Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Michelle Blair, Community Manager at Salesforce. Join us as we chat about Salesforce Community Events, her work with local event organizers, and why you should attend one near you.

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

By Trailblazers, for Trailblazers

Michelle is a part of the Trailblazer Community team, which helps millions of Salesforce users around the world come together and learn. I brought her on the pod to tell us about community conferences and how you can find an event near you.

Salesforce community conferences are created by Trailblazers, for Trailblazers. As Michelle shares, over 40 events are happening this year around the world, and they offer a great opportunity to connect with other people in the community and learn more about Salesforce.

Get personal at a Salesforce community event near you

When you think of Salesforce events, you probably think of Dreamforce or TrailheaDX. These events are huge and offer so much. But all of those choices can get a little overwhelming. The cost can also be a challenge. I remember exactly how much budget I had for attending conferences when I was a solo admin—it was $0.

If you’ve ever felt that way, Michelle recommends that you give community events a try. Because they’re volunteer-organized, they have a more intimate, personal, inclusive feel. It’s easier to talk to speakers and make those connections. You can also find one within driving distance so you don’t have to take a flight or book a hotel.

Most importantly, the quality of content and professional networking opportunities at community conferences is top-notch. Michelle and her team have put together a handy-dandy calendar so you can easily find a community event near you.

Get involved in the Salesforce community

Michelle’s team is hard at work making Salesforce community events even better. They offer sponsorships to help with affordability and are connecting organizers with keynote speakers and Salesforce engineers. This year, they’re bringing several hands-on workshops to community events to take your learning to the next level.

Be sure to listen to the full episode for more on the Salesforce community events happening around the world and how you can get involved. And make sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode.

Podcast swag

• Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Learn more

• Community Conference Calendar
• Trailblazer Community Groups
• What is a Trailblazer Community Conference?

Admin Trailblazers Group

• Admin Trailblazers Community Group

Social

• Michelle: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michelleoblair/
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• Mike on Threads: https://www.threads.net/@mikegerholdt/
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• Mike on X: @MikeGerholdt

Full show transcript

Mike:
Salesforce community events are a great way to connect with Salesforce people in your area, consume some amazing content, dare I say Dreamforce level content, and get connected with your local user group. So this week on the Salesforce Admins podcast I’m talking with Michelle Blair, who’s the community major at Salesforce. And she helps all of these community event organizers really propel their event into the next level. We talk about what a community event is, how it’s different than an actual Salesforce event, some of the stuff that Salesforce is involved and not involved in when it comes to that. And I’ll be honest, why you should go. Now, before we get into that episode, just want to make sure that you’re following the Salesforce Admins podcast on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. That way when new episodes like this come out every Thursday morning, it’s going to be right on your phone. So with that, let’s get to our conversation with Michelle. So Michelle, welcome to the podcast.

Michelle:
Well, thank you, Mike. It’s great to be here.

Mike:
Yeah. Well, I’m excited to talk about there’s a lot of events that Salesforce does, but then the passion that runs through our community also exudes into them running their own events, which we’ll talk about. But let’s get started with you, how did you get started at Salesforce and what do you do?

Michelle:
Yeah, so it’s been about three years that I’ve been at Salesforce now. And I actually was a customer prior to joining Salesforce and was implementing our marketing cloud and our social, using a lot of the social platform at the customer company. And came to Dreamforce back in 2018 and was able to lead a session at Dreamforce, and talking about our journey and working with a Salesforce expert within the company. And from there I really experienced the Trailblazer community and was so inspired and just like, okay, got to get in here somehow. And I was already working with our community at the customer. So kind of just got in there eventually and made my way in about three years ago now, and it’s been quite a ride.

Mike:
And so at Salesforce you manage all kinds of stuff?

Michelle:
Yes, lots of community things.

Mike:
I feel like the over/under at one time I was a customer, it used to be very unique as an answer. Now it’s very common. But our community events, so we do TrailblazerDX, and have Dreamforce and we have World Tours which are smattered across the US and EMEA. But we also have events that our Trailblazer community puts on, so tell me about those.

Michelle:
Yeah. So a little overview of the team that I’m on. So the Trailblazer community team we support that global network of millions of Salesforce users across the world now. And we really help them to learn, succeed, and enable them with the tools to be able to put on their own events, their own communities, bringing people together to talk all about Salesforce and share that knowledge. And we manage a number of different programs like the online community, our community groups, as well as our community experts like Salesforce MVPs, and of course these community conferences which I’m so excited to dive into a lot deeper on this podcast.

Mike:
Yeah. No, and I’ve been to quite a few of them, not all of them because I feel like there’s more all the time. So what are we… First of all, they’re not put on by Salesforce so you don’t have anything in the planning of it, right?

Michelle:
That is correct.

Mike:
Okay.

Michelle:
We do not plan these. So these are a collection of learning conferences and they’re created, organized, managed by the community for the community. So they are around Salesforce content, but just not a Salesforce led event. And they really do offer such a unique opportunity to learn network, get inspired and give back to your community. And like you said, they’re entirely led by our incredible Trailblazers around the world. And they really just volunteer their time and pour their hearts into these community led events. And there are about 40 plus and counting this year and more to come. So these are just popping up all over, which is really exciting.

Mike:
And various sizes too, right?

Michelle:
Correct.

Mike:
With 40 plus, what are we looking at?

Michelle:
Yeah, so community conferences typically it’ll be about 200 minimum and then can go to 1000s now. I think in certain places it goes, we’ve seen 1000s up to 2000, in the States about a 1000. And so they really are just quite a range of options as well. And each of them are so unique to their local culture, to their city, their region. And some are single day, some are multi-day, but all of them have tons of content and a lot of robust speaker lineups that really include a range of sessions, workshops, demos, and all of that networking that we know our Trailblazers love.

Mike:
Yeah. You were a customer and you said you went to Dreamforce, which that was your first event. That’s like, ooh, I’m going to go on vacation for the first time and I’m going to go to Vegas or something. But I feel like when I was a customer I had a budget of zero, which made it very easy for me to know my budget every year. And I found community conferences as a super easy way to get connected with content that was, I would say Dreamforce quality but at a different price. What do you see… And you can see this from both angles, what do you see as the advantages of community conferences and some of our customers going?

Michelle:
Oh, absolutely. And kind of to touch on the Dreamforce part of my experience, it was extremely overwhelming. I remember just walking around and just not really knowing where exactly I should go. There was just so many options and it kind of is easy to feel a bit lost. And I think that is such a benefit of these community conferences. They really do feel like these intimate conferences that if maybe you are newer to the ecosystem, or maybe you’re making a career change and you’re just breaking in that way, or maybe you’re a seasoned Trailblazer and you just enjoy more of these more intimate settings. And I think these community conferences really offer that. They also offer more of affordability in that way too, where they’re just more accessible and budget friendly. So I think there’s a lot of opportunity to be more inclusive through these than your typical industry event. And make it possible for folks who may not be able to attend those big events like Dreamforce and TDX. So I think that’s really important to definitely note.

