all sorts of things with unique IDs and keys and that sort of thing. It’s doing a lot of the heavy lifting, and it fits very much into the standard Salesforce model of making those things easy. You’re now dealing with it at an app level, not at a lower level, in most cases. You’re not having to do that every day, trying to figure out how to get the data in.

Mike Gerholdt:
One of the things that came up in the discussion that we had of getting the data out of the silo… To be clear, it’s not that we wanted it out, it was more of we just need to reference it. I think one thing you mentioned to me that was very intriguing is because back, this is ’07, we were going to copy the data and then Salesforce could see it. But with Data Cloud, we actually don’t need to worry necessarily about that, right? It’s a feature we can set up where, if we want to keep that single source of truth and reference that glass pane, we can do that. Right?

Skip Sauls:
Exactly. The terminology you might hear is bring your own lake, bring your own code, and that sort of thing. There’s a whole class of things there. I don’t know how much I can say, because there’s some pretty cool announcements coming around this, but there’s a lot of work on making it so that you can leave the data in the external store. It could be a lake, lake house, data warehouse, traditional database, S3 buckets, wherever. You can leave a lot of those things in place, and you reference them from Data Cloud as opposed to importing them. This gets into the zero copy, no ELT mantra that you’ll hear. The basic idea is that you’re not having to actually make those copies, like you were saying. You’re not going to move it back into it. It stays in place. It stays resident in the external system. But to your apps and to your users, it looks like it’s natively in Data Cloud, and therefore natively in Salesforce.

That’s pretty exciting. There’s still the case where you might want to transform something to make it fit into the shape you want, but importantly, you don’t have to do that to this data. You don’t have to do it every time you want to try to use it. That’s what we’ve seen traditionally with Salesforce is we were always importing, whether it was into Core or into Tableau or CRMA, etc. You are always importing the data, doing stuff to it, making copies of it, and that sort of thing. As powerful as those tools were, they still required that copy, which is the part you were saying we’re trying to get away from.

Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, copy, sync, then you had to figure out last modified, who wins, conflict resolution… That was a whole day of meetings for me.

Skip Sauls:
Exactly.

Mike Gerholdt:
It was not good. As you mentioned all this, I’m thinking just offhand, because this is how my brain works. A really fun swag item for Dreamforce would be a lake-making kit, like from the Progressive commercials. That would be hilarious.

Skip Sauls:
Yeah.

Mike Gerholdt:
I’m the only one that thinks that’s funny, I think.

Skip Sauls:
Maybe you can do that for a Dreamforce or TDX next year.

Mike Gerholdt:
Yep. “Here you go, sign up to win a lake-making kit.” One of the important things I think about not having to sync data and worry about that as a potential is also, depending on the organization and how they use the data, if they’re in a contract and there’s PII involved, then they can confidently say, “This is only stored here.” As opposed to… I remember we had to go through that with a government contract and outline all of the places that this data could appear. When we were syncing data, then it became another page and a half of documentation of how people had access to Salesforce. I think that’s really cool. You mentioned ease of use, and with ease of use, to me, that is also just how do we get the word out? How do we get people hands-on with that? What are some of the things that your team’s working on around that?

Skip Sauls:
One of the things we’re really excited about is providing hands-on challenges where you get to actually use Data Cloud directly. There’s some technology behind it, but in effect, you’re getting an org that is Data Cloud-ready, and then you can go do a trail, do a hands-on challenge at TDX or Dreamforce, maybe you’re in a course somewhere. Using that org, and in the Trailhead model, you’re running a check, have you done the work and that kind of thing. That all works perfectly. Now we’ve got that working very well. You can use this in the same way you would your standard Salesforce org. You get a DE org or something, and you start working against that. That’s very exciting. And the cool part about that is that also will power all of these modules that come from Einstein, things like Prompt Builder and so forth.

Almost everything that you’ll see for these new technologies is actually powered by Data Cloud. Even though you’re not maybe explicitly using Data Cloud for the trail or the hands-on challenge, it’s under the covers, Data Cloud being used for all the data, objects, services, and so forth. The reason that’s exciting is it’s harder than it may sound, because Data Cloud instances are not as lightweight and inexpensive as say, a Salesforce DE org. There’s a cost associated to it. They’re consumption-based. So we had to do a lot of work to figure out how to get that into a manageable state so we can offer that experience to our users and not be too much of a cost burden for us. There’s still a cost there, but it’s worth it for us to invest in our users, our customers, so they can get up to speed on Data Cloud, they’re enabled on it, and they’re also enabled on, again, I mentioned Einstein and that sort of thing. That’s very exciting.

We were hearing from people, “I like Data Cloud, I want to learn more about it, but these trails don’t let me use it.” “I don’t have Data Cloud. How can I learn more directly?” As I’ve heard you and others say, a lot of people can learn the theory from a standard trail or from docs and that kind of thing. Maybe they can pass a test, but in practice, it’s that hands-on experience that really resonates. It’s like, “I actually know what I’m doing here. I know how this behaves when I click on it. I know where to go.” And that sort of thing. That’s a really cool thing, which you’re going to see a lot of.

Our plans are to have dozens of these out over the next few months, and we have a goal of getting tens of thousands of users enabled with these hands-on challenges. That tells you the scale we’re talking about. I would encourage everybody who’s listening, go try out the hands-on challenges that are on Trailhead right now. There’s at least a few of them there for Data Cloud, some for Einstein, etc. You can get nice, shiny new badges and get your real world hands-on experience, and you’ll see more and more of these in the coming months.

Mike Gerholdt:
It’s one thing to do a module where it ends in quiz questions and then you read some stuff, and then it’s another to do one and then get the error message be like, “Oh, really? I got to go back and read some of this. I really thought I knew what I was doing here.”

Skip Sauls:
Exactly, exactly.

Mike Gerholdt:
One thing we didn’t touch on, and this is maybe blinders that I have, but what about people with multiple orgs?

Skip Sauls:
A really cool feature, which is… I have to go look at my schedule and see when it’s going to be out, but it’s soon. Is the notion of a remote Data Cloud. I’m waving my hands here as I’m talking to you, but I’ll try to describe it for the listeners. What you’ll do in the future is when you have multiple orgs that you’re managing, for example. A lot of people will have more than one. You’ll designate one to be the home org. I don’t know if that’s the official terminology, but that’s what we’re calling it right now. That is where the Data Cloud instance will live. It’ll be tied to that org. You won’t have multiple Data Clouds, you’ll have one, in most cases. Then the other orgs you have will be remote orgs that are leveraging that org.

There’s some technology there. You can look up something called data spaces. You’ll be able to say this part of this data in this data space can be mapped to these remote orgs, and in your remote org, you’ll be able to access that as if it’s natively inside of your org. In all cases, Data Cloud doesn’t live inside of Salesforce Core, it’s actually running externally. It’s not as big of a hop, if you will, to have these remote orgs. It’s not like they’re really going around the globe trying to connect to each other. The home org is just where you’re going to manage the core data, the way to do everything. But you could then have orgs that are primarily for sales or for service, or maybe you’ve got some that are by industry or by region. However you decide to organize yourself, no pun intended, you can still use the same Data Cloud instance.

The cool part there is because we’re unifying all this data, you could have the same customer represented in multiple places across all these orgs, but they look like the same customer inside of Data Cloud. You can use this for how do you rationalize the data instead of trying to do it manually with all sorts of mappings and code and that sort of thing. You can say, “This is going to be Mike on all these different orgs.” And also, importantly, it’s Mike coming in from external data sources. It could be IoT, it could be social media, pretty much wherever you’d like to. But you can know this is Mike across all those, and it’s a lot more straightforward than in the past, where we had to manually do a lot of work to say, “This is actually the same user across all these things.”

Mike Gerholdt:
I like that. Yeah. Boy, 2007 Mike really needed Data Cloud, let me tell you. One of the things I was thinking about as you were talking through all this and unifying the data is really looking at Einstein and some of the stuff that’s coming down now, and admins are seeing that. We saw it at TDX with Prompt Builder and Copilot. If you’re a Salesforce admin and you’re sitting there and you listen to this Data Cloud, what are some of the questions that we’re hearing from customers that are really good questions to ask on what should I be looking for in an organization that should prompt me to start having these conversations about getting Data Cloud?

Skip Sauls:
There’s a really good blog, and I’m going to try to find this for you. I’m going to tell you there’s some great quotes in here if you’re not familiar with SalesforceBlogger.com, that’s actually run by some Salesforce employees. It’s mostly employees posting it, but it’s not our official blog. It’s like some of the other semi-official blogs that has some really great content. In there, there’s a whole section of what people will ask for. The reason I bring this up is a lot of times, you won’t hear people saying, “We need Data Cloud.” They’re going to actually say, “We need to make better sense of our sales data.” “My sales guy needs to be able to know which customers to target.” In that example, you might have your current notion of your accounts and contacts and leads and that sort of thing. Then you’ve got some external data which talks about very similar things, but it’s from a public source. It’s not Salesforce data

But it’s information about accounts and it could be customer data, it could be company data and that kind of thing. But it tells you something interesting about them and what they’re interested in, and you can actually import that data and unify it and then run some calculated insights and other about it. You might find out you’re not really targeting the right people. You might say, “We actually need to branch out and target other customers.” Or you’re enriching the same data for your current customers, it’s just data you didn’t have before. It’s like, “We didn’t know this. We didn’t know they were interested in these things, and we can have other selling opportunities.” It’s that kind of thing that I think is very important is that you’re using it as a tool to make better sense of your data, make better sense of your respective target objects, whether they be customers or things, than you could before. You can do so in a way that doesn’t require that you’re manually trying to build all this inside of Salesforce Core.

Mike Gerholdt:
For the longest time, the joke was how long is your account page or your contact page, because you are having to reduplicate all these fields just to accommodate all of this extra data.

Skip Sauls:
Exactly. We see lots of interesting naming conventions for that kind of thing

Mike Gerholdt:
Probably horrible ones, too.

Skip Sauls:
Yeah, exactly.

Mike Gerholdt:
I’m guilty of that, too. Contact, last name, four, because that’s how it’s going to work.

Skip Sauls:
If you inherit orgs from others, sometimes that’s multi-generational. You can certainly see that with like, “There’s three or four different naming conventions and duplicates of objects.” Because they oftentimes came in and said, “We can’t really change this. We can’t really make sense of it. We almost have to start over again in order to enhance something.” The idea with Data Cloud is don’t do that. Keep your existing data, move the source of truth into Data Cloud and operate it on it there, and you don’t have to go back and rewrite everything in Core or importantly, everything off Core, every single time.

Mike Gerholdt:
You bring up a point, so let me… Silly question, because I’m still learning this too, but with Data Cloud… This is going to sound weird, correct me if I’m wrong, but you can have multiple sources of truths. We would have a finance system that was a source of truth for address, but we had a certification system that was a source of truth for what certifications that organization held. We didn’t want them all in Salesforce. We wanted each… It’s a data silo, but that’s its job, and it’s secure that way. With Data Cloud, we can connect them, we can get that view in Salesforce, but we also don’t have to pull all that data in. Am I right in saying that?

Skip Sauls:
Exactly. You’re mapping the data from Salesforce into Data Cloud, and if you have the same names and same values across different objects in different fields and external sources, you can resolve those inside of Data Cloud and say which one is the one you want to use, which one is that source of truth. You can create your ideal, I think people call it the golden record, is one notion I’ve heard of. This is the agreed upon… I heard it called the single version of the truth, which sounds political, but it’s basically you as an organization say, “This is what we all agree is the correct source of truth for these things.” Instead of it being in multiple orgs or across multiple objects, you now have the single unified object and you agree that this is the address, this is the account value, this is whatever the dates might be.

That’s the beauty of it is it gives you one place to do that work, instead of trying to do it across things. It’s always been possible to do this kind of thing. You didn’t need Data Cloud to do that kind of thing, it’s just harder to do those things. People found it frustrating, and the thing we didn’t want to hear, what we heard people say, “I had to pretty much export everything outside of Salesforce and do work on it in some other cloud to get the results that I wanted.” So we’re saying, “Let’s not let require people to do that. We don’t want them to leave Salesforce. We want this inner gravity to still be on Salesforce. Let’s give them the tools they need to be inside of our platform instead of externally.”

Mike Gerholdt:
I remember having real conversations about how this X server could do a CSV and put it on… I think it was an Outlook or SharePoint, and then how do I set up, at the time, Data Loader via the CLI to do batch imports? That was a conversation that now feels so dated. Feels like watching a early ’90s sitcom where they have a bag phone in a car.

Skip Sauls:
But people still do that today. We saw that with analytics. We still see it with people exporting, and they go into Excel, and they do their work there. We have had lots of great tools for this, and Data Cloud has the best suite of these things now, and you can actually do it really well in place. There’s no reason for you to export anything, unless you want to make it available to somebody to play with in Excel, but there’s no reason you should be doing your work there. Importantly, you’ve got tools like Tableau, which are really good at this, much better than Excel would ever be. Do your work in Data Cloud, use some of these great tools we have, and not do this external manual copying, uploading type of thing. That stuff works fine in the small, but it’s terrible when you have large numbers of people working on it, and really bad when you have different people coming in at different times that may not realize what was happening.

Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, let alone the second you pull something out of a system, now you’ve lost all control over that data.

Skip Sauls:
Exactly.

Mike Gerholdt:
In terms of security, confidentiality, especially if it’s a spreadsheet, could be emailed to somebody. That’s the part that always worried me. I always had the sales manager whose second question was, “Who can export this data?” Nobody, thankfully. That’s a checkbox I never check. Skip, thanks for coming on. I know last time, we talked about the Evel Knievel motorcycle, but that was just because I was fresh off of going through a world tour DC and some museums out there.

Skip Sauls:
Oh, yeah. I’m a big motor sports fan, just like you. A gear head, whatever you want to call it. If it has a motor, I’m interested in it. Getting a little too old for some of it, but I still enjoy it.

Mike Gerholdt:
Well, that’s the beauty is you can always watch it. There’s always somebody younger than us that’ll want to do something fun.

Skip Sauls:
Exactly.

Mike Gerholdt:
Thanks for catching us up as the new Trailhead… I’ll link to the Trailhead modules that we’ve got available on that. Then of course, knowing that there’s more coming out. To me, the most exciting part with everything is the second I can get my hands on a DE org or something, that’s when I can actually start to understand it. I remember that was so fundamental when I first started as an admin, the ability to get my hands on a DE org and try stuff out that wasn’t a production org. The same holds true for all of our products, so I’m glad that we’ve overcome that barrier.

Skip Sauls:
I encourage everybody to try that out and give us your feedback. What else do you want to know? What doesn’t work well? What did you enjoy? Reach out to us. You guys will see me, the community, on Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. I’m always looking for more feedback, and ping me if you need anything. Let me know how we can help.

Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah. I appreciate it, Skip. Thanks for coming back.

Skip Sauls:
Yep, thanks a lot.

Mike Gerholdt:
I’m glad we could have Skip back. Always appreciate him coming back and helping admins understand how we can break down all of the data silos that we have within an organization and make our lives easier. I wasn’t kidding when I asked a few of the questions about syncing data and back and forth. I’ve got to believe that’s some of your life, too, because I feel like everybody just one view of the customer. But everybody’s got to own different parts of data, and that’s fine. This really helps knock things out. I think it really makes things interesting and accessible for Salesforce Admins.

Now, if you’re listening, I want you to do me a favor. Click on the Share Episode button, and you can post it to any of your social media. You can text it to a friend, maybe there’s a friend. You guys can both do a Data Cloud Trailhead module together, and let him know that you got hands-on with Data Cloud, which was something that the last time we were on the Salesforce podcast that Skip was on, he couldn’t tell us to do.
Thanks for listening, and until next week, we’ll see you in the cloud.

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Lizz Hellinga, Consultant and Salesforce MVP. Join us as we chat about why product management principles in Salesforce are crucial if you want to take advantage of new AI tools.

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

AI enhancements and what they mean for adminsThe last time I had Lizz on the pod, we talked about why clean data is crucial for AI tools. But with everything that Einstein Copilot and Prompt Builder make possible, I wanted to bring her back to help us understand how to approach AI enhancements.

The big thing to get your head around is that these tools make it easier than ever to implement changes to your org. However, as Lizz points out, that means it’s even more important to think through how Salesforce fits with your business processes. How you gather requirements and communicate with your stakeholders is more important than ever before.

Apply project management principles to your Salesforce orgTo get the most out of everything that’s possible with AI enhancements, Salesforce Admins need to brush up on product management. “It’s kind of like the operations around your operations of Salesforce,” Lizz says. She wants everyone to think through three questions:

1. How are you taking in change requests?
2. How are you working with your stakeholders to determine if those requests are aligned?
3. And, finally, how do you go through the process of enabling that change and then extending it for adoption?

As Lizz points out, what you need to do hasn’t changed. You might be able to do things faster with AI tools, but big-picture thinking is even more essential so you can deliver the right solutions at the right time.

Communication with stakeholders is a two-way streetSo how do you get started? For one thing, you need to figure who you’re trying to talk to. As Lizz puts it, “it’s never too late to run a report and do a stakeholder analysis.” You can look at profiles or roles to determine who the main people are in your organization and what they need from Salesforce.

You need to build trust with your stakeholders, and that means establishing two-way communication about requests and what you’re working on. Lizz recommends creating a transparent system for tracking requests, whether that’s using case objects or custom objects in Salesforce, or even (gasp!) creating a shared spreadsheet.

It can often feel like there’s a lot of heat on you to get everything done as quickly as possible, but that’s why bringing stakeholders into the conversation around enhancements is so important. If people understand why bumping something up on the roadmap will push other changes back, it can really turn the temperature down. It’s all about creating a feedback loop that turns stakeholders into collaborators.

Be sure to listen to the full episode for more from Lizz, and don’t forget to subscribe for more from the Salesforce Admins Podcast.

Podcast swag* Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Learn more* Listen: Can AI Enhance Salesforce Architecture and Decision Making? * Listen: Why Clean Data Is Non-Negotiable in the AI Era with Lizz Hellinga

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Social* Lizz on X: @LizzHellinga * Salesforce Admins on X: @SalesforceAdmns * Mike on Threads: https://www.threads.net/@mikegerholdt/ * Mike on Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@salesforce.mike * Mike on X: @MikeGerholdt

Full show transcriptMike:
So we’re talking about product management this week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast with returning guest Lizz Hellinga. You may remember she was on in December and really focused us on getting data cleaned up to get ready for AI. Well, now it’s, how do we manage Salesforce as a product manager and also take into consideration all of the things that we’ve got going on with AI? And really all of the tools that AI can provide us, like Einstein Copilot, Prompt Builder. What can we do?

Before we get into that episode, I just want to point out if you’re getting ready for all of the content that we’ve got lined up this month… So last week we had Tom Leddy on the podcast, check out that episode. Next week is Skip Solves. We’re going to talk about Data Cloud updates. Skip was on last year. And then at the end of the month on the 25th, we’re launching a new style of episode. It’s going to happen at the end of every month, and it’s… We called it Deep Dive and it’s with a fellow evangelist, Josh Burke. He’s going to deep dive into a topic a little bit more than I do. We’re going to kick it off with our Katie Holmes, who is on our design team and talk about design and AI. It’s going to be a really cool conversation.

But for now, let’s talk about product management and AI and helping Salesforce admins be good stewards of the platform. So let’s get Lizz on the podcast.

So Lizz, welcome back to the podcast.

Lizz:
Thank you, Mike. I’m happy to be here.

Mike:
Last time you were here, we talked about how clean data is non-negotiable in the era of AI, and I still think it is. So let’s pick up our discussion from there. What have you learned about cleaning data in the last four months?

Lizz:
That it’s still essential and it’s ongoing. And that I really do love a good data dictionary that helps you define data and make sure that you’re using it correctly aligned to your processes. But in this age of AI, it’s even more crucial as we talked about before, because people are going to be making decisions on that. And we’re all able to make more decisions based on AI, whether it’s around our data or whether it’s around how we build in our Salesforce org.

Mike:
Yeah, I think that’s the thing that’s changed since I started doing podcasts around AI last year is, last year we really focused a lot of the episodes on, well, how does this affect data? What can it do? Now… And I ran into you at Trailblazer DX. Now we’ve seen things around Einstein Copilot, Einstein Prompt Builder, which yes can do things around the data. But also a lot of the promise that we’re seeing with Copilot is this will be a tool to help admins not only generate information or help users generate information, but also potentially configure organizations as well.

Lizz:
Yes. And it increases the rate that we’re able to make change because-

Mike:
Very true.

Lizz:
… you’re shortening some of that cycle to produce for those outputs. You still… Just like data, you still need to have some of these core foundations in place to make sure that you’re making the best decisions for your Salesforce instance based on the output. But the scale of change is going to continue to increase, and it’s going to be back to the basics for some of those things like around product management, the Salesforce, product management.

Mike:
Yeah. Well, and that’s really one of the key things that admins work on because I remember way back in the days… I want to just outdate myself. I believe it was Shell Black, for those of you that are as old as me. Remember, he coined a phrase, “Order taker admin.” And I think that’s kind of relevant to what we’re talking about because we’ve always talked about, “Wow, with every new innovation that Salesforce comes out with, it’s easier and easier to make change.”

Now, we’re also have the ability to ask AI to start making change for us or to show us various flows, right?

Lizz:
Right.

Mike:
And that affects our ability to manage the product because essentially the way that we’re perceived potentially from our users is, “Well, it’s just a field. Why can’t you add it?” Or, “It’s just a flow, why can’t you add it?”

Lizz:
Yes. And they’re not always familiar with all the behind the scenes stuff that it takes. But ultimately, with your Salesforce instance, you always need to be enabling change based on what you’re gathering from your end users and your stakeholders and aligning it to business objectives. And so that still hasn’t changed. You may be able to do it a little bit faster with the help of some of these things like Copilot. But you still need to understand and have a lens for that decision making. Because just because you can add a flow or just because you can do something, doesn’t mean that you always should. You still need to think through it from a process lens, from a stakeholder lens.

Mike:
So maybe we jumped in too quick, but to level set, I’d love to hear from you. What is your definition of product management that a Salesforce admin would do for the platform?

Lizz:
Yes. Gosh, I have such a strong opinion on this, Mike.

Mike:
I know that’s why I’m having to move on.

Lizz:
Well, with… Product management is really sort of like the operations that you wrap around your Salesforce instance. How are you taking in change requests? How are you working with your stakeholders to determine if those requests are aligned? And then how do you go through that process of enabling that change and then extending it for adoption? So it’s kind of like the operations around your operations of Salesforce a little bit. But it’s just a way to bring structure and I would say consistency and continuity around how you iterate on your Salesforce org.

Mike:
So product management is not just a ticketing system and doing what the users ask.

Lizz:
Correct. There needs to be thought around it. And I’ve been in orgs, right, where… We’ve been in those shoes where there’s pressure to do something and you do it because you’re just like, “Well, I don’t know. I don’t have enough to stop this.” Or, “We’re under a time crunch. We’ve got to get it done.” But that’s why it’s not easy. But admins have to spend time building relationships with their stakeholders and being thoughtful about how they take in change requests.

And it could be something as simple as even just… Not that I want people to use spreadsheets and things like that, but sometimes just at least capturing that information even in a typical requirements document or building that out within Salesforce. I’ve seen a lot of people, and I’ve done this myself too, use the case object to help manage that and then review it with key stakeholders, determine what changes do we need to implement and how? What is the best method for it? ‘Cause that’s the beauty of Salesforce, there is usually more than one way to do something.

Mike:
Yeah, no and beauty and part where you have to really contemplate. What I’m hearing, and I’d love to know your thought on this ’cause this is something that even I struggled with as an admin. I think everybody does. The short-term change versus the long-term. And I mean that in respect of… I almost think of you know when you get a scratch on your car? Well, the long-term change is, I’m going to get it in the body shop. But the short-term is I’m just going to shoot it with a can of spray paint really quick to prevent it from rusting out. How do you balance that?

I mean, what can we do to think through product management to say like, “Okay, cool. I totally hear you need this and it’s on my six month roadmap.” As opposed to maybe I just invest time now and build a little bit of it to turn the heat down knowing we’re going to invest in it later. What’s the balance there?

Lizz:
Yeah, the balance comes from understanding your stakeholders and the processes that you’re using, that you’re building out in your Salesforce system. So for example, if you know on the roadmap that something’s coming in six months, but there’s heat to get that taken care of sooner. I mean, being able to have conversations around, “Well, this is what’s on the roadmap. If we pull this forward, something else is going to have to be pushed. How might we make that decision so that we can meet this business need sooner rather than later?” And it’s not always an easy conversation for admins to have because it takes relationship building initially and trust building.

Mike:
What are some of the most important things that you feel should be communicated to stakeholders in order to keep that constant level of trust high?

Lizz:
Yep. Great question. So there’s a couple things that you can do. So initially… And it’s never too late to do this, so you could be in an org for three days, or you could be in an org for three years. It’s never too late to just start to do a stakeholder analysis. You can just run a report, group people by either their profile, their roles and determine who are the main people. You may be in an org where you can’t talk to all 1000 users, but you may be able to get to a subset for relationship building.

And that is crucial, especially with the pace of change that we’re encountering now because of generative AI. And then I tried to get a system down for gathering enhancements. Some of those enhancements may honestly never get built, but at least you’re documenting them and those as request and keeping a… Excuse me, keeping a log or a history of that. Sometimes you just build it in the case object. Some people do custom objects. You can do integrations for those or a spreadsheet depending on how big your org is. Just giving a place for that and then creating some transparency around that list is helpful.

And then including those stakeholders in discussions around how do you prioritize those things? And I would start small, especially if your org is larger. If you’re dealing with a lot of stakeholders, you want to start small maybe with one group. But as you can expand that, then I would probably start to do… And this is what I do in one of my orgs currently is, I do a bi-weekly update. And we don’t work on a regular sprint cycle per se. We’re not as hardcore with the Agile methodology, but we share every two weeks what we’ve accomplished, if it has a significant impact on the end users.

And then we also share in that notification projects that are in flight and their status. So if we’re working on maybe implementing something from the app exchange that maybe take us a month or two to implement, we include that and we provide status. So it’s creating that visibility because sometimes people… You’ll be surprised that people will respond and say, “Hey, I’m interested in this,” or “I have an idea, or I have a thought on this.” It creates that two-way communication that is required for admins and their end users.

Mike:
Yeah, I think a lot of… And I experienced this too. A lot of the requests, I was able to dial the heat down and dial the request down when I started sharing very transparently the roadmap on what was coming and features that were coming. Because, to be frank, a ton of users, over 500, and they don’t know. And when an absence of knowledge happens, they feel, well, maybe nobody’s thinking of this, so I better raise my hand and put in a request when in fact it is on the roadmap.

Lizz:
And then sometimes too, just getting that visibility into the roadmap, end users will kind of do a groundswell like, “Hey, we actually need this sooner.” And it helps when you’ve got a list of 10 people, individuals, that are asking for something and you’re like, you can then go to leadership and say, “Hey, this is becoming a real need. How can we prioritize this? What can we put further down the backlog so that we can push this forward and get this really great feature out that could help make the team more productive?”

So creating that path for feedback is essential. And I know sometimes there’s this… People think, “Oh, we’re going to just get inundated with complaints or things like that.” But I’m like, “Bring it,” ’cause I want to know. I’d rather have people log a case with me around something that they is annoying them so that I can analyze it and determine, can I fix this? Is this a part of something else that we’re working on so that we can keep iterating?

Mike:
Yeah, I agree. I would rather them be publicly vocal than privately angry.

Lizz:
Yes. Plus, when things come in the written format, it allows me to use the written format back to them versus sometimes when you’re maybe on a group call, a meeting and it’s hard to be eloquent. So I will say one other area that the LLMs have helped me significantly is crafting more clear and concise messages back to my end users and stakeholders.

Mike:
Yeah, I was just going to ask you about that. Because I think that’s one of the things where for a long time, creating training and stuff, people can look at, “Well, I’m just not a good writer,” or “I’m just not a good communicator.” And I was going to ask you what specifically maybe some of the tips that you have for admins to get out there and experiment with AI and absent of some of the products that Salesforce has, because AI seems to be everywhere now. I feel like pretty soon my toothbrush is going to have AI, it’s going to start talking to me while I’m brushing my teeth.

Lizz:
Well, hopefully it’ll tell you if it has a cavity.

Mike:
Yeah, I don’t… But do you want to know that? You got a cavity here. I just might throw you away now.

Lizz:
I know, right?

Mike:
No, you’re lying at me. But I feel like that could be one avenue that could help admins both understand how to write good prompts and understand AI while benefiting us back.

Lizz:
So for example, I can be quite verbose and long-winded, and so I will sometimes ask something like ChatGPT or Gemini to make… I’ll just draft something. This is the one thing. It’s like you can draft something and your tone could be maybe terse or it could just be long-winded or filled with jargon. And I can pop it into ChatGPT and sometimes I’ll use it like explain this like you’re explaining it to an eighteen-year-old. Oddly, the eighteen-year-old or sixteen-year-old sort of prompt kind of helps me because it takes out some of that technical jargon, but also softens the tone a little bit for me. That’s been quite helpful. I have ideas in how I want to communicate. ChatGPT helps me kind of put a little bit of structure around it so that it’s not so all over the place.

Mike:
Yeah. I also really like it. I’ll ask it for different tones.

Lizz:
Yes.

Mike:
That was always a… A friend of mine told me this trick, which now it feels like trying to teach somebody how to use a rotary phone. But if you need to write a difficult email, pay attention to your tongue because you’re probably nervous and your tongue’s on the roof of your mouth, so you need to lower that. That’ll also help lower your stress, but also pay attention to your eyebrows. And it was always referred to me as eyebrows up, because it’s really hard to write something angry if you have your eyebrows up.

Lizz:
Oh, I never knew that.

Mike:
Yeah, I mean, you can of course, but if you’re trying to not write something terse per se, eyebrows up because it kind of pulls your whole face into that happy smiley. And it’s very non-verbal and it’s telling your brain, “No, we’re happy. Let’s write this in a non-confrontational way.” But the AI can do that.

Lizz:
Where was that advice pre-ChatGPT, Mike-

Mike:
Sorry.

Lizz:
… when my brow is furrowed and I’m thinking I’ve reset your password 10 times in the last week.

Mike:
Yeah. Well, there are some things you can write with your eyebrows up that still come off terse, but that was always the trick that I was told.

Lizz:
Well, it helps too, ’cause sometimes you can play around with formatting using ChatGPT. It’s like how would you format this for a Slack message versus an email? And it is helpful. It even adds an emoji sometimes, which to me, it could be a little bit of overkill. And sometimes when I ask it to write in a friendly tone, it’s a little too much. So I like balance between professional and friendly.

And then obviously, I’m going to still make changes to it, but it just gets me closer to… It saves me a significant amount of time. It gets me closer to communicating effectively, and it allows me to continue the positive relationships that I do care about and that I want with my stakeholders. But sometimes in the moment, emotions can get the best of you.

Mike:
Well, and you bring up a good point, and I can always edit it. And I think that’s very relevant to a discussion we had last week with Tom Leddy on decision-making and throwing things at Copilot and Prompt Builder and then just taking what it gives you. One of the ways you can always think about that as a product manager is, “Okay, so is this thinking of ideas that maybe I didn’t come up with?” And I think for me, a lot of times Copilot if it can build me a flow that I didn’t think about or in a way I didn’t think about, that gives me another option as a product manager for how best to manage all of the platform.

Lizz:
Yes. Well, and if it’s giving you an option that you didn’t think about, you still need to spend time thinking about it before you select that as your option, right, to solve that problem or to solve that request. What’s nice about is it shortens your learning time. You’re not having to build and fail, build and fail as much, but you can’t take the human assessment out of it.

Mike:
Right, right. There’s no one right way to product manage. And I say that and then oof, somebody’s going to be like, “No, there is,” because the internet. But I think from your perspective, having worked with a lot of admins and seen orgs and seeing various different ways of product managing, rather than asking you, “What’s your preface for product management?” What are attributes that admins should think about when creating a system like a ticketing system, regardless of what it looks like, that would be a good attribute to help them manage Salesforce as a product in their organization?

Lizz:
Yeah. So I mean, you think fields that you would ask?

Mike:
Happy with fields or outcomes or… I’ve definitely… We’ve discussed using, you said, service cloud and cases. That’s one way.

Lizz:
I mean, I love a good Kanban view, right?

Mike:
Sure. I mean, we can have that.

Lizz:
That is one of my favorites, and it’s a great screenshot for a slide if you have to.

Mike:
Not that you’ve done that before.

Lizz:
But for me, it’s the level of detail that you’re willing to ask your end users to put in. I mean, I would say for about every couple of tickets, most of the time I still need to have an additional conversation to understand. And this is purely around enhancements. I mean, definitely if there’s fixes that need to happen, there’s conversations automatically. But I love that it creates this opportunity for me to reach out to people and continue to build that rapport. So it’s never just like, “Oh, I get this request in from a case for an enhancement.” And, “Okay, I am just going to do this.” It’s never that. I always want to understand a little bit more context.

So I try not to create too many field requests on that enhancement request, but I do want to understand what process is this supporting? What is this hindering you from doing? How will this help you? Things like that. I try to get a little bit of what I would say, just contextual information if I can. But sometimes people just put stuff in. It’s like, “I want this field so that I can do this reporting.” And that’s their enhancement request.

Mike:
Yes. I need six check boxes, one for every color of the product that we sell.

Lizz:
Yes. Or they want five multi-selects.

Mike:
Oh.

Lizz:
But it’s also too… The one other thing that I like about creating the space for people to submit enhancements, it allows me to create groupings. And that’s one of the key things that I look for when I’m building the system is, can I group… Well, for lack of a better term, tickets or requests together to form a mini project? Because then you’re really thinking through the process and how it relates to Salesforce beyond just a field.

And so typically when things are going on at the company and people are all of a sudden you’re getting all these kind of related asks, that means there’s like, is there an initiative that I haven’t been informed upon? Do I need to know more than I know? Because maybe I can build a better solution if I get more looped into these internal initiatives or objectives.

Mike:
Yeah, I really like that idea. I mean, I think that’s something that I would love to see in a future roadmap for some of the Einstein products is helping if you set up a ticketing system, using cases, helping you kind of clump, for lack of a better term, those cases together into these kind of… It’s almost like, do you play connections in the New York Times?

Lizz:
I do.

Mike:
Okay. So don’t get started on that. But it would be like, what are these all have to do together with each other kind of a thing?

Lizz:
Oh, that would be awesome.

Mike:
I know, right?

Lizz:
It’ll be here before-

Mike:
And then purple would be like-

Lizz:
…we know it.

Mike:
… here’s the craziest cases that we’ve found a through thread. I can’t figure out what the through thread is.

Lizz:
That would be incredible. I’m sure that will be here before we know it. I

Mike:
I mean, next year maybe we’ll be on the podcast together. I’ll be like, “Lizz, hey, remember we had that podcast we talked about? Now it works.”

Lizz:
Yes, that would be a dream because I think I do spend a bit of time grouping things together and trying to figure out like, “Okay, is this related to something? And maybe I need to look more.” But that’s the beauty of it ’cause sometimes you get the cases in and then you’re like, “Oh my gosh, we may have something that we may need to fix or we may need to re-engineer,” and that’s okay. You want that. And again, the more you can get that and iterate on it, the more your stakeholders and your end users are going to trust what you’re building and doing in the system.

Mike:
So one thing I want to touch on, and unfortunately we’re doing it at the end, but a lot of this we talked about product management in terms of what users want and what’s being requested of you, absent of the release schedule that Salesforce has. What is your philosophy or how do you think about adding that as… Because that’s an additional layer that we have to consider, right? Three times a year there’s a brand new release, there’s new features, and they may or may not be on any roadmap.

Lizz:
Well, if you’re in your org and you know what’s going on with it, you’re usually waiting for those features. I usually get pretty excited about some of the things that come out. So usually I feel that I’m always eager. And I love all the stuff that the, admins blog and the Salesforce plus sessions that you all do for release readiness. That’s so incredibly helpful because I sometimes listen to and have an ‘aha’ moment like, “Oh wait, we were just talking about this and this could help me solve it.”

And it’s just being aware. I think having that rigor around your enhancement list and then reviewing it on a regular basis helps you when you’re starting to review the release notes or attend release readiness live, you’ll get those light bulb moments. And you’ll just be like, “Okay, well this is coming, but it’s going to have to now wait until the summer release.” Or should I say fall? Just joking.

Mike:
Yeah, right. That’s always a quiz question to get wrong is what’s the season that’s not a release?

Lizz:
Right.

Mike:
Or I guess I always think of it, here’s a feature that’s coming that I don’t have to build.

Lizz:
Yes, yes. It saves time.

Mike:
Which used to be the case a lot. So thanks for coming on and refreshing us on product management because I feel this is a core responsibility that admins focus on, and especially given the speed of innovation now that we’re thrust into with AI.

Lizz:
Yes. And it’s even more important for them to flex these types of skills around product management.

Mike:
Oh, absolutely. I mean, product management skills as an admin will translate to other skills across the organization and within technology.

Lizz:
Yes, exactly. And it’s a great way for them to build their career and trust.

Mike:
Absolutely. Thanks for being on.

Lizz:
Thanks so much. It’s always a pleasure to be here.

Mike:
Of course, that was a great discussion with Lizz. I love having her back. I’ll also link to that previous episode down in the show notes so you can check it out because clean data with AI is super important. But love some of the points that she had to bring up, especially around thinking through different features and really managing all of the requests and roadmap. I hope that’s something that you’re thinking about, too.

Now, if you enjoyed this episode… I hope you did. I had a lot of fun recording it. I would love for you to share the episode. And if you’re listening on iTunes or really any platform, it’s usually super easy. You hit like an up arrow or in iTunes, you hit three dots and you can click share episode, and that’ll allow you to post it to social or text to a friend. Maybe you got a friend that’s getting started as a Salesforce admin and they want to learn how to manage the product.

And of course, as always, I appreciate you listening. So until next week, we’ll see you in the cloud.

The post What Does the Future Hold for Salesforce Administration with AI Enhancements? appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Tom Leddy, the Product Director of Decision Guides at Salesforce. Join us as we chat about decision making in the age of AI and why cleaning up your data is more important than ever.

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

Decision Guides and the Well-Architected FrameworkAlmost exactly a year ago, we had Tom on the pod to talk about the Well-Architected framework. I’ll link the episode below but Tom gives us a quick summary: “It tells you how to build healthy solutions with Salesforce and what a healthy solution should look like,” he says.

Making your org healthy comes down to looking for patterns and anti-patterns. Essentially, you want to do things in a way that sets you up for long-term success.

Tom and his team are hard at work rolling Decision Guides into the Well-Architected framework. These walkthroughs are designed to help you decide which Salesforce tool is right for you when they have overlapping functionality. The answer is going to depend on your specific use case, so looking at a Decision Guide can help you understand the full picture and make the best choice for your business.

Understanding AI as a toolLooking forward, Tom sees a lot of potential in combining AI tools like Einstein Copilot with the information in Well-Architected and Decision Guides. There’s a lot of potential to make things more interactive or quicker to digest, but you’ll still need to do some critical thinking and make your own decisions.

In terms of incorporating AI tools into your org, Tom is working on decision guides for that, too. “A lot of the cool AI features are not going to work very well unless you have a good underlying data strategy,” he says. Working through the Well-Architected framework will help you create a solid foundation to get the most out of these new tools now and in the future.

Why AI needs clean dataIf you’re a frequent listener, you’ll know that we can’t have an episode about AI without mentioning just how important it is to have clean data. As Tom points out, this extends to patterns and anti-patterns as well. It’ll be easier than ever to roll out code to your org and create new customizations, but you need to be sure you’re doing it the right way and not crippling yourself with technical debt.

Luckily, Tom and his team are working on tools to help you make sure your org is, well, Well-Architected. Stay on the lookout for a Data Strategy Decision Guide, coming soon, and new ways to assess the health of your org with Einstein Copilot. The future is bright, and hopefully a little more organized.

Be sure to listen to the full episode for more tips from Tom, and don’t forget to subscribe for more from the Salesforce Admins Podcast.

Podcast swag* Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Learn more* Well-Architected Framework * Listen: Well-Architected Automation with Tom Leddy * Listen: Why Clean Data Is Non-Negotiable in the AI Era with Lizz Hellinga

Admin Trailblazers Group* Admin Trailblazers Community Group

Social* Tom on X: @TomRuns_262 * Salesforce Admins on X: @SalesforceAdmns * Mike on Threads: https://www.threads.net/@mikegerholdt/ * Mike on Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@salesforce.mike * Mike on X: @MikeGerholdt

Full show transcriptMike:
This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, it’s all about decision-making in the age of AI because we need to make decisions too. And Tom is here to help us. In case you’ve been following along, this is a follow-up from when Tom was last on the podcast to talk about Well-Architected. They’ve gone even farther now and they are combining Well-Architected and Decision Guides, and well, that’s all in the podcast. But I also had a lot of questions about the role that AI is going to play in helping admins and architects make decisions. So we’re going to get into that today, which is going to be amazing. Also, you get an update on Tom’s marathoning, but looking ahead at the rest of April, because we are kicking off April now with our Decision Guides, next week we’re going to have Lizz Hellinga on. We’re going to talk about AI and clean data.

You remember she was previously on to help us get geared up for that. I’ve got plans to have Skip Sauls back. He’s going to give us a Data Cloud update. He literally stopped me in the hallway at TDX and said, Mike, I got to get on the podcast and update all the admins about Data Cloud. So that’s going to be amazing. And then, of course, at the end of April, we’re launching a completely new style of episode. Josh Burke is going to be running the last episode of every month. And he’s going to do a deep dive format with different people in the ecosystem and different Salesforce leaders. We’re going to start this one off with Katie Holmes on design and AI, and really how to be a design thinker. It’s going to be amazing. So that’s our April, which I think is pretty phenomenal. But before we get into April, let’s talk about decisioning in the age of AI with Tom. So let’s get Tom on the podcast. So Tom, welcome back to the podcast.

Tom:
Thanks, Mike. It’s great to be back.

Mike:
I totally planned this because you were on a year ago in April, ironically, right after TDX, which is when we had a chance to catch up. And you were talking about Well-Architected automation. I’ll include the link in the show notes below. But for those people that have yet to listen to that episode, let’s talk about what Well-Architected is and maybe what you’ve been working on since then.

Tom:
Sure. So Well-Architected is, it’s a framework that’s available for, it’s on architect.salesforce.com and anybody can access it. And what it really does is it tells you how to build healthy solutions with Salesforce and what a healthy solution should look like. It contains information about guidance. How do you think about things like security and compliance as an architect, but also what are specific patterns and anti-patterns? What are things you should be able to physically see in an org? If this setting is X and this other one is Y, that’s not a well-architected solution. You need to go and change one of those two settings. And one of the things that I’ve specifically been working on this year is we actually have another resource on architect.salesforce.com called Decision Guides. And up until recently, Decision Guides were kind of their own little thing that we’re hanging off on the website by themselves.

We always knew that they were valuable because what they do is they’ll give you a trade-off analysis between different Salesforce tools that sometimes we have different tools that kind of overlap with each other and look like they might do the same thing, and you need to know when to use which tool in a certain scenario. That’s been there for a while. But last year when my colleagues and I were going around and having discussions with our ecosystem about Well-Architected, we would get two pieces of feedback is number one, the people that already knew about Decision Guides, we just kind of assume that they were part of Well-Architected, and they would talk about how great they were. And then we were sitting around, “Okay, cool. This isn’t what we came here to talk about, but thanks for the great feedback.”

Or then people who didn’t know the Decision Guides existed would actually ask us questions about, “Oh, why doesn’t Well-Architected have information about how to select the right products?” And then we would bring up, “Well, actually we do, but it’s a different tool.” So one of the things that we’ve decided to do this year is bring Decision Guides under the overall Well-Architected umbrella. And then we’re going to start enabling deeper integration between that whole product selection, trade-off analysis, and the rest of the Well- Architected framework. So that’s going to be evolving over the next few months, and it’s pretty exciting. And specifically, Decision Guides are my area that I’m going to be focusing on.

Mike:
I mean, I like that. I like that for many reasons. But the biggest reason is critical thinking. I think critical thinking and walking through, and not only just giving people the answer, obviously that’s not critical thinking, but showing them possible paths, and helping them understand pros and cons to choosing different tools is just so fundamental to where tech is. Tech, 10, 15 years ago when I was doing things in Salesforce, you wanted to automate something that was a workflow, that was it. The Decision Guide was to automate or not.

Tom:
Right.

Mike:
And I’m using that as an example because since then, we’ve had a few different automation tools and some which are being moved forward. But I think the ability to just sit back and problem- solve like that, because the solution to a corporate issue isn’t as black and white as sometimes we make it out to be in terms of how you can configure that technology solution.

Tom:
I think that’s a good point too, is if you look at the overall Salesforce product catalog, you’ll probably notice that there are a lot of things, products and tools that they look like they kind of do the same thing. And maybe some of them even have overlapping functionality. And you might be thinking, “Well, why do you need all of these things?” And the reason is because when you think about it from a business perspective, maybe you’re solving similar problems, but there’s always going to be little nuances where if you have this specific set of requirements, tool A is actually the best tool to use to solve that problem. But if even one of those requirements changes, now you might want to look at a different tool because it actually works differently and it’s going to be a better fit, and you’re not going to run into as many issues down the road if you use that tool instead.

Mike:
Right. So now let’s talk about the Einstein in the room because AI is everywhere.

Tom:
Right.

Mike:
And I feel you watch the TikToks on things and there’s a guy on TikTok that talks about how to use different AI tools and write blog posts or create videos. Do we need Decision Guides in era of AI?

Tom:
I think we do for a couple reasons. One of the things is at some point it might be nice to maybe… AI might be able to give you a summary of a Decision Guide and say, “Hey, here’s what I’m trying to do,” and it’ll give you the options. But at the end of the day, as an architect or an admin or really any technical professional working with Salesforce, you have to make a decision yourself of, I need to go in this direction because maybe the choice that you need to take involves purchasing a tool, and you need to contact your account executive, or we already have this tool, it works. We have the right people to support it. But really, only you know things like, do you have a staff of developers? If there’s a tool that requires coding skills, do you even have people that can support that? Right?