Mike:
Yeah, I know for a few of them I didn’t even have to spend a night in a hotel. It was great because it was one day, but also the drive, the Midwest, everybody, we drive everywhere. We only fly if we have to go to the coasts. But you could drive, attend the event and drive home. And that also was a huge kind of budget saver. Not to focus on that, but money talks a lot.

Michelle:
100%, yes. And I think that is something that we absolutely love about these events, is we have to keep in mind that they’re 100% community-led so these are people who are just volunteering to put these events on. So they create these events through sponsors, like ourselves, the Trailblazer community team we do offer a sponsorship. And just to help out with some of those costs, but it really it’s a lot of people just have to get creative to put these events on. And I think they do such a wonderful job and really hone in on the community. And that’s really the whole point of these is to bring the community together.

Mike:
Yeah, absolutely. And then for some of the events, I guess, what are you seeing as a trend in, you mentioned 2018 and I often think back to even the Dreamforce and some of the events that we’ve done pre 2020 and post 2020. What are some of the trends that you’re seeing in the style of community event or the length of community event now versus say a few years ago?

Michelle:
That’s a great question, Mike. And I wish as a customer, I had attended a community conference to be able to share that perspective of like this is as a customer back in 2018 versus now working at Salesforce and actually helping to support these events internally. But I will say, I think with the pandemic we definitely saw that these particular events, there was a pause on a lot of them. Many of them had to skip a year or two years or just coming back maybe this year, which is really exciting. And I will say last year in particular, that’s when I really helped to bring our focus back to community conferences and really find ways to support internally through our team and build out this sponsorship. And I think there was so much excitement this past year and that continues on through this year. And I think internally, something we have been really honing in on is that internal awareness and making sure that employees know that these are happening.

We get out account executives, we get out those engineers who can really get this feedback in person. We also are delivering some hands-on workshops that have been really impactful at some of these pilots that we’ve had this year. And we have a goal of piloting 10 hands-on workshops at community conferences by the end of this year, which is really exciting.

Mike:
Yeah, I think that’s always the part for me that felt very, I don’t know, lack of a better term, real, was you went to the event and it was very local to you unless you flew across the country or something, or you went outside of the United States. But it felt very local. So there’s a lot of people that you would know or you could connect with. If you go to an event in the Midwest, you’re going to talk about the weather 100%. And then we’re going to avoid bumping into you and say, “Oh, [inaudible 00:12:10].” But I think you get a mix of community members presenting, but then you also have Salesforce shows up. It just shows up in a very different way. It’s not a heavy-handed message, but in a supportive manner like you said, where we can do a workshop. And so you still get kind of that local flavor, but also some of the big production of a hands-on workshop that you feel like, oh, well, this poor customer didn’t have to spend 10 weeks toiling away to create this workshop.

Michelle:
Right. Yes, I think that is a really important note because we 100% want to respect the community and give them the credit that they all deserve for organizing these events. And one way we can do that is within our sponsorship package, we actually do offer whether it’s keynote assistance, where we can make an ask on behalf of the conference organizers if they have a keynote or an internal speaker that they would really like as their keynote speaker or as a session topic. So that is one way we support logistically. And I think it is wherever we can help out, we will try to find a way. And I think it is just that trust piece where the community trusts us to have their back to know that we will support where we can. And then we trust in them to put on these incredible conferences that really just are the heart of this community.

Mike:
Yeah. Speaking of local, are there… And there’s so many, are there unique events that some of these community events do outside of the conference?

Michelle:
Yes. So I know that… Well, and to give a little history but just on that local piece, Mike-

Mike:
Oh, please do.

Michelle:
So the history of these events really came from, I think it was back in 2012, and it’s a customer who actually wasn’t able to attend Dreamforce. They wanted to offer something similar to their local Salesforce network. So they basically decided to bring this mini Dreamforce to their hometown, and that’s been duplicated all over the world now. We’re seeing all of these pop up globally, but it really is the overall vision. And the goal here really is to connect local Trailblazer community groups. So those are those regional groups that get together, very product and industry specific groups, so architects, admins, developers. And then those local Salesforce customers who just want to get together and get to know each other as well as share that knowledge and then anyone interested in learning.

And that’s really the goal here is to spark those connections and ideas for all. And yeah, I think the local piece is just so important because these conferences are a celebration in a sense of that region, that local culture that people really love about their city, about their state. So we do see a lot of very specific, especially in the States, very specific regions that these Dream and events are named after. And then we’re seeing a ton come up in EMEA as well as APAC. Yeah, there’s so much local flavor that we’re seeing and it’s amazing.

Mike:
It sounds like… Well, I’ll flip to the other side of the coin because I feel like going to these is paramount. We’ve talked about that a lot. What if you’re on the other side of the coin you’re thinking, boy, I think I could do something like this in my area. From your perspective, what does it take to put on a community event? How big are some of these teams that plan these? And I think you said the turnout’s kind of all over the place, but if somebody wanted to get started what are they looking at?

Michelle:
Great question. So typically with our conference planning teams, we see at least three to four members. I would say that’s a minimum because you got to think about all the different components that go into these conferences and up to it could be 10 planning team members. So really is just depending on the scope of your conference and what you’re trying to bring together. And we really recommend even forming an additional volunteer team to help handle this day of responsibilities as well. So those are additional folks who can jump in if there’s any fires, anything going on that need to be addressed as soon as possible. Something we also do recommend is having at least one community group leader that currently is leading one of those regional community groups, just so that they kind of have that full understanding of the Trailblazer community and the importance of bringing the community together.

And then typically we also recommend that the planning team is individuals not employed but just by one company. It’s really spread out through a company and different organizations coming together. And that could include customers, partners, and making sure that they are active members of the Salesforce ecosystem, the Trailblazer community. And that they really create that open and inclusive environment that these community conferences are known for.

Mike:
Yeah. No, sometimes it takes an army or what’s it? No, it takes a village.

Michelle:
Takes a village.

Mike:
It takes a village, yes. May feel like an army sometime, but yeah, I’ve been to quite a few and I think it’s always interesting. I also, just to speak to kind of the vibe, I don’t know how best to say that but the vibe, the vibes at a community conference are so different. On top of just the speakers being super approachable, they’ll get up and literally there’ll be times… There was one time I was sitting in a session, he’s like, “I wonder who the speaker is.” And he just got up because they’re not in this bougie suit like you see at Dreamforce. But also when you’re there talking with the partners, the SIs and stuff, they’re a little more laid back. It’s a little more casual. I really enjoy that you can have what I’ll call a human conversation, as opposed to at some of these more formal corporate events where the people at the booth or whatever are just trying to hard sell you the whole time.

There you can be like, now, you sit down and it’s nothing to walk past a table and see people sketching stuff on a piece of paper. And then really working through the challenge as opposed to like, “Buy my product.” I don’t know how best to say that.