And AI isn’t necessarily going to tell you that, but it probably will give you a nice summary of here are the pros and cons of these tools, and then you still make the final selection. And one of the other things that we actually have coming out, this is Safe Harbor, but this is one of the things that I’m working on for later this year, is we’re going to be adding a new Decision Guide, and it’s specifically going to be about org strategy and data strategy overall. And one of the reasons that this is important is because a lot of the really cool AI features that are available and that we keep getting rolled out almost on a daily basis now, they’re not going to really work very well unless you have a good underlying data strategy, and your data is high quality, and the right places that your data’s coming from, and you’re able to analyze it properly. So being able to do that correctly to even enable AI to work in the first place is going to require a series of decisions that we’re hoping to encompass in that guide.

Mike:
I mean, AI works because of data. Right? So it goes back to the very second thing you learn as an admin besides setting up a profile, which is whatever data you put in the system is how it’s going to be reported back out.

Tom:
Yeah, exactly. And it’s funny because I think that message gets lost sometimes is that if you think about it’s how it’s going to be reported back out in the form of a report that you would run, that’s true, but that’s also how it’s going to come back out. And if you’re asking an LLM for a response based on whatever data you’re feeding it, it needs good data or you’re going to get, it’s the same old garbage in, garbage out, but now you just happen to have AI in front of it.

Mike:
Yeah. Looking at… I mean, we’re fresh off of TrailblazerDX, and you probably saw Prompt Builder and Einstein Copilot, and those just got launched. Thinking ahead for architects and admins and people that just build software solutions in Salesforce, how do you see those tools augmenting what they do with a Decision Guide?

Tom:
So long term, this might be a… Well, we’ll see what the timeline on this looks like, but if I had my ideal what the future would look like, it would be somebody is doing configuration in a system, or maybe they’re a developer and they’re writing code, but alongside them, they’ve got their Copilot window that is giving them recommendations of you realize you’re about to create an Apex class when a flow might actually be better to do this. Or you’re about to wire this up to build an integration to this system, have you thought about maybe using a middleware tool? Because just doing a direct call out is probably not going to be your best option in this scenario, and it’s kind of powered by what the content that’s in the Decision Guides.

Mike:
Yeah, I mean, there’s so much possibility there with both, knowing, I always come back, and you’ve probably heard this, well, you probably have him, but the listeners have of AI feels like the first time in math class that you got to use a calculator. And I remember the teacher, I was like, “Yes, totally going to get all the answers right,” because I’m horrible at math, horrible. But then she dropped this just mega real-life bomb on me, and it was, “But you need to know that whatever you put in the calculator, it will give you that answer, but if you’re not putting the right data in and you need to know what to expect.” And I was like, “Oh, I really just wanted the calculator to figure this thing out for me. Don’t you know what I’m trying to do?”

Tom:
Yeah. It’s funny that… Because I remember that too when first got to use calculators in math class, and it wasn’t the simple arithmetic at this point. It’s not where you’re just doing four plus four on a calculator. It’s usually this complex algebra or calculus or something like that where you have to go through a series of steps to even figure out what you’re putting in the calculator in the first place, and then assuming you’ve performed those steps, right? The calculator will give you the right answer exactly. But it’s kind of the same way.

Mike:
In thinking through, because a lot of what admins do or tasks that architects do, we sit down. I’ve seen examples of having Einstein start to create a flow for us. Looking at that and looking at some of the architect, the Well-Architected stuff, I’m feeling like they’re kind of complimentary, right? It’s almost kind of if you go to Utah, they have this fry sauce that supposedly makes french fries taste better, but french fries taste good all on their own.

Tom:
Totally.

Mike:
So should we be seeing a, let’s use Einstein copilot maybe in a way to give us ideas we didn’t think of?

Tom:
Yes. And I would say, like you said, those two things are definitely complimentary in the way that if you look through any of our Decision Guides, they’re actually packed with a lot of good information, but they’re also 45-minute reads. And if you want to read the whole thing, I mean, that’s great, but if you’re able to get a quick summary from Copilot or from our Decision Guides or anything else on Well-Architected really, where it might give you something that either you didn’t have time to read through the entire guide, or maybe you read it but you missed it because it’s a lot of content, whatever. But yeah, you’re right. It might be something that you could see in Copilot and say, “Oh, I didn’t realize this was even an option. But yeah, this looks great.”

Mike:
I noticed at TDX, one of the really cool things that you and your team do in the architect area is you have these kind of see-through boards, but essentially whiteboard or diagram stuff. What were some of the things maybe brought up at this TDX that you saw different from last year’s TDX? Because a year in technology can be like 10 years in the rest of the world.

Tom:
Yes. So a lot of the things that we covered in our workshops this year were a lot of data strategy and a lot of just general automation strategy that some of the underlying foundational pieces that you need to have in place to get ready for things like AI, like we talked about earlier. So last year we were solving problems that were more like general architecture problems that are still definitely important. You need to make sure that you have the right integration strategy if you want to connect multiple systems to Salesforce. But this year, a lot of companies want to roll out AI functionality, and it’s huge. It’s going to be a point of discussion for a long time. So we want to make sure that you also have all of the foundational pieces in place to be successful when you’re doing that.

Mike:
Yeah, I would agree. Thinking through AI, what have you heard from architects in terms of tools and AI to help them learn and maybe accelerate faster in understanding software architecture?

Tom:
So there’s a few. So there are tools like Copilot, for example. There are LLMs in general. There’s a variety of third-party tools that we’re seeing that are coming out. But really what I’m more excited about are some of the official Salesforce tools that I’ve seen on our roadmap that people can use to help make decisions. There’s AI tools, like you said, that’ll help you start creating a flow or create an Apex class.

And then maybe you’re going to, obviously you’re going to want to review that ahead of time. You’re not going to want to just generate a bunch of code with AI and throw it in your production environment. But it is something that will, I think, will speed up your time significantly as a developer. And then from an architecture perspective, it’s more going to be a matter of making sure that you’re taking a step back and looking at everything you’re creating because you’re going to be creating it so much more rapidly, making sure you really have a handle on what is being rolled out and what all the downstream implications are so that you don’t push something in, like I said, too fast into production and end up with a domino effect where it causes some other issues down the road.

Mike:
Yeah. Or increased reporting complexity.

Tom:
Yes. That’s another one.

Mike:
One thing that looking at what we talked about last year that I want to touch on, ironically, it’s towards the end of the podcast, but it’s still important, remediating technical debt. And I think, too often, our discussion around both Decision Guides and AI are around net new. Always, what can we create net new? But really, I’d be interested, what’s your take on Decision Guides and using some of our Einstein Copilot and Prompt Builder to remediate technical debt? Should we think about it differently?

Tom:
Yeah, I think the biggest difference is if you’re creating that new, it’s nice because you have this greenfield environment, you can go and look and say, “What is the best way to do that?” But the reality is we all know that this far along, the chances of going someplace where you have a brand new org with nothing in it are smaller and smaller. You’re going to, more than likely, if you’re starting at a new organization or if you’re a consultant and you’re working for a company, the first thing you’re going to do is you’re going to have to untangle a bunch of things that were maybe created that might’ve even made sense at the time when they were created a few years ago, but the business changed or whatever.

And now it doesn’t make sense to have an org set up the way that it is, and being able to use AI to identify some of the anti-patterns that exist in your org, and then figure out the steps to remediate those, and then maybe even prioritize them. So it’s not just saying, “Hey, there’s 15 things that you have to fix, which you can see in a health report today, but here’s the ones with the biggest impact and here’s what you should be doing to fix them,” I think will be super powerful, and it’ll make it, going forward, a lot easier to remediate technical debt, for sure.

Mike:
Yeah, I’d love to see Copilot really dive into Health Check and optimize, especially Optimizer.

Tom:
Yeah, for sure.

Mike:
That would be to prioritize, and also to think about linking together changes, that would be a really cool feature to see.

Tom:
Yeah, definitely.

Mike:
Yeah. Well, I appreciate you jumping on. I know we touched on it last podcast, but how is the marathoning going?

Tom:
Great. So I just, about maybe 12 days ago, ran the LA Marathon in Los Angeles, and it was a great race. It was the first full marathon I had done in a while. I had been doing halfs more recently, but this one, the weather was great. The course was a little bit hilly, but overall, I mean, I got to run through Hollywood and Beverly Hills and-

Mike:
Oh, wow.

Tom:
Got to see a bunch of friends in Los Angeles, and it was a really good time. I had one friend in particular that I ran it with, and we had a lot of fun during the race.

Mike:
And to recap, I think, I don’t want to speak out of term, but you’ve ran a marathon in every state, is that right?

Tom:
Yeah, every state and every continent.

Mike:
Man. Okay. Wow. Holy cow. That’s really cool. I appreciate you sharing that. Well, thanks for coming on and getting us updated about Decision Guides. I think one thing that I’ll definitely be looking for is the data strategy Decision Guide that you mentioned. We might have to have you back to talk through that, because I’ve done a few episodes on the importance of clean data and making sure that you think through your data strategy, especially with AI now. So I’ll look forward to that.

Tom:
Yeah, I am as well, and I’m working with the product teams on that and getting a lot of great input on it already. So yeah, I would love to come back and talk about it once it’s live.

Mike:
Will do.
That was another great discussion with Tom. I appreciate him coming back, and I’m still kind of a little amazed that he’s ran a marathon in every single state and on every single continent. I don’t know that I’ve done anything in any single state and every single continent, which is pretty cool. I’d love to know, have you done anything like that? I’ve also never done a marathon, so that’s pretty neat. But I want to do one thing. Make sure that you are following the Salesforce Admins Podcast and sharing it out. It’s really easy to share. All you have to do, if you’re in iTunes, you tap the three dots and you click the share episode. Then you can post it social or text it to a friend. Maybe they’re working on building out some decisioning and want to know how to well-architect things. And of course, there’s a ton of resources on everything, including the links in the show notes that I mentioned during the call and a transcript.

It’s all at admin.salesforce.com, so be sure to join there. But with that, until next week, I’ll see you in the cloud.

The post Can AI Enhance Salesforce Architecture and Decision Making? appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Jim Ray, Director of Developer Relations and Advocacy at Slack. Join us as we chat about automating in Slack and what’s coming with Slack AI.

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

Slack is more than just a chat toolJim gave a great breakout session at TDX on automating in Slack, so I wanted to bring him on the pod to tell us all about it. “If you’re just using Slack for communication, you’re overpaying for a chat tool,” he says, “there’s a lot more you can do to broaden your usage of Slack.”

Slack integrations have been around for forever, but it used to be that you needed a fair bit of technical knowledge in order to make your own customizations. With the launch of Workflow Builder, however, you can build automations in Slack without having to code or host an app yourself. This unlocks a whole new level for how Slack can improve your business processes and make everything easier.

Build custom automations with Slack Workflow BuilderIf you’ve played around with Workflow Builder in the past, you may be familiar with how you can use it to create a new channel or automatically post a formatted message at a certain time each week. But recently, they’ve added the ability to use custom steps from apps and 3rd-party tools, like Salesforce, and now the possibilities are endless.

Jim gives a few examples that help spell out how big this actually is. For example, imagine you have a weekly status report meeting. You can create a scheduled Slack workflow that automatically drops the relevant Salesforce info into a Slack channel so everyone can refer to it. That can save you a bunch of time you’d spend bringing the room up to speed, or even eliminate the meeting entirely.

We get into a ton of other examples, including adding info to the channel’s Canvas document and even using a Slack automation to execute a flow in Salesforce. There’s just a ton of great use cases here when you’re able to bring your Salesforce data directly into Slack and vice versa.

Summarize and search with Slack AILastly, we talked about Slack AI and that’s where things get really interesting. It gives you the ability to search Slack with natural language queries, and summarize or format the results.

Jim gives the example of when he returned to work after some time off for paternity leave. He had a first meeting with a new skip-level manager and needed to do some prep. So he asked Slack AI, “what does this person think about the Slack platform?” It not only found everything they ever posted on the subject and summarized the results, but it also gave him footnotes with links to the actual comments so he could do more digging.

AI does even better with structured data, and that’s where Workflow Builder comes back into the picture. The automations you build create exactly the kind of data that Slack AI loves. It opens up a whole new world of possibilities for how you can share information across your organization without the need to put everyone on Salesforce.

Jim shares a bunch more use cases and tips for how to get started building automations in Slack, so be sure to take a listen. And don’t forget to subscribe for more from the Salesforce Admins Podcast.

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Full show transcriptMike:
Okay, this week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we are going to have a lot of fun because we are talking about Slack automations with the director of developer relations and advocacy, Jim Ray of Slack. Now, you’re probably a Salesforce Admin, you’re like, “Oh, but we don’t use Slack. I’m not going to listen to this.” No! This is a fun episode and it’s going to give you a ton of ideas for, hey, maybe we should think about using Slack. I’m not here to sell you anything. I don’t get any commissions.

I just love when I can give you ideas and creative answers to challenges that you’re facing. And Jim talks us through a whole bunch of fun stuff that you can do in Slack and gave me a ton of ideas. We talked about canvases. I don’t know if you use canvases, but it’s a ton of fun. Now, before we get into that, I want to tell you about, hey, what we got coming up in April, because this is last episode of March. I have architect evangelist Tom Leddy coming on to talk about decisioning. I reconnected with Lizz Hellinga at TrailblazerDX.

Remember, she was on a previous episode talking about the importance of clean data and why that’s important for AI. She’s coming back. I’m working on getting Skip Sauls with the Data Cloud update, so Data Cloud. And then I’m going to introduce a new episode at the end of April where I’m bringing my co-worker, Josh Burke, on, and he’s going to do a deep dive episode with a product manager. We’re working on getting somebody really cool to help you change the way you do some of your thinking.

That’s all I’m going to tease out for right now. But of course, if you’re not already subscribed to the podcast, make sure you’re doing that, make sure you’re following it. It’s a different word on every podcast platform. But if you do that, new episodes automatically get downloaded to your phone. That way when you wake up in the morning, you put the leash on the dog, you go out, boom! You press play, podcast is going, and you can get some great information. You don’t have to think about it, or maybe you’re riding the bus to work or bicycling.
It’s starting to become summer now. So anyway, that’s a whole long way. This is fun. You’re going to enjoy this podcast. Let’s get Jim on the pod. So Jim, welcome to the podcast.

Jim Ray:
Thanks so much. It’s great to be here, Mike.

Mike:
I always have fun talking Slack. I feel like the last time we talked Slack was with Amber Boaz and she was telling us how to replace meetings with Slack. And then you did a presentation in the admin track at TDX about automating in Slack, and I just feel like that’s the next level for people that use Slack is getting it to do stuff automagically. So that’s what I’d love to talk about, but let’s start with how did Jim get all the way to Slack?

Jim Ray:
That’s a great question. I’m also glad you mentioned Amber Boaz. I had the opportunity to meet her at TDX.

Mike:
Oh, she’s wonderful.

Jim Ray:
She’s from my neck of the woods, so I’m going to try to drive down to Durham in a month or so and hang out with the user group that she’s got.

Mike:
That’s pretty country down there too.

Jim Ray:
It is. It’s nice. I went to school down there too, so it’s pretty great. So if we’re talking background here, my background is actually in journalism. I have a journalism degree from the University of North Carolina. That’s what I did.

Mike:
So it’s obvious that you would work in tech.

Jim Ray:
Obvious that I would be working in developer relations at Slack. It’s maybe not as much of a leap as people might think. I was always kind of the techie guy that was looking for… My degree is in this multimedia storytelling. This was the late ’90s. We were trying to figure out how to do interesting new ways of telling stories on the web, and that’s what I was into. So I always had a tech mindset inside of the newsrooms that I worked in. And then when I switched over to tech, I still brought that media background with me.

And interestingly enough, DevRel has merged those two things. It wasn’t something that I’d set out to do, but I was really interested in what was going on at Slack. I started working at Slack in the middle of 2016, so just as the company was really rocketing off. It was a really incredible first year. The user growth was happening a lot. The company itself was growing tremendously. It was a different place every year for the first couple of years that I was there. And so I’ve been working on the DevRel side for most of that time.

And then recently, about a year and a half ago, I took over our developer advocacy team. And so on developer advocacy in Slack, what we do is we work primarily with our customers who are building on the Slack platform. The platform is multifaceted in some ways. We have our Slack App Directory where you go and you install apps that are built by our partners, or they’re built by companies that are building their business on top of Slack.

But the bulk of the work that happens on the platform is custom apps and integrations that are built by our customers to solve their own needs. We’re always looking for ways to engage with that audience and help them understand how to do automation in Slack.

Mike:
I mean, I think too often people just look at Slack as like, oh, it’s just another communication tool. But just as we were chatting before we even got started, the number of features that it has and the way you can configure things to, lack of a better term, almost communicate back with you and make life easier, which is what the point of automation.

I remember the first time I built an automation, which I believe was just for a simple Slack group where it was like, I really want questions in the Slack group formatted in a certain way, and so I just stuck up that form and they just auto created that post. But the cool thing was somebody on my team pointed out, you know it could also put all of that text into a Google Doc so that you have this running FAQ?

I was done at that point. I was like, oh God, no idea, right? Because for so long, you mentioned you started in 2016, but you got a degree in multimedia storytelling, who would’ve thought like, VHS, what are we going to do? DVD now for a certain period. Now, so many of these communication apps are not just like remember the days of MSN Messenger. It’s not just text back and forth. It’s actually managing of information and context.

Jim Ray:
I think that’s such a good point, and I really love your example of formatting your questions. I think one of the things, and this is something that I learned from working more closely with my friends on the sales side of the house, is that if you’re just using Slack for communication, you’re overpaying for a chat tool, as they like to say. And there’s a lot more that you can do to broaden your usage of Slack, and we’re increasingly trying to be a surface area for getting work done. Obviously, Slack doesn’t have any desire to be the only place where you come and do your work.
It would pretty well constrain the work that I think people could do. But it’s definitely a place, particularly those quick interactions, and that’s where some of the automation comes in. But things like approvals, things like questions, even quick bug reports where you’re already interacting with your colleagues, automation allows you to bring in your other tools, and that’s where the power of that lies. And the platform has really expanded a lot in the early days. Slack came with some built-in integration.

So if you wanted to do things like get an alert whenever somebody uploaded a file to Dropbox, then we had that automatically configured. But if you wanted to do something outside of the bounds of that automatic configuration, then that wasn’t really possible. Then we launched the API and along with that we launched the app directory. And so we were approaching it from a couple of different ways. You could build custom integrations, or you could install apps and integrations that other people had built from the directory.

And then that’s where we saw that usage explode, where people were really building custom use cases. The problem was for those early days of the API was that it really did require a fair bit of technical knowledge. You had to know how to program against our APIs, which means you had to know how APIs work. You also had to host the app yourself. And so in those early days of the APIs, you had to build out an application. And it worked very similarly to how you might build a Twitter app or something like that, but you were responsible for hosting that.

And then we built a lot of tooling around that to help improve that. We built some frameworks to make it easier to build with some of our most popular programming languages. And then we acquired a company called Missions, and this is where Workflow Builder really… Where its origins lie. We acquired this company called Missions, and the team that built Missions, they were a team that was actually inside of a consulting company called Robots & Pencils, and they were like, “We’ve got this idea for our product that can interact with Slack.”

Mike:
That’s a great name.

Jim Ray:
It’s a cool name, right? And so the Missions app was all about making it easier to build automations without having to write any code. So we acquired that team, fantastic team, really love working with them. A number of them are still at Slack, thankfully, and they’re doing fantastic work. And that became the first version of Workflow Builder, and Workflow Builder was our no code automation product. And that was a way to use the platform without having to know how to program, without having to host an app. And so that was the first big expansion beyond just writing applications.

Mike:
Jumping ahead to your TDX presentation, because we talked about automation, because the example I gave was just literally Slack just automating within itself, what were some of the examples you gave in that breakout presentation?

Jim Ray:
The evolution of Workflow Builder also mirrors the increased complexity of things that you can build. The initial version of Workflow Builder allows you to do exactly what you were just talking about, allows you to automate work within Slack. So if you wanted to do something like create a new channel or post a message that was formatted in a certain way, then you could do that with Workflow Builder.

The second version of Workflow Builder that we released, and this is the current contemporary version, allowed hooks into other applications. And so apps could build custom steps that could then be inserted into workflows. And so you could install an app, and then that app would bring custom steps along with it. And what we’ve done now is continue to expand on that surface area.

So now anyone can write a custom step and you can actually deploy that up to Slack and we’ll run that custom step inside of Workflow Builder. We’ve also built out a number of what we call connectors. These are connections to other third-party tools. So Salesforce is a great example. So if you want to create a new record in Salesforce, then we have that connector built in.

And what’s nice about the way that we’ve built it is we handle things like authentication. We handle all of the API communications so that you don’t have to worry about that, and then all you have to do is off with your credentials. And then when you run the workflow, then it will just essentially act on your behalf. And so we’ve got about 70 of these connectors into a whole bunch of apps.

So Salesforce is obviously one. The Google suite, so if you need to create a new Google Doc or if you need to insert a row into a spreadsheet, if you want to upload files into various file providers. So we’ve got a number of steps that do things like that. And then one of the Salesforce steps that we’ve also got is to kick off a flow.

So if your organization is dependent or you’ve built out a lot of custom flows or things like that, then you can insert a step into Workflow Builder and then we’ll kick off that flow. So it’ll actually execute a more complex workflow instead of just creating a new record or updating a record or something like that.

Mike:
I think the really cool automation stuff, at least cool to me, was giving Salesforce admins the ability to, lack of a better term, expand the footprint of Salesforce within an organization, but without having to add per se more platform licenses. And we did an example where like a warehouse manager really deals with the data, but a lot of people also needed to just know about things. And with automation, they could follow records and channels and get updates, but they never needed to update any of the physical data on the Salesforce record.

Jim Ray:
That’s such a good example, and it’s something that we see from our sales and customer success friends all the time as well is… So at Slack, the way that our channels are organized is that every account that we’re attached to gets its own channel. They all have their own prefix and stuff like that. So it might be Account-Salesforce and Account-Acme. And then you can actually build automations that will do things like one of the ways that you can trigger your automation is you can have your automation set to go at a certain time once a week.

So maybe you’ve got a Monday morning meeting and you want to get the entire sales team around that, but you want to pull some data from Salesforce. So you can go grab some information from Salesforce. You want to get the latest updated figures that have come in over the past week, and then you can just drop that information into channel, and then now everybody’s got the context. And so you’re not just blindly talking about, “Hey, what’s going on with the customer this week,” you actually have some information, and then you can start a conversation around that.
It’s actually a great way that teams have eliminated those regular meetings that we have so that everybody stays in sync. There’s often good reasons why we have them, but maybe not good reasons why we keep them, especially now that everybody’s working in a more distributed way these days. This works across all kinds of teams, not just sales team, but you might have a marketing team and maybe you want to pull some data from Google Analytics or any of your social analytics platforms or anything like that.

You can drop that information in there and then the team can have a conversation around that. Maybe you notice something’s right, or maybe everything’s great and then you just don’t need to have a meeting. It’s just like, “Looking good and all systems go,” and then you’ve just saved your entire team half an hour. Translate that over a quarter or a year, and that’s some actual real-time savings.

Mike:
Am I understanding you right by also saying it could pull from reports or dashboards in Salesforce?

Jim Ray:
Absolutely. Because everyone’s Salesforce instance is special, we operate on the record level, and so we’d be able to look at how those records are set up. And one thing that we’re interested in getting a little bit closer to is things like Tableau and MuleSoft where there might be some complex records that run in the background, and then how do we pull that information into Slack? So we haven’t quite fully figured out that level of automation yet, but it’s absolutely something that folks on both sides are working on.

Mike:
On top of it just being cool, the part that really appeals to me is the lack of having the context switch. So this concept came to me, oh, I want to say four or five years ago when we were trying to work through a ticketing system for what my team does. We really tried to narrow down, what is the hardest part of your job? Well, the hardest part of your job is regardless of where your mind is at at say 12:30, you have to join this meeting. And for me, oftentimes I’ll sit down at my desk, I don’t know what the priority is that morning.

I could get working on something. And then to your point, oh, it’s 10:00. I got to join this team meeting. Boy, if I didn’t have to and I could just stay in my mindset and do another 45 minutes, I could finish this project. But now I have to context switch. Join this meeting, look at 20 people on a call, waste an hour, and then spend another 20 minutes getting my brain back to where it was. I could have been done with this project and maybe my update was five minutes.

And I bring that up because I think like, wow, just the ability to, hey, we’re still going to have that Monday team call at 10 AM, except it’s going to be a scheduled Slack post. And then I just expect you, the directs, to respond to as needed throughout the day. Because if you’re a sales guy, you probably have a 10 AM with a customer, and that’s bringing money in as opposed to, well, my update was only five minutes anyway, I’m going to add this update at 11:05 after I’m done with my customer call.

I’m not going to prevent anybody. I bring that up because I think the value of not having to context switch by just putting in simple automation is so important when you think of it’s not just automating and putting a dashboard in a Slack channel.

Jim Ray:
I think it’s a hugely important point, and I think it really emphasizes how we work today. So the instance that you were just talking about about the meeting interrupting your day, so if you can eliminate that standing meeting, obviously we’re not going to eliminate all of our meetings, I still have one-on-ones with all my reports and all that, but eliminate those kinds of meetings where the sharing of information is important, but having to sit together in a room is less important. So that’s one great way that we can eliminate context switching.

I think it’s really important. One another way is to eliminate what I think of as alt tabbing. So every time you alt tab between applications, that actually… Even if you are actually working on the same project, we know, and I’ve studied this a little bit because it has to do with the customers that I work with and the kinds of applications that they’re interested in building, but every time you alt tab between apps, it actually does a little mini version of that context switch.

It’s almost like going into a new meeting, especially if you haven’t offed in, or you can’t remember where you’re supposed to go, or you have to pull some information from one system of record and put it into another. So those are the kinds of things that we know are real drains on people’s productivity and actually their ability to get into that meaningful deep work state, that flow state that we know is really important for knowledge work. I mean, we’re all really lucky we get to sit in front of computers all day for the most part.

I’m not worried about getting black lung or anything like that, but the work actually does have a drain on our brains, the thing that we’re using to do the work. And we know that by eliminating some of that context switching, we can actually help people get back and do some important work. There’s some really great examples about how bringing some of that automation, and again, not bringing all of your work, but bringing some of that automation into Slack can be really helpful.

So a couple of ways that we’ve been using it for a long time is, again, at Slack, we will set up channels for specific projects or features that we’re working on. So we’re working on a new feature, and that feature gets its own channel. And the team that’s working on that feature will start working on it. And then when we release it internally, we create a feedback channel. And the feedback channel is where everybody who is starting to use that new feature, they’ll come and they’ll offer up obviously their feedback or give bug reports or maybe just things that they think could be tweaked.
And so oftentimes we’ll set up a workflow, and we’ve got some examples of it that teams across the organization can use, we’ll set that workflow up in that channel. And then what it’ll do is it’ll post a message in the channel and we can have some conversation about that feedback. And then you can take that conversation and you can submit a bug report. So if somebody says, “Hey, this doesn’t look right,” then it doesn’t automatically submit the bug report, but then the PM or the engineer or the designer can come in and say, “Oh, you know what? I can reproduce that. Let me file a bug.”

And then what they can do is they can kick off another workflow that will log that entire conversation in JIRA and create the new bug. And then once the bug has been created in JIRA, attach the URL for the bug into the thread. So then you’ve got the context in both directions. So the person who submitted the bug, they don’t have to go through and figure out how JIRA works or whatever. The PM or the engineer, they don’t have to context switch out to another application.

And then if you want to come back and get some context about it, maybe I reported this a week ago and I want to see what the update is, I can go back to that original conversation. I can search for my name or whatever, and then I can click on the link and go in JIRA. And then JIRA remains the system of record. We’re not trying to replicate all of JIRA. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone, but JIRA remains the system of record, but the actual filing of that bug report didn’t require switching between lots of different systems.

Mike:
That’s along the lines with the automation that I saw where Salesforce remains a system of record. Slack just hosts the conversation, right?

Jim Ray:
Yeah, exactly.

Mike:
Back and forth and keeping people up to date. And also it reduces training, right? If I’ve got somebody like I think the example we used was a retail manager, if all the retail manager knows Slack, they don’t need to know the back ends of everything. That’s the best part about the apps and stuff.
I was singing the praises of canvases before we started this call because I’ve started to use canvases a little bit more. I’d love for you to help me understand what are some examples that admins could use of automating with canvases or creating canvases as a result of automation? Is that even possible?

Jim Ray:
Totally, and it’s a great question. So if listeners aren’t familiar, canvases are kind of our document project or product inside of Slack. It’s built into every Slack. You can create as many canvases as you want to. And think of a canvas just as kind of a lightweight doc. If you remember Dropbox Paper from back in the day, it works very similarly. It’s not all the formatting that you get from something like Microsoft Word or Google Doc or something like that, but it’s just enough formatting so that you can lay things out in a pretty consistent way.

And the nice thing about canvases is they can exist anywhere inside of Slack and you can attach them in different places. So you can create a canvas that is attached permanently to a channel. If you want to provide some context, maybe again, it’s one of those feedback channels, so you want to provide some information about how a person gives feedback, what to expect, is there an SLA, things like that, you can write all of that up inside of a canvas. And the cool thing is canvases can be automated.

They can be automated with workflows. So one of the options for steps that you have inside of Workflow Builder is to create a new canvas. But the other thing that you can do is you can insert variables inside of canvases, and then the information that you collect from a previous step in a workflow can be inserted into that canvas where those variables are. We nerds, we call that variable interpolation. So basically you create a canvas that acts as a template.

So maybe you want to create across your organization, you want to say, every time we spin up a new feature, we’re also going to spin up a corresponding feedback channel. And every one of those feedback channels should have a canvas attached to it that provides some information about the channel. Maybe it’s going to be who is the DRI for this feature? Maybe it’s a PM or maybe it’s an engineering lead and that person is the DRI for this. And so you should expect to hear feedback from them.

And then maybe we also want to point you to a workflow that says, hey, this is the workflow to use if you want to give us information or if you want to give us feedback about this. And so you can create that workflow and then you can attach the workflow into canvas and we’ll create a nice little widget for you. And then we’ll put all of the information about the person, about the people who are responsible for that feedback channel into the canvas as well.

And so you can create a setup feedback channel workflow, and maybe you gather some information, maybe you say, “Who’s the DRI for this? Point me to the tech spec,” and then any further information. Well, you can fill all that in in your workflow and then we’ll automatically create a new canvas from that template, fill that information in, and attach it directly to the channel that gets created. And the workflow can also create the channel too.

Mike:
I don’t want to get into different channels because right now I feel I need a workflow to manage my channels, but that’s probably… I mean, well, let me ask about that. That’s probably where the AI is going to go, right? So I see AI now in Slack in the search, but I got to envision that it’s going to start heading into channels and other things, right?

Jim Ray:
Absolutely. And that’s kind of where we’re starting to think about some of this. And so back in February, I think it was actually Valentine’s Day, we dropped a little Valentine’s Day gift for everybody, which was Slack AI. The initial version of Slack AI was really all about improving your ability to search and find and summarize. And so now if you have the Slack AI, and it is an additional product because it’s pretty expensive computationally and just in terms of resources to run.

So if you have Slack AI enabled on your workspace, then search will be able to do things like take natural language queries. I was on paternity leave for about half of last year, and I came back and we still had a pre-release version of Slack AI running on our instance. And it was really great for me because I could do things like… I had a new skip level manager. And so I was like, what does this person think about the Slack platform? And it was just a very open-ended query.

I was testing to see how the system worked, but it was also some information that I really needed to do my job. And it came back, and not only did it come back with a standard search result that we give you now with just here are some bits, but it uses the generative AI piece to say it actually found all of the relevant posts, composed a response for me as if a human had written it, but then it also has footnotes to the relevant posts. And so I was just like, oh, what is this person? That’s fantastic.

So I was ready for my one-on-one with them coming up. And then you can also do things like summarize. So if I wanted to be able to summarize a channel, again, that was super helpful for me coming back from a pretty extended leave, I was able to summarize some of the channels that maybe they were new or maybe it was the kinds of things that I keep an eye on, but I hadn’t been there in a few months. So I was able to get those summaries. And so right now, Slack AI works on all of the data that gets put into your Slack instance.

Most of that data is unstructured data, and so it’s conversations that you’re having. We know that generative AI, large language models are really good with that kind of unstructured data. But we also know that search and AI and just computers in general do really, really well when we give them a little bit of structured data. And that’s where automations in the platform come back in. And that’s where we’re really going to be able to enhance some of these AI capabilities.

So if you are adding context to all of these unstructured conversations with information back to your systems of record, that’s the kind of thing that the AI is going to be able to ingest and get more information about. So if you need to know, hey, what’s the latest with this customer, then we’ll be able to grab that information. It will be inside of Slack. And then you can imagine, we’re working on some ideas about this, we don’t have any products or anything like that, but a whole bunch of…

Even our customers are building custom versions of this where they’re using these large language models, they’re accessing their various systems of record, and then they’re pushing it all into Slack. So you might ask a custom AI bot that you build or someone else builds for you some information and then it goes out and spiders the various systems of record and then brings back a comprehensive result.

Mike:
I will tell you that we use the summarize this. I tried it on a few Slack channels, and then I put the summaries into a canvas as a way to summarize a big channel internally for my team. It was interesting to see how it came back. It’s also fun because it talked about me in the third person, and I just let it continue doing that because it’s an ongoing Seinfeld joke.

But last question for you. I mean, I got a million. We could go for hours, I think. If a Salesforce admin has… Obviously they’ve got Salesforce. They probably have Slack, that’s why they’re still listening. What is some automation that they should think about to get started with?

Jim Ray:
I think the easiest thing would probably be the ability to create or update a record. And this is for the low friction entry points. So obviously we’re not trying to be the only interface to Salesforce, but Slack has a great mobile client. I know Salesforce does as well. But maybe you’re out on the field and you just want to make it easy for folks that are out in the field to quickly update or create a new record and have that send the information. And you still want Salesforce to continue to be the system of record.

So an example, and this is an example that I showed during one of my demonstrations, I’d built out a Salesforce instance and I’d put a bunch of data in from a real estate management company. It’s just one of the data back-ends that we have with a lot of sample data in it. And the idea was that you might be out on the road and you might want to quickly add a new property that you had gone to see or inspect or something like that. And so you could pull that up in Slack. You could pull that up.

The form is automatically formatted using our what we call Block Kit, which is really just our UI Kit, and you can create all of the fields that you need. So maybe there’s half a dozen fields that you need just to get started on a new property. And then maybe when you get back to the office, you’re going to fill it in. But maybe you’re out there, you snap a quick pic and you want to add the address and a couple of quick information about it. That’s something that you can do very quickly inside of Slack, quickly generate that, throw it in there, but then also have it update the rest of your team.
So it’s not just storing the information in your system of record, but you’re also posting that inside of a channel. So now your team knows like, “Oh, okay, Jim was out in the field. He added this quick record in here.” And then maybe somebody else who’s already in the office, they can add some more contextual information about it, or it can kick off a chat and people can start conversing about what we want to do with that and where to go from there.

So anytime that you have an instance where you want to keep the system of record, Salesforce in this case, you want to keep that updated, up to date, add new information, but then you also want to have a place where people are discussing that, and that could be a Slack channel, those two things are happening simultaneously, well, that’s a great use case for a workflow.

Mike:
I would agree. You mentioned my favorite thing, which is Block Kit Builder. So I’m going to put you on the spot. Promise me you’ll come back on and we’ll do an episode on Block Kit Builder.

Jim Ray:
I would love to. Block Kit Builder is fantastic.

Mike:
Oh my God, I have so much fun with Block Kit Builder. You have no idea.

Jim Ray:
Fantastic.

Mike:
I have a million questions too.

Jim Ray:
Excellent.

Mike:
When you said that, I lit up and thought, oh, I have to do a whole episode on Block Kit Builder.

Jim Ray:
Well, schedule me up. I’d love to talk about it.

Mike:
l will. Thanks so much for coming on the pod, Jim. This was great. I’ve always been excited for Slack and just the cool stuff we can do, especially when it doesn’t require code. The Block Kit Builder episode is going to be fun because it’s both code and not code.

Jim Ray:
Absolutely.

Mike:
So we’ll tease that out.

Jim Ray:
Thanks so much, Mike. I really appreciate it. It was great getting to talk to the audience.

Mike:
Am I right? How much fun is automations with Slack? Also, I might’ve gotten a little too giddy about Block Kit Builder, and I promise you that I’m already working on my schedule to get Jim back to talk about Block Kit Builder for Slack. But he gave me a ton of ideas for automations, including creating canvases and just the management of information. This was such a fun episode. I hope you enjoyed listening to it. And if you did, can you do me a favor?

Maybe you’re heading to a community user group with other Salesforce admins, or you’re going to dinner, or you’ve got a large social following, just click the dots there in the podcast app and choose share episode. And when you do, you can text it to a friend or you can post the social. And then that way you help spread the word and spread all this really cool stuff that we’re learning how to do without code.

Now, if you’re looking for more great resources, of course, everything that you need is at admin.salesforce.com, including the transcript of the show. And of course, you can join the conversation in the Trailblazer Community. There’s a lot of great questions being asked there. A lot of admins helping other admins with stuff. And that’s in the Trailblazer Community, in the Admin Trailblazer Group.

So I’ll include all the links to those in the show notes, which is on admin.salesforce.com. And until then, I’ll see you in the cloud.

The post How Can Automating with Slack Transform Your Workflow? appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Lisa Tulchin, Senior Curriculum Developer at Salesforce.

Join us as we chat about choosing the learning path that fits your learning style and strategies for training your users.

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

Choose a learning path that matches your learning styleLisa works on the Trailhead Academy Team, and I wanted to hear her take on a common question I get asked: “Should I work through Trailhead on my own or do I need to sign up for a class with Trailhead Academy?”

For Lisa, deciding between self-paced or instructor-led learning is going to depend on knowing yourself and what you need. What’s worked for you in the past? And when have you struggled to learn something? “You have to stop and have an honest talk with yourself,” she says. Some people like to work through a checklist of goals, and other folks need a bit more guidance.

It’s important to remember that it doesn’t have to be a binary choice. You can go for credentials, but you can also look at the recommended badges and trails for them to give yourself some guidance. And Trailhead Academy is always an option for when you get stuck. Learning is a process, and most people are going to succeed by trying different approaches and seeing what works.

Facing fear and finding community makes learning easierWhen you’re struggling to learn something new, you should be aware that fear might be holding you back. “Kids are a lot more comfortable making mistakes than we are as adults,” Lisa says, “saying, ‘I don’t know,’ is one of the scariest things for adults to admit.”

That’s why she encourages tapping into the Salesforce community, whether that’s online or through your local user group. You might hear someone else ask the same questions that are on your mind and, suddenly, you’re not alone. Or you might even find yourself able to answer someone else’s question. Finding peers makes the whole learning process easier.

Best practices for training your usersAs an experienced instructor, Lisa has some great tips for how to overcome resistance and train your users. Change is hard and, again, fear might be a factor. She recommends starting off by “hugging the elephant” and explaining that, yes, this new process is tricky but it will make your life easier.

Lisa also shares some best practices for how to write an effective training. For starters, there’s the 80/20 Rule. In other words, your training should focus on the 80% of knowledge they need to do their job, not the 20% that would be nice for them to know.

Additionally, you can make something easier to learn by breaking it down into manageable tasks. Our brains remember things in 5-7 chunks at a time (for example, phone numbers or ZIP codes). If you’re writing out a task and the individual steps are getting into the double digits, you might want to break it down differently to make it easier to remember.

This episode has a bunch more great tips for how to keep up with your own learning and take advantage of the resources out there from Salesforce, so be sure to take a listen. And don’t forget to subscribe for more from the Salesforce Admins Podcast.

Podcast swag* Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Learn more* Listen: Elizabeth Bochanski on Starting Learning on Trailhead * Listen: New Admin Classes from Trailhead Academy with Stuart and Feroz

Admin Trailblazers Group* Admin Trailblazers Community Group

Social* Lisa on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lisatulch/ * Salesforce Admins on X: @SalesforceAdmns * Mike on Threads: https://www.threads.net/@mikegerholdt/ * Mike on Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@salesforce.mike * Mike on X: @MikeGerholdt

Full show transcriptMike Gerholdt:
This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we were talking to Lisa Tulchin about learning and how you can be a better learner, and also, as a Salesforce admin, how you can help teach and educate and drive user adoption with your user. I’ve known Lisa for over a decade now. She’s a senior curriculum developer at Trailhead. She’s done both in-person and self-paced learning. She’s created both.

So I feel like she’s a real expert on this, and we cover a lot because I had a lot of great conversations at TrailblazerDX about learning, and I know admins are always learning, so that’s why I wanted to cover that. Now, before we get into the episode, I want to be sure that you’re following the Salesforce Admins Podcast on iTunes or Spotify, wherever you get your podcasts. That way, when a new episode drops like this one, and it’s amazing on learning on Thursday mornings, it’s immediately on your phone. So be sure you’re following that, and then a new episode will drop. So with that, let’s get to, this is such a fun episode, let’s get to Lisa Tulchin. So, Lisa, welcome to the podcast.

Lisa Tulchin:
Thanks. It’s such a privilege to be here.

Mike Gerholdt:
Well, we’ve known each other for a while, but I am unleashing you to the Salesforce ecosystem because I feel like I’ve secretly held this decade of awesomeness of knowing you and talking about learning. That’s what we’re going to talk about today, in case you didn’t listen in the intro. But Lisa, let’s level set because I’ve had the privilege of working with you and seeing you teach, and create, and do, and that’s why I wanted to have you on the podcast. But let’s start with what you do at Salesforce and how you got here.

Lisa Tulchin:
I am a senior curriculum developer, which means I help write content for the product education team. I have been focusing almost exclusively on instructor-led training. So when you sign up through Trailhead Academy or one of the bootcamps before an event to be in a live or virtual classroom with the person. So that’s what I have been focusing on, but the group has expanded over the past year, and I will no longer be focusing just on that type of content.

Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah. And so if you think about it, what’s great about Salesforce is we have lots of different methods of learning.

Lisa Tulchin:
Indeed.

Mike Gerholdt:
And to hover around, I’ve seen you do instructor-led training and we have that. We also have Trailhead, or what’d you call it? Self-paced learning.

Lisa Tulchin:
Yeah, so Trailhead is one example of self-paced, and I have in my past at Salesforce as a full-time employee, because I’ve been here three years, I have actually written a few trails. I may start writing them again. We are still figuring out exactly the roles, but that’s just one example of what we’d like to say self-paced. And self-paced really means that you, as an individual, go to the resource and, I guess, take it in, read it, test it on your own timing. The difference with if you’re in a classroom, you’re following the agenda with the instructor, and you have to do things in a certain order, in a certain pace. But self-paced, and Trailhead is one example. Slack, and Tableau, or other resources that have their own training repositories that you can also take in at your own timing. So that’s why we use the term self-paced.

Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, no, it makes sense. Otherwise, I was just going to call it instructor-led and not instructor-led.

Lisa Tulchin:
Exactly.

Mike Gerholdt:
Like hot dog, not hot dog, right?

Lisa Tulchin:
Exactly.

Mike Gerholdt:
Okay, so I feel like here is the question everybody thinks I’m going to ask, and I’m not because everybody would ask, Okay, Lisa, well, then which is better, instructor-led or self-paced? And I’m not going to ask you that question because I think it’s the wrong question to ask. I think what the right question to ask is how, as a Salesforce administrator getting into the ecosystem, do I figure out if in-person or self-paced learning is best for me?

Lisa Tulchin:
I like that question a lot.

Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, that’s why I’m asking it.

Lisa Tulchin:
Yeah, no, I really like that question a lot. The hardest thing with radio, of course, is that people can’t see me thinking literally when I think, I always think my face shows the wheels turning, but I have to remind myself that you all can’t see that. So I’m thinking through-

Mike Gerholdt:
You’re envisioning.

Lisa Tulchin:
Visualize Lisa looking away, and the [inaudible 00:05:01] the hamster in her brain is running on that wheel.

Mike Gerholdt:
It’s smoking.

Lisa Tulchin:
Yeah, exactly. I think you have to stop and have an honest talk with yourself. What have you found for yourself in the past? We’re all adults going into this scenario for the most part, and I’d like to think that by the time we get to that stage, we understand a little bit about ourselves and how we take information in. So for example, if you’re just starting out in the ecosystem, not even for example, I’d say the first thing you should do if you haven’t already is actually go to trailhead.com and sign up for an account.

It’s free to do that, and you automatically then have an enormous number of resources at your fingertip just through that site. There is Trailhead, the slightly gamified, self-paced learning that’s available to you for Trailhead resources. There’s also Trailhead Academy, which are the classes. But there also is the community, and so your peers. So I think that’s one way that you can explore and test out waters. If you’re thinking to yourself, I think I could do this on my own. Well, if you log in and you see how you feel after taking a couple of what they call modules, or trails, or badges, then that may be a sign that you’re good to go. But if you’re doing this and you’re thinking I need a little structure, then you immediately do have resources because you can sign up for ILT, but you also have the community.

So you can go there, maybe find a local user group through that site, and ask questions of other people there. So I think that’s the first thing is have an honest talk with yourself. See if you can figure out for yourself what your learning style is. I personally often need that instructor. I need that person in the room either live or virtually helping talk me through things, honestly, helping me keep focused on what I’m actually doing. There are other resources there. I sometimes need a map.