Michelle:
I totally agree, Mike. I think that is really the magic is that relaxed environment where you can show up authentically. You don’t have to play a certain role or act a certain way. You just show up as yourself, whether you’ve been in the ecosystem for years and years or you’re coming in new, I think it’s somewhere that is so welcoming and inclusive of all. And that is something I just absolutely love. And you see that across every single community conference. It really is that’s just the vibe of our Dream and events. So it really is incredible. And I think touching on the opportunities that when you can show up authentically, it really does offer or allows you to grow personally and professionally on such a different level because you can be yourself and then you make those really special connections that will allow you to become a better admin, become a better community member, become a better community leader. And then that kind of just flows into your personal everything. So I think that’s really such a beautiful thing about these conferences.

Mike:
If somebody was listening and we’ll put the link in the show notes, and wanted to find, do we list all these or is there a listing somewhere that they could find of these events?

Michelle:
We sure do, yes. Great question. It’s exciting because we’re actually going to be updating this landing page very soon. So you can find community conferences at Trailblazercommunitygroups.com. And then on that top area you can just click onto community conferences from there. And you will see a calendar of all of the amazing events that are happening throughout this year, and then all of the past events that have happened as well.

Mike:
So you can find out all the stuff you missed out on.

Michelle:
Yes, exactly.

Mike:
I feel like it’s that way with me all the time. Like, oh. Every time I hear a band or a comic is going on tour, like, oh. And like, “You didn’t know they were going on tour.” You’re like, “No, I didn’t.” And then you pull up the event and you’re like, “Cool, [inaudible 00:22:19].”

Michelle:
It was last weekend, yeah.

Mike:
So conversely, if somebody’s listening to this, what would be the bar? Is there a requirement that they should have stuff together before they contact you if they were looking to get into creating a community event?

Michelle:
Yeah, I think it really is there’s quite a range in that too. When a team will come to us and say, “I have interest in this. I really don’t know what to do. Can you help guide me?” And then we also see the other side where it’s like, we have the date, we have the venue, we have everything already set. All we need from you is really the sponsorship and a point of contact on your team to help support in that planning and execution. So we show up wherever the conference planning team really is. And yeah, once they kind of go through our intake process and we say, “All right, you’re approved. Here’s the sponsorship, here’s your point of contact.” We then the point of contact on our team will be able to support them with all the additional items like that internal awareness piece. We do a demo jam trophy, that keynote speaker sourcing, some marketing support as well, as well as some little giveaway items that we provide.

And something new that we’re piloting at domestic conferences is an onsite community booth where our team, yes, for those who our team is able to travel to some of these conferences. And when we do we kind of bring this community booth kit where we have pop-up banner, we have all of the things that help to identify the Trailblazer community. And we spread some of that awareness of what makes the Trailblazer community unique, and how we support these conferences as well as our community groups and our community experts. So lots of fun things.

Mike:
I would say, that’s quite the welcome wagon. My God.

Michelle:
Yes.

Mike:
Well, Michelle, thanks for coming on the pod and talking about our community events. I know that I’ve been to quite a few and I’ve got quite a few listeners that go to them and plan them and talk about them. And it’s just kind of a neat extra layer of participation that we have as part of this ecosystem.

Michelle:
Yes, I couldn’t agree more, Mike. And thank you so much for supporting these incredible community led events. They really are just exactly what the community is all about. And we couldn’t do any of this without the people who are organizing these events, so big shout out to them.

Mike:
Yeah, absolutely.

Michelle:
They’re the real heroes here.

Mike:
Yep, absolutely. Well, it was great to have Michelle on the podcast. I’m glad she could join us. I really love going to community events. I think they’re a lot of fun, and I wasn’t kidding about the vibe. I think it’s so much more enjoyable when you can sit down with a lot of the vendors. And also to be honest with you, a lot of the speakers are also a little less rushed too. So if you’re working on a budget like I am all the time, community events are a great way to get connected with some great content. Also, a great way for you as a Salesforce admin to try out your presentation skills. If you’ve been presenting at a local user group and kind of want to go that next level, community event is a great way to get in front of a larger group of people and really try out your speaking abilities.

So if you enjoyed this episode, can you do me a favor and just tap on the three dots in Apple Podcasts and click the share episode. That way you can text it to a friend or you can most importantly share it on social. And of course, we mentioned resources, Michelle had a couple of URLs. I want to make sure you know how to get to those. All those resources are in the show notes, and those show notes and along with everything else is at Admin.salesforce.com, including a transcript of the show. Now, be sure to join us in the Admin Trailblazer group in the Trailblazer community if you’re not there already. And of course, until next week, we’ll see you in the cloud.

The post Why Salesforce Community Events Are Crucial for Professional Networking appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Jason Atwood, CEO and Co-Founder of Arkus. Join us as we chat about landing your first Salesforce Admin role, from finding good opportunities to nailing the interview and more.

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

The 20/30/50 rule

Jason has interviewed a lot of people for Salesforce roles in his 15 years in the ecosystem. His biggest piece of advice when looking for your first role is pretty simple: “Relax. It’s going to be OK.”

But you still need to acquire skills and there’s a lot to do, so Jason recommends following his 20/30/50 rule. Spend 20% of your time on Trailhead, 30% on certifications, and 50% finding some way to gain experience. This split loosely follows what he looks for on a resume when he’s making a new hire. He also shared some advice about each step of your journey.

Trailhead: Becoming a Ranger is your number one priority, followed by Superbadges. He also recommends taking the time to set up your profile with a photo, description of yourself, and custom URL.

Certifications: Don’t put off taking your certifications. Give it a go as soon as you’re ready. If you don’t get it this time, you can use your results to help you prep better the next time. And if you do pass, you can move on to the next one sooner.

Gaining Experience: Volunteering isn’t the only way to do this. You can enroll in a program where you build mock projects, or simply build something on your own that you’re willing to demo in an interview.

Preparing for a Salesforce Admin interview

Jason interviews a lot of people, so I asked him, how should you prepare for your first interview for a Salesforce role? The first thing is to be ready for some sort of assessment. Since there’s often time pressure, Jason recommends doing a practice run. Talk to a friend, find out what kind of data they collect, and build them an app to track the books they’ve read or the distance they’ve run, anything will do.

When you sit down in the room, Jason emphasizes the importance of listening and showing empathy. One way to do that is to ask good questions. What’s their Salesforce roadmap and what can you build for them? What’s their organization’s approach to culture? You can also do your homework and bring up a blog post they wrote, or something specific their company has done.

Admins are consultants

Listening and empathy are so important to Jason because he sees 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 transcript

Mike:
I got an idea. How about we tackle the hardest question on the Salesforce Trailblazer community? That’s right. This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we’re going to look for advice on finding your first admin job and doing the interview, getting experience, and more. And we’re going to do all that with CEO and co-founder of Arkus, Jason Atwood. Jason and I chatted at TrailblazerDX and really wanted to dive into this topic. Now, before we bring Jason on, I just want to make sure that you’re following the Salesforce Admins Podcast on iTunes or Spotify. That way, when new episodes like this one come out, they’re automatically downloaded to your phone. But enough about that. Let’s talk about finding that first job or even finding your next job as a Salesforce administrator. Oh, I almost forgot to mention we tackle the myth of “but it’s just an admin job.” So with that, let’s get Jason on the podcast. So, Jason, welcome to the podcast.