I like to have a map and being able to think. I also need to be goal-oriented. So for me, credentials were a natural way to think about things. And even if you’re not going to study and earn a credential, there is a section on the site for credentials, and they have, for example, if you were just starting out in the ecosystem, the Salesforce Associate Certification might be a really good starting point, and they have recommended badges and trails to take. So that’s what I mean there’s some guidance, even if you don’t think that cert is for you, you could look at the map to get that cert and follow that along, and take information in.

Mike Gerholdt:
No, I think, I mean, you’re so spot on. I often see a lot of people in the community ask a question assuming someone else has the answer, and I really think a lot of people forget they have the answer inside them. They know what way they learn best. They just sometimes are looking for validation in that. Listening to your answer, I was thinking back to when I had to tackle something big, I really needed that in class sitting next to somebody with an instructor so that I was focused. And it’s not that I can’t focus at home or at work, it’s that I think you probably know this, people sometimes try to do a trailhead module and answer email and maybe watch a webinar, and it’s like, stop. You can’t get away with that in class.

Lisa Tulchin:
You can’t.

Mike Gerholdt:
So that’s what I find. That’s what I find.

Lisa Tulchin:
Yeah, and I mean, the other benefit is finding a local Salesforce user group can also be super helpful because I think typically they have regular meetings at a certain date and time, and so I find there’s a lot of talk about what they call the beginner’s mindset and how we all have to have the beginner’s mindset, and I think it’s really hard and it’s easy for us to talk about, but truly being beginners, it’s scary. You don’t know something, you don’t know what you don’t know. For me, there’s that fear of messing up, and that’s definitely something I’ve learned like teaching adults, and I have also taught kids or, yeah, kids, they were actually kids, and kids are a lot more comfortable making mistakes than we are as adults.

Mike Gerholdt:
Why do you think that is?

Lisa Tulchin:
I think part of that is that feeling of, as adults, we’re supposed to know everything. If we followed a traditional path, we’ve gone to college, we’ve maybe gone on to graduate school, and we’re just supposed to know. You’re supposed to be able to move and function in an environment. And saying I don’t know, is one of the scariest things I think for adults to admit.

And that’s one reason why I just encourage a community and peers because there typically are themes for meetings where people go and either someone’s presenting or sharing what they know or everyone’s there asking questions, and sometimes it’s just being in a room and having somebody else ask a question that you’ve been worrying about. It almost makes you relax a little, feel somewhat more secure. And that’s one reason why I would recommend that. Now, I say that as an ambivert, as someone who is very uncomfortable in situations where I don’t know people. So it’s actually quite challenging for me. It’s easy for me to say, go join the local user group. Actually, showing up to that first meeting of a user group is really hard for me.

But once I settle in an environment and I can feel more comfortable, I am very outgoing, but that’s what that ambivert talks to, but that first getting me out the door. So if you’re sitting here and you’re listening to me talk and saying, Lisa, you are crazy. There’s no way I’m ever going to join a user group, that’s talking to people I don’t know. I get it. And that’s why, in a way, there’s a virtual user group, people can chat. I think every cloud, for the most part, has its own section of the community where people can ask questions and help each other. And as I said, we have all these self-paced environments where you can little by little take on information and take it in without having, if you’re truly introverted, you don’t need to interact with anybody else.

Mike Gerholdt:
So flip the coin a little bit from us learning to admins teaching and maybe even user group leaders doing some of this birds of a feather or instructor walking people through stuff. What in your experience in both you’ve said you’ve taught children, you’ve taught adults, what in your experience really resonates when you’re trying to walk some adults through new technology or new functionality and have them learn?

Lisa Tulchin:
There are a lot of different words for this, but yeah, I was thinking about how I was going to answer you while you were asking the question. I came up with three or four different ways of saying the same thing. When we first worked together, it was WIIFM, what’s in it for me? I think now they talk a lot about personas or jobs to be done, so I’m throwing these out there in case folks listening have heard any of these. The really important thing for adults is that when they go into training, or if you’re trying to think of developing training for them, the training speaks very specifically to what they need to know to get the job done.

When you’re teaching kids, you can teach them almost any topic, and they’ll be much more trusting about, I don’t see the why, but I understand you’re telling me, and therefore I need to know. But with adults, it is so critical that they understand the why am I sitting here or why am I watching this video? Or why am I reading this Java? I think figure out the why, and everything should hopefully flow a lot easier from that why. For one thing, you’ll have immediate buy-in from the people that you’re working with, because if they don’t understand the why, they tune you out.

If you have that why you have their attention. I’m not saying they’re going to be eager, willing, and able when they’re sitting in the room, but they’re going to be more likely to be behind you or stay with you as you go through it. And it also will help them remember what you’re training them. It can be overwhelming to sit down and learn a new technology. Now, Salesforce, as we both know, has evolved and is constantly, I think, improving what they call the user experience, the way that you as an end user take in the system, but it’s still scary, and new, and challenging. So the more that you get what you need to know in the moment that you’re needing to know it and not getting a lot of extra stuff, that’s another thing that’s really important in designing training. Another thing people may have heard or some folks throw around is the 80/20 approach, which is that training should focus on the 80% of what people need to know.

So dividing the focus of the training to be almost exclusively on what they need to know 80% of the time, and maybe if you have time, have an extra session or just provide an additional resource for what they need to know 20% of the time. Part of that is I’ve learned a lot about the science behind the way we take information in, the way we remember things, and that’s another reason to emphasize what they need to know now as opposed to the nice to have for that couple times a year. I mean, think about it, right? If you’re a salesperson and you’re learning how to use Salesforce, what do you need to know? You need to know how to enter leads.

If you’re doing sales cloud, you need to probably know how to do leads so that you can track potential sales. And then you need to know how to create probably an opportunity so you can track an actual sale and maybe how to add products to that opportunity, but that’s the bulk of your time, right? Creating leads, creating opportunities, tracking activity around those two records. But you may not close, depending on the type of business you do, you may not close that many opportunities in a year. It may be a lot of nurturing. So focusing training on closing opportunities may not be as important. That’s just one example.

Mike Gerholdt:
No, that’s a really good example. So here’s why I was looking forward to this podcast. So can I take those two principles and turn them on their head and ask you, do those two apply, and I’ll regurgitate those, when admins are trying to learn Salesforce through Trailhead? And those two principles I’m pointing at are they may or may not understand why, and they’re trying to focus on the 20% versus the 80%.

Lisa Tulchin:
So that’s a really good question because having from the admin perspective, there’s just so much to learn, and it can be overwhelming. I think, honestly, what I had to do, and I’m trying to remember when I was first starting it out, I broke things down. Instead of looking at the whole 100%. What I did was I looked at, now I admit, because I’ve never sat in the job, I’ve never sat in the chair as an admin. I was looking at the admin certification, and I was looking at the breakdown of the exam and looking at what the breakdown of the exam was and what had the most emphasis in the exam. And then I was thinking, well, that’s probably either what’s the hardest or, I mean, I probably was going about it the wrong way from that point of ignorance, but I felt like that’s most of what admins have to do. And so for me, I would probably break it down and focus section by section of that.

Mike Gerholdt:
I think that’s good philosophy. I mean, I was kind of sneaking that question at you because I feel like it’s one thing to give people advice on how to instruct, but then it’s also on, does that also apply to us learning as well? So you tackled it well. How does some of this work? As we both, I mean, we focus on learning and being new, and that applies throughout the years, but is there anything you think of if you are going into perhaps training an older set of users, and so there’s median age, obviously companies try to hire for diversity, but some companies have older users, and should you think about how to frame things differently or if you are in that set, is there a way to think through maybe because you teased, and I’d love to know more about the science of what you read on learning?

Lisa Tulchin:
Oh, yeah. So there are a couple of things popping into my mind with that. One is that there has been a lot written, and I’ve only read a little bit about generationally differences in learning. So that Gen X, Y, and Z, millennials, I’m not sure exactly the lineup, they learn differently, and the younger employees are having grown up in a much more digital first age, take information in differently. So if you’re training older employees, there are a couple of things that come to mind. One is my feeling, oh my goodness, I may be approaching older employee “as a group.” But the other thing is that try to be sensitive to what you may encounter as resistance may actually be fear.

There can be a sense with new, technology in particular, a fear of I know how to do things really, really well in the previous system, method, whatever you want to call it. This is something new, and I don’t know how to do my job well. And the reality is there is age discrimination and so you could be starting to spiral into a fear cycle. What if I can’t catch on? What if I can’t do my job? What if I can’t “wrap my hands” around this new technology? Am I going to lose my job? So I think there’s a level of that that could be behind what you might be perceiving as resistance with older employees that you wouldn’t necessarily be receiving from younger employees. For one thing, they’re closer to being in that true beginner’s mindset where they don’t know things and are taking things in all the time. They’re less likely to be as insecure about their job and potentially a little more open to systems changing.

So that’s one thing that pops into my head. And I have gone and I’ve trained people on how to use a CRM system when the previous one was paper, and there was a range of employees in the room; they did tend to be older, and there was a lot of resistance to that. So it could also depend on the shift that you’re making. If you’re going from one online system to another online system, it likely would have less resistance. I kept emphasizing, you’re just carrying around an iPad, you’re not carrying around stacks and stacks and files and files. Look how much easier this is. And a lot of them though still were like, but everything’s in my head. Now you’re making me write it down. So I think the reality is change is hard, no matter what. I think it’s just as someone who might be in charge of training others, being open to the fact that what you may be seeing as intractable resistance could actually be a fear-based response. Yeah.

Mike Gerholdt:
One thing you said, which is the biggest thing in all of learning, which is change is hard, right? Anytime you’re learning something, you’re learning something because something is changing. One, and I believe you were part of this project with me, I’ve always tried to really make it resonate with admins. Hey, when you’re rolling out a new app, make sure you’re paying attention to all the other changes that are going on in the organization. Because I know the project that we worked on together, we had a big change in the organization on top of a technical change. And you can be focused on, well, we’re just rolling out Salesforce, right? Oh, but there’s organizational structure, and there’s a whole bunch of other changes going on. I think it’s one thing, it can be a little hard maybe for an admin to wrap their head around organizational change, although they should. But looking at yourself individually. Is there something to be said for taking an inventory in the amount of change that’s going on in your life while you’re trying to learn something? Does that affect how you gain your knowledge?

Lisa Tulchin:
Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And that’s a really good point, which is that, and actually something popped into my head, sorry, when you were talking about how when we worked together, there was a big change, not just a technology, is that you may encounter resistance to training people on a new technology because the new technology could be the convenient scapegoat for a lot of the anxiety and fear around change that is happening. So sometimes it’s good to just open things up or just acknowledge and be open to the fact. I was in a meeting with someone recently, who I loved the way they opened it. They just opened it with a phrase that they said they’d been taught, which is, “Let’s start off by hugging the elephant,” was what they said.

Mike Gerholdt:
Oh, I’ve never heard that.

Lisa Tulchin:
Isn’t it wonderful? I loved that, and a picture of a baby elephant and people hugging it. But it was really, let’s start out by hugging the elephant, which is to just acknowledge upfront that that elephant in the room. We’re not going to tiptoe around a topic. So it could be as simple as opening up a training with, Hey, I know there’s a lot going on, let’s just acknowledge that right out and maybe give five minutes for people to just talk about it and get it off their chest. And then they’ll feel better. They’ll have cleansed the air a little bit, and you can move into, okay, let’s focus on how the system works. But I’ve noticed myself personally, yeah, if a lot of things are happening and I’m under stress, I could have more trouble focusing, which means that as a learner being in a classroom, it’s harder for me to take things in if things aren’t paced appropriately, which is a great way for me to seg into the science of learning.

Mike Gerholdt:
Nice segue.

Lisa Tulchin:
I took that, and I brought it back where I wanted to go five minutes ago, whatever it was, that was so subtle. So from a science perspective, there’s this feeling of, and as a curriculum developer, we talk about the need to what we call chunk things out. So it’s break things down. And now, admittedly, my research is a little outdated on this, but when I was first learning it, they talked about no more than five or seven things in any given segment. And I know sometimes, especially with software training, it’s really hard because, in order to do a task, you may actually have to do a certain number of steps maybe. But I really try to break training down by tasks. So if I have an exercise, I’ll have broken the exercise down into tasks, and if I’ve written a task out and it’s more than a certain number of steps within that task, that’s usually assigned to me that this might be too big a chunk. And I go back, and I see, do I have to break this down further?

And every exercise, I should say, is pinned to a scenario. And so it all goes back to the scenario. Okay, in this exercise, it’s usually a scenario. Either you are an admin or you’re observing an admin who has something to do and they’re trying to do A, B, C, and I’m like, oh, well, maybe A, B, and C is too much, too big a chunk right now, and it has to really be A, B, or maybe even just A, and that’s the way I approach it because you need to only give so much information to a person, and then you need to shift gears and maybe you need to talk about something else for a while, let them process. It’s another reason why a lot of training with systems is around watch me do it. Now you do it. We don’t always have the time. I always wish we were given more time for training, but you may not always have the time. So it may be introduce a concept and then have people walk through, but just make sure you’re not having them walk through too much at one given time.

Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, training, unfortunately, is always like the landscaping when you’re building a new house. It’s the last thing and you have no money left, and it just ends up being here’s a flower from the hardware store.

Lisa Tulchin:
I know, I really wish-

Mike Gerholdt:
Congratulations.

Lisa Tulchin:
I really wish we’d be able to have the full landscape architect at all times.

Mike Gerholdt:
The whole thing. The whole thing, the drawing. Everything.

Lisa Tulchin:
Tear the yard out, rebuild it entirely. That’s what I feel. I mean, that’s one reason why it’s nice that there is a resource such as Trailhead, and I haven’t even talked about it, but when you onboard as a Salesforce customer, there are other resources that are available to you or to companies and to customers, especially if they’re on a success plan. There are whole libraries and resources available to them. So I would say, as an admin, find out is your company, do they have a success plan? And if so, which plan and what resources are available to you? And if you have them, take advantage of them. Some of them are one-on-one coaching, I think for Premier. So you have all these resources, and I would say take advantage of all of the resources that are available to you to help you learn and then help you get everyone else working towards using the system effectively.

Mike Gerholdt:
One thing I thought of as we bring this around to a close. One thing you do that is exactly what admins do, I mean, you do a lot, is approach a brand new feature and have to learn it because you have to write training for it. I mean, you have to write Trailhead modules and all kinds of stuff, and admins maybe don’t necessarily have to train somebody else on that, but they have to learn it themselves. I would love to know, based on your experience, when a new feature comes down into your queue and you’re like, I got to write a module on this and I got to learn this feature, what’s your approach?

Lisa Tulchin:
I personally might be more of a maximalist than a minimalist.

Mike Gerholdt:
Please explain.

Lisa Tulchin:
I want to get my hands on all the things and digest them to try to figure out what is the essence there. Now I admit, Mike, I am learning this not because I’m going to have to use it every day in my job. I’m learning this because I want to understand the full picture in order to be able to distill it down to its basic essence. And so my objective might be a little bit different. I would say that the task is easier if it’s something that is new to me because there will be resources that are out there for me to take in. When it’s net new, the challenge really can be trying to figure out how something works when there aren’t as many resources, but I would definitely say being part of the ecosystem, stay plugged in, keep an ear out for the announcements that happen at the regular events such as the TDX, the conference that just happened.

Big announcements will be made at Dreamforce and at TDX. There are also what we call world tours, which are events that take place in different cities around the world. I know that it’s not possible for everyone to attend these, but there is the Salesforce Plus website, and a lot of the keynotes and major presentations from all of these events are available for free streaming. And actually, I think Salesforce Plus has other admin-focused resources that could be amazing right there. And especially if you’re a visual or an auditory learner, and by that I mean watching something or hearing something that could be a really good resource because you can listen to the announcements and then they have sessions that focus on different aspects of different clouds, and so you can listen in and hear announcements and sharing about resources.

The Salesforce blog is another good site because there’ll be articles published there talking about new resources, and that’s kind of how I get my information for net new content. And then they release webinars, and I know as an employee, I have access to all of them, but keep an ear out for resources such like that because they’ll share all the changes that are coming and there’ll be demos of how it works.

Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, no, there’s a ton out there. You very much are a maximalist.

Lisa Tulchin:
I know, man. I know. I’m not saying do it all, I’m saying pick and choose, right?

Mike Gerholdt:
Thank you, Lisa, for being on the podcast. I appreciate you coming by and sharing resources, and helping us understand the world of learning. Again, you know what’s funny? Is if you’ve listened to this podcast for a while, you know how many times we keep mentioning know the why. And I’ve done podcasts with Kevin Richardson on the five whys. I’ve worked with the Trailhead team on understanding the why. It really always keeps coming back to the why. But I will tell you this, listening to this episode, I learned something, which was the whole point, but it really sunk into me. The fear could equal resistance when you’re doing training. I run into that where people are super resistant, and it was out of fear, not out of the willingness to learn. So I think that’s interesting. I really hope you got something out of this. I loved the way Lisa approached training and talking about five to seven steps.

I feel like that was super important. So I hope you enjoyed this episode, and if you did, can you do me a favor? Share it on social. Share it to one person, maybe send it to a friend that could be doing training. I promise you, you have to know somebody that’s doing training. That, or at a user group, you could share it and be like, Hey, listen to this great podcast about training. And I learned about five to seven steps and the 80/20 rule, but you got to listen for the 80/20 rule. And of course, if you’re looking for more great resources, just check out the show notes. Also, everything is at admin.salesforce.com, including in the show notes a transcript of this episode. And of course, we will post this to the Admin Trailblazer community, which is one of the plethora of places that you can go and ask questions and help other Salesforce admins learn. So, of course, until next time, I’ll see you in the cloud.

The post How Do I Know What My Learning Style Is? appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Evan Ponter, Salesforce Consultant and Certified Application Architect. Join us as we chat about all things reporting from his breakout session at TrailblazerDX.

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

A deep dive into Salesforce reportingWe last spoke to Evan back in 2019. Since then, he’s struck out on his own as a Salesforce Consultant, where he helps businesses get everything they need out of Salesforce and their reporting. He recently did a 75-minute breakout session at TrailblazerDX 2024 about everything reporting, so I wanted to bring him on the pod to tell us all about it.

The 75-minute deep dive breakout session is a new thing we tried this year at TDX, and it was everything we hoped for and more. Evan was able to not only cover the basic concepts around reporting but also get into some very advanced concepts. Or, as he puts it, how to crawl, walk, run, and fly with Salesforce reporting.

Crawling, walking, and running with Salesforce reportingWhen he talks about learning to crawl, Evan means that you need to understand that every report you build is meant to answer a question. As he puts it, “Start with the end in mind.” If you know what question you’re trying to answer, you can make decisions about what information you need to see and how you might want to display it.

Next, Evan gets into how to walk and run with reports. To do that, you need to understand what’s happening in a custom report type as far as which records are being visualized and what other opportunities that opens up for you. Several out-of-the-box Salesforce features can help here, like cross filters, with or without filtering, and pulling in fields from other objects.

Flying towards the future of Salesforce reportingYou probably have the same question I did for Evan: if that’s walking and running with reports, then what does it mean to fly? The answer is Cartesian product data sets, which let you bring together sibling records from two different objects that are both related to a common parent without changing your org’s architecture.

Finally, we get into what the future looks like for reporting. AI is only getting smarter but, as Evan points out, while we might be able to automate some aspects of reporting, we’ll still need to understand how everything works if we want to get the results we’re after.

As you can probably tell, this is a very in-depth episode, so be sure to take a listen (or check the transcript) for more on cross filters, with or without filters, Cartesian data sets, and everything about reporting.

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Full show transcriptMike:
So it’s all things reporting this week on the Salesforce Admins podcast. That’s right, we’re fresh off of TrailblazerDX. I think I’ve got through my jet lag and the time change, and I’m ready to start reporting. Evan Ponter last week, gave an amazing breakout session at TrailblazerDX, and I had to have him on the pod to talk about what he was talking to all of our wonderful trailblazers about, crawl, walk, run, fly, with reporting. That’s right.

And speaking of TDX, I want to give a shout-out to Scott, Katie, and Bill, you three are amazing. Thank you for coming up saying hello, sharing your stories with me. You’re an inspiration to me, you’re why I do the podcast, and thank you to all the listeners that listen in. I got to meet with many of you last week at TrailblazerDX, it’s why I love coming to events. And thank you for sharing your stories, I hope to continue inspire you, I hope to continue to make a podcast that is exactly the length of your dog walks and your commutes, because those are what I listen to podcasts for. Of course, we’re getting into summer, so I got to start mowing the yard, but let’s not talk about grass, this is a Salesforce podcast, and we’re going to talk about reporting with Evan Ponter.

But of course, before we get into that, just a quick reminder, it is super easy to follow the Salesforce Admins podcast on whatever platform you’re listening to me on. So on iTunes, all you got to do is click follow, and then, iTunes takes care of all the hard work for you. Downloads the newest episode, then Thursday morning, you wake up, you’re ready to go. Hey, let’s knock an episode out on our drive to work, or maybe we’re walking the dog that morning, and iTunes will have already downloaded it for you. It’s just that easy. Almost all of the podcast apps will do that. So just a reminder, makes it easy, makes it one less thing to worry about. So wanted to get that out of the way, but let’s get to our amazing conversation with Evan Ponter. Welcome back to the podcast.

Evan:
Thanks for having me.

Mike:
I happened to look, it was 2019, which feels like a decade ago.

Evan:
Yeah, absolutely.

Mike:
I’ll definitely link to that episode, because we talked about the ultimate guide to report types, but you’re still on the reporting train …

Evan:
I am.

Mike:
… and you gave an amazing session at TDX, and since a lot of people probably weren’t there, let’s talk about that. But what have you been up to since 2019?

Evan:
Oh, well, in the midst of the pandemic, I decided it would be a great time to go out on my own and become an independent Salesforce consultant, through a lot of turmoil, but it ended up being a really incredible journey for me, and the next step in my career, to start to facilitate working for a handful of clients, supporting them as an external Salesforce consultant, being the expert they can lean on. And I’ve been able to take a lot of this reporting content and apply it to any project that I’m working on.

Mike:
Yeah. To be honest with you, it’s actually kind of brilliant, if you think about it, with all of the shifts in employment and labor that are going on post-pandemic, being an outsourced admin, developer, architect, however you view yourself, would benefit the company and you.

Evan:
Yeah, no, it’s been great.

Mike:
But you still report, you still literally are my one of two go-to sources for reporting. I go to Jennifer for flows, I go to Evan for reporting. Yes, I go to Trailhead, but I feel like the way you teach me is so much better. So let’s talk a little bit about … Because you gave, at least in admin [inaudible 00:03:57], one of two 75-minute deep dive sessions, which was a little bit of an experiment for us. I think it went well, there’s probably some stuff we could do better. But 75-minute session, because we heard from a lot of the feedback, like, 40 minutes is great, but I’ve sat through a ton of dry runs, and it feels like the start of a really good book, when they’re getting to something, and they’re like, oh, and if you have any questions, you’re like, no, I want another 30 minutes. [inaudible 00:04:31] we did, so you did one on reporting, and I’ll let you explain kind of the theory from there.

Evan:
Sure, yeah, so over the years, I’ve given some variation of a report session, and I’ve had, actually, a couple of different topics. So I can do a 40-minute session, I’ve done a 20-minute session, and then, I’ve done a couple more advanced topics as separate sessions. But getting the chance to do a 75-minute hands-on deep dive allowed me to pull a majority from a few of the main topics, but really kind of package it all up together as a full hour of everything you would ever need to know about reporting if you only had an hour to learn it. So it was really cool to tackle some of those basic concepts, but also, get into some of the more advanced stuff. And to have everybody following along and doing the hands-on exercises, you really get to see, feel, and live that experience in the hour of time that we have together.

Mike:
Yeah, and I think what was nice … I mean, it can be intimidating, because a little bit of what we did with this is, it’s not really a hands-on workshop, there’s not really tables and that traditional learning experience, but people had the option to be what I call, fingers on keyboards, and doing something, or just following along, and I think that’s a fun balance. But what I loved about how you walked into it is, there was no real worry about, oh, I better know all of my stuff or I’m going to not know where things are at, because your concept of, was it crawl, walk, run, fly?

Evan:
Yeah.

Mike:
Really helped walk people through the complexities of understanding reporting.

Evan:
Absolutely, yeah. We start with some basic crawl concepts that you can apply to anything. So we built a deluxe report type together, and we learned how using customer report types really opens up a ton of flexibility. But then, as we get into the walking and running portions, we start to look at some more advanced stuff, so really taking that base concept and expanding it so you can tackle different requirements and get a little more complex. And then, the fly piece was really just truly on the frontier of what you can do in a customer port type, so it was really cool to share that with everybody.

Mike:
Now, what part of … So let’s go back to crawling. Crawling, to me, feels like, okay, we’re just going to use maybe some standard objects stuff that’s there, existing architecture. What part of moving from crawling to walking is really … How much do I need to consider when I’m building an application about the reports? Because I feel like, too often, we build tons of these cool applications, and we forget about what the report is going to look like.

Evan:
Yeah, so in any project I’ve been on, you kind of have to start with the end in mind, and really think about what questions are you going to need to answer with this data, this process, this automation, whatever it is you’re doing, so that, you at least have a concept of what a report might look like, so that you can help answer that question. And a lot of what I talk about in the crawl portion is just being able to really make it concrete, what data you’re visualizing in a report.
And as we build our one deluxe custom report type for that object, you are tying together records from an object to results that you see in a report. And once that concept is tangible, and you can feel that and understand how that’s working, then we can look at the walking and running concepts that really build on what’s happening in a customer port type, as far as which records are being visualized, and what other opportunities that opens to use some of the other out-of-the-box features, like cross filters, and doing some more advanced filtering capabilities, and pulling in other fields from other objects.

Mike:
So you mentioned exactly the thing I was going to talk to you about, which is cross filters, because when I start building reports, or even when I get back into reports, if I haven’t done it for a while, it’s like riding a bicycle. I feel like I start off and I need training wheels, and then it takes me two, three weeks to get to Tour de France-style bike skill. You just get on a bike, and you’re down the road. Cross filters to me always trip me up. What is the most common thing you see when you talk to people, or when you work with companies, that trip people up with cross filters?

Evan:
Yeah, so I mean, first of all, I do a whole 20-minute session on cross filters, so being able to incorporate that into this deep dive was really cool. It’s one of those topics that I’m super passionate about because there are so many problems that can be solved with a cross filter, people just aren’t quite aware of it, or exactly how to set them up. So the basic thing that it solves for is, you want a list of records, but you want to filter them based on the presence or absence of some child records. And what it allows you to do is, anytime you’ve had a situation where you’re like, I have this report results, but I need to get rid of all the duplicates. I really just want to see a clean list of accounts that had opportunities closed last year. And you started with an accounts and opportunities report type, and you have all this opportunity data, but you really just care about seeing the account records.

What a cross filter allows you to do is run a report based on your report type that will show you account records, and then filter them based on those opportunities. So you get to filter based on objects and fields from that object that do not appear in your report results as columns. And it opens up a lot of possibilities, so for that example, you would say, show me all the accounts that have opportunities where the close date equals last year, and the stage is closed one, and you get a nice, clean, de-duplicated list of account records that meet that filter criteria.

Then, as far as what trips … A lot of people can get that down once you sort of explain what’s happening, what trips people up is when you start using the cross filter using the without operator. So it works 100% opposite of using the with operator. So when we said, show me accounts with opportunities that have a close date in the last year, that means each one of those account records in your results has at least one opportunity that meets that filter criteria. But when we switch that operator to without, it means every one of those accounts does not have any opportunities that meet that filter criteria. And that’s where things get super interesting, as you add cross filter criteria that has the without operator, you’re actually opening up your results. So you could say something along the lines of, show me accounts that don’t have any open opportunities, and what you’ll end up seeing is, there are accounts that have opportunities, but none of them are open, they’re all closed one or closed loss status.

Mike:
And that exactly is where it usually happens that I get tripped up, because … Well, and I bet it’s other admins, too. I think the frustration, you probably dealt with this, too, is, especially when you’re helping build a report for somebody, there’s an expectation in their head. They know there’s usually one or two data points they’re looking for that are kind of like a check. Like, is that report really working? And if they don’t show up, then they question, well, what’s wrong with Salesforce?

And well, it’s not wrong, it’s just, I think to your point, as you add without filter criteria, you’re opening more things up. And the thing that always bugged me was, somebody would always pull up on the screen, well, I’m on this opportunity here, and it’s got an opportunity, or I’m on this account here, and it’s got this opportunity, and it fits all the criteria. And you’re like, right, except you don’t own that account, and we were doing my account. And you don’t say that to be the IT guy, like, move, you say that to be like, no, we have to evaluate all of the criteria and figure out why something is or is not being omitted.

Evan:
Exactly, and I think that’s a key thing that I show in the presentation, is, if you are on the filters tab of a report, and you understand what the report type results are going to show you, you can read from top to bottom and understand exactly, every filter being applied to your data, which helps immensely when you’re doing that troubleshooting of, oh, it doesn’t show up because I have a my accounts filter right here. It’s going to show you that. So I kind of walk people through that troubleshooting to make sure … You have to be critical of every filter being applied to your data.

Mike:
And not to mention permissions, whether or not they also have view permissions, because they could be looking at someone else’s account, or … Who knows, right?

Evan:
Yeah. Yeah, security model definitely comes into play.

Mike:
I feel like those are all the diagrams you kind of need to have handy when you’re thinking about like, okay, I need to build this report. First, what’s the architecture of my organization? Not necessarily the whole org, but pertaining to what I’m creating a report for. And then, two, what security is in place for the individual or individuals that I’m running this report for? Because I don’t want to always be the run report as person.

Evan:
Right, yeah, that would always show organization-wide data. So yeah, if you have a private model, thinking about that as you’re building reports is really going to help you build one report that can support multiple people across different teams, and allow them to only see their own data, but it’s also going to help to have an understanding of that as you’re troubleshooting things. Because it’s going to drive yourself crazy if you’re helping two people that are on two different role hierarchy points, and they’re running the same report, but they get different results, well, you must have some kind of private model in place, or some kind of my ownership filter on the records in that report.

Mike:
Right. So I feel like that’s walk, what are some of the things you cover in run?

Evan:
Yeah, in the run portion, we’re really looking at … We do a little bit with cross filters, but we also take a look at those with or without style report types, and those can be tricky, as well. I kind of walked through, when you have the normal kind of [inaudible 00:16:13] report type words, every A record must have related B records. You’re getting that inner join of the diagram that shows you all the child records that specified parents.

And that is still true for that with or without style report type, where it’s, each A record may or may not have related B records. It’s really two different data sets that get put together and dumped onto your screen. And they can be really useful for solving certain types of problems, but the key thing to think about with those is, those two data sets that are being put together for you, can be filtered independently, so it allows you to do things like, I want to summarize the total amount of opportunities for all the accounts that I own, and I want to just get a summary of the close dates in the last year.

So you’ll have your opportunity records, and you’ll have your account records, and because you can filter them independently, you could say, all right, show me all of my accounts, and then, only show me the opportunities that had a close date in the last year, and I want to summarize the amount from those records. What you’ll end up getting is, all of your accounts are going to show up, and if they don’t have opportunities that meet that criteria, the account still displays as a row, it just has a zero for that amount summary. And it really helps people keep tabs on things, like, they care about seeing all 50 their accounts, or whatever it is, but they just want a summary from a specific timeframe. And those with or without style custom report types are really the only reporting tool that allow to do something like that.

Mike:
Those always trip me up, because it would or would not exclude the entire object.

Evan:
Yeah, right, so if you filter an account out of your data, it’s also going to take out all of its related records, so all of its related opportunities would also be excluded. But if you just filter based on an opportunity field, it doesn’t exclude the account from showing up.

Mike:
So the other thing that I’ve really wanted to always get into, I’ve never had the use case for, is report formulas, where you’re building the formula to also be inside the report. Do you include that in your crawl, walk, run, fly? And if so, where do you stick that?

Evan:
No, I mean, we don’t get into that. I mean, there’s so many different possibilities with setting up row level formulas-

Mike:
Yeah, like, it’s not going to the same with formulas for just everything, right?

Evan:
… Yeah, right. But yeah, I mean, there’s a whole bunch of interesting things you can do. One place where I really like using the row level formulas is when I’m reporting on objects that I cannot customize. So you weren’t able to put a formula field on the object, but now that you can do a row level formula in a report, you kind of can at this point. So that’s helpful for … I mean, there’s a ton of standard objects where you can’t set up a formula field, so having that ability really opens up some possibilities for data points that were never possible before.

Mike:
Yeah. [inaudible 00:19:42], let’s tackle a little bit … I know everybody’s [inaudible 00:19:45], what is fly? What’s fly?

Evan:
Fly? Yes.

Mike:
So the fun backstory behind this, when I saw your submission, I read it, I was like, okay, cool, Evan’s man with the report stuff. Got it, he’s going to be great. And then, you showed up to the dry run, and you’re like, hey, I kind of added a whole other section, and I’m calling it fly. And I was like, oh, well, tell me more.

Evan:
So for as long as I’ve been reporting in Salesforce, somebody always comes up and asks me a question. I have records in two sibling objects, can I bring them together in a single report without using a joint report? And I’ve always had to tell them, no, you can’t do that. There’s no way for me to relate these sibling records together because there’s no direct relationship. They have a common parent, but there’s no way to say that record one from this object matches up with record two from this other object.

So this fly portion of the presentation is what I call Cartesian product data sets. It’s on the bleeding edge of what’s possible in a custom report type. I’ve done some experiments, and I think people have been using this style of custom report type and not even realizing what’s happening, but there’s a handful of scenarios involving Salesforce standard objects that allow you to essentially cross multiply records from one object against records from another object. And it allows you to bring together those sibling records from two different objects that are both related to a common parent.

And it’s really cool to create one of those data sets. So the example I always give is, if you have three records in one object, and three records in another object, your report results, without any other filters supplied, are going to show you nine results. It would be like, record 1A, record 1B, record 1C, record 2A, 2B, 2C, 3A, 3B, 3C. And it just puts together every possible combination of matching up those records from those two different objects. And if you take that, and then filter it for your needs, you can do things like, the example I give is, you have a bunch of customers, and they have contact roles on opportunities, and you’re selling them a bunch of products, and you want to answer the question, which products are associated with which contacts?

Those are sibling records, they’re both related to a single opportunity, but there’s no direct relationship. And I walked through how you can build one of these Cartesian product data sets to cross multiply those records, then, you can put a visualization on a contact record page that shows you the products and the quantities that are associated with that contact, without having to change your architecture, without having to do any custom automation. You can just take advantage of this Cartesian product data set.

Mike:
I think the key thing I heard there is, without changing your architecture. We’re not building anything new that has to be constantly dealt with forever in time, because it’s part of the report. So I didn’t prompt you for this question, but I’m going to look ahead, because there’s a lot of AI stuff out there, and I’m sure you hear about it, you see it. There’s all kinds of plugins and stuff where you can throw spreadsheets at AI, and it’ll analyze things, and it’ll create pretty charts that, to be honest with you, aren’t that hard in Google Docs or whatever, Microsoft, or whatever tool you use. Devil’s advocate, five years from now, I don’t know, 10 years from now, maybe, at some point, you’re just going to be able to say, hey, Salesforce, run this report and make this output. How important is it now to learn this stuff, knowing that AI is going to take care of it?

Evan:
I still think people are going to be troubleshooting their reports and their report results, the same, if not more than they do now, once AI is generating this stuff. Because especially at first, we’re going to want to verify that we’re getting the results we think we’re getting, so that we don’t cause ourselves to go into hallucinations with [inaudible 00:24:24] business. If the AI is not-

Mike:
That’s a good point.

Evan:
… Yeah, if the AI is not giving us what we need, then we’re not able to make a good business decision. So a lot of the skills I’m teaching are about troubleshooting, and they’re about taking the actual root question that needs to be answered, and making sure we’re answering that question. And it’s less about order taking and just throwing together a bunch of columns on a report and creating a chart out of it. Sure, it might look nice, but what is it we’re trying to get at there? And I think that level of scrutiny, if you can start to have those skills now, while you’re building the reports manually, those will carry over into the AI world, but we’ll be able to scrutinize and make sure that those AI-generated results are giving us the answers that we truly need.

Mike:
Yeah. I think about it sometimes, when I have it do whatever kind of calculations, I’ll double check it on a different spreadsheet. I always think back to, was it like, fourth or fifth grade, I think, we finally got to use calculators in math class. I am of that age that they used to make you suffer in math and write everything out. And the teacher’s saying, well, yeah, but you can’t just plug it in, you have to know what to expect the output to be, because the calculator will only do what you tell it to do. It doesn’t know what the intent of the answer should be.

And I come back to that, I never thought I’d think about that again, and then, here, 100 years later, I’m out of school, and it’s kind of like it’s coming full circle of, yeah, you can ask this thing to do whatever, but if you don’t know how to double check it, or you don’t know what the expected answer should be, even for, I’m thinking through a lot of your examples, just running a report that returns a handful of rows, just so that you can check all of your filters, as opposed to creating a report that returns tens of thousands or whatever records, and you’re like, oh, it’s too much to check, is knowing what you’re going to double check for.

Evan:
Yeah. Yeah, having that sanity check, I mean, that’s crucial, just to make sure that we’re getting something valid. And I think trying to do that at the reporting stage is tough if that’s the only place where you’re doing the sanity check. And I think it’s part of the process all the way through, you have to be making sure that your data architecture lines up with what you’re trying to capture in the real world, and that the data you’re putting into that structure actually aligns and is kept up to date, and has all the right validation rules in place, you’re using automation to fill in the gaps, and auto calculate anything that you can.

And I think it’s important to take advantage of what computers are good at, putting in sound calculations that you can guarantee the arithmetic is going to be correct. But then, we still need to rely on humans to be sanity checking all of this stuff, making sure that we’re asking the right questions, and that the answers that we’re trying to get out of the system are actually addressing that question.

Mike:
Yep, I couldn’t have said it any better. Evan, I appreciate you coming back on the podcast and towing the straight and narrow line for us on reporting, and helping us get all of the good data out that we hope our users are putting in.

Evan:
Yeah, thanks so much for having me. This is always a blast, I’ll come back anytime.

Mike:
You bet. Thanks, sir. I bet you never thought you’d hear Cartesian report types on this podcast. I know I didn’t. If I had to go back 10 years ago and say words that are going to be said on this podcast, Cartesian report types probably wouldn’t be on my list of things. But that’s the beauty of the incredible intelligence that everybody has in the community, and some of the really fun stuff that you’re doing, like Evan, on report types, and just tapping into all of the features and functionality. I hope you can get a chance to dive into some of the stuff that he’s doing, I think it’s really cool.

Now, if you’re doing something like listening to this on iTunes, do me a favor. Click the three dots in the upper right-hand corner. Okay, see, it says share episode? You can now text or post social, like, hey, I just listened to this episode with Evan about reporting, I think it’s really cool. And you can share it with your community, share it with your friends, share it with fellow Salesforce admins. Maybe you have some people in your organization that are looking to up their reporting skills. Great idea to share the podcast with them.

And of course, if you’re looking for more great resources, you can always find everything admin at admin.salesforce.com, including a transcript of the show, so that you can read through, follow along. Of course, be sure to join the conversation, the Admin Trailblazer group, that is in the Trailblazer community. Of course, the link for that, where is it? Show notes, absolutely, you know where it’s at. All right, so until next week, I’ll see you in the cloud.

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Gary Brandeleer, Senior Director of Product Management, Emerging Tech and Products at Salesforce.

Join us for a roundtable discussion of everything Einstein Copilot: what it can do, how you can customize it, and what you need to do to get your org ready to get the most out of it.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Gary Brandeleer and Josh Birk.

What is Einstein Copilot?At TDX this week, we’ve talked a lot about a cool new AI tool for Salesforce called Einstein Copliot. We thought it might be nice to hear all about it from the PM in charge, so we brought Gary Brandeleer on the pod to learn more. We’re also joined by Salesforce Evangelist Josh Birk, who has spent a lot of time working with Einstein Copilot.

Simply put, Einstein Copilot is an AI assistant that will help you get things done in Salesforce with natural language prompts. So you might ask it to give you a list of all your opportunities in the last month, or to summarize your most recent opportunity, and it will give you an answer in natural language. But we’re only scratching the surface of what it can do, and Gary was excited to tell us more about it.

Customizing Einstein Copilot to get more doneSalesforce has been working with AI for a long time, and you’ve probably seen it integrated into things like lead scoring and analytics. So what’s so special about Einstein Copilot?

For one thing, natural language processing makes everything much more user-friendly. You can chain multiple actions into one request. For example, “summarize the most recent case and write an email about it.” If you think about how many clicks that would take to do on your own, it’s easy to see the potential of it for your users.

As for what you sort of actions you can request Einstein Copilot to do, there will be several options available out of the box. But because Gary knows how important Flows, Apex, and other customizations are to admins everywhere, you’ll be able leverage those skills to create your own custom actions, too. The possibilities are truly limitless.

How to get your org ready for Einstein CopilotWe’ve talked a fair amount on the pod about what you need to do to get ready for the AI tools coming to Salesforce. Data cleanup is more important than ever before.

For custom actions to work well, you need to make sure that you’ve updated the descriptions on all of your flows so that Einstein Copilot knows what it’s looking at. In general, you need to take a look at your labeling and organization practices for all of your data.

Finally, it’s important to remember that prompting AI is a skill that you need to practice. Both Josh and Gary recommend spending some time with a tool like ChatGPT seeing what kind of prompts work best. Try to get it to give you a recipe, or tell you a dad joke, and then see what kinds of questions get the results you’re looking for.

There’s a lot more in this episode about how Copilot works, so be sure to take a listen and subscribe so you’ll never miss out.

Podcast swag* Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Learn more* Get Started with Einstein Copilot Custom Actions * Salesforce’s Einstein Copilot is Here: The Conversational AI Assistant for CRM that Delivers Trusted AI Responses Grounded with Your Company Data * AI Resource Roundup for Salesforce Admins * Podcast: Why Clean Data Is Non-Negotiable in the AI Era with Lizz Hellinga

Admin Trailblazers Group* Admin Trailblazers Community Group

Social* Gary on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/garybrandeleer/ * Josh on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshuabirk/ * Salesforce Admins on X: @SalesforceAdmns * Mike on Threads: https://www.threads.net/@mikegerholdt/ * Mike on Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@salesforce.mike * Mike on X: @MikeGerholdt

Full show transcriptMike Gerholdt:
This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we are talking with Gary Brandeleer about Einstein Copilot. Now, it’s March 7th if you’re listening to this, the day this podcast drops, which I’m sure you are, you could be at TDX. Or not. So this is why I’m bringing this to you because we’re talking about Copilot at Trailblazer DX and wanted to bring you a little bit of a conversation that myself and my fellow evangelist, Josh Birk had with Gary Brandeleer on some of the challenges and features of Copilot, the direction that they’re going to go in terms of building it, some of the really cool capabilities of it. It’s just a really fun discussion. I appreciate Josh jumping in, helping me out with this podcast. He really had an opportunity to get hands-on with Copilot at this point, so he really helped steer the conversation. I hope you find it intriguing. I did.

Now, of course, if you love what you are listening to, can you do me a favor and just make sure you’re following the Salesforce Admins Podcast? So if you’re listening to this episode and you like what you hear, listen to a couple more. Hit that follow button on iTunes or in Spotify or iHeartRadio. Because then every time a new episode comes out, it will drop right on your phone. But enough of me, let’s get to the conversation we had with Gary and Josh about Copilot.

So Josh and Gary, welcome to the podcast.

Gary Brandeleer:
Thank you.

Josh Birk:
Thanks for having us, man.

Mike Gerholdt:
Good. Well, wanted to have a little bit of a round table discussion because Copilot is such a very cool product that we’re launching actually today because today is the first day of TDX if you’re listening to this when the podcast comes out. And I know you are because you downloaded it on your phone right away, just like I said in the intro to do. But we’ve got Gary on, and I brought Josh on, a familiar voice from those that listen to the Admin Podcast because Josh has actually been a little bit more hands on with Copilot than I have. So Gary, let’s kick off with you. How did you get started at Salesforce and what do you do?

Gary Brandeleer:
So amazingly enough, I started on the Salesforce field service product as a solution engineer, and then I moved to the US. So obviously I’m from Belgium. I cannot get rid of this accent.

Mike Gerholdt:
I thought it was a southern accent. It sounds like Tennessee to me.

Gary Brandeleer:
Exactly. It’s directly from there.

Mike Gerholdt:
Is it? Okay, the mountains.

Gary Brandeleer:
And so yeah, in San Francisco now it’s been six years or a bit more. And so I worked as a product manager on Salesforce Field Service. Then I moved to the emerging tech team where we worked on blockchain and Web3 related aspects. And then of course when GPT happened, we got asked to work very fast on that technology. And so that’s what I’ve been doing now for a couple of months, if not already a year.

Mike Gerholdt:
Great. And Josh, we know your history. You created Trailhead, you’ve done a lot of stuff. You’ve been hands-on with Copilot. So I’ll let you kick off the discussion with Gary.

Josh Birk:
Yeah. Now, first of all, I’m shy about the whole created Trailhead thing.

Mike Gerholdt:
I’m not.

Josh Birk:
I know. A lot of people aren’t. I had a lot to do with the prototype and getting involved in the first year. But Trailhead took a village for sure. But anyway, moving on from that. Gary, it’s good to talk to you again.

Gary Brandeleer:
Good to talk to you.

Josh Birk:
Well, let’s start at the very basics, and I’m going to ask you a very basic question, but I want to get an answer that’s pointed to those nouns you just used like blockchain. Pretend I don’t know anything about that. So slow walk me through what exactly is Copilot?

Gary Brandeleer:
So Copilot is really an AI assistant that’s going to help you to do your tasks inside Salesforce. And I think that the easiest way to understand this is simply to tell you what you can ask it essentially. And so something you could ask to your Copilot is, “Can you give me list of the opportunities I have and what’s the total amount?” And you use natural language and suddenly you have a Copilot AI assistant that is helping you at getting the answer. It’s giving you the answer in the form of text or other forms. And that’s pretty much it. It’s really helping you to be more proactive using Salesforce data. And of course it can use also external data through data cloud and so on.

Josh Birk:
Right. I want to follow up a little bit on that conversational model, but kind of a historical question because as you mentioned, GPT happened, when did Salesforce first started working with technologies like this? And then what has the last six to eight months been like for you?

Gary Brandeleer:
I think it’s a little bit tricky to answer because we started to work on AI very long ago. So GPT are just one of the many, many technologies out there that we can use under the banner of artificial intelligence. So I would say Salesforce started long ago on artificial intelligence in general. And you can see that, for example, from in Sales Cloud, you have lead scoring, we have also analytics that can use different algorithm and so on. So we had a lot of already of AI intelligence, I would say, in our product.

But then what happened really is that when we saw the power of what LLM could do, especially around analyzing texts, giving you answers in the natural language or using natural language, we were thinking of, okay, now how can we use that on Salesforce? And I think really we started a bit earlier than when it became very public that LLM we are going to change everything. If you look at our Salesforce AI research team, they have been working on LLMs for quite a while and they had already a lot of patents and white paper about it.

But I think it’s accelerated once the public have seen how much value could LLM provide. And so that accelerated, I would say, starting January of last year. And since then it’s been very intense, I would say. And the reason why is first of all, shipping a product very fast is not easy. Shipping an AI product very fast is even harder. And the story is even getting harder, as you look at the AI space right now, it’s evolving like crazy. Every week I have something that is blowing my mind. I’m reading an article and I’m like, “Wow. That is feasible now? That’s mind blowing.” So keeping the rhythm, keeping yourself informed about what’s feasible and then making sure that we can deliver as much value as possible to our customers using the latest and greatest is really, really a big challenge. But it has been super fun so far.

Josh Birk:
Yeah, it is. And I can sympathize with you because I have made statements to the public about AI, which were then disproven about three weeks later. It can be so hard to say, “This is exactly what the feature set it’s going to be like.” It has been a fascinating journey kind of interacting with them. Pretend I’m somebody who has heard about ChatGPT, is kind of familiar with the idea of a bot, but probably kind of in a more traditional sense of a bot. And when I hear we can do things like ask Copilot for the last three leads that I worked on or something like that, I might also think, well, that sounds like a dashboard or a report or a list view or aspects of the UI we’re already familiar with. What novelty, what innovation is Copilot bringing to the user interface that’s giving this power? What is the LLM and IN adding to it?

Gary Brandeleer:
I think there is two answers to that topic. One is if you look at LLMs, generally speaking, they’re very good at managing text, summarizing, generating content, and so on. The second part, and that’s more Copilot related, is that Copilot is able to chain what we call Copilot actions, which is really basically stuff it can do. I would say another way to position this is to say that Copilot will have a brain, and we call that the planner. That’s the technical term so far.

But basically that brain will select different actions based on what you are asking the Copilot. And so what would happen is that you could say, yeah, if I want to find the latest scales, I can do that by going on a list view, for example, so on and indeed you could ask Copilot, “Hey, find the latest case,” it will find it for you. And then you could ask this follow-up question of, “Hey, summarize it.” And so it’s going to summarize it for you.

What’s much better is to say, “Hey, summarize the latest case.” And in that scenario, the Copilot will combine different actions. It’ll find dynamically which actions it need to combine to answer the requests. And so then you unlock a lot of value and a lot of different use cases simply because now the Copilot is able to chain the different actions together and give you an output that will be relevant for your request. And so I think more and more as it evolved and as we get user feedback, you will see that people will say, “Oh, wait a minute, I can do that with clicks, but now I could have done this with 10 clicks or I can just ask one single sentence to Copilot and the 10 clicks [inaudible 00:09:52] for me.”

Josh Birk:
Right. Yeah. And I want to dig into actions a little bit more, but let me give you a theoretical based on what you just said. With Copilot, I could ask one question, which is, “Provide the three most recent open case leads I have.” And then I could say, “Summarize those based on the amount of active cases that they have.” And then I could say, “Okay. For that lead that has the most active cases, could you give me an email version of the summary that I could send to my manager?” And that’s three prompts and I would get that actionable piece of content, right?

Gary Brandeleer:
That’s exactly correct. And so you could even go as far as, I would simplify a little bit, but I would say you could go as far as saying, “Hey, summarize this lead or summarize this case and write an email about it.” And at that stage you will not see the summary first. You’ll basically get as an output directly the email, even though the Copilot has executed two or three actions to get to that output.

Josh Birk:
Got it. Now, first of all, I absolutely love the definition of an action as stuff that it can do because I feel like that boils it down so wonderfully. But let’s bring that up another level. What is powering an action? What’s the technology behind it and what is Salesforce providing out of the box with that?

Gary Brandeleer:
That’s extremely important to flag it. And there is differences of course between what we ship. So as Salesforce, we will ship standard Copilot action or Copilot standard actions. And an example of that would be query CRM, draft and revise emails, summarize records. And these are really standard actions that are coming with Copilot. But then what we know is that many, many of our customers still love to configure, customize Salesforce. We also know that a lot of Salesforce admin tailor flows, apex and so on. So we are like, “Okay, wait a minute, because we need to be sure that the Copilot can be configurable, so how can we do that?”

And so we introduced the concept of Copilot custom action, and you can then create these custom actions and select either invocable actions, either auto launch through so far, either prompt template. And that’s unlocking a lot of value because you can then cover a lot of use cases. On top of this, I would say, it’s introducing one aspect that people will have to learn, which is you might already have an auto launch tool, or you might have already an invocable action that you are thinking of, “Hey, wait a minute, if I set up that in Copilot, this is going to be a super cool use case that Copilot will be able to do for my user.”
But what is very important is to describe very well what the action is doing. And that’s, I think, a new pattern that is popping up is that we are not very good at describing. Every time I’m creating a flow, I’m like, “Hey, I’m creating the flow. I’m naming it.” And then the description, I’m just skipping it because I was like, “Nobody’s going to read the description of the flow anyway.” And that’s just the way I’m doing it. Maybe some people out there are more disciplined than me.

But now it’s extremely important because there is actually something that’s going to read that description and it’s going to be the LLM. So the LLM will only know if it needs to pick up this action or not based on the description you have for that custom action. And so to put that a bit more in context, it would be, I have a flow that is allowing me to, let’s say, create a case. Then I would’ve to create the custom action, select that flow, and then I would’ve to describe, okay, this action is allowing you to create a case which is a Salesforce object used in the context of call center. And now the LLM will be, “Okay, if there is a call center agent asking me about creating a case, I will use this action. That’s something I can do that has been well described to me.”

Josh Birk:
Yeah. First of all, I love that acknowledgement of human behavior. My father is a surgeon and he got flagged by an administrator because none of his notes had his signature on it. And his response was, “They’re my notes. They’re for me.” I know I wrote them, they’re my notes. Why are you bugging me about my signature? And I think a lot of people think, well, if I put the label in and it’s human friendly enough and most of the people are going to be seeing it are the people who are using it, the description is just sort of an add-on. But first of all, I want to hang a lantern on something. We’ve said LLM as an abbreviation a few times. It’s large language model.

Gary Brandeleer:
That’s correct.

Josh Birk:
Which is basically… I’ve heard it described, I mean, I kind of have it in my head as it’s the very specific kind of data that the AI is looking at, right?

Gary Brandeleer:
I would put it another way, I like to simplify stuff a lot. And this is an oversimplification.

Josh Birk:
Okay.

Gary Brandeleer:
And it’s probably a very, very, very simplified version. But for me it’s more like what the LLM can do, at least in our context right now. And for math, I was going to use a calculator and I’m going to do one plus one equals two, which I can prove now that I’m very good at math. But the second thing here was for text, I could not really use anything. And now I have these LLMs that are able to ingest a lot of texts, generate a lot of content and so on. And that’s what I think is important. How it’s built, we can go very technical. But basically neural network and so on and so on. So I mean, we could create a full podcast just on that if you want, but it’s more important to know what the use of it and the use of it is. Now everything you are doing with text can be much more automated or I would say much more augmented in some ways.

Josh Birk:
It’s very good that this is a podcast format because it means we don’t even have the idea of adding in the formulas that make this thing work that made my eyes bleed the first time I saw them. So I think that’s an excellent description. And I think it also, thinking as terms of a calculator of AI and hallucination, some of the ways we phrase these things kind of makes it sound like they’re almost a thinking sort of thing, but they’re really more of a calculating kind of thing. And I wanted to say that to kind of emphasize your importance on, well, why do you need a really well fleshed out description? Because you’re talking to a calculator that needs as much, it needs all of the numbers you would put into the calculator in the first place.

Gary Brandeleer:
That’s correct. And on top of that, I would say the basics behind is that basically when you ask a request to a large language model or LLM, each word is basically a statistic. Meaning it’s going to think of, “Hey, I’m going to speak about the cat, and the two words are going to come based on statistics.” So it looks to us like it’s complete magic and you have nearly someone speaking to you. At the end of the day, it’s just statistic behind the scene that are popping up the right word and that’s important to keep in mind, essentially.

Josh Birk:
Got it. So I can leverage my existing flow skills. I can even, to a certain extent… When we talk about invocable flows and headless flows, are you seeing flows that are kind of like, if I make my descriptions really good, they can pretty much serve as actions or what’s your recommendation there that I kind of take an existing flow tailored for Copilot and then make sure the descriptions are a nice hefty paragraph?

Gary Brandeleer:
My recommendation there would be think really about the different strengths of Copilot and of LLMs in general. So if you have an existing flow that is already working and you would think of this would be worked for the Copilot to be able to call it whenever a user is requesting. Then, indeed, the only thing you need to do really is to create your custom action, describe it very well, describe the input, describe the output, and that’s pretty much it.

Now that I think is a little bit too much of a dream, it’ll not work as easy as that. What I mean by this is that now you might have, let’s say 10, 15 actions that you have assigned to your Copilot. It might be that you add one more action and now your description was pretty bad. So this time for some reason, it was late on a Friday, you wanted to close your computer fast and you created very bad description.

If your description is very bad, it might be that suddenly, even though your first actions were all working fine, that now when you ask some requests to the Copilot, the Copilot will always select that action with the bad description simply because it’s a description that is so bad that it’s kind of overrule all the others. So I think what’s important really is that testing of utterances, which is another word for simply a request from users. And so every time you create a new action is think about the value. Is there a real value to add that in a Copilot, yes or no? Is that using the power of LLMs? So content generation, summarization. In some ways text analysis or I would go for data analysis even though it’s not exactly right. But think about that, the strength of the LLMs themselves, and then think about, wait, is that going to be overlapping with other actions I have already?

And the last piece is that going to be used and chained with other actions? And that I think is a very important point is back to that question of, if you ask it to summarize the data scales, will it use different actions, chain them? And the answer is yes. If you create a new custom action, is there something super cool you could do by thinking of, hey, wait a minute now I could create this flow. It’s going to retrieve some data, for example, and then it’s going to use the existing summarize action to summarize something, a customer record or something like this. So really that chaining of action can be also a good reason for why or why not taking an existing flow and creating that as a custom action or using that as a custom action.

Josh Birk:
Got it. Now Copilot’s going to arrive out of the box. It’s going to have some standard actions. We’ve talked about actions. What else does an admin need to know day one if Copilot’s enabled? What other kind of setup tips and steps should they know they should be working towards to get it up and running in an org?

Gary Brandeleer:
A couple of things. One, there is one Copilot for your employee in that Salesforce org. So generally speaking, you will have one single Copilot so far for all your employees in your Salesforce org. Second, you can, of course, control the access and the access to the Copilot is done via permission sets. The data access, you don’t have to change much. It will respect, of course, the system we have for years now. Which basically if you have a profile and you don’t have CRED access on some objects or whatever else, we will not of course certainly overrule that because you are asking to Copilot to update an opportunity where you don’t have access, for example.

Josh Birk:
Gotcha.

Gary Brandeleer:
So the beauty there is really activate the Copilot, give the perm sets to the right users so that they can use Copilot. And that’s pretty much it. And that’s using the out of the box standard actions. After that, once you see and get feedback from your users, I think then think about what kind of custom actions you could add, what other use case you could cover, but don’t go too fast. Like, little by little. New technology, people need to get used to it. I think there is a big, big part of expectation as well. People expect a lot from AI. The reality is that at first it’ll do a few things pretty good for you and your users will tell you, “Well, I keep asking to the Copilot, ‘What is the weather in San Francisco?’ And it doesn’t reply.” And I’m like, “Okay, that might be a custom action. I’m not sure you should really do that in Salesforce.” But that, I think, is important is look at what kind of requests your users are requesting, and from there you will find cool use case that you can customize and configure.

Josh Birk:
Now-

Mike Gerholdt:
Josh, I have a little bit of a specific follow-up question before you go.

Josh Birk:
Oh, go go. Yeah.

Mike Gerholdt:
Because Gary, a lot of the podcasts that we’ve been doing and a lot of articles around getting ready for AI have really focused on data cleanup, and we actually had quite a few customers at Dreamforce talk about data cleanup in terms of prepping for AI, which is a best practice for a Salesforce admin anyway. It should be in their essential habits. What I’m also hearing, and this makes my heart sing, is that you now have a reason to have a systematic plan to go through and either describe or clean up your descriptions on key things like flows, custom objects. I’m hearing this is a priority, right?

Gary Brandeleer:
I think it is, at least for the flows you want the Copilot to use once you set up your custom action. But yeah, it’s becoming much more important. And data quality has always been super important. I think what’s new is, I would nearly say metadata quality is also super important now. So not only if you look at an opportunity is the opportunity description well described is the amount at the right level and things like this. So the data quality itself, but then did you describe really well what that flow on the opportunity object was doing? Keeping in mind that if you, for example, go in one of your existing flow and you add descriptions there or edit the descriptions there, once you will select that flow as a Copilot custom action, we will of course copy over all the description from your flow. So I would say best practices would be, hey, get the source cleaned up so that whenever you are using it in Copilot, you don’t even have to change the description. You just take the one that were set in your flow essentially.

Mike Gerholdt:
Gotcha.

Josh Birk:
How does things like duplicate fields and records and other aspects of unclean data, can that impact how well… Is it on the same level as what we usually see with that kind of turn? Or can Copilot be even more affected by that kind of thing?

Gary Brandeleer:
I would take the example of summarization. If you try to summarize an opportunity where many of the fields are completely blank, nothing has been really changed and there is not even a good naming convention of your opportunity or whatever else. You can do whatever you want, but there will be no magic. The summary will be looking pretty bad simply because it’s trying to summarize data that is pretty bad. So that’s one. When it comes to identifying records, I would think more about it as a search mechanism where, generally speaking, if you have opportunity names that are a bit weird, as long as you search for the right name, the Copilot will be able to find them the same way you would be able to search them.

But of course, if you have, for example, let’s go a bit more to a practical example. If you say, okay, I have a deal called Acme, but now you have three deals actually called Acme. If you search for it, you’ll find three records. If you ask a Copilot to update Acme and you have three opportunities named exactly the same way, then at that stage, Copilot will try to ask you more information to find the right record. So it’ll probably ask you, “Which record are you talking about? Because now there is three of them that have exactly the same name, so which one do you really want me to update?” So that’s what you can expect. So I think a search mechanism would be more like we show you the result and then you figure it out. With the Copilot, it’s more like, hey, we get some results, and then we ask you more questions to know that we are acting on the right record.

Josh Birk:
Which speaks right back to the power of that conversational model. Which is really hard, I feel, to know until you experience it. One final question for me, where can people learn more both at TDX since the magic of time travel we’ll be talking to people sharing TDX when this launches. But also beyond TDX, what are some of the best resources?

Gary Brandeleer:
So we are working on a couple of trails that will be published by TDX. We are also, of course, updating our websites with a lot of data there. And then I would say release notes are still your best friends. We will make sure that they’re as clear as possible. But I think these are a couple of places where to find this. And then we have, I think, multiple communities as well that are set up for AI and we should reuse just these to have our discussions about Copilot. So that’s what we’ll have by that time.

Josh Birk:
Nice.

Mike Gerholdt:
I have a feeling this is going to be on everybody’s lips when they’re at TDX and all of these groups thereafter.

Gary Brandeleer:
I have a feeling as well that this will be very much discussed.

Josh Birk:
Yeah. And the hand things right back off to you, Mike, I have a feelings will probably not be your last AI centric episode.

Mike Gerholdt:
No, there is no such thing. We’re just getting started. I am excited to do an entire presentation on best practices for updating your description fields, though.

Gary Brandeleer:
Yep.

Mike Gerholdt:
I know it sounds insanely boring talking about how white rice is, but man, let me tell you, it sounds like that is going to be key.

Gary Brandeleer:
It’s going to be key. I can tell you [inaudible 00:29:20].

Mike Gerholdt:
It’s all the little thousand paper cuts.

Gary Brandeleer:
Yes, yes. And we even ourself, we struggle with it honestly by building this product. We are like, every time we build a standard action, we also need to describe it correctly. And there was a lot of back and forth on how to name it, how to describe it, and so on. So that has been quite a challenge, I would say.

Mike Gerholdt:
Well, to echo back to an episode that I published in February with Marissa Scalercio, who is a customer that was on the podcast talking about her pilot use of Prompt Builder. One thing I asked her, and I think it reigns true for this episode, regardless of what we’re talking about in terms of AI for Salesforce, her advice was, “I can’t tell you how much I wish my past self would tell my future self to start using AI now. Just any AI. Because asking it questions, doing things.”

Josh, you probably follow me on Instagram. I’m spitting out a whole bunch of AI generated images just because I find it’s interesting what you ask AI and what it comes back and then getting better at learning how to ask questions and learning how to, not train the model, but think through, oh, this is literally what I asked for, but in my head it was something different. And I will echo back to her advice because I think it reigns true. Even getting ready for Copilot, you’re going to have to get better at asking questions and get better at cleaning your data up.

Gary Brandeleer:
That’s correct.

Josh Birk:
And there’s no reason this magic of a conversational UI, which is so hard to describe in any way other than just saying, “Do it.” There’s no reason to wait. You don’t have to wait for Copilot access or anything like that. Go to Bard and ask it to give you dad jokes. Jump in and just get that conversation flowing just to feel the fact that, oh, like Gary was saying, I thought it’d be three prompts. It actually could be two if you know how to ask the right questions.

Gary Brandeleer:
That’s very involved, I would say-

Mike Gerholdt:
Gary, thanks so much for coming on the podcast, and I’m sure people… I have a feeling you’re going to be a little bit popular at Trailblazer DX.

Gary Brandeleer:
It might be. I will be there hopefully being able to answer as many questions as possible from the customers. And if not, we’ll try to find a way to get maybe a Copilot answering the questions. So we’ll see.

Mike Gerholdt:
There you go. Oh, look at that.

Gary Brandeleer:
We will see.

Mike Gerholdt:
Very meta answer of you.

Josh Birk:
One final question, Gary. Are you a coffee person?

Gary Brandeleer:
Actually, so amazingly enough, yes, but I stopped because I was not sleeping well because I was drinking too much coffee. So now I’m a tea person, which is much more boring.

Mike Gerholdt:
That’s the best part of coffee.

Gary Brandeleer:
Yeah, kind of.

Mike Gerholdt:
You quit because of the best part.

Gary Brandeleer:
Kind of in the morning, yes. But in the evening when you’re in your bed and trying to get asleep and you’re still thinking about all the stuff you could do and so on, and you can’t just go to sleep, it’s just a little annoying. So after a while I was like, “Okay, let’s switch to tea.” But I must say I’m really missing a good coffee cup, especially a bold espresso. That would be the best. But for now, this month is coffee free for me.

Mike Gerholdt:
So it was a fun conversation. Boy, there’s a lot to pick up. A lot of really cool features coming, I feel, in the next few years with all of the AI possibilities and some of the stuff that’s going on with the ability to automate things and ask conversations, and talk with our data. Isn’t that something we’ve been talking about for a while?

So if you enjoyed this episode at the beginning, I asked you to hit follow. Hey, maybe share it with somebody. You got a fellow person on your team that’s looking to expand their admin skills or learn more about Einstein Copilot or the plethora of information that we cover on this podcast. All you got to do is just really tap the three dots and click share episode. You can post it social, you can text it to a friend. I appreciate you doing that. And of course, if you’ve got more great resources, your one stop for everything is admin.salesforce.com, including a transcript of the show. So that way, if there’s a part of it that doesn’t make sense, you can go through, read the transcript and get some information that way.

But be sure to join in the Trailblazer Group community discussion. A lot of great questions there and people sharing the podcast, which I appreciate. Also, if you have feedback, hey, I’m on Twitter and Threads and TikTok, and I think I’m on everything at this point. But send me your feedback. I’d love to hear it. I’d love to know what you think. I do enjoy reading all of the comments and hearing about the podcast because it’s something I enjoy creating for you. So until next week, we’ll see you in the cloud.

The post Introduction to Einstein Copilot with Gary Brandeleer appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Ketan Karkhanis, EVP and GM of Sales Cloud at Salesforce. Join us for a replay of this episode 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 CloudOver 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 EverywhereAnother 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 helpIf 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* Admin Trailblazers Community Group

Social* Ketan on X: @Karkhanis * Salesforce Admins on X: @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 show transcriptMike: Hey, Salesforce Admins. When content is so nice we like to air it twice. So to get ready for TDX and to help us get ready I think you might’ve missed an episode that Gillian did back in October where she’s talking about Sales Cloud core. So this week we’re going to replay that episode so that you can listen to it because it’s phenomenal and then that way we can get ready for TrailblazerDX. You can get ready for TrailblazerDX and then let me tell you we have some amazing content coming up in the next few weeks where we’re going to talk to the people that built Einstein Copilot. We’re going to talk to one of the presenters at TDX about advanced reporting. I’ve also got some other presenters coming up about low-code automations with Slack and learning Salesforce skills. March is jam packed with stuff, so let’s end February on a fun note and re-listen to our Sales Cloud core episode. This one’s with Gillian in case you’re wondering. So that’s whose taken over this podcast, enjoy.

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.

The post Replay: Sales Cloud Core with Ketan Karkhanis appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Ella Marks, Senior Marketing Manager at Salesforce. Join us as we chat about the keys to creating a great presentation, how to prep, and how to always nail your ending.

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

Presenting is a core skill for adminsPresentations are an important part of every admin’s life. And I’m not just talking about speaking in front of your local user group. Admins present every time they go in for a budgeting conversation, or demo a new process for their users.

That’s why I’m so excited to bring Ella Marks on the pod. She’s presented on some of Salesforce’s biggest stages, like Dreamforce and several World Tours. So I wanted to hear her tips for how to put together and prep for a great presentation.

The cool thing is that no matter the format or venue, Ella uses the same core principles to prep for every presentation.

Know your audienceElla’s first step is to identify the audience that you’re presenting for. Who’s in the room? What do they already know, and what are you going to teach them? Your content is going to be very different if you’re presenting to a room full of admins versus a room full of new users.

There are several situations where you might not know exactly who’s going to be in the audience or what their level of expertise is. Ella’s trick for this is to just ask them, for example, “Raise your hand if this topic is new to you.”

Experienced presenters will be able to use the information they get about their audience to change things on the fly. If this sounds daunting to you, Ella recommends that you start small. Pick one slide or part of your presentation that you’ll adjust based on the answer to your question. That gives you a manageable way to practice thinking on your feet, and you’ll soon find yourself getting more comfortable with improvising.

Make an effective outlineThe next step is to make an outline. For Ella, that’s listing out everything she could say about the presentation topic in a big list. This gives her the chance to move things around, pick out some themes, decide on a call to action, and then start editing it down.

When she’s ready to start creating her slide deck, Ella uses a technique called “blue boxing” to make a rough draft. Essentially, you use blue boxes to map out what you’re going to put on each slide. So a slide might have three blue boxes that say:

• Title about why this is important right now
• Text of the most important point I’m going to say
• Image to illustrate the point

This allows you to visually sketch out what each slide looks like and how the presentation flows as a whole. Variation is what keeps your audience engaged, so we want to make sure that we have a balance of slides with more text and slides with more visuals. Blue boxing lets you make these decisions before you spend time hammering out the specifics of which image or bullet point you’re going to use.

The trick to nailing your endingConclusions are always tricky. Ella recommends asking yourself three questions:

• After my presentation, how do you want them to feel?
• After my presentation, what do you want them to think?
• After my presentation, what do you want them to do?

These are your three goals, and the secret to nailing your ending is to work toward them throughout the presentation. Every slide should be aimed at answering one of these questions so that, by the end, you’ve brought the audience with you and it feels inevitable.

This episode is chock-full of great tips for creating presentations, including how to prep with a group and the importance of a good pump-up song, so be sure to take a listen and subscribe so you’ll never miss out.

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Full show transcriptMike Gerholdt:
This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we are talking with Ella Marks about building phenomenal presentations and the art of presenting how she gets ready. Now, if you don’t know who Ella is, Ella’s on our Admin Relations team and she’s done Dreamforce keynotes. Maybe you’ve seen her in the Release Readiness Live and at Dreamforce, also on stage at Release Readiness Live. So she’s presented to a few thousand people at a time and knows quite a thing or two about getting ready. Now, how is this relevant to you, admins? Well, you are going to be presenting at some point, either maybe to a board of directors or peers, or hopefully you’re at a user group and you’re getting ready to present a really cool idea.

But presentation is really part of what we do a lot because we’re showing all kinds of stuff and always presenting new ideas. Now, before I get into this episode, I want to make sure you’re following the Admins Podcast on iTunes or Spotify. That way whenever a new podcast drops, which is Thursday morning, it shows up right on your phone and you don’t have to do anything. You can just press play and get on the bus and go to work or take your dog for a walk. So with that, let’s get Ella on the podcast.

So Ella, welcome to the podcast.

Ella Marks:
Thanks so much, Mike. Thanks for having me.

Mike Gerholdt:
Well, it’s been a while, but I think people have seen you elsewhere in the ecosystem. I mean, we’re on the same team together, but for community members that haven’t run into you or seen the plethora of work that you’ve put out, what are some of the things you do at Salesforce?

Ella Marks:
I’ve been at Salesforce for almost seven years now and I’ve done a lot of different things and I’m so grateful. A lot of the time that I’ve spent here has been working with the admin community. You may have seen my face before on Release Readiness Live or on the keynote stage at Dreamforce, but I have the privilege of focusing on creating and distributing content for admins like you on some of our new release features and really exciting new innovations like AI. It’s really fun. I get to learn a lot about the platform and I’m always really excited to hear from admins and speak to admins and create presentations for admins. So really excited to be here today and talk to you a little bit more about that.

Mike Gerholdt:
Cool. I’m thinking ahead and for some of the admins we’re getting ready. There’s TDX coming up, but also user groups for those of us in the Midwest that aren’t snowed in anymore, we can get to user groups and presentations are important there and there’s all kinds of stuff that we present. Not to mention that it’s probably almost budget season. I got to do some presentations for budget. I got to do a whole bunch of presentations if I’m an admin.

Ella Marks:
There’s no limit I think to the type of presentations and the amount of presentations that you can do as an admin. Like you mentioned, there’s events where you’re speaking to your fellow admins and developers, there’s internal presentations. And I think the most exciting thing or interesting thing to me about presentations is no matter what presentation you’re giving or who you’re giving it to, you can go about planning for it and preparing that presentation in kind of the same way. There’s some fundamentals that go across every type of presentation that you may have or create in your role as an admin.

Mike Gerholdt:
And you’ve done quite a few because I remember seeing you on the Dreamforce keynote stage and Release Readiness. I feel like you’ve done a lot of different style presentations too.

Ella Marks:
I’ve honestly had the privilege to be on a bunch of different stages at Salesforce, whether it’s a virtual presentation or a webinar on the Dreamforce stage or even at an event. This year, I got to present and connect with a lot of people at world tour events, and like I said, they’re all very different. The people in the audience are very different, and so the way that I create content for them, while I might be covering the same things is always going to have a different output because I am trying to tailor it to the audience that I have, but I kind of use the same fundamental principles when approaching any presentation I give, whether it’s online, in person, a hybrid. There’s a few key things that I really go back to.

Mike Gerholdt:
Well, let’s dive into those principles. Where do you start?

Ella Marks:
The first thing that I do when I’m putting together any presentation is identify the audience that I’m presenting for. Now, this can be super straightforward. Sometimes you’re going to know exactly who’s going to be in the room. You might be doing an internal presentation at work, the stakeholders, the names on a meeting invite, and you can take the guidance from there. In other times, you may not have the list of everybody exactly who’s going to be in the room, but you have a sense of who they are. So a user group presentation, for example, you may know there’s a mix of admins and developers and maybe architects in that room.

And you need to know who those people are in order to build a presentation that is really going to engage them and teach them or persuade them or whatever your goal is. You need to start with knowing who that audience is to understand where that goal fits in and how can I communicate this information best to them.

Mike Gerholdt:
But I’m going to play devil’s advocate and say, so what if I’m presenting to a user group and maybe I’ve only been there once and I don’t know all the people that are going to see my presentation. What do you do then?

Ella Marks:
One of my favorite things that presenters do, and I use this trick sometimes. And Mike, I’ve seen presentations where I know you’ve done this too, is you can ask the room. I think it’s important for us to not make any assumptions about the audiences that we’re speaking to. I think that can lead sometimes to a lack of clarity and confusion. And so if you’re presenting to a user group about a topic that you know a lot about, I think it’s a great tool. Sometimes even just engage the audience and bring them with you to say, “Before I get started, raise your hand if you’re an admin or raise your hand if you have familiarity with the topic that I’m going to cover.”

And that does two things. One, it tells you how you can tailor the rest of your content or your presentation to the people in the room, but it also kind of opens up almost a dialogue between you and the audience. So even if they don’t speak for the rest of your presentation, you’ve created a real human moment of engagement with them that is going to be super important and key to holding their attention for the entire time that you’re presenting.

Mike Gerholdt:
And much like that, and Ella, I’ve seen you do this, is if you’re going to ask the question, make sure it’s data that you’re going to actually act upon. Because I feel if you’re going to somehow tailor your presentation and make a couple versions, which I’ve done for user groups because I wasn’t sure what the level of interest or the level of knowledge of the topic that I was talking about was, then you can kind of immediately pivot based on that. And I think everybody appreciates when they took the time to raise their hand that you’re actually curating the content for that.

Ella Marks:
There absolutely needs to be a payoff. If you’re someone that’s not as comfortable giving presentations, starting with the question at the very beginning and trying to weave that throughout can feel intimidating. And what I would recommend instead is to pick a moment within your content where you can do exactly Mike, what you just said. Which is, you have a slide that hits on, maybe it’s a new feature or a different topic. Instead of asking a super broad question that you then need to weave into your story for the rest of your presentation. You can tailor your question to exactly what you’re talking about on the slide.

And that can help you build that muscle to incorporate who’s in the room and that audience into your talk track without having to start with that big broad question at the beginning. We have to start somewhere. And I think a great place to learn that skill is really starting with something small, a specific slide or a specific product, and learning from there how to incorporate the questions that you’re asking to a more broader scale to cover a whole presentation.

Mike Gerholdt:
So sticking on the theme of building content, there’s a lot of mechanics to a presentation, but building the content. Depending on the topic you’re choosing, it can feel like you’re boiling the ocean. “I have all this to show, and I’m on slide 68 already. I can’t possibly show “What are some of the techniques that you use to really boil down what you’re presenting given sometimes the restricted timeline that you have?

Ella Marks:
First, before I go into tips, I just want to reiterate that phrase, don’t boil the ocean. That is the number one thing that literally…

Mike Gerholdt:
Literally don’t. If you have a big death ray, please don’t boil the ocean.

Ella Marks:
Please don’t boil the ocean. Global warming, we don’t need that. But I think with presentations, it’s super important because you usually have limited time to communicate whatever it is in your presentation you’re going to communicate. That’s not even considering the fact that people’s attention spans are short. So you need to do that work to figure out what are your key points. And one of the things that I really like to do is I create a document and I will just start an outline. I’ll start typing out what I think the points are in the story that I need to cover.

I’ll include any important examples, include a CTA, kind of those key pieces of a presentation, but I’m not actually putting it together yet. I’m just making a huge list of everything I think might be included. And then from there, I go in and I kind of prioritize. So that list is usually way longer than what the presentation ends up being or has way more information, but it is a starting point. And that’s the starting point that I kind of use to say, “Okay, I’m identifying that I’m seeing a couple common themes in what I’ve written out here. How can I communicate those most effectively?”

And what I like about the list is that if you’re doing it… Whatever platform that you’re using, a Google Doc, a Quip Doc, whatever, it’s really easy to copy and paste and move around the order as well to think about not just, “What am I including, but how am I going to start creating this story?” And that gives you kind of a framework to use moving forward.

Mike Gerholdt:
I would agree. So you mentioned story, and I think a big part of storytelling is the visual element. How do you balance just not putting paragraphs of text up on the slides and that imagery?

Ella Marks:
It’s a really good question, and it’s something that I ask myself all the time. Because I’m not a designer, I do not consider myself to be good at graphic design. And so when I build a presentation, it can feel really intimidating to think about what are the visuals that I need to create? And there’s a technique that I learned at Salesforce that I was taught called blue boxing, and that’s really what I use. And the way that it works is once I’ve gotten to that state, I have my outline, I kind of know what I’m going to put on slides. Instead of jumping right to what is my final slide going to look like, here is the exact paragraphs, here’s the exact talk track, here’s the exact visual.

I kind of take a step back from that and use blue boxes, literal blue boxes on a slide to map out what I think it could look like and how I think the content on the slide can reinforce what it is that I’m going to say. So if I know that I’m going to put together a slide that has some tips, for example. I might put together a placement of where those tips might go and think, “Oh, there could be a supporting image for this.” What I don’t do is I don’t dive in and find that image right away. I really take that step of thinking through, “Okay, what is a visual that can support what I’m saying?” And I go through the whole deck like that first and then come back to really hone in on what the message is on that particular slide and pull in those core visuals.

But taking that step to do that kind of blue boxing framework really helps you identify how the story is going to flow and how those visuals are going to support you. Because I will say there are times when you’re going to want more text on a slide than others, and so you want to have a good balance of that. You don’t want folks to also just only be reading the content on your slides while you’re speaking to them. And so if you take that kind of step to build it out first, you’ll have a better idea of what the mix of your presentation is going to look like, how you might use different slide formats to engage people, because we know people have short attention spans, so you want to make sure that we’re kind of switching things up.

We’re providing different visuals every few minutes, and I think using design is a very powerful tool to help you do that.

Mike Gerholdt:
I would agree. I would agree. Plus pacing, when you’re thinking that through, you mentioned people have short attention spans, so keeping the slides moving also helps keep people’s attention as well. I think often when I’m reviewing decks or I’m watching presentations at events, and these are outside of Salesforce too, sometimes people have a hard time closing their presentation. I feel like it’s either one, they kind of fade off into the distance. It’s like an eighties’ movie where they just walk off into the beach into the sunset and we never hear from them again. Or it’s like a steel door slamming shut where it’s like, “Okay, so that’s this. And if you have any questions, thanks.” Bam.
And the presentation’s done. What’s your approach for the closure because I feel like the closure is the most important part?

Ella Marks:
I’d agree that if you don’t have people with you at the end, I think you’ve really missed a big opportunity when it comes to creating presentations. The way that I would think about it is throughout your entire presentation, as you’re putting together that outline. There are three things that you can think about that you want people to take away, how you want them to feel, what you want them to think and how you want them to act. And I would say that’s not just your final slide or the thing that you leave the audience with. That should be at the core of why you’re putting that presentation together.

I think the final slide in that CTA is incredibly important, but I also think that as someone in the audience who doesn’t know anything about your presentation going into it, I think that they should know where you’re going throughout the presentation. And that’s really how you make whatever it is you share, whatever your CTA is super impactful. So I’ll give you an example of that. If you’re going to do an amazing presentation, let’s say it’s on new release features and you’re going into great depth about… We have the spring 24 release right now, I know that’s top of mind for a lot of admins.

If you go through great content throughout, at the end, to your point, if you don’t leave folks with something to do next, they start to question what the purpose was of you sharing all that information. And as a speaker, that is the opposite of what you want. You want to be able to say, “I’m doing this presentation to help you prepare for the release, and I’m going to do that by showing you features and leaving you with either a resource or an approach or tips for you to take and go do this at your own companies or deliver your own presentation.”

And I think where sometimes people fall flat is they think, “Great, I’ll throw a CTA in my presentation at the end, and then everybody will go read my blog post or they’ll all go follow me on various social media networks.” And unfortunately, if you’re not working in the purpose of what that CTA is throughout, it’s not going to have that same impact. So you need it to close strong, but it shouldn’t be an afterthought. Everything in your presentation should in essence be pointing towards your end goal, whatever you want to leave the audience with.

Mike Gerholdt:
I’ve many a times seen an entire slide devoted to resources and thought to myself, “I don’t know where to start.” There’s a lot of resources, but a library is a resource too, and it’s full of books, but I don’t know where to start. [inaudible 00:16:32]

Ella Marks:
It’s so common. Well, and that’s the thing, it’s kind of a double-edged sword, right? Because a lot of times there’s so many resources because there are so many good resources out there, and that’s awesome. But one thing to keep in mind when you’re putting together a presentation is you’re presenting because you have expertise or you have a message to share. And so really rely on that. Use that to say, “Okay, great. I know there are tons of resources.” But actually share your recommendation. What is the number one thing that you would do. That’s something that you as a presenter bring that no one else can that’s unique to you, what that next step is.

We know that where most presentations, if you put 10 resources, people usually don’t look at all 10. I hate to say it, but they probably won’t look at more than one anyway, so focus on that one thing. And you really use your credibility that you’ve built with your audience to drive towards something more specific than a laundry list of things that people can do or read or engage with.

Mike Gerholdt:
A lot of this content creation focused around a solo presenter, but I think it carries over if you’re presenting with someone else. And I see this a lot at our events, even user groups. It’s a lot easier. And myself included, the first time I presented at Dreamforce, I had a co-presenter. It’s a lot easier to feel like more people carrying the weight of a presentation. What advice or what best practices do you have when you’re pairing up with somebody to present on how you divide up content and how the two of you interact during the presentation?

Ella Marks:
The first thing that I would do if I was presenting with someone else is have a meeting, get together with them, chat with them. I’m someone that prefers a meeting. I know some folks like to communicate on Slack or other formats, but I just love to chat with someone about this because you are going to be presenting and speaking. And to me, that’s the best way to get a sense of that person’s presentation style. And in that conversation, we might divide, if we’re building content together, we might talk about our own expertise and where we feel like we can add the most value to the story and divide up the content that we work on and the slides and who’s speaking based on what we think our strengths are.

And then making sure that we’re having a really open conversation about that. And I think one thing that you can do that when you divide a presentation, a lot of times what you see is, “Okay, Mike and I are presenting together. I’ll take one slide, Mike, you take the next one, then we’ll go back and forth.” And sometimes that doesn’t feel super. It feels a little disjointed when you haven’t had the chance to actually talk through your content and rehearse. Rehearsing is so important for any presentation, but if you have more than one person, it is absolutely critical because that’s how you’re going to feel out how that story is going to come together.

And what you may find is, “Yeah, I’m presenting with Mike, and Mike has a ton of expertise in this one area, but I have something to add there too.” And actually switching up who’s speaking on a particular slide that can reengage the audience. That’s another tool that we have in our toolkits to make sure that people are staying with us throughout our presentation. And all that’s going to come down to whether or not you’ve communicated all of these things with your co-presenter. Making sure that you guys are connected every step of the way is I think the best way to make a successful presentation with a partner or with the group, whoever it is.

Mike Gerholdt:
I would agree. And I feel to that point of, I’ve seen decks and presentations where it’s every other slide. Change it up where it makes it most relevant because there is a little bit with the audience of context switching going on where they’re trying to understand who’s speaking and it should be relevant if the person’s speaking and not just, “Oh, well, that means if we go every other one, I’m on this slide and I don’t know anything about this.” It can also help you regroup content that you’re putting together.

Ella Marks:
Absolutely. And there’s a lot of different ways that you can do this, but I really think that having that conversation with your co-presenter or co-presenters is going to be the best way to highlight how can you use your collective energy to get your message across in the best way possible?

Mike Gerholdt:
Right. Stage presence or stagecraft, even in small presentations where boardrooms I think are super important. How do you prepare for that? What are some of the things that you’ve gone through as you’ve kind of honed your ability as you were getting ready for a Dreamforce keynote to kind of make sure that your presence was there and it was adding to what the content you were presenting?

Ella Marks:
There are definitely a few things I do before every presentation, but I think a lot of it for me personally comes down to some important self-talk and pump up for a presentation. When you’re chosen to present at an event or you’ve submitted something to a community conference, sometimes you need to remind yourself the day of, you get a little bit nervous, you might be scared to present. You were chosen for this, and you have knowledge and expertise to share. And going back for me and giving myself that confidence is probably the most important step that I take before I present anything. I always have to remind myself there’s a reason I’m here.

I have valuable knowledge to share. I’ll reset on whatever the topic or the goal is of the presentation. And then my hidden trick, I would say. I was like, “I don’t know where I was going with that sneaky trick.” I guess. Sneaky trick, my trick or treat tip, which is not uncommon at all, is I love a pump up song. I just love something to help, I don’t know, make me feel energized and excited because I know that if I go into a presentation not pumped up, it’s going to be really hard for people to listen. A lot of times we present… Internally, we present in a meeting and there’s a lot of other people presenting or we’re in a lot of meetings that day, or at Dreamforce, people attend a lot of sessions.
That’s a lot of listening. And if you come out there with flat energy and aren’t excited to be there and excited to get going, it shows and it makes it a lot harder for people to actually listen and absorb the content. And so going in pumping myself up is actually something that when I don’t do it, I feel like I can tell in the presentation that my energy is not there, that I’m not communicating what I could in the best way possible.

Mike Gerholdt:
You know I have to ask what your pump up song is, right?

Ella Marks:
I know. It changes. A lot of my pump up songs are Lizzo though. I have to say Lizzo. I do love Taylor Swift as well, but I just… Lizzo, the number one song for me last year was Truth Hurts. There’s some lyrics in there that I can’t repeat on the podcast, but if you listen to the song, I think…

Mike Gerholdt:
My pump up song…

Ella Marks:
I think you’ll know.

Mike Gerholdt:
A lot of lyrics I can’t repeat on the podcast.

Ella Marks:
If you do listen, I think you’ll know exactly what part of the song I’m referring to where I walk out and I’m like, “Aha, let’s go. Let’s get into it.”

Mike Gerholdt:
So if you see people at community events or at Salesforce events, walk up to the stage with their AirPods in, it’s probably a pump up song that they’re listening to. I can’t blame them. If you were to boil down and think of maybe, I don’t know… Let’s choose five because five’s a good number to remember. What are five things that you always try to include that you really look for in like, “Wow, that presentation knocked it out of the park?”

Ella Marks:
That’s a good question. As a reviewer of a lot of content, I’m just trying to think the things that have absolutely wowed me. Well definitely first, when it comes to presenting a good title to me, I’m immediately locked in. If there’s a description associated with it like it would be for an event or maybe even a calendar invite. That to me is a sign of a good presentation. I know what I’m going to see. I’m excited for that content and I’m kind of hopeful to dive in. The second is probably… This is tough. There’s just so many different ways to present, but I think looking for people that engage with the audience.

So either doing what we talked about before, getting that post-check of who’s in the room or have some sort of engaging component to their presentation. That for me, because my attention span is very short, tends to be a very effective way to get my attention. And I enjoy presentations that have that. I think when people also set context by sharing their own expertise, we didn’t talk about it in this conversation, but I think one important thing that you really need to do when you present is make sure that you highlight who you are. You need to have an introduction that is, “Here’s who I am, here’s why I’m here.” And that builds credibility.

So when I hear something or see a presentation that I know the person is credible, that usually also is an indicator to me that it’s a great presentation. Mike, I feel like you wanted five quick tips, and I’m giving you a lot longer than that.

Mike Gerholdt:
I don’t know. I just picked five out of the air because it sounds good. It doesn’t have to be five.

Ella Marks:
I also can’t count, so I don’t know what I’m on, but I’ll say…

Mike Gerholdt:
Well, as a good host, you’d think I was paying attention and counting.

Ella Marks:
This is where I would use a visual to reinforce what I’m saying and remind me. If I was presenting this, I would put together a slide and I would have probably five horizontal bubbles on the slide and a few words about each, and that would help me stay on track. And at the end, I would have a super effective CTA, which I think would be one of the things that I look out for. If I know what… If I’m feeling inspired or motivated, or even just know the next steps I have to take after a presentation. That’s how I know that it was good and it was effective.

And then I think my final thing would be, and this may seem counterintuitive, but if I have questions, a lot of times that’s a sign to me that the content was really interesting. I think if I want to approach a speaker after their presentation and want to learn more and want to continue the conversation. I have follow-ups or things like that, that’s a sign that they did a really good job in engaging me. It could sometimes be a sign that they didn’t share the right information. So I think you have to be careful there, but wanting to connect with the presenter, wanting to learn a little bit more and asking a question, I think is engaging in itself. So that to me is a good sign that it was a good presentation as well.

Mike Gerholdt:
I go back and forth with questions, but I see your point. I think for me, I mean if I was to boil it to one thing. I don’t have a word, but the comfort ability that the presenter has with the content. I really love it when somebody, it doesn’t feel like their first time going through the content. And it so bugs me when I see somebody walk through and they click and goes to the slide and it surprises them. You’re like, “Really? Okay.” I really like it when somebody knows something and the slides are almost happening in the background and they’re really paying attention to the audience. That to me, really gets me. And that comes with rehearsals, it comes with knowing the content, everything that you said previously.

Ella Marks:
Absolutely. I think a lot of us think, especially people who give presentations all the time, we’re like, “Oh, we can win this. It’ll be fine. I know the content.” But the reality is people can tell when you have not done the preparation necessary for a particular presentation. And so I think it is a great sign of a good presentation and good content when someone isn’t overly relying on their visuals or words on the slide to tell the story.
It’s actually a story that they’re telling where the visuals are supporting. It’s not at the center of everything that they’re doing. It’s really more of a show that you’re watching.