Jason Atwood:
Thank you for having me. It’s been a long time since we’ve podcast together.

Mike:
I know. I was thinking back; well, we were just reminiscing of the days at the Marriott Marquis and the Arkus podcast.

Jason Atwood:
Yep. You were on an episode of CloudFocus Weekly. We had it as part of our trivia once there was only four or five guests ever on the podcast, and you were one of them.

Mike:
Snuck in, only proximity. I’m going to say. So catch people up. What have you been up to?

Jason Atwood:
Well, since then, whatever that was, 10 years ago. Yeah. So I am now the current CEO and co-founder of Arkus. We’re a Salesforce consulting firm. We deal mostly in the nonprofit space, and we’ve grown from that little company back then. We’re almost up to 75 people. And now I run around between putting out fires, talking on podcasts, and trying to educate myself on the whole changing landscape of technology.

Mike:
Yeah, it does feel like in the last decade, it’s gone from everything we know to a brand new world.

Jason Atwood:
It certainly is. And I just spent three hours at a Heroku dev meetup and could hang there mentally for a bit, but they lost me at a little point. So it’s both fun, interesting, and challenging to stay up with all this stuff.

Mike:
So one of the things that everyone’s trying to stay up with is the ever-changing job market and hiring. We see a lot of the questions in the Trailblazer community from new admins, people getting into the ecosystem that want to become Salesforce admins, people in the ecosystem that are looking for jobs, or maybe have kind of hit a career plateau. And you and I were chatting, and boy, I think it’d be fun to kind of delve into that topic with you.

Jason Atwood:
Let’s do it. I have some experience in hiring people over the last 15 years, so I can certainly talk about it.

Mike:
A little bit more than me. More than me.
Well, let’s get started. So let’s start fresh. There’s a lot of new people. As we were talking about in the intro, there’s a lot of new people coming into the ecosystem that maybe don’t have tech advice. They are doing Trailhead modules, completing challenges, getting a lot of badges, trying to round out their resumes, and they don’t know A, what to look for, or B, what to put on their resumes. So somebody that’s hired a bunch of people and been around for a long time, let’s start there with some of your advice and where they should go.

Jason Atwood:
Sure. This is a very common thing, and the first thing I would tell everybody is relax. It’s going to be okay. I know it feels daunting, and you see these triple all-star rangers and you see all these, the hoodies, and you see the people with the 15 certifications and 10 years of experience, and you feel like, “How am I ever going to get there?” You will; you’ll get there. So the first thing is just to take it easy and not to get too worked up on it. It does feel like a lot. It’s a very big community and filled with lots of hungry people for jobs, a lot of recruiters, a lot of activity. When I talk to people about getting started in the ecosystem, and certainly on the admin track, and we can talk about other tracks if you want, but on the admin track, I kind of say all those things matter.

So when it comes to certifications, when it comes to Trailhead, when it comes to experience, they all matter. And usually the question I get is, “But what should I focus on?” And so I came up with something, I maybe made it up years and years ago. I call it the 30, 20, 50 rule, or 20, 30, 50. It doesn’t matter; you can break it up anyway. And if you’re going to take your time, right, you’re in the hunt for a job, and you need to do the education, you need to get enabled, you need to build your experience level. I break it down into those percentages. So 20% of the time, I’d focus on Trailhead. And the trick for Trailhead is A, you just have to be a ranger. We don’t even look at people who aren’t rangers. I had an intern apply the other day, and I said, “No, you’re not even on Trailhead. Go get a ranger before I even talk to you.”

So that, to me, is just a minimum bar. Just go be a ranger, and then if you can go up from there, that’s great. And then, if you’re still in your Trailhead worlds, the thing that we then look for besides looking at their profile, is it filled out? Have they thought about it? Have they created it like LinkedIn? So second advice on the Trailhead side is treat your profile like LinkedIn: fill it out, put your picture, put your description, do all the things. It’ll probably take you no more than a half an hour. Make your URL; you can make your customized URL so people can find you; do all the things so it looks like you’re part of the community, right? Make sure that your profile is rich and full. And then the third thing on the Trailhead side of things is to go for super badges.

So I can look at double ranger, triple ranger all day long, but if I don’t see some super badges and I speak from someone who doesn’t have any super badges.

Mike:
Oh, no.

Jason Atwood:
I know, I know, it’s on my hit list for this year. I know, I know, I mean, I have 15 certs, and so I have some experience, but I’d say, get some super badges. We see that when we look at that as a higher level of dedication and of expertise, because, as you know and as I’ve been doing them, they’re difficult. They show that you have really dug in, and they’re more than just answering some questions or watching videos, or getting fun ones. I love badges, but the super badges really show that kind of a deeper level of education and sort of just being in the Trailhead world. So that’s the 20%. Then the 30% is certifications.

You need to have both. You can’t have one without the other. I don’t know what that commercial was, peanut butter and chocolate or something, but-

Mike:
Yeah, I think so, yeah.

Jason Atwood:
-You might be [inaudible 00:07:08]. Certifications are important; you should focus on them. What I tell people is you need to get them, but you can’t stall. Most people, I think, when we talk to them and we’ll find in the ecosystem, say, “Oh, I’m thinking about getting that, or I’m planning to get that one next year.” And our advice is, “Nope, go get it. Go get it now. Go take it. Go take the test a couple of times.” Do whatever it is you can do to start your certification journey; don’t put it off; don’t procrastinate on it. You don’t have to be perfect; just go get some. And obviously there’s a path of which ones you should get, blah, blah, blah.

It depends on where you’re going in your world, but having at least one or two certs is kind of a bare minimum. So if you’re starting off and you’re trying to get into the ecosystem, that’s your 20 and your 30, and then the 50 is the hardest part. And it’s just hard to tell people because it’s the experience. The third thing we look for is experience. I want to see that you’ve done something obviously new to the ecosystem, harder to have the experience, but that’s where I say spend 50% of your time trying to gain that experience. There’s the old adage: try to go work with a non-profit. Although there’s some pushback on that nowadays because of the complexity of the platform, you don’t want to hurt a non-profit.

There’s definitely… Get in in a way, there’s programs, there’s tons of programs out there that will help you do mock projects and things where you can just get your hands dirty. And even if you have to build your own thing that you’re going to demo, you got to get experience because I’ve not hired people with 22 certifications, and because it didn’t add up to any experience, and I’ve seen people with tons and tons of experience with zero certs, and I would hire anyway, just from the experience. But for me, that’s how I tell spend your time: 20% trailhead, 30% certifications, and 50% getting that experience.

Mike:
I think that 50%, that part that you’re talking about is always the part that feels like the hardest to get into. Because if you’re not in tech and you don’t have any experience and you’re trying to land that first job, that can feel like, “If I could get this job, then I could get the experience.” And so, part of that lends to my next question is, so you’re new, we’ve checked all the boxes on filling out our profiles and done that part. What should I get ready for when I interview?