Mike Gerholdt:
I often compare presenting to athletes. Some of the greatest athletes that we’ve had in baseball or basketball or whatever sport you watch, they practice and there’s a reason for that. They don’t just show up and naturally wing it. Derek Jeter didn’t naturally winged being good. It’s repetition and it’s doing and becoming comfortable with the moment. So it’s great stuff. Thank you, Ella for coming on the pod and sharing. This is very relevant for where we are right now. Not only heading into TDX, but heading into world tour. And I feel like community group season, not to mention just budget presenting. I want more things in Salesforce season to my executives and all kinds of presentation times.

Ella Marks:
This is definitely super timely. So thanks so much, Mike, for having me.

Mike Gerholdt:
So it was a great discussion with Ella. I feel like we only scratched the surface. We talked about content creation and also stagecraft. I know there’s so much more. I could probably do two or three more episodes with Ella. So if you enjoyed this episode and you’ve got some content ideas that you’d like to have her speak on, ping us, let us know. I’d love to have her back on to talk more about content and the art of presenting. Now, I need you to do one thing, the art of presenting, which is press share on this episode. So if you’re listening to it on iTunes, it’s super easy. You just tap the dots and click share episode and you can post it to social.

Maybe you got a friend that’s getting ready for a big user group presentation or they’re going to do a presentation to their company. This would help them 20, 30 minutes, they’d go out, walk the dog, “Hey, come back. I got a whole bunch of knowledge about how I’m going to get my presentation together.” And of course, we have way more resources for admins at admin.salesforce.com, including a transcript of the show. Now, if you got more interesting things, questions, comments, concerns, you can go to the Admin Trailblazer group in the Trailblazer community. Of course, the link is in the show notes. And with that, until next week, I’ll see you in the cloud.

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Emma Keeling, Salesforce Consultant and Nonprofit Community Group Leader. Join us as we chat about the skill of project management and some best practices to help you keep things organized.

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

Why everyone needs project management skillsEmma is one of our guests on our new “Skills for Success” video series, which breaks down the skills Salesforce Admins need to succeed in today’s world. And even though we brought her on to talk about project management, she actually doesn’t call herself a project manager. But she uses those skills all the time as a Salesforce Consultant, which is kind of the point.

When we think of project management, we imagine an array of timetables and Kanban Boards, and, indeed, there are some project managers who use those things to do big jobs at large organizations. What Emma does, however, is a little different. She keeps her team on task, on schedule, and working together effectively. And those are skills that every admin should have.

Start with the starting pointOften, your starting point is figuring out what you’re even starting with. Is this a new process or an old process? Has it been documented before or are you coming in to make those decisions? And what are the priorities for the organization? Sometimes someone is saying they need this feature or that feature but the problem you really need to be solving is something else entirely.

“One of the key things is people,” Emma says, “if you’re doing an implementation, you’re probably not the expert on everything.” If you’re adding a new feature for fundraising, for example, you probably need to talk to the people doing the fundraising to figure out the best way to do things.

Timelines for your organization and your peopleEven if you’re not a Kanban Master, you need to be aware of what timelines are important for your organization. For the nonprofit world that Emma operates in, November 1st is an important date because it marks the start of the holiday giving season. That means you probably want to get anything related to donations squared away and tested before it sees heavy use.

You also want to be aware of how timelines affect your people. Is everyone busy at the same time, or are their schedules independent from each other? Who is going to make plans based on the timeline that you’re outlining? It’s crucial to communicate which dates are firm and which dates are flexible. And it’s important to build in flexibility in case the unexpected happens.

Be sure to listen to the full episode for Emma’s four key project management skills for admins.

Podcast swag* Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Resources* Skills for Success—A New Video Series to Help Salesforce Admins Succeed * Salesforce Admin Skills Kit * The Human Stack

Social* Emma: @Salesforce_Em * Salesforce Admins: @SalesforceAdmns * Gillian: @GillianKBruce * Mike: @MikeGerholdt

Full show transcriptMike: This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we’re talking with Emma Keeling about the skill of project management and some best practices that Emma uses to keep things organized. Emma is a Salesforce consultant and nonprofit community group leader. Now, before we get into this episode, which I know you’re going to want to check out, I want you to be sure you’re doing the following. So if you’re listening to Salesforce Admins Podcasts on iTunes or just wherever you get your podcast, make sure that you are subscribed or following the podcast. That way every Thursday you will get a brand new episode dropped right on your phone automatically, so then you don’t have to think about it. Boom, new episode. Yay. All right, so with that, let’s get to our conversation with Emma. Emma, welcome to the podcast.

Emma Keeling: Thanks for having me, Mike.

Mike: Well, I’m glad we had a chance to connect as part of the Skills for Success series. Jillian’s having you on, and I also wanted to talk too, because you are in the project management video I’ll say, but as you told me before I pressed record, you’re not a project manager. So let’s start there. What do you do in the Salesforce ecosystem?

Emma Keeling: So in the Salesforce ecosystem, I am effectively a Salesforce consultant. I started my life back in corporate hospitality where I was the expert of a product that wasn’t Salesforce, that then got migrated to being built on force.com, and I was the admin for that and suddenly had to become the Salesforce expert and basically an accidental admin. And then after about three years, I kind of got to the point where I was the global product manager and they were starting to talk about moving me to onto other products that weren’t Salesforce related. And at that point I was like, no, because I want to do Salesforce and I also want to stay hands-on. I don’t just want to do product management as such. So that’s what I did.
I went freelance, started doing hospitality stuff and then Covid hit, and that gave me a real good opportunity to diversify and I jumped in full feet into the nonprofit world. And we’re now more than three years on and that’s going really well. And yeah, so I’m Salesforce consultant, but with that role comes a lot of project management, right?

Mike: Yeah.

Emma Keeling: So I am currently spend about half of my time working with one client where I am the project manager for their Salesforce implementation. And I’m actually working with another partner, which is really interesting. So there’s another partner on the other side actually doing the implementation. And when I was asked to do that role, they were like, “We’ve been recommended you for this and we are looking for a project manager.” And I was like, awesome. I was like, I have project manager experience, but not your typical project manager.

I remember project managers when I was in the big corporate hospitality world, and they were drawing their massive diagrams and they were timetabling it out to almost the minute. And I had more than one project manager telling me, “Well, you can’t now change your mind about that.” I’m like, what? That decision that you made three months ago and you didn’t really know what the product could do, but at that point you said you were going to do X and you now want to do Y. Well, you can’t do that because it’s not in the plan. And I was like, okay. So I’m like, I’m not one of them. It’s like I’m more, what I would say is a taskmaster, don’t get me wrong. I can run to a timetable. We can sit and look at timings and work out. Do they make sense? I can juggle diaries and that sort of thing.

I can work with vendors and help timetable that in. But to me that’s a slightly different form. I almost feel like I’m more of what I would call an internal project manager. I’m not that external project manager you bring in who all they’ve ever done is big projects that are really needed in some of those, say Fortune 500 companies. I’m sort of a slightly smaller scale project manager. I was told very clearly by somebody that there’s no way you’ll manage to project manage this project in two days a week. And I was like, well, I’m like, let’s see how it goes. And actually it’s gone very well and we’re actually going to deliver on time and on budget. So it’s working.

Mike: So you’re a good project manager. And I think that’s the reality of it. There’s different levels of project management. There’s the full on people that are dedicated. They come in, everything’s a Kanban chart, a swim lane, they’ve got Gantt charts, everything. That’s their world. Then there’s kind of everything in between, all the way down to admins that just have to manage a lot of tasks. And I think project management is, that’s why we include it in the Skills for Success series, one of those things where exactly as you put it, how do we manage all of these tasks so that we’re not overwhelmed and we get stuff done on time and hopefully like you on budget.

Emma Keeling: Absolutely. And that’s I think the real key. Like you say, there are people who do this as a full-time job at that high level. And interestingly, the partner I’m working with on this particular project, they have one of those people, but actually she’s also not full-time, she is working multiple projects, but she’s the person who’s already managing a Smartsheet where she’s got all of those dates, but then we just kind of dovetail in together because what I’m managing is those priorities. I’m managing a lot of organizational priorities and a lot of, you talk about tasks. So when I’m working with any of my clients on any of the work I’m working on, whether that is just supporting an admin with some of their questions and almost being there kind of, what’s the word? Their person to just go to just bounce ideas off almost… it’s a little bit like that.

It’s like consultant, but it’s like it’s literally consulting as in I’m not necessarily building stuff. I’m just helping them with their conversations. I’m helping them with their, is this the best way for me to do this? I’m an admin, I’m a solo admin, is this the best way to do this? And then so through that I’m managing tasks there and I’m very much, you need somewhere to keep your tasks that you’re never going to manage to keep everything in your brain or just on a notepad. So I use ClickUp, that’s kind of my product of choice. And in there I put all my tasks in there and they’re all by client and they’re there, ready for me to go through, add notes on, copy and paste emails in. There’s loads more it can do, but I kind of really just manage that.

And then I also have to being a consultant, manage my time, so I attach time to them. And I choose to use ClickUp just to be clear, rather than Salesforce, just simply from a potential growth perspective, Salesforce licensing, as we know, can get a little bit pricey, and I do get an org as a partner, but I kind of went, you know what, ClickUp works. Somebody suggested it to me, I’d seen it in action with somebody else, and I was like, do you know what? I’m going to try that. But you could easily do it in Salesforce, particularly if you’re a solo admin.

Mike: I was going to say, let’s start there at the basement level, as a solo admin or an admin that’s maybe just spun up an org or doing all the implementation themselves, what were some of the things as a project manager that when they put that hat on that they need to think about? Because there’s a lot to do, right? There’s new features, there’s existing features that they need to roll out and maybe bugs. When Emma jumps in and has to sort all that out, do you start by prioritizing things or where does your project management start?

Emma Keeling: So I guess it depends where you are and what you are handling. Because I would say no project ever looks the same, but one of the key things is people, right? Figuring out what people you’ve got. Because if you are doing, say, an implementation, you are probably not the expert on everything. Even if you are implementing a new feature as the Salesforce admin, you may or may not be the expert on that feature. So if you are implementing something for fundraising, you’re probably going to need to talk to the people in fundraising to find out what they really want.

Also, are you starting from totally new? As in no one’s ever documented any of this before to actually there’s a load of stuff here that somebody’s written down and given me. So really that starting point is almost figuring out where you’re starting. So like, I have all the stuff, let me take that away. Let me process it, let me validate it. Or you’re starting with conversations with people. And you’re really trying to understand the lay of the land, particularly even just with an organization, right?

Mike: Right.

Emma Keeling: You are going to have far more success with Salesforce, with exec buy-in. Exec buy-in, I used to, I’ll be honest, I used to scoff and be like, huh, yeah, really no, you really do. Having that exec, and I would say almost that probably level below, depends how big the organization is, but probably that level below, you want your exec to be on board, your top CEO. You want them to be well and truly on board, but you need a good foundation of people around that and you need to know who your players are. You need to know whether they’re pro Salesforce, anti Salesforce, whether they’ve got good technology knowledge or whether they maybe struggle a bit more with technology adoption.

You want to be trying to get all of that sorts of information and really understand your people. And then you want to start understanding what’s key here and you want to understand what’s key right at the top of that organization or as I say at that second level to really understand it’s not the person who came to you first who wants something most importantly, it’s not the person who shouts the loudest. This is where it all kind of dovetails almost into that product management role that I historically did. Because you’re really then kind of going, okay, so I’ve got somebody here in grants who says, all these things are really important, but actually when I talk to the person at the top, they’re saying, “No, no, no, our focus at the moment isn’t our outbound grants, it’s our fundraising and getting our funds in.” And that’s where you’ve got to manage your people.

So you’ve got to manage your people and be like, grants person, you are amazing. I love your energy, I love all your ideas. Let’s take all of that. And then you start almost building out things like roadmaps and you go from there. Now this is where the world of let’s say project management, product management, just being an admin all collides because whose role is that? Is that one person’s role? Is it lots of people’s roles? At least I would say if you are a small organization or maybe you’re not, but there’s just an admin and you kind of think, oh my God, we really could do with more people. You still need to do a little bit of each of those. Because you’ve got to have somewhere where you are documenting what’s important, where you are kind of reviewing what’s important, and then where you are almost getting down those almost business as usual type tasks.

And also then looking at things like timelines and dates. If you are being told that fundraising needs something for the holiday season, and if your holiday season, if it starts 1st of November, let’s say that’s a common date that’s battered around in the UK, it’s like 1st of November is when all this has to be in. Now, if you are in September and you are being asked for a massive piece of functionality, that’s where you kind of have to do the pause and the so what did you do last year? Oh, okay, so you do have a solution in place. Do we want to do this? I have recently witnessed somebody try and roll out brand new donation pages in the middle of their biggest campaign period, and they came to me and said, “Oh, this seems to be a problem.” I’ll be honest, I didn’t project manage this one. I was just on the kind of sideline.

And they came to me and they said, “We’re having problems with these and we’re really worried, it’s impacting our campaign period.” And my first question was, well, my first point, I guess it wasn’t even a question, was why would you do that now? And I think that is kind of also where your project management comes in. It’s sitting down and saying what else is happening in the organization? The organization I’m working with at the moment is going through, we have three really busy periods a year in programs, so you know you’ve got to work around them, but do you have to totally work around them? I actually found out that the key person I needed in that team does a lot of work at other times of the year. Her work is not tied to those programs times. And it was really key that I figured that out because I initially was trying to block out time, kind of going, oh no, we’re not going to be able to use this person during this time.

And actually when I started talking to her, she was like, “No, no, no, I can do that, as long as I know in advance.” So I think that’s a huge amount about project management. It’s getting all those people, knowing your people and getting them in the right place and knowing building relationships, being able to go to somebody and say, I need you to do this, and I know you don’t really have time, but is there any chance you can do this because maybe something’s moved forward in a project, maybe something was delayed, maybe something has just come up. The people are really, really key.

Mike: Yeah, I think that’s an important aspect to bring up is too often I think we forget when we’re doing a new rollout or even adding a new feature, what other things are going on in the organization at the same time and how will this adversely or not adversely affect somebody? Is it our slow period or is it our busy period? Because if it’s your busy time, everything’s got to work. Everybody’s stressed out anyway. And then if you’re rolling something else out on top of that, boy, what is the reception going to be like? I think that’s a really great point to bring up.

Emma Keeling: Yeah, absolutely. And only last week I was chatting with a guy called Tim who does the human stack, really interesting concept of not focusing on the digital but focusing on the humans over the innovation and how that works and really interesting. He’s on LinkedIn and people should go check him out. But what I saw, I was reading some articles and one of them was, it was basically a coffee cup where with an implementation or anything, like you say, it could just be a new feature. You are basically pouring more into that person’s coffee cup and actually what they need is a bigger cup. They can’t just keep taking on more and more. But I think sometimes as a project manager, it’s really key for you to ask that question. So ask the question of who is going to do this? Do we have time to do this? Do you have time to test this?

Those things that even though in a meeting, one of the things I will try and do is bring groups of people together so that I don’t have to repeat the same conversation over and over again. And you also know that everybody then heard the same narrative. So the project I’m currently working on, we’re about 10 months in. It’s going to have been about a 12 month project when it goes live. And we’ve probably had big meetings I would say about every two months where we’ve really, I’ve brought up a timeline and I’ve looked at the next couple of sprints and just called out what is happening, who is responsible for what, and that might be as simple as it’s our responsibility as the client versus it’s the implementation partner’s responsibility, allowing people then to call up and go, actually all my team’s on holiday that week, for example. And you actually have that.

But the other thing I’ve also cautious of doing is giving them a whole project plan and people going away and making full plans based on that when you’re like, actually some of those dates further down the line could be fluid. So being a little bit cautious and making sure that things are caveated. And as much as people say, don’t write everything on a presentation slide, still writing stuff on a presentation slide that says (TBC), next to certain dates. Just so that when somebody says, but you said the date for that training was going to be on that day, I can say, I did say it was to be confirmed and allowing you that space to breathe because actually a lot of what happens in a project isn’t necessarily down to the project manager, even if you are the solo admin.

So you could be the solo admin who’s working on a new piece of functionality, who then gets pulled into another piece of work that really is an organizational priority. So I know somebody who works in a charity to do with children affected by war. Now, you can imagine when the war in the Ukraine started, they got very much, their organizational priorities changed. So that isn’t the project manager’s fault or the admin’s fault when actually that piece of functionality doesn’t happen. That’s something outside of their control. We all face this with Covid, but that can happen on a lower level. People are sick. So you also need to bake in time. You need bake in time for what if somebody’s sick? What if somebody isn’t available to test? Is there a backup person? Can that backup person test and is there output valid? Because I’ve worked on many projects where one person will say, “Yes, that’s absolutely fine,” and they may be aren’t the main decision maker.

Main decision maker comes back and says, “Ooh, sorry, but I’m not happy with that decision.” And you kind of go, okay, well we asked and you said the other person could make the decision, but okay, this is real life and you have to be willing to pivot and you can’t be responsible for everything. When somebody’s son is sick and they can’t make it into the office that day, there’s nothing you can do about it. And I’m always very clear with whoever I’m working with, whoever I’m reporting into, let’s say whether that’s my client, whether that when I was internal, if that was my manager, I would almost make that quite clear of I can only be fully responsible for this to a point.

So especially when I work with clients, I have to kind of highlight, I can’t force your team to do this. I can give them all the tools to fish, teach them to fish. I can get on a call with them and sit with them while they do testing, say, but if they didn’t want to come to the call, I can’t. So there’s kind of a level where you have to say, there’s only so much I can do and also how much do you want me to do? Because when you look at a client, they might not want to pay you for all that time. And even internally, if you’re an internal admin, they might not want you to spend hours just sitting with users while they’re going through testing. So that’s kind of where you need that exec. You need that next level up. You need that next level where we say, hey, team, this needs testing. You’ve been sent all the information. You’ve been sent a deadline. Please work towards that deadline. Please let us know if there are any problems. You almost need that backstop, right?

Mike: Right.

Emma Keeling: And that backstop can’t always just be you. I talk a little bit about playing good cop, bad cop. I also find I kind of need to be good cop as much as I can be. Don’t get me wrong. Sometimes I have to play bad cop and I have to be like, no, sorry, that doesn’t work. And in some roles that’s more of a requirement than others, but sometimes you have to figure out who you need to keep on the side. And if you know that you need to have a team be really happy and you have to, maybe they’re under a lot of pressure. Maybe they’ve got people off sick, maybe they’re down a team member because somebody moved on to another role, you sometimes don’t want to be the person who has to say the final no.
And I don’t always think that that’s a bad thing that you need to bring somebody else in who maybe says, “Hey guys, I don’t think we can do it like that or hey team, let’s think about moving that back. Can we move it back a month?” You need people to help you with those conversations.

Mike: Yeah. When you think through the skill of project management, because you do this for as a consulting and admins manage projects a lot too, what would you say are the three most important things that you’ve learned that help you successfully manage a project?

Emma Keeling: Now, that’s an interesting question because I obviously did the video with Jillian that kind of goes with this, and I can guarantee that whatever I said in that video is going to be completely different to what I say now. And there’s a reason for this, right? Because there are that many skills that I had to pick out what skills I was going to talk about in that video. So I would say our top skills, at least how I feel today, let’s say, are I think people skills. And you can intertwine that with things like leadership.

I think strong people skills, being able to talk to people, being able to understand people, being able to understand what motivates people, even down to things like are the people in your team, people who are there early in the morning and that’s when they have great time? Or are they the sort of person who you’re better getting on a call? Or are they the sort of people you can just send a slack message to and they’ll just be like, “Yep, send over some more information in text form. I’m fine with that.” Really being able to understand people is important.

I think it is very important that you can understand time and budget. So being able to understand how long do I have for this piece of work? How much money do we have? And then be able to also convert that into what does that look like at the end? Because if I have a low budget, but we really need this sort of functionality, in what ways can we achieve that? Is there a lower cost way to achieve it? Can we build an MVP, that minimum viable product? Can we do that instead?

And actually if that isn’t going to meet our use case, do we build anything at all? Do we actually go back to the drawing board and we go back to the leadership and we either A, ask for more money or if you’ve already got to the point where there isn’t the more money, do you go back and say, Hey, do you know what, maybe we’re better to start with something else. Maybe we’re better not to do priority one on the list because maybe we need a round of funding for that. Or maybe we need to wait until our budget comes in for next year. Or maybe we’ve got another in-house resource who can work on that, but they’re working on another project. Try and figure out where are we best placed to use that money and use that time.

And then I think the last thing is probably, and I’m toying here between is it important to be able to use tools and software and that sort of thing, or is it important to have industry knowledge? I would say if I have to put it in a top three, I mean to both equally, it’s important, so I’m going to push it to four. So I would say you’ve got to be able to manage your time as a project manager. If you can’t keep track of your tasks and what you are doing. If you don’t remember to send out the email, if you don’t remember to chase somebody, if you don’t manage to collaborate effectively in JIRA or Google Sheets or whatever that is, you can’t really expect to be able to bring everybody else along for the ride. So you’ve got to be able to do that.

And then I think the last thing really is that industry knowledge. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’ve worked with some very, very good project managers who actually, their industry knowledge was much lower. But you end up caveating that with a lot of time spent with them, learning from subject matter experts to be able to have those questions, to be able to talk about a product or a solution or an industry, and particularly the industry, don’t get me wrong, it can work. And as I said, I’ve been in the nonprofit space now for about three and a half to four years. So I’m not going to say I know everything about nonprofits. I don’t. And I try and ask a lot of questions to learn more, but you really have to up that knowledge. And I think to be successful, you need to learn about that industry or at least be willing to learn. I find it very difficult with project managers who suggest they don’t need to know anything about the industry to be successful in it, because I just don’t think that’s the case.

Mike: Yeah, I would find that hard. I had some great discussions in community groups too about I want to be a Salesforce admin, what industry should I be in? I’m like, well, an industry that you’re aware of and are familiar with, because otherwise you’re really setting yourself up for a steep learning curve, thinking that through of having to learn the industry as well.

Emma Keeling: Yeah, totally. And I think if you are going into maybe a role where you are in a team and you maybe don’t know that, you maybe get a faster ramp up because people around you can help bring up that knowledge. And I think if you apply for a role and you don’t have that, and I think you then just have to be very clear with people. Like “I don’t have the knowledge about this, but I want to learn, so please tell me more or please tell me where I can find out about this.” I’ve even found things like over the lunch table discussions helpful. When I’ve been on site with a client and you sit and have lunch and you can be like, Hey, tell me a bit more about legacy donations and legacy donors and where that comes from and how does that work and how do you find legacy donors, for example?

That was a really interesting discussion. And at the end of it, I was like, wow, I’ve actually learned loads and I can then share that knowledge. But I think if you don’t have industry knowledge, you really need to make sure that people you are working with do or that it’s quite accepted that you don’t, and you need time for that. So you need to factor that in, right? I once went and did a piece of work in a financial services company. It was only a short piece of maternity cover. I’d never wanted to work in that sector, and I was right. I didn’t enjoy working in that sector, if I’m honest. But what I did find was I was able to ask the right questions because I’ve done stuff historically where maybe I haven’t known the answer. So I’ve had to ask lots of questions, but it was challenging. It was challenging.

And the people who knew I didn’t have the knowledge that was okay because they made sure that they started discussions with explanations of why we’re doing this, why is it important? And you have to ask all those whys. Where I was put into conversations with people who didn’t know I didn’t have the industry knowledge, that was really difficult. Because people immediately assume that you do have that knowledge and they aren’t always receptive to the fact that you don’t. So I would say definitely steep learning curve. Try and start somewhere where you’ve got knowledge or at least be clear with people that you don’t have the answers.

Mike: Yeah, absolutely. Emma, you’ve done a really great job of exposing us to some of the things that you do and don’t do as a project manager and thinking about project management as a skill. So I feel this was a very good compliment to the video that you put out with Jillian. So appreciate you taking time out to be on the podcast.

Emma Keeling: Thanks so much for having me, Mike. It’s been fun.

Mike: Yeah, thanks so much.That was a great conversation with Emma. I think she really brought out a lot of things. Boy, one part that you always have to think about is how much other change is going on in the organization as well. So, now if you enjoyed this episode, be sure to share it with one person. If you’re listening on iTunes, just tap those dots and choose share episode. Then you can post it to social, you can text it to a friend. I’d really appreciate it. And of course, if you’re looking for more great resources, your one stop for everything admin is admin.salesforce.com, including a transcript of the show in case you missed anything. So be sure to check that out and join our conversation in the Admin Trailblazer group in the Trailblazer community. Don’t worry, the link is in the show notes. And with that, until next week, we’ll see you in the cloud.

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we sit down for another cup of coffee with Gillian, myself, and Josh Birk. Join us as we chat about the ever-changing nature of work and preview Skills for Success September.

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

How we work, then and nowEvery month, Gillian, myself, and Developer Evangelist Josh Birk sit down with a cup of coffee and a topic. For August’s coffee talk, we’re reflecting on the ever-changing nature of work, how things have changed in our work lives, technology that has changed the way we work, and a look ahead to our Skills for Success series.

Join us as we discuss:* How email has gone from something you’d check every so often to something that’s in your pocket * How Slack has helped with email overload * Camera on or camera off in videoconferences * How perceptions of work-from-home have changed * Why changes in our work lives are opportunities and what that has to do with business analysis * The Skills for Success series coming to YouTube this September * How that’s going to tie in with upcoming episodes on the podcast

Podcast swag* Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Learn more* Admin Trailblazers Group * Salesforce Admins on YouTube * Mexican Street Corn Salad (Esquites) Recipe from Serious Eats

Business analyst August episodes* Ko Forte on Being a Business Analyst * Toni V. Martin on Business Analysis Skills * Amber Boaz on Slack Best Practices * Pei Mun Lim on the Skills of a Business Analyst

Social* Salesforce Admins: @SalesforceAdmns * Gillian: @GillianKBruce * Mike: @MikeGerholdt * Josh: @JoshBirk

Full show transcriptMike: To wrap up Business Analyst August, we’re chatting about the ever-changing nature of work, so how things have changed in our work lives, maybe notable changes in technology that have changed the way we work, and maybe even discuss some crazy processes that we’ve had to unwind as admins or being in the tech world. I don’t know.

We’ll see where this conversation goes. But I also have Gillian on to give us a preview of the Skills for Success September, which is next month’s theme, because we’re also launching that as a YouTube series. To help me do all of these fun, conversational things, joining me is fellow podcast host Gillian Bruce and host of the Dev Podcast and evangelist Josh Birk. Hi, everybody.

Josh Birk: Hey, everybody.

Gillian Bruce: Hello.

Mike: Let’s start with the ever-changing nature of work, which is what business analysts deal with all the time. I’ll just throw out there, I was thinking this is probably the lowest of low-hanging fruit, but how email has changed. Because I remember a time, I don’t know, many, many years ago, when I used to go to the public library to check out a computer to check my email. I didn’t do that every day, and now it’s, what, I mean, how many times have you checked your email this hour?

Josh Birk: I feel like it checks me at this point. It’s just watching me. I think it’s a bidirectional route now.

Gillian Bruce: Well, I think it’s been quite an evolution, right? Because it went from like, oh, there’s this new thing called email that you check when you can, to being like, this is the thing that runs your work life. I literally would spend all day just in email answering things, to now I check it once, twice a day maybe, because everything I do now is Slack.

Josh Birk: That’s right. If we’re centering an email, we’ve definitely drifted away there. I remember my first days in the cubicle, the company had a proprietary… It was a proto email kind of thing.

Mike: Oh, they built their own thing.

Josh Birk: They built their own thing, and then they got Outlook, but the proto email thing had the ability to cancel an email. If your recipient hadn’t opened the email, you could cancel it and they’d never see it. They never knew you wrote it. The entire company went up in arms because they suddenly lost the ability to send their bosses angry email at midnight and delete it at 6:00 AM.

Gillian Bruce: Wow. Because with the unsend now is you have to do it within the first five seconds after you hit the send button or something. Interesting.

Mike: Ridiculous. I remember pre cubicle land when I was in retail and part of your morning startup besides counting your drawer was checking the company email. You had to sign in. I mean, you never responded because it was basically just one way, like here’s the thing from corporate, or here’s the stuff that’s on sale.

Josh Birk: Right.

Gillian Bruce: Well, and I also remember, I mean, you used to have to physically be at a computer to read your email. I remember my first few office jobs, I had to wait until I got into the… Commute into the office, fire up the computer, and then log into the email. Whereas I mean, gosh, now it’s like I just roll over and look at my phone and I can see the email, to the point where I now have to have a really good boundary about, no, we’re not checking work email until it’s a very normal hour to do so, because then I’ll just start doing things. It’s also interesting how that has changed.

Josh Birk: I will always recommend people to have two phones, which is not a phrase I thought I would say five years ago, but it’s like have a work phone, have a life phone. And that way if you want to go walk the dog, just leave the work phone at home, just turn it off for a good couple of hours.

Gillian Bruce: I’ve had Slack creep in that way.

Mike: I’ve always been a two work phone kind of guy. Always two. That way, you go on vacation, my phone can just do whatever.

Gillian Bruce: I used to be very good about turning off the apps or even uninstalling the work apps because I’ve been a one phone person for the last 14 years. I’m starting to realize, okay, maybe it’s getting too complicated to untangle the unification of both personal and work on one device, and maybe I do need to go to two devices at this point.

Josh Birk: Speaking of that, because I was just realizing my work phone is not really a phone. If you look at the call history, it’s all spam and lies and misinformation. Nobody from work calls me on that phone, which is fine because almost nobody from work ever actually calls me anymore. And yet, I remember once again going back to my cubicle days, I remember being told the strategy of when to call somebody when you had to talk to them.

You don’t call at 9:00 because everybody just got in the office. They haven’t had their coffee yet. You don’t call around noon because they’re probably out to lunch. Strategize how you’re going to have a phone conversation with people, and now it’s just like I don’t talk to people. I think there might be a mental emergency if somebody calls you on the phone.

Gillian Bruce: Well, now your phone doesn’t even work if you try to call. Half the time I try to make an outgoing call and it fails.

Josh Birk: Oh, I mean, I just don’t even answer. I got a call the other day. I was like, oh, neat. They can leave me a voicemail.

Gillian Bruce: Thank goodness for transcription of voicemails. You don’t even have to listen to it. You can just see what’s written in the… Gosh, Josh, you’re bringing back so many vivid memories of like remember all of the learning how to use the complex phones in the office.

Josh Birk: Conference calling. Conference calling.

Gillian Bruce: All the headsets everybody would wear and everything was a GoTo Meeting or Cisco. It was a whole other culture and things that we did. I still have a technical landline at Salesforce that I don’t know how you would even access. Occasionally I get an email with a voicemail from that line that I never check. That was a whole thing. How do you record the right greeting and how do you know how to dial the extensions?

I mean, that’s a whole nother thing that, I mean, people these days probably have no idea what that even means. If you’re starting in your professional first ever office job at this point, the concept of a physical intercom, one of those big phones with all the buttons on it, would just be like, “What is this?”

Mike: I mean, you remember those UFO looking phones that they had in conference tables with speakers and all the… I remember every Monday we would have a sales call and people from the field, that’s what we called it, called in, and we’re all sitting around a table and it’s like, Bing. John Smith has joined the call.” And then it’s either they’re in their house or they’re driving, and that was cellphones mid ’90s, which is like a wind turbine. Can you hear me? Can you hear me? Go on mute, John.

Josh Birk: I will confess, one thing I miss about those days is when I was working in a consulting firm, we would have conference calls. If the client was, shall we say, particularly rowdy sometimes, somebody would just put a plastic cup over the speakerphone and all of a sudden they sounded like they’re just like [inaudible] Then we just all laugh at them without them knowing. Harder to do that…

Mike: You do that now, everybody’s on camera. It’s all Zoom and Google Meets. It’s super easy to join. You actually have to say why you’re not on camera.

Gillian Bruce: That’s the thing. How quickly has that culture shifted? I remember, this was probably three years ago, this was before the pandemic, which I think also drastically changed a lot of culture around this, but I was with a couple of friends and we were together, but we were still working our respective jobs for a few hours until we were doing whatever we were doing.

I don’t know if it was weird. It was like we’re doing a wine country thing or something, but we’re all in our respective corners doing work and I’m on video calls. One of the people is just on an actual phone call most of the time, and all of us looking, “What are you doing? The expectation is not to have your camera on?” They’re like, “No. Nobody does that.” We’re like, wow, that’s different.

Josh Birk: I mean, I’ve been remote since well before the pandemic. It used to be you were expected not to be. You were distracting people if you were on camera. And then the pandemic hits and it’s like, “How dare you not show your face? You’re not being social.”

Mike: That changed. It was also kind of weird too, because when you were… I’ve been remote, let’s see, 10 years now. There was a period of time too where you had to have your camera on because it’s like, are you really at your desk slaving away over a keyboard? Because the perception of work was, well, you work from home, you’re just out lollygagging, walking around and enjoying the weather, while the rest of us are stuck in cubicles, slaving away over hot keyboards answering emails.

Gillian Bruce: Before those of us who were office based, we’re all forced during the pandemic to be home-based. That was absolutely the perception from those of us who had to go to the office every day. Oh, cool. You just woke up and turned your computer on. Congratulations. Yeah, that’s working. And now I’m like, actually, I prefer to go office because I don’t have to work as hard in the office. I chat with people, and I’m late to meetings, and I have an excuse not to go to a meeting. It’s so fascinating how that has shifted for me.

Mike: Sorry, the elevator, I’m stuck. I can’t make it.

Gillian Bruce: Meanwhile, those of you who are back to back meetings at home are like, come on, people. You office slackers.

Mike: Click, click. Why are you so late? Why are you 10 seconds late?

Gillian Bruce: I was getting coffee and having a chat in the hallway with so-and-so.

Josh Birk: I had to change rooms, which feels so weird.

Gillian Bruce: I couldn’t find a room.

Mike: When you work from home and people are like, “Well, I had to change rooms,” you’re like, “Oh, yeah, that’s weird.”

Josh Birk: Like what, to the living room? I don’t understand.

Mike: I know. Why? Why did you have to change rooms? I never get kicked out of my house. Well, August was great. Gillian, you said you listened to Amber’s podcast. It rounded out the whole Business Analyst stuff.

Gillian Bruce: It did, yeah, because it connected like, hey… I mean, it connected to what we just talked about. Mike’s very thematic. There’s different moments in time where work cultures shift and how you interact and get work done shifts. Being a good business analyst is all about identifying those opportunities and figuring out how you can make that happen, well, in the Salesforce world with Salesforce technology.

But I think what I really liked about Amber’s podcast is it kind of tied it together because it’s like, oh, it’s not specifically tied to one specific platform, but the advent of something like Slack really gives you an opportunity to reexamine how your team works together, what is productive, what are the outcomes, how do you maybe take a step back and look at this strategically to find ways to make people more productive and happier. It was good. Good job, Mike. I enjoyed Business Analyst Month.

Mike: Well, good, because next month is actually a pairing or a cousin to what you’re launching on the YouTube channel. Let’s talk about the Skills for Success series.

Gillian Bruce: Yes. Well, Mike, you are also a part of this.

Mike: Very small. Real small.

Gillian Bruce: You know what, small but mighty.

Mike: Like 30 seconds.

Gillian Bruce: It was a great 30 seconds, I’ll tell you. We are launching a five part video series on YouTube all about skills for success. We go through all of the 14 skills that are in the Salesforce Admin Skills Kit. It’s not just me talking about them, it’s actually experts and industry leaders within the field. We have real life awesome admins, some of whom, Mike, I know you’re going to have on the podcast, and we have industry leaders. Mike, I’m sorry, I’m calling you an industry leader because that’s what happens when you do this stuff for a long time.

Mike: Because I answer a lot of emails.

Gillian Bruce: Yeah. Well, yeah, probably more Slack messages now. We have some industry leaders. We also have some people who have expertise in hiring Salesforce administrators to get that employer perspective on why these skills are important, how you develop them, how you represent them to potential employers, what employers are looking for. It’s a fun series.

We had some fun, as we do with our YouTube series, injecting some fun in it, but it’s a really great way to hear from different faces and different people and perspectives and hopefully really help you get a more in depth view into how these specific skills can help you be a successful Salesforce administrator.

Mike: Yeah, it’s really cool. As of this recording, I’ve already spoke with one of the guests, which was Emma Keeling, to talk about project management. I’m trying to delve into some of the people that you had on that video series. What was the things that you wanted to talk about but maybe ran out of time, or what was other things that maybe are left on the cutting room floor but are still really good?

Emma and I had that chat and I’ve got a few other guests coming up that will be part of the series. Of course, we can’t feature all of them. You have so many people on the videos. Thankfully, there’s not that many Thursdays in September.

Gillian Bruce: We got lots of awesome admins out there and lots of experts in these arenas. It was really fun to work with all of them and put this together. I’m happy that you’re going to have some of them on the pod to dig a little deeper and get that full picture, that longer soundbite from the 45 seconds or whatever they are. I mean, Mike, you talked about change management, I believe.

Mike: Yes. I talked about a lot of things.

Gillian Bruce: And Josh, I also know that you were part of the series. I think you had a product management section you talked about?

Josh Birk: Something along those lines. I think I pretended to be a product management expert. I just talked about a feature for 15 minutes straight I think was the right thing to do, right?

Mike: Wow, 15 minutes.

Gillian Bruce: Oh, you’ll have to tune in to find out how it all turns out.

Mike: I’ll link to those in September too, so that the podcast can share the love with the YouTube series and back and forth.

Gillian Bruce: It’s like they’re connected or something.

Mike: Look, let’s be honest, as you’re listening to this, we’re like, what, 10 or 12 days out from Dreamforce too.

Josh Birk: Don’t say that.

Mike: Because that’s going to happen in September, but that doesn’t happen to everybody. Now, you have this whole series of videos and podcasts to listen to in September as the leaves fall. I don’t know, September is that weird fall month where it’s like, is it summer? Is it fall?

Gillian Bruce: Well, in San Francisco it’s summer.

Mike: Heat advises already at the coffee shops.

Josh Birk: Are you getting any of those heat advisory stuff over in Iowa?

Mike: Oh yes. It’s going to be melt your face hot today. Not going outside. But who knows what winter will be? I don’t know. Pick one.

Gillian Bruce: I mean, I’m looking forward to… San Francisco summer is literally beginning right now. It goes from late August until mid-November, and this is the second day in a row where it’s gotten above 70 degrees and it’s glorious.

Mike: Wow.

Gillian Bruce: I mean, it’s been foggy basically from May until a week ago consistently. It’s really nice to see the sun and get some warmth, and I’m soaking it all up.

Josh Birk: Well, as I look over at my dashboard, it’s going to hit 102 here tomorrow.

Gillian Bruce: Oh!

Mike: Yeah, we’re in the same boat, Josh, because it’s just really in the heat advisory, because our dew point, I don’t know what your dew point is, but they always say in the Midwest, it’s not the heat, it’s the humidity. Oh, it’s both right now.

Josh Birk: Oh, it’s both. Yeah, it’s both. I think the weather report today is something like 85, but feels like death.

Gillian Bruce: Wow. Well, you will be here in San Francisco with me soon, and you’ll enjoy this beautiful 71 degree weather with a, let’s see, I’m looking it up, a 72% humidity or the dew point is 61.

Mike: Oh, well, that’s not too bad.

Gillian Bruce: No. I mean, it’s humid for us. It’s abnormally humid, but it’s beautiful.

Mike: But Gillian, I bet Josh’s dew point is probably the same as mine. We’re in the 80s, 80 degrees. I woke up this morning literally all the windows in my house were wet because the dew point and the temperature were like one or two degrees apart.

Josh Birk: This is the time of year we’re reminded that Chicago was built on a swamp for sure.

Mike: Full of concrete.

Gillian Bruce: Come on out to the dunes of San Francisco. It’s glorious.

Mike: And then when you’re not in Chicago, and this is a real thing, you can look it up, I don’t know if I’m going to say it right, but it’s not evaporation, but it’s evapostoration or something. It’s literally the fact that Iowa and some neighboring states, but really Iowa has so much corn with so much moisture that it raises the humidity level. Because as it heats up, the corn evaporate. It’s all over The Weather Channel, and you can smell it too. When you walk outside, it smells like corn.

Gillian Bruce: In like a good way?

Mike: Oh, very good way. Very good.

Josh Birk: I can see that one falling either way.

Mike: Right. Right. No, this is a very good corn on the cob on the grill. You’re like, ooh, let’s go get some corn from the farmer’s market.

Gillian Bruce: Speaking tangent, because we like talking about food, I made the most epic elote salad a week ago. Elote is that Mexican street corn basically. They grill it and they put a bunch of aioli on it. Deliciousness.

Mike: I’ve wanted to do that.

Gillian Bruce: And cotija cheese. I made a grilled corn elote salad that I still think about. I think I might have to make it again tonight. It’s basically you grill the corn, you put a bunch of tomatoes and avocado and cheese and deliciousness. You mix it together. Holy moly! I mean, Damon and I ate the entire bowl in one sitting.

Josh Birk: Nice. Nice.

Mike: You kind of live like a Mid-Westerner because I will confess that it is sweet corn season right now. It’s almost at tail end. I really need to go to the farmer’s market. But we’ve had sweet corn for dinner, same as the elote salad, just on the cob with butter on your cheeks. Look at that. Well, there we go. That’s how we’re going to end it, butter on our cheeks or mine at least anyway.

Gillian Bruce: Butter makes everything better, right?

Josh Birk: Yep. Secret ingredient.

Mike: Real good butter. If by chance, by chance you enjoyed this episode, maybe pick a different one and then share that with one person, because that would be awesome. Here’s how you do it. If you’re listening on iTunes, all you got to do is just tap the dots. There’s three little dots. You choose share episode, and then you can post it to social. You can text it to a friend. Maybe you text an elote corn salad recipe. We’d love that too. There’s more recipes.

There’s more resources on our website, which is literally everything admin, admin.salesforce.com, including a transcript of the show. I will bug and see if we can get Gillian’s recipe just because that would be fun and it’d be great if it showed up in the show notes. Be sure to join the conversation in the Admin Trailblazer Group in the Trailblazer Community. Don’t worry, the link is in the show notes. Because remember, everything is on admin.salesforce.com. With that, I will see you in the cloud.

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Jenny McNamara, Salesforce Admin at CINC. Join us as we chat about how she became obsessed with Flow Builder, the importance of Salesforce basics, and why you need to get yourself to a Salesforce live event.

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

Be the translatorJenny started as a business analyst, serving as the scrum master for multiple teams in her organization. When the Salesforce team needed more help, she jumped at the chance to specialize and become an admin. In both roles, you need to be able to translate what people are saying into the why behind it.

“Technical people and client-facing people don’t always speak the same language even though they’re all trying to accomplish the same thing,” Jenny says. A stakeholder may ask for a new data field when what they really want is a way for that information to show up on a dashboard. And tech person may not want to do that because it makes the org a mess. You need someone with an understanding of both sides of the organization to step in and translate.

Flow all nightWhen Jenny first started focusing on Salesforce, the thing that got her hooked on the platform was learning Flow Builder. She was still a business analyst at that point, but the Salesforce Admin on her team was having trouble building something and asked her if she could look into Flow a little bit so he could bounce ideas off of her.

Jenny sat down for a quick glance at what Flow was all about, just enough to help out. Before she knew it, she had learned enough to solve the problem in a single night. Some people binge Netflix, Jenny binged Flow Builder.

The magic of Salesforce live eventsWe met Jenny at TrailblazerDX, where she was really excited to dive into the fundamentals. “The better your basics are, the more of the foundational things that you really master, the better you’re going to be at everything,” she says.

Getting to live Salesforce events has been so important to Jenny’s career in Salesforce, and she recommends it for people at all experience levels. You never know who you’ll meet, and you already have something in common to talk about. You can learn about something you didn’t know existed, which could take your career in a new direction. You might even find yourself staying up all night to learn more.

Podcast swag* Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Learn more* Salesforce Events * Trailhead: Get Started as a Salesforce Business Analyst * Essential Habits for a Salesforce Admin

Social* Connect with Jenny on the Trailblazer Community * Salesforce Admins: @SalesforceAdmns * Gillian: @GillianKBruce * Mike: @MikeGerholdt

Full show transcriptMike Gerholdt: Flow Builder, formerly Salesforce Flow, provides declarative process automation for every Salesforce app, experience, and portal, with point-and-click automation. But what if I told you it’s also a great stepping stone to getting started as a Salesforce Admin?

Today on the podcast, our guest, Jenny McNamara, who’s currently a Salesforce Admin, got hooked on learning Flow as a way for her to grow her business analyst skills and become a Salesforce Admin at her current company. Now, before we get into the episode, be sure you are following Salesforce Admins Podcast on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. That way, you get a new episode every Thursday, right on your phone. Let’s get Jenny on the podcast. So, Jenny, welcome to the podcast.

Jenny McNamara: Great to be here. Thanks for asking me to be here.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, it was fun. So, we actually, I don’t know, the social term is bumped into each other at TrailblazerDX, but you are actually sitting a row in front of me, taking vigorous notes on a team member session, and I wanted to ad hoc get some feedback from you. And so, we started talking about your career and how you got to TrailblazerDX. And so, let’s just kick off there. How did you get started in the Salesforce ecosystem and get to TrailblazerDX this spring?

Jenny McNamara: Oh my gosh. Okay. Well, I went to TrailblazerDX, first of all because my mentor told me I should go, who also happens to be my boss. I’m really lucky that I have a great boss and mentor. But as for how I got started in the Salesforce space, I, a little bit stumbled into it in my journey from going from more of a client-facing role and wanting to get into tech. And at my company we used sales Salesforce, and so I was a user before I moved into the space.

And in trying to get into tech without knowing how to code, I was thinking, “Oh, I might have to learn how to code and look at that.” I became Scrum Master certified and then became … A business analyst is actually the stepping stone I took. From my client-facing role, I became a business analyst for several teams, one of which was our Salesforce team internally. And then there was a need for more help on that team, and so I transitioned into the Salesforce administrator role, as there was a need there, and I really enjoyed that work and I enjoyed going in between what our stakeholders needed and what their problems were, and then actually being able to execute as opposed to just handing it off. So, I guess that was the bridge there.

Mike Gerholdt: There’s always a bridge somewhere. Tell me a little bit more about business analysts, because I think there’s a lot of people, and I know there’s a whole business analyst community on the Trailblazer group that talk about that, but what was your role there? What did you do? What was your day-to-day?

Jenny McNamara: As a business analyst, my role was very much the liaison, I guess, between the tech teams I was working with and the stakeholders internally. All of the teams I was working with were internal tech teams with different focuses. So, I was coordinating with all of the internal stakeholders and hearing what their needs were, identifying if what they were asking for was actually their need. And then, coordinating it all the way through with the tech team to say, “Okay, how can we fill this need?” And going back and forth.

So, my day-to-day there was very, I would say, actively communicating with our internal users and stakeholders and also the tech team. I feel like I was put in that role because I spoke both languages.

Mike Gerholdt: Cool.

Jenny McNamara: And I think there is a need a lot of times, for someone to be in that role, because a lot of times technical people and client-facing people maybe, right?

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah.

Jenny McNamara: Don’t always speak the same language, even though they’re all trying to accomplish the same thing.

Mike Gerholdt: Right. So, as a business analyst, how much Salesforce did you actually know?

Jenny McNamara: Oh, when I got into that role, I knew Salesforce as a user. I didn’t know anything behind the scenes.

Mike Gerholdt: Okay. Do you feel that had you known more about the technical aspects of Salesforce as a business analyst, you would’ve been a better business analyst?

Jenny McNamara: Yes, and I actually started learning more about Salesforce pretty quickly after becoming a business analyst, so that I could be better at it.

Mike Gerholdt: Oh. Gotcha.

Jenny McNamara: Because I found pretty quickly as I entered the role, that the tech team that brought me on board as a business analyst really wanted to leverage my knowledge of all of the processes that our company uses, because I had been in a couple other roles beforehand, so I had a lot of underlying knowledge about all of our company processes. And that was really useful to that team because they knew tech, but they weren’t sure how to fit it into the business processes sometimes.

Mike Gerholdt: Right. Yeah.

Jenny McNamara: And so, what I learned once I got over there is, “Great, I’ve got a lot of great background in the business processes and where there are some opportunities, but if I don’t know what’s possible with the technology, at least at a certain level, I’m not going to be as effective as I can be.” So, I started diving in to see what was possible and how things worked with Salesforce, pretty early on, although it was at a very basic level at the beginning.

Mike Gerholdt: Mm-hmm. What was some of the first stuff you started to dive into that got you hooked on the tech side?

Jenny McNamara: Oh, man. I will say that the first thing that had me really hooked was flow, and usually when I say that, people are confused.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, because it’s literally like learning to swim in the ocean.

Jenny McNamara: So, I had a request of my tech team that was going to fulfill a need for our stakeholders, that was going to require a screen flow.

Mike Gerholdt: Ooh.

Jenny McNamara: And our admin at the time was new to flows, and so he was learning that and he was having some trouble with it. And he was the only admin at our company at the time, and so, he didn’t really have a lot of people to chat with to say, “Hey, how can I accomplish this?” As a business analyst, I want to help facilitate and remove barriers for anyone, wherever I can, right?

Mike Gerholdt: Mm-hmm.

Jenny McNamara: I want to identify those issues and solve them. And so, I asked him one day what I could do to help, and he said, “Hey, if you can just learn a little bit about how flow works, so that I can bounce some ideas off of you.” I was like, “Okay, great.”

So, I got on Trailhead, which is my favorite thing, and I started learning about flows and I thought it was so cool, I decided that I was going to try and do what he was trying to accomplish, myself, just to see, get some hands-on experience. I think I stayed up till three o’clock in the morning doing this. I think I started at probably seven o’clock in the afternoon. I was like after work, going to just spend an hour maybe looking at this. I was up until, I think, 3:00 AM and I basically did the whole thing, but I was so excited I just couldn’t stop.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. I mean, I think I can akin to that on streaming services as well. You know?

Jenny McNamara: Yes.

Mike Gerholdt: So, when I introduced you, I said Salesforce administrator, we’re talking now about when you were a business analyst. Before we make that jump, what were some of those conversations that you were having or that you would advise others to have with … It sounds like you have a great mentor who’s also your boss, but how did you have that career conversation to be like, “Okay, I am now learning these skills and I want to go into this role.”?

Jenny McNamara: That is one of those things I a little bit lucked into. I had been asking my boss at the time, before I became a business analyst, I was trying to find ways to grow and what to do because I had told him I wanted to go towards tech and he didn’t really have an answer, because he wasn’t in tech.

What he did is he connected me with his coach, who connected me with someone in tech, to do some mentoring. And that is how I learned of the tech team’s need for people like business analysts. And that’s how that happened. So, I think it was really me trying to figure out how to get over there and then talking to people and connecting with people and finding what the need was.

Mike Gerholdt: Right. I mean, yeah, I can always look back at parts of my career and say, “Part of that was luck.” But I do also firmly believe you make your own luck.

Jenny McNamara: I’m with you on that. I think you do. I think if I didn’t ask the question, if I wasn’t trying to find the answer, it wouldn’t have just fallen in my lap. On the same token, I think I am quite fortunate.

Mike Gerholdt: So, you got yourself to TrailblazerDX this spring. How’d that happen?

Jenny McNamara: I’m lucky enough that my company provides a stipend we can use for educational purposes, and so, I used mine to fly out and attend TrailblazerDX, and it was fantastic.

Mike Gerholdt: So, what were some of the sessions that you felt really gave you value in terms of starting in your Salesforce admin career?

Jenny McNamara: Oh, man, some of the sessions that I really enjoyed went back to basics and others let me flex some more advanced skills. I find that’s a little bit of my internal struggle all the time, is I like things like flow, that are really exciting, but I really always need to be drawn back to basics because the better your basics are, the more of the foundational things that you really master, the better you’re going to be at everything.

So, as I answer that question, the things that I remember the most and took away the most would be some of the basics, like, I went to a session that was all about, “Okay, with new profiles and permission sets and things like that, what is the best way to structure these?” And that’s so basic. And for some people it’s not as exciting as flow, but it’s so important. Right? I remember things like that. I really enjoyed the session that we met at. That one was all about the essential skills for admins, right?

Mike Gerholdt: Mm-hmm.

Jenny McNamara: And that one had a lot of things that I had heard before but are good to return to. And a lot of those things I had not heard until I met my mentor. She’s very good at the foundational things.

Mike Gerholdt: Oh.

Jenny McNamara: She has a very strong understanding of best practices and things like that.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. What’s interesting, so that’s been on our team for quite some time, I actually threw out an original version of that way back in 2011 at Dreamforce called The Seven Habits of a Highly Successful Admin. And it’s gone through different iterations to where it is now.

I’d be curious, having seen that and also knowing that you’re working on a team, it was very much written individualistic, because I know many of our Salesforce admins are the only person in their organization. Right? It tends to be an unequal curve of, one person or many people, and very few in between. Right? How do you feel like those habits applied when you’re as part of a team?

Jenny McNamara: I think the habits are still really important, right? You still need to cover all of those things. I think when you’re part of a team and you have different strengths on the team, you can let some people cover some of them more strongly than others.

Mike Gerholdt: Right.

Jenny McNamara: Which is something that recently with my team we’ve noticed, “Okay, some of us are better at some things than others.” I don’t think any of us want to be the sole person doing any one thing, but it’s nice to have someone to lean on, “Oh, I know this person is a little stronger with this. Let me ask what they would do in this instance.”

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah.

Jenny McNamara: So, I think with the habits, some of us are stronger with some than others and might notice if we’re behind on something or whatever it may be. But I think with a team, you get the advantage of not having to be great at everything, because you’ve got different skill sets on the team.

Mike Gerholdt: That’s a very good perspective. So, that was a lot of the past. Let’s turn the gaze forward. Salesforce administrator now, you’re a year in, did you say?

Jenny McNamara: I am about a year in now, where I actually stepped into the administrator role as opposed to just the business analyst.

Mike Gerholdt: From being BA?

Jenny McNamara: Mm-hmm.

Mike Gerholdt: Okay. What’s the next year, what is the goalposts ahead for you?

Jenny McNamara: The next things on my list are really, I think all the time for me is to keep looking at the basics. I like to try and get into Trailhead every once in a while and do the things … I just find a module, like, I would like to get into starting to study for my advanced administrator, because that will show me some more foundational things that I just … Sometimes I find things I didn’t even know existed. Right?

Mike Gerholdt: Right.

Jenny McNamara: So, I think, I want to do a mix of returning to basics consistently and anything to do with automation. I still love flows, it is the first thing that I love, but I want to become the master of flows, basically.

Mike Gerholdt: Oh, wow. That’s an audacious goal.

Jenny McNamara: It is. I don’t think I can do it in a year, but…

Mike Gerholdt: I mean if you do, then holy cow. I think I will say there’ll be a standing spot on this podcast for you, because the appetite for flow content is never ending.

Jenny McNamara: Oh goodness. I mean, I guess I’m one of those people too, I love to hear about them. I like to hear what people are doing with them and how you solve the problems, because I’ve worked on several flows since I’ve been on this team now and I learn something new every time.

And then, there’s new ideas that you can vote for in the IdeaExchange, which is great, and I love when they release new features. And I haven’t looked at the spring release notes, or I’m sorry, the summer release notes yet, to know what’s coming out, but I’m excited for whatever is new. I always like to try and use whatever’s new in some way.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. I guess to that learning point, how do you balance … You said you like to get into Trailhead, I think there can be people I know struggle with, “Boy, I’ve got so much to do at work all day and then I get home.” Do you work in an hour? Do you block some time on your calendar during the week? Or, are you fully like, “Ah, I get home and seven o’clock I’m doing Trailhead.”? What’s that for you?

Jenny McNamara: That varies, I think, depending on what my work looks like. There are times where I’m doing it outside of work hours. Sometimes my brain is full at the end of the day because I’m doing something new. For example, recently I was setting up in our test environment, voicemail for Service Cloud Voice, using the newer, out-of-the-box voicemail solutions. And we had had it set up previously, using more heavily customized things. So, we’re moving away from that so that it doesn’t break when we upgrade the phones.

So, before doing this, I hadn’t done much with the phone setup. It was just a piece of it that I hadn’t really had to touch yet. So, a lot of learning was happening during hours. I was in Trailhead during work hours saying, “How does this work? How is it supposed to work?” Attended the Devo office hours that happen every week, to ask some questions and soak in some more knowledge there. And I think all of that is learning and it’s applied to what you’re trying to accomplish.

Mike Gerholdt: Right.

Jenny McNamara: So, sometimes it’s directed more towards what I’m trying to accomplish at work and then if I’m not doing as much of that during work hours, yes, I will block some time before work sometimes, or I’m a night owl and sometimes, I don’t know if I should admit this to the world, but I’ll be awake and excited about learning something at 11 o’clock at night.

Mike Gerholdt: Well, we know you build flows up till 3:00 AM, so.

Jenny McNamara: I already did say that, didn’t I?

Mike Gerholdt: Secret’s out of the bag there.

Jenny McNamara: Yeah, I am that person that will stay up. I am very good at staying awake when I’m excited about something. Sometimes you’ll find me on Trailhead in the middle of the night.

Mike Gerholdt: Which is the middle of the day for other people, so you’re fine.

Jenny McNamara: Yeah. So, same idea as, “Well, it’s five o’clock somewhere.” Right?

Mike Gerholdt: Right. Exactly.

Jenny McNamara: It’s always a good time.

Mike Gerholdt: Looking back at how you’ve gotten to where you’re at so far, if current self, the 2023 Jenny could go back and give a piece of advice to Jenny when she was getting started, what would that be?

Jenny McNamara:I think, diving into the basics sooner is good and finding some of the resources that Salesforce actually provides, like you guys, make for admins sooner, would be what I would tell her. I’d say, “Hey, look at these resources. Go actually dive into them. They’re important.”

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah.

Jenny McNamara: Because I didn’t know about that stuff. My boss now wasn’t my boss right away, and there were a lot of things I didn’t know. And knowing that stuff sooner is, like I said before, when you have a really strong foundation in what the best practices are, and I’m not saying I do, I’m saying I’m working towards that, I think it just makes everything easier. When you know about the best practices, for example, your flows are better

Mike Gerholdt: In theory. I mean-

Jenny McNamara: Not just in theory, in practice. I look at some of the first flows I did and I go, “Oh my goodness.” [inaudible].

Mike Gerholdt: It couldn’t be because they were at 2:00 AM? I mean, I’ve looked at stuff I’ve built-

Jenny McNamara: I think no matter what time of day I did them, I would’ve made those decisions because I didn’t know better at the time.

Mike Gerholdt: So, do you feel for somebody that’s maybe listening to this and thinking, “Wow, I’m in business analyst, but I’ve always wanted to get more into the technical side, become an admin, perhaps pursue architect or developer, a different career path.” Do you feel the same advice applies?

Jenny McNamara: I think so. I think the foundation is really, really important. I think finding a good mentor is really key. Again, I feel very lucky in that one, that it happens to be my boss. So, it was pretty fortunate there. I think that’s really important. I think using Trailhead and actually getting to a Salesforce event, TrailheadDX was something else and I think it’s something that you need to do if you’re going to be a Salesforce professional.

Mike Gerholdt: I mean, I would agree. I feel like it’s that way with just about everything. It’s one thing to participate in an online group or discussion, or maybe even a Zoom call, but it’s another to be there and immersed with other people doing that, right?

Jenny McNamara: Yes.

Mike Gerholdt: That to me is, that’s the point at which if there’s a switch, it’s going to get flipped.

Jenny McNamara: Yes. And at TrailblazerDX, I enjoyed the basics stuff that I did, but I also went and learned … I went to a session about Lightning Web Components for admins and Visualforce pages for admins. And those aren’t typically admin things to do, but it’s good to understand how they work, because then you’re going to have better conversations with your developers that you’re working with. And then, you can figure out, “Oh, I think that’s really cool. I want to try it.” And you have some base knowledge to build off of.

Mike Gerholdt: I couldn’t agree more. Jenny, it’s been a pleasure having you on the podcast today and sharing with us your journey and giving us some advice on where you’re headed.

Jenny McNamara: It’s been great being here. I’m sorry I was a little bit hard to track down there.

Mike Gerholdt: I mean, it happens. It’s okay. You’re busy building your career, so no fault there.

Jenny McNamara: Well, I appreciate you asking me to be here and I’d happily do it again if anyone wants to talk flows, I’m your girl.

Mike Gerholdt: What a great discussion with Jenny. Now, if you enjoyed this episode, can you do me a favor and just share it with one person? If you’re listening in the iTunes app, just tap the dots and choose, “Share episode.” Then you can post it on social or text it to a friend.

And if you’re looking for more great resources, your one stop for everything admin is admin.salesforce.com, including a transcript of this show. And be sure to join our conversation in the Admin Trailblazer Group in the Trailblazer community. Don’t worry, the link is in the show notes. So, until next week, we’ll see you in the cloud.

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, I sit down for coffee with fellow Admin Evangelists Gillian Bruce and Josh Birk. Join us as we chat about the Summer ‘23 release, Einstein GPT, and what makes a Dreamforce speaker submission stand out.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with the Admin Evangelist Team.

Summer ’23 releaseMay is coming to an end, which means the Summer Salesforce Release is just around the corner. The team has been hard at work on content to help you get up to speed on everything you should know. Check out the on-demand Release Readiness Live videos for Admins and Devs, and the Learn MOAR Quests.

We talk through some features we’re looking forward to, both large and small, from horizontal alignment on dynamic fields to custom property editors. There’s a lot to look forward to!

Einstein GPTThere’s been some buzz about Salesforce and AI lately, specifically the announcement of Einstein GPT. We already have some content out there about what admins can do with it right now, but there’s a whole lot more info coming soon.

As more and more AI is incorporated into Salesforce, what we do as admins is naturally going to shift and change. Some things will definitely become easier to accomplish, but the value we bring in understanding business processes and translating them into a solution that works will be even more critical.

Submit to present in Dreamforce 2023We’re currently looking for presenters for the Admin Track for Dreamforce 2023. As someone who reviews submissions, I recommend focusing on a few quality abstracts that you’re really excited about instead of trying to apply with every idea you can possibly think of. As I say in this episode, “It’s not about the number of cupcakes you show up with, it’s about the quality of the cupcake.”

If you’re looking for ideas, a good place to start is in the Trailblazer community. If people are talking a lot about something over there, it’s probably going to be a topic we want to cover. And be sure to listen to the full episode for more about the “Build a Blog” series, and the theory that the Flintstones actually takes place after the Jetsons.

Podcast swag* Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Learn more* Admin Release Countdown: Get Ready for Summer ’23 * Release Readiness Summer ’23 Playlist * Release Highlights for Admins | Learn MOAR Summer ’23 * Understanding What Generative AI Means for Salesforce Admins * The Dreamforce 2023 Admin Track Call for Participation Is Open!

Social* Josh: @JoshBirk * Salesforce Admins: @SalesforceAdmns * Gillian: @GillianKBruce * Mike: @MikeGerholdt

Full show transcriptMike: Okay. So I often describe this podcast to guests as we’re just going to sit down and chat about this stuff over coffee. Don’t be nervous. The more I thought about it the more I thought, wouldn’t it be great if we just got people together and sat around and chat over coffee because I think people would want to sit around and have coffee with us? That doesn’t sound too narcissistic, does it?

Josh: No.

Mike: I’d like to think people want to have coffee with us.

Gillian: Coffee chat.

Mike: This is us having coffee as the final episode for May.

Josh: Thanks.

Mike: Welcome back Gillian and hello Josh.

Josh: Hello everybody.

Gillian: Hello, hello.

Mike: I’ve had a lot more coffee than you guys have apparently.

Josh: Yes. And it’s noon here so that’s … I’m slow today. I’m catching up as well.

Mike: I’m having my midday coffee. It’s the midday coffee that … I grew up rural where my grandpa was a farmer, there was always coffee in the house.

Josh: Oh, yeah.

Mike: Always. 110 outside, 80% humidity, he’d come inside for a cup of coffee.

Josh: If I wasn’t a coffee drinker before college the psychology department at Wesleyan would’ve converted me into one. I have seen gas stations less equipped to handle giving out free coffee to people. They had two industrial-sized brew masters that were working around the clock. It was the liquid fuel for the 8:00 AM Cognitive Psychology talk type thing. My midday coffee’s getting me out in the morning, basically.

Gillian: Well, I went with a green tea today.

Mike: Gillian, you don’t do coffee, do you Gillian?

Gillian: No. I’m a tea drinker so I want the green tea. It doesn’t have quite as much caffeine as a Earl Grey or an English breakfast but I’ve got too little so I’ve already been up for six hours so we’re good.

Mike: Since yesterday.

Josh: Right. Right.

Mike: Sleep time.

Gillian: Is it still Sunday? It feels like it’s Sunday. No.

Mike: Right.

Josh: It’s a blursday after the pandemic, absolutely.

Gillian: A blursday, yes. That’s great, Josh.

Josh: What is it? Green oolong and black tea all come from the same leaf.

Gillian: Oh, is it just the maturation of the leaf or something?

Josh: It’s how long that they are left out in the sun or something like that, and then they crop them at different times.

Gillian: Well, there you go. See, things we learn. It’s an educational podcast, not just about Salesforce everyone.

Mike: Nope. I stand firmly with Ted Lasso and his opinion of tea and I think it looks like yard clippings inside of a cup.

Gillian: Well, if you have a lot of yard clippings to work with so you can make a lot of tea.

Mike: I could tea up the whole neighborhood.

Josh: True.

Gillian: Well, let’s tea up this episode, Mike.

Mike: Sure.

Josh: That’s the opening right there.

Mike: That is, that’s the whole opening. It’s done. Every episode’s going to start this way with three minutes of meandering around while we wait for the caffeine to kick in.

Josh: I like it.

Mike: It’s May, we’re heading into summer. What are some of the things you’ve been working on so far since people probably last saw us at TrailblazerDX?

Gillian: God, that feels like a year ago.

Josh: It does feel like it.

Mike: It was a couple years ago. That whole timeline thing on Facebook is wrong.

Gillian: I mean, it’s summer it’s time for the release. I’ve been knee-deep in release preparation content and our Learn More campaign which is basically the way that we prepare everyone for the release. And so Release Readiness Live, all of that, going through all the release notes and the highlights. So go ahead ask me any question about the release I can try and fake an answer to it.

Mike: I did get asked a question about the release at the Washington, DC user group.

Josh: Oh.

Gillian: Do you remember what it was?

Mike: Give me the highlights of the release.

Josh: Oh.

Mike: Well, we got lots of content that I’ve been helping working on.

Josh: That’s what I was going to say, wait a little while and Gillian will walk you right through it.

Mike: This is the last part of the User Group meeting that’s keeping you from happy hour. I’ll be brief, it’s an amazing release. Next question.

Josh: I like it, I like it. Do you remember when you could read through the whole release notes for the entire company and it was 50 pages?

Mike: Yeah.

Josh: It’s what now 500 or something?

Gillian: I think it’s six something.

Mike: I remember I read all of the summer release notes for I want to say summer ’08 while riding in a car that was being driven to Chicago and I got done in time.

Gillian: Wow.

Josh: Anyway, sorry, Gillian, I jumped in on you.

Gillian: Oh, no that’s totally fine. I was actually going to share some legit information about the release if people want to find out more. No shade in that comment. If you are listening to this podcast then you can definitely right now go check out On Demand Admin Release Readiness Live. You can also check out Developer Admin Release … Or, Developer Admin … Whatever. Developer Release Readiness Live as well. Both on demand you can find them. And that’s a great way to get the highlights. We got a bunch of product managers on there, and evangelists, and advocates talking about what they think is important for you to understand so got that. We got the learn more blogs. There’s good stuff. I personally am most excited about horizontal alignment on dynamic fields. And it sounds super nerdy, but imagine you can just control exactly where fields line up on your page no matter how much text is in the field above or below it. It’s the little things, the little things that matter. My inner controlled freak is very happy about that.

Josh: It is strange how you read something and you’re like “Well, that’s just boring.” And then you see it and you’re like “That’s really cool. I didn’t realize how cool that was.” Somebody had to sell me on custom property editors because on paper they just sound … I can barely even think of as to why somebody would find it exciting. And then it’s like oh, you can write totally custom interfaces for people to go in and configure your components on their really cool interfaces. It’s a shame that they can’t fit all that into a title, I guess, it might help sell it better.

Gillian: Well, that’s why there’s people like us that are supposed to fill that gap, right, Josh?

Josh: Right.

Mike: Right.

Josh: This is true. Including my upcoming episode with Alicia Taylor on custom property editors.

Gillian: Actually, Alba pinged me about that this week. She’s like “Are you going to talk about this at Admin Release Readiness Live?” I’m like “No, it doesn’t sound like Admin at all.” She’s like “Actually, it is, and here’s why.” I was like “Oh. Well then yes, we will absolutely talk about that no problem.” Thank you, Alba.

Josh: Because it’s weird because it’s developer-centric tech I guess but it’s all admin-facing. That’s the end goal is to make things easier and more powerful. You don’t have to guess what a proper date field looks like kind of thing you can actually just pull up a proper date picker. It’s also one of those things that you scratch your head about that’s like “Wow, why did it take us this long to do it?” And I’m sure now if Alicia’s listening to this and she’s like “Because it’s really hard, Josh. We have engineers who have to fix this kind of stuff.”

Mike: I remember for the longest time one of the big requests from the community was an address block like we have on accounts and contacts, and you can never create that. So if you created a custom object you always had to text field it to death. Now you can create that, it came back a long time ago.

Gillian: Again, it’s these little things that make a huge difference. This is why we have an Admin-focused Release Readiness Live session focused on these little things that we care about.

Mike: I never thought until I had to use another product name, not mentioned, of how much I would love-

Gillian: I have no idea what you’re talking about.

Mike: The fact that when you could sort something it stayed sorted that way every time you pulled up that list view. And I was like “But this Salesforce just does that natively.” And you’re like “This product doesn’t.” Oh.

Josh: Oh.

Gillian: And then the question is, why aren’t we using Salesforce for that thing? Well, we try.

Josh: We ask that question a lot, we do. And give us credit for continuing to ask that question. Maybe one of these days we’ll get an answer, I’m not sure, not sure.

Gillian: I don’t know. It’s been a lot of years, Josh, it’s been a lot of years.

Josh: What’s the definition of badness again I forget?

Mike: Insanity.

Josh: It’s at the tip of my tongue, right?

Mike: Insanity. So Gillian’s been working on release. Josh, it sounds like you’ve been diving into stuff.

Josh: Well, two big things. First of all, most people probably have not heard that the three of us are now proper coworkers.

Gillian: Woot, woot.

Josh: I’m happy to hop over and join Admin Evangelism to talk nerdy tech. And speaking of nerdy tech, I don’t know if either of you have heard about this AI stuff, and I don’t know ChatGPT or something. And then Mark tweeted something and now there’s Einstein in front of it. That’s been a whole thing. For me, it’s sort of funny because I was starting to get into this bit by playing around with Midjourney and doing generative art AI stuff just as a goofy, what can I create with this kind of stuff? Here I’m trying to learn up on large language models, and how they’ve advanced from neural networks, and blada, blada, blada. What the community actually keeps asking me is how do I create an image of my mascot. And I’m like “Oh, okay, we can talk about that too.”

Gillian: Of important things. Again, it’s priorities.

Josh: The important things. We got a lot of content coming out on that. We’ve got a blog post in the works that’s just talking about the basics and what admins can do with it now. And we’re getting some guests and some expert panels up and running. Watch the space for more. To me, this is interesting because I have chased a lot of technology, often at Salesforce’s behest, and every now and then there’s something like IoT which gets really popular for a while and then blends into the background. I firmly believe IoT has become an aspect of our lives it’s just that it’s on our phones, and it’s on our smart machines, and it’s just … We’ve just sort of accepted it and then now we’re just talking to our cars and stuff. And then there’s stuff like blockchain which is all a hot minute. And then we started talking about the environment and all this other stuff.
And so every now and then it’s a flash in the pan, right, it’s really exciting for a while but then we move on. I’m becoming a believer in this stuff and I think it is actually going to be around to stay. And I think it will be interesting to see where our product line goes in the next year and where it’s going to start impacting people’s lives. It’s going to be interesting. I believe it’s going to be positive but you all know I’m something of an optimist too so we’ll see.

Gillian: I thought you’re not allowed to talk about AI unless you’re a catastrophist. I thought that was the rule.

Josh: There’s a cottage industry out there for that. The scary thing about the catastrophe speakers to me though is some of them are just insanely smart people. I don’t want to ignore that because there’s something there but it’s almost like they’re so smart about it they don’t know how to talk to other people about why they think AI could be a disaster. So we’ll see. And maybe in three years we’re all robots and this podcast will sound very different.

Mike: It’ll be created by AI.

Gillian: Oh, man, I don’t want to know what an AI Gillian sounds like, that would be scary.

Mike: It probably sounds just like you. I saw a TikTok the other day where there was an AI that could replicate any … You just fed it a audio clip of whomever and it would replicate the sound.

Josh: I mean, I think that’s one of the most early evident scary parts. It’s deep fakes, and misinformation, and people impersonating it. I think it was Spotify broke up a bot circle. It was generated music with bots listening to it to rack up its score. It didn’t even have a human audience. AI-generated AI audience all in one feedback loop.

Gillian: Can we create a bot audience for us for this podcast?

Josh: I, for one, welcome our bot overlord so I think that’s not a bad idea at all.

Gillian: Well-

Josh: And I’m sure-

Gillian: I was just at a community event last week, CenCal Dreamin’ in Fresno, California, shout out to CenCal Dreamin’. Bitwise was the amazing partner who put it on. And there were a lot of discussions I had. Just went off with attendees about AI, and what it means for being a Salesforce professional, and how that is going to shift, and change, and maybe lower some barriers to entry for some certain aspects of what you can do. And really shift the type of work that you’re doing but also making it even more important the expertise you bring in as a Salesforce professional to than work with this technology because it takes a different level of understanding. What to ask for? How to guide it? How to review things? It was really interesting. I had three different in-depth conversations with different folks from various … BA, developer, executive. Just having those talks was really interesting to see where people’s heads are at right now.

Josh: And I think that’s one of the big positives is that I think we’re going to see us getting to a result faster because AI will help us just jump to the end a little bit. I’m not talking to anybody right now who’s thinking the humans are going to just go away. I think you hit on a really good point though. If I have one suggestion to people right now it’s go find a free account and start playing with this because it is a different skillset and a little bit of a different mindset on how to input some things. And there’s features that some people don’t think about like being able to … You could give ChatGPT your resume and it knows what your background and what your style looks like and you can give it a starting point.
It’s learning how to Google something really well. We’ve all slowly learned that skill over the years because it’s so vital to getting anything done. I feel like it’s going to be that. Get into the pool early before it gets too crowded and just tinker around with it. And it’s really fun to play with. Bard also just went public, bard.google.com, it’s another free way of doing it. I tried using Bard to cheat on Wordle over the weekend and that-

Gillian: How’d that work out?

Josh: Oh, it worked out great. Out of the four five-letter words it gave me it included the four letter word that I gave it. Bard has a counting problem.

Mike: Well, it’s young, it’s learning.

Josh: It’s young, it’s learning, right, exactly, exactly.

Mike: Wow.

Josh: So it’ll be interesting, it’ll be interesting.

Mike: I’ll be the constant pessimist in the room. I think that the two things about this that worry me are one, the critical thinking part of it. We’re using AI to, as a content creator, generate massive amounts of content. And then the flip side is … I read a post, actually read the post, I didn’t just skim it, on ways to use AI and it was oh, well you can use it to summarize content. And I’m thinking to myself, “Great, none of this is taking” … It all takes away from the ability for you to sit down, read, have critical thoughts about something, and actually then also just take the time to reflect on it, right? That ability of sitting down and reading a book and thinking through the concepts. Because everything right now is, if AI is generating the content I can also have AI summarize the content and now I basically know what you wrote. Yeah, but you didn’t read it.

Josh: Right. And I think that critical thinking is going to be an important role in it, right? You ask it to generate something but then … Everything I’ve had to generate from a text point of view has been pretty bad. I have put a nothing that I would ever show to the public. It’s just like no, this is not very good writing kind of thing.

Mike: No.

Josh: So I feel like there’s that still.

Gillian: Damon and I were going … He was emceeing a charity event on Saturday night and I was like “Okay, so let’s just ask ChatGPT to write you some funny jokes to say during your MC moment.” Let me tell you, out of the 20 jokes that I got back there was maybe one that was somewhat passable. There were some good puns, I appreciated some of the puns, but it was like okay, I gave it the location, I gave it the type of charity was, I gave some background. It tried hard, it did but they were bad they were so bad. And Damon at some point was like “Okay, stop reading those to me I don’t want to hear anymore.”

Mike: I mean, I’ve tried to see what it would generate for blog post … And actually, I have a friend that wrote, and is doing stuff for the University of Iowa where he’s helping college students understand here’s how you can use this in a constructive way, not in a way that’s just ChatGPT creating your papers for you. It was very sterile, right? It wrote a blog post and it was very sterile, there wasn’t a lot of direction or storytelling to it. It was just very matter-of-factly.

Josh: The song stuck in my head this last month, I don’t know why, it’s usually a Simon & Garfunkel song, and I blame my parents for that, this is You Can Call Me Al when Simon went solo. Also, despite Chevy Chase’s behavior, one of the best music videos ever put together.

Gillian: Agreed. I agree.

Josh: But anyway, there’s a line in You Can Call Me Al, “He doesn’t speak the language and he holds no currency.” And so I was like huh? I’ve always loved that phrase because it’s just like … It’s such a great way of describing somebody who’s a strange in a strange land. And so I asked Bard to write me a fantasy young … The first chapter of a fantasy story about a person who doesn’t speak the language and holds no currency. And it wrote a story about a boy who has no money because currency has vanished from the planet. And he founds finds a spaceship with a box of coins in it, and it ends with him walking away with a coin.

Mike: Oh.

Josh: I’m like “You did not understand the exercise. You really focused on that one word to really hinge the whole thing.”

Mike: Currency.

Josh: Currency.

Mike: Wow. If you want to go down a fun internet tunnel look up the Flintstones and the Jetsons conspiracy theory.

Josh: Oh, no.

Mike: Oh, yes, it’s super fun though.

Josh: Oh.

Mike: So both came out in the, I want to say, early ’60s. Hanna-Barbera, Warner Brothers. I like the Jetsons. I actually never became a Flintstones fan.

Gillian: Yabba-Dabba-Doo!

Mike: I like The Jetsons because of the mid-century modern architecture which is really just cartoons. Anyway. There’s a whole theory that one predates the other and it’s not the Flintstones. It’s actually the Jetsons predates the Flintstones because there was some sort of mega-world collapse. The Flintstones have the concept of work and currency and there’s this … You end up after two hours reading and watching these YouTube videos being, that’s completely plausible. That totally makes sense now why the Flintstones had this, and the idea of television and broadcast waves in theoretically a prehistoric time.

Josh: Right. Fascinating

Gillian: Wow. People spend a lot of thought on some things that I never would’ve ever thought about.

Mike: There’s people in the world that have time on their hands.

Josh: Yes, and the internet.

Gillian: Well, maybe someday.

Josh: I like it, I like it.

Gillian: Mike-

Mike: Fun stuff.

Gillian: I’m just going to call you out here because I know you’ve been working on Call for Presentations for Dreamforce. Do you want to share with our lovely listeners a little bit more about that?

Mike: So if you’re listening to this before I think it’s June 6th, be sure to get your Call for Presentations in for the Admin Track at Dreamforce. It’s open now. It’s open as you listen to this as long as it’s before early part of June. It’s the same as last year. So there’s two ways to submit. There’s a submission which is the traditional way. I have an idea. I want to talk about this product and the thing that I built, and build the presentation and get up on stage. And those are the ones that we’re reviewing to do all of the presentations for both the breakout sessions for Admin Track at Dreamforce and theater sessions at Admin Track. And, of course, space is limited so take time. You don’t have to submit 100 submit three that you’ve really thought about and planned.
I have a friend who has a couple kids that are I believe it’s in Boy Scouts and they do these little Pinewood derby things. I spent some time helping that kid making that car as slick and fast as possible. And we showed up, and we had a pretty polished car, and that thing went down the track. And then there were some people that showed up and they literally just taped a quarter to their car and that was it. And maybe that’s all the time that they had. We had more time. Our car won. And that’s kind of how Call for Presentations work. It’s not about the number of cupcakes you show up with it’s about the quality of the cupcake.

Josh: Right.

Mike: Josh can attest to that.

Josh: I can attest this, I’ve seen it over the years. If you give us three quality submissions you are far more likely to get at least one of those accepted than if you give me 20 even decent once. If you overwhelm me with information, and I know these are coming from the same person, it’s just like you’re throwing spaghetti against the wall at that point. Take your time, choose the stuff that you’re really passionate about, and make that … Make a title in abstract that resembles that passion and that’s going to increase your chances by a lot.

Mike: And also spend time in the Trailblazer community. Look at what people are asking and talking about, right, because that’s the trends that we follow. I mean, we have our own themes and directives that we have to abide by, but overall we’re following that trend as well. If we see that, and your submissions line up with that … Now there’s no guarantee. It’s like applying for a job. I mean, there’s how many 100 people are going to apply for a job? Well, only one person can get it. And it’s the same way with a CFP. How did that one person get it where they’re very persistent, and on point, and made sure stuff lined up? And also, there is a little bit of luck that goes with it.

Gillian: Well, I always like reading the submissions that come in. When I have been reviewing these in the past, if you … To Josh’s point, if you submit 10, 15 sessions that are not really fledged out it’s annoying so don’t do that. Give us good stuff. Make our job hard.

Josh: Right, exactly.

Mike: It also, as a reviewer, I’ll be honest, it makes us worry about the level of effort you’re going to put into the session.

Josh: Exactly. The first question I ask is, is this a good quality submission? Did they actually think it out? Is it more than a two-sentence long abstract? If you put that level of work into what you’re sending us then exactly, I’m hoping you’re going to put that level of work into your presentation and into your stagecraft because it is work. And also consider that before you … You get a free ticket to Dreamforce, that’s great, but also realize Mike’s going to be calling you up and being like “Hey, we need to see your slides, and we need to do your dry run, we need to get you successful on stage. Know what you’re signing up for and think about the thing that you’re going to get really excited about to talk about on stage.

Mike: And you’re willing to devote your summer to getting ready to talk about it on stage.

Josh: At least a decent portion of your summer.

Mike: A good portion. I’m following another community conference that’s doing something very similar to what I have planned for managing speakers in Admin Track, and we’ll see how that goes.

Josh: Got you.

Mike: Yes. We’ll include the link to the blog post so that you can submit or not submit in case you’re on deadline. But looking ahead for June, anything in the works?

Josh: My life is pretty much going to be AI so still … Everybody wants content yesterday so I think June’s going to be a big month for that. The other half of AI that is data and data cloud and so we’re probably … I’m probably going to start looking at that as the next down-the-road topic kind of thing. I think AI is going to be a big part of my life between now and Dreamforce.

Mike: I can understand that.

Gillian: I mean, Josh, you said Dreamforce. I feel like that’s the thing that is rearing up for all of us. That’s what I’m thinking June is going to be like for me is definitely lots of Dreamforce prep and getting things set up for all the cool … The new innovations and also the great content we’re going to bring to life at Dreamforce as now is our time to get it all going.

Mike: So much.

Gillian: Oh, and London World Tour. I get to go to London World Tour which will be lovely. Any listeners over who are going to be at London World Tour, please come say hi to me, I’m really looking forward to being over there. I have not been to London since 2018 so I’m pretty much looking forward to it.

Josh: Oh, wow.

Mike: Oh, my God.

Josh: The whole pandemic. Wow.

Mike: Wow.

Gillian: Before kids.

Josh: Dang. London is hands down one of my favorite cities to get lost in.

Mike: 100%. There’s a new ruler over there that you can … It’s all king stuff now it’s no queen. I don’t know. I guess I didn’t talk about this, but June there will be another Build a Blog series coming out. Post. And we are going to talk about actual content creation, we are to that point. So this has been a fun series. The last one came out May 16th on finding a publishing platform. I’m guessing that’s going to be the one that gets read the most because that seems to be what everybody’s … The major questions are. The plan is to turn people … Anybody that’s aspiring to become a blogger, from Zero to Hero by Dreamforce. I’ve got that going on. And then I’m also working on turning it into a presentation where, as it was announced on the Twitters, you can see me present it at Midwest Dreamin’ in August.

Josh: Woo.

Gillian: Woo-hoo.

Mike: It times out perfect because there’ll be an August post that should go live which would be the last post before Dreamforce. Not that I had that planned or anything.

Josh: Nice.

Mike: Boom.

Gillian: That’s awesome.

Josh: Why do I suddenly have an image of Illuminati’s in my head?

Gillian: I don’t know. AI, AI.

Josh: AI. There’s a hallucination joke in there somewhere but I don’t … It’s on the tip of my tongue I don’t have it.

Mike: Along those lines. A cult film came out I want to say in ’99, Stranger Days. Juliette Lewis. I forget the other person that’s in it.

Josh: Bradley Cooper I think.

Mike: No. Before Bradley Cooper.

Josh: Okay.

Mike: It slipped under the radar for a lot of people. I only remembered it because CBS Sunday Morning did a feature on Juliette Lewis and they talked about that movie. They have this little plastic tentacle thing that you can put on as a hat, and then you can basically experience things from someone else, and it’s like a mind recorder. So when you said Illuminati in your head I’m like maybe you put on the little Strange Days thing.

Gillian: Well, this was really fun, guys, thank you. Thank you, Mike, for organizing this, and thanks for … Hey, Josh, I mean, gosh, this has been so fun. This is like the Podcasters Unite so this is really cool, thank you.

Mike: It is. Well, we’re going to do this every month.

Josh: All right.

Mike: End of the month this is the episode to look forward to.

Josh: I like it. And our timing is perfect I’m actually out of coffee.

Mike: So am I. So this was a fun little coffee chat with my fellow evangelists. We’re going to try to do that every month so if you have ideas or topics, things you want to hear about let me know on Twitter, find me in the social medias somewhere. We’re going to have coffee at the end of every month. And, of course, if you enjoyed this episode can you do me a favor? Just share it with one person. If you’re listening on iTunes, all you got to do is tap the dots and choose share episode, and then you can put that link into a social post, or you can text it to a friend, but doing so would help, I would appreciate that a lot. And, of course, if you’re looking for more great resources, everything that we mentioned links are all at admin.salesforce.com including a transcript of the show. And be sure to join our conversation in the Admin Trailblazer Group in the Trailblazer community. Of course, links are in the show notes. So until then, we’ll see you in the cloud.

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Skip Sauls, Senior Director of Product Management at Salesforce. Join us as we chat about why data is so important to reporting, what some big-data terms are, and some fun hobbies that Skip enjoys outside of building awesome products for Salesforce Admins.

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

The data lakehouseSkip is the product manager in charge of the ecosystem for Data Cloud, which unifies data from Salesforce and other sources to give you a single source of truth for everything your organization knows about your customers. This will make it easier to do everything from generating reports and dashboards to implementing new apps across the organization using the data you have, no matter where it’s coming from.

For admins, Data Cloud will remove the need to move data around every time you want to use it somewhere else. This reduces the risk of using old data or accidentally opening up a security vulnerability. Instead, you’ll keep your data in a centralized “Data Lakehouse” (both a data lake and a data warehouse) and pull it from there when you need to use it for something.

What you get from centralizing dataCentralizing your data management in one place has a number of other benefits. For one thing, it gives you a framework for making important decisions about which source is the most authoritative so you can resolve any conflicts that may come up when there’s a disagreement. What’s more, it’ll minimize situations where reports and dashboards don’t match up because they were created from different sources or pulled at different times.

Today, when new data comes in from somewhere, you can’t necessarily be sure how long it will take to update in your other orgs. With Data Cloud it’s all in one place, which means any changes will be reflected everywhere simultaneously. And if you need to figure out why a report is telling you something different today than it did yesterday, you can go back and look at a snapshot without having to dig through multiple orgs.

The future of SalesforceGoing forward, the hope is to build more and more Salesforce features that are used in multiple orgs on top of Data Cloud, separate from individual platforms. This gives every platform you use access to the same powerful tools like advanced analytics. It’ll also make it possible for third party platforms to work directly with Salesforce capabilities, offering more flexibility for your org.

This all gets even more exciting when Skip starts talking about the possibility for building apps that can be reused throughout an org, or even users creating things with generative AI. The streamlining provided by Data Cloud will make all of that possible.

Be sure to listen to the full episode for more of Skip’s thoughts on the future, and what Evel Knievel’s stunt bike can tell us about where technology is headed.

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Full show transcriptMike: With Salesforce Data Cloud, you can organize and unify data across Salesforce and other data sources. After data has been ingested in Data Cloud, it can be used to drive personalization and engagement through the creation of audience segments. This week I’m talking with Skip Sauls, product manager in charge of the ecosystem for Data Cloud. Skip is going to help us understand why data is so important for admins, and the reporting that we need to do. He’s also going to give us some insight into terms that we’ve been hearing, or at least I’ve been hearing, around data. Before we get into the episode, I want to be sure that you are following the Salesforce Admins Podcast on iTunes, or wherever you get your podcast. That way, you get a new episode every Thursday right on your phone. Let’s talk data with Skip.

Skip, welcome to the podcast.

Skip Sauls: Thanks Mike, enjoy the invitation.

Mike: It’s been a while since we’ve chatted. I know we’ve passed each other quite a few times at events here and there. Just get everybody level set on what you do at Salesforce.

Skip Sauls: I’m a PM on the Data Cloud, and my specific role is around the data cloud ecosystem, which is largely defined as our SI partners, also known as alliance partners, and then our ISV partners, which are largely around app exchange. That means all the things related to making those two groups successful, a lot of that relates to things in the dev and admin world, which is why this is an interesting crowd to talk to. This is everything from the dev experience to packaging to ALM, application lifecycle management, to all the things we need to do. A big passion of mine, as many of from my previous life, is around the admin install experience, so making sure that we can get these apps up and running inside of all these disparate orgs easily.

Mike: For an admin who’s just hearing about Data Cloud, how would you explain Data Cloud?

Skip Sauls: The plan for Data Cloud is to have it be the data platform for all things Salesforce going forward. Over the next several releases and years, you’ll see more and more of our app clouds and properties, and teams, et cetera, moving to use the Data Cloud, and you’ll see some of those in the very near future. This is not a far future thing for a lot of them. The basic idea is to give our customers a more flexible and powerful platform for data than standard Salesforce core, and importantly, unify all that data in one place, so we don’t have the silos of data like we do today, so lots of ambitious things around it.

It came out of the marketing cloud. There’s the customer data platform you’ve heard of, but the features themselves are also designed for use in all data scenarios, and lets you operate on the data in one place, no matter how many different orgs you might be, in the case of the admins, working with, and not have to have movement of data between all the different orgs, like we do today. We’re trying to really make it much more rational, if you will, as to how we deal with data.

Mike: Does Data Cloud really just apply for data movement and reporting between orgs, or does it also apply, you mentioned Marketing Cloud, in between clouds as well?

Skip Sauls: A picture I would paint is that all of the clouds will eventually move to or support Data Cloud, and instead of having each org having its own data, or each product stack having its own data, you’ll have data in one place, the data lake house, as people like to refer to it. You could have data related that’s to customers, or to other business entities, and sales service, marketing, analytics, all the industries would all pull from that common data cloud instead of having the, I hate to say siloed, it sounds so negative, but today you have to move things between the clouds in a more manual fashion.