Jason Atwood:
So every interview’s going to be different, obviously, but a lot of places are using assessments now. So I would say be prepared for an assessment. That means functionally, they’re going to ask you to do something; they’re going to ask you to build something or take something they’ve done and turn it into something on the platform, using Salesforce as the platform. So I would just be ready for that, be prepared, be okay with it. Even do mock versions of it, go have a friend, and I have to given this advice to some people, but go have a friend, sit down with them, talk to them about what they do, and you’ll uncover something that they’re collecting data.

And as soon as you can figure out what the data they’re collecting, whether it’s books or they collect comic books, or they’re a skier or they’re a runner, anything you do, you can just come up with, “Ooh, what if I built you an app to track that?” So be prepared to have an assessment of your skills and be able to show that in a short period of time. Meaning it might be a take-home. Sometimes it’s a take-home. Like, “Hey, go do this over the weekend.” Other times it’s, “You have an hour; come back and show us what you did.”

Mike:
Ooh!

Jason Atwood:
So I’d say… Ooh! Yeah, I know. I’ve been doing that for 15 years to people. Trust me. I’ve seen a lot of, oohs.

Mike:
I would imagine.

Jason Atwood:
Even had one person pass out in the…

Mike:
Oh, my. Oh, goodness.

Jason Atwood:
It happens.

Mike:
You get an extra hour now.

Jason Atwood:
Yeah. So I think that it’s coming more and more in the ecosystem, because again, when you look at a resume, when you look at LinkedIn, a lot of it’s just you can’t tell whether they know what they’re doing. If you actually do an assessment, you can then assess, “Okay, you know, you functionally know how to do things.” So I’d be prepared for that. The other thing is, I think when you’re really, especially in the new, just be honest about what you do and do not know. That’s really, really key. Don’t fluff up your resume; don’t put things that you don’t know; don’t put clouds, don’t throw in data cloud if you don’t know what data cloud is and haven’t used it or can’t really explain it. Just because you took a Trailhead on something doesn’t mean that platform or know that cloud. So I’d really say be honest with what you know and the clouds, and the products, because that’s going to be super important in the interview process.

Mike:
Wow. How much… In prep work for resumes, there’s a lot of AI tools out there, so I’d love to know your perspective on both sides of this one: how much do you, as somebody hiring, kind of look for, “Oh, they used AI to generate most of this resume?” And on the flip side, how much should somebody building their resume that could really benefit from an AI tool? How much should they lean into it?

Jason Atwood:
So I’m going to be the strange answer on this one, or…

Mike:
Oh, good.

Jason Atwood:
Yeah, because I’m going to say, resumes don’t matter.

Mike:
Okay.

Jason Atwood:
They’re just checking a box. When people get to me in the interview process, they’re beyond the resume. So yes, you need to have a resume; you need it because that’s the part. It’s like you have to have the internet; you have to have a way to fill out the form. So you need to have a resume, and it should have your accomplishments and stuff on it. But I don’t look at resumes because they’re just lies. They’re just you telling me all these things, and sometimes I don’t know if any of that’s really true or not true. So to me, it’s like it’s just a checking the box. “Yes, you have to have a resume. Yes, it should be okay.” Honestly, your LinkedIn profile should be your resume, right? Because that’s real; it’s on the web. And if you’re lying, someone might actually call you out for it.

“Hey, you didn’t work at that company for 10 years.” So I would say focus more on the LinkedIn. Because I’ll look at that. If you gave me 10 minutes, I’d look at your LinkedIn first. I would not look at your resume, what you’ve put on, rather than what your actual history has been. That being said, you want to throw all this stuff on there for this ecosystem. So I do think showing work that you’ve done and really pointing to problems you’ve solved, if you really think about any job, especially as an administrator, you’re a Salesforce admin, you’re basically solving problems all day all.

And you’re communicating. So two things that I tell people about the resume and the process is how do you show that you’ve solved problems in the past in your resume, and then how do you show that you are a great communicator? Because great communication, it doesn’t matter what, I mean, well, not what job, but certainly in this world, you are basically talking to people, helping them out, doing stuff, re-communicating with them, getting what they need to do, building it, whatever. You might work with different groups or whatever. But that communication skill is something we deeply look at. So again, if you’re going to focus on stuff, don’t so much focus on your resume as focus on how to be a great communicator.

Mike:
That’s really good advice because I have been at that level where people show up and the resume looked good, but they couldn’t facilitate the conversation or articulate any kind of answer in the interview.

Jason Atwood:
It is a skill that not a lot of people have, but it’s a skill, you can learn it. So a couple of things to put into that communication bucket. We’ll go down a little rathole here.

Mike:
Yeah, let’s do.

Jason Atwood:
One is empathy.

Mike:
Okay.

Jason Atwood:
Have the ability to show empathy, and that means sort of having a conversation with somebody and throwing in stuff that’s like listening to them, talking to them, obviously pulling out information about them, but having the empathy when they say something’s not going to happen or whatever, they could say, “It’s a rainy day.” I look for it in every interview that I do. Now this is going to be on the podcast; everybody’s going to know this, but I will actually throw things into my talk track or as just the warm-up when you’re sort of, “How are you and what’s going on?” I will always throw in something to test empathy.

I’ll say, “Oh, I’m okay, but I didn’t sleep well last night. Or I had a bad egg sandwich this morning, or I’ve tripped over the dog when I came into the room.” And I just listened to hear what they react. If they go, “Oh, that’s terrible. Oh, yeah, I know dogs can be really difficult. Or you know what? I get my egg sandwiches from downstairs, whatever.” But hearing that back of that empathy, super important. Second is actually listening, so I will listen to people, how they listen to me. Are they interrupting me? Are they talking over me? Are they going? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, as I speak, I listen for their real intent and true conversational skills. And so the ability to actually listen, pause, and then answer is a really big; it’s a great skill to have. And so the people who can do that, I know that they can do almost any job better because they’ve intently done that listening skill and they’ve got it working. So those are two that I throw out to most people when they’re trying to build their conversational habits.

Mike:
Yeah, I’m listening to you answer that, and I’m playing devil’s advocate in my head and saying, “Maybe people are hearing Jason say this because he’s hiring consultants.” So why do you think this also translates over to people that are embedded in different work groups, or teams, or have stakeholders within an organization and aren’t consultants, like for your organization?

Jason Atwood:
Because basically, being an admin is being a consultant in one organization. You are a consultant. What are you doing? You’re talking to people; they’re coming to you with their problems; you are getting their requirements; you’re satisfying their needs; you’re working with them; you’re iterating; you’re changing it; you’re updating things, and then you’re presenting it back to them. The thing that changes when you become a consultant is you’re paying for someone’s time, which then becomes a whole other thing. But also, you might be working with other organizations, and the level of expectation of how you do that and your expertise goes way up. And this is something I tell, I warn people about moving into consulting is that when you’re an admin, you have the ability to take some time. Someone says, “Hey, can you build me these three dashboards that I want to track my sales forecasting?”