Mike: I’m trying to put that picture together, and really, how I’m envisioning it is, Sales Cloud or Marketing Cloud is almost the input for how data is then gathered.

Skip Sauls: Exactly.

Mike: Gotcha. As somebody who grew up in Sales Cloud, it feels very different.

Skip Sauls: I would say that to the end user, they won’t necessarily notice a difference. They’re still going to be using a sales app, or a service app. To an admin, you’re going to have the ability to say, “Let’s go to manage it effectively on the data cloud.” In theory, I could manage the objects in one place, and then multiple other orgs can point at that data cloud org, if you want to think of it that way, and they won’t have to have as much data themselves. Things that are currently in core may end up being mostly the metadata, and things like that, but not a lot of the pure data itself.

Mike: One of the things I think people, and you probably run into this a lot, they suddenly care about their data when they need to run reports, which is one of the themes of a lot of the content we’re putting out currently. Data is important for reports, because one, if you don’t have the data, there’s no report; but two, if you have bad data, there’s no report. I think the third thing, the reason why I wanted to have you come on is, there’s also a lot of places currently for data to live, which is why Data Cloud exists. Can you touch on, as an admin sitting down hearing this, thinking, “Okay, I want to take reporting in my organization to the next level,” what are some of the things I should be thinking about with Data Cloud, and with just good data collection and habits?

Skip Sauls: On that point, one of our partners, recently we had a discussion, and they were mentioning what they called a golden record, and what some people call the single version of the truth. That’s where I think a lot of people will leverage Data Cloud. There may be multiple sources of truth, you might have things that come from Salesforce core, maybe have things that come from somewhere on Amazon, or Google, or Microsoft, pulling it in, and the Data Cloud representations are considered to be the single version of the truth, and that is the agreed upon version of the truth for your company.

Now, that sounds politically charged, because it’s the version of the truth, but that is what people want, the ability to effectively curate the data. You’ve got data lineage, data catalogs that prove that it’s the correct data, but what you’re presenting could be effectively controlled and curated by people on the Data Cloud. Your reports can draw from that instead of trying to go across multiple data stores and data sources. If you need to do some data cleansing, checking accuracy, if you want to do things for compliance checking, you can do it on the Data Cloud instead of having to do it in each individual siloed data store like we do today.

Mike: Wow. I was just thinking, many years back I actually went through an exercise where we were looking at an organization that had what everybody thought was multiple sources of truth, and combining them into a master data record, and then sitting down and trying to figure out, what were the resolutions to conflicts, and who can update who and when, and then, who wins? I’m sure these are all terms. For example, if we update a record in Salesforce, and then Oracle Financial gets an update, who pushes to the master data record, and what’s the conflict? Who wins?

Skip Sauls: I’m not working on those features, but the whole resolution aspect of it is something that people bring up. There’s identity resolution right now, which is one of the features of Marketing Cloud. You can take all these disparate representations of a user in this case, and determine that this is actually the same user, even though they’re coming from all these different marketing data sources. The data accuracy piece is one that would probably run in the data cloud itself, and say, “Okay, this is the agreed upon source of truth here, and we’re making sure that it’s correct.”

All the things around the process side that you mentioned, of who gets to update it, is going to be done through Data Cloud. The flows teams are all working on Data Cloud, all the events on Data Clouds. All these things that you’re familiar with in core are being enabled on the Data Cloud. You’d be able to say, based upon something, kick off an action, kick off a flow, just like you do today, and there’ll be some ability to say, “Let that be the thing that determines what gets updated” in a hopefully more structured fashion. You have more control over it.

Mike: Right. Back to something you mentioned earlier, which is interesting, did you say source of truth at the time for data? I always try to explain stuff like this to executives. There’s a lot of talk around realtime data, too, but source of truth at the time, you can run a dashboard at 1:30 in the afternoon, and by 1:35 the dashboard’s out of date because the data’s out of date. If you had to explain source of truth at the time, or multiple sources of truth, isn’t that what’s going on? It’s not that somebody is really fudging the data, the time is also a factor when you’re looking at data.

Skip Sauls: Exactly, and we see this even with standard reports and charts today, where somebody will question, “This is not what we saw in some other presentation.” Somebody else just took a snapshot at a different point in time. I don’t know that Data Cloud’s going to solve that, but in theory, you’re pulling it from one place, and everybody’s getting the same representation of it. Because it’s in a big data lake house, the opportunity to store those snapshots in time is greater. You’re not just looking at the most current record, but you could also have a history of things, and in theory, look back at data at a certain point, and say, “Here it was at 1:30. This is what it was accurately, and it has changed, because it is not necessarily bound to just the current database-style store.”

I think that’s a interesting area. The realtime thing is one that comes up, and that refers a lot to the ability to stream data in. It’s not meant to imply that it’s a realtime system in the classic computer science sense. We’re not changing things so radically that everything is real time, but the goal is to make it feel real time to the average human user who needs to update something and see it reflected somewhere else in a reasonable amount of time. That’s what they’re getting at. The realtime thing is a charged label, as you can imagine. That’s something today that, with a lot of the Salesforce clouds, we struggle with, as to how soon it’s going to show up somewhere else, if you’ve got it in the report, or chart. I think the potential for making that more near real time is there.

Mike: Yeah. Actually, I’m glad you touched on that. I know you’ve said real time in a few answers, and I wanted to come back and be like, “What does that mean?” To me, real time feels like watching the stock ticker at the bottom of a financial network, and you’re like, “It’s happening in real time.” That stock was probably updated, and then it had to go to a system, and then it had to go to another system, and then it had to get fed into this ticker system, so it’s a minute and a half behind, two minutes at best.

Skip Sauls: Exactly.

Mike: Another term you’ve said, and some of this is just the soft landing into this new world, I’ll call it, of CRM. You’ve said data lake a few times. I remember, as I started to get into the world of data and databases, “Okay, this makes sense to me,” and then big data stuff came out, and I started hearing the term data lake. Can you help admins understand what a data lake is? I think you’ve also mentioned a data lake house, which obviously, sounds really cool. Maybe I want to live there, I don’t know.

Skip Sauls: I’m probably not the right one to describe those really deeply, but the idea is that it’s a place for you to store your data. Lake house is data Lake, data warehouse combined together. I would be out of my depth trying to dig into all the specifics around it, but our vision for it is the single place for data. The future, if you will, is that even your single source of truth data, your things that are database-centric today would eventually live there.

If we fast-forward, I don’t even know what the release date would be for this kind of thing, but if you imagine, you’re creating things that are actually living in that world, directly in the Data Cloud, not in core. They’re not creating things anymore in the standard Salesforce core, and you have more potential for large volumes of data. You can handle huge amounts of data compared to classic Salesforce, and even bigger volumes than you can handle with things like some of our analytics products that have large data sets. I’m not sure I’d be the right one to describe the-

Mike: No, I appreciate you taking a swing at it, because I feel like, even if you’re not right, it still helps. How in context would you explain this? That’s often the position that an admin is put in. “That’s a good question. Let me jump into that a little bit more.”

I’m also just scrolling through our page, looking at everything Data Cloud. I think we’ve talked a lot about inputs. Data Cloud is also built to work with all of our analytics platforms, Tableau and stuff like that. If you’re a Tableau user, you’re able to pull these really great visualizations out.

Skip Sauls: Today there’s Tableau connectors that can pull from the Data Cloud. For CRM analytics, there is a direct query into the Data Cloud, so you can actually have a dashboard that’s interacting with it. Over time, we’ll unify a lot of our analytics features on top of the Data Cloud. That’s where things are going, if you will. The vision is that all the tools, analytics tools included, will all pull directly from that Data Cloud in the future.

Mike: Gotcha.

Skip Sauls: That even opens it up to, non Salesforce tooling becomes easier to do, because everything can pull from it in the same fashion. We would have our own products, but competitor products could potentially use it in the same way, which I think is interesting. It’s very different from the very specific tool and data store model that we have today for a lot of things.

Mike: I think there definitely was a period of time when, for an organization or a company, you looked at, how do we go all in on this platform, and use everything? You quickly realize that some parts of the platform don’t do what you need it to do. I think now, 2023, what I see in working with a lot of admins is, organizations find the right tool for what they need. Then it’s, how do we stitch these tools together, which to me, makes Data Cloud the most important thing that we have, because this can act as that foundational layer for, how does everybody, regardless of the tool, get the right information?

Skip Sauls: Exactly, and an example of that is, some of our partners today are looking at what they would do on Data Cloud. They’ve in the past had specific integrations for sales, and service, and industries, and the picture we’re trying to paint is, you would actually have your objects living in this Data Cloud, and your apps could be something that could work more easily with something else. It’d be easier for somebody to wire it together through an app builder, or through some other declarative tech, because they’re all working against the common Data Cloud, the models. It’s not so specific to a particular product or data store. I think that’s very interesting, and that leads into what I love to call ad hoc applications. This is not my idea, it’s what I’ve just heard people talk about. “I need an app that will do something very specific, and I don’t care if it’s highly scalable or lives forever, because I’m not building it for that. I just need to get that job done.”

It may be a throwaway app, or it maybe something a lot of people want to use, and then an admin can take it and make it available to other people. What I’d like to see us get to is letting even end users build these apps, because everything is in a well-defined and controlled environment. They’re wiring it together, or maybe they’re using the generative AI to say, “Build this app for me,” and the app is built using these building blocks that are from Salesforce, from our partners, the customer writes them themselves, and they all work together against the data cloud. It’s easier in theory, because you’re not trying to piece it together across all the different platforms and data stores. That to me is very exciting. I think we’re finally at a point where we can actually realize a lot of that. The Data Cloud is part of that picture, the generative AI that everybody’s excited about is another big part of that.

Mike: Well, that leads perfectly into my last question, which was going to be, where do you see the future of Data Cloud, especially since it seems everybody can’t stop talking about AI, and GPT, and machine learning?

Skip Sauls: The one thing that may not be obvious is that most, if not all of the generative AI tech will be running on Data Cloud. You’ll hear people say, “You probably should be using Data Cloud if you want to use this kind of technology.” Part of that is because, some of the AI tech runs better off core, or what we think of as being near core, meaning that it’s still within the Salesforce-walled garden, but it’s not the classic Salesforce core platform. It’s on the public cloud platforms. The end user won’t know that they’re using another cloud provider. They’re not using a public cloud directly, they’re still using Salesforce, but the underlying pieces of it are running on this new platform, and the data platform is part of that. I would say, if you’re interested in generative AI, look at the Data Cloud as the thing that enables most if not all of that.

On the flip side, the partners and customers who use this can put their data into the Data Cloud, and use generative AI against it more easily than you can with the current Salesforce model. There’s all sorts of issues to work through around this, of data privacy and security, but we as Salesforce can secure it better than if you say, “I need to export this out to a public cloud and run something there, and then import the results back in.” That causes a lot of our customers to have heartache, heartburn, trying to think about how to handle that. We can say now, “Data Cloud is within that Salesforce security model, in the circle of trust, if you will.”

That’s exciting to me. I honestly think that a lot of what we call Data Cloud, the perfect thing that will happen is that no one will talk about Data Cloud in the future, because it’s just part of the Salesforce platform. It’s Salesforce, Data cloud is an enabling tech for it. It’s not a thing you’re going to, if that makes sense.

Mike: No, it does. The irony is that it’s actually so performant and so well-built that it’s invisible.

Skip Sauls: Exactly.

Mike: Isn’t that the whole idea of technology? Technology is almost magic if it’s built really well.

Skip Sauls: Exactly. The stuff that disappears in the background, you don’t think about using it, everybody just intuitively uses these things. That’s the big success point. For our admins, we want our admins to feel like, “Hey, I’m a Salesforce admin, I’m not a Data Cloud admin.” We’re doing persona UX research right now, and everybody keeps coming back to the fact that we don’t really need a Data Cloud admin persona. We have a Salesforce admin persona that will manage these Data Cloud entities, if you will. I think that should be music to the ears of the admin community, because we’re not trying to reinvent the wheel and force you to go to something else to do all these things.

Mike: I think that’s also the fear of customers, too. If you keep adding products and features, do I have to keep adding headcount?

Skip Sauls: Exactly.

Mike: If you have a skilled workforce, in theory, they should be able to handle all of that. Skip, we covered a ton in a little bit of time. I always like to end on something fun. In the years of doing this podcast, I had a product manager on that smelted metal as a hobby, and one of them collected board games. I’ll just put you on the spot, outside of Data Cloud, and generative AI, and everything we just talked about, data lakes, is there some fun stuff that Skip likes to do?

Skip Sauls: Yeah, two things. I love to ride dirt bikes with my son, and I like to build PCs. I think you have a motorsports passion yourself. I used to race cars, but dirt bikes are something I can do with my son, because he’s not of the driving age yet. I’m a gear head.

Mike: Do you have a place to go ride?

Skip Sauls: Yeah, we have three tracks not far from here, they’re motocross tracks. I’m an older guy, so I don’t do the crazy stuff. My kid does the big jumps. I get out there and have fun whenever we can.

Mike: Yeah, those guy… and man, dirt bikes. If you ever want to see something evolve at rapid pace, if you look up what a dirt bike was in the 1970s to what one can do now, it is just phenomenal. The technology, the metal, where we have come with our understanding of how to shape metal, and the tensile strength of metal, and the stuff that we can ask it to do, is just fascinating. I say that because, coming off World Tour DC, we were at the National Air and Space Museum, and they had a dirt bike there, it’s relevant, that Evel Knievel used in one of his jumps. This is late 1970s, and you look at it, and the heft, and the size that some of those bikes were, and how under horse-powered they are compared to now, and how light swing arms are, and how light torsion bars are, and how much horsepower can come out of a two-stroke motor.

Skip Sauls: When I see the old Evel Knievel videos, I’m like, “I can’t believe he’s doing that on that bike.”

Mike: Yeah, it’s a lead weight with a motor. Oh man. Skip, I appreciate you coming on and talking Data Cloud. I’m sure we will see more of your work, or maybe not, actually. Isn’t that the goal? Maybe we won’t see more of your work, it’ll just slip into the background, and we’ll all be very thankful for it.

Skip Sauls: I think that would be the best thing. I do look forward to meeting up with people in the community, maybe at some of the upcoming world tour events. When we do, we try to go to the admin or dev user groups, and present. I would love to meet with you folks in the field.

Mike: Fabulous. Thanks so much, Skip.

Skip Sauls: Yeah, thank you. This was great.

Mike: Well, that was a fun discussion with Skip. I might have spent a little extra time talking dirt bikes with him. I hope you didn’t mind that at the end. If you enjoyed this episode, share it with one person. If you’re listening on iTunes, just tap the three dots, and choose “Share episode.” Then you can post it to social or text it to a friend, your call. If you’re looking for more great resources, your one stop for everything admin is admin.salesforce.com. We’ve got everything there, including a transcript of the show. Be sure to join our conversation in the Admin Trailblazer group in the Trailblazer community. Of course, there’s links to the show notes below. Until next week, we’ll see you in the cloud.

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Elizabeth Bochanski, a newly-certified Salesforce Admin and MidAtlantic Dreamin’ Volunteer Committee Member. Join us as we chat about prepping for your first Salesforce certification and why in-person networking is so important.

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

Taking the leap and becoming a Salesforce AdminElizabeth was working in sales for a mortgage company when they announced they were switching over to a new platform: Salesforce. While many of her coworkers were grumbling about having to change their routines, Elizabeth was excited about all the ways this new technology could make their lives easier. She started making suggestions and, without knowing it, became a power end user at her organization.

During the pandemic, when everyone was stuck at home, Elizabeth happened to be hanging out with her cousin who happened to be an admin. Together, they sorted out an issue she was having in her org. That’s when Elizabeth realized that maybe she should pursue this admin thing more seriously.

How to make studying a hands-on experienceAt TrailblazerDX this year, Elizabeth dove into the Camp Quick Start area. It was exactly what she was looking for because, as she was studying for her certification, she had realized that hands-on learning was key for her. “Going into learning Salesforce, you need to have an idea of what way you learn,” she says.

For Elizabeth, one thing that really helped was to get into an org and do things while learning about them. “When I was taking a practice test and got a question wrong, I would go and find the answer within the org,” she says. She also highly recommends finding a study group for shared motivation and support.

The importance of in-person networkingGoing forward, Elizabeth has her sights set on getting better with Flow, understanding security, and diving into Object relationships. She’s also thinking about what comes next, like getting the Platform App Builder and Business Analyst certifications. She already has experience working with admins on business processes from her time as a power end user, so it’s a logical next step.

The other thing that Elizabeth emphasizes is the importance of networking. And not just virtual networking, but in-person events. It’s how she met her mentor, and how she ended up being a guest on the pod. You never know who you’re going to run into at a live event, and where a chance meeting might take you, so put yourself out there.

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Learn more* Camp Quick Start

Social* Elizabeth Bochanski: https://trailblazer.me/id/ebochanski * Salesforce Admins: @SalesforceAdmns * Gillian: @GillianKBruce * Mike: @MikeGerholdt

Full show transcriptMike Gerholdt: Welcome to the Salesforce Admins Podcast, where we talk about product, community, and career to help you become an awesome admin. And this week we’re talking with Elizabeth Bochanski. She is a sales professional turn Salesforce professional and volunteer committee member for Mid-Atlantic Dreaming. Now, she was introduced to me by a fellow Salesforce employee at TrailblazerDX because she was getting started on her admin journey. And boy did she really lean into using her time at TrailblazerDX to kind of learn more and supercharge all of her information that she needed to get that admin certification, which she emailed me shortly before we started to record that she had passed. So congrats to her. I thought it was important to get somebody on that was, boy, just fresh and getting started to hear their perspective and give us some insight into learning as well. So with that, let’s get Elizabeth on the podcast. So Elizabeth, welcome to the podcast.

Elizabeth Bochanski: Thank you so much for having me, Mike. I’m pretty excited about this.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. Well, I feel like we crossed paths at TDX, but a faithful friend and companion of the Salesforce ecosystem, Becky Webster connected us and told me about some of the amazing stuff you were doing over in Camp Quickstart, and, “You’ve got to talk to this person, Mike, that was literally the words she told me. So here we are. We’re talking now. Elizabeth, why don’t we get started and have you introduce yourself and tell everyone how you got into the Salesforce ecosystem.

Elizabeth Bochanski: Sure. So my name is Elizabeth Bochanski. Nice to meet you all. I guess you could say that. I am a salesperson turned Salesforce professional. I had been introduced to Salesforce in my last in-person job working as a mortgage loan advisor. A lot of other people’s like same kind of story. What happened was I was part of the purchase team, which happened to be a smaller team compared to the refinance one. And they wanted to use us as a test group, and they had someone come in and explain what Salesforce was going to do for us. And right away I was smitten. I was like, “Oh my gosh, this is fantastic.” And it was funny because a lot of my coworkers are like, “Oh goodness, something else to learn.” And I’m looking at them, I’m like, “You all are nuts. This is fantastic. This is going to make our jobs easier.”

And I wound up diving headfirst into it, learning it, and getting my hands in it as an end user. I was offering suggestions to, who I didn’t know then, but know now, were the admins and they were clicking these little buttons and making things happen for me. And I was so excited, writing up meeting notes on the weekends, kept a lot log of bugs and wishlists, and eventually I was brought into meetings. And with all of this, I didn’t realize it, then I found out just this past fall, I had turned into a power end user. Now COVID happened. Okay. And I wasn’t working with Salesforce anymore. I was hanging out with my cousin on the couch who had become an accidental admin at her job, and she was stuck on a pick list.

And I’m like, “Let me take a look at that.” And I poke around a little bit and I was able to help her figure it out, get out of the issue that she was having. And she’s like, “Elizabeth, you have to go for this admin certification.” My cousin Stephanie. I was like, “Okay, all right, I’ll go for it.” And it was a path, and I’m very happy to say I earned it about a week and a half ago on March 27th.

Mike Gerholdt: Wow, okay.

Elizabeth Bochanski: But I’m just so excited about Salesforce because of the opportunities it’s opened up for me. I never really thought that I could get access to the technology world or working with executives or anything like that with my previous experience. And I’m just so excited for all the opportunities.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. Now what’s interesting is a lot of people that I talk to and myself included, came from sales and became Salesforce admins, and who knows where the stars will take you, but what do you think it is about having sales knowledge that somewhat flattens the curve for ramping into becoming a Salesforce admin?

Elizabeth Bochanski: Definitely an appreciation for the capabilities that an admin can bring to a Salesforce org. And the reason why I say this is a lot of salespeople are dealing with antiquated customer relationship management software. I’ve dealt with plenty of them over the years in all different kinds of jobs, to then be presented with this platform that could be customized. I will tell you, I was really content in my sales job. I was helping people get into homes. I enjoyed it. My brain absolutely lit up thinking about business processes and ways to make things more efficient. And for people who are like that in a sales job where they hone their skills, that is where I believe being a Salesforce admin would possibly be a path they’d want to consider.

Mike Gerholdt: So fast-forward to TrailblazerDX, which was earlier this year in 2023, and you kind of dove headfirst into our Camp Quickstart area to do… I would call it accelerated learning maybe. What up into that point had kind of been your learning path? Were you just doing some modules here and there, or did you have a plan?

Elizabeth Bochanski: So my Salesforce learning, it was a little bit longer, I think, than maybe some, and then shorter than others [inaudible] to each individual. What I started out with was actually the Trail Virtual Bootcamp. And it is good. It wasn’t necessarily the best fit for me. I really needed something where I needed to be a little bit more hands-on, and I will even say this, going into learning Salesforce, you need to have an idea of what way you learn. And it took me… And it’s why it took me a little bit longer, I think. I needed to figure that out myself because this was the first time I was doing a career change where it wasn’t within a structured program with a job that I was already in. I had to do this myself and didn’t have people I could turn to for questions for everything. Anyway, as I was going, yeah, I did Trailhead, I used some other resources that are out there.

You just need to search for them. And I’ll do a… I’m planning to write up an article myself, personally, on my experience from start to finish. People could check that out later and that’ll be coming soon. What I’ll say is I focused… Especially within the last six months on practice questions, I focused on getting my hands a little bit more in the org while I was studying was a big help because then I was able to visualize it. I’m a very visual and hands-on learner. And… Well, if you could get yourself a study group, I’d recommend that as well. That was another big component of mine that really helped.

Mike Gerholdt: Now, when you said understand the way you learn, can you kind of dive into that? Like what do you mean? Because I don’t know if I even know I understand the way I learn. Maybe most people don’t.

Elizabeth Bochanski: Yeah, that’s the thing, you need to figure out for yourself. I know some people are really good at studying the material and then they are able to know it. For example, when I started as a mortgage loan advisor, I had to get certified for that, and I would write out notes for all the steps that I did, and I would write them out while I’m doing them so that I could refer back to them. And then eventually it gets to the point we have some repetition after writing the notes, it sinks in. But with Salesforce, it was a little different, especially since with the admin, it’s a lot more expansive compared to some other certifications you could go for. It covers a lot of material.

And I found for me, going in while I am taking a practice test and I find that I had an answer wrong, I would go and find the answer within the org and play around a little bit in that section, get a little bit more familiar with it, things like that. And there’s others that are like me where… I forget… I had read about it. I think there’s four types of learners, but don’t hold me to that, please.

Mike Gerholdt: No, no, absolutely not.

Elizabeth Bochanski: But the ones that I know are visual, because it’s who I am. It’s visual and hands-on.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah.

Elizabeth Bochanski: And there is information out there, I just highly recommend looking into it for yourself because the thing about being an adult learner, a career changer, is you’ve been out of school for a while and going for a certification like this, you want to be prepared and you want to also be effectively using your time. And I got to hone in on that, fortunately, in my last leg. Also had a lot of support and everything, so it was… I earned every point on that test, Mike.

Mike Gerholdt: Yep, everybody does. Everybody does.

Elizabeth Bochanski: I do. Seriously though.

Mike Gerholdt: So looking at that and kind of thinking through… You’re learning, you’re building skills, where are you focusing? Are you focusing in a specific area? Are you focusing on a specific product or feature?

Elizabeth Bochanski: Yeah. Right now, I’m looking to upskill with my flows.

Mike Gerholdt: Okay. Oh, wow. Very ambitious.

Elizabeth Bochanski: Yeah. Yep. I always like to learn something new and to take on a new challenge. I’m also looking more into understanding security. And then I guess also just the object relationships, delving a little bit more in how they impact each other. Those are the three things in terms of, I guess you could say, features that I’m looking into. And then I’m toying with looking at either the platform app builder certification or the business analyst certification next.

Mike Gerholdt: Ah-huh.

Elizabeth Bochanski: Just because with my sales background, I’d say with the business analyst or even the consulting route, I think that can help play to some of my strengths to help stakeholders understand what it is that they’re buying into, like be that bridge of communication.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, I would selfishly… I mean, I would promote both of them, but the business analyst stuff is top of mind for me because I find too often people learn the technology and they can sit and look at a business process and they don’t know how to translate the two together into a solution. And that’s the glue, that’s the value. Because a lot of people can build stuff, but if it doesn’t improve the process.

Elizabeth Bochanski: Yes. And that’s why I’m sort of gearing towards that because as a power end user in a sales position, as a mortgage loan advisor, I had already experience in working on business processes with the admins. So that’s why I was like, “Yeah, let’s just play with our strengths here.”

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. So we know for sure, you did a lot of quick starts at TrailblazerDX-

Elizabeth Bochanski: Yes.

Mike Gerholdt: And you’ve done a lot of stuff in Trailhead. I want to… Sometimes that’s the narrative rightfully so. But outside of that, what are some of the other things that you’re engaging in to upskill yourself?

Elizabeth Bochanski: Well, the interesting thing, you don’t necessarily see a lot of training for what I think is really, really important, especially when you’re starting a new career, is to actually network. Until October of 2022, I barely touched my LinkedIn profile, and from then on I was fortunate to hop into a program that taught me about it, and then I had someone encourage me to lean into it a little bit more. And so I dove in and it’s opened up a world… It’s just moved me along so much faster than I thought was possible. And a lot of things like being on this show have happened because of this. I will say like besides the fact that yes, I am an extrovert, and I like to talk with people and whatnot, I just want to share that it’s in your best interest whether you’re extroverted or not, because I have introverted friends as well going through this, and they went for it themselves, and they were pleasantly surprised.

Well, I’ll just speak to one of them, her name’s Kathy in particular. She was nervous about it, but I had met her in a cohort and found out that she lived close by and I recommended she joined in per networking. That’s another thing besides virtual, in person. She came, she loved it. And I had actually asked her if there was anything she would share to another introvert if she wanted to come. And she said… Let’s see here, “I think with anyone who’s shy and a bit of an introvert, it takes that first step of bravery to really get started. You’ll be surprised by the community of folks and friends that will be cheering you on once you take that first step into an unknown to be known by others. You can do it.” So little encouragement from a fellow introvert. But what’s been really great is it’s true, it’s the community. I’ve really been leaning into it.

First virtual now in person. I go to user group meetings. I drive to user group meetings. I’ve gone to New York, I’ve gone to outside of Philadelphia, of course, in New Jersey, I’m eyeing DC. And I also got very involved in a conference. And I’ve met so many wonderful people who are so supportive through it, and I could turn to them for questions. I will say, it was wonderful having my study group that I had. The one thing though is you’re all on the same level. And I guess for people who are working in a Salesforce org now and are learning the job, I count them very lucky if they have senior members with them because they have someone to turn to. It wasn’t the case. And then as soon as I stepped out and really started to, like I say, in-person network, I can’t recommend that more than enough to anyone listening that’s looking to break into the Salesforce ecosystem.

Having these people in my life, it’s been a game changer, I guess is the way I could put it. I met my mentor, who’s Gina Marques, and she’s absolutely lovely. And I was so surprised because I actually turned to her to ask, “Hey, do you know of anybody who would be willing to help me because I just need someone to help keep me in check. Keep me moving along.” Right? And she’s like, “You know what? I just finished really with mentoring someone. She’s ready to be set free now. I’ll take you on.” I was like, “Oh, really? Oh my God. Okay.” And I was very fortunate when I first started, I was excited about going to the world tour in New York City, and it was going to be my first in-person event. And I posted about it, and I had someone who I had met in a mixer online, her name’s Vanessa Grant, who I absolutely love.

She said, “Okay, here’s the dos and don’ts.” She gave me a list when you go to an event like this. And then she’s like, “I’m going to introduce you to someone. Her name’s Michelle Hansen.”

Mike Gerholdt: Yes.

Elizabeth Bochanski: And she likes to collect-

Elizabeth Bochanski: Stickers.

Elizabeth Bochanski: Collect newbies.

Mike Gerholdt: And stickers.

Elizabeth Bochanski: Stickers.

Mike Gerholdt: [inaudible]-

Elizabeth Bochanski: Newbies and stickers. She likes to collect those too. So she’s like, “Why don’t you meet up with her?” And I did. And Michelle introduced me to a bunch of fabulous people. Michelle is the one who told me to go to the user group meetings for which I’m forever thankful. And that’s how I met Gina, and that’s how I got involved with a community conference. And it’s just been one thing after another, really. And I knew I would get involved in this stuff eventually, but at the rate that it’s been going, and… I mean, my TrailblazerDX experience was absolutely amazing. Going to that quick start camp that I did, I don’t know if people know, but when you go there, the quick start options that you have to choose from were just developer only. And I am was prepping still for my admin, and I hadn’t looked at a line of code ever. And it was so funny. I was looking through the list of options that I could choose from, and I saw lightning web components.

I was like, “Oh, lightning web components. I know that. It shouldn’t be too bad.” Turns out I probably picked one of the hardest ones I possibly could have. Fortunately, there was a village of wonderful helpers there, and they got me through it. And that’s what I just… It was so interesting to me because that experience at Camp Quickstart had such an impact on me because I got to see another role, the developer side. Got a little overview and I was like, “Wow, this was great.” And it’s what led me to just go back the next day and share some feedback with Becky who was more than willing to listen to me. And I’m so grateful for that. And I got… You know what I mean? When I got my astro, I was like, guys, “Let’s go.”

I was like, “I’m going to be back. We’re going to take pictures.” And we did. And it’s just… I will say, I like learning a lot. And then just to have that session on learning about lightning web components on the back end of the back end. Right?

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah.

Elizabeth Bochanski: It was just so cool. And I was so grateful because one of the helpers there, he was more on the developer side of things, and I started peppering him with questions that didn’t have anything to do with the badge. I was like… And he gratefully… I was so grateful. He just kept explaining things and I really got a great overview and I was like, “Oh.” It had such a lasting impact on me. Anyway-

Mike Gerholdt: Well, that’s great.

Elizabeth Bochanski: I’m sorry. I don’t know because I-

Mike Gerholdt: No, it’s okay.

Elizabeth Bochanski: I’m not sure if we’re still answering the same question here, but yeah.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. So I guess as we wrap up, one thing I’d love to know is… And I’ll flip the script on you.

Elizabeth Bochanski: Sure.

Mike Gerholdt: If today’s Elizabeth Bochanski could go back in time to day one Elizabeth Bochanski, when you started this learning journey and give her a piece of advice, what would that be?

Elizabeth Bochanski: Just to go for it. The whole thing that a lot of people and myself included, that stops them from moving forward is doubt, fear hopping into the mind and just jumbling things up a little bit. It’s just push that aside a little bit sooner. But to be honest, I’m also a big believer in things happening when they’re meant to. And I think this journey that I’ve been on, although some might see it as having been longer than it should have been, or too short or whatever opinions that they may have, I really believe that it all happened the way it had meant to because it grew with each step that I’ve taken. And I’m just really shocked at where I’m at now, and I can’t believe what I’m going to be feeling like a year, two, five years from now. So I’m ready to keep running forward. And Elizabeth, just keep running forward. That’s what I would tell her.

Mike Gerholdt: Great. Well, thank you so much for taking time out today and joining us on the podcast. And I guess in two to five years we’ll have to talk to future Elizabeth and see how she’s doing.

Elizabeth Bochanski: Sure. Gladly. I’ll mark it in my schedule, okay, Mike?

Mike Gerholdt: Perfect. Sounds like a plan. Thanks so much for being on.

Elizabeth Bochanski: Thank you so much for having me. And everyone, good luck out there. Thank you.

Mike Gerholdt: Well, it was great talking with Elizabeth. She is definitely leaning into everything, and I think that’s a good theme to kind of go with. You don’t know what opportunities are going to be presented in front of you, and you certainly need to take advantage of those and make the most of them. So it can be difficult to get out there and talk to people and connect and network, but you never know where it’s going to take you. So thank you, Elizabeth, for sharing that with us. Now, of course, if you want to learn more about all things Salesforce Admin, go to admin.salesforce.com to find more resources, including any of the links we mentioned in this episode, as well as a full transcript. You can also stay up to date with us on social. We are @SalesforceAdmns, no I on Twitter. Gillian, my co-host is on Twitter. She is @gilliankbruce. And of course you can give me a follow. I am @mikegerholdt. And with that, stay safe, stay awesome, and stay tuned for the next episode. We’ll see you in the cloud.

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Gorav Seth, Salesforce Platform Manager at Ashoka, and Eric Smith, Technical Architect at RafterOne.

Join us as we chat about the Flow solutions they came up with to improve their processes in their orgs, and how you can get started building your own flows.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Gorav Seth and Eric Smith.

25+ years of Salesforce experience in one episodeWe brought Gorav and Eric on the show to talk about their upcoming appearances on Jennifer Lee’s “Automate This!” YouTube show. If you don’t already tune in, now’s the time to start. They’ll go over the cool Flow solutions they came up with to improve things at their orgs. But first, a little bit more about our guests.

Gorav has a background in plant biology but got involved in the ecosystem when he migrated his nonprofit to Salesforce and fell in love with the technology. Eric’s been in technology for over 45 years, and his path took him through a telecommunications company that was using Salesforce essentially as a Rolodex. He quickly realized that they were barely scratching the surface of what they could do with the platform, and started building things to help his team of product managers do their jobs better.

Collectively, they have over 25 years of experience in Salesforce.

Why automate?One thing we wanted to ask our guests is how they think about automations and why you should build one. For Gorav, it’s all about the massive improvements you can make to usability on both the front end and the back end. For Eric, it’s also about improving data quality and data security. “A well-designed automation will reduce steps for somebody that has to interact with it and improve the quality of the data that comes out of it,” he says.

On “Automate This!”, they’ll each share a pretty nifty Flow solution they found to replace a clunkier process. Gorav consolidated multiple notifications into one rich text email that gave his users all of the information they needed in one place. They ended up replacing something like 10 workflow rules with one streamlined flow.

Eric’s users needed to constantly refer to the case number they were working with but were spending a lot of time trying to find it. He created a utility to highlight field data on a Lightning record page using a screen flow and saving a ton of time.

Starting with FlowFlow offers a lot of possibilities for simplifying and improving things but it can still be intimidating when you’re starting out. Eric recommends breaking your process down into the smaller steps that need to happen in order to get from Point A to Point B.

And, Gorav adds, it’s an iterative process. You can and should use the debugger to understand what’s happening and why. Take it one step at a time and focus on improvements to your process. “We’re not trying to rebuild this stuff,” Gorav says, “we’re trying to say, ‘How can we do this better?’”

There are a lot of great tips in this podcast about the importance of learning in your career, when to use subflows, and more, so be sure to listen to the full episode and don’t miss their appearance on “Automate This!”.

Podcast swag* Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Learn more* “Automate This!” on YouTube

Social* Gorav: @GoravSeth * Eric: @ESmith35 * Salesforce Admins: @SalesforceAdmns * Gillian: @GillianKBruce * Mike: @MikeGerholdt

Full show transcriptMike Gerholdt: Welcome to the Salesforce Admins Podcast where we talk about product, community, and career to help you become an awesome admin, and this week, we’re talking with two guests about flow solutions because flow requires multiple guests. Actually, both are going to be featured on Jennifer Lee’s Automate This YouTube series, so be sure to check that out. Even if you’re not looking for these two guests, that series is amazing.

But today, we’re going to talk with Gorav Seth, who is the director of IT at Ashoka, and Eric Smith, who is the technical architect at RafterOne, which is a Salesforce partner, about the two flow automation solutions they’re going to have on Jennifer’s YouTube series, but also just about flow in general, and then we end the podcast with a little bit of a career discussion because as we’ll find out, Eric and Gorav have been in the ecosystem and been in technology for a long time and there’s a lot we can learn from them. So it’s fun conversation. Let’s get into it and let’s get Gorav and Eric on the podcast. So Gorav and Eric, welcome to the podcast.

Eric Smith: Thanks, Mike.

Gorav Seth: Thank you for having us.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. Well, it’s fun to talk automation and you are both going to be featured on Jennifer’s Automate This series and you’ve got some really cool solutions that I want to talk about, but first, let’s get started with knowing a little bit more about you. So Gorav, can you tell us a little bit about how you got into the ecosystem and what your current role is at your company?

Gorav Seth: Sure, thanks. I am a classic accidental admin, background in plant biology, and started at a nonprofit, migrated us to Salesforce and went through the groups and the other community resources that existed at the time, and got more and more involved. So that was my origin was actually an event in 2007 that Google, Facebook, and Salesforce put on in DC and that’s where I got exposed to it. So it’s been a gradual path, but I’ve been doing Salesforce since about 2008.

Mike Gerholdt: Wow, that’s a long time, and as director of IT, what’s that fun role like?

Gorav Seth: Well, so for the past 10 years, I’ve been managing the Salesforce platform at Ashoka, and Ashoka was one of the early adopters of Salesforce in the nonprofit space and has been using it since 2009. I joined here in 2012 managing Salesforce and growing in my role and just recently, I transitioned into the role of director of IT. Now I basically have two jobs until I fill the Salesforce position. So it’s a great opportunity to take what I’ve learned and expand beyond the Salesforce space even.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, no, absolutely. Eric, you’re a new voice on the podcast, let’s hear from you. How did you get started in the ecosystem and what do you currently do?

Eric Smith: Well, I may be a new voice, but I’m an old timer. I’ve been involved in technology probably for a little over 45 years now. I had my own PC business for many years and a little over 10 years ago, I went to work for a telecommunications company managing project managers, and the company had Salesforce at the time. They had professional edition and they were using it as an electronic Rolodex, and I saw that we had that application.

I said, there’s some interesting things I bet we could do with this to make my team more productive and improve their communication both internally and externally. So I asked for the keys to Salesforce, they gave it to me, and just started building things from there. We ended up going to enterprise edition, putting in sales cloud, service cloud, experience cloud, and really grew the application and it also increased my interest. It was something that was fun to do. I liked working with it and since have moved on and now working as a technical architect for a Salesforce consulting partner. So it’s been a fun ride and it’s a great application to work with.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. So I guess we’re all sitting around here, old hats at some of this, and we could easily talk about workflows and process builder processes and flows and stuff like that, but I want to get into, before we talk about your solutions, just how you think about automation on the platform, and I was thinking through this this morning before we were recording. A lot of automation now is we want to save people time, we want to save people clicking on things, we want to ensure data is correct. Is it that so much that we love, or is it just making things a little bit simpler so somebody doesn’t have to do a couple extra clicks, but I’d love to, Gorav, I’ll start with you, get started with where you look at an automation solution first in terms of is that something we need to build or is that something we just need to tell the people they got to click on?

Gorav Seth: Yeah. I guess my goal is to, it is the simplicity and making a really good application, thinking of the level of usability and user experience that people have come to expect. I think the automation tools let you do that, whether it’s on the front end like a screen flow, or on the backend, automating things that they would have to do manually. I think the scope now for what we can deliver is so high and I think it helps us meet the expectations of our users. That’s where it resonates for me.

Mike Gerholdt: Now Eric, as a technical architect, I think you’re coming in and you’re looking at a lot of different solutions. Of course, you have a lot of different partners that you’re working with. What is one area that you can always hone in on as an area of automation within a company?

Eric Smith: I think it’s data integrity, especially with screen flows. You really have the ability to put some guardrails around the data entry and the information that a user is providing to the system, and I think it provides a way to really reduce chances of error, reduce chances of dirty data, and you can basically guide a user through as few steps as possible to put the information in that they need at the right time when they need to make it available. So I think that well-designed automation will reduce steps for somebody that has to interact with it and will improve the quality of the data that comes out of it.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, no, that’s a good point. I think we all remember the days of just telling the user to click edit and fill in everything you need, and that’s when you get call notes in the phone field.

Eric Smith: Yeah.

Mike Gerholdt: So Gorav, let’s talk a little bit about your solution that you’re going to highlight on Jennifer’s Automate This series. Can you give me an overview of what it is and I’d really love to learn more of what made you build this flow and deploy it?

Gorav Seth: Sure. So it’s a simple concept. In my use case, it was send the opportunity owner a list of the opportunities that are past their closed date that are still open, and we had some workflow rules using the hacky stuff you can do with workflow rules to send these reminders where I think we had 10 or nine or whatever the maximum number of scheduled actions you could have and it would go on for two years or something, but it was popcorn. The user owner would get one notification on this day, one on another day, and it just felt like chaos.

It didn’t give you that sense of an integrated, thought out system because that was a lot more complex at the time. You would require development resources, and all of a sudden, as we were looking to migrating off of workflows and into flows, you’re not trying to rebuild this stuff. You’re trying to say, okay, how can we do this better, and I’ve always been a fan of report notifications, but you can’t put any context in there and you have to schedule them for everybody, and so I thought, let me take flow and see if we can send a nice table of just the information that we want, and it was pretty easy to do. All in all, I was really happy with it.

Mike Gerholdt: Interesting. And Eric, let’s dive into your solution a little bit because yours is kind of the same. It’s using flow, which we’re a fan of, but it does something different.

Eric Smith: What I’m doing is you can go back to what you said before, which is tell the user to click the edit button and have at it with all the information that’s on the screen, and I think with automation and flows, you can really do a much better job with the user interface as far as presenting the information to the user and try not to overload the user with information, but sometimes trying to find something on the screen could still be a little difficult. So I had a situation where my users that were interacting in customer service, they had case records on the screen, so we’re looking at a case record page, but one of the things they kept looking for and going for was the case number, which was used in a lot of different ways.

And I wanted to give them away to very easily and quickly see that case number on the page. So I created a little utility to make that value pop on the page is the way I put it, and it was really just taking a simple flow that would take a case number and put it into a formatted field that you choose the format. In this case, I wanted a big, bold text and display that number on the page instead of the regular field that looked like every other field. So somebody with a quick glance at the page sees this nice, big, bold case number right there in front of them and they have that available at all times, and the flow is just very simple flow that says anytime the case number is set, update this field that has it formatted and displayed on the screen.

Mike Gerholdt: And I’m guilty of this too. Looking at flow solutions, you’re always like, that totally makes sense, and then you go to flow and you start one and you look at that blank canvas and you’re immediately intimidated. I am like, oh man, how am I going to get from what I want to what works? What for you, and Eric, I’ll start with you, what for you was one hurdle that when it clicked, making a flow was really easy for you?

Eric Smith: Two things, one was being able to see examples of what other people had done and how they did it, but I think the most important thing in building a flow is being able to look at something and break it down into individual steps one step at a time so you’re not overwhelmed with the big picture as to everything that needs to be done, but if I want to get from point A to point B, I’m going to take a number of steps and look at it at each step individually, what do I need to do, and then in the end, you can put it all together and hopefully have a complete flow from beginning to end that does what you want it to do.

Mike Gerholdt: Gorav, the same question. What was it that clicked for you, or did the flow just come naturally?

Gorav Seth: It was definitely a process. There are things that I look at now and I’m like how did I come up with that? There’s this creative process that happens, but I think at its core, it’s similar to what Eric said, breaking it into steps and being very methodical in terms of how you get from point A to point B and starting with your record. Whatever record or records you’re working with, start with that and then figure out what it is you need to happen.

But it’s an iterative process and there’s always a lot of detours along the way. I haven’t found a way around that. It always sounds easier than it’s going to be, but by going about it in a methodical way and understanding how to see what’s happening in the debugger, it makes it so much easier to see, okay, this is why it’s going this way instead of that way. So I think understanding the tools that you have at your disposal to conceptualize how this thing’s working can really help.

Mike Gerholdt: I think one of those, and to follow up on that, Gorav, one of those is the ability to create subflows. So reusable components essentially is how that works in my head like lunch meals. How much do you find do you go to… Do you sit down and think of what parts of other things I can reuse, or are you constantly heading into each automation solution as its own package, for lack of a better term, solution?

Gorav Seth: I would say there’s definitely both. I used to use subflows as utilities to do things that you can now generally do out of the box. They’ve added so much more functionality flow to flows. So sometimes to split things or do some kind of stuff that was difficult before, I would use subflows there. Another thing I often do is there are some flows that I have that might fire from different places, but in the end, there’s a core element that’s the same. So that core element is the subflow and if it’s coming from this place, the flows that feed into it can handle the UI side, and then the subflow just does the logic. So I definitely use them, but they’re not something I use every day. Mostly, my flows are standalone.

Mike Gerholdt: Right. Eric, I think you have the benefit of seeing many different orgs as a partner. How often do you find you’re able to recreate subflows or give that ability to customers so that in the future, if Eric isn’t around to help them out, they’re able to package together different flows?

Eric Smith: I love the idea of building blocks and having second building blocks. I think deep down, I’m a lazy person so I don’t want to have to do something twice. So I’ll actually spend more time trying to build a subcomponent or a subflow to make it more usable in more use cases in the future. So rather than just building a particular process into a flow and saying, this is my use case, this solves the problem, and then moving on, I much prefer to look at it as saying, hey, this is something that I have to do now, but I may have to use something very similar in the future so I want to build this in such a way that I can assign attributes and other things to it later and reuse it in a different flow or a different environment and not just for myself, but for other flow builders and other people as well.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah.

Eric Smith: I just love that idea of these building blocks and reusable components.