You go, “Sure,” and you can go Google it, and you spend a week, and you come back, and you’re like, “Here’s your three dashboards.” They’re ecstatic; they’re like, “Great, thank you.” They don’t care that it took you three weeks or whatever, and then you had to ask your friend and Google it or ask ChatGPT to do it for you. In the consulting space, it’s different. They don’t ask, “Could you build this for me?” They say, A, “What are the options to build it? How long is it going to take you, and can you get it to me by next Tuesday?” So the expectation level of what you’re doing goes way up, and they expect you to be expert. They don’t expect you to ever say, “I don’t know, but I’ll figure it out.” As an admin, I said, “I don’t know. I’ll figure it out.”

“Oh, you want to build some tracker for your feedback form? Sure, let go figure it out.” Go away for a week, and I’ll come back and show you something. So I think that’s part of it, but as an admin, you’re still doing all this stuff. It’s the same stuff inside the organization. You’re just not working with external companies or people; you work with internal people. So you still have Mary from accounting coming over and wants to synchronize with the QuickBooks, and you still have the CEO come over and they want an update to some dashboard because they can’t figure it out, and you’re doing the same stuff; it’s more internal, more ad hoc, generally.

Mike:
I mean, I couldn’t agree more. Also, Mary from accounting, they always want to, for some reason, can’t seem to get opportunities flowing through your sales org, but let’s integrate finance.

Jason Atwood:
So true, so true.

Mike:
But you kind of led into that. So what are the different jobs, or different tasks, types of jobs that admins would tackle within an organization?

Jason Atwood:
Yeah, I mean, we kind of started in there. You do become an internal consultant, but I think you first off just think of what, especially when you’re applying for it, and this goes back to sort of the applying and getting the jobs’ thing. When you’re looking at the organization, you obviously want to know what their Salesforce landscape is. So if I were in the interview process, what I would do is come loaded with a bunch of really good questions, and I would pepper that person with tons of questions about their Salesforce instance, or, as we call it in the biz, we call it their org.

But I would come in with, “What kind of licenses? How old is it? What kind of integrations? What kind of applications do you have? When’s the last time you did a health tech? Do you use permission sets or permission set groups? Or did you flip the lightning yet?” I mean, I would be peppering them showing my expertise to get that admin job. So that’s just on the interview side; I just want to throw that in. But coming back to what you do, again, it really depends on the organization, and this is actually a myth that is out there in the ecosystem, is that admins get bored and admins don’t get to play with lots of different clouds, and admins don’t do a lot of diverse things. That’s completely not true because it depends on what organization you’re with. I was with a company who had 375,000 people.

I had a team; I had five people, or five, including me; we were all admins; that’s what we did. And we had 12 different production orgs, 12 orgs with production, and I think nine different applications running in them with thousands and thousands and thousands of users. We were not bored; we had plenty to do; we were playing with great, big, unlimited licensing and integrations and projects, but we were admins. At the end of the day, we were admins. Same thing: you go work for a small company that’s four… I don’t think anyone would hire a full-time admin with four people. But the smaller the organization who’s just using Salesforce for one thing and has no chance of expanding it or doing it, or going anywhere.

Yeah. You’re going to get bored, right? You come in, you’re going to help out Mary in accounting, you get that one project done, and then they’re going to be like, “Can you reset passwords all day?” So I think as part of the interview process to pulling it back in to that, and when your job seeking, you should be really interested in what their, especially if you want to be a Salesforce admin and you really want to do it full time, what’s their Salesforce roadmap? Are they just solid? They have it, and they have had it up and running for five years, and that’s it? Or do they have things that they want to do? New stuff you can build? Do you want to do the integration with that? We want to bring in marketing cloud next year. We’re looking at how to do predictive AI, whatever.

So if I were bringing more questions as the trying to get the job, I would bring in that to the organization. I’d say, “What do you guys, where’s your roadmap? Or do you not have one?” And I think that would show as a hiring person; I’d be like, “Oh, they’re forward-looking.” And it’ll also give you the idea of: “Are you going to get bored in six months?” Because you don’t want to get bored in six months.

Mike:
Right. Although maybe a smaller footprint would be really good if you’re looking to get that first admin job.

Jason Atwood:
Exactly. Exactly right. But then you have the counter, right? You have a smaller footprint, but they have 40 users, and they only use it for service. So you get in, you do some work, you do all the stuff, and then you’re like, “Now what?”

Mike:
Right. So you brought up myths of admins, and one is, well, “I don’t get exposed to enough clouds,” and I’ve heard that at various events. “Well, we only use data cloud, or I just don’t get to see it.” And I feel like, and this still exists, all of these articles on admin to something else, as though admin is just the front door; all you got to do is get in and do that for a few months. But the real money and the real challenge is elsewhere. What would you say to that myth of just an admin?

Jason Atwood:
I think it is a bit of a myth, and it makes admins and being an administrator, Salesforce administrators feel like this… It’s like you’re the fry person in the back at McDonald’s. It’s like, “Well, I don’t ever go back and cook the hamburgers.” I don’t know. And it’s not true.

Mike:
Although the fries are kind of the best part.

Jason Atwood:
That’s true. I actually worked at McDonald’s, and I was the fry person, so that’s why I brought it up.

Mike:
Yeah.

Jason Atwood:
But yes, at some organizations, you could be the one admin, and that could be your role for a long period of time. And you could get bored, and it could just be a starter. At other organizations, you could run an entire group of admins. You could have six or seven admins, you could be part of a team of people supporting a lot of different Salesforce instances, and it could go anywhere from just administrative down to sort of more the solution architect type of stuff, or more towards the BA towards so stuff or more towards the development.

One of the things you and I have been in this ecosystem for a long time, what we were able to do 10 years ago on the platform with our clicks and what we’re able to do with clicks now, we’re programming. Let’s be clear: when we’re building flows, we’re programming; we’re just programming with a user interface. But that’s programming, and the stuff you can do is stunning, that you just couldn’t do with any of the tools unless you’re writing Apex. So I think even the idea that admins who are getting that technical acumen and are going into the more programmatic type of world of admin that could go long, there’s lots of paths you can go down for that. So that’s where I think some of the myths should go away because you’re not just the admin who’s building a report, adding a field to a page way out, and assigning a permission set. There’s many, many different pieces of that platform. And that’s before you even talk about the clouds; before you’d say there’s now, I don’t know how many clouds. There’s a lot of clouds.

Mike:
There is a lot.

Jason Atwood:
Yeah.

Mike:
Yeah. I mean, you brought up flow. I think back to the days of, “Boy, if I could just stand up like a window pane that a screen that people could input the data into as opposed to just editing raw right on the record.” And now we can do that, and you can do that just using the interface. You don’t have to try a single line of code, which is…

Jason Atwood:
It is stunning what you can do with that tool. And it’s one of the things that has left me a little bit behind because I’m old school admin. I’m a work-for-rule person. And for that, I would’ve gone wrote in a user story and had someone written up a Visualforce, and with Apex in the background, and now it’s… The stuff that we can produce with flows, screen flows, and even the call-outs. I was watching the call-out today, a flow that made a call-out to a Heroku Dyno that did a hookup to a Postgres database that pulled in AI predictions. I was like, “What?” So yeah, the world of an admin is becoming very, very broad in some ways.

Mike:
Yeah, no, I agree. And you can also now trigger flows through prompts and have it call AI. And I mean, in a year from now, this is all going to sound like super, “Wow, they were impressed they could do that. Now look at where we are.” kind of stuff. One thing we didn’t touch on is there’s a lot of job places to look at and career stuff. Often, when looking for a developer architect, I think those are a little more defined also, especially with developer, they’ve got experience in writing developer job titles for other platforms. So it’s very easy to translate that over to Salesforce. What are things that an admin should look for in job descriptions? That maybe if the title or description doesn’t say Salesforce admin, that will be the role?

Jason Atwood:
Yeah, it’s a tough one because, I mean, the easiest thing to say is look for the keyword Salesforce. Obviously, there’s going to be some sort of piece of that. I think you’d have to go a little old-school and think of the platform and what it’s doing. So I would start to look for things that were based on what Salesforce, the platform’s doing? Is it sales, right? Is it marketing? Is it service? Is it nonprofit? Especially in the nonprofit space, which is for me. So we would look at grant writing, fundraising, and all that stuff, which could be keywords for, we’re using Salesforce in the background, but we’re using it to do all these things. So I guess the meta hint without giving you the keywords is: What is this organization doing? What is the output of their world? And then looking at what the tool set they’re using.

They might not be Salesforce, right? There are other ways of saying the word. They might say something like health cloud and a health cloud administrator, and you’re like, “Well, that’s Salesforce.” Or they might say, “net-zero cloud.” Or they might say, “nonprofit cloud.” Again, not saying Salesforce, but that’s what it’s based on. So sometimes, as an administrator and as part of this ecosystem, you have to know that there are products that are sitting on top of the platform that don’t necessarily say the word in it. Remember when they named everything Force? Everything was Force something Force, this Force, that Force.

Mike:
We had everything named Lightning for a while, too.

Jason Atwood:
That too. That was fun.

Mike:
We like to do that a lot. I think everything’s named Einstein now.

Jason Atwood:
Pretty much.

Mike:
I’ll probably get in trouble for saying that.

Jason Atwood:
Yes, you will.

Mike:
But you could do the bingo card of name everything, Einstein, Lightning, Force, and then you’re covered.

Jason Atwood:
I’m going to win that Bingo.

Mike:
Einstein, Lightning, Force, and then the actual product. Then you’re covered.

Jason Atwood:
Totally.

Mike:
I was looking through all my notes, roles and descriptions and interviewing and challenges, and certifications, and I feel we touched on a lot. What is something that you feel we missed, that you talk about, that you bring up that maybe people aren’t thinking about when they’re looking to interview or get an admin position?

Jason Atwood:
Sure. I think there’s a couple of things. A couple more things I would, if I were giving advice, which I happen to do all the time.

Mike:
You’re full of advice.

Jason Atwood:
I’m full of advice, maybe too much. So one thing, and this is just generic to not Salesforce, but as anybody looking for a job, cultural fit, I think, is becoming more and more of a need. And I think, as people applying for jobs, you should be looking at it both ways. Do I fit that culture, and does that culture fit me? And that’s do my values and the company’s values or the organization’s values align together. And asking a lot of questions around culture is going to become more and more important, especially because we go do remote work and all that. So I think what we used to think of, like, “Oh, we had coffee breaks and pizza parties for every quarter,” is now a much bigger discussion. So I would say bring culture into the conversation. Another tip that I hadn’t given yet is just preparedness.

It seems silly to say you have to be prepared for an interview, but I can tell you the amount of people who show up who are not prepared, they’re just not prepared; they don’t know their resume; they don’t have good questions; they don’t know how to talk to their experiences. And I’m stunned when it happens, but it happens a lot. And one of my little pet peeves, I’m giving away all my hints, boy, anybody interviewing is going to be able to nail the interview the next time they get to me.

Mike:
Yeah, you say that, but I bet not.

Jason Atwood:
Probably not, right? No one’s even going to pay attention. But having really good questions is something that I look for. Again, we work in an industry where being able to ask your users what they want and question them, and being insightful is a great skill. So if I get to the end of one of my diatribe speeches and I say, “Do you have any questions?” And they’re like, “No, I’m good.” I immediately go, “Okay.” And then I’m not good because I… So have questions ready at the go; have them sitting in front of you on a piece of paper, on a sticky note in a NeverNote, wherever. It’s super important, and don’t be generic. Don’t say, “Where do you see yourself?” Don’t interview the interviewee.

Ask really stuff that’s based on homework you did. And that’s sort of the prepared thing too. When people come in and they say, “Oh, I read your blog post last week about blah, blah, blah. I was really interested about this key point.” Immediately, I’m like, “They did their homework; they know what they’re talking about, and they’re asking me something interesting.” Don’t say, “How do you guys do raises?” That’s not going to be; you need to have the questions about the culture or the stuff. I mean, I’ve had some really good in the past, but I’ve had some really terrible questions. And then two more, I’ll give you two more tips. This is like the hundred tips for interviewing the Salesforce Ecosystem Podcast.

Mike:
We’ll call it 98.

Jason Atwood:
There you go.

Mike:
So there’s two.

Jason Atwood:
Two more is you can never, if you want to get two skills. If I told someone to go get two skills before they get any job to be super useful on day one, two things they should be focusing on: data and documentation. Your ability to understand data is like you need to have it, you have to have it as a skill; you need to know data; you need to know how data interconnects with other data, you need to know how to report on it. It’s getting more and more and more important. So I look for data skills, even data nerds, people who say, “I love data.” So if you’re not that type of person, I would say these jobs are going to be tough. Because I don’t know anywhere in the ecosystem that we are not just really crazed about and or dealing with lots of data.

It is sort of what Salesforce is, in the back of all of it. So understanding data, taking courses on it, go learn SQL, go learn regular databases, go learn third normal form, learn it, and understand it because any of your skill sets that you have that are based in data will make you better at any job in this ecosystem. So data. Second is documentation, because one of the things you can do very quickly in any role is document things. You need to be able to document; you need to be able to take what people say, summarize it, put it into something, and spit it back out for people to take in. If you’re an admin, you’ve got to come up with a training plan or a training agenda. You are an admin; you have to come up with a user story; you hand it off to a developer or someone to build something.

Documenting is, and it’s, I know there’s Trailheads on it, and you can go to those, but really learning how to document even so much prove that skill when you talk to somebody and you follow up with an email. Follow up with an email that proved that you listened and that you’re following up with documentation skills, coming back with key points or things that you wanted or questions, all great ways to show. But I would say two things you could just learn to show up on day one to start working and doing things is know data very well and know how to document things.