Mike Gerholdt: I do too, but I do find myself often in Gorav’s shoes of building that solution and forgetting that I’ve created some of those things elsewhere. As we wrap things up, both of you in your intro that really stuck with me is you’ve really been around the ecosystem and technology for a long time. As people migrating into, there’s people changing careers. I know we’ve seen it at a lot of events, at world tours, at different Salesforce events, new people into the ecosystem or people from different parts of organizations becoming architects, becoming developers, becoming admins. I’d love to know, and Eric, I’ll start with you, is there something consistent that you feel has been a guiding path for you these last 45 years that’s helped you grow your career over this time?

Eric Smith: I think it’s a constant desire and need to learn, to learn more, to understand how things work, take things apart, put things back together again. I think that’s where flow really resonates with me is the creativity and the ability to build a working component out of all these little individual pieces and steps. I’ve always been a curious person and I think this plays in very well and makes it a very interesting area to work.

Mike Gerholdt: And Gorav, I know we’ve talked a long time ago when the podcast first started and you mentioned you’ve been in the ecosystem since ’09, now director of IT. What was a consistent theme along your career path?

Gorav Seth: I think especially in the Salesforce world, I don’t know how it is in other ecosystems, but the community, it comes up a lot, but I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for both the nonprofit community, the MVP community, and just the larger Salesforce community, that a lot of the stuff I’ve learned on flow came from the community. I don’t think I’ve been able to get over that initial learning curve without the blogs from Mark, Ross, and Brian Quang and others that was like, this is how you debug a flow. Now there’s a lot of additional tools, but the learning never stops.

The platform keeps evolving and it’s good. We can do so many things now that were just impossible or just so complex before. We get to do fun stuff. We get to make really nice, engaging interfaces for people to be more productive and so that they don’t have to guess what goes where. We can really make it easy for them and we can do things that before, we just were either cost prohibitive or time prohibitive. So it’s an exciting time to be here. I’m glad that I got started when I did and was able to learn my way up, but I think there’s so many things you don’t have to learn now that are legacy and done with, and you can just get the stuff that works well and has this great capability.

Mike Gerholdt: So Gorav, follow up to that, and Eric, I’m going to ask you this too. As somebody listening to this podcast that’s hearing some of the stuff that you’ve done with flow, what is your advice to them after they finish listening to this podcast? What should they do?

Gorav Seth: I find screen flows to be a really compelling place to start, and specifically, think about the actions, the quick actions you have and which ones could potentially benefit from more context or more control, and think about replacing one of those with a screen flow. It’s one of those things that’s so powerful and enlightening, and with a quick actions are great when you know exactly what you need to do, but when you want to provide more context, you can so easily replace that quick action with the flow action and then you have all the real estate in the world to explain exactly what needs to happen. So that, to me, is a good starting point.

Mike Gerholdt: Eric, same question. What should you do after you get done listening to this podcast?

Eric Smith:I agree. I think screen flows are probably a much better place to start than some of the triggered flows because you’re in charge of all of the steps. It’s real time as somebody is working with it, and I think to try and look for resources. Listen to these podcasts. I know I used to. When I was first started working with Salesforce, I’d go off and my lunch break, I’d put on your podcast, and I’d take a nice long walk and listen to what people were doing, and I think trying to do the same, see what other people are doing, listen to podcasts, look at some of these blogs that are out there. There’s some great information, great use cases, and use that to strike your own creativity. You may not want to do exactly what somebody else has done, but seeing what was done might give you some ideas of some things that you may want to try or incorporate in your own work.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, I would agree. I had the pleasure of co-presenting a code builder session at Trailblazer DX earlier this spring and I didn’t know anything about Code Builder, but I did know that I love to copy and paste code as a way to cheat, and I think to both your points, the idea of looking at flows and not always starting from scratch is a great way. So Gorav and Eric, you were great guests to have on and I can’t wait to catch up on the Automate This episode that you’re doing with Jennifer and see those solutions on the screen. So thank you for being on the pod.

Gorav Seth: Thanks, Mike, great to be here.

Eric Smith: It was great and I think Jen’s presentation is going to be very helpful.

Mike Gerholdt: So that was a fun discussion with Gorav and Eric. I appreciate them sharing some of their wisdom with me, and I don’t know about you, but it does make me want to jump into doing some more flow screens. I feel like actually, those are probably what I really wanted a long, long time ago. I just need to admit it, but of course, if you want to learn about more things and all things Salesforce admin, go to admin.salesforce.com to find more resources, including any of the links that we mentioned in this episode as well as a full transcript. You, of course, can stay up to date with us on social. We are @salesforceadmns on Twitter, no I. Gillian is on Twitter. She is @gilliankbruce, and I am on Twitter as well @mikegerholdt. So with that, stay safe, stay awesome, and stay tuned for the next episode. We’ll see you in the cloud.

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Brandon Van Galder, Technical Consultant at Arkus, Inc.

Join us as we chat about his tips for getting started with Flow, how omni-channel automation solved a big problem for him, and his tips for breaking into a Salesforce career.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Brandon Van Galder.

Tips for your first Salesforce interviewBefore Brandon had ever heard about Salesforce, he was an elementary school PE teacher. When he was feeling burnt out and looking for new opportunities, he happened to hear about Trailhead and the Salesforce Admin role and pretty soon, he was off to the races. He spent about a year as an admin and is now currently a technical consultant with Arkus, Inc.

Going from doing a bunch of online training to sitting in an interview and proving that you have the skills to actually be an admin is a big step, and one that many people struggle with. “I would recommend building a custom app in Salesforce,” Brandon says, “find something in your personal life that you can potentially track in Salesforce and build some automations, and then you can talk about that in your interview.” For example, Brandon built a mileage tracker to help him with training for a 5K race.

Mastering the learning curve for flowsBrandon will be appearing on Jennifer Lee’s “Automate This!” YouTube series soon to talk about omni-channel automation. “When I first was learning, I was deathly afraid of flows,” he says, “but now I can’t look back, I can barely even use Process Builder after being a Flownatic for the last year or so.”

One important thing to keep in mind as you get into flows is that you’re going to get better at it as you go. When Brandon first started, he was trying to send email notifications with flows and it took him about eight hours to get everything working correctly. These days, he can build the same sort of thing and fully test it in a single hour.

Why you should always read the Release NotesBrandon had chats coming in from three different sources and a lot of them were getting missed, especially around shift changes. They really needed to know who was online and when. And it just so happened that Salesforce had recently added custom components that could get the availability of agents. It just goes to show that it’s worth it to keep up-to-date on the Release Notes!

You can learn more about how Brandon solved his problem with automation on “Automate This!”. And make sure to listen to the full episode to hear his tips for getting started with flows, what to look out for when you’re implementing automation, and more.

Podcast swag* Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Learn more:* “Automate This!” on YouTube

Social* Salesforce Admins: @SalesforceAdmns * Gillian: @GillianKBruce * Mike: @MikeGerholdt

Full show transcriptMike Gerholdt: Welcome to the Salesforce Admins podcast. We talk about product, community, and career to help you become an awesome admin. And this week we are talking to Brandon Van Galder, who is a technical consultant at Arkus, but previously a Salesforce Admin and staying on that theme of automation, little bit of omni-channel, little bit of career switching in this. So it’s like a chopped salad. There’s a lot of little bit of everything in it. That’s what I’m going to call this. With that, let’s get Brandon on the podcast. So Brandon, welcome to the podcast.

Brandon Van Gal: Hey Mike. Thanks for having me.

Mike Gerholdt: Let’s get started. For those that don’t know who Brandon is, tell me a little bit about Brandon and how Brandon got into the Salesforce ecosystem.

Brandon Van Gal: Well, that’s a good story. I’ll start. Before I even knew what Salesforce was, I was a teacher and I actually taught elementary PE for most of my career. And then just got burnt out and I heard a podcast where they talked about becoming a Salesforce Admin and how you can make pretty good money, and the training for that was pretty simple, and they had this thing called Trailhead and just signed up for Trailhead after listening to that and fell in love with it immediately because I love badges and points. Fast forward two years later, still teaching. I landed my first role as a Salesforce Admin at a company called Scale Computing, and I worked there for a little over a year, and now I am currently a technical consultant with Arkus, Inc.

Mike Gerholdt: Wow. Okay. Was it my podcast? You could say it’s my podcast. If not, that’s okay.

Brandon Van Gal: It was not. It was the ChooseFI Podcast.

Mike Gerholdt: Darn it. Okay, that’s fine. I’m going to listen to that now. So that PE, we’re going to have to talk about that at the end of the show. You realize that because I think Foursquares should make a comeback because that was a huge PE game for me, but spending that time starting off as a career change before we jump into all the flow stuff, because I know that’s what people want too. What was the learning for you moving from being an educator to getting that first Salesforce job? Was this nights and weekends you were just one or two modules or here or there, or was this very deliberate? You set a goal of within two years, I’m going to be out of education. What was that time period for you?

Brandon Van Gal: It was semi deliberate. I did have a two year plan where I did use nights and weekends and more during spring break, fall break, Christmas break, and especially summer break. I would get a lot of my learning done then, and then transitioning into the business world quite different than the education world. I had to learn that at my first role as well. Just the nuances of business and how it differed from education and that first role was a great learning experience. I landed with a great team. Shout outs to Kelly and Rebecca, if you’re hearing this, thanks for all the healthy [inaudible].

Mike Gerholdt: Of course they are.

Brandon Van Gal: They really took me under their wings and showed me how to do things.

Mike Gerholdt: So I get a lot of questions and I’m spending a lot of time on this. I get a lot of questions like, man, that had to have been a hard interview because you’re sitting across the table from somebody and you’re like, look, I’ve just done a whole bunch of stuff online. What was the contributing factor or what was one piece of advice you’d give new admins that are looking to make that career change and going through that path into landing that first job?

Brandon Van Gal:I would recommend building a custom app in Salesforce. I built out a mileage tracker app for running. I did it during COVID and I started training for a 5K, so it aligned with what I was doing in my personal life. So you can just find something in your personal life that you could potentially track in Salesforce and build it. Built out some automations and then you have that you can demonstrate during your interview and talk about and share your experiences of what you did on the platform.

Mike Gerholdt: I like that. I’ve done that quite a bit actually in some of the stuff. So you mentioned automation. Let’s get into that because I know on Jennifer’s automate this episode, you are going to talk about omni-channel, which is very specific. I will say very specific because we’ve had a lot of her guests on the podcast, but what got you into automating with omni-channel and doing some of that?

Brandon Van Gal: Yeah. Well, when I first was learning, I was deathly afraid of flows. I was like process builder all the way. I’m going to ride this till it dies, and now Salesforce is basically not supporting it as much anymore. So had to learn pretty quick how to do flows and now I can’t look back. I can barely even use Process Builder and look at it and debug it anymore. Trying to figure it out. It just doesn’t make sense to me after being flown addict for the past year or so, and then specifically omni-channel at my role in scale computing, we had chats coming in from three different places and a lot of them were getting missed. Hence, the deep dive into Omni-Channel flows.

Mike Gerholdt: What was the hook? What made things click? And I asked this because I know I’ve done a previous podcast with Eric Smith and Gworth and they said, “Start with screen flows,” and screen flows are a great way to get your teeth into flow. Was the screen flows that got you or was it something else?

Brandon Van Gal: For me, it was more sending email notifications using flows just because that’s what I was doing in the business and I know you can do it just with email alerts, with workflows and things like that, but we had some unique use cases where we couldn’t use flows for that. I mean the first time I built it probably took me eight hours to do one, and then as I got better, I could whip one out in less than an hour, completely tested. And just seeing that learning curve speed up is really helpful and encouraging to myself to use it more.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. What is one area when you’re sitting down with a business, and this can be in your previous job as an admin or your current job as a consultant. What are some of the key words that you feel other admins should listen for when determining how much or where to add automation?

Brandon Van Gal: When someone says, ‘We do this all the time and manually,” that’s a good spot to look for. In some cases you can’t automate it, but in a lot of cases you can just with the power of Salesforce. So that’s what I look out for when asking questions to clients and business units.

Mike Gerholdt: So then conversely, because we love to automate all the things, what are red flags that you listen for as well when you’re like, I could do this, but it means you’re going to get 500 emails

Brandon Van Gal: When they say, I want to email every time, If you hear the word every time or on every status update or something like that, that is definitely a red flag where you can say, “Hey, let’s pump the brakes here.” Maybe having a report that shows these and then it gets emailed out once a day or once a week would be a little bit better than getting 500 email alerts in one day.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, no, that makes sense. Are there, because I’m always noodling around in an org, creating stuff. As you look at flows and flows that you’ve created in the past, are you now seeing just having done this for a while, ways to combine flows together or ways to minimize the number of flows that you’re creating?

Brandon Van Gal: Yeah, absolutely. Early on, I’d never used the invocable flows, but recently I’ve been using that more where I create at least one section of that flow and can reuse it in multiple different flows, being triggered by different actions. That’s been huge. And then I’ve also used the save as a new flow where instead of having to rebuild it from scratch, you can save a previous flow as a new one and then make whatever minor changes you need off of that, where maybe the decisions might be a little different or the loops might be a little different. Yeah. So I’ve used those two things.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, no, that makes sense. I know because I’m just looking through at different flows that I’ve created and sometimes it’s so easy and tempting to click that, create new button and you forget all the other stuff that you’ve added into an org. A little bit back on omni-channel, I think before we pressed record, you were talking about how that got started. Where was some of the omni-channel work that you did and how did that inspire you for automation?

Brandon Van Gal: At scale computing, we had chat capabilities come in from three different websites, one being like the company’s main website, one being the community user portal, and then one being the partner portal. And what was happening is usually during the tier one support agent meeting, they would all log off and then any of the chats that were routed to the tier one agents were being missed. And it just happened to be during that 30 minute window that helped us figure out what to do from there.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. It never fails. It’s always right during the shift change or something when everybody presses the little chat button on your site. So thinking through just, you are a school teacher, you moved into the ecosystem, what now do you do to just outside of the daily work to keep up to date with skills, with new features of flow? How do you plan that out?

Brandon Van Gal: I read the release notes specifically towards flow automation. That’s one of the loves. I skip over some of the other stuff I don’t necessarily work with every day, but I like to see that. And that came in handy when we were building out this Omni-Channel flow. We were manually trying to get the availability of the agents and then all of a sudden in the next release, Salesforce had these custom components where you could get the availability of all the agents in a specific queue. And that was really helpful. And knowing that’s coming down the pipeline really helps you sustain on top of those. Looking at Trailhead when they update those or make new trails is a good way to stay on top of it too, because it includes that new functionality and then watching some YouTube videos that come out every once in a while via it, Jen’s automate this or how I solved it, you see how other people solve issues instead of being just stuck in your own mind, you can see how other people think about flows and use them to solve problems.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, no, that’s great. As you build and possibly rebuild flows, what advice would you give on some best practices that you do for user adoption or people really understanding, here’s the implication of clicking this button or what this means.

Brandon Van Gal: Documentation is huge and screen recordings of the steps that are triggering the flow or what happens when you click the button are huge. In my current work now, we record videos and then share them with the clients at times so they can see, hey, when I update this status, something’s happening in the background, but this is what it looks like on the front end so they can see the changes that were made.

Mike Gerholdt: No, that makes sense. Especially with stuff when it’s going to just trigger because the record was saved. I think behind the scenes maybe sometimes a user doesn’t always know everything else that cascades out as a result of that. So that’s good to know. What part of flow and automation is a little bit, lack of a better term here be dragons for you. It’s a little unknown. You need to learn it, but it’s still off in the distance.

Brandon Van Gal: I’d say some of those newer components that I just haven’t touched yet because I haven’t had the business use case to use. And then when you open your mind to everything on the app exchange, what’s available out there, be it from unofficial Salesforce, they have some great flow components that I just haven’t used, but I’ve seen in other people’s flows. Just trying to wrap my head around what is possible. I think I’m 25% level right now of knowing what flow can do. I feel there’s so much more out there that I just don’t even understand or comprehend at this point.

Mike Gerholdt: I don’t know if anybody’s at 100%.

Brandon Van Gal: Yeah. There’s a lot of things with outbound messages or platform events, things like that that I just haven’t touched that I still need to learn about because those are pretty powerful as well.

Mike Gerholdt: So I asked this on previous pod because I know we’d done a blog post that was probably, Jennifer did a blog post on this, but how often do you find yourself using subflows?

Brandon Van Gal: I do it on rare occasions. There’s one client I’m currently working with where I did use it where it ranks records based on their score. So if a record is created or updated, I can call it, if a record is deleted, I could call a subflow. That ranks everything. So a couple of different use cases personally that I’ve done. It’s just not something I’ve had to use that often.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, absolutely. Moving into the world of teaching, did you have a favorite PE activity?

Brandon Van Gal: Absolutely. I was a dodge-ball fan.

Mike Gerholdt: You call that dodge-ball in schools?

Brandon Van Gal: You just call it throwing and catching skills and then it’s okay. And I’m not big on having the kids sit out for a long time.

Mike Gerholdt: They would have to catch your way back in.

Brandon Van Gal: Do some exercise or whatever to come back in the game and keep it like a nonstop because if you keep it nonstop, then they’re having fun.

Mike Gerholdt: Do you ever do the dodge-ball with… We used to put these boxes in the back of the gym and so in addition to getting all the people out, you also had to knock the boxes down.

Brandon Van Gal: Yeah. We had you use cones or bowling pins on the back. We’d call it pinball bombardment, but same thing, dodge-ball rules, but the real objective for the game was knock down the pins. If you do that type of thing.

Mike Gerholdt: You win. You get the whole thing. Yeah. Even if nobody’s out, you can knock both pit. We did that. Yeah. Of course, immediately when somebody says dodge-ball, I go right to the movie Dodge Ball.

Brandon Van Gal: It’s classic.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. Well, this is great. I feel like we delved into some automation and even touched on little career stuff as well. For people looking to make that switch to go from A to B, whatever A is to either getting into consulting or looking at an admin or consulting job, what was one thing that kept you going?

Brandon Van Gal: I just really fell in love with Salesforce. Once I started digging in. I didn’t know what it was when I heard the podcast, I’d listened to the podcast twice, Google what it was, look at what Trailhead was I had, I didn’t know what a CRM was when I first started, but I’d say, “Yeah, just give it a try.” Jump on Trailhead, do a couple of modules, and then if you feel that itch and you like it, just keep going because there’s a position out there for you.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. No, that’s great. And then ball house fails, we can always get a game of dodge-ball together.

Brandon Van Gal: That’s right.

Mike Gerholdt: Awesome. Brandon, thank you so much for being on the podcast.

Brandon Van Gal: Yeah, thanks for having me, Mike.

Mike Gerholdt: So it’s fun to have Brandon on the podcast and talk about automation and the way he approaches things. And also it was learning journey. I couldn’t help but dive into that. And it wouldn’t be the Salesforce admins podcast if we didn’t talk about something fun like dodge-ball or Foursquare. Did you have a favorite game while you were in school? I like foursquare. But I’d love to hear it. So send me a tweet, let me know. Also, if you still play that game, good for you because I would love to mark out some chalk on my driveway and get a Foursquare game going. But anyway, I digress.
If you want to learn more about all things Salesforce Admin, go to admin.salesforce.com to find more resources, including any of the links that we mentioned in this episode as well as a full transcript. You can stay up to date with us on social. We are @Salesforce.Admns on Twitter. Gillian, my co-host is on Twitter. She is @GillianKBruce. And of course I am at Mike Gerholdt. So with that stay safe, stay awesome, and stay tuned for the next episode. We’ll see you in the cloud.

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Melissa Shepard, Salesforce Certified Architect and CEO of Lizztech Consulting. Join us as we chat about how to approach automations in your org and why asynchronous processes are so powerful.

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

Simple questions for automationsMelissa started as a Salesforce Developer, working on integrating Salesforce with some of the other systems her org was using. “I like to think of integration as a backbone for the bigger, more robust automations that you can build,” she says. And if you think about it, bringing in data to Salesforce and sending it out to other platforms is at the core of what you’re trying to do with automations.

In the first phase of a project, Melissa recommends getting a firm grasp on what you’re trying to accomplish. Those simple questions are so important: what is the process? What is the end goal? “It’s not even thinking about the technology but understanding what’s the problem you’re trying to solve, first,” she says, “and then you decide how you’re going to solve that problem with the technology.”

When to rebuildWhen you’re coming into an org that’s been around for a while, Melissa recommends getting a good lay of the land. Understand how everything was built and why it was built that way. If you’re missing documentation, make sure to do that as you go to make things easier later.

You should especially be on the hunt for processes that are similar but with slight variations. Sometimes you can really simplify things by turning that into one flow with multiple paths. And if you come across something that’s being used multiple times, it could be a good candidate to break out into a subflow.

Asynchronous automation“You can do so much in Flow nowadays that you could do with Apex,” Melissa says, with looping, updating records, and doing things in batches. And there are some great tools like Orchestrator and MuleSoft Composer that make integrations easier than ever before.

Melissa feels that asynchronous automation is one of the most overlooked features in Flow. You can get a lot of benefits from running a process outside of normal operating hours, including more processing power and better performance for your users. She actually has a presentation coming up on this very topic, so if you’re interested in learning more you should catch her talk.

Melissa will be appearing on “Automate This!” with Jennifer Lee later in April, so be sure to tune in for more about how your automations can be well-architected.

Podcast swag* Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Learn more* Salesforce Well-Architected * “Automate This!” on YouTube * Well-Architected Automation with Tom Leddy

Social* Melissa: @Lissa__X * Salesforce Admins: @SalesforceAdmns * Gillian: @GillianKBruce * Mike: @MikeGerholdt

Full show transcriptMike: Welcome to the Salesforce Admins Podcast. We talk about product, community, and career to help you become an awesome admin. And this week we’re talking with Melissa Shepherd, who is a Salesforce CTA and CEO of Liz Tech Consulting. Well, you know about Well Architected automation. If you haven’t picked up, we’ve got a little bit of a theme going. These last few episodes, we’ve talked last week with Tom Letty about Well Architected automation, talked about some new Trailhead classes around Flow and hyperflow. And coming up, boy, there is some really good stuff coming later in April and early May around cool Flow solutions and some omnichannel stuff. So I’ll just tease that out. But of course, Melissa is also going to be on the Automate this series, which is Jennifer Lee’s YouTube series, so be sure to check that out. I’ll also post a link to it. We get her on the podcast first, so by the time you get to watch her on the video, you’ve already seen a podcast star, but enough of me talking, let’s talk automation and some really cool stuff with Melissa. So let’s get Melissa on the podcast.
So Melissa, welcome to the podcast.

Melissa: Thank you.

Mike: We’re talking a lot about automation and I think it’s appropriate to have you on. But before we head into that, give us a little bit of a backstory. How did Melissa come to Salesforce and join the Trailblazer ecosystem?

Melissa: Well, thank you for asking. That’s an interesting story. I actually just wrote a really long blog post about all that because a lot of people don’t know my journey or where I came from. It actually started back in 2006. So I was a developer and I was brought into the IT department of a small but kind of startup company to help build some customer and partner portals in .net to interface with Salesforce and also do some other customizations written in .net. And one of the systems I had to work with was Salesforce, so I had to build these portals and also I saw an opportunity to integrate Salesforce with our other systems to help the users not have to do double entry to help alleviate errors with information they were entering into the system.

So this is actually a form of automation. I like to think of integration as a backbone for some bigger, more robust automations that you can build. So that was how I was introduced to Salesforce. And I really loved working with it and decided to keep working in that space and ended up at an integration middleware company working on the Salesforce adapter and the core software. It was written in multiple languages, so I was still in that development role, but still touching Salesforce. And then when I left there, I just went off and did Salesforce consulting around 2009, 2010. And that’s what I’ve been doing ever since.

Mike: Wow. I think you’re the first person I’ve had on the podcast that has been doing Salesforce since ’06, like me.

Melissa: Oh wow.

Mike: Yeah, you said ’06. I was like, oh, do you remember those days of page builder where you used to have to select and then select where the component went and it wasn’t wizzy wick and it took you hours to do the simplest thing?

Melissa: Yeah. And I also remember not having sandboxes, and then when we finally did have sandboxes, we had to build things in the sandboxes and then rebuild them all in production.

Mike: Yeah, I get a lot of grief for that when I talk to people and tell them. Early days, I would build things two or three times. Why? I mean, I remember chain sets coming out and thinking, oh cool, I’m so used to just building and rebuilding things now that I think I might be faster.

Melissa:Yep.

Mike: Oh, interesting. So I think you’re so spot on that integration is really a form of automation. A lot of the podcast that I’ve had recently where I’ve spoken with people, we’ve always talked about automation just within Salesforce and broadening that even bigger to automation outside of Salesforce, just bringing in data from another system as a way to do that, yeah, I’m on board with that.

Melissa:Or pushing it out to another system. So instead of user having to enter something in Salesforce and then going and enter that in the other system, your backend integration’s going to push it from Salesforce to that other system. And that’s an automation,

Mike: Right. A 100%. I mean a lot of it is, how do we get things just done in Salesforce, but it’s also what are the other systems that people live in? So yeah.

Melissa:Someone that’s in an architect role, a CTA role like me, we care about that. We care about the other systems that interact with Salesforce and how all these automations within Salesforce are affecting these other systems or the data that’s coming into Salesforce are going out and not just on platform.

Mike: So tell me and help everyone think, when you sit down with somebody, where does your mind go for automation in terms of planning, even just your first app or the first phase of a project?

Melissa: So I always like to understand what it is they’re trying to accomplish. So it always starts with the user. The user usually needs to do something. So having an understanding of what it is they’re trying to accomplish, what is the process, what is it that they need to get to? What’s that end goal? Or sometimes it isn’t user, usually it is, but sometimes it isn’t. Like I said, sometimes it could be that backend process that’s performing some sort of automation behind the scenes and that could be done with things like Flow or code. So it’s not even thinking about the technology, but understanding what’s the problem you’re trying to solve first and then you then decide how you’re going to solve that problem with the technology.

Mike: Yeah. So step two, and one of the things that I asked Tom was I think it’s very easy once you have apps built and you kind of have things going to jump into Flow and create these little one-off Flows. You mentioned as an architect, I’ll dive deeper into that. As an architect, how do you resist that urge to keep adding rooms or keep adding closets to a house and really thinking methodically about how you build that automation solution?

Melissa: So understanding what you already have built is a huge part of that and where you need to maybe add on or modify. So instead of just adding something new, you have to understand the house that’s already built and maybe there’s something you can already use and just modify it a little bit or take advantage of something that’s already existing. So sometimes you’re not always the architect that built that house, so you have to gain an understanding of how it was built. I actually just went through this before talking to you how I like to sit down and understand current state. So what’s the process? What are the processes like now? What do they look like and what supports those processes? And is it in flow, is it in Apex? Are there triggers? What is going on behind the scenes and what was built to understand what’s there? And sometimes there’s documentation, sometimes there isn’t. If there isn’t, then it’s a good idea to document all that because then you have that to refer back to when you do need to go and add in new functionality or make changes. And that’s the best practice.

Mike: Oh man, I would love to see documentation everywhere and unfortunately it’s kind of like when you go on a road trip, you forget how you got there ’cause you were in such a hurry to get somewhere.

Melissa: Exactly.

Mike: You mentioned processes and kind of getting an idea of current state. I think a lot of people right now are trying to get an idea of current state because they really want to migrate off of process builder and into Flow. As an admin or developer architect looking at current state, what are places that you look at that maybe are the first stop because they’re over automated or they have overly too many things that could really be migrated into a simple Flow?

Melissa: Yeah, that’s a good question. So it is those areas of process builder and current flows where you want to look at how you can maybe combine things together. So looking at things that are similar processes, but maybe some slight variations. I’ve actually had to do this exercise before in an org merged scenario. So multiple orgs getting merged into one, lots of automation built in each org that was very similar. So there was an exercise of going through everything and understanding the logic. So this was actually workflow and process builder that I was analyzing, understanding what each one was doing, the processes that were happening and then seeing where everything could be combined, but where there was just some slight variations, then you would have different paths to take within your Flow.

Mike: Yeah, I think oftentimes there’s so many paths that cover over, I’d be curious. I mean anecdotally, I’m sure you run into this a lot where you find processes that update processes that have other processes that re-update them.

Melissa: Yeah. You have to be careful with that too, right? Because you’re in an infinite loop of updates. So yeah, definitely. You’ve got to be careful there and I always like to look at things that are very similar and then where it makes sense to break something out into a subflow, something that’s maybe being used over and over multiple times, that is a good candidate to go into a subflow.

Mike: I was just about to ask you, how often do you use subflows?

Melissa: Yeah, where it makes sense.

Mike: Where it makes sense.

Melissa: It’s actually the same concept as development in Apex. So you have things like functions that get called for different purposes and you put them in maybe helper classes. So they get called by all kinds of different code. So when you see something that is getting reused, you want to push that out into your helper class that can then support your other code. So that’s the same idea as a subflow.

Mike: Oh, I like that. Subflow is like a helper class.

Melissa: Right? Exactly.

Mike: I had a lot of fun discussions at TDX and I’m sure you’ve had a lot of fun discussions maybe even just today. How often should somebody go back and revisit Flows or processes that they built in order to make sure that they actually reflect the way that the business does business?

Melissa: That’s actually a good question. That’s going to depend on how often the processes within the business change. So if a business has processes that stay pretty much the same, I couldn’t see that as being something that’s really critical. But if it’s a business that’s growing and changing and their processes are changing or they’re acquiring other businesses, you absolutely need to go in and look at those processes. So mergers and acquisitions, that’s something that at a more higher level, global level that someone like a CTA is caring about. We care about how these mergers and acquisitions are affecting current business process and how it’s affecting the current technology within Salesforce and also in the entire enterprise. So those are the scenarios where you’re going to really need to go back and evaluate current processes against newer processes that are coming in. I’ve had to do that to support organizations that were merging together, their processes were different, had to really go in and look at everything, what can be merged together, what needs to be separate, and just understand how that all can live within the same system.
So yeah, I guess it’s going to depend on the business. The business is going to drive that.

Mike: Yeah, understandably. And hopefully the business keeps you up to date.

Melissa:Right.

Mike: So I’ve had that as an admin too where three months later you’re looking at something like, we don’t do things that way anymore. Since when? Since you have told me?

Melissa: Right, exactly. Yeah, and that’s interesting. So I think that’s where the admin still has to play that role of advisor as well. When the business is not telling you things, you get to be more liaison with the business, have a point of contact that you can go to, maybe sit down or review things with. As companies grow and get bigger, they create these centers of excellence that are overseeing these types of things. But when you’re just in a lonely admin at a company, you don’t have that kind of structure in place, you kind of get to play that role yourself.

Mike: Yeah. You have to be a thorn in their side. That’s the way I always looked at it

Melissa: Yeah. And play that role of advisor. So maybe instead of waiting for them to come to you, maybe trying to find out what’s going on or things changing, how are things going and how are the processes working for you and just check-ins.

Mike: Okay, so in looking at Flows and a business process changes, at what point do you think I need to modify and add on and build a more complex Flow or should I build a new Flow?

Melissa: I would say if the process is very different. So you look at the current process you’re building for and the existing processes that are covered in your existing Flows, and a way that I like to do that is having process diagrams. So there are tools out there that can help you create those process diagrams so that you can understand your current business process that you don’t have to go through and understand every single detail of the flow. And really understand what they’re all doing so that you can decide if one of them is similar enough to what you’re building for. If there’s enough, and it’s hard to really pinpoint that point where it’s enough. So I always like to say if you see at least a few similarities in something, then maybe that’s a good candidate to build off of. If there’s not enough, it also depends on how big it is too. So that’s a hard question.

Mike: Well, and a lot of times there’s no right answer, right? I mean, for sure I’ve looked at Flows and thought we could add on to this, but at what point is it going to be so incredibly hard to troubleshoot and to debug?

Melissa: Yeah, exactly. And got to look at, am I going to make this one Flow too complicated? Does it make sense to just put this new process into its own Flow? Is it small enough to where it’s just a slight variation and it’s similar enough that it’s not going to overcomplicate. So I’ll just add on and modify the current one. So that really does take some analysis. Like you said, there’s no right or wrong answer there.

Mike: Yeah, because if you’ve been working in Salesforce since ’06, you remember workflows and how little we could do with those, but it still felt like a lot.

Melissa:Right.

Mike: And then we went to Process Builder, which was like an animated process diagram and now we’re in the new Flow builder. What about Flow now for you is the most exciting?

Melissa:I would say the fact that you can do so much in Flow that you can do with Apex nowadays, that’s exciting.

Mike: Such as?

Melissa: Just some of the logic that you can build in and then you can even call invocable actions in Apex. So if there is something that some complex logic that you need to run that you just can’t build and flow, you can then just call your Apex there. But just a lot of the things you can do like looping and getting records and updating records and doing stuff in batch. And there’s just so much power in the Flow now as opposed to what you could do with Workflow or Process Builder that you don’t need to just go to Apex to do some of these more complex business processes and error handling and things like that. You can even build tests for your flows, which is great. So it’s a little bit more like building tests for your code.

Mike: Because we started talking about integration and then we got off that a little bit. What is some of the biggest stuff that you are excited about looking at? We now have Orchestrator as an option.

Melissa: So yeah, there are some great tools like Orchestrator, MuleSoft Composer that are helping to build an integration. So a couple of the things that are exciting with Flow is there’s HTTP callouts, so you can make direct callouts to endpoints from within Flow. There’s external services, that’s another way you can integrate. There’s also platform events. So you can create platform events with Flow or not create them, but write records into your platform event, which can then be subscribed to you by something like MuleSoft. There’s so much integration capability out of the box now within Salesforce. And because there is a lot, you want to understand which one you would want to use for each of the different types of use cases. What’s a fire and forget versus what’s a request and reply? And those are patterns that architects really care about. So you have certain use cases for certain patterns and then you have the technology that you want to use that’s the best solution for each of those patterns.

Mike: Two questions as we wrap up both ends of the spectrum. I think the first one, it’s very fortunate for people, the longer they’re around the technology, the more they see it evolve, the easier it is to kind of grasp the concept. But for you in understanding Flow, what was the one hook that made everything click?

Melissa: So I really got into it when I had to build a custom process off of opportunities to interface with Field Service Lightning. And I can say really got hooked because I had to build this custom process and it just made it so easy to build it and get it done, didn’t have to go to code. It made it so fast to get it done and delivered the functionality that was expected and needed.

Mike: So conversely, thing that got you hooked, what do you find or what do you think is the most overlooked feature in Flow?

Melissa: Now? You can do things synchronously and asynchronously within the same flow and maybe the asynchronous stuff is probably the stuff that’s most overlooked. And I actually speak on asynchronous automation specifically, and I actually have a presentation that I’m going to do specifically on all the ways you can automate asynchronously with Flow. Because that’s even something that’s not well understood and there’s different ways to do it. And being able to understand when you’d want to use one versus the other I think is very powerful. So that probably is an area that is overlooked and not well understood as to when and why you would want to use it.

Mike: Yeah, I mean, without seeing your presentation completely understand, I mean I think with Flow we think of how do we make something happen right now? When this either record happens or field changes or something, how does it happen right now as opposed to not right now? I guess is the easiest way to put it.

Melissa: That doesn’t have to always be instant gratification in something that you learn as you grow as an architect is you really like to take advantage of asynchronous processing. There’s reasons for it. You get more power out of the platform, you can allow more for your users so you’re not tying up resources for them to get their jobs done. So where I was going with this is now we’re talking about Salesforce Well Architected and Well Architected is telling you that you really want to try to use asynchronous processing as much as possible.
Synchronous when you absolutely have to, and there’s certain times when you have to use synchronous, but there’s also certain times when you have to go asynchronous and there’s ways you can do that with Flow. So that’s an exciting area and that’s where I like to start talking about what are these well-architected concepts, how can we start applying them? What are the different ways we can build them into our automations? And that that’s actually one of my presentations I actually did at Dreamforce, asynchronous automations presentation. I do that at some community events and like I said, I’m also going to be doing one specifically on how to go asynchronous with Flow.

Mike: And we talked a lot last week with Tom Letty about Well Architected. So I’ll be sure to put a link to the previous week’s podcast, keep people listening in the show notes so they can listen to that.

Melissa: I think admins should get to know Well Architected as much as they can because it’s just going to help them become better admins and grow into architect level if they so wish.

Mike: Absolutely. In fact, we’ve had calls with that team because the goal is to build the best possible application, right? And fun fact, in May I have Gorav, Seth and Eric Smith on about their Flow solutions. And Gorav has a very similar one where it was actually a reporting thing that we talk about because we don’t need that constant… I’m sure you’ve heard or been across the table from some sales manager that had to get an email every time an opportunity closes. And it’s like you don’t want 600 emails. That doesn’t help. You really want one email that’s summarized of the hundred top opportunities and you don’t get that by firing off an email every single day or every single time. Exactly.

Melissa: Yeah, that becomes more noise. And then you can even take advantage of things like notifications as well within the platform if you don’t want to get too many emails.

Mike: Right, yes, exactly.

Melissa: Which can then have your records.

Mike: So I’ll end on this question for you, Melissa. If an admin or anybody listening is ready to get into automation, and this is similar to a question I ask Gorav and Eric, what should be the first thing they should look at?

Melissa: As far as to how to automate?

Mike: I leave that very open for a reason because I think it’s important to understand businesses definitely need to automate processes and there’s automation in Salesforce and as we’ve talked, integration is also automation. But it’s one thing to build an app, I think it’s the next thing and take that app to the next level and start adding automation to it. Where did you start?

Melissa: Usually you look at where pain points are for your users, where maybe they’re doing things multiple times or there’s repetitive tasks. If you can bring value to your users and your business, that’s where you want to look and that’s where you want to start trying to build an automation. So you really want to understand those processes, look at where you can alleviate some issues in the process and then figure out the right technology to bring in, whether it’s Flow or something else that’s going to be developed like Batch Apex or something because you can automate with Apex as well. It’s not always just Flow. Sometimes there’s better use cases for going to something like that, but Flow is such a powerful tool like we’ve talked about that you just really need to understand the process to know which tool to use, if that makes sense.

Mike: It absolutely makes sense. And thank you so much Melissa for spending time with us today. I appreciate you coming on the podcast.

Melissa: Yeah, no problem. Thank you for having me. Really enjoyed our discussion.

Mike: And of course, we appreciate Melissa taking time out of her day to talk through Well Architected Automation. Only took me an entire episode to get that out verbatim, but boy, it has been a trip. Talk and flow these last few episodes and automation. I hope you enjoy it. It’s more to come. And of course, if you want to learn more about all things Salesforce admin, go to admin.salesforce.com to find more resources, including any of the links that we mentioned in this episode, as well as a full transcript. Now you can stay up to date with us on social, we are at Salesforceadmins no I on Twitter, my co-host Jillian is on Twitter. She is at JillianKBruce. And of course I’m on Twitter as well. I am at MikeGeralt. So with that, stay safe, stay awesome, and stay tuned for the next episode. We’ll see you in the cloud.

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Tom Leddy, Principal Evangelist, Architect Relations at Salesforce. Join us as we chat about how admins can build well-architected automation solutions.

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

Salesforce Well-ArchitectedTom is here to tell us about a new program the Architect team created, Salesforce Well-Architected. It’s a framework organized around the principles you need to understand what healthy solutions look like in Salesforce. “There’s a lot of great information there regardless of what your role is,” Tom says, “I think the lines between what admins do and what architects do are blurred these days.”

The Well-Architected Framework will help you get a handle on how to think about the big picture when it comes to making decisions in your Salesforce org. For example, how to put together a security model that is strong, scalable, and meets everyone’s needs over the long haul.

What makes something well-architected?One of the things they cover in-depth is how to create well-architected automations. How do you make something that will scale and will actually add value to your business? Because, as powerful as automations are, if you’re automating a process that doesn’t make sense in the first place then you might be hurting your business more than you realize.

What needs to happen first is business process optimization, asking questions like: Why do we need to do things this way? What other business processes does this affect? Is this process repeated elsewhere in your org? Only when you’ve gotten all that straightened out do you start to build.

Why you need to remediate technical debtThis is especially important as everything is moving over to flows. We have the opportunity to look at things that might’ve been over-built in Process Builder and rethink them moving forward. There’s an architecting term for that: technical debt.

Every org will accrue technical debt over time. Maybe you’ve acquired new skills and that you didn’t have 6 months ago. Maybe Salesforce has added a new feature that makes everything easier. Whatever the reason, you need to make business stakeholders aware of the long-term benefits of remediating technical debt—building a foundation for better solutions in the future. And, like any debt, you need to pay it off little by little or it’ll just grow even bigger in the future.

Tom will be appearing on “Automate This!” with Jennifer Lee later in April, so be sure to tune in for more how your automations can be well-architected.

Podcast swag* Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Learn more* Salesforce Well-Architected * “Automate This!” on YouTube

Social* Tom: @TomRuns_262 * Salesforce Admins: @SalesforceAdmns * Gillian: @GillianKBruce * Mike: @MikeGerholdt

Full show transcriptMike Gerholdt: Welcome to the Salesforce Admins Podcast where we talk about product, community, and career to help you become an awesome admin. And this week we’re talking with Tom Leddy, principal evangelist, architect relations at Salesforce about how admins can build well architected automation solutions. And we did get into a few other things like documentation best practices, and really some tips that architects can give admins. It’s a super fun conversation. Tom and I had a chance to catch up after TrailblazerDX, and of course Tom will also be on the Automate this series with Jennifer Lee later in April. So if you’re listening to this early in April, hang on for later in April because he’s also going to be on Automate this. And if you’re listening later, obviously go check our YouTube page. But fun conversation. There is a question I asked Tom at the end about some fun stuff that he does, and I promise you you don’t know the answer. So with that, let’s get Tom on the podcast. So Tom, welcome to the podcast.

Tom Leddy:Thank you. It’s great to be here.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. Well, we had a chance to catch up at TrailblazerDX, which feels like not that long ago, but for anybody listening that doesn’t know you or ran into at a big event, tell me what you do at Salesforce and how you came here.

Tom Leddy:Sure. So I am an architect evangelist. I’m part of the architect relations team. And what I do at Salesforce is my team is responsible for creating tools and resources to help architects be successful at their jobs. And I help to make sure that our ecosystem is aware of those tools and knows how to use them and where to find them.

Mike Gerholdt: Very succinct. So what’d you do before Salesforce?

Tom Leddy:Before Salesforce, I worked at a variety of different customers and partners and I’ve been working in the ecosystem for a little over 10 years and used to lead digital transformations. I had big Fortune 500 companies and worked for a partner for a little while and then got the call from Salesforce.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. That’s how it works. Boy, I think back to the last, I don’t know, 10 years. You said 10 years. And digital transformations to me feel like we were going from steam powered engines to electric cars overnight to some degree.

Tom Leddy:When I think about tech as a whole, but specifically the Salesforce platform and what it looks like now compared to what it looked like when I first started working with it, it’s night and day for sure.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. I remember page builder having to double click because it wasn’t even wizzywig. You just double clicked and move stuff. Yeah. Anyway. So we chatted at TrailblazerDX and stuff. I saw a lot of people at TrailblazerDX and probably in the community have heard about this, but I want to get up to speed. Tell me about what well architected is.

Tom Leddy:Sure. So Salesforce, well architected is a framework that we created. Then it’s available on the Salesforce architect’s website, which we can share the link in the show notes. And it is a framework that is organized around the principles that you need to see what healthy solutions look like in Salesforce and where to spend your time and what to focus on as an architect.

Mike Gerholdt: What if I’m an admin?

Tom Leddy:You know what? Actually, there’s a lot of great information there, regardless of what your role is. And I think there’s honestly the lines between what admins do and what architects do are blurred a lot really now compared to, again, when we go back to what it was like to work on the platform 10 years ago compared to today. It’s hard to put people into specific roles I think now compared to maybe early on. So there’s a lot of great information for everybody on the site.

Mike Gerholdt: So help me understand that because I feel like I can’t speak for everybody, but I’ve lived in the admin world my whole life and I’ve always seen what architect’s done, and I feel like, wow, that’s super way more detailed than where my brain is at. But you said there’s a blur there. What do you see in that blur?

Tom Leddy:Well, I’ll take security for an example. So that’s one of the topics we cover in, well architected, how do I physically configure a sharing rule, which is obviously good to know, but then how should I even be thinking about putting together a security model so that it’s going to be stronger long term for my organization? It’s going to scale, it’s going to meet everybody’s needs. And that’s the guidance that we really put in well architected, which is how should I even be approaching this and what should I look for to know if something is set up the right way or if it’s bad and there’s something maybe I need to refactor. We have some of that prescriptive guidance and then some tables that have what we call patterns and anti-patterns where a pattern is something you can physically see in an org of if you see your security model set up like this and it has these characteristics, good job, keep going, you’re doing great.

And then an anti-pattern would be okay if you see these things, hold on, stop what you’re doing and let’s maybe rethink this. And you may have to even have a conversation with your business stakeholders where you’re going back and saying, you know what, before we keep building something on top of this that’s going to cause more issues down the road. Yes, it might delay this next project, or it might be a little bit more expensive, but it’s going to pay off a lot more in the long run.

Mike Gerholdt: Then you’re not building something on a house of cards?

Tom Leddy:Exactly.

Mike Gerholdt: So let’s take that one step further because I know later in April you are going to be on Jennifer’s Automate this YouTube series. So plug there.

Tom Leddy:Looking forward to it.

Mike Gerholdt: Which would be fun. But let’s talk about what is well architected automation.

Tom Leddy:Sure. So automation, that’s one of the other topics we cover and we talk about how to design good automations that, number one, will scale and we’ll also, we’ll actually create value for a business because I’m sure everybody has seen this at one time or another where somebody will come and maybe they’ll ask you to build a flow or whatever it is. And they’ll describe a process and you’ll be thinking in your head, “Okay. Why are you even doing this way in the first place?” And then you push back and maybe ask a few questions, and really it comes out, well, nobody really knows why we’re doing it this way, but we always have and now we want to build it in Salesforce. And then you want to be thinking, “Well, do you really want to automate something that you’re not even really clear on why you’re doing it in the first place?”