Mike:
Well, that was a really good point. I would hammer on that cultural fit and question part a lot because I always feel like you and I are of a certain generation that we kind of almost interviewed in the hopes that they chose us, right? The best of the survivor, we get picked. But the part that really dawned on me as I moved through my career was I also need to interview that person to see, is this the type of person that I’m comfortable… Would I be excited to get on a call with them every day? Does this feel like the type of company that I’m going to be excited to go to work at? Or do I just want to get in to get in? And I’ve made the mistakes of going to work for companies and then realizing I didn’t ask enough cultural questions. The way things operate here and my expectations for this job are very different than what I had in my head, and it’s my fault because I didn’t talk about it.

Jason Atwood:
Yeah. And again, I think it’s different. Even again, culture was, I hate to say it, but it wasn’t really that much. It wasn’t that important. 20 years ago, I wasn’t worried about culture; now I think it’s above compensation.

Mike:
Yeah.

Jason Atwood:
I think it really is. And I’ve seen people go to places for less compensation because of a better culture. I’ve seen people leave terrible cultures that were highly paid. So really bringing that in, and that means how do they work? How do people collaborate? And you can ask these questions in the interview. You can say, “What are the three things you’re doing this year to help your culture be better or to improve your culture at your company?” If someone asked me that, I’d be like, “Ooh, wow. Okay.”

Mike:
That’s a good question.

Jason Atwood:
That’s a great question, right? You’re then learning A; are they doing anything to make it better.

Mike:
Right.

Jason Atwood:
Or ask about… One of the things that we take at Arkus as very important is when I was doing my key goals for the next five years, and I was doing some presentations and talking to the staff about it. I had culture as a fifth thing, and then after doing it, I thought, “Wait, no, that’s wrong. It’s got to be number one.” So for me, you ask a company, you say, “What are the main things you’re thinking about doing for the next five years? What are the five key things that you’re doing? What are your pillars?” Or whatever. And if they don’t say culture, then you’d be like, “Oh, why isn’t culture there?” And then you’ll probably catch someone off guard; maybe they won’t hire you there, but they should be thinking that keeping the company culture and embracing it, and making sure that it is… Culture isn’t something that you set up and then walk away from.

It’s not a database system. You don’t just go, “Oh, it’s set up, and it’s running in the corner.” It’s something that needs to be cultivated; it’s something that needs to be put into; it’s something that needs to be fed and loved, and thought of, and changed as the ecosystem and the world changes. Our culture changed when COVID happened, right? We had to adapt; we adapted to that; it wasn’t the same culture as before. When we were three people, now 75, but the culture’s different, but we’re adapting to that. So again, it is a really, really big point. It is something you can catch people on, you can ask, and everybody likes to talk about their culture. Everybody will tell you that they have a great culture, but that’s how, as an interviewer or interviewee, you should be questioning it and really ask the deep questions. So when they say they have a great culture, “Say, can you give me three examples from last week where you prove that or that you know that it is a great culture?”

Mike:
That’s a good question. Thanks for coming by, Jason, and sharing your wisdom with us. You said you present some of this. Are you going to be presenting any of this at upcoming Dreamin’ events after?

Jason Atwood:
I am. Well, you’re catching me on my road tour. I don’t know if this podcast…

Mike:
Oh, there’s a road tour.

Jason Atwood:
There’s a road tour.

Mike:
Are you going to have shirts made up?

Jason Atwood:
I might. So yeah, I actually-

Mike:
Have dates on the back.

Jason Atwood:
-I go to a lot… A lot of things, I will be at World Tour this year. World Tour New York in two days, but I don’t think this podcast will be out by then. But you can catch me at Texas Dreamin’, I’m doing this year. You can catch me at WITness Success, you can catch me at Mile High Dreamin’, you can catch me at Dreamforce, you can catch me at Northeast Dreamin’. And is that it? I think that’s it.

Mike:
I mean, Northeast Dreamin’ is kind of the tail end of the year for us.

Jason Atwood:
Yeah, it is. It’s the last one. So I’ll be at all those. I don’t know if I’ll always be presenting this, but you can at least find me if you wanted to.

Mike:
Right. I appreciate you coming by.

Jason Atwood:
Thank you. It’s been great talking to you. Let’s do it in another 10 years.

Mike:
Or sooner.

Jason Atwood:
Or a little sooner.

Mike:
Well, I thought that episode turned out phenomenal. I’m so glad I got to have Jason back, and he is going to be on a road tour presenting and helping admins at different Dreamin’ events. So hopefully, you can get to some of those that he mentioned. I think that’d be really neat, and some really solid tips on interviewing, and even I couldn’t agree more on building experience when you’ve never had a job in the tech industry. So thanks, Jason, for coming on and sharing everything. And speaking of sharing, if you love this episode and you’ve got friends, or maybe you’re going to a user group and you’d love to say, “Hey, I’ve got a podcast for you to listen to on finding that first job or getting your next Salesforce admin’s job,” here’s how you do it. You click the three dots in the corner; most of these apps, podcast apps, have this now.

And you can click share episode and you can post it to social; you could send it as an email to somebody, and then they get a link and they can listen to the podcast right on their phone, maybe as they’re walking their dog, and even more. Now, if you wanted to look for any links or any resources, everything, everything I’m telling you, start your day admin.salesforce.com; everything is there for you. And of course, we also include a link to the Admin Trailblazer community, which is the admin group in the Trailblazer community, which is a great place and also the place I went to get all of these questions. Now, we’ll also include a transcript if there’s something you need to go back and read through; that is all going to be in the show notes. So, of course, until next week, we’ll see you in the cloud.

The post How to Prepare for a Salesforce Job Interview appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

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 AI

When 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

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• Admin Trailblazers Community Group

Social

• Kat: @katholmes
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• Mike on Threads: https://www.threads.net/@mikegerholdt/
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• Mike on X: @MikeGerholdt

Full show transcript

Mike 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.

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 sources

Pulling 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 management

Data 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 Cloud

Looking 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 transcript

Mike 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.

The post Data Cloud Enhancements That Admins Will Love appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

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 admins

The 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 org

To 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 street

So 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.

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Full show transcript

Mike:
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.

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 Framework

Almost 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 tool

Looking 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 data

If 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.

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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

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• Tom on X: @TomRuns_262
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• Mike on X: @MikeGerholdt

Full show transcript

Mike:
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.

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 tool

Jim 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 Builder

If 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 AI

Lastly, 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 transcript

Mike:
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.

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 style

Lisa 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 easier

When 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 users

As 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 transcript

Mike 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.

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 reporting

We 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 reporting

When 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 reporting

You 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. 

Podcast swag

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Learn more

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• Mike on X: @MikeGerholdt

Full show transcript

Mike:
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.

The post Explore Advanced Reporting Techniques with Evan Ponter appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

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 done

Salesforce 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 Copilot

We’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 transcript

Mike 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.

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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 […]

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